BULLET PROOF (Eliot Ness) Read online

  "I know I will."

  "And," Merlo said, looking around the bullet-torn room, "this won't be a picnic. Whitehall had a lot of enemies. He's been the business agent for the Ice, Coal, and Water Wagon Drivers Union for seven years, and during that time he's been in conflict with all sorts and classes of people."

  "True."

  "A man like that, who used his fists so frequently, who used his size to bulldoze so many people . . . literally hundreds of industrials hated him. Some probably enough to kill him."

  "One did, at least."

  "He was suspected of bombing that coal-company office a couple of years ago. He did time in the workhouse for an assault charge and malicious property damage, in another matter, and had an assault charge coming up for a police officer he roughed up."

  "I know all that."

  "Do you. According to your reporter friend, you were a friend of Whitehall's."

  "We were friendly acquaintances."

  The eyes behind the horn rims were shrewd and narrow. "Is there anything else you'd care to tell me about this case, Mr. Ness? Such as what brought you to the scene?"

  Ness smiled, even though his cheek still stung.

  "You're a good detective, Sergeant. Great instincts. Let's step outside."

  They did. They moved off the porch, away from Cowley, who was still kneeling at the altar of ejected shell casings. They stood on the sidewalk. Past the roped-off front yard, Wild was out having a smoke, his cigarette an amber eye in the night.

  Ness said, "Whitehall was doing some poking around for me."

  "What sort?"

  "Into labor matters. Specifically involving Big Jim Caldwell and Little Jim McFate."

  "I see."

  Ness filled Merlo in, in more detail, alluding to the acquisition of the blacklist by Whitehall without quite spelling it out, without mentioning Wild's role at all.

  "This is helpful background," Merlo said. "What was Whitehall working on lately, do you know?"

  "He was organizing the food terminal, in the wake of our ouster of Harry Gibson, who was Big Jim and Little Jim's man. Hey! That's a thought..."

  "What is?"

  "There was a machine-gunning of a farmer's vehicle at the food market. Sort of a grand-gesture scare tactic, not unlike the Gordon's restaurant shooting. Gibson himself did it, apparently, though we never could quite get a witness to swear to that."

  "Maybe Gibson did the Gordon's shooting."

  Ness poked Merlo knowingly in the chest. "Maybe he did this one, too."

  "Do we have shell casings or spent slugs or anything from the food-terminal shooting? If we could match 'em with what we have here..."

  Ness sighed. "Unfortunately, no. Vandalism sites aren't generally treated as crime scenes. I checked on that already, after what happened at Gordon's."

  "But do we have any casings or slugs from Gordon's? Was that treated as a crime scene?"

  "It wasn't," Ness said, "but I picked up casings and slugs myself, there."

  Merlo smiled and nodded. "You're a good detective, Mr. Ness. Great instincts."

  The two men smiled at each other, a bit awkwardly, and Ness said, "You take it from here, Sergeant. We'll talk tomorrow."

  "Yes we will," Merlo said, and headed back inside.

  Ness joined Wild on the sidewalk.

  "What did Mrs. Whitehall want?" the reporter asked, pitching a spent Lucky Strike into the darkness.

  "To slap me."

  "Oh, Christ. I'm sorry, Eliot."

  "Maybe I had it coming. Maybe I got her husband killed."

  "Bullshit. That idealistic roughneck knew exactly what risks he was taking, and why."

  Ness sighed. "You may be right."

  "You know I'm right. Besides, I don't think his working for you is necessarily what got him killed."

  "Oh?"

  "Who knew about it but the three of us?"

  "We can't know if Jack kept it to himself."

  "I'd bet my ass on him keeping it to himself. Who the hell in his circles could he tell he was in bed with the likes of you? Cops are poison to guys like Whitehall. They'd've thrown him out of his union post if they knew he was keeping company as lousy as you."

  Ness managed to smile a little. "You know how to build up a fella's confidence."

  "Well, it's true. But I think Big Jim and Little Jim were behind it, just the same."

  Ness nodded. "Because Jack was organizing the food terminal. Because he was stepping in and taking over while they were indisposed."

