by Tim Baker
We watch them wheel the corpse onto the street, see the lurching shadows cast by the flashbulbs outside, the press moving in close, consuming the carcass, so that the ambulance attendants have to jostle their way forward; jackal snarls and hyena growls venting the air, everyone feasting on the crime, tearing at the carrion that was once a little boy, the ambulance attendants trying to force open the doors against the clawing crush for the . . . ‘Jesus H. Christ!’
Schiller looks at me as though I were a snake suddenly weaving its way up out of the drain in his kitchen sink. ‘What?’
‘The driver!’ My whole body shivers with the recognition; with the goddamn implications, door after door opening, images coming at me out from the past, every one of them revealing ugliness and truth. ‘The fucking driver. I got him, the son of a bitch.’
Schiller tears his cigar out of his mouth and stomps on it, as though it were alive. ‘Don’t just stand there looking like you’re having a heart attack. Talk to me for Christ’s sake! What about the driver?’
‘The ambulance. Linda Vista . . . ’
Schiller looks up at the corpse being loaded into the ambulance, then back at me. ‘Linda Vista? But the ambulance is going to City Morgue.’
‘He was the ambulance driver at Linda Vista.’
‘What ambulance driver?’
‘This morning, outside the hospital, when I was with Rico, remember?’
He scratches his head. ‘Vaguely . . . ’
He doesn’t remember a thing. ‘Don’t you get it? Where do ambulance drivers go?’
‘To accidents . . . ?’
And him a captain. ‘Where do they take people?’
’To the hospital . . . ’
‘And where else do they take people?’ Schiller’s thinking. I point to the ambulance in front of us. We say the words together: ‘To the morgue . . . ’
‘Don’t you get it . . . ?’ He stares at me, his head tilted, straining hard; willing himself to understand but not quite managing. ‘What if they snatched another kid’s body from the morgue? Or from some goddamn funeral home?’
Schiller’s stumped. ‘But why would they do . . . ’ His jaw drops. ‘Oh, Jesus, Mary . . . ’ And fucking Joseph, he gets it at last. He turns, watching the ambulance scream away. ‘You’re telling me that’s not Ronnie Bannister inside there . . . ?’ He shakes his head. Too big a leap of faith. He can’t just go from case solved—no matter how unsatisfactory for the kid and the Old Man—to case still wide open, and getting more complicated by the second.
‘The ambulance driver has access to stiffs. They heard about the kidnapping and snatched the body of a dead boy who’s the same age as the Bannister kid. Then they pretended to be the kidnappers and staged the ransom.’
Schiller takes a few moments to stew on it. He grew up with meat-and-potatoes criminals. He’s not used to exotic varieties of crime. ‘But that means . . . ’
‘Ronnie Bannister’s still out there. And if we’re lucky, still alive.’
Schiller swears. ‘Chief Parker just called the Old Man and told him they’d found the body of his son.’
‘Parker’s wrong. That kid’s been dead for days. Those cuts were done postmortem, I’d stake my life on it.’
‘If you’re wrong—’
‘Fuck wrong. What if I’m right?’ I start hustling Schiller out through a side door. ‘You’ve got to send someone over to the DMV.’
Schiller looks at his watch. ‘They’re closed.’
‘Wake ’em. Have them pull the records of all the ambulance drivers. Match their licenses with their certificates. We can nail him through the records.’
‘If you can recognize him . . . ’
‘You saw him too.’ Sullen silence. ‘Don’t worry, I couldn’t forget that face, even if I wanted to.’
I head towards my car. Schiller calls out to me. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’
‘Linda Vista.’
He freezes; ossified by fear. ‘Are you out of your mind? We’ve got to get back to Parker, to the Old Man. They’re both expecting us.’
‘They can wait. I’ve going to Linda Vista. That’s where this case gets solved. Maybe someone there knows the name of the ambulance driver. He might even have been the guy who dropped Hidalgo there.’
‘Could be . . . ’ Schiller rubs his chin speculatively with those giant hands of his, adjusting the jaw with great, rolling curves, like a cow chewing its cud. ‘But if he wasn’t? You’d just be wasting time.’
‘Not if Hidalgo’s awake. Not if I can talk to him, or maybe even Elaine Bannister.’
‘A dying man and a woman with a lima bean for a brain? Neither of them are talking.’
‘We’ve still got the driver.’
Schiller follows me to my car. ‘What if nobody knows the driver at Linda Vista?’
‘Then I’ll try the morgue, and if no one knows him there, I try every funeral home in the city.’
‘But . . . ’ The question hurts him to ask—but he has to: ‘Why?’
‘You think it’s normal to even think of snatching a kid’s body in the first place? Criminals have no imagination. There’s only one reason they did it: they snatched the kid’s body because it’s their MO. I think they’ve been running a protection racket for stiffs. Snatching and selling corpses; trading body parts . . . ’
Schiller’s face twists in disgust. ‘Who ever heard of such a thing?’
