The chief sat down and laid his palms flat on his desk, framing a color snapshot of the Antigua family cavorting on the beach at Galveston.
“No small talk,” he said. “I’m calling a press conference at two o’clock to address the Davis case. I need you to give me what you can by noon, with suggestions on what to hold back. I could make that decision, but I’m not in the trenches.”
Childs nodded. He’d been expecting that. “I’d sure like one more day. If the killer’s going to start worrying that he didn’t finish the job and come back to clean up, this would just about be the time.”
“That’s a desperation measure. You talked to the M.E. The killer made sure, then blew town. By now he’s already back in Vegas or wherever.”
“Probably not Vegas. Things’ve changed there, unfortunately. I was a lot happier knowing most of those spaghetti-benders were all in one place.”
“Thank you. I was considering asking you to take part in the press conference, but I can see your sensitivity skills need tweaking.” He didn’t smile. They both knew diplomats made shitty detectives. “The boys and girls of the fourth estate will nail our cocks to the cross if we hold off another day. Frankly, I’m surprised they haven’t sniffed it out before this.”
“I’m not.”
Antigua ignored the compliment. “Turn anything yet at the airport?”
“Which one? Back in Milwaukee I only had to worry about Mitchell. We’re working on the manifests, but it’s slow. Only first initials of Christian names, and these days no one bothers to check spelling. Man named Harrigan changes planes at Dallas-Fort Worth, when he lands in Houston he’s Hansen. It’s not quite that bad, not most of the time, but if they transpose a couple of letters or hit the wrong key at the start and we’re not even in the right part of the alphabet, the cross-match is just a waste of time. In the end we’re probably better off waiting for the ticket information from point of departure. But that can take a week. Unless we got lucky and he used the name Pittsburgh Phil or Nitti the Enforcer.”
This time the chief smiled, a polite indulgence. “What about this Edison kill, anything?”
“M.O.’s different. Davis was stabbed, Edison was shot, and it looks kind of hurry-up, nothing tricky like that business with the Corvette.” Childs managed to keep his expression blank. The morning after Johns Davis was found skewered to death in his living room, a search warrant had turned up a steel ball-bearing lying among the glass fragments on the NRA freak’s backseat. Later that day a gift-wrapped package had appeared on Childs’s desk, containing a kid’s plastic slingshot. He knew it had been put there by one of the cowboys in Fraud or Vice.
Antigua looked troubled. Childs thought, Here it comes. But it didn’t. The chief was thinking about something else.
“I’m worried about the murder weapon on Davis,” he said. “It looks spontaneous. Back on Felony Homicide we’d have booted it over to Domestic Violence on that feature alone.”
Relieved, Childs shook his head. “No spouse or significant other. Then there was that diversionary tactic, which screams premeditation. You can try all day and still not convince me some kids chose that night to raise hell. It isn’t the barrio. I admit it’s unusual. Maybe there was a fuckup and he had to recover. The good ones are trained to use the means at hand when the plan goes flooey. Anything else, a pregnant girlfriend or a sore loser among Davis’s clients, is too much coincidence. I wouldn’t buy a massive coronary if the M.E. dug out the fatty deposits and stuck them under my nose.”
“Death by statue. Let’s hold that back. The media’s going to be pissed enough we sat on the rest.”
“Okay by me. M.O. aside, the kills are connected. Edison was a jobber for Spanish Rivera, strictly small-time, but he’d have been in on the sweep for questioning, and he might have had something to say. Murder weapon, S and W thirty-eight, ditched at the scene, no prints. If it traces, I’ll fly to Vegas myself and try my streak at the tables. None of this went on the blotter, not even the victim’s name. Pending notification of next of kin. The press will buy that; they don’t like to think they’re ogres.”
Antigua said nothing. They both knew what the press was.
Childs said, “So Edison was a professional job, and this time it went off without a hitch. It wasn’t retaliation for Davis. Timeline’s too tight. But we don’t get two of those in one night without they tie in. Not here in the Cradle of the Texas Republic. We’re looking for the same asshole in both cases.”
