by Black Alley
“I’ll be there.” Then I added, “How’s Velda, Pat?”
I knew he was grinning into the phone. “Waiting,” he told me. “She never could see you dying.”
The doctor had gotten me an early flight into New York and had sprung for a first-class ticket to give me plenty of room to stretch out and rest. I told the stewardess not to awaken me until we were in the traffic pattern, then kicked off my loafers and went to sleep. There were no narcotics this time. It was pure, natural sleep with unnatural dreams so disturbingly real they twisted me back to wakefulness just to get rid of them. Faces were distorted, yet ones I knew, and the dream sounds made banging noises that came out of a past I didn’t want to remember. Somehow time compacted itself and before I could swing at the thing that had grabbed me I opened my eyes and saw the pretty stewardess shaking me awake very gently and made myself smile.
But she knew. “Bad dreams?”
“Terrible,” I told her.
“You wanted to clobber me, didn’t you?”
“Not you.”
“Who then?”
“The bad guys,” I said.
“You military?”
“A long time ago.”
“Now you’re a cop.” The tiny frown between her eyes had a smile to it.
“Of a sort,” I said.
The frown went away but the smile stayed. “Ohooo,” she said, “one of those.” She saw that I was wondering what she was getting at and added, “A terrorist, like.”
This time I grinned and straightened up, bringing the seat back to an upright position as the PA directed. I said, “You might say that.”
The smile I got back said she didn’t believe me at all.
It was off season for the return of the snowbirds to the big city so there weren’t many there to meet the passengers. I slung the single piece of luggage over my shoulder and ambled slowly down the corridor, walking too slowly to be a native New Yorker. Everybody else from the plane passed me by before I reached the gate and that strange thrill of anticipation ran up my spine before I ever spotted Pat Chambers and Velda watching me, not really knowing what to expect, a walking dead man, a ghost from the past, or somebody with a crazy, writhing anger bottled up, not knowing where to spill it.
But something came across that said everything was all right. I saw it in Pat’s expression and in the sparkle of Velda’s eyes. My buddy could read me the way old buddies can, but with Velda there was knowledge that saw other things on the inside and her eyes told me that the many past months were just that . . . past. There was no need for excuses, no need for stories to be told if I didn’t want to tell them. Just that wonderful glad you’re back look that said everything without saying anything at all.
If you didn’t look closely, our greeting would have seemed perfunctory. When I shook hands with Pat, we both wanted to do it harder, but knew it wasn’t time yet, and when Velda and I hugged, there was a gentle intensity we both felt. It was only a hello kiss to whoever saw it, but to us it was a silent explosion of flaming emotion that was almost frightening. Velda drew back modestly, and when she looked at my eyes, knew that I had felt it too.
There was a time when I would have questioned the feeling, wondering what it was. But not now. This time I knew. Very quietly, so that even Pat couldn’t hear me, I said, “I love you, Velda.”
And just as quickly she answered, “Yes, I know.”
I waited. She smiled. Finally she said, “You know how I feel, don’t you?” Then I waited, grinned a little bit and said, “Now I know, kitten.”
2
MY APARTMENT HAD CHANGED. There was a different smell to it. The furniture was the same, but seemed brighter. The window curtains weren’t the same ones I had a girl from Third Avenue put up. Velda caught me looking at them and said, “They needed changing.”
I nodded as if I knew what she meant.
No dishes were in the kitchen sink and in the bathroom there was fresh soap and new towels on the rack. “I cleaned up in here,” Velda said. “Then I kept it clean.”
“Yes,” I told her. “I could tell.”
“How?” she asked me with a verbal smirk.
“The toilet seat was down,” I said.
She started to laugh and when she stopped her eyes did that thing that always unnerved me somehow. It was something only a woman could do and she seemed to know just when to do it.
Her voice was low and throaty, her words soft and inviting. She let the look linger a few seconds longer, knowing what it was doing to me, then she husked, “How are you going to thank me, Mike?”
I could time a reaction, too. I knew what she wanted and what she expected me to tell her, but this was my time now and she needed something so utterly unexpected it would rock her down to her socks. It was going to rock me just as well, and for a brief second, I hoped I wasn’t hopping in over my head . . . but that moment passed and the time was right now. I reached out and took both of her hands in mine. I could feel the strength and warmth and felt a little bit of a tremor too.
Very quietly I said to her, “You know what happened to me, doll. I’m all shot up and not worth a damn thing. People are going to be looking for me to make sure I’m out of it for good. Economically I’m a bad risk, though that’s not a totally hopeless situation as long as I can stay alive, and believe me, that last part’s not going to be easy.”
Her frown was back, bewilderment clouded her eyes like she was trying to solve some strange riddle, one that had no good answer.
I took one hand away from hers, then reached up to stroke that lovely auburn hair that still rolled under at her shoulders in a soft pageboy. I said, “I want to marry you, kitten. I think I’ve always wanted to since you walked into my office looking for a job.”
The way her hands squeezed mine told me she had had that same wanting too. Sheer surprise still showed in her eyes at having heard the totally unexpected. There was joy too, but subdued, as if she were reading my mind. “That was the good news,” she said, then waited patiently for my answer.
