True Detective (17 page)

It was only nine-thirty. I called Eliot and said I'd be over for Christmas.

The Long Bellyache January 7- April 8,

The body was in a ditch near a telephone pole. No snow. Tall brown weeds leaned in the wind, and the ground was mostly sand with pebbles mixed in. so that our feet made a crunching sound as we approached. The nearby road was gravel, and there were ridges of sandy mud near the ditch, creased with tire tracks, pocked with footprints. A small middle-aged man in a cap and a heavy brown jacket stood near the body, as if claiming it for his own. Next to him was a heavyset man in a western-style hat and a hunting jacket with a badge pinned on it- the sheriff, apparently. Otherwise there was no one around: just the body in the ditch.

Back of the two men and the body, sand dunes rose. The dunes were spotted with khaki-color brush, like gigantic scalps with the hair mostly fallen out. leaving only occasional sick patches behind. Bare trees, skinny, black against a sky such a faded blue it might have been wearing out, stood close together, watching from atop the dunes, some of which ran to a hundred feet; skeletal branches touched to form a black-lace pattern against the horizon. The bitter cold air and the desert-like dunes mocked each other, and the wind blew like a bored fat man with a sense of irony.

We were on a back road near Chesterton, Indiana, about fifteen miles east of Gary, five miles west of nowhere. It was Saturday morning, about seven, and I would rather have been sleeping. But Eliot called and said he was picking me up; there was something he wanted me to see.

The something was the body in the ditch.

Eliot bent over the body, which was sprawled on its side, wearing an overcoat, a hat partially covering the face; he lifted the hat off. set it easily to one side.

"It's Ted Newberry- all right" he said to me.

The man who seemed to be the sheriff thought that was meant for him. "Thought as much." he said. He was about fifty-five with a vein-shot nose that indicated he didn't keep all the laws he was theoretically hired to enforce.

"I'm Ness." Eliot told the apparent sheriff. "A couple more people from Chicago will be showing up soon. A representative of the police department, and the deceased's lawyer."

"What do we do with the body?"

"What do you usually do?"

"We don't have a morgue; we use a local mortuary."

"Use it, then."

"It's okay if I call 'em now?"

"I think that'd be wise. It's a cold enough day, but this boy isn't going to keep forever."

"I got to walk to that farmhouse." the sheriff said, pointing with a hand distorted by a heavy cotton glove. Then he put the hand down and waited for something, and what he got was silence. When Eliot failed to fill the silence, the sheriff grinned, shrugged, said, "Don't have a police radio in my car yet. Like to have one."

Eliot just looked at him, and the sheriff kind of nodded and walked off, his breath preceding him like smoke from a steam engine.

Eliot stood and looked at Newberry. I did the same, but from more of a distance. In life Newberry had been a jaunty sort; hail-fellow-well-met, though I'd never met him. But he had a reputation as such. A big, dark-haired roughly handsome gangster, about forty. Now he was a body sprawled in a ditch, with his pockets turned inside out.

The guy in the cap and brown jacket said to Eliot, "I found him. 'Bout daybreak."

Eliot nodded, waited for more information to come. It didn't.

"Was there anyone else around when you found him?" Eliot asked.

"No. I was by myself."

Eliot pointed to Newberry. "What about him. Was he by himself?"

"I should say."

"Is there anything else you can tell me about this?"

"Looks to me like this boy was took for a ride."

"Stand over by your car. would you?"

"Are the reporters coming soon?"

"Sooner or later."

Reluctantly, the guy went over and stood by his flivver.

Eliot came over to me and shook his head. "Publicity seekers." he said.

I resisted any ironic comment.

"Come over and take a look at Ted"

"I've seen dead bodies before."

"I know you have. Come on."

We walked to the body and Eliot knelt over it again and pointed to Newberry's belt. The buckle was large and jewel-encrusted: diamonds and emeralds.

"Ever see one like that?" Eliot asked.

"Yeah. Jake Lingle had one on. the day he was shot."

Eliot nodded. "Capone gave more than one of his pals fancy belts like that."

"And more than one of'em ended up like Ted, here."

"Lingle included." he said guardedly.

"Lingle included." I said.

Jake Lingle was a subject Eliot had never broached with me directly, though I knew he wanted to. knew his curiosity was killing him and had killed him repeatedly since he'd known me. but out of a sense of courtesy toward me. he'd resisted the urge. My involvement with the Lingle case predated my friendship with Eliot, which had come about when I got into plainclothes, which had come about after my testifying at the Lingle trial. Which meant that Eliot and I would not have become friends if the Jake Lingle case hadn't elevated me to the status of a detective, a peer of the great Eliot Ness.

He said. "You could look at this as an appointment with Capone that finally got kept."

"How do you mean. Eliot?"

He stood, shrugged, still glancing down at the body. "I'm just thinking of a certain morning when Ted and his boss Bugs Moran were delayed a few minutes on the way to meet with the rest of the boys, and when they finally got there, Ted spotted a squad car parked in front of the garage, and he and Bugs and Willie Marks ducked in a cafe to avoid what they figured was the cops running a petty shakedown. Know what morning I'm talking about, Nate?"

Eliot was giving me his best melodramatic deadpan, now.

"Yeah, yeah," I said.

February 14, 1929. Saint Valentine's Day.

