THE DARK CITY (Eliot Ness)

by Max Allan Collins

  "I was on my way home from a banquet at the Hollenden," Burton explained to Ness. The mayor, in white tie and tails, was an incongruous figure in this neighborhood, standing in an ice-slick street before the burning ramshackle frame house. "I heard an old-age home had caught fire. I thought I should check it out ..."

  Just yesterday Ness had ordered a police radio installed in the mayor's car, at His Honor's request. He had also presented Burton with a gold Safety Department badge, which had pleased the mayor, who seemed to have a childlike enthusiasm for cops-and-robbers stuff.

  "Fire's under control," Ness said.

  "Fatalities?"

  "Two," Ness said, and gave particulars, as many as he knew, anyway. "And thirteen more inhaled a lot of smoke. The Salvation Army's helping us get them to Mount Sinai and Glenville General."

  Burton nodded gravely. He looked over at the burning house across the way. "When I heard an old-age home was on fire, I envisioned something else."

  "Me, too. I wonder how many of these rattraps are passing for nursing homes."

  "We'll have to find out."

  "And we will. You know, we have to talk money."

  The mayor snorted. "Is there any other subject?"

  "The fire department's in sad shape."

  Ness began giving details, but Burton interrupted, saying, "Let's get away from the smell of smoke." He gestured down the street, past the thinning crowd of gawking neighbors. "Let's walk and talk.

  "You've obviously seen why my overriding concern is getting our budget past the council," the mayor said, as they strolled down the dimly lit streets lined with ramshackle frame houses.

  "I can certainly see why we need money for the police department," Ness said. "Money other than the graft some cops are pocketing, that is."

  "You've spent the past two days on the prowl, haven't you, Eliot?"

  It was the first time Burton had called Ness by his first name.

  "I spent most of the afternoon in my office. But yes, I've been out and about. Went on a sorry excuse for a bookie-joint raid this morning. Toured some of the precincts."

  "What have you seen?"

  Ness shrugged. "A bunch of sloppy, poorly trained cops who are low in morale, to say the least, some of whom—perhaps many of whom—are so corrupt they make a Chicago cop look like St. Francis of Assisi."

  "These are rank-and-file cops you're talking about. Any sign of corruption higher up?"

  "Not specifically, but I heard an interesting rumor."

  He told Burton about the so-called "outside chief."

  "Damn," Burton said, his voice breathy. "If such a man exists, and you could nail him ..."

  "You'd have your top-ranking corrupt cop for the papers, and at the same time we'd knock the pins out from under our 'department within the department.' We'd accomplish something substantial."

  Burton had started to smile just thinking about it. "The city council wouldn't dare withhold your budget requests."

  "I'd think not. And all I have to do is turn that rumor into a man. And find him, and arrest him, and make it stick."

  "And do it by early March," Burton added, the dreamy expression gone. "Sorry you took this job?"

  "No."

  "You seem less enthusiastic than you were in my office Wednesday. What do you propose to do at this point?"

  Ness stopped. "Well, to do anything much, I need money, now."

  Burton's face tightened. "I thought you understood that we don't get any money until you produce."

  "I'm not talking about money on a budget level."

  "What level, then?"

  Ness gestured in frustration. "I need to be able to hire men outside the department. I need to be able to bring people in when I need to."

  "Men? People?"

  "Investigators. Including private detectives. I know some pretty good operatives. A friend of mine in Chicago might come in handy now and then. I can't get this job done if I have to draw from the police department for my staff."

  Burton sighed. "Hardly."

  They began to walk again.

  "These investigators would mostly work undercover," Ness said. "So we need new faces. They can't be a part of the current system. Oh, sure, I can call on rookies for occasional help—young kids who haven't lost their fire yet, who became cops for some reason other than a pension and/or a chance to tie into some graft."

  "But your investigators can't be rookies."

  "No. And they may come and go, like I said. I'll only need a handful, but they'll have to be paid."

