'What do you usually do?'
'We don't have a morgue; we use a local mortuary.'
'Use it, then.'
'It's okay if I call 'em now?'
'I think that'd be wise. It's a cold enough day, but this boy isn't going to keep forever.'
'I got to walk to that farmhouse.' the sheriff said, pointing with a hand distorted by a heavy cotton glove. Then he put the hand down and waited for something, and what he got was silence. When Eliot failed to fill the silence, the sheriff grinned, shrugged, said, 'Don't have a police radio in my car yet. Like to have one.'
Eliot just looked at him, and the sheriff kind of nodded and walked off, his breath preceding him like smoke from a steam engine.
Eliot stood and looked at Newberry. I did the same, but from more of a distance. In life Newberry had been a jaunty sort; hail-fellow-well-met, though I'd never met him. But he had a reputation as such. A big, dark-haired roughly handsome gangster, about forty. Now he was a body sprawled in a ditch, with his pockets turned inside out.
The guy in the cap and brown jacket said to Eliot, 'I found him. 'Bout daybreak.'
Eliot nodded, waited for more information to come. It didn't.
'Was there anyone else around when you found him?' Eliot asked.
'No. I was by myself.'
Eliot pointed to Newberry. 'What about him. Was he by himself?'
'I should say.'
'Is there anything else you can tell me about this?'
'Looks to me like this boy was took for a ride.'
'Stand over by your car. would you?'
'Are the reporters coming soon?'
'Sooner or later.'
Reluctantly, the guy went over and stood by his flivver.
Eliot came over to me and shook his head. 'Publicity seekers.' he said.
I resisted any ironic comment.
'Come over and take a look at Ted'
'I've seen dead bodies before.'
'I know you have. Come on.'
We walked to the body and Eliot knelt over it again and pointed to Newberry's belt. The buckle was large and jewel-encrusted: diamonds and emeralds.
'Ever see one like that?' Eliot asked.
'Yeah. Jake Lingle had one on. the day he was shot.'
Eliot nodded. 'Capone gave more than one of his pals fancy belts like that.'
'And more than one of'em ended up like Ted, here.'
'Lingle included.' he said guardedly.
'Lingle included.' I said.
Jake Lingle was a subject Eliot had never broached with me directly, though I knew he wanted to. knew his curiosity was killing him and had killed him repeatedly since he'd known me. but out of a sense of courtesy toward me. he'd resisted the urge. My involvement with the Lingle case predated my friendship with Eliot, which had come about when I got into plainclothes, which had come about after my testifying at the Lingle trial. Which meant that Eliot and I would not have become friends if the Jake Lingle case hadn't elevated me to the status of a detective, a peer of the great Eliot Ness.
He said. 'You could look at this as an appointment with Capone that finally got kept.'
'How do you mean. Eliot?'
He stood, shrugged, still glancing down at the body. 'I'm just thinking of a certain morning when Ted and his boss Bugs Moran were delayed a few minutes on the way to meet with the rest of the boys, and when they finally got there, Ted spotted a squad car parked in front of the garage, and he and Bugs and Willie Marks ducked in a cafe to avoid what they figured was the cops running a petty shakedown. Know what morning I'm talking about, Nate?'
Eliot was giving me his best melodramatic deadpan, now.
'Yeah, yeah,' I said.
February 14, 1929. Saint Valentine's Day.
I bent over Newberry's body and had a close look; it wasn't hard to reconstruct what had happened. He got the bullethole through the hand, with accompanying powder burns, when, in an effort to keep from getting shot, he'd grabbed a gun pointed at him; that same bullet, or another one from the same gun, had shot off his left earlobe as he struggled. That point, probably, was when he got his skull bashed in, and only then came the final bullet, the one
