The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller) Read online

  His one bad break was getting unfairly tarnished in the Jake Lingle affair. Lingle, a Tribune reporter gunned down gangland style in the pedestrian tunnel under Michigan Avenue, had been thick with both Al Capone and the police commissioner—the latter being the bloke who appointed Stege chief of the Detective Bureau. Guilt by association lost Stege that job. And being even vaguely linked to Capone was a bitter pill for one of the Chicago PD’s few good men.

  But that was almost ten years ago. Now he was the grand old man of the force, a favorite of the Chicago press when an expert quote on the latest headline crime was needed.

  There was a time when Stege despised me. He had me pegged as a crooked cop, which was true to a point but by Chicago standards I was a piker; all I did was give some false testimony at the Lingle trial (in return for a promotion to plainclothes), so the patsy the mob and the D.A.’s office selected could take the fall and put a sensational story that refused to die in the press finally to rest.

  Plus, I’d later testified, truthfully, against Miller and Lang, the late Mayor Cermak’s two police bodyguards who had attempted to assassinate Frank Nitti for His Honor, and failed (which Nitti’s hit on Cermak, less than two months later, had not). Testifying against those cops, dirty as they were, still made two black marks against me with Stege: I’d embarrassed the department publicly; and I’d tarnished the martyr Cermak’s memory. Stege, you see, had been a Cermak crony.

  Still, in recent years, Stege seemed to have earned a grudging respect for me. We’d bumped heads in the Dillinger case and a few times after and found, despite ourselves, we often saw eye to eye. Considering how much shorter he was than me, that was an accomplishment. Anyway, he no longer seemed to despise me.

  Or that’s what I thought, until I saw the look on his face when he climbed out of the chauffeured black-and-white squad car, which had come up with siren screaming, as if there was any rush where O’Hare was concerned.

  Stege was a stocky, white-haired little man with a doughy face and black-rim glasses. He looked like an ineffectual owl. Looks can be deceiving.

  “Heller, you lying goddamn son of a bitch,” he said, striding over on short legs to where I stood, on the grass, away from the gawkers and the crumpled car and dead Eddie O’Hare. He wore a topcoat as gray as the overcast afternoon and a shapeless brown hat and half of a grayish-brown cigar was stuck in the corner of his tight mouth. He poked my chest with a short, thick finger not much longer than the cigar. “You’re out of business. You overstepped yourself this time, you cagey bastard. You’re going to jail.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re keeping an open mind,” I said.

  “Stay,” he said, as if to a dog, pointing to the ground where I stood.

  He went over and had a lingering look at O’Hare. Then he allowed the paddy-wagon cops to pull the body out of the car onto a sheet. Lieutenant Phelan bent down and frisked the corpse; emptied its pockets. I couldn’t make out the contents from where I stood. The crowd was wide-eyed as the cops wrapped the body in the sheet and tossed him in the paddy wagon with a thunk and, with no more ceremony than that, Edward J. O’Hare exited public life.

  The car had already been searched; I’d seen Phelan find a steno pad in the glove box of the car—O’Hare’s secretary’s steno pad, perhaps? Had that been the “papers” she wanted to get out of his car? At any rate, Phelan was showing the pad to Stege, who was thumbing through it; he stopped at a page and read, then glanced over at me.

  Stege came over and said, “Give me your story from the top.”

  “O’Hare approached me to handle a security matter at Sportsman’s Park,” I said. “He had a pickpocket problem there. I went out today and had a look at his plant. Then he offered to drive me into the Loop and I took him up on it.”

  “That’s it? That’s your story?”

  “Every word is true, Captain.”

  “A witness—a guy who was painting windowsills on a ladder over on Talman Avenue—saw the whole thing. And he says you jumped from the car, seconds before this went down.”

  I’d seen a guy in work clothes being questioned, earlier, by Phelan. I’d noticed them looking over at me, too, so this revelation came as no real surprise.

  “Yes I did jump from the car. I noticed we were being followed, and I noticed too that the car behind us was picking up speed. I asked O’Hare to let me out, he refused, and I jumped.”

