The sun was shining in Cuyahoga County at one o'clock on this Monday afternoon, but it didn't warm William Wiggens. William-Willie to his friends, at least one of whom hadn't been particularly friendly-was just a body in ditch, and a snowy ditch at that. He lay face down at an odd, askew angle, like a child making a shape in the snow. His topcoat was black and so was his hair; he was hatless. He looked vaguely crumpled, like a discarded piece of paper. The splotches of blood on the snowy ground were turning black.
'We've got to quit meeting like this,' Nathan Heller said, Nate to his friends, one of whom was Eliot Ness.
Heller, a sturdy six-footer in a brown topcoat and a darker brown hat, had just stepped from the squad car that had delivered him, at Ness' request, to this desolate rural spot outside Pepper Pike Village, Cleveland's easternmost suburb, just beyond Shaker Heights. A Pepper Pike patrolman, bundled in a light blue coat, stood nearby with several Cleveland cops in darker blue coats, their breath smoking.
Ness was down in the ditch where Wiggens had fallen. He was bending over the body, having a look at the bullet wounds on the man. Or boy, really-Wiggens was barely past twenty.
Ness stood with a sigh. 'Young,' he said. 'So goddamn young.'
'Not so young,' Heller said. 'You don't get any older than dead.'
Ness nodded, and glanced at Heller, who took off his hat and riffled his head of reddish brown hair. His father had been Jewish, but it was his Irish mother he took after. He had dark blue eyes and was, Ness supposed, handsome, in a rugged sort of way. One corner of Heller's mouth often pulled into a half grin, which gave him a wise-guy appearance. Ness had known Heller a long time, and knew the man's flip cynicism was largely a self- defense mechanism.
'Don't you get a little tired.' Heller asked, putting the hat back on, that half smile tugging at his cheek, 'of poking at corpses in roadside ditches?'
Ness laughed, but it had a hollow sound. 'This isn't the same. A gangster like Prank Nitti bumping off another gangster like Ted Newberry makes a certain kind of sense.'
'That sounds funny, coming from you.'
Ness shrugged. 'Those boys were playing for high stakes, and they weren't really 'boys,' either. This poor kid was just an independent policy writer.'
Heller, hands shoved in his topcoat pockets, looked down unbelievingly at the corpse sprawled nearby. 'Since when do you get killed over the numbers, for Christ's sake?'
Ness held up two fingers. 'There's two ways, in Cleveland. The May field Road mob has a foolproof, profit- every-day system for the numbers racket: they avoid any 'losing' days in their lottery by franchising individual operators who take the financial risk while the mob takes the cream of the profits. Any operators who come up short on a losing day wind up like Mr. Wiggens here.'
'Dead in a ditch,' Heller nodded. 'Is that what Mr. Wiggens did?'
'Not necessarily. According to Captain Cooper, my man on the Detective Bureau, Wiggens was an independent. He wrote policy without a mob franchise. That's the other way you can die over the numbers in Cleveland.'
'How do you happen to have all this information at your fingertips? And, God, how I hate playing Watson to your Sherlock Holmes.'
'Elementary, my dear Nathan. Wiggens' blood-spattered car was found mid-morning, about a mile and a half from here. A shiny new blue Chevy coupe with a bullet hole in the rider's door. We've been looking for him ever since.'
Heller knelt over the body, as if playing Holmes himself. He looked at the wounds. Wiggens had been shot in the left temple, and in the left side, under the shoulder.
'Powder burns,' Heller said, standing, dusting snow off his topcoat with gloveless hands. 'The bullets enter high and exit low.'
'And how do you read that?'
He shrugged. 'He knew the guy who shot him. Car was probably stopped and the guy was talking to him, standing on the running board, with Wiggens behind the wheel. And then the shooting started.'
'One guy, then?'
'One guy shooting. Two guys in all. If they dumped his shiny new car half a mile from here, somebody had to drive it, while somebody else drove the car they came in.'
Ness was nodding. 'That's how I read it, too. Willie used to work for Frank Hogey, who was the most powerful numbers boss in Cleveland, till the Mayfield gang muscled in. Now Hogey's in their pocket.'
'So at least one of the hitters was probably somebody Wiggens knew when he was working for Hogey.'
'Yeah. And that's how this young man came to be dead today.'
They climbed up out of the snowy, bloody ditch.
'This isn't your bailiwick, is it?' Heller asked. 'Not that that would stop you.'
Ness said, 'Cullitan called me. He's working with somebody from the sheriff’s office on this, and asked me to put some men on it, to keep the sheriffs boys honest.'
'So you're helping out.'
'Actually, Cullitan's helping me out. He knows this killing has more to do with Cleveland than Pepper Pike or Shaker Heights.'
'Yeah,' Heller said, the wry half grin back again, 'these ritzy suburbs ain't exactly Little Italy.'
'Not hardly. They don't play the numbers in neighbor-hoods like these. It's wall-to-wall golf courses out here.'
'The only number they're interested in playin' is 'fore,' '
'Exactly. Let's stroll down this country lane a ways, shall we?'
Heller shrugged, and whispered, 'Why the need for privacy? There's nobody around here but us cops.'
Ness didn't dignify that with a response. He walked down the gravel road and Heller walked alongside him.
Nathan Heller was the president of the A-l Detective Agency in Chicago, a small, one-man office that was doing good if unspectacular business in these Depression days. Ness had met Heller around '31 or '32, when Heller was still on the Chicago P.D., and was, in fact, the youngest plainclothes officer on the force. He had gotten there by graft, of course, but had suffered a dose of conscience when his idealistic father, an old union man who hated the cops and hated his son's becoming one, blew his brains out with Nate's automatic.
Nate had, you see, given some of the graft money to his father, whose modest West Side bookstore was in trouble. Suicide had been the old man's response. Not long after, Heller had been called upon to get his badge even dirtier and had instead chosen to leave the department and go private.
Heller, a relatively honest cop by Windy City standards, was one of Ness' few contacts on the Chicago police force, and Ness had been sorry to lose him as a dependable source. But just the same, Ness had helped his friend get started in the detective business, putting him in touch with some of his former clients, particularly one retail credit firm from his own private detective days.
Last night, when he picked Heller up at Union Station in the belly of Terminal Tower, his old friend had wondered what he was doing in Cleveland.
'You got cops and detectives up the wazoo,' Heller told him, as they climbed one of six sets of stairways leading to the terminal's concourse. 'What does the great high muck-a-muck of the Cleveland coppers need one lousy private op from Chicago for?'
The sound of trains behind them made it necessary for Ness to nearly shout his answer, which considering the nature of the conversation made him feel uneasy.
He said. 'I can trust you, Nate.'
Heller, carrying his own bag, glanced at Ness and the familiar half smile started as he seemed to consider a wisecrack. But he left it unsaid and the smile faded.
'I'll help any way I can,' he said. 'Just don't expect me to move to this one-horse town.'
Heller's remark seemed more than faintly ridiculous, as they were presently walking through the Steam Concourse, a vast chamber forty-some feet high, with a skylight the size of a football field, an array of huge bronze chandeliers, marble walls, and mammoth Greek columns. But it was hard to impress somebody from Chicago.
'How long can you stay?' Ness asked.
'A month,' Heller said.
