The Undertaker

by William F. Brown

  “Mind your own business,” she said as she gave him a small pinch on the handle. When he didn’t smack her, that was when I knew Gino must really be hurting and we needed to get him to a hospital.

  We hurried over one more street. At the far corner, I saw his white Lincoln Town Car parked by the curb. He reached into his pocket and handed Sandy the keys. “Here, you drive,” he told her. “Talbott, get me inside.”

  I opened the rear door and Parini fell heavily onto the rear seat while Sandy ran around to the driver's side. It took both of us to push and pull him and his bloody leg inside. By the time I got him propped up in back, the rear door closed, and got myself in the passenger seat in front, Sandy was still settling in behind the wheel, adjusting the seat and the rear view mirrors.

  “Goddamnit!” Parini roared. “If you reach for your freakin’ lipstick, I'm gonna pop you right here. Now get us out of here.”

  “Hey,” Sandy jumped. “Don't blame me if my legs are short.” She turned the key in the ignition. She must have found the right pedals because the Lincoln's engine roared and we sped away down the narrow street.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  With two, you get egg rolls…

  “Turn left,” Parini snapped. “No, your other left.”

  “I drive a little Toyota, not a damn battleship like this thing, and I’ve got short legs. You want to do this?” She sounded flustered as she spun the wheel to the left, narrowly missing two parked cars. “Then shut up and let me drive.”

  “Okay, okay,” Parini answered. “But slow down, for Chris' sake. We’ve got enough people chasing us without you adding more.”

  “Oh, now you want slow,” she snapped at him as she hit the brakes. “Make up your damned mind.”

  “You two need a time out?” I turned in the seat and looked back through the rear window, but no one was chasing us. Parini told her to make a few more turns. As we drove farther and farther away from her apartment, I began to relax.

  “Gino, you need a doctor.” I looked down at him.

  “No shit, Ace. Hand me that phone up there.” Parini groaned as he lay back on the rear seat in pain. I looked around and saw that the Lincoln had a telephone built into the front console. “Punch Memory, then #3, then gimme the damned thing,” he said.

  I did as ordered and watched his face as he waited for the other party to answer. “Joey,” he finally said. “It's me, Gino... No, in Chicago... Never mind that. Look, I need a doctor and I need one quick... No, for me, you asshole, I got clipped in the leg... Yeah, me! Stop laughin’ and tell me where. Yeah... Yeah... I got it... No, no, I'll find it. You just call and make damned sure they'll be there.”

  He handed the phone back to me. His face was pale now, and he was in a lot of pain. “Sweet Pea,” he called to her. “See that console on the dash, above the radio? It’s GPS. Push ‘Power’ and key in 832 West 23rd Street, Chicago, Illinois. No, on second thought, you do it, Ace.”

  “Hey, I can do it,” she said, reaching for the buttons.

  “You got enough to do drivin’ this thing. Let the brain trust do it.”

  In seconds, a brightly colored map popped up on the screen with a red dot in the center. “That’s in Chinatown,” Sandy said.

  “Think you can you get us there?”

  “Chinatown?” she asked. “Sure, why?”

  “’Cause I’ve got a sudden craving for won-ton. Can you freakin’ get us there?”

  “Yeah, I can freakin’ get you there! Sheesh, you're ornery. You want some aspirin or Tylenol for the pain? I know I got Midol and some codeine cough medicine in my purse. Maybe a joint to help take the edge off?”

  “She’s a goddamned pharmacy,” he mumbled. “Tylenol, then.”

  She pulled the big bag over and dug her arm down to the bottom, fishing around inside until it came back out with a bottle. She opened it with her teeth and handed the bottle back to him. Parini dropped a half-dozen pills into his hand, popped them into his mouth, and lay back chewing them. “Thanks, kid,” he said. “And I take back every ugly thing I said about you.”

  “The name’s Sandy.”

  We drove west to Halsted Street and south through the city. It was mid-morning and big CTA commuter buses, semi-trailer trucks, and delivery vans clogged the streets and slowed us to a crawl. I turned around in the seat and looked back at him. He had lost a lot of blood and I was getting worried. “You okay, Gino?” I asked.

  “I’ve been shot a lot worse than this.”

  “Then you need to find a new line of work,” Sandy commented.

