were no betting slips and no evidence that money was being wagered. The celebrated gangbuster, it would seem, may find Cleveland a tougher nut to crack than Chicago.'
'That son of a bitch,' Ness said, under his breath. He thrust the paper back at Burton. 'That's what I get for trusting a guy who ran with Jake Lingle.'
'What is the, uh… scoop? If you'll pardon the expression.'
'The scoop is, I invited Wild along on this raid as a favor. I didn't organize the raid. I just went along to observe procedure, and see if a department leak would sink the thing. Which it did, of course.' He pointed at the newspaper Burton held. 'Wild knew that. Playing it like it was my raid that went sour is a cheap damn shot.'
'We need good press relations, Eliot. Obviously.'
'I'll handle this in my own way.'
Burton shrugged. 'That is our arrangement.'
The fire across the way was still going. Flames licked up in a few windows, but the column of smoke was narrowing.
Ness forgot his departmental problems, for the moment, including that SOB Sam Wild. He looked over at the house, the basic structure of which had somehow survived the fire.
'Two men died in that house tonight,' Ness said.
'A shame.'
'Sure, it's a shame. But we also have to find out why.'
Ness bade the Mayor goodnight and went home to see if his wife was still speaking to him.
CHAPTER 8
When Joe Fusca, alias Special Agent Sidney White, pulled his sporty blue Packard up in front of the paint- peeling, ramshackle two-story clapboard on East Sixty-sixth, he could scarcely believe his eyes. This was hardly a classy neighborhood, sure, but this eyesore was the bottom of the barrel. The pits.
Hard to believe there was a twelve-grand passbook in a shack like that, ripe for the picking.
It was Monday evening, a little before seven, and Joe was pretty much over it. He'd killed before, in Chicago, but that had been different. That had been mob stuff. You had to prove yourself to those guys if you were going to stay on the in with them. You just didn't say no when they asked a favor. And it was other mob guys he'd hit, after all. It was in the family.
Friday night had been a whole 'nother deal. It had given him the willies, doing that. It was creepy, it was dangerous, and, anyway, the two old guys he bumped off were just looking out after their own best interests. Which was more than you could say for most of the bazoos on his sucker list. Most of these lilies were so ripe for plucking it was almost a duty to get there and do the job before somebody beat you to it. People that stupid didn't deserve money. People who saved money for a rainy day when they were in the middle of a goddamn downpour simply had to be relieved of the burden of their dough.
But those two old birds at the Joanna Home, Great War veterans both, had tumbled to the scam. The way it was set up, promising the money within sixty days, was supposed to give the salesmen like Joe that long to fully work a neighborhood, and move on. Only those two old boys had got talking between themselves, after turning their passbooks-one for $5600 and another for $3200- over to 'Agent White.' They took a streetcar down to the Hanna Building where the Memorial Developers, Inc., office was located, just a boiler shop, really, and started complaining. They were talking about going to the county prosecutor, and the boiler-shop boys calmed them down and said Agent White would do a follow-up call.
Agent White had. It had been his own idea to handle it the way he had, but he'd heard no complaints from up-stairs. He knew the lights went out at the Joanna Home around nine, and he slipped in the back door a little before ten. The geezers in question shared a room in back, and they were both asleep in the darkness. Joe didn't even know which one was which, as he crushed the skull of first one, and then the other, with a sash weight. He splashed them down with kerosene, a can of which he'd lugged in with him, and splashed some more on the walls, particularly around a light switch and a couple of electrical outlets that were showing loose frayed wires. The Joanna Home was a wreck, anyway-a lousy firetrap. It was a crime passing the joint off as an old folks' home, Joe thought. The crooks in charge would no doubt take the blame for the fire. That is, the faulty wiring would.
He'd lit two matches-one each for the already dead old men-and tossed them one by one at their targets, lurching back at the immediate flare-up, and ducking out back. No one had seen him as far as he knew. There was a one-story lean-to out back, a sort of annex built onto the house, where some of the old biddies slept (he'd picked up eight passbooks at the Joanna Home), and the lights were out there, too. He was safe.
But he'd had a bad weekend. He hadn't worked at all. He wasn't cut out to be no fucking torch. He was a con artist, not a killer. It made his stomach jumpy.
He just sat in his hotel room and listened to the radio and read every edition of every paper, looking for mentions of the fire. When the Plain Dealer reported the fire warden as blaming the blaze on a short circuit in the 'old, rotten wiring, sending flames crackling up through the dead, dry timber of the walls into the attic,' Joe felt relieved, but not at ease. He could only make it through the weekend by drinking his worries away. Straight Scotch, and a lot of it, had allowed Monday to finally roll around.
He'd felt hung over and shaky, but ready to have at the world again. He went down to the Hanna Building to get a fresh list of names. The way the scam operated was, like all great scams, simple. Neighborhoods were surveyed and blocked off. Slush money was paid to a savings-and-loan employee in the district for providing a sucker list of passbook holders. Commissions were paid to the savings-and-loan bird dog whenever a salesman successfully scammed a passbook. With this system, a guy like Joe didn't have to go door to door. He could hit pay dirt every time he made a call.
There were different ways of going about it, on Joe's end. Some salesmen posed as bank presidents or big real estate operators, particularly those salesmen dealing with clients who could read. They would openly tout cemetery lots as a good investment ('everybody has to die sometime, and there's a big demand for burial plots') which was horsefeathers, of course. Enough lots were available in the Cleveland area to bury the city's dead for the next three hundred years.
That was how the racket got off the ground in the first place: cemeteries laying off their excess lots cheap to the 'sales organization' Fusca worked for. He was vague about who the big shots were. He had the name of a contact, some guy who ran a horse parlor on Ivanhoe Road, if he got in a jam and needed to lam out or hole up. Beyond that he knew nothing.
Except he knew it wasn't the Mayfield Road bunch. They'd tried to cut themselves in for a percentage a while back and got told to back off, by the cops no less. He didn't know who would have the kind of leverage it took to make the local mob back off like that, using the cops as muscle. Some crooked politician, maybe. Joe didn't really care.
All he knew was he was making good dough, a third of everything he hauled to shore.
Of course, Joe had less overhead than most of the salesmen. A lot of them worked in pairs. Those posing as bankers or real estate agents needed translators, as many of the marks didn't speak English. These marks Joe simply avoided. And in most cases it was necessary to employ yet another bird dog, namely somebody in the neighborhood, a respected businessman who spoke the mark's native tongue, to make introductions and pave the way. Or the cop on the beat, of course.
Joe cut out the middle-man with his G-man routine. The shiny gold badge and a little Uncle Sam went a long way with these dumb fucking hunkies. And he got a kick out of using a G-man badge to bilk a mark. It was like getting back at the bastards for nabbing his brother Phillie.
Phillie had been the class act of all con artists. Joe admired and loved his older brother. Every Christmas, coming up soon now, he sat down and wrote Phillie a letter, and sent it off to the pen at Atlanta.
Everything Joe knew about conning came from Phillie. When they were little kids, Joe and his older brother had come over from Italy with their parents. Their papa was an honest man who almost made a living with an import cheese business in Brooklyn. When Phillie came into the nearly bankrupt business at age sixteen, it took him only a few months to turn things around by bribing customhouse weighers.
In 1915 Phillie got sentenced to a year in prison, but only served a few months. An eloquent letter from the
