I felt relieved to hear about these arrangements. It meant that Gardeno’s choking himself into unconsciousness was a more or less regular occurrence, and we were unlikely to be blamed for nearly snuffing the old man.
I was especially glad, because I wanted to talk to him some more. Of all the connections I might have guessed at in the mess my life had become since the Caribbean Comet had steamed out of New York Harbor, the last one would have been Joe Jenkins-Martin Gardeno. I had to hear more about this.
Fortunately, by the time the doctor got around to thinking of throwing us out, Gardeno had come around and was insisting on seeing us. Actually, as the doctor made clear, he had specified only me, but Kenni made it equally clear that she was not going to be moved from my side. That was flattering. I only hoped Gardeno wouldn’t find it inhibiting.
He didn’t. He looked at her, smiled, and said he knew she’d be with me. He said if he had found a woman like her, he might not have been a bachelor all his life.
Then he asked us to stand clear of the TV sets, an array of which was set up at the foot of the bed, sharing space on a rack with sophisticated diagnostic equipment.
A lot of the equipment was hooked up to him, but he paid no attention to the monitors. He was more interested in a ridiculously young Burt Reynolds in some dumb war movie on Channel 9 out of Secaucus, New Jersey. He wasn’t very interested in that, either.
“I hate this room,” he said. “This damn tube in my nose. Oxygen. Know what that means?”
“You won’t turn purple so much,” Kenni offered.
“It means no cigars, either. I’ll be in here two or three days, no cigars. I should have another room in this place padded like a nuthouse for me to stay in after I go three days with no cigars.”
“They’re trying to keep you alive,” Kenni said.
Gardeno looked down the sheet at his gnarled hands. “I know they are. But they ain’t the ones who done it. I been keeping me alive. Willpower. The same way I done everything else in my life. Willpower. Because I had to wait until Janski came back to this island. I knew he would. And then I’d get him, and I’d make him talk, and I’d find out who his partner was, and then I could die in peace. I mean, I don’t know what my soul faces from God, but I made my own choices, you know? Besides, maybe there isn’t any God, and I come out ahead of all the poor suckers who lived on peanuts because they were afraid of what would happen after.
“But what I been afraid of is leaving this job undone. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, Cobb. I want you to do me a favor.”
“I don’t think I do your kind of favors, Mr. Gardeno.”
“Hear me out, then decide.”
The doctor popped his face in and gave us a dirty look. Gardeno told him to get the hell out of there, and began to talk.
Martin Gardeno never married, but he never lacked for women in his life. For fun, there were the girls in his houses, or there were just girls who liked to hang around with a guy who had money and didn’t care to ask any questions about where the money came from. With them, he kept it casual, bought them nice presents, treated them nice (by which he meant he didn’t beat them), and moved on when he wanted a change, no hard feelings.
But a man needed a home made for him, too. That was another big reason he never got married. There were only two women in the world he knew of who were interested in keeping a home for a man the way the home ought to be kept—his mother and his sister, God rest their souls.
When his mother died, he and his sister Angela just kept living in the same house in Greenpoint. Gardeno supported the family, and everything was fine.
Everything was still fine when Angela married a guy named Sam Veria. A good guy. A straight guy. Owned a couple of taxicabs, made a decent living himself, in every sense of the word. Loved Angela, she loved him. Good husband. Good brother-in-law. Good father to little Marty, a smart little kid who looked just like his mother. Gardeno was his godfather.
One day—middle of the afternoon—Sam was out driving one of the cabs. He didn’t have to do that, but he liked to—said it made for a better relationship with his drivers—when he got killed by some doped-up punk who dropped a chunk of concrete off an overpass on the Cross-Bronx Expressway through Sam’s windshield. Gardeno put all his influence to work, but the punk was never found.
Angela made up for the loss of her husband by doubling the amount of love she poured onto her son. At least once a day, she made her brother promise that he would look out for the kid, help him through life.
