“This woman is an ogre, no question…and I’m not talking about her looks. Nate, if we can stop her, and expose what’s she done, it’ll pave the way for prosecuting the other women in the Natural Death, Inc., racket…or at the very least scaring them out of it.”
That evening Katie and I were walking up the hill. No streetlights in this part of town, and no moon to light the way; lights in the frame and brick houses we passed, and the headlights of cars heading toward the bridge, threw yellow light on the cracked sidewalk we trundled up, arm in arm, Katie and me. She wore a yellow peasant blouse, always pleased to show off her treasure chest, and a full green skirt.
“Any second thoughts, handsome?”
“Just one.”
She stopped; we were near the rise of the hill and the lights of cars came up and over and fell like prison searchlights seeking us out. “Which is?”
“I’m willing to do a dirty deed for a tidy dollar, don’t get me wrong, love. It’s just…didn’t your husband die this same way?”
“He did.”
“Heavily insured and pushed in front of his oncoming destiny?”
There was no shame, no denial; if anything, her expression—chin high, eyes cool and hard—spoke pride. “He did. And I pushed him.”
“Did you, now? That gives a new accomplice pause.”
“I guess it would. But I told you he cheated me. He salted money away. And he was seeing other women. I won’t put up with disloyalty in a man.”
“Obviously not.”
“I’m the most loyal steadfast woman in the world…’less you cross me. Frank O’Meara’s loss is your gain…if you have the stomach for the work that needs doing.”
A truck came rumbling up over the rise, gears shifting into low gear, and for a detective, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t know we’d been shadowed; but we had. We’d been followed, or anticipated; to this day I’m not sure whether she came from the bushes or behind us, whether fate had helped her or careful planning and knowledge of her mother’s ways. Whatever the case, Maggie O’Meara came flying out of somewhere, hurling her skinny stick-like arms forward, shoving the much bigger woman into the path of the truck.
Katie had time to scream, and to look back at the wild-eyed smiling face of her daughter washed in the yellow headlights. The big rig’s big tires rolled over her, her girth presenting no problem, bones popping like twigs, blood streaming like water.
The trucker was no hit-and-skip guy. He came to a squealing stop and hopped out and trotted back and looked at the squashed shapeless shape, yellow and green clothing stained crimson, limbs, legs, turned to pulp, head cracked like a melon, oozing.
I had a twinge of sorrow for Katie O’Meara, that beautiful horror, that horrible beauty; but it passed.
“She just jumped right out in front of me!” the trucker blurted. He was a small, wiry man with a mustache, and his eyes were wild.
I glanced at Maggie; she looked blankly back at me.
“I know,” I said. “We saw it, her daughter and I…poor woman’s been despondent.”
I told the uniform cops the same story about Katie, depressed over the loss of her dear husband, leaping in front of the truck. Before long, Eliot arrived himself, topcoat flapping in the breeze as he stepped from the sedan that bore his special EN-1 license plate.
“I’m afraid I added a statistic to your fatalities,” I admitted.
“What’s the real story?” he asked me, getting me to one side. “None of this suicide nonsense.”
I told Eliot that Katie had been demonstrating to me how she wanted me to push Harold Wilson, lost her footing and stumbled to an ironic death. He didn’t believe me, of course, and I think he figured that I’d pushed her myself.
He didn’t mind, because I produced such a great witness for him. Maggie O’Meara had the goods on the Natural Death racket, knew the names of every woman in her mother’s ring, and in May was the star of eighty witnesses in the Grand Jury inquiry. Harold Wilson and many other of the “unwitting pawns in the death-gambling insurance racket” (as reporter Clayton Fritchey put it) were among those witnesses. So were Dr. Alice Jeffers, investigator Gaspar Corso and me.
That night, the night of Katie O’Meara’s “suicide,” after the police were through with us, Maggie had wept at her kitchen table while I fixed coffee for her, though her tears were not for her mother or out of guilt, but for her murdered father. Maggie never seemed to put together that her dad had been an accomplice in the insurance scheme, or anyway never allowed herself to admit it.
Finally, she asked, “Are you…are you really going to cover for me?”
That was when I told her she was going to testify.
