The Last Man to Die (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “God,” Carol breathed.

  “They were evil because they hadn’t had to go to the war and come back without parts of their bodies. They were profiteers of the worst kind, for Max. He had paid the price and they hadn’t.”

  Another silence, broken by a car horn in the street.

  “It was worse when he drank. Then he was a Max I didn’t know, mad at all of them. Even at people close to him. Myself. Idola. Herb.”

  Her voice caught, but she managed to go on: “When Herb died it completed his derangement.”

  Carol’s eyes narrowed and she seemed to shrink back at the truth, but Jake’s eyes stayed riveted on the turning reel.

  “That’s when he started to kill them.”

  Carol made a little sound in her throat and Kelso muttered an oath.

  “It took me a long time to realize what was happening. It never occurred to me that he would do anything like that. I guess it never occurred to him, either, because at about the same time his drinking grew worse. He became convinced that it was the ones on the list who’d conspired to kill Herb. It wasn’t rational. It was just that they were the names he had, and the ones he was convinced had more to lose. But they were small people. Nobody really believed they were the ones. Only Max.”

  Only Max, I thought, as I heard her voice on the tape for the fourth time.

  “And they just disappeared, so there was no outcry. There were rumors, of course: I heard they’d left notes or called their families. We all thought it was just because the net was closing around them. Until my father found out. Actually, I suppose it was someone in the city government, maybe the police department, who put it all together. But my father found out. I guess somebody passed the news to him. He came to see me that day, wanted me to go away for a while with Julius. He wouldn’t spell out why but I knew it had something to do with Max. I wouldn’t listen. I kept pressing him and finally he said, ‘Max is sick.’ I didn’t understand what he meant. I knew Max was under pressure, that he was drinking more, but ‘sick’? All I could think was that my father hated Max, had always hated him, and that he wanted me out of town so he could do something. When Father was gone, I called Max’s office. I was distraught, you have to understand. When Idola said Max wasn’t there, I told her what Father had said. How could I know the effect it would have on Max when he got back and she told him? When she called me back she said he’d become completely irrational. He’d even blamed her for Herb’s death. Then he’d left with a gun in his belt, and she was afraid of what he was going to do. You see, he’d just admitted to her that he’d killed them all.” Silence as the tape whirred. When her voice came back it was weaker. “Once, a long time before, he’d called the Levinthal cabin at Biloxi our hideaway. I had a feeling that was where he was headed now, to escape.”

  Kelso’s face showed nothing, but Carol was beginning to look sick.

  “So I drove after him. I thought he’d go to the Levinthal cabin. He had keys. We all did. At least, I hoped he would. I remember all during the drive I prayed, ‘Good Lord, please don’t let him do anything else.’ ”

  I had an image of the dead woman, thirty years old and beautiful, speeding along the coast with the sea breeze spreading her hair out behind her, as she hoped against hope that hot August night, and waves lapped at the sand.…

  “I found him at the cabin. He was very drunk. We argued and I begged him to let me get help. He got up and pulled out this pistol he’d brought home from the war and waved it around. He said they were all evil and he had to destroy them, just like they’d destroyed Herb, only I knew what he really meant: He meant he had to destroy them because they weren’t like him, crippled. He had to destroy them because they were the lucky ones, the ones who hadn’t been maimed only a few days before it would have all been over. That was when I went crazy myself. I told him he was a fraud, that he preached justice and fairness, but he didn’t really believe, and that was why he wasn’t going to be elected, that people weren’t going to be fooled, that Herb had known, and that if Herb were alive …”

  A pause, then:

  “He froze and for a minute I thought he was going to cry, and I went toward him, to take the gun, but he shoved me and I fell down and struck the bedpost with my head. He looked down at me and for a long time I thought he was going to kill me and then the strangest look came over him, a look I hadn’t seen since before he’d left for the war. It was like the old Max, just for a second, like he couldn’t believe what had happened. He turned and went into the other room and I heard the door lock. A few seconds later I heard a crash and then the shot.”

