The Old Turk's Load (20 page)

In fact, that was exactly what the Mafia did—they went charging across three states on the advice of some crack-brained tipster, reinforced, of course, by solid information from Reardon. Luckily for Gloria and her friends, the Street Brothers had a little trouble getting organized.

Lloyd had called Doc Viera in Newark and told him the deal was too big, too dangerous. He’d realized he was in way over his head. He was ratting out Kelly and the Mailman and he didn’t want any reward, just to be left alone. He wanted to get cleaned up. He made his case to Doc Viera with a druggie’s cunning and Viera bought it. He told Mr. D., and Mr. D. called Woody, for whom the light clicked on immediately.

“Oh, fuck.That musta been the loser with the apartment where we got Kelly. I tossed the place, but there was nothing to connect him with the French stuff. I thought Kelly had just been hiding there. He was some kinda pusher—street-level shit—but no way did I connect him with our stuff. Sorry, Mr. D.”

The only qualities Mr. D. required of his men were honesty, loyalty, and some small measure of competence. He had learned not to expect people to perform beyond their capabilities. “That’s okay, Woody. I’ll call Reardon and get the particulars. Then I want the three of you to beat it up there as fast as you can. Don’t take any shit. Don’t buy any stories. Don’t come back without the goods.”

It was past midnight by this time. Vince, unfamiliar with East Coast highways, went straight up I-95 to Maine instead of turning off at 128. They didn’t realize their mistake until Kittery—when Woody suddenly remembered Maine was north of Massachusetts. So that put them a little behind schedule. The funny thing was, driving up 95 that dawn, they’d passed the Starship headed down to Gloucester at warp speed.

here were two windows, right at ground level, looking down into the Mailman’s dugout apartment. No lights were on, but they could see the room was a disaster. The Mailman’s entry door had a shed built around it. This contained a fifty-gallon kerosene drum, a pair of boots, foul-weather gear, and rusted gardening tools. It smelled of cat spray. Roth, in the lead, nodded approvingly. If there were a scene at the door, at least they’d have a little privacy. Taking the snub-nosed S&W from his jacket pocket, he tucked it into his belt. Jarkey edged up beside him and peered through the glass at the top of the door. The kitchen was similarly dark and empty. “Maybe they’ve already been here,” he whispered. “It’s a mess.”