I bent over Newberry's body and had a close look; it wasn't hard to reconstruct what had happened. He got the bullethole through the hand, with accompanying powder burns, when, in an effort to keep from getting shot, he'd grabbed a gun pointed at him; that same bullet, or another one from the same gun, had shot off his left earlobe as he struggled. That point, probably, was when he got his skull bashed in, and only then came the final bullet, the one that killed him (unless the bashing had already done the trick): a single execution-style slug, fired from behind, at the base of the skull. There wasn't much blood, here. He'd been killed elsewhere and dumped in the dunes, pockets pulled inside out, in a nod toward faking a robbery.

Eliot was looking at the tire tracks. He studied them for a few minutes, then turned to me. "The car came from the west, dumped Ted, turned around, and went back the way it came."

I moved away from the body, pointing at it as I did. "He had a place near here, didn't he? A summer home?"

Eliot nodded. "At Bass Lake. They probably killed him there."

Last night, at about two, Newberry's lawyer, at the prompting of a worried crony of Ted's who said Ted was two hours late for an appointment, had called the detective bureau and asked if his gangster client had been arrested, and got no answer. Then the lawyer had called Eliot at home and asked if the
feds
had his boy, and Eliot had told the lawyer to go jump and went back to sleep. A writ of habeas corpus was filed, and by early this morning the chief of detectives and Eliot were in the former's City Hall office, both officially responding to the lawyer that Newberry was not in custody. And at that point the word came in that a body answering Newberry's description had been found in Indiana.

Shortly after the sheriff had returned from his phone call at a nearby farmhouse, a dark blue Cadillac sedan pulled up and a short squat man in a blue pinstripe with a diamond stickpin hopped out; he was Newberry's lawyer.

"Hello, Abe," Eliot said, as the little man trundled toward the body in the ditch.

Without acknowledging Eliot's greeting, the lawyer looked at Newberry and, as if speaking to Ted, said, "Where's the county official?"

The sheriff, standing in the road, called out, "Me, mister!

The lawyer walked up to the sheriff and said, "That man is Edward Newberry. Where will his body be taken?"

The sheriff gave him the name of the mortuary.

The lawyer nodded, said. "We'll be in touch." and got in his Cadillac and drove off.

The man in the cap and brown jacket was still over by his flivver, standing first on one foot, then the other. He said, to no one in particular, "Where's the reporters, anyway?"

"Stick around," Eliot said, and advised the sheriff the same thing, then nodded to me and we walked back to his Ford.

"Aren't you going to wait for the press, Eliot?" I asked him.

He shook his head no. "This is nothing I want to be part of. You, either."

On the way back to Chicago, Eliot said, "That's Nitti's work, of course. So much for Ted Newberry as the mayor's handpicked candidate for running gambling on the North Side."

"That still leaves Touhy in Cermak's pocket."

"Touhy's nothing. Nitti's made an important point here. Newberry offered fifteen thousand for Nitti dead. Well, Nitti's alive and Ted isn't."

"I wonder how Cermak's favorite bodyguards will take the news of Newberry taking a ride."

Eliot smiled a little. "I wonder how Cermak will take it."

"Why'd you want me to see that, anyway?"

Eliot, watching the road, said, "It concerns you."

"Sure. But you could've phoned and told me about it. Why'd you want me along? Outside of me being charming company."

"Newberry was Cermak's man."

"So?"

"He's nobody's man. now."

"Point being?"

He glanced at me. then back at the road. The dunes were still around us: it was like the Midwest was doing a bad but impressive imitation of Egypt.

Eliot said. "Maybe this opens the door for you telling a different story at the Nitti trial."

"Like the true story, you mean."

He shrugged. "You might want to consider it. Newberry's an example of how Nitti operates. And Newberry's also an example of Cermak's current lack of strength in mob circles."

"So, what? You're saying if I stick with Cermak's team. I'm ditch-bound? That's bullshit. Eliot. Nitti knows I'm an innocent bystander in this. You notice that was
Newberry
dead back there, not Lang or Miller. Frank Nitti doesn't kill the messenger; he kills the guy who
sent
the message."

Eliot just drove.

I kept talking. "Just because Cermak isn't aligned with a gang of any power, at the moment, doesn't mean he isn't going to be again, soon. He's been playing this game a long time, you know. And if I cross Cermak, I'll get my op ticket, and my gun permit, pulled. Get serious, Eliot."

Eliot didn't say another word to me till he pulled up in front of my building on Van Buren; not until I was getting out, feeling just a little irritated with him.

"Sony, Nate," he said. "I just thought you should see that back there."

I could feel my face was red, and it wasn't the cold. "Christ, Eliot, what is it you want out of me? Are you such a goddamn Boy Scout you expect me to tell the truth because it's the truth? You been in Chicago too long to be
that
naive."

Which was a lousy thing for me to say, because Eliot might have been a lot of things, but naive about the Chicago facts of life he wasn't.

He gave me a sad little smile.

And said, "I just don't like the idea of you getting on a witness stand and perjuring yourself."

He didn't add "again," but the word hung in his eyes, and it was that flicking Lingle case again, wasn't it? Coming back to haunt me.

I nodded at him to let him know I understood he meant well, and shut the door on the Ford, and he drove off.

It was a little after eleven, and I hadn't had any breakfast, so I went into the deli on the corner for an early lunch. I ate my usual pastrami sandwich but, despite my hunger, barely got it down. Eliot had bothered me, whether I wanted to admit it to myself or not. I sat nibbling dill pickles absently for maybe half an hour, sipping at a ginger ale, when Barney came in through the door that connected the deli with his speak, noticed me, and got this silly grin, like it just occurred to him that he was top contender.