Silent Scream df-6

by Michael Collins

  He threw a nail into the river. “God, I sound bitter.”

  He did, and maybe I didn’t blame him. But he didn’t want comment, he just wanted to talk it out. I let him.

  “After Korea I couldn’t settle down, get back on the track. A lot of years.” His eyes wondered where all those years since Korea had gone. “We got married six years ago. Maybe we shouldn’t have. Before I met her, all I wanted was to paint, add to the world. Then I wanted her more, I guess. We were good at first, but I’m not the kind who can make money, make the world move.”

  “Not many can, Hal,” I said. “It takes a special talent. Practical. Know what people are like, and how to use them.”

  He watched a barge on the river. “She tried to teach one year, in night school. I tried to help, run the apartment, but night teaching took so much time she shut me out and I couldn’t take it. She quit, but it was never the same after that. We live my way, I guess, going nowhere. No money. Damn my painting!”

  It was her voice-Damn your painting! He beat himself with it. We make our own pain. He didn’t want to think about what she was doing, but he did. He imagined the man, or worse.

  “Maybe she needs help, Mr. Fortune,” he said. “I mean, you said… murder. I can’t make money, and maybe she’s mixed-”

  “I’m Dan,” I said. “Has she said anything suspicious?”

  “No, but… She’s been nervous, maybe scared. I’ve watched her talk to men at Dunlap’s parties. Men I don’t like. Guys like that Kezar you talked about. Big deals, fast talkers.”

  “You go to Dunlap’s affairs with her?”

  “He invites me. The husband, make it look good. I stand in the corner, let her enjoy herself.” The bitterness again. “I’d go on following her myself, but I’m not good at it. I wouldn’t want her to see me. That’d hurt her.”

  “Yeh,” I said. “Hal, do you work on anything important?”

  “A lot of Government research reports. Engineering stuff.”

  I nodded. “Okay, you go to work. I’ll see what I find.”

  Some people never learn. There are things you have to do. Maybe that’s freedom-knowing what you have to do. He was bitter, but he was worried, too. If Diana Wood was involved in anything, he was going to be hurt, too. The helpless bystander.

  “Maybe there’s nothing to find,” he said. “Call me, okay?”

  He was a dreamer. Jealous but guilty, worried but hopeful. Unless he was conning me, had his own scheme. In my work you trust no one all the way. If you want to survive. It doesn’t make me feel good.

  CHAPTER 7

  I caught Lawrence Dunlap on his way out to lunch. Diana Wood’s desk was still untouched. Dunlap was with a tall, slender woman in her late twenties. She wore little make-up, had short and very neat brown hair, and her shoes were “sensible.” Her gray suit and coat were beautiful material, but a shade frumpy. A refined girl. With my slept-in shirt, duffel coat, and missing arm, I must have looked like something from Mars. She stared at me.

  “I lost it in Montego Bay,” I said. “Sharks, you know.”

  She flushed, but took it. I’d caught her staring, being vulgar, and she accepted her own standards. Not bad. What we used to call “breeding,” the real thing. Mainline and bankers.

  Dunlap held her arm. “What do you want, Mr.-?”

  “Fortune, Dan, detective,” I said. “Remember? I need some more information on that employee of yours.”

  Dunlap’s Yale Club face was confused behind his glasses. He looked at the woman, and then he laughed.

  “You mean Diana Wood? You can say her name in front of my wife, Mr. Fortune. All right, come inside for a moment.”

  In his private office he sat in his desk chair, trim and casual, and grinned at me. His wife sat on a couch. I stood.

  “You flatter me,” he said, smiled at his wife. “He thinks Diana and I are an item, Harriet. Jealous?”

  “He is flattering you, dear,” Harriet Dunlap said.

  She laughed, too. A bantering laugh, playful. They were a couple, passion under her polished surface. It was there in the way she looked at him, in her voice, and he returned the feeling. Trouble can be hidden, especially by well-brought-up patricians, but not real happiness. A happy couple. The only incongruous touch was his eyes. They didn’t quite fit the rest of his face, lines of strain around them. Maybe he worked too hard.

  “You and Diana Wood were in Philadelphia the last three days?”

  “So?” he said, nodded. “Yes, we were, a business conference.”

