“Now you sound like a wife for sure. Late, I guess.”
She nuzzled my cheek with her nose. “I was so relieved to find you here when I woke up. I worry about you when you go out alone.”
“Nothing to worry about.”
She didn’t look convinced, but she changed the subject. “We went to the movies,” she said. “Terrible picture. Even Gussie thought so. She’s still asleep. Coffee’s on, and I can start your bacon and eggs if you’re ready?”
“Soon as I shower.”
I took a long one, in the course of which I examined my right hand carefully. The knuckles were cut and the palm was slashed but there was nothing broken; the damage was superficial, although the hand was sore and undoubtedly would, get sorer. I went out into the kitchen and drank a cup of coffee left-handed while I waited for the bacon and eggs.
Gussie stumbled in in her pajamas, looking like wild Aggie with her bright red hair egg-beater fashion all over her head. She plunked herself down opposite me at the table with a solid smack of flesh on wood. I didn’t even think she had her eyes open, but she made a believer out of me. “Man, who’d you knuckledust with that right hand?” she demanded.
“Stuck it into the fan belt on a do-it-yourself job of getting a canary out of the engine,” I said. “Stupid?”
“Stupid,” she agreed. “What are we going to do today?’
“Count our blessings.”
“Stupid,” she said again. “I’m going back to bed.” She bounced up and left the kitchen.
Lynn came to the table and picked up my hand and looked at it. “That ought to be bandaged,” she said with concern.
“It’ll be okay,” I said. To prove it, I picked up a fork in stiff fingers and began pursuing my bacon and eggs. I nodded at the recently occupied chair across from me. “Take her out with you somewhere this morning. I’d like to breathe a little air uncharged by that magnetic personality.”
“Is she getting on your nerves, Pete?”
“Only sometimes.” I had a perfectly legitimate reason for wanting them both out of the house.
“I’ll try to think of something,” Lynn said.
I don’t know what she thought of, but around ten-thirty they went out. I locked the apartment door, then went to the closet and took out my bag. With it open on the bed, I dug around among the package of money until I found the slimmer oilskinned packets. It was high time I took a look at what all the excitement was about. I removed the toilet paper wrapping and sat down with them on the bed.
There were eight of them, six in pale blue oilskin, and two in dark gray. All had the hieroglyphic printing on them. After listening to Joe Foley I was beginning to get a feeling about that printing. I opened four of the packets at random, slitting the oilskin. Three were stuffed with sheets of shiny paper closely printed in the unreadable language. The fourth — one of the gray ones — held a sheaf of miniature mechanical drawings the substance of which I couldn’t relate to anything I’d ever seen.
I opened the rest of them, and they contained more of the same, except that the stuff in the second gray one was handwritten in what looked like engineer’s printing, and it was the slimmest of the lot. Valuable papers? You couldn’t prove it by me. But assuming the people who had come to see Risko and Foley were on the level and not crooked cops on the make, I realized the dimensions of the spot I’d been pushed onto. Because of a hundred-mile-an-hour turnpike crash of a strange car with that of Joe Williams, I could be getting involved in an international tug-o’-war. My reaction to the idea was negative. I couldn’t use it. I had troubles enough of my own.
I put all the papers back together in one package and made a new cover for it out of a couple of the blue oilskins. Even all packed together they weren’t bulky. I started to put the new packet back in the bag, and then stopped. Everybody but me seemed to thing the things were valuable; more valuable than the money, presumably, since it was never mentioned. Although that could be to prevent the organization of a gold rush that would make the forty-niners look like tiddlywink players. Just maybe it would be a good idea to stash the packet in a separate place, in case the roof fell in on me later. A bargaining point never hurt.
I looked around the apartment for a temporary hiding place. The straight lines of the modernistic furniture ruled it out. I finally settled for taping it to the back of a picture in the living room. It would do until I could make some better arrangement. I relocked the bag and put it back in the closet.
When the girls came back, I suggested a picnic lunch in the nearby park. Gussie was enthusiastic; she hustled around the kitchen making sandwiches. Lynn made coffee for the thermos. Gussie tasted it before corking it. “Not enough sugar,” she decided, and added some. “Uncle Pete likes it sweet.”
