Target Lancer (31 page)

“Affirmative.”

“Tommy … were you working for the CIA over there?”

“I’m sorry, but I was told that was classified.”

“Well, since you got out of the Marines … have you worked with the CIA?”

“That’s classified, too.” His eyebrows scrunched. “Were you
really
a Marine?”

“I was.”

“And your name really is Heller?”

“It is.”

“So not everything was lies when we talked.”

“Not at all.”

“Are you with the Company, too, Mr. Heller? Are you debriefing me?”

Christ. I didn’t like where this was heading. For example, if he’d been training Cuban exiles on Long Island, that likely made him some small part, at least, of Operation Mongoose.

“You could call it that, Tommy. Were you on your way to work when those Chicago cops stopped you today?”

“Negative. We were closed today.”

“Were you heading there, anyway? To IPP? Or maybe to some other building on West Jackson?”

“Negative.”

“Okay. What were you doing with all that ammunition and those guns in your trunk?”

“Could I see your ID?”

I showed him the Justice Department credentials. He frowned as he examined them—they weren’t Central Intelligence Agency, but they were official, all right. And not Secret Service.

He sat and mulled that for a good thirty seconds. Then he swallowed. He’d decided what he wanted to say.

“I wasn’t planning to shoot the President. I think somebody
thinks
I was. Because I work on West Jackson. And the motorcade would go right by, and getting off a shot wouldn’t be hard. But that was never my intention. I think … I think I’m being framed for this.”

“Really.”

He nodded. “I got a call from someone I trust. I don’t want to say more. I
can’t
say more. But it was an opportunity for me to make some money this morning.”

I was ahead of him. “When the cops stopped you, you were on your way somewhere to sell guns and ammunition. You had a buyer.”

He nodded. “The deal was to go down at a parking lot in the Loop. I was supposed to wait there. An unspecified time. As long as it took. But I never made it—around nine-fifteen, those cops pulled me over.” The big eyes grew wider. “Is he all right?”

“Is who all right?”

He seemed very earnest. Like he might cry. “The President.
Did
someone shoot him?”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because I think somebody knew about how I felt toward him. Somebody with special knowledge about me and my background and my beliefs. But I’m a good American and a former Marine and wouldn’t do that. I speak my dissatisfied mind under the Freedom of Speech. But I didn’t do it, Mr. Heller. I was framed.”

I raised a calming palm. “Nobody did anything, Tommy. The President canceled his trip.”

He blinked. Sat back. “Nobody told me.”

I rose. “You relax. I don’t think you’ll get anything out of this arrest except maybe a fine. Maybe an overnight stay in lockup. Okay?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I went out and found Shoppa and Gross sitting at a vacant desk they’d commandeered, having coffee. Shoppa was lighting his latest noxious cigar.

I said, “Did you fellas know the President’s trip had been canceled when you pulled Vallee over?”

They looked blankly at me, and then the same way at each other, and then Shoppa shrugged and waved out his match and said, “Yeah, it came over the radio right around nine.”

Official word hadn’t gone out till around 9:15. Those cops in squad cars with bullhorns had been at maybe 9:20 or 9:25. But law enforcement involved in motorcade security would have been told first. At nine.

I asked perhaps too casually, “Why did you wait till after the trip had been canceled to pull Vallee off the street?”

Shoppa’s expression darkened. “We didn’t pull him over till he made that wrong turn! We couldn’t nab him for no fuckin’
reason,
Heller!”

Like
that
had ever stopped the Chicago police.

Shoppa’s cigar jutted from a corner of his mouth. “What the hell are you implying?”

“Nothing. Just that you were asked to pull Vallee off the street because he’s a danger to the President, and it’s interesting you didn’t get around to that till the President wasn’t in danger anymore.”

Shoppa and Gross just laughed and waved me off, like I was a gnat too tiny to warrant swatting. Then, as if I had vanished in a cloud of pixie dust, they returned to their coffee and conversation, and one of the Secret Service crew cuts tapped me on the shoulder.

“Chief Cain of the SIU is in your office, Nate.” He pointed, as if I might have forgotten the way. “Waiting to talk to you.”

“Thanks.”

