Authors: Rex Miller
He got through the phone call on automatic and prepared to go into action. He felt the excitement inside him. The knowledge that he was going to bring those sons of bitches down. He was going to start a fucking war.
Eichord
T
he fact that Eichord had detected a wise guy or an ex-con or whatever breed of felonious monk the non-existent Mr. Streicher might or might not prove to be, would have been insufficient to pull Jack to St. Louis. The gangland type action might not have reached out for him. It was a thing of one too many coincidences. Bad vibes. Rankling hunches. The St. Louis kills were firebombings. Some shootings. But no EYEBALL M. O. No ballistics, forensics, or any other hard information linked the California assassinations and the St. Louis murders.
The randomness of the kills were, however, a factor in themselves. The St. Louis homicide reports told of brutal and what appeared to be unconnected slayings. They could be strictly gangland stuff. But like the L.A. area murders the media attention was noteworthy. When you add to this factoring the coincidental sighting of a definite wise guy leaving the Coast for St. Louis, Eichord thought it might be worth a look.
He was coming in superficially just as he had in L.A., at a summons from the Task Force. But this time he would not be a cherry to be picked, chewed, pitted, and spit out. He'd not be manipulated again by "liaison" smoothies. He'd come in quietly. Unannounced to all but the local honcho. No VIP stuff. He'd ease on in and look around. Check it out his own way.
Jack had fond memories of the St. Louis he could recall from the couple of good years he'd lived there a quarter-century ago. But from the second the cab left Lambert he might as well have been on Mars.
Similarly he found himself unprepared for the Special Division, a compact unit working out of the Homicide Bureau at Twelfth and Clark downtown, now Twelfth and Tucker Boulevard. He found the burg largely unrecognizable, this town he'd called home in the 60s, in Plaza Square, not two blocks from the Division HQ.
Homicide occupied the fourth floor of the six-story building where Chief Adler ran his command post for the Metropolitan Saint Louis area. This was the headquarters for the detectives assigned to the nine St. Louis Police divisions.
The city was a completely different ball game than he remembered. Gone was the old, infamous Pruett-Igo, where two-man cars eventually became open game for snipers. But there were still low-income housing projects in heavily black areas north of the city. Still pockets of unrest and crime. It would take some time to get used to the absence of Gaslight Square, and the wide open Strip. De Baliviere Strip had been notorious back in the druggy 60s, a hot tenderloin of street-corner smack dealers and hookers flagrantly offering their wares. Now De Baliviere, the Seventh Police District — was all rehabs and pricey condos. And the only dope was being sold by $200,000-a-year professional men.
He thought the Bureau looked like a city room of a very-laid-back metro newspaper, or the offices of a prestigious yuppie insurance agency. The cops looked like schoolteachers or ad men for an ultra-conservative house account. Anything but coppers. Only the eyes and the holstered Smiths said different.
"Good morning, Jack, glad to have you aboard," his new temporary boss said with a half-smile in an exchange of the initial pleasantries.
The district commander, under whom Eichord would nominally be working, was out of the city taking an FBI-agent-taught course sanctioned by the University of Virginia, and the acting shop head was Lieutenant Victor Springer, whom Eichord found distant and routinely polite, as if meeting Jack was 361 on a list of 362 things he had to do that day, which it probably was.
"Come on in. You settled yet?"
"No," Eichord said, "I just came in this morning."
There was the ritual of getting coffee. The usual exchange of amenities. The obligatory comments about Eichord's track record and the expected questions about his fame and the Chicago case. The comments about lodging, the bread-and-butter basics of payroll stuff, where he'd sit, his temporary place in the scheme of things. Then Springer laid it out for him.
"As you know, we have what appears to be the beginning of a full scale gang war on our hands."
"Yeah."
"These mob killings have up until recently been just that — within the crime factions. Wise guys taking down other wise guys. So we thought. But then there was the shooting at Laclede Landing." Springer shoved a newspaper across the desk. "I saved that one." The headline said
Two Injured In Saint Louis Mob Shoot-out.
Replete with front-page crime-scene photo.
