Hooligans (6 page)

“Well, saves the Fed a lot of money, [ suppose,” I said. “But it would have been nice to put the

bastard in Leavenworth with his brother.”

“One more thing,” Cisco said before hanging up. “You‟re not here to solve any murder cases. You‟re

h ere to find out if there were any outside mob strings on Tagliani and who holds them. That‟s number

one. We could have a classic case working here, Jake.”

“Morehead said something funny,” I told him. “He said, „I‟ve got the whole thing on tape.”

“What whole thing? You mean the Tagliani hit?”

“I guess so. He was evasive when I asked him.”

“Well, ask him again. You can fill me in at breakfast.”

“Sure.”

“I‟ll meet you in the hotel restaurant. Eight o‟clock suit you?”

“Nine might be better.”

“See you at eight,” he said, ending the conversation.

6

When I got back to the Kindergarten, Dutch Morehead‟s SOB‟s were beginning to gather in the room,

One or two had drifted in. Dutch had a handful of photographs which he was about to pin on a

corkboard. A quick glance confirmed that the Tagliani gang was in Dunetown and was there in force.

Only two pictures were missing: Tuna Chevos and his gunman, Turk Nance. And as I told Cisco, I

knew they had to be in Dunetown somewhere.

“That‟s Tagliani‟s outfit all right,” I told Dutch. “All but two of them. Otherwise known as the

Cincinnati Triad. Mind if I ask you what put you on to him in the first place?”

“Ever hear of Charlie Flowers?” Dutch asked.

“Charlie „One Ear‟ Flowers?” I asked surprised.

“Could there be more than one?” he said with a smile.

“Everybody in the business has heard of Charlie One Ear,” I said.

“What‟ve you heard?” he asked.

Charlie One Ear was a legend in the business. It was said that he had the best string of snitches in the

country, had a computer for a brain, was part Indian, and was one of the best trackers alive. If rumor

was correct, Flowers could find a footprint in a jar of honey, and I told Dutch that.

“Ever meet him?”

“No,” I said, “I‟ve never met a living legend.”

“What have you heard lately?”

He asked it the way people who already know the answers ask questions.

I hesitated for a moment, then said, „Word is, he got on the sauce and had to retire.”

“You been listening to a bunch of
sheiss kopfes,”
he said. “That gent in the tweeds, second row there,

that‟s Charlie One Ear. He‟s never had a drink in his life.”

I looked at him. He was short and squat, a barrel of a man, impeccably dressed in a tweed suit, tan

suede vest, and a perfectly matched tie. His mustache was trimmed to perfection, his nails

immaculately manicured. He had no right ear, just a little bunch of balled-up flesh where it should

have been. I had heard that story too. When Flowers was a young patrolman in St. Louis, a mugger bit

his ear off.

He was chatting with a middling, wiry tiger of a man who was dressed on the opposite end of the

sartorial scale: Hell‟s Angels‟ leather and denim. His face looked like it had been sculpted with a

waffle iron.

“Flowers remembers every face, rap sheet, stiff he‟s ever seen or met,” said Dutch. “Photographic

men-wry, total recall—whatever you call it—he‟s got it. Anyway, h e didn‟t make Tagliani, but he

made a couple of Tagliani‟s out-of-town pals. A lot of heavyweights from out of state spent time with

Tagliani at the track, none of them exactly movie-star material. Tagliani was also a very private kind,

but he flashed lots of money. Big money. So Charlie One Ear got nosy, shot some pictures one day

out at the track. Stick sends the photos up to D.C. to Mazzola and tells him Turner, which is how we

knew him then, is keeping fast company and spending money like he owns the Bank of England.

Cisco takes one look and bingo, we got a Tagliani instead of a Turner on our hands. That was last

week.”

“Great timing,” I said.

“Ain‟t it though,” Dutch said woefully.

“Who‟s that he‟s talking to?” I asked.

“You mean the dude in black tie and tails?” Dutch said with a snicker. “That‟s Chino Zapata. He

mangles the king‟s English and thinks
Miranda
is a Central American banana republic, but he can

follow a speck of dust into a Texas tornado and never lose sight of it. And in a pinch, he‟s got a punch

like Dempsey.”

Where‟d you find him?”

