AHMM, March 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Anything new?” Charley asked him when he met the car.

  Ross blinked at him. “Never seen nothing."

  Matter of fact, there wasn't much to see. Just the guards’ tent and a couple of boats tied up to the rickety little pier.

  Al looked pretty disgusted about this arrangement, and I expect he was. Al never went after anything or anybody without a solid angle and lots of backup.

  Charley explained how he'd planned a night raid on Nap by canoe, the one at the pier. But about midnight, when he and Ross snuck up to the tent ready to blow the guards to their Maker, they found them stone dead in a wallow of guns and bottles and puddles of puke.

  Now Nap's triggermen lay in the tent under a piece of tarp. When Eddy peeled it back, Al gazed down on the two boys and shook his head. “We're making a shooting gallery out of a great business,” he said. “And nobody is profiting."*

  But they hadn't been shot. Nor hooked or dug. Strangled, neither.

  However they got dead, I recognized one of them as Jack di Rippa, an old boy the newspapers liked to describe as “a known criminal, with a special fondness for aging streetwalkers."

  Charley poked a toe toward the t'other, a dark little fellow with a wine bottle by his hand. “Used to be one of my mugs,” he said. “Name of Shicklgruber. Just off the boat and always bragging about some cousin back in the old country—politician, paperhanger, something like that."

  By now Al was mad, like he always got when good Joes clicked it. “I curse whoever done this,” he shouted, shaking his cigar in the air.

  His face turned dark red and his scars started to glow like white-hot coals. “Why can't we treat our business like any other man treats his, something to work at in the daytime and forget when he goes home at night? There's plenty of business for everybody. Why kill each other over it?"*

  Then Al was all at once calm again. “Okay, Charley,” he said. “Let's get back to your plan for Nap. How'd you keep tabs on him?"

  "Just had him followed around,” Charley said. “He never seemed to care, even bought the trailer a Green River one time. Anybody got a fag?"

  Eddy broke out a pack of humps, and both men lit up.

  Charley said, “I had the island staked out all summer and fall—fellows on the lake looking like fishermen or in the brush making like poachers. Even got some Chippewa to keep an eye on the place while they was gathering the wild rice."

  "Nap come out to the island a lot?"

  "Not once since June. Nobody else, neither. Even the guards never went over ‘cause there wasn't a boat for ‘em to use. Nap brought the only one with him yesterday."

  Charley pointed his Camel toward the big rowboat by the pier. “Him and the others came in the afternoon, and the Kraut rowed ‘em out to the island. Took a couple trips."

  I said, “How you know that?"

  "He already told ya,” Eddy said, jerking his butt right up to my kisser. “Charley was on their tail, and even a hillbilly like you musta hoid of field glasses."

  This was going to be the end of Edward G. Caesar. “Listen, you yeller Yankee—"

  Big Al stepped in. “Cut it out, both of you. Think about these two dead fellows. What do you want to do, get yourself killed before you're thirty? You'd better get some sense while a few of us are left alive."*

  While Charley rowed Al and me and Eddy across the lake—Ross stayed with the stiffs—I could see the island was as naked as the rest of that poor, timbered-out country. Except for a blanket of bush and a little stand of cedar, the island was picked clean as a chicken at Christmas.

  Which was just the way Nap planned it. “Nobody's gonna jump outta the woods at me,” he once told Al. “And with the lake for protection, I don't have to bother building guard towers."

  As for his big log house, it sure wasn't the kind of cabin I grew up in—ramshackle pine over the dirt floor, swarming with young'uns and a pack of hounds to keep you from freezing to death come January. No siree, this house was made of fat brown logs with a shake roof and pretty green shutters that would've looked good even in Winnetka.

  After we tied up at the island pier, Al told Eddy to check out the three little outbuildings, then come back and stay with the boat.

  "We're going in the house,” he said to me and Charley. “Get out your gat, Charley. Bill, you bring our guns."

  The rain started in again as we walked up the gravel path, Al smoking his cigar, me carrying the bag of iron, Charley pointing a .38 at his foot.

  The big oak front door, with irises and what looked like a beehive carved into it, stood wide open. Al sent Charley inside to see if the place was like he'd left it.

