Ness stood in the midst of the wreckage of the Gordon's restaurant on Playhouse Square, hat pushed back, hands on his hips, face tightened into a mask of disgust. Sunlight streamed through the rows of yawning metal mouths where plate glass had been, sun glinting and bouncing off their jagged teeth.
"Chicago typewriter wrote this," Will Garner said, pointing to the patterns of bullet holes in the woodwork, the plaster. The big Indian in a brown suit was slowly prowling the shard-strewn, rubble-filled dining room.
Detective Albert Curry, tagging along after Ness, seemed shaken. He had apparently never seen the damage a machine gun could do.
"We've had broken windows before," Curry said, "but nothing like this. This goes beyond vandalism into sheer…"
He searched for a sufficient word.
"Gangsterism," Ness filled in flatly. "This is extortion in the true, time-honored Black Hand tradition. This is how the Mafia got its start, gentlemen."
"We aren't dealing with the Mafia, surely," Curry said with a nervous smile. "This is labor racketeering, pure and simple."
"It's labor racketeering, all right," Ness said, kneeling, picking up several blunted. 45 slugs and dropping them into an evidence envelope. "But it's not pure and it's not simple."
Garner said, "I think Mr. Gordon's arrived."
Ness stood and watched as Vernon Gordon, wearing a blue suit and a scowl, stepped inside his shot-out front doors and heaved a sigh.
"I thought I'd covered this last night," Gordon said impatiently, not meeting the eyes of Ness or Curry or Garner. "I gave a full statement to the two officers."
Ness walked over, glass fragments fragmenting further under his feet, and smiled tightly at Gordon and said, "Good morning. Vern."
The two men knew each other socially, at the country club, at various business and fraternal associations around town; they were less than friends, but hardly strangers.
"Sorry, Eliot," Gordon said with a quick smile, still not meeting Ness's gaze. "Afraid I'm a little testy this morning."
"I can well understand why."
He gestured with both hands, indicating his ravaged restaurant. "But, frankly, I have a lot to do-obviously. I've said all I have to regarding this… accident."
"Accident? Why, did somebody accidentally fire off a few hundred rounds of forty-five caliber ammunition your way? That's a hell of an accident, Vern."
"Eliot, I have things to attend to."
"You sure as hell do. You need to attend to the bastards responsible. And I'm here to offer my help in that regard."
Gordon sighed, and he smiled again, wearily. "I'm grateful. But I'm afraid there's nothing either of us can do."
"Why don't you tell me about your union troubles, Vern."
"I don't have any union troubles, Eliot." He sighed again, adding, almost to himself, "Not now."
"I see. Then you've talked to Caldwell and/or McFate already this morning."
Gordon said nothing.
Ness gestured with a fist. "You can help me put those venal bastards away. This episode goes way beyond anything they've pulled to date. Firing off machine guns in the city streets is not going to endear the public-or a judge or a jury-to the 'boys.' This time they've gone too far."
Gordon was shaking his head side to side, as if Ness's words were blows he needed to deflect. "Eliot, I didn't see who did it."
"You could have been killed, Vern."
"Whoever did it didn't realize I was here."
"That wouldn't make you any less dead."
"Well, I'm not dead."
Ness raised a hand as if swearing an oath in court. "It was late at night-or in the early morning hours, depending on how you look at it."
"Yes."
"So it was well after the theater crowd on Euclid had cleared. The streets were fairly empty."
"That's right."
"According to the officers' report, the car-a dark sedan-stopped, and then someone fired upon your restaurant. Is that right?"
"Well… yes."
"As opposed to firing while the car drove by?"
"I'd say that's right. Why? What's the significance of that?"
Garner, who had ambled over near Ness, said, "It means there was only one man in the car, most likely. He had to come to a stop, slide over and shoot."
Gordon looked confused. "Is that significant?"
"I think so," Ness said. "I don't think either Caldwell or McFate would do the machine-gunning themselves, so it required strong-arm assistance. To which end they only used one man."
Gordon's irritation was barely in check; but he couldn't disguise his interest, either. "So what?"
