True Detective (49 page)

"I imagine."

"Was it worth it Eliot?"

"What?"

"Fighting the good fight. Putting Capone away. All that."

"Putting Capone away was satisfying. Trouble is. nobody's doing a damn thing about Nitti. The FBI's busy running after outlaws like Dillinger. because the public
sees
what the likes of that breed does."

"Then you figure Melvin Purvis'll take care of Chicago while you're gone."

"That jerk! That pip-squeak doesn't know his dick from a doughnut."

Then Eliot realized I was baiting him and we both sat grinning at each other.

He said. "I stopped in downstairs and Barney wasn't around."

"He's at his training camp in the Catskills. Canzoneü rematch is coming up in a few weeks."

"Speaking of rematches. I wish I could be around to see the Lang trial."

That was coming up in a few weeks, too.

"Won't be much to it." I said. "I don't imagine much'll come of it other than Lang and Miller getting good and kicked out of the department." Both were on suspension at the moment.

"Well, just the same. I'd like to be there. Have you heard from Mary Ann lately?"

"She dropped me a card last week. She's up for a part in a picture."

"Hollywood must agree with her."

"It's the place for her."

"I kind of… thought you were serious about her."

I was.

"You doin' okay. Nate?"

"I'm getting there."

"You want to take a break? Those reports can wait, can't they?"

"Got something in mind?"

Eliot stood. "Yeah. Let's go downstairs. I want to buy you a drink."

I saw Eliot only occasionally after that; but I kept track of him, and most of the others.

Eliot spent two years chasing moonshiners in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio; later he became public safety director of Cleveland, Ohio- at thirty-two, the youngest in the city's history. During World War Two, he was the director of social protection for the Federal Security Agency- a fancy title meaning he was charged with combating venereal disease on U.S. military bases.

He did that from '41 till '45, and while he was waging a battle against VD, so was an old friend of his: Al Capone. Al did get out of Atlanta Penitentiary, but not as he hoped: he was transferred to Alcatraz, the "rock," which had been especially designed to be "a place of confinement for the more dangerous, intractable criminals." Syphilis began eating his brain away, and by '39 he was out of Alcatraz, but he was already partially paralyzed, both in mind and body. By his death in '47, at age forty-eight, VD had made him pretty much a vegetable.

As for Eliot, he went into private business, became president of a Pennsylvania paper company. Some of his friends- myself among them- urged him to put the story of his war against the Capone mob in writing. I guess he had enough of the old publicity-hound left in him to go along with it, because he wrote his autobiographical book,
The Untouchables
, which sparked the TV series that made his name a household word, and did the same for Capone, to a generation who hadn't even heard of the Big Fellow.

But Eliot didn't live to see any of that; he had just finished correcting the final galley proofs of his book when he died of a heart attack, in 1957. He was fifty-four.

On September 12, 1933, Barney took Canzoneri in the rematch, in New York, Canzoneri's home turf. The speakeasy became the Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge, and when Henry Armstrong defeated Barney for the title in '38, Barney devoted himself to the club and to gambling, and wasn't terribly successful at either. When World War Two came along, Barney joined the marines and fought at Guadalcanal, and got the Silver Star, a presidential citation, and malaria. The medics treated him for the latter with morphine, and, like more than a few Gls, Barney ended up an inadvertent addict. It's still hard for me to think of Barney as a junkie, but that's what he became- till he kicked it and went public with the story, winning the championship all over again. It finally took cancer ("the Big C," he called it) to beat him, in '67.

Frank Nitti had ten golden years- killing Cermak and getting away with it had given him power and credibility in the eyes of everybody from the high-hats to the hoods, the politicians to the harness bulls. Clearly this was not a gangster of the crudity of Capone, no hothead who would machine-gun a garageful of competitors and fill the headlines with blood and bad publicity. Nitti was an executive, a businessman; he, more than Capone, invented the modern corporate gangster.

And, like a lot of executives, he had stomach trouble: ulcers had developed in the wake of the attempt on his life by Sergeant Lang, and those wounds, though long since healed, had continued to give him pain, particularly the back wound. In 1943, faced with racketeering charges and certain imprisonment for his efforts with Campagna and others to extort big bucks from the movie industry, Nitti left his house in suburban Riverside and took a walk in the rain along some railroad tracks, about a block from Cermak Road (Twenty-second Street, renamed for the martyred mayor). His beloved wife, Anna, had died eighteen months before; he was fifty-eight. His stomach hurt him, and they say he just couldn't face another long prison term. Two witnesses saw him shoot himself in the head. The date was March 19, just one day short often years since the day Joe Zangara said, "Push the button." Nitti's gravestone reads: "There is no life except by death."

