The Blackmail Club

by David Bishop

  “What makes you think your dad was gay?”

  “I just know. All right. I know.” Donny groaned.

  “Let’s have it.”

  “For years Mom went to Baltimore every other weekend to visit her old-maid sister. When she was gone, Dad would meet someone. It was always a man. The same man.” He angrily swiped at a new tear. “I followed him. Okay. I saw him with his butt-fucking pal.”

  Donny’s entire body wriggled.

  “And you felt humiliated.”

  “Go to hell, McCall.”

  “Give.”

  “Damn you. Yes. I was humiliated. All right? You satisfied? I was humiliated. Okay?”

  He started to stand. Jack wagged his gun. Donny sat back down.

  “Is that why you killed him?”

  “I already told you. I didn’t kill him.”

  “Which one of your goons did it for you?”

  “He killed himself. The cops said so.” With a pleading gesture, he added, “Christ, McCall, even Mom agrees.”

  “I want you to give your mother the money you blackmailed from your father.”

  “What? Mom told me yesterday she thought that Dad had been blackmailed. If that’s true, I swear it wasn’t me.”

  Jack raised his cane and pointed it at Donny. “Why did you have me beaten?”

  “I had to get you off the case. I couldn’t let everyone find out that my old man was a fag.” He looked down. “I’d be a laughing stock in my own club.”

  Perspiration rose from Donny’s pores like the early bubbles in boiling water. Jack could smell the sweat.

  “You stupid putz, we had begun to think maybe your mother had it wrong. That it might have been a straight suicide. Nobody beats up anybody to keep them off a case of suicide. When you attacked me, you convinced me to stay on the case. Along with that, it’s too big a coincidence that the dead Ben Haviland also did work for you. You may be big in booze and boobs, but you’re a sorry excuse for a gangster.”

  “You won’t have any more trouble from me.” He sounded like an adolescent whose maturity and backbone hadn’t caught up with his years. “Please don’t tell about my dad.”

  “We’re not done here.” Jack took a deep breath, biting down hard to get through a jolt of pain from his bruised ribs. “How did you know we would be at your mother’s last Sunday?”

  “I just stopped by—”

  “Don’t slip back into bad habits.”

  “Art Tyson. He—he told me. Okay. He stopped to see my mother. She must’ve told him.”

  “Bullshit,” Jack roared, then grimaced. “Your mother tolerated Tyson when your father was alive. I doubt she’d let him in the house now, and your mother swore she had not told anyone. Now who do you figure I believe you or your mother?”

  Donny mopped his brow with the flat of his hand. “It was Engels. Okay? Troy Engles.” Donny wiped his wet hand across his shirt front. “Engels stopped at the club.”

  Jack raised his hand like a traffic cop. “Stop.” Then he sapped Dumbo again. The man hadn’t moved, but Donny recoiled as if he had taken the blow himself. “Engels is an expert who deals in international espionage. Why would he bother doing favors for a punk gangster barely out of pimples?”

  Donny’s face turned white. “Engels was Dad’s lover … I got pictures.” He took a deep, hard swallow. “Engels keeps me informed of anything he runs across that affects me.”

  “So you were blackmailing Engels. How does he learn of things that affect you?”

  “Engels is tight with Art Tyson.” He clasped his hands to illustrate. “They played poker every month with my dad. The other regulars were Chief Mandrake and Mayor Molloy. They all lived near each other in the old days when they were young. From what I hear that newspaper columnist Eric Dunn, who’s in solid with the mayor, has taken over Dad’s chair. Engels told me Dunn has agreed not to print anything he hears at the poker games without an okay from the others.”

  If Tyson and Engels are poker pals, why did Engels con me at our open house about not wanting to be near Tyson?

  “I’m getting tired, Donny. And thanks to you, I hurt. What little patience I had, is gone. Tell me the rest. What about Tyson? The chief? And the story behind your escorting one of your girls to rendezvous with the mayor?”