She came out of it, fine; she inherited a lot of money from her late mother—the various insurance companies did not contest previous pay-outs—and I understand she sold O’Meara’s and moved on, with a considerable nest egg. I have no idea what became of her, after that.
Busting the Natural Death, Inc., racket was Eliot’s last major triumph in Cleveland law enforcement. The following March, after a night of dining, dancing and drinking at the Vogue Room, Eliot and Ev Ness were in an automobile accident, Eliot sliding into another driver’s car. With Ev minorly hurt, Eliot—after checking the other driver and finding him dazed but all right—rushed her to a hospital and became a hit-f eun driver. He made some efforts to cover up and, even when he finally fessed up in a press conference, claimed he’d not been intoxicated behind that wheel; his political enemies crucified him, and a month later Eliot resigned as Public Safety Director.
During the war, Eliot headed up the government’s efforts to control venereal disease on military bases; but he never held a law enforcement position again. He and Ev divorced in 1945. He married a third time, in 1946, and ran, unsuccessfully for mayor of Cleveland in ’47, spending the rest of his life trying, without luck, to make it in the world of business, often playing on his reputation as a famed gangbuster.
In May, 1957, Eliot Ness collapsed in his kitchen shortly after he had arrived home from the liquor store, where he had bought a bottle of Scotch.
He died with less than a thousand dollars to his name—I kicked in several hundred bucks on the funeral, wishing his wife had taken out some damn burial insurance on him.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed within this story, which is based on an actual case in the career of Eliot Ness.
Not long ago Miami Beach had been a sixteen-hundred-acre stretch of jungle sandbar thick with mangroves and scrub palmetto, inhabited by wild birds, mosquitoes and snakes. Less than thirty years later, the wilderness had given way to plush hotels, high-rent apartment houses and lavish homes, with manicured terraces and swimming pools, facing a beach littered brightly with cabanas and sun umbrellas.
That didn’t mean the place wasn’t still infested with snakes, birds and bugs—just that it was now the human variety.
It was May 22, 1941, and dead; winter season was mid-December through April, and the summer’s onslaught of tourists was a few weeks away. At the moment, the majority of restaurants and nightclubs in Miami Beach were shuttered, and the handful of the latter still doing business were the ones with gaming rooms. Even in off-season, gambling made it pay for a club to keep its doors open.
The glitzy showroom of Chez Clifton had been patterned on (though was about a third the size of) the Chez Paree back home in Chicago, with a similarly set up backroom gambling casino called (in both instances) the Gold Key Club. But where the Chez Paree was home to bigname stars and orchestras—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Ted Lewis, Martha Raye—the Chez Clifton’s headliner was invariably its namesake: Pete Clifton.
A near ringer for Zeppo, the “normal” Marx Brother, Clifton was tall, dark and horsily handsome, his slicked-back, parted-at-the side hair as black as his tie and tux. He was at the microphone, leaning on it like a jokester Sinatra, the orchestra behind him, accompanying him occasionally on song parodies, the
drummer providing the requisite rimshots, the boys laughing heartily at gags they’d heard over and over, prompting the audience.
Not that the audience needed help: the crowd thought Clifton was a scream. And, for a Thursday night, it was a good crowd, too.
“Hear about the gu that bought his wife a bicycle?” he asked innocently. “Now she’s peddling it all over town.”
They howled at that.
“Hear about the sleepy bride?…. She couldn’t stay away awake for a second.”
Laughter all around me, I was settled in at a table for two—by myself—listening to one dirty joke after another. Clifton had always worked blue, back when I knew him; he’d been the opening act at the Colony Club showroom on Rush Street—a mob joint fronted by Nicky Dean, a crony of Al Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti.
But tonight, every gag was filthy.
“Hear about the girl whose boyfriend didn’t have any furniture? She was floored.”
People were crying at this rapier wit. But not everybody liked it. The guy Clifton was fronting for, in particular.
“Nate,” Frank Nitti had said to me earlier that afternoon, “I need you to deliver a message to your old pal Pete Clifton.”
