“Wasn’t much of a safe house,” I said.
But now the picture was a little clearer. The two dead guys had been on the prowl for Penta, all right. He was their target. This thing had all the earmarks of a contract kill that went sour. Penta had gotten wise. Penta had gotten to them first. Someplace Penta had picked up their trail, followed them to the safe house and eliminated them. That is, if they were Bern and Fells.
Dead bodies don’t take long to smell. The odor from these two was starting to bubble up and when we had enough, Pat said, “Look at their fingers.”
The tips had been cut off very neatly.
I said, “Another signature.”
“The one on DiCica was even better. He had a real mad on when he carved up that guy.”
“Don’t say it, Pat.” I knew what he was thinking.
Lewis Ferguson made the identification. He came in behind us and said, “That’s Bern and Fells, all right.”
“They’re pretty bloated,” Pat said. “You’d better be sure.”
“Positive. Prints will confirm it.”
Pat nodded and called one of the detectives over. “Get all the preliminaries done, then sweep this place good. Like I mean take it apart. When you’re done, I want it to look like the city wrecking crew was here. Pick your guys, keep the clowns out of here. I want some evidence, something, anything of what went on here. You got it?”
“Got it, Captain.”
Carmody and Ferguson were having a serious conversation with Bradley when we came out. Jurisdiction seemed to be the heart of the matter, but Pat called a halt to that in a hurry. He said, “Let’s get something squared away, people. We got two more corpses inside my area and that’s where it’s going to stay. You guys can play around with any espionage or international bellyaches you want, but these bodies belong to NYPD and until I get a direct order from my superior, that’s the way it goes.”
“Captain ...” Bradley started.
Pat held up his hand. “Don’t challenge me, Bradley. NYPD is a bigger outfit than yours and if you want to see how clout works, just mess around with this investigation.”
“No intention of doing that, Captain,” Bennett Bradley said. “Let’s say that all of our agencies are anxious to cooperate in any way.”
Ferguson agreed. “This has overlapped into strange areas. Stumbling blocks we don’t need.”
One of the uniformed cops came up with a detective and got Pat’s attention. The detective said, “Patrolman Carsi here was working in the back. There’s a garage attached to the building.”
“Not quite attached. A walkway goes into the cellar,” the patrolman told him. “There’s a car in there. Pretty lush.”
And there was the Mercedes. The rear taillight was broken.
I said, “If you find my prints in there, you know when it happened.”
There were New York State plates on the car, but a current Florida tag was on the floor under the front seat. In the glove compartment were all the goodies belonging to a Richard Welkes with a Miami Beach address.
A uniformed sergeant drove by and told Pat that the press had just arrived on the other block. Pat muttered an annoyed “Damn,” then instructed the detective with him to go rough things in for them, playing it down as much as possible. An unidentified squeal on a couple of dead bodies could command the amount of police attention that was in the area, so there shouldn’t be any kickback from the news hounds. Not right now, anyway.
Within an hour only the investigative crew was left. A pair of uniforms stayed out of sight in the doorway, alert and quiet. Carmody came up with containers of coffee and we passed it around. You could hear nails being wrenched out of boards inside the building and occasionally something came crashing down.
Forty-five minutes later a dust-covered detective came to the doorway and waved to Pat. “You better come over here, Captain.”
He told me, “Wait here,” and followed the cop inside.
In ten minutes he came out with a small box in his hands, nodded toward the cars and said, “Let’s go.”
I sat beside him in the back and didn’t say a word. He was waiting for me to throw a question because it was my work that had opened the murders up. Twice, in his reflection in the window, I saw him watching me.
Finally I said, “Now it jumps back into Bradley’s hands, doesn’t it?”
He said it very softly. “How’d you figure that out?”
“I get tingling sensations.” I hit the window button and let some air in. “Why did those two want to hit Penta?”
“He wasn’t doing his primary job. He was off on something else.”
I looked down at the box in his lap.
“The assholes didn’t destroy a letter of authorization they got. We can assume it was Penta they were after, but the person was simply mentioned as ‘Subject’ ”
“What was Penta’s primary job, Pat?”
“You mention this to anybody and you’re on my permanent shit list.”
“Don’t insult me, buddy.”
“Sorry, Fells sent a letter to Harry Bern. He had gotten a contact from their employer overseas who wanted to know if they wanted the assignment of killing the VP.”
“The who?”
“VP. I assume it stands for vice president.”
“Of what?” I asked him.
“Let’s start with the United States.”
“Pat ... why the hell would anybody want the vice president dead? I can understand the president ...”
“Hold it, will you? Apparently Penta screwed up someplace along the line and his employer would only tolerate one mistake. Fells and Bern were offered his initial contract afterthey wiped him out. If those two could take out Penta, they certainly could hit the VP.”
“Somebody has a damn good reason. With the VP dead, think of the consternation it would cause in Washington. Man, they never could figure that one out. The VP doesn’t get the personal coverage the president does, so he would be an easier target. But hell, that’s still hitting right at the heart of our government.”
