by Mike Dennis
“Well now, she’s off tonight, but she’ll —”
Dunlap scowled. “We need to see her. Now.”
AJ clasped his hands together thoughtfully. He allowed just enough silence to show he wasn’t intimidated by this gumshoe gorilla. He could tell that Dunlap, no doubt accustomed to rapid responses from cowering suspects, caught the meaning.
“Well, Lieutenant, I’ll have to know a little more about this before I go giving out information on my employees.”
“We’re police officers and we wanna talk to her. That’s all you need to know.”
AJ leaned forward a little. His eyes zeroed in on Dunlap. He knew the type of cop he was dealing with here: look at him wrong and he breaks your face. He’d seen it all before, and he wasn’t rattled.
“You’re from Houston,” he said. “That means you’re out of your jurisdiction. That’s all I need to know. Now, unless you got any of our local boys backing you up, I don’t have to tell you shit. On the other hand, maybe if I call my good friend, the Chief of Detectives, downtown here, he’ll be happy to fill me in on what this’s all about.”
He picked up his telephone, then began punching up numbers.
“Awright, hold it, hold it.” Dunlap damn sure didn’t need any New Orleans brass getting mixed up in all this. After all, he was here without a warrant.
Slowly returning the receiver to its cradle, AJ said, “Now, what’s the story?”
“This past Friday night she was seen in your lounge gettin’ friendly with a guy who got carved up like a Christmas turkey right after he left here.”
“She didn’t do it, I can tell you that. Besides, that’s a local matter anyway. What’s your interest in it?”
“We’re interested. Now where can we find her?”
“Not till I know what’s going on.”
This resistance was a wholly new experience for Dunlap. He wanted to reach right across the desk and smack this skinny fuck upside the head. Of course, if he did, it might take the head right off his shoulders.
Clean off, as Dirty Harry used to say.
God, he loved Dirty Harry. Now there was a fucking cop for you. Why couldn’t all cops be like him? Take no shit from anybody and get away with it. Not always havin’ to worry about bullshit procedure and shit.
“They tell me hookers work your lounge.” He shifted his weight in the chair. “That it’s pretty well-known for that kinda thing.”
“You didn’t come all the way from Houston to tell me that.”
“How often is it the johns turn up dead? Prob’ly wouldn’t be too good for business if word got out that a fella was knifed ten minutes after kissy-facin’ one of your girls.”
“Linda plays piano,” AJ said impatiently. “She’s not one of the girls. And I told you, she didn’t do it.”
“Sure, sure. We know. But it prob’ly still wouldn’t be real good for business if that got out. As I recall reading in the paper, he had dinner here at the restaurant right before his date with a knife. Didn’t say nothing ‘bout him going into your club for a little dessert. Izzat how you work it, Frechette? Lure ‘em in, then whack ‘em out? All for the dough in their pockets?”
AJ stood up. “Get the fuck out of here! Or I’m calling the — “
“I know, you’re calling your friends the cops.” Dunlap waved the whole thing off. “Listen, the guy who paid the price that night was wanted for murder in Houston. And that’s why we’re here.” AJ was stopped in his tracks. Dunlap sensed a winning hand. He continued: “Now, unless you spill this bitch’s address, we’re holding you as a material witness, maybe chargin’ you with obstruction, withholding evidence in a homicide investigation, and anything else we can think of. Now, I suppose you prob’ly got slick lawyers and you might could beat the rap, but once it even looks like you got dirty hands, I just bet your little friggin’ playpen here’ll be closed down in a New York minute.”
The room was quiet. Dunlap’s words hung over the place like locker room body odor. AJ sat back down, straightening his suit jacket, then retrieved his composure.
“I don’t know about any murder in Houston,” he said quietly. “But I do know Linda didn’t have anything to do with it. Or with this guy getting it either.”
“Where’s she live?” Dunlap asked with finality. The hand was over. Time to rake in the pot.
