Silent Scream df-6

by Michael Collins

  The cause of it was Andy Pappas seated in a red plastic chair. He waved me in.

  “Take a seat, Dan.”

  Little Max Bagnio was against his usual wall, and Levi Stern sat near Bagnio, watching them all as if in some zoo. My escort, Charley, crossed to the only other person in the room. She was a delicate-boned woman in her late forties, dressed in expensive ladies-luncheon clothes that didn’t suit her. Plump and awkward, she looked like she’d be happier in a kitchen cooking pasta.

  “Maybe you never met my wife, too, Dan?” Andy said.

  It was an introduction, statement, and slap. He knew Mia had hired me, I should have told him, and his wife was here.

  “Mrs. Pappas,” I said.

  My voice seemed to startle her. In all the years I’d never met her, and if she had a name, it wasn’t important. Andy’s wife, period. Her colorless face must have been pretty once, like a doll, but it was permanently subdued by some force around her-Andy. He smiled at her, and at me.

  “Mia paid you, Dan?”

  “She paid me.”

  “Smart girl, my Mia. Only twenty-two, runs her own business. The job she hired is over, Dan?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She fired me.”

  “She got her money’s worth? You did the job she wanted?”

  “She fired me before I finished.”

  Andy shook his head. “That’s bad business, right? What do you figure she was going to do with what you dug up?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Andy.”

  “Sure you do. She was going to fix my wagon, right? I think she ought to get her money’s worth. Only save time, Dan, tell what you’ve got to report to my wife straight out.”

  The older woman looked confused and stricken at the same time. As if she wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere out of the light. I said nothing.

  “Okay,” Andy said, “I’ll tell her. Mia paid for it.” He turned to his wife. She looked afraid, but didn’t know of what, and didn’t want to know. Andy said, “Mia hired him to take pics of me, Stella. With a girl. She was going to show you the pics, tell you all about the girl and me, open your eyes, make me stop. How about that, Stel?”

  Stella Pappas went pale, then red. She stared at Mia. She walked to the girl and slapped her across the face. Mia fell back a step from her mother. Levi Stern moved. Little Max put a hand on him, held him down. Stella Pappas slapped Mia again.

  “You spy on your father?” the mother said. Her voice was a surprise. Clear and American, no accent. “Who said you had the right? You thought I’d like that? I’d thank you?”

  “Ma!” Mia cried. “He-!”

  “Don’t you judge your father! You’re a child!”

  Andy watched the two women. He made a sound, motioned his wife away, pointed at Mia as if pinning her to the wall.

  “What I do is between your mother and me, no one else. You don’t even think about what I do. Whatever, you hear? Your Ma and me. You got that now, kid?”

  Mia nodded, but her big eyes were almost black with anger. Her father’s daughter. Andy seemed to consider her. In a way, I knew, he would admire her defiance, but he had to deal with it, too. He stood up, walked to her, and slapped her. Hard.

  “That’s for hiring a snooper to do anything,” Andy said, cold and sharp. “You never do that again. Never!”

  I was watching them, Andy and Mia, and didn’t see anything until I heard the noise behind me. I turned. So did Andy. Charley yellow-gloves had his gun out. The women shrank back.

  Levi Stern was up on his feet. Little Max Bagnio was up, too, but not on his feet. Stern had Bagnio around the throat with his left arm. Little Max was off the floor, gagging and kicking air like a hung chicken, helpless in Stern’s grip. Stern had Little Max’s. 45 automatic in his right hand.

  “You!” Andy snapped. “Drop him!”

  I guessed what had happened. When Andy slapped Mia, Stern had jumped up again, and Little Max had put a hand on him to hold him down again. This time Stern had used his judo, his training, and Little Max never knew what hit him. Snared like a rabbit, his gun taken like candy. Pappas’s number-one gun, but no match for Stern.

  “I do not like to be interfered with,” Stern said, his gaunt face neither smiling nor snarling, expressionless. “Instruct your hoodlums, Mr. Pappas, and do not slap Mia again.”