  Donny’s face registered shock. “Mayor Molloy protects me because he’s bumping uglies with Jena Moves, my hottest lap dancer.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “Tyson has sessions with Jena, too, but he arranges his own. Jena told me she and Tyson sometimes do a threesome with some old ugly broad. I don’t know her name. That fat fuck Tyson is always horny. He beats his dick like it owes him money.” Donny squinted and shuddered. “Far as I know Dunn and Mandrake are straight. Christ, McCall, that’s all I know. That’s all of it.”

  “For now I’ll hold your confession and won’t tell your mother about your father being gay. But if I learn that you’ve held out, I’ll be back.”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. McCall.”

  “A couple more things.”

  Donny’s forced smile faded. “What the fuck else do you want?” he asked, sagging deep in his chair.

  “Treat your mother with the respect she deserves. You might just find out she’s a great lady.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Like everybody else, you think my mother’s Opie’s Aunt Bea from Mayberry. None of you know the real Sarah Beth Andujar.”

  Jack’s leg had gone to sleep. He shifted in the hard chair and stretched it out straight. “I wanna talk to Jena Moves. Give me her address, phone number, and real name.”

  “Her real name is Phoebe Ziegler. You can see why I had to change it. No man wants a Phoebe on his lap.” He offered a weak chuckle.

  Jack leaned down and laid another egg on Dumbo’s noggin, then squinted at Donny.

  “I don’t know anything else,” Donny said, his arms stretched out in front of him.

  “Open that safe.”

  Donny jerked hard on the back of his chair. “I told you I didn’t blackmail my father.”

  “If I thought you did, I’d turn your ass over to the cops right now. Open that safe and give me the pictures of Engels and your dad.”

  “Super spy comes in from the cold,” Donny said with dripping sarcasm. “I read you inherited millions from your old man, but you’re still just like the rest of us. You can never get enough scratch. Now you’re going to blackmail Engels.”

  “Think what you will,” Jack said, ignoring the increasing drumbeat in his head.

  Jack would need to follow Donny to the safe, so he needed an alarm in case the pachyderm woke. After standing, Jack told Donny to put the two chairs they had been sitting on across his man’s legs; one above the knee of one leg and the second below the knee of the other. If the man moved, the chairs would shift on the hard surface floor.

  “Get on the floor and open the safe from a seating position.”

  As soon as the safe door cleared the latch, Jack barked, “Scoot back.”

  Jack could no longer separate the bass from the treble in the music pushing through the walls from the main room. When he started toward the safe, his senses told him he was walking in foot-sucking mud. He shook his head and the second and third images of Donny disappeared. When he got to the safe and looked in, he saw neither a gun nor an alarm button.

  “Get up. Put the pictures on your desk, along with two one-hundred-dollar bills.”

  “Anything else I can do, Mr. McCall?”

  “I should also punch your lights out, but I won’t.” Then he smacked Donny in the jaw, the punk landing on the bed-long leather couch against the wall. “Like hell, I won’t.” Jack wasn’t sure which of them it hurt worse, but he knew which of them felt good about it.

  He picked up the photos, and acted out the final scene of Sap meets Dumbo before going out through the door.

  Like medieval jousters, the oncoming traffic kept thrusting lances of light to complicate Jack’s struggle to stay on the right h
alf of the road. He parked in the hospital lot near Twenty-second and “I” Streets. Donny’s two hundred went to reward a janitor for getting him back inside and up to his room without being seen.

  He kicked off his shoes and put his dirty clothes back in the small closet, then took the sleeping pills he’d saved from earlier and crawled into bed.

  Later today Jack would have visitors. He figured Max would come by and he wanted to know why the fella Max had tailing Donny hadn’t helped him in the alley.

  Chapter 17

  The morning light poured through Jack’s hospital window and with its warmth came the realization that Donny could not have shaken down CIA Deputy Director Troy Engels over the intimate pictures of himself with Chris Andujar. Engels would have handled Donny like an experienced nanny handles an unruly child.

  Nora came through the hospital door wearing a black blouse and her everything-is-going-to-be-better-today attitude. Her smile made him feel like a newborn colt, which was quite an accomplishment given his body felt like an old nag on the way to the glue factory. When she leaned down in her scoop-necked blouse to kiss him on the forehead, the colt had the feelings of a stallion.

