True Crime (23 page)

Nitti was thinking too. Finally he said, “I could help you. But the best favor I could do you is not to.”

I sat up. “Why’s that, Frank?”

“Haven’t you thought this through, kid?”

So now I was a “kid” again.

“Well, yes…”

“Don’t you realize your name was in the papers, associated with the Dillinger kill? As far as some of these dumb-ass farmer-outlaws are concerned, you helped set their pal up for the feds. You helped kill Johnny Dillinger.”

“I realize that…”

“How were you plannin’ to go about lookin’ for this girl, then?”

“You’re saying if I go around asking questions of Candy Walker and his associates under my own name, I’ll run into somebody who might want to do me in.”

“No,” Nitti said, shaking a finger at me like a disappointed schoolteacher, “you’ll run into
everybody
who might wanna do you in.”

“I figured if I could restrict my investigating to Chicago…”

“Candy Walker ain’t in Chicago.”

I sighed. “I didn’t figure there’d be much chance of that.”

“You’re probably gonna have to go out among them apple-knockers to find that girl. And you can’t go out as, what’s your first name again?”

“Nathan.”

“You can’t go out as Nathan Heller, private cop that helped get Dillinger. Not without comin’ back in one or more boxes.”

“I guess I knew that.”

“Got any ideas?”

I sighed again. “I could go out under a phony name. You know—undercover.”

Nitti lifted an eyebrow, nodded. “Like that fed your pal Ness sent around to suck up to Al. That guy sure looked, talked and acted like a real wop.”

I nodded too. “Yeah—and his testimony had a lot to do with putting Capone away.”

Nitti smiled, a little. “Maybe I should thank that guy—he made me what I am today.”

“Some people think Capone is still running things from behind bars.”

“He’s in Alcatraz now. You don’t run shit from Alcatraz.”

“Anyway, it can be done. Going undercover.”

“Yeah, but it’d be good and goddamn dangerous. I’d have to hand it to you, kid, if you pulled that off.”

“Would you be willing to help me do it?”

Not smiling, he tipped his head back, narrowed his eyes. “How?”

“Give me a name I can use, and a background. Somebody who’s out of circulation, in jail or whatever, who I can say I am, without risk of Candy Walker or anybody he runs with ever having met the guy. Somebody they might’ve heard of. Somebody they could call around and check up on. So I could get in and get this girl and get out again. In one piece.”

About halfway through that, he started nodding. He was still nodding as he said, “Possible. Let me make a phone call.”

He got up and went out of the room. I could hear his muffled voice, but not make out any of the words. Then he came back in, smiled meaninglessly and sat back down.

“It’s fixed. I got a name for you to use.”

“Good. Somebody in jail?”

“Better. Somebody dead.”

“Oh…”

“This guy worked out East till about a year ago, when he come to work for us.”

“Candy Walker never met him?”

Nitti shook his head. “No, but he’s heard of him. That’s the beauty part. There’s a chance he was pointed out to Walker once or twice, but they never met.”

“Well, if Walker saw him…”

“The guy had plastic surgery. That’s your explanation, if it comes up—it also happens to be true.”

“Oh—okay. How can I prove I’m this guy?”

“I’ll fill you in some more—I’m going to have a driver’s license in his name dropped off at your office tomorrow morning. We can make it work. A cinch.”

“Well, uh. Thanks. I appreciate this, Frank.”

“Actually, you’re doing me a favor.”

“How’s that?”

“This guy you’ll be playin’—he’s dead, but nobody knows it. Or, not many people know it. And it makes things sweeter if he’s seen walking around. It confuses the issue, see? Makes him not dead.”

I didn’t follow this exactly, but I nodded.

“Now,” Nitti said, writing on a white pad on the coffee table before him, “here’s an address. It’s an apartment house. You’ll go see this old hillbilly woman who lives on the ground floor. Her name’s Kate Barker.”

“Kate Barker. Is she related to the Barker boys?”

Nitti nodded curtly. “She’s their ma.”

