She’d been pretty, once. She was still sexy, in a slutty way, if you’d had enough beers and it was just before closing time.
Kathleen O’Meara, who ran the dingy dive that sported her last name, would have been a well-preserved fifty, if she hadn’t been forty. But I knew from the background materials I’d been provided that she was born in 1899, here in the dirt-poor Irish neighborhood of Cleveland known as the Angles, a scattering of brick and frame dwellings and businesses at the north end of 25th Street in the industrial flats.
Kathleen O’Meara’s husband, Frank, had been dead barely a month now, but Katie wasn’t wearing black: her blouse was white with red polka dots, a low-cut peasant affair out of which spilled well-powdered, bowling ball-size breasts. Her mouth was a heavily red-rouged chasm within which gleamed white storebought choppers; her eyes were lovely, within their pouches, long-lashed and money-green.
“What’s your pleasure, handsome?” she asked, her soprano voice musical in a calliope sort of way, a hint of Irish lilt in it.
I guess I was handsome, for this crowd anyway, six feet, one-hundred-eighty pounds poured into threadbare mismatched suitcoat and pants, a wilted excuse for a fedora snugged low over my reddish brown hair, chin and cheeks stubbled with two days growth, looking back at myself in the streaked smudgy mirror behind the bar. A chilly March afternoon had driven better than a dozen men inside the shabby walls of O’Meara’s, where a churning exhaust fan did little to stave off the bouquet of stale smoke and beer-soaked sawdust.
“Suds is all I can afford,” I said.
“There’s worse ways to die,” she said, eyes sparkling.
“Ain’t been reduced to canned heat yet,” I admitted.
At least half of he clientele around me couldn’t have made that claim; while those standing at the bar, with a foot on the rail like me, wore the sweatstained workclothes that branded them employed, the men hunkered at tables and booths wore the tattered rags of the derelict. A skinny dark-haired dead-eyed sunken-cheeked barmaid in an off-white waitress uniform was collecting empty mugs and replacing them with foaming new ones.
The bosomy saloonkeeper set a sloshing mug before me. “Railroad worker?”
I sipped; it was warm and bitter. “Steel mill. Pretty lean in Gary; heard they was hiring at Republic.”
“That was last month.”
“Yeah. Found that out in a hurry.”
She extended a pudgy hand. “Kathleen O’Meara, at your service.”
“William O’Hara,” I said. Nathan Heller, actually. The Jewish last name came from my father, but the Irish mug that was fooling the saloonkeeper was courtesy of my mother.
“Two O’s, that’s us,” she grinned; that mouth must have have been something, once. “My pals call me Katie. Feel free.”
“Well, thanks, Katie. And my pals call me Bill.” Nate.
“Got a place to stay, Bill?”
“No. Thought I’d hop a freight tonight. See what’s shakin’ up at Flint.”
“They ain’t hiring up there, neither.”
“Well, I dunno, then.”
“I got rooms upstairs, Bill.”
“Couldn’t afford it, Katie.”
“Another mug?”
“Couldn’t afford that, either.”
She winked. “Handsome, you got me wrapped around your little pinkie, ain’t ya noticed?”
She fetched me a second beer, then attended to the rest of her customers at the bar. I watched her, feeling both attracted and repulsed; what is it about a beautiful woman run to fat, gone to seed, that can still summon the male in a man?
I was nursing the second beer, knowing that if I had enough of these I might do something I’d regret in the morning, when she trundled back over and leaned on the bar with both elbows.
“A room just opened up. Yours, if you want it.”
“I told ya, Katie, I’m flat-busted.”
“But I’m not,” she said with a lecherous smile, and I couldn’t be sure whether she meant money or her billowing powdered bosoms. “I could use a helpin’ hand around here…. I’m a widow lady, Bill, runnin’ this big old place by her lonesome.”
“You mean sweep up and do dishes and the like.”
Her cute nose wrinkled as if a bad smell had caught its attention; a little late for that, in this joint. “My daughter does most of the drudgery.” She nodded toward the barmaid, who was moving througthe room like a zombie with a beer tray. “Wouldn’t insult ya with woman’s work, Bill…. But there’s things only a man can do.”
She said “things” like “tings.”
“What kind of things?”
Her eyes had a twinkle, like broken glass. “Things…. Interested?”
“Sure, Katie.”
And it was just that easy.
Three days earlier, I had been seated at a conference table in the spacious dark-wood and pebbled-glass office of the Public Safety Director in Cleveland’s City Hall.
“It’s going to be necessary to swear you in as a part of my staff,” Eliot Ness said.
I had known Eliot since we were both teenagers at the University of Chicago. I’d dropped out, finished up at a community college and gone into law enforcement; Eliot had graduated and became a private investigator, often working for insurance companies. Somewhere along the way, we’d swapped jobs.
His dark brown hair brushed with gray at the temples, Eliot’s faintly freckled, boyish good looks were going puffy on him, gray eyes pouchy and marked by crow’s feet. But even in his late thirties, the former Treasury agent who had been instrumental in Al Capone’s fall was the youngest Public Safety Director in the nation.
