Hank went from room to room. A hallway on one end of the small house with a bathroom and four cramped bedrooms. Everything was furnished in a spare, expensive style. Hank guessed Lugano had arrived in town with nothing, bought the place, slept on the floor until the phone was turned on, and then spent twenty minutes with a catalogue filling the place up. Either that, or he walked through a show room in Vegas for a half hour pointing to things as a flabbergasted clerk tried to write it all down—two of these, three of those, this couch, that chair—and paid cash for everything.
In the back bedroom, the one Lugano used, there was a slightly more lived-in look. Jeans draped over the corner of the bed. The blankets thrown back, exposing sheets that probably never got washed. Half a dozen bottles of cologne sat across the top of the dresser. Apparently Lugano liked to smell good. Hank imagined him being the kind of guy who wore too much and drove people crazy with it in confined spaces. He studied the bottles and grinned. You definitely didn’t want to ride on an elevator with a guy like Lugano.
The top dresser drawer held the usual: socks, underwear, and a few odds and ends crammed in along one side. Hank pulled out a small box and flipped it open. A thick gold money clip. His grin grew wider. That was the kind of guy Lugano was. Vain. Heavy cologne and a gold money clip, all the way.
The second drawer down was T-shirts. Nothing interesting. The third was more of the same. The guy had a ton of shirts. Hank flipped through a few of them. They were old. They bore the names of bars in New York, most of which probably weren’t even there anymore. At the bottom of the stack was faded shirt from The Cellar. Hank laughed out loud and pulled it from the drawer, holding it up.
The Cellar. Hank hadn’t thought of that place for twenty years. Probably not since the week it closed and he had to find a new bar to hang out in. A lot of Fazioli’s guys used to be in there. Hank didn’t really remember seeing Lugano in there, but obviously he’d been there.
It was on the lower east side, somewhere between Delancey and Canal—maybe on Orchard?—he couldn’t remember now. It was a real dive, but not an attention grabber, which made it perfect for the clientele. It was a place all the young tough guys would go to drink beer, shoot pool, and convince whatever women were there that they were the baddest thing in the room.
Those kinds of places were dangerous. A lot of young guys wanted to prove themselves and that caused a lot of stupid shit to happen. Fights. Drunks waving guns around. It was fun for a while, and then the serious people moved on. You only moved up in the organization if you were professional. Most of the guys never figured that part out. They thought it was all about being as tough as could be. As cruel and dangerous as possible. But they were wrong.
It was about efficiency. Calculation. The guy who could get in and get out without anyone seeing was the most dangerous of all. After four or five years in the game, after the shootout in Miami, Hank realized he had to get serious or get the hell out. The key to being someone the boss looked to for the serious jobs was being a serious guy yourself.
A serious guy didn’t hang out in places like The Cellar. A serious guy kept a nice apartment in a part of town not normally associated with the mob. The Village. Chelsea. The Upper East Side. He kept a low profile. Lived clean. Didn’t do anything flashy. Spent time in museums, art galleries, learning an instrument, whatever he wanted to do to kill the time between jobs, and just waited patiently for the phone to ring or a knock on the door. Patience, after all, was the virtue he used most in his line of work. Sit back. Observe. Stay ready, and wait for the bastard to make it easy on you.
When there was a serious case, you called the serious guy. Not the street thug who hung out at The Cellar with the other thugs and shook down dealers or shop owners for payoffs, but the cool professional. You needed a guy you could trust to travel across the country, blend in, play it smart, track the target down, watch him, be patient, wait for the right moment, and then simply appear out of nowhere, put a clean round through the back of the head, and vaporize. No complications.
There were only a handful of people in that category, and Hank had spent twenty years becoming one of the best, one of the most trusted, and most feared. He got a hundred grand minimum, and often two or three times that, which meant his services were used sparingly and only when it truly mattered. Finding and killing people in the witness protection program certainly qualified.