“Let’s find out,”said Roth, and pounded on the door.The wall rattled, but there was no response.
The shed began to fill with jangled, disparate vibes. Gloria knew this was the moment on which everything turned. It was her play, her chance to prove herself to Irene, certainly, but also to Julie who, amazingly, was supporting her. Or maybe he had been all along. Irene understood that it was Gloria’s show and was content to have it so. But she was at war with herself. Why was she here? What if something went wrong and they got caught with drugs? She wouldn’t be much help then, would she? But what if things went the way Gloria wanted and they wound up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the fund? Money from selling poison that would kill hundreds of people. Destroy countless families. Could she live with that? If the heroin ruined more lives than she might save, where was the gain? She felt sick. To Jarkey it all seemed unreal, like a movie of the four of them. How could there be no Kelly? How could there be Irene? How could he be standing on the other side of the door from millions of dollars’ worth of heroin? Roth was playing out in his head possible sequences of what might come next. But catching the whiff of nervous perspiration in the air of the entry shed, he realized his troops were on the edge of losing it.
He motioned Jarkey back and got ready to put his shoulder to the door. Harry edged toward the shed’s opening, forcing the two women outside. Gloria turned back toward the street and saw a little girl standing there, watching. She might’ve been eight, with long raven hair, olive skin, and luminous black eyes. She showed no sign of shyness or fear. As if she’d been expecting them.
Gloria gave the girl a warm smile and a gentle “Hello.” This kid would need to be dealt with.“My name’s Gloria.What’s yours?”
“Ilda.”
“We’re friends. From out of town. We came to visit.”
“He’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yes, he left. Wait. I’ll show you.”She disappeared around the front corner of the house.
The mood shifted instantly. Gloria said it for the four of them. “The fuckers beat us here.”
Roth nudged his bulk against the door and it popped open.The kitchen was dominated by a cast-iron kerosene stove. All the drawers in the other room had been emptied, bed pulled apart.There weren’t many places to hide ten kilos of heroin. Roth examined them all.
The little girl came back with her papa’s copy of the
Gloucester Daily Times
. Just below the fold on the front page the headline read, “Local Man Found Dead.” His name was Martin Langer and he was forty-two.The cause had been a probable drug overdose. Police had been summoned to the 31 Webster Street apartment by an anonymous call. Foul play was not suspected. Traces of a class D substance were found at the scene. Pending an autopsy, scheduled for later in the week, no further details were available.
“Papa said they were bad men. But I liked the Mailman. I taught him how to talk after his operation.”
It had to be the pull of the old Turk’s load, dragging them off course. Ilda was telling them, plain as day, what had happened. But they, for all their intelligence, were not understanding what she was saying.
“Must have sampled some of the product,” Roth told them. “And OD’d.” He was remembering Smoot, back in Newark, and Kelly dead in some Mafia hideout. Now the Mailman.
Irene rode the edge of Roth’s thinking. She felt tragedies and deaths, then a rush of mortal sadness. She bit her lower lip and stared out the window. Jarkey gazed at her anxiously, beaming her a psychic Get Well card. She refused it.
Gloria pushed ahead. “Honey, did anyone else come here after . . . you know?”
Ilda saw immediately that these grown-ups had misunderstood her, that they thought Langer was the Mailman, and she wanted to correct their mistake. But she could feel how nervous they were. The lady seemed nice, but maybe they weren’t the Mailman’s friends.
“Just the police.”
“Did you talk to them?”
“No. They were mean to Mama because she doesn’t speak English.”The little girl seemed so gorgeous and calm, in the midst of their squalid angst and nasty business, that she might have been an apparition.
Gloria shot Roth a look. “Think the cops nabbed it?”
“Then they would’ve written it up as a drug bust,” Roth told her.
“Not if they stole it.”
“It’s a lot of dope. They’d have to be
really
crooked,” he said, pursing his lips.
They paused for a moment, pondering how really crooked the Gloucester cops might be. Then Gloria resumed her interrogation.
“The police came, honey, and they looked all around, right?”
“Yes.”
“Did anyone else come here after the police left?”
“Mr. Schultz came, and his friend, the woman.”
“Mr. Schultz?”
“He was the Mailman’s friend. After the police left, he came and took the car away.”
The car! “You mean, that one out front doesn’t belong to the Mailman?”
“That’s Herbie’s. On the third floor.”
“Ilda, we need to find the Mailman’s car.”
Ilda wanted these people to go away now.There was definitely something wrong with them, and they were not the Mailman’s friends. She said, “Wait. I’ll ask Mama.”
They followed her around to the front steps, to the apartment above the Mailman’s. Ilda went in and reappeared with a heavyset woman in a print dress. Ilda asked her something in Portuguese and the woman gave a lengthy reply.
“After the policemen left, the Mailman’s car was blocking Papa in and he had to go to work. So he called Mr. Schultz, and Mr. Schultz came and towed it away.”
“Where does Mr. Schultz live, honey?”
She asked her mother, who shrugged. “She doesn’t know,” Ilda reported.
They walked back to the parking lot of the PortugueseAmerican Club and noted the sign posting its dire warning that unauthorized vehicles would be towed at the owner’s expense.This didn’t seem likely, but there was no point being sloppy. Roth parked down the street and the four of them got back into Gloria’s car.
Gloria told them, “Maybe Rosy can help us.”
“Rosy?’
“Wait till you meet him.”

hey found a Gloucester phone book in a booth on the way back to Tally’s. To their relief, only one Schultz was listed. Rosy directed them to Church Street, the site of the Mailman’s first long-term relationship and, probably, his happiest days. Faye and Schultzie’s house was a cramped brown two-story, squeezed in among a row of similarly cramped houses across from the Unitarian church.
Gloria and Irene stayed in the car this time, so that Roth and

“Friends of the Mailman’s? That’s a good one. He owe you money?” She led them to the kitchen table where she and Schultzie were smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from thick mugs. Schultzie was skinny, about one hundred fifty pounds, and dressed in tidy khaki work clothes. He smelled of Wildroot Cream Oil.

