Hooligans (10 page)

matter.”

“When Nose comes out, he comes out like a Brahman bull comin‟ out of the chute,” said Dutch.

“Did he keep the business while he was gone?” I asked.

“It was nip and tuck. The trip cost everybody. In the end it was a trade-off—three of Graves‟ boys

vent down in the street; a couple of McGee‟s shooters ended up in the swamp.”

“Is it still going on?”

“Not since McGee and his top gun got their brains handed to them, wham, bam, just like that,” said

Dutch.

“Hey, Chief, it‟s the phone for you,” Chino yelled from across the room. “It‟s Kite Lange, babblin‟

like Niagara Falls.”

“Excuse me,” Dutch said, and dashed for the phone.

“Who‟s this Mufalatta Kid?” I asked the Stick.

“Black cop, out from New Orleans. He‟s very good. Moves easy on the range. A real cool operator,

but make him mad, you got a ton of bad nigger on a hundred-and-fifty-pound frame.”

Dutch‟s “Schmerz!” could be heard for miles. The room got as quiet as a prayer meeting. Then he

said it again, this time louder and, to everyone‟s shock, in English. “Holy shit!”

He slammed down the phone.

“Somebody just blew up Johnny Draganata in the family swimming pool while Lange was sittin‟

shiva half a block from his house,” the Dutchman bellowed.

The war room sounded suddenly like a hen house.

“Now listen t‟me,” Dutch boomed. “I want Tagliani‟s bunch covered like a strawberry sundae, and

now. I‟m goin‟ up to Draganata‟s. Chino, you come with me. The rest of you know your marks. Let‟s

roll before the whole town gets snuffed.”

He rushed back to us.

“You two wanna join us?”

“We wouldn‟t miss it for the world,” I said.

“Let‟s roll,” the Dutchman roared, and moved faster than any big man I ever saw.

11

It was like Saturday afternoon at the county fair and the Stick was Joey Chitwood. He slapped the

blue light on the top of his black Firebird and took off, driving with one hand while he lit cigarettes,

tuned the police radio, and hit the siren with the other, cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth as

he talked. Pedestrians and traffic ran for cover before the screaming Pontiac. I hunkered down in my

seat and stiff-armed the console.

“You nervous?” he asked.

“Not a bit,” I lied.

He hit Azalea Boulevard sideways and straightened out doing seventy. I could feel the seat moving

out from under me.

I liked the Stick‟s cavalier attitude, but his driving was downright hazardous. I knew he had to be a

good cop or he wouldn‟t be in the Freeze. The Federal Racket Squad, which everybody called the

Freeze, was three years old, understaffed, underpublicized, underlobbied, and under the gun. The FBI

wanted to make it part of their dodge, but so far we had maintained our integrity because our job was

mainly gathering information, not strict law enforcement. At least, that‟s what it was supposed to be.

Sometimes it didn‟t work out just that way. Cisco Mazzola, who had formed the outfit, was an exstreet cop and he hired only street cops. As far as I could tell, the Stick fit in perfectly.

He seemed to know the town. His course took us down a few alleys and past an impressive row of old

homes, restored to Revolutionary grandeur, their lights blurring into a single streak as we vaulted

down the street.

“How long you been here?”

“Coupla months,” he said around the cigarette dangling from his lips.

“So you were here for the Graves-McGee showdown?”

“Just after it happened.”

“I knew a Philly shooter who operated out of Pittsburgh named McGee,” I said, still making small talk

“But he called himself Ipswich.”

“I wouldn‟t know about that,” Stick said. “Actually, it was all over when I got here. All I know is

what I heard on the gas pipe.”

More turns. More screaming tires. More fleeing pedestrians.

“What‟s this Graves like?” I asked.

“Like Dutch said, for years he had the town sewed up. I get the idea the local law left him alone as

long as he didn‟t get too far out of line,”

“Wasting McGee wasn‟t getting out of line?” I asked.

“Y‟know, I don‟t think anybody blamed him for the McGee thing. In fact, I get the feeling the locals

were glad he did McGee

in.

“Could he be behind this Tagliani chill?”

“I suppose he could. Mufalatta‟s keeping an eye on him. If anybody will know, the Kid will.”