  Stege grimaced; then he spoke, with a formality filtered through sarcasm: “And what made you think the car following you presented a danger great enough for you to risk injury by jumping from a moving vehicle?”

  I nodded over at the wreck that had been O’Hare’s car. “Gee, I don’t know, Captain. For the life of me.”

  His cigar was out; he looked at it, as irritated with it as with me, and hurled it off into the park. Then a stubby finger was pointing at me again: “You jumped because you knew they were going to shoot O’Hare.”

  “It was a reasonable assumption on my part.”

  “That’s all it was? An assumption?”

  “O’Hare was acting jumpy, nervous. He was cleaning a gun in his office this afternoon, when I went to see him. He had it on the seat next to him while we drove.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Haven’t you heard, Captain? Al Capone is getting out of jail in a few days. Not that he would ever think of having a respected community leader like E. J. O’Hare murdered…”

  Stege reflected on that for a moment. More to himself than me, he said, glancing over at O’Hare’s smashed car, “There’s no one on earth Capone wouldn’t send to his death if he thought his interests would be served.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve heard rumors O’Hare was an informant, and that Capone’s known about it for some time.”

  He didn’t confirm or deny that; his putty face looked at me blankly, only the hard dark blue eyes behind the round dark rims of his glasses betraying his dislike for me as he said, pointing at me again, less forcefully now, “You fingered him.”

  “What?”

  “You fingered O’Hare. You set him up, I was right about you the first time; you are a bent cop.”

  “I’m a private bent cop, I’ll have you know.”

  “You’ve been known to have audiences with Nitti himself. Are you still for sale, after all these years? Are you Nitti’s man, now?”

  “I kind of like to think of myself as my own man, Captain. Are you going to charge me with anything, or maybe just haul me into the basement of the nearest precinct house and feed me the goldfish for a few hours?”

  Red came to the white face. “I wouldn’t waste a good rubber hose on you.”

  “You could always use a lead pipe. Can I go?”

  He was lighting up another cigar, the wind catching the flame of his match and making it dance. “You can go,” he said flatly. Puffing. Pointing the cigar at me, now. “But I’m going to investigate this killing myself, personally. And if you were Nitti’s finger man in this nasty little episode, you’ll spend Christmas in the Bridewell, and eternity at Joliet. That’s a promise.”

  “That’s funny. It sounded like a threat. What did it say in that steno pad?”

  “What?”

  “The steno pad. It’s O’Hare’s secretary’s steno pad, right? Her name’s Cavaretta. I don’t know her first name.”

  The hard blue eyes squinted at me from behind the owlish glasses. “It’s Antoinette. Toni.”

  “I see. Did she take notes on O’Hare’s visit to my office yesterday?”

  His lips were pressed together so tight, it was a shock when they parted enough to emit: “Yes.”

  “And does it confirm my story about O’Hare wanting some pickpocket work done?”

  “Yes. Very conveniently, too.”

  He was right about that. Was the steno pad left there on purpose, to explain away my presence? To let the cops tie off the loose end called Heller?

  “You met this Cavaretta woman?” he asked.

  “A couple of t
imes, yes. Briefly.”

  “Any impressions?”

  I shrugged. “Handsome woman. Pretty hard-looking, though. Calculating.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Just an impression. She’s in her mid-to late thirties but she isn’t married. Yet she’s not bad looking. Nice shape on her.”

  “By which you mean to imply what?”

  I shrugged again. “A dago gal from the West Side working for somebody like O’Hare, unmarried. She must be somebody’s sister or mistress or something. Both, maybe.”

  Stege was nodding. “I’ll keep that in mind when I question her.”

  “You see this as something Capone ordered from inside, Captain?”

  He looked over at the wreck again. “Well, it’s more Capone’s style than Nitti’s.”

  “True. Nitti doesn’t like to fill the headlines with blood.”

  “Nitti would’ve arranged it much less spectacular,” Stege agreed. “Nitti has more finesse. His boys would’ve taken Mr. O’Hare at their leisure and dumped him in a spot from whence he would not emerge, till Gabriel blew his horn.”

