A minute later, Sal put his foot in the floor of the Ford Coupe and didn’t let up until he saw the frenzied seagulls circling, indignant that they were being denied such a fine feast. Sal instructed the patrolman to stay up on the dirt road and to keep any curious onlookers at bay.
Captain Ciril Yarborough stood on the jagged rocks as the water splashed ten feet below him. A cigarette dangled from the Captain’s lips and his hat twirled nervously in his hand while his bald head absorbed the sun. Sal could tell that his superior was itching to show him the body bobbing in the water just below him.
“Took ya so long?” Yarborough asked.
Sal struggled over the enormous, mossy rocks until he found a spot where he felt halfway safe to stand. In a small eddy below them floated the familiar figure of Lex Curran, face up. He was bloated—a hole in his forehead. Just behind his head floated enough loose attachments of skin and skull that Sal immediately knew the bullet had been high-powered. Several brown fish brazenly nibbled and tugged at the loose skin.
“Can’t say I’m too sorry this guy’s no longer among the living,” Yarborough pronounced, the cigarette clamped between his yellow teeth. “Ya bring any coffee?”
Small waves lapped at the rocks, and mist flew in the air from the larger waves that crashed just around the point. Sal shook his head as he stared at Lex Curran, his mind struggling to imagine why Curran would finally surface—here—dead.
“You kept this quiet?” he mumbled to the captain.
“I did. How much time did ya burn on this bastard?”
“Two years, almost to the day,” Sal answered automatically. “Who found him?”
“Fishermen called it in. Trolled around the point and saw the gulls in the moonlight. They didn’t see the body. Just called and said something was dead over here. With the new bridge there’s been a fair number of jumpers and the currents take their bodies all over the bay.” Yarborough dragged deeply on the cigarette before flicking it in the water. “I was monitoring an all-nighter, about to go home, when patrol called me. I put a lid on it and waited for ya.”
“Thanks, Cappy,” Sal said without smiling. “Anything to indicate where he’s been?”
Yarborough knelt down, using his pen to push aside the top of Curran’s shirt. “See the upper chest? Scars…old scars…lots of ‘em. Were those there before?”
“We didn’t strip him, but we did turn up pictures of him from a beach trip and I don’t recall any notable scars on his torso.”
“And the bugger’s lost quite a piece a weight since he ran away, even bloated like he is. My guess is someone held Curran a while, and his recalcitrant nature finally got to his captor.”
Sal knelt down on the other side of the eddy, lifting Curran’s sleeve. The skin on his hand was loose, like an oily rubber glove too large for the hand it covered. There were striations around the wrist. “Handcuffs?”
“Looks like that t’me.”
Sal dropped the arm back in the water. “Reuter?”
“Ya read my mind.”
“Have you sent someone to grab him?”
“A’course. Sent the partner of the patrol who came and got ya. Sent him with strict orders to keep it quiet.”
Sal nodded. “Did he get him?”
Silence.
Sal looked up at his captain, standing on the adjacent, higher rock. His face was bright with the aura of the eastern sun on one side, a dark shadow on the other.
“Cappy?”
“Salvatore…Neil Reuter is gone.”
“Do you mean gone, as in dead, or gone as in out of town?”
“I mean, gone, gone. Poof! Vanished like a magic man.” Yarborough answered with his full accent and a mock magician’s gesticulation of his hands.
Sal glanced back down at Lex Curran’s puffy body before climbing up to Yarborough’s rock. “Was anyone at his estate?”
“The kid that went to Hillside got back to me ten minutes before ya did. Said a woman named Agnes Holloway—I guess ya remember her, Reuter’s housekeeper—she said the estate had been sold last week. Sold lightning quick. Said Reuter gave her two years’ salary and a fancy new Oldsmobile. Said she has to vacate her cottage in a couple of weeks. Said she’s going to Saratoga to be near her daughter.”
Sal struggled to process everything, twisting his face as the realities began to strike him. “Wait a minute. Reuter sold his estate? He sold Hillside?”
“Accordin’ to the housekeeper, he did,” Yarborough answered, his face a mix of frustration and amusement.
