Killer Mine (6 page)

I went inside.

Al Reese was at the bar, his bulk taking up a corner of it Loefert was two stools down with a pretty, but hard-looking B girl beside him, and next to her Will Fater and Steve Lutz were sipping drinks without talking, satisfied with watching their reflections in the back bar mirror.

It was going to be a fun evening. And the night hadn’t even begun.

When I tapped him on the shoulder he turned around, annoyed at the interruption, his chunky jowls ready to chop into me with a wise remark, then all at once he went white.

Everybody was looking when I said, “On the wall, fatty. Hands out, feet back and apart and make a move I don’t like and you’ll catch one.” I let them see the rod in the Weber rig and whatever my face said, they knew I wasn’t kidding. To insure the deal I nodded to Loefert, Fater and Lutz to join him and without a word they took the position. Hell, I knew they’d all be clean, but when you roust you roust and you don’t give a damn. Tomorrow all hell would break loose at HQ when Reese put the squeal in, but right then I was enjoying myself. The customers had a treat, the hired help had a laugh and Al Reese damn near had a stroke when I finally got them patted down, identified and let them go back to their seats. For the others it was an old routine, but for Reese, it was strictly a new experience.

To add to it, I shoved him in the corner and made it quick. I made it loud enough so the bartender would hear it and let it go out on that grapevine that was faster than Western Union and said, “Fat boy… there’s a girl named Paula Lees that you lay off.” I looked over at Loefert and knew he was listening to every word. “If you… or anybody… bothers her I’ll take your ears off. Now I’m not speaking figuratively.
I mean take your ears off.
One day see Fuchie. Remember him? Remember that goatee he had? Know what his chin looks like now? I did that, fat boy, and the same I’ll do to your ears. Yell all you want and it’ll be like old times in the Tombs with the rubber hose and the hard cell. Think we can’t do it that way now and you aren’t thinking straight.”

I gave Al Reese one hard shot in the kidneys with my fist to punctuate the argument and all the breath went out of him in a long sigh and Loefert turned eyes of pure hate my way while the others played it cool and just looked away.

But they got the message.

Paula Lees got her freedom.

It was that easy. So far.

I was a cop coming home to his old turf who didn’t like what he saw and decided to clean it up. I could hit the punks and take care of the unfortunate. Word would go out and maybe talking to them would be easier. Maybe.

At six I knocked at Marty’s door and heard her run across the room to answer it. She had changed into a skirt and blouse, let her hair down, and the welcome home smile she gave me sent that feeling back into my stomach again. I could smell the coffee and hear chops sizzling in the kitchen and went in licking my lips.

“Hungry, Joe?” She saw my expression and added, “Don’t answer that,” with an even bigger smile. “Grab a beer out of the fridge. Everything’ll be ready in a minute.”

Damn, my place was never like this.

We ate with a peculiar intimacy neither of us wanted to mention, but it hung in the air like a wild perfume. We talked about little things, both of us prolonging the moments we had until it came to an end over coffee. Marty poured a second cup and said, “The boys will kick you out of the club if they know you’ve been consorting with girls.”

“No more. Most of them are dead.”

“Strange, isn’t it?” She put the pot back on the stove and sat down. “Time goes so fast. I can remember chasing you and Larry, trying to get into the game… you sending me on stupid errands so I’d get lost or Larry making like he was going to scalp me with that tomahawk…”

“I was thinking of him before,” I said.

“You miss him, don’t you?”

“We were pretty close. We were those kind of brothers.” I shrugged. “Life, kid.”

“I know.”

It had to end sooner or later so I said, “Finish your check today?”

She regretted the sudden switch as much as I did and nodded ruefully, her attitude suddenly professional. “Verbal?”

“That’ll do.”

“Murphy had the most to contribute,” she told me. “He has some people inside their ranks and the word is that there is something hot brewing. The top men are pretty disturbed about something and have been doing a lot of traveling between New York and Chicago. Looked like a high-level series of meetings. There is a definite connection with the mob here and upstate… they’re looking out for Gus Wilder, all right, but that factor isn’t of prime importance. It’s something else… and
that
nobody is talking about.”

“Still leaves us guessing,” I said.

“Not quite. Orders that came from one of those meetings directed Loefert, Fater and Steve Lutz into this area. We concentrate on them, and we might find out something.”

“Those guys don’t break very easily,” I reminded her.

