Hooligans (55 page)

we‟re going to do the very best we can but I„m afraid that‟s not very much. Harry was shot in

the forehead. They‟ve done a scan and the bullet is lodged in the rear of the frontal lobe. It‟s

inoperable.”

She fell against him, her arms limp at her sides.

“I‟m going to give you something to relax you,” he said, but she started shaking her head

violently.

“No, I‟m not going to sleep through this. I‟ve been protected enough in my life. I‟m not a

child, George.”

“It won‟t put you to sleep, it will just take the edge off things a little.”

“I want the edge. I want to feel it all. Don‟t you understand? This isn‟t your problem or Mr.

Stoney‟s, it‟s mine. He‟s my husband and I will make whatever decisions are necessary here.

I can‟t do that stoned out on a cot.”

“Let her handle it her way,” Donleavy said quietly.

Hanson was uncomfortable. He patted her shoulder. “AS you wish,” he said.

“May I see him?”

“Of course,” Hanson said.

“I‟ll come along,” Donleavy said, and followed them into the ICU.

The minute they were out of the room, Titan turned on me, his teeth showing.

“Keep out of this,” he hissed, jabbing his finger in my face. “The one thing she don‟t need

right now is you.”

“That‟s up to her,” I hissed back.

“I‟m telling you, back off. Get out of her life. I blame all this on you, you and that bunch of

stumblebums of Morehead‟s. This never should have happened—”

“Forget it!” I barked back. “You can „t blame Morehead. Your mighty Committee screwed

up. That‟s how Tagliani got in here.”

“Damn you,” he said in a threatening whisper. “We ain‟t smart college boys like you hotshot

federals. So they got in! Morehead‟s job was to keep this element in line if they did.”

“Screw you, Titan,” I said vehemently. “You‟re just like the rest of these assholes who want

to pass the buck to somebody else.”

“I don‟t give a hoot owl‟s cross eyes what those wop bastards do to each other,” Titan said,

his voice rising to a shriek. “They want to kill each other off, that‟s goddamn good riddance, I

say.”

He was trembling with rage, the rage of a man whose power had been compromised.

“That ain‟t what I had to say to you, anyway,” he went on. “I‟ll try appealing to your sense of

honour, if you got any. Don‟t give the town reason to wag their tongues, doughboy. She

surely don‟t need such as that at this time.”

“Doe and I are old friends. Did it occur to you that I may be able to help?”

“Keep away from her!” he screamed.

“Mind your own fucking business,” I said softly, and left the room.

“What was that all about?” Dutch asked as I joined them.

“Titan got a little out of line,” I said.

“Titan doesn‟t get out of line,” Dutch said.

“Wrong,” I said. “He just did.”

We hung around for fifteen or twenty minutes. It was obvious that Raines‟ time was running

out, but the doctor was playing his prognosis close to the chest. Doe stayed in the unit with

Raines while Titan and Donleavy were knee to knee, palavering in the waiting room,

probably deciding who would replace Raines in the political structure. There were several

uniformed police hanging around and there was nothing further we could do, so we moved on

after I scribbled a brief note to Doe with some phone numbers on it and left it with a nurse.

It had cleared up outside. A warm summer wind had blown away the storm, leaving behind a

beautiful starry night. Dutch, Stick, and I drove back to the park in silence, each of us in his

own way trying to make sense out of what appeared to be a senseless holocaust plaguing

Doomstown.

There was still a light fog hanging over the Quadrangle, like a wisp of cloud, but I could see

across it to Warehouse Three, on the opposite side. Cobblestone walkways crisscrossed the

park like an asterisk, intersecting at its centre. One of them dissected the park and ran straight

to the river‟s edge; another ran between the bank and Warehouse Three.

Plainclothesmen and uniformed cops were still examining the scene and had extended their

yellow control ribbons around the entire park.

Raines had met his assailant about halfway between the back of the park, where Dutch‟s ear

witnesses were searching for the lost necklace, and the river. I stood next to the chalked form

on the walk and looked back and forth. Chip and his fiancée had been less than thirty yards

away when Raines was shot.

“I wonder what direction Raines was walking in and where he was going,” I mused aloud.

