by Thomas Perry
Elizabeth wondered if he would have said that to Jack Hamp. It wasn’t that another man would have punched him, but there was something about her being a woman that made it easier for them to behave like this. If she answered the same way, she would be a bitch. She explained patiently, “There are too many things happening at once. Some of them are contradictory, others are meaningless and some are probably fake. In any case these people don’t always make long-term plans and stick to them. When they feel threatened, they lash out at somebody, and when they see an opportunity, they take it.”
Delamo sighed. “Come on. You might as well see what we’ve got.”
He walked her over to the grove of trees and stopped where the yellow police tape was stretched from tree to tree. He pointed to the three body bags. “This one is Fratelli. Shotgun blast to the head, took off the top of the skull. Ditto this one. He was a bodyguard named Salvatore Gamuchio, age thirty-eight, twenty years of rap sheets for strong-arm robbery, extortion, assault, et cetera. He was carrying a submachine gun in his coat and a pistol in an ankle holster, neither one fired. This one over here is a puzzle. He seems to have a broken neck. The coroner will have to tell us how that happened. No identification. One of the guys said he looks familiar, but so far we can’t place him.”
“All this happened here? In the park?”
“Yeah. Lots of calls from people living around here—loud gunshots, yelling, the whole bit. Units in the area responded, but this is a big park, and by the time they could sweep it with lights nobody was standing up anymore, so the patrolmen didn’t find them until they walked the area on foot.”
“Have you figured out … how?”
“I think some people over there in the trees shot them with shotguns. With the exception of this one. How he died I can’t imagine.”
Another voice came out of the darkness behind them. “Lieutenant …”
He turned toward it in a leisurely way. “Yeah?”
“We found a shotgun over there in the bushes.”
“Anything interesting about it?”
“No, sir. Twelve-gauge Remington pump. Not sawed-off or anything.”
“I know I don’t need to say this, but be careful with it. I’d sure like to get a print off it.” As the patrolman walked away, Delamo turned to Elizabeth. “I guess that eliminates looking for a man with a shotgun.”
“Lieutenant?”
As Delamo turned in the other direction, Elizabeth had a sense of what a Homicide lieutenant’s life must be like. They would bring him items one after another, and he would evaluate them and sort of put them into his pockets. “Yeah?”
“They just called in with the IDs on the other ones.”
“And?”
“The two on Grant Street were Fratelli’s too. The house was owned by the old man they found in the river.”
“Thanks,” Delamo said, then turned to Elizabeth. “I think your theory’s starting to look a little weak.”
“Why?”
“Well, there’s an old black man we found in the river about suppertime with a thirty-eight bullet in his head. It seems that two other guys got killed in his house. With one or more shotguns. Then you got Fratelli and Salvatore Gamuchio, and this other guy who got his neck broken. All in the space of about three or four hours. It’s a lot of work.”
“Lieutenant,” came another voice. “We got some more blood way over there.”
“Get a bunch of it on slides,” Delamo said, “and then look for some more bodies. I think we’re going to have to drag the damned lake as soon as the sun comes up.”
“I think there may be some way to drain it,” said the voice.
“Find out. Call the Parks Department.”
“Right.”
Delamo turned back to Elizabeth. “I guess that once again the ‘lone gunman’ theory doesn’t hold up.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I don’t care who this no-name-no-description guy is. It’s pretty unlikely that he came in ail by himself and wasted six-plus men in at least three locations in three different ways in one night, And if he came here because he hated Angelo Fratelli, he would have killed Angelo Fratelli. He wouldn’t have killed three men who worked for Fratelli first. Do you disagree with that?”
“I’d have to know what he was thinking to answer that.” Oh, God, she thought. I’m only a few hours behind him, and this man is sending the police to look for a gang while he wastes time convincing me.
“How do you think one man could do all that?”
“I’m not sure how,” said Elizabeth, “but I know that ten years ago a man in Las Vegas who had never laid eyes on him came to me for protection because he was afraid to go to sleep. I couldn’t blame him, because that morning we’d found nine bodies around town. The man who killed them is the one I’m looking for now.”
It wasn’t long after Ms. Waring left that McElroy appeared at Delamo’s elbow again. “We just got a radio call from downtown, Lieutenant. They said another fed will be here in a few minutes. We’re supposed to extend him every courtesy.”
Delamo turned to look at him. “What the hell is that about? Why wouldn’t we?”
“I’m just repeating what they said. The guy wants to examine the body. Fingerprints, pictures, the whole thing.”
“Didn’t you tell them we already did that? We’ve got a positive ID. It’s Fratelli.”
“Not that body. The other one—the one with the broken neck.”
Eddie Mastrewski had shown him what to do in a variety of situations that arose in their business. He remembered Eddie waking him up in the middle of the night in a hotel in Milwaukee. At first the boy had been terrified because he thought the only reason to get up in the dark was that the police had somehow found out about the man Eddie had killed by the lake. His name had been “Good Eye” Fraser. Eddie had told him it was because Fraser had lost an eye in a fight years before, and it had been replaced by a very expensive and well-crafted glass sphere. That was the good eye. The other was small, red and piercing, and Fraser moved his head like an enraged turkey to bring it to bear on his enemies, a group that seemed to include everyone it looked at. The boy had assumed the police were now moving up the two stairways quietly because only a few hours before the satisfied customers had paid Eddie in a room behind an old pool hall a mile from there. They had scarcely been able to contain their joy at Good Eye’s demise. There could be no question of Good Eye’s friends seeking vengeance, because his friends had been the customers. They had literally stopped a game of rotation on the back pool table and passed a hat around to collect the money.
