THE DARK CITY (Eliot Ness) Read online

  "All right," he said. "Your men can go on in and serve their warrants now. We'll back you up."

  As Cullitan moved by, Ness cautioned him: "A couple of hoods inside have machine guns, so take it easy. I don't think they're in the mood to use them, but you never know."

  Sam Wild and other reporters from all the papers— photographers, too—showed up soon thereafter.

  But all that was left for the photographers to shoot was a huge, pretty much empty room where open steel beams and catwalks looked down on a cement floor littered with paper, a U-shaped blackjack table, and a few baize dice tables. A gigantic race chart blackboard also remained, but otherwise, the casino had been stripped, the roulette wheels, slot machines and such having somehow been carted away. While the front of the Harvard Club held a well-appointed restaurant and bar, echoing the New Orleans appearance of the building's facade, the sprawling interior of the casino had all the atmosphere of the warehouse it once had been.

  Perhaps a score of strong-arms remained, in blue cheeks and tuxes. No guns were in evidence. Patton and a clutch of bodyguards were grouped around the blackjack table. Cullitan sent two of the private eyes over to cuff them, and one thug threw a punch. A private eye punched back and punches from both camps began flying.

  Ness crooked his finger and gathered one of his cops and waded in, pulling Patton and his men off the two constables, and Patton jerked away from Ness, saying, "Don't you try to slug me! You do and you won't get out of this place alive."

  "Really."

  "Lightning's liable to strike you, buddy." Patton brushed himself off. "You guys act like gentlemen while you're in here, or you'll wish to hell you had."

  "I see."

  Patten looked at Ness.

  Ness looked at Patton.

  "I gotta get my coat," Patton said, and scurried away, ducking into a doorway, followed by several of his "boys." The door, marked OFFICE—PRIVATE, slammed.

  Ness laughed to himself, and shook his head.

  Meanwhile, Press photographer "Shorty" Philkins had climbed up on top of a stool to snap some pics, and picked as his subject one of Patton's boys who hadn't managed to flee to the office. Said subject quickly kicked the stool out from under Shorty, who fell hard on the cement floor.

  Sam Wild, standing nearby and taking some notes, crossed over and swung a haymaker that started at his knees and ended on the chin of the thug, who went down on the cement harder than Shorty had.

  There was no love lost between the Harvard Club's surly staff and the gloating reporters, whose papers had been harping about wide-open gambling in greater Cleveland for years, paving the way for raids like tonight's.

  So, when the remainder of Patton's strong-arm squad went rushing over to thump Wild, the rest of the reporters picked up on that, and went rushing over themselves, fists flying and folding chairs getting folded over heads and backs. Ness had to go wading in again, some of his uniform boys backing him up, helping him try to pull the foes apart, only it just wasn't taking.

  Finally Ness turned to one of the cops and held out his hand, palm up. "Loan me your service revolver, would you?"

  The cop, a surprised young rookie, obeyed.

  Ness fired the gun in the air.

  Reporters and hoods froze in mid-swing.

  Ness smiled at the group and waggled a finger of his free hand at them, as if to say, "Settle down, kids," handing the smoking gun back to the startled cop.

  Then he called Flynt over and had him herd the thugs into one corner to get them cuffed.

  Ness wandered over to Wild, looking down at the sprawling, sleeping hood, who Wild had coldcocked, starting it all.

  "In Chicago," Ness said, "we call that assault."

  "Good thing we're in Cleveland," Wild said with a grin, rubbing his bleeding knuckles.

  Shorty Philkins was still on the floor as well, but not out cold.

  "You might want to get a picture of this," Ness said to Shorty, helping him up, then heading for the office.

  With several of Cullitan's constables backing him up, Ness stood at the door and said, "I can kick this one down too, if you like, Shimmy. Or maybe knock this little window out and send some tear gas in."

  Brief silence.

  And the door opened.

  Inside were three of Patton's boys, who when patted down proved to be unarmed, though two were the original machine-gunners. A chair with a box on it stood next to a high, open window through which Patton apparently had fled. The office was as stripped as the casino: four large safes squatted along one wall with their doors open and their insides emptied. The floor was littered with betting slips.

