by Black Alley
The guy was young, friendly, and told me to come on over and he’d give me a map with the location I wanted. Cheery guy. You could tell you were out of the big city. I thanked the salesman and got back in the car.
Johnny Leeds met us at the door, glad to see somebody from the Big Apple. We had to tell him what was new on Broadway, where the latest in spots were and how much an apartment with a decent address cost. I told him he didn’t even want to know and to stay happy up here with trees and grass. Finally he agreed with me and we got down to my problem.
When I showed him the numbers he made a face like they were familiar to him, looked up something in a book, then waved us to a wall map. “That wasn’t hard,” he said.
“You know that place?”
“Sure. Everybody does. There was an old bootlegger named Harris . . .”
“Slipped Disk,” Velda offered.
“Yeah, that’s him. He ran a bootleg operation out of there during prohibition. Not much left up there now. The big house rotted out a long time ago and some old caretaker lives in an outbuilding. Once in a while he cuts some choice slate out of there. You looking to buy the place?”
“It’s possible.”
Leeds smiled gently at the two city slickers and warned us, “That’s a depressed area if you want to start a business.”
“How about starting a family?” I grinned back. Velda’s mock punch in my arm was soft, but I felt it.
He looked at Velda appreciatively and said, “Now there’s a great idea.” He turned and went to a rack of road maps, pulled one out, traced out the route from where we were right up to the Harris property.
Driving there wasn’t that simple. Where the state ran out of roads the county took over, and when townships wanted to maintain them, the county nodded an okay, and when nobody used them anymore except an old recluse the township let them have their way. After four wrong turns we found the narrow, single-lane dirt road that twisted and turned through the trees toward the rise of the Appalachian Mountains that marked the area.
Jammed in a ditch where it had skidded off the road was the wreckage of an old truck, two stout pine trees keeping it from sliding further down the slope. Velda said, “Did you see that?”
I nodded. “That was an old chain-driven Mack truck.”
“What would it be doing here?”
“Those were the major workhorses of the day. Not fast, but they sure could haul a payload. This is slate country, remember. You’d need a Mack to get that stuff out of here.”
“Or booze, right?”
She had a point there. “Right,” I said.
The old estate of Slipped Disk Harris came on us like a sudden sunrise. We went around a turn and there were no more trees, just a big empty field on the edge of an overpowering mountainside with three old buildings nestling in the shadows. Small hills of grey slag made mounds on the acreage, insolently decorated with purple thistles. The single roadway branched out into five different directions, all but one in total disrepair, so I stayed on the passable one, which brought me to a weatherworn building that had been patched and repatched, but still looked livable. There was a brick chimney running up the side, and although no smoke came out, there was a shimmer of heat distortion against the clouds, so I knew someone was there.
Rather than take a chance on stirring up some irritable old mountaineer waving a shotgun, I beeped the horn and waited. The screen door with paint so thick you couldn’t see through it whipped open and the mountaineer was there, all right, old, but smiling and not at all irritable. “Y’all step down and come right in,” he yelled. His voice was cackly, but happy. “Sure good to see some company. Saw you comin’ a mile away and put on coffee.”
Velda slid out and introduced herself. “You sure a looker,” the old man said. “I’m just Slateman. Got a real name, but nobody calls me that.” He took my hand too, shook it and squinted up at me. “Do I know you?”
“We never met, Slateman. First time I’ve been up this way.”
“You an actor? Got a TV, ya know.”
“Nope.”
“Man, only actors got good-lookin’ women like yours here. What do ya do?”
“What I want to do is see Slipped Disk’s old operation.”
“Ah, yes,” Slateman said. “You’re a writer, that’s what. About every two years some newspaper guy or a book writer comes up here to see what it was all about. See, I knew I could figure you out. This lady your whatchamacall it?”
I nudged Velda with my elbow. “You may call her that,” I said. Velda nudged me back and her fingernails bit warningly into my arm.
The place was clean and neat, but a decorator’s nightmare. The walls were lined with pink insulation, ballooning out between the studs, and cattails and dried leaves stuffed into old bottles prettied up the rough board shelving. I pointed to a large multicolored arrangement that exploded out of a coffee can and asked, “What is that?”
Velda was the one to say, “Queen Anne’s lace, dyed and dried. We used to do that with food coloring when we were kids. I haven’t seen that for a long time.”
Slateman was beaming at her. Apparently until now nobody had appreciated his handiwork. “Did it all myself,” he stated proudly. “Nothin’ to it, really. What I like is those cattails. Sometimes I light ‘em up and the smoke keeps the bugs away. Everything’s good for something, ya know.” He got the pot from the wood-stove and poured the coffee into three mismatched cups on the table. “Only got sugar here. Got no cow and the store’s too far away. Couldn’t milk a cow anyway.”
So we talked country talk until we finished the coffee, then Slateman stood up, said, “You want to see where Ol’ Slipped Disk kept the stuff, right?”
“You got it.”
“Better get your cameras then.”
