Killer Mine (14 page)

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll get on it. Your loot ought to buy enough help to make it easier. Call me every once in a while.”

“Don’t worry.” He laid a bill on the table to cover the check and walked out.

When he was gone I dialed Jerry Nolan at his office, and when he was on I said, “Regan, Jerry.”

“I heard the results of the trial.”

“Not over yet. They’ll have to kick the negligence bit out What I did was S.O.P. and you know it.”

“I hope the commission does. What’s up?”

“Get me copies of the body shots of Marcus. I’m at Vinnie’s.”

“Hell, man, you saw them,” he said.

“So I want to do it again. I’m thinking straighter now.”

Jerry let out a resigned breath over the phone. “Okay, stay there. Give me a half hour.”

Twenty minutes later he was sitting where George had been and I had the eight-by-ten glossies spread out in front of me. They weren’t very pretty. Four different angles were covered, the details clear in every one. All six shots had taken Leo Marcus in his face, the first one blowing off the pinkey of his left hand as he tried to protect himself from his killer in that last second. Blood, brain, bone and hair were splattered against the fieldstone of the fireplace and the rest of him was lying in the remains of the fire that had cooked the top part of his torso to charred remains.

“Nice job,” I commented drily.

Jerry looked at me, his face tight “We would have bought the mistaken identity bit if it weren’t for the finger. It was stuck under the mantle. Two teeth from his plate were smashed into the log and three others with part of the plastic work intact were on the floor. In this case it was a special job and identifiable. The oral surgeon who did the work gave us an absolute position and our lab confirmed it”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Nothing else he could be identified by?”

“Hell, who needed it? No… nothing. No surgery, no broken bones, but if you don’t think we didn’t go all the way, get this. We brought in two of his broads. They took a damn close look at his privates and confirmed. You like that bit?”

“No.”

Jerry gave an exasperated snort. “Why not?”

“When they saw him before he was in a highly emotional state.”

“Oh, balls.”

“That’s what I mean.”

I sat there looking at the mess that had been Leo Marcus, the mess that I had made. There was no remorse, just the antagonizing feeling that I hadn’t been alive enough to know what I had done because if it had been me I would have wanted to see every damn slug splash into his fat face, the same goddamn face that had broken others with a single look and had winked more into sudden death because they had displeased him. That one face had hooked kids into the big H, steered the unknowing into the bright eyed things that knew all the answers and died early by their own hands, squeezed too many into shapeless forms whose minds were his… people, but not by the standards I knew.

“Jerry…”

“What?”

“I wish it
had
been me.”

“You sure it wasn’t?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It wouldn’t have happened so fast. I would have destroyed him slowly then let the law take care of him in that terrible, tantalizing way it has until he sat there crowded up against the arms of the big chair in Sing with the hood over his head and the electrodes on with all the witnesses watching and hoped he could hear them puke when the top of his head started to smoke from the juice going through him. No, it wasn’t me.”

“I know,” Jerry said. “Now I know.”

“You do? Why?”

“Because you aren’t capable of simple murder. I’ve seen you smoke out killers before. You lived with this one too damn long, Regan.”

“I’m still living with it.”

“Then give me the answers.”

I shuffled the photos like cards and stacked them and handed them back to him. “Somebody’s on top of Marcus. His time was up. They wanted him out and they got him out. I was the sucker to take the heat off them. It didn’t work.”

“Who, Regan?” Jerry asked me. His face was a blank mask, a professional mask no different from the one the punks saw in the interrogation rooms.

“Find out. That’s your business. I don’t carry a badge any more.”

“Or a gun?”

“I might do that. The hoods don’t mind. The punks take pleasure in it. The proper civilians terrified by the stupid Sullivan Act and forgetting they have the protection of the Constitution unrestricted by jerks are too obsessed by legal interpretations to pack one when they should may be like that. But not me, Jerry. I’m not a proper civilian any more.”

“You haven’t been kicked off the force.”

“You’re damn right.”

“Stay cool, buddy.”

“Like hell. You know better. We can’t exist cool, can we? Somebody has to move. It’s my neck on the block.”

