The Million-Dollar Wound

“When I first got back from overseas,” I said, “I had trouble sleeping. But lately I catch myself napping every time I turn around. I’m really sorry.”

He waved that off. He looked at me; his eyes narrowed-in concern? Or was that suspicion?

“I hope my business meeting didn’t disturb your sleep,” he said.

“Nope,” I said, cheerfully. I hoped not too transparently cheerfully. “Slept right through it.”

“Why was it you wanted to talk to me, Heller?”

“Uh, you invited me here, Frank.”

“Oh. Yeah. Correa called you. That prick.”

“He’s going to call me to testify. I guess they were keeping tabs on you, when we were having our various meetings over the years. They’re going to ask about those meetings, and…”

He shrugged. “Forget it.”

“Well, that’s what I intend to do. What you and I talked about is nobody’s business but ours. Like I told Campagna, I got some convenient after-effects of my combat duty-they treated me for amnesia, while I was in the bughouse. I don’t remember nothing, Frank.”

He patted my shoulder. “I’m proud of what you did over there.”

“What?”

“I brag on you to my boy, all the time. You were a hero.” He got up and crossed to an expensive, possibly antique cabinet and took out a bottle of wine and poured himself a glass. “This is a great country. Worth fighting for. An immigrant like me can have a home and a family and a business. Some vino, kid?”

“No thanks, Frank.”

He drank the wine, pacing slowly around the little study. “I never worried about you, kid. You coulda gone running off the mouth about Cermak, and you didn’t. You coulda done the same thing where Dillinger was concerned, but you didn’t. You understand it, omerta, and you ain’t even one of us.”

“Frank, I’m not going to betray you.”

He sat down next to me. “You seen Ness lately?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Last month.”

“You know what he’s doing these days?”

“Yeah,” I said, and smiled.

Nitti sat there and laughed.

“Al coulda used his help,” he said, and laughed some more.

When he stopped laughing, he finished the glass of wine and said, “That’s another secret you kept.”

“Frank?”

“You knew about O’Hare.”

I swallowed. “You mean, you knew…”

“That you figured out I…” He gestured with one hand, as if sculpting something. “…sent Al away. Yeah. I saw it in your eyes, kid, when we talked that time.”

He meant that night in ’39 in the suite at the Bismarck.

“Then why in hell am I alive?” I said.

“I told you to stay out of my business. You stayed out, more or less. I trust you. I respect you.”

“Frank-I’m right in thinking you didn’t have anything to do with Estelle Carey’s death, aren’t I?”

“Would I invite such heat?” His face tightened into an angry mask. “My bloodthirsty friend Paul the Waiter sent those”-and then he said something in Sicilian that sounded very vile indeed-“to hit her. He was afraid she’d talk, this grand jury thing. I believe her killers took it on themselves to try to make her talk.” He laughed without humor. “To make her lead them to money she never had.”

“Money she…what?”

He got up and poured himself some more wine. “The Carey dame never had Nicky’s dough. He didn’t trust her. He thought she’d fingered him to the feds. That million of his, well, it’s really just under a million, the feds exaggerate, so they can tax you more…anyway, that million is stashed away for Nicky when he gets out. He’s being a pretty good boy. He’s talked some, but not given ’em anything they didn’t already have. Willie and Browne, well…don’t invest in their stock.”

Nitti’s openness was startling. And frightening. Was he drunk? Was he telling me things he’d regret telling me, later?

“You killing that bastard Borgia and his bitch was a good thing,” he said. “And then calling me so we could clean up, that I also appreciate. Think of what the papers woulda done with that; talk about stirring up the heat. Do you know how many of the boys have been pulled in over the Carey dame? Shit. That’s Ricca for you. Anyway.” He sipped his wine. “I owe you one.”

He’d said that to me before, more than once. More than twice.

“Hey, you have some wine, now,” he said.

I had some wine. We sat and drank it and I said, “If you feel you owe me one, Frank, I’d like to collect.”

Nitti shrugged. “Sure. Why not.”

“You know about my friend Barney Ross.”

He nodded. Of course he knew; I’d heard it from him. Or from Campagna. Same difference-before tonight, at least.

He said, “Have you talked to him about this problem of his?”

“Yes I have,” I said. “And he claims he can handle the stuff. He needs it for his pain, he says. To help him sleep. He acted like it was no big deal-then made me promise not to tell his wife, his family.”

“He’s a good man,” Nitti said. “He shouldn’t have this monkey on his back. It will ruin him.”

“I know.”

It seemed to anger Nitti. “He’s a hero. Kids look up to him. He shouldn’t go down that road.”

“Then help me stop him.”

He looked at me; the old Nitti seemed to be home, if only briefly, in the hard eyes.

“Put the word out,” I said. “Nobody in Chicago sells dope to Barney Ross. Cut off his supply. Capeesh?”

“Capeesh,” Nitti said.

We shook hands at the front door and I walked out into the wintry air, wondering how many eyes other than Nitti’s were on me.

Drury drove. We left his unmarked car on Cermak Road, near Woodlawn Cemetery, and walked along the railroad tracks, south. A light drizzling rain was falling. These were Illinois Central tracks, freight, not commuter; at this time of afternoon, just a little before four, there would be little or no train traffic, not till after rush hour-Cermak Road was too major a thoroughfare to be held up by a train, this time of day.

We were out in the boonies, really. To my left a few blocks was downtown Berwyn, but just due north was a working farm; and right here, the tracks ran through a virtual prairie-tall grass, scrub brush and trees. Up at right was a wire fence, behind which loomed the several faded brick buildings of a sanitarium. Some uniformed cops were gathered there; three men in coveralls, railroad workers obviously, were being questioned over to one side.

I followed Drury down the gentle embankment from the tracks through brush and tall grass to where the cops stood by the wire fence. One of the cops, a man in his fifties, in a white cap, walked to Drury and extended a hand and the men shook, as the white-capped cop said, “Chief Rose, of the Riverside P. D. You’d be Captain Drury.”

