Knockdown

by Don Pendleton

  "What kind of men did you use?" Segesta asked, visibly perturbed.

  "Salvatore Albanese arranged the hit," Barbosa replied. "He assigned it to Grotti. He paid Grotti and told him to take a vacation, not show up in town for two, three months."

  "Whitey Albanese… You handed the responsibility to a madman," Rossi complained.

  "Albanese is a madman, true," Carlo Lentini agreed. "But he's a good man. Effective. You can trust him. And, incidentally, Joe, I wouldn't let him hear you call him a madman. I would hope the word doesn't get back to him."

  "Let Albanese turn his attention to the witness," Segesta suggested.

  "And leave the old Mohawk alone," Lentini said. "That's our advice."

  "I would put the word out," Rossi added, "that we want to know where Vince Grotti is."

  "You want to hit Vincenza Grotti?" Barbosa asked.

  Rossi shook his head. "I just want to know where he is. We ought to have our options as to what we do about him."

  "I will carefully consider the advice of the council," Barbosa said.

  * * *

  Sunglasses covered Whitey Albanese's blue eyes, which was essential. In a theatrical makeup shop on the West Side, he'd bought a jar of skin color and a dull black, frizzy wig. The mobster had parked his car on Avenue U and applied the makeup to the exposed portions of his body. Then he had settled the wig firmly in place. His skin was naturally pallid, and when he'd darkened it to a walnut hue, Albanese thought it looked pretty good.

  As he walked down into the subway station, girls cast him appraising, even inviting, glances. As Salvatore Albanese, he had all his life been conscious that he didn't attract women. Now, as an apparent black, he seemed actually to appeal to them. Maybe he should enroll in a tanning salon. He'd never thought of anything like that.

  He banished the thoughts from his mind. He couldn't afford distractions right now. This was a chancy thing. It wasn't as well planned as Mr. Barbosa would want it to be, but it was a chance of paying his debt to the don fast and efficiently — and that was a good idea.

  Robert Bear Claw was sixty-three, but he still went to the hiring hall in Brooklyn every weekday morning. He was handed a job now and then, and Whitey thought he should have had sense enough to keep his mouth shut. At any rate, he boarded the subway every morning, a man of habit, living on a regular schedule — even on the day after his son's funeral. The easiest kind of citizen to hit.

  Albanese pushed his token into the turnstile slot and shouldered his way out onto the platform, earning a few hostile stares. As he jostled through the crowd, keeping Claw in view, he felt as though this were his lucky day — the job was going to be a piece of cake. Robert Bear Claw was standing near the edge of the platform.

  The hit man shoved his way up behind the graying man. Why had the old bastard come into the station so early? His train wasn't due for another ten minutes. Albanese had come early to get himself in position, to be ready for him. But why was Robert Claw here so early? Albanese looked around. Was this a setup?

  The man beside Claw said something to him, but it was garbled and Albanese couldn't understand. Then Claw answered him — in Greek. Albanese stepped closer to the old man and peered at him intently. Then he stepped back, shaking. It wasn't Claw. He'd almost knocked off the wrong man.

  Albanese lit a cigarette. He drew the satisfying smoke deep into his lungs and calmed himself. If he'd gotten the wrong man, he just wouldn't have told Mr. Barbosa. No. If he had to confess a second mistake, the don might — Whitey's hand shook slightly as he took a drag from the cigarette and contemplated the consequences.

  The second time he saw Robert Claw, he was certain this one was really the man he sought. He looked like his son. The similarity was unreal.

  The hit man elbowed his way to a position directly behind Claw. He kept his place and waited. A blast of hot, stinking air rushed out of the tunnel into the station, pushed by the coming train. People began to crowd closer to the edge of the platform, staring at the lights in the tunnel. No one would clearly see what was about to happen. The setup was more perfect than Albanese had hoped.

  It took only a little push. Nothing dramatic. He gave Robert Claw a hip and shoulder, and the man fell across the third rail, electrocuted even before the train ran over him.