General Dawes died reading in his study, in 1951. He had given an interview shortly before, in which he told the reporters he had no interest in imparting any wisdom to the people through the mass media. He concluded with what might as well be his epitaph: "God give us common sense!"

Janey married a Republican count)' official from the suburbs. He rose to state senator, then finally to United States Representative he was defeated for reelection after serving for many years, but was offered a post with the Nixon administration. He was a minor figure in the Watergate scandal and served eighteen months at a prison farm, during which time Janey divorced him and is now living alone in Evanston- their three children are grown. I understand she is seeing a local businessman, an ex-mayor of Evanston who owns condos.

My uncle Louis died in 1948 after a stroke. We never reconciled.

Walter Winchell's sagging career was given one last boost when he was hired to do the voiceover narration for "The Untouchables" TV show.

George Raft made a movie in 34 called
Bolero
, in which he finally got to do more dancing than acting. One of his co-stars was Sally Rand, who did a laundered version of her famous world's fair fan dance. She flopped in the picture, and never had much of a movie career. She did her fan and bubble dances till her death a few years ago. Raft's career faded by the 1950s, partially because of his insistence on playing only "good guy" roles- Humphrey Bogart built a career on Raft's rejected "unsympathetic" parts, like Sam Spade in
The Maltese Falcon
. Raft's personal associations with the likes of Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone's brother John brought him public criticism, and toward the end of his show biz career, he acted as a shill for various mob casinos, from Havana to London. His most successful role in the last few years of his life was as a convict in an Alka Seltzer TV commercial, spoofing his image. He also gave a good performance weeping at his tax-evasion trial.

Dutch Reagan went into acting, too.

Campagna was fishing in Florida in 1955, reeling in a thirty-pound catch, when he had a heart attack and died. He was fifty-seven.

I lost track of Miller; he was kicked off the department and left the city, as best I know. Lang was found guilty at his trial but was immediately granted a petition for a new trial. He had loudly told reporters he would "blow the lid off the Democratic party" if he went to jail. A year and some eighteen continuances later, the case was thrown out of court. Lang waited a few years for the heat to die down, then sued the city for reinstatement as a detective sergeant and got that and restoration of full pay for the time he'd missed. I had run-ins with him from time to time thereafter, as you well might guess; but I don't know what became of him after he finally did retire from the department.

Mary Ann, of course, went to Hollywood and changed her name to something you would recognize more readily than Mary Ann Beanie. She did several pictures for Monogram before Twentieth Century-Fox bought up her contract. I was supposed to go out to Hollywood and we would get married. Mary Ann got married, all right; several times- never to me. She died last year of lung cancer; she was a heavy smoker, the
National Enquirer
said.

When I read of Mary Ann's death, it brought memories rushing back. I was (and am) living in Florida, having retired some years ago. I am married to a wonderful woman who is not a character in this book. We live in Boca Raton, but we set to Miami from time to time. We were walking through Bayfront Park one sunny February afternoon when I came to the memorial with the inscription "I'm glad it was me instead of you," and started to laugh. My wife wanted to know what was so funny, and I told her. And she suggested I write this book.

So I have.

As for the Century of Progress, it was held over for another year. And when they finally closed the fair down, crowds swarmed the lakefront to watch the demolition crews dismantle the City of Tomorrow. Last to go was the east tower of the Sky Ride. On Saturday. August 31, 1935, two hundred thousand people were on hand to watch the biggest crash since Wall Street. Engineers had placed seven hundred and fifty pounds of Thermit explosive in boxes wired to the north legs of the structure, and at the appointed time Rufus Dawes pushed the button and "the great tower" fell.

It made quite a racket.

/
Owe Them One

Because of the inconsistencies in "nonfiction" books about the gangster era in Chicago, and the tendency of history books to dismiss Zangara as "a demented bricklayer who failed to assassinate FDR." I went back to the newspaper files of the
Tribune, The Daily News
and other Chicago papers of the day. as well as the Miami
Herald
and
News
, where eyewitness accounts of such events as the shooting at Bayfront Park, and lengthy accountings of testimony at the Zangara and Nitti trials, were at variance with "history's" version of the events in question.

