Chicago Lightning

Then the shotgun stopped, too, and the thunder storm was over, leaving a legacy of pain and terror: Neddie Herbert was shrieking, yammering about not being able to feel his legs, and Didi was weeping, her long brunette hair come undone, trailing down her face and her back like tendrils. Writhing on the sidewalk like a bug on its back, big rugged Cooper had his revolver in one hand, waving it around in a punch-drunk manner; his other hand was clutching his bloody stomach, blood bubbling through his fingers.

I moved out from behind the Caddy, stepping out into the street, gun in hand—ready to dive back if I drew any fire.

But none came.

I wanted to run across there and try to catch up with the bastards, but I knew I had to stay put, at least for a while; if those guys had a car, they might pull around and try to finish the job. And since I had a gun—and hadn’t been wounded—I had to stand guard.

Now time sped up: I saw the parking lot attendant, who had apparently ducked under the car when the shooting started, scramble out from under and back inside the restaurant, glass crunching under his feet. Niccoli ran out, with Stompanato and Fred Rubinski on his tail; Niccoli got in the Caddy, and Cohen—despite his limp bloody arm—used his other arm to haul the big, bleeding Cooper up into the backseat. Stompanato helped and climbed in back with the wounded cop.

Fred yelled, “Don’t worry, Mick—ambulances are on the way! We’ll take care of everybody!”

And the Caddy roared off.

Neddie Herbert couldn’t be moved; he was alternately whimpering and screaming, still going on about not being able to move his legs. Some waitresses wrapped checkered tablecloths around the suffering Neddie, while I helped Didi inside; she said she was cold and I gave her my sportjacket to wear.

Florabel came up to me, her left hand out of sight, behind her; she held out her right palm to show me a flattened deer slug about the size of a half dollar.

“Pretty nasty,” she said.

“You get hit, Florabel?”

“Just bruised—where the sun don’t shine. Hell, I thought it was fireworks, and kids throwing rocks.”

“You reporters have such great instincts.”

As a waitress tended to Didi, Fred took me aside and said, “Real professional job.”

I nodded. “Shotgun to cause chaos, that 30.06 to pinpoint Cohen…only they missed.”

“You okay, Nate?”

“Yeah—I don’t think I even got nicked. Scraped my hands on the sidewalk, is all. Get me a flashlight, Fred.”

“What?”

“Sheriff’s deputies’ll show up pretty soon—I want a look across the way before they get here.”

Fred understood: the sheriff’s office was in Jack Dragna’s pocket, so their work might be more cover-up than investigation.

The vacant lot across the street, near the Blatz billboard, was not what I’d expected, and I immediately knew why they’d chosen this spot. Directly off the sidewalk, an embankment fell to a sunken lot, with cement stairs up the slope providing a perfect place for shooters to perch out of sight. No street or even alley back here, either: just the backyards of houses asleep for the night (lights in those houses were blazing now, however). The assassins could sit on the stairs, unseen, and fire up over the sidewalk, from ideal cover.

“Twelve-gauge,” Fred commented, pointing to a scattering of spent shells in the grass near the steps.

My flashlight found something else. “What’s this?”

Fred bent next to what appeared to a sandwich—a half-eaten sandwich….

“Christ!” Fred said, lifting the partial slice of white bread. “Who eats this shit?”

An ambulance was screaming; so was Neddie Herbert.

“What shit?” I asked.

Fred shuddered. “It’s a fucking sardine sandwich.”

The shooting victims were transferred from the emergency room of the nearest hospital to top-notch Queen of Angels, where the head doctor was Cohen’s personal physician. An entire wing was roped off f the Cohen party, with a pressroom and listening posts for both the LAPD and County Sheriff’s department.

I stayed away. Didi’s wounds were only superficial, so she was never admitted, anyway. Cohen called me from the hospital to thank me for my “quick thinking”; all I had done was throw a few shots in the shooters’ direction, but maybe that had kept the carnage to a minimum. I don’t know.