“His Mercedes is parked down behind the bank,” Stick offered.

I walked the fifty yards or so down to the river‟s edge. What had once been a dock had been

converted into a small fishing pier. The dark river swirled past its pillars, gurgling up small

black whirlpools. The river walk ran from River Road, where it turned and coursed up an

embankment to the highway above, along the river bank, and behind three warehouses that

had been converted into office buildings.

“Findley Enterprises is in Warehouse Three, next to the park, and Costello and Cohen have

their offices in One. That‟s three buildings down on the end,” Dutch offered.

I looked tip and down the river, then back toward the museum and the spot where Raines was

shot.

“Any ideas?” said Dutch.

I had a lot of ideas, all of them pure guesswork, none of them provable, and none I cared to

share at that moment.

“Not really,” I said. “How about you two?”

“Let‟s say Raines parked his car over at the bank and started across the pork toward the

Findley office,” Stick said. “That young couple was twenty, thirty yards away, talking. The

killer must have heard them. Seems to me whoever did the trick had to know the park pretty

well.”

“And knew which way Raines was coming, so he or she knew exactly where to wait,” Dutch

conjectured.

“And was pretty desperate,” I concluded.

“How so?” said Dutch.

“To shoot him down with witnesses a few yards away,” I said. “I call that taking a chance.”

We walked back toward the bank, looking on all sides of the walkways, but found nothing

else of interest. The locals had obviously worked the place over. I stood at the shooting site

for a moment or two more.

“Could‟ve been Nance,” said the Stick. “Could‟ve come down from Costello‟s office, waited

until Raines parked his car, started across the park, done the deed, and run back to Costello‟s

office.”

“Maybe,” I said. “A lot of maybes, as usual.”

“Why don‟t we talk this out over a piece of pie and coffee,” Dutch said. “This caught me in

the middle of dinner.”

“Suppose it wasn‟t Nance,” I said. “Suppose it was somebody who was so desperate they had

to take a chance and blitz Raines on the spot. What would they do?”

“Run in the opposite direction from the witnesses,” Dutch said. “Down toward the river.”

“Yeah,” 1 said. “And if they were real desperate, they might have ditched the weapon.”

“In the river,” Stick said.

“Exactly,” I agreed.

“George Baker,” both Stick and Dutch said in unison.

“Who‟s George Baker?” I asked.

“The best black-water diver in these parts,” said Dutch. “If there‟s a gun in the river, he‟ll

find it.”

“Think it‟s worth a chance?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” said Stick. “George‟d leave a movie queen‟s bed to go diving. It‟s how

he gets his jollies.”

“Then let‟s get him,” I said.

“How about pie and coffee?” Dutch implored.

“Let‟s see if we can dig up Baker first,” I said.

64

BLACK-WATER DIVE

Stick found Baker at home watching television. The diver, excited by the prospect of finding the

murder weapon, promised to keep his mouth shut and be on the pier at first light. Coffee and pie

brought Stick, Dutch, and me nothing but endless speculation. We packed it in early and I went to bed

after checking the hospital and being told that Raines‟ condition was “guarded.”

At five thirty am. I was back at the park with Stick, huddled over the river‟s edge in fog thicker than

the previous night‟s, sipping black coffee from a plastic cup and listening to George Baker describe

what he and his partner were about to do. Baker was a big man with a barrel chest, hulking shoulders,

a neck like a spare tire, and black hair cut shorter than a buck private‟s. A telephone man by trade, he

was a black-water diver by avocation and an auxiliary policeman, whatever that was, for the hell of it.

“It‟s dark down there,” he said dramatically as he pulled on his wet suit. His patois, a blend of

southern colloquial and old English, was as descriptive as it was archaic. He sounded like the hawker

for an old medicine show.

“Yessir, dark and dangerous. Don‟t take much more‟n a Mexico minute for a man to perish under

these waters. A man cannot afford errors of the mind, for you don‟t make any miscalculations, least

not more than once. Why, sir, I dive in waters so dark, even a torch will hardly cut their swarthy

depths. The bottom is either sugar mud, which is shifty and quicksandy, or it‟s covered with old, rusty

cables, the likes of an octopus, and old boat propellers, tin cans, and other such various obstacles from

time past when this here was a pier for mighty ships of the sea. Why, say, at high noon, it‟s so dark at

the depths of fifteen feet, I must, by needs, do everything by the touch of these here fingers.”