  Andy isn’t used to being put down, even opposed, but he’s not so blinded by power that he’ll attack when he can’t win. He saw that Little Max, with all his deadly experience, was no match for Stern. He didn’t believe it, but he saw it. He saw that Charley and his gun couldn’t stop Stern without Max getting hurt, or maybe everyone. A stand-off, or worse.

  “Charley,” Andy said, “put it away. Let Max go, Stern.”

  The underboss lowered his gun. Stern waited, tall and skinny, but holding Max Bagnio like a toy.

  “Levi, let him go,” Mia Morgan said. She sounded annoyed, but almost pleased, too. Even as surprised as Andy.

  “Put the gun away, damn it!” Andy said to Charley.

  Charley holstered the gun. Levi Stern released Little Max, but still held Max’s automatic. Little Max walked to stand behind Pappas, rubbing his throat. He said nothing, looked at Stern as if to remember him, but with respect.

  “You’ve had your family discussion, Mr. Pappas,” Stern said. “You can leave now.”

  “Yeh,” Andy said, and to Mia, “Don’t forget it, kid.”

  Levi Stern held Max’s gun out to him. Stern didn’t think anyone was going to shoot now, and he wasn’t worried about anything else they could do. We left him alone with Mia.

  On the dark street, Stella Pappas and Charley got into the black car. Little Max stood apart, still rubbing his throat, while Andy smiled at me on the sidewalk, looked up toward the lighted windows of his daughter’s apartment.

  “That’s some Jew she’s got,” Andy said.

  “Commando type,” I said. “Maybe you could use him.”

  “Maybe, except Mia wouldn’t like that,” he said. “All closed up now, Dan? You got nothing more to work on for Mia or Wood? All in the open, right? No secrets, no clients.”

  “What did you find out about Sid Meyer?”

  “Not a thing. They weren’t my boys, no trace of imported talent we can find.”

  “They came from somewhere.”

  His eyes glinted in the dark. “Let the cops handle it, Dan. It’s not a job for you. No client, no reason, no stake in it. I’ll drive you home, then it’s over. I don’t see you again.”

  “I’ll walk,” I said.

  When the black car had driven away, I started to walk south in the cold night. I walked a long way. Captain Gazzo would say the same as Pappas-it wasn’t a job for me, Sid Meyer’s murder. They were right. A private detective has no business messing in gang killings, or crimes by pros, or any kind of “public” crime. No business investigating without a client. I didn’t want to anyway. Sid Meyer was nothing to me, he was public property. If there was anything still hidden around Mia Morgan or Hal Wood, I didn’t want to know about it. I had no concern in it.

  As Pappas said, it was over. We were both wrong.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 11

  A few days later I got a job from an old man who ran a delicatessen on Third Avenue. His grandson, who worked in the store and went to college nights, had left his apron and classes and disappeared. The old man wanted the boy to come home.

  It took me a week to trace the grandson to a communal farm outside Los Angeles. He had a girl with him. He was a nice kid, she was a nice girl, and they wanted to work on the farm. I told the old man. The boy was his only relative, he had big hopes for him, and he was heartbroken. What could you do? The old man paid me, I had most of Mia Morgan’s thousand, and I wanted some peace and clean air. I went north to the snow.

  With one arm I don’t ski or skate well, and my money was limited, so I picked Great Barrington, Mass. The food was good in a boarding house, it was quiet, and I liked to walk in the snow
woods. I stayed two weeks, eating, sleeping, and walking in the woods. I tried to forget the city, clear the grime and the crime from my brain. Why did I stay in New York anyway, with Marty gone? Maybe I should find a ship, ship out, try being a sailor again.

  I was thinking about where I could ship to, maybe on a South American voyage, and walking in the woods, when I saw him coming across the snow toward me. It was three weeks since Andy Pappas had kissed me off, and I wasn’t happy when I recognized who it was walking up to me. John Albano.

  “How’d you find me?” I said. “Mia fired me.”

  “I asked around,” Albano said. “Your friend Joe Harris.”

  “He’s not supposed to tell.”

  “He thought it was important enough, Mr. Fortune.”

  His turtle-neck was black, he wore the same light topcoat even here, and his hair was whiter than the snow. It was still hard to believe he was seventy, solid in the snow like a short, wide tree. He watched some skiers in the far distance across the snow, didn’t even blink in the wind.