“You talked to Rivera.” Not a question. Policy was to notify the chief whenever a VIP—Very Important Perpetrator—was rousted.
“Courtesy call, at his restaurant. I recommend the flan.”
“So nothing.”
“Worse.”
The chief waited politely.
Childs lifted his glasses and resettled them. He hated theorizing in front of brass, even friendly brass. When the boat you built sprang a leak you went to the bottom alone. But he was good at holding his breath.
“I’ve talked to these made guys before,” he said. “Nothing changes except the table settings. They’ve got it down to a few phrases they use over and over, and they’ve done it so much they aren’t even listening to themselves anymore. He didn’t use any of them. He wasn’t surprised. That’d be a tip-off, after one attempt was already made on Davis. He wasn’t happy either. He acted like a broker who just got bad news from Wall Street. He was expecting it, but it was still bad. I don’t think he set this one up.”
“Rivera’s lied to more cops than you and I know. It’s no stretch to assume he’s gotten good at it.”
“You’re probably right.” Childs let out his breath. The chief had spotted the leaks before he pushed off. Then he went ahead and pushed off anyway. “I’ve just got a bad feeling this is more than just a housecleaning.”
“Someone’s muscling in?”
“Muscling in, yeah. Someone’s being taken for a ride.”
They shared a bitter chuckle. TV networks were bouncing reruns of Mister Ed off satellites and kids were buying lasers in corner drugstores, and two DNA-savvy detectives were sitting around still talking like Jimmy Cagney. Gutter talk was past due for a makeover.
Childs cleared his throat. “If this were Detroit or Chicago, the cops would let these boys whack each other, no sweat. This is an unconnected town, and we like to keep it that way. Rivera knows that, or he’d let his whores hang their titties over the balcony at Goliad. His madam’s Mrs. Brady. Well, Mrs. Brady on cable—she says ‘cunt’ a lot. Whoever pushed the button on Davis and Edison is out to burn down Rivera.”
“Why not just hit him?”
“These people have people to answer to. Call it the Commission or whatever, no one hits a capo without clearing it with someone. You might as well put out the hit on yourself. But a rookie’s another animal, a pigeon. Wing one and ten more fly in to shit on your car. Why not whack him and let the police do the rest? Then when the heat dies down, step in and rebuild.”
Antigua turned one of his hands over and looked at the palm. “I should be mad. Wonder why I’m not.”
“We’ve been using them all these years. Luciano helped whip the Nazis and we deported him. Giancana fought commies and we let him get killed. We ought to have expected them to return the compliment.”
“Maybe. What else?”
“This has to come from out of town. Rivera’s lieutenant retired to Arizona last year and no one replaced him. At this point the local organization could run itself: no growth, but no losses either. It’s what the folks in Corporate call a prime takeover target.” Childs paused. “So what now? Feds?”
“We won’t bother Washington with this.” That had the snap of finality. Antigua’s issues with the Justice Department were his own. “We’ll use their facilities, like the good taxpayers we are, but we’ll keep this local. Get a warrant for Rivera and bring him in. I’ll coordinate a sweep and put Vice on Goliad and the parlors downtown. If your hunch is right, that’s just what the bastar
ds want, but we can’t sit still. Police police.” It was the chief’s favorite phrase, a noun and a verb. He’d used it in press conference and it showed up on the turnout sheet some mornings. “When it’s finished, we’ll see who’s new in town and start a scrapbook. Meanwhile, get me the shooter.”
“If someone else doesn’t get him first. Whoever paid him has to be looking over both shoulders. He’s either a genius or a nut.”
“Let’s hope genius.” Antigua’s smile was chilly. “Geniuses outsmart themselves sooner or later, but you can’t predict what a nut’s going to do. They don’t know themselves.”
“Okay, boss.”
The chief stood to shake his hand. He hung on. “A little advice. Go easy on that ‘Cradle of the Texas Republic’ business. You never know when you might need these redneck sons of bitches.”
Childs grinned. But Antigua’s face was grave.
“Get me the shooter,” he repeated.
