Max Collins - The dark city

"That goes out to all of the press at once. All I'm giving you is the basic story. Your 'scoop.' And the Cooper appointment is a little bonus for you."

"Fair enough." Wild put his pencil and pad down. "You know, Ness, no offense, but you're really inviting a shit storm with all this."

"I have a hat."

"It better have a hell of a brim. Never mind your wholesale transfers of a hundred and twenty-some cops. Just those two cops you charged on intoxication will be enough to get your ass in a sling."

Ness smiled mildly. "I was hired to clean up this town. I'm starting with the department. Let's just call it my Christmas present to the city."

"Let's just hope somebody else's idea of a Christmas present isn't you in a ditch with a bow around ya."

"It's been tried."

"Yeah, and successfully."

"Not with me it hasn't."

"Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot. You're untouchable. Unkillable."

"Don't be stupid."

"Some advice, considering the source."

"You're suggesting I'm reckless."

Wild gestured with an open hand, and rolled his eyes. "I'm suggesting you're bucking civil service and public opinion, not to mention the politicians. One of those cops you dismissed is related by marriage to Councilman Fink, you know."

"Do tell."

"There'll be hearings. You'll have to defend yourself, like it was you who's on trial, Johnny-come-lately Ness, and not those longtime public-servant cops. It could be a real circus."

"Maybe I should bring a whip."

"Hell of a lot of good it'll do you on a high wire. Did you ever think about taking things a step at a time? You ever consider that firing and transferring and putting cops on probation right before Christmas is going to make you look more like Scrooge than J. Edgar Hoover?"

"Hoover's no friend of mine."

"And Scrooge is? Rome wasn't built in a day. It took longer than a day to fall, too. But, hey, do what you want-keep going a hundred miles an hour. It'll make great copy. But if you last longer than a couple of months, you'll be beatin' the odds."

Ness smiled again, briefly, and said, "Did you ever stop to consider that a couple months is about all the time I have, anyway?"

The skin around Wild's eyes tightened. "What do you mean?"

"Think about it."

Wild thought; said, "You want to go off the record for a minute?"

"Okay."

Wild slid his pad and pencil away from him on the table top. "This is all about money, isn't it? You have to come up with some phenomenal results before the council votes on the budget."

Ness nodded.

"So you're depending on the press to make you such a big deal that your budget requests can't be denied."

Ness nodded again.

"Then you got a funny idea of how to maintain good press relations," Wild said, with a wise-guy grin, touching the corner of his mouth where a little blood was caked.

"I'm not going to apologize for that," Ness said. "If you can't keep your word with me, I'll do my business with Fritchey and Lawrence and the rest."

"I'm not going to apologize either," Wild said. "But I won't make a sap out of you again. That much I promise. Look at it this way. You'll seem all the more a hero when you do start going out on real raids."

"Which I will," Ness said. "But first I have some transfers to sign."

Wild stood. "That's dangerous enough in itself. But if you really have to pull this off in a couple of months, you better find yourself some doors to kick down, in a hurry."

"I can usually find those, Sam."

"Maybe you'll get a couple for Christmas."

And Wild went out, and Ness went back to work, neither man knowing that the Christmas present they were both hoping for wouldn't arrive until January tenth.

Blizzards in late December had turned the dark city white. And on Friday, January 10, the sun was rumored to have been seen shining in Cleveland, briefly, in the morning. Some attributed that notion to light from blast furnaces in the steel mills. Others figured the radiance must just have been another winter fire, albeit a particularly ambitious one. Very young children, confronted with a glowing ball of light in the sky, may simply have failed to recognize it.

For those who did, clouds soon rolled in from the west to make the point moot. Gray-and-white Cleveland settled in for another bleak day. As the afternoon faded into the subtle difference of evening, Assistant Prosecutor Charles Me Andrew, slight, barely thirty, stood in the cinders of the parking lot of the massive Harvard Club, backed up by two assistants and ten plainclothes "constables." The constables were really deputized private detectives from the McGrath Agency.

The Harvard Club, a gambling casino run by Mayfield Road mob members, was just south of the city limits in the suburb of Newburgh Heights. That put it within the jurisdiction of County Prosecutor Cullitan, for whom McAndrew and the others were working, but outside the bailiwick of the Cleveland police.

Truth be told, McAndrew well knew that steering clear of the Cleveland police was just fine with Prosecutor Cullitan. And it had been on the suggestion of the top cop in town, Safety Director Eliot Ness, that Cullitan had turned to private detectives.

"It's the only way to avoid a tip-off," Ness had told Cullitan.

The local Newburgh cops were out of the question for the same reason. And as for enlisting the aid of the county sheriff, well, that too was out of the question. Sheriff John L. "Honest John" Sultzman-that white-maned, folksy, self-styled friend of the people-had a strict hands-off position toward the law enforcement affairs of the communities within his county: "My home rule policy is a sacred instrument in the hands of the people, who love liberty and freedom and who love to govern themselves!" What this meant was the sheriff left up to others as much of the law enforcement in the county as he possibly could.

Then there was the little matter of the sheriff’s son having been held overnight in the lockup at the Central Police Station in Cleveland proper just the day before yesterday. The kid was drunk and his car climbed the curb and tried to climb a tree as well. A passenger was injured and the driver was booked, sheriffs son or not.

The previous administration would've helped the sheriff out on something like this. But Safety Director Ness was cracking down on traffic offenses, and didn't play politics (or anyway, that kind of politics) and so the kid went to jail.

McAndrew was wishing Ness and Cullitan weren't such damn hard-noses. It'd be nice to have the sheriffs deputies behind him right now. He couldn't help but wonder, if any court cases came out of this, how it would look, using a bunch of private eyes as backup.

I'm a lawyer, McAndrew thought, wincing at the cold, and at the thought of what was ahead of him, not a cop.

He gave his men a tight smile and motioned for them to stay behind him in the drive of the parking lot, and he advanced up the porch steps of the barnlike building with the fancy, New Orleans-style facade that could not hide the structure's warehouse roots.

He swallowed. He sighed. He stared at the massive wooden doorway before him, with its speakeasy slot. He knocked.

The slot slid open and dark eyes with dark bushy brows and dark circles beneath filled the opening. At first blank, then bored, the eyes narrowed as they took McAndrew in, particularly the badge on his lapel.

"Yeah?" The voice wasn't as menacing as the eyes, but it came in a close second.

McAndrew held up his left gloved hand with the folded warrant.

"Better open up," he said. "This is a raid."

"Fuck you," the voice said, turning the first word into two-syllables, and the window slot slid shut with metallic force, like a soldier quickly cocking a carbine.