When I was on the Chicago P.D., I had been one of the few cops Eliot could trust for information; and when I opened up the one-man A-1 Detective Agency, Eliot had returned the favor as my only trustworthy source within the law enforcement community. I had remained in Chicago and he had gone on to more government crimebusting in various corners of the Midwest, winding up with this high profile job as Cleveland’s “top cop”; since 1935, he had made national headlines cleaning up the police department, busting crooked labor unions and curtailing the numbers racket.
Eliot was perched on the edge of the table, a casual posture at odds with his three-piece suit and tie. “Just a formality,” he explained. “I caught a little heat recently from the City Council for hiring outside investigators.”
I’d been brought in on several other cases, over the past five or six years.
“It’s an undercover assignment?”
He nodded. “Yes, and I’d love to tackle it myself, but I’m afraid at this point, even in the Angles, this puss of mine is too well-known.”
Eliot, a boyhood Sherlock Holmes fan, was not one to stay behind his desk; even as Public Safety Director, he was known to lead raids, wielding an ax, and go undercover, in disguise.
I said, “You’ve never been shy about staying out of the papers.”
I was one of the few people who could make a crack like that and not get a rebuke; in fact, I got a little smile out of the stone face.
“Well, I don’t like what’s been in the papers, lately,” he admitted, brushing the stray comma of hair off his forehead, for what good it did him. “You know I’ve made traffic safety a priority.”
“Sure. Can’t jaywalk in this burg without getting a ticket.”
When Eliot came into office, Cleveland was ranked the second un-safest city in America, after Los Angeles. By 1938, Cleveland was ranked the safest big city, and by 1939 the safest city, period. This reflected Eliot instituting a public safety campaign through education and “warning” tickets, and reorganizing the traffic division, putting in two-way radios in patrol cars and creating a fleet of motorcycle cops.
“Well, we’re in no danger of receiving any ‘safest city’ honors this year,” he said, dryly. He settled into the wooden chair next to mine, folded his hands prayerfully. “We’ve already had thirty-two traffic fatalities this year. That’s more than double where we stood, this time last year.”
“What’s the reason for it?”
“We thought it had to do with increased industrial activity.”
“You mean, companies are hiring again, and more people are driving to work.”
“Right. We’ve had employers insert ‘drive carefully’ cards in pay envelopes, we’ve made elaborate safety presentations…. There’s also an increase in teenage drivers, you know, kids driving to high school.”
“More parents working, more kids with cars. Follows.”
“Yes. And we stepped up educational efforts, at schools, accordingly. Plus, we’ve cracked down on traffic violators of all stripe-four times as many speeding arrests; traffic violations arrests up twenty-five-percent, intoxication arrests almost double.”
“What sort of results are you having?”
“In these specific areas-industrial drivers, teenage drivers-very positive. These are efforts that went into effect around the middle of last year-and yet this year, the statistics are far worse.”
“You wouldn’t be sending me undercover if you didn’t have the problem pinpointed.”
He nodded. “My Traffic Analysis Bureau came up with several interesting stats: seventy-two percent of our traffic fatalities this year are age forty-five or older. But only twenty percent of our population falls in that category. And thirty-six percent of those fatalities are sixty-five or up…a category that comprises only four percent of Cleveland’s population.”
“So more older people are getting hit by cars than younger people,” I said with a shrug. “Is that a surprise? The elderly don’t have the reflexes of young bucks like us.”
“Forty-five isn’t ‘elderly,’” Eliot said, “as we’ll both find out sooner than we’d like.”
The intercom on Eliot’s nearby rolltop desk buzzed and he rose and responded to it. His secretary’s voice informed us that Dr. Jeffers was here to see him.
“Send her in,” Eliot said.
The woman who entered was small and wore a white shirt and matching trousers, baggy oversize apparel that gave little hint of anyshape beneath; though her heart-shaped face was attractive, she wore no make-up and her dark hair was cut mannishly short, clunky thick-lensed tortoise-shell glasses distorting dark almond-shaped eyes.
“Alice, thank you for coming,” Eliot said, rising, shaking her hand. “Nate Heller, this is Dr. Alice Jeffers, assistant county coroner.”
“A pleasure, Dr. Jeffers,” I said, rising, shaking her cool, dry hand, as she twitched me a smile.
Eliot pulled out a chair for her opposite me at the conference table, telling her, “I’ve been filling Nate in. I’m just up to your part in this investigation.”
With no further prompting, Dr. Jeffers said, “I was alerted by a morgue attendant, actually. It seemed we’d had an unusual number of hit-and-skip fatalities in the last six months, particularly in January, from a certain part of the city, and a certain part of community.”
“Alice is referring to a part of Cleveland called the Angles,” Eliot explained, “which is just across the Detroit Bridge, opposite the factory and warehouse district.”
“I’ve been there,” I said. The Angles was a classic waterfront area, where bars and whorehouses and cheap rooming houses serviced a clientele of workingmen and longshoremen. It was also an area rife with derelicts, particularly since Eliot burned out the Hoovervilles nestling in Kingsbury Run and under various bridges.
