Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle

by Lee Lamothe

  Chapter 6

  The Parisian dreamers were yawning across a closed laptop and a stack of printouts and photographs on their desk when the Cashman looked in their open door. He knew they were doing each other and they looked it. No sleep, a quick communal shower, and probably some faux croissants from a freezer, cups of expensive foaming coffee for breakfast. A night of banging and baking.

  The Cashman had been a cop for thirty-two years. Three years more and he’d get max pension, the payout based on the average of his highest three years of salary. If those three years were as a staff-inspector he could live like a king in Scottsdale with his Harley and incidentally his wife. He wondered, watching Ray Tate in his wrinkled day-old Hawaiian shirt and Djuna Brown in a Musée d’Orsay sweatshirt, if maybe a month in Paris would be a good bridge between Murder City and retirement in the desert. Of course, he knew that Paris action could make you stupid and dreamy. What if his wife, an amateur chef, decided to stay there, become a Julia Child zombie? Started walking on stilts and chuckling like a gerbil as she ripped up chickens? What then for him? How much would it cost to ship his Harley to France? His beard had always come in patchy but a luxurious moustache wasn’t out of the question.

  Something about his pet kooks was infectious. You couldn’t deny that they’d been cops. Except for getting killed yourself, wiping someone’s shadow off the wall was the most anyone could ask of a cop. They’d both taken the giant step in the line and had none of the angst or aggressiveness that that usually brought on. They were beatnik killers, but they’d sorted. They weren’t really cops any longer; they seemed to have joined hands and tripped out into some parallel universe. Plus, Hambone Hogarth had their backs.

  He beamed fondly upon them from the doorway. They were driving the bus that would take him to Scottsdale. “G’morning, campers. So, how much we got, so far? You guys want a chalkboard of your own, on the wall, there? Keep track?”

  Djuna Brown nodded at the wall behind the door. A single dollar bill was neatly tacked to the wall beside a jailhouse portrait of a glum Marko Markowitz. “Nine million nine hundred and ninety-nine to go, boss. We’re cleaning up.” She tapped into the laptop and said to Ray Tate, “Seventy-one.”

  “Nice,” he said. “Nice. Getting there.”

  The Cashman asked, “Seventy-one what? Thousand?”

  “Degrees, boss,” Djuna Brown said. “Paris. Daytime temperature yesterday. They use Communist Celsius over there but I got a site that puts it into honest American Fahrenheit.”

  “You fucking guys …” Cash shook his head. “Gimme something.”

  “Okay.” Ray Tate put his hand on the printouts and photographs. “We got a briefing from the thugs in drugs and some stuff from intel, so we’re up and running.

  “We got the ringleader, and that’s Markowitz, no question. We got his henchman, that’s Jerry Kelly. We got a bunch of mutts, guys like Abner Hussey. Some do the dope side, some do the money side. From the seizures we’ve made off people who might be connected to Markowitz, it looks like we’ve maybe nailed him almost a million so far. We got intel gossip that says Markowitz is in the pliers with the Colombians, mostly this guy Pavo. Pavo’s got a cousin up in Canada who can get the money off the continent without getting hassled by those pesky folk from Homeland Security. But Pavo’s cousin needs to get the money. Up there, not here. And Pavo’s getting all macho about it. Markowitz’s got other problems. Someone’s tipping us to his couriers. Short stroke is that Markowitz has to get the money out, fast. He’s in a panic and that’s going to make him careless.”

  “Yep,” Djuna Brown said, making a sly smile. “We’ll just set up on him and he’ll take us to the money. We take the money off him, give it to you, you give us a ride to the airport to catch the commuter to Chicago for the transatlantic.” She yawned. “Simple shit, really, boss.”

  “I’m on a limb here, guys. I vouched you to Hambone Hogarth. If I hadn’t said there was money and we didn’t get it, okay, that’s okay, nobody’d know. But I said there is money and we don’t get it, that’s not so okay. Am I going to be fucked here, or what?”