  There was sudden silence and I reached over and pushed the button, stopping the machine.

  Kelso exhaled. “So Chantry shot himself.”

  I nodded. “And it fits with the evidence: the bullet wound was in the middle of his forehead.”

  “That’s right,” Carol said.

  “But I still don’t understand,” she said. “Who buried the body and why? And why kill people forty-odd years later over a suicide?”

  “Because,” I said. “Lydia had no way of proving it was a suicide.”

  “You mean …?” Carol began.

  I pressed the button again and the tape started to turn.

  “At first I wanted to run away, to scream, to pretend none of it had happened. But I made myself break the lock on the door and go in. He was on the bed, dead, the gun next to his hand. He’d taken his prosthesis off, almost as if he was finally admitting, at the end, that he knew the truth about himself. I picked up the gun. But I was afraid it would go off. So I laid it down again.”

  I pushed the button and stopped it.

  I reached down to where I had taped the Walther against the inner side of the desk.

  “What next?” Kelso asked.

  “She called somebody,” I said. “Somebody she thought she could trust.”

  “Who?” Carol asked.

  I nodded over at Kelso, who had something in his hand now, pointed at my chest.

  “Oh, boyo, you wouldn’t let it alone, would you? And now it’s too late.”

  Carol gave a little cry, but Sam just took it all in with a blank look on his face.

  “She called you, didn’t she, Jake?” I asked wearily. “You were one of the policemen sent to guard Max. She’d gotten to know you a little and she trusted you. When the heat was off they pulled off the guards, but she still knew where to get hold of you.”

  “I was just a young patrolman then. She was a very high-class woman, was Mrs. Lydia Chantry,” said Jake Kelso. “Too high-class for the likes of me. But not too proud to ask for help.”

  “So you drove over. It took a couple of hours, tops. When you went in …”

  “I found what looked like a murder,” Kelso said. “It was her word against the facts. And she’d had the pistol in her hand. I told her it looked very bad.”

  “But you agreed to fix it,” I said. “You took the pistol and you took Max’s body and that night you chartered a boat. Who did it belong to, this boat? Silvano?”

  “We’d had a few dealings. I wasn’t high on his list, but I’d done him some favors. You remember how the coast used to be? Wide open. Big Al had some joints over there, people he could call on. When I told him what I had in mind he told his boys to help me out. Me and No Toes took Max and buried him on Ship Island. Then I went back and told her the thing was taken care of, and for all the world knew, the Mob had knocked him off. No harm to Silvano, because there was no proof. He was clear, and Max was out of the way.”

  I nodded. “It was just Lydia Chantry who was on the hook. Who stayed on the hook to you for over forty years.”

  Kelso sighed. “Her old man could’ve fixed it in New Orleans,” he said. “But the killing was in Mississippi. She knew it would be hard for him to swing his weight over there.”

  “She knew you had the gun with her prints and anytime she refused to pay you could arrange to find the body with the bullet hole in it. That’s why you didn’t du
mp Max over the side wrapped in chains: Knowing where he was helped you keep your hold on her.”

  “Hold? It was only a loan every now and then to help me pay my debts.” He shook his head. “It was always my damn luck to get the slow ponies.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I saved her family trouble. A suicide would’ve looked bad. It would’ve all came out, about the men Max killed. What would that have done to her high-and-mighty old man? The old bastard probably made a novena of thanks when Max disappeared.”

  “I’ll agree he wasn’t much interested in an investigation,” I said. “And I’m sure you used his social position to help convince Lydia to keep it between the two of you.”

  “Does she say that?” Kelso asked.

  “Every word. Even how she invented the story about being called by somebody with an Italian accent when Max went missing. Do you want to hear?”

  “No, I’ll take your word. And the tape, too, if you don’t mind. But I’d like to know what made you suspect.”

