The Million-Dollar Wound (20 page)

“So what?” I said. “I already told you Bioff got a conviction off that bust.”

Smugness was in every line of his face, every pore. “We needed verification. But we found much more; we hit the proverbial jackpot. You see, Willie Bioff’s
never served
his six-month sentence for pandering.”

I shrugged. “I could’ve told you that. He clouted his way out of it.”

“Perhaps. But I don’t think you understand—it’s on the records as an ‘open’ conviction—Willie Bioff
still
owes the state of Illinois six
months.
”

I sat forward. “Maybe you really do have hold of something. You’re sure about this? My understanding was he appealed it and bought his way out.”

“Money no doubt exchanged hands,” Pegler said, blowing out smoke but not hot air, “and William Morris Bioff did appeal the sentence, and was released pending the decision of the higher court. But when I placed a simple phone call to the clerk of the Supreme Court in Springfield, Illinois, I learned that the appeal had never reached there. The case had been purposely sidetracked in Cook County, somewhere, and conveniently forgotten.”

Jesus. In 1930 I’d been part of a raid on a sleazy South Halsted Street brothel and we’d caught the stocky little pimp slipping out the back with the brothel’s tally sheet in hand; later he’d slapped one of the whores who said the wrong incriminating thing about him, and I’d sworn to myself the little bastard would serve time in the Bridewell for it, Chicago or no Chicago. Now, almost ten years later, it looked like maybe he would.

“I’ve laid the information before State’s Attorney Thomas E. Courtney,” Pegler said grandiosely, “who informs me he’ll request Bioff’s extradition to Illinois.”

“By God, I think you’ve got the little bastard.”

“I’ve got the little kike, all right.”

Silence.

“Watch that, okay, Mr. Pegler?”

Amused little smile. “You’re offended?”

“Nothing much offends me. But sometimes I get pissed off awful fierce. You remember me—the guy with the gun?”

Pegler smirked at that and said, “At any rate, your friend Lieutenant Drury has come up with the goods on George Browne, as well. In 1925 Browne was involved in a gangland shooting, in a restaurant; he was shot in the seat of the pants, and his companion was killed. Browne was quoted as telling the police at the scene, ‘I’ll take care of it, boys.’ Four weeks after he got out of the hospital, the man who fired the shots was himself shot to death, his assailant never found.”

“That’s not as good as an unserved jail sentence,” I said, “but it’ll play in your column. It’ll paint Browne as a union man with a gangster past.”

“They’re both finished,” he said, with quiet glee. “And so is the Stagehands Union.”

“I wouldn’t count on that. Maybe they’ll clean house. Maybe if Bioff and Browne and the Outfit are tossed out, it’ll be a
real
union again.”

He looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth, as he said, “A real union, what is that? An inert rank and file who go to meetings only when something’s in it for them. And a union boss who’s part ham actor and part Tammany chief, who knows enough not to show too much respect for their intelligence.”

“I don’t want to talk unions with you, Pegler. I’m for exposing Bioff and Browne and Dean and the rest, because they’re perverting something that
should
work. But your anti-unionism offends me, it’s bullshit. My father—”

“Your father. He was of that particular tribe, I take it?”

“What?”

Pegler rose. Stabbed his cigarette out in the glass tray on my desk. “Nothing. It’s too bad you’re unwilling to put your convictions on the line and tell me what else you’ve discovered, in your own investigation. You’ll be a hero in my column, nonetheless, as the surviving arresting officer, as the man whose hard work ten years ago made possible bringing Willie Bioff to justice today.”

“Spell my name right and mention the agency and I won’t sue you.”

“How generous of you. Are you certain you wouldn’t care to share any further information with me? There’s money in it. A man of your persuasion can appreciate
that
, I’m sure.”

“My persuasion?”

His lip curled in a patrician sneer. “You’re a Jew, aren’t you? Mr.
Heller
? You don’t look it, but you are.”

“So fucking what?”

He didn’t like being cursed at; his face reddened and his satanic eyebrows twitched and he said, “Listen to me, you foulmouthed little hebe—if I didn’t need you to make this story float, I’d paint you for the kike coward you are…”

I was out from behind the desk before he could finish and grabbed him by the wings of his suitcoat and dragged him out of my inner office and dragged him through my outer office and hurled him out into the hall, where he bounced up against and off the abortionist’s office, almost shattering
that
glass.

