Bay City Blast td-38

by Warren Murphy

  Bay City Blast

  ( The Destroyer - 38 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  "Yes," Smith said, "he is taking over the city. He is giving an open invitation to organized crime to move its operations into Bay City. He's opening the piers so that contraband can move in and out easily, so drugs can flow freely. Mob interests are coming from all over the country . . . setting up cutting rooms and jewelry factories for stolen diamonds . . . printing facilities for counterfeit stock certificates and securities . . . major counting rooms for what may become the nation's biggest illegal gambling operations. It'll be the crime capital of the U.S. within a few months!" "Well, there's capitalism at work again. Proving that our system works best," Remo said. " . . . And we want you and Chiun to keep him alive. Of course, he won't know who you are or who you work for," Smith said. "Or why. Which includes us, as usual. But that's OK, if we can't kill him with kindness, then we'll CURE him," Remo said. "Let's not get into that," Smith gasped.

  DESTROYER 38: BAY CITY BLAST

  Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

  CHAPTER ONE

  If Jesus had walked across the tiny cove that was the harbor of Bay City, New Jersey, no one would have bothered to think twice about it. The debris and rubble and flotsam and jetsam that packed the murky oily waters was so thick that anyone could have walked on the water there.

  The city was tucked into two hundred acres of shoreline and upland on the coastline of New York Bay between Jersey City and Hoboken.

  The upland was an average of only eighteen inches above sea level and when it rained for more than twelve minutes, every cellar in Bay City flooded. When Bay City was booming, no one had seemed to mind. There was plenty of money for plumbers. There was enough for everyone. Hot dog salesmen got rich. Loan sharks wore vicuna. The city's bookies wintered in Florida, at least until that time each year when they had to come back and remind their subordinates that honesty was the best policy.

  The city had grown around its small seaport. Since the Thirties, graceful ocean-going liners and sturdy tankers had loaded and unloaded at the two concrete piers on either side of the bay twenty-four hours a day. The Holland Tunnel to New York City and New Jersey's heavy-duty road system were only minutes away. Bay City had blossomed. Twenty-two thousand people were packed into its small area, making it the most densely populated city in the United States.

  It all came unglued right after the Korean War. New methods of shipping and larger ships required more upland area for trucks to park. They required deeper channels and bigger piers and the city fathers of Bay City refused to make any improvements in the harbor. One day everyone looked up and found that Bay City's shipping business had gone to Port Elizabeth to the south and to Hoboken to the north.

  Like automobile rust, the process of urban deterioration was irreversible. By 1960, the population of Bay City had dropped to ten thousand. Fifteen years later, it had been cut in half again.

  As people moved away in search of jobs elsewhere, the rats and rot that always threaten waterfront cities expanded unchecked.

  Buildings quantum-leaped from full occupancy to abandoned ruin. Federal government grants allowed the city fathers to tear down most of the buildings, but there was no federal money to build new ones —and no people to move into them even if they had been built—and the skyline of Bay City wound up looking like a jack-o'-lantern's mouth, the wide-

  open spaces of vacant lots interrupted only by an occasional building.

  Most of the five thousand persons left had jobs in the factories of Jersey City and Hoboken. The rest were pensioners too old or poor to move and kids and hustlers and degenerates and hookers and bums who preyed on each other and had no reason to move.

  While Bay City's decline was inexorable, it was also gradual and therefore was not covered by the press, which dealt only in stories featuring explosions or non-negotiable demands. The city was just another declining eastern seaboard community, too small to rate any television exposure, either as contrast or color.

  Few people visited the city, so it was noticed when one day a long black Cadillac limousine with California license plates pulled up in front of the Bay City Arms apartment house.

  The Bay City Arms remained the only apartment building in town fit to inhabit. It was now 67 percent occupied and when the figure dropped below 60 percent, the out-of-town owner was going to dump the building back to the city for unpaid real estate taxes. The building's heat was turned off at 10:00 promptly each night and only one of the two elevators worked, but the building commanded an imposing view on its easterly side of the New York City skyline and the decayed concrete piers of Bay City.

