by David Archer
After two slow-dance numbers, the band picked up the tempo for the next song. To most of the wedding guests, the music had a familiar ring to it, even if they couldn’t quite place it. Most of the music thus far had been a mix of Tony Orlando, Wayne Newton and the early Beatles.
“Signora Gomez, dammi la tua attenzione, per favore,” the wedding singer called out to Sadie Gomez Mueller’s Sicilian mother as he glanced again at the short script the bride had prepared for him. “Questo é per te!” The bride’s mother cast an inquiring look his way.
“C’e la luna mezzo mare, mama mia me maritari,” he began singing. As soon as Camilla Gomez, her sisters and her brother recognized the beloved Sicilian wedding song, they beamed and began to clap to the music.
As the singer went on, Ernie Campanella, an Italian in his own right and who knew the song, decided he ought to help the guy at the mike, who looked like some Polack that didn’t know from Shinola. Before the singer knew it, Ernie had shoved him away from the microphone and taken his place in the song…or, at least that was the plan.
“Si ci pigghia la fantasia…ah, fuck, I forget what comes next…cacciatore ‘u pizza pie!”
“Leroy, old buddy, I think the song’s over,” Ernie’s pal Greg Martin said, calling his friend by the familiar nickname he had used since their police academy days.
“You call me Leroy again, fuckface, and I’ll give you a mouthful of bloody chicklets!” Ernie raged. Camilla Gomez was sobbing into her napkin, while Sadie glared daggers at the drunken guest.
“Sadie, cara, why did you let this strunzo into your wedding?” Camilla wailed. “If your father were alive he’d strangle him, right here and right now!”
“Come on, my friend, let’s go for some fresh air,” Frank Mueller’s police partner Biggie Hilton suggested as he gently, but firmly began guiding Ernie away from the microphone. By “fresh air,” Biggie meant a quick trip in his car to the precinct station, where Ernie could sleep it off in a solitary cell.
“Screw you, Baldy!” Ernie cried out in defiance. Meanwhile, Rasta Pete, Hilton’s favorite snitch, who had managed to wrangle a job on the catering staff, came over to see if Biggie needed any help.
“Anything I can do?” he asked the big man. Instead it was Ernie who answered.
“Yeah, Peedro, you can cut me a slice of medium rare prime rib to go. Seems like I’m getting’ the bum’s rush.”
“God dammit, mah name’s no Pedro!” the server raged. “Mah name is Pete and I’m Jamaican. When you pipple gonna get dat straight?” By the time he finished his protest, he was yelling at the back of Ernie’s head, as the exit party was well on its way to the back door of the hall. Before Biggie could manage to get the two of them outdoors, an obstacle stood in their path. It was Arlene Gomez, the bride’s younger sister, who had once dated Ernie with unpleasant results. Her lips pursed into an angry frown as she sent a hard slap to Ernie’s face. Even in his drunken condition, he felt the pain.
“How dare you?” she screeched at him. “How dare you make my mother cry and completely ruin my sister’s wedding? Get out of my sight, you pig! I never want to lay eyes on you again!”
Whatever the prospects may have been for Ernie Campanella and Arlene Gomez going out on a second date, they had diminished exponentially.
Chapter 1
Ever since young Ivan Johnson had ratted his comrades out, his membership in the Lehigh Avenue Rude Boys had been a matter of uncertainty. It was because of his panic-stricken squealing that the gang members has been rousted out of their hiding places following the murder of a little girl in the course of a drive-by shooting in Strawberry Mansion, where the Jamaican gang now held sway. The members and their runner (that is, leader), Delroy MacGregor, realized there had been no permanent harm done. He and the others had only been detained a short while by the police, and goodness knew, it was not the first time that had happened. On the other hand, Johnson had shown them he was less than a stand-up guy. As a result, they let him stay on, but only on the fringe. He became a slightly glorified errand boy and janitor. No longer was he trusted with any information that could be at all useful to the authorities. Certainly his ganja dealing days were forever relegated to the past. That proved to be a real setback for the young gangster. As a street dealer, he could feel like the badass he imagined himself to be. As a toilet cleaner, he could only feel like the chump he realized he was.
