by Rex Miller
"You've led an interesting life, I see."
"Unquestionably, my dear Watson."
"What made this? Did someone bite you here?" She touched its indentation.
"Probably." He said as he felt the small groove that was a long, forgotten souvenir from a blocked Fairbairn thrust. "Ancient history."
"I feel sure it must be from a woman. A bite."
They sought each other's mouths and her tongue zapped him like the touch of a high-voltage line and he was copper winding down to a long, coiled grounding shaft that took the power hungrily and fed on it and he reached deeply to take as much of her hot, sweet lightning as he could, letting the energy of the electricity charge them in a crackling surge of current.
"Who is it?" Eichord said to Bud Leech, who was already on the crime scene.
"Little joker named Betters. They really played Hurt You with this boy. Hope you've had dinner already."
"Hey, Bud," one of the Homicide people said to Leech, nodding to Eichord.
"Yo."
"Can they take him?"
"Uh, hold it. Not yet, babe. Tell 'em hold it a few minutes."
"Okay."
"Small time jive-ass little punk named Vinnie Betters. Some gofer in with Measure." He shook his head. "I don't know what this is about," he said, jerking his thumb toward the kitchen on the word "this."
"You get done dusting yet?"
"Naw."
"Smells great in here."
"Jesus." Eichord put a handkerchief up to his face.
"Herrrrrrrre's Vinnie."
Eichord looked and turned away after a bit.
"Obviously whoever did this —"
"Yeah." He laughed without humor. "You could say that, all right."
"Seriously. Whatever the reason why he was killed, whoever did it was trying to get something out of their system. Nothing professional about that."
"I figure two, three, maybe four guys taking turns. Really getting themselves worked up. Nothing professional about it, as you say. Unless they were pros trying to tell somebody something — that your point?"
"Right."
"Really did a J.-O.-B. on the little mother."
Vinnie was upside down, with maybe nine hundred puncture wounds in him, turning into maggot food under the kitchen counter there in his ex-wife's house.
"Who called it in?"
"His wife, er, uh, HEY!" He motioned to a detective. "Yo." He motioned for him to come over to the kitchen area.
"Tell him how you caught the call."
"Yeah. Well, it was his ex-wife. She said she'd just come in and found him. Claims she was shacked up with her latest old man in Atlantic City. We're checking it out. Vinnie's got a little yellow sheet. Little half-assed rat package."
"Maybe he ratted out the wrong dudes."
"Could be Rikla's people. I admit it don't look like no hit. Anyway, he was always trying to get made and didn't have the eggs for it, and — far as I ever heard — he just never had his shit together."
"He's got his shit together now." They laughed.
"F'r sure."
"Lynch Street people got here first. They called us. I came. You came. That's about the whole shot."
"Think they'll have anything on the street on this?"
"Naaaaaa. I doubt it."
"A payback thing. Somebody's gonna say somethin' otherwise it's all wasted. You know how the wise guys are."
"Nobody gives a shit about Vinnie. Nobody's gonna miss him. He was a schmuck. Even his ex-old lady pegged it. She said when she came home and found him gathering little white wormies and smellin', in her words "— the cop looked at a notebook — 'like ten bags of dead skunks.'" They chuckled. "It was no big surprise. She told the Lynch Street guys, 'Hell, he was lucky he lived THIS long.'"
"Quite an epitaph."
"Leech."
"Yo."
"Can we take this fucker yet?"
"NO, GODDAMMMIT YOU CAN'T TAKE THIS FUCKER YET, I done tol' y'all fourteen times. Whatsa big hurry, fi'r shit sake?"
"No hurry at all. We LIKE standing here smellin' this puke 'n' shit."
"Right. I know it's a revolutionary theory but what if we would bring latent in here and dust this scene and, you know, find the FINGERPRINTS of the dudes what did the crime. You know, like on TV?"
"Sure. Wonderful."
