Joe Kurtz Omnibus

by Dan Simmons

  They used chopsticks, sat at Arlene’s desk, and ate in silence for a minute. Kurtz slid Goba’s spiral notebook across to her. It was opened to the pencil-shaded page. “How does that read to you?” he asked.

  Still holding her chopsticks, Arlene putted the notebook under her desk lamp and squinted for a minute, moving her glasses forward and back. “Letters missing,” she said at last. “Lots of misspellings. But it looks like the final sentence reads—‘I can’t…live with…’ something, maybe ‘the guilt,’ although he spelled it without a ‘u,’ and then, I must also die.” Arlene looked at Kurtz. “Goba wrote a suicide note.”

  “Yeah. Convenient isn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t make sense…” began Arlene. “Wait a minute. These numbers above the scrawl.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s dated Thursday,” said Arlene.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Didn’t you say that there was no sign that he’d crawled into the bedroom, Joe? No blood trail there?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “So his diary ends with the announcement that he can’t live with the guilt of shooting O’Toole, and presumably you, too, and that he’s going to kill himself. On the day after he bled to death.”

  “A little peculiar, isn’t it?” said Kurtz.

  “But that page was missing,” said Arlene. She pushed the notebook aside and began spearing at her beef and broccoli. “Maybe you shouldn’t have taken this notebook, Joe. The cops might have noticed the missing page and shaded in this last entry’s imprint just the way you did.”

  “Maybe,” said Kurtz.

  “And they’d know that Goba’s confession was a fake.” She looked at him over the desk lamp and adjusted her glasses. “But you don’t want them to know.”

  “Not yet,” said Kurtz. “So far, it’s the only advantage I have in this whole mess.”

  They ate the rest of the meal in silence.

  When he was finished and the white cartons were wrapped in plastic and tossed away, Kurtz stood, walked to his own desk, swayed slightly, shook his head, took the .38 out of the Sheep Dip drawer, and lifted his leather jacket off the back of the chair.

  “Uh-uh,” said Arlene, coming around her desk and taking the pistol out of his hands. “You’re not going anywhere tonight, Joe.”

  “Need to talk to a man in Lackawanna,” mumbled Kurtz. “Baby Doc. Have to find…”

  “Not tonight Your scalp is bleeding again—sutures are all screwed up. I’m changing the bandages and you can sleep on the couch. You’ve done it enough times before.”

  Kurtz shook his head but allowed himself to be led into the little bathroom.

  The bandages were blood-encrusted and they pulled scab and scalp when Arlene jerked them off, but Kurtz was too exhausted to react. If the headache was a noise, it was reaching jackhammer and jet-engine levels now. He sat dully on the edge of the sink while she brought out the serious first-aid kit cleaned and daubed the scalp wound, and set clean bandages in place.

  “I have to see a guy,” said Kurtz, still sitting, trying to visualize standing and retrieving his .38 and jacket. “Baby Doc will probably be at Curly’s. It’s Friday night.”

  “He’ll be there tomorrow,” said Arlene, leading him into the office and pressing against his shoulders until he sat down and then flopped back on the old couch. “Baby Doc always holds court at Curry’s on Saturday mornings.”

  She turned to grab the old blanket they kept on the arm of the couch. When she turned back, Kurtz was asleep.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  The Dodger liked Saturday mornings. Always had. As a kid, he’d hated school, loved weekends, loved playing hooky. Saturdays were the best, even though none of the other kids in the area would play with him. Still, he’d had his Saturday-morning cartoons and then he’d go out alone into the woods adjoining the town. Sometimes he’d take a pet with him into the woods—a neighbor’s cat, say, or Tom Herenson’s old Labrador that time, or even that pale girl’s, Shelley’s, green and yellow parakeet. He’d always enjoyed taking the animals into the woods. Although the parakeet hadn’t been that much fun.

  Now the Dodger was driving slowly through rural residential roads in Orchard Park, the upscale suburb where the Buffalo Bills played their games out at that huge stadium. The Dodger didn’t give the slightest damn about football, but sometimes he pretended he did when befriending some guy in a sports bar. Even the women in Buffalo were gaga over football and hockey and assumed everyone else was, too. It was a place to start with people when you were pretending that you were one of them.