  Albanese staggered back, as if horrified by what he'd seen. Everyone's attention was fixed on the train and the track. People screamed. No one noticed the slender black man purposefully edging his way through the crowd, away from the scene and toward an exit. He walked out of the subway station and to his car.

  * * *

  Burt Whittle's hours were numbered. The way he thought of it, his days were numbered. He'd gone looking for Vince Grotti to renew his assurance that he'd seen nothing, didn't know anything and wouldn't talk even if he had seen anything. Grotti usually hung out around one construction job or another. Officially he was a union rep and could come and go as he pleased. But he wasn't around, and no one had seen him. Whittle went to his apartment. He wasn't there, either. The landlady said she hadn't seen him.

  That was bad. He must have figured he was in trouble, that there was a witness who could put the finger on him, and he'd gone into hiding.

  Whittle couldn't think of running away. In the first place, where would he go? He didn't have the money to hide out in some hotel, not for more than a few weeks, anyway. He owned a house; he had family, responsibilities. His youngest son was still in school. The older kids still needed help from time to time. And the grandchildren…

  "Burl! Telephone!"

  The phone was in the front hall, by the door. That was where the telephone had been kept when he was a kid, and it had never occurred to Burt Whittle to have it installed anywhere else. Or to have more than one. He sat down wearily on what his family called the telephone bench.

  "Yeah?"

  "Don't ask who this is, Whittle. We've got that grandson of yours. Petey, he says his name is. Now you…"

  "Hey! Hey, don't…"

  "Naw. We're not gonna hurt the kid. Providin' you do like I tell you. You listening?"

  Burt Whittle slumped. "I'm listening," he whispered hoarsely.

  "Just go for a walk. A little evening walk, Grandpa. You might not come back after your walk, but Petey will. Too blocks south, then right, then south again into the alley. Got that?"

  "I got it," Burt mumbled.

  He didn't go to the kitchen to tell his wife. He couldn't. He glanced around the comfortable little home they had shared, where they had reared their children. He had something to show for his life, anyway. He sobbed, but walked resolutely out the front door and trudged south.

  * * *

  "Both of them? You hit both of them? Today?"

  "Yessir. The old Mohawk had an accident — fell off a subway platform. The story's on the radio already. Half a dozen witnesses are screaming that he was pushed. By… Get this. By a young black man. The citizen who saw Vince do the hit on the other Mohawk had a different kind of accident. Two big charges of buckshot through his ribs. 'Gangland style, they're saying."

  Luca Barbosa had been driven to Providence this morning to collect a debt. He'd returned only late in the evening. There were two dozen telephone messages — call this one, call that one — and Albanese had been waiting for him.

  "This is well done, Salvatore," he said. "Killed by a young black, huh?"

  Albanese grinned. "Right. If any witness really saw, that's what he saw."

  Barbosa nodded gravely. "Even those meddlers on the council will approve of this. Maybe even Giuseppe Rossi will approve and stop calling you a crazy man."

  "He calls me that?"

  "Yes. Sometime I'll let you teach him better. Hmm?"

  "Let that sometime be soon, Don Barbosa."

  Chapter Two

  "Hear ye! Hear ye! The Honorable Superior Court for the County of Medway is now in session pursuant to adjournment, the Honorable Justice Robert Murphy presiding. All rise!"

  The excited crow
d raggedly struggled up as the flush-faced, white-haired, bespectacled judge strode across the front of the courtroom and mounted the bench. The crowd stood, all, that is, except for the defendant and his attorneys. They remained seated, chatting calmly, and ignored the rap of the gavel, the announcement and the arrival of the judge.

  The man on trial was Harry Greene, a.k.a. Greentree, a.k.a. Groenbaum. He weighed nearly three hundred pounds and strained the near-antique wooden armchair in which he tried to sit comfortably, while leaning back. He was bald but for a fringe of black hair; his face was moon-round, with puffed-out cheeks that nearly obstructed his vision; his huge hands were clenched into a pair of hammy, hairy fists. He wore a suit stretched to cover his bulk, with a broad green necktie — a trademark — that ended six inches short of his belt buckle.