  As soon as the limousine pulled to the curb, two men jumped out of the back seat and closed the door behind them. One looked right and one looked

  left. The first man looked up, while the second looked behind them, scowling at the rooftops and windows of the nearby tenements. The first man went into the apartment lobby and looked around, then nodded out to the second man. Both men kept their right hands jammed deep into their jacket pockets.

  The man on the sidewalk reopened the back door of the limousine and a short, sturdy man got out. He wore a highly fashionable black pinstripe suit. The man was in his early forties. His wavy hair was an unreal jet black and his skin was pockmarked but showed a healthy tan from a lot of time spent in the sun. The man smiled pleasantly as he stepped onto the sidewalk, but the man with his hand in his pocket did not smile and kept looking behind them as they walked toward the building lobby. Behind them, the chauffeur locked all the doors of the limousine, rolled his windows up, and kept the motor running.

  The renting office in the back of the building was actually the superintendent's apartment. The superintendent was annoyed that he had to turn off "The Gong Show" to interview the prospective new tenant.

  The interview was brief.

  "My name is Rocco Nobile," said the well-tailored man with the blue-black hair. "I would like to rent the top floor."

  "Very good, Mr. Nobile," said the superintendent. He was a short man with thinning hair and a surly scowl which had prompted tenants in the building to give him the nickname of "Happy." "We have

  a couple of very nice five-room apartments vacant

  there."

  "You don't understand," said Nobile, smiling politely. "I want the top floor. The whole top floor."

  "That's right," said one of the two men with hands in their pockets. "The whole top floor." He seemed about to say more but clamped his mouth tightly closed when Nobile glanced at him without a smile.

  "But we can't . . . I'm sorry, Mr. Nobile. Two of the apartments on the top floor are already occupied."

  "By whom?" asked Nobile. The two men with hands in their pockets nodded. They were proud to work for a man who said "whom."

  "Mrs. Cochrane and the Gavins," Happy said.

  "You have other apartments they can move into," Nobile said, and it was not a question. Still Happy

  nodded.

  Without turning in his chair, Rocco Nobile reached his hand up to his shoulder and snapped his fingers. One of the men left the room. Nobile asked Happy for a cup of coffee, black, without sugar, while they waited.

  Before he had finished the coffee, the man returned to the apartment. "They'll move by the weekend," he said.

  "Errrr, what'd you say to them?" asked Happy.

  Before the man could answer, Nobile spoke. "Mr. Happy," he said, "my man was very nice to them. I am not wishing to cause trouble but I need the entire top floor. I entertain a great deal and I conduct my business from my home. I empowered my

  man to make them a very handsome cash offer if they would switc
h apartments. Apparently they have accepted. I am glad. I want only to be a good neighbor."

  Happy looked at the man who had just returned to the apartment.

  "That's right," the man said. "Empowered. Me." He nodded.

  Rocco Nobile's good neighbors on the fourteenth floor moved to lower floors the next day, with moving men paid by Rocco Nobile helping them, and with checks for two thousand dollars each in their pockets. That same day, an ant horde of carpenters and contractors and plasterers swarmed into the top floor, knocking out walls and joining the four apartments into one enormous penthouse suite. They were finished in one day.

  The decorators arrived the next morning. The furniture they selected arrived that afternoon.

  Rocco Nobile moved in Saturday morning.

  On Saturday afternoon, his two companions rented a vacant store a block from the city's piers and two blocks from the old yellow brick City Hall. A hastily hired sign painter erected a large sign over the windows.

