Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (14 page)

Angelo and I sat. I noticed that
the chairs were just a tiny little bit lower than Werkle’s, so we had to
look up at him.

“So my good friend, Eddie Gabriel,
said I might be able to provide a service for Mr. Welles.” His gaze came
back to me. “Which I am, of course, happy to provide if it’s within my
power. Tell me, Mr. Welles, what can I do for you?”

“Thank you, Mr. Werkle,” I said. “I
don’t know how much information Mr. Gabriel gave you about my
problem...”

“Eddie told me that you have a
problem here in the east side, and that it was something I could help you
with,” he said. “That’s all I needed to hear. Whatever the problem, I’m
glad to be of service to you and my good friend Eddie.”

“I’m a private investigator,” I
said. “I recently had a client come to me and ask that I find someone who
was probably here in eastside. Specifically at the Floresta apartment
building on Tuxedo Avenue.”

Werkle’s eyes narrowed, just a
little, when I said Floresta. “Please continue,” he said.

“While I was observing the Floresta
from my car, in hopes of confirming that the person I was looking for was
there, I met a Mr. Eichhorn, as well as Mr. Pirelli and a Mr. Brewster. I
understand that they are associates of yours.”

He nodded slowly.

“In talking to them, I got the
strong impression that they knew of the person I was looking
for.”

Werkle stared at me. There’s a
saying that mobsters like to use. A hard stare is worth thousand words.
Werkle was staring War and Peace at me. Then he spoke. “This person you
seek,” he said. “Who is it?”

“Her name is Katarina Schleu,” I
replied. “She’s the leader of those people in the Floresta.”

Werkle had a small mouth with thin
lips. Now compressed so tightly that his mouth was just a little line under
his nose. “That
pucchiacha
!” he suddenly yelled. “The bitch is a
dead woman!”

He brought his fist down on the
desk, hard. The little porcelain child angel wobbled, then fell off the
desk. A wing and an arm broke off when it hit the carpeted
floor.

“Get another one!” he snarled at
Mario, then turned back to me.

Apparently the polite and
meaningless social niceties were over.

Chapter
Nine

Mario came to his feet quickly and
knelt, picking up the broken angel. Behind the desk, Werkle was huffing and
puffing like an angry bull. The young guy to his left sat calmly, as did
Angelo. They’d both obviously seen this before.

Werkle looked at the young guy.
“Alfie, get Bobby Acorns over here, like now. Leave the other two
cazzis
to keep an eye on the joint.”

“Right, Poppa,” the young guy said.
Alfie. Poppa. Alfredo Werkle Jr.? Werkle was a Vee, and when Vees turned
humans and made them their bloodchildren, a name change wasn’t generally in
the cards. So Alfie was probably Werkle’s natural son, born before the war.
Maybe a Vee too, maybe not.

 Alfie stood and started for
the door.

“Hey, Alfie,” Werkle said. “Light
touch, okay. Don’t scare Acorns.”

“I won’t, Poppa,” he
said.

Werkle looked back at me. “So,
Charlie, tell me about the woman.”

“She’s in the Resistance,” I said.
“Leads a group called the Humans First Front. They’re the people in the
Floresta.”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “I know that
part. Tell me why you want to find her.” He paused. “And don’t gimme no
bullshit about it being a job. You wouldn’t have gone to Eddie Gee if it
was just another job”

I’d hoped to avoid details until
knew what his interest in Schleu was all about. But he wasn’t giving me
much choice. “I think she’s got something in the works. Something big,
something she’s got planned for Christmas Eve. She’s Resistance, so it
definitely won’t be good for Vees. But if it’s really bad for vampires, it
could boomerang back and be bad for everybody.”

Werkle studied me for a moment,
then looked at Angelo. “You remember Ralphie?”

“Ralphie Suarez? Sure, good little
thief.”

“A good earner,” Werkle said.
“Respectful. Always quick with the giveup, sometimes even put in a little
extra when he was having a good week.”

