The Blackmail Club (11 page)

Pain coursed through Jack as he sat in the chair nearest Dumbo’s head. He placed the tip of his cane against the downed bodyguard’s neck and looked around the room. A black safe silently stood against the wall behind the desk. The room was carpeted except for the tile strip from the door to the desk which sat just beyond where Dumbo lay. Recessed into one wall were nine television screens arrayed in three rows of three. The upper three showed the club’s stages, the middle row watched the crowds sitting at those stages, and the bottom three sets focused on the front door, the bar, and a panorama of the full room. The bottom screens would have allowed Donny to see Jack come in and approach the bar. Donny’s office had no windows and only the door through which they had entered.

“You may not know this, McCall, I once thought about becoming a cop.”

“And I thought about becoming a priest, so after you answer my questions, I’ll pray for your sorry ass.”

“And here I thought you were a friend of the family.”

“Enough with the small talk, Donny. Here’s the deal. You’ve got a choice and it’s not between good and better. There are things you’re going to tell me right now or I call the police here from your office. You and this guy,” Jack gestured toward the floor, “are wearing the same shoes you wore in the alley. My DNA will be on his fists and traces from my shirt will be on your boot. You’ll be charged with assault and battery. That’ll be enough to shut down this little tits and ass palace.”

Donny eyeballed Jack with an air of defiance, “I don’t know—”

Jack slammed his cane against the side of the desk, the reverberating bass from the big room’s music masking the noise. He returned the cane to the neck of the man on the floor and rested his other hand on Donny’s phone, which he had moved to the corner of the desk.

Jack’s voice crawled out from a deep well. “Truth is, I’d enjoy seeing you in jail and out of this business; your mother would too, so no games. Do we understand each other?”

Jack couldn’t risk letting Donny use his computer. Jack would have to get too close to be sure Donny wouldn’t use the time to email for help. He gestured toward a file cabinet with his semi-automatic Beretta, “Use that old typewriter to write out your confession for assaulting me. Include the identity of Dumbo here and the other two scum suckers who helped you.”

“Now listen, McCall, I’m just a guy trying to get a piece of the action.”

Donny was doing his best to sound seasoned, but Jack could detect fear nibbling the edges of his words. “If you figure you’re owed something,” he said, “we can talk, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna write that down.”

“No sweat, Donny. If you’d rather I call the police now, than you to have to gamble on what I’ll do with your confession, well …” Jack let his words trail off and picked up the phone.

After a bit more grousing, Donny moved the typewriter to his desktop and started typing. When he finished, Jack had Donny read the confession aloud, sign it, push it across the desk, and get back in his chair.

“Who’s Ben Haviland?”

Donny gave a wide-eyed blank look. “Who?”

“Ben Haviland,” Jack repeated, with enough enunciation to get his split lips bleeding again. “Come on, Donny. They found his body with one of your matchbooks in his sleeve.”

Donny raised his eyebrows and shook his head in short, quick jerks. “I got no clue.” After pausing, he corrected himself. “There’s old Bennie. I never knew his last name. Every couple of months he shampoos our carpets. He works for Clark’s Janitorial. Jesus Christ, McCall, our matchbooks are all over the bar and the tables. All over town, anybody could have one.”

“Why did you kill your father?”

“What? I didn’t kill him. I loved him, even though …” He fell silent, his lower lip quivering.

“Even though what, Donny? Spill it! Even though what?”

“Promise me you’ll keep it a secret,” he whined. “Not tell Mom.”

“You’re in no position to bargain. Tell me or tell the cops. I will promise that if you come clean, I’ll do what I think is best for your mother.”

Dumbo moaned, his head moving the cane. Jack reached down and reintroduced his sap to the back of the brute’s head. In his condition Jack couldn’t put a full effort into the swing, but it was enough. Dumbo went back to quiet and Jack reset the cane against the bodyguard’s neck.

“Sorry for the interruption.” Jack felt blood leaking from his split lip. He swiped at it with the back of his hand. “You were saying?”

Donny sat stone still. His head down. His knuckles white from squeezing his thighs. “Dad was a f-fag. A queer. All right?” As he spoke, a silent tear snaked through his stubble.

“What makes you think your dad was gay?”

“I just know. All right. I know.” Donny groaned.

“Let’s have it.”

