by Black Alley
“So’s your attitude.”
“I’m taking it easy. I told you that.”
“The hell you are. That wound is starting to open again. Antibiotics can take it down, but you’re going to have to make up your own mind what you’re going to do. If you were back in the army you’d be hospitalized and strapped down to a bed. As for me, all I can do is give you advice that you don’t want to take.”
“Is it that bad?”
He made a face. He didn’t have to tell me the rest. Finally he said, “If you really want to marry that girl, you’d better think hard on what I’m telling you.” From his pocket he took out a pad of prescription blanks, wrote on two of them and held them out. At least I could read his writing. “That’s in case you run out of these.” He gave me two vials, both containing my usual medication.
“Suppose something does happen, doc . . . if that thing gets ripped open or somebody really creams me?”
“You have your famous .45 with you?”
“Handy enough.”
“Save the last bullet for yourself.”
“Boy,” I told him, “you’re about as consoling as a mongoose is to a cobra.”
I wasn’t in my office more than a minute when Pat called me from his car phone. He was on the way uptown and his voice sounded tight when he said it was imperative that we talk. While I waited for him I sketched out a few notes in outline form to keep all the details in order and when I finished page four I heard the front door open.
Pat walked in, his mouth grim, but it was the man with him that got me a little edgy. I nodded to Pat and said to Homer Watson, “Well, good to see you again.” I waved to the chairs and they both sat down. Neither one of them was holding paperwork, so I asked, “You recording this interview?”
Watson smiled gently and patted his pocket.
I opened my desk drawer and took out my miniature Sony, put it in front of me, touched the on button, gave the date and occasion and asked them, “Then you don’t mind if I do?” Neither one answered.
Finally Pat said, “Do you know what you’re into, Mike?”
“Unless somebody tells me, I’m running blank. But let’s cut to the chase. You and Homer here are scratching for something and you have me right in the dirt. Somehow all this seems to center around Marcos Dooley, and I wasn’t there when he was shot. I came back to New York to pay my last respects before he died because we had been in the same war together.”
“And you two had a big talk together before he went,” Pat reminded me.
“Right. It was at your instigation, pal, so what’s the beef?”
“The gist of your conversation,” Homer said quietly.
“We went through all this before.”
“No, we only touched on the edges.”
I held up my hand and stopped him. “You know, back in the eighties when all of the agencies were pushing the RICO statute to hit the Mafia, you got bugs into the private and protected home of Paul Castellano, you bugged Tony Corallo’s Jaguar, you had super-scopes and parabolic microphones to keep everybody under surveillance and you couldn’t even cover one shot-up war veteran in a city hospital? Come on, what do I look like, a spy of spies?”
“You look like somebody who stumbled into something accidentally.”
“And you want to know what it is?”
There was a short pause, and Watson said, “That’s right.”
“Quid pro quo,” I told him. “You tell me.”
His nod was imperceptible, but it was there. “There seems to be some soul-searching among the families in the mob. There are several high-ranking firms of attorneys and financial houses investigating illegal activities.”
I grinned at him and said, “And they can’t find out where the money went.”
Curtly, he said, “No.” I waited a moment and he added, “It started disappearing about 1986, it seems.”
“That’s not very definite.”
“Our inside sources couldn’t do any better.” I was about to say something, but he anticipated it with a smile. “They sent me. It seems that my superiors think I have a terrier mentality with an uncanny smell for money.”
“So?”
“Ever since Gotti went down the tubes there’s been a scramble for succession. Not only for his former position, but for a clamp on the entire organization. The new blood is different. It’s smarter, it has different ideals. It seems they were pretty well put out when they found the money coffers empty.”
“Where do I come in, Homer. Or Dooley?”
“Your friend left a trail of sorts. Lorenzo Ponti did a lot of talking with him in private, seemingly about nothing. On many occasions there were other bosses on hand who took the same attitude toward Dooley that Ponti did.”
“Dooley wasn’t in the mob,” I ground out. “You ought to know that.”
“I do. What I can’t figure out is, what was he?”
“He was a caretaker, for Pete’s sake. He was a paid employee. He was a nothing. Damn, you guys did a background check on him, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What did you come up with?”
“Nothing.” He leaned forward, his hands on his knees. “The government estimates that over the past not too many years, many billions of dollars have been siphoned from the economy into the hands of those who control the Mafia. At best, the recipients could only have spent a fraction of it, but somehow it’s all disappeared. We’ve had agents on it a long time checking out all the normal depositing facilities, we’ve had cooperation from police agencies and financial institutions, but we find nothing.”
“And you’re out in the field all by yourself?”
“No, but I’m the one concerned with you.”
“How did you tie up with Pat here?”
“Because he had an interest in Dooley too. Then you came into it.”
“Homer,” I asked him, “were you ever in the military?”
“No.”
“You can form some pretty tight friendships under combat conditions.”
“So I understand.”
“Dooley, Pat and I were a team. If Dooley had walked off with Fort Knox it wouldn’t be important enough to worry about when he was dying. Even if I owned the place I could have forgiven him. We were buddies, see?”
