“I … I thought they were going to kill us.”
“Johnny Toes Burke and Bruno.”
“They didn’t give their names. One was skinny and shifty looking. The other was a hulk.”
“What did they do?”
She took a breath and let it out with a shudder.
“They came here last night,” she said. “Milton and I were watching television. I don’t know how they got into the building, because they didn’t buzz. They knocked on the door, and I opened it without thinking. I mean, I thought it must be one of the residents. They started pushing us around. Milton yelled at them to leave, and the little man hit him with his fist. It made Milton’s mouth bleed. Poor Milton. I … I can’t face him.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Zeno.” It was mine.
She hugged herself. “They wanted the copy of Joseph Bellano’s computer records, and they threatened to hurt us if I didn’t give it to them. They’d already talked to Angela Bellano and the people at MicroComp, so they knew you and I had made a copy. I didn’t know how to lie to them, Jake. I mean, they already knew. I told them I’d given you the printout, then erased the disks. They didn’t believe me. That’s when …”
“What?”
“The big man …”
“Bruno.”
“Bruno. He said he knew how to make us talk, and he left. He came back ten minutes later with a can of gasoline.”
That was the smell.
“They tied our hands behind us with towels and shoved us down on the couch and splashed gas all over us. And then … and then Bruno took out a lighter and flipped on the flame and started waving it around us and said that if I didn’t tell him where my copy was, he’d set us both on fire. God, Jake, he would’ve done it, too. I could see it in his eyes. The other man, the smaller one, he was scared, too. Milton started crying and begging him not to do it. I … I guess that convinced them, because they untied us and left.”
“Did you call the police?” I asked, my voice amazingly calm. Zeno shook her head. “They said if we did they’d come back and … finish the job. Jake, I’m afraid to go out or even answer the door. Those two men, if they came back …”
“They won’t bother you again, Zeno. Ever.”
She didn’t look convinced. “And Milton … he … doesn’t want to see me again.”
“Did he say that?”
“No, but …”
“Hey, Zeno, that man cares about you.”
I went to the kitchen, lifted the phone, and called MicroComp. I told Milton that Zeno needed to see him, and that he should probably take the rest of the day off and get his butt over to her apartment on the double. I hung up.
“He’s coming,” I said.
She gave me a weak smile and a kiss on the cheek.
I left.
CHAPTER 21
I DROVE STRAIGHT FROM Zeno’s to Johnny Toes’s apartment. I drove slowly. I needed time to calm down. If I got my hands on him right now, I might not let go until it was too late for both of us.
He lived in a cheesy low rise near Havana and Jewell. I’d gotten his address last week when I’d first gone looking for him. I assumed he hadn’t moved since then. His name was still on the mail slot, and the box was full of envelopes. It hurt to climb the stairs, but I made it to the second floor. I walked along the outside balcony to Johnny Toes’s number.
It hurt to raise my leg too high, but I did it, anyway. Then I kicked in the door.
The place had enough velour to warm the heart of the meanest pimp. There were erotic paintings on the walls and pillows on the floor. The room smelled of stale marijuana. I turned the apartment upside down. Johnny Toes wasn’t home.
When I came out, there were a couple of guys and a young woman standing on the balcony, staring at me.
“I’m calling the cops,” one guy said.
“So call them.”
I stomped down to my car and drove to Terry’s. No one there had seen Johnny Toes for days. No one there knew a bruiser named Bruno. I drove around to several more bars and got the same story—no Johnny Toes. My pulse, though, had settled down to normal. I was thinking more clearly now.
I was thinking of Fat Paulie DaNucci.
If Johnny Toes worked for DaNucci, then he’d terrorized Zeno and Milton under orders. It was DaNucci who wanted Bellano’s records. And it was probably DaNucci who’d been responsible for the bomb that had killed Bellano. I wondered if DaNucci was the “man” Stephanie had called.
One thing, though, was clear: DaNucci was the commander. Johnny Toes and Bruno were merely soldiers.
It was time to go to the top.
It was two-thirty Saturday morning.
