Макс Коллинз - True Crime

“Lake’s real calm these days, Frank.”

“I know. Let’s keep it that way. Now. What favor you need?”

“Remember a guy named Candy Walker?”

Nitti nodded, and I told him my story. Told him Walker’s current moll was a client’s daughter and that client wanted me to try to retrieve her before she got caught in a crossfire somewhere.

I said, “Walker’s running with the Barkers, I understand.”

Nitti confirmed that. “That little penny-ante outfit’s come a long way. They’re in real tight with some of our friends in St. Paul.”

By “our,” he meant the Outfit’s friends, not his and mine. And those friends were the Twin Cities branch of the Syndicate and various corrupt politicians on the municipal and even the state level.

“I, uh, figured you might’ve had some dealings with the Barkers.”

He eyed me shrewdly. “How’d you figure that?”

“Can I speak frankly?”

He nodded.

“Well, when Shotgun Ziegler bought it in Cicero, I figured the Boys either did it or approved it.”

Ziegler, a Capone gunman said to be one of the bogus “cops” who gunned down Bugs Moran’s boys in a North Side garage on Saint Valentine’s Day back in ’29, had been cut in half, his head blasted into fragments, by four shotguns outside his favorite Cicero café this past March. Like Baby Face Nelson and Candy Walker, Ziegler had been a Capone soldier who defected in post-Repeal days to the army of outlaws, specifically the Barker-Karpis gang. Word was he had engineered the Hamm kidnapping for the Barkers — one of several crimes Melvin Purvis tried to pin on the Touhy mob, incidentally — but in the kidnapping’s aftermath the Barkers had soured on Ziegler.

Nitti smiled humorlessly and leaned forward, his legs apart, his hands loosely clasped together, dangling between his knees. “Let me tell you about Mr. Ziegler. A lesson can be learned, there. He drank too much. You ever see me drink too much, Heller?”

“I can’t recall seeing you drink at all, Frank.”

“Right! I’m a businessman, Heller, mine is a business like any other. And businessmen don’t get in their fuckin’ cups and tell tales out of school.”

“Ziegler told tales out of school.”

Nitti nodded, still smiling, still without humor. “He was hangin’ out at saloons and braggin’ about his accomplishments. Startin’ with a certain accomplishment that dates back to February of ’29, if you get my drift. Right up to a couple of more recent accomplishments — namely, snatches. And I don’t mean he was braggin’ about gettin’ laid.”

He meant the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings, said to be the work of the Barber-Karpis gang (said by everybody but Melvin Purvis and his “G-men,” that is).

“Frank, I think you know I can keep my mouth shut. So if you’re willing to put me in touch with Candy Walker — or put me in touch with somebody who could put me in touch with Candy Walker — I sure wouldn’t go spreading your Barker connection around.”

“I know you wouldn’t, Heller. I trust you. Besides, if you did, you’d wind up in an alley.”

I breathed out heavily. “Fair enough. Will you help me out?”

He stood. He walked across the room to the bar and poured himself some soda water on ice; he offered me some and I said no thanks. He came back and sat and sipped the soda water, which bubbled in his glass like the thoughts in my brain.

Nitti was thinking too. Finally he said, “I could help you. But the best favor I could do you is not to.”

I sat up. “Why’s that, Frank?”

“Haven’t you thought this through, kid?”

So now I was a “kid” again.

“Well, yes...”

“Don’t you realize your name was in the papers, associated with the Dillinger kill? As far as some of these dumb-ass farmer-outlaws are concerned, you helped set their pal up for the feds. You helped kill Johnny Dillinger.”

“I realize that...”

“How were you plannin’ to go about lookin’ for this girl, then?”

“You’re saying if I go around asking questions of Candy Walker and his associates under my own name, I’ll run into somebody who might want to do me in.”

“No,” Nitti said, shaking a finger at me like a disappointed schoolteacher, “you’ll run into everybody who might wanna do you in.”

“I figured if I could restrict my investigating to Chicago...”

“Candy Walker ain’t in Chicago.”

I sighed. “I didn’t figure there’d be much chance of that.”

“You’re probably gonna have to go out among them apple-knockers to find that girl. And you can’t go out as, what’s your first name again?”

“Nathan.”

“You can’t go out as Nathan Heller, private cop that helped get Dillinger. Not without comin’ back in one or more boxes.”

“I guess I knew that.”

“Got any ideas?”

I sighed again. “I could go out under a phony name. You know — undercover.”

Nitti lifted an eyebrow, nodded. “Like that fed your pal Ness sent around to suck up to Al. That guy sure looked, talked and acted like a real wop.”

I nodded too. “Yeah — and his testimony had a lot to do with putting Capone away.”

Nitti smiled, a little. “Maybe I should thank that guy — he made me what I am today.”

“Some people think Capone is still running things from behind bars.”

“He’s in Alcatraz now. You don’t run shit from Alcatraz.”

“Anyway, it can be done. Going undercover.”

“Yeah, but it’d be good and goddamn dangerous. I’d have to hand it to you, kid, if you pulled that off.”

“Would you be willing to help me do it?”

Not smiling, he tipped his head back, narrowed his eyes. “How?”

“Give me a name I can use, and a background. Somebody who’s out of circulation, in jail or whatever, who I can say I am, without risk of Candy Walker or anybody he runs with ever having met the guy. Somebody they might’ve heard of. Somebody they could call around and check up on. So I could get in and get this girl and get out again. In one piece.”

About halfway through that, he started nodding. He was still nodding as he said, “Possible. Let me make a phone call.”

He got up and went out of the room. I could hear his muffled voice, but not make out any of the words. Then he came back in, smiled meaninglessly and sat back down.

“It’s fixed. I got a name for you to use.”

“Good. Somebody in jail?”

“Better. Somebody dead.”

“Oh...”

“This guy worked out East till about a year ago, when he come to work for us.”

“Candy Walker never met him?”

Nitti shook his head. “No, but he’s heard of him. That’s the beauty part. There’s a chance he was pointed out to Walker once or twice, but they never met.”

“Well, if Walker saw him...”

“The guy had plastic surgery. That’s your explanation, if it comes up — it also happens to be true.”

“Oh — okay. How can I prove I’m this guy?”

“I’ll fill you in some more — I’m going to have a driver’s license in his name dropped off at your office tomorrow morning. We can make it work. A cinch.”

“Well, uh. Thanks. I appreciate this, Frank.”

“Actually, you’re doing me a favor.”

“How’s that?”

“This guy you’ll be playin’ — he’s dead, but nobody knows it. Or, not many people know it. And it makes things sweeter if he’s seen walking around. It confuses the issue, see? Makes him not dead.”

I didn’t follow this exactly, but I nodded.

“Now,” Nitti said, writing on a white pad on the coffee table before him, “here’s an address. It’s an apartment house. You’ll go see this old hillbilly woman who lives on the ground floor. Her name’s Kate Barker.”