by Thomas Perry
Elizabeth looked at the list she had made before falling asleep last night. The way to keep the cost down was to get in touch with the people who already were paid to watch things and give them something specific to look for. If she was right about what was happening, he was running; that meant small motels, cars fraudulently rented or stolen, bogus identification and credit cards and paying cash for merchandise anybody else would buy with a check. These were details that gave him a chance to make a mistake. If he did, he might come to the attention of a police department somewhere. All she could do was to send out circulars to introduce the possibility that the next time it could be him.
It was essential to keep the Butcher’s Boy from getting out of the country as long as she could. If he had survived for ten years with Carlo Balacontano screaming for his head, then he must have lived someplace where Carlo Balacontano’s voice wasn’t very loud. She had made a formal request to the State Department to examine new passport applications for male Caucasians aged thirty to forty-five with extreme care, checking independently at least two of the statements or supporting documents supplied. It might not turn him up, but it would delay the processing, which might keep him here a little longer. This had brought a strange inquiry from the CIA, but the questions they had asked had been about McCarron, the man who had been found dead with Fratelli in Buffalo. Maybe he was a former agent or something. Whatever their interest was, it couldn’t hurt.
The main thing was to keep trying. If every policeman in every department asked his informants about the Butcher’s Boy, and every person who watched airports and steamships and provided passports and rented cars kept alert, somebody just might notice him. The most depressing thing about it was that the only way she was going to recognize him was if he did something, and what he would have to do to identify himself was to kill someone else.
Elizabeth started to move her eyes down the list again, but now Richardson was standing over her desk. “You know what I think is going on?” he asked. “I think this is a cleansing ritual.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Who was Tony Talarese? He was about forty-five years old, a capo at the time of his life when he should have been out there scrambling. But what was he doing? He wore fancy clothes, spent lots of money, had a house that Al Capone would have thought was too ostentatious. But the main thing was, he was corrupt. He’d been schtupping the waitresses in his brother’s restaurant, the wives of at least two of his soldiers and his brother’s wife’s niece, which in those old-time families is incest. But most of all, he’d been robbing his boss while he was in prison, and he was wearing a wire for the FBI. Think about it.”
Elizabeth rested her head on her fist. “Okay, I’m thinking about it. What conclusion am I supposed to be reaching?”
Richardson frowned and churned his hand in the air to conjure the next example. “Peter Mantino. He was about the same age. He’d been in charge of the western operations for a while. Was he in Las Vegas robbing the suckers? No. Was he in L.A. cutting into the drug trade? No. Was he in Portland or Seattle trying to organize the ports? No. He lived in Santa Fe like a retired homosexual art dealer. He did nothing to increase his family’s stake in the richest, fastest-growing region in the country. He was lazy and corrupt.”
Elizabeth squinted her eyes and tilted her head to look up at Richardson. “It’s been a long time since you actually prosecuted a case, hasn’t it? I mean in front of a jury.”
“Angelo Fratelli.” Richardson stopped for a moment. “You’re not buying this, are you?”
“Go on, Angelo Fratelli,” she prompted. “Corrupt.”
“What I’m getting at is this. We suddenly get three killings, at least two of them done by a very special professional exterminator. Forget everything else we think we know about him. In fact, forget him completely. One correspondence that we seem to have overlooked is that these three people were lousy specimens, and that raises the possibility that their deaths were purchased by reformers.”
“What sort of reformers were you thinking of?”
“Two kinds come to mind. One is the old men at the top—the last generation, who came to power before World War Two. They see that the next generation has grown up into a bunch of slobs, and they don’t like it. They decide, in effect, to replace all of middle management.”
“Okay,” said Elizabeth. “That’s possible. But you said two kinds.”
“The other one is conservatives.”
“Somebody out there who’s older than the old men?”
“In a way. An ultra-neoconservative movement.”
“This is something you know about, or are you making it up?”
“A little of each. You’ve got the generation that’s coming up now, in their twenties and thirties. All over the world—in the Middle East, in Europe, in this country—you have a big stampede toward the past. Every last one of them is dirt-ignorant, and more conservative than their great-grandmothers. Why should the Mafia be immune?”
“No reason that I know of. So what would these people be after?”
“Power. They’re old enough now to have seen a little action and done some dirty work. When they see the degenerate jerks who are in charge they become instant reformers.”
“Okay, then what?”
“They get in touch with a hit man.”
Elizabeth thought about this for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. That’s not the way it works.”
“What do you mean?”
“Reformers have to pull the trigger themselves. If they think the generation that’s in power is fat and lazy, they have to prove that they themselves are not by killing them personally. I can see the old dons hiring some messenger to go out and clean house, but I can’t see a revolution by proxy.”
Richardson paused. “No,” he said. “I guess I can’t either. What are the other alternatives?”