  “You’re sure?” I said.

  He studied me. “You’re no reference-checker, are you? Who is it? Harold Wood? He hired you?”

  “Yes,” I said. It was true now. “But not just him. The police, too, Mr. Dunlap. You better tell me the truth.”

  He hesitated, glanced at his wife. She smiled, shrugged. It was his decision. He thought for a time.

  “If Wood tries to use it against Diana, I’ll deny I said it, but, no, Diana wasn’t with me. I don’t know where she was. I do know she would do nothing to concern the police.”

  “You cover for her? Give her time off to play?”

  “She had days coming. Look, Mr. Fortune, I like Diana, I don’t really know the husband. Diana’s a nice girl. What she does is her affair. I help as a friend. She’s helped me.”

  “Hostess at parties? Nice to visiting clients?”

  “It’s the way we have to do business sometimes.”

  Harriet Dunlap said, “Rules of the game, Mr. Fortune.”

  “Really?” I said to her. “Not nice for the mainline.”

  “My family has been in the country three hundred years,” she said. “We didn’t survive without getting in the dirt to compete.”

  “Look,” Dunlap said again, “it’s none of my business, but Wood almost asked for it. He seems to be a narrow man, surly, with no ambition to get ahead. At parties he stands in the corner, glowers at Diana when she’s just trying to have fun, and leaves her alone. So she met a man.” A shrug.

  “What man?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t want to know. I think Diana outgrew Wood, found out that she could have more, do better. I’m afraid she’s too much for Wood. He acts as if he never heard that a man could make money, from art or anything else. The things money can buy are beneath him, mundane. A pure young man.”

  I said, “What do you think he should do?”

  “I think he should let her go.”

  There was a tone in his voice. Heavy, like… what? A kind of knowledge? He knew more than Harold Wood? About Diana?

  “You know an Irving Kezar?” I asked.

  “Kezar? Vaguely. A lawyer, I believe. Represents a client of ours sometimes. It’s getting late, Mr. Fortune. We must-”

  “Sid Meyer?”

  He got up. “No, sorry. Harriet?”

  The wife stood. She smoothed her skirt, busy. To avoid looking at Dunlap and me? Sid Meyer meant something to her?

  I said, “How about a dapper type, wears a black overcoat, gray hat, yellow gloves?”

  “Good God!” Harriet Dunlap said. “Yellow gloves?”

  “I don’t know him,” Dunlap said. “We’re hungry, Mr. Fortune. Remember, short of the police, I’ll say Diana was with me.”

  “I’ll remember,” I said. “Just when do you think she might be coming back from Philadelphia?”

  “Perhaps today,” Dunlap said, and ushered me out.

  The winter afternoon sun didn’t penetrate into Captain Gazzo’s dim Centre Street office. He says it’s always 3 A.M. in his work, and he works behind drawn shades.

  “The gun on Kezar’s stairs traced to a warehouse robbery ten years ago, unregistered since. End of that,” Gazzo said. “Sid Meyer hadn’t been picked up even for questioning in three years-here or in Jersey. The Newark cops-that’s where his trucking company is-watched him, but he was clean as far as they know. Their informers say Meyer had been dickering for some new trucks lately, but the pigeons don’t have
a whisper of why. All they can offer is that Meyer had been running around a lot, was nervous, seemed to have something going.”

  “He had reason to be nervous,” I said.

  “I wish we had the reason,” Gazzo said. “Irving Kezar’s a funny bird. I found he’s been picked up a lot of times, mostly on business ethics cases, frauds, stock manipulations, yet no one remembers him. The little man who wasn’t there, part of the scenery like the mailman. For all the pick-ups, he’s never even been booked, not once-no evidence, the innocent middleman.”

  “Some power somewhere, Captain? Protection?”

  “It doesn’t show, but when you put it all together, it looks like the pattern. Only if there’s power, it’s not Kezar himself. He’s had that cheapo apartment for twenty years, the records in his office are about as interesting as a bird-watcher’s diary, and just as clean. Almost never has a direct client, works for other lawyers, bigger firms. A plodding attorney, with a plodding income. Only he’s got a second apartment midtown, and I smell a second set of records somewhere. I smell money somewhere, too.”

