The Burning Day (10 page)

“Call me Henry. Miss her? What does it look like?” he asked. “I thought my despair was pretty obvious.”

“You must still miss her badly.”

“It’s all my fault, Mr. Longville. I screwed up. More than once. She found out. I agreed to a trial separation. Little did I ever suspect that she would find someone else. That was stupid of me, too—of course she would. She’s a wonderful woman, and lovely, too. It didn’t take her long. I guess I’m getting just what I deserve. I didn’t realize until she was gone that she meant everything to me.”

I sat without speaking, because there was nothing to say to that.

“Anyway, she filed for divorce, and I didn’t contest it. It killed me to sign those papers, but I had to take responsibility for what I had done. I’d cheated on her, betrayed her trust. So now what’s done is done.”

The Real Henry Wiggins arose and went to the kitchen, where he rummaged in the fridge and came back with a beer with gold foil around the lid. He tore the foil and unscrewed the lid and took a sip, made a face and said, “God. Got to quit drinking this stuff,” and took another.

I looked on for a second, then said, “Mind if I ask who you did the cheating with?”

Wiggins shrugged. “The one that broke the camel’s back? An intern at my accounting firm. A college girl. A young woman, interested in boring old me. It was hard to resist. It was also the dumbest thing I ever did. I should have ended it. I didn’t. It cost me my marriage, and the young lady has graduated from college and moved on, and I am boring old me again, and quite alone.”

“Sounds like you regret some of the choices you made.”

“To tell you the truth, yes. I haven’t been able to put it all behind me . . . I just sit here most days.” He sheepishly looked down at the bottle he was holding. “The last week or so, I’ve mostly been staying drunk.”

“Just the last week?”

“Okay. Maybe more like . . . three months. Time’s been getting away from me.”

“You can’t spend the rest of your life in a bottle, Henry.”

“A private eye who’s against drinking? I thought you guys kept a bottle of whiskey in your desk. You some kind of religious guy or something?”

“I’m no Phillip Marlowe. What I am is a recovering alcoholic. I’ve done what you’re doing. I’m not preaching to you, because that never worked on me, Henry. But I can tell you this. You’re trying to drink Mary back, and she’s not coming.”

He took another look at his hair of the dog beer and put it down. “You recognize my own self-disgust, then? I have been hitting it a little heavy lately, that’s for sure.”

“You’re a successful man, Henry, like it or not. You can move on. It’s up to you. It’ll smart for a long time, but your other choice is to sit here and drink yourself to death. Any fool can do that.”

He smiled. The hair of the dog had restored his humanity a little. “I like you, Longville, you’re an okay sort of guy, but you’re also a frikkin’ hard ass.”

I suppressed a smile. “Does Mary have any family besides you?”

He smiled a little at my referring to him as ‘family.’

“Not that I know of. She always told me she had been adopted by an older couple, and that they had passed away some years back.
 

That wasn’t very helpful, so I asked him, “Did Mary leave any of her things here?”

He shook his head and smiled a bitter smile. “Nothing but me.”
 

“Well, then, I thank you for your time, Mr. Wiggins. It has been an instructive afternoon. I guess I’ll leave you to it.”

 
He looked at his beer and frowned. “I suppose that I could get up from here and go down to the office. I haven’t been there in a few days.”

“I would if I were you. Especially since someone’s running around pretending to be you.” I stood to go.

 
He knitted his brow. “Tell me something. This man who was pretending to be me. What do you suppose he wants with Mary?”

“I can’t say. Up until a few minutes ago, I thought he was you. By the way, did you know that Mary had been married previously?”

Wiggins looked thunderstruck. “Why, no. If that guy told you that—”

“He didn’t. I found that out for myself. You can go look it over for yourself. It’s all on file, downtown.”

“I’ll be damned. She never told me. So you think maybe she went back to her ex?”

“I think not. He’s been dead for four years.”

He looked even more thunderstruck. “Dead? But how did it happen?”

“A traffic accident, apparently.”

“It seems there’s a lot that Mary never told me.”

“A lot, maybe, yes.”

“There’s more?”

“Nothing I’d like to talk about. Mary has some interesting people in her past, though. I don’t have all the details, but it looks to me like something from her past is trying to catch up to her. Something bad.”

Wiggins nodded, and sat there for a second. Then he rose and took the beer to the kitchen, where he poured it down the sink.

I smiled at him. “Going to move on?”

“Proud of me? I’m going to try. I’ll take a few small steps, anyway. First thing, I’m going to grab a shower, then maybe a big, greasy breakfast somewhere, with some coffee. Lots of coffee.”

“That sounds like a good start, Henry.”

I started for the door.

“Mr. Longville?” he called after me. I turned back to look at him.

“Whatever’s going on . . . I know it’s over between us, but, hey, make sure nothing happens to Mary, will you?”

“I’ll do my best, Henry. You can count on that.”

Chapter 16

I drove back to north Birmingham, intent on going to my office to sort things out. I parked in the plaza and headed toward the front door of the Brooks Building. I walked up upstairs and opened the door to my office. The message light on my answering machine was blinking. I reached over and pressed the replay button, but I only heard a series of hang-up calls.
 

I was just starting to get irritated when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?” I said.

“Is this Roland Longville?” A man’s voice asked. The voice sounded ragged, like that of an exhausted man.

“This is Longville.”

“All right, Longville. Let me lay it all out for you. A man hired you the other day. This man said that he was someone he’s not. You follow me so far?”

I thought about the real Henry Wiggins, trying to sober up and get on with life, and the fake Henry Wiggins, with his big words and antiquated clothing.