He stared at me a few moments, then nodded slowly. “Where do you go from here?”
“I want to find out who killed him.”
Homer Watson got up slowly. His hand dipped into his pocket to shut off his miniature tape recorder. He waved a finger at Pat and walked to the door. With his hand on the knob, he turned around, looked at me and asked, “Then what, Mr. Hammer?”
I let him see all my teeth in a big grin.
When the door shut behind him, Pat’s face relaxed. “With eighty billion you probably could buy Ford and GM together.”
“You have a good memory, Pat.”
“If it weren’t for Watson I would have thought you were making it all up. But I did a rundown on him. He got our association from newspaper clips. I got his through police sources. He’s a very competent investigator. Not tough, just able.”
“Then I guess I’ll have a tail on me from now on.”
“You guess correctly, pal.”
“NYPD involved?”
“Nobody has entered a complaint so far.”
“How about our lady assistant DA?”
“So far she’s been pretty quiet. But she can be pretty sneaky too,” he reminded me.
“Okay, where do you stand, old buddy?”
Pat let out a little laugh that sounded more like a cough. “I’m going to watch you work, Mike. This case is over the death of a nobody for billions of dollars that are unrecorded and possibly do not exist and you trying to kill yourself when nobody is around to pay you.”
“You sound a little unconvinced.”
“Then convince me.”
“Would a hot pastrami sandwich and a cold beer do it? I’ll have coffee with mine.”
Velda didn�
�t get to my apartment until eight o’clock. Whatever she had done, her shoes were scuffed up and she was shiny with sweat. She didn’t say hello, she simply threw her purse down on a chair and stated, “I have to take a shower.”
You don’t question beautiful women in that condition. I pointed toward the bathroom and went to my closet to get her the terrycloth robe she had bought for me. I heard her turn the water on and the shower door slide closed and all I could think about was how the hell I was going to get out of a compromising situation like this. Here we were, un-ringed, but vocally engaged, and she was going to get me all wrapped up like a spider does a trapped fly and I’d forget all my no-sex-until-after-marriage attitudes.
Downstairs there was a dry cleaner who kept odd hours and I picked up the phone and got his cigarette-husky hello. He said he could do a quick dry clean job for me in an hour and would send a kid right up for the clothes. In less than five minutes I had passed the garments out, then sat down and watched the TV news. Girls love to take long showers. When they’re real dirty they take longer ones. I watched a local show and the first twenty minutes of Discovery, got the clothes back from the kid and was having a cup of coffee when I heard the water cut off. When the shower door opened I gave her a couple of minutes to dry off, then walked over, opened the door and handed in the robe. I heard her quiet “Damn!” and she pulled the door shut. I knew what she was going to do. She was going to come out in nothing but a cleverly draped bath towel that could fall off whenever she wanted it to.
“Wiseguy,” she said when she came out.
I pointed to her clothes neatly hung over the back of the sofa. Velda knew what I had done. “Smart-ass,” she told me, but she was smiling. “I still have to get dressed.”
“I’ll go in the kitchen when you’re ready,” I said.
“Are you always going to be like this?”
“Only until after we’re married. Remember, you started all this.”
“Mike,” she told me sweetly, “I think this is going to be fun.” She picked up her purse and sat in the chair, doing that bit with a crossing of the legs that women are so good at. With the fingers of one hand she spread apart the terrycloth collar at her throat, her tongue deliberately wetting her lips.
“What have you got for me?” I asked her.
She gave me a silent smile for a moment, then: “I called in a couple of favors and ran your phone bill up, but got some interesting information. That estate Ponti has up in the Adirondacks is in his wife’s name, free and clear with all taxes paid. It’s worth about two hundred thousand, the property being scenic, but not good for cultivation. It’s on the side of a mountain with a slate base and probably not a good site for development. The house is nice, but modest.”
I stared at her face and said, “Now surprise me.”
“Harris and Ponti seemed to be buddies of some sort, so I had surrounding properties checked out. Nothing bordered on Ponti’s estate, but Harris had his own place on the side of another mountain area about five miles away. Nothing fancy here . . . just a big old log cabin put up in the twenties, an open-fronted shed and a three-wagon barn.”
“No outhouse?”
“It has indoor plumbing.”
“Who lives there?”
“Some old guy. He could be a caretaker. The place belongs to Harris’ daughter who lives in the village.”
“If it has a caretaker, the place must make some kind of money.”
“My source said slate was mined there at times. As a matter of fact, it seems to be a revived industry since the Japanese have taken most of the product. There’s another major area in Granville, not too far away.”
“One last thing. Who was your source?”
“An old admirer who works for the state of New York. I met him at a party. No, we never kissed. No, we never even held hands.”
“Way to go,” I told her jokingly.
She blew me a kiss. “Where are we now?”