For a minute I felt stupid, then Velda winked at me and went out to the car. She came back with a small 35mm Minolta that had a flash attachment and seemed very professional about it. Slateman got an oversized flashlight with a strap that slung over one shoulder and led us through the house and out the back door.
There was a story about everything, the age of the farm, the history of the big barn where Harris had kept the trucks, the old well that was sixty feet deep and still filled with clear, cold water from an underground stream. Velda wanted to know how they dug it out and Slateman took ten minutes to explain it to her in detail.
After that we followed a path to the ridge of bushes, then around them to where the ground soared up like an overturned teacup and melted into the mountain proper behind it. We could have missed it if we had been looking ourselves, but when Slateman laughed at us and pointed we saw the cleft in the side of the hill. He pulled a rack of bushes aside and there was an opening a man on horseback could go through. “Used to have a big wooden barn door here,” Slateman explained. “Couldn’t see it, of course. Always kept it properly covered with real growth. A truck could go in and out easy.”
He led the way, flicking on his torch, and we stayed close behind. It was a great natural cave, cool and dry. The dirt under our feet was well packed and the space so big that we could only see one wall to our left.
Velda’s voice had a quaver to it. “Any bats?”
“No bats,” Slateman reassured her. “Some caves have ’em, but this one don’t. Can’t figure it out.”
We walked until we reached the perimeter of it and followed the curve of the walls around. Even after all these years you could tell what had been here. They had shipped booze in wood boxes then, and some were still there. Old tools and the remains of a truck seat were like artifacts in an antique shop. At the back side we had to circle around a heap of old boulders Slateman said had come down from the wall and overhead years ago. He flashed the light above us to make sure we were still safe. Boulders didn’t bother Velda at all. It was just the bats that bothered her. She made Slateman cover the entire room with his light before she was really satisfied. Velda kept popping pictures until she ran out of film, but by then we
had completed the tour and were back at the entrance again.
“How much did he have here, Slateman?”
“Plenty, I’d guess,” the old man said. “I wasn’t here in the real old days, but they told me this place was packed. I finally figured out what he did, ya know.”
“What was that?”
“Old Harris, he stored it up here. He didn’t just fill orders from the big city. Hell no, he kept buying and storing and when an order came in he took it right out of his supply here. He’d wait until the coast was clear, then bring in his trucks. Smart man, him.” He said it with admiration in his tone. “Gov’ment never could catch up with him.”
“Too bad prohibition went out of style,” I remarked.
Slateman chuckled. “Nah, not with him. He hung on to his stockpile and sold it later down in New York. Raised hell, ya know. Bought it a lot cheaper in the old days. No tax, no nothing. He made a bundle before he died. All gone now.”
Velda and I looked at each other. It had all been so simple. For Harris, anyway. For us it was just a big, empty cave of dust and memories and a little old guy glad to have some city slickers visit him. Velda reloaded the camera again and shot some footage around the property while the sun was still up, then stowed the camera away. We told Slateman so long, got back in the car and started down the single-lane road.
We turned south on the main highway and stopped at the first diner we came to, went in and ordered up sausage and pancakes with plenty of real maple syrup and mugs of steaming coffee. This time I had it with Sweet ’N Low.
Halfway through the pancakes, Velda said, “What did we miss, Mike?”
I shook my head in annoyance. “Dooley went through a lot of trouble to plant those numbers. He wanted me to find them and to position them. Okay, so I did both, but they were dead ends.”
“Could someone else have gotten there before us?”
“How? Dooley hasn’t been dead that long.”
“He must have been expecting to get killed, that’s for sure. He etched those numbers on his boat long before he died, so he had something planned ‘in case.’ ”
“And he got ‘in case,’ all right.” I washed down my last forkful of supper and waved for another coffee.
“You know what the big bug is . . . I was expecting that latitude and longitude to lie right on Ponti’s estate. That’s where Dooley did all his work, so why the switch to Slipped Disk Harris?”
“Weren’t they great friends?”
“According to Dooley’s kid, but we never looked into that end.”
“Why not?”
“Because everything was handed to us on a platter. We had the end in our hands without knowing the beginning. Eighty-nine billion dollars was stashed away waiting to be found and the government and the hoods were looking for it too. Somebody finally figured out it was Don Ponti who had corralled the loot. His own kid made the connection and tried to set him up. Well, Azi Ponti made his exit with a .45 slug in his head and now we have Ugo to contend with. That little sucker can still pull a lot of weight with the family, but not as much as the don.”
Velda sat there pensively a minute or so, idly tapping her teeth with a thumbnail. “Mike . . . Don Ponti was a pretty hot-headed guy, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, when he was young.”
“Two years ago they had that rumble with the strikers on that building project. He was there trying to break heads until his men hustled him away.”
“Nothing ever came of that, Velda.”
“He could still get mad. He could still swing a bat. You think he’s changed now?”
I said, “I doubt it.”
“Then how come he’s laying low? How come he hasn’t sent anybody out to put a hit on you? After all, you went putting an arm on his people. You challenge Ugo and Patterson and Drago for starters . . . he knows your connection with Dooley . . . yet he lets you alone.”
