The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “I’m so glad we talked,” Caroline says.

  “Me, too,” Stefan says. So the wife and children start to see more of Peter’s brother, at holidays, weekends, more in the summer. Stefan takes Henry for a few days when Sylvie’s born, shows him the neighborhood where his dad grew up, without saying anything beyond what they see, hear, smell, taste, though it’s hard not to impart the lesson that almost nobody in the world lives like the people of Bratenahl do. The uncle looks after all the kids whenever Caroline needs him. Years later, when she tells him she needs to escape, he understands, and then is the closest thing to a parent Jackie will ever know.

  But Peter won’t know any of that. When the trouble starts, he’ll feel like he’s all alone. By the time it’s over, he really will be.

  Chapter 12

  It’s the evening of June 24, 1947. More than twelve thousand people are packed into the Cleveland Arena on Euclid Avenue, filling all sixty rows of the place, cramming themselves into the floor seats, until the place can’t fit another soul. At home, in bars, they’re gathered around the radio. They’re talking about it on the street. It’s all for the fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Jimmy Doyle, the first championship boxing match Cleveland’s seen in a while. Robinson’s held the world welterweight title for just a few months. He gets it in December 1946 after he goes fifteen rounds against Tommy Bell; he wins by unanimous decision. He should have been champion a long time ago, some people say then, because going into that December fight, he’s got seventy-three wins, one draw, and only one loss, against Jake LaMotta—you know, Raging Bull—but they’ve fought five bouts already, and Robinson’s beaten him in four of them. The draw is with José Basora; they go ten rounds in Philly in 1945, but when they have their rematch in 1950, Robinson knocks out Basora fifty seconds into the first round. The rumor going around is that it takes so long for Sugar Ray to get to be champion because he won’t deal with the mafia, because of racism. But after a while, Robinson’s just too good for all of that.

  So, the packed arena. It’s hot and getting hotter, and loud. Peter Henry Hightower’s in the third row of the floor seats, on an aisle. He’s there by himself. Caroline’s home with the children; Jackie’s only two, and is turning out to be anxious, emotional, while Muriel, who’s five, just wants to talk all the time. Sylvie and Rufus—nine and seven—are the opposite: so quiet, calm, always heading off somewhere, vanishing together. Henry, fifteen, is a serious kid, tall and strong. In the spring he plays baseball for his school, and it’s pretty clear he’ll be the team captain by the time he graduates. He has a discipline, a focus about him, that makes him seem older than he is. Because Henry’s athletic, Peter suggests just before he leaves that maybe he could take his oldest boy with him ringside, and Caroline just glares. She hates boxing, Peter knows that. But it’s something else, too: She knows Peter will end up conducting business at that fight one way or the other. There’ll be too many knowing handshakes, too many pats on the back. Way too many sentences with vague nouns in them. Henry’s not stupid, Caroline’s look says. Do you really want him to know you’re a criminal?

  Things change between Peter and Caroline. In the early years of their marriage, there’s a part of her that can’t get enough of the crime, the deals, the conniving. It teaches her how to manipulate her own family, the Andersons, even through her first falling-out with them. In 1936 her brother William finds out at last just how much better off Peter has become than he is, and there’s a night when he’s angry about it. But it’s so easy to smooth over, just a matter of months. A generous gift over the holidays, a promise of a retainer in one of Peter’s business ventures, an apology from her husband that sounds authentic, and soon they’re laughing at Anderson family gatherings again, patting each other on the back, wishing her the best. Caroline notices that the days of William confiding anything to her have ended; a trust has been broken, and it’ll never be restored. But she decides that what’s left of the affection between them after that is enough for now. After all, she thinks to herself, I love my brother; I don’t need him. She’s twenty-nine then, old and smart enough to see how callous she’s being, but still thinks the sincerity behind it matters, and that it’ll let her fix the damage later.

