MURDER BY THE NUMBERS (Eliot Ness)

by Max Allan Collins

  She was shaking her head again. "I don't know what Johnny C. is going to do when he hears about this."

  "I hope," Ness said, "that he says he'll go along with what I have in mind. . . ."

  CHAPTER 17

  Little Angelo Scalise, not a perfect specimen of mental health even under the best of conditions, was about to go fucking nuts.

  He had been living in the small cement hide-out room behind the lanes at Pla-Mor bowling alley for more than two days now. When Black Sal got tipped that indictments were about to hit the fan, Scalise had holed up in the cement-block room that Lombardi and his associates had used since Prohibition days as a cool-off flat. The room was tiny—a cubicle really—with only one window, and that consisted of glass bricks you couldn't see out of, and a cot and a small dresser and a tiny ice-box and a hot plate and a little Bakelite radio. It wasn't a hell of a lot better than a prison cell.

  And in a prison cell, you wouldn't have to listen to the constant racket of clattering bowling pins.

  The noise was muffled, but not that muffled, and Ange flinched involuntarily with every strike. For a guy who loved to bowl, it was a strange sort of hell. On the few times when he stuck his head out, just to fight the fucking closed-in feeling, he'd see those goddamn pin boys in the narrow walk-way area behind the lanes. They'd be laughing and talking, and he couldn't make out what they were saying because of the sound of pins getting knocked over. But he knew those little fuckers were laughing at him. He'd clipped 'em with pins often enough. He would go back in and flop on his cot and shut the door and muffle the sound of clattering pins and contemplate how much fun it would be to bash in those little fuckers' brains with a bowling pin.

  His cousin Sal had gone south—he'd be in Acapulco by now, spread out on the beach like a big dead fucking fish. They had money in a resort hotel down there, so Sal would be living like a king. But not like a man.

  For all Sal's talk of how important respect was, the fat slob was nothing but a coward, turning his back on a fucking five-mil-a-year business, just because Eliot fucking Ness lined up some niggers to squeal. Angelo wasn't about to turn his back on such a business, to walk away from his money and his manhood.

  "We're rich men," Lombardi had told him, before catching the chartered plane. "We've worked long and hard. Our fathers worked long and hard. We can afford to take a rest, a vacation for a while. Few years pass, this'll all blow over."

  "I ain't gonna waste the best years of my life loafin' on some Mexican beach, with some Mexican bitch sucking my dick! What kind of life is that for a man?"

  Sal had contemplated that, and said, "Not a bad one at all," and got on the plane.

  Goddamn him!

  Well, fine. Who the fuck needed him. Angelo would have the whole goddamn business to himself. Sal and Polizzi and the others were acting like this was the end of the damn world, or at least the damn numbers racket. Hell, as long as there were niggers, there'd be numbers! And as long as there was numbers, there'd be big bucks to be made, and as long as there was big bucks to be made, the Mayfield Road gang—with Little Angelo Scalise as top man, from now on—would own the east side.

  All it would take, he knew, was bumping off one of the big witnesses. Bump 'em off big and bloody. It couldn't just be anybody: It had to be somebody with a name in Central-Scovill. Then those niggers would turn their black tails and run.

  Scalise's laughter echoed in the little cement room. Pins clattered out on the lanes. He flinched.

  Before he'd gone into hiding, he called on some freelance torpedoes from Detroit, who were part of the old Purple Gang. Two brothers, Harry and Sam Keenan, who it was said worked look-out in the St. Valentine's Day massacre back in Chicago in '29, and a fellow named Greene and another named Berns. They were all Jews, but Scalise didn't give a fuck. He wasn't prejudiced.

  The Keenan brothers had done jobs for Scalise before—including an important early hit in the Mayfield Road numbers takeover. It was the Keenans who blew Rufus Murphy all to shit in his driveway back in '33. They did good work. Not cheap—they were Jews after all—but value for the dollar. And tough bastards—they wouldn't talk if you fed their nuts to 'em one at a time.

  Angelo had turned the Keenans and Greene and Berns loose on the east side last night. Waving fat wads of cash under nigger noses, looking for Ness witnesses. But they hadn't got anywhere, and—at Angelo's suggestion—went on to the home of Johnny C., a policy king who "retired" when Ange turned up the heat a few years back. Ange figured Johnny C.—who word on the street said was "out of town, on business"—was a sure bet to be one of Ness's sequestered witnesses.