  THE BAY CITY IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION :

  ROCCO NOBILE, STANDARD BEARER

  Two young women were hired to staff the office. They were told they were to act as a clearing house for city residents seeking information on federal aid programs, about welfare, about Social Security benefits, about recreational programs available. The ex-

  istence of the new office was announced the following Wednesday with an advertisement in the small twice-weekly paper which was Bay City's only media link with civilization.

  Two days later, the Bay City Improvement Association announced that it was making plans to open a privately funded day care center to watch over the children of working parents. A day later, Rocco Nobile, standard bearer of the Bay City Improvement Association, announced that he had received a contribution from an anonymous donor which would enable the association to set up a free medical clinic for Bay City residents who could not afford private doctors.

  After a week of such announcements, it should have begun to get through to the drink-sodden editor of the Bay City Bugle that something unusual was happening in Bay City, but it hadn't.

  As he was sitting in his regular tavern for his morning eye-opener, the drinker on the next stool said to him: "Hey, that Rocco Nobile is something,

  hah?"

  "Who's Rocco Nobile?" the editor asked as he waved to the bartender for another stinger on the

  rocks.

  "That guy you keep writing about in the paper who's doing all those good things."

  "Oh, sure," said the editor. He smiled. Maybe his friend would buy the drink if he said he liked Rocco Nobile. "A great man," the editor said. "I'm going to do a big feature story on him."

  "Hey, that's good," said the man on the next stool. "Let me buy you that drink."

  The editor did not notice that all the while the

  man talked to him, he kept his right hand jammed into his jacket pocket.

  The next day the editor remembered Rocco No-bile and telephoned for an appointment. He was ushered into Nobile's office and sitting room that very afternoon, and he spoke with Nobile for two hours and it might have been longer except he refused, absolutely refused, to have Mr. Nobile go to the trouble of sending out for another bottle of Creme de Menthe to make more stingers on the rocks.

  The next day, the Bay City Bugle announced that Rocco Nobile, a self-made multi-millionaire who had made a giant fortune in the oil importing business, had moved to Bay City.

  His goal, he said, was to "do what little I can" to revitalize the city and to get the piers working again.

  Rocco Nobile said that he owed Bay City a debt he wanted to repay because when his great-grandparents had come to America seventy-five years earlier, they had settled first in Bay City. "I want to repay our family's debt to this great land of freedom and opportunity," Nobile said. In parentheses, the editor added: "A fine and noble sentiment. Would that more of us felt that way."

  Before the story appeared, Nobile told his secretary in her office, "When that drunk's story appears, you're going to hear from the mayor. He'll want to talk to me. Tell him that I'm going to be in and out of town for the next few days. Make the appointment for next Wednesday. Here."

  Mayor Douglass Windlow called on time as No-

  8

  bile had expected and the appointment was made for the following week.

  In the meantime, Nobile's men prowled the city day and night, buying drinks in taverns, courtesy of Rocco Nobile. They visited homes, dispensing leaflets on aid programs for the elderly and sick, courtesy of Rocco Nobile. They talked a lot, but they listened more.

  Mayor Douglass Windlow arrived at 2 P.M. on Wednesday. Nobile asked if he would join him in a small glass of Amaretto, then sat in an unholstered chair across from the mayor, who sat casually on the leather sofa.

  "What is on your mind, Mayor?"

  Windlow showed Nobile the blinding smile which was his greatest political asset, sipped the Amaretto and said, "I just thought I should meet you. For a new man in town, you've made a considerable impact already."

  "Thank you. I hope to do more."

  The mayor put down his glass and fidgeted with one of his gold cufflinks for a moment.

  "Rebuilding a city like this is a terribly hard job," he said. "Everything that the urban crisis is going to be all over the nation is already here. Dwindling resources, a shrinking tax base, an impoverished population requiring more and more services with fewer and fewer tax dollars to pay for them. This city is a whole catalog of urban ills." The mayor slid into the phrases easily and smoothly, as befitting one who had learned them through years of giving exactly the same speech.

  "Well," Nobile said with a slight smile. "It's not that bad for some."

