True Crime (13 page)

A bell was ringing.

I opened my eyes slowly. The round chrome clock on Sally Rand’s nightstand said it was four-oh-seven. Sun streamed in through sheer curtains. I was bathed in sunshine and pain.

The bell kept ringing.

I managed to sit up, but it took a while. The pain was general. Everything from the neck down ached. A long slow dull ache. I’d been sleeping since late morning. I’d been awake for a few hours early this morning, I remembered; Sally had fed me some breakfast and some aspirin. She’d given me some aspirin the night before as well, she said, but I didn’t remember that. And I’d been awake awhile mid-morning, too: a doctor had come round—Barney’s doing—and recommended more aspirin. And sleep. And I’d slept.

The bell kept ringing. In a brilliant intuitive flash—even battered I was still a detective—I realized it was a doorbell.

I swung my legs over to the side of the bed. Lowered them to the floor. The pain became specific. My eyes teared, but I didn’t wipe them dry. I didn’t want to make the effort because my arms hurt worse than my legs. I looked down at my legs and they were splotched with black-and-blue bruises of various sizes—from as small as a dime to as large as a saucer, though they were oblong dimes and saucers. I was in my shorts, I noticed, and my undershirt. My arms had odd-shaped bruises, too. No small ones, though. Large black-and-blue patches, strips of black and blue from the rubber hose.

The bell kept ringing.

I stood. My legs started to buckle but I forced myself not to fall; if I fell, I wouldn’t be able to get up, and that would hurt even worse than standing. Moving across the soft carpet with the slow pathetic urgency of a very elderly man walking toward a bathroom that he has little chance of reaching in time, I found my way into the living room and, eventually, to the front door of the suite.

Facing the white door, the bell louder here (but I was used to it by now—in fact, I couldn’t remember a time when that bell wasn’t ringing), I decided to see if I could speak.

“Who?” I said. It didn’t hurt much to talk. I didn’t have a headache; the aspirin had done that much for me.

“Inspector Cowley, Mr. Heller. Sam Cowley. Could I speak to you?”

There was a night-latch, which I left in place, as I cracked the door open.

“Mr. Heller? Could I come in?” His round, somber, earnest face under the gray hat was damp with sweat.

“Another hot day?” I asked.

A tiny smile creased his face. “Hottest yet.”

“Another good reason for me to stay inside.”

“Could I come in?”

“That putz Purvis with you?”

“No. Nobody’s with me. Nobody knows I’m here.”

“I know you’re here.”

“Nobody at the office.”

I let him in.

The pain turned general again. A neck-to-toe ache. It felt like a cross between the flu and having fallen off a building.

Cowley took off his hat; he had on the same gray suit as before, and the same gray complexion. He wiped his face with a hanky, put it away, looked me over and shook his head slowly.

“My God,” he said. “You took a hell of a beating, didn’t you?”

“They wouldn’t serve me at a lunch counter down South, would they?”

“Your friend Mr. Ross told me you took a beating, but I didn’t imagine…”

“That’s how you found me? Through Barney?”

He nodded. “When I couldn’t reach you at your office this morning, I called around. Ross wouldn’t tell me where you were on the phone. So I went and saw him in person and he finally consented.”

“He’s a good judge of character.”

“Does that mean you don’t mind seeing me?”

“No. I don’t mind. I wanted to talk to you anyway, and it’s better for my health if you come to me. There are people who wouldn’t appreciate my going to see you.”

“The people who did this to you?”

“Among others. Could we sit down? Or would you prefer to wait till I collapse?”

Looking genuinely concerned, he said, “Oh, hell, I’m sorry—you need some help?”

“No. Just let me take it at my own pace. Let’s sit in the kitchen. It’s through there….”

In the small white modern kitchen, there was coffee on the stove. Bless Sally’s heart. She’d be doing her matinee about now. Dancing with a bubble.

I sat at the table while Cowley, at my direction, poured us some coffee. He put a cup in front of me and sat and sipped his own.

With a disgusted look, he said, “I know the aftermath of a rubber-hose session when I see one.”

“Well, you’re a cop. You’ve probably administered a few.”

He didn’t take offense; he didn’t even deny it. “Never to an innocent man.”

I laughed, and it hurt. “I been called a lot of things, but innocent?”

Cowley’s laugh was short and gruff, like he didn’t do it much. “More or less innocent, then. Was it cops?”