  Orchard Park was mostly like this street—rural roads masquerading as streets, homes both large and small set back on an acre or less of woods. The house he was looking for was…right here. Just as described in the Boss’s briefing to him. This rural street ran along a wooded ridgeline and this house, strangely octagonal, was set thirty or forty yards from the road, all but obscured by the trees.

  The Dodger drove his van right up the driveway, not hesitating. There was no car parked outside, but the house had a garage so the car might be in there and she might be home. On the lawn, just as described in the briefing, was a stone Buddha.

  He parked the van in the driveway turnaround just outside the garage and jumped out, whistling, carrying a clipboard. The van was painted with a common pest control logo and graphic, and the Dodger was wearing coveralls and an orange vest, had a white hard hat over his Dodger cap, and he was carrying a clipboard. The old joke that you could go almost anywhere unchallenged with work coveralls, a hard hat, and a clipboard wasn’t really a joke; those cheap props could get you past most people’s radar. The Dodger’s 9mm Beretta was on his belt, under the orange highway vest, holstered next to a folding seven-inch combat knife.

  Still whistling, the Dodger knocked on the front door, taking a half-step back on the stoop as he’d been taught. He’d take another half step back when the door opened, showing how polite he was, how non-aggressive. It was an old door-to-door salesman’s trick.

  The woman didn’t come to the door. The briefing suggested that she’d be home alone on Saturday, unless her boyfriend had slept over. The Dodger was ready for either contingency. He knocked again, pausing in the whistling to look around at the wooded lot and the view from the ridge as if appreciating both even on such a cold and cloudy October day. The air smelted of wet leaves.

  When she didn’t answer a third knock, he strolled around the house, pretending to inspect the foundation. In the back, there was a cheap deck and sliding glass doors. He knocked loudly on the glass, taking a step back again and arranging a sincere smile on his face, but again there was no answer. The house had that empty feel that he knew well from experience.

  The Dodger pulled a multiple-use tool from his coverall pocket and jimmied the door’s lock in ten seconds. He let himself in, called “Hello?” a couple of times into the silence, and then strolled through the octagonally shaped ranch house.

  The woman—Randi Ginetta—was in her early forties, a high-school English teacher, divorced, living alone since her only child, a son, had gone to college in Ohio the year before. Still getting alimony payments from her former husband, she was now dating another teacher, a nice Italian man. Randi was also a heroin addict For years Randi—the Dodger wondered what kind of name that was, “Randi,” it sounded more like a cocktail waitress’s name to him than a teacher’s—for years Randi had been into cocaine, explaining her constant runny nose as allergy problems to her co-workers and students, but in the past three years she’d discovered skag and liked it a lot. She always bought from the same source, a black junkie on Gonzaga’s payroll in the Allentown section of Buffalo. Randi had gotten to know the junkie-dealer during time she volunteered in an inner-city homeless program. The Dodger hadn’t visited the junkie yet, but he was on the list.

  He walked from room to room, the combat knife in his hand now, blade still closed. This teacher and skag-addict liked bright color
s. All the walls were different colors—blue, red, bright green—and the furniture was heavy oak. There was a giant crystal on the floor near the front door. New Age-type, thought the Dodger. Trips to Sedona to tap into energy sources, commune with Indian spirits, that kind of crap. The Dodger wasn’t guessing. It had all been in the Boss’s briefing.

  There were a lot of books, a work desk, a Mac computer, stacks of papers to be graded. But Ms. Randi wasn’t all that neat—there were jeans and sweaters and bras and other underwear lying around her bedroom and on the bathroom floor. The Dodger knew a lot of perverts who would have lifted that silk, sniffed it maybe, but he wasn’t a pervert. He was here to do a job. The Dodger went back across the octagonal living room and into the narrow kitchen.

  There was a photo of Randi and her son—he recognized her from the photo he’d been shown—on the fridge, as well as a photo of the teacher and her boyfriend. She was a babe, no doubt about it. He hoped she’d come home soon, and alone, but looking at the photo of the boyfriend—all serious and squinty-eyed—the Dodger changed his mind and hoped the two would come back together. He had plans for both of them.