“Somewhere, they always have a chink in the armor, don’t they?”

“Always,” I grinned. She was beginning to think like a beat cop now and not a social worker.

“Then how do we start?”

“With the first kills. It’s a homicide case, baby.”

“Until now nobody’s talked. Nobody saw anything.”

“I’m glad you’re so damn confident.”

“Kitten, I’ve been at this job a long time,” I said. “There are times when they get ready. All you have to do is prod them a little.”

“Okay then, ugly, I’m ready whenever you are,” she laughed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE supper crowd had left Tony’s Pizza when we got there. One couple was at the small bar, and two tables were occupied. Fat Mary was busy forcing another helping on one pair and Tony was behind the bar listening to a small transistor radio. Marty and I climbed on the stools and Tony saw us and came over grinning, the first time I saw him smile in a long time. He said hello in his rich Neapolitan accent and drew two beers automatically.

“You do nice thing for those girls, Joe,” he told me. “I see them, they very glad. Terrible a woman should be on the streets and pushed around. Terrible.”

“They should have kept their mouths shut or people will think the cops are getting soft.”

“Ah, no. It is not like you think.” He gave us a knowing glance then. “Now you two, you belong here. Good maybe that you come back, Joe. Things are bad here, very bad.”

“Those killings?”

Tony nodded vigorously. “Very bad, that.”

“It’s another department and I’m off duty. The hell with it.”

His face pulled itself into a seamy, concerned frown. “Who cares about here, Joe? The cops? They don’t care. Somebody dies, so what?” He leaned forward confidentially. “That killer, he’s still here. He can kill anybody.”

“What can I do, Tony? Hell, I knew all the guys who got knocked off. I went to school with “em.”

Tony gave me a typical shrug. “So they’re no good, well okay. But still good people here, you can bet. You oughta know. Plenty good people. They’re scared, that’s what.”

“You scared?”

“Sure. I was scared of that stupid René Mills. I’m scared of everybody like them.”

I kept my voice down. “What was with him, Tony? He was flashing money around and it was more than he ever had before. René never had the brains to set up a heist and nobody was going to just give it to him. He was a low-type punk.”

Tony let his eyes rove around the place before he answered. “You know what I think? He had something on somebody. He was expectin’ plenty money soon. He had it all set.”

“Yeah?”

“Better’n that even. I tell you somethin’, Joe. That René, he stays up all night watching that damn TV or playing cards. Always like that. Never his light go off like he’s scared of the dark. Then alla sudden he got them lights out right after it gets dark. He comes down and goes up, but never a light goes on and when it does the shade is down like never before. He got somebody up there with him.”

“Hiding him out?”

I got another big shrug that lasted three seconds. “Who knows?”

“Doesn’t sound reasonable, Tony. Who the hell would trust René Mills?”

Tony gave me a face full of fat lip. “Suppose there’s nobody else he can go to?”

“It wouldn’t be René Mills, buddy.”

“For whoever it was, he kicked Noisy Stuccio out, didn’t he? René, he wouldn’t give a pork chop to his own mother if she didn’t pay. So Noisy paid him, then gets the boot. Noisy was pretty damn mad. Plenty years he live with René and pays most the bills ’cause he’s scared of René. Then the boot. How about that?”

“How about that?” I repeated. “René still feeling pretty high when he got killed?”

“Sure. He thought he was all set. You gotta get that one, Joe.”

“There’s nothing to get.”

“No?” He gave me a curious look. “Then ask that Al Reese. That fat bum, he knows. He shoves everybody. He always looking for his bite, that bum. He hooked into René, because I seen René pay him off,” he confided.

I finished my beer and nudged Marta to do the same. “Okay, Tony, maybe. Just maybe, remember? I’m out of my district and I don’t want to make trouble around here.”

“Screw you, Joe. When you and Larry was kids, you made plenty trouble for everybody. That… that… what you call him?”

“Chief Crazy Horse,” I said.

“Yeah him. Nutty Indian. Always wearing them feathers and you want to be a cop. Nobody wanted to play with you, did they?”

“I always caught the crooks,” I said. I tapped the side of my head. “You had to be smart, even when you were playing.”

“Now somebody ain’t playing, Joe. They’re going for real.”

“Well, I’ll see what I can do. Keep it quiet though.” I pushed some change across to him and we finished our beer and left while Fat Mary was still heaping the plates of the customers that were left.

