Max Collins - Stolen Away

“Yes.”

“Well. I guess I can live with that.”

“My point exactly,” Nitti said, and patted my arm and went out.

A few days later I was back in my office, trying to pick up the pieces of my life, my health and my business. I was calling a list of my regular credit-check customers on the phone when the damn thing rang under my hand and scared the hell out of me.

“A-1 Detective Agency,” I said. “Nathan Heller speaking.” “Nate,” a voice said. A familiar, throaty female voice, conveyed in that one word a world of disappointment. “Evalyn,” I said.

“What happened to you?”

“I was going to call tonight,” I lied. I did intend to call her, but I wasn’t near ready. Governor Hoffman I intended to write, refunding the balance of my retainer minus the days I’d worked and my somewhat padded expenses.

“What happened, Nate?”

“I just got out of the hospital. I was following up a lead, and stepped on the wrong toes. I got shot in the side, actually.”

“I see,” she said.

It was an odd reaction: I thought when she heard I’d been shot, I might buy myself some sympathy. For Evalyn Walsh McLean, her response was uncharacteristically cold.

“By the time I woke up,” I said, “it was too late. Hauptmann was already dead. The cause was already a lost one. I’m sorry, Evalyn.”

“You disappoint me, Nathan.”

Now I was feeling tired; just plain tired. “Why is that, Evalyn?”

“You’re not the only private detective in the world, you know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, exactly, Evalyn?”

“I was worried about you.” Now I could hear emotion in her voice. “I hired someone to look for you, to see if you were all right, to see if you were in trouble….”

Oh shit.

“Well, that was sweet, Evalyn, but…”

“Sweet! The first thing the operative discovered was that you’d made a phone call from my house to a number in Chicago. The number was that of a business, a ‘cigar stand,’ owned by a certain Mr. Campagna, who is a Chicago mobster, as you well know.”

“Evalyn.”

The husky voice sounded strangely brittle, now. “You lied to me. You were reporting back to them, weren’t you?”

“This isn’t anything you should pursue, Evalyn. It could be dangerous for you, if you did.”

“Are you threatening me, now?”

“No! Hell, no…I just don’t want you to get yourself in trouble.”

“You were in the hospital, all right. And I know it was a gunshot wound, and I was concerned, I am concerned, and maybe there’s a good explanation, maybe you can make me feel good about you again, but can you answer one thing?”

I sighed. “What’s that, Evalyn?”

“Why were you in a hospital where the chief of surgery is the in-law of some top gangster?”

“Your private detective found this out, did he?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Evalyn, those ‘gangsters’ run Chicago. It’s just a coincidence. Don’t make it something it’s not.”

“Do they run you?”

“Sometimes, yes. When they want to. And when I want to keep breathing. I sometimes accommodate them.”

“Bruno Richard Hauptmann is dead.”

“So I hear. What exactly can I do about that at this juncture?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

“Evalyn. Evalyn, are you crying?”

“Fuck you, Heller! Fuck you, Heller.”

Most women get around to saying that to me, eventually. Even the toney ones.

“I’m sorry, Evalyn. I’m sorry I’m not what you’d like me to be.”

“You still could be. I know you’re a good man, underneath it all.”

“Oh, really? Does that mean the chauffeur’s position is still open?”

“Now you’re being cruel,” she said, and I’d hurt her. I’d meant to, but I was sorry.

I told her so.

The earnestness of her voice would’ve broken my heart, if I’d let it. “Nate, that little boy is out there somewhere…I just know he is. If we can find him, we can clear Richard Hauptmann’s name.”

“A posthumous pardon will leave him just as dead as he is now. Maybe history will clear the poor bastard; but I’m not going to. Besides, I’m not so convinced that kid is alive.”

“I’m going to keep looking, Nate. I’ll never stop.”

“Yes, you will, Evalyn. You’ll find some new cause. There’s always another cause to support, just like there’s always another diamond to buy.”

“You are cruel.”

“Sometimes. But not foolish. Goodbye, Evalyn.”

And I hung up.

I just sat there for a while, and then I slammed my fist on the desk, and the phone jumped, and I split a fucking stitch. It hurt like hell. I unbuttoned my shirt and there was blood on the bandage. I’d have to go back to the hospital for a little outpatient number. God, it hurt. I started to cry.

I cried like a baby for several minutes.

I told myself it was the wound. But there are all kinds of those.

I never saw Evalyn again.

She continued investigating the case, and wrote a series of articles about her experiences for Liberty magazine in 1938; but eventually her obsession subsided. Her husband died in an insane asylum in 1941. In 1946, Evalyn’s daughter-who shared her mother’s first name-took an overdose of sleeping pills and never woke up; Evalyn was heartbroken and died, technically of pneumonia, the next year. Sad as that sounds, there was a typically madcap aspect to Evalyn’s last hours: her bedside was surrounded with as many famous friends and relatives as one of her star-studded dinner parties.

Many of the people in the case I never saw again. My uneasy “friendship” with Frank Nitti, on the other hand, continued no matter what I did to try to stop it, until he stopped it himself, with his suicide-under-suspicious-circumstances in 1943.

He and Ricca and Campagna and a few others had just been indicted in the Hollywood movie-union extortion case; the general belief was that Nitti couldn’t face going back to prison. In fact, the recent death of his beloved wife Anna had depressed Nitti, and finally allowed the forceful Ricca to make his move. It was a peaceful overthrow, the force of Ricca’s personality compared to that of the faltering Nitti bringing the Boys over to the Waiter’s side.

Nitti’s suicide was an act of defiance toward Ricca, whose reign as Chicago crime lord began with a prison sentence.

The ruthless Waiter, as Nitti predicted, eventually did learn a lesson about fathers and sons. His own son became a drug addict and Ricca, during his rule, banned the Outfit from narcotics trafficking. Ricca became inclined toward concentrating on victimless crimes, like gambling. He spent his declining years using legal tactics to avoid deportation, and died in his sleep in 1972 at the age of seventy-four.

Capone, of course, never did make his comeback; syphilis caught up with him, and after his stay in Alcatraz, he died a near-vegetable in 1947.

Some of the minor crooks, like Rosner, Spitale and Bitz, I never had contact with again; no idea what became of them. Some of the cops I ran into now and then, of course.

Eliot Ness fought syphilis in a different way from Capone-he was the government’s top vice cop during World War II. But Eliot’s glory days faded in the postwar years, after he lost a mayoral bid in Cleveland, where he’d once been so successful as Director of Public Safety. He died an unsuccessful businessman in 1957, right before his autobiography The Untouchables made him posthumously a legend.

Elmer Irey became the coordinator of the Treasury Department’s law-enforcement agencies, not only the Intelligence Unit but the Secret Service and agents of the Alcohol Tax Unit, Customs, Narcotics Unit and Coast Guard Intelligence. His integrity was unquestioned, and he attacked various investigations regardless of their political implications; because he’d put away Missouri’s political boss Tom Pendergast, he retired in 1946 rather than tangle with the in-coming Truman administration. He died a little over a year later.