“How about women?” I suggested.
“Boy oh boy, do they want something. My apartment, my salary, my pension.”
“Just because you’re good-looking?”
“Man,” he leered, “I may not be a beauty, but I sure got something that is. Well trained. Knows all the tricks. But that’s not what you want to know about. So what’s up?”
“Mike’s been thinking,” Pat said.
He nodded and waited.
I said, “You know about me being mugged. I mean,
classically
mugged?”
“Pat told me,” he said casually.
“Two of them questioned me about Penta. Their voices were accented, but at the time I was pretty cloudy from the shot they had given me and didn’t try to place the inflections. Every time I think back now I seem to come to one conclusion. Those accents were faked.”
“Well?”
My coffee was too hot to drink, so I sipped at it. “What’s your opinion on Penta?”
Wilson gave Pat another of those looks and Pat gave him the “go ahead” sign with his hands. He said to me, “I assume you’re asking me if the guys who grabbed you were from some government agency?”
“You got it.”
“Why?”
“Their method, their attitude. All that was pretty well structured.”
“Hell, Mike, even a bunch of punks could do that.
“Would punks want Penta?”
Pat held up his hand and interrupted. “Suppose as a mob hit man, DiCica thought he had killed Penta and didn’t. That still leaves him open to be knocked off.”
“Where does that put me then?” I asked Pat.
“In the middle, pal, right in the frigging middle. If you know
anything
about Penta, they wanted to know about it.”
“Then why did they leave my gun right there on the floor? No punk is going to walk away from a piece like that.”
Wilson let out a derisive laugh. “With the pieces we get in off the street, nobody would want an antique .45 like yours. Nowadays the hoods opt for Uzis, .357 Magnums and anything untraceable. A registered piece like your Colt could mean trouble.”
“Right,” I agreed. “But if they
did
come from some agency everything would still fit.”
“True.” Wilson finished his sandwich, wiped his hands on a napkin and lit up a butt. “All you wanted was my opinion?”
“That’s all.”
“Okay, they weren’t hoods. They had some intelligence going for them. They knew about the hospital, they had the car preparked, ready for a quick getaway. Sodium Pentothal or a quick-acting tranquilizer could be easy to get, but using Smiley’s garage meant plenty of preknowledge. One other thing, after you damaged two of their guys nobody bothered to lay anything on you. That’s a real professional attitude.”
He stopped, took a long drag on his butt and let the smoke drift toward the ceiling, watching it laze its way upward. “So they were government personnel?”
“I didn’t say which government. Or whose,” he replied easily. “Besides, all you wanted was an opinion.”
“There were FBI and CIA troops probing for more of the same an hour ago.”
“Carmody and Ferguson,” he stated.
“Those are the ones.”
“Old spooks. I know them. Good guys but dull. They were real busy during the Black Panther days. Later Ferguson spent a lot of time overseas helping smooth over some of the blunders we made.”
“You’re real current, Ray.”
He winked at Pat. “Interdepartmental cooperation, they call it.”
Now I took my time about polishing off my coffee. When it was gone I put it down slowly. Little things were beginning to show. I said, “Where does Bradley come into it?”
“He’s a State Department troubleshooter.”
“On what level?” I asked him.
“That I don’t know. He spent the last six months in England and was rotated back here about three weeks ago.”
Someplace there had to be a connection. “Penta’s beginning to have an international flavor.”
“Not necessarily,” Wilson told me. “State might be into this just to protect one of their own sources. Washington gets pretty damn touchy about the contacts they have running for them.”
“Like Pat runs me?”
Wilson grunted something unintelligible. “Yeah.”
“So who the hell is Penta?” I asked.
“And why did you kill him?” Pat said. When I gave him a nasty look he added, “That damn note meant something, Mike.”
“Not if it was DiCica he was really after. In that case you guys have a plain old murder and not some kind of conspiracy.” I got up to leave and tossed a buck down for my coffee.