  So the Keenans and company shook the house down and Mrs. Washington up. Then—also at Angelo's suggestion— one of them, Greene, hung around the neighborhood, staking out the house. Sure enough, first the cops showed, then Ness himself, and pretty soon Johnny C. shows, too, chauffeured by that hard-ass coon cop Toussaint Johnson. The place was crawling with uniformed cops and plainclothes dicks, so there was no way Greene could make a play for Washington.

  But when Washington came out of the house—looking like nigger royalty in his fancy English suit with black-and-white shoes and homburg hat—with a white uniformed cop as his driver, Greene tailed them and saw the cop escort Johnny C. to the Outhwaite public housing project, barely two blocks away.

  Imagine that fucking Ness, hiding his witnesses out right there on the east side, close to home but out of sight, minutes from downtown and the courthouse. Scalise had to give the guy his balls, and his brains. Outhwaite was perfect, in a crazy way. The housing project was finished but for a central, X-shaped building that was supposed to be ready for residents in a couple months. Chances were Ness had all his key witnesses in that one, new, nearly finished building.

  But all Scalise needed was Washington. Johnny C. was a name on the east side; he was still a powerful businessman, respected and even feared. If Johnny C. couldn't make it to the witness stand without dying, nobody else would risk it either; all that Ness talk in the papers about "safety in numbers" and "protection from reprisals" would look like the bullshit it was.

  And the numbers racket would be up and running again, in the hands of the Mayfield Road gang, under the leadership of one Little Angelo Scalise. Only maybe from now on it would be "Big" Angelo.

  Today Scalise had sent the Purple Gang boys to hole up in a hotel in Warrensville Heights, while he sent for Freddy Douglass, the Frank Hogey policy controller into whom Ange had put a scare some months ago in the alley by the Elite Cabaret.

  Freddy, who liked his fancy clothes and fancy women, was hurting, thanks to Ness and his policy-racket squeeze. Scalise gave him a grand in twenties to play with at the Outhwaite housing project.

  "Find out which building Washington's in," Ange told him, "and you earn a C-note. Find out the apartment number, and you earn a grand. And either way, you can keep the change."

  "You got it, Mr. Scalise," Freddy said, putting the money in the jacket of his snappy gray suit. The small cement cubicle in the back of the bowling alley seemed like a closet with two men in it, and the smell of Freddy's heavy cologne made Scalise a little sick.

  But Scalise knew Freddy was a good boy, one of the best of the colored crew, maybe the best of those who didn't get caught up in Ness's numbers net.

  "Careful, now, Fred," Scalise said, ushering him out. "There's gonna be plenty of cops around. Could be plainclothes. Dress down . . . look like somebody who might live in the projects."

  "They dress good over there, Mr. Scalise. You got to pass certain requirements to get in there."

  Scalise snorted a laugh. "I thought 'poor' and 'colored' was all it took."

  "No. You can't get in if you got a record. I oughta know: I tried. Those are nice flats."

  "Better than this shithole I'm stuck in," Scalise said, with a smirk, and patted the Negro on the back, sending him on his way.

  That had been this morning. At two in the afternoon he got a call from Freddy, who had the info.r />
  "He's in the center building," Freddy said quickly. "That X-shaped building."

  Just as Scalise had figured.

  "That part was easy," Freddy went on. "I just asked around—cost me a double-sawbuck, is all. But I also finagled you the apartment number."

  "Beautiful, kid! Give."

  "Johnny's on the top floor. It's five stories, and he's in 514. Nobody up on top but witnesses and probably some cops standing guard. There's no cops on the grounds, that I could see, anyway."

  "Makes sense," Ange said. "They don't wanna advertise—but there's cops there, all right."

  "Up on the fifth floor there's got to be. I had a hell of a time gettin' this. I don't think nobody livin' at Outhwaite has got this info."

  "How the hell did you manage it, boy?"

  "There's some white workmen, finishin' up that building. Painters and carpenters. Good union guys who don't like cops."

  "That's nice work, Freddy. You didn't leave a trail, did you?"