“These hit-and-skip victims were vagrants,” Dr. Jeffers said, her eyes unblinking and intelligent behind the thick lenses, “and tended to be in their fifties or sixties, though they looked much older.”
“Rummies,” I said.
“Yes. With Director Ness’s blessing, and Coroner Gerber’s permission, I conducted several autopsies, and encountered individuals in advanced stages of alcoholism. Cirrhosis of the liver, kidney disease, general debilitation. Had they not been struck by cars, they would surely have died within a matter of years or possibly months or even weeks.”
“Walking dead men.”
“Poetic but apt. My contact at the morgue began keeping me alerted when vagrant ‘customers’ came through, and I soon realized that automobile fatalities were only part of the story.”
“How so?” I asked.
“We had several fatal falls-down-stairs, and a surprising number of fatalities by exposure to the cold weather, death by freezing, by pneumonia. Again, I performed autopsies where normally we would not. These victims were invariably intoxicated at the times of their deaths, and in advanced stages of acute alcoholism.”
I was thoroughly confused. “What’s the percentage in bumping off bums? You got another psychopath at large, Eliot? Or is the Butcher back, changing his style?”
I was referring to the so-called Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, who had cut up a number of indigents here in Cleveland, Jack the Ripper style; but the killings had stopped, long ago.
“This isn’t the Butcher,” Eliot confidently. “And it isn’t psychosis…it’s commerce.”
“There’s money in killing bums?”
“If they’re insured, there is.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, nodding, getting it, or starting to. “But if you overinsure some worthless derelict, surely it’s going to attract the attention of the adjusters for the insurance company.”
“This is more subtle than that,” Eliot said. “When Alice informed me of this, I contacted the State Insurance Division. Their chief investigator, Gaspar Corso-who we’ll meet with later this afternoon, Nate-dug through our ‘drunk cards’ on file at the Central Police Station, some twenty thousand of them. He came up with information that corroborated Alice’s, and confirmed suspicions of mine.”
Corso had an office in the Standard Building-no name on the door, no listing in the building directory. Eliot, Dr. Jeffers and I met with Corso in the latter’s small, spare office, wooden chairs pulled up around a wooden desk that faced the wall, so that Corso was swung around facing us.
He was small and compactly muscular-a former high school football star, according to Eliot-bald with calm blue eyes under black beetle eyebrows. A gold watch chain crossed the vest of his three-piece tweed.
“A majority of the drunks dying either by accident or ‘natural causes,’” he said in a mellow baritone, “come from the West Side-the Angles.”
“And they were over-insured?” I asked.
“Yes, but not in the way you might expect. Do you know what industrial insurance is, Mr. Heller?”
“You mean, burial insurance?”
“That’s right. Small policies designed to pay funeral expenses and the like.”
“Is that what these bums are being bumped off for? Pennies?”
A tiny half smile formed on the impassive investigator’s thin lips. “Hardly. Multiple policies have been taken out on these individuals, dozens in some cases…each small policy with a different insurance company.”
“No wonder no alarms went off,” I said. “Each company got hit for peanuts.”
“Some of these policies are for two-hundred-and-fifty dollars, never higher than a thousand. But I have one victim here…” He turned to his desk, riffled through some papers. “…who I determined, by crosschecking with various companies, racked up a $24,000 payout.”
“Christ. Who was the beneficiary?”
“A Kathleen O’Meara,” Eliot said. “She runs a saloon in the Angles, with a rooming house upstairs.”
“Her husband died last month,” Dr. Jeffers said. “I performed the autopsy myself…. He was intoxicated at the time of his death, and was in an advanced stage of cirrhosis of the liver. Hit by a car. But there was one difference.”
“Yes?”
“He was fairly well-dressed, and was definitely not malnourished.”
O’Meara’s did not serve food, but a greasy spoon down the block did, and that’s where Katie took me for supper, around seven, leaving the running of the saloon to her sullen skinny daughter, Maggie.
“Maggie doesn’t say much,” I said, over a plate of meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gray. Like Katie, it was surprisingly appetizing, particularly if you didn’t look too closely and were half-bombed.
We were in a booth by a window that showed no evidence of ever having been cleaned; cold March wind rattled it and leached through.
“I spoiled her,” Katie admitted. “But, to be fair, she’s still grieving over her papa. She was the apple of his eye.”
“You miss your old man?”
“I miss the help. He took care of the books. I got a head for business, but not for figures. Thing is, he got greedy.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, caught him featherin’ his own nest. Skimmin’. He had a bank account of his own he never told me about.”
“You fight over that?”
“Naw. Forgive and forget, I always say.” Katie was having the same thing as me, and she was shoveling meat loaf into her mouth like coal into a boiler.
“I’m, uh, pretty good with figures,” I said.
Her licentious smile was part lip rouge, part gravy. “I’ll just bet you are…. Ever do time, Bill?”
“Some. I’m not no thief, though…I wouldn’t steal a partner’s money.”
“What were you in for?”
“Manslaughter.”
“Kill somebody, did you?”
“Sort of.”
She giggled. “How do you ‘sort of’ kill somebody, Bill?”
