The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller) Read online

  Not long after, Miss Cavaretta came in; she was in another mannish suit, and it fit her curves snugly, in a most unmannish manner. An attractive woman, all right, although she had a certain West Side hardness, and she’d seen the last of thirty-five. She seemed a little startled to see me; or anyway as startled as a cool customer like her could seem.

  “Well hello,” she said. In that throaty purr.

  “Well hello,” I said.

  “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “I seem to be. I’m surprised this is the first I’ve seen of you today. I expected you’d be taking notes while Mr. O’Hare and I spoke.”

  “Yes, uh—Ed has been having me keep minutes of his business meetings of late. But I just got back from lunch.”

  In the midst of the wall of photos was a square clock with roman numerals.

  “Mr. O’Hare must be a pretty soft touch, as bosses go,” I said, nodding toward the clock. “Here it is a quarter till two and you’re just back from lunch.”

  “I didn’t leave till one,” the secretary said, not at all defensively. She walked to the coat tree, near the wall of books and the solemn Napoleon busts, where O’Hare’s topcoat hung, as did mine. She stood digging in one of his pockets, her back to me; her seams were straight, despite the curves in the road they traveled.

  Then she turned and shrugged and displayed two open hands to me and said, “I was looking for his keys. I’m missing some papers that I thought might be in his car.”

  She didn’t have to explain herself to me; I wondered why she bothered.

  “Tell Mr. O’Hare I’m back from lunch, will you?” she said, and left.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  I got up and looked around a little. In the midst of the framed photos on the one wall, just under the clock, was a framed poem, in flowery lettering:

  The clock of life is wound but once

  And no man has the power

  To tell just when the hands will stop,

  At a late or early hour.

  Now is the only time you own:

  Love, live, toil with a will.

  Place no faith in tomorrow,

  For the clock may then be still.

  Having absorbed that bit of philosophy, I sat back down. The faces in the framed photos on O’Hare’s desk—a boy and two girls who, in the various photos, grew into a handsome young man and two attractive young women—seemed as confused about being here as I was. They were innocent faces, out of place here, ill at ease, sharing the desktop with the foreign-looking automatic.

  O’Hare came back in and smiled, not in his glad-hand manner, and said, “I see you’re admiring my kids.”

  “Nice-looking family.”

  “Separated from my wife. I’m getting married again, when…when everything’s straightened out.” He was behind the desk again, cleaning the gun. “I think my kids understand.” He put the gun down and turned one of the photos to me: the boy, in a Naval uniform.

  “He’s a pilot,” O’Hare said, beaming. And to himself: “I’d do about anything for Butch. Or Patricia Ann or Marilyn Jane, for that matter.”

  “Your secretary came in while you were out.”

  He looked up sharply; put his boy’s picture back in place. “I didn’t realize she was back from lunch.”

  “Well, she is, and said to tell you so.”

  “Oh. Anything else?”

  I gestured back to the coat tree. “She was looking in your coat, for your car keys, she said.”

  Something like relief crossed his face. “Oh. There were some papers of hers in the car. Anyway, my keys weren’t in my topcoat pockets.”

  “I gathered as much.”

  “It can wait.” He stood, dropped the gun in his suitcoat pocket. “Let me get you back to the Loop.”

  “Mr. O’Hare—”

  “Eddie.”

  “Mr. O’Hare, what is this, anyway? You haven’t said two words to me about your pickpocket problem, and now you’re hustling me back to the Loop.”

  He waved that off, getting into his black topcoat and fedora. “We’ll talk in the car.”

  I got my own coat and hat and gloves on and followed him out. We entered directly onto the betting area, two rows of cashier’s windows facing each other across a wide expanse of unpainted cement. No Oriental carpets here.

  We rounded a corner and Patton was talking to another little man, pale, slight, bespectacled, conservatively dressed, and both men stopped talking as we approached, smiling and nodding at us.

  “I won’t be back in till tomorrow, Johnny,” O’Hare said as we passed. And to the other man: “See you later, Les.”

  Les said. “See you later, E. J.”