He turned back to me. “Ralphie’s
grandpa was a friend of ours back in the Havana days, way before my time.
His son worked for Barozie for a lot of years, and when Don Carlo asked me
come to the east side, he gave me Ralphie. Wish I coulda brought him in
regular, but I mean, he was a spic, right? He was okay with being an
associate, though. He understood and always gave me respect.”

Werkle sighed. “So a week ago,
Ralphie was doing his thing over by The Hole. Him and Terry Legs, only
Terry wasn’t right there with him. And this
strunz
, one of that
pucchiacha
’s soldiers, shot him up real good. Up and down. Made him
dance. Terry heard the shooting and got there just when it was happening,
saw the whole thing. Couldn’t do nothing for Ralphie, but followed the fuck
back to the Floresta.”

The Hole was just what it sounded
like, a big hole in the ground. Years before the war, the city decided that
maybe the key to making eastside attractive to business was more mass
transit. There was already a subway line that went up the middle of the
city, from downtown to uptown, and they thought a direct line from the east
side to uptown might be just the thing. Live in uptown, hop a train to the
office in the revitalized eastside without having to transfer.

So they dug a tunnel, supposedly
even connected it to the Second Street Line. Never quite got around to
finishing the actual subway tunnel and laying track, because somebody
finally figured out how much money they were pissing away for a wet dream.
They fenced up The Hole and abandoned the job.

When I was working in eastside
before the war, the chainlink fence around The Hole had plenty of gaps and
it was a place where kids went to get high, or drink, or do whatever kids
do. Supposedly you could even go a few hundred yards into a tunnel before
you hit the first spot where it had collapsed.

“So you’re looking for the guy who
killed Ralphie?”

“No, we’re keeping an eye on that
fucking
puttana
,” he said. “Blood for blood. She killed one of mine
and I’m gonna massacre her real good.”

A very mob way of looking at
things. When Angelo had pulled the trigger on Frankie Lavino, it was Eddie
Gee who’d really killed him. Angelo was just the instrument. It was Eddie’s
hand that did the deed. Werkle looked at the death of Ralphie the same
way.

“Then we may be on the same page,
Mr. Werkle.”

“What does that mean?”

“The only way to stop what she’s
got planned for Christmas Eve may be to kill her. And if she has to die to
stop it, I’m ready to do it. Myself.”

Werkle studied me for a moment.
“It’s all well and good to talk about capping somebody. Sounds real easy.
Just a little squeeze on the trigger. But a lot of guys who think they got
the stones freeze up when it comes time. Empty-suit guys.” He paused. “You
done something like that before, Charlie? Killed somebody who wasn’t
shooting back?”

“Yeah.”

He glanced at Angelo. “Eddie
vouches for him?”

Angelo nodded. “Mr. Gabriel knows
Mr. Welles’s background and experience, and is aware of his intentions. He
takes Mr. Welles at his word.”

“Okay,” Werkle said. “Maybe we can
do a piece of work. We’ll wait for Bobby Acorns and see what we
see.”

Eichhorn showed up about twenty
minutes later. It was a very long twenty minutes, at least for
me.

Our coffee arrived and I took a sip
out of politeness But just one. I stay away from caffeine at night, even
when I’m tired. Mario returned and replaced the porcelain angel with
another that looked identical. Werkle rested his chins on his chest and
stared down at his desk. Angelo looked off into space.

There was no
conversation.

I really wanted more information
about what had happened at The Hole. What kind of ‘thing’ had Ralphie
Suarez been doing there? Was it a chance encounter that went bad, or did
the Human First Front have something going on in the vicinity?

But I didn’t want to be rude to
No-Neck Al and start asking a lot of questions. Certainly not at that
point. I’d see what I could get out of Eichhorn and go from
there.