No mention of an old woman being connected to the Barker-Karpis gang had been in any of the newspaper write-ups.

I said, “Is she aware of her boys’ business?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Does she approve of it?”

“They can do no wrong in her eyes. She goes on the road with ’em sometimes, I’m told. But sometimes she tires of that kind of life and goes and lives in an apartment in the ‘big city.’ She’ll know where they are. Just tell her you want to connect up with her boys and Walker; she won’t care why, she’ll just do it. If she has any doubts about who you are, you have her check with one of my people, whose name I’m gonna give you.”

He tore the sheet with the address on it off the pad; handed it to me.

I glanced at the address.

3967 Pine Grove.

“Jesus—Frank, this is the apartment building where Jimmy Lawrence lived…”

“I know,” Nitti nodded. “I own it. Or one of my companies owns it.”

I was finding out more about Frank Nitti and his business than I wanted to; I could see me, dead in an alley.

“She’s living in Lawrence’s apartment, by the way,” Nitti said.

“Jesus,” I said, just staring at the white piece of paper, the address starting to blur.

“That’s only because the previous tenant vacated,” Nitti said, smiling like a priest. “She never met Lawrence.”

“She—she never met Lawrence?”

“No,” Nitti said. “And that’s to your benefit. Because that’s who you’re posing as.”

“Jimmy Lawrence?” I said.

“Pleased to meet you,” Nitti said, still smiling.

The next afternoon, Tuesday, I parked across from the big brick three-story on Pine Grove and just sat there for a while, collecting my thoughts.

In my billfold, where my Illinois state driver’s license should be, was an Illinois state driver’s license in the name of James L. Lawrence. I was wearing my white suit and a straw boater and gold-rim glasses with window glass in them. I felt faintly ridiculous. I probably was faintly ridiculous.

I was calling on the mother of the Barker boys.

Frank Nitti had spent another half hour with me, in his Bismarck suite yesterday, filling me in on Lawrence’s background.

He—or I—had been born in Canada, moved with his—or my (our?)—parents to New York as a boy; the parents were both dead—the mother in childbirth, the father in a factory accident—and I’d been raised by my uncle and aunt. My uncle had worked in the garment district in the West Thirties, and I’d ended up a union slugger there, for Lepke—as Lucky Luciano’s chief lieutenant Louis Buchalter was inexplicably called—and eventually became one of Lepke’s top aides in the protection racket. But I had a New York murder rap hanging over me, now, and had been shipped out by the New York boys to their friends in Chicago about a year ago, who put me to work, after some plastic surgery.

That much I’d learned yesterday afternoon. This morning around ten Campagna had dropped off the driver’s license and suggested I call a certain phone number, before noon. I did, and Nitti himself answered.

“I got just the ticket,” Nitti said.

We’d discussed the need, yesterday, for me to have a cover story, in addition to the Lawrence name and background—that is, a reason for getting in touch with Candy Walker and the Barkers apart from my
real
reason for being there, specifically, to spirit Walker’s moll away, which of course was nothing I dared advertise.

“There’s a guy named Doc Moran,” Nitti said. “Ever hear of him?”

“Yeah—isn’t he a pin artist?”

“Abortions ain’t all he does, Heller, but yeah, I suppose that’s his specialty. He’s got a practice over on Irving Park Boulevard, and he’s done good work for us over the years. Lots of union work.”

Underworld doctors like Moran came in handy, not just for providing abortions to Syndicate whores, but for dealing with the aftermath of union-busting activities, and any incidental gunplay Outfit troops might get involved in—the latter having declined since the rise of Frank Nitti, under whom less and less overt Syndicate violence was taking place.

I said, “Would I be wrong in supposing Moran’s clientele the last year or so has been primarily of the outlaw variety?”

“You’d be on the money, kid. Matter of fact, right as we speak, he’s in the Barker-Karpis camp…makin’ an extended house call.”

So now I was crossing the street and walking up to the relatively ritzy apartment house where the real Jimmy Lawrence had lived, not so long ago. I’d been his shadow, then; now I was his ghost.