"Mayor Carrol Donovan told St. Louis Police Commissioner Powell, 'Instruct the police department it either cleans this mess up or their replacements will. This city will no longer tolerate an atmosphere of violence,' " Eichord read aloud.
"Well, Jack, you know how it is. You got gang homicides." He shook his head sadly. "Most of the time you're not going to be able to do much. Hell. When they keep it in the family you tend to just go with the flow. The paper's headlines or the position of the
Ten O'clock News'11
pretty much dictate how many man hours we have to waste on looking into something like that." Eichord nodded. "I mean, you got a pro job, well .... "He shrugged and the thought trailed off into space.
"But you got guys going for a whack-out in Laclede Landing, Jesus. It's a helluva mess."
"All these firebombings," Eichord said. "These all related?"
"Yep. Here's what you got." He got up and uncovered a standup easel with a family-tree genealogy plotted out on it. "St. Louis family is really several different factions. You got your basic made wise guys, the old LCN, which was under the legendary Tony Gee, who I know you've heard about. He was the fucking
man.
He ran the whole schmear. His main man was another Tony, Tony Cypriot, and that's where they got the old name the papers used to use: the Two Tonys Mob. But it wasn't that at all. Gee ran everything for Chicago. This is back when I guess" — he glanced at some papers —"you were living here, if I remember my notes correctly."
"I was here in sixty-two and sixty-three," he said. He was looking into the lieutenant's eyes as he spoke and Jack doubted if there were too many notes Springer would remember incorrectly.
"Well, Tony Gee pulled the pin in the seventies. And what he left was Sally Dago — Salvatore Dagatina — who's still alive, by the way, and in the can. And a half-assed dope empire. The old-line Italian and Sicilian factions that had one time controlled all the gambling and narcotics and prostitution, which were under the splinter groups of Syrian, and Chink, and Latin wise guys — and the bikers — now these guys are getting long in the tooth too.
And they can't control the ethnic groups 'n' that. So you got the whole thing breaking into factions.
"Now you got your two Tonys gone. one dead, one kicked upstairs — Cypriot a big shot sitting on the national council, and Sally Dago takes a fall and goes in the slams. So all the people capable of running anything are out of pocket. Gee dead. Cypriot gone. Dago behind bars.
"See . . . Tony Gee was the last peacekeeper. He was like a, uh, orchestra leader, ya know? He pulled tile whole thing together. And with the other Tony and Sally out of the game there was nobody left with the brains, balls, and experience to keep the family unified. No godfather, like the papers are always saying. No safety valve for the territorial disputes and the faction arguments. No more clearinghouse. If you had the balls to make a move, you made a move. Never mind whose country you were in. Forget that turf shit — you went for it. So you had a mess.
"Tony Gee's lifelong confidant and counselor, Paul Rikla, and his bodyguard, James Measure, who had always hated each other's guts but coexisted out of necessity, had been elevated to underbosses with Sally Dago. Now Sally goes and you got these two Syrian dudes each running a faction of the family. The classic power struggle."
"These guys — Measure and Rikla — they're the two heads of the family now?" Jack asked. All the names were beginning to swirl. He'd just learned a whole set of California names. Now here comes another set.
"Right." Springer nodded.
"Where's Cypriot all this time? How come he's not back here taking over?"
"Aw, this is nothing. St. Louis is nickles and dimes to the big boys. Organized crime here isn't shit, and I'm not saying this to, you know, go, Oh, what a clean town we run. I just mean it isn't a big-crime town, as I'm sure you're aware. Kansas City has a little action but there isn't that much here. You got a couple things in East St. Louis, couple things north of town and whatnot, but it's small potatoes. Cypriot's on the national council. He's working in the Big Five New York families, working with the Chicago and Vegas and Miami people. He's a high roller now. St. Louis is like East Dipshit, Nowhere, to the big boys."
"Okay." Eichord couldn't seem to get his mind to kick into gear. His mouth had that familiar cottony taste that neither toothpaste nor mouthwash could stay from its appointed rounds.
