Cold Night (Jack Paine Mysteries)

by Al Sarrantonio

  He drove down to Croton. The blue Chrysler was gone from the front of Hartman's house. In its place was a white Mercedes. It looked like the car that had followed him to the funeral home.

  Paine went to the front door, tried the lock, which was engaged.

  He stepped off the stoop and walked to the small bay window fronting the living room. He heard a television set, a baseball announcer laughing, the rise of the crowd noise and the announcer's laughter turning to excitement.

  "Holy cow!" the television said. It sounded like a Yankee had hit a home run.

  "Holy cow," Paine muttered to himself, shaking his head at the bad luck of the man sitting in Hartman's chair smoking a cigarette and watching the baseball game. It had to be Childs. It would be his bad luck to lose his teeth before Hartman did.

  Paine walked calmly back to the front door and kicked it in with the flat of his right foot. The bolt splintered out of the jam and Paine pushed the door the rest of the way open. He walked in. Childs was up, his cigarette still in his hand.

  "Shit," he said, dropping the cigarette and running to the back of the house.

  Paine went after him. He kicked the television off its stand as he went by. The sound stayed on, increasing in volume. "Holy cow!" the announcer shouted.

  Childs turned from the kitchen table, leveling a .44 at Paine as he entered. It was a wide miss. Paine ran at him and drove him into the refrigerator. Childs dropped the gun and tried to drive his fist into the back of Paine's head. He struck at Paine's rib cage. Paine groaned and loosened his grip. Childs scrambled away. Paine straightened to see the back door fly back on its hinges. Childs disappeared into the backyard.

  Paine followed. His hurt lope turned into angry pursuit. Childs vanished into the yawning opening of the garage. Paine saw another figure in there, working under the upraised hood of the blue Chrysler.

  Paine returned to the kitchen, retrieved Childs's .44 and walked back into the yard, keeping the wide mouth of the garage diagonal to him.

  "Let's talk," Paine called into the garage.

  "Fuck you," Hartman's voice answered.

  The blue Chrysler's rear end butted invitingly out the garage door. Paine took aim at it, putting a slug into the rear panel just above the gas tank.

  "Shit," Childs shouted from the far reaches of the garage.

  "Here's what's going to happen," Paine said. "I'm going to pump shots into the gas tank until one of them hits it. When that happens, gasoline and metal will blow right through your fucking faces. Got anything to say?"

  "Fuck you," Hartman called out.

  Paine put another slug into the side of the car, a little lower.

  "Maybe the next one," Paine said.

  "Jesus," Childs answered, but once again Hartman yelled, "Fuck you!"

  Paine aimed another shot at the Chrysler, shattering the back windshield.

  There was fast arguing and Paine moved toward the side of the garage as Hartman ran out into the open with a shotgun, pulling off one chamber and shouting. He stopped shouting and found himself out in the open with Paine behind him. Paine took careful aim. "Drop it," he said, but Hartman wheeled with the shotgun, pulling off the other chamber. His shot flew into the air as Paine's hit him just under the chin and he got a surprised look on his face and took a couple of breaths through the hole in his neck and then dropped, gasping on the ground like a banked catfish.

  "Enough of this shit," Paine said. He walked to the doorway of the garage and fired two more shots into the tank of the Chrysler.

  One of them flared the tank and Childs ran screaming out of the garage as it blew. The back of his shirt caught fire. He ran blindly at Paine, and Paine punched him and threw him onto his back and snuffed the flames from his shirt.

  Paine stood and put his foot on Childs's chest.

  "Let's talk."

  "We should have killed you in that parking lot," Childs whimpered.

  "You were supposed to, asshole, weren't you?" Paine moved his foot up to Childs's neck and pressed.

  Childs said nothing, so Paine pressed harder. "Weren't you?"

  "Yes," Childs gasped.

  "Who do you work for? Hartman told me you worked for Paterna but that was bullshit, right?"

  Childs said nothing, and Paine increased the pressure on his neck until he began to fight for breath.

  "Tell me. That's Paterna's Mercedes out front. Who gave it to you?"