  "Exactly."

  "Well, that's just another way it's my fault, Sam. I opened that door for Jack."

  "Well what in the hell do you intend to do about it?"

  "What I told his widow I'd do. Find the sons of bitches responsible."

  Wild snorted. "Well, you know who that is."

  "Yeah. The two Jims. And I'd bet a year's pay that Harry Gibson, their out-of-work one-man goon squad from the food terminal, is wielding that tommy gun for "em."

  Wild lit up another Lucky. "Jack Whitehall would probably have taken a baseball bat and beat their brains out. Or blown 'em up with a bomb or something. What will you do?"

  "All I can do is put them in jail," Ness said, digging his hands in his topcoat pockets. "Or hope they resist arrest when I come to pick them up."

  "So you have a reason to kill them?"

  Ness smiled faintly. "I already have a reason," he said. "It's an excuse I'm looking for."

  TWO

  November 7-December 20, 1937

  CHAPTER 16

  Just a few months ago he had been in another funeral home, in Cleveland, at the wake of Jack Whitehall. He hadn't been able to stay long—Whitehall's widow remained bitter toward him—but he'd paid his respects. Said good-bye to an old friend, an old co-worker.

  Now, on this dreary Sunday afternoon, Eliot Ness was in Chicago, in Doty's funeral home on 115th Street, back in his old Roseland neighborhood, just a few blocks from the frame house where he'd been raised. He was saying good-bye to his mother, dead of a heart attack at seventy-three; five years ago, his father had gone the same way.

  But he was also saying good-bye to Roseland. Driving over here from the lavishly lawned Hotel Florence, across from the Pullman plant where he'd worked, going past Palmer Park where he'd played, he felt tugs from his past, felt his last real tie with his youth slip away. He would never live here again. He would rarely visit—only his schoolteacher sister Effie still lived in Roseland; his other two sisters, Clara and Nora, and his brother Charles, had all moved away. The family business, his father's bakery, had been sold years ago.

  Effie was the only one of his siblings present in the long, narrow parlor, a very Protestant room, with its dark wood and small stained-glass windows. His brother and his other two sisters would be coming in by train later today. Now, suffering the too-sweet smell of funereal flowers, he stood making meaningless conversation with faces both familiar and foreign, reaching into his memory for the names of these men and women his age who had stayed in Roseland. The men, most of them, worked in the Pullman plant where Ness had briefly toiled as a young man, dipping radiators. The women looked much older than they should, with lined faces and clinging children. Among the older folks paying their respects was the now-retired Pullman office manager who had told Ness's mother that her son could always count on a job anytime he wanted it.

  That had made his mother proud. She'd been a little too proud of him, he was afraid; not so long ago she had given an embarrassing interview to Sam Wild, damn him, in which she revealed that her youngest son "was so terribly good as a boy, he never got a spanking... I never saw a baby like him." Even worse, Sam had coaxed her into saying that she wasn't the least bit surprised that her youngest child had "the country's attention focused on his work on rebuilding a major city's crime prevention and law enforcement activities."

  He'd been surprised that even Sam Wild could wheedle such admissions out of Mama ("I always expected Eliot to do outstanding things"); she wa
s too quiet, too reserved for such remarks. On the other hand, her high opinion of him was no secret to him. He knew he was the favorite, and his sisters and brother didn't even seem to mind; they had fussed over the freckle-faced baby, too.

  He knew that he'd been somewhat spoiled as a child; ten years younger than his nearest sibling, he'd been doted over, no denying it. Childhoods didn't come much better. He and his papa would hop a streetcar and take in a game at White Sox park; or grab the I.C. to Soldier Field for a football game. His mother would read aloud to him, and had taught him to read before he entered kindergarten. When other kids were reading Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, if they could read at all, young Ness was consuming Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales and the plays of William Shakespeare.

  Nonetheless, his parents had encouraged him to be independent, and there had been no pressure to go into the family business. In fact, his mother and father had urged him to go to college, so he could get a top white collar job; they'd been disappointed, but not disapproving, when he went to work at Pullman instead.