An odd grunt came up into my throat. “We have a little longer to wait,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I have to finish something.”
“Marcos Dooley?”
I nodded. “Pat tell you?”
“Everything.”
“What do you want me to do, Velda?”
Without any hesitation at all, she said, “Finish it, Mike. Unless you do you won’t be any good at all.”
Pat had made the way easy for me. A plainclothesman I recognized met me at Bellevue Hospital and said with a grin, “You sure are like a bad penny. Everything has been nice and quiet and now you show up again.”
“Maybe I can hold it down this time.” I grinned back. “How’s Dooley doing?”
“Dying fast, Mike. If he hadn’t known you were coming in he would’ve been gone by now.”
We got on the elevator and the cop pushed the button to our floor. “Who’s got him under guard?” I asked him.
“The usual,” he told me, then explained, “The DA’s office has a big interest in him, but his doctor won’t let them question him yet.”
“The DA trying to get a fix on the Ponti bunch?”
“You got it.”
“He say anything yet?”
“No. He just asked for you.”
I shrugged as the car stopped and the door opened. “He knew Pat as well as he did me.”
“He just asked for you, though.”
“Who’s on the door?”
“Nobody from the DA’s squad.”
When we turned the corner I saw the pair of uniforms flanking the entrance. The taller one rocked back and forth on his heels while his partner did a slow, steady survey of the corridor. They spotted us, then parted slightly to let us through. The plainclothes dick stopped at the door and motioned for me to go ahead in.
“You’re not coming?” I asked him.
“He won’t talk if there’s anyone else around.”
“No.”
“How come?”
The cop let out a little laugh. “Captain Chambers and the doctor do a dance together.”
“What’s the tune?” I asked him.
He laughed again. “Screw the DA’s office. It’s a great number.”
I turned the knob, went in and closed the door behind me.
The place was a death room, all right. It hung heavy in the air. Light came from the instrument panel behind the bed, the glow a pale orange yellow. You could smell the death. Not really, but you knew you could if you tried.
When my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw the mound under the sheet and knew that was where Dooley was. Quietly, I walked over and stood beside the bed, looking down on something with a hole in it that let life leak out. His breathing was shallow but even, the pain of the gunshot being buried under the weight of narcotics.
While I was trying to figure out a way to waken him he seemed to sense he was not alone and with an effort his eyes opened, strayed vacantly a moment, then centered on me. “You made it, huh?”
“Sure, for you, Dooley. Why didn’t you get Pat?”
“He’s not a snake like you are.”
“Come on—” I started to say, but he cut me off with a shake of his head.
“Mike . . . you’re a mean slob. You’re . . . nasty. You do the damndest things anybody . . . ever heard about. Pat’s not like you.”
“He’s a cop, Marcos.”
The smile was real, but forced. “You always called me Marcos . . .”
“I know. When I was teed off at you.”
“You . . . teed off at me . . . now?”
“Pal, after taking those slugs myself, I haven’t got enough left to get sore at anything. Right now I’m a pussycat.”
“But you’re sort of thinking . . . why I had to see you.”
“Sort of.”
“Uh-huh.” He coughed lightly and his face twitched with pain. My eyes were almost fully adjusted to the gloom now and could see him clearly. The years hadn’t been good to him at all and the final indignity of getting shot had drained him completely.
A full minute passed before the pain was gone, but now there was a clock ticking behind his eyes. I knew it and he knew it. Each tick took him closer to the end. He strained to see me again, finally found my eyes. “Mike . . . remember Don Angelo?”
I thought he was drifting back along memory lane. Don Angelo had been dead for twenty years. At the age of ninety-some he had died in peace in his Brooklyn apartment, surrounded by his real family. His other family was a hundredfold larger, spread out over the East Coast domain the don called his own.
“Sure, Dooley. What about him?”
His expression looked strained and there was shame in his eyes. There was a long pause before he said, “I worked for him, Mike.”
It was hard to believe. “You, Dooley?”
“I wasn’t lucky . . . like you and Pat. Don Angelo . . . found out . . . about me being in Army Intelligence. He had work for me.”
“Dooley,” I asked him, “what kind of work would you do for the mob? You were no gunhand. You never messed around in illegal business.”
He held his hand up again and I stopped talking. “It was . . . a different . . . kind of business.” My silent nod asked him a question and he answered it. “Do you know . . . what the yearly take . . . of the . . .” He groped for the words and said, “associated mobs . . . adds up to?”
“Internal Revenue Service collects statistics like that.”
“And . . . ?”
“It’s a pile of loot,” I said.
“Mike,” he said very solemnly, “you haven’t got the slightest idea.”
“What are you getting at, Dooley?”
His chest rose under the sheet while he took several deep breaths, his eyes closing until whatever spasm it was had calmed down. When he looked up his mouth worked a bit before the words came out.
“It was back before all the trouble, Mike. Remember when the young guys tried to take over . . . the family business?”
“But they didn’t make it, Dooley.”
