“Hurt,” said Bannen. “Would it interest you at all, Miss Baggroli, to know that my wife has left me over this?”
“Your wife?”
“Did you expect this would effect only me? Did you think it would wrap itself up into a nice, neat package, with four tight walls and a pretty ribbon?” Bannen released the pressure on the girl’s shoulders slightly. “What was it for? So Mark Prosser could get a passing grade in my course? Was that it?”
The almond-shaped head nodded. The blonde hair shuddered like gold mist. The pale blue eyes cried.
“It was Mark’s sister,” said the small voice. “Mindy. She doesn’t even know you. God, I told Mark it wouldn’t work. I told him!”
The end in sight, the dark tunnel of this nightmare showing light, Bannen kept at her relentlessly.
“The girl, Mark’s sister, said she wrote down my automobile’s make and license number in a textbook.”
“Mark wrote it down for her,” said the shaken voice. That could be easily verified. Krieg Bannen knew Mark Prosser’s slapdash handwriting, his helpless habit of uncrossed t’s and undotted i’s.
“People don’t do things against their will unless they are threatened. How was Mark Prosser threatening Mindy, Carmine? What was he using against her as a weapon?”
“Drugs,” came Carmine Baggroli’s thin voice as big tears began to fall unabated. “She’s a barb-freak, a fourteen-year-old Barbie Doll. She was into the works, Professor Bannen. Red birds, yellow jackets, blue heavens, goofers. If it’s in a cap, Mindy will pop it.”
“And her parents had no idea she was on her way to Speed and Acid and the whole trip.”
“If they ever found out, it would rip a hole in their whole straight bag big enough to drive a truck through. I mean, they’re nose-to-the-old-grindstone types and Mark’s dada has a heart condition. Like, Mindy is out of her mind ninety percent of the time, but she isn’t so tripped out she doesn’t know what it would do to her dad if he found out she lived out of a capsule.”
The pale blue eyes had finished their crying. Bannen introduced a handkerchief and then led Carmine Baggroli down the final flight of stairs to Rammaford’s first floor.
“We’re going downtown to See a police detective, Carmine. And you’re going to repeat to her precisely what you’ve said to me.”
“Her? I thought detectives were all men?”
“Women’s Lib’s made fantastic inroads everywhere, Carmine.”
It was not until they hit the unpopulated freeway that Krieg Bannen felt his life coming back together again. There were so many things to do, so many wrongs to be right. He sighed. Detective Lieutenant Grace Speers was first. He would go at it one step at a time.
Relaxed, Bannen reached for a cigarette in his shirt pocket and discovered a spreading blue stain from a ballpoint pen which had suddenly choosen to leak. And because he was a man devoted to precepts and symbols, and not precisely of this world until lately, Krieg Bannen read the stain in a symbolic way. The thing about stains, he decided, was that they were difficult to eradicate and very long in vanishing. But they did vanish, they did go away.
And Krieg Bannen, now of this world and a victor in its wars, saw tremendous hope and redemption in that.
Tough Tony Accardo: Mr. Big of Chicago
by David Mazroff
Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti was dead, lying in the weeds with a bullet in his head. The man who had sent Al Capone to a living death had gone the same way, and Chicago knew who the next Mr. Big was going to be Tough Tony Accardo. The kid who knew how to keep his mouth shut and wait, while other men talked and died. Tough Tony rules The Windy City Brotherhood today. Here is his incredible story.
When the cops found wily Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti on that cold autumn night he was dead.
His bare head was against a heavy wire fence, the eyes closed. His body, stretched straight out, toes turned up, lay on an irregular bed of weeds near a railroad siding. He was dressed in an expensive gray suit and a darker gray topcoat. A gray, wide-brimmed hat with a black band lay at the left of the dead man.
Police spotlights were turned on the scene and the prone figure on the ground was silhouetted grotesquely in black and gray shadows.
An inspector and a lieutenant of the homicide division knelt on either side of Nitti’s body while behind them a swelling hum of noises broke the silence of the night as some half-dozen uniformed cops talked among themselves.
The inspector found the .38 caliber white metal, detective special, picked it up by the barrel and dropped it into a cellophane evidence bag. The inspector said, “One neat hole in the right temple. You think it was suicide?”
“No,” the lieutenant answered. “Too pat. Why the hell should Nitti choose a spot like this, way out to hell and gone, to do the kill himself? Why not in his home? Another thing, how the hell did he get here? No buses. No street cars. And no sign of his ear. Would he walk this far to kill himself? I can’t buy it.”
“Neither can I. If we mark it murder, a gangland killing, it will mean putting some good men on the case for weeks. They won’t be able to learn a thing. Let’s call it suicide and forget about it.”
“Nitti was the number one man, Joe. If we’re right, then Nitti was killed or ordered killed by the number two man for a takeover. You know who the number two man is?”
“Yep. Tony Accardo.” He made a noise in his throat. “Getting that baby to talk would be like trying to swallow Lake Michigan. He doesn’t even talk to God.”
“Okay, here’s the meat wagon and the I.D. men. It’s their job now. Let’s get outta here.”
In a suite in the Lexington Hotel on Michigan Boulevard and 22nd Street on Chicago’s South Side, Anthony Joseph Accardo sat behind a polished mahagony desk and grinned at the four men in the room who sat in deep armchairs in front of him.
“Frank shouldn’t have knocked himself off like that,” he said. His grin broadened. “We could’ve done it for him, as a favor, in the bedroom of his home where he woulda been nice and comfortable.”
The four men grinned back silently. They waited for Accardo to say more, to say what really was on his mind. Despite the grin on his face they knew him as few other men knew him. He personified death, harsh, violent, and bloody.
Accardo said, “I have to order a wreath for Frank. Let’s see, roses and carnations. Yeah, that should be nice.” He picked up the phone and called a florist, ordered, the wreath.
“I want a nice blue ribbon across the wreath with the words ‘From your pal, Joe Batters. You got that? Yeah? Send the bill to Mr. Anthony Accardo, Lexington Hotel. Fine.”
Accardo attended Nitti’s funeral, embraced Mrs. Nitti tenderly, and wept for the departed. He could at a moment’s notice, if the occasion demanded it, surrender all the harshness in his makeup, all the violence and calculation, to emotion. There was the time when he attended a soap opera movie with a henchman. The heroine died at a tender age, a la Jenny in “Love Story,” and Accardo wept. The henchman, who had a sense of humor but little feeling for fictional drama, turned to Accardo.
“Tony, stop crying,” he whispered. “You’re flooding the aisles.”
Accardo snapped back, “The trouble with you is that you got no heart.”
Along with his sentimental responses to occasional incidents of social and human tragedies he possessed virtues the community held in high esteem. He was a devoted husband to Clarice, his beautiful, blond wife. That was understandable for not only is Clarice a lovely creature but she has a wicked sense of humor, is bright, intelligent, and an efficient manager of their home, a palace at 915 Franklin Boulevard in River Forest, an exclusive suburb, with an indoor swimming pool, bowling alleys, billiard room, music room, oriental carpeting, gold-plated doorknobs and bathroom fixtures, and bathtubs of polished onyx. The walls of the living room and dining room are hung with oil paintings by some splendid artists.