Candy screeched too. “Where the fuck are you taking me, creep? I know my rights, you son of a bitch. You look like Dracula, you know that?”
Dalton reached for a light switch, the old-fashioned kind that you have to turn instead of flip. Lights came on, throwing shadows on the dusty stone stairs. The walls were old gray stone blocks weeping with moisture; there were spiderwebs where the walls were dry. The musty dank smell of seventy-five years rose up to greet them.
“Walk on down,” said Dalton. “Walk or be dragged. It makes no difference to me.”
“What the fuck do you want with me?”
“Suddenly you’re in a hurry. Walk down ahead of me.”
At the bottom, a flagged floor ran between two rows of ancient cells. Only one had light in it, the one with the heavy wooden chair bolted to the floor. It looked like an old electric chair without wires. Dalton strapped Candy into it so she couldn’t move. The wide leather strap was old, but he guessed it would hold her. In its time it had restrained tougher and stronger people than the whore. When she got tired of struggling she stopped.
There was a battered desk with a telephone and a gooseneck lamp; Dalton put the whore’s red plastic purse on it. After walking around Candy, Dalton sat on the edge of the desk. Candy’s nose was running because she couldn’t use her hands to wipe it.
Dalton said, “Who killed the three Ghouls—Shimmy, Smiley and Paco?”
“Never heard of them. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, I’m just a hooker. I don’t know anything about any killing. I swear.”
Dalton shrugged. “You’ll change your mind after a while.” Then, picking up the purse, he dumped its contents on the desk. It was a big purse and it held a lot: lipstick, eye shadow, a make-up brush, a small mirror, a plastic container of birth control pills, a pack of cigarettes, about $2.00 in coins, a pack of Kleenex, a small knife, a box of condoms.
Dalton poked around until he separated a spoon, a hypodermic needle and a short length of rubber tubing. A folded piece of tinfoil had a faint dust of white powder when he opened it. He tasted the powder though there was no need to—heroin.
She tried to pull away when he came close to her, as if she expected to be hit. Dalton ripped open the sleeve of her blouse—and there were the needle tracks of the heavy user.
“See you later,” he said, turning away.
Now there was panic in her voice. “Hey, where are you going?”
“Out. I want to give you time to think. It’s nice and quiet down here, so you’ll have plenty of time to think about what I asked you. The only problem is—your problem—is I’ll be gone all night. Take it easy and I’ll see you in the morning. How many hours is that? Too many for you—I’m a late sleeper. If you get to feeling bad, scream all you like. Nobody’s going to hear you down here.”
“I tell you I don’t know.”
“Have a good night.”
“Wait,” Candy said. Sweat beaded her face and she was starting to shake and she had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering. “What happens if I tell you what you want to know?”
“You get a fix that’ll carry you till you score.”
“You mean you got shit right here?”
“We always keep a little shit for emergencies like this. You’re not booked yet and don’t have to be. Now talk.”
“Give me a fix first and I’ll remember better.”
“First you talk, then you walk.”
Candy sucked in her breath. “I don’t know the guy that did it. A tall white guy, maybe Irish. Sort of brown hair. A nice looking guy. We were having a party and he came busting in with some kind of a weird looking gun. His face was half-covered by a cap and big shades.”
Dalton took out a notebook and began to write in it.
CHAPTER 7
Eastland got to the Jeffersons’ apartment building just as Mary was coming out. Instead of the fast food uniform, she was wearing a plain blue dress. She had a distracted air; Eastland could see that she had been crying. The children weren’t with her.
At first she didn’t seem to recognize him when he got out of the taxi. He had to call her name twice before she responded.
“Oh, it’s you, Johnny,” she said.
“You’re not going to work today?”
Mary Jefferson made a sobbing sound, but no tears came. She leaned against him and he stroked her hair.