“I beat a guy to death with my fists. I was drunk.”
“Why?”
“I’ve always drunk too much.”
“No, why’d you beat him to death? With your fists.”
I shrugged, chewed meat loaf. “He insulted a woman I was with. I don’t like a man that don’t respect a woman.”
She sighed. Shook her head. “You’re a real gent, Bill. Here I thought chivalry was dead.”
Three evenings before, I’d been in a yellow-leather booth by a blue-mirrored wall in the Vogue Room of the Hollenden Hotel. Clean-shaven and in my best brown suit, I was in the company of Eliot and his recent bride, the former Ev McMillan, a fashion illustrator who worked for Higbee’s department store.
Ev, an almond-eyed slender attractive brunette, wore a simple cobalt blue evening dress with pearls; Eliot was in thehree-piece suit he’d worn to work. We’d had prime rib and were enjoying after dinner drinks; Eliot was on his second, and he’d had two before dinner, as well. Martinis. Ev was only one drink behind him.
Personal chit-chat had lapsed back into talking business.
“It’s goddamn ghoulish,” Eliot said. He was quietly soused, as evidenced by his use of the word “goddamn”-for a tough cop, he usually had a Boy Scout’s vocabulary.
“It’s coldblooded, all right,” I said.
“How does the racket work?” Ev asked.
“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Eliot said. “It doesn’t make for pleasant after-dinner conversation…”
“No, I’m interested,” she said. She was a keenly intelligent young woman. “You compared it to a lottery…how so?”
“Well,” I said, “as it’s been explained to me, speculators ‘invest’ in dozens of small insurance policies on vagrants who were already drinking themselves to imminent graves…malnourished men crushed by dope and/or drink, sleeping in parks and in doorways in all kinds of weather.”
“Men likely to meet an early death by so-called natural causes,” Eliot said. “That’s how we came to nickname the racket ‘Natural Death, Inc.’”
“Getting hit by a car isn’t exactly a ‘natural’ death,” Ev pointed out.
Eliot sipped his martini. “At first, the speculators were just helping nature along by plying their investments with free, large quantities of drink…hastening their death by alcoholism or just making them more prone to stumble in front of a car.”
“Now it looks like these insured derelicts are being shoved in front of cars,” I said.
“Or the drivers of the cars are purposely running them down,” Eliot said. “Dear, this really is unpleasant conversation; I apologize for getting into it…”
“Nonsense,” she said. “Who are these speculators?”
“Women, mostly,” he said. “Harridans running West Side beer parlors and roominghouses. They exchange information, but they aren’t exactly an organized ring or anything, which makes our work difficult. I’m siccing Nate here on the worst offender, the closest thing there is to a ringleader-a woman we’ve confirmed is holding fifty policies on various ‘risks.’”
Ev frowned. “How do these women get their victims to go along with them? I mean, aren’t the insured’s signatures required on the policies?”
“There’s been some forgery going on,” Eliot said. “But mostly these poor bastards are willingly trading their signatures for free booze.”
Ev twitched a non-smile above the rim of her martini glass. “Life in slum areas breeds such tragedy.”
The subject changed to local politics-I’d heard rumors of Eliot running for mayor, which he unconvincingly pooh-thed-and, a few drinks later, Eliot spotted some reporter friends of his, Clayton Fritchey and Sam Wild, and excused himself to go over and speak to them.
“If I’m not being out of line,” I said to Mrs. Ness, “Eliot’s hitting the sauce pretty hard himself. Hope you don’t have any extra policies out on him.”
She managed a wry little smile. “I do my best to keep up with him, but it’s difficult. Ironic, isn’t it? The nation’s most famous Prohibition agent, with a drinking problem.”
“Is it a problem?”
“Eliot doesn’t think so. He says he just has to relax. It’s a stressful job.”
“It is at that. But, Ev-I’ve been around Eliot during ‘stressful’ times before…like when the entire Capone gang was gunning for him. And he never put it away like that, then.”
She was studied the olive in her martini. “You were part of that case, weren’t you?”
“What case? Capone?”
“No-the Butcher.”
I nodded. I’d been part of the capture of the lunatic responsible for those brutal slayings of vagrants; and was one of the handful who knew that Eliot had been forced to make a deal with his influential political backers to allow the son of a bitch-who had a society pedigree-to avoid arrest, and instead be voluntarily committed to a madhouse.
“It bothers him, huh?” I said, and grunted a laugh. “Mr. Squeaky Clean, the ‘Untouchable’ Eliot Ness having to cut a deal like that.”
“I think so,” she admitted. “He never says. You know how quiet he can be.”
“Well, I think he should grow up. For Christ sake, for somebody from Chicago, somebody who’s seen every kind of crime and corruption, he can be as naive as a schoolgirl.”
“An alcoholic schoolgirl,” Ev said with a smirk, and a martini sip.
“…You want me to talk to him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe…. I think this case, these poor homeless men being victimized again, got memories stirred up.”
“Of the Butcher case, you mean.”
“Yes…and Nate, we’ve been getting postcards from that crazy man.”
“What crazy man? Capone?”
