Target Lancer (6 page)

At a little table under an umbrella next to me was Johnny Rosselli. He was in a white hotel terry-cloth robe and sandals and his own Ray-Bans. I believe he felt he had enough of a tan. I could feel the uneasiness coming off him like heat shimmer.

Rosselli caught my glance and said, “Nate? Let’s get another round.”

His eyes said that what he wanted was a word away from Giancana, who was sipping his fruity drink, and seeing us go said, “Get me another of these Zombie fuckers!”

This kind of language was not generally heard in a public place, where children and families frolicked among the palms, even if the outdoor walls
were
adorned with sculptures of centaurs and bathing maidens. We got a lot of dirty looks, but Giancana either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

At the thatched bar, Rosselli and I ordered another round, and while we waited, he said, “We got a problem with Sam.”

“Oh, I think he’s delightful when he drinks too much. Takes the edge off his being a psychopath. That’s a shrink term, you know.”

“Heller, if he doesn’t go up and start talking to Santo, then Santo is gonna get pissed, and I don’t mean drunk. It’s disrespectful. This whole …
enterprise
, it’s gonna go belly-up.”

“I’m a trained detective, John. I already put that together. What the hell is going on?”

Rosselli sighed. “Momo got word that his Phyllis is, you know, being untrue.”

“Momo” was yet another Giancana nickname. “Phyllis” was Sam’s mistress, Phyllis McGuire of the singing sisters, and Rosselli referring to her “being untrue” in that ridiculous high-school sense meant that Sam (who was married, by the way) thought somebody else was fucking her.

“Okay,” I said. “And
this
is what’s putting him in a foul mood?”

“It is. She’s in Vegas right now, and word is, she’s banging Dan Rowan.”

“Of Rowan and Martin. The comedy team?”

“Yeah. Shit, they ain’t even that big. I mean, if it was Martin of Martin and Lewis, that’d be another thing.”

“Yeah, it’d all be in the family. Also, it would mean Martin and Lewis were back together.”

“It’s not funny, Heller. She’s the love of his life, this broad.”

I sighed. “Look, maybe there’s something I can do.”

Rosselli’s eyes sparked with hope. “That would be fucking fantastic, Nate. What?”

I didn’t answer him, just took my share of the drink refills and led him back.

“Sam,” I said, handing the mobster a carved pineapple full of liquor and doodads, “I heard about your problem.”

His nostrils flared. “I don’t
have
any problem!… Rosselli, you got a big fuckin’ mouth, you know that?”

A muscular kid about twenty, with a swarthy cast to his features, was striding over in a small, bulging bathing suit. He was tan, or maybe just Italian.

“Excuse me, mister,” he said, looming over Giancana, throwing shadow on him. Despite the words, this was not delivered in a respectful manner.

“Yeah?” Nor was this.

“I don’t appreciate the comments or the language. This is a respectable place, and if you don’t cut out the filthy talk and the rude remarks about nice girls, you and I are going to have a problem. Do we understand each other?”

You have to give Giancana credit. He waited till the kid was finished with his speech before flying off the deck chair and grabbing him by the neck with both hands and strangling him to his knees.

“I eat little boys like you for breakfast. Get your fuckin’ ass out of here before I get hungry! Do
we
understand each other?”

The guy managed to nod, despite Giancana’s death grip. Out of nowhere, guys in tan suits and sunglasses had appeared, but they were not interceding for this unfortunate guest. They were serving to keep anybody back. To keep Mr. Giancana from being disturbed.

Giancana let the kid get up. The boy clutched his throat and ran off.

“No running around the pool!” Giancana cackled at him. “No
running
, you little prick!”

When he sat down, I said, “Sam, how about I have one of my guys bug a couple of rooms in Vegas, and see what’s really going on? Just for your peace of mind.”

“Could you do that for me, Nate? Would you do that?”

“Sure, Sam.”

Giancana smiled, sighed in a good way, put the latest pineapple drink aside, and suggested we head on up to the suite, where we finally assembled for a conversation.

Santo Trafficante was a no-nonsense man in his late forties, with almost as dark a tan as Giancana, who he was bigger than at five ten and maybe 180 pounds. The Tampa boss looked like an accountant in his black-rimmed glasses, with his bland features and high forehead and thinning black hair. He was conservatively attired—white short-sleeve shirt, black tie, black slacks. He might have been a waiter.

