The Burning Day

by Timothy C. Phillips

  “Mary agreed to let me know ahead of time when she was going to be away when I came home. I’m no fool. I knew that if she was seeing someone else, she would have to come up with a plausible explanation for any subsequent visits. Now, she has given me three dates when she is supposedly going out of town. I want you to follow her on those three days, and report to me where she goes . . . and who she sees, if anyone.”

  “Well, I understand. Mr. Wiggins. I have to ask . . . do you want pictures of these meetings?”

  The little man seemed very taken aback. “Pictures? Nothing untoward—I mean, nothing of too graphic a nature is required. I would like photos of her talking with . . . anyone of interest.”

  “By ‘nothing graphic,’ Mr. Wiggins, I take it that you aren’t looking to begin divorce proceedings? Because usually that’s what’s called for in those instances. People want pictures or movies of their spouses engaged in consensual sex with other people. It’s an unpleasant part of this business. It’s why some people call private eyes ‘peepers.’ Most times, a guy in your position wants pictures of his wife and ‘persons of interest’ caught in the act, on film or digital camera.”

  Wiggins looked thunderstruck at the suggestion. “No, heavens, no. I’m not bitter toward Mary. They’ll be no kicking open doors and snapping pictures. I want to work this out with her, Mr. Longville. Anyone can go astray, and I know I’ve left my wife alone and lonely far too many times. She’s my soul mate, Mr. Longville; I love her very much. But I can’t confront her, or facilitate any sort of interaction about something like this without some sort of proof, since she is being evasive.”

  Wiggins, it seemed, had a far more forgiving nature than other spouses who had come to my office with similar suspicions. “That’s clear enough. Okay, Mr. Wiggins, I’ll need those dates from you. I’ll also need your address, and so on.”

  “Of course. But I need to make one thing absolutely clear. All of our dealings need to be here, in your office. Don’t come to my home. I don’t want anyone to get the least intuition regarding what’s going on. Every housewife in the neighborhood knows Mary, and the first thing they’d do is tell her. So I just can’t risk you coming by. Is that acceptable?”

  “No visits at your home. Got it. Fine with me.”

  “Excellent, then. You’ll also need Mary’s work address. I’d like you to begin your surveillance of her from there.”

  “Work? What kind of work does she do?”

  “Well, it’s not a paid position. She volunteers at a local hospice. She says it gives her purpose. I suspect that means it gets her out of the house.”

  “I understand. And the three days in question?”

  “The dates are, quite simply, the next three Friday evenings. It’s tax season and I will be in the office on each of those nights until late. There’s no way around that. It’s simply part of my job. Mary has told me that since I won’t be available, she’s going to visit friends on those nights, people from college who she hasn’t seen in several years. I merely want you to follow her from our home.” Wiggins pushed an index card toward me with an address and two telephone numbers written on it in calm, square handwriting, “Keep a log of where she goes, and do remember to take photos of her and any individuals who seem . . . pertinent.”

  I was already nodding, glad that Wiggins had come round to his purpose at last. “All right, Mr. Wiggins, I can do that. Not a problem.”

  “Of course, any additional operating money that you will need, I will provide.”

  “This seems pretty straight forward. I can’t imagine running into any added expenses, though if I do I’ll be in touch.” I turned to my side desk and slid the memory stick into a media slot on my computer. I opened up the folder and double-clicked one of the picture icons. After a second, a gorgeous smiling face filled the screen and radiated out at me. Mary Wiggins was a beauty, with high cheek bones, smooth ivory white skin and thick red hair with a hint of gold in it. Her smile was flawless. I resisted the urge to look backwards and forwards between the face on the screen and the odd man in my office.

  “I married up, I know.” Wiggins said, as if reading my thoughts. “Please, just do what you can.”

  Chapter 2

  After Wiggins left me, I went home. It had been a long day, and Wiggins and his strange drama had come at the very end of it. There was a light spring rain on my way to my quiet little house. I let myself in and shucked off my jacket and shoes and stretched out on the sofa. I didn’t turn on the TV or the lights, I just sat there in the dim natural fading glow of the day and thought about the mystery of Mary Wiggins.

