Known Devil

by Matthew Hughes

  “We can drop the charade as long as he’s not close enough to overhear you.”

  “And who would that be?” Manny asked.

  “You’ve got a busboy, early twenties, red-haired, tattoo on the inside of one arm.”

  “Oh, sure, that’s Roger Gillespe. Not to worry, Stan. He never comes back here, except to pick up his check, and that’s on Friday. He couldn’t overhear us even if he had ears on him like an elephant.”

  “Great,” I said. “How long has this Gillespe worked for you?”

  “He’s been with us over a year, I know that. Could be as long as eighteen months. You want I should look it up?”

  “No, that’s OK; it doesn’t make much difference. But what I would like you to look up is his schedule, and whether he’s gonna be working tomorrow.”

  “That I can do.” I heard the chair creak again, then the sound of a file drawer opening. “This busboy of mine – he’s in some kind of trouble, Stan?”

  “Not necessarily,” I lied. “That’s something I’m still trying to find out. Could be he’s just an innocent bystander who might be a useful witness in a case I’m working.”

  Manny’s got a temper, and I knew he’d have trouble controlling it if I told him his busboy was dealing drugs right there in the restaurant. Even if he didn’t fire the kid – or break both his arms and then fire him, which was more likely – he’d act differently toward Gillespe, which might spook the redhead into a disappearing act. And that bastard wasn’t going anywhere until we’d had some conversation.

  Manny came back on the line. “Stan? Roger works six in the morning till two in the afternoon. His days off are Monday and Tuesday, which means he should be here tomorrow – unless he calls in sick, which he doesn’t do often, it looks like.”

  “Have you got a home address for him?”

  I listened to papers rustle for a second or two. “Yeah, here it is – 144 Spruce Street, Apartment 9.”

  “Terrific. Thanks, Manny. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t let this guy know that we’ve talked. In fact, it would be good if you didn’t give him any indication that something’s up.”

  “Not a problem, Stan. I hardly see him anyway, except for two minutes on payday.”

  “I’ll be done with him before then,” I said.

  I finally got home around noon. As I undressed, I told Quincey about the latest developments in the case. The little guy always seems interested in what I have to tell him, which is more than I can say for some of the people I know. I went to bed and grabbed about five hours’ sleep.

  Over breakfast, I told Christine what I’d learned in the last twenty-four hours. It didn’t amount to much.

  She looked at me over the rim of her mug. I noticed she’d slept in a T-shirt that said in front, “‘For the blood is the life’ Deut. 12:23.”

  “What are you going to do about this busboy?” she asked.

  “Talk to Karl about him,” I told her. “Then we’ll see.”

  “Whatever his customer base is, he’s not selling to vampires – not at work, anyway. Manny doesn’t have vamp food on his menu.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know,” she said. “Word gets around – about the places we’re welcome, and the ones where we’re not.”

  “Manny’s not prejudiced,” I said. “If he doesn’t sell blood, it’s probably some kind of religious thing.”

  “Maybe,” she said, and took another sip of warm Type O, her favorite. “But the result’s the same.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say about that.

  Christine put her mug down. “I went for a walk last night, during my break,” she said. “Came across something interesting.”

  “What was that?”

  “A Patriot Party rally. They were holding it at Abington High School’s football field.”

  I smiled a little. “Home of the Fighting Warlocks.”

  “That’s the place. They’ve done some renovations since I was there last. It looks nice.”

  “Good turnout?”

  She nodded. “The bleachers were packed.”

  “The Patriot Party’s gone from zero to sixty in, like, six months,” I said. “And they’re local, not part of some bigger movement, far as anybody knows.”

  “Maybe they’ll catch on,” she said with a shudder. “But I hope not.”

  I drank some of my coffee, which wasn’t remotely as good as McGuire’s. “Yeah, they don’t care much for supes, do they?”

