by Don Swaim
As the two stooges sprang up, guns in their hands, the fossilized concertina lady whipped off her shawl, opened her coat to produce a sawed-off Browning A5 pump action, and cut down the goons.
She was, in disguise, Diana, of course.
Would I have entered a mob hangout without backup?
Although my back was now turned, from my prone position in the barber chair I saw in the mirror the wounded Cherry Lips advancing on me. At the same time, Alibi Guy raised the straight razor, about to slice the blade across my throat. Then the three of us were caught in a sudden death grip: Cherry Lips depositing his heavy torso on top of my chair-bound body while my two hands clutched Alibi Guy’s wrist to fend off the razor.
I expected Diana to let loose with the shotgun again, but, locked in a sort of tableau, Cherry Lips, Alibi Guy, and I would all buy the farm if she did. Cherry Lips was too heavy to shake off and I was losing the strength to repel Alibi Guy’s razor.
I thought I was a gonner when I heard a puff sound and witnessed the surprised expression on Alibi Guy’s mug, although he couldn’t see the dart in the middle of his forehead. The razor fell to the floor along with Alibi Guy himself.
“What the hell?” Cherry Lips said, gaping at Diana, for which he was similarly rewarded with a dart between his eyes. Diana helped roll his big frame off of me and onto the floor.
The poison tip worked swiftly. I’d have to give Kyle a special thanks when I got back to New York.
“Oh, oh,” Diana said to me, as she peeled away her old-lady mask. “We have a witness.”
The shoeshine kid, eyes wide, mouth open, staring in astonishment at the carnage on the floor.
“What’s your name, boy?” I said.
“Elmer.”
“Elmer, you only polished one of my brogans. How’s about doing the other one before I leave? And don’t step in the blood.”
“Right away, mister.”
“I suspect this barber shop’s going to be boarded up for a long time. How’d you like a new job?”
“You betcha.”
“Tomorrow, I want you to report to Mr. Leon Linquist at the Prairie Patriot on Lake Street. Tell him I sent you. But to anyone else you never saw me.”
“Saw who?”
“Elmer, you might become the assistant publisher someday.”
The next day Leon’s paper had not one but two scoops.
ZWILLMAN AND THREE GANGSTERS
RUBBED OUT BY RIVAL GANG IN BARBER SHOP
PATROIT EXCLUSIVE: ZWILLMAN, CARNEY,
KARLSON DIRECTLY LINKED TO SYNDICATE
A victory for freedom of the press and the rule of law.
The police found no clues as to who actually annulled Cherry Lips and the others, but they did discover an old concertina someone had abandoned at the scene. Plus odd puncture wounds in the heads of Zwillman and Toblinsky, but no sign of what made them.
“How can I thank you, Tokol?” Linquist told me as we said our goodbyes. “I wish I could pay you something.”
“What’s important is that my work here is done. And I’m transferring to you ownership of that DeSoto Airstream to replace your gun-riddled car. Diana and I are returning to Manhattan on the Twentieth Century Limited out of Chicago, the only civilized mode of travel in America.”
On the way home, railroad ties furiously clacking under us, I thought about some unfinished business: Nabbing Alvin Karpis and Arthur Barker before the show-off Hoover did. But there was something else that kept nagging at me. What? Was I getting old?
Back in New York, as we enjoyed our buzz from smoking a ritual dual-hose hookah, vanilla-fused shisha loosely packed, Diana and I tangoed to the music of Don Azpiazu and his Havana Casino Orchestra on her Zenith Stratosphere while Kyle coiled in contentment.
Then, disrupting the mellow mood in Diana’s penthouse paradise, Walter Winchell’s voice burst in, jarring us back to a crude reality.
Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press. Flash! Mobster Arthur Barker has been pinched by the FBI on a Chicago street. Barker, known as Doc, is the son of the infamous Ma Baker, gunned down in Florida. When arrested, the unarmed Barker said he forgot and left his gun on the bathroom sink. Still on the lam is Public Enemy Numero Uno, Alvin Karpis, Barker’s accomplice. C’mon, J. Edgar, when are you going to get serious and nail this fugitive?
At least Karpis—for me—was still in play.
