“It’s that distasteful?”
“Hell, no, I’m having a whale of time, so to speak. It’s just shredding what little’s left of my self-respect, and shabby little code of ethics, is all. Banging a big fat murdering bitch and liking it.” I shuddered.
“This woman is an ogre, no question…and I’m not talking about her looks. Nate, if we can stop her, and expose what’s she done, it’ll pave the way for prosecuting the other women in the Natural Death, Inc., racket…or at the very least scaring them out of it.”
That evening Katie and I were walking up the hill. No streetlights in this part of town, and no moon to light the way; lights in the frame and brick houses we passed, and the headlights of cars heading toward the bridge, threw yellow light on the cracked sidewalk we trundled up, arm in arm, Katie and me. She wore a yellow peasant blouse, always pleased to show off her treasure chest, and a full green skirt.
“Any second thoughts, handsome?”
“Just one.”
She stopped; we were near the rise of the hill and the lights of cars came up and over and fell like prison searchlights seeking us out. “Which is?”
“I’m willing to do a dirty deed for a tidy dollar, don’t get me wrong, love. It’s just…didn’t your husband die this same way?”
“He did.”
“Heavily insured and pushed in front of his oncoming destiny?”
There was no shame, no denial; if anything, her expression-chin high, eyes cool and hard-spoke pride. “He did. And I pushed him.”
“Did you, now? That gives a new accomplice pause.”
“I guess it would. But I told you he cheated me. He salted money away. And he was seeing other women. I won’t put up with disloyalty in a man.”
“Obviously not.”
“I’m the most loyal steadfast woman in the world…’less you cross me. Frank O’Meara’s loss is your gain…if you have the stomach for the work that needs doing.”
A truck came rumbling up over the rise, gears shifting into low gear, and for a detective, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t know we’d been shadowed; but we had. We’d been followed, or anticipated; to this day I’m not sure whether she came from the bushes or behind us, whether fate had helped her or careful planning and knowledge of her mother’s ways. Whatever the case, Maggie O’Meara came flying out of somewhere, hurling her skinny stick-like arms forward, shoving the much bigger woman into the path of the truck.
Katie had time to scream, and to look back at the wild-eyed smiling face of her daughter washed in the yellow headlights. The big rig’s big tires rolled over her, her girth presenting no problem, bones popping like twigs, blood streaming like water.
The trucker was no hit-and-skip guy. He came to a squealing stop and hopped out and trotted back and looked at the squashed shapeless shape, yellow and green clothing stained crimson, limbs, legs, turned to pulp, head cracked like a melon, oozing.
I had a twinge of sorrow for Katie O’Meara, that beautiful horror, that horrible beauty; but it passed.
“She just jumped right out in front of me!” the trucker blurted. He was a small, wiry man with a mustache, and his eyes were wild.
I glanced at Maggie; she looked blankly back at me.
“I know,” I said. “We saw it, her daughter and I…poor woman’s been despondent.”
I told the uniform cops the same story about Katie, depressed over the loss of her dear husband, leaping in front of the truck. Before long, Eliot arrived himself, topcoat flapping in the breeze as he stepped from the sedan that bore his special EN-1 license plate.
“I’m afraid I added a statistic to your fatalities,” I admitted.
“What’s the real story?” he asked me, getting me to one side. “None of this suicide nonsense.”
I told Eliot that Katie had been demonstrating to me how she wanted me to push Harold Wilson, lost her footing and stumbled to an ironic death. He didn’t believe me, of course, and I think he figured that I’d pushed her myself.
He didn’t mind, because I produced such a great witness for him. Maggie O’Meara had the goods on the Natural Death racket, knew the names of every woman in her mother’s ring, and in May was the star of eighty witnesses in the Grand Jury inquiry. Harold Wilson and many other of the “unwitting pawns in the death-gambling insurance racket” (as reporter Clayton Fritchey put it) were among those witnesses. So were Dr. Alice Jeffers, investigator Gaspar Corso and me.
That night, the night of Katie O’Meara’s “suicide,” after the police were through with us, Maggie had wept at her kitchen table while I fixed coffee for her, though her tears were not for her mother or out of guilt, but for her murdered father. Maggie never seemed to put together that her dad had been an accomplice in the insurance scheme, or anyway never allowed herself to admit it.
Finally, she asked, “Are you…are you really going to cover for me?”
That was when I told her she was going to testify.
She came out of it, fine; she inherited a lot of money from her late mother-the various insurance companies did not contest previous pay-outs-and I understand she sold O’Meara’s and moved on, with a considerable nest egg. I have no idea what became of her, after that.
Busting the Natural Death, Inc., racket was Eliot’s last major triumph in Cleveland law enforcement. The following March, after a night of dining, dancing and drinking at the Vogue Room, Eliot and Ev Ness were in an automobile accident, Eliot sliding into another driver’s car. With Ev minorly hurt, Eliot-after checking the other driver and finding him dazed but all right-rushed her to a hospital and became a hit-f eun driver. He made some efforts to cover up and, even when he finally fessed up in a press conference, claimed he’d not been intoxicated behind that wheel; his political enemies crucified him, and a month later Eliot resigned as Public Safety Director.
During the war, Eliot headed up the government’s efforts to control venereal disease on military bases; but he never held a law enforcement position again. He and Ev divorced in 1945. He married a third time, in 1946, and ran, unsuccessfully for mayor of Cleveland in ’47, spending the rest of his life trying, without luck, to make it in the world of business, often playing on his reputation as a famed gangbuster.
In May, 1957, Eliot Ness collapsed in his kitchen shortly after he had arrived home from the liquor store, where he had bought a bottle of Scotch.
He died with less than a thousand dollars to his name-I kicked in several hundred bucks on the funeral, wishing his wife had taken out some damn burial insurance on him.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed within this story, which is based on an actual case in the career of Eliot Ness.
SCREWBALL
Not long ago Miami Beach had been a sixteen-hundred-acre stretch of jungle sandbar thick with mangroves and scrub palmetto, inhabited by wild birds, mosquitoes and snakes. Less than thirty years later, the wilderness had given way to plush hotels, high-rent apartment houses and lavish homes, with manicured terraces and swimming pools, facing a beach littered brightly with cabanas and sun umbrellas.
That didn’t mean the place wasn’t still infested with snakes, birds and bugs-just that it was now the human variety.
It was May 22, 1941, and dead; winter season was mid-December through April, and the summer’s onslaught of tourists was a few weeks away. At the moment, the majority of restaurants and nightclubs in Miami Beach were shuttered, and the handful of the latter still doing business were the ones with gaming rooms. Even in off-season, gambling made it pay for a club to keep its doors open.
The glitzy showroom of Chez Clifton had been patterned on (though was about a third the size of) the Chez Paree back home in Chicago, with a similarly set up backroom gambling casino called (in both instances) the Gold Key Club. But where the Chez Paree was home to bigname stars and orchestras-Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Ted Lewis, Martha Raye-the Chez Clifton’s headliner was invariably its namesake: Pete Clifton.