“No . . . not then.” He sucked in another big lungful of air. “But it made the dons think.”
“Yeah,” I reminded him, “they were all going legitimate then. The business went Big Business.”
Somehow, the smile he gave me made me feel pretty ignorant. He let me stew in it for a few seconds and I hoped he was enjoying his moment because I surely wasn’t.
“The original five families met in Miami. They . . . had researched the situation . . . checked out the books with independent counsel as the government likes to say.”
“What are you getting to, Dooley?”
Once again, he gave out a grunt, this time of satisfaction. “They . . . were all getting screwed . . . by their kids. The ones they put through college. The ones they . . . tapped to run the businesses . . . when they handed it over.”
“The dons weren’t that dumb,” I interrupted.
“Computers,” Dooley said.
“Computers!”
“They learned . . . how to use them . . . in college. They didn’t want to wait. They wanted it now . . . and were getting it. Now shut up and don’t talk until I’m finished.”
“And the chronicle continues,” I muttered.
“You had to get that in,” he told me.
“I don’t like it when somebody tells me to shut up,” I said with mock indignity. Then added, “But now I’m shut up.”
“Okay. Stay that way . . . and listen. All the old dons ... never exploited their wealth. They might spend it, but they never looked like . . . they had a dime. Lousy little apartments, their wives did the cleaning and cooking. If they had big times it was when . . . they went back to . . . the old country. The kids . . . the bad ones . . . knew they had it, but they didn’t know where the dons kept it.” He was starting to breathe with an unnatural rhythm and I didn’t like it, but there was no way to stop him now. “That was when . . . they got hold of me.” He knew what I wanted to ask, but shook his head again. “Later . . . you’ll find out why. It isn’t . . . important now.”
A little red light flashed on the panel behind his head. It stayed on about two seconds then went off. Nobody came in so I ignored it.
He said, “Nobody really knows . . . how they did it. Cash and valuables got moved by truck with different crews so that no one knew where it came from or where it was going. Except the last crew.”
“What happened to them?”
“Like the old pirate days. Their skeletons are still there. When their job . . . was done . . . so were they.” He rolled his eyes up to mine again. “Now stay shut up . . . okay?”
I gave him the nod again. “All their heavy money . . . was in paper. They cashed in everything they had and turned it into dollars. They pulled out . . . all their numbered accounts in Switzerland, Bahamas, Cayman. The cash flow was still coming in from gambling and drugs and all that . . . crap, you know?” I nodded again. “That’s what fooled . . . the young bucks. The . . . walking around money was there, but the capital had disappeared.”
“Can I talk now?” I asked him.
“Go ahead.” He seemed a little breathless and glad for the break.
“When did they find out?”
“Maybe six months before the shootup you were in. The computers came up with it. At first they . . . they thought it was . . . like a mistake. When the machines said no way, then they . . . thought they were being ripped off. The stuff . . . really hit the fan then. All those hot shots liked to go nuts. Now . . . let’s see what you remember.”
All I could do was watch and wait. But he made sense. There was a genuine unrest in the upper echelons of the underworld fraternity a couple years ago. Everything was cloaked in total secrecy that even had the IRS concerned. No matter how hard they dug into mob records they kept coming up blank.
Dooley said, “The dons were getting old by then.
When they . . . died off it all . . . seemed natural. Their deaths were the things old men were supposed to die of. You know, strokes, heart attacks, falls down stairs.”
“I remember that. There was a regular parade of those gaudy funerals for a while.”
And it was a time to remember. Every newspaper and television station covered the rows of flowerladed Cadillacs and the rivers of tears the bereaved shed at the gravesites. The families all kept long faces, not letting a smile show through, but inwardly, with each successive carnival, the happy light in their eyes began to show and they all waited to see who the new king would be.
While I was thinking these thoughts I was looking straight down at Dooley and he read my thoughts perfectly.
“I was . . . working for Lorenzo Ponti by then, Mike. Ponti was the . . . smart one. He was in charge of . . . the big operation. He moved faster than the young kids . . . he kept ahead of everybody, that guy.”
“Did he move right in when the others died?” I asked him.
“Hell, Mike, they didn’t . . . just die. They were killed. All of them. Except Ponti. And when he goes there won’t be any more dons . . . just the young phonies who are going to be howling mad because their inheritance has disappeared. Poof! Just . . . like that.” He tried to snap his fingers, but didn’t have the strength.
“Dooley . . . doesn’t Lorenzo Ponti know where this hoard is?”
“He thinks he does.”
“But somebody faked him out?”
“Me,” Dooley told me. “I faked . . . him out. I changed the road signs . . . covered up paths, disguised everything. Someday you’ll find out. Ponti will be digging in the wrong mountain.”
Suddenly sheer, raw pain flashed across his face and his back arched under the cover. He was beginning to look down his own black alley now and it was too fearful to believe.
“Mike . . . these doctors . . .”
He seemed to choke on his voice and closed his eyes. When he forced them open there was a deep seriousness to his gaze. I said, “They’re good men, Dooley. The best.”
“But I’m not a good guy.”
“They don’t care. You’re here and you’re their patient.”