Longo did. And, as Carolyn noted, he started out of the car, stopped, reached in for something, and came out holding it in his right hand. In the deceptive lighting, the cops couldn’t see what it was, only that it was long and dark and appeared cylindrical. The cops ordered him to drop it. Longo did not. Cop A thought it looked like Longo was aiming at Cop B, hollered another warning and, when Longo turned and faced him, the object outstretched, pulled the trigger.
Longo was pronounced dead on the scene.
The Internal Affairs report had not been handed in yet. Cop A would probably be let off with a stern warning. It helped that Longo’s innocence had not been determined.
I folded the pages into thirds and tucked them into my shirt pocket. Then I went looking for the cubicle that contained Detective Kim Banner.
Banner—I’ve tried calling her Kim and it doesn’t work—was sitting behind a desk and a Styrofoam cup of coffee. I lowered myself into an uncomfortable green vinyl chair alongside the desk and crossed my legs.
“Well,” Banner said. “The Big O’s answer to Dashiell Hammett. What brings you out so early, Sherlock? Fighting crime, or just soaking up background?”
“You don’t soak up the background in a place like this. It sort of sticks to you as you pass through.”
Banner made a face. “Someone who didn’t know better might think you didn’t like our decor. How’s the new book coming along?”
“So-so.” I shrugged. “I haven’t looked at it for a couple of weeks. I’ve been back in harness. Trying to make enough to tide me over.”
“Until the royalties come pouring in. How far along are you?”
“Far enough.” I grinned. “That’s my new stock answer to The Inevitable Question. I’ve decided there’s no real way to answer it. For one thing, I won’t know how long the book is until I’ve finished it, so how can I tell you how far along I am? For another, if I sit down today and trash everything I wrote last week, I can go from half done to an eighth done in less time than it takes to tell.”
“Sorry I asked.” Banner sipped at her coffee, grimaced, and reached for a blue paper packet of sweetener. “It’s better than usual this morning,” she said, dumping the contents into her cup. “If you’re private-eyeing again, is it safe to assume this isn’t a social call?”
I hadn’t known Kim Banner long—just long enough to know she was a good cop, in every sense. She knew her job and she did it well, with a kind of quiet, sure efficiency that you don’t get by reading self-help books and attending assertiveness seminars. She was a small woman, compact, with sharp features and short, shaggy dark-blond hair. I’d met her on a case early in the year. When the case was over, we saw each other a couple of times, socially, I mean, but nothing heavy-duty had materialized.
“Not entirely,” I admitted, and flung the Longo report onto her desk.
She unfolded it and skimmed it with quick, gray eyes. Then she folded it again and sailed it back at me across the desk. “Very nice.”
“I’m looking into it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got a client who wants me to.”
“No foolin’. Word is, Internal Affairs will turn in a report this week yet. Three-to-one for a clean shoot.”
“I don’t doubt that. I’m not interested in the shoot. I’m interested in the banks.”
“Ah,” Banner said. She lifted her cup and settled back in her desk chair. “Who’s the client?”
“The wife.” There are times to protect your client’s identity and then there are times when it may do your client more good to be known. In this case, I saw no good reason to play coy about Carolyn’s identity. And if the cops were hassling her, maybe they’d back off a little if they thought she was biting back.
“She thinks her husband got a raw deal on the news shows and she wants you to prove he was an innocent victim,” Banner ventured.
“Something like that. Really all she wants is for you to leave her alone.”
Banner’s eyes widened. “Me? Hey, Ellery, you got the wrong chick. I’m Homicide, not Robbery.”
I rolled my eyes. “Not you personally. Omaha Police Department.”
“Oh, them. You probably won’t buy it, considering the source, but I think your client has a persecution complex. Sure, she got run through the wringer pretty thoroughly there, but my understanding is she’s in the clear as far as we’re concerned. Feds too—and it’s really the feds’ ball game, you know, we just bat cleanup. I don’t even think Longo’s being actively investigated anymore, though of course everyone’s keeping eyes skinned. But except for that fifty he had on him—” she nodded at the half-folded sheets on the edge of her desk “—there’s been no sign of the money, nothing but the flimsiest descriptions to link him to the holdups, and his wife sure doesn’t act like she’s just come into an inheritance.” She sipped some coffee. “ ’Course, if she thinks she’s under the microscope, maybe it’s because she has a guilty conscience.”