  The realization that she’s wrong takes years to sink in, but hits her at last on a Saturday morning in March 1942. She’s sitting at a table on the long sunporch over the lawn that rolls down to the lake, a cup of hot water in her hand; she’s a tea drinker, but she’s six months pregnant with Muriel, and something about tea makes her want to throw up. She looks out to the horizon, toward Canada. There’s a light rain over the water. The newspaper’s folded on the table next to her, but she hasn’t read it. It’s full of news from the war, though you could say there’s still not enough, because we seem to get through the entire thing without knowing just how bad things get for the soldiers fighting it—anywhere, let alone east of Germany. Rufus and Sylvie are playing in the living room. Henry’s upstairs. Her husband is still sleeping, from a very late night; she’s not sure, but she thinks he didn’t get back until dawn. He’s getting too old to be out like that, she thinks. It’s an idle phrase, one she’s thought before, and often, even though she knows why he’s out like that: It’s when the other side of his business gets done. But this morning, it irritates her more than usual. It occurs to her that this criminal thing has been bothering her for a while. No. A long while. Maybe years. Now her brain is off and running, and it goes all the way back to their courtship. The first time she saw the house. Someday I’ll be clear of them, he said to her then, and she knows he might have meant it as an aspiration—Peter, for all his directness, never speaks in absolutes—but the young Caroline heard it as a promise, a condition for marriage. And the older Caroline realizes that she’s been waiting ever since for him to give it all up, to cut those ties. At Henry’s birth. At his mother’s death. At Sylvie’s birth, the first girl. At Rufus’s birth two years later. There’s always been that hope, that one day he’ll come home, wait until everyone else is asleep, take her in his arms and say it: We’re safe. We’re free. Because what made the crime thrilling when she was younger was the certainty—buried so deep she couldn’t see it then, even though it affected her—that someday it would end. But now it’s been sixteen years, and they have three children, soon to be four. And she keeps reading in the papers about the violence gangsters inflict on each other. It’s not thrilling anymore. It just seems dangerous. And she thinks, then, of what she’s lost: her brother’s trust, and her parents’ with it. Even Cecily’s. Was it worth it? she thinks. To live like this?

  That Saturday morning, Peter wakes up to find her just a little bit more distant. Over the next five years, there are fights, every eight months or so. When are you going to get out? Why do you still do this? Sometimes she’s screaming at him. His calm is infuriating. It’s complicated, he says. We need to wait for the right time. This line is the worst thing he can say to her in 1945, when she’s pregnant with Jackie, and fighting even more. It’s been nineteen years, she seethes, and there has never been a right time. He’s reduced to his last defense then. Keep your voice down, he says. Do you want the children to hear? As if he’s the one trying to protect them from her. From then on, that’s the weapon they use against each other. The first one to accuse the other one of hurting the children wins, and they accuse each other of it often enough that, by 1947, each of them is starting to believe it about the other.

  In the Cleveland Arena, the bell goes off for the first round. The crowd sucks in its collective breath when the people see how fast Sugar Ray Robinson is. They know he’s the champion; some people are already saying that, pound for pound, he’s the greatest boxer who ever lived. But it’s another thing to see it. He keeps his distance a little, like a man admiring the cut of another man’s suit, as his biographer will write about him later, and then moves in, throwing punches faster than Jimmy Doyle can keep them off him. Doyle’s a real fighter, too. He’s from Los
Angeles and he’s been pro since 1941, with the busted nose to show for it. He gets a reputation when one fight of his becomes a fight, the two boxers falling through the ropes of the ring and onto the floor, Doyle still going at it. He wasn’t afraid of nothing, another boxer will say years later. He’s single and lives at home with his mother, and he has this idea that he can make enough from boxing to set her up: buy her a house, some nice things. Enough that she can be comfortable. If he hits it big enough, he says, maybe he’ll stop fighting, too. But right now, he’s boxing. He gets through the first round, the second, the third, and Robinson’s still coming. In the fourth round, a good hit from Sugar Ray shuts Doyle’s left eye, and it stays shut.

  The seat next to Peter is empty because he bought it for Henry, and he’s got his hat on it while he sits, impassive. The boy in him wants to put two fingers in his mouth and whistle, loud, every time Sugar Ray lands a solid hit. But that boy hasn’t had a chance to speak in a very long time.

  “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  Peter looks up. There’s a man in a yellow suit standing in the row. Young, maybe twenty-six, Peter thinks. But trying to look older with that mustache. He points at Peter’s hat.

  “Do you mind?”

  “No, of course not,” Peter says, and takes his hat, puts it in his lap.

  The man nods, sits. Watches Jimmy Doyle catch a blow to the side of the head that makes beads of sweat fly out of his hair.

  “He’s some fighter,” the man says.

  “Sugar Ray Robinson?” Peter says. “Yes, he is.”

