by Don Porter
“Call us collect every day, but don't blurt out any information, because the phones are probably bugged again.” George had obviously worked out his spiel; I just listened. “You have a room at the California Hotel. We'll send you more money if you need it, but don't be sticking any into the slot machines. Check out the Fremont area mostly, and when you spot them, don't let them see you, just call us. Say, ‘my friends have arrived.’ Any questions?”
“Yeah, what do they look like? I've only seen O'Malley and Dallas.”
I piped up. “You won't recognize O'Malley. He has a haircut and a shave, but we're counting on the family staying together. Bruno is the same size as a doorway. Willie and O'Malley are on the short, slender side, and there should be two women, either of which could be Rose. Any other questions?”
“About a gazillion, but I'd better scoot, that was my flight they just called.” Maggie ran for the departure gates. George and I hung out and watched until she cleared security. No one else seemed to be interested, except the young guys eyeing her bazooms.
“Well, there goes another one thousand ninety-five dollars plus tax that your bright idea has cost us.”
“Don't you feel just a little guilty, sending Maggie off on a wild goose chase?” I asked.
“Heck no. That was another one of your bright ideas.”
Chapter 12
George got back to the office ahead of me and met me at the door with the Whisk Broom in his hand and a finger to his lips. He pointed toward my telephone.
“Little late this morning,” he chided. “Big night last night?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I checked out the strip clubs in Wahiawa. I think all of the old ones from Hotel Street have moved out there; they just changed their names. Where's Maggie?”
“Called in sick this morning, touch of flu, maybe.” I wondered if he was spelling that flew. George pulled two sheets of paper and two pens out of Maggie's desk drawer, and we sat on opposite sides of her desk.
“Darn,” I said, “I guess that means I'll have to make the daily schedule with O'Malley myself.” I wrote, What's your next idea?
“Yeah, just show him the picture of Mr. Big and be sure it's the guy he saw.” George wrote, How about tailing the tails?
“You know, George, I'm getting nervous about meeting O'Malley at the same place and the same time every day. Sometimes I get the notion that I'm being followed.” How we gonna do that?
Slip out and rent a car. The tails are changing shifts every eight hours, follow the next shift change and see where they go. “Did O'Malley's check clear?” he asked. If we were adlibbing nonsense, we might as well go wild. Give the listeners a little salt to rub into their wounds.
“Yeah, ten thousand bucks, no problem. Did you see that new Porsche he bought?” How many tails do you reckon we have?
George considered. Two cars, two guys per shift, three shifts a day, at least twelve, and probably some looking for O'Malley.
“Holy moley,” I blurted out. Are they out there now?
“Check this out,” George said. He handed me a silver whistle. Yeah, one at each end of the block. They were waiting when we got back from the airport.
“What is it?” It looked like a police whistle, only bigger than most. Don't they follow you to the beach house?
“New police whistle. They claim it's the loudest sound ever made by human lungs.” Nah, I lose them every night in that warren around Kaimuki. George took the whistle back and walked over to my desk. He bent down next to the phone and blasted a screech that hurt my ears from twenty feet away. “Pretty loud, huh?”
“Better than a rock concert. I'll nip out and pick up some doughnuts if you'll make the coffee.”
George only nodded, he bent down to my phone again and gave it a blast that slid the phone an inch across the desk.
I took the elevator down to the garage, grabbed my cell phone from the Jag, and pushed the up button for the elevator. When the door slid open, I ducked around behind the elevator shaft instead of getting into the car. I walked around the shaft (it's an island, ten feet deep and thirty feet wide, with four elevators) and pushed the button again. The elevator car was still there, and I rode it up to the ground floor. I watched the stairway through the glass doors. A guy I'd never seen before came pounding up the stairs, looking around the mall. He wavered a while, then walked across and sat at a table.