In the blue shade of an umbrella at a small white metal table, buttery sun reflecting off the shimmer of cool blue water, Nitti and I were sitting by the pool at Nitti’s Di Lido Island estate, his palatial digs looming around us, rambling white stucco buildings with green-tile roofs behind bougainvillea-covered walls.
Eyes a mystery behind sunglasses, Nitti wore a blue-and-red Hawaiian print shirt, white slacks and sandals, a surprisingly small figure, his handsome oval face flecked with occasional scars, his slicked back black hair touched with gray and immaculately trimmed. I was the one who looked like a gangster, in my brown suit and darker brown fedora, having just arrived from Chicago, Nitti’s driver picking me up at the railroad station.
“I wouldn’t call Clifton an ‘old pal,’ Mr. Nitti.”
“How many times I gotta tell ya, call me, ‘Frank’? After what we been through together?”
I didn’t like the thought of having been through anything “together” with Frank Nitti. But the truth was, fate and circumstance had on several key occasions brought Chicago’s most powerful gangster leader into the path of a certain lowly Loop private detective—though, I wasn’t as lowly as I used to be. The A-1 Agency had a suite of offices now, and I had two experienced ops and a pretty blonde secretary under me—or anyway, the ops were under me; the secretary wasn’t interested.
But when Frank Nitti asked the President of the A-1 to hop a train to Miami Beach and come visit, Nathan Heller hopped and visited—the blow softened by the three hundred dollar retainer check Nitti’s man Louis Campagna had delivered to my Van Buren Street office.
“I understand you two boys used to go out with showgirls and strippers, time to time,” Nitti said, lighting up a Cuban cigar smaller than a billy club.
“Clifton was a cocky, good-looking guy, and the toast of Rush Street. The girls liked him. I liked the spillover.”
Nitti nodded, waving out his match. “He’s still a good-looking guy. And he’s still cocky. Ever wonder how he managed to open up his own club?”
“Never bothered wondering. But I guess it is a little unusual.”
“Yeah. He ain’t famous. He ain’t on the radio.”
“Not with that material.”
Nitti blew a smoke ring; an eyebrow arched. “Oh, you remember that? How blue he works.”
I shrugged. “It was kind of a gimmick, Frank—clean-cut kid, looks like a matinee idol. Kind of a funny, startling contrast with his off-color material.”
“Well, that’s what I want you to talk to him about.”
“Afraid I don’t follow, Frank….”
“He’s workin’ too blue. Too goddamn fuckin’ filthy.”
I winced. Part of it was the sun reflecting off the surface of the pool; most of it was confusion. Why the hell did Frank Nitti give a damn if some two-bit comic was telling dirty jokes?
“That foulmouth is attracting the wrong kind of attention,” Nitti was saying. “The blue noses are gettin’ up in arms. Ministers are givin’ sermons, columnists are frownin’ in print. There’s this ‘Citizens Committee for Clean Entertainment.’ Puttin’ political pressure on. Jesus Christ! The place’ll get raided—shut down.”
I hadn’t been to Chez Clifton yet, though I assumed it was running gambling, wide-open, and was already on the cops’ no-raid list. But if anti-smut reformers made an issue out of Clifton’s immoral monologues, the boys in blue would have to raid the joint—and the gambling baby would go out the window with the dirty bathwater.
“What’s your interest in this, Frank?”
Nitti’s smile was mostly a sneer. “Clifton’s got a club ’cause he’s got a silent partner.”
“You mean…you, Frank? I thought the Outfit kept out of the Florida rackets….”
It was understood that Nitti, Capone and other Chicago mobsters with homes in Miami Beach would not infringe on the hometown gambling syndicate. This was said to be part of the agreement with local politicos to allow the Chicago Outfit to make Miami Beach their home away from home.
“That’s why I called you down here, Nate. I need somebody to talk to the kid who won’t attract no attention. Who ain’t directly connected to me. You’re just an old friend of Clifton’s from outa town.”
“And what do you want me to do, exactly?”
“Tell him to clean up his fuckin’ act.”
So now I was in the audience, sipping my rum and Coke, the walls ringing with laughter, as Pete Clifton made such deft witticisms as the following: “Hear about the doll who found a tramp under her bed? She got so upset, her stomach was on the bum all night.”