Drury said he was.

“Thanks for getting out here so quickly. We need you to positively ID the body. And we could use a little advice about where to go from here…”

Drury didn’t introduce me; everybody just assumed I was another cop. This time I’d been in his office, when he got the call. Correa had asked him to talk to me again, and as a courtesy I’d taken the El over to Town Hall Station. I was sitting there being scolded by him when his phone rang.

Now here we were, in a ditch next to an IC spur between North Riverside and Berwyn, in the midst of a bunch of confused suburban cops who’d drawn a stiff who was just a little out of their league-although very much a resident of their neck of the woods.

He sat slumped against the fence, parting the tall grass around him, brown fedora askew on his head, which rested back against a steel post, eyes shut, a revolver in his right hand-a little black.32, it looked like-and wearing a snappy gray checked suit, expensive brown plaid overcoat, blue and maroon silk scarf. On his shoes were rubbers; some snow was still on the ground, after all. Above his shoes stretched the off-white of long woolen underwear. Behind his right ear was a bullet hole; above his left ear was the exit wound.

Both Drury and I bent over him, one on either side of him. The smell of cordite was in the air.

“He must’ve got his hair cut this morning,” I said.

“Why do you say that?” Drury asked.

I hadn’t told Drury that just yesterday I’d seen this man. And I wasn’t about to.

“Just looks freshly cut, that’s all. You can smell the pomade.”

“I can smell the wine. He must’ve been dead drunk. Well, now he’s just dead.”

Drury stood. He said to Chief Rose, “That’s Frank Nitti, all right.”

“His driver’s license says Nitto,” Rose said.

Drury shrugged. “Nitto’s his real name.” He laughed shortly. “He thought ‘Nitti’ sounded more American, I guess.”

I was still bent over Nitti’s body. I carefully lifted the hat off his head. The brown fedora had several bullet holes in it. Five, to be exact.

“Bill,” I said. “Take a look at this.”

I showed him the hat. “How in the hell does one bullet through the head put five holes in your hat? From the angle of the fatal shot, there should be only one hole, about here…” And I put my pinky through that very hole. “What made these others? Mice?”

Drury took the hat and turned it around in his hands, studying it, frowning.

Chief Rose said, “We’ve got witnesses. Maybe they can help explain.”

He took us over to the three railroad workers. Two of them were skinny, in their forties, and looked uncannily alike, although they proved not to be brothers. The third was heavyset and about thirty-five.

Drury identified himself, and one of the skinny ones stepped forward and said he was William Seebauer, conductor; he and the other men, a switchman and a flagman, were on an IC switch engine when it started. He wore wire-frame glasses-which was about all that distinguished him from the other skinny man-and as he spoke he occasionally removed them and rubbed the drizzle of rain off the lenses, nervously.

“It was around three o’clock,” he said, “and we were backing the train south, caboose in front. After we crossed Cermak Road, I saw a man about a block and a half down, going the same direction as us, south, walking on the tracks just over from us. He was staggering. I thought maybe he was drunk.”

“How fast were you going?” Drury asked.

“Not very. When we got up close to him, I was on the platform, and hollered, ‘Hi there, buddy,’ and at that, the guy raised his hand and there was a revolver in it. He fired at me, and I ducked.”

I asked, “How many shots did he fire at you?”

“Two,” Seebauer said. The switchman and flagman standing nearby both nodded at that.

“What happened then?” Drury asked.

“The man was wavering around and I didn’t think his aim was good. He staggered down the embankment”-he stopped and pointed at the fence and Nitti’s body-“and ended up there. Sat down, or fell down. I couldn’t say.”

“And?”

“Well, I ordered the train stopped and we got off and walked back toward him. He was sitting there with his eyes closed. I told the other boys, ‘Watch this guy-he’s nuts. He may be making believe he’s passed out just to take another shot at us.’ So we moved slow. We were maybe sixty feet of him when his eyes opened, and he looked at us. Kind of rolled his eyes.” The conductor swallowed. “Then he raised the gun to his head. He didn’t miss what he was shooting at that time.”

Drury had the other two tell their stories, individually. While that was going on, I went back to the body. I knelt over him. It.

“Shit, Frank,” I said.

A cop nearby said, “What?”

“Nothing,” I said. I got a handkerchief out of my pocket and carefully lifted the gun from his hand; I shook open the cylinder. Three bullets remained. Three had been fired.

Soon Drury came over. “Their stories all match, pretty much.”

“Three bullets fired, Bill.” I showed him the revolver.

He took it, and my hanky.

“That makes sense,” he said. “He fires two shots at the caboose boys, and put one in his head. Two plus one makes three in my school.”

“Really? Tell me, Bill, the day you graduated-how many bullet holes did you have in your mortar board?”

His mouth distorted as he thought that over. “Maybe he wasn’t shooting at the boys on the train. They just heard shots and thought he was.”

“Who or what was he shooting at, then?”

“His own head, of course!”

“And he missed? And his hat didn’t fly off when these misaimed bullets flew through?”

Drury shrugged. “There are always anomalies in a case like this.”

“Anomalies my ass! Is that how you explain evidence that doesn’t suit you? Dismissing it?”

“Heller, you’re just a civilian observer here. Here at my discretion. Don’t cause any trouble.”

“What do you think happened here, Captain Drury?”

He put his hands on the hips of his expensive black topcoat and smirked. “Gee, I’m trying to work up a suitable theory that makes sense with what little we got-namely, three eyewitnesses who saw a guy shoot himself in the head, and a guy with a gun in his hand and a hole in his head. I’m just leaning the slightest little bit in the direction of suicide. What do you make of it, Heller?”

I motioned around us. “Look at these clumps of bushes; the high grass, weeds. He was running, staggering. Drunk? Sure, from the smell of him he’d been drinking. Granted. But mightn’t he been running from somebody?”