  “Different things. My own experience. I had to fight the same feelings as Max. But there was also my talk with Idola Marsh. When I left she called me Max and asked me not to go. She kept staring at my chest or my midsection. I didn’t know what she was looking at until later. Then I realized: It was my gun. It was probably visible when my coat flapped open. She saw it, and it reminded her of Max the last time she saw him.”

  “So what?”

  “It just made me wonder. Not that Max might not have been carrying a gun for his own protection. But it made me think about what kind of person Max was and what kind of person I was. And about some other men I knew once, in a navy hospital. But I still thought Lydia or her father had probably killed him. When I talked to her that last time she made a slip: She said: ‘Max is dead—I saw him.’ It didn’t sound like she was talking about bones. I was right about that, but wrong about her being his killer. I wasn’t wrong about you, though, and your blackmail. I figured that out correctly.”

  Kelso frowned. “How?”

  “The clipping you stole from her album when I was checking to see if she was dead. I went back to the old newspaper files and got a copy of it. It showed Max and a couple of his police guards. Something rang a bell then but I couldn’t figure what it was. I carried the picture around with me and then the other day I had a chance to talk to a police lieutenant named Leblanc who didn’t have a lot to do. He showed me some old albums and I saw you in one, as a training officer. You’ve changed a lot over the years, and I wouldn’t have recognized you from the picture alone. But that photo in Leblanc’s album showed you in between and the resemblance was there.”

  “So what?”

  “You told me you’d never met Max. And you told me you joined the force after he was killed. Why lie if you didn’t have anything to hide?”

  Kelso shook his head.

  “My mistake. And it looks like it’s going to get you all killed.” He nodded at my midsection. “You can forget the vest this time: I’ll aim for your head. After I kill the girl.”

  I knew I had to play for time now.

  “First tell me why you gave me Frake’s name to begin with.”

  Kelso shook his head. “You were close on the trail, boyo. I had to show you a reason for you to let me get close to you. Frake was living on borrowed time, anyway.”

  “You’d planned to get rid of him.”

  “Sure. He knew too much and he was a damn head case. I needed you to die and I needed him to die. Better if one of you killed the other, and then I could take care of who was left. Even better if you killed each other.”

  “I saw Frake’s intelligence file,” I said. “He was arrested in New Orleans a year or two before you retired from the force. You knew each other back then, didn’t you?”

  “Right and wrong. He wasn’t arrested. He was suspected. But I took care of the evidence. I saved his ass, is what I did. I told him one day I just might call in the marker.” His lips twisted up in a smile.

  I shrugged. “Another mistake on your part, Jake: It was an intelligence file, the kind you were in charge of before you retired. I wondered why you didn’t know the guy right off. Instead, you had to go through this song-and-dance about calling all over the place.”

  “And I thought I’d impressed you,” Kelso lamented.

  “You got him here fast.”

  “When I saw the story about Max in the paper and I heard about this girl asking questions, I decided I better get a hitter, just in case. Hell, I thought I was liable to have problems with Julius! I called that one wrong. Anyway, I didn’t have any money: Everything had gone to the horses and cards. So I had to settle for a psycho who owed me one. Still, you couldn’t ever tell what the bastard was gonna do next. Once he was here, I realized he was gonna figure some way to kill somebody. I told him to keep an eye on the Gourrier girl, make sure she didn’t get cold feet. Naturally, he scared the hell out of her. He said she wanted out, that he was scared she was gonna talk about what we put her up to. So of course he killed her, the dumb asshole.”

  “Did Tommy Noto get him for you?”

  “No Toes put me in touch. But No Toes wants everything to die down. He don’t want no big scandal about Max. He’s trying to get a casino license right now.”

  “Well, keeping Frake around didn’t help.”

  “He give him a place to lie low, that’s all. It was me needed Frake to stick around. And Frake wasn’t in no position to bargain.” He shook his head.