TWENTY-FIVE
Great thing about a knife, when you needed a new one you didn’t have to meet some guy behind his car in a fucking alley, or go to some pee-smelling house in Tarzana and squint at serial numbers in an attic tricked out like the gun room in the J. Edgar Hoover Building. You just parked at the nearest K-Mart and went to Sporting Goods.
A glass case on the wall behind the counter contained an assortment of hunting knives on pegs, ranging from an outsize jackknife with a ceramic blade to a big bowie with a black composition handle and fourteen inches of razor-edged steel, suitable for use on Cape buffalo and small trees. Abilene figured a man had to have a pretty small dick to want to strap on a sticker that hung to his ankles.
The store was close to deserted in the middle of a weekday, just like every other K-Mart in the world, a situation that had been going on for as long as he bothered to remember. If he didn’t know better, he’d think the chain was mobbed up. Except the Organization would have finished looting it and put it out of its misery long ago. There wasn’t a clerk in sight, and after waiting three minutes he started around the counter for a closer look.
“Can I help you?”
Carrot-topped kid with four-alarm acne, swimming around in one of those dopey blue-green smocks. MICHAEL on his cute little nametag. He’d been hiding in the aisle between bicycle tires and sleeping bags. Now he was standing on the customer’s side of the counter looking at Abilene with one foot behind it.
Abilene said, “Let’s find out. I want a look at that Buck knife there in the case.”
The kid reached up under his smock to dig a ring of about a thousand keys out of his baggy pants pocket. He said, “Excuse me,” and when Abilene didn’t move, he walked around him, barely missing a beat. He unlocked the case, swung open the glass and reached for the bowie.
“No, the Buck,” Abilene said.
“Let’s see.” The kid stood staring at the display.
“Third from the top, Hawkeye.”
He took down the big folding knife with the wooden-and-brass handle and handed it to Abilene, who bounced it on his palm, testing the heft, then pressed the thumb-latch and grasped the blade by its dimple and snapped it open. It worked stiffly, not like his old one that he could open with a one-handed flick, letting the weight of the handle do the work. A little oil and a lot of opening and closing would take care of that. He tested the edge with the ball of his thumb. It needed honing. He wondered how long it had been in the case. Since last deer-hunting season, anyway, and probably longer. No one in L.A. hunted. They couldn’t cut into tofu without fainting.
Abilene was about to ask the kid a question when the telephone rang behind the counter. The kid picked up the receiver. “K-Mart Sporting Goods. This is Michael.” He listened, said, “I’ll check,” then laid the receiver on the counter and walked around Abilene, excusing himself.
He was gone five minutes. When he returned he said “Excuse me” again, and lifted the receiver. “No, we don’t have that. I can put in an order. Sorry. Thanks.” He hung up. “Is there something else you’d like to see?” he asked Abilene.
“Yeah, you got—”
The telephone rang again. The kid picked up. “K-Mart Sporting Goods. This is Michael.”
Abilene took hold of the receiver cord, made a loop, inserted the knife blade with the edge turned upward, and sliced the cord in two with a backward jerk. The cord resisted slightly. The blade needed sharpening for sure.
It took the kid a second to realize he’d been disconnected and another second to figure out how. His pimples got fiery-red against his sudden pallor.
Abilene said, “You got a whetstone? I’ll need some three-in-one oil, too. You should take better care of your inventory. Why you think Wal-Mart’s kicking your ass?”
Michael wasn’t as slow as he looked. After a moment of staring at Abilene’s pale eyes he cradled the dead receiver and took a blister card off a peg on the wall next to the knife case and laid it on the counter. Under the transparent plastic was a whetstone in an imitation chamois leather case. The kid cleared his throat. “You’ll find three-in-one oil in Hardware.”
“Thanks, Mike.”
“Michael.”
“Fuck’s the difference?” He waited for his purchases to be scanned in, then paid for them and took the bag and walked over to Hardware. Taking his time. He had six hours till sundown and Montecito was an easy three-hour drive.
