“Frank said you could go in as soon as his barber came out. So you can go on in, Heller.”
I swallowed. “You’re too good to me, Campagna.”
Campagna actually grinned for a moment—the first indication I’d had since knowing him that he had teeth—and opened the door and I went inside.
Glass shards from a small hand mirror crunched under my feet as I entered the plushly carpeted living room of the suite. Nitti was standing looking in a wall mirror, a white barber’s gown tucked in his collar; he was touching his hair, looking at himself with disapproval.
“Come in, Heller,” he said, not looking at me. “Find a seat.”
There was a high-backed chair near a sofa in this white-appointed, gold-trimmed, rather Victorian-looking suite. Black hair trimmings peppered the white carpet near the chair, so I sat on the sofa.
Nitti yanked the white gown from under his neck and pitched it behind him as he walked over to the chair and sat, placing his hands on his knees. He was in gray pants and a white shirt. His suitcoat and tie were on a coffee table nearby, but he didn’t put them on. He was shaking his head.
“They don’t make ’em like they used to,” he said.
“Uh, what’s that, Frank?”
“Barbers. That little cocksucker makes more money off me in fifteen minutes than I got in a week, when I was in the business, and look what he does to me!” He gestured to his immaculately cut black hair, slicked back, parted at the left, perfect.
“It looks pretty good to me, Frank.”
“Does it? Well, maybe I’m too fussy. That’s the fifth barber I tried this year. And they all got the same goddamn problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Their goddamn hands are shaking! Look—” He bent over and tipped his head to one side, folded his ear back; a little red showed. “I’m fuckin’ bleeding! They ain’t barbers, they’re butchers! In my day, a barber had hands like
“Maybe they’re intimidated, Frank.”
That seemed to confound him. “What the hell for?”
“Well,” I said. “They’re cutting Frank Nitti’s hair. There’s a certain amount of pressure in that, don’t you think?”
He thought about that, nodded. “I never thought of it. But you’re right, Heller. It could make a barber nervous, knowin’ he’s cuttin’ another barber’s hair. You may be right. Now.” He slapped his knees. “What’s this about?”
“I’m here for a favor—if you’re willing to grant one.”
He shrugged expansively. “You know I owe you, kid. From way back.”
“Well, I don’t figure you owe me. But if you’d do this for me, I could maybe owe you.”
“You don’t sound nuts about owing me, kid.”
I admitted I wasn’t. “I would like to ask that if you ever call my marker in,” I said, “you’ll restrict it to more or less legal services. Maybe sometime you could use some investigating and wouldn’t want to use your own people —something on the q.t. I could be your man. No fee, no questions asked.”
He nodded, smiling rather absently, almost to himself. “Maybe I ought to quit thinking of you as a kid, Heller. You seem to’ve grown up on me, when I wasn’t lookin’.”
I smiled at him. “You’re always looking, Frank.”
He laughed, the haircut forgotten. “You got that right. Look, I am grateful to you for that last little job you did for me.”
I didn’t know what he meant; I didn’t say so, but he could see it in my face.
“You know,” he said, gesturing with one open hand. “When I gave you that C to mind your own business.”
He meant Dillinger; I was wearing the suit I’d used part of the money on.
“That’s okay, Frank.”
“You coulda gone to the papers, coulda found some news-hound who’d paid you good dough for your story. I ain’t sure anybody woulda believed you, but it’s nice that story never got told. Coulda made a ripple or two in the lake. And ripples can turn into waves, if you ain’t careful.”
“Lake’s real calm these days, Frank.”
“I know. Let’s keep it that way. Now. What favor you need?”
“Remember a guy named Candy Walker?”
Nitti nodded, and I told him my story. Told him Walker’s current moll was a client’s daughter and that client wanted me to try to retrieve her before she got caught in a crossfire somewhere.
I said, “Walker’s running with the Barkers, I understand.”
Nitti confirmed that. “That little penny-ante outfit’s come a long way. They’re in real tight with some of our friends in St. Paul.”
By “our,” he meant the Outfit’s friends, not his and mine. And those friends were the Twin Cities branch of the Syndicate and various corrupt politicians on the municipal and even the state level.