“Who?”

“People trying to kill him, Bill. Maybe he was out walking and somebody took a shot at him from those bushes, and he started running away. He was known to take regular walks, you know.”

“No I don’t,” he said. He eyed me suspiciously. “How do you?”

“Never mind. He did take walks. Maybe he walked a regular route-this route. We’re only a few blocks from his house-he was headed home. Somebody took a shot at him, possibly using a silenced gun, and when he returned fire, those caboose crawlers thought he was shooting at them.”

Drury smiled humorlessly and shook his head. “And then an assassin in the bushes shot him in the head just as the railroad boys were approaching, I suppose?”

I looked up at the sky; let it spit on me. “No, Bill. Nitti shot himself. I don’t question that.”

“What do you question, then?”

“The circumstances. I think he fell, fleeing would-be assassins-knocked himself out. Maybe he was blind drunk and fell, what’s the difference? Anyway, when he opened his eyes he saw the hazy image of three men walking toward him-sixty, seventy feet away-and rather than give Ricca the pleasure, he raised his gun to his head in one last act of defiance and ended it all.”

“Ricca?”

I shrugged. “There’s a rift between Ricca and Nitti-and the Outfit’s sided with Ricca.”

“Who says?”

“Everybody knows that. Get out of your office once in a while. Let’s say Ricca put a contract out on Nitti. His torpedoes tried to kill Frank, today, along these tracks, and when the switchman and flagman and their conductor jumped off the train, the torpedoes headed for the hills. Unseen. Only Nitti didn’t know they’d gone. And he mistook the IC men approaching him for his assassins.”

Drury thought about that. “That’s where the bullet holes in his hat came from? They shot at him and missed, these torpedoes of yours and Ricca’s?”

“Yeah. Or Nitti hit the high weeds himself, when the first shot rang out. And then stuck his hat up on a stick or on his finger, to draw their fire. Maybe.” I shrugged again. “Who knows?”

“Anomalies, Heller,” he said. “These things never sort out exactly right.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think he shot himself in the head.”

“Cornered by Ricca’s gunmen, he did.”

“What’s the difference?”

I couldn’t answer that. I walked away from him, my hands in my topcoat pockets. Why did it matter to me? Why did I want to believe Frank Nitti’s final act was one of defiance, not despair?

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Drury.

He said, “When we get some more cops out here, some more real cops, I’ll have these ditches combed. If we find any more spent shells, I’ll give your theory some thought. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You liked the man, didn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say I liked him.”

“Respected him, then.”

“Let’s just say I knew him.”

We walked back toward the suburban cops and Nitti’s body. Chief Rose approached us. He said, “I never heard of one of these big gangsters killing himself before. Isn’t this a little unusual?’

“Frankly,” Drury said, “I’m not surprised. Nitti’s been in ill health. He probably figured he was due for prison, and that he couldn’t get the express medical care he desired there-so he took the easy way out.”

That was the way Bill wanted it to be. He hated the gangsters, and he loved the idea of making a coward out of Nitti. Bill was a fine cop, a good man, a better friend; but I knew my reading of how Nitti had died would be lost in the shuffle. Maybe it was wrong of me to look at the facts and investigate wanting to prove Nitti died defiantly; but it was just as wrong for Drury to do the same wanting to prove Nitti a coward. Bill was in charge, though; and the way he saw it would be the way it went down.

Then, suddenly, in a black coat and a black dress, already in mourning, automatically in mourning, there she was: Antoinette Cavaretta. The current Mrs. Frank Nitti. The widow Nitti. The steel woman. On the arm of a uniformed cop who’d gone to get her, at Chief Rose’s request, as it turned out.

She walked falteringly to the fence where Nitti lay; she knelt by him and held his hand and made a sign of the cross.

She stood.

“This was my husband,” she said.

Her usually dark face seemed pale; she wore very little makeup. The uniformed man escorted her a ways away from the body.

Drury went to her; I followed.

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Nitti,” Drury said.

“Don’t be a hypocrite, Captain Drury,” she said. “We both know you hated my husband.”

I said, “Where were you when this happened?”

She looked at me sharply. “Praying for my husband.”

“Really,” I said.

“Frank left about one o’clock and said he was going downtown to see his lawyer. I was worried. He’s been sick, and then this grand jury trouble came up. So I went to church, to Our Lady of Sorrows, and made a novena for him.”

Drury shot me a look as if to say this news proved that Nitti had set out today to commit suicide.

She said, “You people have always persecuted him. Poor Frank! He never did a wrong thing in his life.”

Drury said nothing.

“Do I need your permission,” she asked, bitterly, “to make the funeral arrangements? To have my husband removed to a mortuary?”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Drury said. “Due to the circumstances of his death, it’s the county morgue for him.”

She gave him a look to kill. “You’re so superior, Captain. Don’t take such a death so lightly. You and my husband played in the same arena; such an end could well be yours one day.”

“Is that a threat, Mrs. Nitti?”

“No, Mr. Drury. It’s the voice of experience. Now, I’d like to go home. I have a little boy who’ll be coming home from St. Mary’s in half an hour. There’s difficult news I must share with him.”

“Certainly you can go,” he said, not unkindly.

“Why don’t I walk her?” I asked him.

“It’s not necessary,” she said.

“I’d like to,” I said.

Drury didn’t care.

Mrs. Nitti said, “I would appreciate an arm to lean on, Mr. Heller, yes.”

I gave her my arm and we walked back up along the tracks toward Cermak Road; it was the opposite direction from her house, but the closest street that crossed the tracks.

“My husband was fond of you,” she said.

“Sometimes he had funny ways of showing it.”

We walked.

“That was Frank,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“Mrs. Nitti-or should I call you Toni?”

She took her arm from mine. Stopped for a moment. “Mrs. Nitti will be just fine. Do I sense a touch of disrespect in your voice?”