Getting into René’s old apartment was no trouble. The padlock the landlord had put on opened with a sharp rap from my gun butt and the door swung open. Marta found the light switch and pulled it after making sure the shades were drawn.

The police had checked the rooms, found nothing, the landlord had made a partial attempt at cleaning it up, emptying the garbage and piling dishes in the sink, so anything of significance would have been destroyed. Like the other apartments, this was typical of a slum section. It was the front half of a partially renovated brownstone building, the flat containing a living room with a battered TV, a pair of worn mohair chairs and a couple of end tables. The bedroom was furnished with a single bed, chair and table. René’s clothes came from a low cost outlet store, all bore the marks of hard usage except for two pairs of expensive shoes that hadn’t been worn at all. The kitchen was a hodgepodge of rickety pieces, the dishes chipped and cracked, the closet over the refrigerator empty. But there had been plenty of groceries in there. The marks showed in the dust where cans had been stacked and a cash register slip caught in a crack was for forty-two dollars. The landlord wasn’t going to leave all that stuff for the next tenant.

When Marty came back from looking around I asked, “Find anything?”

“Possibly. Come back in the living room a minute.” She pointed to the floor and indicated a series of scratches that led from one chair to the other. “We know what we’re looking for… so do those mean anything?”

I got her point. “Somebody dragged that chair up to the other to make a bed?”

“That’s right. So René
did
have somebody here.” She looked at me carefully and sat on the arm of the chair. “You see the same picture, don’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tell it to me.”

I nodded and started pacing the room. “Nobody who knew better would trust René. It had to be someone who knew him well enough to be able to handle him. René was a sharpie. So let’s say this guy needs a hideout and is prepared to pay. He approaches René who kicks Noisy Stuccio out and takes this guy in. Now René starts sharpshooting. He’s going to try to take this guy for his bundle and sets something up, only he makes a mistake in underestimating his new boarder. The guy gets wise and kills him.

“That gets us to Noisy Stuccio. People don’t change and Noisy was a mean little punk who never liked to be second rated. He was always in somebody’s business and he would have wanted to know what was going on and somehow he found out who the boarder was. If this guy knew René, then he certainly would have known Noisy. When René was killed Noisy got the score and made his bid for the loot this guy was packing.”

Marta said, “And wound up the same way.”

“This guy is a pure psychopath. He’ll kill at the drop of a hat. He’s an old experienced hand with the crazy intuitive values psychos have and can kill without leaving a trace. That’s the most difficult part,” I said. “There doesn’t even have to be a motive. He doesn’t go into wild flight that attracts attention and anybody in his way is simply disposed of.”

She frowned and nibbled at a fingernail. “But Hymie Shapiro…”

I cut her off with, “I’ll have to go back to when we were kids. Hymie and Noisy were a couple of sharpies who stuck together. Hymie used to plan little chintzy jobs and leave them up to Noisy to pull off. Could be that Noisy didn’t want to move in on this by himself because he knew he wasn’t capable of pulling it off alone. He always was a lippy guy with Hymie. Suppose he talked it over with Hymie and they laid it out together. Our guy would have moved out after he killed René, but they found out where he was holed up and Noisy went to see him. So the guy makes a date to pay off and instead lets Noisy have a bullet, but not before Noisy tried to insure himself staying alive by reminding the guy someone else knew the play.”

“It sounds good, Joe.”

“What it means is that Noisy didn’t have to tell him
who
it was that knew. Our guy automatically understood, popped Noisy, then went looking for Hymie and found him.”

“And that brings us up to Doug Kitchen,” Marta said.

“Paula Lees saw that action. Doug saw the guy and recognized him. That’s what got him killed. He started across the street to say hello, then saw what was going to happen and started to run. He was the only one shot in the back.”

“Gus Wilder?”

“They all knew him. Hell, everybody around here knows everybody else, especially when they’re hardcases.”

I stopped pacing then and stared at the dark green surface of the dirty window shade. Marta asked, “What are you thinking of, Joe?”

“There’s a hook in this someplace. I have the feeling that somebody I’ve talked to has fed it to me already and I can’t remember what it is.”

“It’ll come.”

“But I want it now.”

“Relax,” she said softly.

I turned around and grinned at her. “Sure, little Giggie. Come on and let’s try it from another angle.”

When we reached the street there was a slight jolt in the air, concussion from thunder far off, and the sky over Jersey turned a momentary pink. It was cooler now, the smell of rain coming in with the west breeze.