It did not take Ivan long to figure out he was no longer happy being a Rude Boy, despite the desperado’s prestige that came with such an affiliation. He wanted out and no one there was exactly begging him to stay. When he approached MacGregor with a request for permission to leave the gang, the head man told him he’d consider it and get back to him.
As he thought the matter over, Delroy had reason to feel content. With the mysterious death of rival kingpin Spencer Bennett, followed by the maybe-not-so mysterious disappearance of his top dealer Ellis Washington, the Lehigh Avenue Rude Boys had the territory to themselves. Their weekly income had skyrocketed to the point where Delroy hardly knew what to do with all the cash. While, back in the bad old days, when they had tough competition to deal with, such an idea would have been unthinkable, now, in a happier time, he decided he could let Ivan Johnson leave, if that was what the kid wanted.
The thing of it was, you did not just leave a gang anywhere in urban America. If you were permitted to go at all, which often you were not, the way you left was to get beaten out. That even applied to the girl gangs. What that meant was your former comrades were going to give you a brutal beating to remember them by. What Delroy had in mind for this yellow punk was for the guys to pin his arms and keep his legs splayed while their girlfriends worked him over with hard boots and brass knuckles. He knew they would pay particular attention to the place that hurt a man the most. Just what the little shit deserves, Delroy figured.
In all cases, getting beaten out of a gang was a very unpleasant experience. In most cases it was an ordeal from which the departing member would eventually recover. Sometimes, though, it was not, such as with Ivan Johnson. Perhaps fueled by their suppressed anger over his earlier cowardice, the farewell party planners got a little too enthusiastic. When they stopped to give themselves a breather before one final volley of kicks and punches, they realized their guest of honor was no longer breathing.
Ivan Johnson may have become a useful snitch to the Jamaican detective Biggie Hilton, had there been time to develop the connection. All of a sudden, the young man was nowhere to be seen. Knowing his own inability to have a productive conversation with Delroy MacGregor, without the high probability of his fingers ending up wrapped tightly around the gangster’s neck, he asked his partner to nose around and find out what the gang leader was willing to say about the matter.
“Who, Ivan?” Macgregor casually answered Frank Mueller. “He skipped town, maybe skipped the country. Far as I know he decided to make himself useless in Kingston, ‘stead of here.” By Kingston, Delroy MacGregor meant the bottom of the Delaware River.
Chapter 2
Sean Higgins sat before the chief of station, his hands tightly clasped between his knees. This was not going to be a happy conversation. The chances were better than even that he might get fired, or, rather, “debriefed,” in light of his recent and repeated failures. At best, he might just get suspended or transferred out of the Coral Gables district he had found so enjoyable. This happened to be the day after the Commander-in-Chief’s unprecedented resignation from the highest office in the land, but Sean knew he was not there to talk about Dick Nixon. Even in the most politically awkward of times, the business of the bureau had to go on.
Just two days earlier, Estéban Vasquez had been found dead in his room at the Biltmore, with a curtain cord around his neck. The notion of auto-erotic asphyxiation had not yet caught on as a possible reason for death in this manner, so the choice was between deliberate suicide and murder. The local police, as well as the Biltmore Hotel’s management were strongly inclined to be
lieve in the suicide hypothesis, especially since they had found a note at the scene, expressing regret for a life of useless idleness. But Sean Higgins and Station Chief Sam Wilton knew perfectly good-and-well it was outright murder.
Over the past two months, two other eminent Cuban exiles had been found dead in Dade County, both of them also under suspicious circumstances that included remorseful suicide notes of questionable sincerity. All three of these businessmen had been of immense help to the bureau in their ongoing efforts to deal with Castro and his troublesome regime. It had been Higgins’ particular duty to keep them protected—just those three, and now they were all dead. In all three cases, the two men were sure, it was the work of Castro’s D.G.I., but they had no idea of the agent or agents’ identity.