Then I mulled over what had bothered me aboard the Twentieth Century Limited. The matter of the missing Browning that not only launched the War to End All Wars, but eliminated a Cajun State despot.
It must be found and returned to Vienna, its sacred home.
Then…
The public is sick and tired of waiting for Alvin Karpis to be captured. This reporter has learned exclusively that a Certain Acquaintance of mine, plans to personally take this violent criminal into custody—no matter the risk to C.A.’s life and limb. God speed, C.A.
…For Jergens Lotion, this is Walter Winchell wishing you lotions of love.
three
Without Fear or Regret 1936
Public Enemy Number One was hiding out in the Crescent City. That’s why I was there. To put the cuffs on Alvin Karpis for keeps. And that wasn’t the only thing I had to do.
On this expedition I was flying solo, sans Diana, so had my work cut out for me.
A bellhop, boyish and cute, knocked at my suite in the Roosevelt Hotel on Baronne Street, where I was suffering from an incurable hangover from too many Sazeracs—no doubt due to the Angostura bitters. He handed me a letter from Clarence Darrow forwarded from Chicago via New York to New Orleans.
As I tipped the kid, he mentioned suggestively he would be off duty and out of uniform when his shift ended at midnight. I made a mental note.
Darrow’s handwriting resembled chicken scratches, but he was an old man, seventy-six, who’d claimed he was through with lawyering—too hoary, too tired, too depleted—so I was surprised to learn he was back at work. The eminent lawyer begged me to go to Chicago to help him on a case.
I wired Darrow I’d be in the City of the Big Shoulders on the Panama Limited as soon as I wrapped up here.
It happened that J. Edgar Hoover was also in NO, staying at the Roosevelt as well, which suggested the Feds were closing in on Karpis—and that Edgar intended to be conspicuously present when it happened. Normally, Hoover’s agents would make the bust, but he was smarting under criticism that he wasn’t an actual lawman, had no police training, and had never made an arrest, not even for jaywalking.
The schnook wanted to take credit for this apprehension himself.
But not if I beat him to it.
I spotted Hoover and his boyfriend Clyde Tolson in the hotel lobby, but hid behind a palm so they wouldn’t see me. I planned to keep it that way.
That said, I wasn’t going to allow mere work distract me from the fun and frolic available in this suffocatingly humid, low-lying coastal city, so I occupied a table in the Roosevelt’s lobby-level Blue Room to watch the white-tuxedoed Cab Calloway flinging his untamable mop of hair while belting out “Minnie the Moocher”:
Hi-de hi-de hi-de-hi / Hi-de hi-de hi-de-hi.
Calloway’s band was broadcasting live on WWL, run by Jesuits, whose clear-channel signal reached the nation’s nether regions.
At one point, Cab became so ebullient he lost his grip on his baton, which almost smacked me in the eye. I was so taken with his “Reefer Man,” “Boog It,” and “Peck-a Doodle Doo,” I kept the Sazeracs a-coming, wishing Diana was around to prop me up. But job-related issues involving her daytime radio serials kept her and Kyle in Manhattan.
Staggering up to my room after closing down the Blue Room, I found the winsome bellboy of earlier in the day waiting outside my door.
I invited him in, of course, but don’t recall much thereafter except that the kid’s name was Mickey.
In the morning, the bellboy having decamped, I got a grip on myself by swallowing a h
andful of aspirin along with a bucket of java, very black, and returned to business. The first order was to call my message center, Mrs. Prunella Mayhem’s Accurate Answering Service (“discreet and confidential”). Mrs. Mayhem’s girls always knew what to say and where and how to reach me, something that stymied even J. Edgar Hoover.
My sources were superior to the FBI’s, and I’d learned Karpis—born Albin Francis Karpavicius to Lithuanian immigrants in Montreal—was now hiding incognito under the name Edward O’Hara.
There were no messages, so I left the hotel to find an old pal of mine, Papa Celestin, who agreed to drive me around town in his second-hand jalopy, the one he crammed his musicians in during the better days when his Tuxedo Jazz Band toured throughout the South. He was dark skinned and broad featured with a toothy smile, close-cropped hair, always impeccably garbed in a double-breasted.
“Didn’t expect you to be back in New Orleans so soon, Tokol.”
