by Jack Kline
“First off, Mr. Holloway, your generous offer was nothing more than what we originally agreed upon. So dismount that high horse.”
His face reddened, and the cigar went back in his mouth.
“Second, I earned every penny of it. Bad men have your son. They killed my dog and my car. Tried to kill me at least three times. Almost killed my partner—doctors are filling him up with someone else’s blood in General Hospital right now.” I expect that my face reddened to match Holloway’s. And I wasn’t done yet.
“I don’t know how much you knew when you hired me, but you got off cheap, even with all of the expenses you’ll owe. From the start, no one in your family has leveled with me. Not you, not Hannerty, not your daughter.” Holloway started to say something. I held up my hand. “Not yet; I’m almost done.
“These are bad people. They’ll most likely kill your son whether they get the ransom or not. And for me, this is personal now. I want to be your bagman. I’ll take the ransom. I’ve got a better chance than anyone else of getting your boy out alive.”
As I finished my little soliloquy, I realized I’d leaned further and further forward in the chair while gabbing. My keister had almost slid off. I scooted back onto the chair and saw the office door open and Hannerty in the doorway.
Holloway exhaled a smoky billow that hung between us. Hannerty said nothing and looked disinterested. Holloway broke the silence.
“Not going to happen, Mr. Morris. They specifically told us to call off our dog. Meaning you. They’ll kill Tom Junior if we don’t. So you’re out, Morris. In fact, if they’re watching the house now, my boy’s life might hang in the balance. I want you out of here now. Hannerty?”
I stood and held out a stop sign for the big lug. “Okay, hear me out.” Hannerty didn’t make a move toward me, and Holloway didn’t give him further orders.
“You had your boy confirm that he was still alive when the kidnappers phoned, right?”
“How’d you know?”
“Doesn’t matter, listen. When they call again—
“Yes, it does matter. How did you know what was said when they phoned here last night?”
I looked at Hannerty. Hannerty knew how.
“I didn’t know,” I lied. “But I do know how kidnappers operate. I figured you knew enough to make sure your boy was alive.” Holloway bought it.
“Let’s talk this out.” I sat again. “When they call again, you make sure the boy’s still breathing. They want the dough. They’ll keep him alive as long as they know you won’t deliver if they ice him. But I’m telling you, they’ll most likely kill him as soon as they get their hands on your money.”
Holloway listened, but I couldn’t be sure I was getting through.
“That’s why you need me. I can handle whatever comes up. Whatever schmuck you send is liable to get himself dead too.” No way Holloway was fool enough to deliver the dough himself, I thought. But he wasn’t volunteering anything. “Say, you aren’t planning to do it yourself?”
“No, Hannerty’s making the exchange.”
I turned to Hannerty. He said nothing, betrayed no emotion.
“You must be kidding, Mr. Holloway. You plan to send your butler? He’s got no prayer of coming back with the boy. Hell, not much chance you’ll ever see him alive again either.”
“Not necessarily.”
The way Holloway said it gave me pause. I looked back and forth between the two.
“Tell him, Hannerty,” Holloway said.
Without facial expression, Hannerty’s body relaxed and he leaned against the door frame. “At age twenty-two, I fought with Patrick Pearse in the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In the Easter Rising of 1916, we were outnumbered twelve to one, yet we held off the British Army for seven days at the Dublin General Post Office. Not so different than your Alamo. A few of us escaped through the sewers and fought again with the Hibernian Rifles in the Irish Republican Army.”
All I could do was whistle.
“So you see, Mr. Morris, I’ve been in jams before. I know a little about danger and weapons, and how to hide and use them.” He grinned. “You would never have seen my pistol when we met six days ago, had I not wanted it seen.”
I laughed out loud. “Touché, Mr. Hannerty.”
I glanced over at Holloway—he leaned back in his chair, his cigar in the side of his mouth and a smug expression on his face. It’s easy for a fella to be smug when his life isn’t on the line. The fact that his butler’s and his son’s lives were didn’t seem to weigh too heavily. Holloway carefully rolled the cigar in his ashtray, removing the ash in one intact chunk.
