“I’M ON $300 a day, plus expenses. I’m happy to help you, but what will I say to Jimmy the Greek?”
“That is the second time you have lied to me today,” said the Don flatly, “The first lie was that you were going to tell Jimmy that you were going to quit. As I understand this is the first solid piece of work you have had in four months and you are desperate for the money. Which leads me to the second lie. You are only being paid $200 a day. But I will pay your $600 because I want you to do the job and I know that you will only feel cheated if I offer $400.”
I could tell that my face was twitching nervously. “I cannot trust a man who never lies, especially a man in your circumstances. Lying to me once in that situation is acceptable. Lying to me twice is not. Lie to me a third time and you will incur my displeasure. Do we have an understanding?”
We sure as fuck did. When the Don was displeased, the object of his anger was normally found at the bottom of the East River with rocks tied to his feet and a bullet between his eyes. That was not one of my life goals.
“Yes, we have an understanding. But what am I going to say to Jimmy the Greek?”
Lambretti was silent for a spell, thinking, his eyes downcast and his arms resting by his side as they had done for the entire time since he sat down.
“You will work for me for a week. You will tell James Popoudopolos that Dawn Pasquale is doing nothing for him to be suspicious of and that the case is closed.”
“OK.”
“And as of today, you will stop following her. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“One final thing before you go ... have you taken any notes or have any other records of your spell following the blonde?”
“Um, let me think ... nothing much. Just her time sheets and stuff.”
“When my assistant drives you back to your office, you will give him any paperwork on Miss. Pasquale. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I do.”
And with that he stood up, walked over to the door and opened it. Her mumbled something to one of the goons, who nodded and took me to his car. The journey back to the city was quiet. I don’t think Cheech could say anything more than ‘No’ in English and I didn’t feel like getting to learn the Italian for ‘sleeps with the fishes’.
We got to my office and the goon came with me to get the papers. They were all in the file marked ‘Popoudopolos’. Me? I hate paperwork, but that’s why I pay a secretary to come in, look after the phones and generally tell me when I should be meeting who and when.
Without a word said between us, the goon walked out of my office and that was the last I saw of him. I called up Jimmy the Greek and broke the news to him. He was OK about it - after all I told him that everything was fine and that his darling Dawn was a stand up broad. But there was one thing bugging me. Why would the great Don Michael Lambretti give a shit about that babe, Pasquale?
5
I FOUND THE answer one week later. In the morning a package arrived containing a roll of in-god-we-trusts to the tune of 42 hundred bucks. In the afternoon I got a call from Jimmy that Dawn had been shot dead at lunch time.
When I tootled over to her apartment to find out what I could find out, I discovered the great Detective Superintendent Paul ‘Rickshaw’ Thomas at the scene. I say great: he was great to me because he’d got me out of more than one jam with the Commissioner downtown, but he was just a humble Super to everybody else.
“What’s up?”
“You tell me, you’re the cop, right?”
“Funny. Real funny. What do you care about another dead broad in this big city?”
“Always with the questions. You a cop or something?”
“Still with the funnies.”
“… So what’s the story here, officer?”
“Not much to see, move along.”
Thomas winked at me and we moved around the corner, away from the front door of the apartment so’s we could have a more private chat.
“Shot dead. Point blank range to the back of the head.”
I grimaced because that was not a nice way to go: it implied a professional hit.
“Tell me about it. And there’s more. She wasn’t alone. She was found, um, on top of a fella, see?”
“Dead also?’
“Yeah but with a smile on his face, if you get my meanin’.”
For a second or two I imagined the two of them dead with the coroner trying to prise them apart so that they could be buried in different caskets. Then my reverie was interrupted by the Rickshaw laughing at me. Clearly, he could read my mind.
“Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? To put you out of your misery, I said she was on top of him, I didn’t say he was inside of her. Schmuck.” One bullet, two bodies and a happy Don Michael. Quite a day’s work for some lucky guy.
I smiled at Rickshaw’s words, but I couldn’t figure out what Dawn was doing sleeping with this guy. From what I’d heard, Jimmy the Greek was all the man that Dawn would have needed in her life - and that didn’t just come from Jimmy himself, although he did proclaim it from the rooftops at every opportunity. After a day or two solid gumshoe work, I’d started to build up a picture of Dawn’s lothario Pete.
Word in the Big Apple was that our man came from Cincinnati and had only been in the city a matter of weeks. A couple of long-distance calls told me the guy was a low level goon for a local enforcer. Nothing clever, nothing fancy, but a regular beater up of neighborhood pond scum - and nothing much more. I couldn’t fathom Pete’s connection with Dawn because she had never been to Cincinnati and this was his first visit to NYC. Time to hit the streets again.
FIRST STOP WAS a trip to Jimmy the Greek to find out what he didn’t know he knew. When he came to the door of his Bronx row house, there was no light on inside. He let me in and he shuffled into his living room, a broken man. Slumped onto a chair and I sat opposite him. We were silent for a spell and I broke the monotony of his inability to communicate:
“Shall I make us a cup of java?”