  Childs was losing his battle for breath; he nodded abruptly, and when Paine released the pressure on his windpipe he gasped, "Henry Kopiak."

  "You work for Kopiak? Paterna did, too?"

  Childs nodded listlessly.

  From inside, the baseball game still droned on loudly, balls and strikes, runs and outs, the passing of an early autumn afternoon with a summer game.

  Paine bent down over Childs, the twinge of his broken ribs telling him he shouldn't do that. "Call an ambulance for your asshole friend," he said. "And like I told him, you're the kind of scumbags that'll never get it right."

  TWENTY-TWO

  Rebecca answered, and he said, "Hello."

  "Jack," she said.

  "You sound relieved to hear from me."

  "Someone threatened to kill me this morning."

  There was a cold place in his heart. "Do you know who it was?"

  She sounded upset. "No."

  "I don't want you to stay there," Paine said. "There's a place upstate my brother and I own." He told her about the key in the hollowed stump. "Go there and wait for me. I think I'm at the end of this thing."

  "Where are you, Jack?"

  "I'm going to see your father's lawyer, Henry Kopiak. He was the one who pulled Paterna's strings. When I'm finished with him I'll meet you. Would you rather I call Bob Petty?"

  "I don't trust anyone."

  "Then do what I said. Someone is getting very desperate, Rebecca."

  "I love you," she said.

  She hung up before he did.

  There was nothing phony about Henry Kopiak's office. It was the real thing, not like Les Paterna's cobbled dream of class. This was the Princeton Club, the good old men, the yachts and polo ponies, the Governor's Ball, the handshakes in small sitting rooms after brandy and cigars. Old money. The root within the root of all evil.

  When he walked in, Kopiak was staring out a wide window that gave the same view of the Hudson that Morris Grumbach had bought for himself. His hands were behind his back, the classic pose of rich lawyers in deep thought.

  "I wasn't able to find Paterna's brown folder before I got fired," Paine said.

  "That doesn't matter," Kopiak said, not turning. "Gloria Fulman and I wanted to see how much you knew. It was Gloria who decided to have you discredited and then killed. There was also the slim chance that you would find the folder, which would tell us who was killing everyone."

  Kopiak turned. On the low sill of the wide window was a bottle of Chivas Regal and a single crystal glass.

  "I don't want to die, Mr. Paine," Kopiak said. "It's as simple as that. I've tried to control this thing all along, but someone has been killing everyone down the line and I know that I'm at the top of the list. Gloria Fulman is already a virtual prisoner in her Boston apartments; there was an attempt on her life when she was in New York and I just can't live like that. I'd rather go to prison than be dead."

  Kopiak's hands shook. Paine had seen him that one time in his office, and now his clubbiness and arrogance had faded like an outmatched number 10 horse in a crowded field. He was a frightened, beaten man.

  "I've telephoned the one other person left in this thing, and when he gets here I intend to settle with him and then turn myself in." He smiled wanly at Paine. "You may do the honors, if you wish."

  "I'd like to hear the whole thing," Paine said.

  Kopiak ran his hands through his hair. There was a photo on his desk, framed, turned so that Paine or any other visitor could see it, of a smiling, middle-aged woman flanked by two college boys. The woman looked content. The boys
looked like the kind that got letters on their jackets, drank moderately, had perky girlfriends.

  "I want you to know something first," Kopiak said. He managed to pour himself another drink and get half of it down. "I want you to know that I made two mistakes in my career, and I never did anything else wrong in forty-five years of practice." His voice strengthened with self-justification. "That's a long time, Mr. Paine. Forty-five years."

  He lowered his voice, using his glass as an emphatic pointer. "There was a time when I wanted to run for office, Mr. Paine. That was my weakness. To do that, you have to make connections, and you have to make money. I made both.

  "I met Morris Grumbach and his wife, Jane, at a fund-raising dinner for a local congressman. I was up on the same slate for state senator. In those days I was surrounded by men who thought I could go far beyond that. Congressman, they said, and then senator, and then . . ." He laughed bitterly. "Those were the Kennedy years, and a Catholic Pollack with connections could dream.

