Joe Kurtz Omnibus

by Dan Simmons

  Hansen unlocked the two expensive padlocks he kept on the unit and stepped into the frigid interior. Five halves of beef hung on hooks. Hansen had planned to use one of these during the July cookout he was going to throw at his Tonawanda home for his detectives and their wives, but it looked as if he would not be around Buffalo in July. Against the back wall were tall wire racks, and on these were four long, opaque plastic bags holding more frozen meat.

  He unzipped the bag on the middle shelf. Mr. Gabriel Kendall, fifty years old, the same height, weight, and general build as James B. Hansen, stared up through a rim of frost covering his open eyes. The cadaver’s lips were blue and pulled back, frozen into the position where Dr. Conway had X-rayed the teeth in Cleveland the previous summer. All four of the men’s bodies stored here had a similar rictus. Kendall was the one Hansen had chosen for Captain Robert Gaines Millworth’s suicide and the dental records should be on file, ready for the blanks to be filled in.

  If he could get in touch with that miserable wretch Conway.

  Satisfied that no one had been in the freezer or tampered with its contents, Hansen zipped the body bag shut, locked the freezer behind him, and drove back home in his Cadillac SUV. The sight of the hanging sides of beef had made him hungry. He used his cell phone to call Donna and tell her to set aside whatever else she had planned for dinner; they would grill steaks on the GrillAire Range tonight.

  Arlene’s sister-in-law Gail’s home was the second floor of an old duplex on Colvin Avenue north of the park. Gail was divorced and was working a double shift at the Medical Center; Arlene had explained that Gail was sleeping at the hospital and wouldn’t be home until late the following afternoon. Good thing, thought Kurtz as Arlene unlocked the door and led Pruno and him up the side stairway. Upstairs, Kurtz looked at the herd of refugees he was collecting—Frears hugging Pruno affectionately as if the old addict didn’t smell like a urinal—Arlene with the .45 still in her sweater pocket. For all the years that he had used Pruno as a street source when he was a P.I., Arlene had never met the old wino, and now the two were busy with their introductions and conversation. Kurtz, a loner all his life, was beginning to feel like Noah, and he suspected that he might need a bigger ark if this refugee crap kept up.

  The four of them sat in the tiny living room. Cooking smells came from the adjoining kitchen, and occasionally she would stand and go in to check on something and the conversation would pause until she returned.

  “What is going on, Mr. Kurtz?” asked John Wellington Frears when they were all gathered around like a happy chipmunk family again.

  Kurtz slipped his peacoat off—it was hot in the little apartment—and explained what he could about James B. Hansen being the esteemed Homicide Captain Robert Millworth.

  “This dentist… Conway…admitted this to you?” asked Pruno.

  “Not in so many words,” said Kurtz. “But let’s say that I confirmed it with him.”

  “I would guess that this Dr. Conway’s life wouldn’t be worth much right now,” said Frears.

  Kurtz had to agree with that.

  “So how do you think this Millworth… Hansen…made the connection between Mr. Frears and you, Joe?” asked Arlene.

  “We’re not certain that he has.”

  “But it would be dangerous to assume anything else,” said Frears.

  “It is folly,” said Pruno, “to form policy based on assumptions of the enemy’s intentions…judge his capabilities and prepare accordingly.”

  “Well,” said Arlene, “a captain in Homicide is capable of using the entire police department to track down Mr. Frears and the rest of us.”

  Kurtz shook his head. “Not without blowing his cover. We have to remember that this Hansen isn’t a real cop.”

  “No,” Frears said evenly, “he is a serial rapist and child killer.”

  That stopped conversation for a while. Finally Arlene said, “Can he trace us here, Joe?”

  “I doubt it. Not if Myers didn’t follow you.”

  “No,” said Arlene. “I made sure that we weren’t followed. But they’ll get suspicious when Mr. Frears and I don’t leave my house tomorrow.”

  “Or when the lights don’t come on tonight,” said Pruno. It was getting dark outside.

  “I left the lamps in the front room on a timer I use when on vacation,” said Arlene. “They’re on now and will go off at eleven.”

