The Million-Dollar Wound (33 page)

Drury stood. He said to Chief Rose, “That’s Frank Nitti, all right.”

“His driver’s license says Nitto,” Rose said.

Drury shrugged. “Nitto’s his real name.” He laughed shortly. “He thought ‘Nitti’ sounded more American, I guess.”

I was still bent over Nitti’s body. I carefully lifted the hat off his head. The brown fedora had several bullet holes in it. Five, to be exact.

“Bill,” I said. “Take a look at this.”

I showed him the hat. “How in the hell does one bullet through the head put five holes in your hat? From the angle of the fatal shot, there should be only
one
hole, about here…” And I put my pinky through that very hole. “What made these others? Mice?”

Drury took the hat and turned it around in his hands, studying it, frowning.

Chief Rose said, “We’ve got witnesses. Maybe they can help explain.”

He took us over to the three railroad workers. Two of them were skinny, in their forties, and looked uncannily alike, although they proved not to be brothers. The third was heavyset and about thirty-five.

Drury identified himself, and one of the skinny ones stepped forward and said he was William Seebauer, conductor; he and the other men, a switchman and a flagman, were on an IC switch engine when it started. He wore wire-frame glasses—which was about all that distinguished him from the other skinny man—and as he spoke he occasionally removed them and rubbed the drizzle of rain off the lenses, nervously.

“It was around three o’clock,” he said, “and we were backing the train south, caboose in front. After we crossed Cermak Road, I saw a man about a block and a half down, going the same direction as us, south, walking on the tracks just over from us. He was staggering. I thought maybe he was drunk.”

“How fast were you going?” Drury asked.

“Not very. When we got up close to him, I was on the platform, and hollered, ‘Hi there, buddy,’ and at that, the guy raised his hand and there was a revolver in it. He fired at me, and I ducked.”

I asked, “How many shots did he fire at you?”

“Two,” Seebauer said. The switchman and flagman standing nearby both nodded at that.

“What happened then?” Drury asked.

“The man was wavering around and I didn’t think his aim was good. He staggered down the embankment”—he stopped and pointed at the fence and Nitti’s body—“and ended up there. Sat down, or fell down. I couldn’t say.”

“And?”

“Well, I ordered the train stopped and we got off and walked back toward him. He was sitting there with his eyes closed. I told the other boys, ‘Watch this guy—he’s nuts. He may be making believe he’s passed out just to take another shot at us.’ So we moved slow. We were maybe sixty feet of him when his eyes opened, and he looked at us. Kind of rolled his eyes.” The conductor swallowed. “Then he raised the gun to his head. He didn’t miss what he was shooting at that time.”

Drury had the other two tell their stories, individually. While that was going on, I went back to the body. I knelt over him. It.

“Shit, Frank,” I said.

A cop nearby said, “What?”

“Nothing,” I said. I got a handkerchief out of my pocket and carefully lifted the gun from his hand; I shook open the cylinder. Three bullets remained. Three had been fired.

Soon Drury came over. “Their stories all match, pretty much.”

“Three bullets fired, Bill.” I showed him the revolver.

He took it, and my hanky.

“That makes sense,” he said. “He fires two shots at the caboose boys, and put one in his head. Two plus one makes three in my school.”

“Really? Tell me, Bill, the day you graduated—how many bullet holes did you have in your mortar board?”

His mouth distorted as he thought that over. “Maybe he wasn’t shooting at the boys on the train. They just heard shots and thought he was.”

“Who or what was he shooting at, then?”

“His own head, of course!”

“And he
missed?
And his hat didn’t fly off when these misaimed bullets flew through?”

Drury shrugged. “There are always anomalies in a case like this.”

“Anomalies my ass! Is that how you explain evidence that doesn’t suit you? Dismissing it?”

“Heller, you’re just a civilian observer here. Here at my discretion. Don’t cause any trouble.”

“What do
you
think happened here, Captain Drury?”

He put his hands on the hips of his expensive black topcoat and smirked. “Gee, I’m trying to work up a suitable theory that makes sense with what little we got—namely, three eyewitnesses who saw a guy shoot himself in the head, and a guy with a gun in his hand and a hole in his head. I’m just leaning the slightest little bit in the direction of suicide. What do
you
make of it, Heller?”

