by Rex Miller
"It's nice to see you too. You really haven't changed a bit." She smiled and he loved it.
"You either." He thought she was a lot better-looking since the last time he'd seen her — but that was years ago. Maybe he hadn't been quite as horny back then. He would never have recognized her in a crowd and he realized immediately it was her hairdo and clothing and not her face. She'd aged beautifully. "Excuse me — just a second." He walked across to a water fountain.
"Sure." He took the Tylenol and walked back to the desk.
"We might get interrupted," she told him, "but we can go ahead and talk if you want to."
"Sure, okay. Let me just get my notes here. What can you tell me about the Laclede Landing shooting? "
"It's just like I said to the other guys, which I know you have in your files and all. I wish I could help but I really didn't get more than just a glance at them. It all happened so quickly. I heard the noise and the man hit me almost at the same time. I just saw a car. It was a car with either two or three men in it. I know I saw a gun out the right-side window in the front seat and I just have an impression of a — a shotgun, I think it was — and I can't be sure if somebody was in the backseat or not. It was all so fast."
"You got a look at the car?"
"Not really. I just have that impression. Of a gun out of a window and the firing. I couldn't even say it was a dark color car for sure. I just . . . Well, the shots hit that man and he hit me as he fell and I went into the wall and it was all over in just a second. I was getting up, trying to get up. It was kind of like if you had real bad whiplash in a car accident or something. I heard all the screaming and there was a lot of blood. I saw the men who had been shot then. And people were all crouched down and it was so frightening — I don't know —"
"That's fine. I just thought perhaps we could talk. Sometimes if you think back you can remember some little detail you might have overlooked. The appearance of the man with the gun, for example. You don't remember anything about his face?"
"I couldn't tell you if he had a beard, what nationality, nothing. I just didn't retain anything about him. Just that short shotgun sticking out the window as he fired again and how loud it was. It was enough to scare you to death. I'd never been through anything like it in my life."
"You said shotgun the first time, then short shotgun. What kind of a short shotgun? What do you mean?"
"Oh, like you see in the movies. Sawed off, I guess. It was a short gun. Not a pistol. It had one barrel, not two like some of my dad's guns. I remember this gun, oh, I do recall seeing a hand move on the gun like it was cocking it or whatever you call it. That's when I got hit, as the second shot was fired and the man got hit next to me on the sidewalk."
"Rita, I noticed in the reports you had a severe injury. Obviously you seem to be fine now." So fine, in fact.
"Yes." She smiled. "I was pretty lucky. It was weird. I thought for a day or two I was going to be in some trouble. The doctor was talking about the possibility of surgery on a disc, and I was getting kind of worried. It was very painful, like a pinched-nerve thing back here." She gestured toward the back of her neck, a move that rearranged her clothing in a most attractive way, and Eichord fought to look impassive and official as she continued telling him about X rays, and how it was better the next day, and how she was okay now.
She was warm, outgoing, genuine, sunny, affectionate-appearing, and yes, very sexy. And she was someone pleasant in a day of unpleasantness and he just stood there drinking her in. God. Rita Paul. Who'd a-thunk it. Her cheerfulness and warmth, and yes, her sexiness chipped away at his official reserve. She finally broke his icy police professionalism down but it hadn't been easy.
It had taken her a good twenty or thirty seconds of conversation. He felt like silly putty.
It wasn't only the fact that she was dynamite-looking. It was also the fact that the day was half over and he hadn't had lunch. It was the fact that this was as good as he was going to feel the rest of the day. And, too, let's be fair. It was the fact that she was DYNAMITE-LOOKING! All right. Wow! Ummm. Yes. He could no more walk away from Rita than the man in the moon could turn into cheese.