Neddie Herbert got the best care, but he died anyway, a week later, of uremic poisoning: gunshot wounds in the kidney are a bitch. At that point, Cohen was still in the hospital, but rebounding fast; and the State Attorney’s man, Cooper, was fighting for his life with a bullet in the liver and internal hemorrhaging from wounds in his intestines.

Fred and I both kept our profiles as low as possible—this kind of publicity for his restaurant and our agency was not exactly what we were looking for.

The night after Neddie Herbert’s death in the afternoon, I was waiting in the parking lot of Googie’s, the coffee shop at Sunset and Crescent Heights. Googie’s was the latest of these atomic-type cafes popping up along the Strip like futuristic mushrooms: a slab of the swooping red-painted structural steel roof rose to jut at an angle toward the street, in an off-balance exclamation point brandishing the neon googie’s, and a massive picture window looked out on the Strip as well as the nearby Hollywood hills.

I’d arrived in a blue Ford that belonged to the A-1; but I was standing alongside a burgundy Dodge, an unmarked car used by the two vice cops who made Googie’s their home away from home. Tonight I was wasn’t taking pictures of their various dealings with bookmakers, madams, fellow crooked cops or politicians. This was something of a social call.

I’d been here since just before midnight; and we were into the early morning hours now—in fact, it was after two a.m. when Lieutenant Delbert Potts and Sergeant Rudy Johnson strolled out of the brightly illuminated glass-and-concrete coffee shop, into the less illuminated parking lot. Potts was in another rumpled brown suit—or maybe the same one—and, again, Johnson was better-dressed than his slob partner, his slender frame well-served by a dark gray suit worthy of Michael’s habidashery.

Hell, maybe Cohen provided Johnson’s wardrobe as part of the regular pay-off—at least till Delbert and Rudy got greedy and went after that twenty grand for the recordings they’d made of Mickey.

I dropped down into a crouch as they approached, pleased that no other customers had wandered into the parking lot at the same time as my friends from the vice squad. Tucked between the Dodge and the car parked next to it, I was as unseen as Potts and Johnson had been, when they’d crouched on those steps with their shotgun and rifle, waiting for Mickey.

Potts and Johnson were laughing about something—maybe Neddie Herbert’s death—and the fat one was in the lead, fishing in his pants pocket for his car keys. He didn’t see me as I rose from the shadows, swinging an underhand fist that sank six inches into his flabby belly.

Like a matador, I pushed past him, while shoving him to the pavement, where he began puking, and grabbed Johnson by one lapel and slammed his head into the rear rider’s side window. He slid down the side of the car and sat, maybe not unconscious, but good and dazed. Neither one protested—rkiking fat one, or the stunned thin one—as I disarmed them, pitching their revolvers into the darkness, where they skittered across the cement like crabs. I checked their ankles for hideout guns, but they were clean. So to speak.

Potts was still puking when I started kicking the shit out of him. I didn’t go overboard: just five or six good ones, cracking two or three ribs. Pretty soon he stopped throwing up and began to cry, wallowing down there between the cars in his own vomit. Johnson was coming around, and tried to crawl away, but I yanked him back by the collar and slammed him into the hubcap of the Dodge.

Johnson had blood all over his face, and was spitting up a bloody froth, as well as a tooth or two, and he was blubbering like a baby.

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw a couple in their twenties emerging from Googie’s; they walked to the car, on the other side of the lot. They were talking and laughing—presumably not about Neddie Herbert’s death—and went to their Chevy convertible and rolled out of the lot.

I kicked Potts in the side and shook Johnson by the lapels, just to get their attention, and they wept and groaned and moaned while I gave them my little speech, which I’d been working on in my head while I waited for them in the parking lot.

“Listen to me, you simple fuckers—you can shoot at Mickey Cohen and his Dwarfs all you want. I really do not give a flying shit. But you shot at me and my date, and a copper too, and that pisses me off. Plus, you shot up the front of my partner’s restaurant.”