  She snorted. “That’s putting it mildly. Phil Slattery, their candidate for Mayor, was speaking when I passed by. He called supernaturals ‘a cancerous growth that threatens our city’s purity.’”

  “I never could stand a politician who mixes his metaphors,” I said.

  “I wish that was the worst you could say about him. But he’s quite the rabble-rouser – got a standing ovation when he was done and everything. That was when I decided it was time for me to get back to work, before the audience noticed me and turned into a lynch mob.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “At least,” she said.

  “Good thing you can fly, if need be.”

  “Good thing I didn’t have to.”

  I got to work a few minutes early and was catching up on my email when Karl plopped down into his desk chair opposite mine.

  “I thought vampires were supposed to be silent as death,” I said, without looking up.

  “We are,” he said. “When death is the objective. But since it’s just you, I figured it was OK to be my old, noisy self.”

  “Works for me,” I said. “It beats having to jump halfway out of my chair every time you appear from out of nowhere.”

  While Karl’s computer was booting up, he asked me, “So, what went down at Ricardo’s Ristorante last night?”

  “Not a damn thing, far as I can tell.”

  He tilted his head a little. “False alarm?”

  “All depends on how you define your terms,” I said.

  I explained how we’d found nothing in the street outside Ricardo’s except some bullet holes that would surely prove worthless as evidence, and some fresh stains on the street that might have been blood – the lab report hadn’t come back yet.

  “Sounds like Calabrese won that round,” Karl said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “If the Delatassos had taken out a bunch of Calabrese’s soldiers again, what incentive would they have to clean up after themselves? They’d want plenty of evidence lying around, just like last time. They probably figure all the carnage is gonna intimidate Calabrese into giving up.”

  “Yeah, and good luck with that,” I said.

  He nodded. “I don’t figure you could scare Calabrese with anything less than a nuclear bomb – and it would have to be a big bomb to do the job.”

  “That’s a pretty good theory you came up with, though – that the lack of bodies means a win for Calabrese. You should share it with McGuire.”

  “OK, if you think it’s worth the effort.”

  “Everything’s worth the effort at this point,” I said. “But I’m not done with my story yet – it gets better. We canvassed the neighborhood and came up with absolutely shit, as you might expect. So, after a couple of hours, they finally let us leave. I was in no hurry to go home, since Christine was already sacked out, so I headed down to Wohlstein’s Deli for something to eat….”

  I told him about the busboy who I’d observed in what had to be a covert business transaction with Barney Ghougle’s brother, Algernon.

  Karl shook his head a couple of times. “Stupid fuck. First indecent exposure, now street drugs. Looks like Algernon’s bucking for a slot in the Loser Hall of Fame.”

  “He’ll get my vote,” I said. “But I’m a lot more interested in that busboy, Gillespe.”

  “Yeah, he’s a link in the chain – the first one we’ve come across so far.”

  Thor and Car, the two gun-toting elves, had hired attorneys and now weren’t sayin
g anything to anybody. I figured the DA would eventually offer one of them a deal that would have the little bastard singing like a drunk on karaoke night, but it hadn’t happened yet. Like everything else in city government, the District Attorney’s office is understaffed and underfunded.

  “And since God, or whoever’s in charge, has seen fit to gift us with this link,” I said, “it would behoove us to follow it and see where it leads.”

  “Well, whether it fucking behooves us or not, we can’t just bust the guy,” Karl said. “The shit he’s selling is legal, remember?”

  “I wasn’t planning to bust him,” I said. “But I do think he should be questioned.”

  Karl looked at me as if I’d just said I believe in the Easter Bunny. I don’t, of course – although, far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out on the Great Pumpkin.

  “We can’t pick bring some guy in to question him about something that’s not a crime, Stan. You know that, well as I do.”

  “I never said anything about bringing Gillespe in,” I told him. “And as for questioning, I figured I’d leave that up to you.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “OK, now the light dawns. You’re talking about one of those more informal Q-and-A sessions.”

