Sharky's Machine

by William Diehl

  “Stop it!” she cried.

  “Am I making my point?”

  “He’s right, you know,” Livingston said from the doorway. “You stay here and you might just as well hang a target on your forehead and sit in the window waiting for it to come.”

  “Ohhh.” She shuddered.

  “We’re not doing this for effect,” Sharky said. “We want to keep you alive, Domino, and not just because it’s our job. I like you. We thought … we thought we lost you once. We don’t want it to happen again.” He turned to Livingston. “Are we set?”

  Livingston nodded. “The place is safe and comfortable. Clean. It beats the hell out of a pine box.”

  She held her hand up and stopped him. “All right. That’s enough. I don’t understand any of this, but you’ve convinced me.”

  She got up and went to the bedroom. “May I change? I’ve been in these clothes all day.”

  “Keep away from the windows,” Sharky said.

  “Will you stop saying things like that!”

  “I’m not trying to scare you,” Sharky said. “I mean it. Stay away from the windows.”

  “Where am I going?”

  Livingston said, “I’ll tell you when we get there. The less you know now, the better.”

  She went into the bedroom and closed the door. She leaned against the dresser and saw Tiffany’s suitcase and the tears started to come back. She shook them off. She looked at the window and suddenly it was no longer just a pane of glass—it was an ominous threat. A sense of danger crept over her and she suddenly found it hard to breathe. She opened her own suitcase, threw the dirty clothes on the floor, and aimlessly, thoughtlessly put clean things in their place, then changed into jeans, a checkered shirt, and boots. And all the time the questions gnawed at her.

  Why? Who?

  But that only made it worse. She turned her thoughts to Sharky and she felt strangely reassured. She felt a link to him, a lifeline that tied them together. Her lifeline. Her danger was now his danger and because of that she sensed a new strength in him, something she had not felt before. A cop, she thought. And that was far more appealing than an elevator man.

  How much did he know? About her? Tiffany? Did he know about Donald? And Victor?

  She would have to tell Donald. He was certain to find out about the shooting and he might do something foolish. He was capable of such a thoughtful gesture, but he could not afford to be linked with this. The least she could do was call him, tell him she was all right, tell him to keep out of it.

  She went back to the bedroom and stood beside the phone, remembering Sharky’s reaction when she had threatened to call somebody.

  Oh, hell, she thought, it can’t hurt to put his mind at ease. He had his own problems; he didn’t need any of hers. She picked up the receiver and quietly punched out his private number, a phone by the bedside in his suite that only he answered. It buzzed several times while she watched the door, fearful that either Sharky or Livingston might come in.

  He isn’t there, she thought, and was about to hang up when he answered. His voice seemed strangely cold, suspicious. “Hello?”

  “Listen to me, I haven’t much time. A terrible thing happened. Somebody was killed in my apartment.”

  A pause. Then: “Where are you?”

  “Don’t worry about me and don’t get involved in this. I’m going to be all right. A cop I know named Sharky is taking care of me.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll be safe. Can’t talk anymore. Goodbye.”

  She put the phone down very softly.

  _____________________

  In his suite, Hotchins stared at the buzzing telephone for a moment and then slowly replaced it.

  “It was her,” he said.

  “Where is she? Is she at home?” DeLaroza was standing beside him.

  “Yes, but the police are into it now. Apparently they’re taking Domino into protective custody.”

  “Who? I need a name,” DeLaroza said.

  “A cop named Sharky.”

  DeLaroza sighed with relief and then smiled. “Excellent. Now you can go back to the others. I’ll handle this.”

  24

  At thirty-four Hazel Weems had begun to show the hard lines of a hard life. She had grown up in the South Georgia cotton country and had started to work in the fields when she was seven. Her father, a sometime preacher, sometime fieldhand, had sent her to live with an aunt in Atlanta when she was fourteen. It was her father’s intention to give her a chance at a decent life, but the aunt had turned out to be an alcoholic who drank up the ten dollars a week that was sent for Hazel’s upkeep and who frequently beat her in a drunken rage.

  On one particularly brutal night neighbors had called the police and one of the investigating officers was Duke Weems, a kind, sympathetic ex-football coach who was twenty-five years older than Hazel. Soon after the beating Weems found her a foster home with a West End grocer and after that was a frequent visitor. After two years of courting they were married. Hazel was seventeen and Duke was forty-two. Two years later he dropped dead of a heart attack chasing a purse snatcher through Five Points.

  A year after that Hazel passed the police examination and was inducted into the force as a meter maid. It took her seven more years to make the regular force and another two to become a third-class detective, one of the first women investigators on the force.

  Duke’s ex-partner, Arch Livingston, had talked Hazel into taking the police exam and had worked tirelessly with her to prepare her for it. It was Livingston too who had fought to get her transferred to the uniformed squad and then badgered his superiors until she was permitted to take the exam for detectives.

  If Livingston had asked her to cut off her nose and send it to him for Christmas she would have done it.

  She lived on the South Side of Atlanta in a predominantly black neighborhood, her small, tidy two-bedroom house the kind they once called a bungalow. There was an island at the end of her street that was pruned, plucked, and planted religiously by the Parton Place Garden Club. Hazel was not a member.