I motioned around us. “Look at these clumps of bushes; the high grass, weeds. He was running, staggering. Drunk? Sure, from the smell of him he’d been drinking. Granted. But mightn’t he been running from somebody?”

“Who?”

“People trying to kill him, Bill. Maybe he was out walking and somebody took a shot at him from those bushes, and he started running away. He was known to take regular walks, you know.”

“No I don’t,” he said. He eyed me suspiciously. “How do you?”

“Never mind. He did take walks. Maybe he walked a regular route—this route. We’re only a few blocks from his house—he was headed home. Somebody took a shot at him, possibly using a silenced gun, and when he returned fire, those caboose crawlers thought he was shooting at them.”

Drury smiled humorlessly and shook his head. “And then an assassin in the bushes shot him in the head just as the railroad boys were approaching, I suppose?”

I looked up at the sky; let it spit on me. “No, Bill. Nitti shot himself. I don’t question that.”

“What do you question, then?”

“The circumstances. I think he fell, fleeing would-be assassins—knocked himself out. Maybe he was blind drunk and fell, what’s the difference? Anyway, when he opened his eyes he saw the hazy image of three men walking toward him—sixty, seventy feet away—and rather than give Ricca the pleasure, he raised his gun to his head in one last act of defiance and ended it all.”

“Ricca?”

I shrugged. “There’s a rift between Ricca and Nitti—and the Outfit’s sided with Ricca.”

“Who says?”

“Everybody knows that. Get out of your office once in a while. Let’s say Ricca put a contract out on Nitti. His torpedoes tried to kill Frank, today, along these tracks, and when the switchman and flagman and their conductor jumped off the train, the torpedoes headed for the hills. Unseen. Only Nitti didn’t know they’d gone. And he mistook the IC men approaching him for his assassins.”

Drury thought about that. “That’s where the bullet holes in his hat came from? They shot at him and missed, these torpedoes of yours and Ricca’s?”

“Yeah. Or Nitti hit the high weeds himself, when the first shot rang out. And then stuck his hat up on a stick or on his finger, to draw their fire. Maybe.” I shrugged again. “Who knows?”

“Anomalies, Heller,” he said. “These things never sort out exactly right.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think he shot himself in the head.”

“Cornered by Ricca’s gunmen, he did.”

“What’s the difference?”

I couldn’t answer that. I walked away from him, my hands in my topcoat pockets. Why did it matter to me? Why did I want to believe Frank Nitti’s final act was one of defiance, not despair?

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Drury.

He said, “When we get some more cops out here, some more
real
cops, I’ll have these ditches combed. If we find any more spent shells, I’ll give your theory some thought. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You liked the man, didn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say I liked him.”

“Respected him, then.”

“Let’s just say I knew him.”

We walked back toward the suburban cops and Nitti’s body. Chief Rose approached us. He said, “I never heard of one of these big gangsters killing himself before. Isn’t this a little unusual?’

“Frankly,” Drury said, “I’m not surprised. Nitti’s been in ill health. He probably figured he was due for prison, and that he couldn’t get the express medical care he desired there—so he took the easy way out.”

That was the way Bill wanted it to be. He hated the gangsters, and he loved the idea of making a coward out of Nitti. Bill was a fine cop, a good man, a better friend; but I knew my reading of how Nitti had died would be lost in the shuffle. Maybe it was wrong of me to look at the facts and investigate wanting to prove Nitti died defiantly; but it was just as wrong for Drury to do the same wanting to prove Nitti a coward. Bill was in charge, though; and the way he saw it would be the way it went down.

Then, suddenly, in a black coat and a black dress, already in mourning, automatically in mourning, there she was: Antoinette Cavaretta. The current Mrs. Frank Nitti. The widow Nitti. The steel woman. On the arm of a uniformed cop who’d gone to get her, at Chief Rose’s request, as it turned out.

She walked falteringly to the fence where Nitti lay; she knelt by him and held his hand and made a sign of the cross.

She stood.

“This was my husband,” she said.

Her usually dark face seemed pale; she wore very little makeup. The uniformed man escorted her a ways away from the body.

Drury went to her; I followed.

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Nitti,” Drury said.