And that was what happened. Jackie Nails, a.k.a Jack Annelo, and Big Mike Stricoti of the Dagatina family —"alleged gunmen," as the papers worded it — had left their big guinea paw prints all over the house. It was enough to make a couple of tentative arrests and within twenty-four hours media was running neat little sidebars about the "big break in the mob slayings."
The entire unit was on hand by chance when the next "big break" took place. A lab finding nailing Annelo to one of the earlier shootings. In the best spirit of omerta he'd clammed up, and that made him look even better for the wise-guy killings. Except to Eichord.
He was prepared to believe almost anything, on one hand, and on the other his healthy skepticism had been replaced by a monumental paranoia about the case. For one thing, ever since the Ventura Boulevard hit in Studio, there had been no more EYEBALL murders. He kept thinking one of these gangland kills in St. Louis would tie to California, but it wasn't happening.
All the facts and the serious conjecture indicated solutions involving more than one perpetrator.
A: The street rumors floating back to Homicide at LAPD pointed to a couple of local punks for the Studio City job.
B: The Laclede Landing shooting had been a shooter and a wheel man at the least.
C: The two Dagatina hoods were tied solid to the Betters killing. Jackie Nails to at least one other hit.
But for all that, Floyd Streicher of the hooded eyes would not get out of his head. And Jack rubbed his eyes, sighed, and looked down at the phrase he'd been doodling:
DID I LIVE? EVIL I DID.
And in a long expulsion of air he emptied his lungs and read the sentence backward. Realizing as he did so that he had no idea what the fuck he was involved in here. And against his better judgment he took in more air and kept going.
* * *
At precisely 1430 the following Monday all hell broke loose. The CP was screaming on the phone to Victor Springer that the notorious mob lawyer Jake Rozitsky and another individual believed to be an innocent bystander had just been blown up in a gangland bombing downtown. An unprecedented number of units responded, as well as the fire department, and Eichord.
Brass balls to the walls. Media going insane. A circus of mobile units, flashing lights, roiling smoke, sirens, you name it. Two television news choppers almost got into a midair chickie fight trying to jockey for position for best shots of the burning building and the obligatory scene of cops and paramedics and firemen taking Rozitsky and the other man, thought to be a building worker, out to a waiting ambulance in body bags.
Glass came running up to Eichord hollering something at him and it was so noisy he couldn't hear.
"What?"
("MUMBLE MUMBLE") "WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
("SOMETHING") He looked like he was saying metro something. Then he made the universal sign for telephone and Eichord got it and grabbed his two-way, switching it over to the metro freq and taking the call from McTuff. It was one of the things he'd put into play on his own, and the Task Force had reached out just in time. He went over and told Springer, "Lieutenant?"
"What?"
"Come inside the car here." He motioned.
"Huh," Springer screamed.
"In HERE."
"Jesus," Vic Springer said, falling into the car. "Sounds like World War Three goin' on out here. Shit, unfuckin'-real, I can't hear any —"
"We got something, maybe," Eichord told him.
"Yeah?"
"I got a court order for a wiretap. I put it in through McTuff. Roundabout through the DAs office."
"How come you didn't ask me about it, Jack?" He looked so dyspeptic Eichord wondered if he was going
to be all right and then he remembered it was just a face. "What tap? Whose phone?" He kept caving in.
"Rozitsky's." He nodded toward the smoking building where firemen were still at work putting the last of the blaze out.
"You tapped Jake Rozitsky? When was this? How come you didn't talk to me?" A basset is all Eichord kept thinking as sad eyes looked at him.
"Just a few days ago. I didn't have a chance, Lieutenant. Always somebody around or I wasn't near a telephone I could trust. Taps go two ways. I got a bad feeling about this Russo case."
"Yeah." Springer sat quietly for a second. "You're saying somebody in the unit is dirty."
"No. Not at all. Just saying — well, you have to consider all the options. The bottom line is. I had his private line tapped when he was killed."
"Umm. And?"
"I think I've got the killer's voice on tape."
Back at Twelfth and dark everybody in Chief Adler's Special Division gathered on the fourth floor as if for a wake or a quiet riot. It took a long, l-o-n-n-n-g forty-five minutes for the agent to show up with the dupe of the original.