Sal pressed fingers on his eyes and wished he had some coffee in his hand to help him wake up. This was all way too much to take before caffeine.
Damn you, Harry Cato.
“Did she say where Reuter went?” Sal asked.
“Wait, there’s more,” Yarborough replied, clearly enjoying himself.
“C’mon Cappy…you’re killing me.”
“When the patrolman pressured the housekeeper a tad, she told him that General Logistics, Reuter’s company, was sold, too—lock, stock and barrel. Sold to some outfit from the southern end of the state. She said the company was sold, along with everything else Reuter owned. All facilitated by his finance man, Musselwhite.” The captain eyed Sal Kalakis. “Sal, th’ housekeeper said Neil Reuter left town last night.”
“Where?”
“Said she didn’t know. Said she thought he left on an aeroplane.”
Sal felt his equilibrium falter so he repositioned his feet for balance. Neil Reuter, grieving widower, a man who many felt would seek to avenge his wife’s death, had cleaned house and liquidated everything…and now he was gone, scot-free.
And just a foot below Sal was the reprehensible Lex Curran—missing for the past two years—now reduced to fish food.
Yarborough jerked his head to the trail. “Let’s log this in official-like and leave our uniformed boy wonders here so they can bag and tag this piece o’ shit. Ya can buy me some breakfast before ya hit up the housekeeper and Musselwhite.”
“You gonna let me work this?” Sal asked.
“Do ya honestly think I woulda gotten splashed by freezing water for two hours if I wasn’t? This is your baby, Sal. Ya stay on it. I’ll give ya all the underlings ya need.”
As Yarborough climbed the rocks and walked to his car, Sal stood there staring at the glazed eyes of Lex Curran. He wasn’t at all sorry for the man. In Sal’s estimation, it had most certainly been Lex who had raped and murdered Emilee Reuter. They’d found even more evidence after his disappearance, and if they’d had a trial, Sal was a hundred percent confident they’d have gotten a conviction.
But it appeared someone else had tried and convicted Curran, and the sentence was what looked like a .45 round through the skull. Fair enough.
“Come on, boyo!” Yarborough yelled, slapping his palm on the sheet metal of the car.
Caffeine addiction took precedent over personal rumination.
~~~
The massive hulk of the gleaming, state-of-the-art RMS Queen Mary towered over Neil as he stood beside his hired car. Neil paid the driver, instructing him to find a porter and have the bags placed into the quarters reserved for Freeman Jennings.
A low fog from the Hudson River had rolled in, just off the surface, adding a sense of atmosphere to the frenetic scene. Neil stared at the massive ship from a hundred feet away, watching the beehive of activity at Chelsea Piers as leathery dock workers scurried like ants, struggling to load cart after cart onto the ship, preparing it for its speedy voyage over the North Atlantic. Neil’s eyes moved up the ship, from the waterline, over the polished black hull, to the sparkling white of the superstructure and finally ending at the shiny crimson steel of the three rearward-raked smokestacks. She was a beautiful ship.
The great vessel made Neil briefly think about his forty-five footer and how, on rare Saturdays when he was in town and had time, he and Em would sail north, anchoring in the calm waters of Richardson Bay just behind Sausalito. There, they’d
listen to her favorite slow jazz and make love all afternoon. She would taunt him playfully afterward, telling him if they wanted to have a child, he would need to slow down and live life like a normal man.
“Anxiety can affect your ability, our ability, to make a baby,” she once told him, cocking her eyebrow at him the way she did when she was being half playful, half serious.
“And who says that?”
“I heard it from Beatrice Fairfax,” she answered.
“Ugh…not her.”
Em had laughed and knocked Neil’s captain’s hat from his head. She’d always known how to handle him.
Oh, what Neil would have given to go back to that moment. To pull her to him, to hold her that way forever. He had been a decent husband to her, nothing more. He’d provided everything she’d needed, bought her whatever she’d asked for, given her attention when she requested it—but he never went out of his way to truly demonstrate his love for her. He never left her a simple love note on her pillow. Didn’t brush her cheek at unexpected moments. He never even popped her on her bottom. Emilee would have probably fainted had he come home in the middle of the day, or during a business trip, to surprise her with his presence. And when he was with her, he was typically distant, his mind occupied with his work and all that went with it.