  Parini’s eyes were closed, but I saw a thin smile. “Yeah, a new line of work. I’ll write that down, so I don’t forget.” We crossed the Chicago River and continued south through a series of ever more dilapidated commercial areas. “Okay, Talbott, who you really workin' for? Justice? Some rinky-dink local outfit? The Santorini people never heard of you. Who then? Rico Patillo?”

  “I work for Symbiotic Software in Waltham, Massachusetts, Gino, or I did until you dragged me into this thing.”

  “Yeah, and I'm the freakin’ Easter Bunny. You expect me to believe you figured all that stuff out by yourself?”

  “I’m a rocket scientist, remember.” I smiled innocently at him.

  “Yeah, right,” Parini opened his eyes and looked at me. “Back in Columbus, I saw you at the funeral home and then I saw you at that bogus accounting office down on Sickles. I didn’t know what to make of those, but when you walked inside Tinkerton's office building dressed up like a delivery boy, the only thing I could figure was you were one of them and you were reporting in. Later, when you went strollin’ into Varner's fruit clinic and all the rest of them showed up, I had no idea what you were up to.”

  “I was looking for proof.”

  “Proof? What you almost got was dead. Tinkerton's a real head case, him and that Sheriff Dannmeyer.”

  “He was,” I smiled.

  “Yeah,” Parini laughed. “I saw you run over him with that ambulance.”

  “A sheriff?” Sandy's mouth dropped open. “You ran over a sheriff?”

  “Not me, the ambulance driver did. He was the one who helped me escape from the embalming room, before Dannmeyer shot him.”

  “I don't believe this.” She smacked her forehead again. “You killed a cop?”

  “That guy deserved it,” Parini answered for me. “And Dannmeyer was no cop. He was a stone-cold killer with a badge, like the rest of Tinkerton’s people.”

  “You could have helped me, you know.”

  “I ain't your Fairy Godmother; you keep forgettin’ that.”

  “Bullshit. You could have stopped him,” I said.

  “Stop what? I didn’t know what he was doin’ down there or how far he’d go. What I did know was you were flushing them out and doing my heavy lifting for me.”

  “You really are a bastard,” Sandy told him.

  “There goes that mouth again,” he chided her. “A nice Italian girl should know better than make negative comments about a gentleman’s heritage like that.”

  “You’re a gentleman like I’m a ‘nice’ Italian girl,” she quickly responded.

  “Okay, okay, Gino.” I turned toward him. “So tell me what's really going on.”

  “Me? Tell you what’s really going on?” Parini chuckled.

  “You’ve been using him for bait,” Sandy told him. “And you owe him one. You owe me one, too. Time to pay up.”

  “Come on, Gino,” I tried to draw it out of him. “I know what they've been doing. I know who's doing it, and I even know how they're doing it, but I can't figure out why.”

  “You wanna know why, huh?” Parini thought it over and finally relented. “You heard of the Federal Witness Protection Program, right?” I nodded. “It’s run by Justice, all top secret and hush-hush. They say in the last twenty, twenty-five years, the Feds have taken maybe 6,500 mopes into that program and maybe 8,000 dependents.”

  Sandy eyed him suspiciously in the rear view mirror.<
br />
  “That’s right out of Time Magazine, Sweet Pea” he reassured her. “Hell, the Feds even brag about it. ‘Cause in all that time, with all those people on the lam and hiding out, they claim they never lost one. Not one! Never had any of them clowns run back to our side. Never had any of them hit. Not one. Never. Ever. Unbelievable, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I frowned, still not getting the point.

  “Think about it. Most of them cruds are small fish, but there’s some big ones in there too, like sixteen ‘made men’ from New York and New Jersey — Jimmy ‘the Bull’ Gravano, ‘Noodles’ Fortuno, Barty Marzini, and your pals Richie Benvenuto, ‘the Mole,’ Paulie Martucci, even that damned bean counter, Louie Panozzo. And I gotta tell ya, seein’ a buncha bums like that sittin' on the beach in Florida, while a stand-up guy like Jimmie Santorini is bustin' rocks in Marion, that ain't fair.”

  “Yeah, a freakin’ tragedy,” Sandy mumbled.