“Unfinished business, Papa.”
A hell of a cornet player, he once recorded for the Okeh label and worked steadily until the Depression swallowed his business and the band scattered. Now he was barely making it as a sometime longshoreman and shipyard welder. On visits to NO when I was a kid—taken there by my dashing uncle who was more of a father than my own—I begged Celestin to teach me the cornet. He did his best, but it was clear I was more suited toward pursuing a something more lucrative than music. Like heisting diamonds.
“Where we all drivin’ to, Tokol?”
“Thirty-three-forty-three Canal Street where it intersects the Jefferson Davis Parkway.”
“I know the place. Drugstore on the corner. You need aspirin or somethin’?”
“I’m about to give someone else a headache, Papa.”
When we got to Canal I trained my binoculars on the building across from the pharmacy.
“It’s apartment number three I’m interested in.”
“Who all’s in there?”
“A thug known as Fred Hunter and his hooker-girlfriend Connie Morris. But it’s Alvin Karpis I want. He drives there every night for dinner in a Plymouth coupe, plate number one-three-six-two-eight-eight.”
We staked out the scene, and as we waited I had this nagging, uncertain feeling about The Man With Two Faces. He was dead, wasn’t he? I saw his body, the staring, lifeless eyes, the foam around his lips, and it was I who shoveled the first scoop of dirt onto both of his faces. Then why did I…
Put it out of your mind, Tokol. You went through a lot with Janus.
After two hours the Plymouth in question pulled up, and the driver got out and entered the building.
“Karpis all right,” I said.
“Him? I seen his wanted posters, Tokol, and that man don’t look the same.”
“He had surgery to alter his appearance. Added lobes to his lobe-less ears. Also an acid bath on his fingers to remove his fingerprints. But, see, he’s still got this mortician-like smile. That’s why his accomplices call him Creepy.”
“You gettin’ the cops in on this, Tokol?”
“This one I’m handling myself.”
Unobtrusively, I huddled in an adjoining doorway for another hour waiting for Karpis to emerge. He finally appeared, a toothpick between his teeth, and walked to his coupe. I was instantly behind him, pressing my Smith and Wesson M&P .38 Special against the back of his neck.
The pinch was a cinch.
“Hands up, Creepy. You make a move my bullet enters your brain, which on principle isn’t a bad thing.”
The toothpick fell from his mouth.
“Ya got it wrong, mister. The name’s O’Hara.”
“And I’m Benito Mussolini. Tough luck about your pal Barker and his ma.”
“Never heard of ’em.”
“I see you’ve grown earlobes, Creepy. Looks like your jaw’s shifted and your nose is a little different. Understand you’ve had surgery on your fingers too.”
“All right, all right.” Karpis shrugged, resigned to reality. “Looks like you fingered me, copper.”
“Spare me the copper crap. I’m a simple citizen performing a public service.”
“Bounty hunter, huh? So you wanna get famous for takin’ me in.”
“Just the opposite, douchemonger.”
“Say, I think I know you. Didn’t we almost meet in St. Paul? Tokol ain’t it? That ransom thing when you got the victim back and I got the cash.”
A sore point with me. I bopped him gently on the back of his skull.
“Ouch!”
“Just wanted to keep you focused, Creepy. Tell me what happened to that mob doctor of yours, Joseph Moran, the guy who operated on your kisser and digits. The Feds wanna talk to him.”
“Beats me. Of course Lake Erie’s mighty wide and deep.”
Bastard wasn’t going to squeal.
“Okay, Creepy, march ahead of me to the pay phone outside that drugstore.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll save the government the cost of putting you on trial.”
My .38 trained on him, the horn’s earpiece cradled at my ear, I dialed the Roosevelt’s switchboard and asked for Hoover’s suite.
The man himself answered.
“It’s Tokol, Edgar. Hope I didn’t interrupt you and Clyde in the middle of an intimate moment. I’m in town.”
“Why are you here?”
“I came to give you a little present.”
Hoover and Tolson once proposed having a threesome with me, but I didn’t lean that way. Besides, all my dresses were at my favorite laundry, Zong Hon Wong’s on Amsterdam Avenue.
“What are you talking about?”
“A little item called Alvin Karpis.”