“I didn’t sleep all night thinking of Michael and what he’s going through. I feel like I’ll never be able to sleep again. Johnny, I couldn’t face that place, not today. The crowds and the noise—I couldn’t face it. I’d go if I thought I could work.”
“Forget about that,” Eastland said. “I want you to level with me for Michael’s sake. I know there’s no money. What about insurance? Don’t go tensing up on me. I’m a friend of the family, right. So tell me how bad off you are.”
“Bad as can be,” Mary said. “Michael enrolled us in some hospital plan. It won’t be nearly enough. I just called. Johnny, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Eastland had taken everything, about fifteen hundred, out of the savings account. Seven hundred of that had gone to the German landlord. He held back a hundred and gave her the rest.
“Take it,” he said. “I owe Michael a lot more than money. Now get on over to the hospital and don’t even think about money. I’m going to get some for you.”
Mary’s eyes were worried. “How Johnny?”
Eastland forced himself to smile. “I’m not going to rob a bank if that’s what you’re thinking.” A taxi turned into the street and he flagged it down. “Tell Michael I’ll be over to see him soon as I can.”
“You’re not coming now?”
Eastland opened the cab door for her. “Not right now. If I don’t catch you at the hospital, will you be home the usual time with the kids?”
Mary nodded. “My sister is looking after them for a few days. That was what we planned, but they don’t want to stay. So I’ll be home about four.”
Eastland shut the cab door. “I’ll call you,” he said as the cab drove away.
Well, there it was. Between them they had something less than eight hundred dollars. With the intensive care Michael was getting, they probably owed that much already. One thing he was sure of—Michael wasn’t going to lie in any charity ward because they didn’t have the money to pay his hospital bills. For what it was worth, Michael was going to have the best care available. If he had to rob a bank then he’d do it, but he had a better idea—Gino Pontivini.
He hadn’t even thought about the Mr. Big of the meat markets, the elderly Mafioso to whom half the businesses in the South Bronx paid tribute. King of the Markets, the tabloids called him, but screwing money out of the market operators was just part of his far-flung operation. A few years before he had been called before a Senate subcommittee and they hadn’t been able to lay a glove on him. They grilled him about loan sharking, truck hijacking, coke smuggling, dealing in stolen bonds, and other matters dear to his heart. Always his response was the same: he pleaded the Fifth Amendment, and no matter how insulting the senators became, he never lost his cool. He remained polite, at times even courtly; there were times when he appeared to be amused.
Shielded by congressional immunity, Senator MacIvers of South Carolina all but called him a dirty murdering wop and said he was going to do his damndest to get him deported.
“Well Senator,” Gino Pontivini said. “That’s gonna be kinda hard to do—I was born in the Bronx.”
That got a laugh from the spectators and from millions of TV watchers. Senator MacIvers, eighty and nearly senile, had gotten his mobsters mixed up. He blamed the mix-up on his staff and fired everyone but his grandson. Then he went after Gino Pontivini, using all the considerable resources of the Justice Department.
For nearly a year, Gino Pontivini had his phones tapped legally and illegally. His mail was opened, his house and car were bugged. All guests arriving at or leaving his house were photograph
ed by government agents. They followed him to Vegas and Palm Springs. The IRS checked his tax returns back to the year one. Affable in public, vicious in private, Gino Pontivini went his way as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
The long investigation came to nothing in the end. The few people who could have helped to nail him disappeared without a trace. Then Senator MacIvers died and the Justice Department went back to business as usual.
Eastland knew that the old don lived in a mansion in Riverdale. Technically a part of the Bronx, Riverdale looked more like affluent Westchester County, just across the county line. It was as far removed from the filth and slums of the Bronx as Harvard was from a barber college. Pontivini’s mansion was a showplace; it had been shown on TV during the crime committee hearings. Copied from a French chateau, it had been built by a political boss back in the days when Tammany was Tammany and crooks were so powerful they didn’t have to give a damn about public opinion. The house and the two acres of land it stood on were worth more than three million dollars.