“Uh-huh. So guilty that she hires a private detective to turn suspicion, which you say there ain’t any of, away from her. When was the last time you heard of that happening?”
“You mean in real life? Okay, look, you want me to say she doesn’t have the money? She doesn’t have the money. What’s it to me? I’m just trying to do you a favor, and her. Nobody here suspects her of anything. She’s paranoid.”
“What about the feds?”
“Those guys are definitely paranoid. Whether they still think your client might know more than she’s telling, I couldn’t say. What I can say is we don’t think so.”
“Not officially, at least. If Longo didn’t rob those banks, you have any idea who did?”
“Male Caucasian, five-nine or five-ten, slender …”
“Well, that ought to narrow it right down for you.” I stood.
“For them.” Banner jerked a thumb over her shoulder, in the general direction of the Robbery unit. Then she swiveled her wrist so that the thumb was aimed at herself. “That’s why I like Homicide,” she said. “It’s cleaner work.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Lovely Rita had gone on duty early that day. I slipped the ticket out from under the wiper blade, gave it the onceover, stuck it under a wiper on the next car down and headed out.
The day was already hotter than an old maid’s dream, as the old-timers still say, and the fitful southwestern breeze was nowhere near a match for the sun. The Impala had what we used to call four-sixty air-conditioning: you roll down all four windows and drive at sixty miles an hour. Still, I reasoned, it was better than the air-conditioning back at my place. It’s not easy getting an apartment building to go sixty miles an hour.
Carolyn Longo had given me the names of her late husband’s two unsavory companions. Marlon Abel and Al Patavena. I also had the names of a couple of bars where they and Longo habitually met for drinks, cards, maybe a couple racks of pool. I checked out both joints, but there had been no sign of either Abel or Patavena yet today. Sure, it was early. But from what Carolyn had indicated, time had little meaning for these jokers. At both bars I exchanged my name and card for promises to call if either of the men turned up. I hadn’t been out of the P.I. game long enough or far enough to have forgotten what promises like those are worth.
Outside the second bar I found a phone booth that actually contained a phone book and looked up both men. Obvious, yes, but sometimes the obvious is what does it. Not this time, unfortunately. Neither was listed. I doubted that either Abel or Patavena was the type who’d feel the need for an unpublished number, so I assumed they either didn’t have phones or lived in places with communal phones.
So I was standing on the crumbling sidewalk outside the phone booth, bracing myself for the hot vinyl seat in my crate, when I noticed the Job Service office across the street. With a mental shrug, I trudged across the softening asphalt, ducked under a waterfall of condensation shed by a window air conditioner over the front door, and entered the tiny storefront office.
Twenty minutes later I was in my red bomber, enjoying the breeze through the windows as I cruised past the gray cylindrical grain elevators off of Interstate 480 just south of town. A plump, balding, birdy-looking fellow at Job Service had readily admitted that Patavena and Abel dropped in whenever they were short on cash, seeking temporary jobs for unskilled labor. “Temporary” was the operative word: When the dynamic duo felt they had enough bread to tide them over, they simply quit showing up for work.
As far as the employment-agency guy knew, both men were still working a street-reconstruction job he’d sent them to earlier in the week, on Hascall off of Seventy-fourth, in the Westgate division.
I took the freeway, the Interstate, as we call it around these parts, west around the south end of town. A viscid haze hung over the lowland south of I-480. I nudged the air-conditioning up to four-sixty-five.
The Seventy-second Street exit got me off of the Interstate; Grover Street, next to the Howard Johnson, got me off of Seventy-second and threaded me along to Seventy-fourth, where I stashed the car in the shade of a willow. The street I wanted was lined by small, trim, thirty-year-old middle-class houses on one side and Saint Joan of Arc Catholic school on the other. Currently, the block was a shambles. The pavement had been ripped out curb to curb. In fact, the curb had been ripped out curb to curb, too. A dozen or so browned, sweating men were getting rid of the debris.