“Yeah. East Chicago boys, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Zarkovich and O’Neill?”

“Not personally. Zarkovich was behind it, I’m sure. Did he bring any men to town with him?”

The disgusted expression returned as he nodded. “A contingency of four, not counting him and his captain.”

“I didn’t get a very good look at the bastards who did this to me, but with that small a field to choose from, I might get lucky.”

“What was this about, Heller?”

I sighed. It hurt. “They wanted me out of commission. They weren’t trying to kill me or anything. Just hurt me bad enough to put me on the sidelines for a few days. Take me out of the action.” I sipped the coffee. It was hot, black, bitter; I liked it. “I’d served my purpose.”

“Which was?”

“To finger Dillinger for them. Specifically, to contact you guys. The feds.”

Cowley did a slow burn, like Edgar Kennedy. “Would you mind telling me the rest of it, in your view? I think I know most of it. But I’d like to hear your thoughts.”

“First, why don’t you tell what’s been going down on your end, where Mr. Dillinger’s concerned?”

He thought about that, then said, with finality and formality, “A few hours ago, in the lobby of my hotel—the Great Northern on Dearborn, to be exact—Melvin Purvis and I met with Martin Zarkovich.” It was like he was writing his field report. “We’ve set up a meeting with Anna Sage. For tonight.”

“And she’s going to give you Dillinger.”

“Apparently, yes.”

I thought about giving him Jimmy Lawrence’s Park Grove address. I thought about Frank Nitti telling me to stay in bed. I thought about the rubber hose swishing in the air.

I said, “I’m going to tell you what I think is going on here. It’s my best educated guess. And it’s just between you and me. Agreed?”

He nodded.

I told him, briefly, about the traveling salesman who’d come to me. About tailing Polly Hamilton and Jimmy Lawrence. About Anna Sage. Everything that led up to my seeing Purvis.

“And contacting Purvis was my function in this,” I said. “A private detective working on a domestic case who just happens to stumble onto Dillinger. Much better than an East Chicago cop like Zarkovich making first contact—the corruption on the East Chicago force makes the Chicago cops look like priests. You guys knew of Zarkovich’s reputation, and wouldn’t have liked the smell of this, if he’d initiated it. Yesterday you said straight out you’d rather deal with me than him, and that you liked the idea of having me—honest ol’ me—as an independent, outside, corroborating source.”

Cowley was nodding again, slowly. “No doubt about it. You gave the Dillinger story credibility.”

“Agreed. Now, anybody else in my shoes would’ve gone to Captain Stege, rather than Purvis. Stege has a solid name in this town, whereas Purvis’s been a joke since Little Bohemia. But my past differences with Stege—well known to just about everybody—made it easy to predict I wouldn’t go to him with the information. And if I had, I’d probably got tossed out on my ass.”

“You sound as if you think there’s a…conspiracy, here. That somebody consciously selected you for this. To put all this in motion.”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know who selected me for my role. Piquett, probably. But it’s obvious who gave the go-ahead for the overall plan.”

“
Who
?”

I told him about my meeting with Nitti.

“If the Outfit wants Dillinger dead,” Cowley said, “why not just kill him, if they know where’s he hiding?”

“Well, they’ve obviously known that from the start. Nothing happens on the North Side that Frank Nitti doesn’t know about. And Dillinger’s hidden out on the North Side any number of times, over the course of a year.”

“Which would mean…”

“Which would mean he did so with Nitti’s knowledge—and, most likely, blessing.”

“You think Dillinger is connected to the Outfit, then.”

I shrugged. It hurt. “Only loosely. Only in the ways I outlined to Nitti. Baby Face Nelson is a former Capone torpedo, remember. They aren’t in the same organization, but they’re members of the same club.”

“Make your point.”

“Nitti made it: ‘It’s better for some people to be dead.’ Dillinger’s at the end of his string. But he’s got a reputation for not shooting it out with the cops, and after all his jailbreaks, security next time’ll be tight. Johnny won’t be doing any more crashing out.”

“Then it’s a simple case of ‘he knows too much.’”

I nodded. It hurt. “That’s why they wanted Purvis in on it. Because Purvis would agree to something Stege never would: to shoot Dillinger on sight. After all, your boss Hoover gave the go-ahead on that. Fuck capture. Kill him.”

Cowley looked bleakly into his coffee.

