"My father is John Cooper. Captain Cooper."
"Of course," he said, smiling. "I heard the Captain had a pretty daughter. Don't you work in City Hall some-where?"
She made a face at his mention of a job she obviously didn't like. "In the Clerk of Public Service office."
"That's just down the hall from me. Why haven't I run into you before?"
"I've seen you around. You've never noticed me. You're always preoccupied."
"Maybe you don't go to work in that gown."
"Hardly ever," she said, smiling again. "I wear my hair up and I have these glasses…"
"You're the classic case of the secretary the boss overlooks."
"I wish you were my boss. I'm so bored where I am. Just clerking."
"Maybe I can do something about that. Do you have a table? Are you with someone? Your husband, perhaps?"
"I have a table. I am with someone. I don't have a husband. Anymore."
"I see. I'm sorry."
"No need to be sorry. He isn't dead, unfortunately. I caught him in bed with another woman."
Her frankness startled him more than the color of her eyes. Maybe she'd had too much champagne, too.
"What asylum is he in?" Ness asked.
She liked that. "My husband-former husband-was a lawyer. He specialized in divorces. He specialized in divorcees, too."
Ness arched an eyebrow. "Interesting way of looking at the lawyer/client relationship."
"He told me he was just comforting them in their time of need."
"A pity he went into law. Medicine could have used his humanitarian instincts."
She shrugged. "He defended himself in the divorce. Fool for a client. I get a handsome alimony check. Not as handsome as you, but what the hell."
Definitely too much champagne.
"Where are you sitting?" Ness said, taking her arm.
She gestured, and he escorted her. Her father, a widower as Ness recalled, was sitting alone at a postage-stamp table that held several empty champagne bottles and glasses. Cooper beamed when he saw Ness, and stood to shake his hand.
The big, balding, moon-faced cop seemed about as at home in his tux as the bodyguards back at the Harvard Club had in theirs. His sky-blue eyes, a much lighter blue than his daughter's, were a little bloodshot. He, too, seemed to have had too much champagne.
"You're the best goddamn safety director this town ever had," Cooper said. "The very best. Sit down."
Everybody sat down, Gwen across the table from Ness and her father between them.
Cooper said, "I can't tell you what it means to me, this vote of confidence."
Earlier that day, Ness had appointed Cooper head of the Detective Bureau, after several weeks as acting head.
"Don't mention it," Ness said. "I knew you were the man for the job."
Cooper leaned over. "Since we spoke today, our boy reported in."
Cooper, apparently a touch tipsy, was referring to the detective who'd been busted down to uniform to go undercover. This topic had no place in a very crowded hotel ballroom.
"He's found nothing yet," Cooper said, "but…"
Ness said, "Let's not talk business here, Captain."
Cooper was immediately embarrassed. "I didn't mean to speak out of turn."
"You didn't. Pour us all some champagne, Captain. It's the President's birthday, after all."
"That it is," Cooper said, and poured a round of bubbly.
Out on the dance floor, with soft, sweet-smelling Gwen in his arms, Ness felt light on his feet, but maybe that was just his head. They were dancing to "The Nearness of You."
"I think Daddy's a little smashed," she said, fondly if a little embarrassed.
"Your dad's a good cop," Ness said flatly. "And besides, we seem to be just this side of smashed ourselves."
"Where's your wife?"
"Uh, this isn't widely known, Mrs. Howell, but my wife and I are separated."
"For how long?"
"Just a couple of weeks."
"How do you like bachelor life?"
"I don't know yet. You're the first girl I've had in my arms since I became one."
"A girl?"
"A bachelor."
"I've been out with men since my divorce. A lot of men."
"How long ago was your divorce?"
"Over a year."
"Lot of boyfriends, huh?"
"Not really. I haven't been with one since my husband."
"Been with one?"
She smiled wryly. "You know. They call it 'sex.' "
"Oh. Is that what they call it."
"How about you?"
"I've never been with a man."
"I see. And you haven't been with your wife for two weeks. That must seem like a year to a man like you. Or is that your finger?"
"How many hands do you think I have?"
"How many do you need?"
"I guess that's up to you, Mrs. Howell."
She whispered in his ear. "Did I see you talking to the manager of this place?"
"Of the Hollenden? Yes."
"Do you know him well enough to ask for a room?"
"I think so."
"Why don't you, then?"
"For us, you mean?"
"Maybe it's a bad idea. Maybe in the morning, when this champagne wears off, we'll feel ashamed."
"Maybe."
"Want to risk it?"
"What about your dad?"
"Think we can find him a ride home?" "I have a cop who can drive him home. Do you live at home with him?"
"Yes. But I've stayed out all night before." "You said you hadn't been with a man in a year." She put her cheek next to his as they danced. "I lied," she said.
THREE
CHAPTER 15
The sun was shining in Cuyahoga County at one o'clock on this Monday afternoon, but it didn't warm William Wiggens. William-Willie to his friends, at least one of whom hadn't been particularly friendly-was just a body in ditch, and a snowy ditch at that. He lay face down at an odd, askew angle, like a child making a shape in the snow. His topcoat was black and so was his hair; he was hatless. He looked vaguely crumpled, like a discarded piece of paper. The splotches of blood on the snowy ground were turning black.
"We've got to quit meeting like this," Nathan Heller said, Nate to his friends, one of whom was Eliot Ness.
Heller, a sturdy six-footer in a brown topcoat and a darker brown hat, had just stepped from the squad car that had delivered him, at Ness' request, to this desolate rural spot outside Pepper Pike Village, Cleveland's easternmost suburb, just beyond Shaker Heights. A Pepper Pike patrolman, bundled in a light blue coat, stood nearby with several Cleveland cops in darker blue coats, their breath smoking.
Ness was down in the ditch where Wiggens had fallen. He was bending over the body, having a look at the bullet wounds on the man. Or boy, really-Wiggens was barely past twenty.
Ness stood with a sigh. "Young," he said. "So goddamn young."
"Not so young," Heller said. "You don't get any older than dead."
Ness nodded, and glanced at Heller, who took off his hat and riffled his head of reddish brown hair. His father had been Jewish, but it was his Irish mother he took after. He had dark blue eyes and was, Ness supposed, handsome, in a rugged sort of way. One corner of Heller's mouth often pulled into a half grin, which gave him a wise-guy appearance. Ness had known Heller a long time, and knew the man's flip cynicism was largely a self-defense mechanism.
"Don't you get a little tired." Heller asked, putting the hat back on, that half smile tugging at his cheek, "of poking at corpses in roadside ditches?"
Ness laughed, but it had a hollow sound. "This isn't the same. A gangster like Prank Nitti bumping off another gangster like Ted Newberry makes a certain kind of sense."
"That sounds funny, coming from you."