by James Swain
Lois answered the phone on the third ring. She was at the kitchen counter, preparing her husband’s lunch. Money was tight, and he bagged it whenever he could.
“Can I tell him who’s calling?” She stuck the receiver into her shoulder, and lowered her voice. “It’s some guy pretending to be Nucky Balducci.”
“Tell him to get stuffed and hang up.”
“It sort of sounds like him.”
Enoch “Nucky” Balducci had run Atlantic City’s rackets for forty years. As a kid, Valentine’s mother had told him that if he didn’t behave, Nucky would climb through his bedroom window, and slit his throat. “You think it’s Doyle?” he asked.
“Could be,” Lois said.
Valentine took the phone from his wife. “Hey buddy, what’s up?”
“We need to talk,” a gruff voice said.
“Who’s this?”
“Your wife fucking deaf? This is Nucky Balducci.”
He saw Lois staring at him. Had his adolescent fear of Nucky registered on his face? “How do I know this is Nucky Balducci?” he asked.
“Your father has a tattoo with your mother’s name stenciled on his ass,” the man growled. “That good enough for you?”
They agreed to meet at the foot of Lucy the Elephant in thirty minutes.
Lucy resided in a park in Margate not far from Valentine’s house. Once, she had been one of Atlantic City’s most famous attractions. Made of timber and sheet metal, she stood sixty-five feet from head-to-toe. For twenty cents, a visitor could climb the spiral staircase in her hind leg, and sit in the basket on her back, called a howdah. These days, Lucy sat unused, the weeds around her long and ragged.
Crossing the park, Valentine spotted Nucky standing beneath Lucy’s tail. The old gangster wore a long winter coat and a black fedora. He was carrying an umbrella, even though it hadn’t rained in days. A scruffy park attendant unlocked Lucy’s hollow leg, then shuffled away.
“You come alone?” Nucky asked.
“Yeah. How about you?”
“Don’t be a wise ass.”
They climbed the spiral staircase and got settled in Lucy’s howdah. A veil of bluish fog hung over the nearby rooftops. Nucky started the conversation.
“Zelda asked about you the other day,” the old gangster said.
“How’s she doing?”
Nucky removed his fedora. He had a shaved head and bulbous, bloodshot eyes. If he wasn’t the ugliest man in Atlantic City, he was in the running.
“Terrible,” he said.
“Still won’t come out of her room?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You should come by. It would cheer her up.”
Zelda Balducci had lost her marbles the day Elvis Presley had died. Locked herself in her bedroom, and kissed the world goodbye. Two years later, she was still in her room. “She likes you,” Nucky added.
Valentine gave him a hard look. His relationship with Nucky was a thin one. His father had saved Nucky’s life before Valentine had been born. Stopped a man from braining Nucky with a shovel, was how the story went. As Nucky had risen up in the ranks of Atlantic City’s underworld, he’d looked out for Dominic Valentine. Valentine had taken Zelda to a high school dance as a favor to his old man, and recalled Zelda stepping on his toes all night long.
“I hear you got promoted,” Nucky said. “Catching cheaters in the casino.”
“That’s right.”
“My first job as a kid was inside this elephant. Lucy was a speakeasy. There was also a blackjack game.”
“What did you do?”
“Cleaned out the spittoons, ran errands.”
“Sounds like a blast.”
Nucky elbowed him in the ribs. “You inherited your old man’s mouth, you know that?”
“Excuse me for asking, but what do you want? ” Valentine said, “If people see me hanging out with you, they might get the wrong idea.”
Nucky stared off into space, then punched his hat with his fist. “There’s bad stuff going down at Resorts. Stuff that could get you hurt.”
He paused, and Valentine realized he was expecting an answer. To act uninformed around Nucky was a mistake, so he said, “I know.”
“I ain’t talking about the stuff you think I’m talking about,” Nucky said.
“What stuff are you talking about?”
“Other stuff.”
“What stuff is that?”
Nucky opened the umbrella and covered them with it. To stop anyone watching with binoculars who knew how to read lips, Valentine guessed.
“I’m talking about stuff you don’t know about,” Nucky said. “Maybe never will know about it. Which is probably for the better.”
“It is?”
Nucky nodded vigorously. “For you, and your family.”
Valentine stared at him. Why was Nucky dragging his family into this? He watched the fog start to lift, the sunlight bleeding through as the day began.
“How much did the Prince tell you before he croaked?” Nucky asked.
So that was why Nucky had asked him here. The Prince.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
Valentine shook his head.
“You sure about that?”
“Positive.”
“You check his pockets?”
There was no love in Nucky’s eyes now. The old gangster wanted to know what had happened to the address book with the names of the New York mafia soldiers.
“No. I don’t roll dead men,” Valentine replied.
