Max Collins - Ask Not

“Dad, are you sure you’re all right? I think we should get you to an emergency room.”

“An emergency room at a Chicago hospital on a Saturday night? That’s more dangerous than that street we crossed.”

He smiled a little. “That was a close one. That was terrible.”

“I’m sorry about that napkin.”

“It’s okay.”

“No. It isn’t. I’m going to call that guy Epstein in London and get you a signed photo.”

“You don’t have to.”

But something had jumped in his eyes.

And eventually I did get him the photo, personally signed to him, and another to me for the A-1 office wall.

Right now, though, more pressing matters were on my mind. Specifically, that swarthy face that blurred by in that Bonneville; but not so blurry that I didn’t recognize him.

I was damn sure — well, pretty sure — that he was a Cuban who’d been arrested in November of last year by the Secret Service. I’d been working with them at the request of a friend of mine who was so famous that if I’d told my son, he would have accused me of bullshitting again.

Three weeks prior to the shooting of the President in Dallas, a similar scheme had been hatched, and thwarted, in Chicago. I had hauled in two Cuban suspects and delivered them to the Secret Service, who had let them go after JFK’s motorcade through the Loop was canceled. I’d never seen either of the Cubans again.

Until tonight, anyway, when one of them tried to run me down outside the Stock Yard Inn.

Late Summer 1962

From Moisant International Airport to New Orleans stretched a dreary ten miles of billboards, filling stations, strip joints, cheap bars, parking lots, neon signs, and sleazy motels. Of the latter, the one at 1225 Airline Highway appeared perhaps the most benign, an innocuous-looking low-slung yellow-brick building with its aqua awnings and towering three-tiered ’50s-modern sign—

— particularly if you were unaware it was owned and operated by Carlos Marcello, mob boss of Louisiana.

The motel’s restaurant/lounge was horizontal to the highway. Behind it were two facing wings of guest rooms separated by an outdoor swimming pool edged at its far end by tall skinny pine trees. The trees helped conceal the bunker-like brick-and-cinder-block one-story building behind the motel.

That modest structure housed Marcello’s office, out of which he ran such legitimate interests as a beer and liquor distributorship, shrimp-boat fleets, taxi and bus firms, and the tomato canning company that allowed him to claim he was principally “a tomato salesman.” Some in law enforcement might point to a panoply of rackets including (but not limited to) narcotics, prostitution, extortion, and gambling ranging from casinos to the Town and Country’s own B-girl-serviced lounge with its side room of slots.

We had just come from the airport, my client Paul Fudala and I. We weren’t here to check in, although any time Carlos Marcello was your host, checking out was a possibility. A longtime veteran of the oil business, Paul was a client out of the A-1’s newest branch, Las Vegas; he had hired me to have my people investigate a couple of potential investors in a new business venture, an oil additive he’d developed. Carlos Marcello was one of those prospective moneymen, but I hadn’t been hired to investigate him. You didn’t have to work very hard to know what Marcello’s background was.

Paul had grown up in New Orleans and had been a childhood friend of Marcello’s. For some reason, Paul had let slip to his old pal that I was doing his investigative work, and “Uncle Carlos” had enthusiastically said he wanted to meet me, “de famous private eye to da stars.” The mob boss, as I am attempting to convey, had a mush-mouth drawl that mingled, or rather mangled, Louisiana and Sicily into a unique mess.

Paul was in his late fifties, a big white-haired cheerful guy with a nice tan and a Brooks Brothers suit not designed for this sticky, muggy heat. I was in a gray lightweight Botany 500, but it wasn’t faring much better against the humidity.

Thankfully, the interior of the unadorned brick building behind the motel was air-conditioned. If anything, it was meat-locker cold. Just inside the building were two facing offices. On our right a closed door was labeled PHILLIP SMITH — a lawyer on staff, Paul said — while on our left an unlabeled door stood open, revealing a nice-looking middle-aged brunette in a short-sleeve pale yellow silk blouse with a jeweled brooch. Eyes friendly behind jeweled cat’s-eye glasses, she greeted Paul warmly by name.

“Frances,” Paul said, smiling at her and taking the hot-pink-nailed hand she offered across a desk piled with paperwork, “it’s been too long. We’re half an hour early — should we go back and kill time in the Lounge, or is the Little Man in?”

The Little Man was Louisiana’s big man, of course.

She slapped at the air. Her drawl was an easily understandable second soprano. “Oh, you boys just go on down and see Mr. Marcello. He said send you all in whenever you got here.”

I followed Paul down the hallway of unadorned cream-colored brick.

“She was pleasant,” I said.

“She’s married to Carlos’s top man — guy who runs the Town and Country. Nofio Pecora? You’d never guess butter-wouldn’t-melt Frances runs a call-girl ring spanning four states. Texas, Mississippi, Alabama.”

“You said four states.”

“Well, Louisiana, too, naturally.”

Naturally.

At the end of the hall, the office labeled CARLOS MARCELLO stood open, revealing the Little Man himself, hunkered behind a big uncluttered mahogany desk in a spacious, dark-paneled, handsomely appointed, plushly carpeted office that might have belonged to a bank president. The walls were all but covered with huge framed aerial photographs of a sampling of what Paul later informed me were Marcello’s Louisiana properties.

Busy on the phone, our host smiled at us both, nodding, waving us into two tufted leather chairs opposite him while he continued his business.

He was a squat, bullnecked, broad-shouldered man. His crisp-looking short-sleeve white shirt with silver-gray silk necktie revealed muscular if short arms. His head was a broad, oversize oval, dark hair graying and receding, eyes dark and wide-set, nose beaky, mouth oddly sensual, cleft chin resting on a fleshy second chin. To me he looked like the oldest, meanest elf on St. Nick’s staff, the guy who kept the other little fuckers in line.

“No... no... yeah... What? Dat dog don’t fuckin’ hunt... Yeah, dat’s right, dat’s right... No ! You tell dat muthafucka he kin go fuck hisself! And ah don’t mean dat in no fun way...”

This went on for a while. Glancing around, I noticed an area over a brown-leather couch where the aerial photographs gave way to family photos and a few celebrity ones. Marcello with his arm around Sinatra, for example, taken maybe around 1950 when the mob was underwriting Frankie’s comeback. One photo had been taken at an outdoor rally and showed a teenaged Marcello grinning and shaking hands with the Kingfish himself, Governor Huey Long.

I’d done a job for the Kingfish, back in ’35, and helped out his widow in ’37; but since then I had rarely returned to the Pelican State. Maybe that was because, once upon a time in Louisiana, I’d almost become a generous serving of Yankee Gumbo. Oh, you’d like the recipe? Well, you jes’ take one tub o’ lye and add y’seff one Yankee. Stir. Then pour the ol’ tub in the nearest swamp.

When I’d been facing getting served up that way, a young, illiterate, bullnecked hood had been one of the flunkies I’d encountered. That teenaged hoodlum was just a hired hand, and we hadn’t really tangled. He had just helped set me down in a wooden chair in the back room of a ramshackle bayou restaurant called the Willswood Tavern and gone back out front to serve his customers, leaving me to the whims of a political stooge named McCracken and an imbecile called Bucky Boy. I wasn’t even sure the hood knew my name, back then. I knew his, all right.