A shirtless black man with broad shoulders and a broadening belly proved to be the gang’s foreman. He was grudgingly cooperative, which is to say that on the one hand he didn’t want any trouble on his site but on the other hand didn’t feel he owed anything to the guys I wanted. He pointed out a small knot of men taking a break farther down what used to be the street. “The skinny guy’s Patavena and the short, square one’s Abel,” the foreman said. I thanked him and set off in that direction. The foreman stopped me with a heavy hand on my biceps. “You take them out of here, there’s gonna be any trouble, right?”
“No trouble,” I said.
The two stood with several other men near the gate of a GMC pickup parked in the alley behind the school. A large metal tank was perched on the edge of the gate. The men were pulling water from the tank, filling plastic cups, trying to beat the heat. Patavena was a tall, dark-haired, dark-skinned fellow with a narrow, pockmarked face. Abel was much shorter and stouter, with pale, dirty-looking brown hair and a miserly peppering of whiskers trying hard to be a mustache. I figured them both to be about my age.
Neither was especially eager to talk with me. I realized within seconds that I’d made an amateur’s mistake: I should have interviewed them separately. Any schoolteacher knows or fast discovers that the class cutup is a hell of a lot less cocky when you pull him away from his audience. Together, Abel and Patavena were like a couple of high-school kids showing off for one another.
I said, “I want to talk to you two about Gregg Longo.”
Patavena said, “Yeah? So talk.”
Abel said, “We don’t know any Longo, do we, Al?”
Patavena. Yeah, that’s right. Too bad.
Abel. We gotta get back to work now, man. Nice talkin’ to you.
Patavena. Yeah. Let’s do it again real soon.
Me (over guffaws). Your foreman doesn’t mind your talking to me.
Patavena. Yeah? Well, maybe we mind.
Me. Maybe you’d rather talk to the cops.
Patavena. (Nothing.)
Abel. (Nothing.)
I hauled out the wallet and showed them the little scrap of paper that says I’m licensed to conduct private investigations and am entitled to all kinds of swell perquisites and considerations not afforded to ordinary mortals. Actually, that last part isn’t in there, but it will be, come the revolution. “I’m investigating Longo’s death,” I told them. “You know that some people think Longo was the guy sticking up all those banks earlier this summer. Some say the stickup man had little helpers with him. Longo’s wife says you and he were pretty tight here the past few months …” I ended it with a shrug.
“Hey, man, what’choo pullin’ here? We already talked to the cops,” Abel squealed.
“Yeah, long time ago,” Patavena said.
“We told them, we don’t know nothin’ about Gregg Longo.”
“Yeah, we don’t know nothin’.”
“I can believe it. But that’s not what Longo’s widow seems to think.”
“Hey, fuck her, man! I don’t care what she says—”
“Yeah.”
“We only knew Longo to have a beer with, you know? Maybe shoot some pool. That’s it, man!”
“Yeah,” Patavena repeated.
“If he was knockin’ over banks, he sure didn’t tell us about it. And we sure as shit didn’t see any of the money, man.”
I pointed a finger at Patavena. “Don’t say it,” I said. “Just don’t.”
Abel said, “If Longo was pulling bank jobs, it’s nothin’ to do with us, okay? Go talk to his old lady.”
Patavena said, “Yeah. Or go talk to his girlf—” He stopped because Abel elbowed him vigorously.
“Longo had a girlf?” I said. “Does the girlf have a name?”
“Hey, man, everybody got a name. But we don’t know this chick’s, right, Al? I mean, Longo just told us about some babe he was boffin’ while his old lady was out working, you know? Hell, for all we know maybe it was more than one broad, right?”
“Right,” said Patavena. It was better than Yeah, at least.
I said, “I assume you told the police about Longo’s girlf back when they questioned you.”