“Don’t be a hypocrite, Captain Drury,” she said. “We both know you hated my husband.”

I said, “Where were you when this happened?”

She looked at me sharply. “Praying for my husband.”

“Really,” I said.

“Frank left about one o’clock and said he was going downtown to see his lawyer. I was worried. He’s been sick, and then this grand jury trouble came up. So I went to church, to Our Lady of Sorrows, and made a novena for him.”

Drury shot me a look as if to say this news proved that Nitti had set out today to commit suicide.

She said, “You people have always persecuted him. Poor Frank! He never did a wrong thing in his life.”

Drury said nothing.

“Do I need your permission,” she asked, bitterly, “to make the funeral arrangements? To have my husband removed to a mortuary?”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Drury said. “Due to the circumstances of his death, it’s the county morgue for him.”

She gave him a look to kill. “You’re so superior, Captain. Don’t take such a death so lightly. You and my husband played in the same arena; such an end could well be yours one day.”

“Is that a threat, Mrs. Nitti?”

“No, Mr. Drury. It’s the voice of experience. Now, I’d like to go home. I have a little boy who’ll be coming home from St. Mary’s in half an hour. There’s difficult news I must share with him.”

“Certainly you can go,” he said, not unkindly.

“Why don’t I walk her?” I asked him.

“It’s not necessary,” she said.

“I’d like to,” I said.

Drury didn’t care.

Mrs. Nitti said, “I would appreciate an arm to lean on, Mr. Heller, yes.”

I gave her my arm and we walked back up along the tracks toward Cermak Road; it was the opposite direction from her house, but the closest street that crossed the tracks.

“My husband was fond of you,” she said.

“Sometimes he had funny ways of showing it.”

We walked.

“That was Frank,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“Mrs. Nitti—or should I call you Toni?”

She took her arm from mine. Stopped for a moment. “Mrs. Nitti will be just fine. Do I sense a touch of disrespect in your voice?”

“I must say you’re taking your husband’s death well, Mrs. Nitti. You’re a rock, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that the first time I saw you, you were in the presence of a dead man. Oh, he didn’t know he was dead, or at least he didn’t like to think he was. But with your help, his faithful secretary’s help, E. J. O’Hare got dead. Good and dead.”

She looked at me coldly, impassively; but she was pulling breath in like a race horse.

“A few years go by, and then you turn up again. At Frank Nitti’s front door. His loving wife. The wife of a dead man. That was the difference between Frank and O’Hare—your husband knew he was dead. When I spoke to him last night, I could tell he knew he was very near the end. He was a brave man, I think.”

“Yes he was,” she said.

“I wonder,” I said, “if you were keeping tabs on Frank for Ricca, like you kept tabs on O’Hare for Frank.”

“You’re a fool.”

“Am I? How’s this for foolish? Frank Nitti, unknown to all but a handful—said handful including you and E. J. O’Hare—betrayed Al Capone to the feds.”

Her eyes flickered.

“It’s so obvious,” I said, “but no one ever thought of it…even though key Capone witness Les Shumway was still employed at Sportsman’s Park.
Of course,
Nitti arranged Capone’s downfall.
Of course,
Nitti moved the chess pieces until he was king himself. In a way, I admire him for it.”

“So,” she said, “do I.”

“But then his wife Anna dies. She was the love of his life. She, and his son, were everything to him. And he begins to slide. He goes into the hospital, for the old back trouble from the wounds Mayor Cermak’s boys caused. And for the ulcers that developed after he was wounded.”

“His heart was also bad,” she said. “And he was convinced he had stomach cancer. I wouldn’t want you to leave anything out, Mr. Heller.”

“Stomach cancer. Perfect. I bet
YOU
don’t even know why he had that notion.”

“Certainly I do, she said. “The assassin who killed Cermak believed he had stomach cancer.”

“That’s right. Joe Zangara. The one-man Sicilian suicide squad who pretended to shoot at FDR so that your husband could bring Mayor Cermak down without… I can almost hear Frank saying it…‘stirring up the heat.’”

“My husband was a brilliant man.”

“Once,” I said “He was—once. He began to slip, though, didn’t he? Despondent over his wife’s death, he took long solitary walks. He even began to drink a little—not like him, not at all like him. His memory began to falter. That’s where you come in.”