by Philip Depoy
Pan Pan saw it happen. ‘What?’
‘They wouldn’t let me see the body because I wasn’t next of kin,’ I told him, standing up. ‘But they’d let you.’
‘How am I next of kin to a stranger?’
I headed for the door.
‘You have a much better estimation of race relations in America,’ I told him, ‘than the facts would support.’
‘Ah,’ he answered, standing up. ‘Black face equals black face.’
I was out of my apartment, into my T-Bird, and off to the Coroner’s Office before my poor body realized that it wasn’t going to get into bed after all.
The outside observer might have wondered at my reaction to the fact that Pan Pan was not dead. But here’s what I would tell that observer. My father, a guy I didn’t know, was one of Red Levine’s operatives in what was called The Combination, an organization that the goyishe press referred to as Murder, Inc. Hebrew hitmen with good reputations. When my father got killed in the course of his work, Red took me under his wing. He wanted me in the organization in general, just not in the murder end of things. He started me doing this and that until I discovered my aptitude for boosting high-end autos from the swanky parts of Brooklyn. But I was still around murder every day. When you’ve got that much death in your daily intercourse, if I may use that word, you get a skin tougher than a tank and an attitude that some describe as fatalistic.
You also lose a certain ability to demonstrate your emotional content. For the most part, you lose it on purpose. It’s just easier that way.
But as we were driving to the Coroner’s Office, I did manage to say to Pan Pan, ‘I’m glad you’re not dead.’
‘Oh.’ He stared at the side of my face as I drove for a minute and said, ‘Me too.’
‘We’ll sort everything out about Icepick as soon as we find out who is dead.’
He nodded. ‘Right.’
And that was that.
Ten minutes later we pulled up to the dingy little government building near the highway that housed, among other things, the Coroner’s Office. One story, all brick, dirty windows and glass doors in the front that made an awful screeching noise when you opened them.
We were almost to the office when Pan Pan said, ‘Do you think it’s somebody we know, this stiff?’
‘I’m still trying to figure how this is a message from Icepick,’ I told him.
‘You know the man,’ Pan Pan offered. ‘His brain works a certain way, and that’s that.’
‘You mean he’s not like normal people.’
Pan Pan stopped in the hallway. ‘No. You and me, we’re not normal people. Icepick is something else altogether.’
‘He shot a dog.’
‘There you go.’ And with that, Pan Pan resumed walking.
I knew the coroner slightly, a weathered and weary civil servant by the name of Parker. Jowly, rum-eyed, fifty pounds overweight. His white lab coat always had yellow and brown stains on it, but his penny loafers were always clean.
When I opened the door and he saw me standing there, he started shaking his head. ‘No, Mr Moscowitz,’ he croaked. ‘Them cops both told me you ain’t to look at that dead body.’
The office was small: a desk, a chair, a picture of Nixon. And one wall was entirely occupied by three large chrome drawers, refrigerated, in which he could store the corpses. The door to his examination lab, in another room, was just behind his desk.
I stepped aside to reveal Pan Pan.
‘I have brought the next of kin,’ I explained, ‘which the cops told me would be someone who could see the body.’
He stared for a minute, then said to Pan Pan, ‘And just who might you be?’
‘I am Albertus T. Washington,’ he announced grandly, which was true; it was Pan Pan’s given moniker.
Parker considered protesting, sniffed, gave up and ambled toward one of the chrome drawers, which he pulled open.
Pan Pan took a breath and went to look.
He stared for what seemed like a long time, then glanced my way.
‘Poor Pan Pan,’ he said. ‘Come have a look, Foggy.’
I looked at Parker. He shrugged. I went to have a look.
