toward the bushes, covering insufficiently with his right hand the bloody fountain spraying from his shattered left shoulder where his arm had been, and a dark shape rose from behind the shrubs and the second shotgun blast blew a hole in Rufus Murphy's chest and knocked him down, flat on his back.
Toussaint Johnson, the instant he'd seen the blossom of gunfire and heard the shotgun's roar, had crossed his hands before him and yanked the twin silver revolvers from his shoulder holsters. His usually impassive face became another face, one of bulging eyes and flaring nostrils and a huge hole of a mouth. Screaming in wordless rage, he bolted across the street and up the lawn and began firing, one gun at a time, like something out of a Western movie, blowing the night apart with his gunfire. Rufus was falling, but the assassin had already leaped from behind the bushes and was cutting through the space between the house and the garage into the backyard.
Johnson did not pause at Murphy's staring lifeless body, though it was jerking from reflex and spraying blood, speckling Johnson as he ran past, the detective nearly slipping in the already pooled blood. The assassin, thin as a blade, was knifing through the short backyard to the driveway of the adjacent house behind, where another vehicle waited, a black Ford sedan; both the assassin and the driver were white, that much Toussaint, even in the dark, on the run, could tell. Dressed in black, black fedora pulled down, the assassin carried the shotgun in his left hand like a relay racer's baton, and now twisted around to shoot a right-hand revolver at Toussaint, who hit the dirt, bullets flying overhead, crunching into the wood of the house behind. He went to return fire but the assassin was climbing into the rider's side of the sedan and the door shut just as Toussaint's next three thunderous shots puckered the metal door.
The car squealed away and was kicking up gravel as it made its turn toward the street by the time Toussaint was standing in the drive, ready to fire again.
He had missed the license plate, but earlier had caught a glimpse of the man's white face, a ghostly white male witch of a face with a pointed chin and a thin sharp nose; the pulled-down fedora obscured the rest.
Behind him he heard screaming.
A woman screaming. Mamie, Toussaint thought. Rufus's wife, wakened by the gunfire.
He ran back to Murphy, and indeed his dead friend was in the arms of his beautiful portly widow, her white nightgown a blotter of crimson from the still-flowing blood. Toussaint stood helpless in the drive, the two fabled silver revolvers loose in the hands of his dangling arms, pointing impotently, limply down.
The car was gone.
So was Rufus Murphy.
And Toussaint couldn't think of a damn thing to say or do, to comfort Mamie. He fell to his knees; blood dampened his trousers; tears dampened his face.
He didn't say a word.
But in his head Toussaint Johnson vowed to God or the devil or anyone who was interested that the men who did this would pay and the color of' their skin wouldn't mean shit.
Only the color of their blood.
ONE
CHAPTER 2
In the dimly lit, walnut-paneled lounge of the Hollenden Hotel, Eliot Ness was conducting a low-key, informal press conference with representatives of Cleveland's three major papers. It was Monday afternoon, just after three o'clock. Squeezed into one booth with Ness were burly Webb Seeley of the News, slim Clayton Fritchey of the Press, and lanky Sam Wild of the Plain-Dealer,
Ness was seated with his back to the wall, as was his habit, and wore a. 38 revolver in a shoulder holster, which was not; a strange mixture of the diplomat and the adventurer, Ness only wore a gun when he felt it unavoidable.
He was director of public safety, the city official in charge of both the police and fire departments. Deep into his third year as the city's 'top cop,' Ness was still, at thirty-five, the youngest man in the nation to hold such a post.
Despite his age, Ness was a veteran of what the papers melodramatically termed his 'personal war on crime.' At twenty-six he had headed up the Prohibition Bureau's Chicago unit, a handful of Ness-picked men who with their baby-faced leader came to be known as the 'Untouchables,' thanks to a deserved reputation for withstanding bribes, threats, and political pressure. In his successful campaign to land Al Capone in jail, and in later efforts against the bootleg gangs of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, Eliot Ness earned a reputation for putting bad guys in the pen, while providing reporters with juicy headlines along the way.
In the last three years, in Cleveland, he had made his share of headlines for the men at this table, certainly, headlines that reached across the nation, due to the unceasing series of major criminal investigations this young executive had launched, made all the more newsworthy because that young executive often got out from behind his desk and into the fray.
First had come a no-holds-barred house-cleaning of the Cleveland P.D. that resulted in convictions and prison for six high-ranking crooked cops, followed by a wave of resignations from other panicking cops-on-the-take. Next the safety director had undertaken the search for the so-called 'Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,' burning out the Hoovervilles where the mass murderer lived and preyed. Most recently Ness had taken on crooked labor racketeers, and the result was again convictions and prison for the perpetrators.
The young safety director was beginning to show signs of the strain of all this; his boyish, faintly freckled face was looking fleshy and the placid gray eyes were pouched and bore crow's feet. His dark brown hair was touched lightly with gray at the temples, though a disobedient comma of dark brown hair touched his forehead in one stubborn flourish of youth.
Ness, dapper in a gray worsted suit with a knit shades-of-gray striped tie and monogrammed breast-pocket handkerchief, sat quietly with his hands folded; he might have been praying had his lips not worn a slight, playful smile. While the reporters drank their second round (bourbon for Wild, Scotch for Fritchey, and a beer for Seeley), Ness was working on his first drink: a cup of black coffee.
'You've never been known to pass up a drink, Eliot,' Sam Wild said, with a good-natured edge. 'Even when you are buying…'
Wild was a pale, dark-blond scarecrow of man, his features angular, pointed, giving him a pleasantly satanic look; he wore a red bow tie and canary seersucker suit. Ness was accessible to all the press and counted many reporters, including those seated here, as friends; but Wild, assigned by the Plain-Dealer to cover Ness full time, was part of the safety director's inner circle, and sometimes unofficially took on investigative work for Ness that an official staff member dared not. And was as close a friend as this shy, private public official had.
Wild had, in the latter capacity, accompanied an inebriated Ness home from time to time; the irony of the world's most famous prohibition agent being a hard drinker was not lost on the reporter.
'Something's up, Eliot,' Wild said. 'Or you wouldn't be teetotaling it this afternoon.'
'Something is up,' Ness admitted, with an ornery child's smile. 'I guess you know that we've been zeroing in on the Mayfield Road bunch.'
'With labor out of the way,' Fritchey drawled, nodding, 'and the police department pretty well sanitized, it would seem about time you took those boys on, directly.'
Webb Seeley shrugged. 'You already chased Horvitz and Rothkopf and McGinty and their gambling interests out of the county.'
'Hell,' said Fritchey, 'out of state — they're operating in northern Kentucky, now.'
'Those boys,' Wild put in, with one arched eyebrow, 'are getting more and more into legitimate concerns. Even Chuck Polizzi is playing it cool. He's leaving it all to Lombard! and Scalise.'