I stood in the dark with the garbage cans. The toes of my shoes were just beyond the cone of yellow light thrown from the fixture over the rear door of Giancio’s Italian Restaurant. My fingers and toes ached from the cold. I shuffled my feet and clapped my hands. It woke up my kidneys, which were still convalescing from Bruno’s pounding.
I’d spent the afternoon and half the evening making calls about Fat Paulie DaNucci. What I found was that he spent a lot of time at his restaurant. The place closed at ten, and the poker game started at ten-thirty. Just DaNucci and some of his pals. They usually broke up around two, by which time they’d had their fill of cigars, Sambuca, and seven-card stud.
When I’d arrived an hour ago, there’d been five cars in the parking lot. Not long ago, they’d begun to leave, a few throwing headlight beams my way. One, in fact, had touched my pant leg and turned me to stone.
Now the lot was empty save for one car—Fat Paulie DaNucci’s shiny black Cadillac.
Suddenly the back door of the building opened. Two men stepped out. One was big and tall; the other was big and fat. They both wore dark overcoats. The fat one wore a hat.
“Mother o’ God, it’s cold,” he said.
“Why don’t you go back in, Mr. DaNucci? I’ll get the car heated up.”
“Forget it, Vinny. Let’s just go.”
They walked toward the Caddy. I stepped out of the shadows behind the fat guy. He started to turn, and I poked the muzzle of the Magnum under his ear.
“Hey—”
“Freeze, Paulie. No pun intended.”
Vinny had already spun around and yanked out his piece and was pointing it our way. I hid behind Fat Paulie.
“Tell him to lose the gun, Paulie, or you’re going to be deaf in one ear.”
“Let him go, motherfucker,” Vinny told me.
“Relax, Vinny. This dumb shit only wants my money. Ain’t that right, you dumb shit?” Fat Paulie didn’t sound frightened, as I’d hoped. He sounded irritated. “It’s in my pants pocket, dumb shit. You want me to take it out for you? Or are you queer besides being dumb and you wanna reach in there yourself and play with me first.”
“Get in the car.”
“What for?”
“We’re going to talk.”
“About what?”
“Move it, Paulie.”
“Drop down, Mr. DaNucci. I’ll ice this son of a bitch.”
“Put away the gun, Vinny,” Fat Paulie said. “You’re forgetting something, right?”
Vinny frowned, his one eyebrow dipping down to form a heavy, hairy black V.
“Right, Vinny?”
“Oh, yeah, right.” Vinny put away his gun.
“Right,” Fat Paulie said.
Obviously there was something going. I didn’t know what it was, but I didn’t like it. I waved my gun, and we all went around to the left side of the car. Vinny climbed in the driver’s seat. Fat Paulie and I squeezed in the back.
“Keep your hands in front of you,” I told Vinny. “If you even look back here, I’ll shoot your boss. Start the car.”
“Now, Mr. DaNucci?”
“Not yet.”
They knew something that I didn’t, and it was beginning to make me nervous.
“First let’s hear what Dumb Shit has to say. Start the car.”
Vinny turned the key. “Where we going?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just drive.”
“Take the highway,” Fat Paulie said.
Then he leaned back in the seat, smiling comfortably, as if he were the pope on tour. He outweighed the pope, though, by at least a hundred pounds. His cheeks were so chubby they pushed his eyes closed from below. Fifty years ago he’d probably been a cute kid. Adorable. Now he was a bookie and a loan shark and a few other things that he’d been charged with but never convicted of. And, like the pope, he’d never been in prison.
Vinny turned right on Thirty-eighth Avenue and headed toward the freeway. There was little traffic. A cop car went by in the other direction. But we were invisible to him behind our darkly tinted windows.
“So,” Fat Paulie said, “here we are driving in the car. Smooth, huh? My wife loves it. She’s waiting for me at home. So what do you want to talk about, Dumb Shit?”
“About whether I should shoot you or not.”
“What?” he said, surprised and angry but certainly not scared. “I don’t even know you. Who’re you working for?”
“Right now I’m working for myself,” I said.