  "Just like it,” Charley said when he came back, though he didn't look happy over saying so.

  Al and me stepped into what Short Nap likely called his foyer but which looked more like the hat check at the Aragon Ballroom. It held fur coats and fedoras, cloaks and cloches. A brown deerstalker hung from a wooden peg.

  "Uh-oh,” Al said, when he saw the dead guy on the wide-planked floor.

  "Just like when I was here before,” Charley said.

  Al stooped to look at the body. “Willy ‘the Shake’ Iago,” he said. “Ex-doughboy, like all Nap's triggermen. Heard he won lots of medals in the war. Much good they did him in here."

  Next to Willy was a silver hip hootch. A Chicago typewriter leaned against the wall.

  We stepped over Iago's body and into the dining room.

  "Will you look at this,” Al said when he saw the room. “Place is bigger than Holy Name Cathedral."

  It was something all right, with a bank of windows running along one whole side, walk-in fireplaces at each end, and log rafters big around as Al's waist. Wide flagstone hearths held half a dozen overstuffed chairs made out of purple plush with little gold irises woven in. Above the fireplaces—their fires still a-smolder—hung the prettiest stuffed heads you ever did see.

  Stretched twixt the two fireplaces was a long table covered with a fancy white cloth. On it sat liquor bottles and silver forks and china eatware. It also bore the remains of a fat Virginia ham and three dead men.

  Not just any dead men either. Slumped on that table were the corpses of some of the best bootleggers in Senator Volstead's America.

  We gazed at them, real quiet-like, till Al broke in. “Now ain't this just a shame?” he said.

  Then he smiled.

  "Whatcha think happened here, Mister Capone?” Charley asked.

  "You tell us, bright boy."

  "I ... I ... I..."

  "Ah, shut up and lemme think,” Al said.

  The room was just like the guard tent—a little puke and no blood at all. Short Nap, decked out in a come-to-Jesus suit, sat slumped in his chair at the head of the table. On his left, half fallen on the floor, was a young fellow also wearing tails.

  "Mickey Carleone,” Al said with a sigh. “From back East. I do business with his brother Don. He's gonna be awful sore about this."

  Further along the table came still another man in a monkey suit—Dr. Arthur C. Moriarity, face smack down in his plate. Doc used to teach chemistry at some jerkwater college out in Iowa. That is, till Big Al came to town and learned him real chemistry.

  "Look at all that booze, will ya,” Charley said, pointing at the table.

  And he was right. There was bottle on bottle. I don't know how many or what they all held. Lots of whiskey, for sure, every bottle of it with a label claiming it was genuine bottled-in-the-bond. No siree, no aged-in-the-barn squirrel dew on Napoleon Short's table. Just plenty of old French cream, lots of Minnehaha water, and veeno in every color of the rainbow.

  I'd set the guns down and picked up a bottle of something called amaretto—it smelled like nuts—when I noticed that a few of the embroidered chairs around the table stood empty. While Al and Charley were still tut-tutting, I pulled up the tablecloth.

  "There's three skirts under here,” I said.

  Al's eyes slewed toward Charley. “Didn't you say you only saw tw
o get in the boat?"

  "I thought I seen just the two, but how do you know these days? The broads all got their hairs bobbed."

  "Well, there's three here now,” I said. “And one deader'n the next."

  "Haul ‘em out,” Al said. “So we can get ‘em sorted."

  Charlie and I grabbed a pair of silk-stockinged mumblypegs and yanked. Out from under the table came the body of a black-headed jane. She was maybe twenty years old and dressed fit to kill in a green evening frock.

  When Al saw her, he nodded his head. “Shouldn't be a surprise,” he said.

  I asked how come.

  "Know who this frail is? This is Antonia Metz-Soprano,” Al said. “From back East."

  Back East folks were always erasing each other.

  "The Metz-Sopranos have been singing,” Al said.

  "To John Law?"

  "The Feds."

  "Can they carry a tune?” I asked.

  "Depends on who's listening."

  I said, “If it's another'n like that Eliot Mess, no point getting all lathered-up. Boy smashes a couple beer barrels, thinks he oughta have a Congressional Medal. Fact is, him and them gumps of his couldn't find their way outta the Loop without calling in the Rainbow Girls."

