'I really don't. What about your father? Does he know you're seeing me?'
She smiled less wryly, shrugged. 'I think so. We haven't talked about it. I think he'll approve.'
'He may not like you’re seeing a married man.'
'I think he'll understand your situation. He thinks the sun rises and sets on you, you know. He sees you like some white knight who's charged into gray ol' Cleveland, to clean up his beloved police department.'
Ness laughed, softly. 'Horseback riding is one sport I stink at. Ah, here's the waiter.'
Antonio's reminded Ness of his favorite restaurant in Chicago, Madame Galli's in Tower Town, in that there was no menu, just spaghetti served with a choice of entrees: chicken, squab, filet mignon, or lamb. Gwen chose the lamb, and Ness ordered the filet. The middle-aged waiter, whose broken English charmed Gwen, was abrupt but polite and wrote nothing down as they ordered. Then he disappeared into the kitchen.
'Are you always out of the office as much as you were today?' she asked Ness.
'I'm at my desk more than I like,' he said. 'But we did have a good afternoon out in the field today, yes.'
'You certainly seemed in a good mood when you got back. You still do. Are you sure it's my first day at work we're celebrating?'
He laughed a little. 'I'm celebrating this afternoon, too. We pulled a little raid.'
'A little raid?'
'Well, not so little.'
It had, in fact, been the first successful raid of a Cuyahoga County policy bank in anybody's memory. With no notice at all, Ness had bundled two squads of Cooper's detectives into unmarked cars, with Sam Wild along for some press coverage, and drove to the headquarters of policy king Frank Hogey, located in a deceptively crummy- looking two-story house on Central Avenue South East. Ness shouldered the door open and Cooper's dicks followed him in, arresting Hogey, his two brothers, and a woman, apparently living with Hogey. His 'housekeeper,' he said-a twenty-one-year-old redhead with a cute, sulky face and a nice shape, for whom any red-blooded man would gladly provide a house for keeping.
When Ness barged in, Hogey had been standing at the open door of a squat square safe in the study-cum- office of the house. He'd tried to shut it, but Ness stopped the door with his foot and Hogey with a right cross. Hogey, a stocky guy of forty or so, had sat on the floor and licked blood out of the corner of his mouth and thought about it. The floor around him was littered with clearinghouse slips and long rolls of adding-machine tape, curling like wood shavings.
A little over two thousand dollars was found in the safe, as were the day's records. Most policy operators burned their records nightly, so, not surprisingly, no others were found.
'This fella Hogey is the biggest numbers operator in the city,' Ness explained to Gwen. 'He's tied in with the Mayfield Road mob now.'
She looked both amused and dumbfounded. She pointed out toward the street. 'As in that Mayfield Road out there?'
'Right,' Ness smiled. 'We're in the midst of their home territory. This place used to be a speakeasy.'
'And you frequent it?'
'Sure. Why not? It's legal now. Have some more wine.'
He poured for her and she smiled and shook her head. Then her expression turned serious, interested. 'What's so important about this guy Hogey? Will he go to jail a long time?'
Hogey, who also ran a chain of butcher shops, was a former Police Court bondsman who knew his way around the legal system.
Ness lifted an eyebrow. 'Probably he'll just get a slap on the wrist and a fine. The judges are so corrupt we can't hope for more. But by raiding him, we're putting him on notice.'
'What sort of notice?'
'That he'll be raided again. And again. That his life will be made pretty much miserable, from here on out.'
'That sounds like harassment.'
'That's exactly what it is. If the courts aren't behind me, what other recourse do I have? I'd like to catch Hogey on a murder rap, but that'll never happen.'
'A murder rap?'
Ness nodded. 'Just a week ago today, a former policy writer of his wound up dead in a ditch.'
'My. I think I read about that in the paper…'
'Yeah. From the evidence at the scene, it's clear the guy was shot by a friend or associate. From other things we know, we believe Hogey and his people were responsible, probably bumping the guy off at the May field Road mob's behest.'
'I'm glad you're naturally soft-spoken,' she said, rolling her eyes, glancing about the restaurant, 'or we'd probably be in a ditch by now ourselves.'
He grinned, and swirled his wine in his glass. 'Not everybody in Murray Hill is a part of the mob. I promise.'
'So you raided Hogey to get back at him for the murder? It didn't have anything to do with this policy racket?'
'Well, I had Hogey on my mind because of the murder, yes. But cracking down on policy is a priority, anyway.'
'This policy you're talking about… that's what they call the numbers racket, isn't it?'
'Right.'
'I don't even know how you play the numbers.'
He shrugged again. 'It's simple. The bettor takes a 1,000-to-1 chance that he'll pick a set of three digits between 000 and 999, as they'll appear on some prearranged daily newspaper statistics. Locally, they key off racetrack results. A winner gets, at most, a 599-to-1 payoff.'
'That's a lot of money.'
'It sounds like it, but the odds are impossible. It's a sucker bet.'
'So it's sort of like a lottery.'
'That's right.'
She made a face, as though this all seemed ridiculous to her. 'Still, I don't understand why something so harmless would be anything you would want to expend your valuable time and energy on.'
'A lot of people have the idea that the numbers racket is harmless. Maybe it is. I do know that nickel-and- dime bets aren't as common these days as quarter ones, and dollar ones aren't unusual. And most bettors bet daily, or anyway six days a week. That means real money in times like these. I've got crime figures from New York that show over a hundred million dollars gets gambled away every year in that city on numbers alone. A city the size of Cleveland is going to be playing in the same ballpark. How would you like to be the mother of seven, and your husband plays his entire relief check on the numbers?'
'No, thank you.'
'And the mob into whose pocket this money goes is using it to finance labor union infiltration, loan-shark syndicates, and expansion of organized crime activity of every stripe… prostitution, narcotics, you name it.'
'I never thought of it that way.'
He grunted. 'But the real problem with the policy racket is that it encourages cops to go on the pad.'
'The pad?'
He gestured with his wineglass. 'The pad's a police-okayed list of spots, of locations, where a policy writer can operate. It might be a grocery store, it might be a luncheonette, a bank of elevators in an office building, or a newsstand on any street corner.'
'And these 'spots' can get a police 'okay'? How?'
'It starts with the cop on the beat. Precinct detectives get a taste. So do lieutenants, sergeants, and especially the captain. It makes crooks out of cops, and it lends itself to the forming of a structure, a, network of crooked cops, within a police department.'
Hence, Ness thought, the need for an 'outside chief' to coordinate all the corruption. But this he didn't mention to Gwen. He and Wild hoped to make the concept public once the 'outside chief' himself had been nabbed.