“No! The Butcher…threatening postcards postmarked the town where that asylum is.”
“Is there any chance Watterson can get out?”
Lloyd Watterson: the Butcher.
“Eliot says no,” Ev said. “He’s been assured of that.”
“Well, these killings aren’t the work of a madman. This is murder for profit, plain and simple. Good old-fashioned garden variety evil.”
“Help him clear this up, amp;8221; she said, and an edge of desperation was in her voice. “I think it would…might…make a difference.”
Then Eliot was back, and sat down with a fresh martini in hand.
“I hope I didn’t miss anything good,” he said.
My room was small but seemed larger due to the sparseness of the furnishings, metallic, institutional-gray clothes cabinet, a chair and a metal cot. A bare bulb bulged from the wall near the door, as if it had blossomed from the faded, fraying floral-print wallpaper. The wooden floor had a greasy, grimy look.
Katie was saying, “Hope it will do.”
“You still haven’t said what my duties are.”
“I’ll think of something. Now, if you need anything, I’m down the hall. Let me show you….”
I followed her to a doorway at the end of the narrow gloomy hallway. She unlocked the door with a key extracted from between her massive breasts, and ushered me into another world.
The livingroom of her apartment held a showroom-like suite of walnut furniture with carved arms, feet and base rails, the chairs and davenport sporting matching green mohair cushions, assembled on a green and blue wall-to-wall Axminster carpet. Pale yellow wallpaper with gold and pink highlights created a tapestry effect, while floral satin damask draperies dressed up the windows, venetian blinds keeping out prying eyes. Surprisingly tasteful, the room didn’t look very lived in.
“Posh digs,” I said, genuinely impressed.
“Came into some money recently. Spruced the joint up a little…. Now, if you need me after hours, be sure to knock good and loud.” She swayed over to a doorless doorway and nodded for me to come to her. “I’m a heavy sleeper.”
The bedroom was similarly decked out with new furnishings-a walnut-veener double bed, dresser and nightstand and three-mirror vanity with modern lines and zebrawood design panels-against ladylike pink-and-white floral wallpaper. The vanity top was neatly arranged with perfumes and face powder and the like, their combined scents lending the room a feminine bouquet. Framed prints of airbrushed flowers hung here and there, a large one over the bed, where sheets and blankets were neatly folded back below lush overstuffed feather pillows, as if by a maid.
“I had this room re-done, too,” she said. “My late husband, rest his soul, was a slob.”
Indeed it was hard to imagine a man sharing this room with her. There was a daintiness that didn’t match up with its inhabitant. The only sign that anybody lived here were the movie magazines on the bedstand in the glow of the only light, a creamy glazed pottery-base lamp whose gold parchment shade gave the room a glow.
The only person more out of place in this tidy, feminine suite than me, in my tattered secondhand store suit, was my blowsy hostess in her polka-dot peasant blouse and flowing dark skirt. She was excited and proud, showing off her fancy living quarters, bobbing up and down like an eager kid; it was cute and a little sickening.
Or maybe that was the cheap beer. I wasn’t drunk but I’d had three glasses of it.
“You okay, Bill?” she asked.
“Demon meatloaf,” I said.
“Sit, sit.”
And I was sitting on the edge of the bed. She stood before me, looming over me, frightening and oddly comely, with her massive bosom spilling from the blouse, her red-rouged mouth, her half-lidded long-lashed green eyes, mother/goddess/whore.
“It’s been lonely, Bill,” she said, “without my man.”
“Suh…sorry for your loss.”
“I could use a man around here, Bill.”
“Try to help.”
“It could be sweet for you.”
She tugged the peasant blouse down over the full, round, white-powdered melons that were her bosom, and pulled my head between them. Their suffocation was pleasant, even heady, and I was wondering whether I’d lost count of those beers when I fished in my trousers for my wallet for the lambskin.
I wasn’t that far gone.
I had never been with a woman as overweight as Kathleen O’Meara before, and I don’t believe I ever was again; many a man might dismiss her as fat. But the sheer womanliness of her was overwhelming; there was so much of her, and she smelled so good, particularly for a saloonkeeper, her skin so smooth, her breasts and behind as firm as they were large and round, that the three nights I spent in her bed remain bittersweet memories. I didn’t love her, obviously, nor did she me-we were using each other, in our various nasty ways.
But it’s odd, how many times, over the years, the memory of carnality in Katie’s bed pops unbidden into my mind. On more than one occasion, in bed with a slender young girlish thing, the image of womanly, obscenely voluptuous Katie would taunt me, as if saying, Now I was a real woman!
Katie was also a real monster. She waited until the second night, when I lay next to her in the recently purchased bed, in her luxuriant remodeled suite of rooms in a waterfront rooming house where her pitiful clientele slept on pancake-flat piss-scented mattresses, to invite me to be her accomplice.
“Someday I’ll move from here,” she said in the golden glow of the parchment lamp and the volcanic sex we’d just had. She was on her back, the sheet only half-covering the globes of her bosom; she was smoking, staring at the ceiling.
I was on my back, too-I wasn’t smoking, cigarettes being one filthy habit I didn’t partake of. “But, Katie-this place is hunky-dory.”
