The Million-Dollar Wound

“Oh?”

Miss Cavaretta was poised, ready to write something down; she’d written nothing as yet, not even a doodle. She wasn’t the doodler type.

“As you may know, at a park like ours, some of our clientele is less than savory.”

“Sure,” I said. “Ex-cons, thieves, bookmakers, whores…excuse my French, Miss Cavaretta.”

The faintest wisp of a smile.

“Particularly on the weekdays,” I went on, “when working stiffs can’t get away from the salt mines.”

“Precisely,” O’Hare said, sitting forward, striving to be earnest. “We’ve done our best to keep out the hoodlums and deadbeats and troublemakers. But there’s only so much we can do, in our business. That’s where you come in, Mr. Heller.”

“I do?”

“We’ve been having pickpocket trouble. A regular epidemic. We don’t mind our customers getting their pockets emptied, it’s just that we prefer to do it ourselves.”

“Naturally.”

“I understand that you have a certain expertise in that area. Pickpocket control, I mean.”

“That’s my police background, yes. And, since going private, I’ve done a lot of security work in that area, that’s correct.”

He smiled-patronizingly, I thought. “I understand you even handled the pickpocket problem at the World’s Fair.”

“The Chicago one, back in ’33,” I said. “They didn’t invite me out to New York for the new one.”

“They’re holding it over, I hear,” someone said.

Surprisingly, it was Miss Cavaretta-who was now in the midst of actually taking a few notes-putting in her two cents, in a lush, throaty voice that was like butter on a warm roll.

“Maybe they’ll invite you there next year,” she said.

O’Hare laughed at that, a little too loud I thought. Was he trying to get in her pants? Was that what this was about? And since when did a millionaire have to try so hard to get in his secretary’s panties? Then again, on the other hand, I kept in mind my own situation with Gladys. Of course, I wasn’t a millionaire.

“Maybe they will invite me,” I said, feeling like the unwanted chaperone on a date.

“What I would like,” O’Hare said, “is for you to instruct my own security staff in the art of spotting and catching pickpockets. I will want you to spend some time at the park yourself, when the next season opens, supervising. You’ll need to come out, as soon as possible, and take a look around the facility, of course.”

“Just a moment, please,” I said, and I picked up the phone and called next door.

In a few moments Lou Sapperstein, wearing his suitcoat, looking spiffy as a hundred bucks, entered, nodding, smiling, eyes lingering just a second on the enticing, enigmatic Miss Cavaretta. I made introductions all around, ending up with Lou: “He was my boss on the pickpocket detail. And he’s my top operative, now. I’ll put him on this for you, Mr. O’Hare.”

O’Hare’s face turned pale; weird as it might seem, his expression was tragic as he said, “But that simply won’t do. I must have you, Mr. Heller. I must have the top man.”

I laughed just a little, a nervous laugh. “You don’t understand, Mr. O’Hare. Lou’s my top man. He was my boss. He taught me everything I know about dips. You couldn’t be in better hands.”

O’Hare stood. “Perhaps when it comes to the supervision of my people, he would be satisfactory. But I’m afraid I must insist that you come out to the park and have a look around personally. I only deal with the top man, understand?”

“Mr. O’Hare, with all due respect, I am the top man in this agency, and I delegate work as I see fit…”

O’Hare reached in his inside coat pocket. He withdrew a checkbook. Leaned over the desk and began to write. “I’m leaving you a thousand-dollar retainer,” he said. “On the understanding that you will come out to the park tomorrow afternoon to inspect the plant, personally.”

He tore off the check and held it out before me, the ink glistening wetly on it.

I took it and blotted it and put it in my desk.

“You want Nate Heller,” I said, “you got Nate Heller.”

“Good man,” O’Hare beamed. He turned and all but bowed deferentially to his secretary. “Miss Cavaretta?”

She stood; smoothed her dress out over long, presumably lush thighs. Why is a woman in mannish clothing such a perversely attractive thing? Maybe Freud knew; personally, I didn’t give a damn. I just knew I would’ve liked to see the lacy things underneath Miss Cavaretta’s pinstripe suit.

She extended a hand with long, clear varnished nails, which I took; was I expected to kiss it? I didn’t.

She said, “It’s been very interesting meeting you, Mr. Heller.”

“Same here, Miss Cavaretta.”

He helped her with her coat, and got his own coat on; he left his hat on the rack. Lou was about to point that out to him, but I raised a finger to my lips and stopped it. I’d been watching O’Hare closely; he’d left that hat on purpose.

I stood and waited and then O’Hare ducked in again, calling back to Miss Cavaretta, “Forgot my blamed hat, my dear,” and went to the hat rack and got it and said to me, very quietly, his face sober and without a trace of the glad-hander’s smile, “Come alone.”

He closed the door and was gone.

Lou and I looked at the door, our brows furrowed.

Lou sat down and so did I. He said, “What the hell was that all about?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“That guy’s connected up the wazoo, you know.”

“I know.”

“He was Capone’s front man for the old Hawthorne dog track. He’s been an Outfit front man for years.”

“I know.”

“Why’d he bring his secretary along?”

“So she could take notes, he said.”

“Did I miss something? All I heard him do was ask if he could hire us-hire you-to do some security work at his lousy racetrack.”

“That’s right.”

“What did he need to bring a secretary along to take notes for, if that’s all he wanted? Hell, why didn’t he just call you on the phone, if all he wanted was to hire you for some pickpocket work?”

“I don’t know, Lou,” I said.

And I didn’t know.

Nor did I know why he felt he had to impart his final message to me out of his dark, lovely secretary’s earshot.

But I was detective enough to want to find out.

E. J. O’Hare was a lawyer, but he hadn’t practiced law since he moved from St. Louis to Chicago in the late ’20s, to begin overseeing various of Al Capone’s business interests, specifically horse-and dog-racing tracks. And not just in Illinois: O’Hare also looked after the Outfit’s tracks in Florida, Tennessee and Massachusetts. He was a stockholder in all of those parks, having gotten a foothold via owning the patent rights on the mechanical rabbit used in dog racing. From that he’d built a financial empire that included extensive real estate holdings, an insurance company and two advertising agencies. According to Barney, O’Hare was also a heavy investor in the Chicago Cardinals pro football team, though that wasn’t widely known.

He was unquestionably a wheeler-dealer, and a financial wizard; the mob’s “one-man brain trust,” the papers called him.

But today, as I entered his office at Sportsman’s Park in Stickney, he was just a nervous little heavyset man in a gray vested suit and blue-and-gray-speckled tie, sitting at his big mahogany desk atop an elaborate Oriental