  The jury was in the box — twelve small citizens acutely self-conscious, some of them manifestly afraid. The district attorney and assistant district attorney, an attractive young woman, sat glumly at the table opposite Greene and his counsel.

  "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?"

  The foreman of the jury, a slight, slope-shouldered man, rose. "We have, Your Honor," he said.

  "Hand your verdict to the clerk."

  The clerk of the court carried the papers to the judge, who looked them over and them handed them back to the woman to read aloud.

  "The People of the State of Connecticut versus Harry Greene, case number 88-346. On the charge of premeditated murder, we the jury find the defendant not guilty."

  Harry Greene smiled benignly on his jury. Some would later say he winked at them.

  "The People of the State of Connecticut versus Harry Greene, case number 88-347. On the charge of conspiracy to commit murder, we the jury find the defendant not guilty."

  Most of the crowd was on its feet now, cheering and whistling. Many weren't, but most of them were. The judge banged his gavel and cried for silence. The clerk read on.

  "The People of the State of Connecticut versus Harry Greene, case number 88-348. On the charge of culpable homicide, we the jury find the defendant not guilty."

  The man and woman quietly weeping in the rear of the courtroom were hardly noticed — except by Harry Greene, who turned in his chair and grinned at them.

  The judge couldn't keep order. He tossed down his gavel, rose and walked out of the courtroom. "Bondsmen discharged!" he yelled back as he swept through the door.

  The crowd broke through the rail and swarmed around Harry Greene, grabbing for his hand, pounding him on the back, whooping their congratulations. Some of them turned on the district attorney and his assistant, shaking their fists. One advanced and spit on their piled law books.

  Greene elbowed people aside and approached the unhappy pair. "Okay, punk," he growled at the district attorney. "School's out. You had your shot. Now stay off my back. I mean permanently." He scowled at the assistant.

  Somebody pushed a cap down on Harry's head. It bore the logo of the Teamsters. Harry reached up and squared it. He laughed.

  "Okay! Party tonight! Celebration tonight! Hey-hey!"

  * * *

  "Celebration…" Joan Warnicke murmured. "Yeah."

  She was the assistant district attorney. With her in the sitting room of the motel suite was District Attorney Bill Fox, Richard Lincoln and the quiet, hawk-faced man from Washington who'd agreed to meet them via Hal Brognola. He was the man, Bill had told her, who would take up the Greene case from here.

  Richard Lincoln, who was sixty-five years old, was the man who, with his wife, had wept in the back of the courtroom when the verdicts were announced. It was their son, Richard Lincoln, Jr., who had called for federal assistance when he came to believe his defeat as a candidate for treasurer of the local had been rigged by Greene. Harry Greene had just been acquitted of all charges resulting from the death of Dick Lincoln.

  "He has held Medway in terror for ten years," Lincoln said. "No one can open a business here, not of any kind, without his consent. If you tried to open a grocery store without paying off Greene, his truckers wouldn't deliver to you. If you tried to open an insurance agency, he'd see to it that no one bought from you."

  "Dick Lincoln isn't the first person he's had murdered," Joan said. "I came here from New Haven, which isn't exactly what you'd call a squeaky-clean town, but I never saw anything like this."

  She was young and pretty, with a firm slender body that might have been called wiry if it had been a man's. Her eyes were dark. She wore her dark brown hair in solid bangs that hung almost to her eyebrows. She had accepted a Scotch, had finished it already and walked to the bar to pour herself another.

  "She's right," Fox agreed. "I was born here, have lived here all my life. It didn't used to be this way. But the last ten years…" He sighed. "It's not just the Teamsters. The local is the base for his power, but he has other connections."

  "How did he get the acquittal?" the big man asked.

  "He owns the judge," Joan replied despondently. "The rulings in the trial…" She stopped, turned down the corners of her mouth, shook her head. "The jury… God knows. Bribed. Intimidated. We tried the case for six weeks, and they took two hours to come out with a verdict."

  "A defendant in a case of premeditated murder was free on bond throughout," Fox added.

  He, too, went to the bar without a suggestion from his host and poured himself another gin and tonic. He was a handsome, scholarly-looking man, and prematurely gray.

