Max Collins - Chicago Lightning

Fred understood: the sheriff’s office was in Jack Dragna’s pocket, so their work might be more cover-up than investigation.

The vacant lot across the street, near the Blatz billboard, was not what I’d expected, and I immediately knew why they’d chosen this spot. Directly off the sidewalk, an embankment fell to a sunken lot, with cement stairs up the slope providing a perfect place for shooters to perch out of sight. No street or even alley back here, either: just the backyards of houses asleep for the night (lights in those houses were blazing now, however). The assassins could sit on the stairs, unseen, and fire up over the sidewalk, from ideal cover.

“Twelve-gauge,” Fred commented, pointing to a scattering of spent shells in the grass near the steps.

My flashlight found something else. “What’s this?”

Fred bent next to what appeared to a sandwich-a half-eaten sandwich….

“Christ!” Fred said, lifting the partial slice of white bread. “Who eats this shit?”

An ambulance was screaming; so was Neddie Herbert.

“What shit?” I asked.

Fred shuddered. “It’s a fucking sardine sandwich.”

The shooting victims were transferred from the emergency room of the nearest hospital to top-notch Queen of Angels, where the head doctor was Cohen’s personal physician. An entire wing was roped off f the Cohen party, with a pressroom and listening posts for both the LAPD and County Sheriff’s department.

I stayed away. Didi’s wounds were only superficial, so she was never admitted, anyway. Cohen called me from the hospital to thank me for my “quick thinking”; all I had done was throw a few shots in the shooters’ direction, but maybe that had kept the carnage to a minimum. I don’t know.

Neddie Herbert got the best care, but he died anyway, a week later, of uremic poisoning: gunshot wounds in the kidney are a bitch. At that point, Cohen was still in the hospital, but rebounding fast; and the State Attorney’s man, Cooper, was fighting for his life with a bullet in the liver and internal hemorrhaging from wounds in his intestines.

Fred and I both kept our profiles as low as possible-this kind of publicity for his restaurant and our agency was not exactly what we were looking for.

The night after Neddie Herbert’s death in the afternoon, I was waiting in the parking lot of Googie’s, the coffee shop at Sunset and Crescent Heights. Googie’s was the latest of these atomic-type cafes popping up along the Strip like futuristic mushrooms: a slab of the swooping red-painted structural steel roof rose to jut at an angle toward the street, in an off-balance exclamation point brandishing the neon googie’s , and a massive picture window looked out on the Strip as well as the nearby Hollywood hills.

I’d arrived in a blue Ford that belonged to the A-1; but I was standing alongside a burgundy Dodge, an unmarked car used by the two vice cops who made Googie’s their home away from home. Tonight I was wasn’t taking pictures of their various dealings with bookmakers, madams, fellow crooked cops or politicians. This was something of a social call.

I’d been here since just before midnight; and we were into the early morning hours now-in fact, it was after two a.m. when Lieutenant Delbert Potts and Sergeant Rudy Johnson strolled out of the brightly illuminated glass-and-concrete coffee shop, into the less illuminated parking lot. Potts was in another rumpled brown suit-or maybe the same one-and, again, Johnson was better-dressed than his slob partner, his slender frame well-served by a dark gray suit worthy of Michael’s habidashery.

Hell, maybe Cohen provided Johnson’s wardrobe as part of the regular pay-off-at least till Delbert and Rudy got greedy and went after that twenty grand for the recordings they’d made of Mickey.

I dropped down into a crouch as they approached, pleased that no other customers had wandered into the parking lot at the same time as my friends from the vice squad. Tucked between the Dodge and the car parked next to it, I was as unseen as Potts and Johnson had been, when they’d crouched on those steps with their shotgun and rifle, waiting for Mickey.

Potts and Johnson were laughing about something-maybe Neddie Herbert’s death-and the fat one was in the lead, fishing in his pants pocket for his car keys. He didn’t see me as I rose from the shadows, swinging an underhand fist that sank six inches into his flabby belly.

Like a matador, I pushed past him, while shoving him to the pavement, where he began puking, and grabbed Johnson by one lapel and slammed his head into the rear rider’s side window. He slid down the side of the car and sat, maybe not unconscious, but good and dazed. Neither one protested-rkiking fat one, or the stunned thin one-as I disarmed them, pitching their revolvers into the darkness, where they skittered across the cement like crabs. I checked their ankles for hideout guns, but they were clean. So to speak.

Potts was still puking when I started kicking the shit out of him. I didn’t go overboard: just five or six good ones, cracking two or three ribs. Pretty soon he stopped throwing up and began to cry, wallowing down there between the cars in his own vomit. Johnson was coming around, and tried to crawl away, but I yanked him back by the collar and slammed him into the hubcap of the Dodge.

Johnson had blood all over his face, and was spitting up a bloody froth, as well as a tooth or two, and he was blubbering like a baby.

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw a couple in their twenties emerging from Googie’s; they walked to the car, on the other side of the lot. They were talking and laughing-presumably not about Neddie Herbert’s death-and went to their Chevy convertible and rolled out of the lot.

I kicked Potts in the side and shook Johnson by the lapels, just to get their attention, and they wept and groaned and moaned while I gave them my little speech, which I’d been working on in my head while I waited for them in the parking lot.

“Listen to me, you simple fuckers-you can shoot at Mickey Cohen and his Dwarfs all you want. I really do not give a flying shit. But you shot at me and my date, and a copper too, and that pisses me off. Plus, you shot up the front of my partner’s restaurant.”

Potts tried to say something, but it was unintelligible; “mercy” was in there, somewhere. Johnson was whimpering, holding up his blood-smeared hands like this was a stick-up.

“Shut-up,” I said, “both of you…. I don’t care what you or Dragna or any gangster or bent fucking cop does out here in Make-believe-ville. I live in Chicago, and I’m going back tomorrow. If you take any steps against me, or Fred Rubinski, or if you put innocent people in the path of your fucking war again, I will talk to my Chicago friends…and you will have an accident. Maybe you’ll get run down by a milk truck, maybe a safe’ll fall on you. Maybe you’ll miss a turn off a cliff. My friends are creative.”

Through his bloody bubbles, Johnson said, “Okay, Heller…okay!”

“By the way, I have photos of you boys taking pay-offs from a fine cross section of L.A.’s sleazy citizenry. Anything happens to me-if I wake up with a goddamn hangnail-those photos go to Jim Richardson at the Examiner , with a duplicate batch to Florabel Muir. Got it?”

Nobody said anything. I kicked Potts in the ass, and he yelped, “Got it!”

“Got it, got it, got it!” Johnson said, backing up against the hubcap, patting the air with his palms.

“We’re almost done-just one question…. Was Stompanato in on it, or was Niccoli your only tip-off man?”

Johnson coughed, getting blood on his chin. “Ni-Niccoli…just Niccoli.”

“He wanted you to take out the Davis dame, right? That was part of the deal?”