  "Naw. I said I had a hundred bucks from a reporter to find out where Johnny C. was being kept. Said I'd split it with anybody interested."

  "You did good, boy. Made out like a bandit, on that grand I gave you. I'm gonna leave your fifteen hundred in a paper bag at the bar with Louie. Pick up it after closing—they don't serve coloreds here."

  There was a slight pause, then: "Fine, boss."

  Ange had next phoned Harry Keenan at the hotel in Warrensville Heights.

  "Go buy an old used delivery truck," he told Keenan. "Pay cash and use a phony name. Make sure it runs good, though. Then get a couple of them tin tool kits—big enough to stuff our heaters in. And find some second-hand shop where you can buy coveralls and work clothes, loose-fitting so we can wear regular street clothes under."

  "We?"

  "Yeah. I'm coming along. I wouldn't miss this for the fuckin' world."

  Ange had been cooped up in his cement cell too long—just two days, really, but it seemed forever—and besides, he wanted the word to go out that he did this deed himself. Angelo Scalise himself put the bullets in that squealing nigger Washington.

  That would earn him respect. Like his cousin Sal professed, but didn't live up to, respect was all-important in a business like this. The whole east side—the whole damn town—would know you don't fuck with Angelo Scalise, the big boss of the Mayfield Road gang.

  He let the Keenans and Greene and Berns in the back, up the fire escape, and they all changed clothes in his little closet of a room. Harry Keenan, a big guy who looked like a melancholy bear, said he had silencers for the guns.

  "No silencers," Ange said, placing a .45 automatic and a .38 revolver, both Colts, in a steel-gray tool kit that contained nothing else except two boxes of ammunition and some towels stuffed in to keep the guns from rattling around. "I want the world to hear this."

  "This place could be crawling with cops," Greene said. Both he and his partner Berns were burly, with lumpy anonymous faces. Sam Keenan rarely said a word; he was a skinny pale killer with a pointy chin and nose, and seemed always to follow his brother's lead.

  "There's gonna be cops," Ange admitted, "but it won't be crawlin' with 'em. They can't afford to, it'd give 'em away."

  "Killing cops ain't a brilliant idea," Berns said. "Remember the shit storm after the Kansas City massacre?"

  Ange waved that off. "That was feds, and besides, we're just gonna kill a nigger. We won't kill any cops unless they get in the way. Shoot 'em in the kneecaps, why don't you? If you're squeamish."

  Harry Keenan planted himself in the middle of the small cement room and spread his hands like an umpire. With five men in there, it was as crowded as the stateroom scene in that Marx Brothers movie. And Ange didn't like being crowded.

  "We need big dough for this," Keenan said. "We never bargained for going head-on with cops. You want us to risk puttin' our faces in every post office in the country with state, feds, and locals aiming to put our asses in the hot squat, you'd better up the fuckin' ante, Ange."

  "You want me to up the fuckin' ante? I'll up your fuckin' ante." Angelo felt the red rising into his face. "You can fucking retire when this is over. A hundred grand apiece. Is that the fuck enough for you bozos?"

  The men glanced at each other with eyes wide with dollar signs and, slowly, began to nod. One hundred thousand depression dollars would buy these men a new life. And these aging remnants of the once-proud Purple Gang could use an opportunity like that, to hell with the risks.

  "Agreed," Harry said, for all of them.

  The Outhwaite housing project was bordered on the north by Quincy and the south by Woodland. The five men were in a battered brown '34 Reo panel truck, Harry and Angelo in the front, the rest riding in back. All wore work clothes— coveralls and caps.

  "Anybody asks," Ange had told them all, "we're plumbers. But let me do the talkin'."

  A second car, a four-door Plymouth, was parked on a side street off Quincy, a few blocks away, so on the getaway they could dump the panel truck with the work clothes inside. Right now, just after four o'clock, they pulled into the access road that took them between two large red-and-orange brick buildings and into the large grassy courtyard of the projects. Outhwaite was like a fortress, a rectangle of land between 40th and 55th with rows of modern brick apartment buildings on each side; in the center was the nearly finished X-shaped building where Washington was sequestered.

