Stolen Away

Dill Pickle. Barney used to own the place, and boxing and other sporting-world pics still decorated the dingy walls.

Davis must have smelled a story, because he bought me a total of four beers. And on the fourth, something in the back of my mind clicked-or maybe snapped-and I decided to let him in on my new client. The thought of the publicity, and what it might do for my business, suddenly sounded as good as the hardboiled egg I was eating.

“Governor Hoffman, huh,” Davis said, his eyes glittering. “You don’t really think that kraut Hauptmann is innocent, do you?”

“Watch your language,” I said. “I’m of German heritage myself.”

“You’re awful sensitive today, for a half-mick, half-hebe.”

“The kraut probably isn’t innocent,” I admitted, “but I’m gonna keep an open mind. Besides, anybody who thinks that clown pulled the kidnapping and the ransom scam, all by his lonesome, is playin’ with the squirrels.”

Davis drank that in and then his face crinkled with amusement. “You know what I heard?”

“No. Illuminate me.”

“You know how one of the big pieces of evidence against Hauptmann was they found that old coot’s phone number written on a wall inside his closet?”

Jafsie’s phone number had indeed been found in that manner at Hauptmann’s apartment.

“Yeah,” I said. “So?”

“So I hear a reporter on the New York Daily News, Tim O’Neil, wrote that.”

“What do you mean, wrote it?”

Davis grinned, shrugged. “After they took Hauptmann away, the cops confiscated his apartment, and gave the press free and easy access. It was a slow news day, so O’Neil writes old Jafsie’s number on the closet-trim and calls the inspector on duty over and says, look what I found. Bingo! Front page of the Daily News that night. Is that sweet or what?”

“Would you do that for a story?”

“Hey, if the guy’s fuckin’ guilty, what’s the difference?”

“Maybe nothing,” I said. “But it just shows how from day one everybody’s been awful goddamn anxious to slap that poor bastard in the chair. Yet nobody seems to give a damn about his accomplices.”

“That’s ’cause this story needs an ending, Heller,” Davis said, matter-of-factly. “America’s had its fill of this one. Even Lindy flew the coop.”

Charles and Anne Lindbergh had taken their young, press-besieged son Jon to Great Britain late last year, in self-imposed exile.

“The New Jersey cops and prosecutors,” Davis said, “would rather let Hauptmann go to the chair and take the names of his accomplices with him, than let him miss out on a punishment he so richly deserves. And a lot of people in this country agree.”

The little reporter, who’d had only two beers, took his leave with a nod of his fedora and a wink of one tiny eye, and I knew he was going to write me up for the late edition. I wasn’t drunk, after all. But I might’ve been a hair less than sober, and as I wandered back up the three flights of stairs to my office, I began to wonder if being tied to what the public might perceive as an effort to clear Hauptmann could really do anything at all positive for my less- than-flourishing one-man business.

I set up a couple of credit-check appointments in Evanston for Saturday afternoon, and called a couple of people I regularly do work for to tell them I’d be out of town for two or three weeks. Nobody seemed put out, and somewhere approaching midafternoon, I pulled the Murphy bed down and flopped out in my shirt and trousers for a nap. The four beers had taken their toll.

A sharp rapping at the door woke me; I came instantly awake, sitting up as if by spring action, surprised a little that the room was so dark, that the world beyond my window was lit only by neon. The day had slipped away. Evening or not, I had serious morning mouth, and as the rapping continued, I crawled off the bed, shouting, “Just a minute, will ya!” and eased the bed up inside its wardrobelike cabinet.

I went into the john, rinsed out my mouth, pissed like a son of a bitch, straightened my tie but didn’t bother with my coat. It was a little late for a client, after all. Whoever it was could take me as I was or leave me.

I cracked the door and saw a slender, white-haired, pockmarked individual who looked a little bit like a LaSalle Street broker and a little bit like the angel of death.

“Yes?” I said, timidly, as if I didn’t recognize him, but I did.

“Mr. Heller,” Paul Ricca said politely. He was a man of forty who looked older than time. “Could I step in.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah, certainly, Mr. Ricca.”

Everything he said had a slight accent: “Could-a I step-a in.” But faint. He was as soft-spoken as a funeral director.

Paul “the Waiter” Ricca had high cheekbones and dark black eyebrows over placid dark eyes; his mouth wasn’t much wider than his nose and his nose wasn’t all that wide, for an Italian. He wore an exquisitely tailored sky-blue double-breasted topcoat under which a dark-blue silk tie was neatly knotted; his navy homburg probably cost more than my couch.

“Frank would like to see you,” he said.

“Me?” I said.

The faintest hint of irritation was in his nod, and in his words: “Get your coat.”

I got-a my coat.

Paul the Waiter Ricca, a.k.a. Paul DeLucia, a.k.a. Paul Maglio, was Frank Nitti’s second-in-command. Nitti, of course, took over the Chicago Outfit when Capone was sent up; and Ricca, word had it, was Capone’s choice to keep an eye on Nitti. The story was that Ricca, when he was a teenager in Sicily, had killed a man in a family feud, and that he served two years and on the day he got out shot and killed the witness who ID’ed him. He’d fled to America and, after working as a theater usher and waiter in New York, wound up one of Snorkey’s top enforcers. Capone had even been best man at Ricca’s wedding.

“Mr. Ricca,” I said, my hat in my hand, “would I be out of line asking what this is about?”

“Yes,” he said. He gestured to the door. I opened it for him and he went out first. They called him the Waiter, but he waited on, or for, nobody.

I wished I had my gun, though if the Outfit had my number, there really was no way out of it. I followed Ricca down the stairs of my nearly seedy building; in his fancy clothes, he seemed very out of place. Actually, he seemed out of place in many respects. Why was he alone? Where were the two requisite goombahs with metal lumps under their armpits? Ricca was high up-second-in-command, according to some-so why in hell was he playing gopher for Nitti?

A black Lincoln limo was waiting. And no one was behind the wheel. Ricca really had come alone.

I stood awkwardly at the curb by the car; the neons and street lights of Van Buren reflected off its shiny roof. A wino approached us, asking for a handout; Ricca froze him with a look. Then the bum stumbled away looking for a more sympathetic mark.

Above us the el rumbled by. I raised my voice above it: “Where do you want me?”

His blank expression somehow conveyed contempt; he didn’t want me at all. But he said, “In the front. I’m not your goddamn chauffeur.”

But that is exactly what he was-which might mean somebody was insulting him by giving him such a lowly task. And if there was anywhere I did not want to be, it was in the middle of some Outfit political gesture.

I didn’t speak to Ricca as he drove me. My mind continued whirring, wondering why in hell we were alone; there wasn’t even a fucking driver! Ricca had, once upon a time, been a driver, however, and the ride was as smooth as it was surprising. I expected to be taken to the Capri Restaurant, or the Bismarck Hotel or maybe the Congress, all frequent sites for Nitti holding court. Instead we took Monroe over to the near West Side.

To Jefferson Park Hospital, where Nitti’s father-in-law, Dr. Gaetano Ronga, was chief of surgery.

Was Nitti sick? I’d been summoned here before, by two lesser Outfit lights than Ricca, in December of ’32, in the aftermath of an assassination attempt on Nitti at an office in the LaSalle-Wacker Building by two cops who’d been Mayor Cermak’s personal hitmen. Those cops had dragged me along when they went to hit Nitti, without telling me that that was on the agenda, and I’d double-crossed them eventually, by telling the truth on the witness stand. By backing Nitti’s story. Which was why Nitti felt he owed me one, and why news-guys like Davis and certain