Eastland knew there would be a safe and an alarm system. All big time mobsters kept a lot of money on hand, in case they had to take off in a hurry. Like all dictators, however powerful, Gino Pontivini liked to take precautions. And, Eastland thought, there would be other money in other places. To get it, he had to get to Pontivini.
There would be bodyguards—naturally—so coming at the old hoodlum with a gun wasn’t the way to do it; in a shoot-out Pontivini might get killed or seriously wounded, and then he would have to find someone else. There were other mobsters, but Pontivini was the biggest in the Bronx. It would take some careful planning and he hadn’t worked out anything yet. A few ideas were rattling around in his head; so far nothing had come together.
At home the refrigerator was empty except for a solitary can of beer with the tab snapped off, so he stopped off at a supermarket. There was a line of people with food stamps ahead of him. It was past noon when he got home. He had showered and was dozing off when the doorbell rang. The cops?
He counted off thirty seconds before the doorbell rang again. He counted another thirty, standing by the intercom. When he answered he made his voice sound sleepy, irritable.
“Who is it?”
“The police.”
“Is it about Michael Jefferson?”
“That’s right. Now buzz me through.”
Eastland put on the top of his pajamas and waited for the cop to come up. The apartment buzzer sounded and he pushed back the peephole and saw a guy in his thirties with a hard, intelligent face. The cop heard the rattle of the peephole and held his gold shield close to it. Eastland knew about cop ranks. This guy was a first grade detective; a guy had to be good to make that.
Dalton came in and gave his name. Eastland didn’t tell him to sit down, didn’t offer to shake hands, didn’t say there was coffee still hot on the stove. Dalton sat on the sagging couch and Eastland took a chair facing him This guy was no pushover, Eastland decided.
“You catch the guys that did it?” Eastland said.
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“You haven’t seen the morning papers?”
“Not yet. I work nights and read the papers when I get up. What am I supposed to see in the papers?”
Dalton had the early Post and he put it on the coffee table between them, turning the paper around so Eastland could see the banner headline: HOMICIDAL SADIST ON THE LOOSE.
Dalton watched while Eastland skimmed through the story that followed. Well, he isn’t as tall as the whore said the killer was. But then the whore was Puerto Rican and short; a man of even average height would look tall to her. She had said he looked sort of Irish, but Eastland wasn’t an “Irish” name. That didn’t have to mean anything: a lot of “Irish” names were English. Like Harrington, Harris, Cunningham, Yates. Maybe he had an Irish mother. That was all bullshit. He would call St. Louis for the guy’s military service record as soon as he got back to the stationhouse.
Eastland finished reading the threw the paper on the table. “What kind of crap is this? Cannibal rats, for God’s sake!”
“At least the part about the Ghetto Ghouls is true,” Dalton said. There was nothing about this guy that suggested the psycho. His eyes were drawn to a homemade bookcase crammed with books and magazines. The apartment wasn’t well looked after, but it wasn’t dirty. It didn’t look all that different from his own apartment, except that he lived in Manhattan and paid more rent. By now he know that Eastland had served in Nam with Jefferson. The guy had been in Nam, but there were no souvenirs lying around; no battle flags, no photographs—nothing.
“The paper says two punks are still alive,” Eastland said.
Dalton said, “One died a few hours ago. The third one was insane when they brought him in. Now they’re not so sure. They were going to check him for rabies last time I called in.”
“You think the Ghouls did it?”
“I thought you could help me to answer that.”
“I don’t want to get mixed up in this.”
Dalton pretended to lose his temper. “You are mixed up in it. Why didn’t you come to the police and say Jefferson and you had a rumble with three punks? Ghetto Ghouls, Eastland. In case you don’t remember, it was painted all over their jackets. On their car, too.”
“Who told you that?”