AJ consulted his Rolodex. “Get this. I don’t want any more bullshit from you after this.”
He wrote Linda’s address on a piece of scratch paper, carelessly shoving it across the desk.
“St. Louis Street!” Dunlap exclaimed. “That’s where our boy got his!”
“I know,” AJ said, “but I’m telling you, she didn’t do it. So no strong-arm shit with her.”
Dunlap got up from the deep chair. The young detective did the same.
“T’tell you the truth,” Dunlap said, “I don’t give a fuck if she did it or not. That’s New Orleans’ problem. We need information about this Ryan guy and she can give it to us.”
They headed for the door. AJ remained behind his desk.
“Listen,” he said. “I know you’re here on the QT. Otherwise, you’d be doing this by the book. So whatever it is you’re after, you better play it on the straight and narrow with Linda, y’understand? Don’t let me hear you roughed her up.” He eyed the young detective. “That goes for you too, Cato. You keep this goon in line, or else I’m holding you just as responsible. I know your names and I know where to find you. I hear you lay one fucking paw on her, and someone from New Orleans is gonna pay you cocksuckers a little visit where you live. Remember that as you get the fuck out of my office!”
37
The money sure seemed a hell of a lot heavier in the black trash bag than it did in the suitcase. Eddie struggled with it every step of the way, especially down the narrow steps from Linda’s apartment into the moonlit courtyard. Felina tried to help as best she could, but she couldn’t really lift much of the bag. There was nothing to get a grip on, so she only made it more awkward for Eddie. He had to stop a couple of times to switch hands and to adjust the .38 in his waistband so it wouldn’t dig into his abdomen.
Earlier in the day, they had purchased a used mattress and some new bedding, meaning their final task was stashing the money. Eddie paused at the front door of the building.
“Take a look,” he said to Felina.
She went out into the chilly night for a look around. A block away, Rampart Street traffic was thin. Back down St. Louis, a couple of blocks in the other direction, was Bourbon Street. She could see lots of boisterous activity going on for eight o’clock on a Monday night, none of it spilling down St Louis toward them. A lone taxi slowly motored up Burgundy past the corner in search of a fare. There were no pedestrians. She signaled Eddie to come ahead.
He carry-dragged the bag out to the van, which was in a legal spot right in front. A street lamp illuminated the area ahead of the van, but behind it there was relative darkness.
Felina opened the rear doors, while Eddie hefted the bundle inside.
“Damn!” he gasped. “I’m glad I don’t have to lug that thing a long ways.” He caught a breath. “Let’s move the mattress out.”
The mattress lay flat across the carpeted interior of the vehicle’s rear. To one side were the sheets and pillows, still in their packaging and department store shopping bag. Eddie shoved the trash bag toward the front, right behind the driver’s seat, then he and Felina each pulled on the mattress, sliding it out the rear doors. They stood it upright on the curb, leaning against one corner of the van.
“Hand me the jack handle, baby,” he said, as Felina produced it. “Now we just pry a little bit of this carpeting up right here … and right over here. Just like this.”
Soon, the carpet was peeled from its wood-frame base to a point about three or four feet back from the rear doors. The exposed base was not quite an inch high, and was screwed into the metal floor of the van. There would be room inside this framework to stack the money
packets two deep, maybe three.
“Eddie, I don’t think we can get all of it in this one little area,” Felina said.
“We’ll start putting it in here, and if we need more room, we’ll just pull more carpet up.” He climbed into the van, then closed the doors. Climbing over the pulled-back carpeting, he retrieved handfuls of money from the trash bag. “Let’s see how many of these babies we can fit in here.”
He carefully laid one packet amid the grid of the wood- frame base, then put another on top of it. When a third was placed on top of those, Felina said, “Three’s not gonna fit. The pile’s too high. It’s gonna push the carpeting up from the wood. Maybe separate it, or cause lumps. We don’t want that.”