  Was Henry being paranoid or was his wife really wandering? I decided to put it from my mind for the moment and take a stab at it in the morning. I picked up the remote and turned on the cable. I might as well catch up with what’s going on in the rest of the world, I told myself.

  There was nothing really new. There were the usual riots and bombings and mayhem rocking the four corners of the world, with the places and the players changing, but the basic storyline staying the same. It seemed the only thing about humankind that never changed was its gnawing hunger for self-destruction. After a few minutes, I tired of the network news and its litany of hopelessness, and started surfing the channels, looking for a quality movie.

  On one channel, Tommy Lee Jones was some sort of Law Enforcement officer, and was talking to the ghost of a confederate general in a Louisiana swamp. I watched for a few minutes, but decided that I had missed too much of the movie to make sense of what was going on. On another channel, there was Tommy Lee Jones again, dressed as some other kind of Law Enforcement officer, and now he was talking with a woman in a cafe. He was telling her a story of some sort. Once again, I decided that I had joined the movie too late to enjoy it, though it looked pretty good.

  I figured that it must be Tommy Lee Jones’ birthday, since he was being featured on so many channels. I thought I might get lucky and catch one of the Men in Black movies on another station, but it didn’t happen. I did catch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly just in time to watch the three-way gunfight at the end. After Clint Eastwood rode away into the sun, I decided to go check the contents of the fridge.

  I opened the refrigerator door and stood there staring at the leftovers in their plastic containers. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Henry Wiggins and his beautiful wife. Something about his story bugged me, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’d been going over it subconsciously since I got home. It wasn’t that what he wanted me to do wasn’t ethical or plausible . . . after all, I had done the same for other people plenty of times before. But something in his story didn’t fit. A wheel was spinning in the back of my mind, stuck on just what that thing was.

  I walked back into the living room and picked up the telephone book and flipped through to the “Accountants” section. I ran my finger down the column of advertisements. There it was. Henry Wiggins, Certified Public Accountant, serving Homewood, Mountainbrook, and Vestavia for fifteen years.

  I wondered if I might be getting a little paranoid, myself. Wiggins was a strange bird, all right, but I’d had limited exposure to accountants, anyway. Maybe they were all weird like him, with archaic clothing and a stilted way of talking.

  I went back to channel surfing, hoping to find some edifying entertainment. I skipped the movie channels and tried to find something informative. I found a show, ostensibly about food, that featured a portly bald man eating worms and larvae. I switched the channel. A group of heavily equipped men were hanging around an abandoned warehouse at night, trying to find ghosts and not having much luck. One of them had a shaved head. He looked a lot like the man who’d been eating bugs on the other channel.

  I decided to catch some news before throwing in the towel altogether. On the local news, there was a recap of the local mob violence. According to the dour young female anchor, the Birmingham Police were bracing for an all-out war on the streets, one that could break loose any day. The anchor then moved
on to a story about a placid, sunny Florida town that was being overrun with huge pythons. The report featured archival footage that showed the town as a dream vacation spot before it had been despoiled by the enormous reptiles. I watched with subdued interest.

  It seemed that many people had bought the reptiles in the 1980s and 1990s as part of the exotic pet fad, only to find that the snakes grew ever larger, and required ever more food. When economic crunches came along, many of those people could no longer afford to feed their beloved monsters. Most of the snake owners were apparently Florida residents, and, doing what they felt was the humanitarian thing, they had let the huge constrictors loose in the swampy, prey-filled environment of the everglades. There, the fearsome animals had found a new home. In short, they had thrived.

  Now, the snakes’ numbers had grown enormously, and they were menacing towns up and down the Gulf Coast, like the tiny idyllic town that was the subject of the news report. I shook my head. There you go, I thought. If man cannot find serpents in the Garden of Eden, he will bring them there himself. Then he will lament their presence, as if it were none of his own doing.

