Triple Shot (21 page)

‘Solari had been dispatched to Brookhills in order that he might maintain the uneasy peace between the Midwest crime families as they divided cash skimmed from their Las Vegas casinos. But legend tells us that it was not the peace that Solari kept. . .’ Another pregnant pause. ‘But rather . . . the loot.’

Chitown slid his rump off the desk edge and started to pace laterally, stage-right to stage-left and back again, the camera lens following him. ‘Over a million dollars in 1974 money, though no one knows the exact amount for sure, except the man who made off with it.

‘Our only true certainty? When the smoke cleared in the back room of this restaurant located, ironically, next to a slaughterhouse and across the tracks from the train depot, six men lay dead and the skimmed cash was . . . gone.’

Now Chitown stopped and engaged the camera straight on, legs planted, eyes blazing. ‘Or was it?’

The APPLAUSE! sign went up.

‘And . . . we’re . . . out!’ Deirdre Doty pronounced.

Elaine Riordan hopped up and brought a cup of water to Chitown.

‘Leave it on the desk,’ I chanted as a mantra. ‘Leave it on the desk.’

Sarah asked, ‘Are you all right?’

I nodded toward the cup, still in Chitown’s hand. ‘It has our logo on the side.’

‘Oh, yeah. Smart, Maggy.’

What did she think? I got to where I was now – the nearly broke co-owner of a struggling coffeehouse – being stupid?

Hell, yes. Let me count the ways.

‘All right. Positions again, everybody.’ Deirdre once more straightening her fingers. ‘And we’re live in . . .’

And so it went.

The next segment included shadowy footage of the depot and The Mob’s Waiting Room, presumably a play on ‘God’s Waiting Room.’ Partway through, Sarah started to snore. I elbowed her.

‘Wha’?’

Deirdre Doty’s eyes shot darts.

Chitown was talking. Still. ‘. . . agents crept through this room, perhaps signaling any innocent bystanders to leave. Sadly, perhaps even tragically, the restaurant’s owner, Joseph Romano, was killed in the crossfire.’ He shook his head. ‘
Probably
just collateral damage.’

I glanced over at Luc and Tien. Luc was looking straight ahead, a tear sliding down his cheek but his jaw clenched, I assumed from Chitown’s smarmy ambiguity about Father Romano’s possible involvement on the Mafia’s side of the raid. Tien squeezed her father’s hand.

‘When we come back live again, we’ll bring you into the infamous boardroom where the actual carnage took place.’

‘Oh, good,’ Sarah said, after Doty signaled we were in commercial. ‘Carnage.’

‘Oh, good,’ I parroted, standing up a bit stiffly. ‘We get to move. C’mon.’

The next segment took place, as promised, in the boardroom. There was just enough space for us, the unwashed audience, to stand out of camera range. Chitown’s on-camera narrative seemed mostly a rehash of what already had been said, the only development vaguely interesting being Chitown’s revelation of that secret panel in the back of the closet.

Since I already knew about it, though, yesteryear’s news was a bit of a snooze.

Besides, I was still smarting from the fact there’d been no mention of Uncommon Grounds during the footage they’d taped at the depot. ‘
Deirdre and Ward want you to get as much product-placement value as possible
.’ My ass.

Sarah, though, seemed to have perked up by the time we went to another commercial break. ‘A secret door. Maybe it’s to the tunnel running under the tracks.’

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘No such luck. It leads to the slaughterhouse. They would sneak out through there and then cross the tracks to hang out in
our
secret room until the train came.’

‘That’s a little low-tech. How do you know?’

‘Elaine showed Tien and me this morning.’

Doty was doing another countdown.

Sarah groaned. ‘So . . . no tunnel?’

I shook my head.

###

‘Move quickly, please.’ Deirdre Doty again – or maybe still: I was becoming numbed to the passage of time – herded us into the slaughterhouse. We were noticeably losing discipline as a flock in the absence of a Border collie nipping at our heels.

I might be a partial owner, according to Sarah, but I did
not
want to go into the slaughterhouse.

Especially now, when the place appeared to be lit up like a blood-soaked Christmas tree. God knows, I’d by then seen plenty of blood and plenty of bodies, but there was something just so wrong about a place . . .
dedicated
to killing.

‘This is a House of Execution, partner,’ I said to Sarah, ‘only its victims were one-hundred-percent innocent. And with such gentle, trusting eyes.’ I sniffled.