  As we were going out onto Laramie Street, into the crisp overcast November afternoon, I said. “Who was that little guy?”

  “The park’s accountant.”

  “He looks familiar.”

  O’Hare said nothing, moving toward an expensive-looking, shiny black late-model Ford coupe.

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “Les Shumway.”

  “Shumway.” Familiar.

  He unlocked the door for me on the rider’s side and I climbed in.

  “Shumway,” I said.

  He got behind the wheel, started her up, pulled out onto Laramie. Awkwardly, he withdrew the automatic—a .32, I’d say—from his suitcoat under his topcoat and placed it on the seat between us.

  “Wait a minute,” I said “That’s not the same Shumway that testified against Capone, is it?”

  O’Hare said nothing, glancing behind him as he drove. A railroad yard was on our left; Sportsman’s Park stretched along our right.

  “That’s who it is, isn’t it?” I said. “The accountant from the Hawthorne Smoke Shop who identified Capone as his boss? Without him, the feds couldn’t have made their tax case.”

  “Yes, yes,” O’Hare said, irritably.

  “What’s he doing working for you? Better still, what’s he doing alive?”

  “Les’s a good man,” O’Hare said, as if that explained it.

  “Capone’s getting out in a few days,” I said. After seven years and some months. “He and Les’ll have a lot to talk about. Old times and all.”

  “Capone’s sick.”

  “So I hear,” I said. “Syphilis. The papers say the docs gave ’im malaria, to induce a fever. Some cure.”

  We were in Cicero, now, having passed out of a thumb of Stickney that stuck into Cicero’s pie; this was a working-class neighborhood of single-family dwellings, an occasional two-flat, mostly wood-frame structures.

  “Never mind that,” he said, looking nervously behind him. “We don’t have all that much time.”

  “For what?”

  “For me to tell you why I hired you.”

  “Oh. Somehow I figured it didn’t really have much to do with picking pockets. But why the elaborate show in front of your secretary and everybody?”

  We were passing by a nice little park, now. O’Hare turned right onto Ogden, which was a well-traveled four-lane thoroughfare, a diagonal street, making each major intersection a three-way one. For now, the railroad yard was on our left, more frame dwellings on our right. And lots of neighborhood bars. This was Cicero, after all.

  “I don’t know who I can trust,” he explained. “Every person in my life, with the exception of my kids, is tainted by those hoodlums. Even my fiancée.”

  “Who’s your fiancée?”

  Vaguely sad, he said, “Sue Granata.”

  I’d seen her before; a beautiful young woman with dark blond hair and a brother who was a mob-owned state representative.

  I said, “And you figure you can trust me?”

  “You have that reputation. Also, we have a mutual friend.”

  “Besides Frank Nitti, you mean?”

  “Besides Frank Nitti.”

  “Who, then?”

  He looked back over his shoulder. Then he said, flatly, “Eliot Ness.”

 
“How do you know Eliot?”

  “I was his inside man with the Outfit.”

  I felt my jaw drop. “What?”

  O’Hare had a faint, sneering smile. He was gripping the wheel like it was somebody’s neck. “I’ve always detested the hoodlums I’ve been forced to deal with. Their loud dress, their bad grammar, their uncouth manners.”

  “Yeah, their grammar’s always been one of my chief complaints against ’em.”

  “This is hardly amusing, Mr. Heller.”

  “What happened to ‘Nate’?”

  “Nate, then. All I ask is that you ride along with me, into the city, and listen to what I have to say.”

  “I’ll listen, but I don’t appreciate being brought out to your track on false pretenses.”

  He shook his head, the firm little chin contrasting with the quivering flab it rested on. “The security work for which I’ve retained you is legitimate. But I have a second job for you—a matter that must stay between just the two of us.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Some years ago, I was a conduit of information for your friend Mr. Ness, as well as Frank Wilson and Elmer Irey.”

  Jesus. That was a laundry list of the federal agents credited with “getting” Capone.

  “Then this is about Capone getting out,” I said. “You’re nervous he may’ve found out you were an informer.”