He wobbled ten fingers at us, just in case we didn‟t know what a finger was, and stared at them

himself with awe.

“Yessir,” he said, „sometimes there ain‟t nothin‟ twixt me and the Almighty but a measly ol‟

fingerprint.”

The bottom, Baker told us, sloped away from the bank for about thirty feet, then dropped off sharply

into the channel. He would use what he called his “tender system,” a ball of twine that he ran from

pillar to pillar and used as a guide under water. His buddy diver, a scroungy-looking young man

identified only as Whippet, who I later learned was a bootlegger by trade, kept track of his progress

by means of a tie line around Baker‟s waist.

“If I get in trouble,” said the master diver, “Whippet will endeavour to pull me up, careful but sure, in

hopes that I will survive whatever calamity might befall me.”

Baker also had a theory, derived from looking for more than just a few murder weapons in his time.

“A man most likely will throw the gun out in the water, such as flingin‟ a baseball,” he said, “whereas

a lady, who don‟t normally have much truck with guns, will tend to just drop the weapon

straightaway, so as to get ii out of hand as quick as is possible. I will operate from the edge of the

channel in, thereby usin‟ the tide to my advantage.”

“If I were guessing,” I volunteered, „I‟d say he or she dumped the gun fast, as soon as they reached

the end of the walk. There were witnesses who heard the shot from fairly close by.”

“Thank you, sir,” Baker said formally. “I‟ll keep that in mind.”

Fully dressed with mask and tanks, he could have modelled for a Hollywood monster, an enormous

black bulk peering like an owl through his face mask. He clambered down the side of the fishing pier,

vanished into the fog, and a moment later splashed into the water fifteen feet below us.

“If you got somethin‟ t‟do, might‟s well get on with it,” Whippet said, stuffing snuff under his lip.

“This‟ll most likely take a while.”

Stick and I groped our way through the fog, found a coffee shop, and took on breakfast.

“1 got a crazy idea,” I said.

He started to laugh. “Is that supposed to surprise me?” he asked. “Shoot.”

“This is a real long shot, but how about checking the local gun shops. Start with the better ones. See if

Donleavy, Seaborn, Raines, Sutter, or Logan, owns a .38 or something close to it.”

“Raines?”

“He‟s got a wife,” I said, without looking up from my eggs.

“Cover all the bases, don‟t you old buddy?” he asked coldly.

“No one is immune,” I answered, just as coldly.

“I thought murder was off our beat.”

“Anything that relates is our beat,” I said. “Humour me on this, I‟ve got an idea.”

“Okay, you‟re humoured. Want to tell me what it is?”

I gave him the short version of the idea before we were interrupted.

Charlie One Ear arrived bringing with him the autopsy reports on all the victims up to and including

Tony Lukatis and Stitch Harper.

“The same gun killed Tagliani, Stinetto, O‟Brian, Harper,” he told us. “A .22. All of them shot to hell

and gone except for Lukatis. He was shot only once, back of the head, with a .337. A .223 removed

Stizano and his people.”

“Coup de grace,” I said.

“What?” Charlie One Ear asked.

“Just thinking out loud.”

“So what else do you think?” he said.

“What I‟ve always thought. We got an M-16, probably with a forty-millimetre grenade launcher

mounted on it, that takes care of the Stizano massacre and Draganata. We got an American 180,

sounds like a dentist drill, fires a hundred eighty rounds in six seconds, which takes care of the

Tagliani kill, O‟Brian, and the boys on the boat. The rope trick was used on Logeto and Della

Norman. And we got a .337 that was used to put the insurance shots into Stinetto, Tagliani, and

Lukatis. Not that big an arsenal for all the damage that‟s been done to date.”

“How about Harry Raines?” Charlie One Ear asked.

“We won‟t know for sure until they get the slug out. Dutch says it was probably a .38 or close to it