The face I was staring at, only a little damaged by saltwater and several days too long above ground, was not familiar. But he was what they called a Black Seminole. These were guys who had mostly descended from runaway slaves who had made it to Florida and ended up marrying Seminole women. They were, for the most part, a tribe apart, living separate lives from other Seminoles but loosely affiliated with all of them. This gent was wearing a suit from Manny’s; I would recognize one from a mile off. Manny was tailor to the criminal element in my former associates in Brooklyn and, to a lesser extent, Manhattan. Manny was as adept at making a suit as any other haberdasher in the city, but he excelled in designs that took holsters and guns into account. You could be wearing a tommy gun under one of Manny’s suits and nobody would know it. In that arena, he was a magician. And this Black Seminole was wearing one of his numbers.
‘Nice suit,’ I said, mostly to point it out to Pan Pan.
‘I noticed that,’ he assured me.
‘Poor Pan Pan,’ I repeated, staring down.
‘I will collect his effects now,’ Pan Pan declared officiously.
‘Sure.’ Parker didn’t care. One black guy’s stuff didn’t mean anything to him. Give it to another black guy and have done with it. ‘You made funeral arrangements?’
‘We’re having the body shipped back home,’ Pan Pan said, maintaining his air of dignity. ‘We want him to be buried in a kosher graveyard.’
Which took me by surprise, and I cracked up. I laughed a little too much, but I recovered quickly.
‘Grief does strange things to a person,’ I explained to Parker. ‘Pan Pan, he’s my best friend, you understand.’
Parker was rummaging in some bin for Pan Pan’s wallet. ‘Takes all kinds.’ He sighed.
He found what he was looking for and handed it to Pan Pan.
‘That’s it?’ he asked Parker. ‘Where’s his watch? His ring?’
‘No watch,’ said Parker. ‘No ring. Maybe the killer took them.’
‘Yes. Possibly.’ Pan Pan made it sound like he knew Parker had taken them.
It was a good trick. It put Parker on the defensive.
‘You can have a look at the paperwork,’ Parker snapped.
‘I can assure you that Mr Moscowitz, here, will be investigating!’ Pan Pan railed. And then he spun round and stormed out the door.
I turned to Parker. ‘Sorry. Like I said: grief makes you say and do odd things.’
‘Don’t I know it.’ He sighed again.
‘OK.’ And I was out the door.
Once Pan Pan and I were in the car, the first question was obvious.
‘Who the hell was that guy?’ he asked.
‘Right,’ I agreed. ‘And why did Icepick kill him?’
‘And then why did Icepick subsequently bring him to your hometown,’ Pan Pan continued, ‘and then dump him in your bay? What exactly was the message?’
‘All questions that must be answered,’ I concluded.
We drove the rest of the way back to my apartment in contemplative silence.
But when we pulled up close to my front door, there was Echu Matta and the redoubtable Agent Rothschild, clearly in a dither.
Before I even shut the engine off, Echu Matta was at the driver’s door.
‘They weren’t there!’ she exploded.
Rothschild was right behind her. ‘They’re gone.’
‘Someone took them!’ Echu Matta.
‘Hang on.’ I turned off the engine, got out of my car and turned to Rothschild. ‘Your FBI guys didn’t see anything?’
He started to talk but Echu Matta interrupted him.
‘Someone took them, Foggy!’ Echu Matta railed.
‘Is it possible,’ I said calmly, ‘that the kids escaped the shack where the cops were keeping them?’
They both began to talk
at the same time. I held up my hand.
‘Steady,’ I said. ‘In the first place, that sounds about right, doesn’t it? I can’t imagine keeping either one of them someplace they didn’t want to stay. And in the second place, they escaped into the swamp. They know the swamp.’
‘Not that part!’ Echu Matta objected. ‘That part is very dangerous!’
‘Nobody took them,’ Rothschild interrupted. ‘That’s what I was trying to say. My people had their eyes on the place constantly. No one came anywhere near that shack. The kids … they were just gone.’
‘And you’re absolutely certain they were there in the first place?’ I asked him.
‘My agents had the house under surveillance the entire time.’
It was odd to me that the FBI would let criminals take children and put them in a shack, but I held off on that suspicion.
I just stated the obvious. ‘They escaped on their own. Let’s go out there and look around.’
‘No. We need John Horse!’ Echu Matta railed. ‘Where’s John Horse?’