“LAPD. The story is they recruited him to get him off the street, although nobody in the LAPD will

admit it. When I found him, he was undercover with the Hell‟s Angels.”

“How‟d you get him down here?”

“I told him he could bring his bike and wear whatever he pleased.”

“Oh.”

By this time the room had gathered three more men—about half of Dutch Morehead‟s squad—a

strange-looking gang whose dress varied from Flowers‟ tweeds and brogans to Zapata‟s black leather

jacket and hobnail boots. They stood, or sat, smoking, drinking coffee, making nickel talk and

eyeballing me. It was my first view of the hard-case bunch I would get to know a lot better, and fast.

Morehead sidled around so his back was to the room and started quietly giving me a rundown on the

rest of his gang.

“Sitting right behind Zapata is Nick Salvatore, a real roughneck. His old man was
soldato
for a smalltime
Mafioso
in south Philly, blew himself up trying to wire a bomb to some politician‟s car. You‟ll

probably get the whole story from him if you stick around long enough, but the long and short of it is

he hates the Outfit with a passion. Calls our job the dago roundup. He‟s more streetwise than Zapata. I

guess you might call Salvatore our resident LCN expert. He doesn‟t know that many of the people,

but he knows the way they think.”

Salvatore was dressed haphazardly at best: a T-shirt with GRATEFUL DEAD
printed over a skull and

crossbones, a purple Windbreaker, and jeans. A single gold earring peeked out from under his long

black hair. It was hard to tell whether he was growing a beard or had lost his razor.

“The earring is his mother‟s wedding band,” Dutch whispered.

“He‟s touchy about that. He also carries a sawed-off pool cue with a leaded handle in his shoulder

holster.”

On my card it was a split decision whether Zapata or Salvatore was the worst dresser, although Dutch

gave the nod to Salvatore.

“Zapata doesn‟t know any better,” he said. “Salvatore doesn‟t give a damn. If you blindfold him and

ask him what he‟s wearing, he couldn‟t even guess.”

Dutch continued the thumbnail sketch of his gang:

“Across from him is Cowboy Lewis.” The man he referred to was as tall as Dutch, thirty pounds

trimmer, and wore a black patch over his left eye. He was dressed in white jeans and a tan

Windbreaker zipped halfway down, had very little hair on his chest. A black baseball cap with a gold

dolphin on the crown covered a tangled mop of dishwater-blond hair. There wasn‟t a spare ounce of

fat on the guy.

“Pound for pound, the hardest man in the bunch. He doesn‟t have much to say, but when he does, it‟s

worth listening to,” Dutch said. “He thinks in a very logical way. A to b to c to d, like that. If there‟s a

bust on the make, Lewis is the man you want in front. He‟s kind of like our fullback, y „know. You

say to Cowboy, we need to lose that door, Cowboy, and the door‟s gone, just like that, no questions

asked. I suppose if I told him to lose an elephant, he‟d waste the elephant. He‟s not afraid of anything

that I can think of.”

“Are any of them?” I asked.

Dutch chuckled. “Not really,” he said. “Lewis is kind of.

He paused a moment, looking for the proper words, and then said, “He‟s just very single-minded.

Actually, he started out to be a hockey player but he never made the big time. His fuse was too short,

even for hockey. Y‟see, if Cowboy was going for a goal, and the cage was way down at the other end

of the rink, he‟d go straight for it. Anybody got in his way, he‟d just flatten them.”

“Doesn‟t sound like the perfect team man,” I said.

“Nobody‟s perfect,” said Dutch.

The last man in the room was also lean and hard-eyed, in his mid-to late thirties, and over six feet tall

. He looked like he had little time for nonsense or small talk.

“The tall guy in the three-piece suit and the flower in his lapel, that‟s Pancho Callahan,” Dutch

contini.ied. “He‟s a former veterinarian, graduated from UCLA, and can tell you more about horse

racing than the staff of Calumet Farms. He spends most of his time at the track. He doesn‟t say too

much unless you get him on horses; then he‟ll talk your ear off.” Callahan seemed restless.

It was obvious he would rather have been elsewhere, which was probably true of all of them.