Curry, standing next to his chief, said, "Our understanding of the approach McFate and Caldwell take, when putting the squeeze on the likes of yourself, is to do everything themselves, from first contact to payoff. They like to keep the circle small."
"Using one man as their strong-arm," Garner explained, "fits that same pattern. They used one man on what most would consider at least a two-man job. Keeping the circle tight, and small."
"Vern," Ness said, "you've done a lot for Cleveland. Do something more-help us get rid of this sickness."
Gordon's eyes tightened and his reluctance to turn Ness down was apparent, but nonetheless he shook his head no.
"We can give you and your family police protection," Curry said. "We can watch the restaurant, too."
Ness nodded, confirming what Curry said, finally catching Gordon's eyes and locking on to them. "You can help rid Cleveland and its business community of one hell of an embarrassment."
The sunlight streaking through the room caught Gordon in the face and he winced; he moved till his face was out of the light and then he looked at Ness with eyes that were tired and sad and resigned to it all.
"Like everybody else in the business community," Gordon said, "I need to stay in business. I do what I have to do to do that."
Ness had an edge in his tone. "And you don't think putting Caldwell and McFate in jail would be good for business?"
"Eliot, I can't help you on this one. I have contractors to call; I have much to put in motion. I have a restaurant to open. If you'll excuse me."
Gordon, glass snapping under his shoes, exited through a bullet-scarred doorway that led to a stairway.
The three detectives stood in the rubble-scattered room, looked at each other and, with the precision of choreography, shrugged.
Ness picked up a chair, glanced at it to see if it was more or less intact, shook some crushed glass and detritus from its seat, and sat down. He nodded to Garner and Curry to find chairs and sit, and they did.
"We need Vern Gordon," Ness said. "I'll keep working on him. I'll talk to the mayor and see if he and Frank Darby, the Chamber of Commerce president, can't apply some pressure."
"I hope they have better luck than Will and I," Curry said glumly.
Ness looked at Garner, who shrugged with his eyebrows. "No luck?" he asked them.
Curry pulled his pocket notebook and began to thumb through it. "Over the past several days, we've talked to several dozen merchants who've been victims of vandalism that seems to be union-related."
"A number of them were willing to speak off the record," Garner said, "but no one wants to buck the unions and talk to a grand jury."
"That new shoe store on Euclid, they were hit up for a grand," Curry said. "It was the same tactic the boys no doubt pulled here at the restaurant: threatening to pull the union glaziers off the job, leaving 'em windowless on the eve of their big opening."
"Our friends hit the smaller businesses, too," said Garner.
Curry nodded, leafing through the notebook, stopping here and there to point out an example. "Here's a fashion shop, also on Euclid, that paid Caldwell a hundred-buck 'fine' because they had some nonunion painting done. And a soda shop paid a fifty-buck 'fine' because the owner allowed his cousin to paint a storeroom, and a butcher who paid 'em sixty bucks because he used nonunion labor to install some fixtures. And a clothing store that, during a work halt, coughed up five hundred for a fund for unemployed union workers."
"That," Garner said with a quiet sarcasm, "was in return for Caldwell and McFate settling a jurisdictional dispute' between two unions."
"What about this 'jurisdictional dispute' business?" Curry asked Ness. "Is there anything to it?"
"Phony as a three-dollar bill," Ness said, shaking his head no. "A real jurisdictional dispute is settled by arbitration, and work on jobs continues until the arbitration is settled."
"We haven't talked to everybody," Garner said. "We may get somebody willing to talk on the record, yet."
"If we could convince Vernon Gordon," Ness said, "the rest would fall in line."
Curry glanced around at the shot-up room. "This is the one to nail 'em on. We got a lot of photographs this morning; they'll look great blown up as court exhibits."
A voice from behind them said, "What did I miss?"
They turned to see Sam Wild, in a red bow tie and pale yellow seersucker suit and straw fedora, grinning at them through the framing of a shot-out window.
Ness motioned for Wild to join them, and he did, coming around through the front double doors that were barely there. He found a chair on the floor, set it upright, brushed it off and sat on it backward, leaning up against the back of it.
"Some air-conditioning system this joint has," he said wryly, noting the sunshine snooting in. "I bet our safety director's feeling homesick."
