Max Collins - Murder by numbers

The resort town would only continue to grow. Sal knew, but there would come a time when it would be too crowded with tourists for his taste. By that time, though, he'd be back in the States, back in Cleveland, back in business. That fucking Ness was already out from under the protective wing of his patron. Mayor Burton; now that Burton was in the U.S. Senate, an acting mayor-Edward Blythin-was filling the slot till the next election. If the democrats won, and they probably would, that meant the end of Ness as safety director-and the beginning of Sal Lombardi finding his way home and back to the top.

Not that he was anxious. If his late cousin Angelo, God rest his soul, had thought that the life down here would make you any less a man, Sal had only to look at his wall of mounted fish and his scrapbook of hunting and fishing photos and for that matter slap his flat firm belly to know how very much a man he was. And people here, whether tourists or locals, knew Sal Lombardi was somebody important from the States. So he had respect, too. Which was important to him.

He would go back home, eventually. He even looked forward to it-but he didn't dwell on it. He was having too good a time drinking tropical drinks out of hollowed-out pineapples and watching sailboats against blue skies and divers cutting into clear water and pretty girls in skimpy bathing suits frolicking and beautiful sunsets painting the horizon.

He had learned something important here: Saludy pesetas, y tiempo para gastarlas — health and money, and the time to enjoy them. No accident that "tiempo" came third. Back in the U.S.A., Sal was like everybody else: a slave to watches, to clocks, marking his life in minutes and hours. These Mexicans knew enough to measure their lives in days or even years.

Time was something you let pass; you enjoyed. Something you disposed of, not let rule you. Sal was a better, happier man, now that he had absorbed this view of life. Look how Little Angelo ended up, because he was impatient; because he couldn't accept things like they were. Sal had no intention ending up that way. He was a new man. A man with a future. A man without an ulcer.

The soccer game between the good-looking young people had broken up. Sal padded out onto the white beach, his feet in sandals, a big towel rolled up under his arm. He threw the towel out and spread himself on it, belly-down; let the warmth of the sun blanket him. Bake him. Turn him blacker.

He thought about Ness, smiling into the towel as he contemplated that smug bastard being out of work soon. That fucker wasn't so much. Big-shot Ness never figured out who the Mayfield Road gang's inside man with the cops was…

Vice cop Moeller-who had tipped Lombardi and Scalise and certain key others, who had lied about getting a tip from that nigger Hollis about that Democratic Party raid which was such an embarrassing fuck-up-was even now the primary police "fixer" on the east side. Even now, Moeller was serving the independent colored policy operators and Councilman Raney and the other big nigs. Even now, Moeller remained a trusted Ness associate. What a laugh. What a great big goddamn laugh!

Sal chuckled to himself as he turned over on his back, but suddenly a cool shadow fell across him. Had the sun gone under a cloud? He opened his eyes.

The silhouette of a man hovering over him blotted out the sun. Sal sat up, and the man came into focus: a big loose-limbed colored man in a baggy brown suit and a misshapen charcoal fedora.

"What you laughin' about, chump?"

"Johnson?" Sal got on his feet, acting angry but in reality startled. "Jesus, Toussaint Johnson… what the hell are you doin' here?"

Johnson smiled; it was a tight smile, like a razor had cut a place in the black face for white to shine through. "You're bein' extradited, Sal," he said, pleasantly. "Vacation's over…"

Sal, feeling naked in his swimming trunks, gestured with open palms. "Take it easy, take it easy-there's no rush. Can't we work something out?"

"Nope."

Now Sal's anger was real. "Hey-I like it down here. I'm not ready to go back to Cleveland-not till your boss is out of office, anyway."

"Oh, you're only goin' back to Cleveland for trial. Sal. After that, you'll be headin' to prison-and then overseas."

"Overseas?"

The smile broadened. "Federal judge ordered your citizenship revoked, last week. Something my 'boss' has been workin' on for a long while. You're goin' back to Italy-after you get outa stir in five or ten years."

Suddenly Sal's stomach began to churn. To burn.

"Let's get you some clothes," Johnson said, and took Sal by the arm. "Can't get on a plane dressed like a jaybird."

Sal, almost sputtering, said, "You can be a very rich man, Detective Johnson. Name your price."

"Don't got one."

Sal laughed harshly, but it caught in his throat as he felt himself being dragged toward the hotel by the unrelenting Negro.

"You don't, huh?" Sal said. "How's one hundred grand strike you? That's a lot of money for a colored boy."

Johnson's big head was shaking side to side. "You ain't buyin' yourself outa this one, Sal. You doin' the time."

Salud y pesetas, y tiempo para gastarlas…

"Then," Johnson continued, "you takes a little trip back to spaghetti land."

Sal stood his ground, jerking Johnson to a stop, breaking his grasp. "Who the hell do you think you are, boy? Eliot fuckin' boy scout Ness? Get off your high horse, Toussaint! You're no goddamn saint-you were on Rufus Murphy's payroll for years!"

"Yeah I was," Johnson said, menacingly. "'Fore you had him killed."

Sal swallowed and looked into the black, hateful carved mask of a face, and said nothing. Sal had just learned his final Mexican lesson about time: It had run out for him, and caught up with him.

Toussaint Johnson latched onto the trembling man's arm and hauled Black Sal Lombardi, his skin burned damn near as dark as Johnson's own, off the beach and into custody.

As was the case with the three previous Eliot Ness novels. The Dark City (1987), Butcher's Dozen (1988), and Bullet Proof (1989), I could not have written this book without the support and advice of my friend and research associate George Hagenauer. George and I, individually and together, have made numerous research trips to Cleveland, visiting many of the sites of the action in this novel. We have, on these trips, haunted the Western Reserve Historical Society, where the Ness papers are kept. We both are grateful to the helpful personnel at the Historical Society, City Hall municipal reference library and Cleveland Public Library.

Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and some liberties have been taken with the facts; the remarkably eventful life of Eliot Ness defies the necessarily tidy shape of a novel, and for that reason I have again compressed time, occasionally re-ordered events, and used composite characters.

Sam Wild represents the many reporter friends Ness had, including Clayton Fritchey of the Press, who, like the fictional Wild, was assigned to cover Ness full-time, and Ralph Kelly of the Plain-Dealer, who also covered the City Hall beat. Albert Curry represents the various hand-picked investigators who worked out of Ness's office, independent of the police department.

Among the historical figures included here under their real names are Mayor Harold Burton; Chief George Matowitz; Executive Assistant Safety Director Robert Chamberlin; Prosecutor Frank T. Cullitan; Albert "Chuck" Polizzi; Webb Seeley; Clayton Fritchey; Maxie Diamond; and various incidental characters, including police officers and judges.

Will Garner, the former "untouchable," is based upon Bill Gardner, who was indeed on Ness's Chicago Capone squad. To my knowledge, Gardner did not work with Ness in Cleveland; but according to several sources, including Oscar Fraley's Four Against the Mob, at least one former "untouchable" was on the safety director's staff of investigators. Ness did not publicize the names of his investigators, though Fraley implies in his slightly fictionalized book (most names are changed, for instance, and some dates) that this staff member was Paul Robsky. But in Robsky's own self-aggrandizing autobiography (co-written with Fraley), The Last of the Untouchables (1961), a work that outrageously all but omits Eliot Ness from the story of that famed squad, Robsky makes no mention of having worked in Cleveland. I chose to use Gardner as the basis for the ex-"untouchable" on the Cleveland staff because, frankly, I found him interesting.