  “Did you get some rest?” she asked.

  “They gave me sleeping pills last night. When I took them, they put me right out.”

  It was the truth constructed to work as a lie for Jack wasn’t ready to hear her admonitions for having snuck out of the hospital to confront Donny.

  “Max and one of his guys took your car to your home. They left it in the driveway.”

  “Good. What’s happening on Andujar?”

  “I finished going through Chris’s laptop. Fuller was straight with us. There’s no legend of the patient codes.”

  Max came in. “Thanks for taking care of my car,” Jack said when he looked up at Max who wasn’t wearing a scoop-necked blouse and didn’t lean forward to kiss him on the forehead.

  Max nodded. “Yellow isn’t your best color, boss, particularly when you wear it with all those shades of bruise.”

  “Thanks, Max. I’ll try to keep in mind next time someone wants to redo my skin tones.”

  Max turned serious and reported that nothing out of the ordinary had happened at Donny’s last night until some hunched-over man limped in around one. “The old scruffer limped out about an hour later. I didn’t even bother taking his picture.” Max turned his face away from Nora and winked. “An hour after scruffer left, Donny came out beside one of his bouncers. The big one was limping and kept rubbing his head like he’d taken a bad fall. The two of them were shouting, then the big guy squeezed into the Porsche and Donny drove him home. I followed.”

  Jack turned his head away from Nora and winked back at the crafty Irish-Scottish breed. Then he asked, “Had Donny left his club earlier?”

  “At first we didn’t think so, but he must have. When I came on duty the man I relieved told me that earlier some big musclebound guy with a flat nose came out, got the van, and pulled it up tight to the club’s side door. The open door blocked my man’s view, but he could tell three more people got in. At the time he figured they were driving home a couple of drunks. They’ve done that a time or two before. It looked routine. My man took two zoomers. I looked at ‘em, but nothing much showed because of that damn door.”

  Max shook his head. “That same van came back around ten-thirty, and Donny, his limping bodyguard, and a big nasty looking biker got out. They all went back into the club. The driver, another steroid experiment gone amuck, joined them inside after he parked the van. That’s when I reasoned it was that group, not drunks, who left earlier. No two ways about it, we missed that, boss. Sorry.”

  “It couldn’t be helped. Let me change the subject. Didn’t you tell me you once worked as a guard at the building where Chris Andujar had his office?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know which janitor service the building used?”

  “Clark’s Janitorial. I walked past their van every time I made my rounds.”

  So the dead Benny Haviland had access to both Chris’s office and his son’s club.

  “Max, stop by that building tonight and find somebody who works for Clark’s. See if you can find out what other buildings they clean.”

  “You got it.”

  The door opened and the nurse walked in to chase off Nora and Max.

  What Jack had heard about hospitals was true. You couldn’t get any rest. If they weren’t poking you, feeding you, running tests, or doing therapy, the doctor was coming in on rounds. To prove the thesis, the doctor walked in just as the nurse walked out. After doing enough to justify billing the insurance company, the doctor said, “You can go home at six if you promise to take it easy the next couple of days.”

  The doc left; Max and Nora came back in. Then Sarah Andujar walked in. She had her coat buttoned all the way up, a black scarf wrapped around her neck trailing back over her shoulder. She took Jack’s hand. “I could not bear it if my asking you to look into what happened to my Christopher was the cause of your being beaten.”

  “It was a random mugging, Sarah, that’s all, just some thugs out for kicks. Lucky me, eh, but I’m fine, really. They’re turning me loose at the end of the day, so I’m on the mend.”

  Sarah shook her head slowly. “I can’t imagine anyone doing such a horrid thing.”

  After a while, Nora stepped closer. “Max and I need to get going. I’ll be back at six to drive you home.”

  Jack watched the automated door close over the space where he had last seen Nora.

  Sarah stepped closer. “I need to leave too, and you need your rest.” She held her scarf in place and leaned in. “I worry about you, you big lug. I love you like you were my own son.” She kissed his forehead and left.