  Up above, an unoccupied machine-gun nest opened off one of the catwalks. From this cubbyhole, with slits for gun barrels, both the office and the main gambling room could be protected from a holdup or raid. It had gone unused tonight.

  In the yard at the rear of the building, constables led by Assistant Safety Director Flynt and backed by Ness' cops found two moving vans, not unlike the ones the constables themselves had arrived in. One of the vans was pulling out; the other was partially loaded with gambling equipment but was unattended.

  Ness stood in the big empty casino and shook his head, smiling at his own expense. He couldn't help but think of the Sweeney Avenue still, his last raid as a Prohibition agent, which had netted him a big, mostly empty building. Now his first gambling raid had netted him much the same.

  "If you're thinking this raid's a flop," Cullitan said, coming up to him, "you're very wrong."

  "Oh?"

  "I wasn't looking for cases to prosecute. You weren't looking for arrests. We were looking to shutter this place. And the Thomas Club. And I think we've accomplished that."

  Ness nodded. "I think we have. I think we've made life a little miserable for the Mayfield mob tonight."

  "What about tomorrow?"

  "Tomorrow I'll issue arrest warrants on Shimmy Patton, Gameboy Miller, and the other club operators. I'm still not looking for arrests, just encouraging the sons of bitches to stay out of Cuyahoga County."

  Soon Ness slipped away. He was just a private citizen, after all. No arrests to make, no property to seize, for him. He felt good. He'd seen some Cleveland cops behave like cops tonight, even if they hadn't officially been cops at the time. He had little doubt that the press would play this up in his favor, which would give the Mayor precisely the publicity fodder he'd been looking for to kick off the battle of the budget. More important, to Ness at least, he'd gotten to kick down a door and tangle with some toughs. His heart had raced and adrenaline flowed.

  It beat the hell out of a city council meeting.

  CHAPTER 12

  Eva Ness, née Jonsen, sat in her modern apartment feeling like a stranger in what was supposed to be her own home.

  She should have felt grateful, she knew, for such a lavish place. At least it seemed lavish to her, lavish compared to any standards she knew. In fact, the apartment was much smaller than their house in Bay Village, which they had not gotten around to renting yet. Good thing, she thought. The apartment consisted of two bedrooms, one of which Eliot had converted into a study, a kitchen, a living room, and one bath. Plenty of space, but not spacious.

  Square footage wasn't the key thing; the location was. Their massive brick gingerbread-trimmed apartment complex fit right into this upper-crust area. The problem was, Eva didn't. What was she doing here, on the West Side of Cleveland, just a block from the lake? The only thing between them and Lake Erie was the even more expensive neighborhood along the lakefront.

  They'd been on the lake in Bay Village, too, but that community was comfortably middle-class, and their house was nothing next to the big, fancy homes of Lakewood and Rocky River that separated Bay Village from Cleveland. This location was uncomfortably top-hat for her. She had tried, for almost two weeks now, to feel at home. They had moved out right after Christmas (she'd begged Eliot to have Christmas at Bay Village, and he'd given her that) and ever since she'd been, well, she
'd been miserable.

  She hated these strangely modern furnishings—the pastel colors, chrome trim, rounded surfaces, the air-brushed paintings of flowers. She much preferred the comfortable, homey furnishings at their Bay Village home, some of which they'd brought with them from Chicago. She was ashamed of herself for feeling this way, since the place wasn't costing them a cent. Eliot described it as a "fringe benefit." The mayor had insisted they move to Cleveland, and some rich friend of his had provided this apartment, already furnished. She and Eliot paid only the utilities and phone.

  It was a dream come true. Why, then, did it feel like a nightmare? Why was she giving into these crying jags? It was more than just homesickness, though even now she had a pang at the thought of having missed Christmas with her family.