“For years Mom went to Baltimore every other weekend to visit her old-maid sister. When she was gone, Dad would meet someone. It was always a man. The same man.” He angrily swiped at a new tear. “I followed him. Okay. I saw him with his butt-fucking pal.”

Donny’s entire body wriggled.

“And you felt humiliated.”

“Go to hell, McCall.”

“Give.”

“Damn you. Yes. I was humiliated. All right? You satisfied? I was humiliated. Okay?”

He started to stand. Jack wagged his gun. Donny sat back down.

“Is that why you killed him?”

“I already told you. I didn’t kill him.”

“Which one of your goons did it for you?”

“He killed himself. The cops said so.” With a pleading gesture, he added, “Christ, McCall, even Mom agrees.”

“I want you to give your mother the money you blackmailed from your father.”

“What? Mom told me yesterday she thought that Dad had been blackmailed. If that’s true, I swear it wasn’t me.”

Jack raised his cane and pointed it at Donny. “Why did you have me beaten?”

“I had to get you off the case. I couldn’t let everyone find out that my old man was a fag.” He looked down. “I’d be a laughing stock in my own club.”

Perspiration rose from Donny’s pores like the early bubbles in boiling water. Jack could smell the sweat.

“You stupid putz, we had begun to think maybe your mother had it wrong. That it might have been a straight suicide. Nobody beats up anybody to keep them off a case of suicide. When you attacked me, you convinced me to stay on the case. Along with that, it’s too big a coincidence that the dead Ben Haviland also did work for you. You may be big in booze and boobs, but you’re a sorry excuse for a gangster.”

“You won’t have any more trouble from me.” He sounded like an adolescent whose maturity and backbone hadn’t caught up with his years. “Please don’t tell about my dad.”

“We’re not done here.” Jack took a deep breath, biting down hard to get through a jolt of pain from his bruised ribs. “How did you know we would be at your mother’s last Sunday?”

“I just stopped by—”

“Don’t slip back into bad habits.”

“Art Tyson. He—he told me. Okay. He stopped to see my mother. She must’ve told him.”

“Bullshit,” Jack roared, then grimaced. “Your mother tolerated Tyson when your father was alive. I doubt she’d let him in the house now, and your mother swore she had not told anyone. Now who do you figure I believe you or your mother?”

Donny mopped his brow with the flat of his hand. “It was Engels. Okay? Troy Engles.” Donny wiped his wet hand across his shirt front. “Engels stopped at the club.”

Jack raised his hand like a traffic cop. “Stop.” Then he sapped Dumbo again. The man hadn’t moved, but Donny recoiled as if he had taken the blow himself. “Engels is an expert who deals in international espionage. Why would he bother doing favors for a punk gangster barely out of pimples?”

Donny’s face turned white. “Engels was Dad’s lover … I got pictures.” He took a deep, hard swallow. “Engels keeps me informed of anything he runs across that affects me.”

“So you were blackmailing Engels. How does he learn of things that affect you?”

“Engels is tight with Art Tyson.” He clasped his hands to illustrate. “They played poker every month with my dad. The other regulars were Chief Mandrake and Mayor Molloy. They all lived near each other in the old days when they were young. From what I hear that newspaper columnist Eric Dunn, who’s in solid with the mayor, has taken over Dad’s chair. Engels told me Dunn has agreed not to print anything he hears at the poker games without an okay from the others.”

If Tyson and Engels are poker pals, why did Engels con me at our open house about not wanting to be near Tyson?

“I’m getting tired, Donny. And thanks to you, I hurt. What little patience I had, is gone. Tell me the rest. What about Tyson? The chief? And the story behind your escorting one of your girls to rendezvous with the mayor?”

Donny’s face registered shock. “Mayor Molloy protects me because he’s bumping uglies with Jena Moves, my hottest lap dancer.”

“Yeah, and?”

“Tyson has sessions with Jena, too, but he arranges his own. Jena told me she and Tyson sometimes do a threesome with some old ugly broad. I don’t know her name. That fat fuck Tyson is always horny. He beats his dick like it owes him money.” Donny squinted and shuddered. “Far as I know Dunn and Mandrake are straight. Christ, McCall, that’s all I know. That’s all of it.”

“For now I’ll hold your confession and won’t tell your mother about your father being gay. But if I learn that you’ve held out, I’ll be back.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. McCall.”