  “You can’t dig deeper?”

  “Not without a clue, a lot of work, and a court order. For that I need some reasonable suspicion to show a judge,” Gazzo said. “Dan, I’ve got to have some names. Leave out the bios for now, but give me the names. Okay?”

  It was more of a break than I deserved, or than he would have given anyone else. He liked my mother, and he’s human.

  “Okay,” I said. “Try Mrs. Mia Morgan.”

  He ran the name through his mental data-bank of thirty years of crime and criminals. He scowled. “Morgan? It doesn’t connect to Sid Meyer, but I’d swear I know it. Morgan… but, something else, too.” He shook his head, amazed. A blank, yet…?

  “Levi Stern?”

  A shrug. Stern in New York was as useful as Jones in Wales. The shrug also said Sid Meyer had no Levi Stern in his history.

  “Lawrence Dunlap.”

  The data-bank clicked out a card. “Blue-chip broker, from out west, but Harvard Business School. Financial whiz-kid once. Married into Pennsylvania blue blood-bankers, public service. Local Jersey politics, community boards, trustee, all that. How does he fit with Sid Meyer and your wife-tail?”

  “I’m not sure he does. I told you.”

  “I haven’t turned him up,” Gazzo admitted. “Who else?”

  “John Albano.”

  “Albano?” Gazzo sat alert. “You’re sure it’s John? I know a lot of Albanos, best and worst. Youngish? Say, thirty-five?”

  “No, say seventy but looks younger. White hair, short with shoulders, worked abroad a lot he says. Lives East Side.”

  Gazzo sighed, shook his head wearily. I named the Woods last, uneasy. I watched him, and felt better. He showed no reaction. Diana and Harold Wood didn’t tie in with Sid Meyer, not yet anyway. I gave him a description of yellow-gloves, and of my adventure in the St. Marks Place alley. His eyes snapped.

  “Hoods, Dan? Pros, like Sid Meyer’s killers?”

  “Sure,” I said, “but what hoods, and why?”

  In the dim office I sensed that all at once he had some kind of answer to that question. Or, at least, he had a more direct question to ask. He got up like a man with work to do. Work that didn’t include me.

  “Keep in touch, Dan,” he said.

  By midafternoon I was back in the lobby of Diana Wood’s building. I waited, and wondered what Gazzo had heard in what I’d told him? I wondered if Sid Meyer’s murder had anything to do with Diana Wood? I wondered about Diana Wood.

  I felt sad for Hal Wood. I felt very bad for Wood-and I felt excited. She had two men, why not three? Hal Wood had lost her, and maybe she and I…? I wonder if we’ll ever change, most men? Or maybe it was only me? I waited, feeling dirty but still excited, and a little after 4 P.M. I saw her.

  She got out of the big, black car in front of the building, still carrying the flat box. A man came into the lobby with her. They stood in front of the elevators for a moment. She had a look in her eyes few men ever see-big, soft, happy. Then she went up. The man glanced around the lobby once before he went out to his car, got in the back, and the car drove off.

  I knew what was familiar about the back of the man in Mia Morgan’s snapshot. I knew the answers to a lot of my questions. I’d seen the man.

  I only hoped he hadn’t seen me!

  CHAPTER 8

  I stopped in the first bar. My hand shook. I slopped the Irish. I swore. Because I couldn’t steady the glass with two hands. Because I’d seen the man-homburg, silk scarf, dark blue suit, dark blue coat, hundred-dollar shoes and all.

  Andy Pappas.

  I’ve known Pappas all my life. We’re the same age. We grew up together, he knows how I lost my arm. But we don’t move in the same circles, and that’s why his back in the snapshot had been only familiar. I don’t see him much these days. Nobody does.

  For the record, Andy Pappas runs a big stevedoring company on the docks. Off the record, he runs something else. Some people say he runs everything else, legal and illegal, in Manhattan and other places, but it’s hard to be sure. What is sure is his true occupation-extortion. Legal or illegal, the base of his business was the same-threat and terror. Fear. A racketeer. Mafia.

  I had another Irish. Had Andy seen me? I watched the door, but no one came in. After a third drink I got up the nerve to walk out. (Not as brave as it looked. I’m a privileged character with Andy, a sort of sacred madman, but I’d been tailing a woman of his, and I never knew when the privilege would stop.) No one was outside. In the darkening afternoon I walked across town toward my office.