“So what’s your problem?”
Vinny steered the Caddy under the railroad bridge, then around the ramp onto southbound I-25. He kept our speed at fifty-four miles an hour. Cars zipped past as if we were crawling.
“My problem, Paulie, is that you sent a pair of goons to terrorize my friends and I’m not very happy about it.”
“You hear that, Vinny? He’s not happy.”
“I heard him, Mr. DaNucci. You want me to do it now?”
“Not yet, Vinny.”
“Not ever, Vinny,” I said. “Either one of your hands comes off the wheel and I blow your boss’s head all over the windows.”
“Just say the word, Mr. DaNucci.” Vinny acted as if he hadn’t heard me.
“So, who are these friends of yours?” Fat Paulie asked me conversationally.
“Eunice Zenkowski and her boyfriend, Milton.”
Fat Paulie shrugged under his overcoat. “Never heard of them.”
“Maybe you don’t know their names, but you know who they are. You sent Johnny Toes Burke and—”
“Johnny Toes? Hah! That little prick don’t work for me no more. I got rid of him when I found out he was selling drugs to kids. He’d do anything for a dollar. I fired him what, Vinny, a year ago?”
“At least a year, Mr. DaNucci.”
“There, you see?” Fat Paulie said. “So what else is on your mind, you dumb shit?”
“You’ve got a nasty mouth for a guy who could get blown away at any moment.”
Fat Paulie snorted. “Number one, you’re not gonna shoot me or you woulda done it back there in the parking lot. And number two, I called you a dumb shit because number one, you gotta be a dumb shit to pull something like this, and number two, I don’t know your name.”
“Jacob Lomax.”
“Lomax. What the hell kind of name is that?”
“A last name.”
“You hear that, Vinny? A comedian.”
“I heard.”
“Okay, so, Mr. Jacob Lomax, now you know that I never heard of your friends, and you know that Johnny Toes don’t work for me anymore, so now can we all go home and go to sleep? It’s late.”
“Nice try, Paulie, but I happen to know you sent those two clowns to my friend’s apartment.” I didn’t know it at all. “And after that they paid me a visit.”
“You don’t listen so good, do you, Mr. Jacob Lomax? What’ve I just been telling you? Okay, wait, let me ask you something—Why would I send a guy who don’t work for me anymore to push around—is that what he did, push?—to push around some people I never heard of? Tell me why.”
“To get Joseph Bellano’s books.”
“Books? What books?”
“His bookmaking records. Mainly his accounts receivable.”
“What, are you kidding me? I don’t have enough trouble right now with my records and an upcoming trial that I gotta be collecting another guy’s records?”
“They’re worth a lot of money,” I said, but I was beginning to lose my conviction.
“Maybe to a cheapie like Johnny Toes they’re worth money, but not to me. To me they’d be more trouble than they’re worth. I’ve got all the accounts I can handle.”
I was beginning to believe him.
“You’re telling me Johnny Toes did that on his own?”
“I’m not telling you anything,” Fat Paulie said. “You’re the one doing the telling. But it looks that way, doesn’t it? One thing that surprises me, though, is that I didn’t think Johnny Toes had the guts to push anybody around, much less a guy your size. Which reminds me, why don’t you put away the gun? Your hand must be getting tired.”
It was, but I kept it pointed at DaNucci’s grand belly.
“Johnny Toes had help,” I said. “A bruiser named Bruno.”
“Bruno Tartalia?”
“I didn’t catch his last name.”
“A big ugly guy with dead eyes?”
“That’s him.”
“You’re maybe lucky you’re alive there, Mr. Jacob Lomax. This Bruno is a very nasty character, especially if he doesn’t get what he wants.”
“So you do know him.”
“Sure I know him. He used to work for me. For a very short time. Then I fired him. Actually, I asked him to resign, because with a guy like Bruno, you don’t want to get him too upset.”
“I coulda handled him, Mr. DaNucci.”