  “Uh-huh. Preferably carried out in the back seat of our car while it’s parked in an alley someplace.”

  “Nothing we get out of him would be admissible in court,” he said slowly. “On the other hand…”

  “On the other hand, it might bring us one step closer to the Delatassos. And if need be, once we find the next link, we can repeat the informal procedure with him.”

  “I like the way you think,” Karl said. “One thing we have to–”

  That was when McGuire opened the door to his office and stepped out. “Markowski! You and Renfer got one!”

  Moments later, McGuire was back behind his desk, while Karl and I stood in front of it to get our marching orders. “Black-and-white units are already at the scene,” he said, “along with the fire department and somebody from the State Police bomb squad. But I wanted you two on it as well.”

  Karl and I looked at each other before Karl said, “On what, boss?”

  “It looks like somebody blew up Victor Castle.”

  Even before we got to Evelyn Avenue, I could hear them: the whooping, screeching, and honking sounds made by about a hundred car alarms going all at once. A sound wave can set off lots of different makes of car alarms, if it’s strong enough. Anybody living near an airport could tell you that.

  Then we turned the corner and drove straight into the middle of a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare.

  The street was full of police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks, not to mention the van belonging to the State Police bomb squad – all parked at crazy angles. Their flashing red-and-blue lights sent strobe-like shadows skittering across the storefronts and apartments that lined the street on both sides. Broken glass from what had been hundreds of windows threw back the flashing lights crazily, as if the street and sidewalks themselves were on fire.

  Somebody had given this part of Scranton its own version of the Nazi Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass. According to what I saw on the History Channel, a night like this had signaled the beginning of the organized persecution of Germany’s Jews. I hoped the rampant destruction I was looking at wasn’t going to be a sign of some new kind of terror.

  We parked as close as we could get to the scene – which turned out to be two blocks away from the outer ring of yellow crime scene tape. Karl and I made sure our badges were in plain view, and started walking. There were no flames visible up ahead, and no water running through the gutters, so I guessed the fire trucks had been called as a precaution and had decided to stick around, just in case.

  Up ahead, I saw an ambulance start up and slowly drive away. I noticed the driver wasn’t using the lights or siren, which meant he was headed for the morgue, not the hospital. There’s never any hurry when your passenger is already dead.

  I saw a guy over near the bomb squad van who I recognized. Chris Dennehy and I used to run into each other at crime scenes back when I was in Homicide, although I hadn’t seen him in a while. Death by explosion isn’t an M. O. you come across very often on the supe squad.

  We went over there and I stuck my hand out. “Chris,” I said. “Been a long time.” I had to raise my voice so that he could hear me over the din caused by all those car alarms.

  “How ya doin’, Stan,” he said as we shook. He was speaking louder than normal, too.

  I saw him looking over my shoulder. “This is my partner, Karl Renfer,” I said. “Karl, meet Chris Dennehy. He’s a Statie who gets blown up for a living.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Dennehy said, and shook hands with Karl. As he let go, I saw a puzzled look on his face – maybe because Karl’s grip, like every vampire’s, is colder than a banker’s heart. Dennehy might have realized then that Karl was undead – but if so, he was smart enough to let it go.

  “Have they got a positive ID on the body yet?” I asked.

  “Yeah, one of the guys who works in the rug store was in back when the bomb went off, so he wasn’t hurt . He looked at the body for us. When he got done puking, he confirmed that it was Castle.”

  I made a head gesture toward the street. “How d’you figure it went down, Chris?”

  He looked toward what had once been the front of Mystic Rugs, Magic Carpets, narrowing his eyes against the flashing lights. “Looks like the bomb was in a trash can in front of the store. Nailed Castle from about twenty feet away, along with a lot of the surrounding real estate.”

  Karl looked at him. “Radio-controlled, right?”

  “Had to be. No way somebody could’ve cut it that fine with a time bomb.”

