" 'Course you can," Elsworth said, gesturing graciously. "Glad for the company. These winter evenings are mighty dull."
The interior was a shock. It made Joe wonder what made Elsworth so goddamn cheerful. With the exception of a worn easy chair, the room was bare of furniture. Across the room a fire burned in a small coal stove. The colorless wallpaper was ancient and peeling off walls that fell from a slanted, cracked ceiling. There were no curtains on the windows, just weathered shades, pulled down. The wooden floor was bare and dirty. In front of the easy chair was a crate, which served as a table for a plate of beans and a cup of coffee, Elsworth's supper, it would seem. On the floor, near the chair, was a large brass ashtray, a remnant of better days perhaps, filled with cigar butts. The smell of smoke and beans lingered in the air. And on another crate was a lit candle, dripping wax. Somewhere in the darkness, perhaps behind a wall, perhaps not, was a chittering sound. Mice.
"Sorry it's so dark in here," Elsworth said. "Don't have no electricity. Place is wired for it, but I just don't care to spend the money. And, well, I'm legally blind, so the devil take it."
The room was fairly warm from the glowing stove, but it was obvious that otherwise there was no heat either.
"Can I offer you my chair?" Elsworth asked, gesturing toward it.
"No. No thank you. You sit. I'll stand."
"Mighty neighborly of you," Elsworth said. He bumped into the crate as he sat, jostling his beans and coffee, and asked Agent White if he'd like some Java. Agent White declined.
"If there's some way I can be of service to the government," Elsworth said, "just let me know. I was a babe in arms during the War Between the States, don't you know, and too old for the Great War. But that don't mean I'm not a good American."
"I'm sure it doesn't," Joe said. "Besides, the government is interested in helping you."
And Joe went into his spieclass="underline" he was collecting pass-books in restricted loan companies with the idea of forwarding them to Washington so Mr. Elsworth could get full value, all at once.
Elsworth sat blinking behind the thick glasses and gradually started to smile.
"I knew it," he said, "I just knew it."
"Uh, knew what, Mr. Elsworth?"
"I knew one day my ship would come in. Why, I scrimped and saved all these years… worked for White Motor Company for longer than you've been alive, I'd reckon. Retired some time ago, and I suffered privations, believe you me, preparing for my declining years."
Jesus Christ, Joe thought, these crazy old coots. What were they waiting for? Elsworth here has a twelve-grand passbook (worth six grand face value, at least) and he lives in a dirty, dreary attic, sitting in the dark, eating his plate of beans, dancing with mice, waiting for what? To get even older?
They didn't deserve their money. They didn't know how to enjoy it. They didn't know anything to do with money but save it. Let somebody have it who knew what to do with it.
Joe Fusca.
"Then you'll stop by in two days with my security bonds, Agent White?"
"That's correct. And I'll see you then. You don't have to get up to show me out. I know the way."
Elsworth pointed to the coal stove.
"I was just about to stoke up my fire," he said.
"You just relax," Agent White said. "Let me do that for you."
CHAPTER 9
On Tuesday morning, Eliot Ness sat at the scarred rolltop desk in his spacious wood-and-pebbled-glass office in City Hall, signing papers. Judging by the grin on his face, you'd think that paperwork was his favorite part of his new job. You would be wrong.
These papers were special ones. As he blotted his signatures one by one, he savored his executive position. He was very quietly, in an administrative way, shaking up the city's police department as it had never been shaken up before.
In the midst of this pleasant paperwork, Ness was interrupted by the buzz of the intercom on the desk.
"Captain Cooper is here for his appointment," his secretary's voice said tinnily.
"Good," Ness said, leaning into the little speaker box. "Send him in."
A tall, balding, round-faced cop of about sixty, Cooper wore a brown suit that looked slept in, and his tie bore a food stain or two. But Ness could grit his teeth and overlook a little personal sloppiness in a cop as hard-working and well-respected as this one.
Cooper, hat in hand, took the chair Ness offered him at one of the conference tables that took up the central part of the room, and Ness sat across from him. Cooper's face was almost as rumpled as his suit, though his light-blue eyes were incongruously benign and even becoming in the midst of his battered features.
"Captain Cooper, I'm naming you acting Detective Bureau chief."
Cooper opened his mouth, but at first couldn't seem to think of anything to say.
Ness went on. "And, if the work of the weeks ahead goes at all well, we'll drop the 'acting.' "
"I… I want to thank you for the vote of confidence, Mr. Ness," Cooper said, beaming, seeming a little nervous.
"From what I've read and heard," Ness said, "it's not misplaced."
"I didn't think you'd see me as, well, the right material for your administration. I'm not exactly a criminologist or anything. Or a spit-and-polish type, either." Chagrined, he flipped his food-stained tie, like Oliver Hardy.
Ness smiled and said, "I'm looking for effectiveness and honesty in my cops. But if you want to spend some of your salary increase on dry cleaning, I wouldn't complain."
Cooper smiled on one side of his face. "I think I can swing that."
"Now," Ness said, "let's get down to it."
Ness filled Cooper in on the theory that a virtual network of crooked cops was working within the force. He didn't mention Wild as the rumor's source.
"If they are an organized group," Ness said, "it stands to reason they do indeed have a leader, a 'chief of their 'department within the department.' I believe this so called 'outside chief is among our sixteen precinct captains. The most likely candidates would seem to be the captains in charge of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Precincts."
"I'd have to agree," Cooper said, nodding.
"There's another possibility, of course: your immediate predecessor."
"Potter?" Cooper said, shocked. "Impossible. He's a political wheeler-dealer, but I don't believe for a minute he's crooked."
"We'll see. At any rate, we have to begin investigating."
"I'll put some of my men right on it."
"I don't know about using the Detective Bureau itself, just yet. Not till you've had a chance to get in there for a while and do some housecleaning. And I don't want this information in the hands of a lot of men."
Cooper gestured casually. "I know some detectives I can trust. Let me put them on the job. They can make some discreet inquiries."
"Okay, but let's make it extremely discreet. Let's do it from the inside. And with one man."
Cooper's sky-blue eyes narrowed. "How, exactly?"
"I've been making a lot of transfers, a lot of changes in assignment. I've got a raft of 'em going out." Ness nodded toward the pile of paperwork on the rolltop desk, itself a veteran of his Chicago wars. "Find me an honest detective, brief him, and I'll put him on that list, knock him back down to uniform, and place him in the Fifteenth Precinct."
"The most suspect precinct in town," Cooper said, nodding again.
"Exactly right. People are assuming that most of these transfers indicate suspicion, on my part, of either corruption or dereliction of duty. That isn't always the case, but it will give our undercover man a nice patina of disrepute. Of course he'll complain vocally about being 'demoted.' And that should encourage any bent cops in the Fifteenth to invite him into their little club."
Cooper smiled tightly, and said, "If we can infiltrate their network with one of our men, we can bust the bastards wide open."