“I must say you’re taking your husband’s death well, Mrs. Nitti. You’re a rock, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that the first time I saw you, you were in the presence of a dead man. Oh, he didn’t know he was dead, or at least he didn’t like to think he was. But with your help, his faithful secretary’s help, E. J. O’Hare got dead. Good and dead.”

She looked at me coldly, impassively; but she was pulling breath in like a race horse.

“A few years go by, and then you turn up again. At Frank Nitti’s front door. His loving wife. The wife of a dead man. That was the difference between Frank and O’Hare-your husband knew he was dead. When I spoke to him last night, I could tell he knew he was very near the end. He was a brave man, I think.”

“Yes he was,” she said.

“I wonder,” I said, “if you were keeping tabs on Frank for Ricca, like you kept tabs on O’Hare for Frank.”

“You’re a fool.”

“Am I? How’s this for foolish? Frank Nitti, unknown to all but a handful-said handful including you and E. J. O’Hare-betrayed Al Capone to the feds.”

Her eyes flickered.

“It’s so obvious,” I said, “but no one ever thought of it…even though key Capone witness Les Shumway was still employed at Sportsman’s Park. Of course, Nitti arranged Capone’s downfall. Of course, Nitti moved the chess pieces until he was king himself. In a way, I admire him for it.”

“So,” she said, “do I.”

“But then his wife Anna dies. She was the love of his life. She, and his son, were everything to him. And he begins to slide. He goes into the hospital, for the old back trouble from the wounds Mayor Cermak’s boys caused. And for the ulcers that developed after he was wounded.”

“His heart was also bad,” she said. “And he was convinced he had stomach cancer. I wouldn’t want you to leave anything out, Mr. Heller.”

“Stomach cancer. Perfect. I bet YOU don’t even know why he had that notion.”

“Certainly I do, she said. “The assassin who killed Cermak believed he had stomach cancer.”

“That’s right. Joe Zangara. The one-man Sicilian suicide squad who pretended to shoot at FDR so that your husband could bring Mayor Cermak down without… I can almost hear Frank saying it…‘stirring up the heat.’”

“My husband was a brilliant man.”

“Once,” I said “He was-once. He began to slip, though, didn’t he? Despondent over his wife’s death, he took long solitary walks. He even began to drink a little-not like him, not at all like him. His memory began to falter. That’s where you come in.”

“Really? In what way?”

“A marriage of convenience. A business arrangement You ran a dogtrack in Miami, you helped run Sportsman’s Park. You’d been Frank’s inside ‘man’ with O’Hare. Frank had a son he loved very much, who needed a mother-a strong person who could look after little Joseph’s interests after he was gone. A mob insider like you, that was perfect. And, maybe, it was a way to keep you from ever spilling what you knew about Frank setting up Capone. Hell, maybe you blackmailed him into marrying you.”

She let out a long breath, and began to walk again. Quickly. I walked right alongside her.

“You know what I think, Mrs. Nitti?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’ve had practice being a widow. After all, you’ve been a black widow for years.”

She stopped in her tracks, next to the tracks, and she slapped me. Hard. A hard, ringing, stinging slap.

“What do you know?” she said. There was bitterness in the throaty voice, but something else too: pain.

But I pressed on, my cheek flaming, like Estelle Carey in her final moments. “You want me to believe you weren’t keeping tabs on him for Ricca? That you didn’t send him out to meet his death on his regular walk, today?”

“I don’t care what you believe.”

She slowed. She stopped. She turned to me.

“I loved Frank,” she said. “I loved him for years. And he came to love me. He worshipped Anna, but he loved me.”

“Goddamn,” I said, stopped in my tracks now. “I believe you.”

She shook her head slowly, lecturing with a jerky finger. “Perhaps some…some… of what you said is true…but know this: I was never in Ricca’s pocket. I never betrayed Frank. I didn’t blackmail him into marriage. I’m no black widow! No black widow.” She sat down, on the slope, by the tracks. “Just a widow. Another widow.”

I sat next to her. “I’m sorry.”

It was still raining, a little. Still drizzling.

She was breathing heavily. “I understand. You felt something for my husband. That’s what caused your anger.”

“I guess so.”

The pain was showing on her face now. “It’s hard to lose him like this. Death by his own hand.”

“My father committed suicide,” I said.

She looked at me.

“He put a bullet in his head, too.” I looked at her. “It’s something you learn to live with, but you never forget.”

“Perhaps you’ve lost another father today.”

“That’s putting it a little strong. But I am sorry to see the old bastard go.”

Then I looked at her again and she was weeping. The steel lady was weeping.

So I put my arm around her and she wept into my shoulder.

When I left her at her door, the boy was just getting home.

I had supposed the final favor Frank Nitti promised me was one he’d been unable to keep. After all, I asked him Thursday night; and Friday afternoon he was dead.

But Saturday morning a pale, shaking Barney Ross, in civvies for a change, brown jacket, gray slacks and a hastily knotted tie under a wrinkled gray raincoat, came into my office, around eleven, slamming the door behind him.

I was standing at Gladys’s desk, handing her my notes on an insurance report.

“We gotta talk,” he said. He was sweating. It was starting to look and feel just a little like spring out there, but nobody was sweating yet. Except Barney.

Gladys seemed thrown by this uncharacteristically sloppy, angry Barney Ross. And it took quite a bit to throw a cool customer like her.

“Forget this last report,” I told her. “Go ahead and take off a little early.” We only worked till noon on Saturday.

“Sure, Mr. Heller,” she said, rising, gathering her things. “See you Monday.” And, with one last wide-eyed glance back at us, she was out the door.

“Step into my office,” I said, gesturing, smiling.

His one arm hung at his side, hand shaking; the other leaned against the wooden walking stick, which trembled like a coconut palm in a storm. “Did you do this, Nate?”

“Step into my office. Sit down. Take a load off.”

