The Confessions of Al Capone

by Loren D. Estleman

  Which was, of course, one definition of a lie.

  "I got to know Frank when he was living with us on Prairie," she said when he finished. "He was the quietest of the brothers, and he had good manners. He spent a lot of time with women, but he never brought one to the house. He had too much respect for his mother and his sister and me to parade them around in front of us. And he'd have died for Al, as he proved. Mafalda wailed for days. Mama Teresa never shed a tear. Her heart was torn from her body, but she spilled it all out in prayer."

  She emptied her glass a second time and lifted the bottle to pour before Vasco could get to it. "When Frank died, that made Ralph the oldest, since no one knew what had become of Jim. Ralph's been doing his best ever since to take Frank's place. That's a full-time job with Al the way he is, but Chicago won't run itself. He's suspicious because he doesn't have time to be anything else."

  "I understand."

  "Thank you for not telling me about Al's little affairs."

  He'd raised his glass to sip and was glad he hadn't gotten farther, or he'd have choked.

  Her smile was tight and bitter. "He lived in a hotel. The house was just to visit. Men are weak when it comes to temptation. I suspected right away, and I wasn't so stupid even then. I overlooked the evidence. When he went out to Los Angeles to set up the Hollywood connection, one of those little snips the Coconut Grove hired to take pictures of customers snapped him dancing with that slut Joan Crawford and it got into all the papers. I threw a potted plant at him when he walked in the door. I didn't care so much about Crawford, but I was pretty sure he went to bed with the little snip too. But the only time I came close to killing him was when he ducked out with Sally Rand during a recess in his income tax trial."

  "The fan dancer?"

  "I don't think she was even using the fans then. They came out only when the World's Fair opened in Chicago in 1933. It was under construction at the time of the trial and she was in town to get a look at the pavilion where she'd be dancing. If you were anywhere nearby that month, you went to the courthouse to see the show. Edward G. Robinson sat in the gallery, plugging Little Caesar, and Ruth Chatterton sashayed down the aisle wrapped in furs trailing some chorus boys prettier than she was. Rafael Sabatini, who wrote Captain Blood, took notes, but I never saw where he wrote a book about it. It was the place to be if you wanted to see celebrities. I took a shot at Al that night with one of his own revolvers."

  He set his drink on the table. It wasn't worth the risk.

  "I aimed high," she said. "I didn't want to make Sonny an orphan, with his father dead and his mother in prison. I just wanted to make my point clear. I was economizing for the long haul, explaining things to our son, hoping for the best but getting ready for the worst, and he's out showing a striptease artist the wonders of his new suite at the Lexington, with its secret escape hatch leading into the office building next door and down the fire stairs to the alley. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd think Al started out as a gopher. Well, I almost hit him anyway. The bullet ricocheted a half-dozen times and made a ditch in the rug before it came to a stop. I forgot about those damn cement walls."

  He wondered if he should be recording the confessions of Mae Capone. He felt like the old family ecclesiastical retainer.

  "What happened then?"

  "Nothing."

  "Nothing?"

  "Unless you call Al's turning white and locking himself in the den something. When he came out, he acted as if we'd had a dustup over a burned roast and we made up. He'd been shot at before, you know, so I guess his reaction was bound to be a little off the common."

  He liked the way she talked. Capone's FBI file reflected Hoover's dismissal of women—with the exceptions of Ma Barker and Machine Gun Kelly's wife Kathryn—as unimportant in criminal matters, but Mae's slim entry had said she'd spent most of her time reading novels while Al was busy corrupting America. "What about you?"

  "I was just happy I didn't hit him, and embarrassed about the whole thing. I'd learned to ignore his little involvements because he was a good father and provider—we never fought about money, which being wed to the Church you may not know how rare such a thing is among married couples—but the timing of this one really stunk. We chalked it up to pressure and never talked about it afterwards. Sally shook her boobies in the pavilion while Al was in Atlanta waiting for transfer to Alcatraz; that made her the problem of every wife whose husband went to the fair, not mine."