Nucky owned two identical Cadillac Eldorados. One was for driving around, the other for parking in front of his plumbing supply store so people would think he was working. Luther, his ex-football player bodyguard and chauffeur, had parked the driving car on the street, and now opened the back door as they came out of the park.
“You ever patch things up with your old man?” Nucky asked.
The question caught Valentine by surprise. “No.”
“I saw him the other day on the street. I took him to a diner, and we talked over coffee. Your father still has a lot upstairs. He hasn’t killed all his brain cells.”
“Glad to hear it,” Valentine said.
“You need to smoke the peace pipe. Make peace.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying you should do it.”
Valentine watched Nucky climb into the backseat. There was a delicate balance in Atlantic City between the crooks, the Jews, the blacks, and the Republican machine, and at the center of it was this man. The passenger window came down, and Nucky peered out at him from inside the car. Valentine realized he was expecting an answer.
“I’ve tried a hundred times.”
“Try a hundred more,” the old gangster said.
Chapter 8
Doyle drove to the beach that morning while it was still dark. It killed his leg to drive, but he gutted it out. He had circled today’s date in his calendar two months ago, right after seeing an article in the newspaper which said a company called Bally’s had gotten the go-ahead to demolish the Marlborough-Blenheim hotel, and build a new casino on the Boardwalk.
The Marlborough-Blenheim had once defined everything that was wonderful about Atlantic City, it’s reinforced concrete towers rising up like a cathedral at the edge of the sea. Doyle had played in its lobby as a kid, and had his wedding reception in one of its ballrooms. And now it was coming down.
An eight-block stretch had been cordoned off by police sawhorses. He parked on Atlantic Avenue, then walked a block to the Boardwalk and headed north. He used a cane, and stopped occasionally to catch his breath. Being crippled was a drag. People avoided eye contact, fearful, he guessed, of being like him one day. It’s not so bad, he wanted to tell them, once you get used to the rejection. Reaching the Boardwalk, he spotted a man with a two-day beard standing by a pushcart.
“You working today?” Doyle asked him.
<
br /> “Trying to,” the man said, blowing into his hands. “I read in the newspaper there might be a crowd to see the explosion, so I figured I’d come out.”
“How much to take me to the hotel?”
“They won’t let you that close.”
“I’m a cop,” Doyle said.
The man scratched his unshaven chin. “Two bucks.”
Doyle climbed into the pushcart. A cold wind was coming off the ocean. He tied a knot in his scarf, then removed the Bell and Howell camera slung around his neck, and made sure it was loaded with film. The man lifted the pushcart onto his shoulders, and started walking. The Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel loomed ahead, still the biggest kid on the block. Ten years ago it had fallen on hard times, and become a refuge for Welfare mothers and transients. Today, it was surrounded by police sawhorses and sleepy-eyed cops.
They soon reached the hotel. Doyle said hello to several cops he knew, and they let him through. The man pulled the pushcart down to the beach and parked it. Doyle got out, and handed the man a five-dollar bill.
“Keep the change,” he said.
Doyle walked down to the shoreline until he was a few feet from the water. He filled his lungs with air, the tangy smell of salt and kelp honing his spirit. Ever since he could remember, he’d loved the smell of the sea.
“You want me to come back when it’s over?” the man asked.
“Do that,” Doyle said.
He spent several minutes focusing his camera, the picture he wanted slowly taking shape as the sun snuck up behind him. At seven, one of the sleepy-eyed cops sauntered over. “We have to clear out,” the cop said. “You’re on your own.”
“Thanks a lot,” Doyle said.
“It could be dangerous, standing this close.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Good luck.”
The cop left, and Doyle continued to adjust the hotel’s image in his camera. At seven-fifteen, five men wearing hard hats came out of the hotel. They worked for a Dallas-based company called Controlled Demolition Incorporated. For the past month, they’d busied themselves drilling 4,000 holes into the hotel’s supports, then filled the holes with 1,200 pounds of high-grade explosives. The local newspaper had run a picture, detailing how the hotel would implode upon itself. Three years to build, the caption read, ten seconds to destroy. The CDI experts also went south.
The wind had picked up, and Doyle felt the cheeks of his ass freeze together. He looked up and down the beach, and realized he was alone. The Marlborough-Blenheim deserved a better send-off, but he guessed no one cared about history these days.
Five minutes later, the beginning of the end. From inside the Marlborough-Blenheim came a series of booming explosions. The whole earth shook, and a flock of seagulls exploded from the roof of the hotel, and flew directly over Doyle’s head. He dropped his cane, then fell backwards in the soft sand, the camera resting safely in his lap.
“There she blows!” he yelled.
He watched the hotel begin to cave in, its walls a jittering mass. It was horribly beautiful the way only a tragedy can be, and he steadied the camera with both hands and started snapping pictures.
