BULLET PROOF (Eliot Ness) Page 8

  Gordon sat and looked out the window at the glittering Playhouse Square night, streaked with neon, alive with moving marquees, slashed by automobile headlights, a sparkling darkness that blurred into something abstractly beautiful.

  The street was hopping, but Gordon was not. He was bone tired. He didn't mind, though; in fact, he liked it. He liked sitting alone in his new creation with its smell of newness, from the disinfectant of the kitchen to the leather of this booth; it was like sitting in a brand-new car you'd bought—and paid cash for.

  He knew he'd been blessed—the only son of a successful farmer—but he also knew he'd never had it easy. His pop had made him work side by side with the hired hands, and, while he liked to work outside and didn't mind physical labor, he'd had no real affinity for farming. The business end of it had interested him, true, but he could not picture himself taking over the reins of the farm.

  In 1922 Gordon, still in college (at Case Western, studying business), encouraged his father to cut out the middleman and open a buttermilk stand. The stand, a small, standup affair under a stairway in the Old Arcade, served as an outlet for the farm's daily products and for Ma's Dutch apple pies.

  Two years later, when Gordon graduated, he was handed the buttermilk stand by his father to run as he saw fit; shortly thereafter, using profits from the unexpected killing the stand had made thus far, Gordon opened a second outlet. He picked up the lease on the stall for peanuts—the last tenant had gone out of business, running a tiny coffee shop within the office building; but Gordon punched out a door and window on Eighth, the narrow street across from the Hippodrome, a popular movie palace. He offered a limited menu (two sandwiches—toasted cheese and bacon-lettuce-and-tomato; and two varieties of pie—Dutch apple and lemon meringue) and kept the place open fourteen hours a day, to get the theater crowd and the usual luncheon set.

  His father was proud of Gordon's success, but had no real interest in getting involved with the restaurants, other than as an outlet for his dairy farm's products; he completely gave Gordon his head. And in that head Gordon had an idea for a new kind of restaurant.

  Good, simple food, served in nicely decorated but not ritzy surroundings. Designed to suit the common man's taste (utilizing Ma's recipes) while at the same time making him—and his family—feel they were out for a night on the town. Gordon envisioned a chain of such restaurants, from the very start; if hamburger stands and automats could go national, why not this? Buying foods in bulk, various other supplies in quantity, uniform layout and design . . .

  The Playhouse Square restaurant would take the place of the Eighth Street location, which had closed its doors that very day. The hole-in-the-wall lunchroom would be replaced by this study in mahogany paneling and clear crystal lighting. Flashier than the New York, Detroit, and Pittsburgh locations, this would truly be the highlight of the growing Gordon's chain. Which was fitting, as this was their Cleveland crown jewel, the Gordon family's home-base showcase.

  Vernon Gordon did not remember falling asleep. He had been sitting in that booth, relaxing, reflecting, enjoying the smells of the new, savoring the exhaustion of this long final workday, knowing that his wife and two kids were already in bed asleep in their Shaker Heights home, that a few quiet moments here, alone, with his new pride and joy, wouldn't hurt a thing. Would, in fact, give him a good measure of simple pleasure.

  But, at some point, he put his head on his folded arms and sleep sneaked up on him, subtly.

  Less subtle was the gunfire that awoke him.

  "Christ!" he yelled to nobody as glass shattered, and he ducked under the booth as it was showered with shards, while the thunder of machine-gun fire ate up the night and the plate-glass windows that looked out on the square.

  He'd caught a glimpse, just a glimpse, out that shattered, shattering window, of the black snout of a machine gun sticking out the window of a black car stopped out in the street; a black snout spitting flame and smoke and .45 slugs.

  And still they came, raking the restaurant, a lead rain falling, making plaster clouds, splintering woodwork, knocking over chairs, tearing tablecloths, cutting grooves in counters and tabletops, puckering the metal of coffee urns and counter trim and cash register, tearing the leather of the booths, turning dishes, glasses, table settings, light fixtures to rubble, as the low-throated chattering of tommy-gun fire accompanied the dissonant music of breaking glass.

