The Last Cop Out (32 page)
Annoyance was in Burke’s voice. “What has to happen?”
“You have to kill Papa Menes.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I’d be wrong, wouldn’t I?”
“You can still go fuck yourself,” Burke told him.
From across the room Helen was watching them both, something in her eyes vacillating between belief and disbelief.
The big house on Long Island had been built by a New York banker during the two years he had been a multimillionaire. He was the son of a middle European immigrant and had been put to work shining shoes in downtown Manhattan, turning over his entire income to his impoverished parents so they could live in a cold water tenement, existing on day-old bread and inexpensive grocery leftovers. Once a week they had a Sunday treat of tough boiled beef or wrinkled frankfurters and he hated the tentacles of poverty that enveloped him.
But he was a good shoe shiner, with a flair and a flourish, a memory for names of the Wall Street tycoons who enjoyed his streetside show and tipped heavily from their fat wallets. He began to save, then, until he could afford a two-chair cubicle in a narrow space between buildings suitable for nothing else.
With two chairs occupied there was always an interesting conversation above his bowed head and one day he listened carefully at what was being said, took sixty dollars he had accumulated and purchased a few shares of the stock that had been under discussion. That afternoon he had a profit of two thousand, seventy-four dollars.
He kept listening and within a month his bank account totaled over six figures. He kept the shop for another thirty days, sold out to his assistant and spent his time at the ticker tape.
When he had made his third million he sent his parents back to the old country with enough for them to live on, established himself in a fabulous office with an apartment on Riverside Drive and commissioned an architect to build him a tasteless, fortress-like mansion on six acres of waterfront footage on Long Island.
He had shined shoes for twenty-four years. He was then thirty-eight years old, a multimillionaire with a grand estate and ready to marry the most beautiful showgirl on Broadway. The year was nineteen twenty-nine.
When the stock market crash broke the backs of the paper rich, the girl laughed at him and he jumped out of his own office window. The house on Long Island went through six owners before a company that was a personal front for Papa Menes obtained it. It was an address no one knew, a fortified castle no enemy could take and a luscious retreat where Papa could operate from until the heat was off and the lawyers could bring things back together again while they snarled the workings of justice in its own red tape. All he needed was time and he had plenty of money to buy that little commodity.
And having bought it, he was going to use it well with the lovely hunk of flesh he had imported from Miami, his own three-way woman who improved with each session, always having something new and different ready for him until he began to wonder if coming so much would drain him like pulling the plug in the bathtub.
That wild Louise Belhander would tease him until he was ready to blow his mind apart and had the shakes like some palsied old man, then at the right time she would whip herself over into that delicious position on her hands and knees, offering her own lewdness to his and he’d bury himself inside her in a frenzy of passion so exhausting that he’d collapse on top of her and she’d have to roll out from under him and wipe him down with a cold wet rag to revive him.
She had already pocketed a little over five thousand bucks of Papa Menes’ generosity, which was about all she needed to make sure she could get clear of the retribution that mighty possibly come after her final act revenging herself on Frank Verdun. Or his friends.
The nice specialists Captain Bill Long had assigned to locate the whereabouts of Papa Menes had put out feelers all over the city without being able to make contact. The legitimate enterprises owned and operated by the shattered underworld kingdom were all functioning normally so there was an active hand still behind it and that only hand had to be the old man’s.
Legal advisers for the many corporate structures readily admitted having orders transmitted to them, but had no knowledge of the source except that the coded identification was authentic and all they could do was carry out instructions. Across the country, city and state attorneys were working day and night trying to break down the barriers of ownership other attorneys had set up and found themsevles up against a dead wall on every occasion. The other side had bought better men, they had a longer time to prepare for the eventuality and long before any breakthrough could be made, the actual owners could liquidate their holdings and leave without having to face any criminal action.
Downstairs in the lab the microfilms had been cleaned and put on the enlarger with a select audience of viewers from federal officers to local police personnel and within minutes after the final slide was shown, warrants were issued for various persons in thirty-two states in the union. There would have been more, but the rest were dead in the Chicago blast, or wiped out before the open war had started.
Robert Lederer sat at the head of the table opposite Bill Long and Burke looking at the check marks he had made on his list, indications of persons beyond prosecution now. “It’s that damn root you have to watch out for.”
Long scowled at him. “What?”
“You can kill the fruit and cut down the tree, but leave the root in the ground and it can start all over again. So we can hit all their drops and put a dent in the narco trade. We can close some bookies and lock up some prostitutes. What good does it do? With all those legitimate assets bringing in the money one big guy can finance the entire operation in a matter of months . . . just one guy big enough for the foreign operators or the big locals to fear enough to trust.”
“We’ll knock off Menes yet, Bob. Relax. Take your time.”
“There isn’t any time, damn it. You know that as well as I do.”
“Something ...” he glanced at Burke who sat there impassively, “... or somebody will break.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that the old man isn’t long for this world. Right, Gill?”
Burke’s eyes barely flicked up at him. “I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute.”
The tap of Lederer’s pencil went on for ten seconds before he said, “You two know something I ought to know?”
“Not really, Bob. It’s pure speculation.”
The D.A. got up and scooped his papers into his attaché case. “You’d better hope something happens.”
When he left, Bill Long leaned back in his chair, his hands folded behind his head. “When is it going to happen, Gill?”