  “That is a part of it. And I’ve been told as much, that Capone’s been making noise about me in Alcatraz. But I’m valuable to the Outfit, and am as powerful in my way as any of them.” He sighed. “It’s all rather complex. With Capone’s release, various factions within the Outfit will be jockeying for position.”

  We were moving up over a tall traffic bridge, over the railroad yard; then we came down into Chicago, into a factory district.

  “What do you want of me?” I asked him.

  “I haven’t been an…‘informer,’ as you put it…in years. And my racing interests are quite legal, now. But recently federal agents have tried to contact me, left several messages at my office, asking for information about a small-time thief from my St. Louis days. Apparently somebody told them I’d be willing to talk. This comes at a very bad time indeed!”

  We were in a residential area now; occasional bars, mom-and-pop groceries.

  “With Capone’s return imminent,” I said, “it’s a very bad time to be renewing your federal acquaintance. Say—the recent problems Billy Skidmore and Moe Annenberg have had with the feds could also be laid at your doorstep—”

  Skidmore, scrap-iron dealer and bailbondsman, had run afoul of the Internal Revenue boys; and Moe Annenberg’s nationwide wire service—on Dearborn, around the corner from my office—had just been shut down for good.

  “Precisely. And I had nothing to do with either. But I’m afraid some people suspect I may have.”

  “Oh?”

  “I fear for my life, Nate. I’m being followed. I’m being watched. I’ve taken to staying in a secret little flat in a building I own on the North Side.”

  We crossed Pulaski and 22nd Street—renamed Cermak Road, though nobody seemed to call it that yet—into a commercial district. A black Ford coupe, a similar make to O’Hare’s, pulled out from the curb and fell in behind us.

  I said, “If it’s a bodyguard you want, I’m not interested.”

  “That’s not what I want of you. I wish that simple a remedy were called for. What I want is for you to go to them, the feds in question. Woltz and Bennett, their names are.”

  “I don’t know ’em.”

  “Neither do I! But you’re Ness’s friend. He’ll vouch for you.”

  “He’s not a fed anymore; and he hasn’t been in Chicago in years.”

  “I know, I know! He’s in Cleveland, but he’d vouch for you, with them, wouldn’t he? There’s such a thing as telephones.”

  “Well, sure…”

  “Tell them I’m not interested. Tell them not to call me. Tell them not to leave messages for me.”

  “Why don’t you tell them?”

  “I’ve had no direct contact with them as yet, and I want to keep it that way.”

  We were now in what had been Mayor Cermak’s old turf—some of the storefronts even had lettering in Czech. I’d grown up not far from here, myself—we were just south of Jake Arvey’s territory, where Czech gave way to Yiddish.

  “Okay,” I said. “I suppose I could do that.”

  “There’s more. I want you to go to Frank Nitti and tell him what you’ve done.”

  “Huh?”

  He was smiling and it was the oddest damn smile I ever saw: his upper lip was pulled back across his teeth in a display of smugness tinged with desperation. And what he said was everything his smile promised: “As if you’re going behind my back, out of loyalty to him, you go to Nitti and tell him that somebody’s trying to make it look like O’Hare’s informing the feds, but that in fact O’Hare isn’t informing, that he went so far as to instruct you to tell the feds he is not about to do any informing.”

  I hate it when people talk about themselves in the third person.

  “Why don’t you just go to Nitti yourself?”

  “Coming from me, it would be dismissed as self-serving. I might be lying to him. Coming from you, without my knowledge, it can prove my loyalty.”

  We went under the El.

  “Will you do it?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t want anything to do with Nitti.”

  “Nitti likes you. He’ll believe you. He respects you.”

  “I don’t know that any of that is true. I’ve had dealings with him from time to time, and he’s been friendly to me in his way, but I always wind up in the middle of something bloody.”

  He took one hand off the wheel and reached over and grasped my arm with it. “I’m being set up, Heller. Only somebody on the outside can save me.”

  I shook the arm off. “No.”

  “Name your retainer.”

  “No.”

  We crossed Kedzie into Douglas Park. I used to play here as a kid; I wondered if the lagoon was frozen over yet. Probably not.