  Partly, it was the crushing boredom. There was so little housekeeping to do; Eliot was home so infrequently, he didn't get much of anything dirty, outside of his clothes, and the bulk of those went to a Chinese laundry. And she was almost afraid to touch anything in this shiny pastel palace. She read movie magazines and romances; she sewed; and she listened to the radio—Just Plain Bill was her favorite program.

  Eva had liked her life better when she was working. She missed that. It made her less mad at Eliot because she could hardly blame him for preferring the hustle and bustle of an office to a dull life at home.

  He wasn't mean to her. He didn't have a mean bone in his body, at least that she'd ever seen. She marveled sometimes when she heard, or, more often, read in the papers, of his exploits. It seemed to have so little to do with the quiet man she—almost—lived with.

  She thought, sometimes, about asking Eliot if she might go back to work. After all, they had no family for her to take care of. But he made a good living, and she assumed he'd be too proud for that. It wouldn't look right for a man with a job like his, she felt. So she never asked.

  Back home in Chicago, in the early years especially, being with a man like Eliot Ness had been thrilling. Even though as his secretary and then his wife, she was on the sidelines, she felt a part of him. He was going places. Name in the papers all the time; fancy education; respected by important people in the community.

  But after they'd been married a while, she began to hate his work. She began to hate the loneliness of waiting for him to get home, and especially to hate the nervousness, the anticipation, the wondering whether anything bad had happened to him. Was he bleeding in an alley somewhere? Was he dying, or dead? The Capone gangsters had threatened them at home many times; the couple had, in response, and more than once, moved. Eliot was shot at more than once. She hated it. She hated it.

  When things began to wind down in Chicago, she had been relieved. But the year that followed, when he was chasing moonshiners around the woods of Kentucky and such, was the worst yet. He admitted that himself. He'd come home shaking.

  "Sometimes I wish I was still up against Capone and machine guns," Eliot had said to her, in a rare discussion of his job. "Those crazy hillbillies with their squirrel guns can spook a fella."

  But the Cleveland job, with the Alcohol Tax Unit, had been easier, less frightening. Certainly Eliot got into scrapes and was doing dangerous police work, and kept his usual long hours. But it didn't seem so intense, somehow. It seemed more like a regular job.

  And she could tell Eliot was getting bored with the Prohibition work. He'd admitted to her that his job "wasn't about anything," several times. He told her he hoped to land a job as police chief or commissioner in some smaller city, or put law enforcement behind him entirely and go into private business.

  Hearing him say that had made her so happy. She felt they could build their marriage at last. His long hours, his dangerous duty would be behind him, a part of his youth. It was time for Eliot to grow up. And he seemed to know it.

  When she first heard the news about his appointment as Cleveland's safety director, she thought heaven had opened up for her. But as soon as Eliot had enthusiastically reported that he wouldn't be "desk bound," that he could still get out and investigate and "shake things up," she knew she was in for the same old hell on earth.

  Such feelings made her feel guilty. She knew it was her responsibility to make a go of the marriage. She knew she should support him in what he was doing. He was doing important work. He was still going places, and the papers had been full of him ever since his appointment was announced.

  Right now, in fact, as she sat on an uncomfortable sofa in the shiny, pastel apartment, sunlight filtering in through sheer patterned curtains, putting shadowy X's on her lap and legs, she had in her hands the morning paper, which was again full of Eliot. She had read the article again and again till her eyes blurred. She read it over morning coffee, and then she took the car and drove to the nearest drugstore where she bought the other papers, and she read their versions of the Harvard Club raid as well.

  She took time out midmorning to do a few personal things, and then she read the papers some more, and then she fixed herself an egg salad sandwich for lunch, drinking a glass of milk with it, feeling like a little girl.

  Shortly after that came the threatening phone call.

  "Your fuckin' husband's a dead man," the voice had said.

  She hung the phone up, quietly, the foul word bouncing off her. Such phone calls had been coming regularly, since they moved in. Eva had mentioned them to Eliot and he had told her not to worry. He had said they had something to do with his throwing two drunken cops off the force.

  "I'll get our phone number changed," he had told her, but he hadn't.