Sarah smacked her lips. ‘And such nice rib-eyes, especially on the grill over mesquite-flavored briquettes, with—’

‘I’ll wait here,’ I said, hanging back.

‘Not when you’re blocking the door,’ Sarah said, putting both palms on my back and shoving.

I stumbled through, nearly running into a concrete-block pillar inside the door. I caught myself just in time, jamming my wrist against the concrete. Reflexively, I pulled back, imagining stickiness in what was likely a blood splatter more than thirty years old and drier than dust.

Stepping around the pillar, we the audience found ourselves in a large room with walls of concrete block, like the pillar. Nearly every inch of the expansive floor was stained varying shades of dark brown. There were huge drains beneath our feet, the nearest beginning about a shoe-length away from me. A faded, cracked hose was coiled in one corner. In another, a wooden column stood, and hanging on that . . .

‘Oh, my God,’ I said, putting the back of my hand up to my mouth. ‘Meat hooks?’

‘What in the world is wrong?’ Sarah said. ‘It’s not like you don’t enjoy a nice burger.’

‘Not anymore,’ I said. Our group was being gathered into one area, all of us standing, and most with arms folded across our chests. Primordial instinct, Eric would say. Assuming a defensive posture for protection against the . . . unknown.

‘All right, people. Quiet, please,’ Deirdre Doty ordered again, though no one was whispering, much less speaking aloud. ‘We’re live in five, four . . .’

‘And now we’ve reached our . . .
final
destination,’ Ward Chitown intoned. ‘The slaughterhouse, next door to the restaurant. But more than mere cattle and veal calves died here. My father believed that known Mafia hitmen also brought their . . . human victims to this killing floor.

‘Imagine: it would have been so easy.’ His hand swept toward the hose. ‘A pressurized water source to wash down the blood, with drains in the floor to carry away the gruesome cocktail into city sewers. Then, spread a little bleach and –’ he shrugged – ‘would anyone even know the difference?

‘This was also where Antonio Solari ran, bleeding from gunshot wounds and desperately clutching a grocery bag that held the cash skimmed from the casinos. Everyone, including my own father, believed he had escaped with more than a million dollars. The only winner in a losing game.’

Chitown approached the camera slowly, shaking his index finger even more so, like a metronome. ‘Because make no mistake about it. No one really won that day. Three wives buried their FBI-agent husbands and seven children grew up without their FBI fathers.’

I saw Tien put an arm around Luc and lay her head on his shoulder.

‘Even Antonio Solari was not a winner, eventually. Nor even a survivor. Now, nearly forty years later, I’m here to tell you that Solari himself died that day. His body was found near the Illinois state line, not identified until just recently, thanks to DNA testing. Police photographs of the then John Doe show that he was fully clothed and had a gunshot wound to the leg, one that caused Solari to bleed out before he could make it from the train station in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to his childhood home nearby.’

Chitown sighed deeply, closing his eyes. ‘But . . . whatever happened to the money?’

Reluctantly, I had to admit I was riveted by his performance. I wanted to scream, ‘Yeah, where is it?’

‘Yeah, where is it?’ Sarah yelled for both of us.

My evil twin – let her take the heat. But this time, neither Deirdre nor Kate displayed the ‘shush’ signal.

‘I’ll tell you where it is,’ Chitown said, nodding affably at the outburst. ‘And, I will tell you . . . now.’

‘What do you bet we go to a commercial?’ Sarah whispered to me.

But Chitown was walking toward us. He knelt by the drain at the base of the pillar I’d barged into and he held out his palm, upward and open. Like a surgical nurse, Deirdre Doty slapped a yellow-handled screwdriver into it.

‘Watch carefully,’ Chitown called and we all shuffled forward. The hell with Deirdre and her ‘Stay out of the shot’ or ‘Keep quiet’. We wanted to see.

And see we did.

Chitown used the screwdriver to pry up an edge of the drain grate. Not quite able to keep the filthy iron away from his designer suit, he rolled the grate aside. Then, barehanded, Chitown reached down into the drain, eventually having to bellyflop onto the equally filthy floor, his arm disappearing to the shoulder, his facial features twisting grotesquely from the strain of . . .

‘No good. Dammit!’ He pounded his other fist against the floor, still apparently unable to dip deeply enough. He again picked up the screwdriver, gripped it as an extension of his hand and plunged both back into the hole.

