The Case Of The Lumbee Millions (Woody Stone, Private Investigator, Series)

by R. D. Herring

  The ramshackle carriage house on Harrison Alley was Federal style. It had been trimmed like the main house, but the shutters were falling off and the many coats of paint were obvious from the peeling. The door was cracked open so I skinned my heater and took a peek. It looked like a slaughterhouse in there, and for good reason it turned out.

  A large quantity of blood has an odd smell; it’s like the taste of copper, if you’ve ever stuck your tongue to a penny. The blood pools had soaked in or oozed between the boards, but there was no denying the amount. It was obvious, and it told a story. Sal had circled the building and I pointed through the door when he returned.

  He sucked his teeth, “Don’t look good, Woody.”

  We jumped in the Hawk and drove to Plymouth Street. Ring’s Bar was a seedy little hole in the wall on a lifeless block. The building was a two-story brick, flat roof, four windows wide on the second floor. It looked like a pretty good rattrap to me. We walked into the dive, and I was expecting to find some amount of activity. A lone gray-bearded derelict cradled a draft beer at a table in the corner.

  A young Irish tough toweled beer mugs behind the bar at the far side of the room. I drifted to the left to get a look down a short hallway. The redheaded hooligan followed me with his eyes as he eased to his left. Sal went to the right. When I lit a gasper and glanced down the hallway, I heard a crack. Looking over, I saw Sal had driven the bartender’s head into the bar top and put him to sleep. The old bum pulled his greasy trench coat together at the neck and walked out with his mug of beer.

  “What’d he do,” I asked Sal?

  Sal lifted a sawed-off double barrel from behind the bar and walked it over to me. I broke it down to check the chambers and told Sal, “The back room is down that hall. Whaddaya say we go meet the boys?”

  Laughter and radio noise filtered through the door. I motioned for Sal to move to my left before I knocked.

  “YEAH? Who is it,” came from beyond the door?

  “It’s Rick,” I said. On the third count, everything happened at once.

  The door flew open, “Who the fuck is Ri…!”

  SPLAT! Sal threw a right that flattened the punk’s beezer and laid him out on the floor like a side of beef.

  The boys had been playing poker at a table in the middle of the room. I stepped over the body and said, “Spider, I wanna talk to you.” Two of them looked at the third; I had my man. Sal cooled the two on the left of the vacant chair as soon as they jumped up. ‘Whack-a-mole’ at Coney Island came to mind. He stepped forward and palmed the brown Bakelite radio sitting on the table; it exploded in pieces when it hit the back wall.

  Spider, the tall, lanky jamoke on the right was slower getting to his feet. I was standing in front of him when I heard the ‘snick’ of a switchblade. My horizontal butt stroke with the 12 gauge didn’t quite connect, but it tore a chunk of meat from his cheekbone. He dropped the knife on the floor when he slammed back down in his chair.

  Sal was behind him and applied the grip of death at the base of his skull. The kid grabbed at his bleeding face, and I saw he was wearing a gold signet ring. I said, “Daltry, you make another move like that and I’ll unscrew your head and shit down your windpipe. Now tell me where Benny Martino is. And before you go bullshittin me, I already know he ain’t walkin back.”

  “Piss off, copper!” Spider’s eyes rolled back and his tongue popped out when Sal squeezed his spine.

  “I ain’t the police, Kevin. I’m going to get that answer about Martino or, in a couple of days, they’ll be asking the same question about you.” Daltry tried to turn away, but couldn’t move.

  “Let me talk to dis asshole,” Sal lifted Daltry to his feet and toe-walked him to a small bathroom at the back. Sal kicked the door closed behind him.

  I sat down, lit a Lucky and studied the three sorry looking shits crumpled on the deck. I was having thoughts about improving the gene pool with the 12 gauge. The sound of crashing ceramic came from the head, then Sal toe-walked Daltry back to his chair.

  Spider’s hanging right arm spoke to a dislocated shoulder or worse. His shirt was blood-soaked from a split lip and the gash on his cheekbone. Sal resumed his vice grip on the boy’s neck, “Tell da man what he wants to know.”

  Spider looked up at me with squinty raccoon eyes. His front teeth were missing. “He’s dead. Martino’s dead” Spider had developed a bad lisp.