Potts tried to say something, but it was unintelligible; “mercy” was in there, somewhere. Johnson was whimpering, holding up his blood-smeared hands like this was a stick-up.

“Shut-up,” I said, “both of you…. I don’t care what you or Dragna or any gangster or bent fucking cop does out here in Make-believe-ville. I live in Chicago, and I’m going back tomorrow. If you take any steps against me, or Fred Rubinski, or if you put innocent people in the path of your fucking war again, I will talk to my Chicago friends…and you will have an accident. Maybe you’ll get run down by a milk truck, maybe a safe’ll fall on you. Maybe you’ll miss a turn off a cliff. My friends are creative.”

Through his bloody bubbles, Johnson said, “Okay, Heller…okay!”

“By the way, I have photos of you boys taking pay-offs from a fine cross section of L.A.’s sleazy citizenry. Anything happens to me—if I wake up with a goddamn hangnail—those photos go to Jim Richardson at the Examiner, with a duplicate batch to Florabel Muir. Got it?”

Nobody said anything. I kicked Potts in the ass, and he yelped, “Got it!”

“Got it, got it, got it!” Johnson said, backing up against the hubcap, patting the air with his palms.

“We’re almost done—just one question…. Was Stompanato in on it, or was Niccoli your only tip-off man?”

Johnson coughed, getting blood on his chin. “Ni-Niccoli…just Niccoli.”

“He wanted you to take out the Davis dame, right? That was part of the deal?”

Johnson nodded. So did g. I kick, who was on his belly, and to see me had to look over his shoulder, puke rolling down his cheeks like a bad complexion that had started to melt.

Just the sight of them disgusted me, and my hand drifted toward my nine millimeter in the shoulder holster. “Or fuck…maybe I should kill you bastards….”

They both shouted “no!” and Potts began to cry again.

Laughing to myself, I returned to the agency’s Ford. These L.A. cops were a bunch of pansies; if this were Chicago, I’d have been dead by now.

In the aftermath of the shoot-out at Sherry’s, various political heads rolled, including Attorney General Fred Howser’s, and several trials took place (Cohen acquitted on various charges), as well as a Grand Jury inquiry into police and political corruption. Potts and Johnson were acquitted of corruption charges, and despite much talk in the press of damning wire recordings in the possession of both sides, no such recordings were entered as evidence in any trial, though Cohen’s lawyer was murdered on the eve of a trial in which those recordings were supposed to figure.

And the unsuccessful attempts on Cohen’s life continued, notably a bombing of his house, which he and his wife and his bull terrier survived without scratches. But no more civilians were put in harm’s way, and no repercussions were felt by either Fred Rubinski or myself.

A few months after Mickey Cohen got out of the hospital, his longtime crony Frank Niccoli—who he’d known since Cleveland days—turned up missing. Suspicions that Niccoli may have been a stool pigeon removed by Mickey himself were offset by Cohen losing $25,000 bail money he’d put up for Niccoli on an unrelated beef.

The next summer, I ran into Cohen at Sherry’s—or actually, I was just coming out of Sherry’s, a date on my arm; another cool, starlit night, around two a.m., the major difference this time being the starlet was a blonde. Mickey and Johnny Stompanato and two more Dwarfs were on their way in. We paused under the canopy.

The rodent grin flashed between five-o’clock-shadowed cheeks. “Nate! Here we are at the scene of the crime—like old times.”

“I hope not, Mickey.”

“You look good. You look swell.”

“That’s a nice suit, Mickey.”

“Stop by Michael’s—I’ll fix you up…on the house. Still owe you a favor for whispering in my ear about…you know.”

“Forget it.”

He leaned in, sotto voce. “New girl?”

“Pretty new.”

“You hear who Didi Davis is dating these days?”

“No.”

“That State’s Attorney cop—Cooper!”

I smiled. “Hadn’t heard that.”

“Yeah, he finally got the bullet removed outa his liver, the other day. My doc came up with some new treatment, makes liver cells reple themselves or somethin’…. All on my tab, of course.”