I strolled out into the sunshine and crossed the mall. On a good day, that pedestrian strip may be the most pleasant place on earth. Red brick walk, sunshine filtered down through O'hia trees, yellow and scarlet flowers masking all of the ugly infrastructure, and the fresh trade wind blowing through from the mountains, mixing the aroma of the flowers with the emanations from the food stalls.
When I passed the watcher, on my way to the doughnut shop, he was careful not to look at me. I bought half a dozen, raised, glazed, and two large cups of coffee. The coffee was so hot that it burned my fingers through the Styrofoam when I put it in the cardboard tray and loosened the lids. I cut behind the guy who wasn't watching me, and clumsy me, caught my foot on a brick. The tray went flying, but I caught the sack of doughnuts and ran. When I rounded the corner onto Pauahi Street, he was rolling around on the bricks, shirt now the color of hot coffee, and screaming in agony. I really must learn to be more careful.
One block down Pauahi Street brought me to the edge of Chinatown, where a million shoppers were milling around the sidewalk displays, fighting over fruit, vegetables, and fish. I turned every corner I came to, but angled toward the bay, crossed King Street, down to Merchant, and turned left to the AMFAC Center.
A very classy young lady was manning the Hertz desk. She had a platinum blonde bouffant perched on top of her cover-girl smile. Her black suit jacket had Hertz appliquéd in yellow thread on her right breast, and a nametag that read Marilyn on her left.
“Good morning, Marilyn. Remember me?” I slid my driver's license and credit card across the desk so that she could read my name if she wanted to play the game. She didn't.
“No, and my name's not Marilyn. We just wear the tags because they make us seem friendly. What size car do you want?”
When I asked for a compact, she wrinkled her nose, indicating that her first judgment of me had been correct. Money was an object, because George was going to be counting, but my primary concern was parking. Hawaiian parking spaces favor compacts five-to-one over full sized. She condescended to rent me a Dodge Neon and called a lot boy to bring it up out of the basement, managing to convey that I'd probably wreck it if I tried to get it out of the garage. She completed the transaction without bothering to look at me again.
The Dodge Neon did turn out to be a good surveillance car, white with no distinguishing features. I got lucky, found a spot in the Diamond Parking lot on the corner with Beretania where I could see all the way down Bishop Street. The Diamond lots have those boxes with the tiny slots marked to match the stalls, and you're supposed to stuff dollar bills in the slots, specifically, three per hour. Since I was going to stay with the car, I didn't worry about that. I spotted the Ford and the Honda, both parked on Bishop Street, one on either side of our garage entrance. I got comfortable and sampled the raised glazed, but wished that I'd spilled only one cup of the coffee.
By four, the traffic was starting to build up, and the doughnuts were gone. A black Cadillac with four guys in it came down the right-hand lane too slowly. It stopped next to the Ford, two guys jumped out, two abandoned the Ford and climbed in. I fired up the Dodge, bulled my way into traffic, and was half a block behind when they made the transfer at the Honda.
Apparently it hadn't occurred to them that tails might be tailed, because they led me on an easy ride, under the freeway, and up onto School Street. They stopped in front of an old, rambling wooden house, opened the garage door with a remote control, and drove inside. I dialed George's cell phone.
“I've got them surrounded. Want to come help me arrest them?”
“Nice going. Just rem
ember, there are at least eight of them, and your Beretta holds seven shots. If I come up, I'll bring two more tails, maybe four, piece of cake.”
“Do we have enough on them to interest Cochran? How about harassment?”
“Well, we do have a celebrity stalking law, maybe you qualify for that. What we really need is for O'Malley to finger one of them. Why not call Cochran and tell him we've located the murderer. Let him sort out which is whom.”
“I'll call you back.”
Cochran came on the line sounding as if he'd just chewed a lemon. It occurred to me that he either needed to get married or divorced; I couldn't remember his present status.
“I've got the guy who murdered that Chicago hood penned up in a house in the three hundred block on North School Street. You might want to bring a deputy, he has about a dozen body guards.”
