The Burning Day (12 page)

“But that didn’t happen when they found out you weren’t acting,”

“Dom went totally crazy. You know what the con was. Dominic set me up with Carlton, and then he sent Charlie Zellars, later . . . after Carlton and I were married. With pictures from those awful films I made for Dom, with some of his other marks. That was the hustle. I was a poor defenseless girl that these two con men had given money to make these films, and now I was ashamed and needed a sugar daddy to pay to make it all go away. Dominic Morton made me do some pretty disgusting things, Mr. Longville.”

I was silent. I let her find whatever she needed within herself in order to go on. She shook her head. “When they first approached Carlton, he was very angry. I told him I’d been with Dom before we met, and that I just wanted him to leave me alone. Carlton was very hurt, and naturally disappointed in me. I think that he thought I really was some lily-white little country girl; it was a pretty rude awakening for him. In the end, he agreed to give Dom some money—a lot of money—to hush it all up. Half a million in cash. I guess he really loved me that much.”

“But it didn’t go down so well.”

“Right. What we didn’t know—Dom, Zellars, even me—was that Carlton was bringing a gun along. He planned to get the pictures from them and keep his money. Dom says he pulled the gun and took off with the money and the tapes. There was a car chase. Carlton lost control and there was a crash. Carlton was hurt very badly and died. Dom and Charlie panicked, and did their best to make it look like an accident.”

“That’s the same as murder.”

“Yes.” Mary bowed her head.

“So they realized that they had to make it look like an accident. They put him in his car and sent it down the side of Red Mountain.”

Mary nodded. “That’s what Dominic told me.”

“How did they plan to put the frame on you if you talked?”

“I got a lot of money from Carlton’s estate. The money that Dom and Charlie made off with was undeclared, all in cash. The finger points back to me, and Dom made sure that it didn’t quite add up to an accident. The cops were suspicious of me. Dom knew how to set it all up so I’d never talk.”

That jibed with what I knew so far. “But still, you stayed around Birmingham after Carlton Silver’s death.”

“I did. With him dead . . . well, like I said, Carlton had left a lot of his money to me. Enough I could have lived comfortably for a long time.”

“So what happened with that?”

She let her breath out, and it made a heavy sound. “Naturally, Dominic and Charlie wanted that, too. It was a little over three hundred thousand. They still had the dirty movies I had made, and now they could also hang Carlton’s murder on me. What could I do? I gave them almost everything. Once they got their hands on that, they forgot about me for a long time. So I slipped away from them. I thought I’d seen the last of them forever.”

I sat back and thought about that. “That means that with the blackmail money they got from Silvers, they had taken in a little over eight hundred thousand dollars in a couple of months. Why are they coming after you now for more money?”

She smiled, and there was a lot of satisfaction in that smile. “They got too big for their britches. They got nabbed running the old investment scam in Tennessee and both of them got put away for a couple of years. The mark had made off with their money when they got out. So they were pretty desperate.”

“So they got out of the pen, and they were broke, and they thought of you.”

She nodded dourly. “Yes, I suppose that’s about it. And they found me, too.”

“So what happened when they found you?”

“I was in the last stages of my marriage to Henry. I’d already met Francis. Dominic and Charlie didn’t know about Francis.”

“Didn’t know you had a boyfriend, or didn’t know he was a gangster?”

She shrugged and gave me one of those million-dollar smiles that no two-bit con would ever take away. “They didn’t know either of those things, I guess.”

“Then they also had no idea that Francis wanted out so the two of you could start a new life.”

She nodded. “They had no idea. They thought it would be like old times.

“By ‘old times’ I take it they wanted you to help shake down Wiggins, just like you guys had Carlton Silvers.”

“Yes. But I wouldn’t do it. I told them the marriage was over, so they could show Henry whatever they wanted. They started following me, harassing me.”

“And the murder charge?”

“I knew that they wouldn’t use it. I couldn’t make them any money in jail. So I stalled them and told them that I’d try to reconnect with Henry, but I needed some time.”

“And that’s where things are now.”

She nodded. “Yes, that’s pretty much it.”

“Have they been in contact with you lately?”

“The last time Morton approached me was a couple of weeks ago. After that, Francis thought it best I ‘go underground,’ as he put it.”

“Do you have a way to contact Morton?”

“No. He always manages to find me.”

“Okay. If they contact you, you need to get in touch with me immediately.”

She nodded. “Will I ever be free of Dom Morton?”

“You will, if you want to be, Mary. One way or the other, I promise you that.”

And with that she turned and walked out of my office.

If she was telling the truth about most of it, her story cleared up a lot of things, but also presented some new and interesting problems. The man who claimed to be Wiggins was really Dominic Morton. He had partnered with another man named Zellars, back when Mary had been Morton’s girl. At this point, Zellars was still an unknown. Was he involved in the current goings on? If not, why?
 

Then there was the whole Silvers murder-accident timeline. I still felt like there was more to that story than anyone had told me. One thing was clear, however. After Morton had arranged Silvers’ ‘accident,’ he’d squeezed all the money out of Mary and left her pretty much destitute. But a woman as beautiful as Mary didn’t stay single long, and another rich man had come into her life—Henry Wiggins.

For whatever reasons, Wiggins and Mary hadn’t worked out. I felt like I had the straight dope on that, at least, from Wiggins himself. That had been a much more amicable split than Mary’s previous marriage, as such things go. No one had died. They had drifted apart. Mary had found someone else.
 

Francis had met Mary and they had quickly realized they shared a very similar outlook on life. They had both been through a lot, seen a lot, and learned a lot. They were as close to soul mates as anybody really gets in this world.
 