‘OK, OK,’ I told her. ‘He’s coming into the bus station today, if I remember the bus schedule correctly. Let’s go there and find out when, exactly, OK?’
I could tell that she really needed to see the old guy.
Rothschild stared at Pan Pan.
‘Who’s this?’ he asked me.
‘My cousin,’ I told him. ‘Twice removed.’
Rothschild started to say something, but he was interrupted.
‘John Horse!’ Echu Matta shouted.
It was startling to hear a woman who had been so calm under such a variety of circumstances suddenly louder than the Fourth of July.
I sighed. ‘Let’s go.’
And I climbed back into my car. Pan Pan hadn’t moved.
‘I’ll wait for you here,’ he told me. ‘FBI freaks me out.’
I nodded.
Echu Matta and I got into my car. As I backed out of my parking space, a big FBI van pulled right up behind me.
We headed for the Fry’s Bay Greyhound station.
TWENTY
The station was empty when we got there – like, Apocalypse empty. No customers, no stationmaster, no busses.
Instinct made Agent Rothschild pull his gun. We found the stationmaster dead behind the counter.
Rothschild stared down. ‘Lively little town you’ve got here.’
‘You hit us during a particularly busy season,’ I told him.
I rummaged around on the desktop where the stationmaster should have been sitting and found a schedule. It took a second to figure that the bus from Oklahoma City wasn’t due until later in the day.
The stationmaster smelled like cigars. He’d been shot twice in the ticker, and there wasn’t as much blood on the floor as there should have been.
‘Ordinarily in a situation like this,’ I said, ‘you’d call the cops. But my thinking is that the cops did this, although I can’t figure why, exactly. So, I’m calling the hospital. They’ll collect the body and maybe even order an autopsy.’
Rothschild nodded. ‘Collect the bullets. See if they match a police revolver.’
‘Right.’ I turned to Echu Matta. ‘If your kids escaped into the swamp, that’s where we should be. Not waiting here in a bus station for John Horse to come home.’
She was staring out the front window. ‘I just thought he’d know what to do. I don’t know what to do now.’
You could see that all the steam had gone out of her. It was kind of a miracle that she’d lasted that long, kidnapped, starved, hauled halfway across the country – and all by an ex-husband. No wonder she ran out of gas.
‘You should go back to my place,’ I told her. ‘I’m going out to find your children. With any luck at all, I’ll have them in my living room by the time you wake up. OK?’
She turned a half-vacant gaze my way, and then nodded. Then she wandered out of the bus station and was gone.
‘I’ll never understand them, the Seminoles,’ Rothschild said when she’d gone. ‘And I’m still trying to figure you out.’
‘Let me know what you turn up,’ I said. ‘In the meantime, I’m none too happy with you and your FBI chums. You seem to have lost two little children. Two little children for whom I am personally responsible, both job-wise and promise-wise. So, you’re going to take me, in that ridiculous black van you’ve got, out to that cabin where the crooked cops were holding them. And then you and me and whoever else is out there, we’re all going to get our suits messy wandering in the swamp until we find them. Any questions?’
I could tell that about a hundred things went through Rothschild’s mind before he settled on the perfect retort.
‘OK.’ He put his gun away and headed for the door.
I didn’t move.
‘I gotta call the hospital,’ I said.
‘You can call them from the van,’ he told me, shoving me out the bus station door.
The cabin at the end of Blake Road was barely standing. Part of the roof was caved in; all the siding was loose or gone. Three guys in cheap suits were standing around in the gravel smoking cigarettes when we pulled up.
Before we were out of the van one of them started talking.
Rothschild held up his hand. ‘I don’t want to hear it. You know who this is?’
They all stared at me as I climbed out of the FBI-mobile.
‘That’s the Child Protective guy?’ one of them asked, looking me up and down.
‘He found the kids’ mother in Oklahoma, along with all the other missing women,’ Rothschild snapped. ‘You know, the women that you three have been trying to find for half a year? How long did it take you, Mr Moscowitz?’