Howie Lugano graduated from the same ranks of low level thugs, but never made it quite as far. His style was over the top, he lacked the cool subtlety required for the discreet hit. But if you wanted a spectacle. If you wanted to send a message to others about the cruelty that awaited them if they stepped out of line, then Lugano was your man.
Hank folded the shirt and tucked it back in the pile exactly where he had found it. He went to the bottom drawer. In among some pairs of pants was a thin, leather bound photo album. Hank flipped through it. Old pictures of Lugano and his friends. Hank recognized a few of the other faces, but most of them were unknown. A cluster of guys held drinks at a bar with a beach and ocean in the background. Lugano and another guy on the stoop of a brownstone, grinning at the camera, a couple of open beers sitting on the step between them. A young woman in a bathing suit, striking a mock glamour pose in the doorway of a cheap motel, the iridescent blue of a kidney-shaped swimming pool gleaming behind her.
Here were Lugano’s personal memories and he kept them in a dresser drawer. Hank closed the book and put it away. He left the bedroom wondering what had happened to the people in the pictures. Did they know who Lugano was? Probably. Did they miss him since he disappeared? Who could say?
Hank thought about the few friends he had. None of them knew what he did for a living. They all thought he was an antiquarian, occasionally flying around the world to collect small batches of rare manuscripts, letters, drafts of poems or books from famous writers. And it was something he did, but only for himself, never as a dealer.
Hank wondered what he would do if he retired. Maybe he really would become an antiquarian dealer. Maybe it would be a seamless transition. He wouldn’t have to be a success at it. He had enough money saved to survive, it wasn’t a question of that. The only issue would be how to kill the time. And it had to be killed. He couldn’t sit alone with idle memories of all the jobs he had done over the years. All the people he had done. How did Lugano manage it?
Hank came back down the hall and stood in the living room, trying to picture Lugano wandering around inside the house for the past four years. He studied the stack of bats leaning up behind the door. That was one way Lugano killed the time, by coaching baseball. Hank wondered if one of the bats was the one used to kill the guy in the desert.
He wondered about it throughout the morning and into the afternoon. He went through the kitchen. He went down to the basement and smiled at the mason jars and the physics textbook. He sat on the couch and waited, checking the mechanism of the gun, feeding a round into the chamber and leaving it there, ready to go.
Every few minutes he would think about the baseball bats in the corner. The whole thing sounded too much like Lugano to dismiss. What was he involved in? What did the guy in the desert have to do with it? Hank assumed it was drugs. It was the obvious thing. Then he thought about the pictures in the photo album and wondered if Lugano had really ever said good-bye. Maybe he just changed industries.
It was nearly two in the afternoon when he finally heard the crunch of gravel under tires and an engine pull up outside and shut off. Hank checked his watch. Apparently Lugano had come home early. Or maybe they worked short shifts with the economy going to hell like it was.
Whatever the reason, Hank could care less. Now was the time. Hank moved to the space behind the door, his motions quick and automatic. Now there would be no more thinking, no more reflection. Now he would do his job.
He heard the steps on the porch. Listened to the keys in the lock. Hank relaxed his grip on the gun, breathed in and out with the slow, steady rhythm of the expert shoot
er. Squeeze the trigger at the bottom of the exhale, when the body is absolutely still. He cocked his elbow out in front of him, the gun pointed vertically at the ceiling, ready to drop in next to the head as it stepped into view.
The lock turned and clicked. The door swung back. Hank dropped the gun, breathing out, ready to squeeze. There it was. He recognized the hair on the back of the head as it came into view around the door. He hesitated and she seemed to sense it.
Janie turned quickly, surprised by the feeling of someone in the room. As she turned, she called out, “Ron?”
But it wasn’t Ron. She gasped at the barrel of the gun resting right between her eyes, and Hank’s face behind it, cool and calm. Hank’s eyes met hers and she watched a hardness deep inside them dissolve. He raised the gun up, away from her face, and kicked the door closed.
