The Burning Day (14 page)

Inside, there was a staircase that rose along one side of a narrow room. As Lonnie moved up the steps, he became aware of another anonymous man standing at the top of the stairs.
 

“Remove your jacket,” the man said quietly. Lonnie complied, and the man frisked him swiftly and expertly. Then he stepped away from Lonnie, nodded, and walked down the stairs and out the door, a man in no particular hurry, just a man out for a stroll.

Lonnie took a deep breath, exhaled, and opened the door in front of him. As he stepped inside, a smile cut across his face. Seated at a table was the first man he’d met, the little old man from the bus station. The paper bag that he had clutched at the bus station now sat on the table.

“Please sit.”

Lonnie walked in and sat down at the table across from the old man. There was nothing else in the room except for the table, two chairs, the old man, the bag, and Lonnie himself. Lonnie suspected that a few minutes before, the room had probably been completely empty. No doubt it would be again, a few minutes after they concluded their business here.
 

The old man spoke without preamble. “You come well-recommended, so we can move directly to business. This room is completely secure, I assure you.” The old man looked steadily at Lonnie, his voice courteous. He did not offer his hand, and used no names, Lonnie noticed. Good.
 

“I have no doubt of that.”

“To the matter at hand. You have asked for an item that is difficult to acquire, though I am confident that we can arrange something that you will be satisfied with.”

He paused, allowing Lonnie time to respond.

“I also told your man that I need the thing quickly,” Lonnie said. “Time’s important here. Price is no object.”

“That is understood. I have spoken with those who will carry the responsibility of the procurement, and they have informed me that by the end of the week, what you have requested will be in your hands. One of these people will instruct your men in its use. You will need to use this very carefully, and discard or abandon it, once it is used.”

“I understand. I’ll only need it once, anyway.”

“Good. Then, unless you have any questions . . . .”
 

The little old man nodded at the paper bag, the one that he had clutched in the bus station, that now sat on the table between them. “Take this bag and go out the front, the way you came in. Then walk one block to the right. The bus will stop there in three minutes. The red line. It will take you back to the parking garage where your rental car is parked. There will be no other stops until you get off.”

“Thanks.”

“Good day.”

Lonnie gingerly picked up the bag and rose and walked out of the room. He waited less than a minute before the bus came. He climbed aboard the bus and looked stealthily around at the empty seats before going to the back and opening the bag. Inside was a bus station locker key, with a plastic numbered keychain ornament dangling from it. Locker number 42, at the station that was the destination of the bus he was sitting on. That’s where he was to leave the payment for what he had ordered, before he left town. The amount required would be written on a piece of paper in that locker. It was almost done. Lonnie let out a breath that he realized he’d been holding for the last half hour. It looked like things were finally starting to go his way.

Chapter 24

I picked my way through the file until I got to the name I was looking for: Charlie Zellars. I looked at the booking mug shot that was stapled to the corner of the page. It was the man who’d passed himself off as Wiggins, all right. He hadn’t changed much from the time the photo had been taken until the moment he came into my office. His had the same tight expression, round little glasses, and math professor’s short, neat hair. I could almost hear his stilted words coming at me off the page.

According to the I&O report, Zellars was picked up in this particular instance for something called “providing women for immoral purposes.” Pimping, they used to call that.

It took me another half hour to find any recent mention of Zellars in Birmingham. But there it was, according to the parole board, a sometimes address in a hotel that was really a low-rent boarding house on, where else, the North Side.

I drove over to Zellars’ home for the moment, a place called the Earle Hotel, a roomy, antique-looking place on the west side of town. I had busted up more than one fracas there during my time as a patrol officer: meth heads, needle jockeys, drunks on meager disability checks. According to the apathetic desk clerk, Zellars was located in Room 605. I took the elevator and instantly regretted it; the interior was hot enough inside to peel wallpaper.
 

“Is the air conditioning broken?” I asked an old man in the elevator who wore something that might have once been a bellhop’s jacket, and looked like he might work there. He wore a dazed expression and his mouth hung open. Maybe it was the heat. I hoped it was the heat.

He mumbled something unintelligible, and then said, “I think maybe. I dunno.”

I got off the elevator on the sixth floor and walked down the hall to room 605. I tried the door. It was unlocked, so I opened it quickly and stepped inside. It was cooler in there, because the window was open. The room was a simple affair. There was a bed in the center of the room, a small desk and television along the right wall, a small closet, and a bathroom off to the left.
 

I stepped into the bathroom to make sure no one was in there. The door swung open slowly. There was a man sitting in a chair. His hands were tied behind his back. He was wearing nothing but a pair of bloody pants. The pants were bloody, because he was very bloody. I knelt and checked him for a pulse, though there was obviously not going to be one. I looked at his face. I had found Zellars. From the look of his room, he had been getting ready to leave town. Now he wasn’t going anywhere, except to the morgue.

His suitcase, which had been carefully packed, was still on the bed. It had since been opened, and something had been removed. His clothes were still neatly folded inside, but there was a square of emptiness just the size of an old school video tape. Undoubtedly, that something that had been taken was a tape that contained the raunchy movies a younger and much more naïve Mary had made to help Dom Morton and the late Charlie Zellars support their con games.
 

I had no doubts about who had done Zellars in. Dom Morton had known that Zellars ripped off his dirty movies, and he had wanted them back, very badly it seemed. I wondered what value he believed they still possessed. Maybe he had just taken them out of a sense of revenge against Zellars. As if what he had done to the man himself wasn’t revenge enough.

Morton had taken his time with his old partner, and however long the proceedings had taken, it must have seemed like an eternity to Zellars. The chair from the desk had been dragged into the bathroom, obviously to take advantage of the floor drain, and Zellars had been lashed to it with rope. His mouth was stuffed full of a pair of his own underwear. Around him on the floor, the gray tile was splashed with a dark ruby stain. Morton had taken a knife to him, and taken his time at his business. I went back to the main room and took a good look around.