Abel crushed the translucent cup he’d been holding and threw the scrap to the ground. “Hey, cop, you ass-ume whatever you feel like, okay? ’Cause I’m tired of talkin’ wit’cha.” He slapped his friend’s arm with a casual backhand. “C’mon, Al, let’s get back to work.”
“Yeah.”
I stayed where I was, near the pickup, and watched them join the men who had already resumed work. Abel looked back at me a couple of times, then resolutely ignored me. He and Patavena exchanged words, but there wasn’t necessarily anything to that.
On my way back up the block I stopped to speak with the foreman, thanking him for his cooperation, et cetera—the P.R. bit. Then I went around the corner and found the car where I’d left it. I got behind the wheel and pointed the machine toward my end of town.
I enjoy it in detective stories when the incorruptible, square-jawed protagonist sits in his car for hours, days, weeks on end, eating junk food and keeping an eye on his quarry. I don’t know about other towns, but forty-five minutes is the upward limit for Omaha. At least, I’ve never been able to stake out a place for more than forty-five consecutive minutes before someone calls a cop who politely asks me what in hell I think I’m doing.
Over the years, I’ve come up with two ways around that potential embarrassment. One is the method I used while I stuck to Loverboy: I let the police know in advance where I’ll be lurking. They give that information to the desk officers, who pass it along to the duty officers, who give it to the patrol officers, and there’s usually no problem.
The other method is to think of ways to not have to waste much time sitting in parked cars.
I like the second approach better; I can think of lots of better ways to waste my time than sitting in parked cars watching other parked cars. And since I had to be downtown again to meet Loverboy before the bells of Saint Mary Magdalene signaled noon Mass, I didn’t have time to hang around Westgate all day. So before I left Hascall Street, I asked the foreman what time the crew knocked off work and got there fifteen minutes before that hour. It meant letting Jonathon Desotel go home unescorted, but I had a feeling that Abel and Patavena might prove a little livelier than he’d been.
I would have been willing to bet real money that Abel and Patavena would be among the first to exit when the whistle blew, figuratively speaking. And I was right. They cut through the alley behind the Catholic church and school, came out o
n Vinton, the next block north of Hascall, and headed for Patavena’s car, parked along the curb. I assume it was Patavena’s, since he got behind the wheel. The car was an ancient Studebaker Lark, a low, square wagon that looked like nothing so much as a refrigerator on wheels. The wagon was army green where it wasn’t gnawed and scarred by the cancer of too many Midwestern winters. On the rear door, studebaker was spelled out in inch-high chrome letters. Someone, Patavena or a previous owner, had pried off the first e: stud baker. Guys used to do that back in high school, too. Even back then, I could never figure out exactly why.
I noticed the creative sign alteration when the Studebaker made the turn from Vinton onto Seventy-fourth, when I fell in right behind.
It was an easy tail. Which is about all you could say for it. They stopped at a liquor store, then they stopped at a decaying old two-story just off of Tenth Street, a big square rooming house that had Rooms To Let, according to the store-bought sign on the porch door. They went in. And that was it.
Me, I did a lot of detectivey things: I ascertained from the house’s mailboxes that Marlon Abel lived there. I sat in the car until I felt sufficiently near heat stroke, then went into the Rexall across the street and pretended to browse through magazines, paperback books, and Hallmark cards. I sat on a bus-stop bench outside the Rexall and kept Patavena’s Studebaker in view while I didn’t read the copy of USA Today I’d bought when the pharmacist started getting edgy. What it boils down to is Abel and Patavena had planned a nice quiet evening with whatever they’d picked up at the package store. At least, they showed no indication of doing anything suspicious or sinister or of the remotest help or interest to me.
I played “ten more minutes” until seven-thirty. You know the game: I’m gonna wait just ten more minutes and see if anything happens. Nothing did, even after three ten-more-minuteses, so I got in the car and wheeled past Loverboy’s place. His cute little Toyota was in the lot, where it always was. I tooled around the back of the building and took a gander at his apartment, three flights up. Desotel was sitting in a lawn chair on his little deck or balcony or whatever you want to call it, reading a newspaper.
Money Trouble Page 4