True Detective (47 page)

Nitti didn't move; the muscles in his back tensed, but he kept his pose. Then, slowly, he glanced back at me. I couldn't see much of his face, but I could see the confusion.

"Heller?" he said.

"Surprised?"

"Where's Louie and Fatso?"

"In the garbage."

"Are you feelin' okay, kid?"

"Take your hand out of the icebox. Frank. Nice and slow."

"What, you think I got a gun in the icebox? You fall off your rocker or something Heller?"

"I fell off something higher. Just take the hand out and turn around slow."

He did. There was another small but nasty red scar on his chest; and one more on his neck, where he'd also been shot by Lang. It looked like an ugly birthmark. He still had the milk bottle in one hand, nothing in the other.

"I was just raidin' the icebox, kid." he said, keeping it casual, but his narrowed eyes were anything but. "There's some leftover roast lamb in there. You wouldn't want to help me finish it. would you?"

The kitchen was white and modern; cozy, with a table in the midst. There were some cards on the table, from where Campagna and Fatso had been sitting, I supposed.

"Anybody else in the apartment, Frank?"

"No."

-

"Show me around."

He shrugged. Walking slowly, he led me through the place, going down a hallway that had several rooms off either side, bedrooms, a sitting room, a study. At the end of the hall was a big living room. The rooms were large, well-furnished; the walls were decorated here and there with Catholic icons. Nobody but Nitti was home.

In the kitchen again, I let him sit at the table, with his back to the door I'd come in. I sat with my back to the sink, so I could see the back door at my right and the hallway at my left. Nitti was studying me. He'd grown out his inverted-V mustache, I noticed; it was thicker, now. He looked older; skinny; small. While he hardly looked like a man on death's door, he was clearly not the man he'd been before Lang shot him.

"Kid. Mind if I take a swig of this milk?"

"Go ahead."

He took two gulps, right from the bottle, and for a moment a milk mustache mingled with Iris own, till he wiped it off with the back of one hand.

"Ulcers." he said. "All I do these days is drink milk."

"My heart bleeds."

"Yeah, well so do my ulcers, you little punk bastard. What the goddamn hell's this about? You're committin' goddamn suicide, you know."

"There's a dead man downstairs."

He sat up. "Louie? If you killed Louie, so help me I'll"

"Campagna's all right. He won't know his name for a couple hours, but he's all right. So's Fatso."

"Then, who…?"

"A blond guy. I don't know his name. But I've seen him around."

Nitti raised his chin and looked at me from slitted eyes.

"Last time I saw him," I said, "was at Bayfront Park, when you sent him to help kill Cermak. The time before that I saw him running down Randolph Street; that was when Capone sent him to kill Jake Lingle. And tonight, tonight you sent him to kill Nathan Heller. And he didn't get the job done, did he?"

Nitti was shaking his head. "You're wrong. Wrong."

"Tell me about it. Tell me you sent that son of a bitch to Florida just to catch some sun."

He pointed a finger at me, like my gun pointed at him. "I didn't say I didn't send him to Florida. What I do say is I didn't send him to kill you."

The gun in my hand was stalling to shake. I heard myself say. "He pushed me off the Sky Ride tower. Frank. Six hundred feet in the sky. and by all rights I should be a twisted sack of bones and meat on a morgue tray right now, but I'm not. I'm here, and he's dead, and so are you, Nitti. I wish to Christ Lang had killed you that day. I wish to Christ I hadn't made 'em call an ambulance for you, cocksucker."

Nitti sat there quietly; when I ran out of speech, he patted the air softly, as if quieting, settling down, a child.

"Heller," he said. "I didn't send him. I didn't even know the bastard was in town. He doesn't work for me."

"Fuck you. You're dead."

"Wait. Just
w&it
. Lower that goddamn thing, will you? Hear me out. I didn't say he never done work for me. He's from the East. He's a guy Johnny Torrio recommended to Al, back on the Lingle deal; and I use him now and then- on ticklish matters."

"So that's what I am. A ticklish matter."

"I know how you feel. I know the kind of emotions that are running wild in you. kid. I know all about revenge. If Ten Percent Tony wasn't in hell already, you could ask
him
if Nitti doesn't know all about revenge. But I didn't hire a contract on you. I swear by all that's holy."

