“Then stay out of it.”
“Mike . . . you know I can’t. Not now. You made it more than just a killing. Dooley opened up a can of worms and you took the bait.” His eyes tightened somewhat. “Now, so did I.”
“You want to make it official business?”
“I can see them trying to get a word out of you,” he said. “There’s not a damn thing they can charge you with and you’re not about to give anything away, are you?”
“Dooley dropped it in my lap, Pat, remember? The conversation wasn’t recorded and all he did was hand me a joker out of the deck and tell me to make a royal flush of it.”
At the corner Pat stopped and stared down the avenue for a cab. “You’ll be tangling with the feds and the DA’s office, for starters, Mike. They’re both heavy hitters with big teams to cover all the bases. You know what you’re up against?”
“You always ask me that, Pat. The answer is the same. No, I don’t know, but I expect I’ll find out pretty soon, don’t you?”
He grunted and waved his hand toward a cab. “At least you got that right.”
When the cab stopped we both got in and Pat gave the driver his midtown address. I told him to let me off at Thirty-fourth Street and we stayed quiet until I got out. When the cab pulled away I grabbed another and went up to Bud Langston’s office, where his first words were, “That was a short week, Mike.”
“This could be a friendly visit,” I said.
“But it’s not, right?”
“Right. Things are beginning to happen.”
“And you want body armor to protect your worn old frame, I imagine.”
“What I want is to see this stuff. If it’s for real it puts another light on what I’m doing.”
“Oh, it’s real, all right. And this time everything was going for us. Coulter and I had a locker together at the club where we used to try out our gadgets in the pool. He mentioned a package he had left there with that new material in it.”
“And?”
Bud got up and walked to the closet and came back with what looked like a long-sleeved black sweatshirt draped over a wire coat hanger. “You still an extra large?”
“You guessed right.”
He held out the hanger and I took the gadget off the wire. For a few seconds I let my fingers run over the fabric itself, noticing the satin-like texture. It was full-waist length, yet couldn’t have weighed more than a few ounces. “And this will stop a bullet?”
“I told you . . . anything under a twenty-millimeter.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Believe it, Mike. I’ve seen the tests carried out.”
“How does it work?”
Bud gave me a sad look, and said, “Why is a single strand of spiderweb stronger than a steel wire of the same dimensions?”
“Beats me,” I told him.
“Then stop asking silly questions. I fused the material into something you can wear. The trouble with a lot of armor is it leaves the arms open to bullet wounds. This thing is like wearing an undershirt. There’s a flap that comes up between your legs that you fasten with Velcro. Pretty neat, eh?”
“I didn’t know you could sew,” I said. “You want it back?”
His eyes seemed to cloud up a little. He had known me too long. “When you’re done with it, Mike.”
I nodded, told him thanks and went out and got a cab back to my office.
The rain had started again. This time it had picked up sky dirt and smelled funny. The drops were smaller than before, nature having a last laugh before deciding to drench the city with a downpour. I was glad I had my trenchcoat with me. The belt had started to bite into my side and I loosened it. It was a half hour late for the pain pills, so I just sat back and made faces until I got to the office.
Velda said I looked pretty pasty when I walked in. I felt even worse until the pills took hold. My legs were shaky and my head was light. I knew I was breathing, but couldn’t seem to feel like anything was going into my lungs. I swung around in my desk chair and leaned back, my feet going up to the windowsill. She had seen me do that so often she figured I was all right, but I was far from it. The greyness of the day outside the glass panes got darker than it should have and I felt as if I were going off into deep sleep in a black alley that was dark and empty.
My head didn’t snap up. The motion was very slow and deliberate. The color outside the window came back and I could feel myself breathing again. I kept thinking that living was a real pleasure and anything that had to be done to prolong it should be done.
When Velda came back she was holding the body armor shirt. “What is this, Mike?”
I didn’t feel like going into long explanations. “Something scuba divers use underwater.”
“What do you want it for?”
“Sunken treasure, doll,” I said.
“You?”
“Let me have my dreams, will you?”
She tossed it on my desk. “You
really
need a wife, Mikey boy.”
“Sure I do,” I agreed with a grunt. “Now sit down in the client’s chair. I need a sounding board. It’s not like the old days anymore. I have a head full of details, but I can’t seem to get them lined up. Azi’s .357 got me in the side, but it’s messed up my thinking.”
With a look of understanding, Velda sat down. She didn’t have to take notes. She was one of those people who had that ability to remember an entire lecture on criminology almost verbatim and repeat it back afterward. It was something she did when she wanted to, but not bothering otherwise. Even the way she sat was part of her deliberate intention to absorb every word I said and the tilt of her head reminded me of a feral cat waiting outside a mouse hole.
So I gave her all the elements of the case as I knew them, and when I was done, went over them again with suppositions thrown in to bolster theory. When I was done I felt like having a cold beer, but the ache in my side said no.
“What do you think, kitten?”
“You’re the detective,” she reminded me.
“Unless you forgot to renew it, you have a ticket too.”
“Wouldn’t you do better asking Pat?”
“If Dooley had wanted that he would have asked Pat himself. This is something he dumped on me. Sooner or later Pat is going to have to come in on it, but right now his job is running down Dooley’s killer. Everybody else is playing a big guessing game and they have the board nailed to my back. They hate me for not holding still long enough to let the darts hit it.”
“It’s all about money, isn’t it, Mike?”
“Eighty-nine billion dollars worth. It sounds almost indecent to say it.”
“And nobody is sure of where it is.”
“Hell, nobody can prove it even was. If the story is true, the old dons got screwed out of it, but they’re all dead except for Ponti. The young guys in the mob have a good idea that it’s somewhere . . . but can’t locate it. What’s funny is that it isn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack at all. It would be one huge pile of cartons packed tight with cash or negotiables . . . and nobody wants to talk about it at all.”
