The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller) Page 9

  I’d almost forgotten.

  Which considering the stature of the client—potential client, as we hadn’t talked, he’d merely called for an appointment—was stupid of me.

  “Send Mr. O’Hare in,” I said, straightening my tie and my posture.

  But Mr. O’Hare wasn’t the first person in. A striking-looking woman was, a rather tall, dark woman who strolled in as if out of an Arabian dream (or was it a Sicilian nightmare?), regal in her camel-hair swagger topcoat with padded shoulders, open to reveal a mannish, pinstripe suit beneath. Beneath the suit, any good detective could deduce, was not a mannish body, the lapels of my suit didn’t flare out like that. She wore a gray pillbox hat atop long black shining hair pulled back in a bun; a large purse was slung over her shoulder on a strap—she could’ve carried a change of clothes in the thing. She glanced at the portraits of actresses on my cream-color wall and seemed faintly amused. Then she smiled at me. nodded; there was no warmth in it, but there was sensuality and smarts: a wide mouth, with dark red lipstick, a patrician Roman nose, dark, dark eyes and ironic arching brows.

  O’Hare, shorter than her, was on her heels, helping her with her coat, like she was the queen and he was her foot servant.

  Which was ridiculous, whoever she was, because Edward J. O’Hare—a small but powerful-looking man in his own natty pinstripe suit, a diamond stick pin in his red, spotted-black tie, a black topcoat over his arm, black fedora in his hand—was a big man in this city, a millionaire with connections in both city hall and the underworld. Especially the underworld. His face was handsome in a lumpy way, dark bushy black eyebrows hanging over piercing dark blue eyes, a sharp, prominent nose, strong features undercut by a small chin riding a saddle of flesh.

  He hung her coat up, and his own, and smiled at me, the smile of the professional glad-hander. “Mr. Heller, 1 hope you don’t mind my bringing my secretary. Miss Cavaretta, along…to take some notes during our visit. It’s my practice at business meetings.”

  I was standing, gesturing to the chairs along the nearby wall. “Not at all,” I said. “Such charming company is always welcome.”

  She smiled, tightly, holding something back, her eyes alive with things she knew I didn’t, and she sat down and crossed slender, shapely legs, getting a steno pad and a pen from her purse.

  O’Hare was standing across from me, offering his hand, still smiling like a politician. I shook the hand, smiled back, wondering why he was so eager to please. This was an important man. I was nobody in particular. Did he always come on this strong?

  “It’s a real pleasure Mr. Heller,” he said. “I’ve heard good things about you.’

  “Who from, Mr. O’Hare? Frank Nitti, possibly?”

  His smile disappeared; I shouldn’t have said that—it just blurted out.

  He sat. “My associations with that crowd are exaggerated, Mr. Heller. Besides, you can make money through such associations and run no risk if you keep it on a business basis, and are forthright in your dealings. Keep it business, and there is nothing to fear.”

  He sounded like he was trying to convince himself, not me.

  I said, “I didn’t mean to be rude, Mr. O’Hare.”

  “Call me Eddie,” he said, getting out a silver cigarette case. He offered one of the cigarettes to Miss Cavaretta; she took it. He offered me one and I politely refused, though I eased an ashtray toward Miss Cavaretta. Our eyes met. She smiled at me with them. She had long legs. They were smiling at me, too.

  “We’ve just closed the season out at Sportsman’s Park,” Edward J. O’Hare said, lighting Miss Cavaretta’s cigarette with a silver lighter shaped like a small horse’s head. He put the cigarettes and lighter away without lighting one up himself.

  I said, “You’ve had a good year, I understand.”

  Sportsman’s Park, of which O’Hare was the president, was a 12,000-seat, half-mile racetrack, converted from dogs to nags back in ’32. It was in Stickney, very near Cicero. In other words, right smack in the middle of mob country.

  “Yes. But we have had a few problems.”

  “Oh?”

  Miss Cavaretta was poised, ready to write something down; she’d written nothing as yet, not even a doodle. She wasn’t the doodler type.

