MURDER BY THE NUMBERS (Eliot Ness)

by Max Allan Collins

  "What if Lombardi and Scalise and the rest skipped the country?" Curry asked.

  "That's tougher," Ness admitted. "But there's such a thing as extradition. We won't give up on 'em."

  "Great," Curry said. "Then why don't you look happy?"

  Ness sighed heavily. He hesitated for a moment, then said, ' 'I let Hollis and Councilman Raney make a fool of me. I was stupid to think I could contain the politics of that situation over at the League Hall."

  "I'll bet Hollis knew it was going to be a big, rowdy, randy scene," Chamberlin said. "That wasn't your average smoker for a dozen lodge brothers."

  "No it wasn't," Ness said.

  "Where's Sergeant Moeller?" Curry asked. His tone lacked respect.

  "I sent him home. He seemed pretty embarrassed about the way things came down."

  "He should be."

  Chamberlin snorted. "Did he really have to go all moral and bust that shindig?"

  Ness looked carefully at Curry, who said, indignantly, "I don't think he did."

  "From the police report," Garner said, unlit cigar roaming his mouth, "it sounds like the kinda party Nero mighta fiddled at."

  "Well," Curry admitted, "yes, it was, kind of."

  "Under normal circumstances," Ness asked, "would you have busted that party, Albert?"

  "Well . . . well. Yes, I suppose I would've. Under normal circumstances."

  "You suppose?"

  Curry breathed out his nose like a bull considering goring a matador. "I would've."

  Ness shrugged. "Moeller was just doing his job. Making a decision under fire, as we all must, from time to time. I'm going to stand behind him on it ... without being thrilled over the results."

  "Johnson isn't here, either," Garner noted.

  "I sent him home, as well," Ness said. "Albert—did you think Johnson knew what you were in for, at that smoker?"

  "No. Not really."

  "You don't think he was working for the interests of Hollis and Raney?"

  "No," Curry said, shaking his head emphatically. "He felt as uneasy as I did, about raiding the place."

  Ness said nothing, thinking.

  "Where do we go from here?" Chamberlin asked.

  The sun was sneaking in around the edges of the shaded windows.

  "I'm going over to the Hollenden," Ness said, rising, yawning, tightening his tie just a bit. "I'm going to catch a couple of hours' sleep before the Grand Jury session convenes."

  The men trudged out, tired to the bone, uncertain to a man about just what, if anything, had been accomplished on this long night.

  CHAPTER 16

  The next night, crowding ten, the same four men—Eliot Ness, Robert Chamberlin, Will Garner, and Albert Curry—sat at a booth in the lounge of the Hollenden Hotel. It was the same booth in which, months before, Ness had held court with various members of the Cleveland press, announcing his intentions to launch a numbers-racket inquiry. The walnut-appointed lounge had a low-key atmosphere, with subdued lighting to match. The mood of these men, however, was neither low-key nor subdued.

  The nation's most famous former Prohibition agent was pouring to overflowing the other three detectives' upraised champagne glasses with the appropriate bubbly beverage. The men were all smiles—even Garner, who prided himself on his stoic Indian countenance, was grinning like a C stu-dent who just got straight As.

  Ness, grinning at least as wide as any other man at the table, poured himself some champagne and they clinked glasses.

  "To Salvatore Lombardi," Ness said. "Wherever he is."

  Everyone laughed. This was a good sign, considering the escape of Lombardi was easily the biggest stain on their victory. Word on the street was that Lombardi had skipped town; that he had headed south, figuratively and literally. Mexico, it was said.

  Even without Lombardi's presence at the Grand Jury today, there was much to celebrate. Indictments had indeed come down on all twenty-three numbers racketeers; only five were still at large. Even without Lombardi and Scalise in custody, the Mayfield Road mob's hold on the numbers racket was broken. The boys couldn't run the racket from jail or from Mexico or whatever rathole the likes of Scalise had dug him-self.

  And one key figure—slot-machine king Albert "Chuck" Polizzi, peer of Lombardi and Scalise—had sauntered into the Hollenden lounge earlier this afternoon, when Ness was at lunch.