  Djuna Brown took pity on him. “Here’s what we figure, quick and dirty. Between what the drug guys say and the brainiacs at intel told us and what Abner Hussey said, it seems like Markowitz has this huge stash of dough that he can’t move because we’re on him. And there’s dope that’s out there is coming back as money. So, even if he gave the dope out on fifty percent front, and that’s probably way, way high, the drug guys say he’s got a lot of cash flowing in. Let’s just think about the money for a few minutes. There’s two things. The dough he’s already collected and can’t move, and the dough that’s coming in that he can’t move. Okay so far?”

  The Cashman nodded. When she wasn’t being a shoo wop singer she had good chops.

  “Right,” she said. “The money that’s coming in, still, we think that’s what we’ve been seizing. New money comes in, Markowitz finds a dummy to march north to the border, gets it the fuck out of here, cool out the Colombians, give him some time to operate on moving the big stash. But we’re grabbing it, left, right, and centre. The money we’ve been seizing is in little tiny bills, right? That means Markowitz is taking delivery from pretty far down the chain. And he isn’t boiling it down into hundreds, or else we’d be seizing packets of hundreds, and we’re not. With Homeland Security all over the usual money movers, tracking terrorist funds, things have tightened up. We figure Markowitz is choked on small bills, and to boil them down he’s going to have to do it on the Canadian side. How he does it up there we dunno and we don’t give a shit. But he ain’t doing it here, much.”

  Ray Tate nodded. “We think he’s got this stash someplace and the dough is still raw. That’s what’s fucking him up. The bulk. Why he didn’t move it as it came in, we don’t know. But now his gringo walnuts are in the Colombian nutcracker. And that makes him vulnerable to our detecting talents.”

  “You think he goes to the stash? You’re going to follow him, grab it up?”

  “Well, he has to. Probably he doesn’t go every day, but he has to go sometime. Or send someone. But probably, being a crook himself, he’s pretty sure the other folks around him are crooks, so probably he goes himself.” Ray Tate thought for a moment. “He’s not going to like word getting around that he’s got this whack of dough someplace. Eventually, somebody strong will put the grab on him, toast his nuts over a Bunsen burner, and go get it themselves. He’s going to want to move it, fast, without getting put through by some local strongmen.”

  “Except,” Djuna Brown said, pushing a photograph toward Cash. “Except for this guy. Jerry Fucking Kelly that the drug guys told us about.” The photograph had the blurry too-blown-up image of Jerry Kelly in full flower, his arms wide and his sports jacket flaring back as he kicked a man on his hands and knees in the head. Dark splotches like blood were puddled under the man’s face. Balanced on one foot, Jerry Kelly was smiling cheerfully; you could tell that even in the fuzzy image.

  Cash studied the photograph. “He looks like a high school teacher.”

  “Yeah, well, he sure made this guy stay after class for football practice,” Djuna Brown said. “I called around and from what we’ve got on him, which is basically nothing, this Kelly guy is a serious psycho. Nobody knows where he came from. Nobody knows what he’s done. Nobody talks about what he’s doing. He’s just here with Markowitz one day. But they do know that he’s done a lot and nobody, and I mean nobody, is talking about him. The robbery squad picked him up after a cop was run over during a heist and they said they couldn’t run his prints because he didn’t have any. He’d burned them off. So, he’s hiding something from his past. No matter how many times they asked him even for his name, he didn’t say a word. Not one. This guy’s Tommy Tight Lips. When his nose got broken falling, he just sat there and bled on his shirt. When he started pissing blood, pre-arrest existing medical condition I guess, he didn’t make a sound. They questioned him, boss, they really qu
estioned him, for hours. I mean, we got a cop crippled for life, right? But, nada, dada. Turned out he didn’t run down the cop. While he’s being interviewed, a couple of chargers in Sector Eight found the car and the wheelman. But this Kelly, even though he didn’t do it, wouldn’t even say he didn’t do it.”

  “He file a complaint?”

  “Nope. Nothing. He took the pain. He just vanishes for a week, comes back with a bandage across his nose, walking with a cane for a few weeks, pissing a rainbow. Then,” she picked up the photograph of Jerry Kelly, “he’s right back in business.” She got up, took a thumbtack from a box, and pinned the photograph to the wall under Marko Markowitz and stepped back, her hands on her hips. “I don’t think this Kelly is a money guy. He’s just the muscle, a dummy.” She tapped a finger on Markowitz’s photograph. “Him, we go after. He’s our ticket to Paris, oui oui.”