The boy had leaped out of the bed, snatched his revolver out of the drawer of the nightstand and groped for his pants. At this point he had seen Eddie’s grin. “Don’t get excited. Everything’s fine,” he had said. “It’s just time to go home.” The boy had been puzzled, but Eddie was busy packing his suitcase. “We did the job and we got paid for it, but if we’re still around after a day, those guys in the pool hall are going to start wondering why. We’re dangerous now. The police might find us, and that’s bad enough, but we also showed them we could take out a man they were afraid of, and that’s even worse. They might get scared that we’ll take over and bully them the way Good Eye did, and then they’d be even worse off. Or they might get to feeling ashamed that they had to hire us, and that we did it so easy. They’ll think, If it was that easy, we should have done it ourselves, so we wasted our money. No matter what they think, it’s bad for us, so we won’t give them time to think. Anyway, it’s part of the contract. If you hang around after a job and get the customers into an uproar, you’re denying them the peace of mind they paid for, and you deserve to die. It’s only fair.”
“Fair?” The boy was still groggy from sleep, and Eddie’s reasoning was hard to follow even in broad daylight. “To kill us for that?”
“Sure,” Eddie had answered. “In this life you always get a little bit worse than you deserve, so you have to take that into
account.”
He had been a child then, and some of it was vague in his memory, but as he thought about it now, the rest of it began to come to him. It had been easy, as Eddie had said, and he realized that Eddie had probably just approached Fraser from his glass-eye side. But the part that seemed different now was the payoff in the pool hall. It hadn’t taken place in the back room, really. That was where they had made him wait while Eddie had accepted the money. His memory of it was the loud laughter and hooting coming from the men around the pool table in the front. For the first time, he remembered it as though he had seen it. Eddie sends the boy into the back room and closes the door, then walks up to the pool table and reaches into his pocket. When his hand comes out, the glass eye rolls the length of the table, looking as though it’s winking at the men gathered there. What other proof would they have asked for?
He knew what Eddie would have said about his situation at this moment: it was his own fault, so he deserved it. It was the result of what Eddie would have called a lapse of professionalism, and he would have said that it had started with The Honourable Meg. Eddie had been the ultimate pragmatist, with little time for sentiment. He had never married because it would have been foolish to imagine he could keep his second profession a secret from anyone who lived with him. He had had a series of liaisons with married women in the neighborhood whom he referred to as his “home-delivery customers.” He would go to their houses on slow afternoons, bringing some lamb chops or a roast for their husbands’ dinners, then return in a couple of hours and go back to work behind the counter. He would not have approved of The Honourable Meg.
But as Wolf searched through his memories of Eddie, he could recall nothing that would help him out of this mess. Eddie had never worked in the league where the customers were more dangerous than the jobs; he had known his limits.
Wolf realized that everything he did now would take on huge proportions in the future. There could be no more mistakes. It was time to lose the rented car. If he turned it in, he faced the risk that somebody would have had it traced through the credit card.
Just outside Cleveland, in the fringes where car lots, carpet stores and furniture warehouses marked the farthest reaches of the city, he found a huge new apartment complex. He parked the car on the street in front of it, then walked two miles down the road to a big motel and called a taxi to take him to the airport. Eventually, the people in the complex would realize that the car did not belong to somebody visiting their neighbors, or the cops would notice that it hadn’t been moved and would tow it. But that process would probably take a week. If he wasn’t out of the country by then, he would probably be dead. It was time to go see Little Norman.
Little Norman was the longest-running lounge act in Las Vegas. Each day at four o’clock in the afternoon for eighteen years, he would eat his breakfast in the back bar at the Sands, then place a two hundred percent tip on the table, stand up to his full six feet six and stroll out in a pair of cowboy boots that added two inches to his height. Today’s boots were hand-sewn iguana with carved silver toe caps and little silver imitation spurs at the heels, selected because the iguana hide went well with the Armani suit he was wearing.
As Little Norman stepped out of the bar and across the casino toward the door, the throngs of gamblers looked only at the clicking, buzzing, jingling displays on slot machines, or the brightly colored playthings on green felt tables. The only people who really watched Little Norman were some men on the walkways above the mirrors in the ceiling because they were paid to see everything, and a couple of women in the cashier’s window because they were bored. Their eyes settled on him for only a second and moved on. Little Norman was a regular, part of the garish sameness that they looked at every day.
There are places in the world where a man nearly seven feet tall, blacker than the king of the Zulus and weighing two hundred eighty pounds might well cause eyes to linger, but Las Vegas isn’t one of them. Little Norman was a familiar sight, and he never caused any trouble. If he had, it would have been very quiet and ended very quickly, because there were not many people who could have offered more than negligible resistance.