  “You wanna know what’s goin’ on, or you wanna keep with the wise cracks?” His eyes flashed and I could see even Parini had his limits. “You gotta figure there ain’t nuthin’ those East Coast Families would like better than to pop one of them cruds, right? Nothin’ they wouldn't do or pay, to crack that ‘shield of invincibility’ the Feds got wrapped around the program. ‘Cause most of those mopes were screw-ups to begin with, bottom feeders, low-lifes. Well, if they’re dumb enough to get caught on some Federal beef, you gotta figure that out of 6,500 of them, there must be dozens and dozens of them stupid enough to screw up again and leave a trail even we could follow.

  “Somebody’s gonna call an old girlfriend,” he went on. “Or he’ll lay down a bet with a bookie back east, deal some coke for a little cash, or free-lance a burglary. Maybe his wife's gotta see her mother. Or he can’t live without some of that special linguine from Giorgio’s back in Bayonne. I don't know, but out of 6,500 there's gotta be some do that, right?” He waited until I shrugged. “Well, so far there ain’t been one. Every time we get close and one of those guys blows his cover or wants to quit — and that does happen — the guy suddenly vanishes.”

  “Maybe they moved them someplace else,” Sandy said.

  “Or maybe he has an ‘accident,’ under some other name,” I chimed in. “Him and his wife.”

  “Or maybe you finally found one of them and got rid of the guy,” Sandy said.

  “Nah.” Gino caught Sandy’s eyes in the rear view mirror. “If we want some mope dead, we pop him in a restaurant or we put a bomb under his car, something big and splashy. We don’t fake no cheesy car accidents or hide the bodies, because when we hit a guy, it’s to make a point, to make an example for all the others. And we don’t take out his old lady. That ain’t our style. We don’t do that, but Tinkerton does. He don’t like loose ends.”

  Sandy looked over at me, then at Parini in the rear view mirror. “Now, wait a minute. You’re saying the government’s killing their own witnesses?”

  “What? You think they're too good for something like that?” Parini barked. “Grow up, Sweet Pea. Compared to them, we're amateurs. Besides, they were ‘former’ witnesses. After the Senate Hearings and the trials, they ain’t no use to the Feds anymore, except to prove we can't touch them. Other than that, they're just more mouths to feed. And as for ones that get out of line or try to take off? What do you think?”

  “I think they disappear up in Oak Hill under somebody else’s name,” I answered. “A name and an identity that Tinkerton’s computer picks out.”

  “If that's what it takes to keep the Feds’ record ‘spotless,’ who's to care? They were as good as dead, anyway.”

  “I don’t get this,” Sandy interjected. “You said Tinkerton is a lawyer with a big law firm in Columbus. He isn't a Fed.”

  “Who says?” Parini countered. “My guess is Tinkerton’s running some kind of top-secret disposal squad for them. Him, Greene, Varner, and Dannmeyer — they're mechanics, contract help, whose job it is to clean up those embarrassing little problems the official agencies won't touch, like runaways or the guys who won’t follow the rules. But don’t kid yourself, one way or the other, he’s government.”

  “Zero Defects,” I suddenly remembered.

  “What's that?” Parini asked.

  “There’s a plaque in Tinkerton’s office — and a tattoo on Dannmeyer’s arm — they said ‘Zero Defects.’ I gave Tinkerton some static about it. He said it means they don’t make mistakes and they don’t tolerate people who do.”

  “Zero Defects, huh? Sounds like him. He’s an arrogant bastard.”

  “I looked up Tinkerton’s background,” I told him. “He was FBI, US Attorney, Justice, and the Marines, probably Intelligence, because he said he had interrogated a lot of people. I think most of them ended up dead.”

  “You're nuts, both of you,” Sandy said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Parini leaned forward on an elbow. “Let me tell you about Louie Panozzo. He was a gutless little accountant who got sloppy. The Feds nailed him on wire fraud, petty stuff, but when they threatened him with ten to twenty in Danamora, he caved and copped a plea. First, he talked to that damned Hardin Commission, then he ratted out Jimmy in court.”

  “I know,” I replied. “I read the clippings.”

  Sandy made eye contact with me, but she never said anything about the accounting records or the printouts we had just sent to Hardin. Neither did I.

  “Six months later,” Gino went on, “Jimmie’s locked away in the Federal pen in Marion and Louie’s doin’ 1040s in that hole-in-the-wall accounting office in Columbus. Anyway, last month, that little rat has a change of heart and calls Jimmy's lawyer, Charley Billingham, a big rainmaker with Steiner, Ernst, and Billingham in New York.”