  9

  Mayor Windlow looked at him, a puzzled expression on his face.

  "Your brother-in-law, for instance," said Nobile, still smiling.

  "My brother-in-law?"

  "Yes," Nobile said. "The one who is the secret owner of the paving company which does all the city's work." He took a notebook from the side pocket of his smoking jacket and carefully opened it to a page. "Yes. Your wife's brother, Fred."

  He looked up at Mayor Windlow and this time Nobile wasn't smiling. Windlow gulped. He started to answer, opened his mouth, then closed it again.

  "And of course there are other people in town who make a very good living. For instance, there is Peppy Rítale, who handles the numbers play in town. He does quite well. Naturally, he would do much better if he did not have to pay you twenty-five percent of his profits each week," Nobile said. "And there is Mr. Bangston, who is the loanshark down on River Street. Another partner of yours. And there is . . ." He stopped and snapped the book closed. The crack of the hard cover lingered in the room like the sound of a pistol shot. "But I guess there isn't any need in going on. You know the names in this book."

  Windlow picked up his glass of Amaretto and drained it in one large swallow.

  "Who are you?" he finally said. "What do you want?"

  "I am who I say. Rocco Nobile. And I am going to be the next mayor of Bay City."

  "The election's two years off," Windlow said.

  "I am not waiting for the election," Nobile said.

  I

  10

  "I will be appointed, after you resign, to fill your unexpired term."

  Windlow tried a small smile. "Oh, you have it all worked out," he said. "I resign, you take over. But suppose I just don't resign?"

  Nobile shrugged. "Then I will have to wait until the federal prosecutors indict you for all the crimes in this book. That will put me several months off schedule, but I guess I could wait if I had to."

  There was a long, uneasy pause in the room.

  "You can prove those things?" the mayor said, pointing toward the notebook which lay on the table between them. His hand quivered as if he were toying with the idea of grabbing the notebook and fleeing.

  "You know I can," Nobile said. "I would be a poor fool to aim a gun at you, withou
t being sure first that it was loaded."

  "There's room enough in Bay City for everybody. I could use a partner," Windlow said hopefully. "I've been thinking for a long time now that some new blood might . . . well, might improve things here. A fresh outlook. There is enough for everybody."

  "Wrong," Nobile said. "There is barely enough for me. But there will be." His dark eyes narrowed as he stared at Mayor Douglass Windlow. He said casually, "I think next week would be a good time for you to resign."

  "The City Commission would have to elect my successor," Windlow said. "I can't just appoint you."

  Nobile picked up the notebook again and opened it to a section near the back.

  "Yes, here it is. The City Commission. I have a

  11

  numbers runner, a man who sells police cars to the city in violation of the law and a man who gets kickbacks from all municipal employees for tickets to testimonial dinners that are never held. That is three out of five. I will have no trouble getting their votes."

  "No, I guess you won't," Windlow said. He sank back in the soft sofa. "Got any more Amaretto?"

  "No," said Nobile. "I see no point in lengthening this meeting unnecessarily since I find it uncomfortable. You resign next Friday. By the following Monday, I want you to be moving to your house at the New Jersey shore." Nobile smiled. "You know. The house which is secretly owned in your wife's maiden name."

  Windlow sighed heavily and nodded. He stood up. "You don't mind, I suppose, if I don't shake your hand," he said bitterly.

  "Not while I wear expensive rings on my fingers," Nobile said. "Good day, Mayor."

  As Windlow reached the door, Nobile called to him.

  "Mayor, I think that no one should know about this until you submit your resignation at next Friday's meeting of the City Commission. And of course you will simply cite health reasons for your decision."

  "Of course. What about that notebook?" "I will hold onto it," Nobile said, "against the day when you might foolishly think of attempting a political comeback."

  He walked to his bar and poured himself another glass of Amaretto. "But of course you won't do that, Mayor. Will you?"