Max Collins - The Million-Dollar Wound

“Mrs. Nitti-or should I call you Toni?”

She took her arm from mine. Stopped for a moment. “Mrs. Nitti will be just fine. Do I sense a touch of disrespect in your voice?”

“I must say you’re taking your husband’s death well, Mrs. Nitti. You’re a rock, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that the first time I saw you, you were in the presence of a dead man. Oh, he didn’t know he was dead, or at least he didn’t like to think he was. But with your help, his faithful secretary’s help, E. J. O’Hare got dead. Good and dead.”

She looked at me coldly, impassively; but she was pulling breath in like a race horse.

“A few years go by, and then you turn up again. At Frank Nitti’s front door. His loving wife. The wife of a dead man. That was the difference between Frank and O’Hare-your husband knew he was dead. When I spoke to him last night, I could tell he knew he was very near the end. He was a brave man, I think.”

“Yes he was,” she said.

“I wonder,” I said, “if you were keeping tabs on Frank for Ricca, like you kept tabs on O’Hare for Frank.”

“You’re a fool.”

“Am I? How’s this for foolish? Frank Nitti, unknown to all but a handful-said handful including you and E. J. O’Hare-betrayed Al Capone to the feds.”

Her eyes flickered.

“It’s so obvious,” I said, “but no one ever thought of it…even though key Capone witness Les Shumway was still employed at Sportsman’s Park. Of course, Nitti arranged Capone’s downfall. Of course, Nitti moved the chess pieces until he was king himself. In a way, I admire him for it.”

“So,” she said, “do I.”

“But then his wife Anna dies. She was the love of his life. She, and his son, were everything to him. And he begins to slide. He goes into the hospital, for the old back trouble from the wounds Mayor Cermak’s boys caused. And for the ulcers that developed after he was wounded.”

“His heart was also bad,” she said. “And he was convinced he had stomach cancer. I wouldn’t want you to leave anything out, Mr. Heller.”

“Stomach cancer. Perfect. I bet YOU don’t even know why he had that notion.”

“Certainly I do, she said. “The assassin who killed Cermak believed he had stomach cancer.”

“That’s right. Joe Zangara. The one-man Sicilian suicide squad who pretended to shoot at FDR so that your husband could bring Mayor Cermak down without… I can almost hear Frank saying it…‘stirring up the heat.’”

“My husband was a brilliant man.”

“Once,” I said “He was-once. He began to slip, though, didn’t he? Despondent over his wife’s death, he took long solitary walks. He even began to drink a little-not like him, not at all like him. His memory began to falter. That’s where you come in.”

“Really? In what way?”

“A marriage of convenience. A business arrangement You ran a dogtrack in Miami, you helped run Sportsman’s Park. You’d been Frank’s inside ‘man’ with O’Hare. Frank had a son he loved very much, who needed a mother-a strong person who could look after little Joseph’s interests after he was gone. A mob insider like you, that was perfect. And, maybe, it was a way to keep you from ever spilling what you knew about Frank setting up Capone. Hell, maybe you blackmailed him into marrying you.”

She let out a long breath, and began to walk again. Quickly. I walked right alongside her.

“You know what I think, Mrs. Nitti?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’ve had practice being a widow. After all, you’ve been a black widow for years.”

She stopped in her tracks, next to the tracks, and she slapped me. Hard. A hard, ringing, stinging slap.

“What do you know?” she said. There was bitterness in the throaty voice, but something else too: pain.

But I pressed on, my cheek flaming, like Estelle Carey in her final moments. “You want me to believe you weren’t keeping tabs on him for Ricca? That you didn’t send him out to meet his death on his regular walk, today?”

“I don’t care what you believe.”

She slowed. She stopped. She turned to me.

“I loved Frank,” she said. “I loved him for years. And he came to love me. He worshipped Anna, but he loved me. ”

“Goddamn,” I said, stopped in my tracks now. “I believe you.”

She shook her head slowly, lecturing with a jerky finger. “Perhaps some… some… of what you said is true…but know this: I was never in Ricca’s pocket. I never betrayed Frank. I didn’t blackmail him into marriage. I’m no black widow! No black widow.” She sat down, on the slope, by the tracks. “Just a widow. Another widow.”

I sat next to her. “I’m sorry.”

It was still raining, a little. Still drizzling.

She was breathing heavily. “I understand. You felt something for my husband. That’s what caused your anger.”

“I guess so.”

The pain was showing on her face now. “It’s hard to lose him like this. Death by his own hand.”

“My father committed suicide,” I said.

She looked at me.

“He put a bullet in his head, too.” I looked at her. “It’s something you learn to live with, but you never forget.”

“Perhaps you’ve lost another father today.”

“That’s putting it a little strong. But I am sorry to see the old bastard go.”

Then I looked at her again and she was weeping. The steel lady was weeping.

So I put my arm around her and she wept into my shoulder.

When I left her at her door, the boy was just getting home.

I had supposed the final favor Frank Nitti promised me was one he’d been unable to keep. After all, I asked him Thursday night; and Friday afternoon he was dead.

But Saturday morning a pale, shaking Barney Ross, in civvies for a change, brown jacket, gray slacks and a hastily knotted tie under a wrinkled gray raincoat, came into my office, around eleven, slamming the door behind him.

I was standing at Gladys’s desk, handing her my notes on an insurance report.

“We gotta talk,” he said. He was sweating. It was starting to look and feel just a little like spring out there, but nobody was sweating yet. Except Barney.

Gladys seemed thrown by this uncharacteristically sloppy, angry Barney Ross. And it took quite a bit to throw a cool customer like her.

“Forget this last report,” I told her. “Go ahead and take off a little early.” We only worked till noon on Saturday.

“Sure, Mr. Heller,” she said, rising, gathering her things. “See you Monday.” And, with one last wide-eyed glance back at us, she was out the door.

“Step into my office,” I said, gesturing, smiling.

His one arm hung at his side, hand shaking; the other leaned against the wooden walking stick, which trembled like a coconut palm in a storm. “Did you do this, Nate?”

“Step into my office. Sit down. Take a load off.”

He went ahead of me, as quickly as his walking stick would allow; sat down. I got behind the desk. He was rubbing his hands on his trousered thighs. He didn’t look at me.

“Did you do this thing to me?”

“Do what, Barney?”

Now he tried to look at me, but it was hard for him; his eyes darted around, not lighting anywhere. “Nobody’ll sell me anything. I need my medicine, Nate.”

“You mean you need a fix.”

“It’s for my headaches, and earaches. The malaria relapses. Goddamn, if you don’t understand this, who would?”

“Go to a doctor.”

“I… I used up the doctors the first three weeks, Nate. They’ll only give me a shot, once. I had to go to the streets.”