Thank God for Ev MacMillan. Without her, he was not sure how he could have gotten through this, at least not without breaking down in front of everybody. Right now she was over looking at the many flowers, reading the small cards of condolence.
Evelyn was a slender brunette, twenty-five, who had first caught his eye half a dozen years ago, when he was still head of the Justice Department prohibition unit in Chicago. He had met her and her family socially (her father was a prominent stockbroker); Ness was still married at the time, and Ev was really just a kid, attending the Art Institute. But she had made an impression on him.
And apparently he had on her, as well.
He and Bob Chamberlin had taken the weekend off to take the train to Ann Arbor for the Michigan-Chicago football game. They had run into Ev and some friends at the stadium Saturday, Ev glowing upon seeing Ness, and the whole crew had gone out for dinner after the game, at the hotel. That evening Ness had gotten word his mother had died that afternoon.
He and Ev had become pretty friendly during the course of the day and the early evening, with some slightly inebriated hand-holding and flirting and such ensuing; but he hardly expected Ev to insist on going back to Chicago with him. But insist she did.
"I'm fine," he'd told her, last night at the Ann Arbor train station. "You don't need to come."
"You're not fine. Your heart is breaking, and I'm here to help you pick up the pieces. No arguments."
He hadn't argued. They got a compartment and he had broken down and cried in her arms; he'd been a little drunk, after all. She had comforted him as he hadn't been comforted since… well, since his mother comforted him as a kid, he guessed.
He walked over to her, where she was still reading the little cards on the floral arrangements.
"These are all so lovely," she said. "Your mother had many friends. So many friends."
"She and Papa lived in the neighborhood over fifty years."
"It's quite a tribute, so many flowers."
Ness began to read the small cards. Names began to register. Faces that went with the names floated up from his memory.
"One time," he said reflectively, "a man came in the bakery and asked my father to bake a cake in the shape of an M. The next day the man came back and saw what Papa had made and said, 'No, no, no-I want a fancy M.' Papa threw the cake away and gave it another go. The next day the man came back in and was handed my father's masterpiece: an ornate M-shaped cake in a flowery script. 'That's more like it!' the man said. And Papa said, 'Shall I wrap it up?' And the man said, 'No thanks, I'll eat it here!'"
Ev smiled at that, and Ness smiled back at her; he had told the story, a favorite of his, to try to cheer himself and Ev up. But for some reason, now he was having to work even harder at holding back the tears.
"Did you see this floral display?" Ev asked, taking his hand, leading him like a child. "It's really quite elaborate…" Then she whispered, "Even if it isn't in the best of taste."
It was a garish display, red and white and blue mums, more appropriate to the winner's circle at a horse race than the parlor of a funeral home. An artist like Ev would naturally find it a little distasteful, but Ness figured it was the thought that counts.
Ev read the card. "This is from 'Frank and the Boys." Who are Frank and the Boys?"
"Let me see that," Ness snapped, and he grabbed the card, pulling it off the tiny string that held it on. Ev was startled, staring wide-eyed as Ness read the card to himself.
He looked at her sharply. "This is from Frank Nitti."
"Oh. Oh my."
"The Chicago Outfit," Ness said bitterly, "paying their respects."
He grabbed the garish wreath and said, "I'll be back."
He marched straight to the rear door and went out into the alley, where a row of one-story parking garages serving adjacent apartment buildings faced the backs of the funeral home and other commercial buildings. Ness carried the wreath to a group of garbage cans behind the store next door and began to beat the wreath against the brick wall savagely, ripping the decorative ribbon, pulverizing the flowers, mashing them to nothing, the wire framework bending, distorting.
When he was finished, he dropped the remains of the wreath into the nearest of the trash cans. Then he stood, with hands balled to fists, and breathed heavily, red with anger.
"Remind me never to send you flowers," a voice said.
Ness turned.
The man standing in the alley, having just come out of the rear door of the funeral home, was a solid six feet tall, with reddish brown hair; his smile was wry but not unkind. His suit was dark and so was his tie. His name was Nathan Heller, and he was an ex-cop pal from Ness's prohibition-unit days; working as a private op out of his own small office, now.
Ness sighed and managed an embarrassed smile. "Frank Nitti sent those flowers. I guess it must've rubbed me the wrong way."
Heller shrugged. "Maybe Frank didn't mean it as a dig. He respects you."
"I don't respect him. I think he meant it as an insult, and if he didn't, it's an intrusion into my personal life that I damn well don't appreciate."
Heller walked up to Ness and put a hand on his shoulder. "It's good to see you, too, Eliot. Wish it wasn't this way, though."
Ness patted his friend's hand. "Yeah. I know. Thanks for coming."
Heller moved a few steps away. "I didn't know your mom very well. But I do know she raised a hell of a son."
"Thanks."
"Where is Charles?"
Ness laughed. "I'm glad you came. We needed to talk, anyway."
"That can wait. Business can wait. We can talk tomorrow."
"No. Let's take some time now. I don't want to go back in there just yet."
Ness put lids on two of the garbage cans, and the two men sat down on them.
"Well, I did finish that job you contracted," Heller said. "In fact, your friend Caldwell headed back to Cleveland just this morning, by train."
Ness had hired Heller, by phone, to shadow Big Jim Caldwell, who had taken a trip to Chicago for a union convention late last week.
"Caldwell met with Louis Campagna at the Bismarck Hotel," Heller said. "They had lunch yesterday. Then they went upstairs."
"To see Nitti?"
"That I'm not sure of. Nitti is known to rent out a suite there, from time to time. But what the hell-Campagna is Nitti's top lieutenant. What more do you need?"
"Nothing more," Ness said.
"Your suspicions were correct, I'd say," the private detective said. "What's going on in Cleveland is not strictly a local deal. It's definitely part of a move by the mob to move in on unions nationally."
"The Chicago mob."
"Well… more than just the Outfit, would be my guess. The whole national syndicate's in this effort."
Ness was nodding. "Thanks, Nate. This will help."
"Where does your investigation stand, anyway?"
"We're in good shape, on the labor racketeering charges. We've got seventy-some witnesses in Cleveland, and I've been gathering more from the midwest and east coast as well. I'm going to follow up on several potential witnesses in Chicago while I'm here in town."
"What about the murder charge? That Whitehall killing?"
Ness shook his head. "We think we know who the shooter was-a strong-arm named Gibson. And we managed to match up the bullets from the Gordon's restaurant shooting to the ones that ripped Jack Whitehall apart."
"Same gun? No question?"
"Same gun. No question. The frustrating thing is, Gibson used a machine gun in a previous vandalism, at the food terminal, but nobody bothered to collect any of the spent slugs as evidence."