“So you processed it. If anybody was in a position to know who was on top of Marcus, it’s Patrick Regan… you. Something had to show. He was hand picked by the rest of the Syndicate… he worked his way up, proved his worth every damn inch of the way and was a power. You don’t blast power out that easily. They have their own machine inside the big one and
coups d’état
aren’t easy.”

“For someone it was,” I reminded him.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“That’s what the D.A.’s lad tried as a last resort when the trial was on.”

“Shit.”

“What else is new?”

To keep calm, Jerry grabbed at his butts, lit up a smoke and deliberately sat back looking at the ceiling. “Give me one idea,” he finally mused.

“Did Van Reeves contact you about the Swiss broad?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She was the redhead, buddy.”

His eyes came down from the ceiling and searched my face.
“Now
you tell me.”

“Last contact was Ray Hilquist. She lived with him.”

“You son of a bitch. Where do you pick it up?”

“I’m fighting for my life,” I said. “Remember?”

Jerry took another pull on the cigarette, his features thoughtful now. “Hilquist and Leo Marcus used to be tied in together. Just little things. Nothing worth pulling them for, but they were close.” He wasn’t looking at me now. He was reviewing the records mentally, pulling out the files in his mind the way cops do, remembering the little things that count. “They had a split once,” he told me. “A broad was involved. Word got out that the wheels in the Syndicate called a meeting and pulled them back together, otherwise it was an ‘or else’ deal. They didn’t like some twist interfering with business. No sweat after that. Too much action was involved. You have posed an interesting thought, Regan.”

“Keep on it.”

“I will.” He leveled his eyes at me. “But you stay cool,” he said as he got up. “When you’re thinking you scare me.”

“I’ll scare a lot of people before it’s through,” I told him.

CHAPTER FOUR

STAN THE PENCIL wasn’t hard to find. Like all the rest, he had his money rounds; the habituals with the two bucks, the fivers, the ten spots who waited for him in the right places to pick up their cash and slap it on the nose of some nag running the circuit. To him it was a living, two fifty a week with a few weeks in the workhouse when the administration needed a patsy to pad the news reports.

All expenses paid and his wife and kids supported while he was staring at the bars wondering when the legislature would legalize off-track betting like the people wanted despite the pious claims of the backwards-collar gooks and the political slobs who went their way.

I found him at The Shamrock making his book in a cheap pad, his eyes too suddenly round at what he saw in my face. I said, “Talk, Stan. Let’s take a table somewhere.”

“Look…”

“I’m off the force, Stan, but I can still break you in little pieces. Here and now. Your choice.”

“So all right. Talk. It’s cheap.”

I grabbed his arm, pushed him to a table and called for a couple of beers. When the waiter brought the steins I sipped the top off mine and put it down and watched the wet circles it made on the table top. “You were there that night, Stan.”

“Was I called as a witness?”

“Nope.”

I let my eyes drift up to his, feeling the air go through my teeth again. “You’ve been around, boy. You know the ropes and the angles. Nothing gets past your kind. I thought nothing did through me, but something did. What was it?”

“Look, Mr. Regan…”

“Think, buddy. It’s your arm. Left or right first?”

Stan The Pencil was scared. His throat bobbed convulsively and a vein in his temple throbbed too damn hard. “Mr. Regan… it was like they said. You got looped. Hell, I’d do what I could if…”

“There was something. I came in that bar sober.”

“You had a headache. You was eating aspirins.”

“I’d just bought them, Stan. An unopened box at the drugstore on the corner. I had six. It’s an occupational hazard.”

“So I didn’t see nothing. No kidding, Mr. Regan…”

“Who slipped me a dose?”

He could hardly keep his hands folded in front of him. “Honest, Mr. Regan, it was like you had too much. So who was there? Them crazy artists, Popeye Lewis and Edna Rells, they ain’t done nothing. Who could louse you up? You know old Popeye. He got nothing going for him except his paintings and fifty million bucks he hates. That nutty Edna he lives with is just as bad. All that loot and they shack up in a garret even if he does own the whole joint. He won’t live off nothing his old man left him, just what they make with that crazy smear they sell. Me, so what did I do? Make a few contacts? I thought it was a good party.”