"Homesick?" Curry asked.
Ness said, "I think he means this place ought to remind me of Chicago."
Wild nodded, grinned wolfishly, dug a pack of Lucky Strikes out of a pocket. Lighting up a smoke, he said, "Looks like the Hawthorne Hotel's coffee shop the day Hymie Weiss tried to have Capone splattered."
"You're a sentimental soul, Sam," Ness said.
"Has Gordon been around? I'd like to interview him. We got some dandy photos this morning, but the great entrepreneur himself wasn't around."
"Gordon came in not long ago," Ness said. "He's upstairs in his office, I'd imagine. I don't think he'll want to talk to you."
"He's not cooperating with the Department of Public Safety?"
"He's not uncooperative."
"But he's not cooperative, either."
"You could say that."
"Yeah, but not in print." He shrugged. "The Gordon family are big advertisers. You know, these clowns Caldwell and McFate've got everybody scared-and now this machine-gun nonsense-brother. You're going to have a hell of a time getting anybody to testify."
"You're telling us," Curry said.
"I think we can give you a list of merchants," Ness said, "who might be willing to talk off the record."
"Yeah, that'd be something, anyway," Wild said reflectively, blowing out smoke. "We could do a nice big expose on the 'boys.' That might build some nice public pressure."
"Worth a try," Ness said. "You can get the names from Detective Curry."
"Any other ideas? We dissipated denizens of the Fourth Estate need all the help we can get from our public officials."
"Go around and see Jack Whitehall," Ness said casually.
Both Garner and Curry looked sharply, with some surprise, at their boss.
"The Teamster?" Wild asked, equally surprised. "That thug?"
"He's no angel," Ness said, "but unlike Caldwell and McFate, his goals are rooted in something more than just making a buck. He really believes in the union ideals. He's no shakedown artist, and I've heard he resents the two Jims."
"Are you serious?" Wild asked, smiling, eyes narrowed, thinking Ness might be stringing him along.
"Give it a try," Ness said, with a little shrug.
Wild lifted his eyebrows and put them back down. "Oh-kay," he said.
The reporter and Curry sat and put their heads together for a few minutes as the young detective gave Wild a list of merchants, with words of guidance on each.
Then the lanky reporter rose, stretched, yawned, and pitched his spent cigarette to the glass-littered floor.
"See you in church, kids," he said, and ambled out.
"Do you trust him?" Garner asked. The Indian was watching Wild's departing back through the row of windowless windows, as if considering whether or not to put an arrow or maybe a tomahawk between the reporter's shoulder blades.
"Yes, Will, I trust him," Ness said. "So should you."
Garner shrugged, smiled a little. "Okay. I trust him."
Curry said, "What's the next step? Do we keep at the merchants?"
"Not just now. Let's let some of that public pressure Mr. Wild mentioned build up some. I have another assignment for the two of you."
They looked at him expectantly.
"We know that Caldwell and McFate handle almost every aspect of their shakedowns themselves. Certainly they make all the initial contacts themselves, and take the payoffs."
"A small circle," Garner said, nodding.
"Let's widen that circle some," Ness said, with a nasty smile. "Let's put a twenty-four-hour watch on Big Jim and Little Jim. I'll get several more shifts of two-man teams, assigned 'round the clock."
"And, what?" Curry asked. "Try to catch them in the act?"
"No. I want you to make no pretense of hiding your presence. Get on their fat butts and stay there. Our goal here is deterrence, not surveillance. From now on, Mr. Caldwell and Mr. McFate will be chaperoned by the city-they'll have their own private police escort."
"I like it," Garner said, the thinnest of smiles on his bronze face.
"But we can't catch them at something that they aren't doing anymore," Curry said, confused.
"We don't need them to commit any new crimes," Ness said. "They committed plenty already. We'll keep working on Vern Gordon and other potential witnesses, both here in Cleveland and outside the city as well. I'll be building a case, gentleman, while you keep on theirs."
The three men exchanged smiles and rose and exited the restaurant into a sunny morning just as a contractor, several carpenters, painters, and plasterers were unloading trucks out front.