by Ed McBain
He had exquisite manners. Henry figured the manners were from his Chinese side.
'I believe Herrera is spreading this rumor in order to serve his own needs. Whatever they maybe.'
This rumor that around Christmastime . . .'
'The twenty seventh.'
'Yes. That on the twenty-seventh, your people intercepted a shipment earmarked for the Hamilton . . .'
'Not the shipment. The money intended to pay for the shipment.'
'Coming from where, this shipment?'
'How do I know?'
'You said . . .'
'I said that's the rumor. That I knew about this shipment. Knew where it would be delivered, and intercepted the money for it.'
'Stole it.'
'Yes, of course, stole it.'
'From the Hamilton posse.'
'Yes.'
'Was this supposed to be a big shipment? In the rumor?'
'In the rumor, it was supposed to be three kilos.'
'Of cocaine.'
'Of cocaine, yes.'
'But you don't know from where?'
'No. That's not important, from where. It could be Miami, it could be Canada, it could be the West - up through Mexico, you know - it could even be from Europe through the airport in a suitcase. Three kilos is a tiny amount. Why would I even bother with such a small amount? Three kilos isn't even seven fucking pounds. You can buy a Thanksgiving turkey that weighs more than that.'
'But which doesn't cost as much,' Juan said, and both men laughed.
'Fifty thousand,' Henry said. 'In the rumor.'
'That you are supposed to have stolen.'
'Not the cocaine.'
'No, the money.'
'Yes.'
'From Herrera.'
'Yes, this little . . .'
Henry almost said 'spic,' but then he remembered that his guest was half-Spanish.
'This little person Herrera, who by the way used to do work for the Chang people. When they had the Yellow Paper Gang. This was before your time.'
'I've read a lot about Walter Chang,' Juan said.
He was only twenty-four years old and still making a rep. He figured it didn't hurt to say he'd read a lot about every famous gangster this city had ever had. Make everyone think he had gone out of his way to learn such things. Actually, though, he did know about the Yellow Paper Gang because his father had once leaned on some people for them. Juan's father was six feet three inches tall and weighed two hundred and forty pounds, which was very large for a Chinese. Everybody joked that there must have been a eunuch in his ancestry someplace. Juan's father found this comical. That was because he had a keen reputation as a ladies' man.
'So as I understand this,' Juan said, wanting to get the entire story straight before he went out of here on a wild pony, 'you'd like to know what really went down on the night of December twenty-seventh.'
'Yes. And why Herrera is saying we cold-cocked him.'
'And stole the fifty.'
'Yes. The story on the street is that Herrera went to take delivery of this lousy three keys . . .'
'Where? Do you know where?'
'Yes, in Riverhead. Where isn't important. Herrera is saying he went there with fifty dollars of Hamilton's money, to make the buy and take delivery, and as he was going in the building he was jumped by two Chinese men he later . . .'
'Your people? In the rumor?'
'Yes,' Henry said. 'I was about to say that he later identified them - this is all in the rumor that's going around - as two people who work for me.'
'And none of this is true.'
'None of it.'
'And you think it's Herrera who's spreading the rumor?'
'Who else would be spreading it?'
'If it's someone else, you want to know that, too.'
'Yes. And why? There has to be a reason for such bullshit.'
'I'll find out,' Juan promised.
But he wasn't sure he could.
It all sounded so fucking Chinese.
* * * *
The way Hamilton had found out was through a person he'd done a favor for in Miami three years ago. The favor happened to have been killing the man's cousin. The man was a Cuban heavily involved in dealing dope. His name was Carlos Felipe Ortega. You kill a man's cousin for him, without charging him anything for it, the man might be grateful later on, if he could find an opportunity. Or so Hamilton thought at first.
The information was that the Tsu gang up here was going to take delivery on a million-dollar shipment of coke.
A hundred keys.
On the twenty-third of January.
The reason Ortega was calling - this was two weeks before Christmas - was that he'd found out the Miami people were insisting on a very low profile. They had gone along with Tsu's bullshit about testing and tasting five keys of the stuff in one place and taking delivery of the rest someplace else, but they didn't want a big fucking Sino-Colombian mob scene up there. In the first instance, they were insisting that one guy from the Chinese side meet one guy from their side, fifty grand here, five keys there. You test, you pay, you take the high road, we take the low, it was nice seeing you. If the stuff tested pure, you sent two other guys to pay for and pick up the rest of the shit. No more than two guys. No crowds from the Forbidden City. Two guys who'd come and go in the night, thank you very much, and so long. Tsu had agreed to the terms. Which meant, Ortega said, that instead of a thousand guys standing around with automatic weapons in their hands and threatening looks on their faces, you had a one-on-one in the first instance, and only two people from each side when the later exchange took place.
