Joe Kurtz Omnibus

by Dan Simmons

  “And lovely…” began Kurtz and stopped when he noted the look in her eyes and the hot coffee in her hand. “What were you going to say about the Danish guy?”

  “I was going to ask who has the money and the motive to bring one of Europe’s hired assassins into little old Western New York,” said Rigby, her voice slurring only slightly from the booze and fatigue. “You want to answer that Joe?”

  “I give up,” said Kurtz.

  “You should. You should.” Rigby held the coffee mug as if for warmth, lowering her face over it and letting the steam touch her cheeks. “They say the Dane’s assassinated more than a hundred prime targets, including that politician in Holland not long ago. Never been caught. Hell, never been identified.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?” said Kurtz.

  Rigby smiled at him. She had a beautiful smile, thought Kurtz, even when it was a mocking one. “Word at the precinct house has you at the Farino estate a year ago when the same Danish guy wasted sister Sophia, Papa Farino, their lawyer—whatever the fuck his name was—and half the old Farino bodyguards. Twenty goombahs protecting Old Man Farino, and the only ones still standing when it was over were the ones the Dane didn’t want dead.”

  Kurtz said nothing. He had a sudden tactile memory of sitting very still, his palms on his thighs, while the tall man in the raincoat and Bavarian-style hat with the feather in it turned the muzzle of his semiautomatic pistol from one target in the room to another, killing each person with a single shot. Kurtz’s name hadn’t been on the list that day. It had been an oversight of sorts. Little Skag Farino, still in Attica, hadn’t thought that Kurtz would be there when the assassin he’d hired came to deal with Little Skag’s sister, father, and the others, and he’d been too cheap to pay for Kurtz on spec.

  “Little Skag’s still a player,” whispered Rigby. “He survived the shanking in Attica after you and the Ferrara bitch leaked the word that Skag had raped a minor. Your pal Angelina had his lawyer whacked a few months ago, but Little Skag’s still alive—wearing a colostomy bag these days, or so I hear—and safe in a federal country club where no one can get at him. But he has a new lawyer. And I think he has some unsettled business—with his little sister Angelina, the new, improved, gay Gonzaga, and some mook named Joe Kurtz.”

  “You’re making this up as you go along,” said Kurtz. “Bullshitting.”

  Rigby shrugged. “Can you take the chance to ignore me? Have you become that crazy a gambler, Joe?”

  Kurtz rubbed the side of his head. The pain seemed to pulse through his skull, through his hand, and down his arm into his chest. “What do you want?”

  “I said that I had an offer for you,” she said. “My offer’s this…” she sipped her coffee and took a breath. “Joe, you’re fucking around trying to solve this O’Toole shooting. I know you know about Goba.”

  “Goba?” said Kurtz in the most innocent voice he could summon through the pain. Kemper hadn’t given him the Yemeni’s name over the phone last night.

  “Fuck you, Joe.” She drank her coffee but never took her luminous eyes off his face. “I don’t know how you knew about Goba, but I think you were in his house yesterday before we were. I think you probably took some evidence with you. I think you’re still acting under the delusion that you’re a private detective, Joe Kurtz, ex-con, felon, parolee, and too-cute shithead.”

  “It was my shooting, too,” Kurtz said softly.

  “What?”

  “You called it the O’Toole shooting,” he said. “It was my shooting, too.” He raised fingers to his torn scalp. The scab was tender. The wound felt hot and it pulsed under his fingertips.

  Rigby shrugged. “She’s on life support You’re hanging out with Baby Doc and snarfing eggs. You want to hear my offer?”

  “Sure.” He conveyed his lack of enthusiasm through flat tone, but he wasn’t happy to hear that they knew he’d met with Baby Doc. His parole could be revoked for just speaking to a known felon.

  “You keep playing private cop,” she said softly, glancing around to make sure that no one could hear. Ruby and Daddy were in the kitchen; Coe Pierce was noodling Miles Davis’s little-known “Peace, Peace.” “If you insist on playing private cop,” she repeated, “I’ll give you the information you need to stay one step ahead of the Dane, solve your little shooting case, and maybe survive the Ferrara bitch’s attentions.”