  Pulling on latex gloves, the Dodger turned on the coffeemaker, rooted around in the cupboard until he found the coffee—Starbucks—and made himself a cup. She—or they—would smell the coffee brewing when they came in the door, but that didn’t matter. They wouldn’t have time to react. He tucked away the knife and laid the Beretta Elite II on the round wooden table as he drank his coffee. He’d rinse the cup well to get rid of any DNA when he was done.

  The Dodger decided he’d wait thirty minutes. The neighbors couldn’t see his van because of the trees and the size of the lot, but a neighbor driving by might see it and call the cops if he stayed here too long. He rose, found the sugar bowl in the cupboard, and stirred some into his coffee.

  The phone rang.

  The Dodger let the machine pick it up. He thought Randi’s voice was sexy, sort of hoarse and sleepy in a sexy junkie way, as it filled the kitchen silence—“Hi, this is Randi. It’s Friday and I’ll be gone for the weekend, but leave a message and I’ll call you back on Sunday night or Monday. Thanks!” The last word was punched with girlish enthusiasm or a heroin-induced high.

  Not very smart, Ms. Ginetta, thought the Dodger, telling every Tom, Dick and Harry who calls that you’re out of town and your house is empty. Good way to get robbed, ma’am.

  The caller hung up without leaving a message. It might be a neighbor calling to see what the pest control van was doing there while Randi was gone. But probably not.

  The Dodger sighed, rinsed out the coffee cup and coffeemaker, set the sugar and everything else back the way it had been—putting the mug on its proper hook—and then he let himself out the back door, locked it behind him, slipped off the latex gloves, hefted the clipboard, and whistled his way back to the van.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  The restaurant called Curly’s was just a few blocks from the Basilica in Lackawanna. Kurtz was at Curly’s by nine-thirty on Saturday morning, having slept a fitful nine hours and feeling more surly than ever.

  He’d awakened in the office sore and disoriented, looked over the printouts of O’Toole’s case notes for Goba to make sure they hadn’t missed anything, left a note for Arlene—who usually came in late on Saturday—and headed back to the Harbor Inn to shower, shave, and change clothes. The headache still buzzed in his skull and if it had let up any, he couldn’t notice the change. But his raccoon eyes had improved. If one didn’t look carefully, Kurtz thought while he stood in front of the steamy mirror, the dark circles under his eyes only made him look like someone who hadn’t slept in a few weeks. The whites of his eyes were pink rather than blood red now, and his vision had cleared.

  Kurtz dressed in a denim workshirt and jeans, tugged on faded Red Wing boots and an old peacoat, and pulled a dark navy watchcap low enough over his hair to hide the scalp wound. The .38 went in a small holster on his belt on the left side.

  Driving down to Lackawanna, he had to smile at the fact that he’d managed to avoid most of Lackawanna for years, but now he found himself heading that way almost every day.

  Curly’s was a few blocks east of the Basilica, where Ridge Road became Franklin Street for a few blocks, just west of the old steel bridge. The restaurant—surfaced by brick on the first floor, siding above—had been popular with locals for decades. There were already cars in the small parking lot, although it wasn’t officially open for breakfast on Saturdays. On Saturdays, it was court to Baby Doc.

  Baby Doc—legally Norv Skrzypczyk—was not officially mobbed up, but he ran most of the action in Lackawanna. His grandfather. Papa Doc, had taken a leave from medical school to help patch up striking steelworkers whose heads were being bashed in by Pinkerton operatives. Papa Doc had given up medicine in favor of smuggling guns in to the workers. By the end of the 1920s, Papa Doc’s people were selling guns and liquor to civilians as well, keeping the Mafia from muscling in on their territory through the simple strategy of out-violencing them. By the time Papa Doc was gunned down in 1942, his son—Doc—had taken over the family business, negotiated a peace with the mobsters, and retained control of most illegal items moving in Lackawanna. Doc retired in 1992, turning the reins over to Baby Doc and taking an old man’s job as a night watchman in various abandoned steel mills, where he kept his hand in by selling the occasional illegal gun. Joe Kurtz had used Doc as an information source—but not a snitch—before Attica, and had bought weapons from him afterward. Kurtz had never met the son.

