After we’d downed far too many little finger sandwiches and tea cakes, we said our thanks to Mrs. Bissel. Dennis and Mr. O’Hara walked downstairs with Sam and me. Keiji followed, leaving Ginger to clear up after everyone.
“I hope this has been of help to you, Detective Rotondo,” said Dennis.
“So do I,” said O’Hara. “If my brother finds out I’ve squealed, he’ll probably murder me.”
Startled, I said, “How can he find out?”
With a shrug, O’Hara said, “I dunno. Probably can’t. The lad’s a pretty dim bulb.”
“If he’s hanging out with Lucky Luciano,” muttered Sam, “he’s not merely dim. He’s crazy and in danger.”
“Lucky Luciano?” I said faintly. “Isn’t he that terrible gangster in New York we keep reading about in the newspapers?”
“One of them,” Sam said through clamped teeth. “A big one. Smart, too. And deadly.”
“Y’think Cullen’s in danger?” asked O’Hara.
Squinting at him—he had to look down to do so, O’Hara being on the short side—Sam said, “Don’t you?”
With a sigh, O’Hara said, “Aye, I do. That’s why I come here today, hopin’ to get the kid out of a mess before it gets too big for him.”
“We’ll see what can be done,” Sam told him noncommittally.
Then and there, I decided Cullen O’Hara was most likely a lost cause, especially since he seemed to have become involved with a vicious gang.
Keiji walked to the coat tree in the sun room, ready to assist anyone on with a coat or hat.
Dennis and Mrs. O’Hara left, but I put a hand on Sam’s arm to prevent him exiting the house.
“May I use Mrs. Bissel’s telephone for a minute, Keiji?” I asked.
Sam said, “What now?”
“I still have to telephone Regina about the dratted exercise class. If Miss Betsy Powell is the Betty whom Cullen O’Hara knows, I might find out tomorrow. Regina said she wanted to go to the class if she’s free at the time, so I have to call her and tell her what time it is.”
“I don’t want you getting anywhere near the people involved in this case, Daisy,” said Sam. “If the man Costello—either one or both of them—is in business with is Lucky Luciano, he’s dangerous as all hell.”
“But if he has Vi, we have to get her back, whether he’s dangerous or not,” I said.
“You don’t have to do a thing, except stay out of our way.”
“Nertz. Anyhow, you already said you were going to the class with me. What can happen if you’re there?”
As Sam commenced rolling his eyes, Keiji, grinning, led me to the telephone in the kitchen. “Feel free,” Keiji said.
“Thanks, Keiji.”
So I telephoned the Pasadena Public Library, even though I knew Regina frowned on receiving telephone calls at work. However, as I didn’t know her work schedule, I figured I’d either get to talk to her or whoever answered the ’phone would tell me she wasn’t there, in which case, I’d call her apartment, where she lived with her mother.
Hmmm. Would her mother live with Regina and Robert after they were married? I’d have hated having to live with Sam’s parents after our wedding, since they disapproved of me, but—
My thoughts were interrupted by Regina Petrie! Oh, good.
“Pasadena Public Library. May I help you?” said she in her sweet voice. Softly, of course.
“Regina!” I whispered. Then I remembered she was the one in the library, not I.
“Daisy?” she whispered—which was fine, because she had to keep her voice down.
“Yes. I’m sorry to call you at work, but I didn’t think I’d have another chance. The exercise class will be held in our church’s fellowship hall tomorrow at one p.m., and I hope you can make it. I need a friend there,” I added unnecessarily, as apparently, I was the only one not overjoyed about the exercise class.
“Oh!” she whispered, sounding pleased. See? Told you. “Thank you, Daisy! Yes. I get off work at noon tomorrow, so one o’clock at your church will be wonderful. Um…how do I get to the fellowship hall? That’s a large church, and Robert, Mother and I attend First Presbyterian, so I’m not familiar with it.”
Therefore, I gave Regina a short geography lesson, she thanked me effusively for calling—even at work!—and we hung up. Shaking my head in bewilderment—why couldn’t ladies who wanted to exercise just walk around the block a few blocks times or something?—I turned and jumped to find Sam standing directly behind me.
“Darn it! Don’t do that!”
“Do what?” he asked, sounding innocent. I didn’t believe him.
“Sneak up on me.”
“I didn’t sneak up on you. I’m too big to sneak. But I want to get back to work and start looking into these names, and I need to drop you off first. Do you have to telephone anyone else? I need to check the files on a few people, so if you do need to call people, can you do it from home? If Luciano is on the West Coast, we need to know about it.”