  “Okay, so give me a plan, the first couple of moves, something I can send to the Jank.”

  “A car, for starters,” Ray Tate said. “Not something with lights in the grill and a crash bumper. Something anonymous so we can operate. If we can get another team, that’d be good. We’ll roll him around town, let him take us to his stash.”

  “Done. When are you starting on him?”

  They sipped coffee in quiet comfort and ease. They worked their way through the photo dump, memorizing faces and noting locations. One picture, taken at a funeral, showed a blond man with a goatee comforting a young blond woman. They were clearly father and daughter. The girl was crying; from behind her, Markowitz was handing her a handkerchief.

  A lot of pictures showed Markowitz and Jerry Kelly together, on patios, coming out of restaurants, walking and talking on various sidewalks around town. Some of Marko with gnarly pot-bellied men in tight leather jackets and shaven heads. One photograph showed a group of Riders in their grimy colours clustered around Markowitz outside a bike shop, all talking with their hands covering their mouths. The back of the photographs were marked in grease pencil with the photographer’s badge number, the date, the location, and prime target’s name and several question marks.

  “Check this, Ray.” Djuna Brown separated a half-dozen pictures. Each showed Markowitz with a stunning blond woman. In some photos taken from the right side, her face was perfect, symmetrical. In others there was damage to her left cheekbone. They were taken at various times: the clothing in each photo was seasonally different and the locations changed. “We’ve got Marko with this blond bimbo in a lot of snaps.” She looked at the back of each photo. “Julia Gurr. Money mover.” She read the dates. “Four times in one week she came up in the photo dump.”

  Ray Tate looked closely at the pictures. “This one, this one, and this one, they were taken at Gratelli’s in Stonetown. You can see the globe lights over the bar.” He put his nose closer. “Check the background people. That’s Jerry Kelly there in two of them. But he isn’t sitting with them.”

  “Bodyguarding Marko, maybe? Fending off the Colombian hordes?”

  “He’s too far away, like he’s hiding.” He showed her one of Marko and the blond woman leaning forward, chatting over a table laden with wine glasses and finished meals. Jerry Kelly, far in the background, had his hand on his face and was peeking casually around his fingers at Markowitz and the woman. “In this one especially he seems to be trying to keep out of sight.”

  “Maybe he eats there. Coincidence.”

  “You think? Anyway, Markowitz is our target.”

  “Well, let’s add blondie here to the group, just in case, give it some class. She might be a way to drill into Marko.” She took the photograph with the best picture of the blonde and tacked it to the wall under Jerry Kelly. “I wonder what happened to her face?”

  Chapter 7

  Bobby Preston had always believed himself a good crook, an honest crook. Eschewing drugs and drug money. Chickens and cigarettes and booze and migrants, all were fair. No one got hurt if he ran a quarter-of-a-ton of cheap American chickens over to Canada where the price difference could be significant. He’d never lost a chicken in the water, or a case of cigarettes over the toll bridge. But then he lost four people. He’d lost a girl.

  He didn’t know anything about the religion of China. Buddhist, he supposed. Zen, if that was even a religion. He thought he remembered something about how a person died affected whether they went to heaven. Drowning might be a bad way to go, god-wise. Or was it dismemberment?

  It didn’t matter. When the blues took him over he forced himself to go the river and make his penance. He’d been drunk that night. There’d been no rescue boat, as the migrants had been promised. The whistles were useless. False hope.

  At the river on the American side, exactly where the migrants were to land, Preston laid a wreath of flowers. He didn’t know if the flowers were appropriate for death to the Chinese, but it made him feel better. The face of the old silent man was forgotten; the faces of the women were forgotten. But the girl who died in her yellow knapsack and his scarf around her neck? He’d never forget that.

  After waiting a moment, staring across the hated river at the pebble beach on the Canadian side, he boarded his borrowed car and headed for the access road. He punched the radio and a religious station came up. Before he could change it, a man began singing, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

  He found himself singing along, smiling sadly, thinking against his will about Marko Markowitz, the two of them in church when they were kids, singing their way through the hymns, Marko trying to impress Julia Gurr who stood with her dad, Growler Gurr, an old-time crook with a baritone voice, in the pews ahead. Marko had been crazy about Julia Gurr and went to any length to get himself noticed. Growler Gurr, Julia’s dad, was partners in crime with Marko and Bobby Preston’s dads, the trio known as the Three Thieves.