We turned south, reached the corner and saw Hal McNeil, the beat cop, just closing the door of the call box. He touched his cap in a salute and said, “Evening, Lieutenant. I was just going to look you up.”

“What’s doing?”

“Sergeant Brissom wants you to call him back.”

“Thanks, Hal. You got anything on Loefert and his buddies?”

The cop nodded. “They’re doing a lot of poking around. The way it looks, they’ve sectioned the neighborhood off and are scouting the areas. The only one I could reach said they were looking for a strange face. A lot of drifters come through, but they weren’t interested. It’s somebody that would be known but hasn’t been seen for a while.”

“No names?”

“You know these people, sir. They aren’t going to stick their necks out. Too many killings have scared them silly.”

I left him talking to Marta and opened the call box and got the duty officer to put me through to Mack Brissom. “Scanlon, Mack. What’s the pitch?”

“Hi, Joe. We have an opening on the action down there. Now get this bit… one of the Chicago hoods was picked up on an old murder second charge and the D.A. got some talk out of him because the guy hoped to drop the charge down to manslaughter.”

“What’s it about?” I asked him.

“The wheels inside the mob gave the go ahead signal to a group to set up one hell of a big heist and was going to take care of the cover and protection for a fifty percent bite if it came off. Well, it came off, all right, only the one guy who was holding the loot had it hijacked out of his hands by an outsider and broke up the whole deal.”

“Which heist, Mack?”

“Could be the Montreal job. How this outsider got into it is anybody’s guess. He could have known one of the boys, had a few drinks with him and the story came out. They’ll talk to their own kind sometimes. This time, knowing they had the mob’s protection, they’d figure nobody would have the guts to try to move in.”

“What’s the connection?”

“This guy who pulled the hijack was waiting when the driver holding the loot came out of his motel, stuck a gun in his ribs, made him drive to a spot where he had a car parked, belted him cold, took the money and ducked out”

“Recognized?”

“No, he was masked, but when he pulled the gun out a five-dollar bill and a piece of paper came out of his pocket with it. There was a phone number on the paper listed to a candy store run by Sigmund Jones in your neighborhood.”

“I know the one. René Mills kept a pair of whores upstairs over it.”

“Making sense?” Mack asked me.

“It’s there, all right. Does Gus Wilder tie into it at all?”

“When you check the dates it does. Wilder jumped his bond two weeks before the Montreal robbery. He might have known what was cooking inside the mob and was on the spot when it happened to pick up some hideout money. Wilder was damn hot. He knew the mob wasn’t going to let him stay alive if there was any indication that he’d talk about their activities. At the same time he didn’t want to take a big fall. If he didn’t talk, the upstate department was going after him on other charges, so the only choice he had was to jump bail.”

“So the mob detailed their boys to look him up,” I stated.

“That’s the picture we’re getting here. All he got is his brother to turn to.”

I said, “He called Henry asking for five hundred bucks.”

“Could be reasonable, Joe. He wouldn’t want to throw hot money around just yet. That, or he asked for the money before the hijack. Check out the dates on your end, will you?”

“Tonight I’ll call you back after I see Henry Wilder.”

“Right. See you later.”

I hung up, closed the call box and went back to McNeil and Marta. The wind had come up a little stronger and I felt the touch of a raindrop against my face. McNeil said, “Anything I can do, sir?”

“Just keep your eyes open. I got that funny feeling that something’s going to break.”

“Sure will.” He started to walk away, stopped and turned back. “Incidentally, Benny Loefert and Will Fater had a long talk with Al Reese tonight”

“Where?”

“In the back room at Bunny’s place.”

“Who passed on the word?”

“A little guy named Harry Wope.”

“I know him.”

“He thought you might like to know.”

“Tell him thanks.”

McNeil saluted again and went back to his beat.

Henry Wilder didn’t appreciate the interruption. Since I saw him last he seemed to have curled up inside himself and reluctance was in every word he spoke. Gus hadn’t contacted him again and as far as he was concerned he hoped he never heard from him. When I got around to asking when he had the last call he thought about it a minute, then placed the day. I ran it through my mind and let it fit the pattern. Gus’ call had come after he jumped his bond and before the Montreal job, so Mack Brissom could have hit it right. Gus had no place to go and headed back to the only place he knew where he thought he’d have a reasonable place of security, buried in the anonymity of a decrepit section of the city.