“I supposed I could have waited to call Regina until I got home, huh?” I said, feeling silly.
“I’d never have said so.”
I said, “That Lucky fellow is a really bad man, is he?”
As we walked back to the sun porch, Sam said, “Probably the worst, actually. He’s been involved in the rackets in New York City since he came over here from Sicily as a kid.”
“He was involved in the rackets when he was a child?” I tried to imagine Pudge Wilson breaking the law, but my imagination, which is occasionally too vivid, failed me.
“He’s got a record dating back to when he was nine or ten. And he’s smart. After his gang got into a war with another Italian family, he teamed up with Meyer Lansky, the leader of a Jewish gang, and wiped out many of his fellow Eye-tyes, as Mr. O’Hara likes to call us Italians.”
“Why do so many Italians join those awful gangs and some don’t? Like you, for instance?”
After heaving a huge sigh, Sam said, “My family came from a different part of Italy, and we came over here a couple of decades before the big Sicilian influx. The entire family isn’t free from gang connections, however, to judge by my mindless nephew.”
“I guess so. I still don’t think I understand Italy and the different parts of it. I thought it was Greece that had all the city-states.”
“It did. So’d Italy. Italy became a united country, more or less, in 1861. Rome continued to be ruled by the Papacy until 1870 or thereabouts. That’s about when my great-grandparents emigrated. There are still factions all over the place. It’s like the Italian people don’t want to be a united country. That’s probably because large numbers of them still consider themselves citizens of the different cities. They fight each other over there and bring their problems over here when they move to the USA, although Giovanni Giolitti was elected prime minister five times. I think it was five times. Several times, anyway. But people kept killing each other. Assassination is a sporting event in Italy.”
“Sam!” I said, sure he was joking about something that didn’t seem funny to me.
“It’s true. The truth isn’t my fault. Anyhow, my great-grandparents got tired of it all and moved to the United States. They were luckier than more recent immigrants from Italy, in that they had a good trade and some money. Most of the new immigrants are dirt poor. These days in Italy, a bully-boy named Benito Mussolini is head of the National Fascist Party, and it looks as if he’s beginning to take everything over by force.”
“Sounds uncomfortable.”
“I wouldn’t know from experience, but I read about it in the newspapers. My family is filled with respectable craftsmen and artisans, so we don’t care for people of Mussolini’s stripe.” He grinned, and I was glad.
“You mean I’m marrying royalty?”
We’d made it to his Hudson by this time, and he opened the door for me. “Not royalty, but we aren’t the scum of the earth, either. My family has been in the jewelry trade for generations. I expect Luciano’s family were starving farmers in Sicily for generations. We’re from Florence.”
“Well, la-di-dah,” I said, laughing.
“You betcha.” Sam shut my door and walked to the driver’s side. Because no other automobiles were parked in the circular drive, he drove us around the big monkey puzzle tree and past Mrs. Bissel’s beautiful rose garden. I really loved her home. It wasn’t palatial, but it was…well, homey. On a large scale. If you know what I mean.
“So you don’t like that new guy…what’s his name? Mussoliti?”
“Mussolini. No. Not particularly. I think he’s power-hungry and will establish himself as a dictator if somebody doesn’t stop him.”
“Goodness.”
“I doubt goodness has ever had much to do with politics. Even here in the good old U S of A.”
I sighed. “I’m afraid you’re right. I know I was glad when Mr. Harding was elected president. And then he died, and everyone was heartbroken. Only after he died did all his despicable acts and shady dealings come to light. And now we have Coolidge, who seems like a cold fish.”
“With any luck, he’s not as corrupt as Harding was.”
“I wouldn’t bet on anything any longer,” I said, surprised by my own cynicism. “Who was the person who said power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely?”
“Can’t remember. Some English fellow, I think.”
“I think he was right.”
“I suspect he was.”
Something else occurred to me. “How’d he get the nickname Lucky?”
“Who?” Sam turned his head to peer at me for a second. He didn’t take his attention from the road for more than a split-second. Honest.
“The Italian fellow you’re worried is in California.” I shook my head, annoyed that I couldn’t remember a name for five minutes. “Luciano! That’s his name. Why do they call him Lucky?”
“Because he’s lucky.”
“Sam,” I said, my voice stern.
He grinned. “He got kidnapped and beaten nearly to death by a rival mob family. He’d probably have died if a copper hadn’t found him and taken him to a hospital.”