  The crowd was thinning. With O’Hare gone, there was nothing much to see but the wreck. Some reporters had arrived, but Phelan was holding them off.

  I said, “This does seem a strange place for a hit to go down. A major thoroughfare like Ogden, with Cook County Jail a stone’s throw away, ditto for the Audy detention home for juvies. There’s always cops all over this area.”

  “Imported killers,” Stege said, nodding again. “Local boys wouldn’t have done this this way.”

  Stege was right, although I failed to point out that using out-of-town help was the way Nitti usually went, when he veered from his normal low-profile use of force. It helped keep the heat off the Outfit, if the killers were seen as out-of-towners, where their actions could be written off as having been the bidding of Eastern gangsters.

  “It’s the Maloy hit all over again,” Stege said suddenly.

  “By God, you’re right,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me.

  Tommy Maloy, the movie projectionists’ union boss, had been driving one February afternoon in 1935 on Lake Shore Drive just opposite the abandoned buildings of the World’s Fair, when two men in a car drew up alongside his, poked a shotgun out the window and blasted the driver’s window, blowing a hole in it, then blasted again, blowing a hole in the driver.

  “That was supposed to be imported talent, too,” I said.

  Stege studied me for a moment, then, impulsively, he took something from his pocket and showed it to me, saying, “What do you make of this?”

  It was a memo. It read: Mr. Woltz phoned and he wants to know if you know anything about Clyde Nimerick. He said you are to call Mr. Bennett. It was signed Toni. The secretary had graceful, feminine handwriting; but there was strength in it, too.

  “Where did you find this?” I asked.

  “In his topcoat pocket.”

  Talk about convenient. “There’s your motive.”

  “Yes,” Stege nodded. “Woltz and Bennett are FBI agents. And Clyde Nimerick is a small-timer from O’Hare’s shyster days in St. Louis. A bank robber.”

  “So O’Hare was up to his informing tricks again, and the Outfit rubbed him out.”

  “Or some St. Louis hoodlums connected to Nimerick did.”

  It was a setup, of course. Another sweet setup with Nitti’s crafty name all over it. O’Hare hadn’t been informing again; but Nitti, for some reason, had wanted to make it look like he was. Five’ll get you ten Toni Cavaretta had planted that note in O’Hare’s topcoat pocket, in front of me, when she pretended to be looking for his keys. To bring O’Hare’s federal connection out in the open.

  I didn’t mention any of this to Stege. It just wasn’t any of my business. At least it wasn’t any business that I wanted to be mine.

  “You know what else he had on him?” Stege asked, smiling humorlessly. “A crucifix, a religious medallion and a rosary.”

  “Sounds like he was getting his house in order.”

  Stege shook his head, flicked cigar ash to the grass. “Here’s a guy who owns a yacht, who’s got an ocean villa, a four-hundred-acre farm, a house like a palace in Glencoe, and your occasional spare penthouse on the side. Who hangs around at the Illinois Athletic Club with the sporting crowd and the money boys. Who chums with judges and mayors and governors and respected people. Who says publicly he will have no truck with gangsters and yet he’s in bed with ’em and ends up this way.”

  “Welcome to Chicago, Captain.”

  He smiled again, just a little. Then it faded. His eyes became slits. “Were you part of this, Heller?’

  “No.”

  “I’d like to believe you.”

  “Go right ahead and believe me, then.”

  “Would you like a ride back to your office?”

  “Please.”

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “You can catch the El at Western and Eighteenth.”

  I did.

  It was after six when I got back to the office, and everybody was gone for the day. I found a stack of memos Gladys had left on my desk, all of them calls that had come in in the late afternoon, in the aftermath of the O’Hare shooting, from reporters wanting a statement. I made a big wad out of them and dropped it in the circular file. Then I fished my keys out of my pocket and unlocked the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk and got out the automatic, the nine-millimeter Browning I’d had since my police days, all tangled up in its shoulder holster. I untangled the gun, took it out of the holster, put it on the desk; then I got out of my topcoat, slipped off my suitcoat, slung on the holster, sat and cleaned and oiled the gun like O’Hare had before me, an irony not lost on me I assure you, loaded it, stood, put on my suitcoat, put on my topcoat, slid the gun not under my arm but into my deep right-hand topcoat pocket, keeping my hand on the gun, rose from my desk and locked up and left.

