"Yeah. They loaned me some Pam-O-Graphs. You can attach them to telephone lines and monitor conversations. I'll expect comprehensive field notes from all of your men."
"I bet you will." Heller sighed. He glanced up at the sky, where clouds now blotted out the sun. "You're wading into murky waters, friend. Crooked cops who been that way since Prohibition passed. Gangsters who murder some pitiful punk over the numbers racket. Anybody take a shot at you yet?"
"No. I get the occasional death-threat phone call. Same old stuff-'we'll cut off your wang and dump you in a ditch.' That old song."
"Yeah. And I'm sure they're just kiddin'. Your Mr. Wiggens didn't get his wang cut off, after all. Of course, when you're in Mr. Wiggens' condition, having a wang is small consolation, right?"
Ness looked at the sky. Where had the sun gone? It seemed like dusk and it was early afternoon.
Heller shook his head. "Let's walk on back. This fucking cold town of yours, I'm getting frozen stiffer than that stiff in the ditch."
They walked back.
"Thanks for coming, Nate."
"Ten bucks a day," Heller said, "and expenses."
Ness smiled and nodded. He opened the squad car door for Heller and the officer drove the private detective back to the dark city.
CHAPTER 16
The Murray Hill district, a somewhat isolated compact area often referred to as Little Italy, was considered home turf for the Mayfield Road mob, although many of the chieftains had moved to better, less claustrophic digs farther to the east. The closely grouped brick buildings tended to be narrow across the front while going back endlessly, built on the slope of Murray Hill Road itself, or the intersecting slope of May-field Road. The cold kept people indoors. In warmer weather, old men would sit on the steps of neighborhood shops arguing politics-national more than local-while younger ones would discuss work, or rather their lack of it. Although the neighborhood produced the occasional lawyer or doctor, as well as a good number of successful merchants, the majority of Italian men here were manual laborers. But about the best a laborer could hope for in these times was working a couple weeks a month for the W.P.A. for seventy bucks or so. During the day, in weather like this, the only activity on the street was the usual stream of women and children going to and from Holy Rosary, praying for better times. Nonetheless, crime wasn't much in evidence here, even at night. You might see some teenage boys playing craps under a dim street light, and occasionally a kid might steal coal from a railroad car to heat the family home. But that was about all. The speakeasy days were over.
In a cozy, unpretentious restaurant called Antonio's, a second-floor walk-up over a grosseria Italiana on Mayfield Road, Eliot Ness sat at a small round table. A thick red candle, its steady flame providing a modest glow in a room dark with atmosphere, dripped wax onto the red-and-white checkered table cloth. Across from him was Gwen Howell. They touched wine glasses.
Gwen looked as lovely as she had that first night at the Hollenden, even though this was the end of a long work day. She still wore the same light blue woolen sweater over a pale pink silk blouse and black skirt that she'd worn to the office twelve hours before. But she'd let down her lighter-than-honey blonde hair so that it brushed her shoulders. And she'd tucked her glasses away in a purse and freshened her lipstick, which again was stop-sign red. She looked like a million.
Ness told her so.
"Thank you, boss," she said, as their glasses clinked.
Across the room, serenading a couple at another table, a man in a waiter's tux played "O sole mio" on the violin with lots of vibrato.
"My pleasure," Ness said, smiling at her, quite taken with her.
Gwen sipped her red wine. "You said you wanted to celebrate. What's the occasion?"
He sipped his. "Your first day on the job, of course."
"Now that I'm your secretary," she said, "will we need to go to out-of-the-way places like this?"
Two evenings last week they'd wined and dined-late evenings, of course, since Ness tended to work till at least seven and often much later-at the Vogue Room at the Hollenden. They'd wound up in bed in a room at the hotel on both occasions. The morning after the President's Ball at the Hollenden, they did not wake up ashamed, nor had they felt compelled to blame their conduct on the champagne. Theirs was a grown-up affair from the start, and was now in full swing.
"No," Ness said. "We'll still take in the Vogue Room. And the Bronze Room at the Hotel Cleveland, too."
"What about reporters? They're thick as flies around those places."
"I'm thicker than that with them-the newshounds, that is. They'll leave me alone."
"What makes you rate?"
Ness shrugged. "Friendship and headlines, not necessarily in that order."
She smiled wryly, a single dimple's worth. "So you don't think being seen out with your new secretary is going to make the papers?"
Ness shook his head. "Why, does it bother you being out with a married man?"
"It would if you weren't separated. Have you talked to her lately? Evie, I mean."
He looked into the glass of wine. "We speak on the phone. Once a week or so."
"If you don't want to talk about it…"
"I really don't. What about your father? Does he know you're seeing me?"
She smiled less wryly, shrugged. "I think so. We haven't talked about it. I think he'll approve."
"He may not like you’re seeing a married man."
"I think he'll understand your situation. He thinks the sun rises and sets on you, you know. He sees you like some white knight who's charged into gray ol' Cleveland, to clean up his beloved police department."
Ness laughed, softly. "Horseback riding is one sport I stink at. Ah, here's the waiter."
Antonio's reminded Ness of his favorite restaurant in Chicago, Madame Galli's in Tower Town, in that there was no menu, just spaghetti served with a choice of entrees: chicken, squab, filet mignon, or lamb. Gwen chose the lamb, and Ness ordered the filet. The middle-aged waiter, whose broken English charmed Gwen, was abrupt but polite and wrote nothing down as they ordered. Then he disappeared into the kitchen.
"Are you always out of the office as much as you were today?" she asked Ness.
"I'm at my desk more than I like," he said. "But we did have a good afternoon out in the field today, yes."
"You certainly seemed in a good mood when you got back. You still do. Are you sure it's my first day at work we're celebrating?"
He laughed a little. "I'm celebrating this afternoon, too. We pulled a little raid."
"A little raid?"
"Well, not so little."
It had, in fact, been the first successful raid of a Cuyahoga County policy bank in anybody's memory. With no notice at all, Ness had bundled two squads of Cooper's detectives into unmarked cars, with Sam Wild along for some press coverage, and drove to the headquarters of policy king Frank Hogey, located in a deceptively crummy-looking two-story house on Central Avenue South East. Ness shouldered the door open and Cooper's dicks followed him in, arresting Hogey, his two brothers, and a woman, apparently living with Hogey. His "housekeeper," he said-a twenty-one-year-old redhead with a cute, sulky face and a nice shape, for whom any red-blooded man would gladly provide a house for keeping.
When Ness barged in, Hogey had been standing at the open door of a squat square safe in the study-cum-office of the house. He'd tried to shut it, but Ness stopped the door with his foot and Hogey with a right cross. Hogey, a stocky guy of forty or so, had sat on the floor and licked blood out of the corner of his mouth and thought about it. The floor around him was littered with clearinghouse slips and long rolls of adding-machine tape, curling like wood shavings.