Then he smiled and said, “I guess we’ve both got some explaining to do.”
XXX
“This is going to take a while.” Paul Kramer studied the bat under a low power microscope. He pulled his eye away from the viewer and looked over the counter at Mickey. “And we may not get anything at all. We’re not well equipped for testing like this. Like I said, the better thing to do would be to ship it to Riverside so a real crime lab can have a go at it.”
Mickey shook his head. “No time. We can do that later. I need to make an arrest and I can’t do it without some kind of preliminary information.”
Paul pushed himself across the tile floor on his stool, the casters squeaked as he rolled to the opposite counter. He took some small tools from a drawer and rolled himself back. He put his eye to the microscope and began to scrape at the wood with something that looked like a dentist’s pick.
“There’s definitely some stuff in here that looks like dried blood. But it could be grease, oil, anything.” Paul worked a small fleck of something dark and dry away from the wood and held it out on the end of the pick for Mickey to see.
Mickey looked it over and shrugged. “Could be blood.”
“If I was betting, I’d say it was blood.” Paul scraped the fleck off onto a glass slide and smiled. “But I wouldn’t bet a whole lot.”
Paul rotated the bat slowly, going over its surface under the magnification. “The interesting thing is,” he said, “there’s nothing on the exterior surfaces of it. Everything’s down in the cracks. Of course, I’m just guessing, but it looks like it’s been washed off.”
Mickey grunted at the suggestion. “That would make sense. I guess he didn’t do a thorough job though.”
“Blood doesn’t take long to dry, especially on a hot day. After only five or ten minutes, it’s going to be pretty crusty. It would be hard to wash every trace of it out of the cracks in the wood.”
Mickey leaned back against the counter and added, “I doubt he tried that hard. I mean, what were the odds that body was every going to be found? I’ll bet he did a half ass job washing it off because he was just trying to get it clean, he wasn’t thinking about hiding the evidence.”
Paul looked up and thought about it. “Yeah. Why would he keep the bat at all if he was trying to hide the evidence? He could have driven half a mile down that dirt road and tossed the bat out into the desert. No one ever would have found it.”
Mickey was getting excited. He paced across the room to the other counter, hesitated for a second and then turned and paced back. He hovered behind Paul and asked, “How long will this take?”
“I don’t know, Chief.”
“Christ. I’ve got to stop this guy.”
“Chief?” Paul swiveled on the stool with the pick in his hand, another crusty black ball on display. “We don’t even know if this is blood yet. It’s going to take some time.”
Mickey knew he had to wait for confirmation. Before that, everything was speculation. But the prospect of sitting around the rest of the day was killing him. He’d already waited the whole morning for Dr. Kramer to finish seeing patients. Mickey leaned against the counter again and checked his watch. It was after noon already. He folded his arms across his chest and said, “But we’ll know something today, right?”
“I’ll do everything I can, Chief.” Paul didn’t look up from the microscope as he spoke.
Mickey hovered in the background awhile longer, realizing there was nothing he could do and that his lingering presence would not speed the process up. The waiting would drive him crazy. “Alright,” he said, after a few minutes of standing there like an idiot, “you’ve got to call the station as soon as you determine if the blood types match. Jimmy will radio me with the news.”
“Will do, Chief.”
Mickey left the clinic in a hurry, although he had nothing to hurry for. Back at the station, Jimmy was still sitting behind the counter, leaning back with his feet up, reading a western novel with a cowboy hiding behind a rock on the cover. He stretched when Mickey walked in, and said, “You find anything, Chief?”
“Don’t know.” Mickey started to go back to his office, but hesitated, and added. “I’m pretty sure I did, but I’m waiting for Dr. Kramer to call with some test results.”
Jimmy looked at him, expectantly, waiting for details. After a few seconds, Mickey told him what he’d found. “Christ,” Jimmy responded, “let’s go get the son of a bitch right now.” He stood behind the counter and clapped his hands together, like a football player leaving a huddle, ready to make the big play. The muscles in his arms swelled and stretched the fabric of his shirt.