  When Jack left the room at six he planned to check outside the door for a sign reading, THIS PATIENT NEEDS FOREHEAD KISSES. He eased himself into a semi-sitting position. It felt good as long as he didn’t let the back of his head touch the headboard.

  The beating had given him more reason to suspect Donny, but in the end he doubted the punk had the moxie for blackmail and murder.

  He dialed Nora’s cell phone on his and headed for the bathroom. “Where are you?” he asked when she came on the line.

  “I stopped at my place. They just delivered a new bed. I got it on trial.”

  “Give me some personal comments on Tyson, Molloy, Mandrake, and Eric Dunn.”

  “Tyson’s divorced. In my mind, he’s worse than some of the guys he arrested. Mayor Molloy and his wife are strong Catholics. Rumor is neither will break the church’s dogma on marriage for life. The chief’s a widower. His wife died of cancer, oh, six, seven years ago. Other than to say hello, I don’t know Eric Dunn. Why?”

  “I’ll explain later.” Jack dragged his palm across his cheek. He’d need to find a way to shave before Nora arrived at six.

  “In an hour,” Nora said, “I’m meeting again with Agnes Fuller. She says she’s been thinking back on the last few weeks and she thinks she may be able to match a few more names with Chris’s patient codes. Bye for now.”

  “Wait! I haven’t had a chance to give you the lowdown on what happened last night.”

  “You know who worked you over?”

  “It was three goons from Donny’s club—probably bouncers. Donny was there too.”

  “That little punk ass! Why didn’t you tell Sergeant Suggs?”

  “I don’t want Sergeant Anal back in the middle of the Andujar case. He called it suicide and closed his file. Now it’s ours.”

  Chapter 18

  A man wearing olive green pants; a baseball style cap, and a light tan jacket emblazoned with the water company’s logo opened Jack’s water meter near the curb. He looked down at the gauge, appeared to make a note of the reading, slid the lid over until it clunked back into place, and continued down the sidewalk until he was beside Jack’s brown Concorde parked in his driveway. He walked slowly around the car, looking as one might at a
car that had a for-sale sign in its window, then ducked between the car and the hedge next to the driveway. From the crouching position he removed a wrapped package from inside his jacket and shimmied his way under Jack’s car.

  An hour after Sarah left Jack’s hospital room, Mary Lou Sanchez came in with the energy of a hummingbird. “Nora okayed my coming to see you. She’s watching the office.” Her smile drooped into concern. “How are you doing, Jack?”

  “I’m fine, Mary Lou. A hundred years from now I’ll never know this happened.”

  Her laugh raised his spirits. Then she kissed him on the forehead.

  There has to be a sign out there.

  “Lean forward,” she said. “I’ll fluff your pillows.”

  Pillow puffing wasn’t in her job description, but what the hell. Jack leaned and Mary Lou fluffed.

  “I’d like to hear more about your father.”

  She pulled a chair close so Jack could see her without having to move his head.

  “My dad, Tino Sanchez, was a cop all his life; he loved it.” Her eyes seemed to sparkle when she spoke his name. “He and my godfather, I call Chief Mandrake, Uncle Harry, but for real, he’s my godfather. He and my dad were more like brothers than friends. Daddy told me once that Mom had some serious hots for Uncle Harry when she first met the two of them. Uncle Harry was already married, so the four of them became close friends. My mom and dad up and got married six months before I was born.” She raised her eyebrows. “We all know how that goes. My mother died giving birth to me. Uncle Harry lost his wife a few years back, and then I lost Daddy. Uncle Harry has been like a second father.”

  She slipped off a locket that hung around her neck and opened it.

  “This is my daddy and my mama.” On each of their pictures she had a small tuft of hair. “Daddy gave me the locket with Momma’s hair when I was a little girl. I swiped Daddy’s hairs out of his brush after he was murdered.”

  “You look like your mother.”

  She opened her eyes wide and took in a big breath, the way one does to hold back the impulse to cry. “Uncle Harry says that too.” Her tone turned wistful. “I loved them both very much. You know, all my friends take their parents for granted. They don’t know how lucky they are to have them.” She closed the locket, paused to hold it tight and then slipped it back over her head to again cradle against her chest.