No Pain, No Gaine

by Edwina Franklin

  “And if Mr. Vanish didn’t kill Parmentier, Blass or Taglia, then we’ve planned a surprise party for someone who isn’t going to show up, and that isn’t going to sit well with Inspector Nielsen.”

  “Well, you’ve done one thing right,” said Joe. Grinning, he leaned back against the edge of his desk and crossed his arms. “You ordered complete electronic monitoring of DiGianni’s apartment.”

  “Yeah,” Ted grunted unhappily. He wasn’t looking forward to telling her that her place had been rebugged. It hadn’t been an easy or a pleasant decision, but the alternative had been much worse.

  “Don’t look so glum,” urged Joe. “Thanks to those bugs, we got a line on her first source late last night.”

  Ted glanced up, startled. “Definite make?” he demanded.

  “Yep.” Joe’s grin broadened. “He returned a phone call and quoted her a price on some additional ‘research’. Taylor’s got the whole conversation on tape. And Forensics is preparing a voiceprint for us.”

  “Bingo,” breathed Ted.

  Sandy was reaching into her desk drawer for her handbag when the phone rang. It was Charlie.

  “You’ve gotta meet me tomorrow night,” he told her, his normally cocksure voice tight and jumpy.

  Frowning, Sandy glanced toward the reception area where Feeney was waiting to drive her home. “I don’t know if I can,” she said, lowering her voice. “I’m being watched.”

  “Yeah, I know about the police surveillance. They listened to us on the phone last night.”

  Sandy snapped erect in her chair. “They what?” she exclaimed, then, remembering Feeney, added in an incredulous whisper, “Are you telling me my apartment is still bugged?”

  “Not still bugged,” he corrected her impatiently, “bugged again, by the cops.”

  Her knuckles whitening around the receiver, Sandy forced her voice to remain calm as she asked, “How do you know?”

  “I got my ways. Anyhow, I’ll be calling you at work from now on, assuming we’re still doing business after tomorrow night. Meet me at the back door of the Shamrock at nine sharp. Make sure you’re not followed and don’t be late.”

  Sandy stared at the humming receiver for a long, thoughtful moment before she hung it back up.

  Sandy arrived at her mother’s place for dinner shortly before 7:00 p.m., parking her shadow outside the door. Uncle Hugo arrived a minute or so later, looking pale but not as pinched as before. He’d spent the previous day at the hospital undergoing tests, and had finally been diagnosed as having high blood pressure. With proper diet and medication, the doctor had told him, Hugo would soon be back to his old self.

  Well, thought Sandy uneasily, that accounted for her uncle’s absence on Thursday, at least. What about Tommy?

  Just after seven o’clock, Sandy, Angela and Hugo sat down to eat at a table set for four. Sandy glanced across at the empty chair and felt a sudden chill. Tommy still hadn’t come home.

  Swallowing with difficulty, she laid down her fork. “Mama, I’m sorry—” she began. But she was cut off by the sudden opening of the front door.

  Tommy sauntered past them, pausing a moment to stare at the three dumbfounded people around the table before walking into his bedroom and slamming the door.

  Sandy felt as though she’d just been kicked in the stomach. He was wearing a jacket—a black leather jacket, with Knights of the Night emblazoned across the back. And Feeney and who knew how many more officers were out there, watching all the entrances to this building. Watching her brother stroll inside wearing that jacket. Dooley’s or Vito’s jacket. Any second now there was going to be a knock at the door.

  She tried to lift her fork again but had to put it back down because her hand was shaking. Sandy didn’t want her mother to see that she was trembling, didn’t want to have to deal with the questions that would raise. So she stared bleakly at the food on her plate and waited.

  A few minutes later, Tommy emerged from his room and took his place at the table with such casual unconcern that Sandy wanted to grab him and shake him until his teeth rattled. She grabbed the edge of the table instead. “You were with Dooley,” she accused him quietly, “and he gave you that jacket. Didn’t he?”

  Tommy shrugged elaborately. “What if I was? And what if he did? Vito has no use for it anymore.”

  Dooley had turned her brother into a target for both Mr. Vanish and the police. A decoy. A patsy. Trembling with rage, she glared hotly across the table at Tommy.