"So you got die old-time
consigliere,
Rikla, and the bodyguard, Measure, running the family. Okay, now Rikla and Measure are both in their seventies. Oldtime warlords. Rikla's enforcer, Jimmie the Hook, Jimmy Russo, he gets killed in a car bombing. So Rikla, he firebombs Lyle Venable, who was the underboss for Measure — and you got a very volatile situation."
"So it's a purely gang-related thing, you think."
"Umm." The lieutenant's face collapsed a little.
"That's hard to say at this point. Some of the kills are so . . . random. They don't seem to fit the pattern of payback or vengeance hits but it's hard to nail it down. Like this Laclede Landing thing" — he shook his head and rubbed hard at his eyes as if he'd walked into cobwebs —"it just isn't the way you do things. You don't draw that kind of attention, that kind of heat. You don't let something get out of control like that."
The first briefing finally got interrupted by the pressures of the day's activities, and Springer passed Jack along to other hands. Eichord spent the rest of the day trying to absorb the odd structure of the Special Division, a subunit within the dozen main circles of responsibility. This was the central cog of a wheel with spokes that disected the city jurisdictionally, and it was typically complex, labyrinthine, and geographically (not to mention philosophically) puzzling to him.
As always he felt his way along carefully, shutting nothing out, the sensors purring quietly; listening, watching, feeling as much as understanding. Tactile, impassive, questioning softly, absorbent, nonjudgmental, open to possibilities. Learning, sensing, spongelike.
The cops in SD looked like teachers for sure. At least more State than street copper. No narky-looking dudes. No gold chains. Businessmen or schoolteachers in their short sleeves and ties. No gunfighter mustaches. No long hair. No fat guys. Lean and clean. State roddish. Feds maybe. Very unstreet.
Loose, but not giving him much. All business. Welcome to St. Louis. Nice meeting you. Here's your desk. This is a telephone. Here's how you get outside. This is how you dial on the Intercom system. Here's a directory. This is a map. Very rank conscious. Cool smiles and paperwork. Guys who wanted good paychecks for their good policework. Young career cops on the make.
Eichord wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but whatever it was, this wasn't quite it. The last place he'd done any temporary duty they'd been worse flakes than the maniacs who were his beloved brethren at Buckhead. Sort of an orderly lunatic asylum. Before that he'd been working out of a metro force so corruption-ridden that it had acquired a national rep. The force was generally conceded to be one of the big three centers for crooked cops on the take. It was a thing that went back sixty, seventy years, back through two and three generations of cop families sometimes — an organic part of The Job. It was so bad there that straight cops could hardly function within the "pad."
The pad went all the way to the top, dizzying heights if you were street heat feeding the maw of a machine that reached far beyond the PC and the mayor and right into the black bag that got passed around the state house every week. When a pad is that thick, with tentacles that far-reaching, going right through the judges and prosecutors and county officials and into the legislator's pockets — then you can forget about it.
It was part of a way of life. The pad went way beyond being on the arm for the odd goody-gumdrop. This was going on die take as a CAREER DIRECTION and there were those who went for it the same way street-smart old-timers angled for a certain beat before Knapp hit the NYPD. Eichord knew his share of cops who saw the street as a free lunch for the entrepreneur with savvy. He didn't share their rationale about the payola perquisites, but he'd managed the minor miracle of staying relatively straight in one of the two or three most corruption-ridden shops in the country, without earning any of the pejorative nicknames like Mr. Clean or St. Eichord that would stick to you and haunt your career.
Vic Springer had been cordial in a cold kind of way, but Jack had a solid first impression of the man and he liked him. That was vital. At least that the ostensible cat in charge be somebody who wouldn't bury Eichord in bullshit. He thought Springer looked like a good, hard-nosed straight shooter. A good cop.
What Springer looked like was in fact a caricature of a hound dog. A plug-ugly version of Lyndon Johnson. A sad-eyed basset but photographed by Karsh. A woebegone hound who had one of those faces that wore a perpetual expression of dolorousness. Eichord would soon learn that this was his happy face. In normal repose his countenance registered abject misery. When he was upset, angry, or dejected, his face caved in like a wrecked building. But Eichord knew that faces are only masks.