by James Swain
Hollis stopped gnashing. “What?”
“Why did you kill those girls? It was my wife you wanted.”
Hollis brought his face to the window. “I fell in love with your wife the first day I met her. You’ve always stood in my way, protecting her like a guard dog. I considered killing you, but never had the courage. So I killed those hookers instead.”
“But why? They didn’t hurt you.”
“I had to have your wife, even if it meant dressing those girls up, and imagining her. Do you understand? I had to have Lois Fabio for my own.”
“You’re sick.”
“I loved her!” Hollis screamed.
Valentine heard someone say his name, and glanced over his shoulder to see Fuller standing on the front path, smoking a cigarette. The FBI agent had a strange look on his face, and Valentine approached him wondering what was on his mind.
“Looks like I owe you a hundred bucks,” Fuller said.
“You owe me more than that.”
“How’s that?”
Valentine took the incriminating photographs from his pocket, and handed them to him. The cigarette fell from Fuller’s lips. He tried to speak, but could not find the words. Valentine said it for him.
“Deep down, I think you’re a good guy. But you’re going to have to prove it.”
Ashamed, Fuller stared at the ground.
“Not to me, but to your partner. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” he whispered.
“Good. It’s been nice knowing you.”
Valentine went back inside to Hollis’s lair. The medics were bringing Mona out on a stretcher, and had an oxygen mask over her face. He saw her look up at him through half-shut eyes, and grabbed her hand.
“Mona. You’re alive.”
Mona said something through her mask, and managed to smile. Valentine couldn’t believe it. She’d been dead five minutes ago, and he looked at the medics for help.
“What happened?”
“One of the cops came in, and started praying for her,” one of the medics explained. “After a couple of minutes, her heart started beating again. Don’t ask me to explain, because I can’t.”
Valentine didn’t need an explanation; seeing Mona alive was enough. She was trying to say something, and he leaned down, and put his ear next to her mask.
“I need a cigarette,” she rasped.
“Later,” he told her.
He watched them carry Mona out before going in. Romero stood at the desk looking at the photos of Hollis’s victims. He remembered Romero saying how he wanted to save a life someday, to atone for his lost girlfriend. God had been kind to him.
“You got your wish,” Valentine said.
Romero turned around. His eyes were filled with tears, and he nodded solemnly.
“God works in strange ways,” the FBI agent said.
Chapter 57
If anything good had come from the arrest, it was that Lois was finally safe. Going into the kitchen, Valentine found a phone, and dialed his house. “We got him,” he told his wife. “Guy named Farky Hollis. He had a big crush on you, if you can call it that.”
“You’re sure he’s the killer?” Lois asked. “I mean, there were a lot of boys — ”
“Trust me,” Valentine said. “He’s the one.”
“What about the prostitute he picked up?”
“We saved her. She’s going to be okay.”
“That’s so wonderful.” She paused, then said, “Is it okay if I tell the detectives watching me the news? I’m sure they’d like to go home, and be with their families tonight.”
“I don’t see why not,” Valentine said.
“Will you be home soon?”
“Another hour or two.”
“I’ll stay up. Thank you for keeping your promise to me. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Valentine said goodbye and hung up. He heard someone coming up from the basement. Banko appeared at the top of the steps looking shaken. His superior went to the sink and let cold water run, then splashed it repeatedly in his face.
“Something wrong?” Valentine asked.
Banko indicated the basement stairs. “Down there. He wasn’t just into women.”
The basement stairs were old and creaky, and Valentine descended while clutching the wood railing. At the bottom, he found himself in a large, finished room used to house Hollis’s vast collection of magic equipment. There was more stuff than Uncle Al’s store, and he saw several rows of folding chairs facing a makeshift plywood stage on the other side of the room, and guessed that Hollis had put on shows for the neighborhood kids.
A uniformed cop stood on the stage next to a large trunk. The trunk was covered with stickers from faraway places like Singapore and China. It looked like a prop, only the uniform’s ashen face said otherwise. Valentine climbed onto the stage.
“This is sick,” the uniform said.
“What’s sick?” Valentine asked.
“See for yourself.”
The uniform flipped back the trunk’s lid, and Valentine stared inside. His heart skipped a beat. A little boy lay face-down in the bottom of the trunk. The child was small, with bushy brown hair the texture of cotton candy, and wore a small tuxedo.
“God damn monster,” the uniform said.