He went ahead of me, as quickly as his walking stick would allow; sat down. I got behind the desk. He was rubbing his hands on his trousered thighs. He didn’t look at me.

“Did you do this thing to me?”

“Do what, Barney?”

Now he tried to look at me, but it was hard for him; his eyes darted around, not lighting anywhere. “Nobody’ll sell me anything. I need my medicine, Nate.”

“You mean you need a fix.”

“It’s for my headaches, and earaches. The malaria relapses. Goddamn, if you don’t understand this, who would?”

“Go to a doctor.”

“I… I used up the doctors the first three weeks, Nate. They’ll only give me a shot, once. I had to go to the streets.”

“Where you’ve found your supply has suddenly dried up.”

“You did it, didn’t you? Why did you do it?”

“What makes you think I did?”

His sweaty face contorted. “You’ve got the pull with the Outfit boys. You coulda gone straight to Nitti himself. That’s what it would take, to dry this town up for me like this.”

“Don’t you read the papers, pal? Nitti’s dead.”

“I don’t care. You did it. Why? Aren’t you my friend?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t hang around with junkies.”

He covered his face with one hand; he was shaking bad. “You can’t stop me. I’m going back out on the road tomorrow. Back on the war-plant circuit. I can find what I need in any town I want. All I got to do is find a new doctor each time-they’ll give it to me. They know who I am, they’ll trust me. They know I’m traveling with a Navy party on this tour…they got no reason to think I’m looking for anything but just one shot of morphine for a malaria flare-up.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’ll work. And when you run out of doctors, you can go back to the street, to the pushers. But not here. Not in Chicago.”

“Nate… I live here.”

“You used to. Maybe you better move to Hollywood with your movie-star wife. You can go make your connection out there. I can’t stop that.”

“Nate! What are you doing to me?”

“What are you doing to yourself?”

“I’ll get past this.”

“That’s a good idea. Get past it. Get some help. Kick this thing.”

He screwed his face up, sweat still beading his brow. “You know what the papers’ll do with this? Look what happened to D’Angelo-all that poor bastard did was write some love letters, and they ruined him.”

I shrugged. “I talked to him a couple of days ago. He’s fine. They’re fitting him a leg. He’ll be working someplace, before you know it. He understands that this thing we went through, we got to put it behind us. You got to put the Island behind you, too, Barney.”

He was almost crying, now. “How could I ever face people? How can I tell Cathy? What would Ma say, and my brothers and my friends? What…what would Rabbi Stein think? Barney Ross, the kid from the ghetto who became champ, the guy they call a war hero and the idol of kids, a sickening, disgusting dope addict! The shame of it, Nate. The shame…”

I got up from behind the desk and put a hand on his shoulder. “You got to do it, Barney. You got to check in someplace and take the cure. You can keep the publicity down to a minimum if you go into a private sanitarium, you know.”

“I… I hear the best place is the government hospital at Lexington. But then everybody’d know…”

“They’d understand. People know what we went through. They don’t understand the extent of it. But they’ll forgive you.”

“I don’t know, Nate.”

“You could start with forgiving yourself.”

“What…what do you mean?”

“For killing Monawk.”

He looked up at me, the tragic brown eyes managing to hold still long enough to lock mine. “You…you know?”

“Yeah.”

He looked away. “H-how long have you known?”

“A little over a month. The night some people broke into my office, it was. Like you, I’d been having nightmares. I dreamed I killed him myself, in one, that night. But when I woke up, I knew I hadn’t. After I thought about it, though, I knew why I’d dreamed that-you killing that poor son of a bitch was the same as me killing him. It was as hard for me to accept, to live with, as if I’d done it myself. That’s why I blocked it, pal. You been sticking a needle in your arm to forget. I managed to forget without any help.”

He was shaking his head. “God, God. I didn’t mean to.”

I squeezed his shoulder. “I know you didn’t. He was screaming, giving us away; you had the forty-five in your hand, and you put a hand over his mouth like you did before, only this time the gun just went off. It was an accident.”

“But I killed him, Nate.”

“Not really. The war killed him. You were trying to save all us poor wounded bastards, him included.”

“I didn’t know anybody else saw it happen.”

“I don’t think anybody did, but me. We were all hurting so bad we were floating in and out of it. But if anybody did, they’ll never say a word.”

He was looking at the floor. “I… I should have reported it. Admitted it. I let them hang this hero shit on me…what kind of man would do that?”

“That’s just it. You’re just a man, Barney. And fuck, you were a hero that night. I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been.”

“I killed him. I kill him over and over in my dreams…”

“The dreams will pass.”

“You shouldn’t have done it, Nate. You shouldn’t have cut off my supply.”

I patted the shoulder. “Someday you’re going to have to learn to live with it. Until that time, go on from town to town selling bonds by day, and scrounging up your fix by night. But don’t do it in Chicago.”

“This is my hometown, Nate-my family’s here…”

“They’ll be here when you decide to come back, too. And so will I.”

He stood, shakily. “I know you did this out of friendship…but it was still wrong…”

“No it wasn’t,” I said.

He and his voodoo cane stumbled out of the inner office; I didn’t help him.

“You might try the abortionist across the hall,” I said.

“You bastard,” he said. But some of the old fight was in his eyes. Barney was still in there, somewhere, in that shell. Someday maybe he’d crawl out.

Barney wasn’t the only local boy to make it big in the papers as a war hero. There was also E. J. O’Hare’s son, “Butch”-a.k.a. Lieutenant Commander Edward Henry O’Hare, a combat pilot who in 1942 received the Congressional Medal of Honor for shooting down five Jap bombers. He died in aerial combat in 1943, and in ’49, Chicago’s International Airport was renamed O’Hare, honoring the son of the proud father who had died eight years earlier, in combat of another sort.

