by Thomas Perry
Lorenz hesitated, then began. “You have to understand that this is the biggest disaster for our department in the last hundred years.”
Hamp answered, “I understand. We can …” he sensed that he was in danger again. “I can assure you that I haven’t any intention of letting what you tell me go into wide dissemination, and I’m not interested in the details of what went wrong. I’m interested in the murderer.” The tension seemed to go out of the big dog. She kept her eyes on him for another moment, then looked at her master without lifting her head.
“He hot-wired a car from North American Watch and drove it to the front of the house so the occupants would see it and open the door to him. After that we don’t know the exact order of events—no witnesses, no prints—but here’s what I think. He got them to believe there was some danger, and Mantino and Sobell picked up guns from the gun cabinet in the living room. When Sobell headed for the back of the house with a thirty-ought-six, he shot him in the back of the head. Sobell had to be the first, because it’s pretty hard to do that to a man carrying a loaded weapon if he knows you’re coming. Then he shot Mantino five times in the chest and the front of the head before Mantino could get a shot off.”
“What next?”
“He kept his head, created confusion and got out. He behaved like a real soldier.”
Hamp held Martha in the corner of his eye as he spoke. “I’m interested in this man.” Martha cocked an ear, but there was no agitation. It was just like trying to beat a lie detector, he realized, and pushed on. “Is there anything in this to indicate where he came from, or where he’ll go next?”
“Nothing,” said Lorenz. “In the early fall there are about a thousand hotel rooms available, and about forty percent are rented. We’re pretty close to having all of them accounted for. We’re working on the planes and trains and buses. I’d say he drove in, did his job, then drove out without attracting any attention. He’s got nothing to worry about from anybody around here.”
“Who was Sobell?”
“Male Caucasian, six-one, one-eighty-five, good build, broken nose, lots of his prints on the guns in the cabinet. He was licensed as a private detective, but I can’t find any indication he worked at it much. I think he was a bodyguard.” Lorenz and his dog watched Hamp closely.
Hamp leaned forward. “Do you have any idea why Mantino hired a bodyguard instead of a member of his own organization? Was he afraid of something?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. It got him, though, didn’t it?”
Hamp thought about it. If Mantino was afraid of a paid assassin who used to work for the Mafia, it made a lot of sense. The one who gains the most is the one standing closest when the body falls. But he couldn’t allow Lorenz to start asking him questions. Even if he managed to compose answers, the dog would smell his tension and premeditation and turn on him. “What was missing from the house?”
Lorenz gave Hamp a wry look. “Nothing. Kind of odd, isn’t it? The theory is that he didn’t have time, or made more noise than he’d expected to.”
Hamp recognized that Lorenz was better than he looked—not as an investigator, because anybody could see it wasn’t a botched robbery, but as a cop. He had been pondering the murder, stewing about it for two days, and using the time to look, listen and evaluate. He had found the discrepancies between the official story he was paid to help concoct to keep publicity down and what his common sense told him was true. Now he was working on his own theory. If he was working on it alone, then all he could do was get in the way. But if he was good, there was some small chance that it might lead him, not to the predator who had made a brief and relatively harmless stop in this little community, but to Mantino’s associates. This good man could have no more idea than his dog did what it would mean to bring himself to the attention of those people right now. Hamp eyed the dog and determined to discourage him.
“He wasn’t trying to rob him,” said Hamp. “Washington is sure of that much.” Elizabeth was, at least. The dog sensed Hamp’s discomfort and turned its head to face him. In a moment, he knew, it would slowly align its body with its head, aimed toward him. “It was a hit.”
Lorenz nodded. “Okay. So what?”
“So his death doesn’t fit the standard motivation of an ordinary murder. I don’t know why he was killed, and we might not know for years, but it wasn’t a local matter. Do you understand?”
Lorenz reserved judgment. “Tell me.”
“I’m asking you not to go out and pursue any leads on your own. If something comes up, turn it over to the FBI.” Hamp was tempted to try to frighten him, but he could tell this was not a man who allowed himself to be frightened; to threaten him would just ensure that he would never drop the case.
Lorenz sighed in frustration, and the dog looked confused. Was her master angry at this stranger? She decided not to take any chances. Hamp watched as her big, muscular body sidestepped into line with the head, so that she was hunched on the couch, ready to spring at him if her master triggered the impulse. “Fair enough,” said Lorenz.
“Do I have your word?” asked Hamp. The dog smelled the tension and her master’s uncertainty. She hunched lower and her upper lip twitched, as though she could already imagine the taste.
“Yes,” Lorenz said finally.
Hamp smiled. “Good,” he said, and he meant it. He felt the tension begin to go out of him. “I appreciate it.” He stood up and took a step toward the door, then stopped and patted Martha’s shoulder hard. He could feel the muscle and bone under the fur, like a man’s upper arm. A tongue like a wet slice of ham slipped out between the lower teeth, and the thick tail whipped back and forth.
