Hooligans (61 page)

Harry Raines‟ political career and padded your own, and that was an error Raines would never

forgive. It was imperative that Tagliani‟s real identity be protected, not for him, but for you. You

needed to keep that power until you established your own power base. Then the war with the

Taglianis broke out and you ran out of time. Like I said, the power is given and the power is taken

away.”

“Nobody has taken anything away from me!” he said, rising up as though he had grown an inch.

It was time to go for the jugular.

“That‟s a lie,” I said. “You committed the big sin. You betrayed Raines‟ trust. He knew Seaborn was

too naive to get as deeply involved as he was on his own, and he really didn‟t have any hold over

Seaborn, anyway. But you? You he had by the short hairs. Harry was the only person in the world

who could destroy you, and he was going to do it. It wasn‟t the killer who said You‟re finished‟ to

Harry Raines down there iii the fog; it was Harry Raines, saying it to you. So you shot him.”

His expression didn‟t change. He blew a thin stream of blue smoke out into the room and watched it

swirl away in the breeze from the windows, and then he laughed in my face.

“Nobody‟ll believe that hot air,” he sneered. “You couldn‟t get that story into small claims court if

you had Clarence Darrow, John Marshall, and Oliver Wendell Holmes on your side.”

I ignored him. I said, “The irony of all this is that Raines might still be alive if it weren‟t for a horse

with a game leg and his croaked owner. It was the death of the horse, the shock of learning that a race

had been fixed and Tagliani knew it, that woke Raines

up.

The phone gave me a breather. Its buzzer startled Donleavy. He snatched it up, said, “Hello,” paused,

and then handed the receiver to me.

“Kilmer,” I said.

It was the Stick. “You were right,” he said. “I dialled the other number.”

“Any other news?”

“Not yet. Baker‟s doing his best. You want me to come up now?”

“That sounds good, thanks,” I said. I gave the phone back to Donleavy.

“Now that your course in Psych 101 is over,” Donleavy said, slamming down the phone, “maybe you‟

-l like to tell me how I‟m supposed to have gotten here from Sea Oat. Did Peter Pan fly me over?”

“You never went home,” I said. “You came straight here from the Thomas cocktail party.”

I took out the card he had given me he night before, the one with his home phone number on it, and

picked up the phone.

One of the dozen or so yellow lights on its base lit up as I dialled the number. When it started to ring,

the light beside it gleamed.

He stared down at it dumbly.

“Pick it up,”! said.

He hesitated for a moment and then lifted the phone.

“It‟s called call-forwarding,” I said, the - two of us staring at each other across the desk. “Courtesy of

Ma Bell. If you want to forward your calls to another number, you punch in a code on your home

phone, followed by the new phone number. The calls are forwarded automatically. Obviously you use

it all the time; your home phone‟s on it right now. That w your home number I just dialled.”

He wasn‟t talking. The muscles under his ear were jerking with every heartbeat. He tapped the ash off

the cigar without taking his eyes off me. I went on:

“When you left the party last night, you came here instead of going home. You knew Raines was in

Seaborn‟s office; you had talked to him when Seaborn called you at Babs‟ party You also knew

Raines would intimidate Seaborn enough to get the whole story. You probably had your gun there in

the desk, or in the car. After I called you, you called Seaborn‟s office again, told Harry you‟d meet

him over here. „Then you went downstairs and took the walkway through the park toward the bank.

When he came up on you and said, „You‟re finished,‟ you knew your career was flushed, so you shot

him. „The girl screamed, you ran back toward the river, dumped the gun, and came back here in time

to get Dutch‟s call.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Well “ he said, “I must admit you‟ve got quite the imagination. But I

can see why you don‟t practice law. You couldn‟t get anywhere with that outrageous bunch of

circumstantial bullshit.”

The office door opened and the Stick meandered in, his hat perched on the hack of his head as usual

“Who the hell are you?” Donleavy demanded.

“He‟s with me,” I said, and to the Stick, „Did you get it?”

He smiled and took a package out of his jacket pocket. It was

381 a Baggie containing a very wet silver-plated S&W .38, with black rubber pistol grips. I looked at

it. There was a number scratched on a piece of tape on the side of the bag.

