“Who in hell are you ordering around?”
“You. Get in the goddamn car.” He trundled off, muttering. I turned to Deputy Dixon, who was taking this in with wide, confused eyes. “I was never here.”
“Pardon?”
“You didn’t see me today, Willis. Understood?”
“Sure, Nate.” He didn’t really understand, but he knew I meant it.
In the Packard, without turning the engine over, I whirled to Parker. “You blew this one, Ellis. You blew this one big.”
“Did I? I’ll have a confession out of Paul H. Wendel that’ll hold water, before you can say Jack Robinson.”
“You don’t have shit. You ever hear of something called the Lindbergh law? You have put your foot in a great big federal cowpie, Ellis. You’ve kidnapped that son of a bitch; you took him across a state line, you hick bastard.”
“I did nothing of the kind.”
“Your cronies did. Your ‘deputies.’ The pity of it is, I think that psycho back there maybe did have some role in the crime. But you’ll never prove it now.”
“I’ll prove it.”
“Ellis, I’m not reporting to Governor Hoffman on this.”
“You’re not?”
“No. You tell him what you want, when you want. I dropped by the office, but I didn’t see Wendel. You didn’t even tell me you had him ‘under wraps.’”
“What in hell are you up to?”
“I’m up to having no part of this. If Hoffman wants to play your crazy game, that’s up to him. I have no interest in being your accomplice or co-conspirator or any such thing. You mention my name, and I’ll make a career out of testifying against you. Goddamn you! I’ve had your ‘Jersey justice’ up to here. You and Schwarzkopf and Wilentz and all the rest…torture and abduction and fabrication…”
He scowled; it was as nasty a look as I ever got, and I’ve gotten my share. “Then go back to Chicago, why don’t you? You goddamn pantywaist.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “At least there, we stop at rubber hoses. Get out.”
We were at the courthouse in Mount Holly, where the rampant Americana now made me a little sick.
He climbed out and then bent down and peeked in and said, “You’ll be singing a different tune, ’fore long. You’ll be telling your grandchildren you knew Ellis Parker.”
“Maybe I will,” I said. “And you probably were a hell of a detective, before it went to your head. But unless you’re even cagier than I think you are, old man, you’ll likely die in jail.”
He was pondering that as I pulled away.
37
For an estate like Friendship, the study was almost cozy; lots of books, a fireplace, prints and paintings of race horses. A dark, masculine room that hadn’t been used much, or at all, since Evalyn’s husband moved out. I sat at a mahogany desk about the size of the Packard and used the phone. It was a long-distance call, but I figured Evalyn could afford it.
I couldn’t get Frank Nitti right away, of course. The number I had on a small slip of paper in my billfold was that of Louis Campagna, the cold-eyed, putty-faced Capone enforcer who since his mentor’s incarceration had become Nitti’s right-hand man. Actually, I had to go through somebody who answered that number, gave me another number, which got me to Campagna, who had me give him the number I was at, and finally Nitti called me, five minutes later.
“So what do you have, Nate?”
“Not a lot,” I said. I felt uneasy. I always felt uneasy talking to Nitti. “I just thought I should touch base.”
“I know you, Nate. You wouldn’t call unless you thought you had something.”
“Well, Frank,” I said, feeling awkward calling him that, “I been nosing around, talking to people, and it’s pretty clear this Hauptmann character is a patsy. For one thing, the lawyer the Hearst people provided him was a guy named Reilly, who…”
“Yeah, yeah, the Bull of Brooklyn, Frankie Yale’s old mouthpiece. ‘Death House’ Reilly. That I know.”
“Well, it smells, wouldn’t you say? And none other than Capone’s old lawyer Sam Leibowitz also offered his services to Hauptmann; telling the world his client was guilty seemed to be his idea of fair representation…”
“Sure, sure. All this I know. Nate, tell me something I
Getting off to a swell start: Nitti aggravated with me already.
“Well,” I went on, “the late Isidor Fisch was clearly some kind of small-time hustler-smuggling furs, probably smuggling dope, too, for Luciano, working out of East Harlem, which is Luciano’s turf, after all. Also a petty con man and maybe a hot-money fence. Hauptmann was his pal, maybe even his accomplice in fur and dope smuggling-
“So Fisch was just a fence who bought some marked bills?”
“No, that’s not my reading of it at all. I think Fisch plays a bigger role in this than that. Fisch seems involved in the extortion itself and maybe the kidnapping. He and two of the Lindbergh servants, including the dame who supposedly killed herself, belonged to a spiritualist church right across the street from Fisch’s apartment house.”
There was a pause.
Then Nitti said: “I can’t see Al getting Luciano or Madden or Costello or any of the East-Coast guys involved in this. They’re too smart. Dutch Schultz, maybe. If this little Fisch is the only connection to the people we do business with…”
“No. There’s also a guy named Wendel.”
“Wendel?”
“He’s a disbarred lawyer. A half-nuts con man who tried to scam Capone a few years back.”
Nitti knowing the name made my skin crawl.
“That’s him. There’s a story I haven’t confirmed yet that Wendel approached Capone with the kidnap plan. At the moment, some hick cops have got Wendel under lock-and-key and armed guard, out in the boonies, squeezing worthless confessions out of him like popping pimples.”
There was urgency in his voice; whether this news made him happy, angry, worried or what, I could not read. “Is this going to come back to Al? Or the Waiter?”
“Ricca’s name has not come up,” I said. “Wendel, and the inimitable Gaston Means, who I also talked to, are bad witnesses. They are both such fucking liars and con men that if they do tell the truth, no one will be able to tell. Both of ’em are being held in the nuthouse, by the way. Well, two different nuthouses.”
“Their testimony would be worthless?”
“Unless somebody checked out their stories, and came up with better witnesses. And time is goddamn short for that; Hauptmann sits down in a couple weeks, you know. How well do you know Gaston Means?”
“Know of him, is all.”
“It occurs to me that enlisting the likes of Wendel and Means, unreliable as they are, would be a stroke of genius on somebody’s part-whether Capone or Ricca.”
“How the hell do you figure that?”
“Well, even lunatics like Wendel and Means know enough not to cross Capone, or Ricca. Means likes his skin too much, and Wendel had an instructive close call with Capone back around ’30. Yet in their way, these guys are savvy crooks, with connections in the underworld and elsewhere. They also both got more balls than sense. So they could get the job done. But suppose the kidnapping goes awry? Capone and Ricca had to know this thing was risky at best, that it might just blow up in everybody’s face.”