Mary had been through a lot, though she was by no means blameless. She’d traded a bad, abusive boyfriend in Dom Morton for Carlton Silvers, a complacent millionaire. After Morton’s plot went south and the millionaire ended up dead, Mary was caught out in the wilderness for a while. She worked nine to five for the first time in her life, until she caught the eye of Henry Wiggins, who would eventually become happy hubby number two. Henry was a robust fellow, used to getting his own way, and after a while he and the headstrong Mary began to quarrel. After a couple of years of quarreling, Henry started to wander.
 

When Mary had learned of his philandering, she put an end to their marriage. Henry realized the errors of his ways, and the depths of his affections, far too late. By then, Mary had found solace in the arms of a certain mobster’s right-hand man. Come with me, my darling, I’ll take you away from all this, he had told her, and that was how the present matter had unfolded.

I thought about Dom Morton coming to my office, claiming to be Wiggins. He must have been laughing himself sick inside. He’d dressed up in those ridiculous clothes, which he’d probably picked up at the Salvation Army store, just before coming to see me, and assumed an equally ridiculous persona to catch me off guard. He was a con man, and a good one, all right, because I had fallen for the whole act.

Chapter 19

I was dealing with people I didn’t trust. Nothing new about that, but I felt a little foolish about being taken in by Morton’s act, so I decided not to make the same mistake twice. I sympathized with Francis and Mary, I really did, and I still felt a little like a heel as I followed them across town to find out where they were hiding. Because, if they were smart, that’s exactly what they would be doing—hiding.

They took the expressway over Red Mountain and drove out past Homewood. I followed them at a safe distance as they took the Shades Valley Parkway out to an area known as Cherokee Forest. There were quiet apartment developments out there, quite a few of them. Francis let Mary out next to an apartment complex that was flanked by two abandoned buildings.

I watched her go up the stairs, and noted which door she entered, just in case I needed to find them in a hurry, I told myself. But the truth was that the stories they had told me were a little too pat, and I had known Francis far too long to trust him unreservedly. I knew that trusting them was like betting on a long shot. But some part of me still wanted to believe in their second chance.

I didn’t plan on hanging around. I backed up and got ready to leave, making sure to let Francis get a headstart on me. I watched his car disappear in the direction of the expressway, and slowly pulled out and headed back in the direction of downtown Birmingham.

Chapter 20

A long way to the north, in a city much larger than Birmingham, a meeting was taking place. In a tiny back office above a trucking firm, an aged, distinguished-looking man in an impeccably tailored dark blue suit sat at a modest, cluttered desk. He would have immediately seemed out of place if a driver or an office worker had wandered in and seen him sitting there. But the trucking and the accounting was all done for the day. The man had let himself in, with his own key. Presently there was the sound of a careful footstep on the old stairs outside, and the door creaked open.

“Leo? You in there?”

“Yeah. Come on in.”

The door opened, and a man in his forties entered. He was brawny, but he also wore an expensive suit, a bit flashier than the older man’s, a suit that spoke of its own cost, rather than its owner’s good taste. Leo, the older one, sat silently for a second, then said, “Sit down, Pete.”

The younger man took a seat, and waited.

“Pete, we have to come to a decision . . . I need your opinion about . . . Don Ganato. He was sent down south back in the Seventies to take over down there. There was heat on him in Chicago back in those days. The old Boss thought he was an up-and-comer, and maybe he was. But after he got sent south, the RICO Act came, and the feds tore the guts out of the old establishment. The Syndicate got pretty broken up. After we managed to piece things back together as much as possible, it was years later, and some people didn’t want to come back into the fold.”

The man called Pete sat silently, listening. Leo went on. “Things changed, after a while. We started sending other guys down south when there was heat on them. They acted as part of Don Ganato’s crew down there, taking orders from him until things cooled off and we sent word for them to come home. After we finally managed to get communication reestablished, we looked around the country and tried to bring all the Family back together. We hadn’t forgotten Don Ganato. We figured to bring the Ganatos back into the fold, and formally renew the old ties.”

Leo paused, and rubbed his palms across the worn desk top like he was trying to smooth away the many layers of scratches that time had etched in its antique surface.

“It didn’t work out, though. They had been taking care of their own affairs for too long. No one down there saw the need to send their money north any more. But the older guys in his outfit, at least, they respected the old etiquette, and they played nice, and still asked formal permission occasionally. No one got hit in those days without permission from the Boss. At first, Ganato was one of those who went with the old ways. But then there was friction. A few years ago, when we wanted to move some merchandise through his territory, he fought us. Told us we didn’t have his permission. Some nerve.”

“We caved in to him on that, I recall. We didn’t get to move the heroin through there.”

“Caved in to him. I honored the memory of his father, is all. He’s not the man his father was, but all right. They don’t make real cars any more, they don’t make real people any more. That I can live with. But now this other thing.”

“What exactly is this ‘other thing,’ Leo?”

The old man took a deep breath, like he was about to talk about something that he found distasteful. Pete figured that was what the history lesson had been about; Leo was trying to avoid coming to the point. But here it was, at last.

“Well, it’s like this,” Leo said. “There’s another crew down there. Not one of ours, you understand? There’s this guy, Irish, I mean from Ireland, not Hell’s Kitchen. Longshot Lonnie O’Malley, they call him, I swear to God, these people . . . the Irish. This guy will cut your throat for laughs. Got two different colored eyes, they say. This guy Longshot, we’ve heard of him before, haven’t we?”

“That’s right, Leo. In a good way, too. A while back, he, uh, did us a favor. Helped us out down there with a problem.”