  “I know that, son. Where’s he dead at?”

  “In da river. In a oil drum off Gold Street Pier.”

  I fanned Daltry for more weapons then walked him out. The redheaded barkeep had deserted his post. In the alley I tossed the goober in the Studebaker trunk; he was too bunged up to escape. I removed the two shells from the 12 gauge and tossed it in too - nice little street sweeper. The salvage diver, Jack Pappalardo, was the go-to guy when the 84th Precinct needed Wallabout Bay dragged. So I drove over to his salvage lot at Front and Gold Streets.

  Jack suited up and met us at the end of Gold Street by the East River. Piles of brick and concrete rubble dominated the shoreline and extended out into the water. Whether from demolition or dumping, the rough waste spoiled the site for any other use. The tide was out and late afternoon rain clouds gathered. A stiff breeze slapped brown oily waves against the rip-rap.

  Jack didn’t bat an eye when I pulled Daltry out of the trunk kicking and whimpering. I thumped him on his hanging shoulder, “Where’d you dump the barrel?”

  “Out the pier a ways, on the left,” he lisped.

  “What color is it,” Pappalardo asked? Then he looked at me, “You’d be surprised how many sealed oil drums you can find in these waters.”

  I nudged Daltry. “It’s orange. I think it’s orange,” he said.

  “Like that?” Jack pointed offshore. The ebb of the river had revealed a foot of orange barrel sticking out of the water about thirty feet out and to the left of the pier. The waves were lapping against and rolling over it.

  I turned to Spider, “Boy, you are as stupid as you look.”

  Jack got a coil of line from his truck and tied one end to his rear hitch. Heaving the coil onto his shoulder, he walked out the pier unwinding the rope as he went. He threw the rope into the water on his return before wading in and tying off the orange drum. Jack had me inch the truck forward while he manhandled the package to shore and up on the rip-rap.

  Crowbarring the lid off the barrel revealed a stew of naked body parts. I smacked Daltry behind the head, “Is that Benny?”

  “Dat’s him.”

  “What’d you cut him up for?”

  Spider looked at me like I was nuts, “Cause he wouldn’t fit.” Just that simple; it was a practical decision born of necessity.

  A length of three-eighths inch rope from my car bound Daltry’s ankles and wrists. I sat him on his ass against the barrel and tied him to it. It was no picnic getting the signet ring from his finger, but I dropped it in my pocket. I would have been glad to break off the slime bag's finger.

  “You can’t leave me here, you sonuvabitch.”

  “You don’t deserve it, Spider, but I’ll send someone for you. Just relax and watch the tide come in. How high doe it get here, anyway?”

  Back at Pappalardo Salvage, I helped Jack hang up his heavy rope inside his yard fence to wash the saltwater off. I gave him fifty bucks for suiting up. I used Jack’s phone to call Detective Max Tolentino at the 84th Precinct.

  “Hey Max, I was walkin my dog by the river at the end of Gold Street. I found an orange drum washed up and busted open by where all that concrete’s dumped. Couldn’t tell much, but I could swear there’s a leg stickin out of it. Oh, and I saw this local kid hangin around there, named Daltry, I think”

  “Spider Daltry? Where you at now, Woody?”

  “Shit! Max, gotta go. My dog just ran off.”

  “GODDAMN IT, WOODY,” was all I heard as I clicked the phone.

  The rain fell as I walked back to my car. I had to return a signet ring and tell the Martino’s not to
wait up.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  (Wednesday, June 7, 1961. Brooklyn Heights.)

  I settled our lunch tab and told the booth waitress to keep the change. She smiled without showing her teeth. It had been forty-five minutes since we left Pappalardo’s place. Back on the sidewalk, I lit a fag and glanced left on Front Street.

  A five-block section of the Manhattan Bridge jutted over Brooklyn Heights. All around us, century-old factories, with windows too fancy, stared like blind men in the park. It was all a monument to the past. We turned right and took it on the heel and toe. Cobblestones still paved part of Front Street.

  We found Jack leaned over a deep-sink. He held the hunk of iron under a stream of water and scrubbed away with a wire brush.

  “Come take a look at this,” he called and started blotting the object with rags. “It looks like a spear tip. There’s a hole in this end where the shaft would go.”

