The Burning Day (9 page)

Big Thom died in his sleep one rainy day, though, and Longshot Lonnie, now a seasoned criminal of a much more pitiless stripe than his doting uncle had ever been, took over. He was tenaciously ambitious, and from the very first day he tested Don Ganato. And so began a long and trying struggle of nerves that lasted more than twenty years, and had seen many a thug end up in a North Side alley or floating face down in the Cahaba River. This was the long bitter fight of attrition that was finally threatening to boil over into an all-out death match between the two factions.

I still have the silver token that Lonnie gave me on that long ago night, and I wear it around my neck on a chain. I don’t know if it possesses any powers, but I guess over the years I’ve grown a bit superstitious. I keep putting the thing in a drawer, but somehow it finds its way back around my neck. Maybe I’ve lived through enough close scrapes to learn that a little luck never hurts, no matter where it comes from.

So I decided that my luck would hold, and I went over to the part of town where downtown starts running into Five Points, and visited a certain bar by the name of Finnegan’s. It was a nicely appointed place, a bit like something one might find in the British Isles not too long ago, a comfortable, quiet pub with some good music playing and a friendly atmosphere. (despite the fact that Longshot Lonnie O’Malley now kept his office in the back).

I walked in and made my way straight to the back, and was immediately intercepted by a wall-eyed thug known as Murderous Pete.

“Where do you think you’re headed?” Pete growled, putting one hand up in front of me, and fixing me with one gray eye. The other eye stared blankly at the wall to his right.

“Easy, Pete, I just want to talk to Lonnie,” I replied, sensing another somebody behind me. “Could you tell him I’m here?” Pete shrugged and turned and went into Lonnie’s office.

“You packing?” Came a voice from behind me. I recognized it as belonging to Mad Dog Maddox, another of Lonnie’s crazed gunmen. “What, did charm school get out early?” I asked without turning around.
 

Mad Dog actually chuckled. “Got to pat you down. Hold still.”

I hadn’t worn my .45 into the bar, since I knew it would just get taken away from me, but I sighed and let Mad Dog do his thing. He patted me down and stepped back, all the while staying behind me.

“Okay, you’re clean.”
 

Behind me I heard a little whimper.

“Mad Dog, do you have a puppy?”

“Yeah. His name is Oscar. He’s a beagle. I got papers.”

He gave me a push and I took an involuntary step forward. Pete came out of the back and nodded. “He’ll see you, Longville. Go on in. Don’t get cute, or you won’t get out of here alive.”

“Like I said, I just want to talk.”

I walked into the office. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting all that I got. Longshot sat behind a desk with a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whisky parked on the blotter. From the level of the brown liquid inside, he’d been whittling away on it all afternoon. What threw me for a loop was the girl standing next to him. I had never seen her in person before, but I had seen her photo.

She and some friends, all college dropouts, had once been professional shoplifters, or “boosters.” They’d made a pretty good living stealing high-priced items and moving them through a fence in north Birmingham. That is, until they’d stolen a certain something from a mob safe house that was masquerading as a failing antiques shop. The offended party had sent his dogs looking for Dextra and her dropout friends. By the time Broom and I had found them, most of the kids were dead. She’d been one of just two that walked away alive. Two out of six.

She looked at me with a glare of the rawest hatred. I guess she’s seen my picture, too.

“This is the son of a bitch got all of my friends killed,” she hissed.

She’d left out the fact that the Mafia hit man had also shot me and my old police partner, Broom, as we tried to save them all. Broom’s partner, a good cop, had lost his life. But I let her enjoy her anger. I had no time to rehash the past.

Lonnie downed his tumbler of Bushmills. He didn’t look too worried by her outburst, or her grief. “There, there, Dexie. Roland here is an old friend, and he’s also here as a guest. I didn’t know that you and the gumshoe knew one another. Run along now while we talk.” He patted her on the rear end and she sneered and spat, but she managed to get past me and out the door without clawing my eyes out.
 

“Dammit, Longville, what did you do to piss Dextra off? I think she’d kill you if I gave her permission.”

“Maybe,” was all that I said,

“Well, take a load off, private eye.” Lonnie poured himself another shot of Bushmills. “I don’t mean to be rude, boyo. I’d offer you a belt but I know you don’t partake . . . any more, that is.”

He looked me over with his peculiar eyes. The Byzantine blue eye appraised me coolly, and then the Mesozoic green eye, with more than a hint of threat in its smoldering depths. He swallowed his latest drink and set the tumbler down. “What did you come here for, Longville?”

“Did you know that one of your gun men is carrying around a beagle puppy?” I asked him.

Longshot poured himself another two fingers and laughed. “You mean Kevin. Got himself a friend at last. Now answer my question.”

“The answer is, I have a question for you.”
 

“So let’s have it.”

So I asked him.

Chapter 14

“Lonnie,” Dextra said softly, her head on his chest. They were in bed, and they lay tangled together, exhausted after a furious bout of make-up sex they had engaged in after their usual fight.
 

Lonnie waited before answering. She had pronounced his name as half a question, half a demand. “Dexie,” he said finally, also half a question, noncommittal.

“What is Roland Longville to you?”

Lonnie breathed in deeply. “He’s an annoying two-bit private eye, and a royal pain in the arse.”
 

“Then do something for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Kill him.”

Lonnie laughed and rolled out from under her. “What kind of person do you take me for?”

“I thought I meant something to you.” She sat up, letting the covers fall away from her perfect body, knowing the effect that it would have on him. But Lonnie only smiled.

“I owe Longville a debt I haven’t yet repaid, my love.”

“What could you possible owe him?” She scowled, covering herself.

“My life. The man saved my life once.”

