Макс Коллинз - True Crime

“I don’t blame you.”

He sat forward; earnestness engulfed his face. “Retrieve her for me.”

“What?”

“Get her back for me.” He pointed to the Van Meter clipping. “Before she meets a similar fate.” He sat back, as if to say, I rest my case.

I looked at this gaunt Midwestern ghost sitting holding onto the ebony armrests on the chrome tubes of my silly goddamn chair, and I wanted to laugh. Or cry.

Instead I simply said, “Mr. Petersen, surely you understand what you’re asking is, well... a tall order. Maybe an impossible one.”

He said nothing, just leaned forward, with anticipation. Waiting for me to say yes. Or even no. Something.

His daughter would go to jail, upon capture — if she was lucky. She could just as easily die — go down “in a hail of bullets,” as he had said. But since she was just another faceless moll (but for one police artist’s sketch), a name that hadn’t got into the papers as yet, it was vaguely possible it wasn’t too late, that she could be rescued, that she might be pulled from out of the fire before the fat fell in...

“Okay, Mr. Petersen,” I said. “I tell you what. I’ll snoop around a bit. Walker used to live in Chicago, so maybe through some of his old contacts I can find out if your daughter’s still with him. If so, maybe I can get a message to her that her father would welcome her home, with open arms.”

He shook his head no. “That wouldn’t be enough. You have to find her. You have to bring her back. Whether she wants to come or not, Mr. Heller.”

“How can I promise to bring her back, if she doesn’t want to come? Be reasonable, Mr. Petersen. After all, that’d be kidnapping...”

“Is it kidnapping to return a daughter to her father?”

He had me there.

And knew it. He stood and dug in another pocket; right pants pocket this time. He took out a thick fold of bills, money-clipped. Counted out five hundred dollars in twenties.

I watched this, amazed. With probably about the same look he’d given my modern chair, coming in.

I picked the stack of money up in one hand; it felt heavy.

“Mr. Petersen — why five hundred dollars?”

He got oddly formal again: “Because you will take risks. You will need to go among the wolves.”

He had a point; it would be dangerous to go around asking questions about the girlfriend of a wanted man, a public enemy. But five hundred dollars was five hundred dollars.

“What do you expect for your money, Mr. Petersen?”

“I want you to look for Louise, Mr. Heller.”

“For — for how long?”

“For five hundred dollars’ worth.”

“At ten bucks a day, that’s a long time.”

“Find her, and you can keep what you don’t use. If you use it up, call me...” He reached in his left pants pocket and removed a slip of paper with his name and phone number and address written on it, and gave it to me. “...I will probably authorize you to continue.”

Petersen picked his hat up off my desk.

“And,” he said, putting on the hat, “there’s a thousand more if you deliver her to me.”

That knocked the breath out of me. I was stunned by the kind of money this simple retired farmer was throwing around. “Mr. Petersen, excuse me for asking this — I don’t mean to pry, or look a gift horse in the mouth. But how can you possibly afford this, in times like these? Or any time?”

His crease of a smile seemed weary, now, and somehow worldly. “My health is bad, Mr. Heller,” he said. “I’m a lunger. Picked it up in the war. I got my pension to get me by and then some. That’s how I was able to sell my farm, and get this money together — to find my girl. I got my little house in De Kalb, where we can live together. On my pension. She can make a new start. Find herself a nice little job, and find a good new man, to take care of her after her daddy’s gone. Which will be soon, Lord’s will be done.”

He extended his hand across the desk and I stood and shook it.

“Tell her that when you find her,” he said. “Maybe then she’ll come home of her own volition.”

I nodded.

“But find her,” he said, and slammed the desk with his fist with sudden force on the “find”; the lamp shook. Then more quietly, and a little embarrassed, he said, “Please find her. Bring her home.”

And he left me alone in the office with my modern furniture and his old-fashioned money.

When Frank Nitti wasn’t holding court at the Capri Restaurant, or meeting with the inner circle of the Outfit at his home in suburban Riverside, he would occupy a suite in various Loop hotels. This was standard operating practice, for meeting with politicians and labor leaders and the like. It made a safer, more neutral ground.

So it was no surprise to me, after I called the Capri and sought an audience with Nitti, that the return phone call I received was a male voice that did not identify itself telling me to be in the lobby of the Bismarck Hotel, two o’clock Monday afternoon.

The Bismarck was on the corner of LaSalle and Randolph, across the street from City Hall — making it a natural place for Nitti to hold meetings. The recently rebuilt hotel dominated German Square, the group of German clubs, steamship offices and shops at the west end of the Rialto Theatre district. But my meeting that Monday afternoon would have a distinctly Italian cast.

I went past the uniformed Bismarck doorman and through the revolving door and up the wide, red-carpeted stairway and my footsteps echoed across the marble floor of the high-ceilinged, elaborate lobby, where I found an overstuffed sofa and sat. Pretty soon a rather short man in a gray suit approached me; his shortness meant nothing: this was a big man. He had shoulders broad enough to balance a midget on either side of his oblong head. His hair was dark and starting to thin; his dark eyes were colder and harder than the marble floor beneath us.

He was Louis “Little New York” Campagna, Frank Nitti’s personal bodyguard.

He didn’t speak. He just stood in front of me and had a faintly disgusted look — and Little New York Campagna looking faintly disgusted was scarier than Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff put together, I might add — and jerked his head, indicating I was to get up. I got up.

I followed him onto an elevator, and the uniformed operator didn’t ask for our floor; he just took us up to the seventh, where Campagna waited for me to get out first.

As we were walking down the hallway, I said, “I hope there’s no hard feelings about that other time.”

I’d knocked Campagna out once; it’s a long story.

Without glancing at me, just walking alongside me, he said, “As long as Frank says there’s no hard feelings, there’s no hard feelings.”

I left it at that.

At the end of the hallway was a little vestibule; the door within the vestibule said 737, with a little gold plaque that said Presidential Suite below it. I stood to one side of the door, within the vestibule, and cold-eyed Campagna stood to the other. He stood with his arms loose at his sides, big hands free.

“Wish I could find a suit like that,” I said. “I can’t find one a gun won’t bulge under.”

He said, “You couldn’t afford my tailor.”

I shrugged. “Probably not.”

It occurred to me then that he hadn’t patted me down for a gun; he could tell just looking at me I wasn’t armed — the suit I had on wasn’t tailored well enough to conceal one. Grooming hints from the underworld.

The door opened and a fat little man with wire-frame glasses, a loud tie and a black silk suit came out, smiling, calling back behind him, “Always a pleasure, Frank!”