  Kurtz, who was suddenly feeling exhausted, looked up at that. “When have you ever taken a vacation?”

  Arlene gave him a look. Kurtz took it as his cue to leave. “I have to return a car,” he said, standing and tugging on his peacoat.

  “Not until you eat,” said Arlene.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “No? When was the last time you ate, Joe? Did you have lunch?”

  Kurtz paused to think. His last meal had been a sweet roll he’d grabbed with coffee at a Thruway stop during his midnight drive back from Cleveland. He hadn’t eaten all this Wednesday and hadn’t slept since Tuesday night.

  “We’re all going to have a good meal,” Arlene said in a tone that brooked no argument. “I’ve made lots of spaghetti, fresh bread, some roast beef. You all have about twenty minutes to wash up.”

  “I may need all of that time,” said Pruno. Kurtz laughed but the old man shot him a glance, lifted the bundle of his garment bag, and disappeared into the bathroom with dignity.

  The family of Robert Gaines Millworth—his wife Donna and fourteen-year-old stepson Jason—ate as a family every night because James Hansen knew it was important that a family eat together. This night they had steak and salad and rice. Donna had wine. Hansen did not drink alcohol, but he allowed his wives to, in moderation.

  While they ate. Donna talked about her work at the library. Jason talked about basketball and about ice hockey. Hansen listened and thought about his next move in this rather interesting chess game he had become involved in. At one point, Hansen found himself looking around the dining room—the art, the glimpse of bookcases from the family room beyond, the expensive furniture and Delft china. It would be a shame, all this lost to the fire. But James B. Hansen had never been one to confuse material possessions with the more important things of the soul.

  After dinner, he would go down to his office, keeping his cell phone with him in case Brubaker or Myers called, and contemplate what he had to do tomorrow and in the days to come.

  It was a strange dinner for Kurtz—a good dinner, lots of spaghetti and roast beef and gravy and real bread and a good salad and coffee—but strange. It had been a while since his last home-cooked dinner eaten with other people. How long? Twelve years. Twelve years and a month. A dinner with Sam at her place, also spaghetti that night, with the baby, the toddler, in a tall chair—not a high chair, it didn’t have a tray—what had Sam called it? A youth chair. With little Rachel in the youth chair at the table, chattering away, reaching over to tug at Kurtz’s napkin, the child babbling even as Sam told him about this interesting case she was pursuing—a teenage runaway missing, drugs involved.

  Kurtz stopped eating. Only Arlene noticed and she looked away after a second.

  Pruno had come out of the bathroom showered, shaven, skin pink and scalded-looking, his fingernails still yellowed and cracked but no longer grimy, his thinning gray hair—which Kurtz had never seen except as a sort of nimbus floating around the old wino’s head—slicked back. He was wearing a suit that might have been two decades out of style and no longer fit. Pruno’s frail form was lost in it, but it also looked clean. How? wondered Kurtz. How could this old heroin addict keep a suit clean when he lived in a packing crate and in cubbies under the Thruway?

  Pruno—or “Dr. Frederick,” as Frears kept addressing him—looked older and frailer and more fragile without his protective crusts of grime and rags. But the old man sat very upright as he ate and drank and nodded his head to accept more food and addressed John Wellington Frears in measured tones. Frears had been his student at Princeton. One old man dying o
f cancer and his ancient teacher sitting there in his double-breasted, pinstripe suit—making conversation about Mozart as a prodigy and about the Palestinian situation and about global warming.

  Kurtz shook his head. He’d not had any wine because he was so damned tired already and because he might have to keep his head clear for several hours more on this endless day, but enough was enough. This scene was not just unreal, it was surreal. He needed a drink.

  Arlene followed him out to the kitchen.

  “Doesn’t your sister-in-law keep any booze in the house?” asked Kurtz.

  “That top cupboard. Johnnie Walker Red.”

  “That’ll do,” said Kurtz. He poured himself three fingers’ worth.

  “What’s the matter, Joe?”

  “Nothing’s the matter. Other than this serial-killer police captain after all of us, I mean. Everything’s great.”

  “You’re thinking about Rachel.”