  Hazel met them at the door and sized up Domino with the eye of a widow studying a prospective daughter-in-law. No hat, a roughhouse shearling coat, blue jeans, and scruffy boots. She liked what she saw.

  “These two ain’t bullying you, are they, honey?” she said, steering Domino into the house.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Domino said and smiled.

  “If they give you any shit, you just tell Hazel. I’ve known this one since he was a rookie directing traffic on Five Points and this one here, I’ve just seen him around, but all he’s good for is raisin’ hell and drivin’ the captain bughouse. You caught yourself quite a pair, lady. I’ll put some coffee on.”

  “I’ll help,” Livingston said and followed her into the kitchen.

  “Look here, Hazel,” Livingston told her. “I got you fixed up with a room at a first-class hotel. Just for a couple of days. Won’t cost you a dime.”

  She turned on him.

  “Move outa my own house! What the hell you talkin’ about? You got free board. Why don’t you go to the hotel?”

  “Too much traffic. Too public. This lady’s on somebody’s hit list.”

  “What did she do?”

  “I don’t think she knows. And that’s for real. I don’t think she can tell us, ’cause I don’t think she’s figured it out herself yet.”

  “Well, anyway I ain’t goin’ to no Lysol-smellin’ hotel. What the hell, Archie, I ain’t the Avon Lady; I’m a cop just like you. If there’s trouble, I’m as good as anybody else downtown. Don’t come at me with that macho shit.”

  “It ain’t macho shit, lady. We’re gonna be in the middle of the goddamndest interdepartmental ass-hittin’ you ever saw. You want to get caught in the middle of that?”

  “Between you and who?”

  “Right now I’d say between us and Riley and Jaspers and D’Agastino.”

  “God damn, yo
u do things in a big way.”

  “You get my point. You get out and when it hits the fan all you got to know is that I asked to use your place for a cover for a coupla days.”

  “It ain’t any of my business, Sergeant, but ain’t you been in enough shit through the years? You got to stick your foot in it again?”

  “Ain’t my gig, this time. I come along for the ride. He’s a young fella. Needs all the help he can get.”

  “Good. In that case I’ll just buy a ticket and jump aboard, too. Now get outa my way while I make some coffee.”

  _____________________

  Sharky carried Domino’s suitcase into the guest bedroom and put it on a chair near the door. The room, modest but comfortable, was quite a contrast to Domino’s apartment.

  “Is the place okay?” Sharky said.

  “It’s fine,” Domino said. “What a nice lady she is but … why is she doing this for me?”

  “She’s doing it for Arch, although if she didn’t like you she probably would have thrown us out. She’s a detective. Her husband was one of the first black cops in the city. He died a couple of years ago.”

  “How sad. She seems so young to be a widow.”

  “Yeah, well, that happens.”

  “Is that the way you think? ‘Oh, well, it happens’?”

  “I can’t imagine what it’s like to be married to a cop,” Sharky said. “I suppose there are realities you either accept and live with or you end it.”

  “Or it gets ended for you,” she said.

  “That, too.”

  Domino sat down on the bed. “I’m tired,” she said.

  “There are a couple of more questions …”

  “I thought it was going to be my turn next,” she said.

  She stared at him, boring in with those green eyes, and Sharky felt the back of his neck warming up. He was moved by her vulnerability and her spirit. He would like to have said something to her but he was afraid it would come out wrong. Instead he said, “You want to know about the elevator, hunh?”

  She nodded.

  “I could lie about it, you know. I’m very good at that. It’s something you learn on the street.”

  “Oh, I know how good you are at it. You sucked me in beautifully. But I thought we could make a fresh start—and both tell the truth this time.”

  “Okay. We were bugging your apartment. I was monitoring the tapes.”

  There it was, quick, to the point, and probably deadly. But her reaction surprised him. She wasn’t mad or indignant or even embarrassed. She simply looked at him rather whimsically and said, “Why?”

  “Did you know Neil Dantzler and Tiffany were involved in blackmail?”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Oh, you can believe it. That part we’re sure of. They shook down a Texas oilman for fifty grand.”

  “Tiffany?”

  Sharky nodded.

  “Then it was Neil. He made her do it. She wasn’t like that.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference. They did it.”

  “And you think I was part of it?”

  Sharky shook his head. “Nope, don’t think that at all. But we had to find out for sure.”

  “And, uh, how many of these bugs did you have in my place?”

  “Enough. I could hear everything in that apartment but the plants growing.”

  “How long were you, uh, up there?”

  “Long enough. Since that night Confucius came to dinner.”

  “Ohhh.” She sucked her bottom lip between her teeth and looked at him and then shrugged. “What can I say?”

  “You can tell me who he was. That’s one of the questions. We’ve got to start someplace. Somebody wants you dead.”

  Victor? she thought. It couldn’t be him. And revealing his name might eventually involve Donald, possibly destroy his career for nothing.

  “It wasn’t him. He’s from out of the country. Germany. He went back to Europe the next day.”

  There, that was easy, she thought, as long as he doesn’t lean on it. She changed the subject.