  "Anyway," Richard Lincoln continued, "we're glad to see somebody from Washington taking an interest."

  "I'm not from Washington," Mack Bolan told him. "Not in any official sense, anyway. I don't work for the federal government. In fact I don't work for anybody."

  "You said your name is…"

  "Michael Belasko." Joan supplied the name.

  Lincoln frowned hard at him. "You've got a military bearing. Were you in Nam?" he asked.

  The big man nodded. "When I read that Dick Lincoln had been murdered, likely because he was trying to break a corrupt racket's hold on his hometown, I remembered him. It sounded like something he'd do. There are still a few people who won't just sit back and take it.

  "I don't work for the Feds," Bolan repeated emphatically. "They can't operate the way I do. Neither can you. And you shouldn't try." He glanced from one absorbed face to the next. "None of you should ever admit you met me. Something might go wrong. For you. For me."

  "Just what are you going to do, Mr. Belasko?" Fox asked.

  "Let's say," Bolan said, "that I'm going back to Washington in my unofficial capacity to file a report about what I saw here." Bolan continued solemnly, "I didn't come here until the case was almost finished. I wanted to give the regular processes of justice a chance. If you had succeeded in convicting Greene, I'd have gone about my business, feeling good about people who've got the guts to do something about guys like him. But…"

  "But he's got it corrupted," Lincoln interrupted. "Nobody can touch him."

  "Sooner or later, somebody would," Bolan corrected. "The trouble is, by that time Greene might have murdered two or three — or maybe half a dozen — other good men and women."

  "Now, just a minute here," Fox said. "Just what do you plan to do?"

  Bolan spoke directly to the grave, guileless district attorney. "Forget you ever met me, Mr. Fox. I'm going to pay a debt we all owe to Dick Lincoln."

  "If you kill Harry Greene — or try to — and survive, I'll be obligated to indict you."

  "He'll have a perfect alibi," Joan Warnicke said.

  "How's that?"

  "I'll testify he was in bed with me, all night, in my apartment."

  * * *

  He was unpacking his equipment when he heard the rap on the door.

  "Who is it?"

  "Joan."

  Even so, his Beretta filled his right hand when he opened the door. But it was Joan Warnicke, wearing blue jeans and a dark blue polo shirt and sneakers.

  "You ne
ed help," she said simply.

  Bolan shook his head curtly.

  "You don't even know where they are," she persisted. "There'll be guns outside, too, and you won't know who they are. I don't propose to go in. I'll just do a little scouting for you."

  Bolan studied the young lawyer's solemn face and saw determination. Joan Warnicke wasn't going to be put off, at least not easily.

  "You ought to stick to your side of the law," he said to her.

  "Right," she agreed. "But you and I are on the same side. You're on the side of justice. So am I."

  "You show me what you have to show me, then put a big distance between us."

  "I'll show you. Then I'll drive to a place where I can wait, out of sight. Than at a time we've set, I'll pick you up."

  "Thanks, but I'll look after my own retreat."

  "You better listen to Aunt Joan, big guy," she said. "What you have planned isn't going to be as easy as you think."

  * * *

  Joan drove his rented car, a dark blue Ford. She was right about knowing where to go. He had known that Harry Greene's victory celebration would be held at a hunting and fishing club on a country road in the woods, but he hadn't known exactly where it was and he might have spent considerable time looking for it.

  Harry's Club, the place was called. It was on a twisting, two-lane, pot-holed, blacktop road, six or seven miles out of town. Other clubs were located there, too: a skeet-shooting club, a target range, and a club with the name Cheetah, which suggested it was at the very least a strip joint. All of these places were one-story cinder-block buildings with unpaved parking lots. None of them was conspicuously lighted and none had garish signs. They were for men who knew where to find them. All belonged to Harry Greene, Joan informed him.

  "Greene Lane," she announced. "A great place, if you're a man with a taste for beer, shooting, fishing, hunting, gambling — and you can guess what else. Harry's buddies think he's created a paradise for them. A blue-collar paradise."