“What? Yes… Yes, why not?”
I stood up and wandered into the kitchen, opening every cupboard door until I found the coffee grounds. Then I messed about with the percolator until everything was brewing. Finally, I took the milk out of the refrigerator and opened the cupboards up again until I found the sugar for Jimmy.
“How’s you take it?” I shouted out to him.
“No milk, no sugar, thanks.” was the reply, so I put my newly-found prizes back in their place and waltzed back into the living room with two cups of dark brown liquid.
“So tell me…” I began, “… what made you think she was having an affair?”
His doleful eyes looked woefully at me, salty liquid forming around the corners. He sniffed.
“The way she was behaving the last few days before I called you.”
“In what way?”
“She was touching me less.” Beat.
“And she was making phone calls.”
“Phone calls? What’s so unusual about that?”
“The number of them and, what raised my attention, the way that she put the phone down almost every time I entered the room. Made me think that she wanted to hide the call from me.”
“Did you ask her about them?”
“No.” He looked down at the floor again and sniffed, rubbing the moisture away from his eyes. I needed him this side of morose to get what I needed.
“Do you know if they were local calls?”
“Local? I dunno. Do you think they were local?”
“Just asking. I’ve got no clue what numbers she dialed - but I might know a guy who does. Leave it with me.”
“Okay.” Beat. “Anything else?”
“Not for now.”
“I’m going back to bed. Let yourself out.” So I did.
I SWUNG BY Rickshaw’s desk at the precinct later that day, mainly to catch up because bumping into him made me remember I liked his company, but also to see if I could get access to Jimmy the
Greek’s phone records. The answer was a big zero but Rickshaw knew me well enough to leave the right bits of paper face up on his desk when he went for a leak. Sure enough, there were daily incoming and outgoing calls to Cincinnati, so Dawn and Pete had something brewing before he hit town last week. But what?
Traveling back to my office, I tried to think of the different games that could have been playing out in front of Jimmy - and what possible connection they had with Don Michael. There was nothing direct to connect all these people, so I figured there must be a third person in the mix who hadn’t shown themselves by now. Apart from the hit man, of course.
What would make Don Michael call a hit on Pete and not want any witnesses? Because he could have just paid me to keep my mouth shut and I surely would. I’d slash my mother’s face for a Jackson and everyone knew it. My conclusion: Don Michael didn’t want me to even see who was performing the hit. And why would that be? Because the hit was personal, otherwise any old out of town hood could have pulled the trigger. So if it was personal, I’d be looking at family or a friend of Don Michael’s who lived in Cincinnati. The field of suspects suddenly got very narrow indeed because Don Michael was not a man who traveled round the country picking up friends. He stayed in the state so that he would not make himself susceptible to detainment by the FBI under the RICO laws. And quite right too. If you are going to be responsible for one of the five Mafia families in New York, you are not going to want to be interrogated by J Edgar’s finest.
One of the bonuses of being an investigator is that we held phone books from each of the major cities, so a quick check in the Cincinnati L-R volume indicated there were only three Lambrettis residing legally. There was Mr. and Mrs. R Lambretti and Mr. P Lambretti. You don’t need lexicographical skills to figure out which one of the three was Pete. Back then, phone books gave addresses as well as phone numbers, so I scribbled down the details and booked a flight to the Queen City.
YOU CAN TELL a lot about a city by the way it welcomes you at its airport. This town wouldn’t piss down your throat if your heart was on fire. I had to wait twenty minutes to catch a cab to my hotel - such a great town that you can’t even pay people to drive round it. Fabulous.
I crashed in my room and after breakfast the next morning, I waited fifteen minutes for a taxi to take me to Mr. P Lambretti’s residence. And what a residence it was. The pillars at the front were making a statement in themselves - and that was once you’d trekked along the path from the front door built into a privet hedge to the main building itself. Mr. P had been doing extraordinarily well for a low life thug - or he had a rich friend.
The guy who opened the door to me clearly believed I was wasting his time even though he was obviously paid to open the door to strangers such a myself.
“Yes?” The single syllable was stretched out on his lips like a body on a rack. It contained at least three separate notes to my count.
“Is Mr. P Lambretti in, by any chance?”
“And you are?”
“I’m the guy asking if Lambretti is in.”
He looked at me like I was scum and said nothing. I could tell that an aggressive, assumptive tone was not going to work on this gate keeper.
“Word on the street is that he’s been shot dead in New York and I wanted to find out if the rumor was true,”
“Dead? Dead, you say?”
“Yeah… so is he in?”
“No. Dead… and his voice trailed off as the butler allowed the reality of the statement to sink into his brain.
“When did you see him last?”
“What? Um… Last week. He stayed as long as he could after Miss. Lambretti left, but then he ...”
“Miss. Lambretti?”
“Yes, Miss. Lambretti,” he said with a simple assertion as though this was the most normal thing in the world. I whipped out a black-and-white of Dawn and showed it to him. He nodded recognition and scrunched up his face, trying to understand why I’d have her photo in my jacket pocket when Pete was the one who’d copped it.