“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth. “I can’t prove that the lieutenant in Buffalo was wrong. It makes perfect sense that with Carl Bala in jail, somebody might kill his caretakers and take over his holdings. And what you were saying about the three victims makes it seem more likely. If you have a business with terrific potential but inefficient management, you have unfriendly takeovers, right?”
“Okay, let’s start with what we know. Tony T was killed by the Butcher’s Boy. He waltzed in there alone and flew out on the next flight. Is that how you’d do an unfriendly takeover?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “It wouldn’t be a bad start. You hire somebody who’s supposed to be the most efficient and reliable at that kind of work but who has no known connection with you. He spends a couple of days decapitating the hierarchy and disappears again. That leaves the field clear, with Carlo Balacontano locked in jail, his lieutenants dead and his troops presumably in disarray.”
“Is that what’s happened?”
“I don’t think so, but if the information we’ve been treating as factual is accurate, then it’s possible.”
“You mean we still haven’t started at zero? We have to go back further?”
“I’m just saying that we shouldn’t get too attached to our facts. We both listened to the tape recording of Tony T getting killed. He says, ‘You?’ Big bang, lots of screaming and scuffling. Then Mrs. T says, ‘He’s wearing a wire!’ Nobody says, ‘Hey, wasn’t that the Butcher’s Boy?’ or words to that effect. Not on the tape, when they were alone. Only Mrs. T says it later, and what she says is that her brother-in-law told her, but she’d never seen the man before in her life.”
“Why would either of them lie?”
“I don’t think they did. But do you remember what it was like ten years ago? When Dominic Palermo came to me in the middle of the night looking for protection, he told me all this stuff about a hired killer. He’d never seen him, just heard about him. The people who were talking about him just referred to him as the Butcher’s Boy. What if there is no such person? What if it’s just a name for a whole lot of men who have done murders fo
r money? Nobody knows who it was, so it all gets attributed to somebody whose exploits are, by this time, mostly imaginary like Buffalo Bill’s, or maybe even attributed to a completely imaginary person, like Paul Bunyan.”
“You’re leaving out the best evidence we have—Carlo Balacontano. He told you about him.”
“He told me that the Butcher’s Boy was the man who really committed the crime he’s spending his life in prison for. I mentioned him first.”
“But you believed him.”
“I still do. I think Carlo Balacontano was framed for the murder of Arthur Fieldston, and I think this department was so eager to put him away that people forgot to ask a lot of questions they were being paid to ask.”
“Did you say anything at the time?”
“You mean you didn’t hear? I said it until everybody got tired of listening, and then I said it again until they decided I wasn’t a team player. That’s what got me my vacation in Europe.”
“No …” Richardson looked genuinely shocked. Elizabeth couldn’t tell whether he was lying, but how could he not be? He had been here in those days. “I thought … They said you’d just sort of burned out, because of the killings …”
She wondered if he was figuring out the rest of it, and hoped he wasn’t. He had at least the right to assume that he had his job because he had earned it, and not because all the competition had turned it down. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” she said. “I did all right. Jim came over and joined me there, and that’s how I got him to marry me.”
Richardson accepted the escape route gratefully. “Really? That sounds romantic.”
“Oh, Jim was a romantic guy.” She smiled.
But she could already see Richardson’s youngest analyst hurrying toward them with the morning’s list of disasters. He followed her eyes and saw her too. “Lana,” he said. “What have you got?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. She glanced at Elizabeth, and seemed to wonder if she should acknowledge that she knew the older woman was somehow above her in the department, so she said, “I wondered if one of you had time to look at this.” She laid the printout on Elizabeth’s desk, and hovered while Elizabeth and Richardson read it.
Elizabeth saw the inconsistency almost instantly. “Salcone, Albert, 42. Ficcio, Daniel, 19. Lempert, Robert, 53.” Sergeant Lempert, Robert. A police officer. Lempert and Ficcio both shot numerous times with an Ingram MAC-10. Salcone shot with Sergeant Lempert’s service revolver. But a witness says Salcone and Ficcio both had MAC-10’s, and they came in together and killed Lempert and another man.
“What is this?” asked Richardson. “Where is this?”
“Gary, Indiana,” said Lana.
“We’ve got one too many dead people,” said Elizabeth. “Or one too few.”
Jack Hamp stepped up to the yellow cordon of police tape and waited for one of the patrolmen to meet his steady gaze. Ducking under the tape to enter the area and then flashing an ID only after somebody stopped him wasn’t a good idea at this particular crime scene. Somebody would stop him, and it might be a more vivid experience than he was in the mood for right now. Policemen didn’t much like letting strangers in when a fellow officer was shot down. They protected each other from having a photographer come in and put the picture in the newspapers. When an officer was shot, they made sure all the papers got to run was a formal portrait of the man in his uniform, usually taken about the time he graduated from the academy.
The man Hamp had been staring at seemed to feel the heat on the back of his neck, turned and strolled toward Hamp, who held out his identification wallet so that the policeman could take it into his hand. “Jack Hamp, Justice Department,” he said. “I’d like to come in and look around.”