My date tightened her grip on my arm; maybe she recognized Cohen and was nervous about the company I was keeping.

So I said, “Well, Mick, better let you and your boys go on in for your coffee and pastries…before somebody starts shooting at us again.”

He laughed heartily and even shook hands with me—which meant he would have to go right in and wash up—but first, leaning in close enough for me to whiff his expensive cologne, he said, “Be sure to say hello to Frankie, since you’re in the neighborhood.”

“What do you mean?”

Actually, I knew he meant Frankie Niccoli, but wasn’t getting the rest of his drift….

Cohen nodded down the Strip. “Remember that road construction they was doin’, the night we got hit? There’s a nice new stretch of concrete there, now. You oughta try it out.”

And Mickey and his boys went inside.

As for me, my latest starlet at my side, I had the parking lot attendant fetch my wheels, and soon I was driving right over that fresh patch of pavement, with pleasure.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Most of the characters in this fact-based story appear under their real names; several—notably, Fred Rubinski, Didi Davis, Delbert Potts and Rudy Johnson—are fictional but have real-life counterparts. Research sources included numerous true-crime magazine articles and the following books: Death in Paradise (1998), Tony Blanche and Brad Schreiber; Headline Happy (1950), Florabel Muir; Hoodlums—Los Angeles (1959), Ted Prager and Larry Craft; The Last Mafioso (1981), Ovid DeMaris; Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words (1975), as told to John Peer Nugent; Mickey Cohen: Mobster (1973); Sins of the City (1999), Jim Heimann; Thicker’n Thieves (1951), Charles Stoker; and Why I Quit Syndicated Crime (1951), Jim Vaus as told to D.C. Haskin.

Original publication:

“Kaddish for the Kid,” Private Eyes (1998)

“The Blonde Tigress,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (2008)

“Private Consultation,” Justice for Hire (1990)

“The Perfect Crime,” Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, 1988 (story originally featuring Marlowe, revised to feature Heller in Kisses of Death, 2001)

“House Call,” Mean Streets (1986)

“Marble Mildred,” Eye for Justice (1988)

“The Strawberry Teardrop,” ThHave It (1984)

“Scrap,” The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction (1987)

“Natural Death, Inc.,” Diagnosis Dead (1999)

“Screwball,” The Shamus Game (2000)

“That Kind of Nag,” Murder at the Racetrack (2006)

“Unreasonable Doubt,” And the Dying is Easy (2001)

“Shoot-out on Sunset,” Mystery Street (2001)

Photo Credit: Bamford Studio

Max Allan Collins has earned fifteen Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning for his Nathan Heller novels, True Detective and Stolen Away, and receiving the PWA life achievement award, the Eye. His graphic novel, Road to Perdition, which is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks, was followed by two novels, Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise. His suspense series include Quarry, Nolan, Mallory, and Eliot Ness, and his numerous comics credits include the syndicated Dick Tracy and his own Ms. Tree. He has written and directed four feature films and two documentaries. His other produced screenplays include “The Expert,” an HBO World Premiere. His coffee-table book The History of Mystery received nominations for every major mystery award and Men’s Adventure Magazines won the Anthony Award. Collins lives in Muscatine, Iowa, with his wife, writer Barbara Collins. They have collaborated on seven novels and numerous short stories, and are currently writing the “Trash ’n’ Treasures” mysteries.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Kaddish for the Kid

The Blonde Tigress

Private Consultation

The Perfect Crime

House Call

Marble Mildred

The Strawberry Teardrop

Scrap

Natural Death, Inc.

Screwball

That Kind of Nag

Unreasonable Doubt

Shoot-Out on Sunset

About the Author

Table of Contents

Introduction

Kaddish for the Kid

The Blonde Tigress

Private Consultation

The Perfect Crime

House Call

Marble Mildred

The Strawberry Teardrop

Scrap

Natural Death, Inc.

Screwball

That Kind of Nag

Unreasonable Doubt

Shoot-Out on Sunset

About the Author