'Which sounds very thin to me,' Ortega had said.
'Very,' Hamilton said.
'Unless, of course, there are no thieves in your city.'
Both men chuckled.
'Do you want to know where all this is going to take place, Lewis?' Ortega asked.
'That might be nice to know,' Hamilton said.
'But no messing with the Miami people, please,' Ortega said. 'I live here.'
'I understand.'
'Whatever you decide to do is between you and the Chinese.'
'Yes, I understand.'
'And if a little happens to fall my way . . .'
Ortega's voice shrugged.
'How much do you think should fall your way, Carlos?' Hamilton asked, thinking You cheap bastard, I killed somebody for you. As a fucking gift.
'I thought ten percent,' Ortega said. 'For the address of where the big buy is going down.'
'You have a deal,' Hamilton said.
'Ten keys, correct?'
'No, that's more than ten percent.'
'No, it's ten percent of a hundred keys.'
'You told me five keys would be someplace else.'
'I know. But ten keys is the price, Lewis.'
'All right.'
'Do we have a deal?'
'I said all right.'
'You deliver.'
'No. You pick up.'
'Certainly,' Ortega said.
'The address,' Hamilton said.
Ortega gave it to him.
This was back in December.
Two weeks before Christmas. The tenth, the eleventh, somewhere in there.
Ortega had told him that the shipment would be arriving in Florida on the twenty-first of January. In Florida, there had to be at least eight zillion canals with private boats on them. A lot of those boats were Cigarette types - high-powered speedboats like an Excalibur or a Donzi or a Wellcraft Scarab that could outrun almost any Coast Guard vessel on the water. Zipped out to where the ship was waiting beyond the three-mile limit, zipped back in to their own little dock behind their own little house. Did it in broad daylight. Safer in the daytime than at night, when the Coast Guard might hail you and stop you. During the daytime, you were just some pleasure-seeking boaters out on the water to get some sun. Out there on the briny, you sometimes wouldn't see another vessel for miles and miles. Your ship'd be standing still out there, you lay
to in her shadow, you could load seven tons of cocaine, there'd be nobody to see you or to challenge you. Coast Guard? Come suck my toe, man. What you needed to stop dope coming into Florida on either of its coasts was a fleet of ten thousand US Navy destroyers and even then they might not be able to do the job.
The shipment would be coming up north by automobile.
No borders to cross, no Coast Guard vessels to worry about.
You drove straight up on interstate highways with the shit in the trunk of your car. You obeyed the speed limit. You drove with a woman beside you on the front seat. A pair of married tourists on vacation. White people, both of them, pure Wonder Bread. No blacks, no Hispanics. Nothing to raise even the slightest eyebrow of suspicion. You later met these people at a prearranged place in the city, usually one of the apartments you rented on a yearly lease for the specific purpose of using it as a drop, you paid them the money, you walked off with the shit.
This big shipment coming up was the reason Hamilton had hired Herrera.
What Herrera hadn't known, of course-
Well, maybe he had known, considering it in retrospect.
'I still don't know why you trusted that fucking spic with fifty dollars,' Isaac said.
This was language the gangs had picked up from fiction.
It was funny the way life often imitated art.
None of the gangs in this city had ever read a book and they would never have heard of Richard Condon's Prizzi's Honor if there hadn't been a movie made from it. They liked that picture. It showed killers in a comical light. It also introduced real-life gangs to something Richard Condon had made up, the way his hoodlums talked about money in terms of singles instead of thousands. If Condon's crooks wanted to say five thousand dollars, they said five dollars. It was very comical. It was also an extension of real-life criminal parlance where, for example, a five-dollar bag of heroin became a nickel bag. That was when heroin was still the drug of choice, later conceding the title to cocaine and then crack, admittedly a cocaine derivative. A five-dollar vial was now a nickel vial. And when a thief said fifty dollars, he meant fifty thousand dollars. Which was the sum of money Lewis Randolph Hamilton had entrusted to José Domingo Herrera on the twenty-seventh day of December last year.
'Why?' Isaac asked now.
He knew he was risking trouble.
Hamilton was angry this morning.
Angry that Herrera had run off with fifty dollars belonging to him. Angry that Andrew Fields, who'd been sent out once again to dispatch the little spic, had been unable to find him anywhere in the city. Angry that he himself, Lewis Randolph Hamilton, had bungled the execution of the blond cop. Angry that the cop had taken a good look at him. All of these things were like a cluster of boils on Hamilton's ass. Isaac should have known better than to ask about Herrera at a time like this. But Isaac was still somewhat pissed himself over the way a week, ten days ago Hamilton had appropriated both of those German hookers for himself.
