then Owens looked sharply at Burton and said, 'Your cops waded into our pickets with billy clubs. Pushed our people off the picket line, forced them down Broadway, way the hell away from the plant entrances.'
Ness said, 'Strikers were hurling bricks at trucks and cars taking non-strikers into the plant. My understanding is that a mounted police officer rode into the crowd, going after a picket brandishing a brick, and was knocked off his horse. That's when the other officers 'waded' in.'
Hawk-faced Ballin spoke up: 'Those bricks were thrown by men planted among us by the company.'
Ness raised an eyebrow. 'My assistant, Robert Chamberlin, was down there this morning. He was threatened by strikers with bricks; and they were local people. This violence cuts both ways, gentlemen.'
'What do you propose to do about it?' Owens said coldly.
'Anyone throwing bricks at cars will be arrested,' Ness said, shrugging. 'If it's somebody the company planted, then I guess we'll find out.'
'What about the trashing of our union hall?' Selby demanded. 'That was company thugs who did that!'
'I'm investigating that. If Republic hired that done, we'll prosecute.'
'Why should we trust you?' Selby asked.
'Because my men haven't shot anybody,' Ness said. 'And they are not going to. Or would you prefer I provide you with a few martyrs, Mr. Owens? I know Republic Steel would appreciate it if I would throw some lead around, and scare your people back to work.'
Burton winced at that, but said, 'We are not here to take sides, gentlemen.'
'We're here to keep the peace,' Ness added quickly. 'Now what do you propose to do toward that end?'
Owens shook his head side to side. 'We're on strike. We don't expect it to be easy.'
'Then why are you wasting our time?' Ness snapped. 'If you want a bloodbath, don't expect me to aid and abet you, and then take the rap for you, too. I won't play savior for you, and I won't play villain, either. If you want to avoid more violence, then limit the number of your pickets and don't physically try to stop nonstrikers from entering the plant.'
'Scabs,' Ballin said bitterly.
'Not necessarily,' Burton said, gesturing with an open hand. 'This morning I had a call from Walter L. Wonder, who is chairman of the Republic Employee's Association…'
'Company union,' Selby snorted.
'… and he claims twenty-two hundred of the thirty-eight hundred employed at Corrigan-McKinney are not on strike.'
Owens laughed at that. 'That's utterly fantastic. We have better than fifty percent of Corrigan-McKinney, and more joining us daily.'
'Then strike peacefully,' Ness said, 'and wait for the company to come around.'
'You want us to limit our pickets,' Selby said, eyes burning. 'Well, why don't you reduce your damn cops at the mill?'
'The number of officers on duty,' Ness said, 'will reflect the need, as the emergency requires.'
'Why don't you present your grievances to the police,' Burton suggested, gesturing gently, 'instead of bucking them?'
Owens rolled his eyes, stood; he sighed theatrically. Made a show of looking about the Tapestry Room, from ornate ceiling to plushly carpeted floor. Then he smiled a smile that had nothing to do with happiness and said, 'We're not getting anywhere. It's clear where you stand. But I would think that even from this ivory tower you could get a view of what's going on down in the real world-on your City Hall sidewalk, for instance.' He nodded to the other two men, said, 'Boys,' and together they stalked out, Owens in the lead.
Burton and Ness sat in silence. The mayor sighed heavily, lit another Havana and said, 'What about tonight?'
Ness looked at his watch. 'When the eleven P.M. shift goes on, that's when all hell will break loose.'
'What do you propose we do about it?'
'I don't know what you're going to do about it,' Ness said, rising, 'but I'm going to be there to catch it.'
And he left the mayor there to ponder that, while he went to his office to get Albert Curry, Bob Chamberlin, and a gun.
CHAPTER 2
Detective Albert Curry, behind the wheel of the black Ford sedan with the special EN-1 license plate, didn't know what to make of the situation. Or, to be more exact, he didn't know what to make of the way his chief was behaving in this situation.
Curry had great admiration for Ness, who had in little more than a year made enormous strides toward cleaning up Cleveland's almost impossibly corrupt police department. Not to mention the safety director's record prior to coming to Cleveland, a record in law enforcement second to few in the nation, second to none when you considered his age.
A prohibition agent in Chicago, assigned to the Justice Department and later Treasury, Ness and his small, hand-picked squad-known in the press as the 'untouchables,' due to their resistance to bribes, threats, and politics-had been instrumental in strangling the Chicago mob financially. Raiding breweries, confiscating beer trucks, seizing records, Ness and his crew earned much of the credit for sending crime kingpin Al Capone on his long ride up the river. This was followed by Ness's war against moonshiners in the mountains (and mobsters in the cities) of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, which proved similarly successful and publicity-making, landing Ness the choice but precarious job of Cleveland's safety director.
Beyond this, Curry knew, Ness was at the forefront of modern thinking in police science and criminology, having trained at the University of Chicago under August Vollmer. With half a dozen successful crooked-cop prosecutions behind him, Ness was effecting his plan to update the force, switching over from foot patrol to patrol cars, reorganizing the traffic bureau, instituting a juvenile delinquency unit and much else.
But what impressed Curry most about Ness was not his forward thinking or administrative skills, but the tendency of the youthful safety director to get out from behind his desk and direct investigations personally. Curry was well aware that a certain amount of Ness's detective work and 'derring-do' reflected the mayor's need for the former T-man to create favorable publicity-which was why the badly factionalized city council had managed to get behind this administration, where Ness's police and fire departments were concerned.
Curry knew, too, that Ness got restless when tied down to his office that he thrived on being out in the field. It was said that Eliot Ness took no greater pleasure out of life than when he was kicking down a door and conducting a raid.
So it was no surprise to Curry to find himself driving Ness to the front lines of the volatile Republic Steel strike. What surprised Curry was seeing his chief strap on a shoulder-holstered revolver, back at Ness's City Hall office.
Despite the somewhat deserved reputation Ness had for embracing danger, Curry knew that Ness rarely ever carried a gun. 'They won't be so quick to shoot at you,' he had explained, 'if they know you can't shoot back.' And resorting to the use of a gun to resolve a situation meant failure to born-diplomat Ness.
Yet tonight Eliot Ness was carrying a gun into a situation. Odd, Curry thought; particularly considering the strict 'no firearms' orders the police detail at Corrigan-McKinney was saddled with.
But Curry said nothing about it to Ness, who had his fedora in his lap and rode leaning against the window, gazing out almost dreamily at the blush of red against the sky that was the signature of the steel mills.
'On summer nights,' Ness said, 'we used to sit out on the porch and drink beer and watch the sky turn orange.'
'Sir?'
Ness smiled gently without looking at Curry. 'South Side of Chicago, where I grew up,' he explained. 'Roseland was my neighborhood… so close to the mills that if you faced east, you'd see an incredible glow on the sky… especially if they were opening the steel furnaces to clean out the coke.'
Curry had never heard Ness talk about Chicago, not even the Capone days, let alone anything about growing up.