Altogether, about as strange a bunch of lawmen as I‟ve ever seen gathered in one room. And there

were a few more to go: the Mufalatta Kid and Kite Lange, more of whom later, and, of course, Stick,

who was still an enigma to me. Eight in all, nine if you counted Dutch.

“Tell me a little about the Stick,” I said. “What kind of guy is he?”

Dutch stared off at a corner of the room for a moment, tugging at his moustache.

“Very likable,” he said finally. “You could call him amiable. Bizarre sense of humour. But not to be

messed with. I‟ll tell you a little story about Stick. He has this old felt hat, I mean this hat looks like

an ape‟s been playing with it. One day he leaves the hat in the car while he goes to get a haircut. He

comes back, somebody lifted the hat. Don‟t ask me why anybody would want the hat, but there you

are. About a week later Stick is cruising up Bay Street one afternoon and there this guy is, strolling up

the boulevard wearing his hat.

“Stick pulls up, starts following the guy on foot. The guy goes into a record store. At that point Stick

remembers he left his piece in his glove compartment. So what does he do? He hops in a hardware

store, buys a number five Stillson wrench, and when the little putz comes out of the record store, Stick

falls in behind him, shoves him in the first alley they come to, and whaps the bejesus out of the guy.

The guy never saw him and never knew what hit him, but he sure knew Stick got his hat back.”

He paused for another moment and then added: “Resourceful, that‟s what Stick is, resourceful.”

I filed that information away, then said to Dutch, “Look, I don‟t want to seem pushy this early in the

game, but I know this Tagliani mob. There‟s something I‟d like to run by your people. Maybe it‟ll

help a little.”

He gave the request a second‟s worth of thought and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “But let me ease you

into the picture first.”

“Anything you say.”

I went over and grabbed a desk near the side of the room.

Dutch, as rumpled as an unmade bed, stood in front of the room.

“All right, listen up,” he told his gashouse gang. “You all know by now what happened tonight. We

lost the ace in the deck and we had a man sitting two hundred yards away.”

He did an eyeball roll call and then bellowed loud enough to wake the dead in Milwaukee:

“Sheiss, we‟re missin‟ half the squad here. Didn‟t they hear this is a command performance?”

“They‟re still out on the range,” a „voice mumbled from the back of the room.

“Hmmm,” Dutch muttered. “Okay, you all know about Tagliani and Stinetto getting chilled. Those

are the two we knew as Turner and Sherman. Well, first, I got a little good news, if you want to call it

that. Then we‟ll talk about who was where and how we screwed up tonight. Anyway, he had the

house bugged and as happens, one of the rooms on the wire was the den, which is where the hit was

made. So I‟ve got the whole thing on tape, thanks to Lange, who did his telephone repairman act.”

Dutch punched a button on a small cassette player and a moment later the room‟s hollow tone hissed

through the speaker.

For maybe two minutes that‟s all there was, room tone.

Then a doorbell, far off, in another part of the house.

Seconds later someone entered the room.

Sounds of someone sitting down, a paper rustling, a lighter being struck, more paper noises. Then a

voice, getting closer to the room:

“Hey, Nicky, bom dia, how ya do at the track?”

It was Tagliani‟s voice; I‟d heard it on tape enough times to know.

“I dropped a bundle.” Stinetto‟s voice.

“How the flick you lose? It was a fix.. I gave it to yuh just this morning. Didn‟t I tell yuh, it‟s on for

the four horse, third heat. Huh?”

“Ya tol‟ me. Too bad the other seven heats wasn‟t fixed.”

Laughter. “I don‟ believe yuh. I give you a sure thing, you turn right aro—”

At that point there was a sound of‟ glass crashing, a lot of jumbled noise, swearing and yelling.

Tagliani: “God—no, no..”

Stinetto: “Motherfu—”

Several shots, from two different gulls.

A man‟s scream.

“Nicky

Brrrddt. A muffled rapid-fire gun, probably a submachine gun. It fired so fast it sounded like a

dentist‟s drill.

Two screams; terrible, terrified, haunting screams.

Two more shots.

Bang.. . bang. Something heavy, a .357 maybe.

Somebody gagged.

Something heavy hit the floor, crunching glass as it fell.

Two more shots, spaced.

Bang... bang!

Footsteps running and the sound of something else hitting the floor.

The something else was sizzling.

A woman‟s voice,

screaming,