'Huh?' Whitehall said.
'She kissed Dorothy on the forehead. And it protected her. Nothing could hurt her.'
'Nothing,' Dorrie said, wide-eyed and nodding.
'That's nice,' Whitehall said, and smiled back at them, loving them without understanding a damn word of it.
In the hall he hugged Sarah to him; she was so much smaller than he was, it was like hugging another child. She beamed up at him, with the same sky-blue eyes as the kids, and said, 'I can kiss you on the forehead, too, if you like.'
'Ha. I don't think that'll do me much good.'
'Well then, let me just do this, then.'
And she kissed him on the mouth. A sweet kiss that had more than a hint of passion in it.
Then, with an ornery little smile, she looked up at him and said, 'Are you coming to bed, you big bully?'
'Yeah. After my radio program.'
'What, Eddie Cantor, again?'
'He's funny, honey.'
She rolled her eyes. 'Then to bed?'
'Then to bed.'
She turned to go and looked at him with a mock mean look, as if to say You better, and he reached out and patted her on her sweet soft ass and her expression melted and she padded down the hall in bare feet.
In the living room he switched on the radio, dialed his station, and settled himself in his easy chair, waiting for his show to come on. Hands folded in his lap, he felt himself on the verge of drifting off to sleep. The overstuffed chair, next to the porch windows, was as comfortable as a mother's arms. It soothed his weary damn bones. He'd had another long day at the food terminal, though well worthwhile. The Teamsters would have that place sewed up in a week.
Whitehall smiled to himself, pleased with his life. He had come a long, long way from that log cabin on Lake Michigan. He had little memory of his father, who had run a small grocery store at Scott's Point, serving a small community of fishermen and loggers. From the age of six he'd been raised by his grandfather on a small farm, and when his grandfather died, went to live with his foundry-foreman uncle in Manistique, Michigan, a town of five thousand whose electric lights, running water, indoor plumbing, movie house, and department stores had opened up a whole new world for the burly bumpkin.
He had also been introduced to pool halls and street gangs, and with his brawn and brains had little trouble maintaining respect and even dominion. Whitehall was an unusual roughneck among roughnecks, because he studied, and liked to read. He grew up on Zane Grey and Tom Swift and was a reader to this day, everything from Karl Marx to Sinclair Lewis.
Of course, it was the sons and daughters of bankers, merchants, doctors, and lawyers who went to college; and occasionally die offspring of the middle class, the department-store clerks, the bank tellers, the civil-service workers. Not the likes of Jack Whitehall, the ill-clad kin of a foundry worker.
He had hoboed around awhile after high school, and took his first real job on a Great Lakes steamer out of Toledo. Working in the galley as a kitchen flunky, he set tables and washed dishes, pots and pans, and swabbed floors. He'd been forced to sign up in the Lakes Carriers Association, a company union. It had been his first lesson in the education of a working man. When the ship steward, to whom he reported, got sacked for drinking on the job, the steward's three-man staff, hardworking Jack Whitehall included, was canned as well.
Like all company unions, there was no real grievance committee; nothing to protect the worker from unjust firings. It had made an impression on young Whitehall. When he finally wound up in Chicago, in the Pullman plant, working back-breaking twelve-hour shifts, he was a man born to the union cause.
A man with a brain in his head and steel in his fists could go a long way for the worker, and for himself. Yes, he was in it for himself and his family, but he was no goddamn pork-chopper. Yes, he used threats and violence when that was what it took to get the job done. But he sure as hell was no shakedown artist like those bastards Caldwell and McFate, who gave the labor movement the worst kind of bad name. Much as he distrusted and even hated cops, he was glad he'd helped Ness try to nail those bums.
And, knowing that stubborn Scandyhoovian (as Nordics like Ness were called back where Whitehall came from), he would get the job done.
Eddie Cantor came on and woke Whitehall up. Soon he was laughing, as Cantor dueled first with the Mad Russian ('How dooo you dooo?' — that always killed Whitehall) and then with that lovable dope Parkyakarkas.
Despite the radio (which wasn't turned up all that loud, with the kids sleeping in the other room), a noise on the porch caught Whitehall's attention. He turned his head slightly and looked over his shoulder, and through the thin white translucent curtain he could make out the figure of a man holding something.
The window behind him shattered under the chatter of a machine gun and slugs riddled the left side of his body and the back of his neck; he began to rise and more bullets tore into him, tore through him, shaking him like a large animal shakes a smaller one in its teeth, and he fell awkwardly to the floor, tumbling, doing an ungainly little dance, dead before the pain could register, dead before he could see his living room and its nice overstuffed furniture get the stuffing knocked out of it, as bullets chewed up the room, shutting off the radio, cutting off Eddie Cantor in mid-joke, the sound of female screams, a mother and her two girls, cutting shrilly above the metallic din.
CHAPTER 15
The body was gone by the time Ness got there; only a chalk outline remained. Both the coroner's man and the photographer were gone as well. Nonetheless, the crime scene was freshly preserved; the murder might have occurred minutes ago, not several hours.
He'd been stuck in an endless, budget-battle city council meeting, seated at Mayor Burton's side, when a plainclothes cop sent by Sergeant Merlo of the Homicide Bureau brought him the news of the Whitehall shooting. With the mayor's permission, Ness had left the meeting. He'd run into Sam Wild coming out of the press room.
'Were your ears burning tonight?' Wild had asked with a one-sided smile.
'Why?' Ness said, moving quickly down the hall, footsteps echoing off the marble floor.
Wild followed along. 'I had dinner at Jack Whitehall's tonight. You were a frequent topic of conversation.'
Ness looked at him sharply. 'When was this?'
'Oh, I don't know. I went over about six-thirty, stayed till eight, maybe.'
'Within an hour of your leaving,' Ness said, 'Jack Whitehall was murdered.'
The usually unflappable Wild stopped dead. His face drained of blood.
Ness kept walking, slipping his trench coat on, looking back to say, 'Machine-gunned through his front-porch window.'
Wild caught up. 'His wife and kids…?'
'Unharmed.'
'I'm coming along.'
'It's not really appropriate, Sam, a reporter at the scene at this stage.'
'Fuck you, I'm coming.'
'I guess you're coming.'
The living room of Whitehall's home was a grisly sight. Next to the white chalk outline on the natural wood floor, which was splashed with blood and brain matter and assorted gore, were hundreds of fragments of glass that had been blown out by the machine-gun fire. The chopper had apparently been thrust right up to the pane. Some of the shards had been scattered across the room; the pattern of slugs was stitched in the wall opposite Whitehall's bullet-tattered easy chair. The radio had taken a dozen slugs easily. The effeminate portrait of Christ still hung on the wall, albeit crookedly now; its glass had been shattered and the Savior had gotten one in the cheek.
Grim as all of this was, Ness was pleased that the evidence had not been disturbed; before his arrival in Cleveland, crime-scene procedure here was unprofessional, to say the least. His first move had been to remind his