Antoinette Cavaretta, Mrs. Frank Nitti, looked after her stepson well. She managed her late husband’s finances, battling (and winning) various IRS assaults; and she continued receiving payments from an Outfit source, namely her old Sportsman’s Park crony Johnny Patton. In 1955 she requested mob banker Moe Greenberg turn over the capital of a trust fund Frank had set up for his boy Joe. The boy was twenty-one, now, and it only seemed fair. Greenberg refused. The Outfit sided with Mrs. Nitti. Moe Greenberg turned up dead on December 8, 1955.

The boy, Joseph, grew up to be a successful businessman.

Les Shumway, incidentally, was still working at Sportsman’s Park as late as the early sixties. How his charmed life extended beyond Nitti’s death, I never knew; perhaps the widow Nitti’s fine hand was at work there as well.

As for the others, many are dead, of course. Jack Barger, in ’59, having branched out from burlesque into pioneering the drive-in movie business. Johnny Patton. Stege. Goldstone. Campagna. Wyman. Sapperstein. Sally. Eliot. When you get to my age, such lists grow long; they end only when your own name is at the bottom-and you’re not alive to put it there, so what the hell.

Pegler had quite a run, for the ten years following the Pulitzer he won for the Browne/Bioff expose. But he grew even more arrogant, once he’d been legitimized by the prize. His anti-Semitism, his hatred for the Roosevelts, his blasts at the unions, at “Commies,” became an embarrassment. His offkilter opinionated writing grew increasingly self-destructive, until finally he met his downfall when he libeled his old friend Quentin Reynolds. In the 1954 court battle, Louis Nizer-your classic New York Jew liberal lawyer-skewered him; it was never the same after that. By the end-June 1969-he’d lost his syndicated column and was reduced to contributing monthly ramblings to a John Birch Society publication.

Montgomery, of course, continued to star in motion pictures through the late forties; but he began directing, as well, and was a pioneer in the early days of TV. His interest in politics and social concerns never abated; he was the first TV media adviser to a U.S. president (Eisenhower) and was a vocal critic of the abuses of network TV, being an early advocate of public television. He also continued to be outspoken on the subject of the mob’s influence on Hollywood; his Chicago contact in such matters was Bill Drury.

Bill waged his war against the mob for the rest of his short life, despite largely trumped-up charges of misconduct that finally lost him his badge. He was fighting for reinstatement, and preparing to testify to the Kefauver Senate Crime Investigating Committee, when he was shotgunned to death in his car on September 25, 1950.

On October 5, 1943, Paul “the Waiter” Ricca, Louis “Little New York” Campagna, Phil D’Andrea, Frank Maritote (a.k.a. Diamond), Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe and John Roselli were found guilty in the federal court in New York. Each was sentenced ten years and fined $10,000. A co-conspirator, Louis Kaufman, head of the Newark, New Jersey IA local, got seven years and a $10,000 fine. I did not testify against them; with Nitti no longer a defendant, and after a discouraging interview with me, Correa declined to call me.

Ricca, Campagna, Gioe and D’Andrea walked out of stir on August 13, 1947, having served the bare one-third minimum of their sentences that it took to make them eligible for parole. Nobody in history ever got out of prison on the very day they became eligible for parole-till Ricca and company. The fix, obviously, was in-and it stretched clear to Tom C. Clark, attorney general of these United States, who (it was said) received from Ricca, by way of payment, the next open seat on the Supreme Court, in 1949. Of course, it was actually President Harry Truman who nominated Clark-Campagna’s lawyer, by the way, was St. Louis attorney Paul Dillon, Truman’s “close personal friend” and former campaign manager.

I don’t know, exactly, what became of Nick Dean, his wife, and (I presume) that fabled hidden million Estelle Carey never had. The government tried to deport him, back in the early fifties, but it fell through. Last I heard of him, he was in South America. He may be there still.

Browne simply faded away. For a time he had a farm in Woodstock, Illinois, near Chicago; and I heard he moved from there to a farm in Wisconsin. I hear he died of natural causes. If so, he managed that by keeping out of any further union and Outfit business, after his release from prison.

Bioff was the Outfit’s prime target, but he too, for a time, was spared. While still in prison, Ricca was said to have ordered contracts on both Bioff and Westbrook Pegler, but was talked out of it, having been advised that killing them would only create martyrs, and public opinion would be so against Ricca and company that their paroles (already in the works) might not go through. A low profile was needed.

That was advice Bioff might well have taken. But in 1948 he helped the government again, testifying in a tax case against the Outfit’s Jake Guzik and Tony Accardo. Then he belatedly took the low-profile route, settling with his wife and kids on a farm outside Phoenix, Arizona, where he became a stockbroker. He called himself Al Nelson, and got chummy with Barry Goldwater, to whose campaign for U.S. Senate he’d made a political contribution of $5,000.

But, gradually, Willie’s itch for action got him back in the mob’s domain. By early 1955 he was trying to worm his way into the gambling scene in Nevada, specifically a joint in Reno, using the same old strong-arm tactics he’d perfected as a pimp. And in the winter of that same year he was hired by Gus Greenbaum to be in charge of entertainment at the Riviera Casino in Las Vegas; Greenbaum was discouraged by his Outfit friends from hiring Bioff, but Gus felt Willie, with his Hollywood contacts, could “persuade” big-name acts to work cheaper. Labor man Willie had no problems working for management.

Two weeks after his latest airplane ride with Senator Goldwater (the senator, in his private plane, from time to time chauffeured Bioff and his bride to various parties around the Southwest), Al Nelson, a.k.a. Willie Bioff, strolled out of the kitchen door of his luxurious Phoenix home on East Bethany Road and climbed behind the wheel of his pickup truck. He waved to his wife; she was waving back, from the kitchen window, when he put the foot to the starter, which was followed by an explosion that blew the truck and Bioff apart, showering Mrs. Nelson/Bioff with glass from the window where she’d been waving. Every window in the house was shattered. And parts of Willie and his truck lay glistening in the desert sun. The former panderer’s charred former finger bearing a $7,500 diamond ring was found in the grass two hundred feet from the house.