  “Don’t you understand what this is going to look like to the police?” she cried. “Vito is killed and you disappear, and then you suddenly reappear wearing the dead boy’s jacket?”

  All at once there was an authoritative knock at the door. As Sandy’s heart began spiraling coldly down into her stomach, Angela drew herself up, slid back her chair and went to see who was there.

  “I’m Sergeant Gaine and this is Sergeant Wegner of the Homicide Squad,” said a polite, familiar voice that froze Sandy in her seat. “May we come in, please?”

  Wordlessly, Angela opened the door wide and let them in.

  Ted Gaine seemed to fill the doorway as he stepped through it. His cold gray eyes swept the tiny apartment like a searchlight, taking in the half-eaten meal on the dining room table and then moving impersonally from face to face. Bypassing Sandy without even a flicker of recognition, he finally settled his attention on Tommy.

  “Mr. DiGianni? We’d like to ask you some questions about your friend, Vito Taglia.”

  Tommy sucked in a breath and leapt to his feet, startling everybody at the table and almost overturning his chair. The detectives drew themselves up, seeming to grow half a foot before Sandy’s shocked eyes.

  “You were wearing a jacket when you entered the building,” said Sergeant Wegner blandly. “Would you bring it out here, please?”

  Tommy’s eyes narrowed momentarily, and Sandy recalled that there was a fire escape outside his bedroom window. She leaned toward her brother with a warning shake of her head. “Don’t run, Tommy,” she told him softly. “If you run now, you’ll be running the rest of your life. We love you. Please!”

  He hesitated briefly, then pivoted and stalked into his room. A moment later he came out with the jacket and made as if to toss it at Sergeant Wegner.

  “Just put it down there,” said the detective, gesturing toward the easy chair. Sergeant Wegner was pulling on a surgical glove. They were treating the jacket as evidence, and he didn’t want to spoil any fingerprints that might be on it. Sandy repressed a groan. Tommy’s prints would be all over that jacket now.

  Tommy dropped it unceremoniously on the seat of the chair and stepped back. As the whole family held their breaths, Sergeant Wegner picked up the jacket with his gloved hand and turned the garment to and fro, gently spreading or lifting parts of it with the capped end of a ballpoint pen. Suddenly he stopped and pointed at something. When Sergeant Gaine saw what he’d found, he frowned and nodded his head.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. DiGianni,” he said politely, “but we’ll have to take you down to the station for questioning.”

  Tommy swayed as though a punch had been thrown at him. Casting a look of horrified disbelief at his sister, he began slowly backing away from the two detectives, shaking his head. “I—I haven’t done anything,” he insisted in a strained voice.

  As Sergeant Wegner carefully folded the jacket, Ted Gaine reached behind his back and produced a pair of handcuffs. “We’d prefer it if you came willingly, son,” he warned softly.

  Tommy froze, swallowing hard, his eyes wide and helpless and riveted on the shiny metal cuffs. Seeing the terror on his face made Sandy’s heart writhe in her chest.

  For a moment nobody moved. Then Uncle Hugo stepped forward and addressed the two detectives in the resonant voice Sandy remembered from her childhood. “My nephew will come peacefully. And I will come with him, sin
ce he’s just a boy.”

  Sergeants Gaine and Wegner exchanged an eloquent look. Then Gaine nodded and replied, “Very well, Mr. Savarini. Shall we go now?”

  As though it were happening on a movie screen, Sandy watched Hugo place a reassuring arm around Tommy’s rigid shoulders and direct him gently out the door, one step ahead of the police.

  Chapter Ten

  Saturday, June 16

  She was in some kind of maze, a labyrinth, full of twistings and turnings and cold dark corners, and she was running, running, out of breath but forcing her burning legs to keep pumping because she didn’t dare stand still again. Suddenly a brick wall blocked her path. A dead end. She was trapped!

  And she could hear him coming for her, his footsteps growing louder and louder until she had to cover her ears against the deafening sound—

  Sandy bolted upright in bed, a scream quivering at the back of her throat as she stared, transfixed, at the walls of the labyrinth that seemed still to enclose her. Then gradually her senses returned to normal, and the high stone wall resolved itself into a dappling of shadows cast by the tall maple tree outside her bedroom window. A dream, she thought, letting out a long, relieved breath. It had just been a horrible dream.