Finally, to much applause, Clifton turned the entertainment over to the orchestra, and couples filled the dancefloor to the strains of “Nice Work if You Can Get It.” Soon the comic had filtered his way through the admiring crowd to join me at my table.
“You look good, you rat bastard,” Clifton said, flashing his boyish smile, extending his hand, which I took and shook. “Getting any since I left Chicago?”
“I wet the wick on occasion,” I said, sitting as he settled in across from me. All around us patrons were sneaking peeks at the star performer who had deigned to come down among them.
“I didn’t figure you’d ever get laid again, once I moved on,” he said, straightening his black tie. “How long you down here for?”
“Couple days.”
He snapped his fingers, pointed at me and winked. “Tell you what, you’re goin’ boating with me tomorrow afternoon. These two cute skirts down the street from where I live, they’re both hot for me—you can take one of ’em offa my hands.”
Smiling, shaking my head, I said, “I thought maybe you’d have found a new hobby, by now, Pete.”
“Not me.” He fired up a Lucky Strike, sucked in smoke, exhaled it like dragon breath from his nostrils. “I never found a sweeter pasttime than doin’ the dirty deed.”
“Doing dames ain’t the only dirty deed you been doing lately, Pete.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Your act.” I gestured with my rum-and-Coke. “I’ve seen cleaner material on outhouse walls.”
He grinned toothily. “You offended? Getting prudish in your old age, Heller? Yeah, I’ve upped the ante, some. Look at this crowd, weeknight, off season. They love it. See, it’s my magic formula: everybody loves sex; and everybody loves a good dirty joke.”
“Not everybody.”
The grin eased off and his forehead tightened. “Wait a minute…. This isn’t a social call, is it?”
“No. It’s nice seeing you again, Pete…but no. You think you know who sent me—and you’re right. And he wants you to back off the smut.”
“You kidding?” Clifton smirked and waved dismissively. “I found a way to mint money, here. And it’s making me a star.”
“You think you can do that material on the radio, or in the movies? Get serious.”
“Hey, everybody needs an angle, a trademark, and I found mine.”
“Pete, I’m not here to discuss it. Just to pass the word along. You can ignore it if you like.” I sipped my drink, shrugged. “Take your dick out and conduct the orchestra with it, far as I’m concerned.”
Clifton leaned across the table. “Nate, you heard those laughs. You see the way every dame in this audience is lookin’ at me? There isn’t a quiff in this room that wouldn’t get on her back for me, or down on her damn knees.”
“Like I said, ignore it if you like. But my guess is, if you do keep working blue—and the Chez Clifton gets shut down—your silent partner’ll get no.”
The comic thought about that, drawing nervously on the Lucky. In his tux, he looked like he fell off a wedding cake. Then he said, “What would you do, Nate?”
“Get some new material. Keep some of the risque stuff, sure—but don’t be so Johnny One-note.”
Some of the cockiness had drained out of him; frustration colored his voice, even self-pity. “It’s what I do, Nate. Why not tell Joe E. Lewis not to do drunk jokes. Why not tell Eddie Cantor not to pop his eyes out?”
“’Cause somebody’ll pop your eyes out, Pete. I say this as a friend, and as somebody who knows how certain parties operate. Back off.”
He sighed, sat back. I didn’t say anything. The orchestra was playing “I’ll Never Smile Again,” now.
“Tell Nitti I’ll…tone it down.”
I saluted him with my nearly empty rum-and-Coke glass. “Good choice.”
And that was it. I had delivered my message. He had another show to do, and I didn’t see him again till the next afternoon, when—as promised—he took me out on his speedboat, a sleek mahogany nineteen-foot Gar Wood runabout whose tail was emblazoned Screwball.
And, as promised, we were in the company of two “cute skirts,” although that’s not what they were wearing. Peggy Simmons, a slender pretty pugnose blonde, and Janet Windom, a cow-eyed bosomy brunette, were in white shorts that showed off their nice, nicely tanned legs. Janet, who Pete had claimed, wore a candy-striped top; Peggy, who had deposited herself next to me on the leather seat, wore a pink longsleeve angora sweater.
Chicago Lightning Page 23