  “As you may know, at a park like ours, some of our clientele is less than savory.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Ex-cons, thieves, bookmakers, whores…excuse my French, Miss Cavaretta.”

  The faintest wisp of a smile.

  “Particularly on the weekdays,” I went on, “when working stiffs can’t get away from the salt mines.”

  “Precisely,” O’Hare said, sitting forward, striving to be earnest. “We’ve done our best to keep out the hoodlums and deadbeats and troublemakers. But there’s only so much we can do, in our business. That’s where you come in, Mr. Heller.”

  “I do?”

  “We’ve been having pickpocket trouble. A regular epidemic. We don’t mind our customers getting their pockets emptied, it’s just that we prefer to do it ourselves.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I understand that you have a certain expertise in that area. Pickpocket control, I mean.”

  “That’s my police background, yes. And, since going private, I’ve done a lot of security work in that area, that’s correct.”

  He smiled—patronizingly, I thought. “I understand you even handled the pickpocket problem at the World’s Fair.”

  “The Chicago one, back in ’33,” I said. “They didn’t invite me out to New York for the new one.”

  “They’re holding it over, I hear,” someone said.

  Surprisingly, it was Miss Cavaretta—who was now in the midst of actually taking a few notes—putting in her two cents, in a lush, throaty voice that was like butter on a warm roll.

  “Maybe they’ll invite you there next year,” she said.

  O’Hare laughed at that, a little too loud I thought. Was he trying to get in her pants? Was that what this was about? And since when did a millionaire have to try so hard to get in his secretary’s panties? Then again, on the other hand, I kept in mind my own situation with Gladys. Of course, I wasn’t a millionaire.

  “Maybe they will invite me,” I said, feeling like the unwanted chaperone on a date.

  “What I would like,” O’Hare said, “is for you to instruct my own security staff in the art of spotting and catching pickpockets. I will want you to spend some time at the park yourself, when the next season opens, supervising. You’ll need to come out, as soon as possible, and take a look around the facility, of course.”

  “Just a moment, please,” I said, and I picked up the phone and called next door.

  In a few moments Lou Sapperstein, wearing his suitcoat, looking spiffy as a hundred bucks, entered, nodding, smiling, eyes lingering just a second on the enticing, enigmatic Miss Cavaretta. I made introductions all around, ending up with Lou: “He was my boss on the pickpocket detail. And he’s my top operative, now. I’ll put him on this for you, Mr. O’Hare.”

  O’Hare’s face turned pale; weird as it might seem, his expression was tragic as he said, “But that simply won’t do. I must have you, Mr. Heller. I must have the top man.”

  I laughed just a little, a nervous laugh. “You don’t understand, Mr. O’Hare. Lou’s my top man. He was my boss. He taught me everything I know about dips. You couldn’t be in better hands.”

  O’Hare stood. “Perhaps when it comes to the supervision of my people, he would be satisfactory. But I’m afraid I must insist that you come out to the park and have a look around personally. I only deal with the top man, understand?”

  “Mr. O’Hare, with all due respect, I am the top man in this agency, and I delegate work as I see fit…”

  O’Hare reached in his inside coat pocket. He withdrew a checkbook. Leaned over the desk and began to write. “I’m leaving you a thousand-dollar retainer,” he said. “On the understanding that you will come out to the park tomorrow afternoon to inspect the plant, persona
lly.”

  He tore off the check and held it out before me, the ink glistening wetly on it.

  I took it and blotted it and put it in my desk.

  “You want Nate Heller,” I said, “you got Nate Heller.”

  “Good man,” O’Hare beamed. He turned and all but bowed deferentially to his secretary. “Miss Cavaretta?”

  She stood; smoothed her dress out over long, presumably lush thighs. Why is a woman in mannish clothing such a perversely attractive thing? Maybe Freud knew; personally, I didn’t give a damn. I just knew I would’ve liked to see the lacy things underneath Miss Cavaretta’s pinstripe suit.

  She extended a hand with long, clear varnished nails, which I took; was I expected to kiss it? I didn’t.

  She said, “It’s been very interesting meeting you, Mr. Heller.”