  "You've a saintly patience, Mrs. Capone."

  "Not when it comes to being addressed by my mother-in-law's name. Please call me Mae."

  "I will if you'll call me Peter. Sonny does."

  "Sonny belongs to your generation. I'm conditioned against it by the life I've lived."

  "In that case I'm afraid we're at a stalemate."

  She cupped both hands around her glass, lips pursed. "I'm open to compromise. When the collar's off we'll use Christian names."

  He smiled and leaned forward to touch his glass to hers. When he sat back, she said, "Anyway, all those women went to bed with Snorky, the human slot machine who paid off in hundred-dollar bills. They didn't have to wake up next to Alphonse. Al knew that. He was too smart to throw me over for the newest thing in a smaller-size girdle, like Colosimo and that North Side crowd. There are all kinds of loyalty, Fath—Peter."

  He started to say something, but she set down her drink and rose, smoothing the front of her slacks. He was aware that the doctor had entered the room. Vasco stood and turned to face the rumpled rustic with his satchel.

  "Just a bad cold, Mae, but they rock him more than most. Give him plenty of liquids and keep him out of drafts. I'll look in on him tomorrow, and tell Esther to send the boy for me if you call and I'm not in."

  "I'm sorry he gave you a bad time." She sounded relieved.

  Vasco suspected she'd been putting up a front of confidence for the sake of her guest.

  "I've seen much worse. My father was a vet."

  "May I see him?"

  "He's resting, but I don't see why not."

  She excused herself and left. The doctor looked at Vasco. "You're the priest." It wasn't a question. Small-town telegraph worked as rapidly as the neighborhood variety in the city.

  "I'm Church of England myself. Up here we talk directly to our Maker without middle management."

  "That's an oversimplification." But he resisted being drawn into a theosophical discussion. "Is what you told Mrs. Capone true? You weren't sugarcoating it."

  "We generally tell it straight up here, except when it comes to fish. A cold isn't a thing you take lightly. It can be influenza masquerading as a case of the sniffles, or it can turn into pneumonia, which considering the state of Mr. Capone's immune system is more than likely. If you want to call that sugarcoating, I can't stop you. It's a free country, even with Rosenfeld in charge."

  He had the doctor pegged then. The white sheet came out Saturday night. "Ralph's putting you up, so I guess you're okay," the man went on. "I don't mind telling you a lot of us weren't any too pleased when he moved in here a couple of years ago. It was going to be wild parties with half-naked women and the devil's music blasting out over the lake and gorillas chopping leaves off the trees with machine guns all night. We even got up a citizens' vigilance committee with shotguns and baseball bats to meet what we expected would be a convoy of moving vans where it turned off the main highway, but then someone pointed out that the vans might come with carloads of gunmen, the way they moved hooch in the old days, and after that the volunteers just sort of drifted away. The plan then was to give Ralph and his people the silent treatment whenever they were in town, let them know they weren't welcome and freeze them out. We're friendly folk as a rule, but when it comes to getting the cold shoulder you can't beat a place where the winter's six months long.

  "Well, there was just one van, filled with the furniture you see, no armed escort, and no loud parties either, just some boys fishing and hunting ducks and deer and sometimes a game of euchre
, which can get pretty raucous, but never so much as at the Elks lodge on a Saturday night with just the locals playing. Then some damnfool kids let a campfire get away from them on state land, and Ralph flew in a crew from Milwaukee in a private plane to help the volunteers and took charge of everything with a broom and buckets of water until it was put out. Afterwards he handed out bottles of cold beer for them that drank it and bottled water for them that didn't, all sooty and sweaty as he was. This after he couldn't get so much as a grunt of greeting in the hardware store or on the street."

  The doctor put down his satchel, filled his pipe from a foil pouch with the picture of an Indian on it, and got it going with a fistful of matches. He threw them into the big fireplace while the room filled with apple-scented smoke.