In the entryway there were mailboxes with name cards; one of the ground-floor flats was occupied by the woman going under the name Alice Hunter. I knocked on her door.

A voice from behind the door, a melodious if quavering voice, feminine with a hint of a drawl, said, “Who is it, please?”

“Jimmy Lawrence,” I heard myself saying. “I’m a friend of your landlord’s.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” the door said, sincerely. “Why’d you drop by, Mr. Lawrence?”

“I need to contact Doc Moran. Can you help?”

“Why, I certainly would like to,” the door said. “Would you mind waitin’ out there a mite, while I make a telephone call?”

“Not at all, ma’am.”

I stood facing the door, straw hat in one hand.

A few minutes later the door cracked open and two bright, dark eyes peered out at me from behind gold-rim glasses, in the midst of a fleshy face highlighted by a witchlike pointed nose and chin, and a forehead where little ringlets dropped out of a skullcap mass of curly hair borrowed from Shirley Temple.

She was the oddest old lady I’d ever seen, and all I could see was her face, sideways, as she peeked around the door.

She smiled; her teeth were false, but the smile wasn’t. “You’re a right handsome young feller. Where’d you get that suit?”

“New York,” I said.

“That’s one place I never been.” She was still just peering around the door. “Would you mind holding open your coat?”

“Not at all,” I said, and did.

She smiled some more, as she noted my lack of hardware. Then the face momentarily disappeared as she opened the door wide and gestured sweepingly with a plump hand on the end of a plump, stubby arm.

I stepped inside. Just beyond the entryway where we were standing was a large living room, where a pastel-green mohair sofa with floral cushions shared the central space with several pastel-green lounge chairs, on a parquet floor somewhat covered by a fringed rug with a pastel-green-and-orange geometric design. Against one wall was a fireplace with a mirror with ivory-and-orange flowers superimposed on it. The apartment must’ve come furnished; this plump Ozark granny hadn’t decorated it. The place must’ve looked about the same when Jimmy Lawrence lived here.

There were touches of the current tenant, however. In front of the straighter backed of the two lounge chairs was a card table on which a jigsaw puzzle was perhaps two-thirds completed: a country church on a fall afternoon, orange and red leaves, blue sky with fluffy clouds—a bunch of the sky was yet to be filled in. In front of the sofa was a round glass-top coffee table with a fat scrapbook on it; clippings stuck out of it like clothes from a hastily shut suitcase. Against one wall in a standing cabinet was a combination radio and phonograph, the cabinet lid propped up and open; the radio was on and a hillbilly song was blaring out.

The fat little woman—she couldn’t have been over five feet two but must’ve tipped the scales at 170—moved gracelessly across the room and turned the hillbilly music down, but not off. She turned and smiled apologetically, girlishly. She took off her gold-rim glasses and tucked them away in a pocket. Her dress was a floral tent but she had what appeared to be a string of real pearls about her neck. Her stomach protruded enough to make the hem of her dress ride up and reveal the rolled tops of her stockings. She was a cross between an old flapper and a new tank.

She gestured for me to sit on the couch and I sat. She sat next to me. She had lipstick on and smelled of lilac water and too much face powder. The oddest thing about her was, despite the false teeth and the jowly face and pointed features and absurd Shirley Temple curls, how nice a smile she had.

“Can I get you some coffee?” she asked. The place was air-conditioned, so the request didn’t seem absurd, despite the August heat outside.

“That’s generous of you, Mrs. Hunter, but no thanks.”

She waved at the air and turned her head coquettishly. “That name’s just for outsiders.”

“We’ll make it ‘Mrs. Barker,’ then.”

She was looking off absently. “Though I
do
like the name Alice…wish my folks had called me that instead of Arizona.”

“Pardon?”

She touched her massive bosom with a splayed hand; her fingernails, though short (possibly through biting), were painted red as her lipsticked mouth. “Isn’t that the most awful name? Arizona? Who can picture callin’ a little girl that!”