"Let's get to the bottom of this," he said in his most Sherlockian tones, saying it just to be saying something funny, then as the words came out he winced at the hidden double entendre, and she laughed sweetly, and . . . oh, shucks. The rest of the day just faded into a hazy memory, when he looked back at it. The fact that he'd walked into the office of someone who was a witness to a crime scene and ended up asking her out for coffee was merely — oh, what would you call it? — a social courtesy. Public relations. Just being friendly. Let's have a cup and talk about it. That kind of thing. A good with-it police representative wants to have cordial relations with the public as much as he possibly can, right? And Jack DESPERATELY wanted to have relations with Rita Haubrich.
What's the matter with me? he remembered thinking to himself, knowing full well the answer as a timeless Hawaiian malady coursed through his veins. Looking back on the fuzzy day all he could really recollect was that he'd had a marvelous time with this colossal-looking lady from out of their mutual past and that it hadn't turned out to be such a bad day, after all.
By the time he ended up back at Twelfth and dark it was late midday and time to do serious policework. This is why there was a federally funded Task Force sitting there throbbing, humming, purring away with its network of interfaced computer linkages. This is why the most sophisticated forensic scientists and advanced criminologists in the world called McTuff the "greatest contemporary aid to law enforcement." This is why the combined brainpower of a great metropolitan law-enforcement agency would reach out for help. It all came down to one man. The finest detective of the century.
Genius is an abused word, he thought, but perhaps it does apply in this case. The genius crime crusher of all time. Thank GOD that these people had the wisdom and the courage to reach out for Jack Eichord to help them solve these puzzling homicides.
Here is what they got that afternoon for their money. Okay, first off — unless you really have a comprehensive understanding of vector analysis, the calculus of complex mechanistic variables, the ellipsoidal harmonics of heterogeneous configurations, hypergeometric functions and orthogonal para-nomials — in other words, just your basic genius stuff — this won't seem like much to you.
First, Jack drew an enormous letter A that filled a sheet of white paper with its symmetry, and with a felt-tipped pen made it look as if it had been carved from wood, complete with knot holes and dents and gouges, and then he gave it dimension and then he shadowed in the perspective.
Next — and this was the brilliant part — he carefully printed out the names of everyone he'd come in contact with today whose first or last named ended in a letter A. SorgA, Rikla he hadn't met but he'd thought a lot about so he printed RiklA, Rita he printed with an especially neat A: RitA, printing the names so they'd sit next to each other beside the giant A which would then be the last letter of their names, you see. This is his "Big A Doodle," which took up a good ten to fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, genius that he was, he was able to listen intently to the whispered conversation around him.
He learned that the Cards were three and oh on the season, Dr. Watson, and had dropped thirteen of their last fifteen games counting regular season play. That everybody on the Cardinal bench hates Dallas. That two detectives named T. J. Monahan and Pat Skully had either a friend or colleague named Art Castor who told disgustingly gross jokes. That it was going to rain tonight. That the tomatoes were all gone.
This so inspired Eichord that he took his felt-tipped pen and began an "Art Castor Doodle." He was pleased with the intricacy of it: an ornate series of interconnected squigglies that surrounded a twenty-word transposition of the name "Art Castor," and — here's the wonderful part — made contextual sense. The sentence that comprised the doodle read "Art Castor cast a rat to act as Castro," and "to cast Coast actors to co-star as Croats to roast Astro Astor." H
e felt a surge of unbridled excitement as it occurred to him he might add a phrase "to tar or rot a Tarot tart, to start to trot," which would add a dozen more words that could give him another fifteen minutes of doodling, when a voice behind him said. "I'm certainly glad we got McTuff's heavy hitter on this bitch. Now that I see the caliber of brilliant detective work we can expect," followed by maniacal laughter.
Eichord turned and a huge man towering behind him was laughing.
"Bud Leech, Intelligence." He laughed. "Gladaseeya."
"God, I hope so," Jack said, laughing with him. Two friendly faces in one day, it was almost too much luck for one afternoon. Leech was more like the cops Eichord was used to, and they went downstairs and had coffee, Eichord beginning to slosh when he walked, and talked some about the case and the peculiarities of the city.