It used to make Gardeno mad. He was the kid’s godfather wasn’t he? And his uncle, too? Of course he’d take Marty under his wing.
In fact, he might have taken the kid under his wing if he’d only been the child of a casual acquaintance. Marty Veria was sharp. He started working for his uncle at the age of seventeen. He streamlined the numbers operation so as to increase profits by almost two percent. That’s no insignificant figure when you’re talking about millions of dollars a day.
And Marty figured out the drug delivery system. Marty had contempt for anybody who used drugs, and he didn’t forget his father. He just realized that the punk who dropped the rock would have gotten the dope somewhere, no matter who was selling it.
So Marty Veria (with financial backing from his uncle) set up a dope operation. The idea was to use free-lancers, who would take all the risks, financial and physical, as far as the Caribbean. It was so easy to smuggle stuff in from the Caribbean, Marty knew, that his uncle’s resources could take it from there.
Unfortunately, free-lancers were usually nervous, to say nothing of paranoid, and while the preliminary deals were set up through intermediaries, leaving Marty out of it, it was still desirable to have as few of these people arrested as possible. The more people the various police agencies got to question, the more they might be able to put together.
So Marty put together an elaborate payoff system. He and the freelancer would meet on Claxton’s Island, a short seaplane hop from Davidstown. Marty would check the stuff for quality, then the freelancer would stash it, or leave it with someone he trusted. Then they’d go, completely clean, to St. David’s Island, where Marty would remove diamonds from a numbered safe-deposit box in one of the island’s anonymous banks. Then they’d go back, retrieve the stuff, make the exchange, and go their separate ways. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than most systems. And, as Marty told each free-lancer, he was making too much money to double-cross anybody.
“Then he worked a deal with this Janski,” Gardeno said. “And I never saw my nephew again. The guy waited at the bank and waited, and Marty never showed up. They finally found him under a pile of rocks on Claxton’s Island.”
“A burn,” I said.
“To hell with the burn. They wanted to keep the drugs, all they had to do was keep the drugs. No skin off my ass, or Marty’s either. They were after something else.”
The dawn broke. “How much was in that numbered box?”
“Still is. Marty was the only one who knew the number. He kept changing it after every operation.”
“So it’s still there,” Kenni breathed.
“Five million dollars in diamonds. At the price then. Less a couple hundred grand paid for a few operations. God knows what they’re worth now.”
“That’s why you knew Janski would come back.”
“That’s why I knew.”
“But why are you so sure they got the number out of your nephew before they killed him?”
“ ’Cause he was tortured. You want to hear what they done to him? It involved a lot of cigarettes and my nephew’s naked body. Seems he talked right after they burned out one of his eyes—sorry, Miss, but you insisted on coming in here.”
Kenni swallowed hard and nodded.
“Okay, then,” Gardeno went on. “They tortured him, but he didn’t die of the torture. He died from having—”
“Having the back of his skull crushed with a rock,” I said. “A blow to the occipital bone from be
low.”
“How did you know that?” Gardeno demanded. He might have been half dead, but right now he was also deadly.
“There’s been a lot of it going around,” I said. “If it makes you feel any better, that’s exactly the way Janski died.”
“It doesn’t make me feel a damn bit better. It just means the partner’s the one who killed my nephew, and he finally turned on Janski, too.”
Kenni, the irrepressible mystery fan, had been puzzling over something. Now she brightened and said, “Ah. If he hadn’t told them the number, they just would have kept on torturing him until he died. Since they ended it abruptly, they must have gotten what they wanted.”
“Yeah,” Gardeno said. “Because I was under indictment in New York, and the D.A. had a good case, and I couldn’t get bail. They figured they could walk into the bank and get the money and take off and start a new life somewhere, and I wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it.”
Gardeno pulled oxygen into his lungs, inhaling so hard, I thought he was going to suck up the whole rubber tube.