  "Sit down, Chuck," Ness had said. "I'll buy you a drink."

  Nattily dressed in a cream-color summer suit, darkly tanned, the forty-five-year-old gangster had grinned smugly and slid into the booth next to the safety director.

  "I been in Florida," Chuck Polizzi said cockily. "Fishin'. Spending' time with the wife and kids. Flew back when I heard you guys was interested in talkin' to me."

  "You were indicted this morning," Ness said.

  Dark-haired, bright-eyed Polizzi shrugged, smirked, and had a bourbon and Coke, on Ness. Chuck Polizzi had done time for armed robbery, once, long ago; but more recently had beaten rap after rap. He obviously thought he had no reason to worry. But Ness, knowing the witnesses and the evidence, knew better. Polizzi would finally do his second stretch.

  Ness had spent the morning with the Grand Jury, of course, and the afternoon on the phone to friends at the FBI, who had promised to arrest any of the five who fled, under the new federal fugitive law that made it a crime to cross a state line to avoid felony charges.

  He'd also had a visit from Reverend Hollis of the Future Outlook League. Again, Hollis did not have an appointment, but Ness didn't care: He was eager to see the race leader. The victories of the day faded, momentarily, and the anger of the early-morning hours had returned like a chronic injury that flared up in bad weather.

  But Hollis was angry, too.

  "You're to be congratulated, obviously," Hollis said tightly, "on your success with the Grand Jury this morning."

  "Thank you. Will you have a seat?"

  "Thank you, no. I won't be here that long, Mr. Ness."

  That may have been a tactic, Ness realized; the preacher, imposing in clerical black, was taller than the safety director and was looking down at him with condescension masquerading as righteousness.

  "You did much damage last night," Hollis said, in a clipped, clearly angry fashion. "That raid at the Democratic League was the poorest possible public-relations move you could have made."

  Ness was astounded. "What?"

  "You've made yourself look extremely bad in the Negro community—white cops harassing some of the east side's finer citizens. The white press has given you a free ride, but the Call and Post will crucify you. I only hope it won't damage your ability to hang on to your witnesses in the coming trial."

  Ness resisted the urge to remind the good Reverend that the "finer citizens" of the east side who were arrested last night included a man who engaged in a sex act on stage, as well as many of the enthusiastic audience members who had cheered him on.

  Instead, Ness said, "Good God, man—the tip came from you, didn't it?"

  Now it was Hollis's turn to look startled.

  "Hell, no!" the clergyman said.

  "Hell no?" Ness asked.

  Hollis looked at Ness warily. "Frankly, that might have been a tactic my friend Councilman Raney would approve of—in a weak moment—but I have enough common sense to assess the ramifications of such a foolhardy enterprise."

  Hollis always sounded like he was giving a sermon, Ness noted; and it was getting goddamn irritating.

  Ness pointed a lecturing finger at the preacher—he didn't poke him with it, or shake it in his face; but he did point.

  He said, "We had a call from one of your Future Outlook League members. Look in your own backyard, Reverend, if you want somebody to blame."

  Hollis thought about that for a moment, then his eyes squinted behind his wire-frame glasses as he said, "Which member called? Did he give a name?"

  "Well, no."

  "Then how do you know it really was one of my members? Perhaps you should look in your
own backyard, Mr. Ness."

  There was an awkward moment then, as both men realized the anger they had brought into this impromptu meeting was ill-placed. Hollis nodded and twitched a smile of farewell; they did not shake hands before the preacher left.

  That one, odd encounter had been the only inglorious moment in a great day for Eliot Ness and his staff.

  "Cullitan's going to ask that bail be set at fifty grand per defendant," Ness said, between sips of champagne. "Except for Willie the Emperor—he's worth one hundred and fifty."

  Curry smiled and shook his head. "Think the prosecutor can pull that off? That'd be an all-time record for a criminal case in this county."

  "I think so," Ness said. "Judge Walther is one of the honest ones."

  "Here's to Judge Walther," Chamberlin said, raising his glass, and the rest of the men followed suit, clinked, drank.