As if on cue. a church bell began ringing. Midnight. I wondered idly if it was Notre Dame or Our Lady of Pompeü.

I said "Who sent him then?"

"I don't know the answer to that. Not for sure. But I can figure it out. So can you. if you try."

I was starting to feel confused: I was starting to wonder what the hell I was doing. The momentum, the moment, was slipping away from me…

"The Lang trial is comin' up in September." Nitti said. "Or have you forgotten? Is that all past history to you now? Well, it isn't past history to some people."

"Are you saying Lang sent that guy? He doesn't have the money or the connections to"

"He doesn't have the brains, or the guts, either. No. Not Lang. Nobody. Nobody sent him. You sang on the stand. Heller. You made news in Chicago: you told the truth. How do you think your blond buddy felt when he heard you were doin' that? You can identify him as the real killer of Jake Lingle; you can identify him as a second gunman at the Cermak kill. What sort of thoughts do you suppose went through his head when he found out Nate Heller's got a sudden case of telling the truth on witness stands? Who can say
what
might come out at this Lang trial. Lang was at Bayfront Park, too, you know."

I was resting the elbow of the arm with the gun-in-hand, on the table; now I leaned on the other elbow, too, and was rubbing the side of my face. I swallowed. My mouth was dry. And I felt sick to my stomach.

So did Nitti, apparently, because he took another swig of milk.

He wiped off his mouth, smiled, and said, "Put the gun down. Just set it on the table."

It sounded like a pretty good idea, but I wasn't ready to believe him just yet.

I said, "What about Jimmy Beame, then?"

"Forget Jimmy Beame. And I'm doing you a favor, giving you that advice. So put the gun down, take the advice, and go. Just go away."

I felt a surge of something; my face felt flushed. "I almost believed you for a minute, Frank. But now the truth comes out, whether you meant it to or not. Jimmy Beame was tied to Ted Newberry, I don't know how exactly, except that it was through the Tri-Cities liquor ring. And then he infiltrated your organization, and you found out, and you what? Had him killed? You're smiling. I'm right, aren't I? I'm right. And I started snooping around, and when I connected with Dipper Cooney- you were at the goddamn fight
yourself
, Frank- you tried to kill us both, but managed only to shut
Cooney
up, and"

"Cooney died because he was with you. That's my guess, anyway. And that dead blond son of a bitch out there was who did it."

That's right: the car he was sitting out there in right now was the car that had glided by shooting last night.

Nitti's voice was a calm drone. "I've known you were looking for Jimmy Beame for a long time." he shrugged. "Since you first started hitting the flophouses on North Clark Street. Nothing much 'scapes my notice, kid."

"He is dead, though, isn't he?"

"Yeah. And he did do some work for Ted Newberry- ran some errands for Ted and his pals in the Tri-Cities. But you're forgetting something: between Saint Valentine's Day, '29, when him and Bugs Moran just missed the party, and that ditch in the dunes this January. Ted was one of ours. Back when the Beame kid was working for him, Ted was working for me and Al. So that fairy tale you built won't wash."

"Tell me a tale that will wash."

"No. You go home. I owe you one. And here's how I'm gonna repay you: the blond's going for a midnight swim in his car, in the Chicago River; and I'm gonna tell Louie and Fatso it was all a misunderstanding and they shouldn't kill you. That's how I'm gonna repay you. Now leave the gun- it's the blond's, ain't it? Dicks don't pack silencers, at least that I ever heard of."

I shifted the silenced gun to my left hand and with my right got out my own automatic; then, awkwardly. I managed to take the clip out of the silenced gun, and put the clip in my pocket, leaving the emptied gun on the table. Then I shifted my automatic to my right hand and said, "I haven't finished with this."

"Yes you have."

"No. You don't get it. do you. Frank? Jimmy Beame isn't just another job I'm doing, just another missing persons case. He's my fiancee's brother. That's right: my fiancee. I met her months ago, when she hired me to find the kid When she finds out he's dead, she's going to insist on me looking into it. I'm going to have to find the guy who did it, Frank. And while you probably didn't pull the trigger, I got a feeling in a very real sense you're the guy."

Nitti laughed: it was a laugh that had no humor in it- something like sadness was more like it.

"Actually," Nitti said, "I owe you one for something else. Something you don't know about. You did me a favor once, and you don't even know it."