“I could break you,” Pegler said, sitting in a pile, breathing through his nose like a bull.

“I could kill you,” I said.

He thought that over. I was, after all, a guy who’d pointed a gun at him more than once. And I was breathing hard, too, and looked like I meant it. I did.

He pushed up and straightened himself and walked off without another word.

That evening, in Barney’s Cocktail Lounge, I sat in a rear booth with my ex-boxer pal and said, “I never felt this Jewish before. I never felt particularly Jewish at all. Anyway, not since I was a kid.”

Barney hadn’t been surprised by my Pegler story.

“There’s a lot of it goin’ around,” he said, shrugging.

I knew what he meant.

“Don’t start with me, Barney. Please don’t start.”

He didn’t. But for the first time I think I understood him, and his concerns. I knew that something was loose in the world that was worse than the Chicago Outfit.

For the moment, however, the Outfit was bad enough.

Because suddenly there was Little New York Campagna standing by the booth with his cold dark eyes and impassive putty face trained on me.

And without saying a word, he clearly conveyed to me that somebody in a suite at the Bismarck Hotel was waiting to see me.

Nitti didn’t have an office in the Loop. He did his business out of several restaurants and various hotels—most frequently the Bismarck, on the corner of LaSalle and Randolph, just across from City Hall. I’d met Nitti here before, in this very suite—the
Presidential Suite,
the little gold plate on the door said. The room was at the dead end of the seventh-floor hall, down at the left after you stepped off the elevator, and I was presently standing in a vestibule facing Louis Campagna.

We’d walked here from Barney’s cocktail lounge; a gentle snow falling. Sunday night in the Loop, and the concrete canyons were strangely peaceful. Like church. My heart was a trip-hammer.

And it hadn’t slowed yet; which was fine with me, since having a heart that was still beating was something I valued. Campagna hadn’t said two words to me on the way here—he hadn’t said one word, either—but he was keeping two eyes on me, rarely blinking, perfecting a cold dark stare that made me wonder just how much trouble I was in.

If I was in serious trouble, wouldn’t I be dead in an alley by now? Or did Nitti merely want to talk to me, first? He’d sent Campagna after me, tonight, just as earlier in the week he’d sent him to deliver a message; and Campagna was beyond that sort of thing—he was in the inner circle, now, not just a bodyguard or an enforcer. Yet Frank had sent
him,
not some flunkie. What did that mean?

The door opened and Johnny Patton, in a dapper gray topcoat with a dark fur collar, exited, looking back, smiling, saying, “A pleasure as always, Frank,” a black homburg in one gloved hand.

What was Patton—the “boy mayor of Burnham,” Eddie O’Hare’s business partner at Sportsman’s Park—doing here? And why had Nitti let me see him?

Patton put his hat on and walked by without a word, not recognizing me, or not choosing to.

Campagna jerked a thumb toward the door, which Patton had left ajar.

That meant I was to go in.

There were no bodyguards in the suite, at least in the living room that I entered into, the same white-appointed, gold-trimmed room I remembered. A bedroom off the entryway, to my right, had its door cracked open and a light was on; someone was rustling around in there. Whether a bodyguard or a woman or what, I couldn’t say. And I sure as hell didn’t ask.

As for Nitti, he was seated on a white couch, feet on a glass coffee table on which were several stacks of ledger books; he was thumbing through one, reading one of the large, awkward-to-hold books like the latest popular novel. He was wearing a brown silk dressing gown, black dress pants and brown slippers. There was no monogram on the robe. A glass of milk, about a third drunk, was making a ring on the coffee table, next to some ledgers.

N
ITTI

He looked heavier than the last time I’d seen him, and older, but good. The mustache he’d had when I first met him was long gone; he was a smooth executive now, despite his rough features, a strong, almost handsome face with flecks of scar tissue here and there, most noticeably on his lower lip. His hair was longer, brushed back with less of that slick look I remembered, a little gray in it, and the part in his hair had wandered from left to right. Maybe he was cutting his own hair, now—I’d known him to be dissatisfied with other barbers. I say “other” barbers, because he’d begun as a barber himself (his first such job in Chicago had been in the same shop as Jake “The Barber” Factor, who later helped Nitti frame Roger Touhy, but that’s another, if typical, Nitti tale) and even before he began to effect the look and style of a business executive, he’d been immaculately groomed.