Giancana did his fellow don the respect of exchanging the swim trunks for a yellow Ban-Lon sport shirt and tan trousers. Rosselli also changed into a sport shirt and slacks, as had I, stopping at my room to do so. We sat at a round poker-style table in the living room area, with windows on the Atlantic.

Soon everybody but me was smoking, cigarettes not cigars. A shoulder-holster bodyguard was serving drinks and snacks. Right now we were all having soft drinks. Since Giancana had to be half in the bag already, I was fine with that.

I figured they already knew the basics, that Rosselli would have filled them in. They listened quietly, with an occasional nod, and no questions. Then I broached new territory.

“What the CIA wants,” I said, no euphemisms necessary among this crew and in a room that was certainly free of bugs, “is for a standard gangland hit. They want the bastard blown away. That simple.”

Giancana was shaking his head. “Too dangerous, Heller. How the hell do you recruit a shooter for a suicide mission like that?”

“It’s been done.”

“Yeah, well, even down here, Zangaras don’t grow on trees.”

Giancana was referring to the cancer-ridden Sicilian stooge who had taken out Chicago Mayor Cermak in nearby Miami, decades before, a mob hit written off as an attempt on president-elect FDR’s life.

Trafficante gestured with an open palm. “Something clean. Something neat.”

“Nothin’ wrong with poison,” Giancana offered.

Trafficante liked the sound of that. His smile made him look like a sinister Jack Benny. “Eliminates the need for an ambush.” He turned his bland gaze on me. “Don’t they have their own scientists, the CIA?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They got their Dr. Feelgoods. But they also got their Dr. Feelbads.”

“What we need,” Trafficante said, “is a pill. Some kind of capsule with a gel coating that dissolves. Something that can be slipped into…” He raised his glass of Coca-Cola. “… his drink. Or emptied into his food.”

I raised my hands, rose. “I’ll let you gentlemen discuss this. I frankly only need one thing from you—a decision on whether you’re game. I don’t need to be privy to any of the details.”

“Understood,” Trafficante said solemnly.

Giancana grinned. “Got it.”

“If it’s a go,” I said, “you’ll meet with a real CIA contact. In the meantime, I need to put something unrelated in motion for Sam.”

Giancana liked hearing that. “You go do that, Heller. We’ll have an answer for you by dark.”

And they did.

It was a go, all right. But that Vegas thing almost got me arrested. The Vegas op my LA partner, Fred Rubinski, lined up got busted for wiretapping Dan Rowan’s hotel-room phone.

The good news was Phyllis wasn’t playing “Sugartime” on Rowan’s skin flute. The bad news was I had to get Shep Shepherd to pull strings to keep the A-1 out of hot water.

There of course was no October surprise for Richard Nixon, just the November one of having the presidency snatched from him by JFK (with some help from Mayor Daley, Sam Giancana, and assorted other patriots).

And when the Kennedy brothers took over the Cuban mission, they only stepped things up—the ongoing attempts to kill Castro by way of poisoned drink, food, and cigars part of an overall scheme to (as Bobby put it) “stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, and general disorder.”

They dubbed the overall operation “Mongoose.”

The baby I’d been midwife to finally had a name.

CHAPTER
4

Saturday, October 26, 1963

A couple years back, when I was still living in my fifteenth-floor apartment at the St. Clair hotel, I got a lead from a well-heeled client that urban renewal would soon be leveling an area from Chicago Avenue to near North Avenue. A model high-rise for low-income housing called Cabrini Green was going in at the west end for the residents displaced when the slums got demolished. It was Negro poor now, but once upon a time it had been Sicilians, and Hell’s Corner, where violence and murder hung out.

With Old Town starting to clean up its act, I took advantage and picked up an old ripe-for-rehab brick three-story on Eugenie Street, one block north of North Avenue, with a stable-turned-garage in back for my Jaguar 3.8 town car. The main building, typical for this side street, was narrow but deep; there was not much of a backyard, with a garden I’d let go wild.

I lived on the upper two floors, with the ground level turned into a spartanly furnished apartment (with its own entrance) that the A-1 used for visiting clients and as a witness safe house. So when I say
I
picked up the place, I mean the A-1 did. Anything to keep the tax boys guessing.