  "What I'm saying is I don't care if you paint your face and stick pins in dolls," he said. "If you're a guest of Ralph's, you're practically a citizen of Mercer."

  Bottles Capone appeared to embrace his nickname as Scarface Al never had his. Vasco had grown up with rumors of vulgar behavior at all the Capone haunts, in Florida, the north woods, and Chicago; Herbert Hoover's campaign in the White House to put Al behind bars was said to have originated when gunfire and drunken laughter had kept him awake while visiting a major donor in Miami. The doctor's testimony was one more example of the mythos surrounding the Capone name. (Luckily I had an alibi for Pearl Harbor.) It made one question everything that had been said about the man and his associates. He accepted the doctor's strong grip and double-pump handshake and saw him to the door.

  "Make sure he stays covered, even if he's feverish," the doctor said on the threshold. "Give him some soup and maybe now and then a dose of his own medicine." He flipped his fist toward his mouth and dipped one eyelid gravely. Then he went out and ground the Model A to life with a backfire that flushed a huge flock of swallows from the tall cedar where they'd been roosting.

  That night Vasco dined on fish with Mae, the walleye coated crisply with breadcrumbs and cornmeal and served by Rose with a pinkish sauce of Brownie's own invention in a gravy boat, a combination of egg whites whipped into a weightless froth and red wine from Ralph's cellar. It came with the inevitable fried potatoes and onions, and Vasco helped himself to seconds, feeling ashamed of his gluttony while Mae picked at her meal and left the table three times to look in on her husband, but not enough so to refrain. Rose seemed to see the emotional conflict and brushed the back of his hand with hers as she filled his glass with cold water from a pitcher.

  When Vasco motioned Mae to keep her seat before she could rise a fourth time and made the visit in her place, he found his host fitful, turning his head from side to side and clenching and unclenching a fist, muttering. Vasco leaned down, placing his ear almost against Capone's lips.

  "Use Paulie, Frankie. You need a wheel man won't leave you standing in the street with your balls hanging out."

  Capone ran a fever. Mae went in often to replace the covers he'd thrown off and lay a wet washcloth on his forehead. Vasco spelled her twice. When he removed the cloth to substitute a fresh one it felt as if he'd taken it from a boiling pot. Nearing midnight, Mae moved into a chair beside the bed. She had her own bed in the room, but she remained fully dressed and took Capone's temperature at regular intervals. She'd taken a shot at him once and now she wouldn't leave his side. Her face looked old in the harsh light of a clear bulb in a lamp fashioned from a half-gallon bottle embossed with the name of the Crystal Springs Company in Brookville, Indiana, bottled and distributed by Lake Street Manufacturing of Chicago, Illinois—Ralph's own plant. After the latest reading from the thermometer she asked Vasco to call the doctor. A woman answered, sounding sleepy and irritated, but when she heard Mae's name she woke up her husband.

  But before he arrived, with the tail of a nightshirt hanging outside his fishing vest, the fever had broken. Mae helped him change the soaked bedding, rolling the patient first one way, then the other, and they got clean pajamas on him while Vasco watched, feeling useless in the presence of such practiced efficiency. Capone grunted in protest, but didn't fully regain consciousness and was snoring evenly by the time they finished and drew a fresh quilt over him.

  "He's tougher than a pine knot," the doctor said. "I've seen lumberjacks half his age just slip away with less temperature than he was running."

  "He's in the habit of surviving," Mae said.

  Vasco didn't sleep much that night, mulling over Capone's words spoken in his delirium. Paul was a common name among Italians; there were nearly as many Paulies in Cicero and on the South Side as there were Johnnies and Frankies. Some of them were bound to be experts behind the wheel of a car. It didn't have to be Paul Anthony Vasco whom Capone was recommending to take Frankie Rio away from someplace dangerous, and the Frankie might have been some other Frankie also. But such arguments were more convincing by daylight.