“Let me tell you something. If I’d stood trial, I would have walked. The fix was in. I’m not gonna tell you how, or with who, but it was set for Gardeno to be acquitted. I was ready to retire, anyway. I would have gone back to Brooklyn and consoled my sister. I would have lived in civilization.
“But I couldn’t afford to wait. I didn’t want to wait. When that Janski showed up, I was going to be the one asking the questions, giving the pain if I didn’t get the name of that partner. I was going to be the one to blow him away. That was worth walking out on a sure thing for. That was worth this goddam exile, with nothing but TV to take me back to the city.”
Gardeno clawed at the bedding. “Without me, without her son, my sister died in two years. I couldn’t even go to her funeral. I owed Janski. I owe his partner. Now I’ll probably never be able to pay.”
About this point, I had to remind myself that Gardeno was no prize as a human being. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was undoubtedly a murderous scumbag. But loyalty to family and determination in the face of adversity are two qualities I regard highly. Gardeno hadn’t made me his friend, but he had fascinated me in spite of myself. A glance at Kenni showed me she was feeling the same way.
“You must have done other things to find him,” I said. “You didn’t just sit here and wait.”
“No, I didn’t just sit here and wait. I pulled every string I knew how. I had the whole outfit searching the world for him. I even did stupid things.”
Kenni shot me a look. Gardeno didn’t notice.
“I sent this colored kid to college, numbers runner for us, smart boy. I sent him to NYU to spy in case Janski was stupid enough to try to go back.”
“NYU?” I said. I remembered the old Red Skelton answer to that—NY not me?—but I put it from my mind. “Janski was at NYU?”
“Yeah. He was old for a student, but he’d been booted out of somewhere a few years before because he sold some coke. He got a suspended sentence or something, came to New York, and NYU let him in.”
My mind was spinning. It had taken a long time for the connections to come, but Gardeno had some doozies. Gardeno and Janski. Janski and NYU.
“You don’t happen to know if Janski had something to do with a Professor Schaeffer, do you? Lee H. Schaeffer?”
“The mystery writer? The guy who invented that private eye show? He taught at NYU?”
“He certainly did,” I said. I pressed on, but while Gardeno had had thorough research done on Robert Joseph Janski, it wasn’t anything I didn’t know from vetting him for the Network. I found it interesting that the one thing Janski had managed to keep hidden from us was his stint at NYU. That, and the fact that he’d apparently once been a torture murderer.
Gardeno was morose. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “God, he was a bastard, wasn’t he?”
I was busy thinking. Gardeno took it for reproach.
“Okay. I’m no better. But I don’t think you think Janski and his friend should get away with what they done.”
“Janski didn’t get away with it. He only got away from you.”
“The partner, then. Cobb, like I said before, there’s something I want you to do for me.”
“I’m not going to do anything for you.”
I looked at Gardeno’s face and was amazed. The old man was hurt by my rejection. I wondered what the hell he expected.
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t do it for me. Do it for justice. Do it for ten percent of the value of the diamonds in that box.”
I opened my mouth, but Gardeno cut me off. “Not for you, personally. For charity. You name it. Or don’t name it. What time does your ship sail?”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” I said. Buxton willing.
“Okay. Tomorrow morning, my lawyer will be at the ship, setting it all up. You can fill in the name of the charity. Or change your mind and keep the money.”
“No,” I said.
“Why don’t you find out what I want you to do?”
“You might as well listen to that much, Matt,” Kenni said.
I looked at her. We’d been close for a few days, but did I really know her? A lot of people’s brains stop working in the vicinity of large sums of money. Working at the Network is no good for anybody’s mental health, but one thing it does do is get you thinking of five hundred thousand dollars as not much. You can’t produce a sitcom for two weeks for the Network on five hundred thousand dollars.
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
“Don’t let it drop. Even if I die, don’t let it drop. Keep on this. Keep after Janski’s partner.”
“Janski’s partner may have nothing to do with my problems.”