  The Mayor stopped and stood with his arms folded; he rocked on his feet a while and thought. "What if we could come up with something like the Secret Six, in Chicago?"

  "Businesspeople, you mean?"

  The two men stood in a pool of light under a street lamp.

  "Merchants," the Mayor said. "Industrialists. I have friends in the Chamber of Commerce and the American Legion who are good and tired of being shaken down."

  Burton had long been associated with the Legion, having been its county chairman.

  Ness raised a hand. "They could have no say over my actions."

  "None at all." Then, thoughtful, Burton said, "But I think perhaps I could put together a secret fund for your investigators. A slush fund of sorts. Perhaps just to tide us over until we get our budget. Assuming we do, of course. And it wouldn't be bottomless, by any means."

  Ness smiled tightly. "Just so I can get my feet wet in it."

  Burton's eyes narrowed; he gestured with a gently lecturing forefinger. "Any investigators you hire will draw a public salary, but they'll be listed on the city's payrolls as laborers. We'll supplement their salaries with money from our new Secret Six."

  "That would be just about perfect, Your Honor."

  Burton smiled a little. "Don't get your feet wet just yet. Let me see if I can get something like this off the ground, first. You, uh, haven't made Inspector Potter very happy, now, have you?"

  "All I did was promote him."

  "Interesting promotion."

  "I hope you don't mind the way I handled it. If I could've busted him on corruption charges, you'd have had your top-ranking bent cop to feed the press. At this stage, though, all I know for sure about Potter is he plays political games. He'll be investigated, but I had to act sooner than that. I had to get him out from under me, now."

  "No, no," the Mayor said, patting the air with his hands. "I wholeheartedly approve. I'm pleased. Even amused."

  Ness had put the inspector in charge of a traffic survey designed to study placement of traffic lights, boulevard stop signs and other matters "materially affecting traffic." Stressing the "high priority" of dealing with traffic problems, Ness had announced to the press that the investigation needed to be done "intelligently" and there-fore the "highest technical intelligence" available in the entire department needed to be employed. Hence, the safety director had relieved Inspector Potter of his duties as chief of the Detective Bureau, and placed him at the head of the survey.

  "The papers treated you kindly, where the Potter ouster is concerned," Burton commented.

  They began to walk again, heading back.

  "They did like it, yes."

  "That's the kind of publicity we're looking for. That's the kind that can get me that slush fund you need. That's the kind that can help us get our budget past even an unwilling city council."

  Ness stopped again. "You say that as if I've generated some other kind of publicity, as well."

  The Mayor stopped, too. "Uh, then, I take it you didn't see the last edition of the Plain Dealer?"

  "No."

  "It's in the car," Burton said. "I'll show you."

  They walked quickly to the limo, where Burton got the paper from the front seat and handed it to Ness. A head-line said,

  FORMER G-MAN'S

  FIRST RAID

  A FIZZLE

  Under Wild's byline, the article went on: "Director Ness accompanied police in a raid on a barbershop and came up empty-h
anded. Ness found a man with earphones listening to a radio broadcast of a horse race, but there were no betting slips and no evidence that money was being wagered. The celebrated gangbuster, it would seem, may find Cleveland a tougher nut to crack than Chicago."

  "That son of a bitch," Ness said, under his breath. He thrust the paper back at Burton. "That's what I get for trusting a guy who ran with Jake Lingle."

  "What is the, uh . . . scoop? If you'll pardon the expression."

  "The scoop is, I invited Wild along on this raid as a favor. I didn't organize the raid. I just went along to observe procedure, and see if a department leak would sink the thing. Which it did, of course." He pointed at the newspaper Burton held. "Wild knew that. Playing it like it was my raid that went sour is a cheap damn shot."

  "We need good press relations, Eliot. Obviously."

  "I'll handle this in my own way."

  Burton shrugged. "That is our arrangement."

  The fire across the way was still going. Flames licked up in a few windows, but the column of smoke was narrowing.

