“Somebody’s got to bring that fat bastard down,” Rocco said.
“Somebody will. She was a great girl. I can see how she’d be easy to fall for.” I didn’t say I knew as much because I’d fallen, too.
He was slumped so far over now, it was like he was doubled up with a cramp; he was rocking a little. “She died, all cold and scared…overdosed. It’s my fault…I got her hooked on that fuckin’ junk. I thought I could…handle her better, that way. She wanted a career, I wanted a wife.”
Only in Rocco’s world would you try to accomplish that by putting your fiancee on junk.
But the guy loved her, all right, in his twisted way. He was sitting there, slumped in half, and I reached over and took the gun from his fingers, and slipped my arm around his shoulder. He put his head against my chest and he wept. He wept for a long time.
Then he got up slowly and swallowed thickly, wiping his face with his hands, saying, “Nate…don’t tell anybody.”
“Don’t tell anybody what?”
“That I blubbered like a baby. I will kill your ass, you do.”
“I cried for her, too, Rock. I just got it out of my system, already…and anyway, you loved her longer…and more.”
He sighed, nodded, straightened his shirt. “Nobody can know about Charley, neither.”
“Obviously.”
“But with a little luck, that bastard’ll keel over dead, any day now.” He smiled to himself, savoring his brother’s imminent demise, as he headed for the door. “Any day….”
Around ten the next morning, Charley was sitting by the pool again, with his brother next to him, the thugs playing bookends. Charley was wearing a bathrobe and swim trunks; and Rocco was in a loud sportshirt and quiet slacks.
I had left Vera in our room, but she was watching out the glass doors. She saw me as I pulled up a deck chair and sat next to the broad-shouldered, oval-faced gangster, who was smoking his black-holdered cigarette.
“How you feeling, Charley?” I asked pleasantly. “You look a little peaked to me.”
The cigarette in the holder fell from his mouth, and hot ashes hit his chest; quickly he brushed them off, his eyes wide with surprise and alarm.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Heller?”
“Today, just relaxing. Thanks for asking, Charley. Yesterday I was taking pictures—your pictures. You don’t know it, but you made the papers all over America, this morning. Drew Pearson has quite a story.”
His eyes were huge and filled with rage under the same sort of black slashes of eyebrow Rocco wore. “You dumb son of a bitch! I was your friend—don’t you know what a bad enemy I can make?”
“No, but I bet Jackie Payne does…. Charley Fischetti, this is Agent Dennison…Agent Dennison, Charley Fischetti.”
And Agent Dennison, in a tan tropical suit that blended well with the uniforms of the
Charley began to swear at me, and shake his fist; then he froze, his eyes popped out a bit—reminding me of Pop-Eye at the Riverview freak show—and he clutched his chest, heaving heavy breaths.
Acting quickly, Rocco went to his brother’s aid, helping him with his little pink pills.
After a few days of legal wrangling, Charley and Rocco Fischetti were flown from Acapulco to the Miami Airport, where—barely having stepped off the plane—they were served with subpoenas to appear in Chicago in front of the Kefauver Committee. Custody was transferred from the Narcotics Bureau agents to federal marshals, with whom Charley got into an argument.
One of Charley’s residences, after all, was in Miami—actually, a mansion on Allison Island—and he demanded to be able to return there, to speak to his wife, and to call his attorney, and generally make arrangements. Even the United States government should have the simple courtesy to treat a taxpaying American citizen with a little goddamn fucking dignity.
The refined collector of modern art, that bon vivant whose nickname not so long ago had been Trigger Happy, blew his top when he was informed he and his brother would be transported directly to the county jail, in “protective custody.” He ranted and raved, and was hauled into a waiting van. The affront of subjecting a connoisseur of the finer things to ride in a paddy wagon was simply too much: Charley exploded.
So did his heart.
And Charley Fischetti got his way: he never had to set foot in that county jail, having died of a heart attack, en route.
Which meant he also avoided testifying in front of the Kefauver Committee, and avoided the wrath of the Outfit, for having disobeyed their collective ruling not to hit Bas and especially Drury.
Brother Rocco did testify—saying “I refuse to answer that” so many times he may have set the record in all of the Crime Committee hearings. (Joey was not called.)
An all-star rogues’ gallery testified in a hearing room at the Federal Building, and I—as a paid investigator on staff, now— heard a lot of it, one of a select handful of insiders allowed to sit in on the hearings, including Virgil Peterson and a few other civic leaders involved with the Chicago Crime Commission, as well that lawyer Kurnitz, who’d been working with the senator’s staffers.
“Why aren’t you up on the dais,” I asked Kurnitz, in the hallway between witnesses, “with Kefauver and his other lawyers?”
The handsome if bug-eyed Kurnitz replied in his courtroom baritone, “Well, of course you understand I’m not
