“Their goddamn hands are shaking! Look—” He bent over and tipped his head to one side, folded his ear back; a little red showed. “I’m fuckin’ bleeding! They ain’t barbers, they’re butchers! In my day, a barber had hands like
“Maybe they’re intimidated, Frank.”
That seemed to confound him. “What the hell for?”
“Well,” I said. “They’re cutting Frank Nitti’s hair. There’s a certain amount of pressure in that, don’t you think?”
He thought about that, nodded. “I never thought of it. But you’re right, Heller. It could make a barber nervous, knowin’ he’s cuttin’ another barber’s hair. You may be right. Now.” He slapped his knees. “What’s this about?”
“I’m here for a favor—if you’re willing to grant one.”
He shrugged expansively. “You know I owe you, kid. From way back.”
“Well, I don’t figure you owe me. But if you’d do this for me, I could maybe owe you.”
“You don’t sound nuts about owing me, kid.”
I admitted I wasn’t. “I would like to ask that if you ever call my marker in,” I said, “you’ll restrict it to more or less legal services. Maybe sometime you could use some investigating and wouldn’t want to use your own people—something on the q.t. I could be your man. No fee, no questions asked.”
He nodded, smiling rather absently, almost to himself. “Maybe I ought to quit thinking of you as a kid, Heller. You seem to’ve grown up on me, when I wasn’t lookin’.”
I smiled at him. “You’re always looking, Frank.”
He laughed, the haircut forgotten. “You got that right. Look, I am grateful to you for that last little job you did for me.”
I didn’t know what he meant; I didn’t say so, but he could see it in my face.
“You know,” he said, gesturing with one open hand. “When I gave you that C to mind your own business.”
He meant Dillinger; I was wearing the suit I’d used part of the money on.
“That’s okay, Frank.”
“You coulda gone to the papers, coulda found some news-hound who’d paid you good dough for your story. I ain’t sure anybody woulda believed you, but it’s nice that story never got told. Coulda made a ripple or two in the lake. And ripples can turn into waves, if you ain’t careful.”
“Lake’s real calm these days, Frank.”
“I know. Let’s keep it that way. Now. What favor you need?”
“Remember a guy named Candy Walker?”
Nitti nodded, and I told him my story. Told him Walker’s current moll was a client’s daughter and that client wanted me to try to retrieve her before she got caught in a crossfire somewhere.
I said, “Walker’s running with the Barkers, I understand.”
Nitti confirmed that. “That little penny-ante outfit’s come a long way. They’re in real tight with some of our friends in St. Paul.”
By “our,” he meant the Outfit’s friends, not his and mine. And those friends were the Twin Cities branch of the Syndicate and various corrupt politicians on the municipal and even the state level.
“I, uh, figured you might’ve had some dealings with the Barkers.”
He eyed me shrewdly. “How’d you figure that?”
“Can I speak frankly?”
He nodded.
“Well, when Shotgun Ziegler bought it in Cicero, I figured the Boys either did it or approved it.”
Ziegler, a Capone gunman said to be one of the bogus “cops” who gunned down Bugs Moran’s boys in a North Side garage on Saint Valentine’s Day back in ’29, had been cut in half, his head blasted into fragments, by four shotguns outside his favorite Cicero café this past March. Like Baby Face Nelson and Candy Walker, Ziegler had been a Capone soldier who defected in post-Repeal days to the army of outlaws, specifically the Barker-Karpis gang. Word was he had engineered the Hamm kidnapping for the Barkers—one of several crimes Melvin Purvis tried to pin on the Touhy mob, incidentally—but in the kidnapping’s aftermath the Barkers had soured on Ziegler.
Nitti smiled humorlessly and leaned forward, his legs apart, his hands loosely clasped together, dangling between his knees. “Let me tell you about Mr. Ziegler. A lesson can be learned, there. He drank too much. You ever see me drink too much, Heller?”
“I can’t recall seeing you drink at all, Frank.”
“Right! I’m a businessman, Heller, mine is a business like any other. And businessmen don’t get in their fuckin’ cups and tell tales out of school.”
“Ziegler told tales out of school.”
Nitti nodded, still smiling, still without humor. “He was hangin’ out at saloons and braggin’ about his accomplishments. Startin’ with a certain accomplishment that dates back to February of ’29, if you get my drift. Right up to a couple of more recent accomplishments—namely, snatches. And I don’t mean he was braggin’ about gettin’ laid.”
He meant the Hamm and Bremer kidnappings, said to be the work of the Barber-Karpis gang (said by everybody but Melvin Purvis and his “G-men,” that is).