“It’s Syndicate all the way, Cowley. Anna Sage is a madam—and the Syndicate always has a piece of every brothel in any city of any size at all. Zarkovich has connections to the Capone crowd going back ten years, and is a bagman between the brothels and various crooks, some of ’em political, some of ’em Syndicate. Louis Piquett is in the Syndicate’s pocket, enough so to betray his own client, it would seem. Do I have to spell it out for you? Frank Nitti has set you up to kill Dillinger for him.”

Cowley’s face seemed impassive, but there was anger in his eyes. In his voice, too: “Why, damnit?
Why don’t they just kill him themselves
?”

“Why send a man when you can get a boy to do the job?”

“Don’t be cute.”

I gestured with one hand. It hurt. “That’s Nitti’s style. It’s the Cermak kill all over again. The world thinks a ‘demented bricklayer’ tried to kill FDR in Miami last year, and ‘accidentally’ killed the mayor of Chicago instead. But you and I know that Cermak and Nitti were blood enemies, and little Joe Zangara was a one-man Sicilian suicide squad, sent to take His Honor out. Which he did.”

Cowley said nothing; his face looked like it was made out of gray putty.

“Don’t stir up the heat, that’s Nitti’s motto. He learned the lesson early on that Capone learned too late—he learned how nervous the public gets when you go around having massacres on Saint Valentine’s Day. So let a would-be presidential assassin ‘miss’ and shoot ‘Ten Percent’ Tony Cermak instead. So let Melvin Purvis, G-man, courageously blow off John Dillinger’s head and make the kind of headlines the public’ll eat up.”

“You’ve made your point.”

“Not to mention how Dillinger’s outlaw cronies might react to one of their own being murdered by the mob; who needs a bloody shooting war breaking out with the likes of Baby Face Nelson and the Barker boys? That’s a battle Nitti could obviously win, but at a high cost—lives of his men, bad publicity—why bother risking it?”

“Enough, Heller.”

“Face it, Cowley. You’re being used.”

“Stop it.”

“Well, actually, it’s Purvis they’re using. He’s dependable. After all, Capone and Nitti used him to put Roger Touhy in Joliet, already.”

“Touhy was guilty.”

“Of a lot of things, but not the kidnapping you guys prosecuted him for.”

“I disagree.”

“It’s a free country, Cowley. You’re like the rest of us—operating of your own free will. It’s not like you’re a puppet or anything.”

“You’re not funny.”

“I know. But the way the Syndicate manipulates you feds is pretty funny. Do you really think Jelly Nash was ‘accidentally’ shot at the Kansas City Massacre? Sure—him and Mayor Cermak. Innocent victims.”

“You’re full of crap on a lot of this, Heller. You really are.”

“Maybe. But not on Dillinger. I’m on the money, there.”

Cowley’s coffee cup was empty; he held it by the china handle and tapped it nervously on the table. “Maybe you are. But it doesn’t make any difference.”

“It doesn’t?”

Cowley shook his head slowly. “Dillinger is public enemy number one. He has to be stopped. And where the information comes from that helps us stop him—whoever it is behind the scenes helping us get him—doesn’t matter. What matters, when you’re going after someone like Dillinger, is getting him. Nothing else.”

“I see. You don’t mind owing a debt of gratitude to Frank Nitti.”

“I don’t know that I do.”

“You heard what I said…”

Cowley grimaced. “Yes, and it makes a lot of sense. It just might be true. But it doesn’t matter.”

“Because Dillinger has caused your Division of Investigation so much grief, given you so much embarrassment, that you have to get him, whatever it costs.”

Cowley, with sadness in his eyes, said, “That’s exactly right.”

That’s when I decided not to give him Jimmy Lawrence’s address. That’s when I decided not to play, anymore. To do what Nitti wanted me to. To do what the East Chicago boys wanted me to. Stay home. Stay in bed.

“Thanks for the coffee,” Cowley said. He rose. “I’ll find my way out.”

He went out into the living room but then, suddenly, he was back in the doorway. With a small smile as inscrutable as a Chinaman’s, he said, “You just may be surprised how this turns out.”

“Why’s that, Cowley?”

“Purvis won’t be alone. I’ll be there, too, when we get Dillinger. And I’m not trigger-happy. And I’m also not inclined to keep deals with crooked cops who insist on me shooting the man they finger for me.

I smiled. It hurt. “You think you can take Dillinger alive?”

“I’m going to try. If Frank Nitti wants him dead, then Mr. Dillinger’s a man who may have some things I’d like to hear.”