“’Warders are ye, whom do ye ward?’” Wilton said, using a scornful quote from W.S. Gilbert. Higgins got a momentary thought of his gravel-voiced boss actually singing the line from The Yeomen of the Guard and broke into an involuntary smile.
“Oh, excuse me, Mr. Higgins. Is there something hilariously funny I am missing about three of our best contacts dying all of a sudden? Enlighten me, by all means.”
“I beg your pardon, Sir, it was just a nervous reaction on my part. I am as upset about this as you are. I suppose this means I am out of a job.”
“It could. It very well could. But then, I’m a fellow who likes to take the long view. You’ve turned in some excellent work for us in the past, and I’m weighing that in the balance.”
“Might I know which way the scales are tipping?”
“It’s not all that simple, Mr. Higgins. I see you as an asset to the bureau, but not so much in this branch. They’re a man short in the Mid-Atlantic North region, so I am going to send you there, or, more accurately, you are going to send me a letter fervently requesting reassignment to that region. You and I both know it’s a lot less red tape that way.”
“That’s true enough.”
“Anyway, your new district will cover Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania from Wilkes Barre east. That includes Philadelphia. In fact, you will be working out of a nearby town called Plymouth Meeting. Nice little place, from what I hear, although you will probably be on the move, more often than not.”
“So, now, did I hear you say that New Jersey was part of the district? That includes Trenton, right?”
“Why on Earth would we include the state capital? Of course it includes Trenton, you dope. What’s so special about Trenton, if I may be so bold.”
“Not a lot. So happens that I graduated from Trenton Catholic Academy. Say, I just had a thought. This might not be such a bad deal after all.”
“What are you up to, Higgins?” his boss asked with a suspicious stare.
“Oh, nothing all that terrible. It’s just that there was this girl in my class I had a mad, passionate crush on. Sadly, I never got up the courage to ask her out. Name was Sadie. Sadie Gomez.”
Chapter 3
Once he sobered up, Ernie made his peace with Greg Martin, who was an easy-going enough soul to begin with. In addition it was not Greg’s wedding reception that had been ruined. The harder job, Ernie feared, would be to square things with his best friend Frank, at whose wedding he had made such a spectacle of himself. He knew his friend was still very angry. Just the other day, shortly after the couple would have returned from their honeymoon, he got a check from them in the mail for $375.00, to cover the cost of the $500.00 savings bond he had given them as a wedding present.
The first time he called, a woman’s voice answered, so he hung up without a word. Talking to Frank would be hard enough. Talking to Sadie, at least for now, would be impossible. The second time he tried, he got their answering machine and hung up without leaving a message. Then he got the bright idea of trying his friend at his work number. He was told that Detective Mueller was not in at the moment, but he could leave a message if he wanted,
“No, thank you,” Ernie told the lady at the other end of the call. “I’ll just try him back later.”
“Shall I tell him you called, Mr.—” But by that time, the caller had hung up.
Playing what he considered a long-shot, Ernie tried Aunt Sally’s Lawndale Ribs and Chicken, where he knew Frank and his partner Biggie Hilton like to eat. This time he managed to bag his quarry, out of blind luck. Frank hadn’t had lunch there in over two weeks, but he felt “in the mood” for some top-quality barbecue that day.
“Afternoon, Francis,” Ernie began after having approached from behind Frank’s table. The detective turned around and glared.
“Get lost, you,” he scowled.
“Hey, come on, man, I’m tryin’ to apologize here,” Ernie protested.
“And doing a really lousy job of it, if you ask me. I got nothing more to say to you, Ernie. You and me are quits.”
“Look, I’m really, really, really sorry I acted like such a fool at your wedding, but you gotta understand, I was too drunk to know what I was doing.”