  No wonder I’d been warned, “advised,” and offered money for my client’s name. The name of someone who would hire me to tail Pappas would be worth gold. Who the hell was Mia Morgan? A jealous girl? Andy liked them young. And Sid Meyer? Maybe Gazzo could tell me. I was ready to tell him now. All I knew. But not quite yet. Andy had seen me.

  The little man leaned on my office door. About five-feet-two, stocky, with a flat nose, eyes hidden in scar tissue, and an easygoing smile. Relaxed, no weapon in sight. Max Bagnio, Pappas’s number-one aide since Jake Roth was buried unclaimed some years ago in Duluth. I could have run. But Little Max had a weapon somewhere, of course, and he’d find me sooner or later.

  “Mr. Pappas wants to buy you some dinner,” Max said.

  I said that sounded nice. Little Max grinned, but stayed behind me all the way down to the black car. We rode downtown. I wasn’t too scared. Andy wouldn’t have sent his top soldier in the open unless he wanted to ask some questions-first, anyway. I hoped I could figure out the right answers. Okay, I was scared.

  The restaurant was near Washington Square: The Lido. Bagnio walked me in. It was quiet, with small tables and dim light. Bagnio took me to an open alcove at the rear. There were four tables in the alcove. In the main room the patrons ignored us.

  Andy was alone at the rear table in the alcove. Two men sat alert at the table near the entrance-soldiers. A short man and a woman ate at the table to Pappas’s right. The man didn’t look up from his dinner. A pair of yellow gloves lay on his table.

  “Hello, Danny,” Andy said. “Fetuccini to start, okay?”

  I sat down, watched only Andy.

  Because Mia Morgan and Captain Levi Stern were at the table to Andy’s left! Max Bagnio joined the girl and Stern.

  “I don’t eat with you, Andy,” I said.

  The sacred madman, privileged. An old story with Andy and me. He smiled, his eyes cold. They were dead eyes, and it wasn’t brave to defy Andy, but I always had to. I was as afraid of him as anyone else, and any second I might push him too far, but I couldn’t back off. Maybe because he called me his friend, and I had to prove to the world that I wasn’t his friend. (In Chelsea no one will ever understand that. A man who Andy calls his friend should be on top of the world. No one believes my denials, so I get status.)

  “Still no old times’ sake, Danny?” Andy said.

>   Andy had a warm voice, low and even, and he spoke well for a boy who barely got out of a poor high school. I knew that he always had that voice, it fools people. What I didn’t know for sure is why he let me talk to him as I did. Maybe he had to prove that I was his friend-not based on power or fear.

  “Still in the same work, Andy?” I said.

  He sighed, he didn’t really care about me. He nodded toward Mia Morgan. I’d tried not to look at her since I came in.

  “You ever meet my daughter Mia, Dan?” Andy said.

  Sometimes an answer is so unexpected, so impossibly simple, that you feel you’ve fallen on your face. The whole dark, devious, complicated maze faded into no more than a private squabble, family! Daddy was cheating. Get a picture and details, accuse him, make him be a good boy! Only Daddy was Andy Pappas, motives could be mistaken even from a daughter, so I fought to show no reaction, to not laugh. And I made a mistake.

  “No,” I said. “Dan Fortune, Mrs. Morgan.”

  The moment I said it, I heard what I’d done. If I didn’t know her, how did I know her married name? I tried to cover.

  “What do you want, Andy?” I said harshly. “I’m busy.”

  I watched him. His face hardened. Who told Andy Pappas that he was busy? A flash of his terror. Maybe he hadn’t heard my slip. I hoped Little Max Bagnio hadn’t heard it, either. It was hard to tell, and now Andy got to the point.

  “Why are you tailing me, Dan? Who for?”

  “I’m not tailing you,” I said. The longer I could make him question me, the less chance he’d think about my slip and guess that Mia Morgan had hired me.

  Andy shook his head, irritated. He’d seen me in that lobby, and he knew more than that.

  “Le Cerf Agile is one of my places. I got word you were asking about… a friend of mine, and about Mia, too.”