Macklin made his last change in San Bernardino—frost-green Catera, last year’s model, the Ford Pinto of Cadillacs—and drove straight through to L.A. He parked it in a Safeway lot and walked four blocks to the hotel. The doorman, in a white summerweight uniform with yards of gold braid, broad Hershey-brown face battered like the part-time stuntman he probably was, wished him a good afternoon on his way through the revolving doors. Macklin’s rumpled clothes and two days’ growth of beard didn’t appear to concern him. It was the look that multimillionaire producers wore to parties at Spago’s.
Any one of the loiterers in the lobby might have been spotting for Maggiore, but Macklin didn’t care. His shirt clung to his back like cellophane, he had a bee sting between his shoulder blades and thirteen hundred miles of desert grit clogging his tear ducts. To hell with sneaking around.
He used one of the beige courtesy telephones to call the room. It rang four times, then a canned voice came on offering to record a message. He hung up.
The clerk behind the desk was the polite young Hispanic who had checked him in, a few days and a couple of hundred years before. “One message, Mr. Macklin.” He reached into one of the varnished maple pigeonholes on the back wall—a holdover from the Hollywood of Nathanael West—and handed him a picture postcard.
Macklin glanced at the glossy photo, then read the writing on the back. He recognized Laurie’s script:… the place where we found the Gypsy puzzled him for a moment. Then he remembered. He went back out, pausing briefly by the bullet-shaped trash can near the door to tear the postcard into small pieces and throw them away.
Laurie kept reaching for the shift lever between the seats and grabbing empty air. She missed her six-year-old Corsica back home. The new Buick she’d rented operated almost entirely from a stick on the column and the interior was like a helicopter cockpit. It reminded her of a medevac run she’d gone on when her turn came up her first year as a student nurse. The sensation of climbing up out of the Valley was identical to that experience. She felt disconnected from the earth.
She turned off the air conditioner and powered down the window, thinking the damp salt air might help keep her alert. She wondered if the mental condition of the old woman in the bed-and-breakfast was contagious. Keep it real, keep it real. The phrase had never meant anything to her before.
She put on the radio, but the selection of rock oldies, telephone call-in shows, Spanish-language stations, news, hip-hop, and musty old jazz had nothing for her and after scanning AM and FM the length of the dial she turned it off. Now she could hear the hum of her tires on the pavement. She couldn’t before, and she decided the flo
ating episode was over.
The drive seemed to take longer than it had before, but clocks had had no significance then. She and Peter had been on Pacific Honeymoon Time, a zone in which there were no Maggiores, no Abilenes, and most important of all, no secrets. She’d been fascinated by the ocean, by the searching and swooping patterns of the seagulls, and by the sea lions flopping about on the rocks like something in a cartoon. It was all destruction. The Pacific threw its shoulder against the rocks again and again in its tireless effort to eradicate the continent that kept it from its meeting with the Atlantic, the gulls were hunting for fish, there was blood and scales on the comical whiskers of the sea lions. None of it had mattered, because of the calm male presence separating her from the mayhem. Now she deliberately avoided looking in that direction.
She’d seen too many movies—most of them shot along that same stretch of highway—in which careening cars burst through guardrails and walloped down cliffs and erupted in flame. Hitchcock and the rest had made such things too easy to picture. But she wasn’t living in one of those films. In those films you were reasonably certain the hero and heroine would survive, and even when you weren’t, when it was Psycho or Chinatown or Basic Instinct, you knew that when the credits crawled all you had to worry about was finding your car in the parking lot and getting away in the general crush of the exodus. Chances are the man you left with wasn’t a murderer.
In Montecito she drove right past the little shop and had to turn around on the gravel apron of a scenic overlook and go back. A rutted drive led down at a thirty-degree angle to a bungalow sort of structure, a small shotgun-style house with pitted aluminum siding and a shingle roof, left over from a time when vacation cottages outnumbered permanent homes along the highway. A swayback porch ran the length of the building, cluttered with cast-iron cookstoves, decommissioned road signs, split-bottom rockers, and a vintage Coke machine, discreetly chained to the columns supporting the porch to discourage scavengers. An oblong sign painted to resemble a human eye hung from chains stapled to the overhang, with LOS OJOS ANTIQUES & GIFTS hand-lettered inside the iris.
Something Borrowed, Something Black Page 17
