“Some people think Capone is still running things from behind bars.”
“He’s in Alcatraz now. You don’t run shit from Alcatraz.”
“Anyway, it can be done. Going undercover.”
“Yeah, but it’d be good and goddamn dangerous. I’d have to hand it to you, kid, if you pulled that off.”
“Would you be willing to help me do it?”
Not smiling, he tipped his head back, narrowed his eyes. “How?”
“Give me a name I can use, and a background. Somebody who’s out of circulation, in jail or whatever, who I can say I am, without risk of Candy Walker or anybody he runs with ever having met the guy. Somebody they might’ve heard of. Somebody they could call around and check up on. So I could get in and get this girl and get out again. In one piece.”
About halfway through that, he started nodding. He was still nodding as he said, “Possible. Let me make a phone call.”
He got up and went out of the room. I could hear his muffled voice, but not make out any of the words. Then he came back in, smiled meaninglessly and sat back down.
“It’s fixed. I got a name for you to use.”
“Good. Somebody in jail?”
“Better. Somebody dead.”
“Oh…”
“This guy worked out East till about a year ago, when he come to work for us.”
“Candy Walker never met him?”
Nitti shook his head. “No, but he’s heard of him. That’s the beauty part. There’s a chance he was pointed out to Walker once or twice, but they never met.”
“Well, if Walker saw him…”
“The guy had plastic surgery. That’s your explanation, if it comes up—it also happens to be true.”
“Oh—okay. How can I prove I’m this guy?”
“I’ll fill you in some more—I’m going to have a driver’s license in his name dropped off at your office tomorrow morning. We can make it work. A cinch.”
“Well, uh. Thanks. I appreciate this, Frank.”
“Actually, you’re doing me a favor.”
“How’s that?”
“This guy you’ll be playin’—he’s dead, but nobody knows it. Or, not many people know it. And it makes things sweeter if he’s seen walking around. It confuses the issue, see? Makes him not dead.”
I didn’t follow this exactly, but I nodded.
“Now,” Nitti said, writing on a white pad on the coffee table before him, “here’s an address. It’s an apartment house. You’ll go see this old hillbilly woman who lives on the ground floor. Her name’s Kate Barker.”
“Kate Barker. Is she related to the Barker boys?”
Nitti nodded curtly. “She’s their ma.”
No mention of an old woman being connected to the Barker-Karpis gang had been in any of the newspaper write-ups.
I said, “Is she aware of her boys’ business?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Does she approve of it?”
“They can do no wrong in her eyes. She goes on the road with ’em sometimes, I’m told. But sometimes she tires of that kind of life and goes and lives in an apartment in the ‘big city.’ She’ll know where they are. Just tell her you want to connect up with her boys and Walker; she won’t care why, she’ll just do it. If she has any doubts about who you are, you have her check with one of my people, whose name I’m gonna give you.”
He tore the sheet with the address on it off the pad; handed it to me.
I glanced at the address.
3967 Pine Grove.
“Jesus—Frank, this is the apartment building where Jimmy Lawrence lived…”
“I know,” Nitti nodded. “I own it. Or one of my companies owns it.”
I was finding out more about Frank Nitti and his business than I wanted to; I could see me, dead in an alley.
“She’s living in Lawrence’s apartment, by the way,” Nitti said.
“Jesus,” I said, just staring at the white piece of paper, the address starting to blur.
“That’s only because the previous tenant vacated,” Nitti said, smiling like a priest. “She never met Lawrence.”