  She wondered if this call was about the drunken cops, or whether it had to do with the raid last night. Not that it mattered. Such calls would continue, for old reasons, and for new ones that Eliot's future actions would provide.

  She had not cried today. Instead, she had trembled with something that she barely recognized as rage, and she had felt oddly empty. These and other reactions, other emotions, ran through her, but she had not cried. She went over and over the newspaper stories of how her husband, the city government executive who ran the police department and the fire department, had gone kicking down doors and scuffling with bandits and facing men with machine guns, unarmed.

  How he had very possibly broken the law by taking a "battalion," as one of the reporters put it, of Cleveland's finest across the city limits to get involved in a messy, dangerous business that was none of Eliot's business, none of the cops', and none of Cleveland's.

  Oh, but the papers loved it. Every one of them. Eliot had proven that the advance notices of his G-man bravery had not been exaggerated. He was a man of action, Eliot Ness was. Fearless. Like something out of the movies.

  Last night, when he got home after midnight, he had said only, "Sorry I'm so late. Stupid city council meeting, and then something else came up."

  She'd found him in the kitchen, checking to see if she had anything ready for him to eat, which of course she did, cold cuts and cheese on a platter in the Frigidaire.

  "Didn't mean to wake you," he'd said, with his shy grin, as he took the platter to the white kitchen table in their oh-so-modern kitchen, the blindingly white kitchen that reminded Eva of an operating room. She missed their breakfast nook so.

  "I wasn't asleep," she told him, sitting with him. She'd dressed in a pink robe and looked nice—at least she hoped she did. She'd made an effort to.

  "I'm starved," he said.

  "You want a beer with that?"

  "Is there some cold? I didn't see any."

  "There's some in there. You just didn't dig around enough."

  He laughed. "Some detective I am, huh?"

  She opened and handed him the bottle of beer; he wasn't one to use a glass. "You want some bread with that?"

  "No, thanks, honey." He was folding the slices of meat and cheese, gobbling them. He usually had better manners than this, but he was clearly tired and, as he said, starved.

  "What came up?"

  He looked at her, puzzled.

 
"You said something came up," she said. "What?"

  He waved it off. "No big deal. A lot of buildup and not much payoff,"

  "Why don't you tell me about it?"

  "Just boring stuff. You know. Work."

  "I see."

  "You better get back to bed. It's the middle of the night."

  "I missed you."

  "I missed you, too, baby."

  She got up and put an arm around him and kissed his cheek. "Come to bed. Don't sit up and read."

  "Is that an invitation?"

  "Sure is."

  "Okay. How can I refuse a siren like you? Give me a few minutes to finish stuffing myself."

  "Sure."

  "And I'll just take a glance at the evening paper."

  "Fine."

  She went to bed and waited. Fifteen minutes later, she got up and found him in the living room, asleep in his chair, the paper in his lap.

  She'd let him sleep. Now she was glad nothing had happened last night. She loved him, and she loved the way he made her feel; he was no rough-and-tumble guy where lovemaking was concerned. If they'd had a sweet night together last night, it would make what she had to do today, this afternoon, even harder.

  He worked till noon on Saturdays, and then had lunch at the Theatrical Restaurant with some of his reporter friends. She knew he would show up around mid-afternoon and take a nap. Then the couple would spend Saturday night together. In Bay Village they had friends they'd play cards with. They hadn't made any friends in the apartment building yet, and last Saturday, their first Saturday in the apartment, he'd taken her to some fancy banquet where they met a lot of politicians and businessmen.

  She'd enjoyed that. She liked dressing up, meeting important people, basking in her husband's celebrity. That was nice, it was fun, and so were most of their Saturday nights together.

  But it wasn't enough. It could not make up for the rest of her life, in this pastel prison.

  At three o'clock he came in. He was cheerful, as she helped him out of his topcoat and hat, which she hung in a pale green closet.

  "How would you like to go to a show tonight?" he said, putting his hands on her shoulders. That boyish grin, that lock of hair that wouldn't stay off his forehead. God, she loved him so.