‘About four days, if you include the drive time,’ I answered him.
‘So, shut up and tell him what happened,’ Rothschild concluded.
The guy hesitated, since shutting up and telling me were, as they say in mathematics, mutually exclusive.
‘All I really want to know is how long the kids have been gone from this house,’ I said after an uncomfortable silence.
‘Can’t be more than two hours, tops,’ the guy said. ‘Hard to keep track out here. It’s really humid.’
The other two just looked down at the ground.
‘Go on,’ I encouraged the talker. ‘What happened?’
He blinked. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean something happened to make them skedaddle,’ I told him. ‘My sense of those two is that they don’t do anything without a reason.’
‘Oh. Well. Nothing happened, but about two hours ago, the girl started yelling that her mother was back. Any idea what she meant?’
I looked at Rothschild. ‘I would say that’s about when I pulled into town with Echu Matta in my passenger seat.’
‘Spooky,’ he said, without the slightest hint of spookiness. Because he didn’t take it seriously, I presumed.
‘Right.’ I made a little dab in the dirt with the toe point of my shoe, and then drew a half circle around it to the south. ‘This dot is the cabin; the crescent is a seven-mile half radius. They went into the swamp; they didn’t go back to town or up to the highway. They think they can hide out in the swamp and then double back to town when it gets dark so they can get next to their mother. That’s why the five of us are going to fan out in that direction.’ I pointed toward the first of the cypress trees.
‘Seven miles?’ Mr Talker complained. ‘That’s a lot of ground for little children to cover in just a couple of hours.’
‘Yeah, they’re stronger and faster than you are,’ I told him in no uncertain terms. ‘And they know these swamps like you know your favorite booth at the Pancake House. Believe me, they could be ten miles away by now.’
‘Listen,’ Rothschild added, ‘you keep calling out that you’re helping Foggy Moscowitz. They’ll trust that name, got it?’
They all nodded.
‘Call the boy Duck and the girl Sharp,’ I told them. ‘That might help too.’
> There was a big show of sighing and crushing out cigarettes, but the three guys eventually took off.
‘By the way,’ I called after them, ‘you should just reconcile yourselves to the fact that you’re going to mess up your suits.’
No one responded. Maybe their suits weren’t as important to them as mine was to me.
I looked at Rothschild. ‘I’m still adjusting to your alter ego, here. I was comfortable thinking of you as the new local dick.’
He sighed. ‘I hate undercover work.’
‘You seemed to get a lot of fun out of calling me “Jew-boy”.’
He laughed. ‘If I told you how many times I’d been called that – to my face – in the FBI offices, no less. Probably just releasing a little pent-up something-or-other.’
‘Yeah.’ I only took a second to meditate on the fact that in my old criminal world I’d never been called that.
‘So, let’s go.’ He started toward the cypress trees.
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘Here’s the thing: you stay on my right, and don’t lose sight of me. I mean it. Lost in a swamp is the worst kind of lost there is.’
He nodded, and off we went.
Now, the first time I was in the swamps around Fry’s Bay, I was in a slightly more hospitable part, owing to the fact that it was the part where a whole lot of Seminoles lived. This part where Agent Rothschild and I were, that was another story. It was less open, more tangled, and about twenty times more dangerous. It wasn’t just the reptiles, including gators which could eat you in five bites, and snakes of all kinds that could bite you dead. There were also puss caterpillars – they looked soft, but if you got a bristle from them stuck in your finger, you’d be throwing up for hours and should really get to a hospital – and poisonous trap-jaw ants, brain-eating amoebas and sometimes black bears. Any one of them could put you down. And that was if five hundred mosquitoes didn’t bite you and give you some godawful disease or just drive you crazy itching yourself to death. Give me a mob war any day.
Except for the fact that Sharp and Duck were out there somewhere and I had to find them.
It was easy enough to stick to solid land at first, but after twenty minutes or so, we had no choice but to wade into water up to our knees. And it wasn’t just water. It was ooze and slime and bugs and slippery bottom.