'Most likely.'
She sat and blankly stared.
'What exactly happened here, Mrs. Washington?'
She didn't say anything for a while, but Ness didn't repeat his question. He waited patiently for her to respond. Finally, she did.
'Four men-white men, dago men. Big awful men. One of them must have knocked out Milton.'
She meant the bodyguard.
'They come in demanding to talk to Johnny C.,' she continued. 'I told them Johnny was out of town on business, like we been saying. They looked all over the house, busting stuff up.' She began to cry again. He patted her shoulder. 'They said… they said… 'we'll be back.' '
Ness looked up at Garner. Garner lifted his eyebrows.
'They probably will,' Ness said. 'I'm going to move you in with your husband.'
'Oh, I'd like that. I'd like that very much.'
'We're going to put an end to this,' he said.
She was shaking her head again. 'I don't know what Johnny C. is going to do when he hears about this.'
'I hope,' Ness said, 'that he says he'll go along with what I have in mind…'
CHAPTER 17
Little Angelo Scalise, not a perfect specimen of mental health even under the best of conditions, was about to go fucking nuts.
He had been living in the small cement hide-out room behind the lanes at Pla-Mor bowling alley for more than two days now. When Black Sal got tipped that indictments were about to hit the fan, Scalise had holed up in the cement-block room that Lombardi and his associates had used since Prohibition days as a cool-off flat. The room was tiny-a cubicle really-with only one window, and that consisted of glass bricks you couldn't see out of, and a cot and a small dresser and a tiny ice-box and a hot plate and a little Bakelite radio. It wasn't a hell of a lot better than a prison cell.
And in a prison cell, you wouldn't have to listen to the constant racket of clattering bowling pins.
The noise was muffled, but not that muffled, and Ange flinched involuntarily with every strike. For a guy who loved to bowl, it was a strange sort of hell. On the few times when he stuck his head out, just to fight the fucking closed-in feeling, he'd see those goddamn pin boys in the narrow walk-way area behind the lanes. They'd be laughing and talking, and he couldn't make out what they were saying because of the sound of pins getting knocked over. But he knew those little fuckers were laughing at him. He'd clipped 'em with pins often enough. He would go back in and flop on his cot and shut the door and muffle the sound of clattering pins and contemplate how much fun it would be to bash in those little fuckers' brains with a bowling pin.
His cousin Sal had gone south-he'd be in Acapulco by now, spread out on the beach like a big dead fucking fish. They had money in a resort hotel down there, so Sal would be living like a king. But not like a man.
For all Sal's talk of how important respect was, the fat slob was nothing but a coward, turning his back on a fucking five-mil-a-year business, just because Eliot fucking Ness lined up some niggers to squeal. Angelo wasn't about to turn his back on such a business, to walk away from his money and his manhood.
'We're rich men,' Lombardi had told him, before catching the chartered plane. 'We've worked long and hard. Our fathers worked long and hard. We can afford to take a rest, a vacation for a while. Few years pass, this'll all blow over.'
'I ain't gonna waste the best years of my life loafin' on some Mexican beach, with some Mexican bitch sucking my dick! What kind of life is that for a man?'
Sal had contemplated that, and said, 'Not a bad one at all,' and got on the plane.
Goddamn him!
Well, fine. Who the fuck needed him. Angelo would have the whole goddamn business to himself. Sal and Polizzi and the others were acting like this was the end of the damn world, or at least the damn numbers racket. Hell, as long as there were niggers, there'd be numbers! And as long as there was numbers, there'd be big bucks to be made, and as long as there was big bucks to be made, the Mayfield Road gang-with Little Angelo Scalise as top man, from now on-would own the east side.
All it would take, he knew, was bumping off one of the big witnesses. Bump 'em off big and bloody. It couldn't just be anybody: It had to be somebody with a name in Central-Scovill. Then those niggers would turn their black tails and run.
Scalise's laughter echoed in the little cement room. Pins clattered out on the lanes. He flinched.
Before he'd gone into hiding, he called on some freelance torpedoes from Detroit, who were part of the old Purple Gang. Two brothers, Harry and Sam Keenan, who it was said worked look-out in the St. Valentine's Day massacre back in Chicago in '29, and a fellow named Greene and another named Berns. They were all Jews, but Scalise didn't give a fuck. He wasn't prejudiced.
The Keenan brothers had done jobs for Scalise before-including an important early hit in the Mayfield Road numbers takeover. It was the Keenans who blew Rufus Murphy all to shit in his driveway back in '33. They did good work. Not cheap-they were Jews after all-but value for the dollar. And tough bastards-they wouldn't talk if you fed their nuts to 'em one at a time.
Angelo had turned the Keenans and Greene and Berns loose on the east side last night. Waving fat wads of cash under nigger noses, looking for Ness witnesses. But they hadn't got anywhere, and-at Angelo's suggestion- went on to the home of Johnny C., a policy king who 'retired' when Ange turned up the heat a few years back. Ange figured Johnny C.-who word on the street said was 'out of town, on business'-was a sure bet to be one of Ness's sequestered witnesses.
So the Keenans and company shook the house down and Mrs. Washington up. Then-also at Angelo's suggestion- one of them, Greene, hung around the neighborhood, staking out the house. Sure enough, first the cops showed, then Ness himself, and pretty soon Johnny C. shows, too, chauffeured by that hard-ass coon cop Toussaint Johnson. The place was crawling with uniformed cops and plainclothes dicks, so there was no way Greene could make a play for Washington.
But when Washington came out of the house-looking like nigger royalty in his fancy English suit with black- and-white shoes and homburg hat-with a white uniformed cop as his driver, Greene tailed them and saw the cop escort Johnny C. to the Outhwaite public housing project, barely two blocks away.
Imagine that fucking Ness, hiding his witnesses out right there on the east side, close to home but out of sight, minutes from downtown and the courthouse. Scalise had to give the guy his balls, and his brains. Outhwaite was perfect, in a crazy way. The housing project was finished but for a central, X-shaped building that was supposed to be ready for residents in a couple months. Chances were Ness had all his key witnesses in that one, new, nearly finished building.
But all Scalise needed was Washington. Johnny C. was a name on the east side; he was still a powerful businessman, respected and even feared. If Johnny C. couldn't make it to the witness stand without dying, nobody else would risk it either; all that Ness talk in the papers about 'safety in numbers' and 'protection from reprisals' would look like the bullshit it was.
And the numbers racket would be up and running again, in the hands of the Mayfield Road gang, under the leadership of one Little Angelo Scalise. Only maybe from now on it would be 'Big' Angelo.
Today Scalise had sent the Purple Gang boys to hole up in a hotel in Warrensville Heights, while he sent for Freddy Douglass, the Frank Hogey policy controller into whom Ange had put a scare some months ago in the alley by the Elite Cabaret.
Freddy, who liked his fancy clothes and fancy women, was hurting, thanks to Ness and his policy-racket squeeze. Scalise gave him a grand in twenties to play with at the Outhwaite housing project.
'Find out which building Washington's in,' Ange told him, 'and you earn a C-note. Find out the apartment number, and you earn a grand. And either way, you can keep the change.'
'You got it, Mr. Scalise,' Freddy said, putting the money in the jacket of his snappy gray suit. The small cement cubicle in the back of the bowling alley seemed like a closet with two men in it, and the smell of Freddy's