Hannerty looked at me and winked.
“So you see, Mr. Morris, Tom Junior will be well protected in the exchange,” Holloway said. “And I really must insist that you leave now. I don’t want the thugs that have my boy to think you are still involved. Send your list of expenses tomorrow or Tuesday. Drop it off at my office downtown or bring it here to Hannerty.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Holloway. The kidnappers want the dough. They’ll take it from anyone who brings it, even me. And they won’t get it from me without delivering the boy alive at the same time. No offense, Hannerty, I’m the best man for the job.”
Hannerty, still relaxed against the door frame, nodded. “None taken, sir.”
“My mind’s made up. Hannerty will show you out.” Holloway began shuffling papers to emphasize the dismissal.
As Hannerty and I walked to the door I tried one more time. “I can help you, Hannerty. We need to talk.”
“I know, sir, but not now. Can you be in your office by noon? We may not have all of the money until then, and we don’t expect a call from the kidnappers until sometime after that.”
I looked at the foyer’s big grandfather: it showed 10:50. I had one stop to make first. “I think so. If it looks like I can’t make it, I’ll try to call.” He opened the front door. “Holloway ever answer the telephone?”
“Never, sir.”
“Good. And call me Phil when we’re not around the boss.”
“I will, sir”
“I will, Phil,” I said.
“Yes, Phil. But I’ll not telephone until after the kidnappers have contacted us. Then we can discuss my strategy.”
“Our strategy.”
“Perhaps, Phil. Until then.” We shook hands. His grip was just short of painful.
I turned off Ward Parkway and zigzagged over to northbound State Line, headed to the river bottoms and the Valencia Hotel. Time to try once more to visit Beverly Cresto. I wasn’t prepared to plug any hallway watchmen but would give forceful reasons why a watchman should allow a brief, chaperoned conversation.
On the way, my mind turned to Hannerty. His past shouldn’t have been such a surprise. Even in a finely tailored suit, the man was a physical specimen. The nimble way he carried himself spoke of a man who worked to get the most out of his body—like I used to do, should still be doing. I thought how much I could use a drink, and at the same time resolved that I would quit drinking as soon as this case was over.
The Easter Rising, Republican Brotherhood, and IRA told of a different kind of training. Hannerty hadn’t been schooled in the military but in guerilla organizations. To have survived, he knew a thing or two about operations against the odds, about being outnumbered, which we’d surely be. I was going too, whether he wanted me or not. If it came to a shoving match, I’d let him think he won, let him think he was going it alone. I could do guerilla.
I pulled into the hotel’s circle drive. The same doorman stood watch. He didn’t recognize me until I stepped out of the car.
“Hello, sir, still not staying?”
“Nope. Tell you what, though.” I peeled off two ones and placed them and Rusty’s car keys in his dingy white-gloved hand. “Keep an eye on the car, and only move it if you have to. I gotta be somewhere soon and I’ll be in a hurry when I leave.” The doorman gave me a toothy, two-dollar smile.
Inside, the desk c
lerk from before must have had the day off, so I ignored the new guy and just headed for the elevator.
“May I help you, sir?” The clerk said with a volume and tone that indicated proprietorship.
I didn’t turn or slow down. “Nope, just visiting some friends.” I pushed the call button.
“May I ask whom you’re visiting?”
I turned toward him. “No, buster, you may not. It’s none of your business.”
Properly chagrined, he returned to his clerk’s busy work.
I asked the elevator man for the sixth floor. Silently he delivered me. The elevator was positioned near the L, and I could see both halls as I stepped out. Nobody there. I knocked on the door at 612. No answer. A moment later 623 produced the same result.
I took the stairs down and walked over to the clerk. “Sorry I was rude to you earlier, Mark.” That’s the name his lapel pin revealed.
“That’s quite all right. Now, may I help you?”
Yep. He was pissed and not professional enough to hide it. I produced the wad of bills again and slapped another two Washingtons on the counter and slid them his way but kept my fingers on them. “Neither of my friends, Miss Cresto in 612 nor Mr. Harman in 623, seem to be in.”