As Hamp walked to the door, Lorenz shook his hand. “Now, that’s something,” he said. “She doesn’t like people much, but she sure likes you.”
* * *
Hamp sat on the bed and looked above him at the big, crude wooden lintel beam over the door that led to the bathroom. There were lots of Spanish touches in La Fonda, little colored designs hand-painted in unlikely places on the white walls, and even the walls themselves, a foot and a half thick on the outside. It was the sort of building that conveyed a sense of security.
Hamp had seen curiosity take some strange forms in his time, and if a man like Peter Mantino was dead, it was conceivable that some of the people who felt close to him were in town. If they were, none of them would be above bugging the room of a Justice Department field man just to see if his leads were any better than theirs. He decided that all he could do was to turn on the television set to mask some of what he was going to say.
When Elizabeth Waring answered, her voice was almost a whisper. “Hello,” said Hamp. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Jack?”
“That’s right. I just finished up with the local police here. They don’t have much to go on, but the best guess is a lone man who probably didn’t have anything in mind except to kill Mantino, The second best guess is what’s going in the papers.”
“What’s that?”
“A robber impersonated a security guard to gain entry, found the victims armed and had to kill them to get out.”
“Do you think it’s the same man?”
“I don’t know that two crimes are enough to establish a reliable pattern.”
She sighed deeply enough so he could hear it. “Jack, yesterday I used up a favor in Personnel to look into who you are. I know you probably don’t expect much from me, but please don’t let that keep you from telling me what you think—not what you know, because nobody really knows anything yet. Because I found out I can expect a lot from you, and I’m going to need it.”
Hamp ran this through a second time, and it surprised him. She was manipulating him with flattery. It was exactly what he would have done if he were the one stuck in Washington. She could easily be one of those blondes with long, straight, shiny hair and light, empty eyes who could look at you without blinking and dazzle you with bullshit. “Ninety-nine to one it’s him.”
“Why?”
“There aren’t a whole lot of people who would do it this way. It takes a certain kind of person to walk into the other fellow’s home ground, look him in the eye, drop the hammer on him and walk away. See, Talarese and Mantino were both people he knew probably weren’t alone. If he knew who they were, then he’d know they were as likely to be armed as he was. It’s not like the sort of thing a psycho does, where he wants to watch some defenseless victim get scared and suffer and all that so he can feel powerful. It’s the opposite. He knows he’s outnumbered and probably being hunted, and he has to be sure because he can’t hang around and try again. He does it this way because he knows that the other fellow is going to take a second or two stuttering and fumbling, and he knows he isn’t. You hear what I’m saying, right? He knows he isn’t.”
There was a pause on Elizabeth’s end of the line that sounded as though she were thinking hard. “What’s he doing now?”
“I think he’s already done it. He wouldn’t have booked a Hong Kong flight if he wasn’t trying to get away. I think the reason he went after Mantino has something to do with that. Maybe it was a payoff to somebody to get him out: Mantino had an outsider for a bodyguard, which to me means that he didn’t trust somebody in his own organization. But it’s just as likely that our boy simply wanted to get everybody in an uproar so they’d be too busy putting in bulletproof glass to go out and look for him.”
“Welcome aboard, Jack.”
“What?”
“You just figured out as much about the way he thinks as anybody else knows after ten years.”
“Save the congratulations.”
“Why?”
“Because if I get too good at this, sometime I just might get a look at him.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I might waste a second or two making up my mind.”
The New Mexico experience had been a disaster. He couldn’t keep putting himself in positions where some scared cop could pop him in the dark.
Eddie Mastrewski had been the world’s greatest advocate of caution. Wolf could see Eddie again, fat and sweating, his eyes bulging and the veins in his forehead visible as he drove the car onto the highway outside St. Louis. “That wasn’t right, kid,” he had said, glancing up at the rearview mirror, then down at the boy, then into the mirror, then into the other mirror so often that the road in front of him seemed only an afterthought. It was at this moment that the boy had begun to worry. Eddie looked as though he were about to explode. The boy had seen piles of internal organs in the butcher shop, but had only a cloudy notion of how they worked. He thought that the pumping of Eddie’s heart was increasing the pressure in his body, and that if it didn’t stop, he would have a heart attack, which in the boy’s mind meant an explosion of the pump.
“We do this for a living,” said Eddie. “It’s not some kind of contest. We can’t go around getting into gunfights.” The boy had nodded sagely for Eddie’s benefit, and watched him start to settle down slowly.
The boy’s part of it had gone as Eddie had planned. He had sat in the back of the movie theater next to some boys his age, and Mancuso hadn’t even noticed him. To all the adults, he had just seemed to be one of a gang of kids who had come together from the neighborhood to see the movie. When Mancuso got up in the middle of the movie to go to the upstairs bathroom, the boy had followed.