  As I browsed the cable channels, unbeknownst to me things were unfolding across town in a way I could never have foreseen. I didn’t get that from the television news, or any of the illuminating programs I flipped through; I was to learn about it all, days later. Although I didn’t know it at the time, two men were talking in the back room of a bar. I had met both of them, one very recently and one a long time ago. What they were talking about was going to have a tremendous impact on my life, the life of certain people moving around me, and the fate of the city itself.

  Chapter 3

  The conversation had started out unpleasantly. One man was trying to strike a bargain. The other was, in the beginning, listening patiently if noncommittally.

  “What I have here is a real chance to score some big money,” one man, the visitor, was saying. “I just need a little help locating a certain broad.”

  Behind the desk, Longshot Lonnie O’Malley sat still as a snake, coiled and ready to strike. “Why should I help you?” he said. “So you have a scheme to rake some lawyer over the coals. Good for you. It’s not exactly my racket. If that’s all you got to lay on the table, you’re wasting my time.”

  The other man became immediately patronizing, and tried to cover his fear. “Oh, I understand that, Mr. O’Malley. There is no way I would have come here if I didn’t have something for you that I believe would be of tremendous interest and value to you. By the way, the man in question is an accountant. Perhaps quite wealthy.”

  “Whatever. So out with it already!”

  “Of course. First, allow me to provide a little background.” Longshot sighed, but his visitor held up one hand. “Please. I assure you, all will be made clear. A friend and I were associated with a certain woman; we all used to partner together, the three of us. She left a few years back, trying to go straight. We lost track of her for a long time.”

  Lonnie raised an eyebrow. “You mean you were a bunch of grifters.”

  The other man raised his eyebrows, as if offended by Longshot’s choice of term, but then shrugged it off, and went on: “Whatever you want to call it. Mary eventually turned up right here in Birmingham, just a few months ago. I was in the area on some business and when I happened to see her, I thought ‘Well, what do you know, there’s good old Mary.’ Small world, as they say? So I followed her to see what she was doing with herself. She’d been married to this accountant, like I said, and I wanted to approach him for a loan, so to speak. I re-introduced myself to Mary and told her we were going to take the guy down. But I got a little surprise. She told me she couldn’t, not this time. I told her she had to, or the husband would find out some things about her that might interest him.”

  Longshot’s visitor paused, as if considering how to phrase some difficult idea. When Longshot drummed his fingers, the man gave a start and went on.

  “But it didn’t go as I’d planned. Mary kept stalling me. She wasn’t afraid of me like she used to be—like she ought to be. With what I had on her, I could ruin her, send her to prison. She knew that. But it made me very curious. I smelled more money. So I kept dogging her tracks, trying to find out why she was being so . . . gutsy. Last Saturday, I got lucky. I snapped a picture of her with her new boyfriend.”

  Lonnie’s eyes were beginning to glow malevolently with impatience, so the man hastily reached into his jacket and produced a photograph, which he placed squarely on the desk and spun with his fingertips for Lonnie to see.

  “Mr. O’Malley, take a look at that.”

  The murderous glow slowly faded from Lonnie’s eyes. The blue eye twinkled. The green eye slowed in its circling and came into focus with its paternal twin.

  “Well, now, that is interesting,” Lonnie commented as he peered down at the picture. The photograph had been taken covertly, obviously through a windshield, but there was no mistaking its subject. The picture clearly showed a model-quality redhead, getting a kiss on the cheek from none other than Francis Lorenzo, Head Capo to Don Ganato, the boss of the Ganato crime family—Longshot Lonnie O’Malley’s greatest and deadliest enemy in the corporeal world.

  When Longshot Lonnie O’Malley looked up from the picture, both Irish eyes were smiling. The man across from him let out his breath as quietly as possible, and smiled back. Longshot reached down and opened a drawer and produced his ever-present bottle of Bushmills Irish Whisky, and two clean glasses.

  “Would you like a drink, Mr. Morton? Because I think we have a lot to talk about.”