  It was dark now. A cold, nearly freezing rain was spitting at me; I kept my hand in my pocket gripping the gun. I felt tired—the evening may have been young, but the day and I felt old. Cutting down Plymouth, I thought for a moment about stopping in at Binyon’s, a favorite restaurant of mine that fortune had put just around the corner from my office. I was hungry enough, despite what I’d witnessed; being close to death doesn’t necessarily kill your appetite—matter of fact, it can make you appreciate life all the more, including such simple, taken-for-granted pleasures as good eats.

  Instead I walked on to the Morrison, going in the main entrance on Madison, through the plush lobby with its high ceiling and inlaid marble and dark wood and overstuffed furniture and potted plants. To the left was a bank of elevators, but I stopped first at the marble-and-bronze check-in desk.

  “Any messages?” I asked the assistant manager, a pockmarked young man named Williams, whose neatly tended slick black hair and tiny mustache complemented his pointlessly superior attitude.

  “That’s an understatement,” he said, with more disgust than humor. He turned to his wall of boxes and withdrew a fat handful of notes; I glanced at them—phone messages from reporters. Davis of the Daily News had called half a dozen times, alone. Some journalistic joker, frustrated in not reaching me it would seem, had left the name Westbrook Pegler. Very funny. Pegler, of course, was a star columnist for Hearst, and hadn’t worked the Chicago beat in years.

  I pushed the stack back at Williams, said, “Toss those for me, would you?”

  His tiny mustache twitched with momentary displeasure, but he did it.

  “And hold all my calls,” I said. “Unless it’s somebody from my office—that would be my secretary or my two operatives.”

  He jotted their names down; at least he was efficient. Then he smirked at me. “I suppose you realize you have a guest.”

  “A guest?”

  “Yes,” he said, a little surprised that I was surprised. “An attractive woman. She said she was a friend and I gave her a key.”

  My right ha
nd was still in my pocket, gripping the automatic; with my left I pointed a finger at him like a gun, almost touching his nose. His eyes involuntarily crossed for a moment, trying to focus on the finger.

  “Never do that,” I said.

  “Well, I’m sorry… I just assumed…”

  “Never let anybody in my room. Never give anybody my key.”

  “She’s a very attractive woman, Mr. Heller. She said she was a friend, a close friend.”

  “Never do that. Never let anybody in my room. Never give anybody my key.”

  I was still pointing the finger at him.

  He swallowed, his mouth obviously gone dry on him. “I assure you it will never happen again.”

  “Good.”

  I got on the nearest elevator; I wasn’t alone: in addition to the red-uniformed operator, there was a mustached midget in a gaudy yellow suit. The little man was smoking a big cigar and reading Variety. He got off on the fourteenth floor, and, when he was gone, the operator, a Swedish kid, said, “He’s a World’s Fair midget.” And I said, “What?” And the operator said, “He’s a World’s Fair midget. We have a troop of forty-five of them visiting from the New York World’s Fair. Appearing in town someplace.” I said, “Oh.”

  He took me up to the tower. The Morrison was the tallest hotel in the city, its main building twenty-one stories high, a nineteen-story tower sitting on top of that. My suite (which is to say my apartment) number was 2324. The operator let me off at the twenty-third floor and I walked toward a room that almost certainly had an uninvited somebody waiting inside for me.

  Probably not the attractive woman, though. Who wasn’t my girlfriend, or even a girlfriend, because I hadn’t been seeing anybody lately. Most probably this dish was sent to con a key out of the clerk, said key then being turned over to a male accomplice or accomplices with a gun or guns. And that’s who’d be waiting for me inside my room.