“Big brown wooden house? Payne, you are one appropriately named S.O.B. You're compromising the latest FBI safe house.”
“What do you mean, FBI? These guys have been staking us out, wanting us to lead them to O'Malley so they can kill him.”
“Pretty close to right, but naturally you've got everything backward. At first they just wanted O'Malley as a witness to the murder on the bridge and for the missing quarter-million dollars. Now, we want him for murder, and after they find him, I think they want to hang you by the heels and work you over with a blowtorch.”
“What quarter million? And, I told you, O'Malley didn't kill that hood. He hired us to find the real killer. The FBI should be grateful to us.”
“They'd be grateful if you turned O'Malley over, but they're not real pleased about you putting two of their guys in the hospital.”
“Hospital?”
“One with second degree burns, the other with a fractured skull. You clowns are getting real popular. Why don't you turn over O'Malley?”
“Cochran, I do not know where O'Malley is, but he still didn't kill that hood, and what's this about money?”
“Look, Payne, nobody ever thought that O'Malley killed the hood. They've always known who did that. At first, they just wanted to ask O'Malley to identify the murderer and about the missing money belt. The murder that the state wants him for just happened day before yesterday.
”What in the devil are you talking about? Money belt? Come on, make some sense. If you knew who the murderer was, why didn't you arrest him?”
“Payne, do I have to draw you pictures? Murder is a state crime. The FBI doesn't care about that. This is the organized crime detail. That so-called hood from Chicago was an undercover agent, here to gather evidence, and he was wearing a money belt with a quarter million in it.”
“So, the murderer grabbed the belt.”
“Forensics say he didn't. Lividity marks, ever hear of them? The corpse was still wearing the belt six hours after he was killed. Get the picture? Someone tried to cover the theft by rebuttoning the shirt only they got the buttons in the wrong holes and smudged one of the buttons with O'Malley's fingerprint.”
“Okay, so maybe O'Malley lifted the belt. That should prove he didn't do the killing, so why is he wanted for murder now?”
“Payne, if you'd read the police reports instead of yammering on about the city council and the smoking ban, you'd know that a consigliore for the Genovese Family was beaten to death yesterday with a pipe. Same size pipe that put the FBI agent in the hospital.”
“So that was you bugging our office?” I didn't know where this was going, but things were changing fast. I realized that Cochran was keeping me talking while he got another tail on me. I slipped the car into gear, drifted down to the next cross street, and started turning every corner.
“You betcha. We bugged your office with a court order. By the way, I have you on tape saying that O'Malley paid you ten thousand dollars, bought a new Porsche, and meets with you every day, so you can knock off that innocent crap.”
“Cochran, I swear to you that I do not know where O'Malley is.” I finally figured out who had been killed. Some big shot from the gambling industry had come over from the mainland a couple of months before, theoretically as an advisor to the pro-gambling faction. The liberal press had been screaming that he was a mobster, and it hadn't helped when he registered as a lobbyist. I needed to get off the phone with Cochran before the new tail discovered that I was no longer at the FBI house. “Hey, I've got to move. Someone's coming out of the garage, I'll call you back.” I hung up. By that time I was six blocks away from the safe house. I called George.
“Hi, George, little change in plans. It's the cops doing the bugging. Apparently O'Malley did kill a mobster.”
George let out a stream of profanity that I'd rather not repeat.
When he ran down, I tried again.
“I've never known you to get that upset over a mobster being killed.” “Not that murder, you dummy. Don't sweat the small stuff. We've got a real problem. I'm worried about the next murder. Maggie just called to say her friends had arrived.”
“She what? The wires must be crossed. Wasn't that our code for
O'Malley and family?”
“You bet it was. Maggie just spotted them in Vegas. Now you tell me that O'Malley really is a murderer and Maggie's going to tail him.” “Darn, shucks, heck and phooey, do you think we should join her?” “Pick me up at that restaurant on Bethel Street, the Indigo.” “I'll be there in five minutes, and, uh — George, when you dodge your tail, be careful not to hurt him. He's an FBI agent.”