“Somehow,” Pat insisted, “that note is important. Just how do you explain him saying ‘You die for killing me’?”
“Easy,” I said.
They both looked up at me.
“Somebody gave him AIDS.”
Pat’s eyes got hard and I waved him off before he could say anything. “Wasn’t me, buddy,” I said.
I thought the little guy in the oddball suit who shuffled up to me was another panhandler. When I closed the cab door he peered at me, a grin twisting his mouth, and said, “Remember me? I’m Ambrose.”
“Ambrose who?”
“How many people with a name like that you know? From Charlie the Greek’s place, man.”
Then I remembered him behind a mop getting the spilled beer off the floors. They called him Ambie then.
He said, “Charlie says for you to give him a call.”
“Why?”
“Beats me, man. He just told me to tell you that. And the sooner the better. It’s important.”
I told him okay, handed him two bucks and watched him scuttle away. When I got upstairs I dug out the old phone book, looked up the Greek’s place and called Charlie. His raspy voice started chewing me out for not stopping by the past six months and when he got finished he said, “There’s a gent that wants to meet with you, Mike.”
Charlie was an old-fashioned guy. When he said “gent” it was with capital quote marks around it, printed in red. Any “gent” would be somebody in the chain of command that led into the strange avenues of what they deny is organized crime. He wasn’t connected; he was simply a useful tool in the underworld apparatus.
“He got a name, Charlie?”
“Sure, I guess. But I don’t know it.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Like tonight. Can you make it down heré tonight?”
“You know what time it is?”
“Since when are you a day person?”
“He there now?”
“I got a number to call. He can be here in an hour.”
I looked at my watch. “Okay, but make it two. You think I ought to have some backup?”
“Naw. This guy’s clean.”
“Tell him to sit at the bar.”
“You got it, Mike.”
The Greek’s place was just a run-down old saloon in a neighborhood that was going under the wrecker’s ball little by little. Half the places had been abandoned, but Charlie’s joint was near the corner, got a regular trade and a lot of daytime transients. From four to seven every evening the gay crowd took over like a swing shift, then left abruptly and everything went back to sloppy normalcy.
A pair of old biddies were sipping beer at the end of the bar and right in the center was a middle-aged portly guy in a dark suit having a highball. His eyes picked me up in the back bar mirror when I came in and we didn’t have to be introduced. He waved Charlie over. I said, “Canadian Club and ginger,” then we picked up the drinks and went to a table across the room.
“Appreciate your coming,” he said.
“No trouble. What’s happening?”
“There are some people interested in Tony DiCica’s death.”
“Pretty messy subject. You know what happened to him?”
He bobbed his head. “Tough.”
“Yeah. He sure as hell messed up my office. But that’s not what you want to know.”
He stared around the room, then sipped at his drink. “You and that police officer checked out his apartment.”
“Right.”
“Did you find anything?”
“There was a loaded clip from an automatic, but no gun. The only thing he had was an old toolbox.”
“You’re coming at me fast and easy, buddy.”
“Negative answers are easy to give.”
“That place really get shaken down?”
“We didn’t take it apart.” I pushed my drink aside. I still hadn’t tasted it. “What should we have found?”
He gave me a long, steady look, then showed a little smile. “You would have known.”
Now I tasted my drink. Charlie had given me a double charge and barely taste it was all I did. The guy opposite was watching me curiously, not quite knowing how to steer the conversation. Finally I said, “Let’s get something squared away here. You guys don’t give a shit who knocked off DiCica, do you?”
“Couldn’t care less.”
“Don’t hand me that,” I told him. “You mean
unless
he got from Tony what you wanted.”
After thinking about it he acknowledged the point. “Something like that.”
I said, “You know, I don’t give a rat’s ass what Tony had. The guy who took him out thought he was me, and
I
give a shit who did the killing.”
“Some people aren’t going to look at it that way,” he told me. “Until they’re absolutely satisfied, you’re going to have a problem.”
