Burton sighed. "Hardly."
They began to walk again.
"These investigators would mostly work undercover," Ness said. "So we need new faces. They can't be a part of the current system. Oh, sure, I can call on rookies for occasional help-young kids who haven't lost their fire yet, who became cops for some reason other than a pension and/or a chance to tie into some graft."
"But your investigators can't be rookies."
"No. And they may come and go, like I said. I'll only need a handful, but they'll have to be paid."
The Mayor stopped and stood with his arms folded; he rocked on his feet a while and thought. "What if we could come up with something like the Secret Six, in Chicago?"
"Businesspeople, you mean?"
The two men stood in a pool of light under a street lamp.
"Merchants," the Mayor said. "Industrialists. I have friends in the Chamber of Commerce and the American Legion who are good and tired of being shaken down."
Burton had long been associated with the Legion, having been its county chairman.
Ness raised a hand. "They could have no say over my actions."
"None at all." Then, thoughtful, Burton said, "But I think perhaps I could put together a secret fund for your investigators. A slush fund of sorts. Perhaps just to tide us over until we get our budget. Assuming we do, of course. And it wouldn't be bottomless, by any means."
Ness smiled tightly. "Just so I can get my feet wet in it."
Burton's eyes narrowed; he gestured with a gently lecturing forefinger. "Any investigators you hire will draw a public salary, but they'll be listed on the city's payrolls as laborers. We'll supplement their salaries with money from our new Secret Six."
"That would be just about perfect, Your Honor."
Burton smiled a little. "Don't get your feet wet just yet. Let me see if I can get something like this off the ground, first. You, uh, haven't made Inspector Potter very happy, now, have you?"
"All I did was promote him."
"Interesting promotion."
"I hope you don't mind the way I handled it. If I could've busted him on corruption charges, you'd have had your top-ranking bent cop to feed the press. At this stage, though, all I know for sure about Potter is he plays political games. He'll be investigated, but I had to act sooner than that. I had to get him out from under me, now."
"No, no," the Mayor said, patting the air with his hands. "I wholeheartedly approve. I'm pleased. Even amused."
Ness had put the inspector in charge of a traffic survey designed to study placement of traffic lights, boulevard stop signs and other matters "materially affecting traffic." Stressing the "high priority" of dealing with traffic problems, Ness had announced to the press that the investigation needed to be done "intelligently" and there-fore the "highest technical intelligence" available in the entire department needed to be employed. Hence, the safety director had relieved Inspector Potter of his duties as chief of the Detective Bureau, and placed him at the head of the survey.
"The papers treated you kindly, where the Potter ouster is concerned," Burton commented.
They began to walk again, heading back.
"They did like it, yes."
"That's the kind of publicity we're looking for. That's the kind that can get me that slush fund you need. That's the kind that can help us get our budget past even an unwilling city council."
Ness stopped again. "You say that as if I've generated some other kind of publicity, as well."
The Mayor stopped, too. "Uh, then, I take it you didn't see the last edition of the Plain Dealer?"
"No."
"It's in the car," Burton said. "I'll show you."
They walked quickly to the limo, where Burton got the paper from the front seat and handed it to Ness. A head-line said, FORMER G-MAN'S FIRST RAID A FIZZLE
Under Wild's byline, the article went on: "Director Ness accompanied police in a raid on a barbershop and came up empty-handed. Ness found a man with earphones listening to a radio broadcast of a horse race, but there were no betting slips and no evidence that money was being wagered. The celebrated gangbuster, it would seem, may find Cleveland a tougher nut to crack than Chicago."
"That son of a bitch," Ness said, under his breath. He thrust the paper back at Burton. "That's what I get for trusting a guy who ran with Jake Lingle."
"What is the, uh… scoop? If you'll pardon the expression."
"The scoop is, I invited Wild along on this raid as a favor. I didn't organize the raid. I just went along to observe procedure, and see if a department leak would sink the thing. Which it did, of course." He pointed at the newspaper Burton held. "Wild knew that. Playing it like it was my raid that went sour is a cheap damn shot."
"We need good press relations, Eliot. Obviously."
"I'll handle this in my own way."
Burton shrugged. "That is our arrangement."
The fire across the way was still going. Flames licked up in a few windows, but the column of smoke was narrowing.
Ness forgot his departmental problems, for the moment, including that SOB Sam Wild. He looked over at the house, the basic structure of which had somehow survived the fire.
"Two men died in that house tonight," Ness said.
"A shame."
"Sure, it's a shame. But we also have to find out why."
Ness bade the Mayor goodnight and went home to see if his wife was still speaking to him.
CHAPTER 8
When Joe Fusca, alias Special Agent Sidney White, pulled his sporty blue Packard up in front of the paint-peeling, ramshackle two-story clapboard on East Sixty-sixth, he could scarcely believe his eyes. This was hardly a classy neighborhood, sure, but this eyesore was the bottom of the barrel. The pits.
Hard to believe there was a twelve-grand passbook in a shack like that, ripe for the picking.
It was Monday evening, a little before seven, and Joe was pretty much over it. He'd killed before, in Chicago, but that had been different. That had been mob stuff. You had to prove yourself to those guys if you were going to stay on the in with them. You just didn't say no when they asked a favor. And it was other mob guys he'd hit, after all. It was in the family.
Friday night had been a whole 'nother deal. It had given him the willies, doing that. It was creepy, it was dangerous, and, anyway, the two old guys he bumped off were just looking out after their own best interests. Which was more than you could say for most of the bazoos on his sucker list. Most of these lilies were so ripe for plucking it was almost a duty to get there and do the job before somebody beat you to it. People that stupid didn't deserve money. People who saved money for a rainy day when they were in the middle of a goddamn downpour simply had to be relieved of the burden of their dough.
But those two old birds at the Joanna Home, Great War veterans both, had tumbled to the scam. The way it was set up, promising the money within sixty days, was supposed to give the salesmen like Joe that long to fully work a neighborhood, and move on. Only those two old boys had got talking between themselves, after turning their passbooks-one for $5600 and another for $3200- over to "Agent White." They took a streetcar down to the Hanna Building where the Memorial Developers, Inc., office was located, just a boiler shop, really, and started complaining. They were talking about going to the county prosecutor, and the boiler-shop boys calmed them down and said Agent White would do a follow-up call.
Agent White had. It had been his own idea to handle it the way he had, but he'd heard no complaints from up-stairs. He knew the lights went out at the Joanna Home around nine, and he slipped in the back door a little before ten. The geezers in question shared a room in back, and they were both asleep in the darkness. Joe didn't even know which one was which, as he crushed the skull of first one, and then the other, with a sash weight. He splashed them down with kerosene, a can of which he'd lugged in with him, and splashed some more on the walls, particularly around a light switch and a couple of electrical outlets that were showing loose frayed wires. The Joanna Home was a wreck, anyway-a lousy firetrap. It was a crime passing the joint off as an old folks' home, Joe thought. The crooks in charge would no doubt take the blame for the fire. That is, the faulty wiring would.