“I coulda told you that if you’d answered me when you came in. They both checked out around eight-thirty this morning.”
“Really? Where’d they go?”
“How should I know? I look like the Encyclopedia Britannica?” He grabbed the two bucks, slid them under the counter, and reached for the cigarette parked behind his ear.
The doorman saw me leave the front desk and head his way. He hustled, held open the main door, then beat me to the car and opened that one too, handing me the keys. I still had almost a half hour before noon.
Church bells clanged the quarter hour a few blocks over on 12th Street as I pulled up to my office building. The main doors were locked, but I had a key. Elevators didn’t run on Sundays so I hoofed it up the stairs. Winded, I arrived at my office. The door hadn’t been messed with.
At my desk, I made sure the phone had a dial tone, slid open the bottom drawer, and plopped down the Beam bottle. No need for the glass. The bottle was three inches from empty. I set to work on it, pulling straight from the bottle.
I lifted the phone receiver and dialed the main cop switchboard. To my surprise, Chief Myers was in his office.
“What you doing in on a Sunday morning, Chief Myers?”
“The police department never sleeps,” Myers said. “But I’m glad you called. I was about to try to reach you.”
“Oh, yeah? What you got?”
“Plenty, Morris.”
He did, too. Turns out Detective Sanderson had gabbed with the Chief after he and his pal third-degreed me at the hospital. And then Myers’ boys did check the other hospitals, and in one of them, they found a fella with a .38 slug in his chest not far from his heart. The fella might not make it. The odd thing—if anything could seem odd anymore—was the guy was from Detroit. He had a record long enough to fill the pages of an issue of True Detective.
“What do you make of that, Chief Myers?”
“I’m not finished,” the Chief said. “I tried to contact Detective Patterson at his home this morning, and his wife said he didn’t come home last night. He told her yesterday not to worry, that he’d be on a stakeout.”
“And I’m guessing you didn’t authorize one.”
“Bingo. What’s more, when I tried to phone Detective Harman to get some answers, the hotel operator told me that he had already checked out.”
He paused, and I pictured him at his desk shaking his head, his bulbous nose swinging, blackjack-like, along with it. “Harman’s required by his Detroit superiors to keep me informed of any developments.”
“Any other bombs to drop?” I said.
“No.”
“What do you make of it?”
The Chief didn’t pause at all. He’d given it some thought already. “I think there’s some major kind of Detroit mob action going on here in KC, a lot bigger than the drug smuggling case Patterson and Harman were investigating. And I think the two detectives are either involved and on the take, or they’re crotch-deep in trouble.”
“They may be involved in more than you know.” As soon as the words left my mouth I knew I’d said too much. Myers’ egg didn’t hatch yesterday.
“What?” Myers said. “What else do you know?”
Damn. What could I tell him without telling him too much?
“We’re pretty sure Tom Junior has been abducted. And Patterson and Harman have the last person the boy was seen with in their protective custody.”
He waited for more. When I wasn’t forthcoming, he began to dig. “You mean Beverly Cresto?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know it’s an abduction? Have they demanded ransom?”
“Look, Chief: we’ve already talked about what I can and cannot say in order to keep faith with my client. I can’t answer those questions.”
“But you think Patterson and Harman may be involved in the abduction?”
“I do. And here’s what I can tell you. I may need your help within the next twelve hours. Should I call here?”
“Yeah, I’ll tell the switchboard to put you through immediately. If I’m not here they’ll know where to find me. What’s going down today? Or is it tonight?”
“Can’t say. Really, I’m sorry.”
“What can I do right now besides wait for your call?”
“Find your detectives.”
My watch showed almost straight up noon. It was my turn to wait by the phone. But first I called Dominic. I wanted to tell him that, in addition to the one charred in the warehouse fire, a second Detroit gangster had been wounded trying to chill off Rusty and me. Who better to dig for information than a newspaperman? Dom could gab with his Free Press buddies in Motor City. But I couldn’t reach him at the city desk and got no answer at home.