“Oh,” I said. “What a shame.”
“What’s a shame?”
“That the policeman who found him took him to the hospital. If he’s as bad as you think he is, we don’t need him here in California selling drugs to motion-picture people and organizing bootlegging gangs. I wonder if he’s the one supplying all the movie stars with drugs. I’ve read scandalous things about some of them. I even read Wallace Reid died because he was addicted to morphine.” As soon as the words left my lips, a lump lodged in my throat.
Sam understood. He patted my knee. “Billy didn’t take morphine for fun, Daisy. He took morphine because he was in mortal pain after he served his country fighting for the freedom of Europe.”
After swallowing the blasted lump, I said bitterly, “Is that why he fought? I’ve read everything I can find about that wretched war, and for the life of me, I don’t know why we got involved.”
Sam heaved a sigh of his own. “Wilson wanted to help the British, I guess. Even though the British were blockading ports into Germany, and the German people—not the soldiers, but the ordinary citizens—were starving to death in droves.”
“I’ve never been fond of Germans,” I said unnecessarily. Sam knew my prejudice of old.
“They were painted as war-mongering devils by the people who wanted to profit from the war,” said Sam mildly.
“It’s difficult to believe some people actually profit from war. Most of us don’t.”
“Most of us don’t manufacture munitions or grow grain to send overseas and so forth.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I said, knowing he was right. “I hate that war.”
“So do I. I think the British blockade and a prevailing sense of unfairness in Germany is why that loudmouth fellow, Hitler, is becoming so popular there. He thinks Germany should have won the war, and I have a feeling he wants to re-fight it and make sure it wins the next time.”
“Oh, Lord, Sam, do you really think so?”
Shaking his head, Sam said, “I don’t know, Daisy, but I’ll tell you this much. If I were in charge of the USA, it would take more than a lot of propaganda to make me send more of our boys overseas to fight a war in Europe.”
“Me, too.” After thinking about Sam’s words for a minute, I said, “Were all those horror stories about German soldiers chopping off Belgian boys’ hands really only propaganda? And about German soldiers burning down Belgian cities and assaulting Belgian women and so forth? Were all of those stories just make-believe to get Americans into a war-like mood? Why would people make up horrible lies like that, if they were lies?”
“I don’t know the answers to either of those questions. War makes beasts out of most people, I guess. But I have a feeling German soldiers were no more cruel than other soldiers from other countries who joined in the conflict. Hell, the Russians killed the tsar and his family in 1917, and then merrily sent more of its men to their deaths in the war. And then those Russians got swept up by other Russians when second batch of Russian soldiers deserted in droves. I have a feeling we’re going to be worrying about the Bolshies and their Soviet Union one of these days.”
“Here I’ve always thought the war started because Kaiser Bill wanted to take over the world.”
“I expect that’s what people in charge of things wanted us to think.”
“How demoralizing.”
With a shrug, Sam said, “Guess that’s one reason folks call those of us who lived through the war years the ‘lost generation,’ because some of us find it so hard to believe in anything.”
“I believe in things!” I countered.
With another smile—Sam’s genuine smiles came infrequently and were, therefore, apt to take my breath away—he said, “I’m glad. I try to believe in some things.”
“What things?” I demanded.
To my surprise, Sam said, “Love. Honor. Bravery. Goodness. Medical science. Humor. Lou Prophet.” He chuckled when he said the last two words. Then he ended on a sour note, “I also believe some people are evil, and even more of them are stupid as stumps.”
“It’s probably the evil and stupid people who will lead us into another war, if there is one,” I said unhappily.
“Probably.” Sam sounded surer of himself than I had.
“I don’t want any more wars, Sam! I can’t stand the thought of a child of mine going into a war in some foreign country and dying there. Aunt Vi’s son, Paul, is buried over there somewhere, and she doesn’t even know where, although she’s trying to find out. She didn’t even get to see her only child buried.”
Snatching a handkerchief from his coat pocket, Sam said, “Dry your eyes, Daisy. With any luck and a smattering of good sense, you won’t see a child of yours—”
“Ours,” I said, interrupting him.
He gave me another quick peek, and another unexpected smile. “Sounds good to me. All right. We won’t see a child of ours fighting in any foreign war. With any luck.”
“I hope we get lucky.”
“So do I.” Sam sounded doubtful.
I feared he had good reason to doubt. The human animal hadn’t often shown itself to be less than brutal, violent and greedy for as far back as I’ve dipped into our history.
How disheartening.