  Gordon Vernon was no coward, but he cowered beneath the booth nonetheless, as any man would, while the table above him was served a noisy meal of glass and debris.

  And when, finally, the gunfire stopped, all sound in the universe seemed to stop as well—other than the beating of Gordon's heart, which was pushing at his chest. Even with the havoc that had been visited upon the restaurant, no sounds broke the lull. Somewhere in his rattled mind Gordon noted that at least no water pipes had been burst, or he'd hear them spraying.

  Then an angry squeal of tires announced the departure of the gunman—or gunmen, Gordon couldn't know— and he was alone with the wreckage that had been his restaurant.

  And when he crawled out from under the tabletop, he did two things he hadn't done in a very long time: he screamed in pain, like a child who'd badly scraped both knees; and then, like that same child, he began to weep uncontrollably.

  The tears weren't tears of pain, however, but of loss, and not monetary loss, not entirely. Something precious had been destroyed. Something Vernon Gordon had made, something he took pride in, something he had come to love, had been ruined.

  The only light was filtering in from the neon and marquees and streetlamps outside, but Gordon could see plainly just how much damage had been done. He himself was the only unscathed item in the place. Thousands upon thousands of dollars, and many days of work, would have to be invested to put this bullet-torn Humpty Dumpty back together. And now the anger pushed away the tears. He wasn't thinking about the money. He was thinking about the greedy bastards who did this.

  Glass crunching under his shoes, he walked to the phone, at the counter, but the phone was among much else that had been shot apart.

  He found his way outside—the double glass front doors were a ruptured metal framework now—into a warm night, where a few people were gathering, but not many. He looked at his watch: after three A.M. He'd slept a long time before his machine-gun wake-up call. He was wondering where he could find a phone at this time of night, and if he could whether he should call the police or not, when the sirens cut the air almost as dramatically as the machine-gun fire had before it.

  He felt calm now; strangely calm. He found a package of cigarettes in his breast pocket and some matches, too. He lit up a smoke.

  The two uniformed policemen seemed young—two of those rookies Eliot Ness had brought onto the force, with much fanfare not so long ago, he supposed—and he told them everything that had happened. No, he hadn't gotten a look at the car or the driver; it was a dark sedan of some kind, that was all he made out in the short time before he ducked under the table. No, he didn't think it was a murder attempt—he didn't think whoever did it realized he, Gordon, was even on the premises.

  "How do you read it, then, Mr. Gordon?" the slightly older of the two cops asked.

  "Simple vandalism," he said, shrugging, smoking.

  "Do you have any idea who might have done this?" the other cop asked.

  "Any idea at all why you were singled out for this?" the first cop added.

  And here was where his cooperation had to stop.

  "No," Gordon said, and smiled meaninglessly. "None."

  And he had asked to be excused. His wife would be worried about him, he said.

  Actually, she wouldn't be. She was used to his long and odd hours; and she was in fact deep asleep and didn't wake when he crawled into bed. He didn't tell her about the machine-gunning till the next morning, over breakfast, and even then didn't tell her that he'd been in the line of fire or in any danger at all, for that matter. He told her less, in fact, than he'd told the
two rookie cops.

  This was business, after all. And the fear, tears, and anger of the night before needed to be kept to himself. Not forgotten, never forgotten; but tucked away. The most important order of business was business. Was getting his restaurant put back together.

  Shortly after ten that morning, Vernon Gordon, in a well-tailored blue suit with a blue-and-white tie snug at his throat, looking nothing at all like a man who the night before had recoiled under a table while gunfire chewed up the world above him, entered the third-floor offices of the union headquarters in a turn-of-the-century, six-story brick building on East Seventeenth Street. He walked without a word past an attractive young brunette secretary who was doing the morning filing (of her nails) at a reception desk in the small, sparsely furnished waiting room, and entered a large, sparsely furnished office where Big Jim Caldwell sat with feet up on a desk as he read the sports section of the morning paper. He was smoking a cigar.