  The day he came home with a new suit and suitcase, to tell his mother he had enrolled in the University of Chicago, she had said only, "It's like you to enroll first, then tell us." But there had been no disapproval in that. If anything, the opposite. And his father had only nodded, said, "Good," and gone back to puffing his pipe and reading his evening paper.

  Now they were both gone. Actually, his mother was still here—in that coffin, across the room. She truly looked peaceful; like she was sleeping. Yes. But Eliot Ness, who had seen more corpses than the undertaker who ran this place, who had seen bodies riddled with bullets, who had seen stiffs knife-slashed from head to foot, had never seen a dead body that disturbed him more.

  Thank God for Ev MacMillan. Without her, he was not sure how he could have gotten through this, at least not without breaking down in front of everybody. Right now she was over looking at the many flowers, reading the small cards of condolence.

  Evelyn was a slender brunette, twenty-five, who had first caught his eye half a dozen years ago, when he was still head of the Justice Department prohibition unit in Chicago. He had met her and her family socially (her father was a prominent stockbroker); Ness was still married at the time, and Ev was really just a kid, attending the Art Institute. But she had made an impression on him.

  And apparently he had on her, as well.

  He and Bob Chamberlin had taken the weekend off to take the train to Ann Arbor for the Michigan-Chicago football game. They had run into Ev and some friends at the stadium Saturday, Ev glowing upon seeing Ness, and the whole crew had gone out for dinner after the game, at the hotel. That evening Ness had gotten word his mother had died that afternoon.

  He and Ev had become pretty friendly during the course of the day and the early evening, with some slightly inebriated hand-holding and flirting and such ensuing; but he hardly expected Ev to insist on going back to Chicago with him. But insist she did.

  "I'm fine," he'd told her, last night at the Ann Arbor train station. "You don't need to come."

  "You're not fine. Your heart is breaking, and I'm here to help you pick up the pieces. No arguments."

  He hadn't argued. They got a compartment and he had broken down and cried in her arms; he'd been a little drunk, after all. She had comforted him as he hadn't been comforted since . . . well, since his mother comforted him as a kid, he guessed.

  He walked over to her, where she was still reading the little cards on the floral arrangements.

  "These are all so lovely," she said. "Your mother had many friends. So many friends."

  "She and Papa lived in the neighborhood over fifty years."

  "It's quite a tribute, so many flowers."

  Ness began to read the small cards. Names began to register. Faces that went with the names floated up from his memory.

  "One time," he said reflectively, "a man came in the bakery and asked my father to bake a cake in the shape of an M. The next day the man came back and saw what Papa had made and said, 'No, no, no—I want a fancy M.' Papa threw the cake away and gave it another go. The next day the man came back in and was handed my father's masterpiece: an ornate M-shaped cake in a flowery script. 'That's more like it!' the man said. And Papa said, 'Shall I wrap it up?' And the man said, 'No thanks, I'll eat it here!'"

  Ev smiled at that, and Ness smiled back at her; he had told the story, a favorite of his, to try to cheer himself and Ev up. But for some reason, now he was having to work even harder at holding back the tears.

  "Did you see this floral display?" Ev asked, taking his hand, leading him like a child. "It's really quite elaborate . . ." Then she whispered, "Even if it isn't in the best of taste."

  It was a garish display, red and white and blue mums, more appropriate to the winner's circle at a horse race than the parlor of a funeral home. An artist like Ev would naturally find it a little distasteful, but Ness figured it was the thought that counts.

  Ev read the card. "This is from 'Frank and the Boys." Who are Frank and the Boys?"

  "Let me see that," Ness snapped, and he grabbed the card, pulling it off the tiny string that held it on. Ev was startled, staring wide-eyed as Ness read the card to himself.

  He looked at her sharply. "This is from Frank Nitti."

  "Oh. Oh my."

  "The Chicago Outfit," Ness said bitterly, "paying their respects."

  He grabbed the garish wreath and said, "I'll be back."

