Max Collins - Target Lancer

“Yeah. Shit, they ain’t even that big. I mean, if it was Martin of Martin and Lewis, that’d be another thing.”

“Yeah, it’d all be in the family. Also, it would mean Martin and Lewis were back together.”

“It’s not funny, Heller. She’s the love of his life, this broad.”

I sighed. “Look, maybe there’s something I can do.”

Rosselli’s eyes sparked with hope. “That would be fucking fantastic, Nate. What?”

I didn’t answer him, just took my share of the drink refills and led him back.

“Sam,” I said, handing the mobster a carved pineapple full of liquor and doodads, “I heard about your problem.”

His nostrils flared. “I don’t have any problem!.. Rosselli, you got a big fuckin’ mouth, you know that?”

A muscular kid about twenty, with a swarthy cast to his features, was striding over in a small, bulging bathing suit. He was tan, or maybe just Italian.

“Excuse me, mister,” he said, looming over Giancana, throwing shadow on him. Despite the words, this was not delivered in a respectful manner.

“Yeah?” Nor was this.

“I don’t appreciate the comments or the language. This is a respectable place, and if you don’t cut out the filthy talk and the rude remarks about nice girls, you and I are going to have a problem. Do we understand each other?”

You have to give Giancana credit. He waited till the kid was finished with his speech before flying off the deck chair and grabbing him by the neck with both hands and strangling him to his knees.

“I eat little boys like you for breakfast. Get your fuckin’ ass out of here before I get hungry! Do we understand each other?”

The guy managed to nod, despite Giancana’s death grip. Out of nowhere, guys in tan suits and sunglasses had appeared, but they were not interceding for this unfortunate guest. They were serving to keep anybody back. To keep Mr. Giancana from being disturbed.

Giancana let the kid get up. The boy clutched his throat and ran off.

“No running around the pool!” Giancana cackled at him. “No running , you little prick!”

When he sat down, I said, “Sam, how about I have one of my guys bug a couple of rooms in Vegas, and see what’s really going on? Just for your peace of mind.”

“Could you do that for me, Nate? Would you do that?”

“Sure, Sam.”

Giancana smiled, sighed in a good way, put the latest pineapple drink aside, and suggested we head on up to the suite, where we finally assembled for a conversation.

Santo Trafficante was a no-nonsense man in his late forties, with almost as dark a tan as Giancana, who he was bigger than at five ten and maybe 180 pounds. The Tampa boss looked like an accountant in his black-rimmed glasses, with his bland features and high forehead and thinning black hair. He was conservatively attired-white short-sleeve shirt, black tie, black slacks. He might have been a waiter.

Giancana did his fellow don the respect of exchanging the swim trunks for a yellow Ban-Lon sport shirt and tan trousers. Rosselli also changed into a sport shirt and slacks, as had I, stopping at my room to do so. We sat at a round poker-style table in the living room area, with windows on the Atlantic.

Soon everybody but me was smoking, cigarettes not cigars. A shoulder-holster bodyguard was serving drinks and snacks. Right now we were all having soft drinks. Since Giancana had to be half in the bag already, I was fine with that.

I figured they already knew the basics, that Rosselli would have filled them in. They listened quietly, with an occasional nod, and no questions. Then I broached new territory.

“What the CIA wants,” I said, no euphemisms necessary among this crew and in a room that was certainly free of bugs, “is for a standard gangland hit. They want the bastard blown away. That simple.”

Giancana was shaking his head. “Too dangerous, Heller. How the hell do you recruit a shooter for a suicide mission like that?”

“It’s been done.”

“Yeah, well, even down here, Zangaras don’t grow on trees.”

Giancana was referring to the cancer-ridden Sicilian stooge who had taken out Chicago Mayor Cermak in nearby Miami, decades before, a mob hit written off as an attempt on president-elect FDR’s life.

Trafficante gestured with an open palm. “Something clean. Something neat.”

“Nothin’ wrong with poison,” Giancana offered.

Trafficante liked the sound of that. His smile made him look like a sinister Jack Benny. “Eliminates the need for an ambush.” He turned his bland gaze on me. “Don’t they have their own scientists, the CIA?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They got their Dr. Feelgoods. But they also got their Dr. Feelbads.”

“What we need,” Trafficante said, “is a pill. Some kind of capsule with a gel coating that dissolves. Something that can be slipped into…” He raised his glass of Coca-Cola. “… his drink. Or emptied into his food.”

I raised my hands, rose. “I’ll let you gentlemen discuss this. I frankly only need one thing from you-a decision on whether you’re game. I don’t need to be privy to any of the details.”

“Understood,” Trafficante said solemnly.

Giancana grinned. “Got it.”

“If it’s a go,” I said, “you’ll meet with a real CIA contact. In the meantime, I need to put something unrelated in motion for Sam.”

Giancana liked hearing that. “You go do that, Heller. We’ll have an answer for you by dark.”

And they did.

It was a go, all right. But that Vegas thing almost got me arrested. The Vegas op my LA partner, Fred Rubinski, lined up got busted for wiretapping Dan Rowan’s hotel-room phone.

The good news was Phyllis wasn’t playing “Sugartime” on Rowan’s skin flute. The bad news was I had to get Shep Shepherd to pull strings to keep the A-1 out of hot water.

There of course was no October surprise for Richard Nixon, just the November one of having the presidency snatched from him by JFK (with some help from Mayor Daley, Sam Giancana, and assorted other patriots).

And when the Kennedy brothers took over the Cuban mission, they only stepped things up-the ongoing attempts to kill Castro by way of poisoned drink, food, and cigars part of an overall scheme to (as Bobby put it) “stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, and general disorder.”

They dubbed the overall operation “Mongoose.”

The baby I’d been midwife to finally had a name.

Saturday, October 26, 1963

A couple years back, when I was still living in my fifteenth-floor apartment at the St. Clair hotel, I got a lead from a well-heeled client that urban renewal would soon be leveling an area from Chicago Avenue to near North Avenue. A model high-rise for low-income housing called Cabrini Green was going in at the west end for the residents displaced when the slums got demolished. It was Negro poor now, but once upon a time it had been Sicilians, and Hell’s Corner, where violence and murder hung out.

With Old Town starting to clean up its act, I took advantage and picked up an old ripe-for-rehab brick three-story on Eugenie Street, one block north of North Avenue, with a stable-turned-garage in back for my Jaguar 3.8 town car. The main building, typical for this side street, was narrow but deep; there was not much of a backyard, with a garden I’d let go wild.

I lived on the upper two floors, with the ground level turned into a spartanly furnished apartment (with its own entrance) that the A-1 used for visiting clients and as a witness safe house. So when I say I picked up the place, I mean the A-1 did. Anything to keep the tax boys guessing.

Historic preservation defined the neighborhood as something special, and I lived in a kind of artist’s oasis surrounded by the high-income high-rises along Michigan Avenue and the cheap rooming houses (and the hookers and junkies) of Clark, LaSalle, and Wells (south of Division), with the Puerto Rican ghetto at the west end of Old Town as close by as the Playboy Mansion on State.