  Now, if she could only awaken from the other nightmare. Willing her hands to stop shaking, she pulled the summer-weight blanket up to her chin and settled back against her pillow. It made no difference where she looked, all she could see was tough-as-nails Sergeant Gaine pulling out his handcuffs and threatening a terrified teenaged boy. Her mother had stood silently by the whole time, a mannequin with tears in her eyes. And Sandy, too, had been unable to move or cry out. It was as though Ted Gaine’s cold gray eyes had turned both women to stone.

  Tommy and Uncle Hugo had returned from the police station shortly after midnight, Tommy looking pale and shaken, Hugo pale and weary. The detectives had found the bullet hole in Vito’s jacket. They’d wanted to hold Tommy on suspicion of murder, but Uncle Hugo had argued them out of it—for now. For now, Tommy was free. But that didn’t mean he was off the hook. He could still end up paying a terrible price for his impulsiveness, and he knew it. Sandy had never seen her little brother this frightened.

  And now Dooley had gone deep underground and left Tommy high and dry, a prime suspect in a murder; and Sandy had never felt so frustrated. Dooley was the only way Tommy could be cleared, and Dooley was not to be found.

  Or was he? Suddenly the light dawned, and she wanted to kick herself for being so dense. Of course, Dooley could be found—by Charlie, the man who knew absolutely everything that was happening on the streets. The man who wanted her to meet him tonight behind the Shamrock Tavern.

  With renewed determination, Sandy stripped off her nightgown and headed for the shower. Between now and this evening there were a hundred things to do. And she’d better not mention any of them aloud, she reminded herself. Sergeant Taylor was probably hunched over a tape machine across the road, listening to every sound she made.

  Sandy hatched her plan under the stinging hot spray of the shower, and inspected it for holes as she toweled off and dusted herself with talcum. By the time she’d slipped into a halter-top sundress and tied on her leather thong sandals, she was utterly convinced it would work. But as she stepped in front of the mirror to brush her hair, she saw a worried face staring back at her.

  The bait was plotting to sneak away from the trap. Ted Gaine would see it as a betrayal. He would be furious. He might even arrest her, as he had wanted to do to Tommy last night. Or perhaps he would simply turn his back sadly and walk away, and quietly hate her for the rest of his life.

  Suddenly tears were stinging her eyes.

  No, she mustn’t cry, she scolded herself, impatiently wiping the moisture away with her fingertips. She mustn’t give in to such feelings. Now, especially, she had to be strong, for Tommy’s sake.

  Yawning, Ted glanced at the clock on his nightstand. Nearly half-past seven. The sun had been up for an hour, and he still hadn’t gotten to sleep. Like a dog chasing its tail, his mind had followed the same maddening thoughts around and around all night, refusing to let him rest.

  What if Alessandra was right, and Dave Ragusz had gone bad? He’d informed Ted of her visit to Dragnet last Saturday; he could equally well have informed Mr. Vanish about Bert. And Ragusz certainly had had both the opportunity and the ability to tamper with Alessandra’s files Tuesday afternoon—and a strong motive for diverting suspicion from himself by demonstrating that virtually anyone could have done it.

  Could Dave Ragusz be Mr. Vanish?

  And what about that speculative M.O. for Mr. Vanish that Joe had worked up on the computer? Joe was pretty good with computers, but that analysis had to be wrong. All of Ted’s police instincts were telling him that the Parmentier case had been a Mr. Vanish hit. It was the only conclusion that made all the inconsistencies make sense.

  There had to be a pivotal clue, a key they could insert and twist to unlock the entire investigation. Maybe it was the classified ads Alessandra had found in that subfile of Bert’s. Maybe instead of scolding her for checking them out with the librarian, he should have helped her to find out who had placed them. But he’d been so worried about her safety at that point that nothing else had seemed to matter.

  Muttering unhappily to himself, Ted swung his long legs out of bed, pulled on a pair of undershorts and padded downstairs to the kitchen to make some instant coffee.