Historic preservation defined the neighborhood as something special, and I lived in a kind of artist’s oasis surrounded by the high-income high-rises along Michigan Avenue and the cheap rooming houses (and the hookers and junkies) of Clark, LaSalle, and Wells (south of Division), with the Puerto Rican ghetto at the west end of Old Town as close by as the Playboy Mansion on State.

I liked Old Town with its newly put in old-fashioned lampposts and narrow, shade-tree-lined one-way side streets that would twist only to end unexpectedly, with their baroque renovated 1800s houses, some frame, others brick, with the occasional walled garden patio; and the wide boulevard of North Avenue, home to offbeat bars and restaurants, quirky boutiques and coffee houses, and even a Buddhist temple. Somebody had fired the starting gun on what they were calling the Sexual Revolution—probably Hefner, come to think of it—and I liked having the singles bars and nightclubs close at hand, where females gave away what used to be for sale in the same Rush and Division Street area.

As for work, if I didn’t feel like driving there, the El could drop me within a block of the Monadnock Building, and a bus or cab down LaSalle would do just as well.

Or maybe I was getting nostalgic in my middle age. I was just slightly north of what had been Tower Town, the Greenwich Village of Chicago in the twenties and thirties, where I’d once fallen in love with an actress. And not too far from me was the building where the guy they shot down outside the Biograph Theater had been hiding out. We’ll call him Dillinger, for simplicity’s sake.

I’m about to give a tour of an aging bachelor’s pad, and you are free to skip it. Just wait till some dialogue kicks in. On the other hand, as a trained investigator, I have found that the living quarters of a missing person or for that matter a suspected felon can tell you everything you need to know about the individual in question.

You entered from the cast-iron porch into the living room, with a jut of closet to the right and a big open room with off-white wall-to-wall carpet everywhere else. The plaster walls, painted a rust orange, had select framed artwork to break things up—black-and-blue-and-white spatter by Jackson Pollock (a Hef-suggested investment), a small melting clock by Dalí, a Picasso lithograph called
Still Life,
a big Vegas-theme oil by LeRoy Neiman (a gift from the artist), and a little Shel Silverstein cartoon of a dancing nude girl (a gift from that artist).

The right wall was a white bookcase—my taste, I’m afraid, running to popular fiction like Harold Robbins and Ian Fleming, with a dab of Steinbeck and Hemingway, and some nonfiction: Ted White’s
Making of the President,
Sandburg’s Lincoln, Shirer’s
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
. The shelves were deep enough to address an LP collection that was further evidence of my middlebrow tastes—suspects included Henry Mancini (
Peter Gunn
), Julie London (
Julie Is Her Name
), Johnny Mathis (
Greatest Hits
), Dave Brubeck (
Take Five
), Bobby Darin (
That’s All
). No Sinatra (I knew him too well).

The furnishings ran to overstuffed couches and chairs, some brown, some green, with throw pillows of those same colors. My brown-leather recliner, its back to the bookcase wall, faced the RCA color console TV, with its whopping twenty-one-inch screen, next to a walnut Grundig Majestic stereo console (compliments of the Wilcox-Gay Corp on LaSalle Street, a client). A little Danish modern teakwood bar tucked itself near the corner where what might have been an abstract sculpture was really the spiral staircase to the upstairs, where awaited a bedroom with the de rigueur round bed plus a home office and a shower.

Beyond the living room was a dining room that didn’t get used much, except when parties needed a long table where food could be laid out. A short hall with the other bathroom at left and more closet at right led into the kitchen, a white, fully modern affair vaguely reminiscent of an operating room. I’d been living alone long enough to get good in there. My specialty was breakfast for attractive young women before sending them home in a cab.

Right now I was sitting on a couch next to an attractive woman named Helen Beck, not young. You will be relieved to learn that I was not in a silk smoking jacket. Looked fairly dapper, though, in an olive Cricketeer blazer, light-green Van Heusen button-down with Webley shantung-silk dark-brown tie, and dark-brown Sansabelt slacks. Helen was in a tan jumper over a black turtleneck, a very young-looking outfit for a woman who was around my age, but she pulled it off.