by Jack Lynch
I rose and took the note. “Thanks, Otto.”
He leaned back to stare at me thoughtfully. “I hope you feel that way about it later.”
I turned and went to the door, but hesitated before opening it. “I want to make a phone call to put some things into tentative operation. Give me just one hint. Are the people Fitzmorris is surrounding himself with apt to be the sort of men who could administer the beating to the girl?”
“Could, and probably would enjoy it. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
I found a phone booth and called Marin General. They put me through to a nurses’ station from which I was able to send a message into Jimmy Harrington. He was just finishing the photo session with Shirley.
“Are you about through?” I asked when he came on the line.
“Yeah, and you don’t want to hear about it.”
“I was afraid of that. This is what I want you to do next.”
It didn’t take long. I told him briefly what I wanted, and why. Jimmy would know how to go about doing it. I hung up a moment later, and started for the city.
I found a parking place on a side street about a half block from the San Francisco Hall of Justice. I left my .45 in the car. I walked through the metal detector just inside the main entrance, and took an elevator up to the fifth floor.
In the structure of the department, the air was thin up there. McDonnough’s office was right next door to that of the chief of police.
I waited in an outer office for a minute or two before McDonnough himself came to the door and ushered me in. He was a big man with a rough face and suspicious eyes who looked like he’d spent his share of time out on the streets. He was in the civvies, wearing the pants and vest of a gray suit. He wore a white shirt and dark tie over a chest that looked like a tree stump.
“Ten minutes,” he told the uniformed officer who sat at the desk in the outer office. “No calls, except the chief.”
“Yessir.”
I followed McDonnough into his office. It was a small and busy place, with a lot of file cabinets and a deskful of papers. He motioned me to a chair to one side and went around behind his desk. Before sitting he arched his back a couple of times and breathed a curse. Then he sat down and went right to work.
“Marinship Shores,” he said crisply.
I nodded.
“I don’t have time to fuck around, Bragg. Otto Damstadt says you’re a good man and might be the sort of person I’ve been praying might come along for the past several weeks. But if in the course of this you decide it’s not for you, there will be no hard feelings. Unless you breathe a word of it outside of this office. I don’t have to dwell on that; you’ve got a license.”
I nodded to let him know I understood. McDonnough continued.
“The whole thing evolves from the fertile imagination of one Elliott Fitzmorris of Ross. Know him?”
“We’ve met. I know very little of him, except he apparently is taking over financing for the Shores project.”
McDonnough nodded. “He is an elegant man who over the years has become an afficionado of hoods. A rich man’s son who went bad. A man with a kink in his soul, and an utter fascination for criminals and all their activities. It seems almost as if the alignment of his connections and money with mob elements is a way of getting even with his spoiled background. Shit, why would anyone have to get even for something like that?”
He thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “We began hearing things about Marinship Shores several weeks ago. Not from around here, mind you, but from departments in the Midwest. Chicago. Kansas City. Detroit. Places like that. What we heard was disturbing enough so that we began making some discreet queries at this end, but we didn’t turn up anything. The Shores looked straight arrow enough. County support, minority jobs, reputable builder—the works. Our sources in the Midwest said their stuff was good enough, so no matter how it looked, we should keep an eye on things as they developed. We have done that.”
McDonnough got up and paced around the room. “Since that time, Marin County has voted itself in a new sheriff. On a hunch, we backtracked the financing of Sheriff Randall Lawton’s successful campaign to become top law officer there. It came under a lot of names and dummies, but it added up to Elliott Fitzmorris. At least, if he wasn’t the sole source, he was the pipeline.”
McDonnough sat back down behind his desk. “Meanwhile, other bits and pieces began to emerge. The project’s sponsors stepped out of the arena of public financing and went private. Certain other changes were noted. Then we received additional information from the Midwest that confirmed their earlier suspicions beyond a doubt. What we have a-building there in Sausalito on the edge of Richardson Bay is a resort for hoods. The mob. Various families. Call them what you will. They’re a bunch of fucking crooks, and they’ve taken over the Shores project, and they’re planning to come out here and get away from those harsh Midwestern winters.”
He got up again and went around his desk. “Picture if you can what that sort of thing means to a hard-working cop here in the city of St. Francis. Maybe fifty, sixty, seventy of those people at any one time sitting around on their asses over there in Sausalito. So maybe they get a little rain over a couple of months. The only snow they’re apt to see is when it dusts the top of Mt. Tamalpais overnight. Then there’s all the diversions around the Bay Area. San Francisco itself. Sailing on the Bay. The federal recreation area along the coast. Wine country up north. Some of them will leave here finally and go home into the middle of a raging blizzard in Chicago and say, ‘This is bullshit. I’m moving out to San Francisco.’
“I’m looking ahead to what it’ll be like ten years down the pike. How would you feel about it if you were in my place, Bragg?”
I didn’t answer that, and he didn’t expect me to. He picked up a pencil and rolled it around in his hand as he paced around the small office.
“The pattern’s already developing. Very old, very familiar. To clear out the entire Basin area for themselves, they work on a broad front. A killing here. A fire there.”