  Kurtz shook his head and took a drink. The two old men in the dining room laughed at something.

  “What are you going to do about that, Joe?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. You can’t let her go back to Donald Rafferty.”

  Kurtz shrugged. He remembered tearing up the photograph of Frears’s dead daughter—Crystal. He remembered leaving the torn bits of the photograph on the scarred table at Blues Franklin.

  Arlene lit a cigarette and pulled down a small bowl for an ashtray. “Gail won’t let me smoke in her house. She’ll be furious when she gets home tomorrow.”

  Kurtz studied the amber liquid in his glass.

  “What if the police don’t arrest Rafferty, Joe?”

  He shrugged again.

  “Or if they do?” said Arlene. “Either way, Rachel is going to be at risk. A foster home? Samantha had no other family. Just her ex-husband. Unless he has family who can take care of her.”

  Kurtz poured another finger of scotch. Rafferty’s only living family was an alcoholic bitch of a mother who lived in Las Vegas and a younger brother who was doing time in an Indiana state prison for armed robbery. He’d listened to the phone conversations.

  “But if she goes into some sort of temporary foster home…” began Arlene.

  “Look,” said Kurtz, slamming the empty glass down on the counter, “what the hell do you want me to do about it?”

  Arlene blinked. Joe Kurtz had never yelled at her in all their years of working together. She exhaled smoke and batted ashes into the dainty little ceramic bowl. “DNA,” she said.

  “What?”

  “DNA testing would show paternity, Joe. You could—”

  “Are you fucking nuts? An ex-con who served time for manslaughter? A former P.I. who will never get his license back? Somebody with at least three death sentences out on him?” Kurtz laughed. “Yeah, I don’t see why the courts wouldn’t place the kid with someone like that. Besides, I don’t know for sure that I’m the—”

  “Don’t,” said Arlene, her finger raised and pointed. “Don’t say that. Don’t even pretend to me that you think it.”

  Kurtz went out into the tiny living room, retrieved his peacoat and the S&W .40 from where he’d left them and went down the stairs and out of the house. It was dark out and it had begun to snow again.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I was just about to call and report a stolen Porsche,” said Angelina Farino Ferrara.

  “That little electronic-card thing is handy,” said Kurtz. “It lets you into both the parking garage and the elevator. Useful.”

  “I hope you put the Boxster back in the same slot. And there had better not be any scratches.”

  Kurtz ignored her and walked over to the center of the penthouse’s living room. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling window on the east side, the lights of downtown Buffalo glowed through the falling snow. To the west was the darkness of the river and lake, with only a few distant ship lights blinking against blackness.

  “We have to get rid of Leo,” said Angelina.

  “I know. Any problems with Marco?”

  “Not a peep. He’s handcuffed in the bathroom. Seems to be mildly amused by all this. Marco may be smarter than I thought.”

  “Maybe so. You have anyone on the floor below us?”

  “Five people work there—no muscle, just bookkeeper types—but they went home at six. Marco and Leo were the only ones using the living quarters there.”

  “I thought Little Skag brought in new muscle from the east.”

  “He did. Eight other new guys besides Marco and Leo. But they’re all out doing what they do—running what’s left of Stevie’s crews, handling the whores and gambling. Day-to-day stuff. They don’t come by here that much.”

  “Who does?”

  “Albert Bell is the lawyer who acts as liaison between Little Stevie and me. I usually see Mr. Bell on Saturdays.”

  “But Marco and Leo check in with Little Skag by phone every Wednesday?”

  “Right. Stevie calls his lawyer. The call is forwarded. I don’t know where the Boys take the call.”

  “Marco will tell us,” said Kurtz. He felt very tired. “You ready to transport the frozen goods?”

  “I’ll go down and back the Town Car right up to the elevator.”

  “I’ll need a big garment bag, sheet, something.”

  “Shower curtain,” said Angelina. “Little blue fish on it. I took care of it.”