I wanted to talk to him, too.

CHAPTER
20

I shut myself in my office with Dick Cain, who was already settled in the visitor’s chair, his feet up on my desk, drinking a bottle of Coke he had wangled from somewhere. The reddish-brown-haired detective was in an olive Ivy League suit and his socks were dark green with black brogans.

“Make yourself at home, why don’t you?” I said, sitting across from him.

He removed his feet, grinned at me, set the Coke on a scrap of paper, then settled back in the chair. His green-eyed gaze behind the black-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses would have been reassuring had it not been for that milky left eye.

“Everything is copasetic,” he said, and gestured with two open palms. “You never shot anybody. Those two white kids never existed. You want the details?”

“Hell no.” I leaned back. “But I would like to know what the fuck is
really
going on.”

Dick just grinned at me. “What do you mean, what the fuck is really going on?”

“Like—what’s this about you being a Company guy?”

He shrugged. “I’m not a Company guy. You mean CIA? That’s bullshit.”

“Utter bullshit? Complete bullshit? Or just plain bullshit?”

He smirked and batted the air dismissively. “I did some electronic jobs for them when I had my office down in Mexico—during that little hiatus between my Chicago PD time and this sheriff’s office gig. So what? Lots of Chicago cops have done business with those spooks. Taken training, traded favors.”

“Cops like Shoppa and Gross out there?”

“Yeah. Sure. What of it?”

I was shaking my head. “I don’t know, Dick. I don’t know. But some things are starting to make sense to me. A kind of a theory is forming.”

He reached for the Coke, swigged it. “This oughta be good.”

“That kid Thomas Arthur Vallee, sitting in Interview One right now? What if he was supposed to be the patsy today? Put in position to take the fall for the real shooters—the ones that disappeared? Remember them?”

He snorted a laugh. “My understanding is that kid is a screwball. A fag screwball at that.”

“Right. And he’d have been the fag screwball ex-Marine who popped the President, all on his own. Crazy collage in his apartment, lots of big talk about killing JFK, ties to the John Birch Society, perfect.”

“Nate. Really. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“Why, is it an accident Vallee and the real printing-plant shooter wore the same fucking shirt today? Is it just a coincidence that the two Chicago cops assigned to bring in the nut who threatened Kennedy waited till the President’s trip got canceled before doing it? I’m supposed to believe
your
handpicked dicks didn’t intend to follow Vallee to that parking lot, where he was heading to a nonexistent gun sale?”

“And do what?”

“What do you think? Wait for word that JFK had been shot, after which they would bring the schmuck in to fit some early suspect description. Or maybe just force or stage a shoot-out. Didn’t you leave the force ’cause they thought you’d staged a shoot-out, Dick?”

Cain’s expression darkened and he sat forward and clunked the now-empty Coke bottle hard on my desk. “Are you
serious
about this?”

“I always get serious after I kill a couple of nameless assholes. I’m sensitive that way. Were those soldier boys Company, too, Dick? How about the Cubans? Are they assets? Like Vallee is an asset, only
smarter,
and up a level or two?”

“You really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Has the CIA finally had it up to here with those skirt-chasing Kennedy boys? Or is this just rogue elements, still sulking over the Bay of Pigs? Gung ho to get rid of JFK, and set up some schmuck like the Vallee kid to take the fall?”

Now he laughed, or pretended to. He got out his pack of Dunhills—moving carefully, I noted—and lit one up. Sucked smoke in. Let it out.

“Quite a yarn, Nate. Why don’t you go next door and try peddling it to Martineau? Wait … I know! It’s because it’s a pile of unbelievable crap. Why are you telling
me
all this? You think I’m part of it, this James Bond coup you concocted? I didn’t know you smoked the same cigarettes as your musician pals.”

“I have no idea who the mastermind is,” I admitted. “Hoffa? Marcello? Giancana? Maybe Trafficante, or maybe take one from column A, two from column B. Probably not Johnny Rosselli. Certainly not
you
. You were a kind of point man, weren’t you?”