Willie’s Vegas mentor Greenbaum was killed in 1958; he and his wife were trussed up in their home and their throats slashed.

Such deaths were typical of the post-Nitti Outfit’s style; the headlines were often bloody, the heat was frequently stirred up. Not until the 1960s did the style revert, somewhat, to Nitti’s lower-key approach.

The Chicago local of the IATSE, by the way, continues to be linked to the Outfit; in 1980 the Chicago Tribune reported that the feds had identified twenty-four men with mob ties as members of Local 110. And the second-highest-paid labor leader in the entertainment industry, Variety said in 1985, was the business manager of that local, who took home nearly a million in salary and expenses over the latest ten-year period.

As for me, from time to time I had dealings with Nitti’s successors, but never again did I come to know one of the mob bosses in the way I knew Nitti. My agency, A-1, is still around; but I retired years ago.

Barney? On January 12, 1947, he was released from the U.S. Public Health Service addiction hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, where he had admitted himself voluntarily three months earlier. He’d gone that route because (he told me later) he heard “those private sanitariums ain’t tough enough.” Also, by going to a government hospital, he’d make a clean breast of it, publicly; he might encourage others with the same problem to come forward, too. It was also a gesture to his wife, who had recently left him, of his sincerity about quitting the stuff. Cathy was there for him, when he got out of Lexington.

“The withdrawal gave me the miseries,” he told me, “because the reduced dose of morphine wasn’t enough to kill the cramps and the sweats. I learned quick enough where the expression ‘kick the habit’ come from. When they gradually cut down my dope, I got spasms in the muscles of my arms and my legs actually kicked. And then I was back there again, Nate. On the Island. I kept fighting the Japs in that muddy shell hole, over and over again. But now I don’t have to go back there no more.”

I hope nobody does.

Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and a few liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible-and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of my conflicting source material, and the need to telescope certain events to make for a more smoothly flowing narrative. The E. J. O’Hare and Estelle Carey cases are complex and, in order to deal with them both within this one volume, the use of compressed time and composite characters was occasionally necessary. While in most cases real names have been used, I have at times substituted similar or variantly spelled names for those of real people, when these real people-particularly, more minor, non-“household name” historical figures-have been used in a markedly fictionalized manner. Such characters include Nate and Barney’s fellow Marines and soldiers in the Guadalcanal section; Sergeant Donahoe; the Borgias; and Wyman. All of these characters did, however, have real-life counterparts.

While numerous books and newspaper accounts were consulted in the writing of the Guadalcanal section of The Million-Dollar Wound, several books proved particularly helpful. Semper Fi, Mac (1982), by Henry Berry, a Studs Terkel-style oral history of the Marines in the Pacific, was far and away the most valuable resource for that section, and is highly recommended to any readers interested in exploring this subject further. Very helpful as well (and recommended reading) were (are) two Marine memoirs: With the Old Breed (1981), E. B. Sledge; and Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (1980), William Manchester. And, of course, the autobiography of Barney Ross (written with Martin Abramson), No Man Stands Alone (1957), provided the basis for Barney and Nate’s story; it should be noted that the death of a Marine by “friendly fire” in this novel is fictional, although it grows out of an admission in the Ross autobiography that such an event nearly occurred. Otherwise, the account of Barney Ross’s experiences in that bloody, muddy shell hole is a true one.

The portrait of Westbrook Pegler is drawn primarily from two biographies-Pegler: Angry Man of the Press (1963), Oliver Platt; and Fair Enough: The Life of Westbrook Pegler (1975), Finis Farr. Also consulted were Pegler’s own writings, including the collections ’T Ain’t Right (1936) and George Spelvin, American, and Fireside Chats (1942), as well as his newspaper columns pertaining to Bioff and Browne. The anti-Semitic behavior of Pegler depicted here is reflected in these biographies to an extent, as well as in Louis Nizer’s My Life in Court (1961); but is based also upon an interview with an acquaintance of Pegler’s who was on the receiving end of the columnist’s prejudice.

As was the case in True Crime (1984), the portrait of Sally Rand herein is a fictionalized one, though based upon numerous newspaper and magazine articles, and especially drawing upon Stud Terkel’s oral history Hard Times (1970); but I feel I must label it as fictionalized, as I know of no historic parallel in Sally Rand’s life to her relationship with Nate Heller. Her portrait in these pages is also drawn from a 1939 Collier’s article by Quentin Reynolds. The portrait of Robert Montgomery is largely drawn from another Collier’s article by Reynolds of approximately the same vintage (it is typically Heller-ironic that two articles by Quentin Reynolds, whose libel suit against Westbrook Pegler spelled the beginning of the end for the feisty columnist, served as major reference sources for this novel). The Montgomery portrait was further drawn from Current Biography (1948) and Contemporary Authors, his own book Open Letter From a Television Viewer (1968), and various other magazine articles and books.

Other books that deserve singling out include The Legacy of Al Capone (1975) by George Murray-the only comprehensive study of the post-Capone mob era, and a very valuable reference to the writing of the Nitti Trilogy; The Tax Dodgers (1948), a memoir by Treasury Agent Elmer L. Irey (with William J. Slocum); and The Extortionists (1972), a memoir of Herbert Aller, business representative of the IATSE for thirty-six years.

The portrait of Antoinette Cavaretta, the second Mrs. Nitti, must be viewed as a fictionalized one. Although the basic facts of her business involvement with Nitti, working as E. J. O’Hare’s secretary, marrying Nitti, etc., are accurate, few interviews with her exist (and these brief interviews were at the stressful time of her husband’s death); my imagined portrait of her is largely drawn from the newspaper accounts of the day, and from material in Murray’s The Legacy of Al Capone and Ed Reid’s The Grim Reapers (1969). Also consulted (in regard to Antoinette Cavaretta and other mob-related figures in this book) were the transcripts of the Kefauver Senate Crime Investigating Committee hearings. Nate Heller’s speculations about Cavaretta’s personal relationship with Nitti prior to their marriage-including her possible role in O’Hare’s murder-should be viewed as just that: speculation; and speculation by a fictional character in a historical novel, at that. It should be noted, however, that the Kefauver investigators explored the same area in the questioning of various Chicago crime figures.