“Listen, Tokol, I hired you to help us nab Karpis and Doc Barker in that St. Paul kidnap case, but you screwed it up. Lost the ransom, lost the kidnappers.”
“But I saved the victim.”
“Nevertheless, we landed Barker ourselves.”
“But not Karpis. So now, thanks to me, you’re getting him on a silver platter, provided the FBI returns the platter with my usual fee on it.”
“You mean—”
“Creepy’s all yours, Edgar. From the goodness of my heart. Write down this address…”
Within half an hour three dozen FBI agents led by Mike Litvak converged on Canal Street and took Karpis off my hands. After St. Paul, Litvak and I had kept up our camaraderie. Mike was a pea-brain and forgot to bring handcuffs, so he had to use Karpis’s own striped necktie to secure his wrists.
When the scene was declared safe, Edgar appeared, bravely lugging a tommy gun he’d never learned to shoot, to symbolically take Creepy into custody while the photographers and a Hearst Metrotone News cameraman fired away.
I didn’t like Hoover much more than Karpis.
All the while, Papa Celestin had been waiting patiently in his car.
“Where to next, Tokol?”
“Lakefront Airport. I want to see Karpis off.”
On the tarmac, where Karpis was bundled onto a Transcontinental & Western Air charter flight to St. Paul to answer kidnap charges, Hoover told me, “We would have gotten him sooner or later, Tokol, but I guess I should thank you anyway.”
“Damned white of you, Edgar. Say, throw me a bone from time to time. Not for the cash. Just want to keep my hand in. Besides, if I can’t piss you off I’m doing something wrong.”
Standing behind Hoover, Mike Litvak winked at me. He wasn’t keen on Hoover either.
Back at the hotel, the operator put me through to Diana in New York.
“Hey, dollface, how’d you like an all expenses paid trip to Chi-Town?”
“What’s there?”
“Clarence Darrow.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“Not to his friends. Meet me there and we’ll crawl the blues joints to hear Alberta Hunter and Big Bill Broonzy, bill and coo in a fabulous suite at the Drake Hotel, and dine on steak Diane and cherries jubilee served by the monkey-suits in the
Royal Pumpus Room.”
“You need not ask me twice, Tokee, darling.”
To indulge ourselves when so many were destitute, hungry, and sick during our terrible depression preyed on my conscience, yet I justified it by telling myself of the unsung good I always did. Nearly always.
In the morning, Papa Celestin picked me up at the hotel. I had one more matter to dispose of before heading to the Windy City.
“Where we goin’ now, Tokol?”
“Daytrip. The Baton Rouge Bureau of the New Orleans Item-Tribune.”
Diana and I had known the bureau’s Helen Grey Gilkison since she graduated from journalism school, and if anyone had a line on the missing Huey Long murder weapon she did. Helen had craved a newspaper career ever since she won a Times-Picayune high-school essay contest.
When the Kingfish was assassinated she was at the bloody scene, deputized by East Baton Rouge Coroner Thomas Bird to help him search the dead assassin’s pockets. Carl Weiss had a wallet containing six dollars, fountain pen, pocket knife, and an engraved calling card.
Helen said, “I don’t know why you’re so interested in that .32 Browning, Tokol. I saw it myself. It was right next to the body. Weiss bought it in Belgium when he was studying medicine abroad. We know because when he returned to America he filed a customs declaration claiming the gun had a value of eight dollars.”
“The gun he brought through customs wasn’t the one that killed Long, Helen. He used a different Browning, and that’s the one I want. I read that it was pinched at the scene, so it’s got to be somewhere.”
She sighed. “Okay, after I got your telegram I made a list of anyone who might have swiped it. Coroner Bird, of course. Also John Fred Odom, the district attorney. Highway Police Chief E.P. Roy. All of Huey’s bodyguards: Roden, Messina, Coleman, Bates, Votler, McQuiston. A judge named Fournet, a couple of state representatives, Riddle and Wimberly. So it could have been just about anybody. However…”
“Go on, Helen.”
“It was snatched by Brigadier General Louis Guerre, head of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. He’s the one who ordered the corridor cordoned off and the capitol locked down. Guerre wanted the gun as a souvenir.”