In the background somebody—Gene Autry?—was singing plaintively about his horse.

“I like ‘Kate’ better,” I said.

“So do I. But you can call me Ma. All the boys call me Ma.”

I suppose I should’ve been honored or at least flattered at being admitted to the club so easily, so rapidly; but all I felt was a little queasy.

I said, “You’re too kind…Ma. And why don’t you call me Jimmy?”

“Jimmy. That’s a good name. I like it.”

“I’m glad.”

“Well, Jimmy. How can ol’ Ma be of help?” One of her plump arms was brushing against me.

“I wonder if you could put me in touch with Doc Moran—a mutual friend of ours has requested I find him, and bring him back.”

She pursed her lips in what was meant to be a facial shrug but came off more like a grimace. She said, “Might be I could take a message for you.”

“Are you going to be seeing the doctor?”

“Might be. If I can find me a ride.”

“A ride?”

“The doctor’s with my boys Freddie and Arthur right now. They’re with that nice boy Alvin Karpis. Do you know Alvin?”

“Never had the pleasure.”

“He’s a right nice boy. Anyway, I got to get to ’em, soon as I can.” Her fleshy face tightened. “They
need
me.”

“You’re in regular touch with them?”

She shrugged again, with her shoulders this time; the earth moved. “They don’t have a phone where they’s stayin’. But they call from in town now and then.”

That sounded like they were in the country somewhere.

“And you’re planning to join them, soon?” I asked.

She nodded, said, “But I don’t drive. I have to find me a driver.”

You never know when opportunity’s going to knock; it might even knock in the form of a fat little old lady from the Ozarks…Gene Autry, if that’s who that was, was suddenly singing something more upbeat, about the prairie.

“I could drive you,” I said. Not too eagerly, I hoped. “My instructions are to see the doctor personally. No go-betweens.”

She nodded sagely. “You gotta bring him back yourself. That’s your orders.”

“Right.”

“And orders is orders.”

“Yes they are.”

She put her hand on mine; it was cold, clammy—hers, I mean. Hell, mine too.

She said, “Well, why don’t you drive me there, then. But I gotta warn you. Somethin’ big’s in the wind.”

“Oh?”

“Felt I should warn you. You might get caught up in it.”

“In what?”

“Somethin’ big.”

“Well. Would that be bad?”

She smiled enigmatically. Still a nice smile, despite the otherwise physically grotesque person it belonged to. “Not if you like money.”

“I like money.”

“Well, wherever my boys go, there’s money to be had. I got good boys who work hard, Jimmy. You looking to make an extra dollar?”

“Sure.”

She winked at me. “You’ll do no better than to stick with my boys.”

“You seem proud of them.”

“Couldn’t be prouder. So—do I have me a chauffeur?” She said it like ‘show fer.’

“It’d be my honor. I even have a car…”

“What kind?”

That stopped me.

“Chevy coupe,” I said.

She shook her head. “Won’t do, won’t do.” She got up and clomped over to a chest of drawers against one wall. She pulled open a drawer and it was brimming with cash. She counted out a stack and trundled over and handed it to me.

“There’s six hundred,” she said. “See if you can’t get a nice used twelve-cylinder Auburn. With a radio. I’m partial to twelve-cylinder Auburns with radios.”

I put the fat wad of cash in my suitcoat pocket as she went back and closed the drawer.

I said, “When would you like to leave?”

“Tomorrow afternoon soon enough? Like to pack my bags, and take in a movie s’evenin’—I just love the movies, and when I’m out on the road with my boys I sometimes go
weeks
without a movie. Or bingo, or anything civilized. But a mother’s got to make sacrifices for her boys, don’t you know?”

I said I knew, and told her I’d pick her up the next day at one.

She walked me to the door, her arm linked in mine; gave me a pat on the cheek. Her fingers were cold and soft.

“You seem like a nice boy,” she said. “You gone always to be good to your ol’ Ma, now, ain’t you?”

I said I’d do my best.

Then I went out and bought a used twelve-cylinder Auburn. With a radio.