  Al grinned. “There's a lot of mob guys might not be casual as you where it comes to squawkers."

  He took out his Cuban stogies, offered them around. “How about it, Charley?"

  Charley nearly had his cigar lit before he figured out what Al was getting at.

  "Jeepers, Mr. Capone,” he said, the Havana dropping from his fingers. “I didn't do this. I swear on my grandmother's knees I didn't."

  Al grinned again. “I know you didn't. Whoever did's got more than cheese for brains."

  Charley couldn't dare take offense, so he picked up the cigar and went to stand by the window, smoking and peering into the drizzle.

  Me, I'd passed on the stogie—I'd rather blow up a tailor-made Fatima—and was taking a looksee at the Metz-Soprano dame. “No blood on her. Only a little puke, just like on the men."

  When we pulled out the other two bodies—a redhead and a blonde, both bottle jobs—it was the same.

  "How many's that make now?” Al asked.

  I ticked them off on my fingers—the three triggermen, the six at the dinner table. “Nine,” I said.

  Al again shook his head in puzzlement.

  After a while he said, “Know who the two fems are, don't you?"

  "Sure. Bessy James and that doll Doc Moriarity's been playing with lately."

  "Bessy was Short Nap's payoff man, you know. Very smart lady."

  "If she was so smart,” I said, “how'd she wind up under a dinner table, dead as any Dumb Dora?"

  From his spot by the window, Charley said, “Never seen how he could put a frill in charge of his brass."

  Al said, “Nap stumbled onto her when she was just a kid in his stable. She wasn't much good on the game, he claimed. But, oh boy, could she diddle numbers."

  Al squatted beside red-haired Bessy, his britches stretched almost as tight over his wide butt as the black silk crepe was over hers. He lifted her diamond choker to show a yellow iris tattoo.

  "Nap always liked a union label on his merchandise,” I said.

  "Bet we won't find any tattoos on that one,” Al said, nodding at the other gal. “Her name's Isabel Lecter, and she's a student dietitian."

  Isabel, blond as Mary Pickford, had on a white middy blouse, pleated tweed skirt, kid-leather oxfords.

  "Girl must've got the wrong invitation,” Al said as he stood up. “She sure isn't dressed for a formal supfest like everybody else is."

  "But she's cold meat anyhow,” Charley said.

  "Out,” Al told him, cocking a thumb toward the door. “Now."

  When Charley had gone, Al picked up one of the wine bottles. It was labeled Chateau de Froggy or some such, though I doubted anything French was inside. Short Nap had a cellar full of fancy labels, and the fakers to print them.

  Al sniffed at the wine bottle and a couple of other empties. Then he held some of the gin and whiskey bottles to the light before opening and sniffing them too.

  "Did Charley say who brought the liquor?” he asked.

  "Said Nap brought it all up hisself, early in the summer. Said Nap's boys wouldn't let anybody else come on the island with so much as a split in their hand."

  Al already knew—and it was a sore point with him—that Nap would only drink, or serve, his own stuff. Even when he sat in Al's offices at the Hawthorne Hotel, smoking Al's Cubans, he still sipped from the tickler he kept in his pocket.

  "Look for his flask,” Al told me. “The others’ too. Bessy'll have hers strapped to her right thigh."

  I grinned when I found it. Al was some hijacker all right.

  Meantime, he'd set to inspecting the Virginia ham and its fixings, poking and slicing and sniffing. But never, I saw, tasting of anything.

  When he was done with the table and the flasks, he went to the kitchen. Except for the boxes the food came in—they were from a North Avenue delicatessen—the kitchen was cold, damp, and empty.

  Back in the dining room, Al ran a hand over the whiskers he liked to raise when he came up north. He still looked puzzled.

  He was poking around in the ashtrays on the table and I'd moseyed over to the windows when Charley came bursting back in. “Al, come quick! Eddy's pooped."

  Sure enough, inside one of Short Nap's sheds, Eddy lay dead. I can't say I was very sorry about it.

  There was no blood on the shed's dirt floor or on any of the rough, empty shelves and when Charley checked Eddy over, all he found was a pearl-handled .44, a half-empty wine split, and two herds of Camels.

