other.
'Oh, they killed my cousin a few years ago,' he said, casually. 'One of the independent policy operators they rubbed out.'
'What was his name?' Ness asked.
'Willie Wiggens,' Katzi said, emotionlessly.
Ness looked at Katzi long and hard.
Then he said, 'Thank you, Katzi,' and shook the man's hand again. Any irritation had vanished; bare gratitude had taken its place. He dug into his topcoat pocket. 'Here's a little more for you.'
He handed Katzi a fin and the smoothly affable Negro took it gladly.
'If there's anything else I can do for you,' Ness said, 'let me know. Information like this is greatly appreciated.'
'Well, you can put a word in for me with the parole board,' Katzi said, as they all stood, and moved out into the aisle. 'I'd like to get my citizenship restored and put the past behind me.'
'That's an admirable goal,' Ness said. 'I'll see what I can do.'
'Appreciate it. But I got no delusions about the past going away altogether.'
'I know what you mean,' Ness said, with a glum smile. The past had, after all, caught up with him today.
Wild nodded and smiled to Katzi, who said, 'See you in the funny papers, Samuel,' and sauntered down the aisle and took a closer seat, watching the rehearsal, where deep voices boomed.
Out in the gently blowing snow, the wind nipping at them, Wild said to Ness, 'How's that for a source?'
'Goddamn good,' Ness admitted. 'But it frustrates me that I had to come here to get it.'
'Hey, come on. Using stoolies is what police work is all about.'
'Maybe. But I hate like hell to have to get from a stoolie information that my own men are keeping from me.'
On the way back, Ness looked over, from behind the wheel of his sedan, and said, 'Is that fellow a good writer?'
'Better than I am,' Wild said with a smirk.
'I ought to read something of his. What's his real name?'
'Himes,' Wild said. 'Chester Himes.'
'I'll try to remember that,' Ness said.
'Remember him to the parole board,' Wild said, 'if you're really interested.'
Ness nodded.
But Wild could see that the safety director was already lost in other thoughts. Thoughts of Lombardi and Scalise, and a police department that even after all of Ness's efforts and successes in cleaning it up remained a fortress of self-interest.
THREE
CHAPTER 14
Ness was behind the wheel of a black unmarked Ford sedan-but not the one with the familiar-around-town EN-1 license plate: No calling card was required or desired on this excursion.
It was shortly after midnight on a pleasantly cool Tuesday in April; the moon was a shining silver-white plate that reflected on the hood of the sedan as Ness eased into a parking space just down the street from his destination. Jammed in the car with him were two plainclothes men and two uniformed. He checked his watch.
Two minutes.
The apartment building was just north of Case Western Reserve, overlooking the vast garden that was Rockefeller Park, on Ansel Avenue. A five-story graystone with terra cotta trim, the building had a uniformed doorman and, one would think, well-to-do or anyway well-off tenants.
One of those tenants was Willie 'the Emperor' Rushing, one-time policy king, current front man for the Mayfield Road gang. Undoubtedly one of the few Negro residents of this obviously predominantly white neighborhood.
Ness was leading one of five squads that were about to simultaneously attack key numbers-racket figures. Two months ago he had delivered to Prosecutor Cullitan a document as thick as a popular novel; that document detailed the evidence and gathered the statements of seventy witnesses against twenty-three members of the Mayfield Road mob-including Salvatore Lombardi and Angelo Scalise.
After interviewing the witnesses himself, Cullitan had gone forward. For the last two weeks, those seventy witnesses paraded secretly through the Grand Jury room, with no press coverage and no apparent leaks to the mob; and tomorrow the indictments were to come down, naming all twenty-three defendants.
It was going so well it made Ness uneasy.
'We're taking no chances,' Ness had told the startled group of detectives who without advance warning had been summoned (from home, in many instances) to the safety director's office at City Hall, for an eleven P.M. meeting. 'We're not giving these bastards any opportunity to take a powder.'
Pointing at a wall map of Greater Cleveland, with appropriate pins stuck in twenty-three positions, he explained that there would be five unmarked cars with twenty-five men divided between them. Around the table sat Moeller, Curry, Chamberlin, Garner, and Toussaint Johnson.
'It'll be a mass round-up,' Ness said, with a tight smile. 'We'll hit the first five targets at the precise same moment-synchronizing by police radio. Five minutes after each raid goes down, a paddy wagon will roll up in front and you'll load 'er up with bad guys.'
'Sounds simple,' Garner said, wetting the end of a fresh fat cheap cigar. 'Any special charge? Never heard of arresting crooks the day before indictments were voted.'
'Jail them as suspicious characters and hold them for investigation,' Ness said. 'That's good enough for Prosecutor Cullitan, and it's good enough for me.'
One team would hit the Central-Scovill district; that would be led by Moeller with Curry and Johnson lending support. Two teams, led by Chamberlin and Garner respectively, would head for Cleveland Heights, where (among others) Lombardi himself lived. Detectives Powers and Allen, who had already been dispatched, would hit the far northeast side of Cleveland. Ness himself would hit three targets, two of them clustered together at East 90th and East 93rd, and another just north of that on Ansel.
It frustrated Ness that he couldn't be in on the collar of Lombardi and Scalise, personally; but realistically, as the leader of this mass offensive, Ness could not head up one of the outlying teams. He needed to be able to round up his quota of suspects quickly, and get to Central Station to supervise the booking and questioning of everybody else's prisoners, as well as his own, as they were hauled in.
But when Chamberlin paused while lighting up his pipe to ask the safety director why he wasn't claiming the Lombardi/Scalise collar for himself, Ness offered a different excuse.
'I'm an old Chicago boy,' Ness said, smiling a little. 'To me Cleveland Heights is all hills and winding roads. Even with a driver, I'd feel lost. You'll do a better job. Bob.'
Albert Curry seemed stuck somewhere between confused and annoyed as he said, 'Why are you putting Moeller and Johnson and me on the same team?'
'Two reasons,' Ness said. 'You're hitting the heart of the ghetto-it's going to be unpredictable and precarious down there. Obviously, Detective Johnson will be a great asset in that neighborhood, and Sergeant Moeller is an old hand at raids of this sort.'
'This won't be my first raid, either,' Curry said, obviously a bit offended that he wasn't heading up one of the