“A pretty young woman I know living on a houseboat was beaten beyond recognition last night.”
He looked over at me. “Had she been involved in efforts to resist the heave-ho?”
“Exactly.”
He nodded. “They’ll let a few civilians vacation there as well, for the cover it provides, but with the sheriff in their pocket I’m certain of this thing now, beyond a hundred percent. Beyond a hundred percent.” The pencil in his hand snapped in two. He threw it in a wastebasket.
“A man I knew was approached by Elliott Fitzmorris to set up a book at the Shores, once it’s going. A part-time hooker said there’s a call-girl ring going in.”
“A hundred percent.” The captain paused, then wheeled around and stabbed a finger at me. “This is where you come in, Bragg, if you choose to. Maybe because of the girl last night you’d be willing. That’s what Otto thought.”
“Maybe.”
“My department is powerless. They were very smart that way, setting up shop out of my jurisdiction. The most I could do right now is tip off the local media, but that would take for fucking ever. The papers are shy of lawsuits, and there won’t be enough visuals to interest TV until the bodies start stacking up on the street corner ten years down the line.”
He looked away, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “No. What I need is a hired gun. One I can’t even hire. I need documents, check receipts, ledgers, anything that will firmly and conclusively tie Elliott Fitzmorris to these various family organizations back in the Midwest. I have enough sources here and there to know that they exist. This Fitzmorris apparently is a very meticulous man when it comes to records. At this point, the records themselves would only handicap me. I need photostats of them. Enough so a federal judge sympathetic to our cause can issue a search warrant so we can go in and tear the fucking place apart and carry off what we want.”
“We? It’s still out of your jurisdiction.”
He grinned briefly. “I’ve been pulling together a little sub-rosa task force. U.S. Attorney’s office. Treasury. SFPD is in it because we flushed the original information. We’ll have a lot of help. All we need is a search warrant.”
“If you go in, where will the Marin people be?”
“Out in the cold. We already have enough documents clinching the Sheriff Lawton and Elliott Fitzmorris connection. If we get the leg between Fitzmorris and the mob, we’re home free.”
I cleared my throat. “This involves more things than I suspected.”
“Too much for you?”
“Oh, no, not that. But getting back to these photostats you want, to justify the search warrant. It seems to me that somewhere down the line a court is apt to pitch all of that out.”
“Not to worry, Bragg. I don’t care about a trial stage. I’ll have established the connection and go public with it. They can’t afford that sort of publicity, no matter what happens in a courtroom later.”
“What specifically did you have in mind for me?”
He sat at his desk and leaned back in his chair, studying me. “You’re wearing an empty shoulder holster.”
I pulled down the tails of my jacket so it wouldn’t gap so much.
“You have a permit to carry?”
“Yes.”
“A man with a permit is in a fine position to intimidate another man, short of actual homicide. If he has the stomach for it. You can reach me through the switchboard day or night.”
I waited for more. I waited several moments for more. Captain McDonnough’s eyes never left mine, and his face was a blank. Then I got it. There wasn’t going to be any more. I got up and crossed to the door.
“Bragg, look at it from my point of view.”
I turned and waited. The captain leaned across the desk. “When the village is threatened, you remove the poison at the well.”
“That’s okay, Captain. You’ll be hearing from me.”
TWENTY-THREE
Downstairs, I made a phone call. It was to Otto Damstadt. It was a professional courtesy call. I told him I didn’t think it would be in the interest of justice for us to acknowledge each other’s existence for a while.
“Frankly, I’m beginning to think it was a mistake that we ever met in the first place,” he told me. “But so long as you’re on the phone, a preliminary battery of tests on the revolver found on Cookie Poole’s body indicate it was the weapon that killed the man who called himself Red Dewer. Also the man found earlier in Cookie’s house in Tam Valley.”
“That’s awfully fast work on a weapon that had been in the Bay for a couple of days.”
“I suggested they push right along on this one. I told them there was another police agency interested in whatever we could come up with.”
“Who’s that?”
“SFPD. A Captain McDonnough. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”
“Maybe.”
“We also have an ID on the person this revolver is registered to, one Melody Moss. We don’t have a current address. We’re working on it.”
“I might be able to help with that when we’re speaking again.”
“Good luck, Pete.”
I put the .45 back in its holster, and headed back out Doyle Drive and across the Golden Gate Bridge. I stayed on the freeway over the hill and dropped down to the Marinship area. Sometimes my brain does things I marvel over later. Maybe it’s making up for the times it falls short. The falling-short times are more common than the others. But occasionally, just occasionally, it’s as if a few of the cells take a little stroll off by themselves somewhere and cook up a full-blown scheme without letting the rest of me know what’s going on until they’re ready to spring it as a little surprise.
It had happened now, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. I kept thinking about Shirley—how she’d looked when I found her earlier in the day, compared with the way she’d looked before that.
But by the time I took the Marin City and Sausalito exit, I had a pretty comprehensive idea of how to go about things. But I would need a little help to make it work. I drove up Bridgeway to the Shores project building site and turned in. I parked near the trailer office and went up the stairs and inside.