“What bigger target has he got than that, for Pete’s sake?”
Pat just looked at me a couple of seconds. “I can’t believe it,” he said.
My eyes started to go tight. “Believe what?”
“If the so-called subject is Penta, where you would come into the picture.” He stopped me before I could get a word out. “I know, you’re not in. He was after DiCica and all the crap. But I can’t figure that way. How the hell you do it, I’ll never know. I’ve said that before too, haven’t I? How the hell you go from kicking around in the streets to substituting for the vice president of the United States in a murder scheme defies belief. Where do you come from, Mike? I’ve known you all these years, but I don’t think I know you very well at all.”
“Pat ...”
He shook his head. “You’ve been running me, haven’t you? Here I thought you were my boy and I was running ... all the time you have something else going down.” He paused, wiped his hand across his face and took a deep breath. “What’s happening, Mike?”
I shrugged. “What else is in the box?”
“Forty-two one-thousand-dollar bills,” he said.
“Be hard to cash,” I told him.
“What’s happening, Mike?” he asked again, ignoring my remark.
“Tomorrow, Pat. I have to make sure of something first.”
“You know, I’m a lousy cop, old buddy. I have you inside this package like you’re the PC or something. I have my neck out, giving you information, breaking all the rules—”
“Balls. You had no choice. Like Candace Amory said, I’m an adjunct of the law, licensed by the state, subject to conditions no ordinary citizen has to operate under. Consider it professional courtesy.”
“I must be off my rocker,” he said.
“You going by your office?”
“I have to.”
“Good. I want to use your phone.”
When we reached P
at’s office I slid behind Pat’s desk into his chair and punched the number into his phone. I had one foot up on Anthony DiCica’s antique toolbox, which Pat had in the kneehole, but took it off when I realized what it was.
She picked up the phone on the first ring and there was no sleepiness in her voice at all. I said, “This is Mike, Candace.”
“Well, I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
“The grapevine working?”
“Not until after the Brooklyn soiree was over. I understand there were two bodies found.”
“Both shot.”
“I don’t suppose you’d care to explain further.”
“Right. All information will come from official sources. It’s strictly a police matter.”
She had to probe with a lawyer’s instinct. “But you were there?”
“The police acted on my information. I went along for verification.”
“Very neat.”
“What’s new on that load of cocaine?”
“Something extremely interesting. It’s totally hearsay, but often enough what sounds like a fairy tale is factual. Your friend Ray Wilson came up with another lead, an old dealer who is straight now and doesn’t want his name mentioned in any way.”
“So?”
He had heard about the shipment being set up. It was delivered by freighter at Miami, concealed as bags of coffee beans. The shipper was genuine and the destination was a reputable buyer. Nobody knows just how the switch was made, but the cargo was off-loaded into a tractor-trailer.“
“Do you realize how much stuff that is?”
“In dollars the final street value is incredible. Anyway, it came up via Route Ninety-five into the New York area. The trailer was delivered to a depot in Brooklyn, all the paperwork completed, and the next day another tractor signed for them, hauled them out and it hasn’t been seen to this day.”
“You can’t just hide a trailer,” I told her. “I can see -the run being made, but you’d still be dealing with a driver who probably had a helper along.”
“Thanks to Ray Wilson we found a possible line on that one too. He went into the computers for known mob persons who could handle trucks. Not live ones, but deceased. He came up with two names of men who were found dead in a car that had apparently been sideswiped and knocked off Route Nine-W up near Bear Mountain. Two days later the brother of one was killed in a hit-and-run accident in Newark.”
“That took care of the driver and a helper,” I said. “Your hearsay is making pretty good sense.”
“But somebody would know where the cargo went to. Whoever gave the instructions to the two men DiCica killed would know.”
“Sure,” I said. “The driver and the helper would have known. Those guys were probably made men who would lay down their lives for their bosses. They were taking no chances on any hijack action so they planned the delivery themselves, which could have meant repainting the truck or changing the lettering somewhere along the way. The legitimate driver on the first leg of the run really took the odds for the mob boys. His making it to Brooklyn meant the job was coming out clean.”
“Then the driver and helper were the only ones who knew?”
“Why not? The fewer the better. They picked their own hiding spot for the shipment, made up a map and delivered it to the bosses. On the way out they were followed by the hit men and taken out in a supposed accident.”
“Why kill...”
“The bosses didn’t want anybody but them knowing where the stuff went to,” I told her. “Unfortunately, they were in line for a hit themselves that night. And unfortunately, they closed off the mob’s only access to the stuff.”
“And DiCica had it all.”
“Wild, huh? Tell me something. How much is the street value of the junk today?”
She told me. I let out a low whistle. No wonder Penta could afford to pass up the VP for an old hood. Nine-digit figures are understandable.
YOU DIE FOR KILLING ME.
Okay, DiCica. You were the hit man. That was your trade. Who did you kill and how did you work it? That note was for you after all, wasn’t it?
“Mike ...”
I shook myself out of my thoughts. “Sorry, kid.”