I started to ask Lynn just when Uncle Pete had become big-man-on-campus, and decided against it.
The park was cool and the lunch pleasant. Gussie stretched out on a blanket under a maple tree and fell asleep, snoring lightly. At her age and with her looks and figure, not even snoring was unattractive.
Lynn moved closer beside me. “Pete, we’re not really settling anything, are we?”
“What do you mean?” I knew what she meant.
“Well, living like this — we can’t keep it up indefinitely. Why don’t you — ”
“I’m working on something,” I interrupted before she could ask me again why I didn’t turn myself in. “I should know in three or four days if it pans out. We might be able to forget the whole thing.”
That was a mistake. “Pete Karma, how can we just forget the whole thing?” Lynn looked as indignant as she sounded. “That’s the most foolish thing I’ve ever heard you say. We need to — ”
I nudged her in the ribs with a nod at Gussie. The redhead’s eyes were still closed but the snores had ceased. Lynn changed the subject, but I knew I hadn’t heard the last of it. She was getting restless, and I didn’t have the answer. I didn’t have any part of the answer.
A thunderstorm drove us back to the apartment at four. We ran the last hundred yards through a downpour. Gussie dashed up the hallway to the apartment, laughing, picking up her wet dress from her shoulders where it was sticking to her. Lynn was five yards ahead of me, shaking out her blonde hair. I had passed two apartment doors with folded-back afternoon papers in front of them when the effect of a glance down at a two-column cut visible in the upper left corner hit me right in the solar plexus.
It was my picture.
For a second I had the sensation of seeing the same movie twice. That night in Palladino’s bar, and now this …
The girls had disappeared into the apartment. I stooped and picked up the paper and shoved it under my arm. Inside, Gussie’s bedroom door was closed. In our bedroom Lynn was taking off her wet things. I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I opened up the paper, and I had to will my hands from trembling. It was my picture. It was my rogues’ gallery picture, front view and profile; because of the fold of the paper I’d only seen half of it. The large black front-page headline was about a stevedore strike. A smaller one under my picture said: RISKO CONSTRUCTION COMPANY NIGHT WATCHMAN IDENTIFIES MYSTERIOUS ATTACKER AS ESCAPED CONVICT. The small print contained my real name. It also contained Pete Karma’s name.
I stopped skimming the print and stared at the bathroom wall. Charley Risko knew how to protect himself. He’d been willing to lie doggo hoping I’d run into his arms trying to get to him. He’d been willing to give lip service to cooperation when asked. Last night had been too close for his nerves. It could have been him in that office. Ben Curry had never set eyes on me last night. He’d been told what to say. “Circumstances alter cases, pal,” Charley would say blandly to the outraged inquiry about the lack of cooperation. I had heard him say it blandly to so many outraged inquiries over the years.
I hadn’t appreciated the umbrella afforded me by the lack of police activity because I hadn’t known about it. I surely appreciated it now that it was gone. Every cop in the st
ate would be looking for me. Every last one.
I reopened the paper and looked at the picture again, and a faint hope grew. It had been taken nearly four years ago. I had been twenty pounds heavier; there was a puffiness in the pictured features. And I had been wearing my hair long then instead of in a semi-crewcut.
I moved over to the medicine chest mirror. The face looking back at me was definitely leaner. It had lines in it the face in the picture didn’t have. The difference in the hair helped to make a difference between face and picture. BUT — to anyone who knew me, it was my picture. The hope that had burgeoned died. Charley Risko had given himself very good protection indeed.
I removed the front page from the paper, folded it up and put it in my pocket before stuffing the rest in the wastebasket. I went out into the bedroom where Lynn was sitting on the bed in her panties. “Sorry,” I said to her. “I’ve got to go out again tonight. I’m leaving now.” I didn’t wait for her reaction. I knew what it would be. I didn’t want to see it. I was outside the bedroom door before the sound of my words died away.