  Angelina drove. They took the Buffalo Skyway south along the lake. It was snowing very hard now, visibility was limited to the two cones of headlights filled with flurries, and the elevated highway was treacherous with black ice. Only the Lincoln Town Car’s massive weight kept them moving as the rear-wheel drive slipped and then gripped for pavement. Kurtz had the clear image of them getting stuck and a friendly patrolman stopping to help them out, a need to look in the trunk for the chains or somesuch…

  “We going far?” he asked.

  “Not far. Near Hamburg.”

  “What’s near Hamburg?”

  “My father and older brother used to keep an ice-fishing shack just offshore in February. Sometimes they’d drag Little Stevie along, whining and pouting. I went a few times. If there’s anything more stupid than sitting in a freezing shack staring at a hole in the ice, I don’t what it might be. But some of the old capos still set up the shack even though there are no Farinos around to use it.”

  “I didn’t know that people ice-fished on Lake Erie. Is the ice thick enough to walk on?”

  “We’re going to drive this car out onto it.”

  “But aren’t there big ships still moving out there?”

  “Yeah.”

  That was all Kurtz wanted to know about that subject. He concentrated on staying awake while the big car crept along through blowing snow. Once off the Skyway and moving along Highway 5 through little shoreline communities like Locksley Park and Mount Vernon, the black ice was less frequent but the snow was worse.

  “Are you still with me on this, Kurtz?”

  The woman’s voice made him blink awake. “With you on what?”

  “You know. Gonzaga.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Angelina drove in silence for a few minutes.

  “Why don’t you tell me what your real plan is,” Kurtz said. “What your objectives are, long term goals. So far you’ve just tried to use me like some damned Hamas suicide bomber.”

  “And you used me,” she said. “You were ready to get me killed today just so you could get to Emilio.”

  Kurtz shrugged at that. He waited.

  “If Little Skag gets out of Attica this spring, it’s too late,” Angelina said at last. “I’m screwed. The Farino Family is finished. Stevie thinks he can ride this tiger, but Emilio will gobble him up in six weeks. Less.”

  “So? You can always go back to Italy or something. Can’t you?”

  “No,” said Angelina, throwing the word like a javelin. “Fuck that. The Gonzagas have been planning this
…this extermination…of the Farinos for a long, long time. It was Emilio’s father who had my father ambushed and crippled sixteen years ago. Emilio raped me seven years ago as much out of Gonzaga contempt as anything else. There’s no way on earth that I’m going to let them destroy the family without a fight.” She slowed, hunted for a street sign in the blizzard, and turned right toward the lake.

  “So say I’d killed Gonzaga for you,” said Kurtz. “Either you or one of the New York families would have had me killed, but then where are you? Little Skag is still running things from Attica.”

  “But he can’t get out without the judges and parole-board people on the Gonzaga payroll,” said Angelina. “It buys me time to try to consolidate things. If the rebuilt Farino Family is earning money for them, the New York bosses won’t care who’s actually running the action here in Buffalo.”

  “But Little Skag still has the leverage and control of the money,” said Kurtz. “In a vacuum, he’ll just find a way to buy the Gonzaga judges and parole-board people.”

  “Yes.” The asphalt road ended at a snowy boat ramp dropping down onto the lake. Two rows of red flares were dimly visible stretching across the snowy ice, marking a makeshift road onto Lake Erie. A few truck and snowmobile tracks were gradually being erased by the wind. “The goddamned Gonzagas,” muttered Angelina as she slowly descended the boat ramp. She was talking without thinking about it, just to relieve the tension of the driving. “While Papa and my family were consolidating gambling and prostitution and paying off just a few tame judges, the Gonzagas spent their money to buy top officials. Hell, most of the top cops in the Buffalo P.D. are on their pad.”

  “Stop!” said Kurtz.

  The big Lincoln slewed to a stop with only its front wheels on the ice. “What?” snapped Angelina. “Goddammit, Kurtz. I told you, the ice is thick enough now to hold ten, Town Cars. Quit being so fucking nervous.”

  “No,” said Kurtz. The windshield wipers pounded wildly, trying to knock away the blowing snow. “Say that again…about the cops.”

  “Say what? The Gonzagas have been paying the top cops for years. It’s how Emilio’s family gets away with moving the huge volume of drugs it does.”