  Ness forgot his departmental problems, for the moment, including that SOB Sam Wild. He looked over at the house, the basic structure of which had somehow survived the fire.

  "Two men died in that house tonight," Ness said.

  "A shame."

  "Sure, it's a shame. But we also have to find out why."

  Ness bade the Mayor goodnight and went home to see if his wife was still speaking to him.

  CHAPTER 8

  When Joe Fusca, alias Special Agent Sidney White, pulled his sporty blue Packard up in front of the paint-peeling, ramshackle two-story clapboard on East Sixty-sixth, he could scarcely believe his eyes. This was hardly a classy neighborhood, sure, but this eyesore was the bottom of the barrel. The pits.

  Hard to believe there was a twelve-grand passbook in a shack like that, ripe for the picking.

  It was Monday evening, a little before seven, and Joe was pretty much over it. He'd killed before, in Chicago, but that had been different. That had been mob stuff. You had to prove yourself to those guys if you were going to stay on the in with them. You just didn't say no when they asked a favor. And it was other mob guys he'd hit, after all. It was in the family.

  Friday night had been a whole 'nother deal. It had given him the willies, doing that. It was creepy, it was dangerous, and, anyway, the two old guys he bumped off were just looking out after their own best interests. Which was more than you could say for most of the bazoos on his sucker list. Most of these lilies were so ripe for plucking it was almost a duty to get there and do the job before somebody beat you to it. People that stupid didn't deserve money. People who saved money for a rainy day when they were in the middle of a goddamn downpour simply had to be relieved of the burden of their dough.

  But those two old birds at the Joanna Home, Great War veterans both, had tumbled to the scam. The way it was set up, promising the money within sixty days, was supposed to give the salesmen like Joe that long to fully work a neighborhood, and move on. Only those two old boys had got talking between themselves, after turning their passbooks—one for $5600 and another for $3200— over to "Agent White." They took a streetcar down to the Hanna Building where the Memorial Developers, Inc., office was located, just a boiler shop, really, and started complaining. They were talking about going to the county prosecutor, and the boiler-shop boys calmed them down and said Agent White would do a follow-up call.

  Agent White had. It had been his own idea to handle it the way he had, but he'd heard no complaints from up-stairs. He knew the lights went out at the Joanna Home around nine, and he slipped in the back door a little before ten. The geezers in question shared a room in back, and they were both asleep in the darkness. Joe didn't even know which one was which, as he crushed the skull of first one, and then the other, with a sash weight. He splashed them down with kerosene, a can of which he'd lugged in with him, and splashed some more on the walls, particularly around a light switch and a couple of electrical outlets that were showing loose frayed wires. The Joanna Home was a wreck, anyway—a lousy firetrap. It was a crime passing the joint off as an old folks' home, Joe thought. The crooks in charge would no doubt take the blame for the fire. That is, the faulty wiring would.

  He'd lit two matches—one each for the already dead old men—and tossed them one by one at their targets, lurching back at the immediate flare-up, and ducking out back. No one had seen him as far as he knew. There was a one-story lean-to out back, a sort of annex built onto the house, where some of the old biddies slept (he'd picked up eight passbooks at the Joanna Home), and the lights were out there, too. He was safe.

  But he'd had a bad weekend. He hadn't worked at all. He wasn't cut out to be no fucking torch. He was a con artist, not a killer. It made his stomach jumpy.

  He just sat in his hotel room and listened to the radio and read every edition of every paper, looking for mentions of the fire. When the Plain Dealer reported the fire warden as blaming the blaze on a short circuit in the "old, rotten wiring, sending flames crackling up through the dead, dry timber of the walls into the attic," Joe felt relieved, but not at ease. He could only make it through the weekend by drinking his worries away. Straight Scotch, and a lot of it, had allowed Monday to finally roll around.