He hadn’t wanted to follow because he was getting interested in the images on the huge screen at the front. The movie was La Dolce Vita, and he could still remember the moment when he’d had to walk out. It was dawn somewhere outside Rome after a night of incomprehensible carousing, and Marcello Mastroianni had climbed onto some woman’s back and was riding her like a horse on the grass. The boy had no clear notion of what was going on, or if indeed it really was going on or was just some foreign way of conveying decadence. It was the only image he now retained of the film thirty years later, because it was what had been on the screen as he had glanced over his shoulder when he reached the aisle. He had longed to stay at least until the scene changed, because although it had never happened in any movie he had ever seen, he had some forlorn hope that somebody was about to have sexual intercourse, or at least that the woman was about to become naked through some happy act of negligence. Even he could see that the rules were different for foreign movies—he had never seen Doris Day and Rock Hudson behave like this—and he hated to leave without knowing.
Because of this he was annoyed with Mancuso when he followed him into the men’s room in the loge. But when he had opened the door, he had forgotten about the movie. Mancuso hadn’t gone in to relieve himself; he had gone in to meet two other men. When the boy walked in, all three had turned to face him, jerking their heads in quick unison like a flock of birds. The boy had looked away from them and gone straight to the urinal because he couldn’t imagine any other act that would explain his presence. He had stood there, straining to coax some urine out of himself. Could they tell he wasn’t pissing? The three had moved away to the end of the room. He could hear their leather soles on the hard white tiles. Mancuso gave the two men crinkly envelopes, and then the men left, swinging the door against the squeaky spring that was supposed to hold it closed.
As Mancuso went to wash his hands at the sink, the boy had wondered why. But Mancuso was using it as an excuse for standing in front of the mirror and admiring his thick brown hair. Then he had run his wet hands through the hair and taken out a black plastic comb. The boy had tried to stop time, to hold everything the way it was while he decided, but it didn’t work.
Mancuso put the comb in the breast pocket of his suit and turned to dry his hands on the filthy rolling towel. The boy turned with him, took the revolver out of his jacket and aimed at the base of his skull. When he fired, the noise was terrible and bright and hollow in the little room. Then he dashed out, as much to escape the ringing in his ears as the corpse. But in the dim light of the small, orange, flame-shaped bulbs mounted on the walls of the mezzanine, he saw his mistake.
The two men hadn’t left at all. They had been waiting just outside the door for Mancuso to join them, and now they pulled guns out of their suit coats and aimed them at the boy. He remembered the puzzled face of one of them, a tall, thin man with a long nose. He looked at the boy, then past him as though he expected someone else to come out of the men’s room. The boy ran.
Years later he understood that it was probably the only thing that had saved him. To pull out the gun again, even to stand in one place long enough to allow the two men to think, would have doomed him. But he ran down the stairs to the lobby, where Eddie was just coming out of the swinging double doors with some scared ushers and three other middle-aged men in hats and long overcoats. At first the boy thought that Eddie had been caught, because they looked like plainclothes cops. But when the two men with guns had appeared behind him on the stairway, everybody but Eddie ran back into the theater. Only the boy and Eddie fired. Both of them aimed at the same man and hit him, and left the other to get off two or three shots over the railing. He was too cunning, because he fired at the big glass door to the street, where Eddie and the boy should have been, instead of into the lobby, where they were. The boy aimed again, but then the railing was a blur because he was being snatched off his feet and hustled through the pile of broken glass into the street.
Eddie had been right to do it. Eddie was a born foot soldier. He always kept in the front of his brain the certainty that anyone who thought he had a valid reason to put his head up when the air was full of flying metal was an idiot. And now it was time for Wolf to put his head down.
It had taken him two days of driving to reach Buffalo, and he felt a kind of empty-headed euphoria to be able to stand and walk. His right foot was cramped and stiff, and the tendon behind his right knee felt stretched and rubbery. He walked along Grant Street and studied the buildings. They hadn’t changed in the ten years since he had seen them except for the signs, so there was some hope. When he had
arrived in Buffalo he had found it gripped by some kind of madness. The center of the downtown section had been bulldozed and sandblasted, and now lived a strange, mummified, decorative existence, with a set of trolley tracks running down Main Street and a lot of lights to verify the first impression that there was nobody on the sidewalks. They had hosed the dirty, dangerous occupants out of Chippewa Street and turned the buildings into the core of some imaginary theater district.
The whole business alarmed him. What could have become of the old man if there was some urban-renewal craziness going on? But the juggernaut had obviously run its course before it reached Grant Street. The respectable blue-collar sections obviously hadn’t struck anybody in city hall as a priority, and they retained their ancient gritty integrity.
When he had been here on business with Eddie when he was sixteen, they had driven by the house slowly, but didn’t stop. “What is it?” he had asked. Eddie had answered, “There’s a man in there who makes people disappear. He’s black—sort of brown and leathery like my shoes, and he’s about a thousand years old. Remember where it is. Never write it down, just remember.”