  Ness glanced up and saw a big black man in a baggy brown suit moving quickly through the lounge, carrying a battered black fedora in one hand like a dead rat to be dumped in a garbage can. Most of the all-white patrons of the Hollenden lounge looked at Toussaint Johnson as if a rat were exactly what he was carrying.

  "Detective Johnson," Ness said pleasantly. "Sit down and join us—have some champagne."

  Toussaint Johnson shook his head, no. His harshly hand-some face looked like a carved African mask; his eyes were intense and troubled.

  "Bad shit happening in Central-Scovill," he said.

  "Sit," Ness said. This time it wasn't a request.

  Johnson squeezed in next to Curry; the men were watching the Negro cop with rapt attention: None of them had ever seen him this close to upset before.

  "There's a flyin' squad of dago hoodlums racing around the east side," Johnson said. "Offering cash money."

  "Huh?" Ness said.

  Johnson breathed out heavily and started over. "Four hoods nobody ever seen before is driving all over the east side in a black Buick, offering five hundred bucks cold cash to anybody who'll cough up the name of any one of our seventy secret witnesses."

  "Damn," Ness said.

  "That's a lot of money," Curry said breathlessly.

  "You think that's a lot of money in the Hollenden Hotel," Johnson said,

  "'magine what it is on the east side."

  "I wonder if they're getting any takers," Chamberlin said.

  "I don't know," Johnson said. "But it gets worse 'fore it gets better, and it don't get better." He paused for effect. "They're offering a thousand clams for the whereabouts of any witness."

  All of the men looked at Ness.

  Minor witnesses were holed up in the YMCA, with considerable police protection. But key witnesses were hidden away in a safe house whose location was known only to Ness and his closest safety department associates—Chamberlin, Curry, and Garner—and the handful of crack rookie uniform cops that Ness had hand-picked to stand guard there.

  "Ten thousand bucks wouldn't spring that information loose," Ness said confidently. "Nobody on the east side even knows the 'whereabouts.' "

  Since that was supposed to include Johnson himself, the big Negro cop said, in a barely audible tone, "The projects."

  The Outhwaite public housing project was a relatively new addition to the east side and one partially completed building, into which tenants weren't due to move for several months, was indeed where Ness was sequestering his key witnesses.

  Ness flinched, as if a punch had been thrown. "How in hell . . . ?"

  "Ain't much on the east side that I don't know," Johnson said flatly. "And what I don't know, I can figure out."

  "And if you know . . ."

  "I ain't the only smart colored man in Cleveland, Mr. Ness."

  "What do you suggest, Detective Johnson?"

  "I suggest we put together a couple of flyin' squads of our own, and go prowlin' the Roarin' Third looking for a black sedan that don't have cops in it."

  Ness was already getting up. "That, Detective Johnson, is a fine idea."

  Curry, Johnson, and Chamberlin piled into the Negro detective's second-hand Chevy, while Ness and Garner took the EN-1 sedan. Garner, who had lived undercover on the east side for nearly a month in the earliest stages of the investigation, was familiar enough with the territory to guide the way; he in fact drove, while Ness kept an eye out.

  It was a Wednesday night, colder than the night before, but the way the streets of the Roaring Third were hopping, it might've been Saturday. Jukeboxes exploded with uptempo music inside saloons burning with neon; colored men in every range of apparel from rags to zoot suits milled up and down the sidewalks, their boisterous voices spanning every human emotion, laughing, shouting, raging; whores decorated street corners and in the recessions of doorways junkies sat on cement steps like potted plants, only babbling. Ness noted with clinical interest the businesses that were undoubtedly numbers drops: tobacco stands, barber shops, news-stands—these wouldn't likely be open at eleven-something at night, otherwise. While he rode, studying this street of barbecue stands, bars, and bedbug-haven hotels, Ness flashed an order over the police radio to pick up the four hoods in the black sedan. Garner kept prowling. They were on Central, now, in the east fifties.

  "Something," Garner said, taking one hand off the wheel to point up ahead.

  It was a black sedan, its tail sticking out of an alley, revealing a mud-spattered license plate. The doors were open.

  "Pull over," Ness said, needlessly, because Garner already was.

