The Burning Day (8 page)

“Sounds interesting.”

Tiller laughed aloud. “It’s not. Reminds me of the Navy. You see, when they wanted to punish you, they made you inventory stuff. Like a warehouse full of shoes and underwear, for example. Now that was interesting. You’d rather pull shore patrol, I assure you. You have a case number, I hope?”

I pulled out the printout that the desk sergeant at Central HQ had given me and Tiller squinted at it through his bifocals. “Hmm. Carlton Silvers . . . now, that sounds vaguely familiar. I’ll just go have a look.”
 

Tiller wandered off into the darkness of the dungeon, and after several minutes returned with a thick manila folder, which he theatrically blew the dust from, and heaved onto the table as if it weighed a hundred pounds. It made quite a thud. It was pretty heavy, at that.

“Looks like this case got a lot of attention from someone.”

“Yeah. This was no routine crack-up, or at least the cop who worked it up thought so. He had his reasons, Roland, we can be sure. Someone went to a lot of trouble over this case to generate that much paperwork. That’s a heavy file for one traffic crack-up.”

Tiller opened the file and, after a momentary perusal, slid the cover sheet across to me. It was the original I and O report, filled out by a patrol cop who had answered the call about a car down a ravine.
 

“This is it. A copy of this cover sheet was all they had at HQ.”

Tiller nodded. “This was the old days, everything was on a paper original. Most police organizations didn’t trust computers just yet. Now, another consideration is in play. Storage space is at a premium everywhere. Crimes keep piling up, after all, and every one of them generates the usual reams of paperwork . . . someone has to key it all into a database, and paper gets shredded. A few years more, even that original report would have been on microfilm. Or nowadays, I suppose, reduced to ones and zeroes on some data storage gadget or another. No tree would have to die.”

Tiller stretched and shook his head.

 
“Everything is moving towards being green and eco-friendly, right? Well, anyway, you’ve got the entire file, here. Let’s see, now. Ah, here’s what you’re looking for. Apparently, someone wanted to question some gorgeous young redhead in connection with her husband’s demise.”

“Redhead?” I asked as Tiller slid the photo across to me. There, looking up at me, was a younger, slightly more doe-eyed, and undeniably beautiful, Mary Wiggins, nee Silvers, apparently.

“That’s her, all right.”

“Quite a looker. Your suspicions are now confirmed, I believe. So, I take it that lovely young Mary here had not informed her new husband about her former husband’s demise?”

“It’s more than that. He wasn’t even aware that there was a previous husband, let alone a dead one. She apparently pulled a vanishing act after Silver’s death.”

Tiller slid me a piece of internal police paperwork that identified Mary as a “person of interest” in the death of Carlton “Carl” Silvers. “Person of Interest” is cop talk for “will be a suspect as soon as we find evidence.” So the retired detective had plainly thought that Mary was somehow involved in her husband’s death. He had enclosed his notes in the case file, as well as photographs of the car at the scene of the accident. There had been a fire, and the notes indicated that Silver’s body had been burned beyond recognition. He had been identified by dental records and personal items on the body, as well as the fact he owned the car, a brand new Jaguar.

Every indication was that Silvers had been a man of considerable means. So had Mary profited by his death? Had he left her his fortune? If so, that seemed to contradict Wiggins’s statement that she had been penniless when they met.

“Whatever your mystery lady is up to, Roland, it looks like this cold case is still cold. No new leads, no quaking of the earth has turned up anything to indicate guilt or absolve it. That is, unless you have uncovered something that you care to share with your old comrade in arms?”

I smiled and rose to go. “Nothing, Tiller. Not yet. But I’m going to keep shaking this thing. I think something will fall out sooner or later.”

I said goodbye to Tiller and left to go do a little shaking.

Chapter 12

I was just getting into the office the next morning when it happened. Two hoods, similar to those I had encountered before, using similar gestures, shepherded me to a waiting luxury vehicle. The car itself was similar to the one in which Francis had made his revelation. But the stoic silence and the absence of Francis’ smiling face let me know all too clearly who I was going to see. We rode in silence to Mountainbrook, where I was ushered in stony silence to a library. A man stood at a wide window, his back to me.
 