Valentine looked at the empty chairs facing the stage. Had Hollis snatched a kid from the audience of one of his shows, and later killed him? It seemed the likely answer, only he couldn’t remember a young child having gone missing in a long time. As the uniform closed the trunk, Valentine noticed a name stenciled on the trunk’s lid. Woody.
“We need to let the medics handle this,” the uniform said.
Valentine flipped the trunk open, and touched the back of the boy’s head. The hair was fake. He grabbed the boy by the collar, and lifted him clean into the air.
Woody was a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Valentine raced up the creaky stairs holding Woody in his arms. The kitchen was empty, and he ran out the front door. The cruiser with Hollis had left. He found Banko standing in the driveway, and shoved Woody into his arms.
“It’s a dummy,” Valentine said.
The horror ebbed from Banko’s face. “Is this what I saw in the basement?”
“Yes. Hollis is a ventriloquist. That’s how I got tricked the other day at the Bijou, when the piano nearly fell on me. You need to alert whoever’s driving that cruiser that Hollis can throw his voice. Otherwise he’ll trick him, just like he tricked me.”
Banko climbed into the cruiser. Getting on the radio, he called Marlene, and told her to contact the cruiser, then call him back. Hanging up, he said, “I got fooled by a dummy. God, I thought I was going to have a stroke.”
The dispatcher called back a few moments later.
“He’s not picking up,” Marlene said.
“Try him again,” Banko said.
“I tried several times. He’s not answering.”
“Has the cruiser come in?”
“No, sir. There’s no sign of him.”
“Keep trying.”
“Yes, sir.”
Banko signed off. He turned to speak to Valentine, and saw that he was gone.
Lois sat at the dining room table grading a stack of history tests when she heard the rock come through the glass in the back door. The detectives assigned to guard her had gone home, and she froze in her chair. The nightmare was over. Tony had said as much. It’s over, she told herself.
Staring through the open doorway to the kitchen, she saw a man’s hand come through the broken pane of glass, and fumble as it tried to unlock the back door. She’d learned a lot of practical things from Tony over the years. The first, and most important, was never to panic. Rising, she went to the head of the stairs, and called to her son. “Gerry, I want you to go to your room, and lock the door. You hear me?”
Her son appeared at the head of the stairs. “What was that noise? What’s going on?”
“Go to your room.”
“But —”
“Now!”
She heard Gerry’s door slam. Then the back door banged open. She calmly crossed the room, and removed the Smith & Wesson Model 65 revolver from a shelf in the china cabinet. Tony had given the gun to her one Christmas, and taken her to a firing range and taught her how to shoot. It was a hefty, solid piece of steel. Equipped with a speed-loader, it was capable of popping all six rounds at once.
Two men entered the kitchen, and staggered towards her. The first was a baby-faced cop, the second a smaller man with a bloody face, who pressed a handgun to the cop’s side. Holding the Model 65 with both hands, Lois aimed at them.
“Stop,” she declared.
“Hello, Lois,” the man with the bloody face said.
“I said stop!”
The two men were inside the living room, and halted.
“Do you remember me?” the bloodied man asked. “My name’s Martin Hollis. Everyone calls me Farky. We met on the Boardwalk many years ago. I was in the Summer of Love show with you.”
Hollis wrapped his free arm around the cop’s neck, and pressed the handgun to his temple. “Put your gun down, or I’ll splatter his brains against your lovely dining room walls.”
“No,” Lois said.
“Do you want me to kill him?”
“He’s a cop. He knows the risks.”
The cop’s eyes went wide.
“I’m sorry,” Lois told him.
“God damn you, I said drop it,” Hollis screamed at her.
“No!”
“Very well.”
Raising his gun, Hollis pointed it at the ceiling, and let off a round.
Lois heard a loud thump on the second floor. She envisioned Gerry taking the bullet and nearly fainted. Hollis pressed the gun’s smoking barrel against the cop’s chin.
“Now, drop your gun,” Hollis said.
“Gerry,” she yelled upstairs, “are you all right?”
“What’s going on,” her son yelled back fearfully.
“What was that sound?”
“I heard a gunshot and dropped my guitar on the floor.”
“Stay in your room. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, mom.”
Hollis nodded at the ceiling. “He’s right above me. I can hear the pitter-patter of his little feet. I’ll shoot him through the floor. Do you want that?”
“No!” Lois exclaimed.
“Then do as I say, and put your gun away.”
