He said, “When we get some more cops out here, some more real cops, I’ll have these ditches combed. If we find any more spent shells, I’ll give your theory some thought. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“You liked the man, didn’t you?”
“I wouldn’t say I liked him.”
“Respected him, then.”
“Let’s just say I knew him.”
We walked back toward the suburban cops and Nitti’s body. Chief Rose approached us. He said, “I never heard of one of these big gangsters killing himself before. Isn’t this a little unusual?’
“Frankly,” Drury said, “I’m not surprised. Nitti’s been in ill health. He probably figured he was due for prison, and that he couldn’t get the express medical care he desired there-so he took the easy way out.”
That was the way Bill wanted it to be. He hated the gangsters, and he loved the idea of making a coward out of Nitti. Bill was a fine cop, a good man, a better friend; but I knew my reading of how Nitti had died would be lost in the shuffle. Maybe it was wrong of me to look at the facts and investigate wanting to prove Nitti died defiantly; but it was just as wrong for Drury to do the same wanting to prove Nitti a coward. Bill was in charge, though; and the way he saw it would be the way it went down.
Then, suddenly, in a black coat and a black dress, already in mourning, automatically in mourning, there she was: Antoinette Cavaretta. The current Mrs. Frank Nitti. The widow Nitti. The steel woman. On the arm of a uniformed cop who’d gone to get her, at Chief Rose’s request, as it turned out.
She walked falteringly to the fence where Nitti lay; she knelt by him and held his hand and made a sign of the cross.
She stood.
“This was my husband,” she said.
Her usually dark face seemed pale; she wore very little makeup. The uniformed man escorted her a ways away from the body.
Drury went to her; I followed.
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Nitti,” Drury said.
“Don’t be a hypocrite, Captain Drury,” she said. “We both know you hated my husband.”
I said, “Where were you when this happened?”
She looked at me sharply. “Praying for my husband.”
“Really,” I said.
“Frank left about one o’clock and said he was going downtown to see his lawyer. I was worried. He’s been sick, and then this grand jury trouble came up. So I went to church, to Our Lady of Sorrows, and made a novena for him.”
Drury shot me a look as if to say this news proved that Nitti had set out today to commit suicide.
She said, “You people have always persecuted him. Poor Frank! He never did a wrong thing in his life.”
Drury said nothing.
“Do I need your permission,” she asked, bitterly, “to make the funeral arrangements? To have my husband removed to a mortuary?”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Drury said. “Due to the circumstances of his death, it’s the county morgue for him.”
She gave him a look to kill. “You’re so superior, Captain. Don’t take such a death so lightly. You and my husband played in the same arena; such an end could well be yours one day.”
“Is that a threat, Mrs. Nitti?”
“No, Mr. Drury. It’s the voice of experience. Now, I’d like to go home. I have a little boy who’ll be coming home from St. Mary’s in half an hour. There’s difficult news I must share with him.”
“Certainly you can go,” he said, not unkindly.
“Why don’t I walk her?” I asked him.
“It’s not necessary,” she said.
“I’d like to,” I said.
Drury didn’t care.
Mrs. Nitti said, “I would appreciate an arm to lean on, Mr. Heller, yes.”
I gave her my arm and we walked back up along the tracks toward Cermak Road; it was the opposite direction from her house, but the closest street that crossed the tracks.
“My husband was fond of you,” she said.
“Sometimes he had funny ways of showing it.”
We walked.
“That was Frank,” she said, as if that explained everything.
“Mrs. Nitti-or should I call you Toni?”
She took her arm from mine. Stopped for a moment. “Mrs. Nitti will be just fine. Do I sense a touch of disrespect in your voice?”
“I must say you’re taking your husband’s death well, Mrs. Nitti. You’re a rock, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, that the first time I saw you, you were in the presence of a dead man. Oh, he didn’t know he was dead, or at least he didn’t like to think he was. But with your help, his faithful secretary’s help, E. J. O’Hare got dead. Good and dead.”
She looked at me coldly, impassively; but she was pulling breath in like a race horse.
“A few years go by, and then you turn up again. At Frank Nitti’s front door. His loving wife. The wife of a dead man. That was the difference between Frank and O’Hare-your husband knew he was dead. When I spoke to him last night, I could tell he knew he was very near the end. He was a brave man, I think.”
“Yes he was,” she said.
“I wonder,” I said, “if you were keeping tabs on Frank for Ricca, like you kept tabs on O’Hare for Frank.”
“You’re a fool.”
“Am I? How’s this for foolish? Frank Nitti, unknown to all but a handful-said handful including you and E. J. O’Hare-betrayed Al Capone to the feds.”
Her eyes flickered.
“It’s so obvious,” I said, “but no one ever thought of it…even though key Capone witness Les Shumway was still employed at Sportsman’s Park. Of course, Nitti arranged Capone’s downfall. Of course, Nitti moved the chess pieces until he was king himself. In a way, I admire him for it.”
“So,” she said, “do I.”
“But then his wife Anna dies. She was the love of his life. She, and his son, were everything to him. And he begins to slide. He goes into the hospital, for the old back trouble from the wounds Mayor Cermak’s boys caused. And for the ulcers that developed after he was wounded.”
“His heart was also bad,” she said. “And he was convinced he had stomach cancer. I wouldn’t want you to leave anything out, Mr. Heller.”
“Stomach cancer. Perfect. I bet YOU don’t even know why he had that notion.”
“Certainly I do, she said. “The assassin who killed Cermak believed he had stomach cancer.”
“That’s right. Joe Zangara. The one-man Sicilian suicide squad who pretended to shoot at FDR so that your husband could bring Mayor Cermak down without… I can almost hear Frank saying it…‘stirring up the heat.’”
“My husband was a brilliant man.”
“Once,” I said “He was-once. He began to slip, though, didn’t he? Despondent over his wife’s death, he took long solitary walks. He even began to drink a little-not like him, not at all like him. His memory began to falter. That’s where you come in.”
“Really? In what way?”
“A marriage of convenience. A business arrangement You ran a dogtrack in Miami, you helped run Sportsman’s Park. You’d been Frank’s inside ‘man’ with O’Hare. Frank had a son he loved very much, who needed a mother-a strong person who could look after little Joseph’s interests after he was gone. A mob insider like you, that was perfect. And, maybe, it was a way to keep you from ever spilling what you knew about Frank setting up Capone. Hell, maybe you blackmailed him into marrying you.”
She let out a long breath, and began to walk again. Quickly. I walked right alongside her.
“You know what I think, Mrs. Nitti?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you’ve had practice being a widow. After all, you’ve been a black widow for years.”
She stopped in her tracks, next to the tracks, and she slapped me. Hard. A hard, ringing, stinging slap.
“What do you know?” she said. There was bitterness in the throaty voice, but something else too: pain.
But I pressed on, my cheek flaming, like Estelle Carey in her final moments. “You want me to believe you weren’t keeping tabs on him for Ricca? That you didn’t send him out to meet his death on his regular walk, today?”