Don Ganato looked out over the city, the sunny, Southern city that was Birmingham. He had long ago left Chicago to come here to take charge of business. He had done so not of his own choosing, but on the orders of his superiors. When one is bidden, one obeys. He’d done well for himself, his family and his organization, here in the south. But times had changed, and the “family” had changed with them. It was just business, after all. Knowing that, he realized what was taking shape.
 

The refusal of aid, the delaying. If they had not already sold him out, they were probably going to do so soon. That would mean that they were prepared to do business with Longshot Lonnie O’Malley, rather than run the risk of being pulled into the open in the war that Lonnie had started. Don Ganato knew that he would have to fight this war with what men he had at his disposal, and that they had gotten precious few in the last couple of weeks.

Don Ganato looked up as Rudi and Georgio brought me in.

“Leave us,” he told Rudi. “You too, Georgio.”
 

“We’ll be right outside,” Rudi said, but Don Ganato shook his head.

“No. Go get some coffee or a drink somewhere. Leave Mr. Longville and I to talk alone. He is an old friend, after all.”

The room was silent for a few moments as Don Ganato waited for his henchmen to get lost.

“Please, Mr. Longville, sit down.”

I sat down in a leather upholstered chair and Ganato seated himself across from me.

“If this is about me talking to Longshot—”

Don Ganato gave me a strange look, as if I had brought up something embarrassing at a dinner party.

“I assure you I would not waste my time addressing such trivial matters, Mr. Longville. Your private conversations do not concern me.”

Okay, I thought, that leaves just one thing.

“You are seeing my niece, Beatrice.” It was a statement, quietly given, with just the faintest suggestion of a question trailing behind it. There it was at last, out in the open. Ganato let it hang in the air.

“I am.” I started to ask if there was a problem with that, but I stopped myself. I knew very well that if Don Ganato had a problem with that, I was about to know all about it.

“Beatrice is very dear to me, Mr. Longville,” Don Ganato said, in a quiet voice, his eyes growing distant. “You see, when my sister died she left her children in my care. She had only two, Anthony—Little Tony they called him—and Beatrice. Now, Anthony is dead, and Beatrice is all that I have left.”

I nodded, but I didn’t know where he was going with his story. I figured he was going to tell me to stay the hell away from his niece, or get a couple of his mooks in there with a blow torch, I didn’t know what, but something in his tone was off. He went on.

“I am a man who has always taken care of his own. In the old days, this was a simple matter: an eye for an eye. So perhaps now, I am an anachronism. I am a man of principle. I am a man of values. I do not believe in unnecessary violence. But the blood of my family is mine to avenge.”

I knew what he was getting at; I knew he wasn’t finished.

 
“Now, the world is turned on its ear. You know the details, I am sure. Longshot Lonnie and his boys are coming for us. Coming for me, Mr. Longville. Little Tony, Angelo, Rocco, Geppetto, so many others, all dead already. So, here it is. If anything should happen to me . . . I would prefer if Beatrice lived a life that was closer to normal than the one I have chosen. I would ask you to protect her, Mr. Longville, if you can.” I saw a tear in the man’s eye, and for some reason I tried to look away, and not let him know I had seen it.

Don Ganato nodded solemnly at his own words. He was a criminal, and had always been one, and by choice. I didn’t pity him his fate, because as far as I was concerned, he’d gone out of his way, for a very long time now, to bring it down upon himself. We both knew what was coming, and that the odds against him were pretty heavy. So, for a minute, looking at him there, he was just a man—one that was pretty sure he was going to die. So I gave him what I could, which was: “I’ll take care of Beatrice, Mr. Ganato. That’s something that you don’t have to worry about.”

He was quiet for a long moment, and then he said, “I never doubted that. Then, Mr. Longville . . . Roland . . . if you will allow me, I leave her in your care.”