“There’s something you gotta understand, Patrolman Campanella. Being drunk is no excuse for anything. I know good and well that nobody sat on top of you and poured all that hooch down your throat. It was you and only you that made the decision to get so drunk, as you always do. Well, from now on you can get loaded on your own time…or stay sober for a few minutes, I really don’t care. I want nothing more to do with you, ever, and that goes triple for my wife. Now can I get some peace and quiet or do I have to ask Aunt Sally to chuck you outa the place?”
Don’t bother,” Ernie sighed. “I’m goin’.”
Frank was too angry to finish his meal. After staring at it with profound disinterest, he finally asked if he could get the thing wrapped up to go. On his way back to his desk, he could not help but to think about his former friend. Ernie was good people, most of the time, and smart as a whip…when he was in any condition to think. Let him get good and drunk, though, and he was about as bright and useful as a box of rocks. More than once, he had helped Frank crack a case when the detective had been ready to give it up as a lost cause.
“Well, I better not hit any more walls,” Frank thought, “because I’ll be damned if I’ll ever ask that son of a bitch for a favor again.”
Even if he wanted to seek Ernie’s help on a case, Sadie would not stand for it. As it was, their wedding night was far short of the fun and festive occasion Frank had been planning in his mind. It was not until the third night of their honeymoon that Sadie relented enough to accept her husband’s heartfelt and, by now, frantic apology amid assurances repeated to the loss of anyone’s count that he would never, ever, ever have anything to do with that bum again.
Fortunately for Frank, nothing had come up since the little girl’s killing that he and Biggie—now his permanent partner—couldn’t handle. As if the cosmos wanted to tell him the bridge had been burned to a cinder, he finished the Sunday crossword puzzle all by himself, down to the very last square. It was the first time he had managed to do that with no help the following Monday from his know-it-all former friend. So who needed Ernie Campanella…for anything?
Chapter 4
Sean Higgins had been working out of the Plymouth Meeting office for close to four years before he remembered why he had been so happy to get the assignment in the first place. There had been a lot of adjustments to make amidst endless briefings and debriefings.
Once he got settled to the point where he had some idea of his place in the general scheme of things, his first priority had not been to look up an old high school crush, but to discreetly check back with the Coral Gables office to see if they had made any progress on the Vasquez murder, which still stuck in his craw. As it turned out, they had, even if it fell short of complete resolution.
Sean found out from a friendly colleague that the bureau had finally fingered Humberto Diaz as the mastermind behind the assassinations. Rather than let himself fall into their hands, though, Diaz had chosen to end his career and his life in a ferocious but futile gun battle. In the end,
he had been unable to take even one of those gringo pendejos with him. As a result, they never did get the name of the killer, assuming there had only been one. As for the killer’s current address, it may as well have been Off the Face of the Earth. Oh well, Sean figured, at least they got Señor Big.
Things were slow enough at the office that Sean could do a little sleuthing for his own ends. A friendly visit to Trenton Catholic, amidst glad-handing and amiable small talk with the remaining faculty, allowed him to discover that Miss Gomez had gone on to Temple University in Philadelphia. What he was able to glean from the few people at Temple who remembered her was that, yeah, she was still living somewhere in Philly.
The next step was to check the archives of The Philadelphia Inquirer for any mention of the lady, since he could find no listing for Sadie Gomez in the phone book. When Sadie signed on as a civilian employee of the Philadelphia Police Department, it was hardly a newsworthy event, so Sean had to keep ploughing through to the year before this, where he finally found a mention of her in the society pages. To his disappointment it was an announcement of her engagement to Detective Francis J. Mueller, also of the Philadelphia Police Department.
Sean thought the matter over for a moment, then decided to go ahead. Even if nothing was likely to come of it, he decided he wanted to visit her, if for no other reason than to satisfy his curiosity. It did not take much digging around for a professional digger around like Sean Higgins to find out exactly where in the vast bureaucracy she worked.
“Are you here to see Captain Williams?” the lady inquired of the visitor.
“Actually, I am here to see you, I think. Mrs. Mueller, is it?”
“Yes, I am Mrs. Mueller. Do I know you?”
“Not at present, I wouldn’t think, but you may remember me from high school when you were Sadie Gomez.”