  The afternoon was cool and overcast, but not cold; colored kids of grade-school age with light jackets or no jackets were running around the big grassy area, playing kick the can, screaming gleefully. Several trucks of various sizes, apparently belonging to the handful of white workmen who were milling about, were parked on the grass near the X-shaped building. Up on the roof were more white laborers, working with tar; the smell of it was in the air.

  Angelo and his four cohorts got out of the panel truck slowly, casually, talking amongst themselves—the topic of conversation being whether that Iowa kid Bob Feller could pitch the Indians into the next World Series.

  A young-looking fair-haired workman loading a ladder into the back of a truck said, "Hiya,'' and then, "Little late in the day to be comin' to work, ain't it, fellas?"

  "You know how it is in the plumbing business," Ange said, shrugging, fist tightening around the handle of the tin tool box he was lugging. "Trouble with those new fixtures already."

  "No rest for the wicked," the workman said with a grin, and went back about his own business.

  The double doors to the main lobby were in the middle of the X on the Woodland Avenue side. The lobby was unfinished cement, ceiling and floor, and empty. Angelo tried the elevator, but it wasn't working yet. They found a stairwell and walked up, flight after flight, without a word.

  At the landing of the fifth floor, Angelo paused and peeked out the hallway door.

  Not a soul in sight.

  Like the lobby, the walls were concrete and so was the floor, no carpet or tile laid yet. The light fixtures had not been put in, though bulbs and wiring were in place. The place smelled new: The scents of fresh cement, of glue, of metal, mingled. There were, however, numbers on the varnished wood doors.

  Angelo posted Greene on the stairwell door. He sent Berns to the other end of the hall, cautioning both men not to create a crossfire if any gunplay broke out. Then Ange led the Keenans down the hallway to room 514. Harry, like Ange, was hauling a tin tool kit. Carefully, quietly, both men set their tool kits on the floor, snapped them open, and withdrew guns. Harry took out two nine-millimeter Brownings, kept one, and gave one to his skeletal brother Sam; Ange held his Colts, the .45 and the .38, in either hand, a regular two-gun plumber. With nods, he positioned Harry and Sam on either side of the door, their backs to the cement wall.

  Whispering, just mouthing the words really, he told them, "Follow me."

  Then Ange raised his foot and kicked the door in with one try, knocking the fucker off its hinges.

  He bulled through, into a barely furnished living
room, and, seeing a figure in a chair by a window with its back turned, he began shooting with both hands. Harry and Sam Keenan burst into the room and followed Ange's lead, bullets chewing up the sparse second-hand furnishings and punching holes in newly plastered walls and shattering the glass of windows that overlooked the grassy courtyard. The sound bounced off the hard plastered walls, flattening but not muting it; the din was deafening. The air filled with cordite and smoke and powdered plaster from the walls.

  It was all over in a matter of seconds.

  The three men stood flat-footed for a moment, watching the store-window dummy in the English suit tumble out of the chair, shot to shit.

  From an adjoining room at left, possibly the kitchen, Eliot Ness emerged, with his own .38 in hand; from a room at the right, possibly a bedroom, Toussaint Johnson came out with a shiny silver revolver in either hand. Angelo was not the only two-gun cowboy in this corral.

  "Just drop them," Ness said.

  "I know you," Johnson said, his eyes narrowing, his nostrils flaring, pointing accusingly first at Sam and then at Harry Keenan with each of the silver weapons.

  At once Angelo and the two Keenans knew exactly who Johnson was and what he meant: That this was the Negro detective who had been at the scene of the murder of Rufus Murphy; the man who had in fact pursued Sam Keenan through Murphy's backyard on that violent night in 1933. In a flash all three men knew that they were facing the black cop whose friend they had killed.

  So nobody dropped their gun.

  Instead the Keenans stepped forward to fire at Johnson, faces taut with desperation, but Johnson beat them to it; he was screaming with rage as he fixed both those silver revolvers simultaneously, aiming one at Harry and one at Sam, who were on either side of the stunned Angelo, punching a hole through the chest of Sam and another through the forehead of Harry, whose head came apart like a melon. Out of the comer of Ange's left eye he saw most of the inside of Harry's head go splat against the wall, like a mudball flung by a kid, a bloody gray mess sliding down the plaster wall.