Jack learned what it was. The unit had been burned recently in a citywide scandal involving the mob and two of the coppers who had been caught on the take. Everybody had figured him for a natural shoe-fly. They assumed the McTuff thing was a setup by the sneaky assholes in Internal Affairs Division.
And Bud Leech told him a lot more as the day wore on. He learned about how the mob had penetrated the highest levels of the force here, how their tentacles stretched out into the court system and into the senior strata of government. Facts to reaffirm Eichord's feeling that St. Louis was more than it appeared. He was beginning to at least see some of the pieces of the puzzle, but the problem was what names to ascribe to them.
Law-abiding or lawless, victims or victimizers, as always in what laughingly gets called real life, nothing much is pure black or white. Reality appears in shades. Degrees. And there was an added layer of complexity here. Eichord suspected they were dealing with something more than warring mob factions.
He played Las Vegas style. When you're cold, you fold; when you're hot, you shoot your shot. He phoned Rita Haubrich, getting her voice on the first ring, and wondered if she'd help a newcomer find his way around the town a little this weekend and he could remember later thinking about all the red hair and those long legs and that mouth and getting in the car and he's singing softly about how the pale moon didn't excite him and trying not to move his lips, thinking about this great-looking redhead when the first October raindrops started splashing down on his windshield.
In Spain's motel room he had a small box with the printed legend Greta Griswold. The box contained a man's brown hairpiece, a pair of ordinary rectangular-framed glasses with clear lenses, a pipe and pipe tobacco, and other small items that he used to pull a certain persona together. This was the persona who, under yet another alias, owned the fictitious company Direct Import Enterprises. And it was behind this mask and assumed character that Spain went whenever he had personal contact with one Greta Griswold, who was his cutout gofer, hence the name on the box.
Thanks to her efforts he'd be in the house soon. He was already working on plans for the Interrogation Room, which would add a necessary dimension of security to what he was about to do. The higher up in the organization his revenge took him, the greater the hazards would be to him personally, and this was one of the reasons for a safe, sanitized, soundproofed place where he could linger with his targets, take his time with them, take as long as he liked, where their screams would not draw unwanted attention. Where the blood could flow.
A woman named Greta Griswold was helping him in this regard. He'd hired her through his girl-friday ad. She was fifty-two. Plain. Timid. Obedient. Reasonably efficient. Not excessively bright or curious. He paid her just enough that she was grateful for the good wage, yet not enough she'd be suspicious. Spain did most of his business with her on the phone, but to avoid appearing too bizarre he had to have some contact with her. As it was, he had her convinced that he was simply a very busy, preoccupied, and eccentric employer who paid well and was willing to delegate a lot of unusual responsibility.
He put on his entrepreneurial hairpiece and glasses and pipe in place headed for their storefront office nearby. The disguise was not enough to fool anyone who knew him, but for someone who only saw him for a few minutes at a time, it might be enough to render him faceless in a police report. Glasses and a pipe and other certain mannerisms and affectations would be what she'd remember about the man himself.
"Good morning," he said, in a clenched voice that he used with her.
"Good morning, sir," she said, immediately starting in on the hundred things she'd saved up to tell him. "I've got your mail from the box there on the desk, and I cashed that check and put it in the deposit with your money from before, and this is the picture of the house," all over him with her little duties fulfilled, handing him a key, while he went, "Ummmm — fine."
"And this is for four-three-one. There's the Xerox of the multiple listings. You can't tell much from it but it has that, uh, unusual roofline and ceiling combination you said, uh, and you can take a look whenever you want. That's five-fifty a month. And this is how I entered that sale in the new ledger for accounts receivable ..." And as she went on with phony business, he tuned out, looking at the grainy picture of the house. He'd seen the rental property from the outside and it looked perfect. The lay of the land was an unexpected bonus.
He let her go on about fake-business stuff until she'd run out of things to tell him. She'd been "running his traps" for him. He had her take care of anything where there was personal contact with others, where a surveillance camera at the bank would retain an image of a depositor, where they'd retain a likeness of the individual who rented a postal drawer, anything like that. Rental properties seemed easier to negotiate than an outright purchase, so he'd had her deal extensively with the realtors. He would be a subject of much discussion there for his idiosyncratic way of having a secretary do his house bunting, but it wouldn't be the first time a busy executive delegated that to another party.