He seemed about to rise. “If you’re gonna keep this up, I’ve got better things to do.…”

“You know me, and you know me well. When I turned up as a bodyguard for Tom Ellison, at that money drop, that meant Ellison wasn’t following orders. In fact, he’d pulled in Nate Heller of all people, a guy already connected to some of the players and a snoop to boot. You figured it wise to do something about it. About Ellison, anyway, who was the kind of civilian who could prove to be a problem. Me, an insider with my own dirty laundry, different story. You stayed close to me, showing up at the hotel crime scene, to see if I could be handled, or at least sent off in the wrong direction.”

“I was there, Nate, because the victim had your card in his damn billfold.”

“No he didn’t. I never gave Ellison my card.”

He was leaning far forward now, a vein throbbing in his forehead. “You think
I
killed Tom Ellison?”

“Well, Mad Sam probably killed Tom. Ice pick. Right height, too. I’d almost pay to see Sam in a bellboy outfit, though, if that’s how he swung it. No, you ordered the hit, or Rosselli, or you two came to the mutual conclusion that Ellison was a loose end. What made him important enough a loose end to tie off, I still can’t figure. But in a plot to kill the President—”

“You really think I orchestrated a
plot
to kill the
president
?”

“You’re part of it. But it failed, didn’t it? It fucking failed.”

He flopped back in the chair and he was grinning, but it was forced. He did have a gun under his left shoulder—his tailor wasn’t as good as mine.

“Nate—you’re kidding, right? This is your idea of a Second City skit or some shit.”

“No, Dick, I think I’m right on the money. Not that there’s anything I can do about it. I could warn Bobby, but I don’t exactly think you’re gonna try again. Not with the scheme exposed. You fucked up. You failed. It’s over.”

He got to his feet, stubbed out the Dunhill in an ashtray on my desk. He was smiling, and it wasn’t pretty, not with that milky-eyed stare a part of it. “I’m not saying there’s anything to this, Nate. But keep a couple of things in mind. You shot two men today, and I covered it up for you. And do I have to whisper those two little words? The ones that guarantee you can’t go public?”

Operation Mongoose
.

I said, “Why kill Ellison over Jack Ruby getting passed ten measly grand?”

Suddenly Dick’s expression carried a remarkable lack of human emotion, and it came to me that his Dana Andrews–ish features had probably never worn any actual human emotion. He was one of those guys missing a small but vital part of the machinery we call humanity—an alien from Planet X who could only imitate human feeling.

He said, “I thought you had everything figured out, Nate. But you don’t, because there
is
nothing
to
figure out. You’re a paranoid seeing spooks in a big dark old house. You don’t have any evidence, not a shred. You’re just a guy who has had a very tough week who is walkin’ around delirious on his damn feet. You go around spewing crazy ideas like these, you might have problems, even though there’s nothing to it.”

Cain was right. And I was on dangerous ground.

“Not from
me,
” he said with a grin. A practiced grin, it now seemed. “But these wild accusations, about those kind of people—Rosselli, Hoffa, and on up that ladder you mentioned—a guy can wake up dead.”

I thought about killing him right there. It might be the only way to protect myself, and—more important—my son. But alone on some deserted warehouse floor of a printing plant was one thing. Next door to the Chicago chief of the Secret Service was another.

“You’re right,” I said. Sighed, shook my head, and gave him a grin as phony but I hoped believable as the one he’d just flashed me. “I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with me. Maybe it’s the Mexican food I had last night. Maybe I should get a good night’s sleep for a change.”

Actually I’d slept long and well last night.

Cain seemed relieved. Whether he really was or not, who could say?

And now he summoned compassion, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. “Look, old friend—you killed a couple guys this morning. That’s enough to sit anybody back on their ass. Enough to get the nuttiest thoughts going. You’ll keep all this craziness to yourself?”

I grunted a laugh. “Keep what to myself? Sorry, Dick. It just all sort of seemed to fit. You’re right—I sound screwier than that Vallee kid. Forget I said any of it.”

“Sure.” He rose and ambled to the door, then paused there, a hand on the knob. “You forget all of it, too.”

“Sure.”

He gave me an unfiltered smile that would have made the devil jump. “Or do you actually
believe
that load of horseshit, Nate? You wouldn’t be harboring any ideas of settling up with me, would you?”