'We can't know if Jack kept it to himself.'
'I'd bet my ass on him keeping it to himself. Who the hell in his circles could he tell he was in bed with the likes of you? Cops are poison to guys like Whitehall. They'd've thrown him out of his union post if they knew he was keeping company as lousy as you.'
Ness managed to smile a little. 'You know how to build up a fella's confidence.'
'Well, it's true. But I think Big Jim and Little Jim were behind it, just the same.'
Ness nodded. 'Because Jack was organizing the food terminal. Because he was stepping in and taking over while they were indisposed.'
'Exactly.'
'Well, that's just another way it's my fault, Sam. I opened that door for Jack.'
'Well what in the hell do you intend to do about it?'
'What I told his widow I'd do. Find the sons of bitches responsible.'
Wild snorted. 'Well, you know who that is.'
'Yeah. The two Jims. And I'd bet a year's pay that Harry Gibson, their out-of-work one-man goon squad from the food terminal, is wielding that tommy gun for 'em.'
Wild lit up another Lucky. 'Jack Whitehall would probably have taken a baseball bat and beat their brains out. Or blown 'em up with a bomb or something. What will you do?'
'All I can do is put them in jail,' Ness said, digging his hands in his topcoat pockets. 'Or hope they resist arrest when I come to pick them up.'
'So you have a reason to kill them?'
Ness smiled faintly. 'I already have a reason,' he said. 'It's an excuse I'm looking for.'
TWO
CHAPTER 16
Just a few months ago he had been in another funeral home, in Cleveland, at the wake of Jack Whitehall. He hadn't been able to stay long-Whitehall's widow remained bitter toward him-but he'd paid his respects. Said good- bye to an old friend, an old co-worker.
Now, on this dreary Sunday afternoon, Eliot Ness was in Chicago, in Doty's funeral home on 115th Street, back in his old Roseland neighborhood, just a few blocks from the frame house where he'd been raised. He was saying good-bye to his mother, dead of a heart attack at seventy-three; five years ago, his father had gone the same way.
But he was also saying good-bye to Roseland. Driving over here from the lavishly lawned Hotel Florence, across from the Pullman plant where he'd worked, going past Palmer Park where he'd played, he felt tugs from his past, felt his last real tie with his youth slip away. He would never live here again. He would rarely visit-only his schoolteacher sister Effie still lived in Roseland; his other two sisters, Clara and Nora, and his brother Charles, had all moved away. The family business, his father's bakery, had been sold years ago.
Effie was the only one of his siblings present in the long, narrow parlor, a very Protestant room, with its dark wood and small stained-glass windows. His brother and his other two sisters would be coming in by train later today. Now, suffering the too-sweet smell of funereal flowers, he stood making meaningless conversation with faces both familiar and foreign, reaching into his memory for the names of these men and women his age who had stayed in Roseland. The men, most of them, worked in the Pullman plant where Ness had briefly toiled as a young man, dipping radiators. The women looked much older than they should, with lined faces and clinging children. Among the older folks paying their respects was the now-retired Pullman office manager who had told Ness's mother that her son could always count on a job anytime he wanted it.
That had made his mother proud. She'd been a little too proud of him, he was afraid; not so long ago she had given an embarrassing interview to Sam Wild, damn him, in which she revealed that her youngest son 'was so terribly good as a boy, he never got a spanking… I never saw a baby like him.' Even worse, Sam had coaxed her into saying that she wasn't the least bit surprised that her youngest child had 'the country's attention focused on his work on rebuilding a major city's crime prevention and law enforcement activities.'
He'd been surprised that even Sam Wild could wheedle such admissions out of Mama ('I always expected Eliot to do outstanding things'); she was too quiet, too reserved for such remarks. On the other hand, her high opinion of him was no secret to him. He knew he was the favorite, and his sisters and brother didn't even seem to mind; they had fussed over the freckle-faced baby, too.
He knew that he'd been somewhat spoiled as a child; ten years younger than his nearest sibling, he'd been doted over, no denying it. Childhoods didn't come much better. He and his papa would hop a streetcar and take in a game at White Sox park; or grab the I.C. to Soldier Field for a football game. His mother would read aloud to him, and had taught him to read before he entered kindergarten. When other kids were reading Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, if they could read at all, young Ness was consuming Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales and the plays of William Shakespeare.
Nonetheless, his parents had encouraged him to be independent, and there had been no pressure to go into the family business. In fact, his mother and father had urged him to go to college, so he could get a top white collar job; they'd been disappointed, but not disapproving, when he went to work at Pullman instead.
The day he came home with a new suit and suitcase, to tell his mother he had enrolled in the University of Chicago, she had said only, 'It's like you to enroll first, then tell us.' But there had been no disapproval in that. If anything, the opposite. And his father had only nodded, said, 'Good,' and gone back to puffing his pipe and reading his evening paper.
Now they were both gone. Actually, his mother was still here-in that coffin, across the room. She truly looked peaceful; like she was sleeping. Yes. But Eliot Ness, who had seen more corpses than the undertaker who ran this place, who had seen bodies riddled with bullets, who had seen stiffs knife-slashed from head to foot, had never seen a dead body that disturbed him more.
Thank God for Ev MacMillan. Without her, he was not sure how he could have gotten through this, at least not without breaking down in front of everybody. Right now she was over looking at the many flowers, reading the small cards of condolence.
Evelyn was a slender brunette, twenty-five, who had first caught his eye half a dozen years ago, when he was still head of the Justice Department prohibition unit in Chicago. He had met her and her family socially (her father was a prominent stockbroker); Ness was still married at the time, and Ev was really just a kid, attending the Art Institute. But she had made an impression on him.
And apparently he had on her, as well.
He and Bob Chamberlin had taken the weekend off to take the train to Ann Arbor for the Michigan-Chicago football game. They had run into Ev and some friends at the stadium Saturday, Ev glowing upon seeing Ness, and the whole crew had gone out for dinner after the game, at the hotel. That evening Ness had gotten word his mother had died that afternoon.
He and Ev had become pretty friendly during the course of the day and the early evening, with some slightly inebriated hand-holding and flirting and such ensuing; but he hardly expected Ev to insist on going back to Chicago with him. But insist she did.
'I'm fine,' he'd told her, last night at the Ann Arbor train station. 'You don't need to come.'
'You're not fine. Your heart is breaking, and I'm here to help you pick up the pieces. No arguments.'
He hadn't argued. They got a compartment and he had broken down and cried in her arms; he'd been a little drunk, after all. She had comforted him as he hadn't been comforted since… well, since his mother comforted him as a kid, he guessed.
He walked over to her, where she was still reading the little cards on the floral arrangements.