“I’m with you so far.”

“Well, I’m going to throw you a bone. Have you got something to write with?”

I picked up a pen. “Go ahead.”

“Zellars. Z-E-L-LA-R-S. Charlie Zellars. You might want to look him up.”

I cradled the phone on a shoulder while I wrote down the name. “Can I get your name?” I asked.
 

The caller hung up, of course. Nothing to lose in asking.

Chapter 17

The blood of thine is thine to avenge. It was a maxim that Don Ganato knew well. His father and his grandfather, stern Sicilian gangsters from the old school, had taught him this and other rubrics from a very early age. It was part of a code that he and other men like him had lived by for centuries. Little Tony had been hot-headed and on a one-way street to getting exactly what he got, and Don Ganato had seen that coming. But he knew his duty. His nephew was dead, and his blood cried out from the ground for revenge.

The Don was talking to two of his men in hushed tones in his office. “Have you found out who killed Little Tony?”

“We did,” the one called Joe Martini said. They were members of one of the North Side gangs, hired to do it, and promised the turf would be added to their own once they hit Little Tony.”

“And where are these people now?”

“They’ve been dealt with.”

Don Ganato sat motionless for a second. Then he spoke, slowly and clearly. “That isn’t enough.”

Joe Martini’s eyes flashed, and the other man sat up in his seat. They knew that Don Ganato was about to, at last, give them the order they had been waiting for. Don Ganato did not disappoint them.

“The order to hit Little Tony came from Lonnie O’Malley. I want you to find a couple of his men and send him a message.”

“What should the message tell him?” Joe said.

“That if it’s war he wants, it’s war he’s going to get.”

Chapter 18

I was just leaving the Brooks Building when two big men stepped out of an adjacent doorway and flanked me. They were Ganato hoods, judging from their size and complexion.

“Mr. Longville,” said the one on my right. “Somebody wants to talk with you.”

“You can tell Don Ganato I’m busy,” I told the man. Instead of the uppercut I was expecting, though, a grin crossed his big face. “It’s not the Don who wants to talk with you.”

The other guy stood there, looking like he was ready in case I made a run for it, so I shrugged and nodded. “Okay. So where’s this someone?”

The guy with the smile led the way, his wary friend behind me, and we rounded the corner. A black Cadillac with tinted windows was parked at the curb, engine running. Smiley opened the rear door and I crawled in. Francis Lorenzo was sitting there. “Hiya, Longville.”

“Francis. What’s this all about?”

“Just wanted to have a little chat. I told you I was coming by, remember?”

“I remember. Are you worried I was going to go to the cops with what I saw out at the old Bessemer Airport?”

Francis put his palms out, and did a comic shrug, a gesture that seemed to say, ‘Go ahead, what do I care?’ After a moment he turned and looked out the window and murmured, “Not exactly.”

I sat silently and waited for him to go on. There was a shadow over his features, but he was trying not to show it. I noticed the two gorillas hadn’t gotten into the car after me. Francis and I were to have a private conversation, it seemed.

“Listen, Longville, I need to tell you a couple of things.”

“I’m listening.”
 

“First of all, you know this guy?” Francis pulled a picture out of his jacket pocket. It was a printout of a digital mug shot. The subject was the man who had come into my office a few days before, the man who claimed to be Henry Wiggins. The man my mystery caller had referred to as Zellars.

“Never saw him before,” I told Francis.

“Come on, I know better. One of my guys saw him talking to you in your office.”

“Your man should get his eyes checked.”

“Whatever you say, Longville. Just listen. This guy probably told you that he was somebody named Henry Wiggins, which he is not. I think you might have learned that by now. In case you didn’t, there’s something I want to let you in on. This guy’s a con man. He’s got a partner. Or, I should say, had a partner. They used to do the short-con racket together, and they were good at it. They had a falling out, though. I don’t have the details, but they split. Now this guy is trying to get you involved in a shakedown that he’s running.”

“What kind of a shakedown?”

Francis smiled. Touché, the smile seemed to say. I had let him know I was interested; I had little choice.

“Well, let’s just say it concerns a matter that I’m interested in, also.”

I took my turn looking out the car window for a moment. “I’d like to believe you, Francis, but I have a few problems with that.”

“Like what?” Francis did his best to look innocent. It didn’t take.

“First of all, what were you doing out at the airstrip?”

“I came out there with someone to meet a plane. You saw what happened, Longville. Some nut-job that works for Longshot Lonnie fired at me and the boys.”

“I hate to tell you this, Francis, but your friend’s flight was about twenty years too late. That airstrip’s been shut down a long time.”

“Did I say my friend was flying in, Longville? I went out there to meet someone, somewhere no one would be watching, that’s all. Except it seemed like half of Birmingham was out there.” He eyed me like I was in on some vast conspiracy against him, but there was still humor in his voice.

“Okay, so this friend drove out there. I’ll bite. I drove out there, myself. You guys wanted a secluded meeting place. Okay. There’s another problem, Francis. Why do you care if someone’s trying to run a game on me? Why would you warn me? For all I know, this Morton and his pal Zellars are employed by your boss, Don Ganato. He could be keeping tabs on you, especially after you asked him to let you out of the Family.”

“I thought of all that, of course.”
 

“Well, I have to tell you something, Francis. Whatever you guys were really doing out there, I’m sure it was illegal, and I have a hard time believing you’d try to warn me about these guys out of the milk of human kindness. So, if you don’t have anything more to tell me, I guess I’ll be going.”