  I took the spike from Jack’s hand; I wanted to eyeball the writing. Deep pits pockmarked the metal; rust had taken its toll. But, clear as day, there were two engraved sets of six numbers each - just regular numbers, not Roman numerals.

  “What do y’all think,” I asked?

  Sal was fingering the spear, “Dunno, Wood. Phone numbers?”

  “Looks like grid coordinates to me. There’s a point after the first two numbers in each set,” Jack said and started walking toward a cabinet on the far wall. “Bring that over here.” He unrolled a map, titled ‘The Greater New York Area’ on a workbench and laid the spear on it. His head pivoted back and forth - spear to map, map to spear, “These coordinates aren’t even close to being around here.” He pulled and unrolled two more maps from the cabinet and performed the same search. “The location is hundreds of miles to the south.”

  He laid out a chart centered on the Outer Banks, a place named Kinnakeet, North Carolina. ”Here we go. I don’t have the scale to pinpoint it, but note the town down here in the lower left corner? Those coordinates are pretty damn close to a Lumberton, North Carolina.”

  I’d heard of that place before. I wrote the name of the town and the coordinates in my notebook and thanked Jack, “What do I owe you, bo?”

  “Nothin, Woody. I use a boatload a’ that naval jelly every year. Say, you can let me know what you find in North Carolina.”

  “Shit, I don’t think you’ll see me going to North Carolina.”

  “Well, you boys take care. Got a barge to cut up.”

  Sally planned to catch the ‘J’ Train into Manhattan. I dropped him at the Marcy Avenue Station and gave him a double sawbuck. Turned out, I hadn’t really needed his help, but you never know. I sure wanted to keep him happy against the time I did need him. On the drive to the platform, he asked if I knew the story of the ‘Spear of Destiny’.

  “Only what I remember from Sunday school when I was a kid.”

  He had a glazed look in his eye when he said, “Don’t lose that relic, Woody.” Why was he calling it a relic?

  Parking the Hawk in the alley by my office, I left it tight up against the rear loading dock. That kept it away from the dribble of traffic that came through there. The next day I’d be hanging around waiting for the call from the DA’s office to report for Gallo’s hearing. I kept my eyes peeled when I went back to get the 12 gauge Spider Daltry souvenir out of my trunk. Hard to believe I’d had that scattergun for two years.

  Detective Max Tolentino never called me about that case. Maybe Daltry manned up in the end; maybe he didn’t survive. Hell, Max might have decided to pluck a thorn from the community’s paw. At any rate, I wasn’t going to call Tolentino to see if he rescued Spider before, during or after the tide came in.

  Up in my office, I poured myself a stiff one and plopped down at my desk to contemplate the brick wall through the window. My mind turned to the bizarre day’s happenings. Gold bullion - yeah, I wish. Poor old Grandma Collins had almost gotten herself and her daughter hurt. She had tried impressing her card playing buddies with pipe dreams and her version of reality. I lit a Lucky, blew two smoke rings and poked at them with the fag.

  But what about the map coordinates that pointed directly to the place old Doc DeCamp grew up? What if it were all true and the details evaporated through the years because of a family that didn’t talk about their past? ‘Get a grip, Woody. Better yet, get a drink’.

  I splashed some water on my face, locked up, and hoofed it over to Hammerhead’s Bar and Grill. The eatery sat a block away on the corner of Division Avenue and Berry Street. I grabbed an evening edition on the way. Follow up stories of President Kennedy’s meeting in Austria covered the front page. He’d had a sit-down with the head Roosky commie the previous weekend. I ordered a glass of Jack, neat, and thumbed through the City Section while they grilled my steak. I intended to peruse the Real Estate Section back at the office.

  As I dodged sidewalk trash and discarded furniture, I made my way west along South 11th Street. It was a block-long shortcut back to the office, but ran in deserted darkness between two aging six-story apartment projects. No street lights were working along that stretch. I kept my head on a swivel and spotted Dupree Davis as I approached the fully lit Wythe Avenue. He bopped along from the direction of Division where he worked at his cousin’s Texaco station.