“How many times do I have to tell you to go fuck yourself, buddy?”
“As many as you want. I’m too damn curious to see how you work it to get insulted. I really want to see how you kill the old man. I want to see how you react, how it affects you.”
“You ought to know, Bill. How did Shelby’s death affect you?”
“Ah, that wasn’t my kill, friend. That was yours, all yours. It was my finger on the trigger, but your mind that pulled it.”
Burke stood up and slipped into his coat. “Bill, I hope that brain of yours is good enough to snap back when you really know the answers.”
The party on Long Island had gotten more boisterous with every network news flash. From the time of Mark Shelby’s death to the daily recapitulation of events, the wine and booze had flowed freely throughout the house, celebrating the sole ownership of Papa Menes’ empire. The guards outside had to wait their turn to indulge, and their replacements brought out enough refreshment to hold them over until they, too, were relieved again.
It had been a long time since Papa had been drunk. Artie Meeker had started too early and was snoring away beside the stupid redhead he picked up in Brooklyn and Remy was dragged away by the two broads who took care of the office work.
Not that Papa minded. He was alone again with Louise and the champagne had gotten to them both and Louise was giving him a rubdown with those agile fingers of hers and he could feel the sensation all the way down to his balls. The communiques from his legal advisers assured him that all was well and as long as he wasn’t available to accept a subpoena there was nothing much that could happen to him. His men on the outside had already squelched a couple of the Philadelphia outfit who were talking big and Moss Pitkin from St. Louis stopped the raid he was making on the dry cleaning joints there when he had his head banged around for him. By now everybody knew the old man meant business, knew his business and they were happy to sit back and let him run things.
Louise giggled when her fingers made Papa squirm and she got her hands under his shoulders and pushed. “Roll over, Papa.”
“No . . . keep doing what you were. I like that.”
“I’ll make it better for you,” she teased. “I can’t do it while you’re lying on your stomach.”
Papa let out one of his chuckles, amazed at how the blonde twist could get to him. His pecker had been hard so many times it was starting to ache and here it was coming up again and he couldn’t fight it back because whatever she did was new and different and worth any ache he might feel. Her naked body was slithering all over him, warm and throbbing, lubricated by the sweat of her unique exertions. Her teeth nipped at his neck and her tongue probed his ear, making his shoulder muscles twitch and gooseflesh stand out over his seamed skin.
“Come on, roll over,” she said again.
This time he was fully prepared and let her flip him onto his back and was pleased when Louise let out one of the funny gasps when she saw him in the full glory of manhood. He didn’t know that the gasp was really a suppressed laugh and she pounced on it too quickly for him to even speculate on it.
She stopped when she felt the signs and he tried to push her back. “Keep going,” he told her. Damn it to hell, don’t quit now. Just . . .”
“I’m boss now,” she reminded him lightly. “If you like my specialties, you let me do things my way.”
He kept his eyes closed tightly. “Yeah, okay, sure. But hurry up.”
“Oh, no, this is one time we don’t hurry at all because it’s going to be the biggest and best of all. It’s something so very extraordinary I have to build up to it step by step, otherwise you’d never appreciate it.”
This time his eyes opened, bright with anticipation. “What’re you gonna do? You tell me.”
“Lay back, relax, and I’ll show you, big daddy. I just promise you one thing . . . you’ll never forget it.”
For the first time since he was a little kid, Papa Menes took an order from a woman and did what he was told. He lay back and relaxed, wondering what surprise she had waiting for him.
There wasn’t much to see from the miniature terrace outside Burke’s living room windows unless you understood the raw, primitive nature of the real New York. There was nothing aesthetic about black tarred rooftops with their ugly slanted doorwells gouged into their tops. TV antennas stood barren and angular, reminiscent of a denuded forest held together by stands of soot-dirtied clotheslines.
Here and there patches of green showed where somebody who still had a feeling for soil had tried to grow things, and empty beach chairs were bright splotches of color waiting for those who sought the sun that managed to penetrate the smog.
Even the smell was visible, rising on the heat waves from the streets below, driven upward by the artificial thermals, dancing to the heartbeat of blaring horns and heavy rumble of traffic. Darkness was coming on and when the lights winked out in the towering office buildings uptown, they blinked on again in the high rise apartments and lower silhouettes of the renovated town houses and tenements closer by.
Jet traffic made a mockery of the free sky, creating artificial clouds with their contrails and an illusion of space with their pulsating red and green false stars. Only the emerging moon was real and they had even contaminated that.
Burke said, “Let’s go back inside,” and closed the sliding doors behind them.
For a minute Helen looked back while he made fresh drinks for them, her mind spinning like a centrifuge, trying to throw out the fragments of unreality so there would be some core of true substance left.
How long had she known him? It seemed like a lifetime, but it had only been a little while. And how long had she known the others? She had been exposed to death and destruction since she had been born, had associated with the good and the evil from birth to maturity . . . so she should be able to make an evaluation herself.
Yet she was part of it all, was there enmeshed in the violence and all she could hear were those deadly words of accusation that Bill Long spoke that made him, if the words were true, the most frightening human being who ever lived.
“Unless there was justification.”
She spun around, her breath caught in her throat. “What?”
“I know what you were thinking,” Burke told her. He handed her the glass and she took it. Her hand was trembling.
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