  Capone sat up in bed the next morning, eating oatmeal from a bowl on a tray and munching toast. He greeted Vasco cheerfully but looked drawn, and the conversation was brief: They shared a distaste for oatmeal, but Mae had been firm regarding its restorative properties and Capone lacked the strength to refuse. If Dion O'Banion had caught him in that condition, the history of American gangland would have gone differently.

  Vasco spent the rest of the morning reading. Ralph's birch bark shelves contained a library of westerns by Zane Grey and Clarence E. Mulford, and the hell-for-leather antics of Hopalong Cassidy kept him entertained until lunch, which he ate alone while Mae caught up on her sleep. Rose offered him a second sandwich, salmon salad canned in Mason jars by Brownie himself, but this time he declined. She smiled as she refreshed his coffee. "Told you he's strong as a bull. You should look to your own care."

  After lunch he took a walk down to the lake and watched a pair of blue herons take off from a standstill from the surface and fly a wide high loop before landing on the opposite shore. He knew nothing about them but that they mated for life, like the Capones. A loon called. He was growing accustomed to the sound but it would never match the rattle of the el for maintaining his faith in the consistency of things.

  When he returned to the cabin, the wood-paneled station wagon was parked in front and Frankie Rio was dragging a pair of leather-bound suitcases from the back. Ralph confronted Vasco in the living room, red-faced and looking rumpled in a two-hundred-dollar suit. "Ain't you got no better sense than to keep a sick man out on the lake all fucking day?"

  Mae emerged from the bedroom she shared with Al, looking younger than the night before in pressed gingham but with the circles still apparent under her eyes. "Let him alone, Ralph. You know how it is trying to talk Al out of something. Peter was up most of the night helping look after him."

  "So it's Peter now." But that was the end of that conversation.

  Ralph was agitated the rest of the day, chain-smoking Melachrinos and never staying seated for long, pacing the floor and walking into and out of his room, barking at Rio when he got in the way, which was difficult not to be with his employer stalking about in unpredictable patterns. Vasco was certain he was disturbed about something other than his brother's health. His business in Milwaukee must not have gone well.

  Oblivion came more easily that night; exhaustion was the cause more than any diminishment in Vasco's sense of worry. He dreamed he'd talked to his father and that Paul had provided answers to all his questions that satisfied him he was the son of a onetime beer truck driver and nothing more sinister. When he awoke, the feeling of well-being remained with him until he realized where he was, two thousand miles away from Paul Anthony Vasco and many more times than that beyond hope of such comforting conversation. He was also aware, more from sixth sense than actual evidence of activity, of an unnatural stirring in the household. Long before he became aware of voices murmuring elsewhere in the cabin, he got up and padded to his window. An unfamiliar car was parked outside, its hood pointed toward the road in a position he knew well from the company he'd been keeping.

  It was a sev
en-passenger Lincoln, the Continental model with the spare tire mounted on the back under a sleek doughnut-shaped cover, painted deep aubergine with bottle-green fenders and running boards and more chrome than he'd seen since the auto industry had gone to war. A skin of brown dust covering the bullet-shaped hood and bug splatter on the windshield told him it had traveled a great distance since its last wash and polish. Mud caked the whitewalls and formed clumps inside the wheel wells.

  He dressed hurriedly and went into the living room, which was more crowded than he'd seen. Ralph and Rio stood to one side facing four men dressed in three-piece suits cut to accommodate expansive chest and shoulder development and a fifth seated in Al's favorite armchair. This last bent his head to set afire a cigarette in an amber holder from a pigskin lighter held by one of the four. He was slight of build, almost frail in contrast to the others, and wore a double-breasted suit that looked like spun silver, with horn buttons on the cuffs. His black hair was slicked back and parted left of center, and when he turned his head to look at the newcomer his eyes were as dead as if they'd been fashioned from the same material as the buttons. They lifted the hairs on the back of Vasco's neck.

  Ralph cleared debris from his throat. "This is the priest I was telling you about. Padre, meet Frank Nitti from Chicago."

  He dipped his head to the Enforcer. His jaw trembled. His time was running out, if it hadn't already.

  TWENTY-SIX