“The number of your .38—is it 7906549?” 1 asked Donleavy.

“What .38?” he demanded.

“The one you bought on February third of last year at Odum‟s Sport Shop on Third Street,” Stick said.

“Mr. Odum remembers it very well. The only thing he had to look up was the exact day and the serial

number.”

“This is hard evidence,” I said. “There‟s nothing circumstantial about a murder weapon.”

“That gun was stolen from me months ago,” he squealed.

“Tell it to the judge,” I said.

“Let me see that,” he demanded.

“When we get downtown,” I said. “You want to book the man, Stick?”

“Delighted,” he said, grinning, “What‟s the charge?”

“Murder in the first,” I said. “Let‟s go all the way.”

Stick took off his hat and peered into it. He had a list of rights printed on a card taped to the inside of

the crown and started reading them to Donleavy.

“You have a right to remain silent—”

Donleavy swatted the hat out of his hands. “The hell with that,” he snarled, reaching for the phone.

I laid a forefinger on the receiver. “You can make your call from the tank like everybody else does,” I

said.

The Stick took out a pair of cuffs and twisted Donleavy rudely around. “Normally we wouldn‟t need

these,” he said quietly in Donleavy‟s ear as he snapped on the cuffs. “That was a mistake, doing that

thing with my hat. Your manners are for shit.”

“Hell,” I said, “we all make mistakes. Look at poor old Harry, he wrote his own epitaph: „Here lies

Harry Raines. He trusted the wrong man.”

Donleavy was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. We escorted him downstairs and turned him over

to two patrolmen in a blue and white and told them we‟d meet them at the station.

“What do we do now?” Stick asked.

“Pray,” I said.

We didn‟t have to. George Baker came running across the park as we started back toward our cars. He

was still in his wet suit, although he had changed his flippers for boots.

“Gotcha a present,” he said, and handed me an S&W .38, black handles, two-inch barrel. It was

wrapped in a cloth to protect whatever fingerprints might be on it. I checked the registration. It was

Donleavy‟s gun.

“I assure you, that‟s the weapon,” Baker said proudly. “It has not been underwater long enough to

gather rust.”

“Thank you, Mr. Baker,” I said with a smile. “You just saved my ass.”

“Well now, sir, that‟s a compliment which I will certainly not liken to forget.”

I gave Stick the Baggie he had given me in Donleavy‟s office, the one with the other S&W silverplated .38 in it.

“Where did you get this one?” I asked Stick.

“A friend of mine on Front Street,” he said.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“That was one helluva play up there,” he said. “Remind me never to play poker with you.”

“I don‟t play poker,” I said.

“Love your style, man,” said the Stick.

70

I was feeling great when we got to the county courthouse. The stately brick antique stood alone in the

center of a city square surrounded by ancient oaks big enough to pass for California redwoods, and

palm trees, which seemed somehow cheap and out of place beside them. The old place seemed to

groan under its burden of history. One story had it t1at Button Gwinnett had drafted his amendments

to the Declaration of Independence in one of its second-story offices. Another that, on Christmas Eve,

1864, in a secret meeting in one of the courtrooms, Sean Findley, Chief‟s grandfather, had turned

Dunetown over to General Sherman without a shot, after Sherman agreed to spare the city from the

torch. It was a story Teddy loved to tell, although the way he told it, old Sean‟s role in the surrender

came off more selfish than patriotic. Others apparently thought so too. The old man was assassinated

on the front steps of this same courthouse as he was being inaugurated as Dunetown‟s first post-war

mayor.

So much for history.

The DA‟s suite was on the first floor, protected by a frost-panelled door and little else. The door to

Galavanti‟s office stood open. The tough little district attorney „as poring over a sheaf of legal

documents as thick as an encyclopaedia, her Ben Franklin glasses perched on the end of her nose. I

leaned on the edge of the door and rattled my fingers on the jamb.

“Hi, kiddo,” I said. “Send anybody to the chair today?” She glowered at me over the top of her

glasses.