  He'd felt hung over and shaky, but ready to have at the world again. He went down to the Hanna Building to get a fresh list of names. The way the scam operated was, like all great scams, simple. Neighborhoods were surveyed and blocked off. Slush money was paid to a savings-and-loan employee in the district for providing a sucker list of passbook holders. Commissions were paid to the savings-and-loan bird dog whenever a salesman successfully scammed a passbook. With this system, a guy like Joe didn't have to go door to door. He could hit pay dirt every time he made a call.

  There were different ways of going about it, on Joe's end. Some salesmen posed as bank presidents or big real estate operators, particularly those salesmen dealing with clients who could read. They would openly tout cemetery lots as a good investment ("everybody has to die sometime, and there's a big demand for burial plots") which was horsefeathers, of course. Enough lots were available in the Cleveland area to bury the city's dead for the next three hundred years.

  That was how the racket got off the ground in the first place: cemeteries laying off their excess lots cheap to the "sales organization" Fusca worked for. He was vague about who the big shots were. He had the name of a contact, some guy who ran a horse parlor on Ivanhoe Road, if he got in a jam and needed to lam out or hole up. Beyond that he knew nothing.

  Except he knew it wasn't the Mayfield Road bunch. They'd tried to cut themselves in for a percentage a while back and got told to back off, by the cops no less. He didn't know who would have the kind of leverage it took to make the local mob back off like that, using the cops as muscle. Some crooked politician, maybe. Joe didn't really care.

  All he knew was he was making good dough, a third of everything he hauled to shore.

  Of course, Joe had less overhead than most of the salesmen. A lot of them worked in pairs. Those posing as bankers or real estate agents needed translators, as many of the marks didn't speak English. These marks Joe simply avoided. And in most cases it was necessary to employ yet another bird dog, namely somebody in the neighborhood, a respected businessman who spoke the mark's native tongue, to make introductions and pave the way. Or the cop on the beat, of course.

  Joe cut out the middle-man with his G-man routine. The shiny gold badge and a little Uncle Sam went a long way with these dumb fucking hunkies. And he got a kick out of using a G-man badge to bilk a mark. It was like getting back at the bastards for nabbing his brother Phillie.

  Phillie had been the class act of all con artists. Joe admired and loved his older brother. Every Christmas, coming up soon now, he sat down and wrote Phillie a letter, and sent it off to the pen at Atlanta.

  Everything Joe knew about conning came from Phillie. When they were little kids, Joe and his o
lder brother had come over from Italy with their parents. Their papa was an honest man who almost made a living with an import cheese business in Brooklyn. When Phillie came into the nearly bankrupt business at age sixteen, it took him only a few months to turn things around by bribing customhouse weighers.

  In 1915 Phillie got sentenced to a year in prison, but only served a few months. An eloquent letter from the parish priest ("the gallant lad shielded his father from jailhouse bars, shouldering the blame on himself) won him a Presidential pardon. It paid, young Joe had learned, to put money in the collection plate.

  The next family business, engineered by Phillie of course, was importing human hair from Italy to make wigs for American would-be Gibson girls. This went very well, till the Burns Detective Agency proved the Fuscas had conned twenty banks out of nearly a million bucks by taking loans on hair shipments based on phony invoices.

  The whole family was caught in New Orleans, boarding a Honduras-bound liner. Joe tried to throw twenty grand overboard, but it landed in a government boat. Phillie again gallantly took the rap for the family, winding up in the Tombs in New York City. He played stoolie for the prosecutors for a year, spying on other prisoners, and earned the gratitude of the law, and a suspended sentence.

  Chicago and Prohibition came next. Phillie became a partner in a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, entitling him to five thousand gallons of alcohol a month for production of hair tonic and cough syrup. It was Joe's idea (Phillie was proud) to color and scent the products in such a way that a simple run through a still turned them back into high-proof straight alcohol. A little water, some color and flavoring, and you had stuff "right off the boat."

  They had to tie in with the Capone crowd, of course, but there was money enough to be had by all.