“Unless we find that cargo, nothing will ever end.”
“Is Ray checking out all the leads?”
“The trailer would take a certain size building to be concealed in. He’s working on the assumption something was bought, rather than leased. By now taxes would be owing and if anything matches, we’ll be on it.”
“You don’t have that much time.”
“Any other options?”
“A lot of luck. We still have a killer out there waiting.”
“For what?”
“Pat will have to tell you that. Or Coleman or Carmody or Ferguson.”
“You going to be around?”
I told her I would. She said she’d call tomorrow and I hung up. I would have gone home and crawled into bed, but I called in to check the tapes on my phone and a deep, sultry voice said to call at any hour.
When the call went through, General Rudy Skubal answered it himself. As soon as he recognized my voice, he said, “I couldn’t stand not having more pieces of the puzzle, Mike. I went back to when they were feeding information into the computers and zeroed in on Fells and Bern. We ran constant checks on our men without their knowledge, especially those whose performance was getting shoddy.”
“Bern and Fells are dead,” I interrupted.
“Killed at the safe house, I presume?”
“Good guess, General.”
“It wasn’t a guess. That safe house was supposed to be known and used by Bern and Fells only. I have two reports that a third party had access to it on several occasions. No description.”
“Penta,” I said.
“What makes you think so?”
“You said he was here on a high-level assignment.”
“That was a generality.”
“Now it’s a specific. He had a target ... the vice president. He didn’t make it a priority and was probably considered unreliable. Bern and Fells were sent to kill him. The only real contact they had with him was through me, so they tried the interrogation under narcotics in Smiley’s garage. Hell, they probably used Smiley’s premises before when they were on your team.”
“Shall I check on that point?”
“No use, General. One of them came back and knocked off Smiley so nobody would make the connection. Their mistake was using their old safe house again. If they had let slip to Penta when they worked together where that safe house was, he could have used it himself. It wouldn’t have been much of a trick to get keys to the place. A nice piece of information to have just in case.”
“He used it well,” Skubal said. “I imagine he staked it out and killed them both together.”
“Looked like a small-caliber hollow-point at close range, right in the heads.”
“Penta has used that technique before. One shot each?”
“He didn’t need any more.”
“What else can keep him in the area, Mike?”
“Explain.”
“He killed his first person in your office. He’s killed two men assigned to wipe him out. If the reports are correct, nothing is going to keep this Penta from fulfilling his contract.”
“Why should somebody want to kill the vice president?”
“No one can really understand the political mind. What happens at those levels aren’t mine to consider, outside investigative situations. I collect facts now. However, there is one thing for you to reflect on.”
Here it came again and I beat him to it. “He doesn’t want me, General.”
“If you say so. But somebody wants you. Why?” I said, “They still think I know where their billion dollars went to.”
The word billion stopped him momentarily. “For that much money,” he told me, “I think they would go to far sterner methods to get you out of the way. Where are you now?”
&n
bsp; “In Pat’s office. I couldn’t be safer.”
“You realize, of course, that you’re vulnerable.
Have you seen the tabloid that’s on the newsstand?“
“I picked it up on the way home.”
“Then anyone who knows of your true connection with Velda can have a secondary target. Have you checked on her yet?”
“No, I was planning to, but—”
“Get in gear, Michael. That girl had better be kept under close cover. The vice president is under security, money can always wait, but don’t let that girl get killed. She was your primary reason for getting involved in this to start with, so keep it that way.”
“Okay, General, you got it.” He hung up with a grunt before I could say good-bye.
Pat was looking at me, washing a couple of aspirins down with a drink of water. He squashed the cup in his fingers and tossed it in a wastebasket. The clock on the wall said it was five minutes after midnight. He said, “It’s tomorrow, pal. I think we should talk.”
“You feel it too?”
He nodded. “It’s all closing in and I’m sitting on my thumbs. It started out as the murder of a nobody and now we’re into all kinds of shit. Over in the other corner you’re playing footsies with the Ice Lady and leaving me out in the cold. So let’s put the pieces together. Sooner or later they are going to be asking me questions about your involvement and how and why I tolerated it and I’d like it all to go down clean and neat so that I’m off the hook and back on pension drive again. Now, let’s do it.”
Talk. I pushed myself out of the chair and walked to the window. A few drops of rain hit it and inched down the pane, gradually soaking into the New York grime. Talk. Nothing but air and sounds unless it made sense. I turned around and stared at Pat. He had settled down in the desk chair, slowly folding his hands behind his head. He propped his foot on the toolbox and pushed himself back into a leaning position, waiting for me to talk.
When he saw me grin with my teeth tight and my lips pulled back, he started to frown because he knew something had happened. I picked up the phone. I called Candace again and told her to get down here right away. She got all pissed off this time and insisted I tell her why. I said because she wanted to be president, that’s why, and she didn’t give me any more argument. I went to the coffee maker, poured a stale cup, stirred in enough sweetener so it didn’t matter and sat down on the edge of the desk.
The Killing Man Page 17