Everybody – yes, including me – held our breath until . . . finally . . . an inch at a time, Ward Chitown’s arm began craning upward, ever upward. And, when that screwdriver finally reappeared, a worn, plastic grocery bag dangled precariously at its tip, corners of green currency poking out from a partial tear in the bag’s bottom.

Chapter Eighteen

‘Amazing,’ I said to Sarah, as Ward Chitown signed off and turned the money over to the two men in business suits I’d seen arriving earlier.

Apparently, they were certified public accountants, now counting the loot instead of tallying votes for the Oscars.

‘What’s amazing? That Chitown didn’t come up empty
ala
Geraldo?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Ward knew the money was down there,’ Elaine Riordan said from beside us and nearly bursting with pent-up excitement. ‘He and Deirdre found it when they scouted the slaughterhouse on Monday, but told no one, not even
me
, until now.’

The woman giggled and ran off.

‘Balls of steel.’ Sarah said.

I looked at her.

‘I mean to leave the cash there for the better part of a week. What if one of our even more amateurish treasure hunters had found it?’

‘After all these years?’ I said. ‘Besides, our other amateurs were too busy digging holes in our lawn.’

‘True. I wonder if Chitown’d have been so sanguine about leaving it if he’d realized the bag was ripped and might be leaking c-notes.’

I was watching the suits do their count. The bills looked damp and . . . oh, was that dark splotch another blood stain?

Ugh. The ‘ambience’ was closing in on me, making my stomach turn queasy. ‘How about we go back into the Ristorante?’

‘Sure, but I can’t stay. I have to run home and change for the party.’

‘You’re dressing up?’ It was unusual to see Sarah in anything beyond her jackets and trousers. I’d seen her legs in a tennis skirt once, but that had been an aberration. And a little frightening.

She nodded toward my sensible outfit. ‘You’re wearing that?’

Might as well, given that Pavlik wouldn’t be there. But that was the fourteen-year-old talking again. ‘I have a change of clothes in the car. I’ll get dressed in the restaurant ladies’ room and meet you at Sapphire.’

I followed Sarah out of the closet and into the boardroom. ‘And, given that –’ I poked my thumb toward the hubbub still going on around the money behind us – ‘I think it’s going to be quite the party.’

The dining room of the restaurant was a hive of activity. Cables were being recoiled and cameras packed up now that the live production – at least at this location – had ended. But at the same time, the local news operations began making their way into the Ristorante.

‘The other stations must have been watching,’ I said, recognizing an on-air reporter with the Milwaukee CBS affiliate as he blasted by me. ‘Didn’t take them long to get here.’

‘Oh, they had their trucks lined up along the road right outside,’ Elaine Riordan said smugly. The woman seemed to be everywhere. Right now, she was lifting her dinosaur typewriter off the desk so workmen could move the old desk and dismantle the makeshift stage.

‘Most excitement Brookhills has seen in a while,’ Sarah said, raising her hand. ‘Catch you later.’

As she left, I looked around. ‘Anything I can help you with, Elaine?’

‘Oh, that’s so nice of you, Maggy. You don’t mind?’

‘Not at all. I need to change for the party, but I have my things with me and it’s probably going to be at least an hour before anyone gets over to Sapphire anyway.’

‘I’m sure.’ Riordan strained to lovingly lower the Underwood onto the floor next to her leather handbag which probably weighed somewhere close to a side of beef.

Which reminded me, unfortunately, of the slaughterhouse.

As I swallowed back another wave of queasiness, Riordan straightened. ‘What an exciting night, Maggy. I’m so happy to be part of it.’

‘Well, happiness agrees with you.’ It was true. The woman was practically glowing.

Now she blushed. ‘I have to tell you, I feel better right now than I have in weeks.’

‘Had you been ill?’ Or depressed, I was thinking. I gestured for her to join me in folding up the front row of chairs.

‘I really feared so,’ Riordan said, sitting down instead of helping. ‘My weight has dropped and I have the most horrible headaches sometimes.’

MaryAnne Williams had mentioned the weight loss, though if I’d noticed at all – never a sure bet – I’d have attributed it to Barbies just being Barbies. Never thin enough or rich enough. ‘Have you been to a doctor?’

‘No.’ Another blush, but a different ‘shade’ than the happy one. ‘With the divorce and all, health insurance has been a problem.’