“A guy at the market told me. The other dummies acted like the dummies they are. But one guy that owes me talked. Now suppose you tell me what happened. Jefferson is supposed to be your friend—remember?”
“Okay, there was a fight. I caught three guys—Ghouls—stealing beer. Michael said he’d spring for the coffee if I pushed his load down to Stall 34. That’s where the fight was. Michael was right behind me when I saw the three guys lifting the beer. They dared us to take the beer back and we did. It didn’t last long. Michael knows karate and French foot fighting—savate—and knocked them around pretty bad.”
“How about you?”
“How about what?”
“Do you know karate?”
“Not as good as Michael.”
Well, he’s kind of hostile, Dalton thought. But then he lives in the South Bronx, so he has no special reason to like cops. The way he’s telling it, without really saying it, is he didn’t have such a big part in the fight. And maybe he was feeling guilty because he was still walking around undamaged.
“I hear you and Jefferson dumped the Ghouls in the car and sent them home,” Dalton said. “My informant says you put a PR with a beard and a beret behind the wheel. From his description, that was Smiley Vargas, leader of the Ghouls.”
“I don’t know what his name was.”
“You didn’t think of calling the police?”
“What good would that do? They’d be back on the streets in a couple of hours. Then they’d come looking for us. Michael … we figured let the bastards go.”
Dalton leaned forward. “But they did come looking for you … they came looking for Jefferson and they found him.”
Eastland stared at the backs of his hands. “I guess they did. What can I do about it?”
“I’ll tell you what you can do. You can stop behaving like a hostile witness and tell it straight. Did Smiley make any threats?”
“Yeah, he made threats. He threatened me too. But he said Michael was going to get it first.”
“Did you take it seriously.”
“I don’t know how I took it. I told Michael to watch himself and I’d do the same. These punks make threats all the time, so there was no way to know what they were going to do.”
Dalton asked the next question in a casual voice. “Did you do the job on the Ghouls?”
Eastland didn’t pretend to be astonished. He didn’t react at all. “I didn’t do anything. You must be pretty hard up when you come to me.”
“But you’re not surprised at the question.”
Eastland shrugged. “Why should I be surprised? You
asked if Michael had any close friends and your stooge at the market said me. Michael had one close friend, so he did it—right? Case closed.”
“You don’t like cops, do you?”
“I don’t hate cops. I can do without them. I’ve seen too many cops with their hand out to have much faith in cops.”
“You want to make a complaint about some crooked cops?”
Eastland smiled a bitter smile. “I just want to be left alone.”
Dalton didn’t know what to make of this man. “Michael Jefferson was your friend. What about him?”
“Let me tell you something about friends, Dalton. When I was in Nam it worked like this. You made a friend and he got killed. Then you made another friend and he got killed. You expected it to happen and it did. No matter how good a friend he was, you always thought better him than me. The important thing was to stay alive. You couldn’t get too involved or you’d go crazy. So you didn’t get too involved. The rule was—look out for number one. That’s how it was in Nam. You wouldn’t know about that.”
“I was in Nam too.”
Eastland looked at Dalton’s clothes. “What were you? A second loot?”
“I got drafted,” Dalton said. “I’m a few years older than you are—I got there early. It was just as bad.”
“You don’t have to tell me how bad it was.”
“What happened to Jefferson didn’t happen in Nam. What I don’t get is the way you’re taking this. Nothing seems to reach you. If I had a friend … if I had a friend and something like this happened to him, I don’t know what I’d do.”
“That’s your business. Me, I just worked all night and I’m tired—okay? Michael was my friend—is my friend—and I’m going to help him every way I can. I’ll go see him in the hospital and help out with the money, all I can spare. If these punks did it I’m glad they’re dead. I got a lousy job but it keeps me in beer and sandwiches. I got a crummy apartment but the rent is paid. Michael is there and I’m here. If you think that’s a crummy way to look at things—you’re right. You got any more questions?”
The Exterminator Page 8