  “Would it help my image any if I told you I’m going to retire?”

  “It won’t change anything,” Sharky said softly. “Hell, I’m not here to judge you. What you do is your business.”

  She cocked her head to one side and smiled. “Do you mean that?”

  “Sure. We’re being honest, remember?”

  “Thank you.”

  “I felt like a goddamn eavesdropper anyhow.” He hesitated, then changed the subject. “You’re sure you never heard of Angelo Scardi or Howard Burns?”

  “Who is this Burns?”

  “It’s Scardi’s moniker … alias. Scardi was very big in the news about seven years ago.”

  “Oh, hell,” she said, “seven years ago I was seventeen and living in Mudville, Utah, and all I cared about was Warren Beatty and rock and roll.”

  “Then he’s just the trigger. Somebody else wants you scratched and that’s the somebody I want.”

  “It sounds personal.”

  “Well, it got that way …”

  “Why? Because of me, Sharky? Because you thought I was dead?”

  “Uh, I …”

  Livingston saved him.

  “You gonna be okay?” he asked Domino.

  “Yes. And I thank you.”

  “Sure.” He turned to Sharky. “I’m gonna check in with Friscoe but I’m not givin’ him this number. I’ll set up a phone drop, have him leave a number. For now I’d like to keep this place between the four of us.”

  “Good idea,” Sharky said. “What we should do, I can stay here with her. You meet the Machine someplace and fill them in. Everybody needs to know.”

  “Right. Be back in a minute.” He went in the other room to make the call.

  Sharky moved the suitcase off the chair and dropped into it like a sack of cement.

  “You look like something out of a horror movie,” Domino said. “When’s the last time you were in bed?”

  “I forget.”

  “Come here.”

  “If I lay down on that bed, I won’t get up until Easter.”

  She looked at him and mischief played at her lips. “Wanna bet?”

  Sharky thought about it. He wasn’t too tired to think about it. Then she held out her foot. “Would you mind helping me off with my boots?”

  He went over, turned his back to her, and took the boot by the instep and heel and pulled it off. She watched him and when he had pulled the other one off, she said, “Anybody ever tell you you’ve got a beautiful ass?”

  Sharky turned around and looked down at her. “That’s supposed to be my line,” he said.

  “Oh, piffle. Haven’t you heard? Times are changing.”

  Livingston called to him from the other room and she sighed.

  “Saved by Ma Bell,” she said ruefully as he left the room.

  Livingston handed Sharky a slip of paper with a phone number on it. It was a drop, the P in front of the number indicating a phonebooth.

  “You got two urgents from The Nosh,” Livingston said. “The first one was at six ten, the other one about ten minutes ago. He says he’ll be at this number until seven thirty.”

  A warning bell went off deep inside Sharky, but he didn’t stop to analyze it. It was seven thirty already. He grabbed the phone and dialed the number.

  25

  The apartment houses along Piedmont Road facing the sprawling inner city park were a tawdry souvenir of more elegant times. Once, near the turn of the century, the park had hosted the International Exposition and on one brilliant afternoon John Phillip Sousa had introduced “The Stars and Stripes Forever” before an assemblage that had included the President of the United States. But the grandeur of Piedmont Road was long gone. The lawns in front of the apartment buildings had eroded into red clay deserts infested with old tires and broken bottles. Behind paneless windows covered with old blankets derelicts of every kind huddled together in the agony of poverty, cooking
over cans of Sterno or, worse, drinking it to forget their lost dreams.

  The Nosh sat huddled behind the wheel of his Olds watching one of the battered apartments up the street. He was getting nervous, even a little scared. He looked at his watch. Seven thirty. Time for the meet. Why the hell didn’t Sharky call?

  He reached under the seat, got his flashlight, and climbed out of the car. And then, with blessed relief, he heard the phone in the booth ring.

  He caught it on the second ring.

  “Hello.”

  “Nosh? It’s Shark.”

  “Hey, man, I was gettin’ worried. I’m runnin’ outa time.”

  “What do you mean, runnin’ outa time?”

  “I got this weird phonecall about six o’clock, Shark. Guy tells me he can identify the voice on the tape. ‘What tape?’ I says and he says, ‘The Chinese tape.’ So I says to him, ‘I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about’ and he says, ‘Don’t be dumb—the one from Domino’s apartment’ and then he tells me he can identify the guy on the tape for a hundred bucks, but I gotta come to this apartment on Twelfth and Piedmont alone before seven thirty. So I argued a little, you know, told him I ain’t goin’ no place alone and then he says I can bring you along.”

  “He said me? He said my name?”

  “Yeah. So anyways, I went by Tillie the Teller and got a hundred bucks and I’m here now, right up the street from …”

  “Nosh, don’t move. Get back in your car and wait right there. I’m on my way.”

  “But he’s gonna leave at seven thirty and it’s—”

  “Nosh, you’re not listening! Don’t go near the fuckin’ place. Stay there. Wait for me, okay?”

  “… Well, okay …”

  “Nosh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You stay there, you hear me?”

  “Okay.”

  “Gimme fifteen minutes. I’m leaving now.”