cops like Captain John Stege considered me to be in Nitti’s pocket.
My first meeting with Nitti-not counting the few minutes in the LaSalle-Wacker when Cermak’s two cops had shot Nitti full of holes-had been in this same hospital, in Nitti’s private room, where he was surprising Cermak, Cermak’s killer cops and probably God Himself by surviving multiple close-range bullet wounds to the neck and back. Nitti was a hard man to kill. Cermak had proved less hard, when Nitti’s one-man suicide squad, Giuseppe Zangara, hit His Honor out in Miami. But that’s another story.
We were on the third floor. It was after visiting hours and the corridor was dark; what little light there was reflected off the shining waxed hardwood floor. An occasional nurse or doctor drifted by, faceless in the dimness. Ricca was walking quickly, his steps echoing, and sick people in their white beds and dark rooms glimpsed at left and right made a sort of morbid, moving and occasionally moaning tapestry. I kept up with Ricca, but stayed behind him, following like a kid being led to the principal’s office by a strict and pissed-off teacher.
Then we went around a comer and moved away from hospital rooms into what seemed to be an administrative area. At a door marked Dr. Gaetano Ronga, Ricca knocked; his lips were pursed with quiet annoyance.
“Yes?” said a confident male voice from within.
“It’s Paul,” he said. “Your package is here.”
“Send him in,” the voice said.
And Ricca, for once, did wait on me: he opened the door. The look on his face was glazed and quietly contemptuous. I went on by him, into the room, and the door shut behind me. Ricca had not followed.
In a medium-size office, filled with dark wood filing cabinets, its walls hung with diplomas, family pictures and prints of flying fowl, behind a big desk on which various manila folders were neatly arranged, sat Frank Nitti.
“Nate Heller,” Nitti said, with a generous gesture of one hand and a smile, but not getting up, “sit down. Nice to see you again. Thanks for comin’ around.”
“My pleasure, Mr. Nitti,” I said, finding a hardwood chair and sitting across from him.
“You know better than that,” he said, mock-scoldingly. “It’s ‘Frank’ and it’s ‘Nate.’ Right?”
“Right,” I said. We were old friends, after all; ask anybody.
Nitti was a small, well-groomed man in his early fifties, damn near handsome, his face flecked with scar tissue here and there, his lower lip particularly. His hair was slicked back, dark with a little gray, and very neat; he was a former barber and fussy about his appearance. He seemed uncharacteristically casual in dress tonight, a white shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled up.
“I hope you’re well, Frank,” I said.
“Just in for a checkup. Ever since Cermak’s sons of bitches pumped that lead in me, I gotta come in all the time and get this and that checked.” He shrugged dismissively, but I’d heard about his bleeding ulcers and back problems. “I take these physicals at night. It’s more private that way. So. How’s business, Heller?”
“Not bad. Little divorce work. Some retail credit accounts.”
“I see in the paper you picked up a client out east.”
I figured that was it. Davis’s story about me working for Governor Hoffman on the Lindbergh case was undoubtedly all over the evening edition of the
“Yeah,” I said. “Hell of a thing. Governor of New Jersey, no less.”
“You worked the Lindbergh case as a cop, didn’t you? Back in ’32?”
“I was the Chicago police liaison, yes. I was just on the fringes. No big deal.”
“That was when Al said he could get Little Lindy back. Right?”
“Uh, right, Frank.” Where the hell was this going?
Nitti folded his hands; he looked strangely thoughtful. “I’d like you to do a job for me, while you’re out there.”
“A job?”
He shrugged. “Nothing hard. Just, if you turn anything up that would be of interest to me, I want you to let me know.”
“Of interest to you…?”
He looked at me pointedly. “Heller, don’t make me spell it out.”
I wasn’t “Nate” anymore, I noticed.
“Okay,” I said tentatively. “But I’m not quite following you.”
He lifted a hand and one finger of that hand. “If this thing comes back to Chicago…if it comes back to the Outfit…I want to be the first to know.”
I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “Frank, maybe I better call Governor Hoffman and just back out of this thing. I don’t want to be put in a position where I’m working at cross-purposes for two clients.”
Nitti stood and I damn near jumped. He walked past me to the door and opened it. Ricca was waiting out there, across the hail, a sentry in a tailored topcoat.
“Paul,” he said, gently. “See if you can find me a glass of milk.”
Ricca nodded and disappeared and Nitti shut the door.
He began to pace, saying, “You know, I was the first of the boys to take a tax-rap fall. They got me before they got Al, you know.”
I nodded.
“I hadn’t been outside so very long, when they put Al away. While I was gone, Al moved the Waiter up in my place-temporarily of course.”
I said nothing.
He stopped pacing, stood before me. He was not a big man; and he was slender. But his presence was towering. He said, “A1 and the Waiter always been tight. They got tighter when I was away. I feel they could be… reckless, at times. One thing you know about me, Heller, is I don’t like attracting the heat. If something has to be done, then you do it in such a way it don’t come back to your doorstep.”
What Nitti was talking about was his disagreement with Capone over such PR catastrophes as the shooting of reporter Jake Lingle and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Not that Nitti was nonviolent. But Nitti was a master manipulator, a cunning impresario of events. When he took Cermak out, it looked political; when he got rid of John Dillinger, it was the feds who took the rap. Just last month, “Machine-Gun” Jack McGurn-longtime Outfit guy who’d reportedly gone disloyal-was gunned down in a bowling alley, on St. Valentine’s Day. The hitters left a comic valentine on the corpse, leading the cops and press to assume that this was some long-overdue revenge upon McGurn by remnants of the old Bugs Moran gang for McGurn’s role in the famed Clark Street massacre seven years before. To me the slaying had Nitti’s chess-master fingerprints all over it.
“I think Al and the Waiter may have done this Lindbergh thing,” he said. Shrugged. ‘That is, had it done, through their East-Coast contacts. Ricca spent as much time out there as he did Chicago, in those days; he was Al’s contact with Luciano and Gordon and Schultz and the rest.”
I didn’t know if I liked hearing Nitti talk this openly. But I didn’t seem to have any other choice than to listen.
“If Al did this-had this done-to try and buy himself out of stir, I want to know.”
“Wouldn’t you have been…consulted?”
“Jesus, Heller! Are you kidding? You think I’d let them pull a crazy fucking stunt like that? It would’ve been from Capone’s lips to Ricca’s ear. I don’t know for sure that they did it, understand. It’s rumor. It’s just…what you say, supposition, on my part.”
“Capone always claimed a former employee of his, name of Bob Conroy, pulled the job.”
“Conroy was Al’s man. No former about it.”
“I don’t think the feds ever found Conroy.”
Nitti winced with amusement. “Oh sure, they did. Frank Wilson himself, workin’ with that New York dick Finn, turned Conroy up, in August of ’32.”
“Really? I never heard about it.”
Nitti shrugged. “Didn’t make the papers out here. Nobody picked up on the Chicago angle. Conroy was found in a rundown back-room apartment he’d been hiding out in on West Hundred and Fourth in New York. Him and his pretty blonde wife. Double suicide, they called it.”
“Jesus.”
“There was a beer war that broke out, right about the time the body of the Lindbergh kid turned up. A lot of