Little Norman had discovered Las Vegas in 1958, when he arrived there as the bodyguard of a boxer named Walt “The Animal” Homer. A convincing bodyguard for a celebrity who made his living beating other celebrities senseless had to be big, ugly and mean. Anyone could see that Little Norman was big and ugly enough, and the rest of his credentials came to the Las Vegas Police Department by way of his parole officer in Kansas City. Walt Homer turned out to be a bad ticket. He had his nose moved half an inch to the right in a match in Florida later that year, and the promoters decided not to invest any more in his doubtful future, so it was left in doubt no longer.
But in those days Little Norman was a warm, comforting presence for people in certain professions to have around. He met some friends of the promoters, made himself agreeable, did some favors and eventually built a place for himself in the world. By the time he returned to Las Vegas fifteen years later, it was in the position of responsibility and trust he now held.
After breakfast Little Norman always promenaded along the Strip, stopping in each of the casino lounges he passed. He would spend a few minutes in each bar, conferring with various consultants he kept on retainer—waitresses and dealers who worked in the casinos, chambermaids who worked above them and people who simply made it their business to be there because Little Norman had told them to. Whenever he had heard enough, he would reach into the pocket of the tailored suit, pull out a wad of twenty-dollar bills and strip off one note or several, depending upon the freshness and weight of what he had been told.
What Little Norman was doing was checking the weather in Las Vegas. For a number of years now—ten, to be precise—the weather had been fine. The money he paid for the recitations he heard each day came to him indirectly from fourteen old men, none of whom lived within five hundred miles of the city, who had gotten into the habit of depending on Little Norman. His job was to ensure that nothing ever happened to disturb the tranquility that had prevailed with few interruptions since their predecessors had formally agreed to it forty years ago.
Today, as Little Norman sampled the weather, he stared particularly intently at his observers and listened for mistakes. It wasn’t that any of them would be so foolish as to tell him a lie, but after so many days of clear weather, they might have missed something. As usual, he asked them who had checked in that they recognized, and who had played with a lot more money than his clothes indicated he should have. But today he also asked if there was a man of average height and build, with sand-brown hair, who seemed to be looking for someone. He would have sat watching at a remote table in the bar, or passed through the casino slowly, never gambling or talking to anybody. None of Little Norman’s people had seen such a man, so by the time he had finished his rounds at eight, he was satisfied that the weather was still fine.
At nine P.M. Little Norman’s long strides took him into Caesars Palace, where he had a light lunch with a girl named Yolanda. She claimed to be nineteen but provided him with evidence that was ambiguous. When he went to the men’s room, she tried to steal some of the money he had left under the check for the waiter. This meant that she was old enough to be squeezing each opportunity to put something away for the future, so she might have seen a sag or a wrinkle already, which argued twenty-five. But doing this also meant that she was young enough not to realize how bad that sort of behavior was for her future, because until the waiter picked it up, that money still belonged to Little Norman. He explained the distinction to her patiently, with a reassuring smile on his face, and she listened with the alertness of a rabbit. For her benefit he added that Las Vegas was going to be a cold, hard place for her if she didn’t value the goodwill of people like waiters and doormen. She demonstrated her native intelligence by openly taking the money out of her sleeve and putting it back on the table—not on the check, but under her own plate. Little Norman liked her for
that.
By eleven P.M. Little Norman was making his second circuit of the casinos. He couldn’t be everywhere, but he could seem to be. He made eye contact with everybody he saw whom he knew, so that if they had seen anything he might like to hear, they wouldn’t need to wonder where to find him.
Little Norman returned to his car in the lot at the Sands at six in the morning. It was a bright red Corvette with an engine that could do a hundred fifty if he had been reckless enough to try it. He had bought the first one he could afford in 1960, and kept trading them in ever since, always bright red, because that was the color of the first one he had seen in Kansas City; it was the color Corvettes were. He always had experienced a comfort in having more car than anybody he was likely to have to chase down.
Little Norman had lived in some of the big hotels downtown when he had first come to preserve the good weather. The fact that he could afford this luxury had appealed to him then. Now he lived in a three-bedroom house on the edge of town near an entrance to the Interstate. The fourteen old men were deeply conservative in their souls, and they didn’t trust a man who lived as though he didn’t intend to stay.
The traffic was sparse, and Little Norman drove home with only a couple of almost-stops at corners where he had mistimed the lights. He unlocked the door of his house and entered, punched the buttons on the panel in the wall to let his security system know who he was. Then he locked the door and walked into his bedroom.
Outside the window at the back of the living room that looked out on the empty swimming pool and the cactus plants, Wolf ducked into the darkness. “One-five-two-four: fifteen twenty-four.” He waited, then moved to the bedroom window, stooping to look through the crack in the blinds at Little Norman’s bedtime ritual. The big man carefully took off his clothes and boots and put them in the closet, then opened the drawer on the nightstand, pulled out a .45 ACP pistol that Wolf judged was a Beretta and slipped it under the pillow beside him. He disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes, then returned, climbed into bed and turned off the light with a remote control on the nightstand.