In many ways, Isaac and Hamilton were like man and wife. They each knew which buttons to push to get the proper response from the other. They each knew what the kill words were. Unlike most married couples, however, they did not fight fair. A marriage was doomed when either partner decided he or she would no longer fight fair. Hamilton had never fought fair in his life. Neither had Isaac. They weren't about to start now. But this was not threatening to their relationship. In fact, they each respected this about the other. They were killers. Killers did not fight fair.
'Not of the blood,' Isaac said, shaking his head in exaggerated incredulity. 'To have chosen someone not of the blood . . .'
'There's Spanish in you, too,' Hamilton said.
'East Indian maybe, but not Spanish.'
'A Spanish whore,' Hamilton said.
'Chinese maybe,' Isaac said, 'but not Spanish.'
'From the old days,' Hamilton said. 'From when Christopher Columbus was still there.'
'That far back, huh, man?' Isaac said.
'Before the British took over.'
'Oh my, a Spanish whore,' Isaac said. He was letting all this roll off his back. This wasn't dirty fighting, it wasn't even fighting. Hamilton was just feinting, seeing could he get a rise without exerting too much effort. Isaac was the one with the power to punch below the belt today. Isaac was the one who insisted on knowing why Hamilton had handed fifty big ones to a spic.
'I thought you knew the Spanish were not to be trusted,' Isaac said
Of course, Hamilton might just tell him to fuck off.
'A race that writes on walls,' Isaac said.
'You are not making sense, man,' Hamilton said.
'It's a cultural thing,' Isaac said. 'Writing on walls. They also stare at women. It's all cultural. Go look it up.'
'Come look up my asshole,' Hamilton said.
'I might find a dozen roses up there,' Isaac said.
Both men laughed.
'With a card,' Isaac said.
Both men laughed again.
This was a homosexual joke. Neither of the men was homosexual, but they often made homosexual jokes, exchanged homosexual banter. This was common among heterosexual men, Harold. It happened all the time.
'To have trusted a spic,' Isaac said, shaking his head again. 'Whose credentials you never thought to . . .'
'He was checked,' Hamilton said.
'Not by me.'
'He was checked,' Hamilton said again, hitting the word harder this time.
'If so, he was . . .'
'Thoroughly,' Hamilton said.
And glared at Isaac.
Isaac didn't flinch.
'If I had checked the man . . .' he said.
'You were in Baltimore,' Hamilton said.
'It could have waited till I got back.'
'Visiting your Mama,' Hamilton said.
'There was no urgency . . .'
'Running home to Mama for Christmas.'
He was getting to Isaac now. Isaac did not like to think of himself as a Mama's Boy. But he was always running down to see his mother in Baltimore.
'Running home to eat Mama's plum pudding,' Hamilton said.
Somehow he made this sound obscenely malicious.
'While you,' Isaac said, 'are having a spic checked by ... who checked him, anyway?'
'James.'
'James!' Isaac said.
'Yes, James. And he ran the check in a very pro . . .'
'You picked James to do this job? James who later used baseball bats on this very same . . .'
'I didn't know at the time that lames would later fuck up,' Hamilton said frostily. 'You were in Baltimore. Someone had to do the job. I asked James to check on him. He came back with credentials that sounded okay.'
'Like?'
'Like no current affiliations. A freelancer. No police record. A courier once, long ago, for the Chang people. I figured . . .'
'Chinks are not to be trusted, either,' Isaac said.
'No one is to be trusted,' Hamilton said flatly. 'You didn't know what the situation was, you were in Baltimore . I had to operate on my instincts.'
'That's right, I didn't know what the situation was.'
'That's right.'
'And I still don't.'
'That's right, too.'
'All I know is Herrera stole the fifty.'
'Yes, that's all you know.'
'Do you want to tell me the rest?'
'No,' Hamilton said.
* * * *
The Ba twins had been Hamilton's idea, too.
They were named Ba Zheng Shen and Ba Zhai Kong, but people outside the Chinese community called them Zing and Zang. They were both twenty-seven years old, Zing being the oldest by five minutes. They were also extraordinarily and identically handsome. It was rumored that Zing had once lived with a gorgeous redheaded American girl for six months without her realizing that he and his brother were taking turns fucking her.
Zing and Zang knew that if the Chinese ever took over the world -which they did not doubt for a momen
t would happen one day - it would not be because Communism was a better form of government than democracy; it would be because the Chinese were such good businessmen. Zing and Zang were young and energetic and extremely ambitious. It was said in Chinatown that if the price was right, they would kill their own mother. And steal her gold fillings afterward. The very first time the Ba twins had killed anyone was in Hong Kong five years back when they were but mere twenty-two-year-olds. The price back then had been a thousand dollars American for each of them.