  “You knew Mia was Andy Pappas’s daughter all along,” I said. “That’s why you advised me. Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “I don’t interfere, not directly. Not when I didn’t know why she hired you. Maybe it had nothing to do with Andy.”

  “Just indirectly? General advice, keep watch on her?”

  “Mia is my granddaughter, Mr. Fortune.”

  “Granddaughter? Then… You mean Andy Pappas is-?”

  “Stella Pappas is my daughter. Andy was my son-in-law.”

  “Was?” I said. “He got the divorce already?”

  “Andy’s dead, Mr. Fortune. Shot down three days ago.”

  All right, no big surprise. Not for the shooting of Andy Pappas. A little, Andy had been boss a long time. I’m not a hypocrite, the world would be better off, but I’d been mixed with Andy too recently to ignore it. And I’d known him a long time. When someone you know dies, even Andy Pappas, a small part of you goes with him.

  “Two men?” I said. “Professionals?”

  “Professional enough,” Albano said. “I want to hire you.”

  “For a gang killing? What do I care?”

  “Maybe not a gang killing,” John Albano said. “The girl was murdered, too. Diana Wood. They were shot together.”

  I walked back to the boarding house for my things. John Albano drove me toward New York in his car.

  “The police are asking questions about Mia, about Stella,” John Albano said. “A Captain Gazzo took Mia downtown for questioning because she hired you.”

  “Hate and anger are good motives. Jealousy.”

  “Hate and jealousy would fit the husband, too.”

  I’d thought of that. I also thought of Sid Meyer and maybe some big deal. Greed, revenge, and fear are good motives.

  “Max Bagnio was on guard in the apartment vestibule,” John Albano said. “Now he’s missing.”

  Little Max? A new loyalty? “There’s an underboss. Close to Andy. Charley something, wears yellow gloves.”

  “Charley Albano,” the old man said, watched the highway.

  “Your son?”

  “He means no more to me than any of them.”

  “Them? What are you, Albano?”

  “An engineer, Mr. Fortune. Honest, I hope, and on my own. A normal man. It’s too late for my son and daughter, but I’ve got a granddaughter who’s going to be normal. I want you to help Mia, find the truth.”

  I said nothing more, and the snow on the ground got dirtier as we neared New York.

  When I walked into Centre Street, Gazzo was on his way out. He scowled at me. It must have been a bad three days.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’m going up there.”

  We rode in the back of his car. He carried a large, flat envelope, stared out at the city as if it had failed him.

  “He’d filed for the divorce, set Diana Wood up in this apartment,” he said. “About two A.M. Andy and the girl were alone in the apartment. Guard in the corridor, Bagnio downstairs. Someone shot the guard in the corridor, shot up Andy and the girl. With an automatic rifle.”

  “Gang war? Sid Meyer, now Pappas?”

  “The Diana Wood girl just caught in the cross fire? Maybe. I’ve been waiting for the next killing. But there hasn’t been one. Nothing except Max Bagnio’s vanishing act. Quiet.”

  If he had a reason to doubt a gang war beyond the absence of a second killing, he’d tell me in his own time.

  We turned into a quiet block of Twelfth Street off Fifth Avenue, and stopped in front of a four-story brownstone in a row of brownstones. On the sidewalk I looked up at the building.

  “Hard to guard,” I said. “Open and ordinary.”

  “I guess the girl wanted a quiet place,” Gazzo said. “No guard in the apartment with them. Trying to please the girl, his vigilance down. Someone took advantage.”

  “If they never made a mistake, they’d never get killed.”

  The vestibule was narrow, carpeted stairs going up.

  “Max Bagnio was here inside the vestibule,” Gazzo said.

  “You talked to Bagnio after the killings?”

  “He came to Centre Street the next day. Vanished after that.”

  We went up to the top floor. There were no corridor windows, only two apartments on each floor. The top landing was straight and clear, and the stairs went on up to a door out to the roof. We stopped at the door of the rear apartment.

  “The corridor guard was out here in front of the broken door,” Gazzo said. “Shot up good.”