Doyle had a small darkroom in the basement of his house. He drove home and went there immediately, not bothering to brush the dust out of his hair. The hotel had come down fast, and he wasn’t sure if any of his pictures were good.
He spent an hour inhaling the warm chemical stench as he shepherded glossies from developer to stop bath to fixer tray. He worked backwards in the roll. His fingers were in several of the shots. Others were ruined by a bad angle, or the intrusive sunlight. Reaching the last shot, he hesitated before removing it from the tray.
He shook the glossy out, then placed it beneath an infra-red light on his work area. The photograph showed the building in mid-collapse, the floors caving in with uniform precision, while the building’s towers were still erect. Through a cloud of white dust, he spied a face in an upper-story window. A man, staring out, wanting no part of a world that would destroy a building as beautiful as the Marlborough-Blenheim. Then, before his disbelieving eyes, the face vanished.
“Can’t be,” he said aloud.
He got a magnifying glass and had another look. The image hadn’t left a trace, and he decided it was the processing fluid. It always distorted a picture before it dried.
“Who lived in the hotel?” his wife Liddy asked a few minutes later. Seeing the stricken look on his face as he’d come upstairs, she’d fixed him a pot of coffee.
“Welfare mothers and elderly people,” Doyle said, sitting at the kitchen table. “A month ago they were evicted. Some refused to leave, so Banko made us take them out. Bunch of them were crying.”
Liddy sat next to her husband. She knew how much Doyle had loved the hotel, and how its demolition had torn his heart in two.
“It must have been hard,” she said.
“Hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
“But it had to be done,” she reminded him.
“I know. But it still didn’t feel right. Couldn’t Bally’s have built their casino someplace else? That building was special.”
Liddy placed her hand on top of her husband’s. They had grown up on the island, and it was hard to see the old places being torn down to be replaced by casinos.
“Do you really think you saw a face in the picture?” she asked.
“I saw something, that’s for sure.”
“Can I have a look?”
“Sure.”
They went downstairs to the darkroom and looked at the photograph together. Now, instead of a face in the upper-story window, there was nothing but bright sunlight. Doyle wondered if his eyes were playing tricks with him.
“Maybe it was a ghost,” Liddy suggested.
“I heard the hotel was filled with those,” Doyle said.
She put her arms around her husband’s waist, and held him tightly.
“I’m sorry, Doyle. I know you loved that place.”
Doyle kissed the top of his wife’s head. As they headed back upstairs, he glanced at his wristwatch. It was ten minutes before nine. Banko had called a special meeting at the station house at nine sharp. If he hurried, he could still get there on time.
“Got to run,” he said.
Chapter 9
The station house was a tomb when Valentine came in at five past nine.
“Hey Joe, where is everybody?” he asked the desk sergeant.
Joe Scagglione looked up from the sports section of the newspaper. He’d gotten shot in the spine during a foiled bank robbery ten years ago, and was a constant reminder to every cop of what happened to the disabled.
“Jesus, Tony, didn’t you get the memo?”
“What memo?”
“Banko wanted everyone here at nine sharp. He’s brought in the FBI.” Joe pointed down the hall at the room that was used for morning briefings. “In there.”
Valentine hurried down the hallway, and entered the briefing room to the stares of a hundred of his peers. The briefing room had tiered seating, and he saw Doyle sitting in the last row, holding a chair for him. He scampered up the aisle and joined his partner.
Moments later, Banko entered the meeting room followed by two men wearing off-the-rack suits that screamed law enforcement. One was Mexican, heavyset, with salt and pepper hair and slate blue eyes. The other was white, with a hatchet face and a mouth as thin as a paper cut. Banko addressed his troops.
“Good morning. I realize it’s not the wisest thing to pull every cop off their beat for a meeting, but I believe this situation warrants it. As you know, there’s a killer on the loose, and we have no idea who he is, or where he’ll strike again. To help our investigation along, I’ve asked the FBI for help. Special Agents Romero and Fuller are based in Washington, and work in the bureau’s Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. Agent Fuller will speak to you first.”
Fuller took center stage. He wore a scowl, and looked like a classic ball-buster.
Behind him, Romero pulled down a movie screen hanging above a chalkboard.
“Good morning,” Fuller said. “The FBI normally doesn’t involve itself with local problems. But with serial killers, we make an exception. And that appears to be what you’re dealing with here.”
A slide projector sat on a table in front of the screen. Fuller picked up a clicker and pressed it. A slide appeared containing two photographs. One showed a smiling brunette, the other, the same girl hanging by her bound wrists from the ceiling. The dead girl wore wide bell bottoms, a denim shirt with flower embroidery, and strands of love beads. Rigor mortis had left her body, and her flaccid skin hung limply from her bones.