Once he got in the house he'd have no real reason for contact with either a real-estate agent or the home owner, as long as all his checks paid the rent well in advance. He would keep Greta busy with make-work, preparing mailings for his nonexistent business and responding to monies he would funnel into Direct Import Enterprises through another of his mail-drop covers. Keep her available for those unexpected times when a cutout was required.
"I'm going to go look at the house today. Nobody's in there doing repainting or anything, right?"
"No, sir. I was given to understand it would be empty."
"Okay. I'll let you know. I'll call and if I like it you can go ahead and wrap it up for me. Lock up here and just work on that, and when the house deal is settled you can go home early. All right?"
"Yes, sir. Thank you." She brightened at the idea of quitting early.
As he drove toward the home he let himself roar with laughter at the joy of what he'd already accomplished. Setting the mob factions against each other had been a beautiful touch, and accomplishing it, thanks to his assessment of the Troxell report and his own intimacy with the family's weaknesses, had been child's play. He relished the phrase. Child's play.
What made him laugh the hardest was the fact that he'd finessed those dumb shitbrains into whacking Lyle Venable for him. He had his eye on a target for each side that would really set this thing into motion. Blue Kriegal's long-time bodyguard, Johny Picciotti. And his counterpart within the other side of the family, another legbreaker named Tripotra. Their respective deaths, if handled right, would appear to be more gangland retaliation, if only to the cops and media.
He looked at the house and it was ideal. It had been made for his purposes. Both the isolation and the rooms themselves. He'd wanted "an unusual roofline with angles going every which way," he'd told Greta, even given her some sketches. "I like houses with unusual-shaped rooms, cathedral ceilings, sunken living rooms ..." And he'd gone on about his likes. But what he really wanted was a house where a secret room could be built and the walls wouldn't give it away.
Spain thought it was perfect. He stood there in the quiet house imagining
what it would be like to hear the tortured screams of filth like Blue Kriegal and he laughed out loud. Most of all, to bring Ciprioni here . . . Oh, what a pleasure it would be to cut him open and slowly pull his guts out, make him watch as he was slowly, gently disemboweled and fed his own poisonous, shit-eating guts.
He went back to the motel and removed his Greta Griswold hairpiece and picked up the phone.
"Direct Import Enterprises," the woman said with enthusiasm, in one of her two or three contacts with the outside world each day.
"It's me," he told her unnecessarily. "I love it. It's nice. So go ahead and pay them the two months and get all the keys. Sign for me if you can."
"Okay. What if they have to have you come in and sign?"
"Explain to them I'm too busy. That I'm involved in a very delicate business deal with many meetings where I have to be available all the time — and just get anything that needs a signature and I'll sign it and have it returned to them." They hung up and Spain went out to the car and took a large sack of heavy items from the trunk.
He worked on hardware the rest of the day. By late afternoon he was parked down the street from the apartment house where Tripotra lived. He could see the man's fancy car in its parking stall. He'd be real tough to tail with a black Mercedes and the sophomoric vanity plates BADTRIP.
Spain felt his head falling to the side and he woke up. It was night. Shit. He'd dozed off. The Mercedes was still there. Forty-five minutes later and getting very uncomfortable, somebody comes out and gets into the black car. Spain follows him from a distance when he pulls out. Fifteen more minutes and he stops and talks to somebody Spain doesn't recognize. They get in their cars and he follows them out to the boonies.
The other car is a dark-colored Caddy, and it passes the Tripotra car, so Spain stays back with BADTRIP.
It was getting dark now and more difficult to tail. The lights of the traffic were starting to hurt Spain's eyes. He'd been in the car for hours and he was getting sore. His neck and back hurt and his butt was getting numb and he had a slight headache. He rolled down the window a bit and rubbed his eyes.