killed two men, and it would hit me later, but right now I felt good.
“You…you shot Eddie,” the blonde said. She was shaking her head, disagreeing with reality.
“No kidding,” I said. Rocking the child as I eased back onto my feet.
“How could you risk it? He had his finger on the trigger…”
“A shot in the head kills all reflex action, lady.”
“Am I…under arrest?”
“You’re under arrest.”
“What…what charge?”
“Kidnapping.”
She sighed. Nodded.
“This
She cocked her head, like she hadn’t understood me. Her Master’s Voice.
“Well?” I said. “Isn’t it?”
“Mister,” she said, “that’s Hymie Goldberg’s kid.”
“Hymie Goldberg?”
“The bootlegger. In Peoria. He’s loaded. We were gonna get five grand for the little bastard.”
My boss burst in the open door, then. Lou Sapperstein, a sturdy, balding cop of about forty seasoned years. He took off his hat, eyes wide behind wire-framed glasses; snow dusted his topcoat like dandruff. He had a.38 in one hand.
“What the hell are you up to, Nate?”
“I just cracked the Hymie Goldberg kidnapping,” I said.
And I handed him the baby.
1
2
“There’s somebody I want you to meet,” Eliot Ness said.
I sat slumped in a hard wooden chair in Eliot’s spartan, orderly office in the Transportation Building on Dearborn.
“And who would that be?” I asked.
“Al Capone,” Ness said, with the smile of a mischievous kid.
Eliot was leaning back in his swivel chair, sitting with his back to his rolltop desk. He was a fairly big guy, about my height-six feet-with broad shoulders on an otherwise lithe frame; his upper torso had gotten powerful from a stint dipping radiators at the Pullman plant as a youth.
The biggest surprise about Eliot Ness-for those who’d read newspaper and magazine accounts of his exploits as a gang-busting prohibition agent-was his youth, his boyishness. Eliot was twenty-eight years old, with a ruddy, well-scrubbed appearance and a sprinkling of freckles across his Norwegian nose. That he was an ambitious young exec moving up the ladder of life was evident only in his impeccable three-piece steel-gray suit and black-and- white-and-gray speckled tie.
“Actually,” Ness said, reconsidering a bit, or pretending to, “I’d prefer you didn’t meet him. I just want you along to listen.”
“Listen to what?”
“Snorkey says he can get the Lindbergh kid back.”
I sighed, shook my head. “It’s just a scam, Eliot. Besides, none of it has anything to do with me.”
He put his hands behind his neck, elbows flaring out. “Nate-you’re the resident kidnapping expert around this town right now.”
I gave him a Bronx cheer. “Why, ’cause I stumbled onto getting some bootlegger’s kid back for him? We couldn’t even make the charges stick against that Rogers dame!”
He shrugged with his eyebrows. “How were you to know Hymie Goldberg would claim the woman was acting as his intermediary?”
“Yeah, right-his intermediary. That’s why her brother Eddie shot it out with a cop.”
Eliot shrugged again, shoulders this time. “Why do you think these snatch-racket gangs prey on their own kind, so often? Their victims are primarily borderline characters like themselves-bootleggers and gamblers and the like. Who know their fellow underworld denizens would never seek help from the cops at the outset, and won’t rat them out at the finish line.”
Eliot was the only guy I knew who might actually use the word “denizens” in a sentence, let alone one that also included the phrase “rat them out.”
“But these days,” he continued, “most major gamblers and bootleggers and panderers don’t go anywhere without bodyguards. So the snatch-racket boys are looking to greener pastures, monetarily speaking.”
“Like the Lindberghs.”
Eliot nodded. “We’re already seeing a pattern of industrialists and bankers and businessmen being hit. Remember the Parker case in California? That little girl was dead and dismembered before the ransom was even collected.” He sighed, shook his head. “With prohibition winding down, kidnapping could be the next big racket.”
“Well, it’s easy money. What are you gonna do?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Eliot answered it literally. “I’ve sent a petition to the federal government. Recommending capital punishment for the transportation of a kidnapped person from one state to another.”
“You’d like kidnapping to be a federal crime?”
He nodded sharply, smiled the same way. “No offense, Nate, but too many local cops are either incompetent or on the take.”
“I’d tip my hat to you,” I said, “if my hands weren’t so full of apples I took off pushcarts.”
“That’s not fair, Nate.”
“Hey, I’ve seen J. Edgar’s boys operate. Third-rate accountants and lawyers who graduated bottom of the class.”
“I’m not talking about Hoover-I’m talking about my own unit…and the IRS squad, of course. Speaking of which…Elmer Irey and Frank Wilson are going up from Washington, D.C., tomorrow, to Hopewell, New Jersey. To meet with Lindbergh.”
“Why? Kidnapping isn’t a Treasury matter by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Well…I don’t think Lindbergh has any more confidence in J. Edgar’s boys than you do. That’s why he called his pal Ogden Mills…”
“Who?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “The Secretary of the Treasury? Of the United States? Of America?”
“Oh. That Ogden Mills.”
“Lindy wanted Mills to send him the agents who ‘got Capone.’”
“Meaning you, Irey and Wilson.”
“Yes. But I’m tied up with the mop-up operation here, and besides, Irey and Wilson would rather work without me, I’m sure.”
Elmer Irey, Frank Wilson and Eliot Ness were indeed the feds who nailed Capone. Eliot’s Justice Department unit squeezed Capone’s financial nuts in the vise, and confiscated the records Irey, Wilson and their pencil-pushers turned into evidence. But there was friction between Justice man Ness and the IRS boys; both factions seemed to resent the credit taken by the other.