“Sure you could,” Fat Paulie said to the back of Vinny’s head. Then he glanced at me, rolled his eyes, and shook his head, like one parent to another. “The trouble with Bruno,” he said to me, “was that he’d forget himself. Like he’d forget that all I wanted him to do was talk to a guy and ask him why he was late with an interest payment. Just talk to him. Scare him with his looks. Not break both the guy’s arms so the guy couldn’t even go to work to pick up his paycheck, much less endorse the damn thing.”
Fat Paulie shook his head and chuckled to himself, his round body moving under his coat.
“The government wants to do something about Iran,” he said, “they should fly Bruno over there and tell him all of them owe us money, then drop him out of the plane. Couple of weeks that whole country’d be a hospital ward.”
When nobody laughed, Fat Paulie sighed.
“Yeah, well,” he said. Then, “So Bruno and Johnny Toes are after poor Joe’s books, huh?”
“‘Poor Joe.’ Like he was a friend of yours.”
“As a matter of fact, he was. It was a terrible thing that happened to him. I’d like to get my hands on whoever did it.”
“Some people think you did it.”
Fat Paulie jerked around in his seat, and for a moment I thought he was going to attack me. I raised the Magnum so he could see it better.
“That’s bullshit!” he yelled at me. “Do you hear me? Joe Bellano, God rest his soul, was my friend since we were practically kids.”
“He told me you were afraid he’d testify against you.”
“Afraid? More bullshit. I knew he’d never testify against me. He was an honorable man. Besides, he couldn’t hurt me no matter what he said, not at the trial, not anywhere. My lawyers already told me not to worry about the trial. Now you tell me something. What’s your connection with Joe Bellano?”
“He hired me to find his daughter the day before he was murdered.”
Fat Paulie blinked at me a couple of times.
“I knew there was a private dick trying to track down Joe’s kid. So that’s you, huh?”
“How did you know that?”
“You hear things,” Fat Paulie said. “You wanna put away the piece now? I think maybe we’re on the same side.”
“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t see how. “But now that I’ve threatened you, maybe I need the gun for protection.”
“That gun would do him a lot o
f good, wouldn’t it, Vinny?”
Vinny laughed. Fat Paulie joined him.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” Fat Paulie said. “Vinny, turn us around.”
Vinny took the next exit, then swung us under the freeway and back up the on-ramp heading north. I knew now that Johnny Toes Burke and Bruno Tartalia were working on their own. I also realized I’d been sidetracked from my main objective—locating Stephanie Bellano—by my own desire for revenge. I’d harassed Fat Paulie for nothing. The problem was that I had harassed him. I’d have to start checking the Olds for bombs.
“So,” Fat Paulie said to me as if I’d been wrong about that and we really were pals, “have you had any luck looking for Joe’s kid, what’s her name, Stephanie?”
“Not much,” I said.
“God, poor Angela. She must be going crazy. I know, I’ve got three daughters. Of course, they’re all grown now, with families of their own.”
I figured next he’d show me pictures. Maybe we were pals.
So I told him about the four customers and Big Pine and the church near Wray. I told him there was probably a connection between Stephanie’s running and Bellano’s death. I also told him about the only connection I’d found: Both Stephanie’s father and her ex-employer in Big Pine had been murdered with military weapons.
“The cops traced the bomb—it was a land mine—to a theft at the armory last year.”
“No shit?” Fat Paulie tugged at his fat bottom lip. “This armory thing—” he said. “Let’s say I know a guy who knows a guy who can tell me where that stuff went. Would that help?”
“It might.”
Fat Paulie nodded. “If I hear something, I’ll call you.”
I put away my gun, tentatively, then dug out a card. Fat Paulie held it up as if it were a rare stamp.
“Hey, Vinny, he’s got business cards and everything.”
“I’m impressed,” Vinny said.
We drove back to Giancio’s. I opened my door but didn’t get out.
“I apologize for threatening you, Paulie.”
“Believe me, Mr. Jacob Lomax, you were never a threat. The main thing is, you find Angela Bellano’s kid.”
“Right. And what do you mean I was never a threat?”
“He’s curious, Vinny.”
The Dead of Winter (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 3) Page 16