  "Grumbach was a blowhard, but not unpleasant. Came into his money almost by mistake; his father had filed a basic patent and the family got rich overnight. He acted like he still didn't know if he deserved it.

  "But Jane believed he deserved it, all right. And more. She had been born for that money, and she acted like it had always belonged to her. She thought she was royalty and acted like it.

  "I didn't see all this at first, of course. But that night she seemed to take an inordinate interest in me. Fawned over me, almost. I was flattered, and, I think, my wife was a little jealous. It turned out Jane wanted something from me. She never hesitated in going after something she wanted.

  "She pledged a lot of money to my campaign. As I say, I was flattered. And I needed the money. But the next week she came to my office and we had a little private talk. She had already checked me out, long before that fund-raiser, but I didn't know that then. There was something I'd done for my father-in-law, just after passing the bar, and I didn't think a soul on earth knew about it. But she did. She was very discreet about it, very gentle, but also very clear."

  Kopiak looked down at the thin pool of scotch in his glass and emptied it. He went to the windowsill and poured another drink, setting it down on the ledge and staring at it. He looked around at Paine.

  "She had me by the balls. With her contribution, which I had already spent, I had enough money for my campaign to really get off the ground. My practice was doing well also. My first son had just been born, giving me a real family for the first time in my life. With one phone call she could end it all." He fingered the glass on the ledge. "Or, she hinted, she could take out her checkbook and write another check."

  He picked up the glass and moved it to the desk, sitting down in his chair. "She wrote another check. While she did that she told me what she wanted.

  "It didn't seem like much, the way she told it. She had a way of talking that made you think you had nothing to do with her business, that she was merely hiring you for the details she couldn't handle herself. It was her way of making you feel as if you weren't in any way responsible. Which wasn't true, of course."

  Kopiak held out a shaking hand to Paine. "I believe you have two packets of photographs?"

  Paine took them out and handed them over. Kopiak took the pictures of Les Paterna, Lucas Druckman and Jeffrey Steppen and put them to one side. He spread out the other three and stared at them, as if coming across an old memory in a scrapbook, something momentous, perhaps, and, though buried by time, finding a host of dredged and still-sharp memories surface. His hand moved to his drink and, without removing his eyes from the three photos, he brought his scotch to his lips and drank. When the glass was empty he set it down.

  "These two," he said quietly, as if to himself, pointing with his forefinger to the picture of the man and woman standing next to the new car, "were Gloria's father and mother. He worked for an aviation firm in southern California. She was their only child, and they had her late in life. He died about eight years ago, a massive coronary. His wife died two months later."

  He moved to the second photograph, his finger trembling slightly over the man and woman in the field with the horse in the background. "Dolores's parents. Originally from New Mexico. They moved to California in 1966. Dolores was born two years later. She was their only child. They died in an auto accident in 1975. The coroner's report said he was driving while intoxicated."

  The finger moved to the third photo, the corporate head shot of the man with the wry smile. "Rebecca's father. He served in Korea in 1953, worked for a P.R. firm when this picture was taken, and, after his wife left with their other child, a son, he went back to serve in Vietnam in 1968. Suicide ran in his family. The wife and son left no tracks, and he never saw them again. After he got back from the war he hung himself in 1972."

  He stared at the three photos as if waiting for them to speak. But the dead don't speak. Then, seemingly of its own accord, his hand moved to the other three photographs, coming down flat on all of them.

  "And this," he said, "was the man who stole the three girls away from their real parents."

  Kopiak reached back toward the windowsill for the scotch bottle, but instead of taking it he knocked it to the rug. The sweet-sour smell of spilled Chivas filled the office.

  "Oh, Jesus," he sobbed in self-pity, putting his head in his hands. He looked up into Paine's face, searching it for something he didn't find.