On the day she died, Emilee had been combing the city, searching for an antique chest of some sort. She was probably planning to use it in the nursery. Antiques were a hobby of hers, especially of the mid-19th century prairie variety. Finding items from that period gave her joy.
According to the police, she drove to the South Shore area on that late June morning, visiting two stores in search of the simple, rough-hewn piece of furniture. A witness testified to seeing Lex Curran approach her on the sidewalk from the side door of his unopened bar. They spoke for a moment before the witness said Curran grasped Emilee’s arm. She slapped his face two times as Curran pulled her into the building. The witness, an unemployed carpenter on his way to the “work-wall” that morning, said he thought it was a domestic dispute, so he minded his own business. The witness was a neighborhood resident—he knew all about Lex Curran—and he knew a violent altercation would have been in the cards had he confronted Curran.
Emilee’s body was discovered in her car, twenty miles away. She had been strangled to death. Neil found out a day later that she’d been eight weeks pregnant. Only her closest friend had known. Neil had been so busy he hadn’t even noticed her morning sickness. She was waiting to tell him, wanting to make certain the pregnancy took. Neil didn’t know for certain the sex of the child; but over time, in his grief, his belief that the unborn child was a male became engraved in his mind.
The unemployed witness, the only one who saw Lex Curran and Emilee together, came forward after reading about the murder in the afternoon newspaper. Before he was even asked, he described her maroon Ford four-door to a tee. The police, in an effort to bolster the case against Curran, didn’t release Emilee Reuter’s name or photograph. Unfortunately for the police, the carpenter, a known drunk, was unable to identify her picture in three different photo lineups of ten.
No other witnesses came forward.
The inability of the carpenter to identify Emilee Reuter, which came to be known as “the lineup debacle,” was the reason Lex Curran had initially walked—along with several false alibis. The witness later saw a picture of Emilee Reuter, swearing to anyone who would listen that she was indeed the one, and his ability to separate facial characteristics from the photographic lineups was hampered by a vision defect—a side effect of his liver condition. A doctor confirmed this, but the damage to the investigation was already done. The police later found two other witnesses who placed Curran near the scene where her body was discovered but, by this time, Curran had disappeared.
There was other evidence, too. Few people doubted Lex Curran’s guilt.
Now that he was sober, Neil couldn’t get Emilee’s death out of his mind. He wanted to savor the horrid thoughts, but to keep them tucked away in a dark recess of his brain, available for when he truly needed them. Because, despite Agnes Holloway’s predictions, Neil would come back—come back with a vengeance. He planned to use every fiber of his being to find Lex Curran, and kill him. The people in Washington had already proven that they were unwilling to assist. They were obstinate even, their replies distant and cold, the murder nothing more than an annoyance to their busy lives.
The one thing Neil had never tried—and it had never occurred to him, not in his grief and drunkenness—was a threat to his bosses over their lack of cooperation. He knew the Department of War probably wouldn’t react well to such a thing. But if Neil truly didn’t fear death, then why wouldn’t he play his ultimate trump card? With everything he knew, with all of the sordid details, the raw realities, the killings—he could bring Washington D.C. to its very knees. He stopped on the street, cupping his hand over his Lucky Strike as he lit his memento Thorens lighter in the wind, glancing at the etching on its face, thinking of his friend Jakey.
“Give it to ‘em with both barrels, Barkie,” Jakey would say, grinning crookedly at him. “Why hold back? Why ever hold back?”
Neil puffed the cigarette and returned his friend’s smile.
“Okay, Jakey. I won’t…I won’t hold back.”
Neil flipped his lighter shut and turned away from the Chelsea Piers, walking south to 20th Street, taking the street to the east until he reached 10th Avenue. He would have liked to have walked farther; the exercise felt magnificent to his cramped body which was knotted and sore from sitting in one place for nearly a day’s time.