Several hardworking people helped me research this book, primarily George Hagenauer, whose many contributions include helping develop the theory regarding Frank Nitti’s “setting up” Al Capone, and exploring the suspicious circumstances surrounding Nitti’s death. In the previous two volumes “from the memoirs of Nathan Heller,” True Detective (1983) and True Crime (1984), which with this novel comprise the Nitti Trilogy, theories regarding the assassination of Mayor Anton Cermak, and the substitution of a “patsy” in the FBI-sanctioned shooting of John Dillinger, were respectively explored; these theories, however, had been discussed and developed, in part at least, by previous crime historians. To our knowledge, no one has ever before questioned and explored the circumstances of Nitti’s suicide, or seriously suggested that Nitti engineered Al Capone’s fall; these theories are new to this volume. Despite their presentation within this fictional arena, we offer, and stand behind, these as serious theories and invite further research by crime historians, which we feel will only serve to demonstrate the legitimacy of our claims. (We have, for example, visited the Nitti death site, the terrain of which tends to confirm our notion that a gunman or gunmen may have been firing at Nitti just prior to his suicide.)

Mike Gold, another Chicagoan who is a Chicago history buff with an eye for detail, provided his usual help and support. My friend John W. McRae, a Marine through and through, was kind enough to read the Guadalcanal section and make some suggestions, all of which I took. My friend and frequent collaborator, cartoonist Terry Beatty, also lent his support and editor’s eye to this project. And I would like especially to thank Dominick Abel, my agent, who has done more for me than these few words can indicate. Ruptured Duck awards for combat duty are due Tom Dunne, my editor, who has believed in Heller from the beginning; and his associate Susannah Driver, whose hard work on these books was well above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks also to editorial assistants Susan Patterson and Pam Hoenig. And a big thanks to Ed Gorman and Connie Sisson of Media Consultations. Thanks also to Jane Crawford, of AAA Travel Agency, Muscatine, Iowa; and Chris Dobson, American Airlines historian. Thanks to Chicago’s Bob Cromie for sharing his Pacific experiences in an interview (and whose original Tribune articles were invaluable). And a tip of the fedora to three suspense masters: Andrew M. Greeley, Howard Browne and Mickey Spillane, for help, suggestions, and support.

A special thanks to my aunt and uncle, Beth and Paul Povlsen, who shared with me their wartime experiences as nurse and corpsman, respectively, at St. Elizabeth’s. Some of the medical treatment described herein (including the use of hypnosis in treatment of amnesia) derives from John Huston’s classic documentary Let There Be Light (1948).

Photos selected by the author for use in this edition are courtesy AP/World Wide Photos and the Chicago Tribune; the rest have been selected from the personal collections of George Hagenauer and the author, the bulk of them having been culled from long out-of-print “true detective” magazines of the late thirties and early forties-a few others are U.S. Marine Corps photos. Efforts to track the sources of certain photos have been unsuccessful; upon notification these sources will be listed in subsequent editions.

Hundreds of books, and magazine and newspaper articles (from the Tribune, Daily News, Herald-American, and other Chicago papers of the day), have been consulted in researching The Million-Dollar Wound; among the magazines are issues of This Week in Chicago, a publication that provided background on Rinella’s Brown Derby (where Sally Rand did indeed appear in 1943), the Barney Ross Cocktail Lounge and the Rialto Theater. I am particularly indebted to the anonymous authors of the Federal Writers Project volumes on the states of California and Illinois, both of which appeared in 1939. A few other books deserve singling out: Hollywood Babylon II (1984), Kenneth Anger; Maxwell Street (1977), Ira Berkow; Cleveland: The Best Kept Secret (1967), George E. Condon; This Was Burlesque (1968), Ann Corio (with Joseph DiMona); Captive City (1969), Ovid Demaris; Time Capsule: History of the War Years 1939–1945 (1972), John Dille; Pacific Victory 1945 (1944), Joseph Driscoll; Dining in Chicago (1931), John Drury; Gone Hollywood (1979), Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz; The Art of Detection (1948), Jacob Fisher; Mafia USA (1972), Nicholas Gage, editor; The Battle for Guadalcanal (1963), Samuel B. Griffith II; The Homefront: America During World War II (1984), Mark Jonathan Harris, Franklin Mitchell, and Steven Schechter; WW II (1975), James Jones; Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (1971), John Kobler; Chicago Confidential (1950), Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer; World War II Super Facts (1983), Don McCombs and Fred L. Worth; Guadalcanal Remembered (1982), Herbert Christian Merillat; The Mob in Show Business (1973), Hank Messick; People to See (1981), Jay Robert Nash; The Untouchables (1957), Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley; The Great Battles of World War II, Volume I: The Pacific Island Battles (1985), Charles E. Pfannes and Victor A. Salamone; The Green Felt Jungle (1963), Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris; Since You Went Away (1973), Donald I. Rogers; The Man Who Got Capone (1976), Frank Spiering; The 100 Greatest Boxers of All Time (1984), Bert Randolph Sugar; Encyclopedia of American Crime (1982), Carl Sifakis; Syndicate City (1954), Alson J. Smith; The Good War (1984), Studs Terkel; Guadalcanal Diary (1943), Richard Tregaskis; Yank: The Story of World War II as Written by the Soldiers (1984), Yank editors; and The Guadalcanal Campaign (1949), Major John L. Zimmerman, USMCR.

When all the debts have been paid, or at least acknowledged, one remains: this book could not have been written without the love, help and support of my wife, Barbara Collins-Nate’s mother.