  Dominic Morton’s smile brightened. He rubbed his hands together and leaned forward in his seat. “Mr. O’Malley, don’t mind if I do.”

  Chapter 4

  If anyone had ever asked him, “Mad Dog” Maddox would have told them that he worked for a living. If the listener was really unlucky, he might even go on to explain just what type of work that was, and survive the explanation. His was the kind of work that required no time clock to keep track of his hours. Indeed, the hours he kept were strange, because they depended on when he could catch other people unaware. Mad Dog collected money that was owed to a certain businessman. His employer was the kind of guy who tolerated no nonsense and no mistakes. Mad Dog was good at what he did—he had to be.

  Mad Dog’s boss was a man named Lonnie “Longshot” O’Malley, the nephew of long-dead crime boss Big Thom O’Hearn, an Irish immigrant who had started up the numbers rackets on the North Side of Birmingham in the early 1960s. Big Thom had died as few men in his line of work ever do, at home and in bed, as the 1980s came to an end. Since he had died childless, the rackets fell to his unstable nephew, Lonnie O’Malley, to run. He had run them, all right.

  In five short years, Lonnie, who had just turned twenty when he inherited the rackets, had turned the numbers business into a going concern. No one made book in Metropolitan Birmingham without getting his nod. In time, though, numbers were no longer enough for him. Lonnie branched out into the soft money rackets that surrounded strip joints, floating card games and unlicensed back alley gambling of all kinds. He hired an army of thugs. Pushers had to pay him regular tribute, or they ended up in body casts or got found dead in back alley dumpsters. The most brutal hoods of every stripe came to fear and respect Longshot Lonnie O’Malley and his knuckle-dragging foot soldiers. Most of the low-lifes on the north side of Birmingham had to cough up to his goons on occasion, to stay in whatever sleazy racket they had picked for themselves. It was business, after all.

  E Pluribus Unum, it said on the money that was the singular reason for the existence of Lonnie’s empire. And, just as it was proclaimed on all of those dollars and coins, e pluribus unum, I am one of many, the same might be said of Mad Dog Maddox, the man who came to collect those dollars and coins. He was one thug out of a large school of thugs. But he was of a singular vintage. He took great pride in his collecting, and collecting was what he was all about this fine morning.

  Mad
Dog parked his car on the corner of Third Avenue North and Forty-First Street. He walked toward the offices of Merle Building Supply. Mr. Merle was a business man who couldn’t pick a winner at the horse track, it seemed. He owed Longshot Lonnie O’Malley over nine thousand dollars. He was behind in his payments, and this required the presence of Mad Dog Maddox.

  Mad Dog had blue eyes that looked just a little out of focus. He wore a constant, dreamy smile beneath a perpetual five o’clock shadow. There was something a little off about the smile, an odd quality that perceptive people might detect, that maybe children or the very aged might sense as disturbed. For most people, though, who did not pay much attention, Mad Dog Maddox passed muster, and some of them even found the smile infectious. That only added to his danger, because Mad Dog Maddox was a killer.

  Mad Dog’s father had named him Hubert Third Battle of the Isonzo Maddox. The strange middle name came from an engagement in the First World War in which the boy’s grandfather, then an Irish conscript in the British Army, had earned a medal for valor. The grandfather had also borne the name of Hubert. As a boy, Mad Dog had suffered vicious derision and had endured several beatings over his unfortunate name. He had tried shortening it to Hubert Isonzo, but this hadn’t helped much. All of this had changed after he had begun to refer to himself as Kevin, the name of his twin brother who had died at birth, until one day when he was in the seventh grade, a petty teacher had revealed his complete actual birth name to the entire class. The class had erupted into cruel laughter. That day, he had endured harsh treatment from his classmates, just as before.

  This time Kevin, AKA Hubert Isonzo, had taken action. He had patiently waited in the parking lot after school, laying in wait for the teacher. When he appeared, young Maddox had beaten him to death with a length of heavy iron pipe that he had stolen from the school machine shop. Even as he had beaten the man to death, he had worn his strange, peaceful, quite vacant smile.