“I‟m not your kiddo, Mr. Kilmer,” he said. “We‟re not that familiar. How about the Harry Raines

tape?”

“A bust,” I said. “Nothing but a lot of rataratarata.”

She narrowed her eyes as if she didn‟t believe me and said, “I should have guessed that would

happen.”

“Now that‟s no way to talk to someone who just laid the biggest case in the county‟s history right in

your lap,” I said.

She leaned back, still staring warily at me.

“And just what case is that?”

I paused a little for effect, then said, “The State versus Sam Donleavy.”

She leaned forward so quickly that her chair almost rolled out from under her.

“You busted Sam Donleavy?” she said, her tone sounding like I had Just accused Billy Graham of

indecent exposure.

“He‟s being booked right now,” I said, as casually as I could make it.

“On what charge?”

“First-degree murder.”

She jumped up, all five feet of her, and stood with her mouth dangling open.

I held up a forefinger and repeated the news: “Murder one.”

She gulped. I had never heard anybody gulp before, but she definitely gulped.

“Who the hell did he kill?”

“How about Harry Raines for starters?”

“Oh my God!” she said, and the “God” stretched out for several seconds.

I walked into her office and dropped the Baggie-cased .38 on her desk.

“I‟d feel better giving this to you than the Keystone Kops down in homicide. It‟s the gun Donleavy

used to do the trick. We dug it out of the river about half an hour ago.”

“Harry Raines,” she said with awe, staring at the .38.

“Donleavy has an alibi but it won‟t hold water,” I continued. She hadn‟t caught up with me yet.

“Harry Raines?” she repeated, still staring at the gun, as though she expected it to say something back.

“You may have a little trouble proving premeditation,” I went on. “I don‟t think the idea occurred to

him until about thirty minutes before he did it.

This time she heard me and cut me off in midsentence. “That‟s plenty of time,” she said quickly.

“Hell, if he gave it five minutes‟ thought, that‟s premeditation enough for me.”

“If you can make it work in court, that‟s okay by me.”

“Why did he do it?”

I gave her the basic details as quickly as I could, including background on the pyramid accounts, the

Hollywood boxes, and Seaborn‟s questionably benign role in the matter.

“So the motive was fear of exposure by Raines,” she said. “Seems to me he was on borrowed time,

anyway. Tagliani would have surfaced sooner or later.”

“By that time Donleavy hoped to have established such a strong power base of his own that he could

override his „error in judgment.‟ That‟s what he likes to call it.”

“What do you call it?” she asked.

“Craft,” I said. “Besides, as I told Donleavy, murder leads to murder.”

“You mean he killed somebody else?” she asked, her eyebrows flirting with the ceiling.

“Accessory,” I said.

“Before or after the fact?”

“Both.”

“Who was it?”

“Ike Leadbetter.”

“Ike Leadbetter! Ike Leadbetter!”

“Yeah, you remember him, don‟t you? He used to be chief of police.”

“Leadbetter‟s death was an accident,” she said.

“Only because you couldn‟t prove otherwise,” I told her.

She closed one eye and gave me her sternest look. “Don‟t get uppity with me,” she said.

“Dutch Morehead thinks it was murder and I‟m inclined to agree. At first I figured Dutch was angry

arid wanted to make a case out of the Leadbetter drowning. It wasn‟t Tagliani‟s style to kill a police

chief, particularly when Tagliani was on the dodge. And there weren‟t any other likely suspects. Then

I thought better of it.”

“Oh? How come?”

“I don‟t believe in accidents any more than Dutch does. Not in this town. Not when the police chief is

the victim.”

“Why was Leadbetter killed?” she asked.

“Look, Ms. Galavanti, if one person in this town was likely to make Tagliani, it was Leadbetter. He

had done some time on the force in Atlantic City before coming here, so he was more than just a little

familiar with LCN and how it operates.”

“You think Leadbetter recognized Tagliani?” she said.

“Right, and Leadbetter went to Donleavy with it, the natural thing to do. After all, Donleavy was

Harry Raines‟ personal choice to head the Committee. Donleavy was facing exposure himself, so he