“Can I come inside?” I asked by way of non-explanation. He opened the door wider and stepped aside to let me past the threshold. As impressive as the pillars were, the marble vestibule was something else: a sweeping curved staircase led to the second floor and there were two imposing doors leading off the vestibule. I guessed one was a sitting room and I was right, because a few seconds later, George and myself were sitting in that room having a fireside chat, although the fire wasn’t technically lit.
He told me how Pete and Miss. Lambretti had been living in the house on their own ever since Mr. Lambretti died about a year ago.
“So when you say Miss. Lambretti,” I asked after a while because I really wanted to get to the punchline, “what exactly do you mean?”
“I don’t understand the meaning behind your question,” responded George and I believed him as my question was particularly vague.
“Well… Pete wasn’t the only person to be found dead, to be honest.”
“Not Dawn as well?”
“I’m afraid so, George. I’m afraid so.”
“Oh god…”
I gave George time to compose himself again. He was definitely saddened by the whole situation; the tears were not from a crocodile.
“The thing is they were found dead together.”
“Ah, I see,” replied George almost immediately.
“What do you see?”
“Well, let’s just say they had a special relationship.”
“Special is the word.”
“Yes. If you think I am very calm about this matter, you must understand that we have got used to them over a long period of time: nearly threw up the first time I walked into Pete’s bedroom with his breakfast to find Dawn in there, naked, with him.”
I pondered this thought for a while, letting it melt into my mind.
“And let’s be clear, shall we? Dawn and Pete were…”
“Brother and sister. Yes.”
THE CONVERSATION FELL away and I stirred my cup of coffee and sipped it slowly. George carried on sitting opposite me, probably enjoying sitting in the chair instead of serving in these rooms.
“So why did Dawn leave for New York, then?”
“Not sure, to be honest. They had an argument. I could hear the shouting but couldn’t work out any of the words. Next thing, Dawn had grabbed her own bag and some clothes and plain walked out the house.”
Out of the house and into the arms of Jimmy the Greek, which was very convenient, given that she had spent less than two weeks in Manhattan before bumping into the money lender in his local bar in the Bronx. Sounded to me like there was much more to this whole situation than a brother and sister lovers’ argument. The fact that Don Michael was involved, and what appeared to be a large quantity of the Lambretti family, meant that I was beginning to get quite nervous about delving too deeply.
I stayed in Cincinnati for one more day, mainly to scout around the house and to try to find out what the two of them might have been arguing about, but when they were outside the house, they were just brother and sister to the local community. On that basis, I could only imagine that Don Michael heard wind of the unusual family situation and decided to put an end to the entire affair. And the simple truth of the matter was that Don Michael had paid me to look the other way as he killed Pete and, presumably, Dawn just happened to be in the way. Having been paid once to ignore the situation, I figured it was time to go home and ignore the situation from the comfort of my own bed.
When I arrived back in the Big Apple, I spent some time talking to some Bronx guys I knew. Word on the mean streets was that Pete had been operating a sideline business for himself. A small amount of heroin was being shipped in from Sicily by Pete the Lothario and he was making a tidy profit by selling the little bags off brown dust cheaper than other members of his family. Great for short term profitability; bad for long-term chances of survival. So Dawn must have realized this was bad for the Family and left Cincinnati to avo
id the inevitable fallout. Unfortunately for her, she kept in touch with the dope, because of their unholy union and in the end she got hers. Dawn had the right idea about the heroin but an amazingly bad idea about adult sexual relations.
Moral of the story: don’t deal drugs in your own Family’s backyard and always trust the instincts of an enormously fat Greek man.
PART THREE
CHICAGO 1949
6
DAWN’S DEATH PLAYED heavy on my soul. Not because I thought her incestuous relationship chimed with anything I’d come across, but because the ménage à trois reminded me of Ed Schwartz, my erstwhile business partner and closest friend in the world. Well, he held that honor until he got a bullet in his skull.
Before I found myself in the depths of Korea, Ed Schwartz and I worked the beat in Chicago. When I say “worked”, I mean we had P.I. licenses and when I say “the beat” I mean we took any case that was going provided we were getting paid - preferably up front.
Anyway, Ed and I had an office with our names on the door in a building where it was pretty swanky to have gold lettering anywhere, really. There were two desks in our room - one for each of us with matching chairs and desks - and an anteroom where Cheryl Dupovnik, our secretary, sat typing and generally keeping the riffraff out until they looked like clients.
So it was one August day that a dame walked in that Cheryl allowed inside our hallowed turf. Her name was Mrs. McCready and her cream silk skirt suit did little to hide her hips or breasts. Ed and I were suitably entranced by her tale of woe: her husband was cheating on her, she was certain of that. And while that wasn’t good, she wanted us to understand that what really mattered to her was that Mr. McCready didn’t get his hands on Daddy Roebuck’s packing case fortune. Her father had found himself in the wonderful position of furnishing Uncle Sam with gun packaging during WWII and had established a strong presence in the civilian packing industry afterwards as a result.
The Case Page 3