Gardeno lifted his head from the pillow and fixed me with his eyes. “I’m a dying man,” he said. “Don’t waste my time. The shots to the head? My nephew? Janski?”
He was right of course. His nephew, Janski, and Watson Burkehart, too. Copycat killers have been known to exist, but in order to copy the technique of a previous murder, you have to know it happened. Janski’s body hadn’t been discovered until after Burkehart was killed and, Gardeno was telling me now, the details of his nephew’s death had never been released.
“So I keep after Janski’s partner, and then what?”
“Then you do the right thing. That’s all I ask.”
“I do the right thing,” I said.
“Didn’t I just say I want you for this because I can tell you’re an honest man? What do you think, I want to make a goddam torpedo out of you? You do the right thing. If you got a case for the cops, go to the cops. If I’m alive and you need me, I’ll come and testify and die in jail. At least I’ll be home. If you don’t have a case for the cops, think of something. I tell you, I know about you. Don’t do nothing to hurt your conscience. Just hurt this bastard friend of Janski’s.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You agree?” Gardeno seemed surprised.
“Why not? It’s exactly what I was going to do, anyway. Tell your lawyer the money goes to the New York Public Library.”
Kenni gasped. Gardeno laughed at her, coughed, then laughed some more. He was still smiling as he drifted off to sleep.
21
“No runs, no hits, one error, no one left...”
—Bob Costas, “Game of The Week” (NBC)
BUXTON LET US SAIL. Not, mind you, before he had taken everybody’s name and address (from passports—he was taking nobody’s word for anything) and extracted approximately a thousand solemn vows to cooperate if their local police contacted them on his behalf with further inquiries in the matter. There was some grumbling about it being a lousy way to spend your last morning on the island, especially since we’d only been there a couple of days, but everybody went along. A lot of them probably thought it was still part of the mystery game.
Buxton had a few words with me, too. I filled him in on the state of Martin Gardeno. He got excited.
&nb
sp; “This means the whole time he’s been on St. David’s Island, he’s been conspiring to commit a crime.” He was instantly depressed. “But I couldn’t make anything of that, could I?”
“He could say he was teasing us.”
“Precisely. And it would take the lawyers years to prove any overt action had been taken in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
He got technical for a while, and I tuned him out. Gardeno’s lawyer had delivered that morning a three-inch-thick stack of legal technicalities. Thank God I didn’t have to sign it, because then I would have had to read it. I’d been impressed, though, with the sheer volume of the thing. Either Gardeno had told his lawyers to keep something like this ready in case an honest man showed up, or the old man demanded and got a level of service only the most extravagant expenditure of money can secure.
Anyway, the idea was to hand that over to a lawyer in New York, and the New York Public Library could keep a few branches open a few more weeks.
In the middle of everything, I received a message telling me Mr. Maxwell of the American Embassy wanted to see me. I let him speak to Mr. Buxton, of the Royal St. David’s Island Constabulary, who told him I could not be spared before sailing time. Maxwell then apparently got huffy about my rights as an American, which was big of him, but Buxton told him I had volunteered to stay put and that I had made no request to see anyone from the Embassy.
Then damned if Maxwell doesn’t come to the ship to see me. He was not pleased with me. I had told him I didn’t know Mr. Gardeno, but there I was yesterday, calling on him. Me and Miss Clayton.
Usually, when it becomes my fate to be involved in something like this, I wind up lying to the authorities about something in one way or another. Not this time. I just opened the bag for Maxwell. I didn’t even ask why a cultural attaché would want to know this stuff. I told him everything I’d told Buxton, and I learned something. It’s not that honesty isn’t the best policy, it’s that sometimes it makes no damn difference at all. Maxwell was every bit as suspicious, hostile, and obnoxious as he would have been if I’d been setting out a line of whoppers for him. I think it really bothered him that with his cover, he couldn’t actually threaten me. At last, he went away, suppressing grumbles.
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