Damn right he didn’t want that. But then, a lot of things happened lately that he didn’t want. Things that shouldn’t have happened. Things that messed everything up. Things that were making him crazy, tying his guts up into painful knots.
Old fears of insecurity and danger were visiting again, invading in his deepest, most private areas. Had those fears ever really left? Hell, they must have. For a time, anyway.
You know, he was drawing straights pretty good there for a while, back a couple of years ago when he was pulling down serious coin every week.
You couldn’t do all that if you were scared shitless all the time, could you? A guy’d have to be able to look the world in the eye if he ever wanted to have it by the balls. Well, wouldn’t he?
“Two it is,” he agreed.
They started placing the money accordingly, although he told himself that those tiny rivulets of sweat really weren’t sneaking down his spine.
≈≈≈
They hadn’t been working too long, only a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth, but because they were inside the van with the doors shut, they never saw the cop car come around the corner from Burgundy.
It was just two cops in a black-and-white out on routine patrol, and the thing was, they would’ve kept right on going if one of them hadn’t spotted something unusual leaning up against the corner of that van parked over there. Then, he thought he caught a hint of something — he wasn’t sure what — something moving inside the darkened van.
“Pull up here for a second,” he said. His partner, the driver, gently brought the car to a stop on the other side of the street about ten or fifteen yards behind the suspicious vehicle.
“What is it? What’re you seeing?” asked the driver.
“I don’t know — that thing over there by that van. It’s … it’s …” He squinted carefully. “Wait here a second.”
He got out of the car. His eyes never left the van’s rear windows, while he noted positive movement in its interior. He paused by the driver’s side of the car, then softly said to his partner, “Run a make on this van.”
He read him the license number before moving slowly across the street.
≈≈≈
The sound of the opening and closing car door reverberated through the silence of the van like an exploding hand grenade. Eddie and Felina dropped the money packets they were holding. Frozen for a moment, Eddie peered out the side-panel window.
“Cops!” he whispered in a near-panic. He wheeled around and pressed his back flat against the van’s wall. “Fuckin’ cops!”
Felina stole a glance through the side window. The conference at the squad car was just breaking up, as one of the cops cautiously moved toward the van. In his left hand she saw a flashlight casting beams in the van’s direction. Then she caught his other hand unbuckling his holster.
“We can’t let them find us,” she whispered, quickly rolling the carpet back into place. “Get down.”
Eddie moved, his head and eyes rapidly turning here and there like a cornered animal desperately seeking a path of escape. But of course, there was none.
“What the fuck —”
“Get down,” she ordered, as she shoved Eddie to the floor of the van. She slid down next to him on her stomach, facing the rear doors, then said, “You heeled?” Her whisper was urgent.
“Wh-wha —”
”You heeled? Goddammit, answer me.”
He pulled the heater from his waistband. She grabbed it and held it with both hands, slowly cocking the hammer. It was aimed directly at the back doors. From their prone position, they could only see the waving shafts of light outside the rear windows. They quit breathing at the thundering click of approaching footsteps.
≈≈≈
The patrolman stopped about ten feet from the back of the van. All movement in the black interior had stopped. There was no traffic on the street, as though all other worldly events in that immediate area had been suspended, while he took care of this. He turned his flashlight on the object that first caught his attention. A mattress. Now he had to flush out whoever was inside.
Great waves of uncertainty and tension pounded him, like high surf roiling a stormy shore. Briefly, he reminded himself that this was the part of the job where he earned his money. The two percent of the job that was sheer terror. The kind of thing you can’t really talk to anyone about, except other police officers. The kind of thing you carry around inside you like a gurgling roux that just won’t quit churning. Oh, you learn to live with it eventually, and if you have any civilian friends, they never suspect a thing. But shit, if it would only go away for just a little while. If it would just —
He reached for the .357 at his side. Caressing the ribbed handle, he extended his trigger finger, and he slowly slid the weapon out of its freshly-oiled holster. As his finger expertly entered the trigger housing, he held his breath. At that moment, the still night was split apart by the crackling radio back in the squad car.