Capone said almost the same thing to me, at Atlanta.

"I didn't know this Beame kid by that name," he said. "I didn't know about the Newberry connection, either, at first. All I knew was Dipper Cooney- who knew better than to stiff me- okayed this kid, and when I talked to the kid, I found him different. He was a little wiseguy, for one thing, but more than that, he was smart. I said, you been to college, ain't ya, kid? And he said, don't let it get around. I liked that. He was real good with figures, and we made him kind of an accountant, in a wire room. Joe Palumbo's wire room. Ring a bell yet. Heller?"

No church bells rang on cue this time; but a bell was ringing.

"Got Jimmy Beanie's picture handy. Heller?"

I dug at my billfold; got the picture out.

"Lemme see." Nitti said, reaching across. "I never seen him this young, or this fat. either. Baby fat. His hair was longer, too, curlier. And he had a mustache. Must've grew that to look older."

The kid in the window.

"
You
killed him, Heller," Nitti said.

Then he wasn't in the window anymore.

"You killed him," Nitti continued. "That's the favor you did us. See, one of my guys recognized the kid was somebody who'd done some running for Newberry and the Tri-Cities boys. Only he knew the kid's name wasn't Hurt- that's what he was calling himself, Frankie Hurt- but the guy couldn't remember what the other name was. Well, hell, a lot of guys use more than one name in a lifetime- I was bora Nitto, ya know- but better safe than sorry. I had Louie check out the kid's flop.

"And Louie found something bad. He found notebooks. Lined paper, like a school kid. Only these notebooks were full of writing, and it wasn't no school kid's work. This Hurt was writing down everything he saw and heard, and because Palumbo's wire room was a place I was at a lot. the kid heard a lot. Just bits and pieces, of course, but good bits and pieces, or bad ones, depending on how you look at it. He also found the kid's real ID. a driver's license, and saw his name was James something Beame. James Palmer Beame, I think it was. And found an address book with the kid's father's name in it, and the father was a doctor in Idaho or something, and something else. The damn kid had his damn college diploma in the drawer, and guess what it said he studied in?"

"Journalism," I said.

"Right! The kid was going to peddle his story
our
story- to the papers! Something had to be done. Do I got to spell out what? But here's the catch- Louie found this out the morning of the day you and Lang and Miller raided the wire room at the Wacker-LaSalle. The kid was there, and Louie hadn't had a chance to tell me any of this- obviously, it was better for me to know about the kid before the kid knew he was found out. So I was in there mouthing off about this and that, as I was placing some bets, and Louie grabbed the notepaper I was jotting bets down on- I had Anna's grocery list on it, too, can you top it?- and wrote me a quick message about the kid, and then you guys showed."

I felt strange- almost
dizzy
. "That note," I said. "Was it…?"

"Yeah. That was the note I chewed up, the note I got shot over. Not that Lang wouldn't've found some other excuse. Then I got shot, and in the other room, the kid was getting nervous- this I found out later, of course, from Louie. The kid knows if he gets pulled in by the cops, he stands to get found out. He must've wanted to fill a couple more notebooks before goin' public. Anyway, so Louie tells the kid to make a break for it. The kid doesn't know. Louie says, do it. Go on. Go. And you come in the room, and Louie tosses the kid a gun. and you did us all a favor."

I just sat there. The gun was in my hand, but wasn't pointing at anything. The gun I'd used. The gun my father used.

Then Campagna was in the back doorway, unarmed, but angry, teeth bared, blood caked on the side of his face. He was moving toward me. not giving a damn that I had a gun, but Nitti put an ami out and stopped him. Campagna, confused, leaned over and Nitti whispered to him; and Campagna, rolling his eyes, sighing, said, "Well, then. I'll go help Fatso. He's still out."

"Good idea," Nitti said.

I put the gun back under my arm.

"You want a drink, Heller? I got some nice vino. Can't drink it myself, this damn stomach of mine. Been killin' me. Hey- cheer up. You'll think of something to tell your girl."

"I killed her brother," I said.

"I know that. You know that. Nobody else does. He's buried in potter's field; just another dead nobody. Leave him there."

I got up; my legs wobbled, but I got up.

Nitti. bare-chested, came around and put an arm around my shoulder. "You been through a lot. my friend. You go get some sleep. And let go of this."