We drove away from the downtown section and across the bridge to Skidaway Island, which lay

between the city and the beach. The rain had stopped and the moon seemed to be racing in and out of

the clouds. As we crossed the bridge, the old-town charm of Dunetown vanished, swallowed up by

redwood apartment complexes and condos that looked like gray boxes in the fleeting moonlight.

There was something sterile and antiseptic about Skidaway. Twenty years ago it was a wild,

undeveloped island, a refuge for wildlife and birds. Now it appeared almost overpopulated.

Stick took Ocean Boulevard like it was Indianapolis. The souped-up engine growled angrily beneath

us and the needle of the speedometer inched past one-twenty. The landscape became a blur. Five

minutes of that and he downshifted and swerved off the four-lane and headed off through a

subdivision, its houses set back from the road behind carefully planted trees and shrubs. In the dark it

could have been any planned community.

“Cisco says you lived here once,” Stick said past the cigarette clenched between his teeth.

“I just spent a summer here,” I answered, trying to adjust my eyes to the fleeing landscape.

“When was that?”

“I hate to tell you. Kennedy was still the President.”

“That long ago, huh?” he said, somewhat surprised.

“I was still a college boy in those days,” I said. I was beginning to feel like an antique.

He made a hairpin turn with one hand.

“Surprised you, huh, how much it changed?”

I laughed, only it didn‟t come out like a laugh; it sounded like I was gagging.

“Oh, yeah, you could say that. You could say I was surprised, and I haven‟t even seen the place in the

daylight.”

“I couldn‟t tell you about all that. No frame of reference, y‟know.”

“This used to be a wildlife refuge,” I said. “That give you an idea?”

He flipped the cigarette out the window and whistled through his teeth.

“I doubt if you‟ll see a sparrow out here now. Rents are too high.”

He swerved into Highland Drive without even making a pass at the brakes and lit another cigarette at

the same time. I started thinking about taking a cab when I saw half a dozen blue and whites blocking

the street ahead, their red and blue lights flashing. We pulled up behind one of them, leaving a mile or

so of hot rubber in the process. Ground never felt better underfoot.

I could smell salt air when we got out of the car.

“Lock up,” the Stick said. “Some fuckhead stole my hat once.”

“So I heard,” I said as we headed toward the house, which sat a hundred yards or so back from the

road against high dunes. An electric fence was the closest thing to a welcome mat.

I began to get the feeling that this whole bunch of hooligans, Stick included, were like Cowboy

Lewis. They definitely believed the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. I also

began to wonder where due process fit into all this, if it fit in at all.

We reached the fence, showed some bronze to the man on the gate, and started up the long drive on

foot. Dutch was right behind us. I could see his enormous hulk silhouetted against the headlights of

the patrol cars. The body lay, uncovered, at the pool‟s edge. A breeze blew in off the bay, rattling the

sea oats along the dunes above.

The old man was unrecognizable. Whatever had blown up, had blown up right in his face. One of his

arms had been blown off and either be had been knocked into the pool or was in it when the bomb

went off, The water was the colour of cherry soda.

There were blood and bits of flesh splattered on the wall of the brick house.

All the windows in the back were blown out.

A woman was hysterical somewhere inside.

“What kind of maniac we got here?” Dutch said, as quietly as I‟d heard him say anything since I

arrived in Dunetown.

“Right under my fuckin‟ nose,” Kite Lange said. And quite a nose it was. It looked like it had been

reworked with a flat iron, and he talked through it like a man with a bad cold or a big coke habit. To

make it worse, he was neither. His nose simply had been broken so many times that his mother

probably cried every time she saw him. He had knuckles the size of Bermuda onions.

Ex-fighter, had to be.

He was wearing ragged leans, a faded and nicked denim battle jacket, no shirt under it, and a pair of

cowboy boots that must have set him back five hundred bucks. „The headband he wore had to be for

show—he didn‟t have enough dishwater-blond hair left to bother with. He also had a gold tooth, right

in the front of his bridgework. I was to find out later that he was a former Golden Gloves

middleweight champion, a West Coast surfer, and, for ten years, a bounty hunter for a San Francisco

bail bondsman before he went legit and joined the police.