The policeman handed it back to him and said, “Suit yourself.” Hamp let this reverberate in his mind as he slipped under the tape and walked to the front of the store. It wasn’t right. It didn’t tell him what was going on, but it wasn’t right. If they were eager to accept federal help, the policeman would have taken him to the ranking officer on the scene and introduced him. If they were still shaken by having one of their own killed and were operating on the herd instinct, he would have brought the head man out to the tape to talk to Hamp. But this man had done neither.
Before Hamp reached the broken window he could see the destruction inside. Automatic weapons at close range made more hits than misses and spread a lot of blood around. The floor and walls of the store made a horrible first impression.
Hamp didn’t have any trouble spotting the captain; he was the only one around who didn’t look as though he’d had to pay attention to the fitness regulations. He approached the man warily. “Jack Hamp, Justice Department.” The captain saw his hand but didn’t shake it, so he added, “Sorry about Sergeant Lempert.”
The captain looked at him, then looked away. He didn’t say, “Yeah, he was a good man,” or, “We’ll get the bastard who did it.” All he did say was, “What can I do for you?”
This told Hamp that what he could see right now was about all he was going to see. But that was all right, because looking at dead men didn’t tell you as much as looking at the ones who were still alive.
Wolf was only a little surprised after he had looked through every telephone book the Washington public library had and still couldn’t find a listing for anybody named E. V. Waring. There were lots of Warings in the books, but no E.V. He supposed it wasn’t unusual for somebody who worked for the Justice Department on cases like this not to want his address printed out where everybody could read it. But it was the Department of Motor Vehicles that really surprised him. He paid his ten bucks, filled out the department’s form at the long, stand-up writing table, waited for three hours and finally was told that E. V. Waring didn’t have a vehicle registered to him. This was more peculiar, but Waring was listed on the NCIC printout as “Agent in Charge,” so maybe he had a government car. Still, this was starting to feel like somebody who actually went to some trouble to keep out of sight after the office closed at night.
Wolf was experiencing a sense of increasing uneasiness. Waring had to be the one who was making it hard for him to get out of the country; Waring had figured out his escape route and blocked it within hours. He was also careful enough to keep himself from being found easily, and this was the part that was worrisome. Wolf could find anyone. If he wanted to, he could start going through lists at the county clerk’s office to find the house Waring undoubtedly owned, or pay the credit bureau for a credit report, or use any of a hundred other lists that solid citizens couldn’t help getting their names on. But all of these took time.
On his second day in Washington, he took a bus to Georgetown University. He walked around the fringes of the campus until he found a stationery store that looked as though the owner had been around long enough to be trustworthy, and was prosperous enough to stay. He picked out a folding leather notebook cover of the sort that he had seen people who worked in law offices use for notes. He ordered the engraving on the leather, then picked out the paper for it and selected a serious, businesslike typeface for the printing.
By afternoon Elizabeth had decided that she liked Lana. It was such an odd name for a woman her age. It was a relic of the fifties, and she had to admit that Lana must have been born in the late sixties. But Lana had found another anomaly, so Elizabeth forced herself to think about it.
This time it had happened right inside Cook County. It was a small motel, and the couple who owned it had been murdered. But either before that or afterward, several heavily armed men claiming to be police officers had gone from room to room just before dawn, telling everyone to leave because they had cornered a fugitive in the building. Then they had gone through the place breaking in all the doors, and ended by burning it down. Or maybe they had opened the doors to make the fire move faster. The police had already declared the fire an arson to cover up the murder of the proprietors when they got a call from one of the motel guests who was in a phone booth in Springfie
ld and was curious to know if they had caught the fugitive. A second call came from Carbondale, and that guest wanted to know if the police were going to refund part of his room rental, since he had been forced to leave a full eight hours before checkout time.
Elizabeth picked up the telephone and dialed the number of Jack Hamp’s motel room in Chicago for the third time, listened to six rings and then set it down again. It was infuriating to know that he was practically on the scene, and she couldn’t even tell him it had happened. Finally she took the report and started to walk toward Richardson’s office, then realized that she was walking alone. She stopped and turned. “Come on, Lana.”
Lana hesitated, then caught up with her. “I don’t usually just pop in,” she said, and then gave a nervous, apologetic laugh.
“He’s not doing anything more important than this,” said Elizabeth.
“What have you got?” Richardson asked as they entered.
“We’re not sure,” said Elizabeth. “What I think we’ve got is several men trying to burn him out of a motel near O’Hare. I’m not sure who that would be. It’s Castiglione territory.”
“Maybe Paul Cambria’s men,” said Richardson. “I’ve been trying to sort out the one from yesterday. The night the cop and the two guys with machine guns got killed, Paul Cambria was at a public function in Gary, maybe a mile from the spot. The local cops think he might have been trying to establish an alibi.”
