The gun in my hand was stalling to shake. I heard myself say. "He pushed me off the Sky Ride tower. Frank. Six hundred feet in the sky. and by all rights I should be a twisted sack of bones and meat on a morgue tray right now, but I'm not. I'm here, and he's dead, and so are you, Nitti. I wish to Christ Lang had killed you that day. I wish to Christ I hadn't made 'em call an ambulance for you, cocksucker."
Nitti sat there quietly; when I ran out of speech, he patted the air softly, as if quieting, settling down, a child.
"Heller," he said. "I didn't send him. I didn't even know the bastard was in town. He doesn't work for me."
"Fuck you. You're dead."
"Wait. Just w&it. Lower that goddamn thing, will you? Hear me out. I didn't say he never done work for me. He's from the East. He's a guy Johnny Torrio recommended to Al, back on the Lingle deal; and I use him now and then- on ticklish matters."
"So that's what I am. A ticklish matter."
"I know how you feel. I know the kind of emotions that are running wild in you. kid. I know all about revenge. If Ten Percent Tony wasn't in hell already, you could ask him if Nitti doesn't know all about revenge. But I didn't hire a contract on you. I swear by all that's holy."
As if on cue. a church bell began ringing. Midnight. I wondered idly if it was Notre Dame or Our Lady of Pompeü.
I said "Who sent him then?"
"I don't know the answer to that. Not for sure. But I can figure it out. So can you. if you try."
I was starting to feel confused: I was starting to wonder what the hell I was doing. The momentum, the moment, was slipping away from me…
"The Lang trial is comin' up in September." Nitti said. "Or have you forgotten? Is that all past history to you now? Well, it isn't past history to some people."
"Are you saying Lang sent that guy? He doesn't have the money or the connections to"
"He doesn't have the brains, or the guts, either. No. Not Lang. Nobody. Nobody sent him. You sang on the stand. Heller. You made news in Chicago: you told the truth. How do you think your blond buddy felt when he heard you were doin' that? You can identify him as the real killer of Jake Lingle; you can identify him as a second gunman at the Cermak kill. What sort of thoughts do you suppose went through his head when he found out Nate Heller's got a sudden case of telling the truth on witness stands? Who can say what might come out at this Lang trial. Lang was at Bayfront Park, too, you know."
I was resting the elbow of the arm with the gun-in-hand, on the table; now I leaned on the other elbow, too, and was rubbing the side of my face. I swallowed. My mouth was dry. And I felt sick to my stomach.
So did Nitti, apparently, because he took another swig of milk.
He wiped off his mouth, smiled, and said, "Put the gun down. Just set it on the table."
It sounded like a pretty good idea, but I wasn't ready to believe him just yet.
I said, "What about Jimmy Beame, then?"
"Forget Jimmy Beame. And I'm doing you a favor, giving you that advice. So put the gun down, take the advice, and go. Just go away."
I felt a surge of something; my face felt flushed. "I almost believed you for a minute, Frank. But now the truth comes out, whether you meant it to or not. Jimmy Beame was tied to Ted Newberry, I don't know how exactly, except that it was through the Tri-Cities liquor ring. And then he infiltrated your organization, and you found out, and you what? Had him killed? You're smiling. I'm right, aren't I? I'm right. And I started snooping around, and when I connected with Dipper Cooney- you were at the goddamn fight yourself, Frank- you tried to kill us both, but managed only to shut Cooney up, and"
"Cooney died because he was with you. That's my guess, anyway. And that dead blond son of a bitch out there was who did it."
That's right: the car he was sitting out there in right now was the car that had glided by shooting last night.
Nitti's voice was a calm drone. "I've known you were looking for Jimmy Beame for a long time." he shrugged. "Since you first started hitting the flophouses on North Clark Street. Nothing much 'scapes my notice, kid."
"He is dead, though, isn't he?"
"Yeah. And he did do some work for Ted Newberry- ran some errands for Ted and his pals in the Tri-Cities. But you're forgetting something: between Saint Valentine's Day, '29, when him and Bugs Moran just missed the party, and that ditch in the dunes this January. Ted was one of ours. Back when the Beame kid was working for him, Ted was working for me and Al. So that fairy tale you built won't wash."
"Tell me a tale that will wash."
"No. You go home. I owe you one. And here's how I'm gonna repay you: the blond's going for a midnight swim in his car, in the Chicago River; and I'm gonna tell Louie and Fatso it was all a misunderstanding and they shouldn't kill you. That's how I'm gonna repay you. Now leave the gun- it's the blond's, ain't it? Dicks don't pack silencers, at least that I ever heard of."
I shifted the silenced gun to my left hand and with my right got out my own automatic; then, awkwardly. I managed to take the clip out of the silenced gun, and put the clip in my pocket, leaving the emptied gun on the table. Then I shifted my automatic to my right hand and said, "I haven't finished with this."
"Yes you have."
"No. You don't get it. do you. Frank? Jimmy Beame isn't just another job I'm doing, just another missing persons case. He's my fiancee's brother. That's right: my fiancee. I met her months ago, when she hired me to find the kid When she finds out he's dead, she's going to insist on me looking into it. I'm going to have to find the guy who did it, Frank. And while you probably didn't pull the trigger, I got a feeling in a very real sense you're the guy."
Nitti laughed: it was a laugh that had no humor in it- something like sadness was more like it.
"Actually," Nitti said, "I owe you one for something else. Something you don't know about. You did me a favor once, and you don't even know it."
Capone said almost the same thing to me, at Atlanta.
"I didn't know this Beame kid by that name," he said. "I didn't know about the Newberry connection, either, at first. All I knew was Dipper Cooney- who knew better than to stiff me- okayed this kid, and when I talked to the kid, I found him different. He was a little wiseguy, for one thing, but more than that, he was smart. I said, you been to college, ain't ya, kid? And he said, don't let it get around. I liked that. He was real good with figures, and we made him kind of an accountant, in a wire room. Joe Palumbo's wire room. Ring a bell yet. Heller?"
No church bells rang on cue this time; but a bell was ringing.
"Got Jimmy Beanie's picture handy. Heller?"
I dug at my billfold; got the picture out.
"Lemme see." Nitti said, reaching across. "I never seen him this young, or this fat. either. Baby fat. His hair was longer, too, curlier. And he had a mustache. Must've grew that to look older."
The kid in the window.
"You killed him, Heller," Nitti said.
Then he wasn't in the window anymore.
"You killed him," Nitti continued. "That's the favor you did us. See, one of my guys recognized the kid was somebody who'd done some running for Newberry and the Tri-Cities boys. Only he knew the kid's name wasn't Hurt- that's what he was calling himself, Frankie Hurt- but the guy couldn't remember what the other name was. Well, hell, a lot of guys use more than one name in a lifetime- I was bora Nitto, ya know- but better safe than sorry. I had Louie check out the kid's flop.
"And Louie found something bad. He found notebooks. Lined paper, like a school kid. Only these notebooks were full of writing, and it wasn't no school kid's work. This Hurt was writing down everything he saw and heard, and because Palumbo's wire room was a place I was at a lot. the kid heard a lot. Just bits and pieces, of course, but good bits and pieces, or bad ones, depending on how you look at it. He also found the kid's real ID. a driver's license, and saw his name was James something Beame. James Palmer Beame, I think it was. And found an address book with the kid's father's name in it, and the father was a doctor in Idaho or something, and something else. The damn kid had his damn college diploma in the drawer, and guess what it said he studied in?"