  His shirt sleeve, pinned up and flapping as he walked, added to the cartoon quality of his peculiar stride. He said he had lost the arm and got shrapnel in the butt from an exploding commie mortar round in Korea. I later found out that the ‘shrapnel in the butt’ almost blew out his hip. He was lucky to be walking - lucky to be alive. He lived in a storage room on the first floor of my building and opened the alley door to his squatter’s digs with a butter knife.

  “Hey, Woody,” he waved and crossed to my side of Wythe Avenue. “How’s it hangin?”

  “Can’t complain, Dupree. Been over to Hammerhead’s.”

  “Oh, man, they got some good beef heart fried with onions.”

  When we got to our shared alley, I said, “ Why dontcha grab a jug and come up to the office.” I knew he’d be drinking his Wild Irish Rose until midnight anyway. He didn’t drink while working at his cousin’s place, but he made up for lost time every night.

  “Shit, Wood, I forgot. Gina taped a note on my door that you wanted to see me.”

  “Yeah, well, grab some ‘Wild I’ and come on up and see me.”

  ***

  A thin, wiry black man, Dupree Davis was a pisser. Very bright guy, but he’d come home from Korea with a bad drinking habit and minus an arm. The war destroyed his body and spirit. After most of ten years on the skids, he was just starting to mend when I met him.

  My square two story brick building on Wythe Avenue was unremarkable; it housed only Stone Investigations on the second floor. The first floor had a very high ceiling. Centered on the front, a twelve-foot rollup door used to allow delivery trucks to back inside.

  From the mid-1930’s until six months after I set up shop in 1957, the Liberty Paper Company occupied the much larger first floor. They also ran a large printing business in the back. Responding to the tanking of the neighborhood economy, Liberty folded and moved several blocks east. They followed the population and traffic to Bedford Avenue.

  The realtor showed the place one time. Then they boarded the two front windows, and the two front and two alley doors stayed locked. Little incentive remained for anyone to move into the space. All needed stores and services were available one block south on Division Avenue.

  The place sat empty for a year, or so I thought. Early one morning in 1958, I made a predawn exit of the door at the bottom of my stairs. I had to squint in the half-light to verify what I thought I saw. Fifteen feet away, a skinny splib was leaving the building and carefully closing the door behind him. I skinned my heater and braced him fast. Dupree Davis had seen me coming and just leaned back against the brick wall.

  “A little midnight B and E, huh, scumbag?” I had my forearm against his throat.

  “Mister,
you got it all wrong,” he said.

  “Why don’t you set me straight, then, dog nuts.” I let him breathe a little.

  “I live here.”

  He may as well have been speaking Russian. I couldn’t immediately grasp that nugget of information. He must’ve seen my thousand yard stare.

  “Let go and I’ll show you.”

  I stepped back and noticed his left shirtsleeve folded up and pinned to his shoulder. His gray shirt had a red star and ‘Mel’s Texaco’ over the left pocket. He gave me the patient smile reserved for the addle-brained and produced a butter knife. Addled or not, that brought the .45 back to his chest.

  “Easy now, big boss, that’s just my door key.”

  He slid the thin blade in beside the doorjamb and pulled the metal fire door open. He picked up his butter knife and moved back for me to step inside. I indicated with my gun barrel that he should go first. I followed him halfway down a dim hall where he reached in a door and snapped a light switch.

  I’ll be damned; they had never turned the power off. A GI sleeping bag laid on wooden pallets and an old suitcase was open on a steel-topped table. The shelf-lined room had been used for storage originally. Now the shelves held Mad Dog 20/20 and Wild Irish Rose bottles - mostly empties.

  “My name’s Dupree Davis. I ain’t hurtin a soul, and that’s flat,” he said. “I work at my cousin’s service station over on Division Ave. Give a veteran a break, will ya?”

  “Looka here, Dupree, I got no beef with what you’re doin. But if you ever get within ten feet of my office door with your key, you’re gonna look funny with it up your ass sideways. I got business now. I’ll let myself out.” He gave me a big grin, and I found myself smiling as I walked away.

  During several late night office sessions over the following three years, I got the wire on the Dupree Davis story in spades, no pun intended. Sitting in my office smoking Luckies and Camels, we’d each drink our favorite straight from our bottles. I told him I was from Memphis and had worked on the river a while. He said he’d sailed the Mississippi many times in his head thanks to Mark Twain. Dupree hounded me for as many memories as I could pull up.