  “I mean Jimmy Doyle.”

  Peter nods. “It’s a good match.”

  “Excuse me for asking,” the man in the yellow suit says, “but you’re not Peter Henry Hightower, are you?”

  Peter looks at him now, much longer, and the man has a sense of Hightower’s brain memorizing him. The lines on his face. The tangled whiskers in his mustache.

  “I’m sorry, do I know you?” Peter says.

  The man gives him a broad smile. “Joe Rizzi,” he says.

  “Lou’s son.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I knew your father very well, Joe.”

  “You did? I didn’t see you at the funeral, Mr. Hightower.”

  Peter blinks once, and Joe wonders if he can already see where all this is going.

  “I didn’t know he had died,” Peter says.

  “Yeah. Throat cancer. You must not have called much in the last couple years.”

  “No, I hadn’t. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

  Things are awkward for a couple minutes. The fourth round ends and the fighters go back to their corners, then come out swinging again.

  “I’m very sorry to hear about your father, Joe.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “I did think of him often.”

  “Well isn’t that nice. He used to talk about you all the time.”

  “Did he, now?”

  “He did. He mentioned this little routine you could do. A shtick, really. You know, talking like me.”

  Peter smiles. “Yes, I could.”

  “You don’t mind if I hear a bit of it, do you?”

  “Oh, no. I haven’t done it in years.”

  “Come on. It’s got to be in there somewhere.”

  “Oh, it is, it is,” Peter says. “But I don’t think I could summon it now.”

  “Why?” Joe says, and looks around. “Because of where we are?”

  “Yes, that’s part of it.”

  “But it’s part of you, too, isn’t it? Pete the Uke?”

  Peter smiles again. “I haven’t heard that name in years.”

  “That’s funny, because I heard it for years. My father was real proud of you, you know. How big you got, and so fast. That boy’s got a head on his shoulders, he used to say. He respected you so much.” He licks his lips. “Even though—maybe because—he knew what you had to do to get there.”

  “He exaggerated,” Peter says. “I was just lucky.”

  “I don’t think lucky is the word Rinaldo Panetti would use. I know for sure it’s not the word his wife and kids would use.”

  “Who’s Rinaldo Panetti?” Peter says.

  The tone of voice, the rhythm, is perfect, suggesting nothing but benign ignorance. I’m sorry, I haven’t met the man. As if Pete the Uke didn’t pull a razor across Rinaldo Panetti’s throat and get three guys to dump him in the lake. Joe Rizzi’s father told him that in confidence. It wasn’t information he was supposed to use; it was only to know, to understand the man. If anything, it was a warning, and a warning Joe Rizzi’s getting again right now, that Peter Henry Hightower is not a man to mess with. But Joe Rizzi’s come a long way to get here. He’s been asking around, going through his dad’s old things to find a cooked book or two. He’s linked it all up, the chain of crimes that starts in Tremont and ends in a giant shackle around Peter Henry Hightower’s ankle. The money laundering, the tax evasion. The payoffs, the kickbacks. The financing of a dozen or so operations over the years that turned a couple guys into corpses. And at the very beginning, the murder itself, the story that’s an open secret among the wiseguys of Cleveland, that Peter Henry Hightower is one of them. They respect him enough, know the system well enough, to never tell. But Joe Rizzi’s not quite smart enough and a little too ambitious to pay attention to respect. So something that could have been done anytime, by anyone in Cleveland’s criminal underground, Joe Rizzi is at last doing: He’s going for blackmail.

  “Oh, you know who Rinaldo Panetti is,” Joe Rizzi says. And then twirls his left pointer finger as though it were a knife and drags it across his own throat. Smiling the whole time, staring Hightower down.

  “Joe,” Peter says. “Do you mind if I call you Joe, Joe?”

  “No.”

  “We can’t talk about this here, Joe.”

  “Sure we can. Nobody’s paying any attention to us. We’re alone here.”

  “Alone?” Now Peter laughs. “All right, then,” he says. “Since we’re alone, I’ll say it plain. You have a choice to make right now. You can get up and walk away, and if I see you later, I’ll be cordial, nice and friendly, because I held your father in that kind of esteem. Or, you can change that tone of voice of yours right now, and we might even become friends. But continue with what you’re doing, and by God, I will ruin you. You will be like the walking dead.”

