The Million-Dollar Wound

Stege grimaced; then he spoke, with a formality filtered through sarcasm: “And what made you think the car following you presented a danger great enough for you to risk injury by jumping from a moving vehicle?”

I nodded over at the wreck that had been O’Hare’s car. “Gee, I don’t know, Captain. For the life of me.”

His cigar was out; he looked at it, as irritated with it as with me, and hurled it off into the park. Then a stubby finger was pointing at me again: “You jumped because you knew they were going to shoot O’Hare.”

“It was a reasonable assumption on my part.”

“That’s all it was? An assumption?”

“O’Hare was acting jumpy, nervous. He was cleaning a gun in his office this afternoon, when I went to see him. He had it on the seat next to him while we drove.”

“And why is that?”

“Haven’t you heard, Captain? Al Capone is getting out of jail in a few days. Not that he would ever think of having a respected community leader like E. J. O’Hare murdered…”

Stege reflected on that for a moment. More to himself than me, he said, glancing over at O’Hare’s smashed car, “There’s no one on earth Capone wouldn’t send to his death if he thought his interests would be served.”

I shrugged. “I’ve heard rumors O’Hare was an informant, and that Capone’s known about it for some time.”

He didn’t confirm or deny that; his putty face looked at me blankly, only the hard dark blue eyes behind the round dark rims of his glasses betraying his dislike for me as he said, pointing at me again, less forcefully now, “You fingered him.”

“What?”

“You fingered O’Hare. You set him up, I was right about you the first time; you are a bent cop.”

“I’m a private bent cop, I’ll have you know.”

“You’ve been known to have audiences with Nitti himself. Are you still for sale, after all these years? Are you Nitti’s man, now?”

“I kind of like to think of myself as my own man, Captain. Are you going to charge me with anything, or maybe just haul me into the basement of the nearest precinct house and feed me the goldfish for a few hours?”

Red came to the white face. “I wouldn’t waste a good rubber hose on you.”

“You could always use a lead pipe. Can I go?”

He was lighting up another cigar, the wind catching the flame of his match and making it dance. “You can go,” he said flatly. Puffing. Pointing the cigar at me, now. “But I’m going to investigate this killing myself, personally. And if you were Nitti’s finger man in this nasty little episode, you’ll spend Christmas in the Bridewell, and eternity at Joliet. That’s a promise.”

“That’s funny. It sounded like a threat. What did it say in that steno pad?”

“What?”

“The steno pad. It’s O’Hare’s secretary’s steno pad, right? Her name’s Cavaretta. I don’t know her first name.”

The hard blue eyes squinted at me from behind the owlish glasses. “It’s Antoinette. Toni.”

“I see. Did she take notes on O’Hare’s visit to my office yesterday?”

His lips were pressed together so tight, it was a shock when they parted enough to emit: “Yes.”

“And does it confirm my story about O’Hare wanting some pickpocket work done?”

“Yes. Very conveniently, too.”

He was right about that. Was the steno pad left there on purpose, to explain away my presence? To let the cops tie off the loose end called Heller?

“You met this Cavaretta woman?” he asked.

“A couple of times, yes. Briefly.”

“Any impressions?”

I shrugged. “Handsome woman. Pretty hard-looking, though. Calculating.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Just an impression. She’s in her mid-to late thirties but she isn’t married. Yet she’s not bad looking. Nice shape on her.”

“By which you mean to imply what?”

I shrugged again. “A dago gal from the West Side working for somebody like O’Hare, unmarried. She must be somebody’s sister or mistress or something. Both, maybe.”

Stege was nodding. “I’ll keep that in mind when I question her.”

“You see this as something Capone ordered from inside, Captain?”

He looked over at the wreck again. “Well, it’s more Capone’s style than Nitti’s.”

“True. Nitti doesn’t like to fill the headlines with blood.”

“Nitti would’ve arranged it much less spectacular,” Stege agreed. “Nitti has more finesse. His boys would’ve taken Mr. O’Hare at their leisure and dumped him in a spot from whence he would not emerge, till Gabriel blew his horn.”

The crowd was thinning. With O’Hare gone, there was nothing much to see but the wreck. Some reporters had arrived, but Phelan was holding them off.

I said, “This does seem a strange place for a hit to go down. A major thoroughfare like Ogden, with Cook County Jail a stone’s throw away, ditto for the Audy detention home for juvies. There’s always cops all over this area.”

“Imported killers,” Stege said, nodding again. “Local boys wouldn’t have done this this way.”

Stege was right, although I failed to point out that using out-of-town help was the way Nitti usually went, when he veered from his normal low-profile use of force. It helped keep the heat off the Outfit, if the killers were seen as out-of-towners, where their actions could be written off as having been the bidding of Eastern gangsters.

“It’s the Maloy hit all over again,” Stege said suddenly.

“By God, you’re right,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me.

Tommy Maloy, the movie projectionists’ union boss, had been driving one February afternoon in 1935 on Lake Shore Drive just opposite the abandoned buildings of the World’s Fair, when two men in a car drew up alongside his, poked a shotgun out the window and blasted the driver’s window, blowing a hole in it, then blasted again, blowing a hole in the driver.

“That was supposed to be imported talent, too,” I said.

Stege studied me for a moment, then, impulsively, he took something from his pocket and showed it to me, saying, “What do you make of this?”

It was a memo. It read: Mr. Woltz phoned and he wants to know if you know anything about Clyde Nimerick. He said you are to call Mr. Bennett. It was signed Toni. The secretary had graceful, feminine handwriting; but there was strength in it, too.

“Where did you find this?” I asked.

“In his topcoat pocket.”

Talk about convenient. “There’s your motive.”

“Yes,” Stege nodded. “Woltz and Bennett are FBI agents. And Clyde Nimerick is a small-timer from O’Hare’s shyster days in St. Louis. A bank robber.”

“So O’Hare was up to his informing tricks again, and the Outfit rubbed him out.”

“Or some St. Louis hoodlums connected to Nimerick did.”

It was a setup, of course. Another sweet setup with Nitti’s crafty name all over it. O’Hare hadn’t been informing again; but Nitti, for some reason, had wanted to make it look like he was. Five’ll get you ten Toni Cavaretta had planted that note in O’Hare’s topcoat pocket, in front of me, when she pretended to be looking for his keys. To bring O’Hare’s federal connection out in the open.

I didn’t mention any of this to Stege. It just wasn’t any of my business. At least it wasn’t any business that I wanted to be mine.

“You know what else he had on him?” Stege asked, smiling humorlessly. “A crucifix, a religious medallion and a rosary.”