“All First District units, including the French Quarter, proceed immediately to St. Claude and Frenchmen Streets. Officer is shot and needs assistance. Repeat, all First District units —”
“Larry!” the driver shouted. “Forget it. Officer down. Let’s go!”
The .357 slipped back into the holster. For a split second, the patrolman’s eyes remained riveted on the rear doors of the van. He would never know what lay inside, but as he turned and hustled back to the car, he knew his number had not yet been called.
38
“Linda! Linda!”
It was like an alarm going off.
Eddie and Felina rushed into the apartment, lugging the twist-tied trash bag with them. Eddie dumped it onto the floor.
“Linda!” he cried.
Linda darted out of the bedroom, a full-length towel wrapped around her.
“I was just fixing to take a shower.”
“We gotta get out of here. Now.”
”What is it?” she said. “What happened?”
He ran past her into the other bedroom, where he hurriedly threw their things into the leather suitcase. Felina was right behind him, scooping up clothes and toiletries.
“Will you tell me what the hell happened?” she demanded.
Eddie paused to look up from the suitcase. Through heavy breathing, he said, “We came this close to killing a cop out there just now. They didn’t see us and they’re gone now, but they might be back. Shit. We gotta get the fuck out of here. This minute.”
“Whoa,” she cried, closing the suitcase on his hands. “Slow down, goddammit. Now what-all went down out there?”
Felina was still breathing hard. “It was close, too fucking close.” She gave Linda the short version, then said, “Anyway, Eddie’s right. We got to leave right now.”
She threw a few more items into the bulging suitcase. The rest got crammed into a plastic shopping bag. Eddie took them both, leaving the big trash bag in the hall.
“I’ll take this stuff to the car and come back for the money. You check around, see if we left anything.”
He whisked out the door, down through the courtyard into the street. He cursed as he noticed the mattress still leaning up against the corner of the van. Opening the rear doors, he tossed the luggage inside, pushing it all the way to the f
ront, then struggled with the mattress. It took a lot of effort just to maneuver the hulking piece around to the open door. He just about had it all the way in when he saw the car.
Something about it caught the corner of his eye, kind of like a tiny flickering movement in a perfectly still room. What made this car different? Was it because it was going slow, almost too slow, for the empty street? It was an ordinary-looking big white sedan, not really worth his attention, except for the blackwall tires.
The car double-parked, then the two occupants climbed out. Ties and overcoats. Cops for sure.
Cold sweat worked its way out onto his face, then onto his neck. He felt gummy all over. The men came across the street toward him. He stepped to his left, partially shielded behind the open van door. Instinctively, he put his hand on the gat in his waistband.
Shit, this was all happening so fast, I mean, what could he do? He certainly couldn’t get up and run — they’d probably plug him right in his tracks.
Nope, he’d have to wait it out for just a second here, maybe draw on them at close range. At least, then he’d have surprise on his side, as well as maybe have a fighting chance. Get the big one first. He falls, the other one might dive for cover.
They walked past him and into Linda’s apartment building. Goddamn it. He’d propped the gate open so he could run back inside after loading the bags.
And now they just walked right in. Goddamn it.
No, wait. What am I gonna do here? I just can’t go in there blasting. I mean, sure, they’re cops but I don’t know what they want. I mean, maybe they’re not actually looking for me. They might just be asking questions about Garner’s killing, looking around for witnesses and shit. Yeah, that’s it. They’re just doing their routine legwork, asking if anybody saw anything. Why, they’re prob’ly checking the whole building, not just Linda’s place.
He considered creeping up to the door and into the courtyard to see where they were headed, but decided against it. No sense taking unnecessary chances. Linda’ll know what to do if they come to her door. She always knows what to do.