  He marched straight to the rear door and went out into the alley, where a row of one-story parking garages serving adjacent apartment buildings faced the backs of the funeral home and other commercial buildings. Ness carried the wreath to a group of garbage cans behind the store next door and began to beat the wreath against the brick wall savagely, ripping the decorative ribbon, pulverizing the flowers, mashing them to nothing, the wire framework bending, distorting.

  When he was finished, he dropped the remains of the wreath into the nearest of the trash cans. Then he stood, with hands balled to fists, and breathed heavily, red with anger.

  "Remind me never to send you flowers," a voice said.

  Ness turned.

  The man standing in the alley, having just come out of the rear door of the funeral home, was a solid six feet tall, with reddish brown hair; his smile was wry but not unkind. His suit was dark and so was his tie. His name was Nathan Heller, and he was an ex-cop pal from Ness's prohibition-unit days; working as a private op out of his own small office, now.

  Ness sighed and managed an embarrassed smile. "Frank Nitti sent those flowers. I guess it must've rubbed me the wrong way."

  Heller shrugged. "Maybe Frank didn't mean it as a dig. He respects you."

  "I don't respect him. I think he meant it as an insult, and if he didn't, it's an intrusion into my personal life that I damn well don't appreciate."

  Heller walked up to Ness and put a hand on his shoulder. "It's good to see you, too, Eliot. Wish it wasn't this way, though."

  Ness patted his friend's hand. "Yeah. I know. Thanks for coming."

  Heller moved a few steps away. "I didn't know your mom very well. But I do know she raised a hell of a son."

  "Thanks."

  "Where is Charles?"

  Ness laughed. "I'm glad you came. We needed to talk, anyway."

  "That can wait. Business can wait. We can talk tomorrow."

  "No. Let's take some time now. I don't want to go back in there just yet."

  Ness put lids on two of the garbage cans, and the two men sat down on them.

  "Well, I did finish that job you contracted," Heller said. "In fact, your friend Caldwell headed back to Cleveland just this morning, by train."

  Ness had hired Heller, by phone, to shadow Big Jim Caldwell, who had taken a trip to Chicago for a union convention late last week.

  "Caldwell met with Louis Campagna at the Bismarck Hotel," Heller said. "They had lunch yesterday. Then they went upstairs."

  "To see Nitti?"

 
"That I'm not sure of. Nitti is known to rent out a suite there, from time to time. But what the hell—Campagna is Nitti's top lieutenant. What more do you need?"

  "Nothing more," Ness said.

  "Your suspicions were correct, I'd say," the private detective said. "What's going on in Cleveland is not strictly a local deal. It's definitely part of a move by the mob to move in on unions nationally."

  "The Chicago mob."

  "Well . . . more than just the Outfit, would be my guess. The whole national syndicate's in this effort."

  Ness was nodding. "Thanks, Nate. This will help."

  "Where does your investigation stand, anyway?"

  "We're in good shape, on the labor racketeering charges. We've got seventy-some witnesses in Cleveland, and I've been gathering more from the midwest and east coast as well. I'm going to follow up on several potential witnesses in Chicago while I'm here in town."

  "What about the murder charge? That Whitehall killing?"

  Ness shook his head. "We think we know who the shooter was—a strong-arm named Gibson. And we managed to match up the bullets from the Gordon's restaurant shooting to the ones that ripped Jack Whitehall apart."

  "Same gun? No question?"

  "Same gun. No question. The frustrating thing is, Gibson used a machine gun in a previous vandalism, at the food terminal, but nobody bothered to collect any of the spent slugs as evidence."

  Heller shrugged. "It was just a case of vandalism, after all."

  "Bullshit. When a machine gun is used, it goes way the hell beyond vandalism. That was sloppy police work, and I blame myself for it."

  "You can't be everywhere."

  "Perhaps not. But if I had been on top of that one, if I'd seen to it that we treated that food-market machine-gunning as a crime scene, and matched up all three sets of slugs, we'd have Gibson by the short hair."

  "And if you could get Gibson, you could probably swap him a life sentence for testimony against Caldwell and McFate."

  "Don't I know it. We had him under twenty-four-hour surveillance for a month, but he stayed clean."