  As if at military attention, Gordon stood across the desk from Caldwell, who barely glanced up from the paper. The fat little man in shirt-sleeves said, not unpleasantly, "Good morning, Mr. Gordon. Paper says you suffered some vandalism last evening. Dirty shame."

  "How much?" Gordon asked coldly.

  Half hidden behind the papers, Caldwell said, "As terrible as these lawless vandals are, I feel sure they didn't realize you were in the restaurant. I'm sure no one would have wanted you to come to harm."

  "How much?"

  Looking up from the paper, smiling slightly around his cigar, the round-faced Caldwell said, "The other day I gave you advice and you didn't listen. A shame."

  "How much?"

  He folded the paper and placed it gently across his generous lap. "You see, as it turned out, you could've used that bulletproof glass."

  "How much?"

  "You should take this opportunity to put some in. Bulletproof glass, I mean."

  "How much?"

  Caldwell, his expression blandly pleasant, shrugged. "Same as before."

  "You already got fifteen hundred out of me. And the window washers union fee."

  "That covers work—and plate glass—from days past. We're discussing the present, right now, and the future. You have a remodeling job to do, and you're going to need carpenters, glaziers, the whole megillah. You need the unions I control. You need me." He gestured to himself with a pudgy hand, two fingers of which now held the cigar. "And I need two thousand dollars."

  "I should turn your fat ass over to the cops."

  Caldwell's expression remained pleasant, but it was as hard and transparent as the plate glass he peddled. "I'm sure that would give you a certain satisfaction. The question is, would it replace the satisfaction of successfully opening your new restaurant? Because without me in your corner, you're out of fucking business, laddie-buck."

  Gordon contained his rage; he stood, as if frozen, and said, "I'll have the money for you this afternoon. In cash."

  Caldwell unfolded the paper, lifted it off his lap. "Good. Give me a call, and we'll arrange a drop. Little Jim'll pick it up. And I'll see to it that you get your bulletproof glass."

  Gordon raised a cautionary finger. "I view this as a business expense. I'm putting up with it as such. Push me one step beyond this point and I'll consider you a bad investment. I will see your fat ass in jail, and it will give me considerably more than just a 'certain' satisfaction."

  Caldwell smiled like a cherub. "You've made your point. We understand each other." He raised the paper, blocking his face from Gordon's view.

  But Gordon figured the cherubic smile was gone when the voice from behind the paper said: "Don't come here again Union headquarters is for union members only,"

  "What a pity I can't belong to such an elite club," Gordon said, and stalked out.

  CHAPTER 9

  Ness stood in the midst of the wreckage of the Gordon's restaurant on Playhouse Square, hat pushed back, hands on his hips, face tightened into a mask of disgust. Sunlight streamed through the rows of yawning metal mouths where plate glass had been, sun glinting and bouncing off their jagged teeth.

  "Chicago typewriter wrote this," Will Garner said, pointing to the patterns of bullet holes in the woodwork, the plaster. The big Indian in a brown suit was slowly prowling the shard-strewn, rubble-filled dining room.

  Detective Albert Curry, tagging along after Ness, seemed shaken. He had apparently never seen the damage a machine gun could do.

  "We've had broken windows before," Curry said, "but nothing like this. This goes beyond vandalism into sheer. . ."

  He searched for a sufficient word.

  "Gangsterism," Ness filled in flatly. "This is extortion in the true, time-honored Black Hand tradition. This is how the Mafia got its start, gentlemen."

  "We aren't dealing with the Mafia, surely," Curry said with a nervous smile. "This is labor racketeering, pure and simple."

  "It's labor racketeering, all right," Ness said, kneeling, picking up several blunted .45 slugs and dropping them into an evidence envelope. "But it's not pure and it's not simple."

  Garner said, "I think Mr. Gordon's arrived."

  Ness stood and watched as Vernon Gordon, wearing a blue suit and a scowl, stepped inside his shot-out front doors and heaved a sigh.