Using the experience and cunning stored in my noggin, I tried to come up with a plausible explanation for what the hell was going on. But no scenario fit all the facts. Some sharp investigator I was. Every time I found a puzzle piece that didn’t fit, I raised Jim Beam to my lips. No way I could get drunk when lives hung in the balance. No way I could put Mr. Beam back in the bottom drawer.
By 1:15 and my phone still silent, I had come up with a slapped-together scenario on two sheets of paper: the Detroit mob decides to initiate a takeover move in Kansas City. The top rooster in KC’s henhouse was Lazzeri’s Black Hand Sicilian mob. Detroit probes the Black Hand’s strengths and weaknesses, looking for places to strike crippling blows. They have a Kansas City girl, Beverly Cresto, whose lover is Detroit cop detective Harman. Detective Harman is dirty. He’s on the take with the Detroit mob. Harman tells her to sidle in with a fella in the Black Hand. Tommy, unluckily, is the fella that gets sidled. They snatch him while on a date with her.
Once the Detroiters snatch themselves a KC mobster, they plan to extract what they can, and then bump him off. That’s before they discover they struck the mother lode. They not only dig the information from the kid—the arsoned booze warehouse?—to the extent he knows, but they decide to sell him back to the wealthy father.
If I was Harman or whoever ran the show, once I got the money, I’d kill the kid anyway. And then I’d either make it look like the Black Hand killed him, or the Irish mob had kidnapped and killed him out of revenge for their own kid lap-dogging for Palmisano. One way, you have Holloway and his mighty machine after the Black Hand. The other way, you ramp up the KC mob’s civil war. Either way, you keep the Detroit takeover under the radar and weaken the KC mobs.
I looked at what I had scribbled on the paper in front of me. Swiss cheese, full of holes— and influenced heavily by my friend Jim Beam. But it was the best I could do. One thing I felt certain of—Tom Holloway Junior was scheduled to die, and maybe the Cresto girl too.
I wasn’t confident Beverly Cresto was inv
olved. She might have just had the misfortune to go out on the town with the kid on the wrong night. She might have had the smarts to know what would happen to them once the ransom was paid. With her life on the line, maybe she distanced herself from Tommy and began a goo-goo eyes routine with Harman. She wouldn’t be the first dame who tried to stay alive lying on her back.
Then I began to worry about Colleen. Hannerty feared she had found where they kept her brother and thought she might be trying to rescue him. If so, why hadn’t she come to me? Or more logical, why not confide in her pal Hannerty, the man she’d been in cahoots with since she was a girl? I wondered if she knew Hannerty’s Irish Republican credentials. There simply was no way Colleen would go it alone. She was too smart for that.
My pencil made dots on a third page as I tried to figure where Colleen was and what she was up to. The phone rang.
It was Hannerty. He spoke softly. The kidnappers had telephoned.
“They wanted to make sure we had raised the money,” Hannerty said.
“Did you get the dough?” I asked.
“Yes, the bankers made good on their assurance to Mr. Holloway. The kidnappers told him to place the money in a suitcase.” Hannerty paused. “I stood next to him as he spoke to the kidnappers. I told Mr. Holloway that because they wanted small bills, we could not fit the entire amount in one suitcase.”
“What’d they say to that?”
“They told him no more than two. Even if we must sit on them to get them closed.”
“So when do we make the swap?”
“We don’t know yet, sir. They told Mr. Holloway to select a car that has plenty of petrol. They will call again. The house is being watched, they said. If anyone arrives or leaves before they next telephone, young Thomas dies. After the call, I locked the gate to the drive.”
“Are you sure he’s not already dead?”
“No, sir. But Mr. Holloway told them the next time they telephone he wants to speak to Thomas or there will be no deal.
“Good.”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Holloway was very firm. The abductors said they would comply, and after speaking to young Thomas, he would be given instructions for one man, alone, to drive the money to a location. He wouldn’t be given much time to get there. And then they abruptly ended the call.”