Andy Dustin had arrived. He was huddled over a set of drawings with Joe Sidjakov and a couple of other men. He was looking angry. I was hoping to find him that way. When he looked up and saw me standing in the outer passage, he recognized me, but didn’t show any surprise at my being there.
“Can we talk somewhere?” I asked him.
He had a cold cigar in his face. He took it out of his mouth and came around the table. “Sure.”
He looked as if he still had his traveling clothes on. He was wearing a light brown leisure suit. His luggage was over in one corner of the office.
“My car okay?”
He nodded and followed me out and down the stairs, glancing around at the project on his way. We got in the car and slammed the doors.
“If you start to holler about the changes,” I told him, “Fitzmorris plans to toss your outfit off the job and bring in somebody else.”
He nodded, as if it didn’t come as any surprise. “Where’d you hear that?” He lit the cigar and cracked open the side window a few inches.
“Paul Anderson. He’s working strictly for Fitzmorris these days. Says he wants the management position at the Shores that he’s been offered. Wants security and a job where he doesn’t have to quote-travel-unquote so much.”
Dustin looked out the window with a weary smile. “Poor Paul. Poor, poor dumb bastard.”
“Can Fitzmorris do it that easily—pitch you out?”
“No. It’ll be a gang brawl, but I can stop it. This all came as a big shock to Arthur Moss. Another dumb bastard, only his heart’s in the right place. He should have been sharp enough to smell it coming.”
“Moss is on your side?”
“You’re damn right. We used to sit up nights scheming about how we could tie these Marin City jobs into the thing. It’s the reason Moss came into it. He’s an honorable man. As a matter of fact, he’s up at the civic center right now doing a little preliminary work. Laying a mine field here. A tank trap there.”
“We might be able to speed things up,” I told him. “Avoid all the county bureaucracy and courtroom fights.”
“By God, I’d sure like to hear how.”
I told him. I brought him up to date on several things—what they’d done to Shirley, and what Captain McDonnough had to say about things. Dustin said he would keep that part under his hat. Then I told him what I intended to do.
He sat staring at me with rapt attention. He continued staring for several seconds after I was through laying it out for him.
“Jesus Christ, will they really let you get away with something like that?”
“They will, if it produces results. Remember, these aren’t bona fide Class A citizens we’re dealing with.”
A little twinkle came into his crystal blue eyes. “We?”
“Yeah. The physical stuff will take more than one man. I would need help. Maybe a couple of your boys. Young, husky. Not too squeamish.”
He rolled the cigar in his mouth and crinkled his eyes as he stared off in the distance. “You shall have them. Along with myself.”
“So be it.”
“How soon?”
“With luck, before the afternoon is out. If I can flush out the proper person. And I probably can. And if a friend of mine has managed to take the photos I want. And he probably has.”
Dustin took a business card from his wallet and scribbled a phone number on the back. “That’s the number in the office over there. Keep me current. I’ll go set up a couple of things.”
Before I left the job site, I used one of their phones to call Jimmy Harrington’s office. His secretary told me he’d been back in the office for twenty minutes and was now in the darkroom processing film. I drove on up to his office to wait until he was finished.
Jimmy was a lean man of modest height with a weasel face. That’s why he could move easily in some of the circles his work put him in. He looked like a crook. He gave me prints of the photos he’d taken at the hospital and also some sharp, five-by-seven prints of the several people he’d photographed around the Fitzmorris residence in Ross. He had good, tight mug shots of Fitzmorris’s aide, Anthony, and of the three other men I’d seen in the house the night I’d chased Cookie Poole.
“Should I ask how you managed to get these?” I asked him.
“Why not? My methods are more often than not crude and direct, when money is no object and the client is in a hurry. I had a couple of people stage a slight traffic accident out in front of the place. That developed into a yelling fist fight. Everybody in the house came running out to see what the hell was going on. Myself and an assistant had it covered from a couple of angles behind bushes and things.”
“So far so good,” I told him. Then I told him about the sort of camera I might want to use later that evening. “You have something that would work?”
“Sure, if you promise not to drop it. The sucker’s expensive. It would be better if you let me tag along and operate it.”
“No, I’ll be pushing my luck as it is. Can’t let the party grow.”
Jimmy shrugged. “I’ll try to figure out some safeguards.”
I drove back down to Greenbrae and parked up behind the Emergency entrance to Marin General. I went into the business office and signed a few forms to guarantee payment for Shirley’s treatment. They told me the kid was tougher than she looked. No damaged spleen or kidneys. As I suspected, her jaw had been broken—along with a couple of other bones in her face, and her nose. Plus the arm. But they hadn’t found any signs of internal injuries, and for that I felt thankful. After I gave them a substantial check, they said I could pay her a brief visit. I should have thought so after the amount of money I had agreed to pay them. I should have been entitled to a bed of my own next door if I wanted one.
Shirley seemed to be resting as comfortably as could be expected after that sort of beating. Her jaw was bandaged tightly closed. They were going to set it in the morning, if other tests they were administering indicated she could undergo surgery. They had doped her up to ease the pain, but when I said my name she opened her eyes and wriggled a couple of fingers in greeting.