I left the apartment. I had only one move left now, and I’d be damn lucky if I could make it. If I could reach Joe Bonigli, I might still be able to pin the tail on the Charley Risko donkey. As I climbed into the Buick, I realized with a renewed sense of shock just what bad shape I was in. My license said Pete Karma; if I was stopped for going five miles an hour over the speed limit, or making a prohibited U-turn, I was gone.
I put on my Panama hat and my windowpane spectacles and took out my lower plate. It was the best I could do. I drove north fighting my foot from slamming the accelerator to the floor. I watched traffic signals and roadside markers as I never had in my life.
I got into Lake City around eight-thirty. Only then did it come to me that I didn’t know how to get in touch with Bonigli. I’d made no arrangement, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to be listed in the phone book. I parked the Buick across from a cab stand in front of the Duxbury Hotel. I crossed the street and walked down the line of cabs. The third driver looked like an Italian. He had an opened newspaper spread over his steering wheel. I leaned in the sidewalk-side front window. “I’d like to make a phone call to Joe Bonigli,” I said. Without my lower plate I had to form the words carefully.
The cabby never even looked up from his paper. “You think I got a radiophone here, maybe?” he rasped.
“Bonigli,” I said. “B-O-N-I-G-L-I.”
There was no answer at all this time. I took out my cigarette lighter and set the edge of his newspaper afire. When it flamed up, he started to crush it in his hands, then threw it out on the street. He got of the cab and walked around in front of it to face me on the sidewalk. “A comedian,” he said bitterly.
“Joe Bonigli,” I said. “I’m from out of town.”
He stopped in his advance. I don’t know what he thought he saw in my face, but he gestured at the cab. “Get in.”
“Bonigli?” I asked.
“I’ll deliver you to someone who knows him, wise guy, an’ I hope they don’t take to you no more’n I do.”
I got into the cab.
He drove to the south side of the city and a dingy, rundown neighborhood. He stopped with a squeal of brakes in front of a bar that had letters blacked out in its outside neon sign which said: G-ME-OCK B-R. I paid him off with a five-dollar bill as I climbed out of the cab. It was a waste of money as far as reinstating myself in his good graces was concerned. He drove off with a blaatt of the exhaust that probably inadequately expressed his opinion of me.
I went inside, to a cramped, dimly lit, smoky interior. The bar was half full, and Italian faces predominated. “Draw one,” I said to the bartender when he came down my way. When he came back with the beer, I leaned forward over the bar. “I’d like to make a telephone call to Joe Bonigli,” I said. The air was so close I could feel the perspiration starting on my forehead.
The bartender looked over my shoulder. “Silvio,” he said. In the back bar mirror I could see a man get up from a table behind me and look inquiringly in our direction. When the bartender nodded at me, the man came over and took the stool to my left. I repeated myself.
“Lotsa people wanna talk to Joe,” Silvio replied. He had a young face, tough-looking but cheerful, with an engaging smile. “Why would he wanna talk to you, though?”
“I think he would,” I said. I tried to think of some way of identifying myself to Bonigli without using Tony Falcaro’s name. At the moment that could be too damn much identification. “It’s about a car one of his men drove to the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago.”
Silvio looked doubtful. “I don’t know …”
Under cover of the overhang of the bar I tried to pass him a folded-over hundred-dollar bill. “Try it once.”
He saw what it was but he wouldn’t take it. “You better be right,” he warned me, and walked over to a pay phone booth. I could see him through the glass door, and he looked over at me several times as he talked. The door opened finally and he leaned out with the phone in his hand. “How long since the car made the trip?” he called over to me.
I had to stop and think. “Seven, eight months.”
The booth door closed again. When it opened, Silvio came back to me at the bar and handed me a card with a telephone number printed on it. There was nothing else on the card, front or back. “Call that number in ten minutes,” he told me, and went back to his table. He seemed to have lost all interest in me.
I had another beer while I waited, but even at that it probably wasn’t more than eight minutes before I was in the booth. Under cover of my handkerchief I slipped my lower plate back in. Bonigli had to be able to recognize my voice. I recognized his when he came on the line “It’s me, all right,” I said. “Even if you didn’t like the description.”
“I been wantin’ to see you, man, but did you have to make it now? You realize how hot you are?”
“I know. You’ve been wanting to see me?”