“These rooms are nice, love. But little Katie was meant for a better life than the Angles can provide.”
“You got a good business, here.”
She chuckled. “Better than you know.”
“What do you mean?”
She leaned on one elbow and the sheet fell away from the large, lovely bosoms. “Don’t you wonder why I’m so good to these stumblebums?”
“You give a lot of free beer away, I noticed.”
“Why do you suppose Katie does that?”
“’Cause you’re a good Christian woman?”
She roared with laughter, globes shimmering like Jello. “Don’t be a child! Have you heard of burial insurance, love?”
And she filled me in on the scheme-the lottery portion of it, at least, taking out policies on men who were good bets for quick rides to potter’s field. But she didn’t mention anything about helping speed the insured to even quicker, surer deaths.
“You disappointed in Katie?” she asked. “That I’m not such a good Christian woman?”
I grinned at her. “I’m tickled pink to find out how smart you are, baby. Was your old man in on this?”
“He was. But he wasn’t trustworthy.”
“Lucky for you he croaked.”
“Lucky.”
“Hey…I didn’t mean to be coldhearted, baby. I know you miss him.”
Her plump pretty face was as blank as a bisque baby’s. “He disappointed me.”
“How’d he die?”
“Got drunk and stepped in front of a car.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t pay for a dipso to run a bar, too much helpin’ himself…. I notice you don’t hit the sauce so hard. You don’t drink too much, and you hold what you do drink.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re just a good joe, down on his luck. Could use a break.”
“Who couldn’t?”
“And I can use a man. I can use a partner.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Just be friendly to these rummies. Get ’em on your good side, get ’em to sign up. Usually all it takes is a friendly ear and a pint of rotgut.”
“And when they finally drink themselves into a grave, we get a nice payday.”
“Yup. And enough nice paydays, we can leave the Angles behind. Retire rich while we’re still young and pretty.”
His name was Harold Wilson. He looked at least sixty but when we filled out the application, he managed to remember he was forty-three.
He and I sat in a booth at O’Meara’s and I plied him with cheap beers, which Katie’s hollow-eyed daughter dutifully delivered, while Harold told me, in bits and pieces, the sad story that had brought him to the Angles.
Hunkered over the beer, he seemed small, but he’d been of stature once, physically and otherwise. In a fahat was both withered and puffy, bloodshot powder-blue eyes peered from pouches, by turns rheumy and teary.
He had been a stock broker. When the Crash came, he chose to jump a freight rather than out a window, leaving behind a well-bred wife and two young daughters.
“I meant to go back,” Harold said, in a baritone voice whose dignity had been sandpapered away, leaving scratchiness and quaver behind. “For years, I did menial jobs…seasonal work, janitorial work, chopping firewood, shoveling walks, mowing grass…and I’d save. But the money never grew. I’d either get jackrolled or spend it on…”
He finished the sentence by grabbing the latest foamy mug of warm beer from Maggie O’Meara and guzzling it.
I listened to Harold’s sad story all afternoon and into the evening; he repeated himself a lot, and he signed three burial policies, one for $450, another for $750 and finally the jackpot, $1000. Death would probably be a merciful way out for the poor bastard, but even at this stage of his life, Harold Wilson deserved a better legacy than helping provide for Katie O’Meara’s retirement.
Late in the evening, he said, “Did go back, once…to Elmhurst…. Tha’s Chicago.”
“Yeah, I know, Harold.”
“Thomas Wolfe said, ‘Can’t go home again.’ Shouldn’t go home again’s more like it.”
“Did you talk to them?”
“No! No. It was Chrissmuss. Sad story, huh? Looked in the window. Didn’t expect to see ’em, my family; figured they’d lose the house.”
“But they didn’t? How’d they manage that?”
“Mary…that’s my wife…her family had some money. Must not’ve got hurt as bad as me in the Crash. Figure they musta bought the house for her.”
“I see.”
“Sure wasn’t her new husband. I recognized him; fella I went to high school with. A postman.”
“A mail carrier?”
“Yeah. ’Fore the Crash, Mary, she woulda looked down on a lowly civil servant like that…. But in Depression times, that’s a hell of a good job.”
“True enough.”
The eyes were distant and runny. “My girls was grown. College age. Blond and pretty, with boy friends, holdin’ hands…. The place hadn’t changed. Same furniture. Chrissmuss tree where we always put it, in the front window…. We’d move the couch out of the way and…anyway. Nothing different. Except in the middle of it, no me. A mailman took my place.”
For a moment I thought he said “male man.”
O’Meara’s closed at two a.m. I helped Maggie clean up, even though Katie hadn’t asked me to. Katie was upstairs, waiting for me in her bedroom. Frankly, I didn’t feel like doing my duty tonight, pleasant though it admittedly was. On the one hand, I was using Katie, banging this br I was undercover, and undercovers, to get the goods on, which made me a louse; and on the other hand, spending the day with her next victim, Harold Wilson, brought home what an enormous louse she was.