It was now after nine in the morning. As the last of the workers from the docks and meatpacking districts scurried to their places of business, Neil stretched his body on the street corner. His suit was wrinkled and matted. A heavy five o’clock shadow accented his somewhat menacing appearance. He untied his silk tie and stuffed it in his pocket. In this seedy district, the rougher he looked, the safer he’d be. Neil walked on, idly wondering if Manhattan would ever be safe for pedestrians.
After paying a newspaper boy three shiny pennies for The Times, Neil stepped into the café he’d been told to go to, glanced around, and took a seat at the rear booth. He ordered black coffee, plain oatmeal and dry toast. Neil scanned the paper’s headlines, mostly concerning tensions over Czechoslovakia and their region of Sudetenland, along with Hitler’s lust to take it. Following the hours of tedious translation on the airplane, he didn’t feel like reading, dropping the paper to the sticky table and focusing on the coffee instead. His contact arrived five minutes later.
The man was nothing, absolutely nothing, like Neil would have expected. He had been told the man he would meet was New York’s finest forger of European documents. Neil had expected a shadowy gentleman, perhaps with a sneaky Machiavellian air and a smart suit. Instead, the man who slid into the booth was a Hasidic Jew at least fifteen years Neil’s senior. He had bulging, expressive eyes, each mapped by red lines all leading from the corners to the brown centers. His face was dominated by a wide, toothy grin that exposed great gaps between each of his khaki teeth. His skin was shiny with bodily oil or sweat, Neil couldn’t tell which. And he smelled heavily of this morning’s coffee and last night’s onions and garlic.
“You are Mister Jennings?” the forger asked with a thick accent, offering a sweaty hand over the table.
Neil took the hand and nodded. “Do you have everything?”
“Ah…right down to business, I see. Of course I have everything, of course, of course,” the man answered, tapping the breast pocket of his coat. “But first, we shall converse.”
“I have until noon,” Neil answered with a wave of his cigarette, still a bit dismayed about the slovenly appearance of the man he was sitting with.
“So, you are the man who will rescue the children, yes?”
Neil dragged on the cigarette. “That’s the plan.”
“I want to hear all about it. Now it is t
ime that I must eat. My mogn calls, you know.”
Narrowing his eyes at the forger, Neil felt he was not only an interesting character to look at, but he also had a peculiar way of speaking. It probably had something to do with his native language, whatever it was.
The forger signaled the weary waitress and ordered a large plate of food, including fried potatoes, four runny eggs, a sliced green apple, oatmeal, buttered toast, and two orders of orange juice. “My good friend here will reimburse you for the food,” he said, pointing at Neil. Neil nodded and asked for a refill of his coffee. The waitress scurried away.
“Aren’t you supposed to follow strict eating laws?” Neil asked.
The forger either didn’t hear him, or pretended not to hear him. Instead, he leaned forward, patting his chest again and whispering even louder than he spoke at his normal tone. “These documents are absolutely flawless. The best available anywhere in the world, or beyond if you so please. Hitler and his closest minions wouldn’t be able to spot the forgery. In fact, I would wager my firstborn that these official papers are of higher quality than those actually turned out by the legions of ignorant followers in that vacuous excuse for an Austrian government.” The forger made a shushing motion by placing his finger over his lips. “If there is any question about you, friend, it will be because of your own numerous misgivings, not these documents.”
“What do you mean? And why are you whispering?” Neil asked, glancing around.
The waitress clunked the two glasses of orange juice in front of the forger and splashed coffee into Neil’s cup before shuffling away. The forger continued, speaking conspiratorially. “Germany and Austria have become police states, and in police states the authorities can do as they wish. If they have any suspicion,” he poked the tabletop with a thick finger, “they will detain you and will get the truth from you. Believe me, they will.”
“I’ll be fine,” Neil answered as he crushed out his cigarette.
“Ah…American resolve. It is a good thing. A very good thing. It will take you far in life, especially where you are going…into the belly of the beast.” The forger again leaned forward. “Or, it might lead you to an agonizing death. But only God knows your fate.”
Final Mission: Zion - A World War 2 Thriller Page 7