Nevertheless, this is a work of fiction, and a few liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible- and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of my conflicting source material and the need to telescope certain minor events to make for a more smoothly flowing narrative.

Several hardworking people helped me research this book, primarily George Hagenauer, whose contributions include helping develop the family history of the Hellers; discovering the Nydick killing in the newspaper files, a related case not touched upon in any of the nonfiction books covering the Nitti shooting/Cermak assassination; and uncovering a massive scrapbook on the Century of Progress, which allowed me to "go" to the fair. George is a lifelong resident of Chicago, and he- and Mike Gold, another Chicagoan who is a Chicago history buff with an eye for detail- provided invaluable help and support. Jay Maeder, of the Miami
Herald
, was similarly helpful. If I have re-created any sense of Chicago in the 1930s- or, in Jay's case, Miami in the 1930s- much credit must go to them. Jim Arpy, of the Quad City
Times
, shared his expertise (and files) with me. Also helpful was retired police reporter

(of the Davenport
Democrat
and Quad City
Times)
Paul Conway, as were Rick McQuire and Dave Lund of WOC-TV. My friend and frequent collaborator, cartoonist Terry Beatty, also lent his support and help to this project (and the loan of another Century of Progress scrapbook/diary, kept by his grandmother when she attended the fair). And I'd like to thank Dominick Abel, my agent; Tom Dunne, my editor, and his associate. Ellen Loonam; Rick Marschall, who when he was editor at Field Enterprises encouraged me to do a story about a private eye in the '30s period; Bob Randisi, who encouraged me to do a story about a private eye. period; and Sarah Lifton, another former editor of mine, who seems to make a habit out of being in my corner.

Thanks are also due to Donald E. Westlake and Mickey Spillane, for more reasons than just the moral support they lent during the writing of this novel.

Photos selected by the author for use in this edition are courtesy the Chicago Historical Society
⁷
(Maxwell Street, General Dawes, Water Tower, Al Capone, Hooverville, and Barney Ross); other photos are courtesy the Miami
Herald
, the Chicago
Tribune
, and UPI; the Bayfront Park, 1983, photo was taken by Marice Cohn, staff photographer with the Miami
Herald
. Remaining photos have been selected from the personal collections of George Hagenauer, Barry Luebbert, and the author. Efforts to track the sources of certain photos have been unsuccessful; upon notification these sources will be listed in subsequent editions.

Literally hundreds of books and magazine and newspaper articles have been consulted in researching
True Detective
. I am particularly indebted to the anonymous authors of the Federal Writers Project volumes on the states of Florida, Georgia, Illinois and Iowa, all of which appeared in the late '30s: also helpful were several University of Chicago sociological studies, including
From the Gold Coast to the

Slum
(1929) and
Chicago Police Problems
(1932). A few other books deserve singling out: A Corner

of Chicago
(1963). Robert Hardy Andrews;
Al Capone
(1930). Fred D. Pasley;
The Bootleggers
(1961), Kenneth Allsop;
Boss Cermak of Chicago
(1962), Alex Gottfried;
Captive City
(1969), Ovid Demaris;
Chicago Confidential
(1950), Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer;
Dining in Chicago
(1931), John Drury;
The Dry and Lawless Years
(1960), Judge John H. Lyle;
Four Against the Mob
(1961), Oscar Fraley;
George Raft
(1974), Lewis Yablonsky;
The George Raft File
(1973), James Robert Paris with Steven Whitney;
Headquarters
(1955), Quentin Reynolds;
Maxwell Street
(1977), Ira Berkow;
Mayors, Madams, and Madmen
(1979), Norman Mark;
No Man Stands Alone
(1957), Barney Ross and Martin Abramson;
That Man Dawes
(1930), Paul R Leach;
The Twenty Incredible Years
(1935), William H Stuart;
The Underworld of American Politics
(1932), Fletcher Dobbins;
The Untouchables
(1957), Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley;
Where's the Rest of Me
? (1965), Ronald Reagan and Richard G. Hubler; and
Winchell
(1971)
_:
Bob Thomas.