“There’s one hell of a hole in your presentation, fella,” I said. “Tony’s been running loose a long time. If he had something, why didn’t they get it from him when he was alive?”
“You know about Tony’s history?”
“I know.”
“If you guess the answer I’ll tell you if it’s right.”
Hell, there could only be one answer. I said, “Tony had something he could hang somebody with.” The guy kept watching me. “He had permanent amnesia after getting his head bashed in and didn’t remember having it or putting it somewhere.” The eyes were still on mine. The storyline started to open up now. “Just lately he said or did something that might indicate a sudden return of memory.” The eyes narrowed and I knew I had it.
When he put his drink away in two quick swallows, he rolled the empty glass in his fingers a moment. “It came in the day he was killed. A week before he suddenly recognized somebody
they
kept close to him and called him by his right name.”
“Then he relapsed back into the amnesia again?”
“Nobody knows that.”
“Don’t tell me they never checked his apartment before.”
“Twice. Didn’t find a damn thing. If they had splintered the place he might have panicked. After all, he was living in a whole new world. If he stayed that way and the stuff stayed with him everything would’ve been okay. But he came out of it.”
Now I was beginning to see what he was getting at. “And you think somebody else was watching him too, waiting for him to shake off the amnesia.”
He just looked at me, not saying a word.
“Where do I come in?” I asked him.
“Mike, you got a big reputation, you know that?”
“So?”
“You have your fingers in all kinds of shit. You move with the clean guys and you go with the dirty ones just as easy. Nobody likes to mess with you because you’ve blown a few asses off with that cannon of yours and you got buddies up in Badgeville where it counts. So you’d be just the kind of guy Tony DiCica would run to with a story that would keep his head on his shoulders.”
“Crazy,” I said.
“Not really. He’d been to your office three times before.”
“Business with the printer. My secretary took care of it.”
“You say. He could have been discussing
his
business.”
“Wrong,” I stated.
“Can you prove otherwise?”
I thought a second. “No.”
“The day he was killed he had come in to arrange something with you. Before you got there somebody else showed up and did the job, expecting to walk away with the information. He didn’t have it on him, but he sure would have talked when he was getting his fingers whacked off.”
This thing was really coming back at me. “Okay, what’s my part?”
“He is your client, Mr. Hammer. He has told you all in return for an escape route you are to furnish.”
“That’s a lot of bullshit, you know.”
A gesture of his hands meant it didn’t make any difference. “You see, as far as certain people are concerned, you are in until they say you’re out. The information Tony had can be worth a lot of money and can cause a lot of killing. One way or another, they expect to get it back.”
“What happens if the cops get it first?”
“Nobody really expects that to happen,” he said. He pulled his cuff back and looked at his watch. “If the killer didn’t get the info from Tony he’ll be thinking the same way the others are ... that you have it or know where it is.”
I took one more sip of my drink and stood up. “I guess everybody wants me dead.”
“At least
certain
people are giving you a few days of grace to make a decision.”
I could feel my lips pulling back in controlled anger and knew it wasn’t a nice grin at all. I pulled the .45 out, watched his eyes go blank until I flipped out the clip and fingered a shell loose. I handed it to him. “Give them that,” I said.
“What’s this supposed to mean?”
“They’ll know,” I told him.
4
I’ve often wondered how Petey Benson got his information. The phone was his friend and the taxis were his ally. He seemed to know nobody, yet knew everybody. Twice in recent years his inside stories blew two administrations out of office and his penetration into a Wall Street operation almost wrecked a bank. Crime wasn’t his bag, but devious causes were. Breaking down the intricate machinations of the power jockeys brought a glow to his face.
We met in front of the Plaza Hotel, then ducked inside to the bar. At this time there were only two others at the far end, immersed in their own business. Petey slid an envelope to me and I pulled out two sheets of handwritten notes and a photostat.