I nodded and turned and left him there. And that was the last time we ever saw one another.
 

It had been a long time since I had seen Don Ganato, and under some very different circumstances. His fatalistic attitude put a weird thought in my head, one that I decided to act on. So I drove across town, leaving the cushy environs of Mountainbrook behind me, and passed into the North Side, to markedly less opulent homes. I was going to see the most dangerous man in Birmingham, Longshot Lonnie O’Malley.

Chapter 13

I knew Longshot Lonnie wouldn’t shoot me. He owed me, and he was the kind of guy who, twisted and psychopathic as he might be, lived by a code. You see, long ago when I was a uniformed patrol officer I had saved Lonnie’s life. At the time, he had been a numbers runner. Back in those days, he had done no more harm to the world than keeping a little book out at the Greyhound Track in East Birmingham. But later on, Lonnie had expanded his rackets to the North Side, and had run afoul of Don Ganato’s boys, because that was traditionally Ganato territory, and he had eventually ended up getting too big a piece of their pie at that venue. There had, therefore, been a reaction.
 

I had been on the job for about three years, when I had first met Lonnie O’Malley in person. Back before I was a gumshoe and he was a mob boss, I was a patrol cop and he was a two-bit crook. I had heard his name around the Ensley neighborhood that I patrolled. I knew he was a bookie, and I knew that he was trying to muscle in on the Ganato family numbers racket in Birmingham’s North Side. He was of no consequence to me, just one more hood in a part of town full of petty criminals, each with their own plan, their own angle. In time, though, Lonnie would stand out.

About two-thirty one morning, fate brought Lonnie and me together. I spotted a brand new Lincoln cruising near the projects, going slow, trying a little too hard to obey the speed limit. I lit it up and asked the two occupants what they were doing skulking around Ensley at that time of the morning, Those occupants were two well-dressed thugs from Don Ganatos family, and while they were trying to give me contradictory stories in explanation, I heard muffled cries coming from the trunk.
 

I called for backup and got the two guys in handcuffs, and disarmed them. They didn’t resist. They seemed to think all of it was a big joke. As it turned out, they were back on the streets in eight hours. The driver’s name was Francis, but that’s another story. When we finally got the person out of the trunk, it had turned out to be a much disheveled young Lonnie O’Malley. The Longshot moniker came along sometime after that, although his getting rescued that night had been a long shot, indeed. The guys in the Lincoln had caught him making book in Ensley projects on their turf, he confessed, and so had decided to take him for a little ride. As I gave him a ride to the station, he had given me his good luck charm, a silver poker chip pierced by a bullet hole.
 

“This good luck charm,” he told me, “saved my uncle Big Thom O’Hearn’s life, and he made a gift of it to me when I came to the States. I have to pass it on to you, to keep the luck going.” Lonnie apparently reasoned on that night that the charm, and not me, had saved his life. By passing it on to me, he was passing the luck on to me, too. I started to give him the usual song and dance about police officers accepting gratuities, but in the end, I took the thing because it was important to this scared kid, whom I hoped would see the light and stay away from crime. I took his statement and later dropped him off at home, never dreaming who and what he would later become.

I had often, since that night, had cause to regret pulling over that Lincoln. I sometimes wonder what the city would be like if those two Ganato hoods, Francis and his buddy, had gone on to whatever dark alley that awaited them and ridded the city, once and for all, of the strange creature that was Lonnie O’Malley. But I couldn’t let them do that, of course. No way, and remain one of the good guys.

Lonnie and his lucky Uncle, Big Thom O’Hearn, ended up dominating the numbers rackets in Birmingham when the racetrack was big. Don Ganato and Big Thom, both reasonable men as criminals go, reached a peaceful accord that carved up the city into crime zones. Don Ganato took the liquor and prostitution and union payola, and Big Thom got the greyhounds and the NASCAR and the football and whatever else book there was to make. This worked well as long as both men were alive, because both were Old World, and honor meant something.