  For maybe a second, Joe Rizzi’s afraid, but it doesn’t show. “It’s interesting to hear you talk like that,” he says, “when you’re the one in the quicksand. You got nothing on me, see, because everyone knows I’m a dirtbag. But you? You’re squeaky clean. All those cocktail parties and business meetings you go to now, and no one suspects a thing. All those secrets tucked away safe in that big house of yours. But I can let them all out.” He’s feeling almost cocky now. “You ruining me? There’s nothing to ruin. But I can ruin you with a couple phone calls, a couple letters. First to your business associates. Maybe your wife’s family, too. Then to the police. Maybe they won’t have enough to put you away, but it’ll be enough to destroy that precious life you’ve built for yourself, won’t it? Because here’s the thing: You have all the power, all the money, all the influence. But I’ve got the truth. Nothing but the truth.” Now he can’t resist. “So help me, God.”

  The fifth round ends and they go into the sixth. Doyle’s still taking punches; he’s outstanding at it. Sugar Ray’ll say later how amazed he is at the hits Doyle takes. Then Doyle gets Robinson back, at last, right over the eye. Sugar Ray staggers back and starts to bleed. They fight the rest of the round to a draw. Doyle’s surviving. But in the seventh round, Robinson starts hitting him, hard, again and again.

  “What do you want?” Peter says at last. “Money, I assume.”

  “You’re smart,” Joe says.

  “How much?”
<
br />   “Let’s not put a number on it just yet. But you might want to think twice about getting ponies for your daughters.”

  “So you’re planning on ruining me anyway?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” Joe says. “But, hey, if that happens?” He shrugs.

  “I see.” For a moment Peter’s breezy. “So since it doesn’t matter to you, then maybe I’ll just ignore you and get on with my life.” Then Joe feels it before Peter speaks, the ice in the air. “You fucking wop lowlife. You two-bit imbecile. I could break your neck with my little toe and you’re too fucking stupid to even notice.”

  Peter’s not watching the fight anymore. He’s watching Joe Rizzi. And Joe Rizzi turns and looks back at him.

  “Sure,” he says, “but what about your children?”

  Peter swallows. Joe sees it and is satisfied. He’s already broken one rule today—the code of silence, a big one. Why not break a few more?

  “Oh, yes. Because I know where you live, and you can’t keep all your children in your sight all the time, can you? Can anyone? You have so many. It would be impossible to keep one of them from going missing. And if one of them does, Peter, there won’t be a ransom. Oh, no. None of that fucking around for me. I’ll make it look like one of the torso murders, like the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run did it. Yes I will.”

  It’s been nine years since the last victims were discovered: On August 16, 1938, at the dump on the corner of Lake Shore Drive and East 9th Street, three men come across what look like human bones, and get the first policeman they can find. Turns out there’s a human torso there, a woman’s, wrapped in heavy brown paper, a striped summer coat, and a quilt. The thighs are right under it, bundled in the same paper and held together with a rubber band. There’s another package five feet away; the head’s in there, with silky light brown hair. The arms and lower legs are in a cardboard box made from two different boxes, one for biscuits, the other for seafood; it says so right on the side. Just a few hours later, a machinist there to see the police activity finds the bones of another murder victim, in a depression in the ground near an outflow pipe. The head, now just a skull, is in a can nearby. They’re the eleventh and twelfth people slaughtered this way around Cleveland since 1934. They find the parts in the river. They find them in the lake. They find them on hillsides, in baskets on curbsides. The papers have gone mad every time. This torso killer—what sort of madman is he? A cunning madman with the strength of an ox. He’s as regular, as coldly efficient, and as relentless as an executioner when the mood to kill comes over him. Never has an intended victim escaped his relentless knife, never has a “friend” lived to tell the tale. The police have been investigating for years, following one trail after another that all go cold. In 1938 Eliot Ness, then Cleveland’s safety director, rounds up dozens of hobos who live in the Flats and Kingsbury Run and burns down the shantytown there. It parts a lot of people from their houses and their jobs, and it doesn’t do anything for Ness or the case except stain his own reputation. In 1947, when Ness is running to be mayor of Cleveland, shaking hands and going to rallies, riding around town and waving from the back of a convertible with his wife in the backseat, it’s a big deal, but people haven’t forgotten how he couldn’t catch the Mad Butcher, and when he loses the campaign, they say that’s part of it, that the killer’s still out there, that no one is safe.