  “Five thousand. Five grand, Heller!”

  Judas Priest. For running a couple of errands? Could I say no to that?

  “No.” I said. “No more Nitti. Five grand is five grand, but it ain’t worth getting killed over. Now, pull over and let me out.”

  “Somebody’s following me.”

  “I know. They have been since Twenty-second Street.”

  The park was empty of people; the faded green of it, its barren trees, leaves blown away, seemed oddly peaceful. O’Hare was picking up speed, going forty, now, and the Ford was a few car lengths behind, keeping right up.

  “Do you have a gun?” he sputtered.

  “In my desk drawer in my office, I do. Pull over.”

  “Use mine, then!”

  “Okay.”

  I picked up his automatic and pointed it at him. “Pull over and let me out.”

  His cheeks were blood red. “I’m not stopping!”

  I put the gun in his face.

  He swallowed. “I’ll slow down, but I’m not stopping!”

  “I’ll settle for that.”

  “At least leave me the gun!”

  He slowed, I opened the door, stepped onto the running board, tossed the gun on the seat and dove for grass.

  The other black coupe came roaring up, and then it was alongside of O’Hare, both cars going fifty at least, barreling through the park, and then a shotgun barrel extended from the rider’s window of the coupe and blasted a hole in the driver’s window of O’Hare’s car, the roar of the gun and the crash of the glass fighting over who was loudest.

  O’Hare swerved away from the other coupe, then back into it, nearly sideswiping them; they were riding the white center line of the four-lane street. I could see them, barely, two anonymous hoodlums in black hats and black coats in their black car with their black gun, which blew
a second hole in O’Hare’s window, and in him, too, apparently, for the fancy coupe careened out of control, lurched over the curb, sideswiping a light pole, its white globe shattering, and then shuttled down the streetcar tracks like a berserk sidecar and smashed into a trolley pole and stopped.

  The other black Ford coupe cut its speed, stopping for a red light at Western. I couldn’t make out the license plates, but they were Illinois. Then it moved nonchalantly on.

  I was the first one to O’Hare’s car. The window on the side I’d been sitting on was spiderwebbed from buckshot. I opened the door and there he was, slumped, hatless, the wheel of the car bent away from him, his eyes open and staring, lips parted as if about to speak, blood spattered everywhere, one hand tucked inside his jacket, like the Little General he’d patterned himself after, two baseball-size holes from close-up shotgun blasts in the driver’s window just above him, like two more empty eyes, staring.

  The .32 automatic was on the seat beside him.

  I had to find a phone. Not to call the cops: some honest citizen would’ve beat me to it, by now.

  I wanted to call Gladys and tell her if she hadn’t already deposited O’Hare’s check, drop everything and do it.

  The two dicks from the detective bureau knew who I was, and called my name in to Captain Stege. So I ended up having to hang around waiting for Stege to show up, as did everybody else, four uniformed officers, the two detective bureau dicks, a police photographer, somebody from the coroner’s office, three guys with the paddy wagon that O’Hare would be hauled off to the nearby morgue in. The captain wanted to see the crime scene, including poor old Eddie O’Hare, who accordingly had spent the past forty-five minutes of this cold afternoon a virtual sideshow attraction for the gawkers who’d gathered around the wrecked car, which was crumpled against a trolley pole like a used paper cup. Ogden is a busy street; and several residential areas were close by, as was Mt. Sinai Hospital, a pillar covering the corner of California and Ogden. So there were plenty of gawkers.

  Lieutenant Phelan, a gray-complected man in his forties, asked me some questions and took some notes, but it was pretty perfunctory. Phelan knew that Stege would take over, where questioning me was concerned. Stege and me went way back.

  The captain was an exception to the Chicago rule: he was an honest cop. He’d helped nail Capone—his raid on the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, where O’Hare’s accountant Les Shumway had once worked, provided the feds with the ledgers that allowed them to make their income-tax case against the Big Fellow. Later Stege (rhymes with “leggy,” which he wasn’t, being just a shade taller than a fireplug) had been the head of the special Dillinger Squad.