A brisk knock at the door signaled
that Eichhorn had arrived. I looked over my shoulder as the door opened and
Alfie Werkle Jr. came into the room. Eichhorn was right behind
him.

He glanced at me as he walked in.
No reaction. He stopped a few feet back from the desk, Alfie beside him.
“Don Alfredo,” he said with a half-bow like the one Angelo had given
Werkle.

“Alfie, we’ll talk later,” Werkle
said. “Bobby, have a seat.”

“Sure, Poppa,” Alfie said. He
turned and left. Eichhorn crossed behind us and sat in the chair at
Werkle’s right.

Werkle looked at him. “Bobby, this
is Angelo, and I believe you know Mr. Welles. They’re friends of mine. Mr.
Welles would like to know about the Floresta.”

“Mr. Welles,” Eichhorn said with a
nod in my direction. “Good to see you again.”

“Good to see you...Special
Agent.”

He smiled. “Sorry about that.
Didn’t know you were a friend of Don Alfredo. The FBI gag is usually pretty
effective when we need to scare people off.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” I
said. “I didn’t actually buy it.”

“Really,” he said. “We’ll have to
talk about that. I thought it was pretty good.”

“Talk about it on your own time,
not mine,” Werkle said. His eyes met mine. “Ask your questions.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “How long were
you staked out at the Floresta, Bobby?”

“Started Monday afternoon and we’ve
been there since,” he said. “Don Alfredo told us to keep an eye on it and
that’s what we been doing.”

Six days.

“That woman I mentioned, the blond.
When I asked you to watch out for her, I got the impression that you knew
exactly who I was talking about. I also got the impression that you’d seen
her.”

Eichhorn nodded. “Yeah, it was the
same lady that Don Alfredo had us looking for.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“Oh, yeah, pretty much every day.
Three or four times most days, though we’ve only seen her a couple of times
since Thursday morning.”

The morning Michael Redmond was
shot.

“Is it always the same time of day
or does it vary?”

“Well, you know, it’s when they
bring the people to the building. Whenever that is, she usually meets them
at the front door before they all go inside. But like I said, that hasn’t
been happening much the past couple of days. We did see her when she went
inside Thursday morning with some of her boys, and this
morning...”

I held up my hand. “Stop there.
What do you mean, when they bring the people into the building?”

Eichhorn looked at Werkle, then
back at me. “You know, when her boys bring people to the
building.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t
know,” I said. “Why don’t you take it from the top, when you got
there.”

“Okay,” he said. “Me, Paulie and
Jack got there around three-thirty Monday afternoon.” He paused. “Paulie
Pirelli and Jack Bristow. You met ‘em. Anyway, we were checking the places
on the other side of Tuxedo from the Floresta. That apartment we’re
watching from had stairs going down to the backroom of the empty storefront
under it, and the storefront had a back door. Went to an alley that ran
back to McLendon. So we could come and go without attracting any attention,
which was important because those fucks at the Floresta are always
looking.”

“I’m more interested in the woman
and the people who were coming into the Floresta,” I said.

“Sure. We saw a couple of her boys
bring up some people just before it got real dark Monday night, but we
weren’t really set up. We saw somebody come out of the front door and talk
to them for a minute or so, then everybody went back inside. Probably the
lady, but like I said, we didn’t have our stuff ready and it was too dark
to really tell. Then Tuesday morning, when the next bunch arrived, we were
ready and we got a good look at her.”

“Describe her.”

“Like you said last night, short
blond hair, kinda like a dyke, around thirty or so. Tall, for a girl. Face
is kind of square, so she isn’t real pretty, but attractive enough, I
guess.”

Almost certainly Schleu. “Tell me
about the people?”

“The ones that were going
in?”

I nodded. “How many, what did they
look like?”

“I dunno,” he said. “They looked
like regular people. Neighborhood people. Men and women. No old people. All
white, no coloreds or spics. About eight or ten in every bunch.”

“They were escorted by Schleu’s
guys?”