  “Why?” said Kurtz.

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Rigby. “You agree now to help me on something later, and we have a deal. I’ll risk my gold shield to feed you information.”

  Kurtz laughed softly. “Uh-huh. Sure. I sign a blank check to help you later on some unspecified crap and you risk your badge to help me now. This is bullshit, Rigby.” He stood.

  “It’s the best deal you’ll ever get, Joe.” For a second, astoundingly, unbelievably, Rigby King looked as if she was going to cry. She looked away, mopped her nose with the back of her hand, and looked back at Kurtz. The only emotion visible in her eyes now was the anger he’d seen earlier.

  “Tell me what I’d have to do,” said Kurtz.

  She looked up at him across the table. “I help you now,” she said so softly that he had to lean forward to hear. “I help you stay alive now, and sometime… I don’t know when, not soon…maybe next summer, maybe later, you help me find Farouz and Kevin Eftakar.”

  “Who the fuck are Farouz and Kevin Eftakar?” said Kurtz, still standing and leaning his weight on his arms.

  “My ex-husband and my son,” whispered Rigby.

  “Your son?”

  “My baby,” said the cop. “He was one year old when Farouz stole him.”

  “Stole him?” said Kurtz. “You’re talking about a custody case? If the judge said…”

  “The judge didn’t say a fucking thing,” snapped Rigby. “There were no custody hearings. Farouz just took him.”

  Kurtz sat down. “Look, you’ve got the law on your side, Rigby. The FBI will work the case if your asshole of an ex-husband crossed state lines. You’re a good detective yourself and all the other departments will give you a hand…”

  “He stole my baby from me nine years ago and took him to Iran,” said Rigby. “I want Kevin back.”

  “Ah,” said Kurtz. He rubbed his face. “I’d be the wrong person to help you. The last person who could.” Kurtz laughed softly. “As you said, Rig, I’m a felon, an ex-con, a parolee. I can’t walk across the damned Peace Bridge without ten types of permission I wouldn’t get, much less get a passport and go to Iran. You’ll just have to…”

  “I can get the forged documents for you,” said Rigby. “I have enough money set aside to get us to Iran.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to find…” began Kurtz.

  “You don’t have to. I’ll have located Farouz and Kevin before we leave.”

  Kurtz looked at her. “If you can find them, you don’t need me…”

  “I need you,” said Rigby. She actually reached across and took his hand. “I’ll find Farouz. I need you to kill the fucker for me.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  Kurtz insisted on driving Rigby home. They had more to talk about, but Kurtz didn’t want to discuss murder in a public place, even in the Blues Franklin, which undoubtedly had been the site for more than one murder being planned.

  “Is it a deal, Joe?”

  “You’re drunk, Rigby.”

  “Maybe so, but tomorrow I’ll be sober and you’ll still need my help if you want to find out who shot you and…whatshername…the parole officer.”

  “O’Toole.”

  “Yeah, so is it a deal?”

  “I’m not a hired gun.”

  Rigby barked a laugh that ended in a snort. She rubbed her nose.

  “Hire the Dane if you’re so hot to take a killer to Iran with you,” said Kurtz.

  “I can’t afford the Dane. Word is that he asks a hundred thousand bucks a pop. Who the hell can afford that? Other than Little Skag and these other
Mafia assholes like your girlfriend and the faggot, I mean.”

  “So you want to hire me because I come cheap.”

  “Yeah.”

  Kurtz turned up Delaware Avenue. Rigby had told him she lived in a townhouse up there toward Sheridan. “The problem,” said Kurtz, “is that I’m not a killer.”

  “I know you’re not, Joe,” said Rigby, tone lower now. “But you can kill a man. I’ve seen you do it.”

  “Bangkok,” said Kurtz. “Bangkok doesn’t count.”

  “No,” agreed Rigby, “Bangkok doesn’t count. But I know you’ve killed men here as well. Hell, you went to jail for throwing a mook out a sixth-story window. And every black in the projects knows that you took that drug dealer, Malcolm Kibunte, out of the Seneca Street Social Club one night last winter and tossed him over the Falls.”