  “That’s the bald-headed guy we saw on TV yesterday,” Sandy crowed.

  “Yeah, I heard they were going after Charley next. Lotsa luck hangin’ anything on that guy,” Gino chuckled. “He invented slick. Anyway, Panozzo tells Charley he’s really sorry and he has a deal for Jimmy. He says he'll recant all his testimony, if Jimmy would call off the open hit he has out on him and let him slide back home.”

  “I'm sure Jimmy was real understanding,” I said.

  “Think about it. Louie said he'd go on all the TV talk shows: Oprah, Larry King, Sixty Minutes, the works. He'd swear the Feds made it all up and blackmailed him into saying all those terrible things about Jimmie.”

  “And that was supposed to get Louie off the hook?” Sandy asked.

  “How could Jimmy turn him down? He don’t exactly have a lot of options anymore.” Gino said. ”He’d have to leave Panozzo alone just to prove the fat shit was telling the truth and it was the Feds who were lying, and Panozzo knew it.”

  “Did Louie tell Billingham he was in Columbus?”

  “Didn’t have to. The dumb ass used his office phone, and Charley has caller ID. I’m sure he had the Feds on his line to, which is probably how Tinkerton got wind of what Louie was up to. Like I said, sometimes those guys ain’t too bright.”

  I had to admit, there was some logic to all of it. “So, if Jimmy bought the deal, why did he send you there?”

  Parini smiled. “It ain’t what you think.”

  “So you’re saying you didn’t kill him?” Sandy said.

  “Hell no! Louie Panozzo was Jimmy’s best chance to get out of jail, maybe his last, so why would he have him whacked? Louie was supposed to call Billingham last week and finalize the deal, but he had his ‘car accident’ and that was the end of that. On the other hand, maybe that's why he had the accident. Anyway, we weren’t sure whether they killed him or just faked the whole thing and moved the fat shit someplace else, but we smelled a rat. That’s why they sent me to Columbus, after he disappeared. I started checking out the stuff in the obituary, the house, and the office, like you did, but I never thought to look for more obituaries. That was brilliant, kid.”

  After another mile, Sandy turned east on Cermak Road and we crossed through an industrial no-man’s-land of r
ailroad tracks and run down overpasses. Two blocks later at Canal Street, I saw the first signs of Chinatown. We passed a row of Chinese import-export firms. She turned south again into a busy commercial street full of Chinese restaurants and gift shops. The buildings had colorful green and red oriental tile facings, terra cotta tile roofs, and colorful ceramic lions guarding the doors, big upright ones with slant eyes and long Fu-Manchu mustaches. They reminded me of Grant Avenue in San Francisco. And I’d bet the gift shops and stores carried the same kitsch from Mexico or the Philippines that they sold in every other Chinatown.

  “Sure you don’t want any won-ton to go, Gino?” she asked. “Last chance.”

  He looked up at me and shook his head. “Sooner or later, her mouth's going to get you in serious trouble, Ace.”

  “That's what all the boys tell me,” she laughed. “But with you bleeding to death back there, you aren’t that much of a threat anymore.”

  “Yeah, serious trouble,” he said, but I saw a thin smile on his lips.

  Much to my surprise, the residential neighborhood behind the Peking-kitsch could have been in Bogalusa, Des Moines or Stockton. The houses were small, with brick, clapboard, or wooden shingle siding, mostly two stories high, and dating from the 1920s. The lots were narrow and they had garages out back.

  “There, the fourth house on the left,” Parini pointed. “Drive around back.” It was an undistinguished, aging Cape Cod with a black shingle roof and dark blue shutters. It had a swing hanging on the front porch, a couple of kid’s bikes lying in the neatly trimmed front yard, and geraniums growing in the flower boxes under the windows. It was clean and neat, and it looked like every other house on the street. As we turned the corner into the narrow, rutted alley, Parini had one more piece of information to share. “This place belongs to the Magiori Family in Cicero, so if you don't want a whole lot worse problems than you already got, keep your big mouths shut about it. You two got that?”

  We pulled up behind the house and parked. I got out and opened the rear door, intending to help Gino out of the back seat, but four young Chinese men in white medical gowns and surgical masks suddenly materialized next to me. They politely moved me aside and in seconds had Parini out of the back seat and on a hospital gurney. They pushed it up the walkway, across the back porch, and through the rear door of the house.