  “Same here, Miss Cavaretta.”

  He helped her with her coat, and got his own coat on; he left his hat on the rack. Lou was about to point that out to him, but I raised a finger to my lips and stopped it. I’d been watching O’Hare closely; he’d left that hat on purpose.

  I stood and waited and then O’Hare ducked in again, calling back to Miss Cavaretta, “Forgot my blamed hat, my dear,” and went to the hat rack and got it and said to me, very quietly, his face sober and without a trace of the glad-hander’s smile, “Come alone.”

  He closed the door and was gone.

  Lou and I looked at the door, our brows furrowed.

  Lou sat down and so did I. He said, “What the hell was that all about?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “That guy’s connected up the wazoo, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “He was Capone’s front man for the old Hawthorne dog track. He’s been an Outfit front man for years.”

  “I know.”

  “Why’d he bring his secretary along?”

  “So she could take notes, he said.”

  “Did I miss something? All I heard him do was ask if he could hire us—hire you—to do some security work at his lousy racetrack.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What did he need to bring a secretary along to take notes for, if that’s all he wanted? Hell, why didn’t he just call you on the phone, if all he wanted was to hire you for some pickpocket work?”

  “I don’t know, Lou,” I said.

  And I didn’t know.

  Nor did I know why he felt he had to impart his final message to me out of his dark, lovely secretary’s earshot.

  But I was detective enough to want to find out.

  E. J. O’Hare was a lawyer, but he hadn’t practiced law since he moved from St. Louis to Chicago in the late ’20s, to begin overseeing various of Al Capone’s business interests, specifically horse-and dog-racing tracks. And not just in Illinois: O’Hare also looked after the Outfit’s tracks in Florida, Tennessee and Massachusetts. He was a stockholder in all of those parks, having gotten a foothold via owning the patent rights on the mechanical rabbit used in dog racing. From that he’d built a financial empire that included extensive real estate holdings, an insurance company and two advertising agencies. According to Barney, O’Hare was also a heavy investor in the Chicago Cardinals pro football team, though that wasn’t widely known.

  He was unquestionably a wheeler-dealer, and a financial wizard; the mob’s “one-man brain trust,” the papers called him.

  But today, as I entered his office at Sportsman’s Park in Stickney, he was just a nervous little heavyset man in a gray vested suit and blue-and-gray-speckled tie, sitting at his big mahogany desk atop an elaborate Oriental rug, cleaning and oiling an automatic pistol. A foreign make, I’d say.

  “Nate Heller!” he said, with a big grin, standing behind the desk to extend a hand, like I was an old friend, an unexpected and welcome guest who just happened to drop by. Never mind that I’d known him since yesterday and was here at his paid request.

  I shook his hand; the other one held the automatic. There was a little 2-in-l oil on the hand that firmly gripped mine, and when I took a handkerchief out of my pocket to wipe off my palm, he apologized for this uncharacteristic messiness.

  “Sorry,” he said. “A man can’t be too careful.” He meant the gun, which he now lay gently on the desk.

  “I’ve already had a walk around your facility, Mr. O’Hare,” I said, hanging my topcoat and hat next to his on the tree in one corner. “I hope you don’t mind my taking the liberty.”

  “Not at all, and I asked you yesterday to call me Eddie.”

  “Fine, Eddie. Call me Nate.” He already had, actually.

  “Pull up a chair,” he said, and I did, glancing around the office, which—like O’Hare—was small but plush. Dark wood paneling, a wall of framed photos to my left, a built-in bookcase at right. The wall of photos—from which I took a chair—showed O’Hare in the presence of various civic leaders and Chicago celebrities, here at Sportsman’s Park, lots of big smiles and arms around shoulders, his Outfit associates conspicuous in their absence. My favorite picture was one of him with Mayor Cermak at the opening of the park, His Honor and O’Hare standing on either side of the winning jockey who was atop his horse, with a huge floral horseshoe draped around them all. Behind him at his desk was a gigantic framed photograph of Sportsman’s Park, from a slightly overhead angle that got both the grandstand and the track in, in color, pastel tints. On the desk, at either side, were clusters of framed family photos. The bookcase at right was brimming with volumes, some leather-bound, interspersed with an occasional fancy crystal glass piece and various busts of various sizes of Napoleon.