Salvatore appeared through the bright lights, nosing around.

“I thought you were gonna check out Stizano,” Dutch said. “What the hell are you doin‟ here?”

“A look-see, okay? Where‟s Stizano gonna go anyway? He‟s an old fart and it‟s past ten o‟clock.”

“You don‟t think the whole bunch ain‟t hangin‟ on by their back teeth at this point? Somebody just

wasted their king.”

“They‟re on the phones,” Salvatore said confidently. “They‟re jawin‟ back and forth, tryin‟ to figure

out what the hell to do next. What they ain‟t gonna do at this point is bunch up. Jesus, will you look at

this!”

I was beginning to get a handle on Dutch‟s hooligans, on the common strain that bonded them into a

unit. What they lacked in finesse, they made up for with what could mercifully be called individuality.

There‟s an old theory that the cops closest to the money are the ones most likely to get bent. Dutch

went looking for mavericks, men too proud to sell out and too tough to scare off. Whatever their other

merits, they seemed to have one thing in common—they were honest because it probably didn‟t occur

to them to be anything else.

“First Tagliani‟s wife gets whacked,” Lange said. “And the old man‟s grandson almost got it here.”

“This here don‟t read like a Mafia hit t‟me,” Salvatore said. “Killing family members ain‟t their

style.”

“Maybe it was a mistake,” the Stick volunteered.

“Yeah,” Dutch said, “like Pearl Harbor.”

“More like a warning,” I said.

“Warning?” Lange and Dutch asked at the same time. A lot of eyebrows made question marks.

“Yeah,” I said, “a warning that he or she or it—whoever he, she, or it is—means to waste the whole

clan.”

“Tell me some more good news,” said Dutch.

“So why warn them?” Lange said.

“It‟s the way it‟s done,” said Salvatore. “All that Sicilian bullshit.”

“Now we got four stiffs, and we‟re still as confused as we ever were,” Dutch said. “Hey, Doc, you got

any idea what caused this?”

The ME, who was as thin as a phalanx and looked two hundred years old, was leaning over what was

left of the old man. His sleeves were rolled up and he wore rubber gloves stained red with blood. He

shook his head.

“Not yet. A hand grenade, maybe.”

“Hand grenade?” the Stick said.

“Yeah,” the ME said. “From up there. He was blown down here from the terrace. See the

bloodstains?”

“There were two,” Lange said.

“Two what?” the ME asked.

“Explosions. I was sittin‟ right down there. The first one was a little muffled, like maybe the thing

went off underwater. The second one sounded like Hiroshima.”

“Woke ya up, huh,” Dutch said.

The ME still would not agree. He shook his head. “Let‟s wait until I get up there and take a look. The

pattern of stains on the wall there and the condition of the body indicate a single explosion.

“I heard two bangs,” Lange insisted.

“How far apart?” I asked.

“Hell, not much. It was like. . . bang, bang! Like that.”

I had a terrifying thought but I decided to keep it to myself for the moment. The whole scene was

terrifying enough.

The woman screaming uncontrollably inside the house didn‟t help.

“Homicide‟ll clean this up,” Dutch said. “I‟m lust interested in the autopsy. Maybe there‟s something

with the weapons‟ll give us a lead.”

The homicide man was a beefy lieutenant in his early forties dressed in tan slacks, a tattersall vest, a

dark brown jacket, and an atrocious flowered tie. His name was Lundy. He came over shaking his

head.

“Hey, Dutch, what d‟ya think? We got a fuckin‟ mess on our hands here, wouldn‟t ya say?”

“Forget that Lindbergh shit, Lundy. This isn‟t a „we,‟ it‟s a „you.‟ Homicide ain‟t my business.”

Lundy said with a scowl, “1 need all the help I can get.”

Dutch smiled vaguely and nodded. “I would say that, Lundy.”

“Can ya believe it, Dutch,” Lundy said, “that little kid almost bought it!”

it occurred to me that nobody had expressed any concern for Grandpa Draganata, whose face was all

over the side of the house. I mentioned my feelings quietly to the Stick.

“What‟d you expect, a twenty-one-gun salute?”

“Four stiffs in less than three hours,” Dutch mused again. “This keeps up, I‟ll be out of work before