Morton had interrogated Zellars first. The questioning had taken a long time, from the marks on Zellars’ body and the amount of blood he had lost. When he had found out what he wanted to know, Morton had finished him with a ligature made from one of Zellars’ own shoestrings. The unlaced shoe lay cast aside, its mate still on the dead man’s left foot.

It had been a brutal business, but also Morton had kept it quiet. One doesn’t want blood-curdling screams disturbing the guests in hotels with paper-thin walls. Morton had wanted to find out what Zellars knew, pretty badly. Or maybe he had gotten the pictures and movies right off the bat, and decided to punish Zellars for pursuing him. Or maybe it was just something purely evil that Morton had enjoyed doing.

Zellars must have had the videos in his luggage, and returned to Birmingham to either extort Mary anew or attempt a deal with his old friend. Morton had probably agreed, and had sat and patiently waited for the knock on the door. One thing was clear. If this was Morton’s way of dealing with his old buddies, then I had to get to Mary and the now unarmed Francis before Morton found them. I was betting he’d gotten information from Zellars on just where to do that.
 

I wondered about Francis and Mary and the airstrip. Was that the missing something? What had really been going on out there? I was just getting ready to leave when somebody hit me across the side of the head, and the lights went out.

~

When I came to, I was lying in the floor. My hands were tied behind my back. Zellars had checked out, as it turned out, but his old friend had checked in. Dominic Morton was sitting over me, in a chair. He also had my Colt .45 in his hand.

My head throbbed. There was a pretty big welt there, behind the right temple. I made up my mind that Morton needed one just like it, if I ever got the chance.

“You clipped me pretty good, Mr. Wiggins,” I said, trying to sound witty. It came out more like a croak. I realized I was very thirsty. Dom Morton smiled. “Brad, down at the desk warned me you were coming up, Longville. So, you managed to find out who I really am. Well, guess what, I already knew that. You should have checked the closet, gumshoe. I was hiding in there.”

I made a mental note to deal with Brad later. And another one to check closets in the future. “Yes. I know you hired me to follow Mary Wiggins because you’d lost her trail,” I said. “I still haven’t figured out why.”

Dominic Morton shrugged smugly. “I had a couple of reasons. You almost mucked them up for me, I must say. But I managed to salvage the situation. I wanted to know who Mary’s new man friend was. So I had you flush him out. I tailed you to that old airport, Longville. I hid in the woods and took pictures of the man you talked with.”

“It was dark.”

“Which is why I had a camera with a low light lens. I’ve done this all before, Longville. You have too, am I right, Mr. Detective? You peepers should know all about that kind of thing. I got the pictures, all right. Not that it mattered, at the time. I still didn’t know what I had. I showed them to a couple of acquaintances of mine, and they told me who the guy was. Francis Lorenzo, Don Ganato’s right-hand man. Holy crap, a mobster, a high-up mobster in the Ganato crime family! Back off, they said. You’ll end up in the Cahaba River with cement shoes on. I must admit that once I learned just who Francis was, I panicked for a bit.”

“But you calmed down, apparently. Because you didn’t back off.”

“No. Well, yes, at first I did, but not because I was scared. I mean, I knew that I had something, I just didn’t know how to use it. But everywhere I went, the newspaper, the cable news, the Internet, they’re full of this mob war that’s going on, and then I began to think about this rival gang, this Irish guy who’s supposedly nuts—Longshot Lonnie O’Malley. Maybe this Longshot character might find this information useful. But still I had just one problem—”

“—You didn’t have an angle.”

“Right again. You’re pretty quick, Longville, but I forget you know these thugs. All I could do was put all of this in front of Longshot Lonnie O’Malley and say, hey, guess what, Mr. Mob Boss, Francis Lorenzo is dating this redheaded chick I know. It’s a fact, but with no angle. But then I figured it out. I got the angle, all right.”

“You bugged my phone and heard everything.”

“That’s right. You didn’t follow orders. Shame on you, Longville. I told you not to go to the Wiggins home. Once you did, I couldn’t come back to see you, since you had found the real Henry Wiggins. So, I put my thinking cap on, and went to the electronics store. While you were out, nosing around, I waited until that cute little piece of tail you call a secretary went out to lunch, and I let myself in and bugged your office. And, like a good fellow, you waltzed in a couple days later and talked to good old Mary about how Francis wanted out of the mob business, and Don Ganato wouldn’t let him loose. Then, I definitely had something to sell Longshot. So thank you very kindly.”

I cursed silently. “You gave Longshot the story on Francis and Mary. That gave Longshot something to offer Francis, in turn, for betraying Don Ganato.”

“Sure. Why not? After all, they’re all just a bunch of crooks. Who cares what happens to them? They deserve whatever they get. I don’t see anything wrong with using their hatred of each other to my own benefit. Plus, the added joy of having turned the Don’s right hand man around really must have made dear old Longshot lay awake at night, smiling.”

I sat up slowly, having to twist to get up with my hands tied behind me. Morton leveled his gun at me. “Easy, there, brother man.”

I shrugged as much as my bonds would allow. “Just trying to get comfortable.”

 
Morton shrugged. “I’ve enjoyed our little chat. Anyway, it’s all a done deal. Don Ganato and his boys are dog meat by now, thanks to you and your old pal, Francis.”

“What are you getting out of all this?”

“The only thing I ever wanted, Longville. Money. Longshot Lonnie O’Malley may be a dumb Mick, but he pays well for the right kind of information. He paid me enough that I can go away and start over somewhere, which is what I plan to do.”