  "I thought I'd covered this last night," Gordon said impatiently, not meeting the eyes of Ness or Curry or Garner. "I gave a full statement to the two officers."

  Ness walked over, glass fragments fragmenting further under his feet, and smiled tightly at Gordon and said, "Good morning. Vern."

  The two men knew each other socially, at the country club, at various business and fraternal associations around town; they were less than friends, but hardly strangers.

  "Sorry, Eliot," Gordon said with a quick smile, still not meeting Ness's gaze. "Afraid I'm a little testy this morning."

  "I can well understand why."

  He gestured with both hands, indicating his ravaged restaurant. "But, frankly, I have a lot to do—obviously. I've said all I have to regarding this . . . accident."

  "Accident? Why, did somebody accidentally fire off a few hundred rounds of forty-five caliber ammunition your way? That's a hell of an accident, Vern."

  "Eliot, I have things to attend to."

  "You sure as hell do. You need to attend to the bastards responsible. And I'm here to offer my help in that regard."

  Gordon sighed, and he smiled again, wearily. "I'm grateful. But I'm afraid there's nothing either of us can do."

  "Why don't you tell me about your union troubles, Vern."

  "I don't have any union troubles, Eliot." He sighed again, adding, almost to himself, "Not now."

  "I see. Then you've talked to Caldwell and/or McFate already this morning."

  Gordon said nothing.

  Ness gestured with a fist. "You can help me put those venal bastards away. This episode goes way beyond anything they've pulled to date. Firing off machine guns in the city streets is not going to endear the public—or a judge or a jury—to the 'boys.' This time they've gone too far."

  Gordon was shaking his head side to side, as if Ness's words were blows he needed to deflect. "Eliot, I didn't see who did it."

  "You could have been killed, Vern."

  "Whoever did it didn't realize I was here."

  "That wouldn't make you any less dead."

  "Well, I'm not dead."

  Ness raised a hand as if swearing an oath in court. "It was late at night—or in the early morning hours, depending on how you look at it."

  "Yes."

  "So it was well after the theater crowd on Euclid had cleared. The streets were fairly empty."

  "That's right."

  "According to the officers' report, the car—a dark sedan—stopped, and then someone fired upon your restaurant. Is that right?"

  "Well . . . yes."

  "As opposed to firing while the car drove by?"

  "I'd say that's right. Why? What's the significance of that?"

  Garner, who
had ambled over near Ness, said, "It means there was only one man in the car, most likely. He had to come to a stop, slide over and shoot."

  Gordon looked confused. "Is that significant?"

  "I think so," Ness said. "I don't think either Caldwell or McFate would do the machine-gunning themselves, so it required strong-arm assistance. To which end they only used one man."

  Gordon's irritation was barely in check; but he couldn't disguise his interest, either. "So what?"

  Curry, standing next to his chief, said, "Our understanding of the approach McFate and Caldwell take, when putting the squeeze on the likes of yourself, is to do everything themselves, from first contact to payoff. They like to keep the circle small."

  "Using one man as their strong-arm," Garner explained, "fits that same pattern. They used one man on what most would consider at least a two-man job. Keeping the circle tight, and small."

  "Vern," Ness said, "you've done a lot for Cleveland. Do something more—help us get rid of this sickness."

  Gordon's eyes tightened and his reluctance to turn Ness down was apparent, but nonetheless he shook his head no.

  "We can give you and your family police protection," Curry said. "We can watch the restaurant, too."

  Ness nodded, confirming what Curry said, finally catching Gordon's eyes and locking on to them. "You can help rid Cleveland and its business community of one hell of an embarrassment."

  The sunlight streaking through the room caught Gordon in the face and he winced; he moved till his face was out of the light and then he looked at Ness with eyes that were tired and sad and resigned to it all.

  "Like everybody else in the business community," Gordon said, "I need to stay in business. I do what I have to do to do that."

  Ness had an edge in his tone. "And you don't think putting Caldwell and McFate in jail would be good for business?"