"Go ahead," Springer told him, and the special agent threaded the tape into a playback unit.
"Okay. Uh" — he cleared his throat — "this is not going to be real great quality so we'll have to concentrate and make as little noise as possible, please, so everybody can hear this clearly. This is a dupe of the original and we lost a lot of the sound quality dubbing it but we knew you wanted to hear the content as soon as possible. We should have the real thing for you all remastered and quite audible by tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile this is all we can give you."
"All right. What it is — this is a tap made from an office bug in the law office of the decedent, but this was patched into a mobile phone which transmits through high-frequency radio waves. It's a cellular unit, like your two-ways, or paging services, things like that, but this is not off the open tap that addresses the device by harmonics, this —"
"Uh, excuse me," Eichord interrupted. "Sorry but we need to hear this, so if you will hold off on the technical stuff for later." Somebody said showtime as the agent nodded and hit Play. For five minutes all they heard was a lot of crap about the Dolphins game, and the line on the game, and the point spread. Then there was a new conversation.
Eichord listened to the somewhat poor-quality tape as the lawyer's secretary spoke with someone else's secretary, and there was a pause while the other party came on the line. One of the cops in the room said, "This is James Measure he's talkin' to."
"Yeah," a gruff voice barked.
"Mr. Measure, please stay on the line for Mr. Rozitsky."
"Yeah, awright."
"Jim-baby," a rich voice enthused.
"Jake. What's up?"
"How are ya, booby?"
"I'm awright. Not too bad."
"Listen, Jim ... I gotta talk to ya about a couple of things later, ya know?"
"Yeah."
"I had that meeting with our friend over there, and it's just what I told you. He's holding us up, but he's gonna' swing with it, so that's all there is to it we just gotta push his buttons."
"He's holding us up awright, the cocksuck."
"Yeah. That's going to have to be taken care of. We gonna get banged for some sweetener, ya' know?"
"Oh, I figured that out awready."
"He's gonna have to have some sweetener but he'll pop for us I promise ya, no problem at all. We gotta waltz him around a little first, and then he's gonna waltz us around a little, and then we're all gonna dance a little more, and finally we gonna get a bottom line, and that's the way it'll work. I mean, we'll get there it's just gonna take a dance or two."
"I don't give a fuck he gotta go with me on this thing, that's all there is to it."
"I talked to him. Look, Jim, he knows that's your country here and he's gotta go through you to do this thing, and some dues get paid both ways, he's aware of this."
"Fuckin' right it's our country here, the mother-fucker."
"So it's just getting banged for a little sweetener and dance a couple dances with the sonofabitch and that's that, emmis, but it's like a bullshit thing with him, ya know? He's gotta put you through the numbers, see, so it looks like it's all kosher, and Mr. Big Businessman, but at the end he's got his hand out. He just don't ask for the sweetener like a man, he gotta waltz us around all over the place first. But that's what you got me for. I'll dance with the cock-suck for a while and then we'll do something."
"So what's he gonna nail us on it?"
"I figure another ten dollars on it."
"Je-sus CHRIST! Whattya' fuckin' MEAN ten shit. That sonofabitch thinks we're made outta fuckin' money, fer Chrissakes? Fuck him."
"So we'll get banged for a little sweetener and that's the name of that tune. But you know, what pisses me off he can't be a man and just come out wit' it he's gotta' waltz around all over the place first and act like Honest John, see, and the slimy sonofabitch is puttin' his hand down in your pocket and telling you this and that and the other thing like he can't do this and he can't do that."
"This is bullshit. Ten large. Christ, the fuck, gonna bang me for another ten large I better see something happen pretty fuckin' fast is all I can tell ya. I ain't payin' ten dollars more for a hand job."
"I'll let you know what finally gets decided on that. But meanwhile on the other thing you had me reach out for —?"
"Yeah?"
"No problem. He's very understanding to our situation. I can absolutely fuckin' guarantee you we reach him when we want him. The only thing is it has to be handled with kid gloves. I don't want to do it myself."