I reached over, turned the TV off and sat back. “Let’s see what we have. One killing and a big stink. Dooley was an innocuous figure, so his murder couldn’t have been over any direct involvement with the big stink. Now, that stink has been in the making for some time. You don’t run off with billions overnight. A lot of thought went into that scheme. It was started when the dons were alive, when the Mafia had a different sort of organizational setup. But now, except for Lorenzo Ponti, there are new heads of the families. They’re younger and smarter, but the feds and the new laws are harder to deal with and the money, the big power, isn’t there anymore and the families are hurting.”
“Where could it go, Mike?”
“It hasn’t been destroyed, kitten.”
“And it hasn’t been spent.”
“But it’s been stolen.”
“Supposing it was stolen. Who is big enough to steal it?”
“The government could,” I said.
“Which government?”
I took another sip of my coffee. It had grown cold and tasted terrible. “It would have to be pretty damn powerful and mighty devious. To make a move like that it would have to have a need so big it would take a chance of being obliterated if it were caught.”
Velda sat there, her fingertips touching her lips. “What are you thinking, Mike?”
“They were caught, but after the heist was over. They died for it because the killers weren’t sure about things.”
“Why is Ponti still alive?”
“That don is smarter. They have to keep someone alive to set them on the right track and he’ll stay breathing until the loot is recovered.”
“Then he’ll be killed?”
“Most likely. His kid Ugo is a trigger-happy slob who wouldn’t think twice about rubbing out the old man if he could inherit the cash. In fact, he could have explored this situation and figured out where Dooley stood and arranged to have his father killed in a staged gang war. That didn’t work, so he took Dooley out before the guy could decide to open up to the authorities.”
“Where did Dooley stand?”
“Between a rock and a hard place. He was a person who could do a job, but not somebody who would be sorely missed if he had a fatal accident.” The jarring ring of the phone cut in, making us both jump.
“Who knows you’re here?” Velda asked.
I shook my head and picked up the receiver. An odd voice said, “Mr. Hammer?” I said that it was. “This is Marshall Brotorrio, Mr. Hammer.”
Then I remembered him. He was in charge of the repository where I had placed Dooley’s remains.
“Sorry to be calling you so late.”
“No trouble. What’s up?”
“My night man was making his usual rounds when he found the urn you had placed here taken from the niche and emptied on the floor. Whoever did it kicked the casing across the aisle, putting a big dent in it.”
“What about the ashes?”
“Those were scattered, as if someone had kicked them too.”
“Any sign of a break-in?”
“Oh, yes. One window was out. The glass was broken, the catch opened and the window pushed back. There was no difficulty there at all. It must have happened right after my man came on. He was eating supper on the other side of the building and never heard a thing.”
“Have you called the police?”
“No, not yet. This is such a personal matter . . . nothing else has been touched . . . that I thought you should know about it first. What do you suggest?”
“Tell you what, Marshall, why don’t you sweep the remains back into the urn and put it back where it belongs.”
“There could be floor dirt and . . .”
“Dooley won’t care about that.”
“Should I call the police?”
“That’ll only get you bad publicity. You wouldn’t want your clients thinking vandals could get to the remains of their loved ones, would you?”
“Certainly not!”
“Then just get the window fixed, Marshall, and we’ll f
orget about it.”
Velda was waiting intently and I told her what had happened. She said, “Somebody thought you hid something in that urn.”
“They sure got teed off when they found it empty.”
“Who knew where you put the ashes?”
“Marvin Dooley knew, but it’s unlikely he’d figure I’d stash anything out there. No, it was somebody who knew the score. I’d finger Ugo for that deal. He was at the funeral parlor and he could have seen Richmond take me aside and talk to me. He might not have followed me himself, but someone else in his crowd could have.”
“You think he made the break-in himself?”
“Let’s consider that a distinct possibility. The bad news is that since he didn’t find anything he’ll keep looking.”
“Mike . . .” she started.
“What?”
“Did you open the urn at all?”
“No, why?”
“Maybe he did find something and kicked the empty jar around as a red herring.”
I let it run through my mind, then said, “Think happy thoughts, will you?”
“Boss, I’m not Peter Pan.” She grinned and stood up, letting the terrycloth robe swirl around her. It was really something, seeing her like that. My mind kept telling me that one day it would all be mine, that tall loveliness of a sweet-smelling woman. All I had to do was stay alive. “Now, what are you going to do with me?”
“You have two choices, doll. I’m going to let that hole in me get a nice, soft rest in my bed. So . . . you can either get dressed and go home, or sack it in on the couch. Alone.”
“You’re really trying to ruin your reputation, aren’t you.” She made a definite statement out of that, but her smile took the edge off.
7
IN THE MORNING I filled the coffee pot, pushed the ON button and got dressed while Velda still made soft sleep sounds on the couch. I brushed my teeth, shaved and had a quick cup of fresh ground Dunkin’ Donuts special blend, wrote a note and left it on the coffee table where she’d be sure to spot it.
Outside, the morning didn’t seem too encouraging, so I slipped into my trenchcoat and went down to the lobby. Bill Raabe was still on security detail and waved me over to his cubbyhole where he was sorting out packages.