“Forgive me if I don’t rise,” he said.

I tried to find sarcasm in the words, but couldn’t quite do it. Couldn’t quite rule it out, either.

“Sure, Frank.” Was it still okay to call him that? “Mind if I sit down?”

Still reading the ledger, his eyes having not yet landed on me, Nitti waved one hand with mild impatience, saying, “Sit, sit.”

I sat in a high-backed, gold-upholstered chair near Nitti. I was up higher than him, in this thronelike chair; and he was a relatively small man, perhaps four inches shorter than me. None of which kept me from feeling intimidated, and very small indeed.

After what seemed forever, and was probably a minute, Nitti put the ledger on top of some other ledgers and pointed to his glass of milk. “Care for something? Just ’cause I gotta drink this goddamn stuff doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy yourself.”

“No thanks, Frank.”

“Not a drinking man?”

“Sometimes. Not during business. I assume this isn’t a social call.”

He shrugged, ignored the question, saying, “I’m not a drinking man myself. Some occasional vino, that’s about it. My apologies for bothering you on a Sunday, a Sunday night at that.”

“No, that’s fine,” I said, “it’s good to see you,” trying not to let it sound like a lie.

He gestured with both hands, a very Italian gesture, or in his case Sicilian. “I usually don’t work on Sundays,’’ he said. “I like to spend Sunday with the family. Go to Mass. Play with my boy. Hey, you want to see something?”

I swallowed. “Sure, Frank.”

He dug under the robe. I remembered the story about the night Capone threw a testimonial banquet for Scalise and Anselmi and was toasting them when he reached behind him for a baseball bat and splattered their brains.

But Nitti was only getting his wallet. He opened it, grinning, pushed it in front of me.

It was a picture, in a plastic compartment in the wallet, of Nitti, smiling, his arm around a little boy. Hugging the child; the child was smiling, too, obviously loving his father. As that’s what this obviously was: a snapshot portrait of father and son.

“He’s big for six,” Nitti said, beaming; he withdrew the wallet and looked at the picture himself. “You know, I’m a little guy.”

Right.

“My son’s gonna be a bigger man than me. The men in his mama’s family are six foot, some of ’em. He’ll stand taller than his old man.”

There seemed to be no irony in his words.

“Handsome lad,” I said.

Nitti nodded in agreement, smiled at the picture, and put the wallet back in his pocket.

“Now,” he said, “what’s this about you nosing around in the Outfit’s business?”

I hadn’t
seen
any baseball bats when I came in; maybe one was behind Nitti’s couch…

“What do you mean, Frank?”

“Don’t shit me, kid.”

I wasn’t a kid anymore, but I didn’t point that out to him; I’d been young enough for him to call me that when we first met, and it was clear I’d be a kid to him till the day he died. Maybe that was a saving grace; maybe his looking on me that way was keeping me alive.

“I did a job for Willie Bioff,” I said. Hoping that was what he wanted to hear. Hoping to Christ he didn’t somehow know about Montgomery. That was the job that would get me the testimonial banquet.

“I know,” Nitti said. He reached for the glass of milk, sipped it; brushed away a small milk mustache with a hand that then extended to point a blunt finger at me. “You shouldn’t try keeping things from me.”

I gestured with two open hands. “Bioff didn’t ask me to keep anything from you, exactly. He just didn’t want this situation advertised. He seemed to think he was in the doghouse enough with you fellas, over the income-tax trouble he was in.”

Nitti’s eyes weren’t narrowed; they seemed as casual as two eyes could be. But I knew they were studying me; watching my every movement. Looking for me to betray myself.

“I sometimes think it was a mistake,” Nitti said, reflective all of a sudden, “letting that pimp represent us. But he was in on the ground floor, on the IA deal, so it only seemed fair.”

“He seems to have done a good job for you.”

“He’s got himself rich, is what he’s done, and I don’t begrudge him. That’s what we’re in it for, all of us, our own financial well-being. How the hell else are a bunch of immigrants like us gonna make it in this world, if we don’t look after ourselves?”

“Right,” I said. He seemed to be including me in that, so I didn’t remind him I was born here.

“Tell me what you did for Bioff, exactly.”

I did. From Barger through the phone calls to the movie circuit bigwigs to Estelle. No details about my method of dealing with the latter party, but Nitti smiled at the mention of her name, anyway.

“Nice work if you can get it,” he said.