  He ran his hand once more through his hair and continued. "Jane Grumbach was from an underworld family in California. Morris had nothing to do with the Mafia, but he fell in love with her and she ran him like a puppet. She was a very strong woman. Marrying Morris made her legitimate rich, but she never forgot how she'd grown up. She got whatever she wanted. And she wanted little girls. She couldn't have them herself, and adoption was long and would not give her exactly what she required, so she hired Jeffrey Steppen to get them for her. She heard about Steppen through her family; he had been kicked out of the FBI but knew everything about getting things like phony birth records and Social Security numbers. It was easy for her to buy Steppen; she had enough to blackmail him to begin with through her underworld acquaintances, and he was a sucker for money and the trappings of it. He gave her some trouble later, when his side businesses kept getting him into hot water with various mob people, but he was valuable enough to her that she put up with his face changes and she always paid his bills when it was necessary. She even made Morris work with him and set up Bravura Enterprises after he became Les Paterna.

  "Steppen found a couple of Hollywood leeches named Izzy and Mona to do the actual snatchings. He had pictures taken of various children that fitted the description of what Jane Grumbach wanted, and then she picked the photos of the babies she wanted and Izzy and Mona stole them. She wanted three daughters, and she got them, in 1962, 1965 and 1968."

  Kopiak looked around for his scotch bottle, located it on the floor and picked it up. There was enough unspilled Chivas in the bottle for a two-finger drink. "And I did the paperwork. Steppen provided the documents, I did the rest. I knew the right people, Jane Grumbach knew anyone I didn't, and the job got done." He drank the last of the scotch. "I didn't win my election that first year I met the Grumbachs, but my law practice thrived. I became the Grumbach family's lawyer. I watched the three girls grow up. I went to their high school graduations." He put the empty crystal glass down, next to the picture of his wife and sons. He looked at it wistfully. "I sent them presents each Christmas."

  "Did the girls know about it?" Paine asked.

  "No," Kopiak said dreamily. "Not until just before their mother died, about a year ago. Rebecca found these pictures of yours and confronted her father; he was drunk and feeling guilty and he told her everything. Her mother just laughed, told them they were better off and that she'd done them a favor. It must have been terrible for them. . ."

  "Who killed everyone, Kopiak?"

  Kopiak stood. "I don't know. . ." he said. He paced to the window, turned
his back and assumed the position Paine had seen him in when he came in. He stared down through the glass into nothing, into the river, perhaps.

  Suddenly he seemed to peer closely at something, and his body tightened and he said, as if in revelation, "Oh—"

  Paine heard the shot. The window had a two-foot hole in it where Kopiak's face had been. Imploded fragments of blood-tinted glass showered the room.

  Paine crouched his way to the corner of the window, stepping over Kopiak's nearly beheaded body, and glanced cautiously outside. He saw nothing: street, low buildings, river. Keeping low, he ran for the door of the office and down to the street. He still saw nothing.

  As he got into his car and headed north a tan Ford immediately settled in behind him. Paine drove a couple of blocks and the Ford kept its distance. When Paine next glanced in his rearview mirror the driver of the tan Ford had put a red flasher on the roof and a siren began to wail.

  "Shit," Paine said.

  He came to a stop at the curb and the tan Ford pulled in behind him. Paine watched in the rearview mirror as the driver got out, keeping his head down. It looked like he was studying his ticket book.

  Paine glanced away and when he looked back the driver was not there anymore.

  "Move over, asshole."

  The driver was behind him, and Paine saw the .38 before he heard the voice. The voice was Dannon's. Dannon opened the back door of Paine's car and slid across the seat.

  "Drive," he said.

  The round cool mouth of the .38 kissed the back of Paine's neck.

  "Where do you want me to go?"

  "The old beat, Jackie-boy."

  Paine drove slowly. He took each turn cautiously, keeping his hands in view on the wheel.

  "Did Jane Grumbach own you long?" Paine asked.

  The mouth of the .38 bumped his neck as Dannon laughed. "I don't know what you're talking about, fuckhead."

  "The way I figure it, you took care of the local police for Kopiak and the Grumbachs. The thing I can't figure out is why you killed Kopiak and the rest—why derail the gravy train?"