“Actually, ma’am, we’re looking for his car.”
“
His
car?” erupted Schultzie. “That’s rich. I loaned it to him for a weekend three years ago and I never got it back. Never saw a nickel either.”
“Aww, lighten up,” Faye told him. “Poor guy.”
“Yeah, well. Anyway, the guy upstairs, Menezes, he calls me and says the Mailman’s car is blocking him in. And the Mailman’s gone. So I go over, and of course the place is locked up, and the car is, too, but I still have my other set of keys. Wouldn’t you know, she won’t start. So I pop the hood, and he’s blown the seal, cracked the block. Trashed it. So I call Kaminsky’s and they tow it away.”
Roth got directions, then he and his companions sped off to Kaminsky’s, a smallish junkyard at the end of a railroad spur in the industrial part of town. On one side of the yard was a tar-paper shack with a hand-lettered office sign atop the door. The four of them, hot for the load, spilled into the room like Keystone Kops.
There, uniformly squat and burly, were Joe, Benny, and Rem Kaminsky, enjoying their mid-morning coffee and doughnuts—the three of them balding exactly the same way. Same faces, schnozzes, smiles, each bearing the same uncanny resemblance to beloved Red Sox center fielder Dom DiMaggio, the L’il Perfessor, brother of Joe. (DiMaggio, not Kaminsky.) Joe Kaminsky and Benny were on stools at the counter up front, Rem at the desk in back.
Rem spoke first. “The Mailman’s Ford? Sure. Bought it from Schultzie for ten bucks. Stripped the starter, the generator, and the radiator, but that was it. The thing was a wreck. Too many Ford parts around anyhow. No market for ’em.”
“We just need to look at it. We might want to buy it back.”
“Look at it? Sure. Benny, show them where it is.”
Benny walked around from behind the counter, opened the door, and pointed into the yard.
They stared, searched, squinted hard for their heroin. Harry looked at Irene. Irene looked at Gloria. Gloria looked at Julie, who willed the mound of scrap metal to resolve itself into a heap of crushed automobiles—not squeezed into bricks, but pancaked, obviously, by the Kaminskys’ homemade car squasher, a huge hydraulic rig in a frame of I beams. A crane with a giant magnet stood poised over the pile just as the Kaminskys had left it when they retired to their office for coffee. Off to the side of the crane were two railroad cars on which the squashed autos were being loaded. The front car was already full.
“There it is,”said Benny.“On one of them freight cars. Prob’ly near the bottom of the first one, since it came in last.”
Rem pitched in from behind them. “We ain’t that big here. Can’t have these clunkers hanging around.We were scheduled to get a load picked up today, so we crunched it right away. Otherwise it’d be parked right there where you’re standing. Bad timing, I guess.”

n the bigger picture, contrary to Rem Kaminsky’s assessment, their timing had actually been pretty good. As the four dejected opportunists slunk out of Gloucester,Vince,Woody, and the Mushroom arrived on the scene.They deconstructed the Mailman’s apartment, then took the Buick apart right on the street.
Wolf and Sponagle had just come on duty, still high from their

evening with the girls. Wolf got the neighbor’s complaint call from the dispatcher and told Sponagle, “Oh, fuck. It’s the car.” “What’s the car?”
“That junker that Kaminsky towed away after Langer croaked. That’s what all this is about.We got so wrapped up with the stiff, we never thought about where the Dixie cup came from. Five’ll get you ten that fucking car had been the transport. Now a crew of Mob guys is over there tearing up someone else’s car.” Not feeling as good as they had prior to the complaint call, they drove to Webster Street.
What they found there was Vince slashing away at the backseat of the Buick with a buck knife. Woody’s big black Lincoln was parked just behind. He was standing with his arms crossed over his chest, watching the approach of the cruiser.
Sponagle rolled his window down.“’Scuse me, fellahs. I think the vehicle you’re looking for has been towed to Kaminsky’s.”
Woody looked disdainfully at him. Then he noted that Wolf had activated neither siren nor lights.The fuckers were bent.“Where did you say?”
“Kaminsky’s junkyard. If you’d like, you can follow us.”
Vince had stopped slashing. Vince and Woody looked at the cops, then at one another. The Mushroom was looking at a bird in the little apple tree across the way.
“Why not?”
Wolf radioed in that the situation on Webster Street had been resolved. Unfortunately, Chief Movalli, who’d just finished briefing Agents Spaulding and Voorhees, intercepted the call.
“What the fuck is going on over there?”He had a pretty good idea what the fuck, in fact. He ached for the chance to get Wolfie and his lard-ass partner to incriminate themselves, hoping against hope one of them would let something slip. Spaulding was standing right beside him, monitoring every word.
But Wolf wouldn’t bite. He resolved to let Movalli handle the situation. The son of a bitch could go ahead and deal with Mr. Reardon. End of Movalli.
“Appears to be a case of mistaken identity, Chief, involving a motor vehicle that was towed to Kaminsky’s after that 911.”
“Get back to the station, Wolf.”
“Yes sir.”
Chief Movalli hustled Spaulding and Voorhees into his cruiser and screamed over to Kaminsky’s. Agent Spaulding told Movalli to pull into a driveway at the end of Cleveland Street and he and