“She’s who told you, isn’t she? I mean, Sonny Goldstone obviously reported seeing me at the Colony Club, but then you talked to Estelle, and she spilled about me and Bioff, right?”

“Never trust a whore, kid. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

“I guess not. But, then, I’m tempted to say the same thing to you about pimps.”

“Point well taken,” he said, nodding.

“I, uh, didn’t feel I was working behind your back, Frank. Bioff’s one of yours, after all.”

For the first time this evening, his expression seemed thoughtful, not offhand. “I asked around a little. I hear you hate Bioff. Why would you take work from somebody whose fuckin’ guts you hate?”

Shrug. “Money’s money. And I don’t hate Willie. I don’t feel much about him one way or another.”

“I hear you arrested him once.”

Batter up.

“Uh, Frank, that was a long time ago. I haven’t been on the force since ’32, remember?”

He cracked his knuckles; it sounded like a firing squad warming up. “This guy Pegler,” he said, back to his deceptively casual tone, “this big-deal columnist that Bioff was havin’ you issue the warnings about. You had any contact with him?”

Straight was the only way to play it; pretty straight, anyway.

“Twice,” I said. “He came around early this week asking if I ever arrested Bioff. I said yes, but gave him no details. He came around to my office this afternoon, looking for more information; I didn’t give him any. In fact, I threw him out of my office. And I mean
threw
him out—bodily.”

He took another slow sip of milk. “Why?”

“He called me a hebe.”

“Why, are you a hebe?”

“My father was Jewish. Does Heller sound Irish to you?”

He liked that small bit of impertinence. He said, “If he called me a wop, I’d have him talked to.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I wouldn’t kill him. I’d like to have him hit, right now, for the trouble he’s drumming up for me, but he’s out of bounds.”

“Hitting a newsman like him would really stir up the heat.”

“Like Al used to say,” he added, with a private smile. He meant Capone. “I hear this Pegler’s found out that Bioff still has six months to serve.”

Nitti knowing that was no surprise: little went on in the police department that wasn’t known to the Outfit.

“He told me as much this afternoon,” I said, confirming it.

“You’ll be made a hero,” he said, still smiling, faintly.

“It’ll stick in Pegler’s craw,” I said. “Hebe that I am.”

Nitti laughed. “That is kinda sweet. He needs to build you up to help tear Willie down.”

“I’m not going along with it, Frank.”

He waved a hand at me. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault you busted that little pimp a hundred years ago. It also ain’t your fault that this old unserved sentence caught up with him. He shoulda served it, or bought his way out, or something—not just let it hang.”

“If I had it to do again,” I said, “I’d still bust the bastard. He was a mean pimp; he hurt his girls.”

“Sometimes I think you’re still a cop at heart, Heller.”

“Sometimes I think I am, too.”

“Then why do I trust you?”

“Because I’m afraid of you, Frank.”

He laughed; it was a booming laugh. I’d never heard him laugh that way before; and I never did again.

He said, “I like you, kid. You got chutzpah, you got integrity, you got brains. Why don’t you close down that little shop of yours and come to work for me?”

“I really am too much a cop, Frank. I respect you. You’re the best man in your world. But the Outfit does a lot of things that make me…uncomfortable.”

“Fair enough,” he said, and I couldn’t help thinking again that that was the name of that goddamn Pegler’s column, “but I got to ask you a favor.”

“Sure.”

All humor, all goodwill, left his face; like a sudden change in the weather, Nitti rained on me: “Stay out of the Outfit’s business. You turned up twice this week in my business. You almost got killed once because of it. I would’ve regretted that. I would’ve sent flowers. But dead is dead, my friend, and that is how you will be if you continue to put your nose in my affairs.
Capeesh?
”

“Capeesh,”
I managed to say.

He leaned back; his face and his voice softened a bit. “You can’t be faulted for taking on a client who offers money. I understand that. I understand the temptation when an O’Hare, a Bioff, comes around and says I will give you money. But next time such a person comes to you,
think
, next time,
remember
: Frank Nitti offered you a job. I offered you a job years ago, in a hospital room as a matter of fact, not long after you saved my life from Cermak’s maggots and I don’t forget that, not a second do I forget that, but in truth you turned my offer down. And you turned me down just now, again. From that I take it to mean that you aren’t interested in my business. So stay the hell out of it. I mean this in a friendly way. Final warning.”