  Inside, the apartment was a large living room, with a bathroom, small kitchen, and single bedroom off it on the far side. The furniture was new and rich. We went into the bedroom.

  “Just the way we found it,” Gazzo said.

  A blue-and-white bedroom, Andy hadn’t spared the cost, and a wreck now. The dark red of dried blood splattered the wall behind an enormous bed, stained the blue rug and the unmade bed itself. Two tall lamps and a mirrored dressing table had been smashed. Andy’s clothes lay on a long blue couch. I saw no gun.

  “Andy wasn’t carrying a gun,” Gazzo read my mind. “For the girl, I guess.” He looked back through the open bedroom door to the front door directly across the living room. “They must have been asleep. The killer, or killers, shot the man in the corridor, kicked the door in, cornered Andy in here.”

  “Maybe held the man in the corridor, shot him going out.”

  “Possible. Andy still should have had some time if he wasn’t asleep. Killer just lined them up next to the bed.”

  “The bodies were beside the bed?”

  Gazzo opened his flat envelope, handed me a series of glossy photographs. Bodies in violent death are torn and bloody, seem flat and not human, as if whatever makes us human had slipped out of them. But there are some that seem just asleep, and you want to tell them to get up. Diana looked like that. Andy didn’t, his face exploded into a bloody mess. Diana wore a robe. The robe had fallen open, she was naked under it, her blonde hair flung about her dead face. Andy was naked, too.

  “She had time to put on a robe?”

  “Maybe she slept in it, women do,” Gazzo said. “Or maybe she grabbed it by reflex. A matter of seconds, modest.”

  A nice girl, gentle, and now…? I forced myself to study the photos, be objective, the detective. Diana was deeply tanned, with stark white bikini areas across her breasts and lower pelvis. Her tanned hands were lying on her belly, a pale ring mark on her right ring finger.

  “Where’d she get so tanned? She wasn’t when I saw her last.”

  “Miami. Two weeks down there, they just got back,” Gazzo said. “Max Bagnio heard the barrage, got up here in maybe twenty seconds, saw no one on the way. They must have escaped over the roofs. Bagnio checked to be sure Andy was dead, ran around the apartment. He kicked down the door of the next apartment in case the killer was hiding there, but it was empty, the tenant out. The roof door was locked inside, but it’s a spring l
ock. The roof was clean. Bagnio went to report to the mob, came in to us the next day, told his story, and vanished.”

  “Who called the police?”

  “Tenants downstairs.”

  “How’d the gunman get in the building past Little Max?”

  “We figure he had to be hiding inside somewhere. None of the tenants will admit anyone hid in their apartments, but there was another empty apartment on three.”

  “Bagnio and the other guard didn’t check the apartments?”

  “Andy wouldn’t let them bother the girl’s neighbors. They just checked the corridor and roof door and watched.”

  A risk for the sake of Diana. It had cost Andy. It had cost Diana, too-for the sake of Andy and what she wanted. An abnormal action for Andy, but, then, he’d already filed for divorce, which was abnormal already. I wondered if that had been what cost him?

  “You’ve got another reason for doubting a gang war,” I said.

  “Come on,” Gazzo said. He led me out into the corridor. He pointed at the landing, at the stairs, both down and up to the roof. “A clear view everywhere, Dan, yet the guard here was shot with his gun still in his holster. Maybe the killer was hiding in an empty apartment, got around Max Bagnio that way, but how did he get near the guard up here without a battle?”

  “You think it was someone the guard knew?”

  “And trusted. No rival mob,” Gazzo said. “I think he knew the killer, thought Max Bagnio had already passed him in.”

  “Or maybe someone was with the killer,” I said. “Stella Pappas, or Mia, or Charley Albano.”

  “Andy was getting a divorce,” Gazzo said. “This John Albano you talked about, any relation to Charley?”

  “Father. An old man, not Mafia, he says. I believe him.”

  Gazzo thought. “None of them have decent alibis. Mrs. Pappas was in town visiting an old friend, but the friend wasn’t home that night. Mia and Stern were together, out on the town, but they can’t prove where they were.”