  “What about Idola? You had Frake kill her because she’d seen you with Max in the old days, I guess.”

  “That’s about it.”

  He reached for the tape player and ejected the cassette.

  Then, without warning, Sam was on his feet and lunging forward.

  “You aren’t going to kill her, by God. I’ll shove that gun up your ass.”

  Kelso swung the gun around to cover the new threat and I pulled the Walther loose from the side of the desk and raised it chest high.

  “Drop it, Jake.”

  The gun wavered for a moment, as if he couldn’t decide whether to shoot Sam or swing it toward me.

  But when I told him the second time he let his arm fall to his side.

  “Elaine’s gonna be pissed,” he said.

  Then, before I could react, he swept the tape player toward me, deflecting my aim. He grabbed Carol and dragged her after him, into the kitchen, and toward the porch over the patio.

  “Jake, it’s no good,” I yelled.

  “It ain’t worth a damn,” he yelled back, “but I haven’t got a choice.”

  He pulled her through the back door and then closed it behind them. I turned to Sam.

  “Call the police.”

  I headed for the door, crashing through it just in time to see them at the end of the porch. Then, even as I watched, he threw Carol onto the boards and raised the gun. It wasn’t me he was pointing it at but himself. I was still staring when the shot exploded, blowing the morning quiet to bits.

  He flew back against the wall and slid down, the gun clattering onto the boards, beside him.

  Now I knew it was over.

  EPILOGUE

  I met Mancuso in the hallway outside the chief of detectives’ office.

  “Want to get a burger?” he asked. It was noon and I’d been inside for three hours, telling the story over and over to detectives from Homicide, Intelligence, and Internal Affairs. Finally, I’d been called in by the chief of detectives and made to tell it again.

  “I guess.” We walked out into the wringing heat and I slumped into his car and closed my eyes as he started the engine.

  “Well, they’re gonna bury it,” he said. “I guess they told you.”

  I nodded. “I don’t care.”

  “They figure it doesn’t do the department any good. They’ll just write it off as another old cop who ate his gun. Maybe it’s just as well.”

  “They buried it a long time ago,” I said. “They knew what happened to Max. At least, that he’d
done the killings and was dead now.”

  “You’re probably right. Silvano let the right people know, anyway. So nobody pressed for the whereabouts of the people Max killed. And they even passed it to the right people at the newspapers. ‘The killer’s dead, so let it drop.’ ”

  “Jesus,” I said. “He was blackmailing her all those years.”

  “Yeah. Our deputy chief wasn’t such a nice guy.” He pulled into the traffic. “But you rattled him with this investigation. He wasn’t scared you’d find anything on your own. He knew Lydia was in bad health and was scared to death you’d convince her to tell you before she died, just so she could pass on with a clean slate.”

  “He must’ve been rattled even more when Frake shot him,” I said. “I figured he’d make his play to kill me and Frake. That’s why I had Sandy out there.”

  “I fucked it up,” Mancuso admitted. “If it hadn’t been for the traffic I’d have gotten him before he made it into the house. Instead, he came in, saw Kelso, and figured he’d been double-crossed. That’s why he shot Kelso. After all, Kelso had called him after he’d talked to you, and told Frake to get out of the house and come back later.”

  “Well, it’s over now,” I said. “By the way, any idea why a Mob-owned funeral home was chosen for Max?”

  “Julius says he didn’t know it until just before his mother died, but the funeral home was Kelso’s idea. When Max’s bones were found Lydia went hysterical because she was afraid they might point to her as the killer—that’s what Kelso had been using all these years to scare her with. She told him she’d been paying for protection and he had to do something. He promised to handle it and told her to make arrangements with Gulfland.”

  “You talked to Julius, then?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He didn’t want to say much but when I told him it was all going to go away he gave me some details. The trouble was that even though Julius, as a lawyer, knew the evidence against his mother was slim, by the time he found out about the deal she was in such bad health he knew she couldn’t stand the controversy.”