I was helping daughter Maggie put chairs on tables; she hadn’t said a word to me yet. She had her mother’s pretty green eyes and she might have been pretty herself if her scarecrow thin frame and narrow, hatchet face had a little meat on them.
The room was tidied when she said, “Nightcap?”
Surprised, I said, “Sure.”
“I got a pot of coffee on, if you’re sick of warm beer.”
The kitchen in back was small and neat and Maggie’s living quarters were back here, as well. She and her mother did not live together; in fact, they rarely spoke, other than Katie issuing commands.
I sat at a wooden table in the midst of the small cupboard-lined kitchen and sipped the coffee Maggie provided in a chipped cup. In her white waitress uniform, she looked like a wilted nurse.
“That suit you’re wearing,” she said.
Katie had given me clothes to wear; I was in a brown suit and a yellow-and-brown tie, nothing fancy but a step or two up from the threadbare duds “Bill O’Hara” had worn into O’Meara’s.
“What about ’em?”
“Those were my father’s.” Maggie sipped her coffee. “You’re about his size.”
I’d guessed as much. “I didn’t know. I don’t mean to be a scavenger, Miss O’Meara, but life can do that to you. The Angles ain’t high society.”
“You were talking to that man all afternoon.”
“Harold Wilson. Sure. Nice fella.”
“Ma’s signing up policies on him.”
“That’s right. You know about that, do you?”
“I know more than you know. If you knew what I knew, you wouldn’t be so eager to sleep with that cow.”
“Now, let’s not be disrespectful…”
“To you or the cow?…. Mr. O’Hara, you seem like a decent enough sort. Careful what you get yourself into. Remember how my papa died.”
“No one ever told me,” I lied.
“He got run down by a car. I think he got pushed.”
“Really? Who’d do a thing like that?”
The voice behind us said, “This is cozy.”
She was in the doorway, Katie, in a red Kimono with yellow flowers on it; you could’ve rigged out a sailboat with all that cloth.
“Mr. O’Hara helped me tidy up,” Maggie said coldly. No fear in her voice. “I offered him coffee.”
“Just don’t offer him anything else,” Katie snapped. The green eyes were har20;jade.
Maggie blushed, and rose, taking her empty cup and mine and depositing them awkwardly, clatteringly, in the sink.
In bed, Katie said, “Good job today with our investment, Bill.”
“Thanks.”
“Know what Harold Wilson’s worth, now?”
“No.”
“Ten thousand…. Poor sad soul. Terrible to see him suffering like that. Like it’s terrible for us to have to wait and wait, before we can leave all this behind.”
“What are you sayin’, love?”
“I’m sayin’, were somebody to put that poor man out of his misery, they’d be doin’ him a favor, is all I’m sayin’.”
“You’re probably right, at that. Poor bastard.”
“You know how cars’ll come up over the hill…25th Street, headin’ for the bridge? Movin’ quick through this here bad part of a town?”
“Yeah, what about ’em?”
“If someone were to shove some poor soul out in front of a car, just as it was coming up and over, there’d be no time for stoppin’.”
I pretended to digest that, then said, “That’d be murder, Katie.”
“Would it?”
“Still…You might be doin’ the poor bastard a favor, at that.”
“And make ourselves $10,000 richer.”
“…. You ever do this before, Katie?”
She pressed a hand to her generous bare bosom. “No! No. But I never had a man I could trust before.”
Late the next morning, I met with Eliot in a back booth at Mickey’s, a dimly lit hole-in-the-wall saloon a stone’s throw from City Hall. He was having a late breakfast-a bloody Mary-and I had coffee.
“How’d you get away from Kathleen O’Meara?” he wondered. He looked businesslike in his usual three-piece suit; I was wearing a blue number from the Frank O’Meara Collection.
“She sleeps till noon. I told her daughter I was taking a walk.”
“Long walk.”
“The taxi’ll be on my expense account. Eliot, I don’t know how much more of this I can stand. She sent the forms in and paid the premiums on Harold Wilson, and she’s talking murder all right, but if you want to catch her in the act, she’s plannin’ to wait at least a month before we give Harold a friendly push.”
“That’s a long time for you to stay undercover,” Eliot admitted, stirring his bloody Mary with its celery stalk. “But it’s in my budget.”
I sighed. “I never knew being a city employee could be so exhausting.”
“I take it you and Katie are friendly.”
“She’s a ride, all right. I’ve never been so disgusted with myself in my life.”
“It’s that distasteful?”
“Hell, no, I’m having a whale of time, so to speak. It’s just shredding what little’s left of my self-respect, and shabby little code of ethics, is all. Banging a big fat murdering bitch and liking it.” I shuddered.
“This woman is an ogre, no question…and I’m not talking about her looks. Nate, if we can stop her, and expose what’s she done, it’ll pave the way for prosecuting the other women in the Natural Death, Inc., racket…or at the very least scaring them out of it.”
That evening Katie and I were walking up the hill. No streetlights in this part of town, and no moon to light the way; lights in the frame and brick houses we passed, and the headlights of cars heading toward the bridge, threw yellow light on the cracked sidewalk we trundled up, arm in arm, Katie and me. She wore a yellow peasant blouse, always pleased to show off her treasure chest, and a full green skirt.