“Damn, Velda, you talk just like a street cop.”
“I carry a gun too. Now tell me, Mike.”
“He’s waiting to see how far I get.”
“Go on.”
“If Dooley’s lead is any good and I uncover it, he guns us down and takes over.”
“No . . . he can’t just take over. The cache is too big. Physically, I mean. He just wipes you out and he has it all to himself. Right now he’s a little worried because you have Uncle Sam’s men on your tail too, and he doesn’t want them pointing at him. He doesn’t want Pat to roust him either. No, he’s waiting for you to make a move.”
She had it pretty well figured out. “If I decided to visit Ponti’s place to see where Dooley came into the picture, and Ponti was waiting for me, I could become the victim of an accidental shooting or a supposed intruder he thought was trespassing.”
“He’d think of something good.”
“Ponti doesn’t live too far from here,” I reminded her. “He and Harris were friends and in the same business.”
“And you are going to pay him a visit.”
“What do you think, doll?”
“I think we ought to sleep on it.”
The desk clerk at the Cinnamon Motel had given me an odd look when I signed in for two rooms. Not that I could blame him. The bumper stickers and license plates of the parked cars seemed to indicate that it was a fairly popular local rendezvous and he couldn’t understand why I was putting Velda in a separate compartment.
At seven-thirty I was up and hungry, banging on her door. She opened it before I could rap it the third time, standing there in mock anger, dressed in a black jumpsuit with a greenish sheen woven into it. On most girls it would be a casual hiking outfit, but on her it looked like it was painted on.
She said, “It’s about time you came home. You ought to be ashamed, staying away all night—”
“You going out like that?” I interrupted.
Her eyebrows went up. “Mike . . .” her voice seemed annoyed, “this is the way I’m made. I have no engineering, internal or external, built into me. I’m sorry, but . . .”
I let a laugh out. “Don’t be sorry, doll. Let everybody else be sorry.”
For that remark she blew me a kiss, grabbed a small handbag and shut the door.
9
IT WAS LIKE BEING BACK in the army again, scouting the details of Lorenzo Ponti’s estate. We had parked a good mile away and worked our way through the brush and clusters of trees until we came over a rise and saw the don’s vacation home. It wasn’t a pretentious place at all, large enough for a big family with plenty of open ground space for a couple of football fields with stadium lights for night games of softball if you wanted. Or a deadly area for an approaching enemy to try to cross if he was going to initiate an attack on the house.
At strategic points around the building were cleverly designed floral beds, raised a good three feet at the center with rocks arranged for protected shooting, but obscuring a decent view of the premises from anybody approaching. The main door was formidable in size and construction, the hinges huge, the structure being decorative as well as useful.
Velda handed me the binoculars. “I don’t see a thing,” she said.
“That’s because you’re a city girl.” We moved a little to the right and I focused in on a shadow between one of the hills and the house, then handed the glasses back and told her what to look for.
Finally she got it. “I see the shadow . . . if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s what I mean, all right. Now, what’s causing it?”
She checked the sunlight and shadow from the trees and shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Right. That shadow is a shallow ditch. It leads to a window at ground level of the building. Take another look.”
She peered through the glasses again, then said, “You should have been at the Alamo. We would’ve won.”
“Kitten, I would have been outside that church long before Santa Anna got there. Now, if you can spot them, there are four depressions like that so you could go out from or into the
main building.”
“I see one to the right.”
“Can you see the windows?”
“Only the outline. They have no glass in them.”
“And they’ll be barricaded. If you notice up under the eaves there are some decorative wooded sections with a few slots in them. Get the glasses on them while there’s still some light.”
When she located them she studied them carefully. She handed the glasses back to me with a serious frown tugging at her eyes. “Boss, you surprise me,” she said. “For someone straight out of New York . . .”
“I didn’t say I grew up there, kitten.”
“Okay, what are those things? They don’t make sense to me.”
“The don’s got a place that’s real early American. He’s got a damn fortress there and we’ve only seen the front side. These slotted jobs are shooting stations too. You slide open the slots and you can aim down at the enemy from high ground, and whatever he has for weapons must be pretty substantial.”
Her voice was incredulous. “And you’re taking them on?”
“I didn’t say that either.” I gave her a small grin. “Besides, I wouldn’t be surprised if all that ground was seeded with remote-activated land mines.”
“Why remote?”
“So you couldn’t set them off accidentally.”
“Who would want to go out there at all?”
“Nobody who lived in the house, that’s for sure.”
I handed her the glasses and she packed them back in her bottomless purse. “You know, Mike,” she said to me, “I think I enjoyed this stuff more back in the city. You don’t get hung up on thistle bushes and briars, or get stuck by pine needles.” She pushed a branch away from her face and said a low, “Damn!”
“Quit complaining,” I told her.
“And there aren’t any bats in the city.”
“There aren’t any bats here either,” I reminded her.
“Why weren’t any in the cave at Harris’ place? On TV they always come swooping out of old caves at sundown.”
“Look, if you want bats, I’ll find you some. Don’t you know that—”