  Ness jumped out of the car, just as it was stopping, and reached absent-mindedly for his gun. All he touched was the empty shoulder holster: He hadn't taken time to fill it.

  No matter. The car, a new Buick parked in the middle of an alley next to a dignified two-story brick undertaking parlor, was empty.

  Garner had a look inside the car. "Registered to Roland Rushing."

  "That's the Emperor's brother. Go call it in. Will—have him picked up."

  Ness walked down the alley a ways, not looking for anything in particular. A cat scurried across his path and made him jump, a little. As the darkness of the alley gathered in on him, he suddenly became aware that he was walking unarmed down a ghetto alley, next to a funeral home. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned quickly, ready to swing.

  "Easy, boss," Garner said.

  Ness sighed heavily. "Gave me a start."

  "Carry a gun. You'll live longer. We got trouble—come on."

  Ness followed his old comrade out of the alley, as Garner's words flew out in an uncharacteristic rush: "I was getting ready to put that APB out on Roland Rushing when I heard the call."

  They were to their sedan, now.

  "What call?"

  Garner, on the driver's side, looked gravely across the top of the car at Ness, standing on the rider's side. "The dispatcher said Mrs. John C. Washington called for help—four men broke into her home looking for her husband."

  "Damn! Was she hurt?"

  "Don't know."

  "Get the hell over there right now."

  The Hawthorne Avenue area felt even more like a trap tonight, as they turned back east past the fortress-like wall of factories, into the quiet neighborhood where the John C. Washington home had once again been invaded.

  Two uniformed patrolmen were inside with the former policy king's queen; one of them stood near Mrs. Washington, who wore a pink satin robe, as she sat on the couch, crying into a handkerchief. The other cop was in the kitchen, applying a damp cloth to the head of a burly fiftyish Negro in sportcoat and no tie, the Washingtons' live-in bodyguard.

  The living room had been turned upside-down; not as thorough a job as when the cops had played wrecking crew here a few months before. But thorough enough.

  Ness sat next to Mrs. Washington. The slightly plump, very pretty woman looked up with a tear-streaked face, her mouth quivering, her eyes red and frightened and angry.

  "We just got this place put back the way it should be," she said, as hurt as a disappointed child, as bitter a
s a spurned lover.

  "Yes, I know," Ness said. "I'm sorry. I wish you would've let us post men here, like I asked."

  "Johnny didn't want that. He said that'd tip everybody off that he was talking. We have bodyguards anyway. That oughta been enough."

  "Yes, it should. But we'll protect you from here on out."

  She was shaking her head emphatically. "I'm tired of this, I'm so tired of this . . . first you damn white police ruin, my beautiful house, then more white men, criminals this time, come do the same blessed thing. You're all the damn same. Ain't no difference between you. White crooks, white cops, what's the difference?"

  "I know it must seem that way to you, Mrs. Washington."

  Sometimes it seemed that way to Ness. He'd put as many cops in jail as gangsters, in this town.

  He squeezed her shoulder gently. "But it wasn't anybody white who sold you out, tonight."

  She blinked, cocked her head. "What do you mean?"

  "Those same four men who worked you over were riding around the east side earlier this evening, offering money for the names of witnesses."

  Her features tightened. "You're saying, someone of my race took money to give up Johnny C.?"

  "Most likely."

  She sat and blankly stared.

  "What exactly happened here, Mrs. Washington?"

  She didn't say anything for a while, but Ness didn't repeat his question. He waited patiently for her to respond. Finally, she did.

  "Four men—white men, dago men. Big awful men. One of them must have knocked out Milton."

  She meant the bodyguard.

  "They come in demanding to talk to Johnny C.," she continued. "I told them Johnny was out of town on business, like we been saying. They looked all over the house, busting stuff up." She began to cry again. He patted her shoulder. "They said . . . they said . . . 'we'll be back.' "

  Ness looked up at Garner. Garner lifted his eyebrows.

  "They probably will," Ness said. "I'm going to move you in with your husband."

  "Oh, I'd like that. I'd like that very much."

  "We're going to put an end to this," he said.