Lois started to cry. Tony had told her to never put the gun down when faced with certain danger. But what choice did she have? She slipped the Model 65 back into the china cabinet. As she moved away from the weapon, her husband entered through the back door, gasping for breath. In his hand was his beloved snub-nosed .38.
“Drop the gun, and put your hands in the air,” Tony said.
Hollis glanced over his shoulder, then turned to look at her. “I love you. You realize that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Lois said quietly.
Hollis shoved the young cop into the dining room, then spun around like a gunslinger. Her husband emptied the .38 into him, the bullets tearing through his sweatshirt. Hollis staggered back and stopped a few feet from where Lois stood. He made a face like he was dying. Then, he burst out laughing.
“Fooled you!” Hollis shouted.
He lifted his sweatshirt, and showed Lois the bulletproof vest he’d stolen from the police cruiser. He was a magician, and had tricked them.
“Now, it’s my turn,” Hollis said.
Hollis walked toward the kitchen aiming the weapon at her husband. Tony had run out of bullets, and was helpless. Their eyes met. He mouthed the words I love you to his wife.
Lois did not remember moving toward the china cabinet, or snatching up the Model 65, or the sickening sound it made as she emptied it into the back of Hollis’s head. All she remembered was Tony holding her in his arms a few moments later, and telling her that everything would be all right. Feeling safe was all she’d ever wanted, and she prayed that maybe this time, he was right.
Chapter 58
The hookers eating breakfast at Harold’s House of Pancakes gave Valentine a hero’s welcome the next morning, with plenty of kisses and hugs. He was blushing by the time he slipped into a booth, and a gum-chewing waitress took his order.
Fuller and Romero came in a few minutes later, and sat across from him. Through Banko, he’d learned that the two FBI agents were facing an official reprimand from their bosses for leaving Atlantic City while Hollis was still on the loose. They were both in hot water, and facing uncertain futures.
Normally, Valentine wouldn’t have cared. They had made their beds, and now they had to sleep in them. Only there was unfinished business that needed attending to, and he had decided that Fuller and Romero were the perfect pair to make things right.
“I’ve got a proposition for you,” Valentine said.
Fuller put his elbows on the table. “In case you haven’t heard, we’re screwed.”
“Come to mention it, I did hear that. This could change things.”
Fuller glanced at his partner, then back at him. “Change things how?”
“Make you look good.”
“How the hell are you going to do that?”
“When I got the job to police Resorts’ casino, I thought I was supposed to keep cheaters out. But then I found out something worse was going on. A skim was happening right in front of my nose. A hundred grand a day out the door.”
“Mafia?” Fuller said.
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“It’s their speciality.”
“This may be their crown jewel. Resorts makes twenty million a month profit. Fifteen percent of that money is used for comps to lure high rollers. It’s the same formula used in Las Vegas, only we’re not Las Vegas. Las Vegas is in the desert. Atlantic City is a two hour drive for fifty million people. We don’t need to give away anything. Only the auditors don’t realize that.”
“So the mob is stealing comp money,” Romero said.
“That’s right.”
Fuller acted skeptical. “Where’s your proof?”
Valentine removed the Prince’s address book from his pocket along with the write-up of the skim which he’d planned to send to the newspaper. He slid both across the table. “The address book contains the names of the runners. The ringleader is a New York mobster named Vinny Acosta. Every day, a runner goes into the casino, and draws a credit line at the cage for a hundred grand. He plays for a while, then cashes the chips, and leaves with the money. The loss is shown on the books as paying for comps.”
Fuller took his time reading through his notes. Holding the page which described how the loss was being hidden by Resorts’ bookkeeping department, he said, “This reads like a big job.”
“It is,” Valentine said.
Fuller put his elbows on the table, and lowered his voice. “Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page. You want the FBI to set up a sting, tail these people, tap their phones, and put all the pieces of the puzzle together.”
“That’s right. Think you can handle it?”
“That’s what we do every day.”
“I know that.”
Fuller leaned closer. Romero leaned in as well.
“So what’s the catch,” Fuller said, sounding skeptical.
“I want you to do it my way,” Valentine said.
A couple of hookers took the table next to theirs, and the three men went outside to the parking lot to finish their conversation.
“My way,” Fuller said. “Isn’t that one of Sinatra’s songs?”
Fuller was trying to be funny, and maybe to an outsider it was funny. A bunch of Mafia goons had come to town, and stolen millions of dollars right in front of everyone’s noses. It sounded like a script for a movie, only the script included too many lives being destroyed. There was nothing funny about any of it.
