wouldn’t count on me to make the payoff, if the family of the kid wants to go the ransom.”
“And what do you want from the federal government, Al, if you manage to pull off this trick?”
He cut the air with his hands, like an umpire calling somebody safe. “It’s no trick. If I can’t do any good for you, then I come back here, and let justice go on with her racket.”
“You didn’t answer my question, Al. What do you want if you succeed?”
His hands clenched into softball-size fists. A vein in his forehead began to throb; his scar turned white on his fleshy cheek. His expression was like a very pissed-off bull studying a red cape.
“What the hell do you think, Ness? I want out! I want this goddamn sentence set aside! What in fucking hell do you
Capone had worked out a plea bargain that would allow him to pay off his tax debt and get a two-and-a- half-year sentence, which with good behavior he could have done in a walk. But Judge Wilkerson had not been party to the deal, and sentenced him to eleven years in federal prison.
“You guys want me to cough up three hundred thirty-six thousand dollars! I don’t know where you get these figures, ’less it’s the moon! You never proved I ever received
“Al, like the man says-tell it to the judge.”
“The judge! That son of a bitch won’t even let me out on bail! Other people convicted on income-tax raps get set free, till the highest court passes on their appeal. Not Capone! They leave me to rot in stir. They make
Ness stood with folded arms; his smile was gone. So, I gathered, was his patience.
Snorkey sensed that, too.
“I just don’t understand you guys,” he said, trying to sound reasonable, but damn near whining. “When I came to Chicago eleven years ago, I had only forty bucks in my pocket. I went in a business that didn’t do nobody no harm. They talk about the unemployed. Well, I give work to the unemployed. At least three hundred young men are getting from one hundred fifty dollars to two hundred dollars a week from me, in the harmless beer racket. Put me out of business, and all my men lose their jobs-they have families and little houses. What do you think they’ll do? Go on the streets and beg? No. These are men I’ve taken out of the holdup and bank-robbery business and worse and gave
“We’ll find cells for them, too, Al.”
His eyes blazed. “You’re so high and fuckin’ mighty! Sharing in a bootlegger’s profits by way of income tax, you’re aiding and abetting after the goddamn fact. It’s like the G was demanding its percentage of a bank burglar’s haul!”
“Old news, Snorkey. Very old news.”
The rage was bubbling in Capone, but he restrained himself.
“Look, look,” he said, patting the air in a peacemaking gesture, “never mind that. Never mind any of that. I just want to help, here. There isn’t a man in America that wouldn’t like to return that child to its folks, whatever it cost him personally.”
He pointed to a picture of his young son gilt-framed by his bed in the cell.
“I can imagine,” he said, gray-green eyes glistening in the sorrowful mask of his round face, “how Colonel Lindbergh feels. I weep for him and his lovely wife.”
“Do you really?”
Capone’s lip began to curl in a sneer, but he pulled back, and meekly said, “They’ll listen to you, Ness. You tell them.”
“Then tell me something you didn’t tell anybody else. You’ve run this vaudeville routine past Captain Stege, and Callahan of the Secret Service…but if you want to convince
Silence hung in the air like a noose.
Capone licked his fat lips and, mustering all the earnestness he could, said, “There’s a possibility a guy who did some work for me, once, did this awful thing. He is not in my employ now. Understood? But if he did it, and I can find him-and I
“Who is it, Al? Give me a name.”
“Why in hell should I tell you?”
“Because you care about that kid. Because you cry yourself to sleep at night, over this ‘awful thing.’”
Capone lifted his head, looked down at Ness suspiciously. “If I tell you, you’d take it as a show of… sincerity?”
“I might.”
The glittering eyes narrowed to slits. “Conroy,” he said.
“Bob Conroy?”
The big head nodded once.
Eliot thought about that. Then he said, almost to himself, “Conroy lammed it out of Chicago years ago.”
Conroy was said to be one of the shooters in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Word was he’d gone east, when the heat got turned up after that noisy little affair.
Capone clutched the bars. “I can find Conroy. Get me out of here. Let me help.”
Ness smiled blandly at Capone. “I wouldn’t let you out of that cell to save a hundred kids.”
The round face filled with blood.
“So long, Snorkey.”
“Only my friends call me that,” the gangster said ominously. “You son of a bitch…who the hell do you think you are…”
“I’m Eliot Ness,” Eliot Ness said pleasantly. “And you-you’re right where you belong.”
From behind us, as the deputy was unlocking the big steel door for us, Capone called out, “I’m going to the papers with this! Lindbergh’s going to hear about my offer!”
Going down in the elevator, Eliot said, “Lindy already has heard, obviously. That’s why Irey and Wilson are going up there. To advise him.”
“Do you take Capone seriously?”
“Well, this morning, President Hoover and his cabinet discussed his offer.”
“Jesus.”
“The Attorney General suggested exploring whether Capone’s proposal would have to be referred to the Circuit Court of Appeals.”
“For Pete’s sake, Eliot. Capone’s just trying any desperate measure to get out of stir…”
“Right. But how desperate
“What do you mean?”
“Desperate enough to engineer this kidnapping himself, so he can ‘solve’ it, and earn his freedom?”
The elevator clanked to a stop.
“What do you think, Eliot?”
“I think with Capone,” he said, “any evil thing is possible.”
3
The road to the Lindbergh estate was called Featherbed Lane; but the winding, rutted dirt path was hardly rest-inducing. In fact, it woke me out of a sound sleep I’d been enjoying since shortly after leaving Grand Central Station, at 10:00 A.M., where the Twentieth Century Limited had deposited me into the care of a stuffy, well-stuffed Britisher named Oliver Whately.
Tall, rawboned yet fleshy looking, dark hair thinning and slicked back, Whately was Colonel Lindbergh’s butler, not a chauffeur, and he seemed to resent the duty. I’d tried to make conversation, and got back a combination of