  Now Kurtz left his holstered .38 under the driver’s seat of the Pinto, made sure the car was locked, and went in, ignoring the CLOSED sign on the door.

  Baby Doc sat in his regular semicircular booth at the right rear of the restaurant. The booth was raised slightly, unlike the other tables, and gave the sense of a modest throne. There were only half a dozen other men in the room, not counting Baby Doc’s three bodyguards and the waiter behind the counter. Kurtz noticed that these bodyguards didn’t use blow driers or wear mafia collars and suits—the two big guys in the booth next to Baby Doc and the other one lounging at the counter could have been stevedores or millworkers except for their watchful eyes and the just-detectable bulges under their union windbreakers.

  There was an older man talking to Baby Doc in the rear booth, speaking earnestly, moving his scarred hands as he spoke. Baby Doc would nod in the intervals when the old man stopped talking. This is the first time Kurtz had seen Baby Doc in person and he was surprised how large he was; the older Doc had been a small man.

  A waiter came over, poured coffee without being asked, and said, “You here to see the Man?”

  “Yeah.”

  The waiter went back to the counter and whispered to the older bodyguard, who approached Baby Doc when the old man had finished his supplication, received some answer that had made him smile, and left the restaurant.

  Baby Doc looked at Kurtz a minute and then raised a finger, beckoning Kurtz, and then gesturing to the two guards in the booth next to him.

  The huge men intercepted Kurtz in the middle of the room. “Let’s visit the restroom,” said the one with scar tissue around his eyes.

  Kurtz nodded and followed them to the back of Curly’s. The men’s restroom was big enough to hold all three of them, but one man stood watching out the door while the other gestured for Kurtz to remove his shirt and to lift his undershirt Then he gestured for Kurtz to drop his pants. Kurtz did all this without protest.

  “Okay,” said the ex-boxer and stepped out. Kurtz zipped and buttoned, up and went out to sit in the booth.

  Baby Doc wore horn-rimmed glasses that looked incongruous on such a sharply chiseled face. He was in his late forties, and Kurtz saw that the man wasn’t so much bald as he was hairless. His eyes were a startling cold blue. His neck, shoulders, and forearms were heavily muscled. There was a flag and army tattoo on Baby Doc’s massive left forearm, and Kurtz remembered that Baby Doc h
ad left Lackawanna and joined the army—over his father’s objections—a few years before the first Gulf War and had flown some sort of attack helicopter during the liberation of Kuwait. Doc, his father, had been forced to hold off his own retirement for a few years until Baby Doc returned from the service with a chest covered with combat ribbons which—according to sources available to Kurtz—had been folded away in a trunk with the uniform and never taken out again. Rumor persisted that Baby Doc’s chopper had destroyed more than a dozen Iraqi tanks on a single hot day.

  “You’re Joe Kurtz, aren’t you?”

  Kurtz nodded.

  “I remember you sent flowers to my father’s funeral last year,” said Baby Doc. “Thank you for that.”

  Kurtz nodded again.

  “I considered having you killed,” said Baby Doc.

  Kurtz didn’t nod this time, but he looked the bigger man in the eye.

  Baby Doc put down his fork, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. When he set the glasses back on, he said tiredly, “My father was killed by a rogue homicide detective named Hathaway.”

  “Yes.”

  “My sources in the B.P.D. tell me that Hathaway had a hard-on for you and had tapped a call between you and my father. You were meeting him at the old steel mill, a year ago next week, to buy a piece. Hathaway killed my father before you got there.”

  “That’s true,” said Kurtz.

  “Hathaway didn’t have anything against Doc. He just wanted to wait for you in the mill without my father being in the way. If it hadn’t been for you, the Old Man might still be alive.”

  “That’s true, too,” said Kurtz. He glanced at the two closest bodyguards. They were looking the other way but were close enough to hear everything. Kurtz knew he couldn’t take them both even if they weren’t armed—he’d seen the bigger man fight professionally years ago—so his only chance might be to crash through the window behind Baby Doc. But he’d never get around front to his car before they did. He’d have to head east through the backyards, into the railyards. Kurtz had known every tunnel and shack and switch tower in those yards when he was young, but he doubted if he could outrun or hide from these guys there now.