  The dads were all dead and gone. Growler Gurr vanished one night after heading up to the Breakers to play poker with some Chicago pals. Mrs. Gurr, for a year afterward, every day made a blood sausage sandwich and kept it in the refrigerator for his return. She put off killing herself until the anniversary of his vanishing, then she went for relief to the gas stove.

  Markowitz’s dad was a gunman. He loved the effect of putting a gun in someone’s face. He died in a getaway car in front of a bank with a sawn-off shotgun on his lap. A young tough cop, without so much as a fuck-you-Mickey, leaned in the window and fired once into his left eye.

  Bobby Preston’s dad, a widower, died of nothing at all in Craddock, just waking up dead in his cell in the middle of spending five bucks for a truck hijacking.

  They all, the dads and the children, came out of the Grid, a nasty little warren of narrow streets where you did anything you had to to put bread on the table. As long as it didn’t hurt the neighbourhood. You went out like a foraging predator and grabbed whatever you could with both hands, then you returned and you partied and spread the wealth around in the local shops and restaurants. Cops who came around afterward were met with bovine stares.

  Thinking about the old neighbourhood made Preston melancholy. It could have been perfect, he thought, me and Marko. We should never have moved out into the wider world with the greed and betrayal. But Marko decided that if he became rich he could come back and sweep Julia Gurr off her feet. He went over to Chicago to learn the drug trade; he swooped back into the Grid on a huge Harley Davidson, popping noisy wheelies in front of the Gurr house. He brought drugs into the Grid and when that happened he was shunned as if he had typhoid.

  Preston remembered when they were boys, the two of them in a garage, sawing at their thumbs with a dull Buck knife, mixing their blood like the Italians down in the Boot did, binding themselves together for life. Their faces close together, they solemnly swore that when one earned, both ate; never to turn their back on the other, as they rubbed their thumbs, comingling their blood. They were fourteen. Drug trafficking was unimaginable.

  It killed Preston to close his heart on Markowitz over his drug business, but he didn’t clo
se it all the way. He couldn’t. While Marko was pulling his first adult stretch, spending three bucks for robbery in Craddock, Preston had married Julia Gurr. There was a drunken night when they both went up to the penitentiary to visit Marko and bring him canteen money, accidentally staying at the same High Five with vibrating beds and a kick-ass country joint next door. The result was Zoe; there was no question of the correct move to make. The neighbourhood demanded what it demanded. They married. Markowitz came out on parole and after a drunken fistfight with Preston, accepted reality. He was to be the uncle. Not the ideal role he’d wanted, but not a horrible job either.

  Too soon, he felt, he hit the off-ramp to the Eight. He had a sudden melancholy craving and, instead of exiting at the Annex exit that would take him home, he ramped off at Mechanics Boulevard. Strip plazas crammed with fast-food joints, drive-thrus, and legal-aid storefronts quickly gave way to garish signs of Asian lettering, most of it Vietnamese. The shops elbowed up against each other on the wide street. Car and pedestrian traffic thickened. There were pho dumps, massage racks, trinket stores, vegetable stands, tiny two-pump gas stations, grimy body shops. The free-for-all of entry-level entrepreneurship.

  Just short of the heart of East Chinatown, Preston pulled the car into an alley and parked near Tiger Truong’s garage. He put the keys in the visor, rolled down all the windows, left the doors unlocked and glove compartment flapped open. Theft protection. See: nothing to hide, nothing worth stealing. Go find yourself a tourist’s Audi.

  He walked out of the alley and onto Mechanics Boulevard, eddied along in a thick crowd, trying to resist the smell of the food. He couldn’t, no one alive could. He picked a pho dump at random and found a window seat. When the bowl was slammed down with perfect indifference, he went at it sticks-and-spoon, periodically tearing up basil leaves and squirting lemon.

  He remembered bringing Zoe to Little Saigon on her twelfth birthday, showing her how to work the sticks off the spoon, not to be embarrassed at slurping the noodles off her chin. It had taken a while to get her to the red sauce, but she took to it.