She nodded slowly, though she had still not let go of her anger.

“Is he your friend, then?”

Lonnie picked her chin up and brought her eyes up to meet his.

“I have only one friend, Dexie. And that’s human frailty.”

She put her arms around him and her face against his chest so that they could not see each other’s eyes.

“Sometimes I hate you,” she said softly.

“I know, dearest.” Lonnie smiled and lovingly stroked her silky black hair. “I know.”

Chapter 15

I rarely break the conditions of a contract I make with an employer, unless they do something on their end that breaks the rules. But an abiding curiosity made me make a sudden and fateful decision: I would go to Wiggin’s house and confront him. I remembered the little BMW convertible pulled into the double garage, all alone. His office visit left me with the impression of a lonely man, resigned to life with his erring wife, stoically going about his business until I reported back to him with details. But was he really waiting for the whole story from me? Or did he know more than he was telling? Something wasn’t adding up. We needed to talk about that, never mind his instructions to meet away from his home.

I figured that Wiggins would be angry at me for disregarding his strict prohibition against calling on him at his place of residence. Since I was already upset with him for lying to me, though, I figured fair was fair. I speculated that if I showed up unannounced, I might shake him up enough to get the straight dope from him, or at least learn more than I knew about what was going on. As it turned out, I was right about that last part.

As I drove through Wiggin’s quiet, upscale neighborhood, kids played in the yards and happy dogs barked and ran in the parks, chasing Frisbees and harassing the ducks that lived in the ponds. Henry Wiggins’ car was in the yard, just where it had been a few days earlier. Maybe he was home early, or taking a sick day. Anyway, he was in. I parked at the curb and walked up to the door. I squared my shoulders and rapped with my knuckles on the jam. I counted off twenty seconds before I heard a muffled call from inside and steps coming towards the door, heavy, as if whoever was inside was half-stumbling.

The door opened, and a tall, athletic-looking man of about forty stood squinting against the sudden light. He would have looked at home on a tennis court, I supposed, under normal circumstances. This morning, though, his circumstances weren’t normal. He was dressed in a badly rumbled suit and his eyes were red and glassy. I had felt like that enough times in my previous life to know—the man was hung over, and in a very big way.

“Uh . . . hello,” he managed, somewhat pleasantly. There was already a question in his eyes, however.
 

“Sorry if I woke you. I’m here to see Henry Wiggins.”

The man blinked rapidly, and now there was confusion to go with the hangover and the question in his eyes. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. You are . . . ?”

“My name is Roland Longville. I’m a private detective, and I’m employed by a Mr. Henry Wiggins.” I brought out my I.D. and flashed it at him.

The man squinted at my credentials, rubbed his temples, and broke into a wide smile. Then he scratched his head through his thick sandy blond hair. He made a weak effort at straightening his rumpled appearance. “Is this some kind of a joke?”

“I’m afraid not. Why do you ask that?”

“Well, it’s just that I’m fairly certain that
I’m
Henry Wiggins, and I’m also pretty sure that I’ve never seen you before, let alone hired any . . . private detective, did you say? Since you’ve shown me your identification, Mr. Longville, if you want, I can prove who I am.”

I stood there for a second, at a loss as to how to follow up. Clearly someone was playing a game, but the purpose of the game, and the rules themselves, were completely unknown to me. I mentally backed up a step, and tried again.

“I came here to see if Mr. Wiggins was at home . . .”

Mr. Wiggins was at home. The man at the door fished a driver’s license out of his pocket and put it in my hand. He was, indeed, it proclaimed, Henry H. Wiggins. He followed up with a business card that identified him as a Certified Public Accountant. I cursed silently and went on.

“I’m sorry. Someone who claimed to be Henry Wiggins . . . that is . . . you . . . came to my office three days ago. This man . . . the man who hired me, said that he wanted me to follow a woman. This was a woman he said was his . . . or . . . your . . . wife. Do you recognize her?” I took the picture of Mary out of my pocket and showed it to him. The smile vanished instantly, and something like despair replaced it.

“That’s Mary. She is my wife . . . well, not any more. She’s my ex-wife.” He looked up from the photo. “I have no idea how this man would know my wife, or why he would pretend to be me.”

Ex-wife, I mused. That was interesting. I quickly described the False Wiggins’ archaic suit, his
Reader’s Digest
vocabulary, his model’s stature. “Any idea who that man might be, or why he would want your ex-wife followed?”

“I’m sure I don’t know the answer to either of those questions. Say, Mr. Longville, why don’t you come inside? The bright sunlight out here is killing me.”

I followed Wiggins into the interior of the house. It was a nicely appointed home: real art on the walls; comfortable-looking, expensive furniture; a grand piano under a skylight that was currently covered with a blind; a wide arch that opened into a dining room with a banquet table under a crystal chandelier; and a wine rack sparkling mysteriously beyond, with its charge of bottles that meditated on festivities yet to come. The shades were drawn, and there were no lights on in the house. That self-imposed darkness was a scenario I well remembered all too well from my own drinking days.

The coffee table told that things were starting to slip in this perfect world. A mostly empty liter of Maker’s Mark Bourbon played general to a platoon of empty beer bottles that stood at attention nearby. These would have told the cause of the real Mr. Wiggin’s present discomfort, had it not been obvious at first glance. He’d been drinking most of last night, apparently in the dark, and quite probably alone. Only a few things will make a man do that.

“How long have you and Mary been divorced?” I asked Wiggins, taking a shot at one of the most common causes. He crossed to the couch and flopped down, his right arm crossed over his eyes.

“It’s been about three months since the divorce was finalized. We’d been apart, on and off, another three.”

“You miss her, don’t you, Mr. Wiggins?”