“Any second thoughts, handsome?”
“Just one.”
She stopped; we were near the rise of the hill and the lights of cars came up and over and fell like prison searchlights seeking us out. “Which is?”
“I’m willing to do a dirty deed for a tidy dollar, don’t get me wrong, love. It’s just…didn’t your husband die this same way?”
“He did.”
“Heavily insured and pushed in front of his oncoming destiny?”
There was no shame, no denial; if anything, her expression-chin high, eyes cool and hard-spoke pride. “He did. And I pushed him.”
“Did you, now? That gives a new accomplice pause.”
“I guess it would. But I told you he cheated me. He salted money away. And he was seeing other women. I won’t put up with disloyalty in a man.”
“Obviously not.”
“I’m the most loyal steadfast woman in the world…’less you cross me. Frank O’Meara’s loss is your gain…if you have the stomach for the work that needs doing.”
A truck came rumbling up over the rise, gears shifting into low gear, and for a detective, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t know we’d been shadowed; but we had. We’d been followed, or anticipated; to this day I’m not sure whether she came from the bushes or behind us, whether fate had helped her or careful planning and knowledge of her mother’s ways. Whatever the case, Maggie O’Meara came flying out of somewhere, hurling her skinny stick-like arms forward, shoving the much bigger woman into the path of the truck.
Katie had time to scream, and to look back at the wild-eyed smiling face of her daughter washed in the yellow headlights. The big rig’s big tires rolled over her, her girth presenting no problem, bones popping like twigs, blood streaming like water.
The trucker was no hit-and-skip guy. He came to a squealing stop and hopped out and trotted back and looked at the squashed shapeless shape, yellow and green clothing stained crimson, limbs, legs, turned to pulp, head cracked like a melon, oozing.
I had a twinge of sorrow for Katie O’Meara, that beautiful horror, that horrible beauty; but it passed.
“She just jumped right out in front of me!” the trucker blurted. He was a small, wiry man with a mustache, and his eyes were wild.
I glanced at Maggie; she looked blankly back at me.
“I know,” I said. “We saw it, her daughter and I…poor woman’s been despondent.”
I told the uniform cops the same story about Katie, depressed over the loss of her dear husband, leaping in front of the truck. Before long, Eliot arrived himself, topcoat flapping in the breeze as he stepped from the sedan that bore his special EN-1 license plate.
“I’m afraid I added a statistic to your fatalities,” I admitted.
“What’s the real story?” he asked me, getting me to one side. “None of this suicide nonsense.”
I told Eliot that Katie had been demonstrating to me how she wanted me to push Harold Wilson, lost her footing and stumbled to an ironic death. He didn’t believe me, of course, and I think he figured that I’d pushed her myself.
He didn’t mind, because I produced such a great witness for him. Maggie O’Meara had the goods on the Natural Death racket, knew the names of every woman in her mother’s ring, and in May was the star of eighty witnesses in the Grand Jury inquiry. Harold Wilson and many other of the “unwitting pawns in the death-gambling insurance racket” (as reporter Clayton Fritchey put it) were among those witnesses. So were Dr. Alice Jeffers, investigator Gaspar Corso and me.
That night, the night of Katie O’Meara’s “suicide,” after the police were through with us, Maggie had wept at her kitchen table while I fixed coffee for her, though her tears were not for her mother or out of guilt, but for her murdered father. Maggie never seemed to put together that her dad had been an accomplice in the insurance scheme, or anyway never allowed herself to admit it.
Finally, she asked, “Are you…are you really going to cover for me?”
That was when I told her she was going to testify.
She came out of it, fine; she inherited a lot of money from her late mother-the various insurance companies did not contest previous pay-outs-and I understand she sold O’Meara’s and moved on, with a considerable nest egg. I have no idea what became of her, after that.
Busting the Natural Death, Inc., racket was Eliot’s last major triumph in Cleveland law enforcement. The following March, after a night of dining, dancing and drinking at the Vogue Room, Eliot and Ev Ness were in an automobile accident, Eliot sliding into another driver’s car. With Ev minorly hurt, Eliot-after checking the other driver and finding him dazed but all right-rushed her to a hospital and became a hit-f eun driver. He made some efforts to cover up and, even when he finally fessed up in a press conference, claimed he’d not been intoxicated behind that wheel; his political enemies crucified him, and a month later Eliot resigned as Public Safety Director.
During the war, Eliot headed up the government’s efforts to control venereal disease on military bases; but he never held a law enforcement position again. He and Ev divorced in 1945. He married a third time, in 1946, and ran, unsuccessfully for mayor of Cleveland in ’47, spending the rest of his life trying, without luck, to make it in the world of business, often playing on his reputation as a famed gangbuster.
In May, 1957, Eliot Ness collapsed in his kitchen shortly after he had arrived home from the liquor store, where he had bought a bottle of Scotch.
He died with less than a thousand dollars to his name-I kicked in several hundred bucks on the funeral, wishing his wife had taken out some damn burial insurance on him.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed within this story, which is based on an actual case in the career of Eliot Ness.