Max Collins - The Million-Dollar Wound

“Who or what was he shooting at, then?”

“His own head, of course!”

“And he missed? And his hat didn’t fly off when these misaimed bullets flew through?”

Drury shrugged. “There are always anomalies in a case like this.”

“Anomalies my ass! Is that how you explain evidence that doesn’t suit you? Dismissing it?”

“Heller, you’re just a civilian observer here. Here at my discretion. Don’t cause any trouble.”

“What do you think happened here, Captain Drury?”

He put his hands on the hips of his expensive black topcoat and smirked. “Gee, I’m trying to work up a suitable theory that makes sense with what little we got-namely, three eyewitnesses who saw a guy shoot himself in the head, and a guy with a gun in his hand and a hole in his head. I’m just leaning the slightest little bit in the direction of suicide. What do you make of it, Heller?”

I motioned around us. “Look at these clumps of bushes; the high grass, weeds. He was running, staggering. Drunk? Sure, from the smell of him he’d been drinking. Granted. But mightn’t he been running from somebody?”

“Who?”

“People trying to kill him, Bill. Maybe he was out walking and somebody took a shot at him from those bushes, and he started running away. He was known to take regular walks, you know.”

“No I don’t,” he said. He eyed me suspiciously. “How do you?”

“Never mind. He did take walks. Maybe he walked a regular route-this route. We’re only a few blocks from his house-he was headed home. Somebody took a shot at him, possibly using a silenced gun, and when he returned fire, those caboose crawlers thought he was shooting at them.”

Drury smiled humorlessly and shook his head. “And then an assassin in the bushes shot him in the head just as the railroad boys were approaching, I suppose?”

I looked up at the sky; let it spit on me. “No, Bill. Nitti shot himself. I don’t question that.”

“What do you question, then?”

“The circumstances. I think he fell, fleeing would-be assassins-knocked himself out. Maybe he was blind drunk and fell, what’s the difference? Anyway, when he opened his eyes he saw the hazy image of three men walking toward him-sixty, seventy feet away-and rather than give Ricca the pleasure, he raised his gun to his head in one last act of defiance and ended it all.”

“Ricca?”

I shrugged. “There’s a rift between Ricca and Nitti-and the Outfit’s sided with Ricca.”

“Who says?”

“Everybody knows that. Get out of your office once in a while. Let’s say Ricca put a contract out on Nitti. His torpedoes tried to kill Frank, today, along these tracks, and when the switchman and flagman and their conductor jumped off the train, the torpedoes headed for the hills. Unseen. Only Nitti didn’t know they’d gone. And he mistook the IC men approaching him for his assassins.”

Drury thought about that. “That’s where the bullet holes in his hat came from? They shot at him and missed, these torpedoes of yours and Ricca’s?”

“Yeah. Or Nitti hit the high weeds himself, when the first shot rang out. And then stuck his hat up on a stick or on his finger, to draw their fire. Maybe.” I shrugged again. “Who knows?”

“Anomalies, Heller,” he said. “These things never sort out exactly right.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think he shot himself in the head.”

“Cornered by Ricca’s gunmen, he did.”

“What’s the difference?”

I couldn’t answer that. I walked away from him, my hands in my topcoat pockets. Why did it matter to me? Why did I want to believe Frank Nitti’s final act was one of defiance, not despair?

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Drury.

He said, “When we get some more cops out here, some more real cops, I’ll have these ditches combed. If we find any more spent shells, I’ll give your theory some thought. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You liked the man, didn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say I liked him.”

“Respected him, then.”

“Let’s just say I knew him.”

We walked back toward the suburban cops and Nitti’s body. Chief Rose approached us. He said, “I never heard of one of these big gangsters killing himself before. Isn’t this a little unusual?’

“Frankly,” Drury said, “I’m not surprised. Nitti’s been in ill health. He probably figured he was due for prison, and that he couldn’t get the express medical care he desired there-so he took the easy way out.”

That was the way Bill wanted it to be. He hated the gangsters, and he loved the idea of making a coward out of Nitti. Bill was a fine cop, a good man, a better friend; but I knew my reading of how Nitti had died would be lost in the shuffle. Maybe it was wrong of me to look at the facts and investigate wanting to prove Nitti died defiantly; but it was just as wrong for Drury to do the same wanting to prove Nitti a coward. Bill was in charge, though; and the way he saw it would be the way it went down.

Then, suddenly, in a black coat and a black dress, already in mourning, automatically in mourning, there she was: Antoinette Cavaretta. The current Mrs. Frank Nitti. The widow Nitti. The steel woman. On the arm of a uniformed cop who’d gone to get her, at Chief Rose’s request, as it turned out.

She walked falteringly to the fence where Nitti lay; she knelt by him and held his hand and made a sign of the cross.

She stood.

“This was my husband,” she said.

Her usually dark face seemed pale; she wore very little makeup. The uniformed man escorted her a ways away from the body.

Drury went to her; I followed.

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Nitti,” Drury said.

“Don’t be a hypocrite, Captain Drury,” she said. “We both know you hated my husband.”

I said, “Where were you when this happened?”

She looked at me sharply. “Praying for my husband.”

“Really,” I said.

“Frank left about one o’clock and said he was going downtown to see his lawyer. I was worried. He’s been sick, and then this grand jury trouble came up. So I went to church, to Our Lady of Sorrows, and made a novena for him.”

Drury shot me a look as if to say this news proved that Nitti had set out today to commit suicide.

She said, “You people have always persecuted him. Poor Frank! He never did a wrong thing in his life.”

Drury said nothing.

“Do I need your permission,” she asked, bitterly, “to make the funeral arrangements? To have my husband removed to a mortuary?”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Drury said. “Due to the circumstances of his death, it’s the county morgue for him.”

She gave him a look to kill. “You’re so superior, Captain. Don’t take such a death so lightly. You and my husband played in the same arena; such an end could well be yours one day.”

“Is that a threat, Mrs. Nitti?”

“No, Mr. Drury. It’s the voice of experience. Now, I’d like to go home. I have a little boy who’ll be coming home from St. Mary’s in half an hour. There’s difficult news I must share with him.”

“Certainly you can go,” he said, not unkindly.

“Why don’t I walk her?” I asked him.

“It’s not necessary,” she said.

“I’d like to,” I said.

Drury didn’t care.

Mrs. Nitti said, “I would appreciate an arm to lean on, Mr. Heller, yes.”

I gave her my arm and we walked back up along the tracks toward Cermak Road; it was the opposite direction from her house, but the closest street that crossed the tracks.

“My husband was fond of you,” she said.

“Sometimes he had funny ways of showing it.”

We walked.

“That was Frank,” she said, as if that explained everything.