“Mike . . . how did the feds come in on this?”
“They’re money mice, doll. They can smell the stuff and will follow the trail until they die. They don’t care how they clip the public, but don’t let anybody hold out a dollar on them. Look at how they got Capone.”
She considered that a minute, then smiled gently. “Modern technology. In Capone’s day they had comptometers, today we have computers. They’re going to run that money down with electronics. The new dons used them to shake out the possibility of a hoard and we don’t even have a laptop.”
“We don’t need one,” I said. “Electronics didn’t squirrel that much cash away. It was being collected and hidden before the computer age hit us.”
She was thinking the same thing I was, and it showed in the way she pursed her lips. “We still follow the money trail, don’t we?”
“Right you are, doll, but before we do, let’s verify those big numbers.
Time
,
Newsweek
,
U.S. News and World Report
. . . all those magazines have covered the actions of the families. Go hire some researchers to get the details. Pick up what you can from the newspapers and don’t sweat out specifics. Anything they got would have been an estimated figure anyway. We know what the drug revenue is figured at, so put it all together in big round numbers and see what we get. And by the way, have we got enough money to pay for researchers?”
“
That
much we have,” Velda reassured me.
“Let’s do it then.”
Ever since the army days I had never stayed in the sack after six. The coffee was made, my face was shaved and I was all dressed when the authoritative knock came on my door. I could have told who it was. Unless a badge was flashed on Bill Raabe and he was told officially not to announce the visitors he wouldn’t have let the president in. But here was Mr. Authority with a big fist who looked startled as hell when I jerked the door open and said, “Well, Miss Lake and Mr. Watson, you’re just in time for coffee.” I looked at my watch. “You city people sure get up late. Where have you been?”
Florence Lake smiled feebly. Homer harrumphed and let me shut the door behind him. I ushered them into the living room, then went back and got two cups of freshly brewed Dunkin’ Donuts coffee for them. They both muttered thanks, but I had sure put a big dent in their surprise visit. Some people can be all shook up by an official call that early in the morning.
So I let them sit. Finally Florence Lake said, “We have done an exhaustive study of Mr. Dooley’s past. A lot of man-hours went into this and we came up with some interesting details.”
“Good for you,” I told her. “You sharing this information?”
“We may.”
I took a taste of my coffee and set the cup down. “Look, Miss Lake, I don’t give a hoot one way or another what you tell me. If it’s something I wanted to know I’d find it out myself. Let’s not play games. What have you got?”
The two of them exchanged glances, then she pulled a few papers from her pocket and laid them on the coffee table. They were receipt forms, six from Gerrity Trucking company, listing week-long rentals each time and four separate orders from Watertight Carton Company. The dates were years old.
I looked them over, shrugged, and said, “What’s this suppose to mean?”
“Your friend rented those trucks and bought those cartons in his name.”
“Big deal. He worked for Ponti and the don let him do what he wanted on his estates. Why don’t you check with Lorenzo himself?”
“You know what Ponti would tell us,” Homer said.
“Yeah, he’s not a nice guy like I am.”
“Mr. Hammer,” Homer insisted, “have you got any idea what your friend would transport in those trucks?”
“Of course,” I told him.
They both edged forward on their chairs. “If you’d check those dates, it was when old Ponti was building his place up there in the mountains. Dooley was crating all the furnishings he was putting in there and hauling them up.” Their expressions suddenly turned cold. “Why, do you think he was carting money someplace?”
They were lousy poker players. That’s exactly what they had in mind. I was only guessing about when Ponti decided to move to the country, but it sounded like a good guess. If it had fallen to the don to hide the great pile of loot he’d need some kind of a cover story to do it and this would have been a logical one.
Neither one wanted another cup of coffee, so I let them leave and called Pat at his office. He chuckled when I told him what had happened, then asked what I was doing for lunch. I knew something was up by the way he said it and told him I’d meet him at his favorite pizza place at noon.
I had a single slice with coffee. Pat ate all the rest, washed it down with a cold Miller High-Life, then leaned back, satisfied. “Dooley has really got things rolling. This business with the families is nothing new. Our guys knew something was going on, but nobody was shooting at each other with any great regularity. . . .”
“What about the shoot-out at the dock?” I said sharply.
“That one was a total surprise. We never saw it coming. They put it down to a sudden animosity between the mobs, or something the young ones brought up. They couldn’t find a reason for it and Ponti certainly didn’t offer one. All he told us was ‘You know how it is.’ ”
“Pat, you have something on your mind,” I told him.
He waved for another cup of coffee. I shook my head. “For the past two years there has been some great familiarity between the young punks in the mob. It isn’t that they have any great love for each other, just that they have something in common.”
“Sure, the only thing that interests them is money.”
“They’ve hired some fancy talent to do things for them. A lot of those kids are damn well schooled and know where to look for specialized help.”
“But there’s nothing you can charge them with,” I stated.
“Right.”
His coffee came and he tore open a couple packets of Sweet ’N Low and dropped the contents in.
“But we know where they have an office full of top of the line computer equipment. We staked the place out for three months and have a total of twenty-seven upper-echelon mobsters who have been there. We never knew why, but we have enough supposition to get a friendly judge to sign an order that allows us to search the place.”
“Pat, you’re not supposed to be telling me this.”
“I know, pal, but it was you, me and Dooley before and no matter how you cut it, you’re in this too.”
“When are you going to hit that place?”
“No way you can tag along, Mike.”
“Then how am I in it?”
“In spirit, pal. You can read about it in the papers.”
“The feds going in?”
“Can’t keep them out.”
“But you have the search warrant.”
“Sure, and we’re scratching backs too.”
I said, “When do I get the details, Pat?”