"Just take care of it whatever ya' think."
"Yeah. I'll have somebody here in the office drop around and give him the envelope. That's no problem. And he's quite understanding and sympathetic. The thing is you know he says there has to be something for show. My feeling is we can expect a very smooth thing there, though."
"When we come up? What is it — three weeks?"
"Yeah, right. Jim, another thing good for us there is that he's got his friend wants that political thing. That appointment is like a fucking lifetime annuity, ya know?"
"Ya better fucking believe it. Those cocksucks don't do shit and the fucking thing pays seventy large while they sit on their asses, and they don't gotta run every couple years like them other assholes. Shit. They gotta fuckin' bird's nest on the ground."
"Abso-fuckin'-lutely. Shit, I'd take a fuckin' judgeship over there. And of course he knows you got the fix in with the Committee too, so we got no problem there whatsoever. So his friend has done all that work for the ticket, see, and we just ease him into that, we got two out of three bases covered over there."
"Goddamn right."
"Well, I'm sorry about the other but I wanted to let you know about our friend over there. I think he'll bang us for ten dollars and that'll be that, so hang tough, and I'll get back to ya when I have something concrete."
"I got something concrete for the cocksuck."
(They laugh.)
"Take care — talk to ya later."
"Awright, Jake, lemme know."
"Will do, my friend. Talk to ya soon."
"Okay. Now listen," as the voice-activated Norelco kicked back on again and Eichord heard a soft, extremely precise voice ask the secretary if Mr. Rozitsky was in.
"Who shall I say is calling, please?"
"Tell him it's Roy Cohn," the man said.
"Yes, sir, Mr. Cohen, one moment please," the woman said, missing the man's joke.
A few seconds later a laughing voice came on the line: "Jake Rozitsky."
"Hello, Mr. Rozitsky. You don't know me and my name won't be important to you, but I have some information that you're going to find very valuable with respect to a criminal case you're going to be involved in within a couple of weeks."
"Who am I talking with, please?"
"Oh, just think of me as a friend of the court. Listen, I don't want money. I just want
justice. And I happen to be in a position to tell you something about a certain person that will be of great help to you in the upcoming situation."
"If you're talking about the hearing, I really can't discuss something like this over the phone and I —"
"Cut the bullshit," the voice said quietly. "I'm a friend. All you have to do is listen and judge for yourself. I don't trust this line of yours at all, for starters, and if you have half a brain you'll know what I'm talking about. If you want to hear the information I have for you, no strings attached, go downstairs to the pay telephone in your lobby. Do you know the phone I'm talking about?"
"Yeah, but that —"
"This is important. I don't have time to bullshit with you, I'm phoning that pay telephone in three minutes. If you're there to answer it, fine. If the doorman or somebody answers it, I hang up and you won't hear from me again. If I get a busy I'll dial it again in three minutes, but that's it. You've got three minutes to get downstairs." The line clicked dead before the lawyer had a chance to argue about it.
"He told his secretary he'd be back in a few minutes," the cop said to Eichord, "and that was the last thing he ever said to anybody as far as we know.
"There was about a half a pound of plastique under the pay phone. It went off approximately three minutes following this last call. Blew him right in half, took out the front windows, glass fucking everywhere, killed an innocent man —"
"Adios, Jake." another cop said.
Eichord thought about the line in Shakespeare's Henry VI. The one about "Kill all the lawyers." He rewound the tape back a little ways, listening to the cool, well-modulated, soft tones say, "Tell him it's Roy Cohn." It was a distinctive voice. The man speaking barely above a whisper, enunciating with the greatest precision, accentless and bland like an announcer but without the professional smoothness, each syllable distinct from the next. Overprecise. Confident.
"You don't know me and my name won't be important to you," the soft voice said, pronouncing each vowel so precisely.
Jack Eichord reached over and rewound it back again and tried to imagine the man's mouth as it formed the o sounds, "You don't know me and my name won't be important to you —"