“A proposition come up. I think we could do some good. Or we could have before you broke into print.”
“I don’t like the picture, Joe.”
“I should hope not. Well, put Silvio back on. You do like he says.”
I looked toward Silvio’s table. He was watching the booth, and I beckoned to him. He came and took the phone, closing the door when I showed no sign of moving away. The conversation was brief; when he emerged he was smiling. It was some time later before I realized Silvio always was smiling.
“I’ll drive you,” he said.
“I’ve got a car parked downtown.”
“So you’ll tell me where, an’ we’ll take someone along to follow us with it,” he said agreeably. Just for a second I wondered if this could be a one-way ride; then I dismissed the idea as ridiculous. If Bonigli wanted to kiss me off, all he had to do was send someone for the cop on the corner.
A slim, sharply dressed youth followed us as Silvio led the way out the back door. Among half a dozen cars parked there a Lincoln Continental stood out like a pimple in a Vegas chorus line. Silvio opened the door and the three of us got into the front seat. “Whereabouts you at?” he inquired, starting the motor.
“Across the street from the Hotel Duxbury.”
He nodded and drove out of the parking lot. He hummed tunelessly all the way back uptown. “Give Rocco your keys,” he said to me then, easing in behind the Buick. The silent Rocco took them from me and got out of the Lincoln.
The ride began again. Silvio seemed to feel no need for conversation. We moved smoothly through town, toward the heights on the eastern outskirts. We rode so long I began to get uneasy. If I wanted to get back to town and didn’t have my car, I was in trouble. Residences had begun to thin out some distance back. Then Silvio aimed the Lincoln up a long street dotted with homes of size and quality. When he slowed for a crushed-stone driveway and circled it to pull up in front of a garage built into a hillside with a big house off to the left, I took a careful look at what I could see of the layo
ut. “Is this his home you brought me to?” I asked Silvio.
“Safest place,” he said. He was watching the garage doors rise ahead of us. He rolled the Lincoln inside into a space larger than a good many parking garages I’ve been in. When I got out, the Buick was coming through the doors. I felt better. “We’ll take the elevator,” Silvio said.
The garage was air-conditioned. I looked around. The door which had closed again behind the Buick was massive-looking; I doubted that a tank could have breached it. Rocco had already disappeared somewhere; I hadn’t even seen him go. I saw no sign of an elevator until an apparently solid section of the cement wall slid sideways to disclose a chrome interior. The operator wore an open shoulder holster from which a black butt protruded. He was stamped from the same mold as Silvio, slim and dapper, but without the cheerfulness.
He punched a button when we stepped inside. We rose a floor and stopped. The elevator was self-service, but what caught my eye was an instrument panel on the right-hand wall of the cab that would have done justice to a Boeing 707. When we stopped, I could see why. The grilled back of the cab overlooked the driveway through a big window. The elevator jockey punched a button on the instrument panel and I could hear the faint rumble below us as the garage door lifted again. In seconds Silvio’s Lincoln appeared and rolled down the driveway. Another button, and back down came the door.
The setup was impressive. From his aerie, the elevator man could see every approaching car. If he didn’t like what he saw, the door stayed down. Even if the door was forced the elevator wasn’t accessible to anyone on the garage floor level. If the rest of the house was in proportion, Bonigli had himself a junior grade fortress.
“Bring him to the library,” a disembodied voice said in the cab.
“Right,” Silvio said. The operator pushed another button, and we rose again. Voice communication, and there was probably a wall indicator in the library, I decided, showing the position of the elevator at all times. Joe Bonigli left little to chance.
Silvio stepped off briskly when the elevator stopped and the door slid noiselessly open. I wondered why he hadn’t frisked me. Or maybe we’d passed a fluoroscope without my seeing it? I’d rather believe I was considered “in” because of the previous association. Silvio led the way to an open door at the end of the gloomy, carpeted corridor. Inside, Joe Bonigli was standing behind a desk in a high-ceilinged room paneled with expensive-looking books. He lit a cigar, then pushed the cigar box across the desk toward me. “Have one?” he asked, waving out his match.
Strongarm (Prologue Crime) Page 12