“Where did the redhead come in?”

“Who knows?” he said. “Dames were all over the place.”

“You saw her?”

“I saw plenty of broads. She latched on when you started the big pitch. Come on, Mr. Regan.”

“How long have I known you, Stan?”

“Like maybe five years.”

“Ever get yanked?”

“Hell, you weren’t on that detail.”

“Phones were all over the place,” I reminded him. “I could have assigned it anytime.”

“All right, all right. You were square. What you want from me, anyway?”

“The redhead.”

Stan The Pencil’s hands were in tight knots, the fingers twisted together. “Like she drifted over. You pitched, she caught. I cut out about then. I don’t know from nothing. I told them all that.”

“You know her?” I watched him closely.

He caught the funny look in my eyes and said, “I know her now. Not before. I seen it in the papers.”

“Let’s think back.”

“What for?”

“Leo Marcus and Hilquist.”

“Mr. Regan…”

“Stop bullshitting me.”

His face got sullen and his eyes dropped to his hands.

I said, “What’s the racket talk?”

“Some broad,” Stan said softly. “This gonna hurt me?”

“No.”

“Marcus fixed it. What difference does it make now?”

“Because I got fixed too,” I said.

Very simply he looked up and said, “I’m more scared of them than you, Mr. Regan. What now?”

“Nothing, buddy,” I said. “You can blow now.” He hadn’t told me anything, but he’d think he had and he’d be different later.

I got out and walked. My apartment was fifteen blocks away but I had to think about it. A month gone sitting on a bail bond because they wanted to get it over with in a hurry, the eyes of a guy who had been close friends looking at you speculatively, the hatred of the press and the animosity of the public because they thought a hard-working career cop took five grand instead of his life’s work. Nuts.

The rain started in a gentle mist at first, working up to a great gout that caught me on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-ninth and when I walked through it, ignoring all its malicious fury, developed a rumble with heat lightning in the west that growled its displeasure at me.

I said, “Drop dead,” toward the sky and kept walking while people watched curiously. Screw them too, I thought. If they knew who I was, they’d spit. The killer cop. He had gotten away with murder.

Well, thank somebody for twelve good men and true who had bought the story.

I hoped they were right.

There was still a chance they weren’t.

I went over it again, knowing the odds I was up against. I reached the apartment and studied the old brownstone from the outside, realizing that anybody could get inside there. Hell, for a pro, you could get anywhere. A key was easy to get. I inserted my own in the lock, turned it and pushed the door open. It was only a three room flat you could expect a bachelor cop to occupy, nothing special no matter how hard you looked. The only extravagance was the wall safe with nothing in it outside a will, a birth certificate and two diplomas, compliments of the butcher downstairs who thought I needed more security. The Marcus file had been stowed in the false bottom of the rectangular bottom of the waste basket by the old desk I used, a nothing place an ordinary housebreaker would have missed and a pro looking for the right thing in the right place found. The five grand was in a new place, too damn obvious, an area above the unpainted pine that formed a ceiling in the bedroom closet.

It was newly cut and that was what had made it all the more damning.

Out of curiosity I checked the apartment. The signs of white dust from the print teams the department sent in were still showing on the furniture, wisps here and there like an untidy woman would make from powdering after a bath, the
stigmata
of the professionals taking care of their own.
Or frying him if they had to.

I lay down on the bed, listening to the air going out of the mattress with a soft hiss and closed my eyes, thinking of how nice it was to sleep and be away from it all. There was a sweet smell of pleasure there, a sensual odor of the far-off things that could never be attained for someone like me and sleep was the utmost pinnacle of desire. It was a gentle, wafting breeze that talked to me from way down deep and out of the downy fluffiness of it all I could hear a strange voice that had turned us into the wild assed bastards they couldn’t beat with all of the Nazi deviousness and the man kept saying, “They’ll try anything. If it’s foreign to you, cut out and run. Shoot. No matter who. Blow out your breath and get away. They have chemical warfare to offset our superiority in noxious gases. They want you. Remember…
YOU. You
have information. They’ll do anything. They’ll do…”