  Al asked Charley what was in the other two sheds.

  "One of ‘em's empty,” Charley said. “The other's just got a bunch of dead soldiers in it."

  Back in the house, we stood by one of the big fireplaces, smoking and warming up. Al went back to scratching his whiskers.

  Presently, Charley got glasses and an unopened bottle of wine from the table. When he'd found a corkscrew, he pulled the plug and poured three goodly dollops of some French stuff.

  As Al and me stuck our noses in our glasses, Charley raised his and uttered every bootlegger's favorite toast—"Prohibition now, Prohibition tomorrow, Prohibition forever."

  The words were barely in the air when Al's glass went splintering onto the stone hearth. He slapped away my own glass, then Charley's.

  While me and Charley stood there with our jaws around our belt buckles, Al pointed at the broken glass and spilt wine. “Poison,” he said.

  "Hunh?"

  "You dopes!” Al said. “They've all been poisoned. The ones in here, that boy in the hall, Eddy, the ones across the lake. All of ‘em."

  He wheeled on Charley. “And I don't like it! Poison just ain't American! My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way."*

  For a minute, Charley looked like he'd been smacked with an oak towel.

  I said, “What you mean poison?"

  "Can't you smell it?"

  "Hunh?"

  "The bitter almond,” Al said. “It's cyanide."

  I'd smelled something like almonds around the table, but I thought it came from that amaretto stuff. Charley, finding himself still among the living, swore he didn't smell a thing.

  We went to the table, where Al picked up one of the wine bottles and shoved it under my nose. “Smell it?"

  I did. “But how you know it's cyanide?"

  "Read about it in Agatha Christie,” Al said, and right then I decided I better get my own set of the Harvard Classics.

  "I never poisoned nobody,” Charley said. He was still plenty scared.

  Lucky for Charley, Al had calmed down. “I know you didn't,” he said. “And I'll prove it. Go out to that shed and bring back half a dozen dead soldiers."

  When Charley'd gone, I said, “If Charley didn't kill ‘em, who did?"
>
  Al settled his bulk in one of the purple plush easy chairs. Folding diamond-ringed hands over his belly, he said, “It was an accident."

  I picked up on the notion right off. “So you're saying Nap wanted to do Doc or the Carleone kid and slipped up, put poison in everybody's drinks?"

  "Now, now, Bill,” the Big Fellow said. “You know Nap was too smart for that."

  I pointed at the table. “One of them did it, then."

  "They couldn't've delivered enough poison."

  "Not even Doc or his dietitian gal?"

  "Use your head, Bill. Think Nap's boys woulda taken a drink off Doc Moriarity, much less his girlfriend?"

  "That brings us back to Charley."

  "Charley's a man!” Al snapped. “He'da come in with guns blazing."

  Charley came in now, arms loaded with empty wine bottles.

  "Take a whiff of ‘em,” Al said.

  Sure enough, the bottles smelt of bitter almonds.

  Al said, “You boys know plenty about making hooch. But you don't know anything about wine, do you?"

  We admitted we didn't.

  "When you make wine, ‘specially white wine, and you want it to look and taste real good, you have to do something to clarify it,” he said. “That's called fining, and most often it's done with cyanide."

  Al lit a Havana. “I won't bore you with all of how it works, but sometimes it doesn't go right, and the wine gets poisoned."

  "You didn't learn that out of no book,” I said. “More like in your daddy's basement."

  Al winked at me and puffed his stogie.

  But I was still a little confused. “How come these folks went and downed what was pretty much straight prussic acid?"

  "Simple,” Al said. “Nap's booze is always so bad, nobody knew what they were drinking."

  "We're sure in a tough business,” I said.

  "You're right about that,” Al said, sounding a mite sad. “It's a thankless one and full of grief."*

  By now, Charley had stuck his nose in half a dozen wine bottles. Finally, looking like a bluetick that can't tree his coon, he turned to Al. “Don't smell like nothing,” he said.

  "These stiffs sure will pretty soon,” Al said, standing up. “Let's go, Bill."

  Charley let out a yelp. “But, Mr. Capone, that's why I come to you. I don't know what I'm s'posed to do with all these dead people. The cops'll think I killed ‘em."