  E. J. O’HARE

  He must have noticed me taking in the Napoleon busts curiously, as he smiled, rather proudly, and said, “An interest of mine. Those books, all of them, are on the Little General. A small sampling of what I daresay is the largest collection of Napoleonana in the United States.”

  “Really?”

  He had a distant expression as he looked at the wall of Napoleon stuff. He said, “Napoleon was a little man.”

  “Uh, yeah. So I heard.”

  “But he was the biggest general history ever saw.”

  “No argument there.”

  He turned his attention back to the gun he was cleaning; he had a pipe cleaner stuck down the barrel at the moment. He said, “He always made the right decision when it counted.”

  “Who?”

  A little crossly he said, “Napoleon.” Then wistfully: “Once he had to decide whether to carry fifteen hundred prisoners of war or have them killed.”

  “Really.”

  He gestured with a fist, suddenly firm. “He had them shot, making the decision in five minutes.”

  What decisions had Eddie O’Hare been making in this office, of late?

  “Mr. O’Hare. Eddie. I’ve looked over your plant, and can see no insurmountable problems, assuming your security staff numbers twenty or more.”

  “Few problems regarding what?”

  “Your pickpocket situation. The grandstands themselves are too large to effectively control, but I doubt the dips would hit there much, anyway. It’s down by the cashier windows that they’ll make their move. And at your concession stands.”

  He nodded, a strained look on his face, as if the relevance of all this was something he couldn’t really grasp.

  “At any rate,” I said, “I think a few weeks before the next season begins, we can give your staff some pointers, and not just the security people. Ushers and concessionaires and all. Do you have any questions?”

  “How did you come?”

  “What?”

  “Did you drive out here?”

  “No. I took the El to Laramie and hopped a streetcar. One of my other operatives needed my car. Why?”

  “Good.” He smiled, but more to himself than to me. “I’ll give you a ride into the Loop.”

  “That isn’t really necessary.” Just as this trip out to Sportsman’s Park wasn’t really necessary.

  “No! I
insist.”

  A knock came at the door.

  “Yes?” O’Hare said.

  A small, boyish, nattily dressed man with graying hair entered, smiled pleasantly, said, “Excuse me, gentlemen. Is this a private conference?”

  “Not at all, Johnny,” O’Hare said, half rising, gesturing for him to come in with one hand, continuing to clean his automatic with the other.

  I stood and shook hands with the little man.

  “This is Nate Heller, the private detective,” O’Hare said. “Nate, this is—”

  “I recognize His Honor,” I said, trying not to sound tongue in cheek.

  I had recognized him at once, though I’d never met him: Johnny Patton, the boy mayor of Burnham. The “boy” mayor was well over fifty now, but he’d supposedly been fourteen when he opened his first saloon and wasn’t yet twenty when first elected mayor of Burnham, another of the mob-dominated southwest suburbs like Stickney and Cicero. Once upon a time he’d been Johnny Torrio’s boy; in recent years he’d been snuggled comfortably in Frank Nitti’s pocket.

  He was also O’Hare’s chief partner in Sportsman’s Park. That is, excluding the silent ones.

  “Oh yes, Nate Heller,” Patton said, nodding for me to sit back down, but not taking a seat himself. “You’re going to help us lick our pickpocket problem.”

  “I’m going to try,” I said.

  “I’m sure you’ll come through for us. I’ve heard good things about you.”

  Nitti again? I wondered to myself. I had presence enough of mind, this time, not to blurt it out.

  He turned his attention to O’Hare. “Could you step in my office, E. J.? Bill and I have the last of that publicity material ready—you need to take a look at it.”

  “Certainly,” O’Hare said, and rose. “Wait here a moment, will you, Nate? I’ll give you a lift back to the Loop.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  Patton said, “You’ll be riding back with E. J.?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I see,” he said.

  Then, slipping an arm around O’Hare’s shoulder, Patton and O’Hare exited.