  His objectivity was shot to hell and he knew it. That was why he’d bent over backward to compensate last night. Although Joe Wegner hadn’t commented on it, Ted realized he’d come on unusually strong with Tommy DiGianni. Initially, it had been a reaction to Alessandra’s presence in the room. Then he’d felt he had to maintain that persona throughout the interrogation. If Joe hadn’t been there to balance him off, and if the uncle hadn’t stood up to them both, Tommy would probably be in a holding cell right now, charged with murder, on the strength of one damning piece of circumstantial evidence. And Ted would be kicking himself even harder this morning than he already was.

  Alessandra must think he was an ogre.

  But not for long, he promised himself grimly, sipping at his mug of coffee. He would get to the bottom of the Taglia case, and he would do it this weekend. Sean Dooley was hiding out, but Ted hadn’t spent all those years on the street for nothing. He wouldn’t rest until he’d flushed out one king-sized sewer rat and shaken the necessary information out of him.

  And then he would go to work on the Parmentier case—that ledger page from Roger Blass had proven to be most informative—and make Mr. Vanish vanish once and for all.

  And then there would be only Ted and Alessandra, finding out whether they had anything left to build a relationship on. God, he hoped so…

  Cautiously, Sandy shifted the edge of her bedroom curtain an inch and peered out through the crack. The golden sunlight of late afternoon was beginning to fade to the silver of dusk. Gaine had assured her there was a detective watching the back of her building at all times, but the tiny, carefully landscaped yard was empty, as was the paved laneway that bisected the block and connected the rear gates of all the homes that lined it.

  Maybe the unseen watcher was stationed at one of the windows that faced hers across the laneway, training a telescope or binoculars on the rear windows of her apartment, just as Sergeant Ishito was doing at the front.

  Sandy glanced at the clock on her nightstand and did some rapid mental calculation. It was 7:55 p.m., time to begin getting ready.

  Forcing herself to walk, not run, she fetched the radio out of the kitchen and brought it back to the bedroom. Then she tuned it to her favorite rock station and turned up the volume, praying that the music would absorb any sounds she made while changing her clothes.

  That afternoon, Sandy had coaxed the detectives into letting her go shopping for an hour at a department store of their choosing.
She had come back with a disguise of sorts, praying that Detective Feeney had been too busy watching the other people in the store to notice the individual items she’d purchased.

  First, Sandy put on a regular outfit from her closet—a short lime-green cotton skirt, matching oversize shirt, and lemon-yellow tank top.

  Then she put on her brand-new “sensible shoes” and slipped the too-large, flower-printed cotton dress over her other clothes, belting it loosely to give the impression of greater body mass. Finally, she stood at the bathroom mirror and put on the short, platinum-blonde wig—a pity it couldn’t have had brown roots—that completed Sandy’s impersonation of her downstairs neighbor.

  Not bad for a cheap wig, she thought as she tucked in a stray tendril of dark hair. From a distance, she ought to be able to fool Sergeant Ishito. Ten minutes was all she needed, just long enough to get on a subway train.

  Sandy tied a gauzy scarf around her head, carefully pulling the front edges forward a little to partly conceal her profile. She picked up a tote bag, borrowed from her neighbor earlier that day for this specific purpose. She placed the radio, still blaring, on the coffee table in the living room to cover the sound of her apartment door opening and closing. Then she stepped out into the hall, locking the door behind her—and in that instant knew the panic a high-diver must feel at the moment of losing her balance.

  Dio, this was never going to work. Her downstairs neighbor was ten years older than Sandy, and two inches shorter. She had a different posture, a different gait. Ishito would stop her before she got half a block away from the building. Charlie would think she’d stood him up. She wouldn’t find Dooley. Tommy would go to prison. And Ted Gaine would never look at her again except with his official police eyes.

  No, forget Ted Gaine! Forget everyone except Tommy…

  A moment later, Sandy was breathing normally again. If Ishito stopped her, he stopped her. At least she would have the satisfaction of knowing that she’d tried to clear her brother. Slowly, she negotiated the wooden stairs in her sensible shoes and pulled open the street door.