  It was Kurtz’s turn to snort. He’d never thrown anyone over the Falls. Kibunte had been tied to a rope and dangled over the edge in the icy water while he was asked a few simple questions. The stupid shit had decided to slip out of the rope and swim for it instead of answering. No one can swim upstream at the brink of Niagara Fails in the dark, in winter, at night. It was unusual that the body was found by the Maid of the Mist the next morning—usually the Falls hold the bodies underneath the incredible weight of falling water for years or decades.

  Kurtz said, “Nine years is a hell of a long time to wait to get your kid back. He won’t remember you. He’s probably sporting a mustache and got a harem of his own by now.”

  “Of course he won’t remember me,” said Rigby, not reacting with the fury Kurtz had expected. She just sounded tired. “And I haven’t waited nine years. I followed them over there the month after Farouz kidnapped Kevin.”

  “What happened?”

  “First, I couldn’t get a visa from our own State Department Senator Moynihan—he was our senator then, not this dim-blonde cuckolded bitch we have now—”

  “I don’t think that a woman can be a cuckold,” said Kurtz.

  “Do you want to fucking hear this or not?” snapped Rigby. “Moynihan tried to help, but there was nothing he could do, not even get me a visa. So I went through Canada and flew to Iran and found out where Farouz was living with his family in Tehran and went to the police there and made my case—when I found out he’d been cheating on me, Eftakar just stole my one-year-old baby—and the cops called some mullah and I was kicked out of the country within twenty-four hours.”

  “Still…” began Kurtz.

  “That was the first time,” said Rigby.

  “You tried again?”

  “In nine years?” said the cop. She sounded sober. “Of course I’ve tried again. When I came back after the first attempt, I moved back to Buffalo, joined the B.P.D., and tried to get legal and political help. Nothing. Two years later, I took a short leave of absence and went back to Iran under a false name. That time I actually saw Farouz—confronted him in some sort of coffee and smoking club with his brothers and pals.”

  “They kick you out of the country again?”

  “After three weeks in a Tehran jail this time.”

  “But you went back again?”

  “The next time, I went in overland through Turkey and northern Iraq. It cost me ten thousand bucks to get smuggled through Turkey, another eight thousand to the fucking Kurds to get me across the border, and five grand to smugglers in Iran.”

  “Where’d you get money like that?” said Kurtz. What he was thinking was You’re lucky they didn’t rape and kill you. But she must have known that.

  “This was the nineties,” said Rigby. “I’d put everything I had into the stock market and did all right Then blew it all going back to Iran.”

  “But you didn’t find Kevin?”

  “This time I didn’t get within four hundred kilometers of Tehran. Some religious-police fanatics had my smugglers arrested—and probably shot—and I got questioned for ten days in some provincial cop station before they just drove me to the Iraq border in a Land Cruiser and kicked me out again.”

  “Did they hurt you?” Kurtz was imagining burns from lighted cigarettes, jolts from car batteries.

  “Never touched me,” said Rigby. “I think the local chief of police liked Americans.”

  “So that was it?”

  “Not by a long shot. In 1998 I hired a mercenary soldier named Tucker to go get Kevin. I didn’t care if he killed Farouz, I just wanted Kevin back. Tucker told me that he used to be Special Forces and had been in Iran dozens of times—had been inserted into Tehran as part of the plan to get the hostages out as part of that fucked-up Jimmy Carter raid in April 1980…”

  “Not the best thing to list on a resume,” said Kurtz. He’d reached Sheridan Road and turned left according to Rigby’s instructions, then right again into a maze of streets with townhouses and apartments built in the sixties. Rigby didn’t live far from Peg O’Toole’s apartment and he wanted to go there next.

  “No,” said Rigby. “As it turned out it wasn’t a good recommendation for old Tucker.”

  “He didn’t succeed.”

  “He disappeared,” said Rigby King. “I got a cable from him in Cyprus, saying he was ready for ‘the last stage of the operation,’ whatever the hell that meant, and then he disappeared. Two months later I got a package from Tehran—from Farouz, although there was no return address.”

  “Let me guess,” said Kurtz. “Ears?”

  “Eight fingers and a big toe,” said Rigby. “I recognized the ring on one of the fingers, big ruby in a sort of class ring that Tucker seemed proud of.”