  I nodded agreement, then said, “Can you think of any local experts who might have been able to put something like this together?”

  “Uh-uh. Only guy from around here who was good at stuff like this was Mickey McCormick,” he said, “and he spread himself over two city blocks in Hazelton last year, in what I can only assume was some kind of on-the-job accident.”

  I took a slow look around at the broken glass and scorched pavement. “Whoever he was, he used something pretty powerful. You don’t get results like this from a couple of cherry bombs taped together.”

  “Judging from the blast pattern, I’d say it was some kind of plastic,” Dennehy said. “C-4, maybe even Semtex. We might have something more definitive on that in a couple of days.” He shrugged. “Or not. You know how it goes.”

  “A remote detonator and Semtex,” Karl said. “Not exactly amateur night, is it?”

  “It’s professional work, alright,” Dennehy said. “And since Mickey McCormick’s in the ground, probably buried in a shoebox, I’d say somebody brought in out-of-town talent.”

  “Where you gonna find somebody like that?” I said. “I’m pretty sure they don’t let bombers advertise on Craigslist.”

  “Best bet’s one of the big cities,” Dennehy said. “And even then, you’d have to know the right people to talk to. There’s two pros I’ve heard of in New York, although they mostly do work for the Five Families. And if you looked hard enough, you could probably find bomb specialists in Boston, Chicago…”

  “Maybe even Philadelphia,” Karl said.

  “So, when you said Philly, you were thinking of the Delatassos,” I said to Karl. “Right?”

  “Course I was,” he said.

  We were on our way to a bar – but not because either one of us wanted a drink. Drinking on duty’s against department policy, anyway.

  But Renfield’s is more than just a place where you can get any drink known to man – as well as a few that most men wouldn’t want to know. As the biggest supe bar in town, it’s often been a good source of information for Karl and me. You get an interesting mix of customers at Renfield’s, and some of them have been known to be talkative, given the right incentive.

  I glanced at Karl. “Why wou
ld the Delatassos want to take out Victor Castle?”

  He shrugged. “Could be he was trying to fuck with the Slide trade. When we told him about that stuff the other night, he wasn’t a happy camper, remember? I don’t know what pissed him off more – that somebody was selling shit like that in Scranton, or that he hadn’t heard about it yet.”

  They say that bad news travel fast. You may also have heard the expression “the dead travel fast”. So you can just imagine how fast bad tidings travel among the dead, the undead, and the formerly dead. The news of Victor Castle’s murder had gone through the local supe community like a prairie fire.

  I realized that as soon as Karl and I opened the front door of Renfield’s. For one thing, the place was packed – pretty unusual, even for Saturday night. But when catastrophe strikes, the members of any community will tend to draw together – whether to mourn, to commiserate with each other, or just to gossip about what had happened and share details that are mostly rumor, fantasy, or speculation.

  And if the size of crowd didn’t tell me that news of Castle’s death had already spread, what happened when Karl and I came in would have made it crystal clear. We hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps into the room when the level of conversation went from what I’d call “medium-loud” to what anybody would have to describe as “silent as a fucking tomb”.

  That wasn’t normal. Sure, they knew Karl and I were cops, but we’d been coming into Renfield’s together for more than a year without any problems, not to mention all the times before that when I’d drop by with my old partner, Paul DiNapoli. And these days, Karl was even what you might call a member of the supe club.

  Our footsteps sounded loud in the silence as we made our way to the bar. I don’t know if the customers were expecting us to make some kind of announcement, or start arresting people, or even shoot up the place. But once it became clear that none of that was going to happen, the level of tension slowly eased. By the time we reached the bar, the buzz of conversation had started again. Over the next few minutes, it gradually returned to its former level.

  Tending bar was a thirtyish brown-eyed blonde with a pug nose and a perky manner. I was a little surprised to see her on a Saturday, since she usually works weeknights.