Mickey shook his head. “We have to wait. I shouldn’t have gone into his truck without a warrant anyway. That’s going to be a tough one to explain. That’s a big enough problem already. We can’t do anything worse than we have already.”
“Hell, just say you were looking in the window and saw the bat on the floor. Say you saw the blood on it. Who’s gonna know?”
Mickey heard the words but chose not to listen to them. He’d played that game in the past, every cop who’d been around awhile had played it, whether consciously or not. But not with something like this. It was usually with punks, teenagers, or a traffic stop where the driver was being an asshole. It was a fun game to play. The officer leans in close to the open driver’s window and says to his partner, I think I smell marijuana, do you smell that? The partner knows the game and says he does. Then you cuff the driver and tear the car apart. Sometimes you find something, sometimes you don’t, but you always have a good time looking. And you were always safe doing it. If you found something, you could make an arrest or not. If you didn’t find anything, you sent that bastard on his way and never heard anything about it.
“This isn’t that kind of deal,” Mickey said, giving Jimmy the long stare.
“Shit, Chief, I’m just saying. It’s a way to get the guy off the street. If he’s a murderer, you can’t feel guilty about bending the rules.”
Mickey thought it through. It had a certain appeal, but arresting someone for murder drew a lot more attention than shaking down a couple of teenagers on a roadside at night. If you were wrong about the teenagers, they were just happy to be let go. If you were wrong about arresting a guy for murder in front of his coworkers, you had yourself a serious lawsuit. Especially if you knew the evidence you were using was wrongfully obtained. But he could lie about that. Maybe he had looked in the window. Maybe he had seen the bloody bat on the floor.
Mickey shook his head, thinking it through. But there was no way. He couldn’t lie about it. Not because of some moral obligation to tell the truth, but because a good lawyer would tear the lie to shreds. Mickey had seen the bat up close. So had Dr. Kramer. It was clean except for a dark crust embedded in the cracks. A dark crust that even Dr. Kramer was hesitant to call dried blood until it underwent testing.
Mickey could practically see a lawyer standing in front of a jury, waving the bat in front of them: And Sheriff, wouldn’t you say the bat, on the floor of the truck, was about as far away from you as it is from the jury right now? And you say that you could see the blood from there? You s
ay you knew it was blood? But you heard Dr. Kramer testify that he couldn’t tell if it was blood when he examined it under a microscope, isn’t that right? And you have no medical or scientific training, isn’t that right, Sheriff? But you could see from a distance of several feet, through a dirty truck window, what a trained physician could not identify under a microscope, in a laboratory? Is that what you’re telling us, Sheriff? And all the while, the jurors would be staring at the bat, unable to see any blood at all.
It would not be pretty, and the already strained city budget would be driven into bankruptcy. Mickey couldn’t lie about how he found the bat. Not because it was the wrong thing to do, but because there was no way he could get away with it.
“I know, Jimmy,” he finally said. “But even if Grimaldi is the killer, he’s not dangerous right now. He has no idea we’re onto him. He’s at work, at least until later today. So he’ll be easy enough to keep track of until we know something. All we’ve got to do is watch him.”
Jimmy nodded, appreciating the plan. “Makes sense,” he said. “You want me to go out there?”
“I’ll do it.” Mickey unsnapped the holster on his nine millimeter and withdrew it, feeling the grip in his hand. “You stay here. And I mean don’t leave. I told Dr. Kramer to call here as soon as he knows anything. If there’s any blood on the bat, he’s going to try to match the blood type to the body.”
Mickey pulled the slide back on the gun, slowly, smoothly. He could feel the soft thud of the bullet popping up from the clip. He could hear the click. Then he let the slide go and it snapped back, feeding the round into the chamber with solid, mechanical precision. He cocked it, clicked the safety, and snapped the gun back in the holster.
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