  “Why a big toe?” said Kurtz.

  “Beats the shit out of me,” said Rigby and laughed. She didn’t really sound amused.

  “So now you’re ready to go back again, taking me with you.”

  “Not quite ready,” said the cop. “Next summer maybe.”

  “Oh boy,” said Kurtz. He stopped at the curb in front of the dreary townhouse that Rigby had indicated.

  “And I’ll help you as much as I can until then,” said Rigby, turning to look at him. The smell of death still wafted from her clothes.

  “Just trust me to hold up my end of the bargain when the time comes, huh?” said Kurtz.

  “Yeah.”

  “What can you tell me that would help me with this shooting thing?” said Kurtz. He’d made his decision. He wanted her help.

  “Kemper thinks that you’re right,” said Rigby. “That Yasein Goba didn’t act alone.”

  “Why?”

  “Several reasons. Kemper doesn’t think that Goba had the strength to drag himself up those stairs in his house. The M.E. says that despite all the blood trail and the blood in the bathroom, Goba’d lost two-thirds of his blood supply before he got to the house.”

  “So someone helped him up the stairs,” said Kurtz. “Anything else?”

  “The missing car,” said Rigby. “Sure, it’d be stolen in that neighborhood, but if Goba’d driven himself from the parking garage, the seat and floor and wheel and everything must’ve been saturated with blood. Blood everywhere. That might give even the back-the-Bridge Lackawanna thieves pause.”

  “Unless the blood was all in the backseat,” said Kurtz. “Or trunk.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you trust Kemper’s judgment, Rig?”

  “I do,” said the woman. “He’s a good detective. Better than I’ll ever be.” She rubbed her temples. “Jesus, I’m going to have a headache tomorrow.”

  “Join the club,” said Kurtz. He made a decision. “Anything else on Goba?”

  “We’re talking to everyone who knew him,” said Rigby King. “And the Yemenis are really clannish and close-mouthed—especially after that terrorist thing last year. But they’ve told us enough to convince us that Goba was a real loner. No friends. No family here. It appears that he’s been waiting for his fiancée to be smuggled into the country. We’re looking into that. But a couple of neighbors tell us that they’d caught glimpses of Goba being dropped off
once or twice by a white guy.”

  “A white guy dropped him off once or twice,” repeated Kurtz. “That’s it?”

  “So far. We’re still questioning neighbors and people who worked with Goba at the car wash.”

  “Any description on the white guy?”

  “Just white,” said Rigby. “Oh, yeah—one crackhead said that Goba’s pal had long hair—‘like a woman’s.’”

  Like the driver of the car that broke out through the garage barrier, thought Kurtz. “Can you get me some information on Peg O’Toole’s uncle?”

  “The old man in the wheelchair who slapped you? The Major?” said Rigby. “Yeah, why? We called him and asked how he and his associate, the Vietnamese ex-colonel…”

  “Trinh.”

  “Yeah. We asked the Major how they’d heard about Officer O’Toole’s shooting. The Major lives in Florida, you know. Trinh in California.”

  Kurtz waited. He knew where the two lived thanks to Arlene, but he wasn’t going to reveal anything to Rigby unless he had to.

  “The Major told Kemper that he’d been back in Neola for a shareholders’ meeting of a company called SEATCO that he and Trinh had started way back in the seventies. Import-export stuff. The Major and Trinh are retired, but they still hold honorary positions on the board of directors.”

  “Which explains why they were in the state,” said Kurtz. “Not how he heard about the shooting.”

  Rigby shrugged. “The Major said that he called Peg O’Toole’s house and office Wednesday evening after the shareholders’ meeting. He said he likes to get together with his niece when he’s back in the state. Someone at the parole office told him there’d been a shooting—they didn’t have any family member to contact for O’Toole, just the Brian Kennedy guy in Manhattan.”

  “Was Kennedy in Manhattan when they contacted him?”

  “He was in transit,” said Rigby. “Flying to Buffalo to see his fiancée.” She smiled crookedly. “You suspect the boyfriend? They were engaged, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Gee,” said Kurtz, “you’re right. He couldn’t have been involved if he was engaged to the victim. That’s never happened before.”