Chapter 13
We lucked out and caught a Vegas flight forty minutes after we hit the airport. Actually the flights between Hawaii and Las Vegas are almost a commuter run. For reasons I've never quite fathomed, many Hawaiian residents go to Vegas several times a year. If you ask them, they'll say it's for the shopping and the cheap restaurants and hotels. They seldom admit to gambling, unless someone happens to win. Also, many people from Hawaii have moved to Vegas in recent years. Blue-collar workers who have to work two jobs in Hawaii to rent a two-room apartment have discovered that they can work one job and afford to buy a three-bedroom house in Vegas. That makes for a lot of relatives visiting back and forth.
We were probably the only ones on the plane who were rushing to Vegas because we had accidentally set our receptionist up for a rendezvous with a killer.
“George, you are positive that Maggie meant the O'Malley family was in Vegas?” George was squirming around in his seat, trying to get one leg comfortable, then the other.
“Yeah, no doubt about that. I thought it was funny, just another one of your plans gone catawampus. You had to wait until after she hung up to tell me that O'Malley really is a cold-blooded serial killer.”
“Hey, come on, innocent until proven guilty.”
“Oh sure. Maybe beating people's brains out with a pipe is the new fashion— saves ammunition. We should check the papers. Probably it's a new national trend.”
“But why did they go to Vegas? Even I'm not that unlucky.”
“Oh, I wouldn't place any limits on your ineptitude. Let's hope that Maggie is luckier. And, why Vegas? You said it yourself, cheapest way to get off the island.” George couldn't sit still any longer; I could see that his leg cramps were killing him. He got up to pace the aisles for a while. I tried to think about something other than Maggie's new blonde bob smeared with blood and brains.
Hawaiian air is soft, like a cotton blanket. Las Vegas air is hard, like a linen sheet, and it hasn't any substance to it. The temperature was the same eighty degrees as Hawaii, but you felt as if Las Vegas might drop to fifty or rocket to a hundred at any moment. The concourse had been reduced to an aisle between rows of slot machines, most of them occupied. I guess if you came to gamble, there was no point in going any farther.
We walked the last mile, half of it on moving sidewalks, escalated down to terra firma, grabbed our bags, and rented a Dodge Dart from Budget. George managed to get us headed north on Las Vegas Boulevard. Driving into town is a surreal experience. I was gawking at the
New York skyline on the left, turned around and passed the Eiffel tower and a hot air balloon from Around the World in Eighty Days on the right. I wondered where all of the water for the Bellagio fountains came from, but, this being Vegas, it probably isn't water, and if it is, it's recycled. Circus Circus made me turn around in my seat. On our left we passed an active, but tame volcano that was bubbling lava.
The buildings were impressive, but most of them were disguised to look like something other than hotels and casinos, like pyramids, for instance. In the daylight, there was more brown dust than glitter. I think Las Vegas is supposed to be seen only at night. Daylight is too revealing, like glimpsing a movie star without makeup. The street narrowed, and we couldn't see the buildings anymore; they were hidden by million-bulb, blinking signs. We used the Diamond Horseshoe for a landmark, turned left into the cave of the old strip, and parked in the drive at the California. A kid in a bellhop uniform opened the door on George's side, handed George a ticket, and stole our car.
Suddenly it seemed to be evening, all references to outside reality were missing. We were swallowed in the perpetual twilight and rabbit-warren confusion of a massive casino. We threaded our way on the thick maroon carpet, past alcoves with card tables, wove between endless offset rows of slot machines, through a maze of more card tables, around a bar that was made of video poker games, and saw a reception sign in the distance.
The thick carpet, the textured ceiling thirty feet above us, and the various dividers were all meant to deaden sound, so you didn't hear anything specific. You heard it all at once, and I finally understood the expression, dull roar.