“A couple more things.”

Donny’s forced smile faded. “What the fuck else do you want?” he asked, sagging deep in his chair.

“Treat your mother with the respect she deserves. You might just find out she’s a great lady.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Like everybody else, you think my mother’s Opie’s Aunt Bea from Mayberry. None of you know the real Sarah Beth Andujar.”

Jack’s leg had gone to sleep. He shifted in the hard chair and stretched it out straight. “I wanna talk to Jena Moves. Give me her address, phone number, and real name.”

“Her real name is Phoebe Ziegler. You can see why I had to change it. No man wants a Phoebe on his lap.” He offered a weak chuckle.

Jack leaned down and laid another egg on Dumbo’s noggin, then squinted at Donny.

“I don’t know anything else,” Donny said, his arms stretched out in front of him.

“Open that safe.”

Donny jerked hard on the back of his chair. “I told you I didn’t blackmail my father.”

“If I thought you did, I’d turn your ass over to the cops right now. Open that safe and give me the pictures of Engels and your dad.”

“Super spy comes in from the cold,” Donny said with dripping sarcasm. “I read you inherited millions from your old man, but you’re still just like the rest of us. You can never get enough scratch. Now you’re going to blackmail Engels.”

“Think what you will,” Jack said, ignoring the increasing drumbeat in his head.

Jack would need to follow Donny to the safe, so he needed an alarm in case the pachyderm woke. After standing, Jack told Donny to put the two chairs they had been sitting on across his man’s legs; one above the knee of one leg and the second below the knee of the other. If the man moved, the chairs would shift on the hard surface floor.

“Get on the floor and open the safe from a seating position.”

As soon as the safe door cleared the latch, Jack barked, “Scoot back.”

Jack could no longer separate the bass from the treble in the music pushing through the walls from the main room. When he started toward the safe, his senses told him he was walking in foot-sucking mud. He shook his head and the second and third images of Donny disappeared. When he got to the safe and looked in, he saw neither a gun nor an alarm button.

“Get up. Put the pictures on your desk, along with two one-hundred-dollar bills.”

“Anything else I can do, Mr. McCall?”

“I should also punch your lights out, but I won’t.” Then he smacked Donny in the jaw, the punk landing on the bed-long leather couch against the wall. “Like hell, I won’t.” Jack wasn’t sure which of them it hurt worse, but he knew which of them felt good about it.

He picked up the photos, and acted out the final scene of Sap meets Dumbo before going out through the door.

Like medieval jousters, the oncoming traffic kept thrusting lances of light to complicate Jack’s struggle to stay on the right half of the road. He parked in the hospital lot near Twenty-second and “I” Streets. Donny’s two hundred went to reward a janitor for getting him back inside and up to his room without being seen.

He kicked off his shoes and put his dirty clothes back in the small closet, then took the sleeping pills he’d saved from earlier and crawled into bed.

Later today Jack would have visitors. He figured Max would come by and he wanted to know why the fella Max had tailing Donny hadn’t helped him in the alley.

Chapter 17

The morning light poured through Jack’s hospital window and with its warmth came the realization that Donny could not have shaken down CIA Deputy Director Troy Engels over the intimate pictures of himself with Chris Andujar. Engels would have handled Donny like an experienced nanny handles an unruly child.

Nora came through the hospital door wearing a black blouse and her everything-is-going-to-be-better-today attitude. Her smile made him feel like a newborn colt, which was quite an accomplishment given his body felt like an old nag on the way to the glue factory. When she leaned down in her scoop-necked blouse to kiss him on the forehead, the colt had the feelings of a stallion.

“Did you get some rest?” she asked.

“They gave me sleeping pills last night. When I took them, they put me right out.”

It was the truth constructed to work as a lie for Jack wasn’t ready to hear her admonitions for having snuck out of the hospital to confront Donny.

“Max and one of his guys took your car to your home. They left it in the driveway.”

“Good. What’s happening on Andujar?”

“I finished going through Chris’s laptop. Fuller was straight with us. There’s no legend of the patient codes.”

Max came in. “Thanks for taking care of my car,” Jack said when he looked up at Max who wasn’t wearing a scoop-necked blouse and didn’t lean forward to kiss him on the forehead.