‘Just because we live in modern times doesn’t mean they’ve stopped ancient rackets. Grave snatching is as old as the pyramids.’ I slap my pockets for my car keys and then I remember. I swear. ‘I need a car.’
‘What happened to yours?’
‘Long story.’ I point to the one I arrived in. ‘That one is stolen.’
‘Evidence. We’ll impound it.’ He gestures to the mayhem outside the house. ‘Pick a driver. Stay in touch . . . ’
I nod to a young cop. ‘Marching orders. We’re going to Linda Vista.’
The cop looks at Schiller. He doesn’t like taking orders from a civilian. Schiller shoves him towards the curb. ‘Take him wherever he needs to go. He’s working for Mr. Bannister.’
The cop looks back at me with different eyes. Servile. Greedy. I smile. ‘Help us find the kid and you might even get a piece of that reward money.’ That’s all it takes: the fat tip at the end. Nobody cares about the going. It’s only the payoff that counts, everyone jostling right at the finishing line, pushing and shoving to get to be the doorman with the open palm and the false smile. Charon in a peaked cap and livery suit.
The cop glances over at the house, puzzled. ‘But . . . Haven’t they just found the kid?’
‘Don’t believe everything you read in the papers . . . ’
‘It’s already in the papers?’
Literal guy. I better be extra careful with traffic directions. ‘Forget about it, kid, and get a move on. We got a lot of turf to cover.’
He switches on the siren. It starts up as a hesitant, simpering moan, augmenting to a throaty protest with a touch of evil in the lower registers. Then it starts to sing its song, remembering the melody, rising high above the other cars, swelling up to our lonely, empty sky.
I settle back in the seat, watching the traffic ceding to us—not with deference but with resentment and fear; like in the old days when the king’s bodyguards marched before him with whips, clearing subjects out of the way. Red pulses on and off, reflecting against the hood and flashing across our faces, masking then unmasking us in the colour of blood. In this world, we’re all stained with guilt. It’s not about doing right, it’s too late for that. It’s just about atonement. And a dash of revenge.
I think of Tommy’s killer—out there, drinking a beer, the sun on his face. One day I will find him and kill him. It suddenly feels like old times again. Back on the Force. In a squad ca
r with a partner I don’t trust, cars scattering out of our way. Owning the street.
Rows of telegraph poles fly by, post after post, their arms stretched out like the crosses of Spartacus and his crucified army, leading all the way back to Rome.
‘Where did you say we were going?’
‘Linda Vista.’
‘What’s at Linda Vista?’
Maybe a name for the driver. Maybe a word from Elaine Bannister. Maybe a clue that will save a kid’s life.
I turn to the rookie. ‘Why don’t you mind your own business, shut your fucking mouth, and drive.’
CHAPTER 32
Los Angeles 1963
Hastings watched Walter Stark get out of his car and slam the door, pausing to look up and down the street before crossing to the porch at the end of a well-kept pathway. It was a mob safe house, on the right side of Griffith Park—if you were a dentist. If you were a mobster, you were a long way from home.
Stark slowly unlatched the screen door, listened against the wooden door, then tried the doorknob. Locked. He sorted through a hoop of keys in his hand, looked around once more, then started comparing keys and lock. He was halfway through the loop when he found what he wanted, opened the door and disappeared inside.
Hastings had been waiting all day for Stark to show. Roselli had put out the hit, right after New York. Maybe Roselli thought Stark had something to do with tipping off Kennedy at the Sherry Netherland. Maybe Roselli thought Stark had found out about the new arrangements in Dallas.
Stark was a full-time burglar and a part-time hit man. Capable of taking out Hastings if he had a little luck on his side. And from what Hastings had heard, luck was something Stark carried with him at all times, alongside his skeleton keys and glass cutter.
Howard Hughes hired Stark as he own yeggman, always over easy. It might have been the Hughes connection that had brought down the contract on Stark. When you’re as powerful as Howard Hughes, your enemies become desperate. They’ll take any target, no matter how petty. They’ll slash your tires, poison your cat, piss in your swimming pool. Killing Stark would be like putting a rock through Hughes’s window. An anonymous manifestation of hate and frustration, but a minor inconvenience for Hughes, in the run of things.
Hastings glanced up and down the street. He’d been waiting in the car for hours, watching the purple noon swell into the blinding yellow nothing of a phosphorescent LA afternoon. A white butterfly settled on the windshield, magnified by the sun. Every line of its segmented body was bleached of colour; X-rayed and exposed. It fluttered away, leaving a faint powder behind. Hastings hit the windshield wipers. One single arc. That’s all it took to remove all trace of the butterfly ever being there. Whether it’s the blade of a windshield wiper or a navaja sevillana, the results are always the same: now you’re here; now you’re not.
Hastings got out of the car, walking quickly across the road, a large brown shopping bag cradled in each arm. He’d cut a hole out for his right hand, which held a suppressed .45 hidden amongst the masquerade of retail. The other bag was full of post-hit cleaning material. He rang the doorbell with his elbow.
An alarmed silence sweated its way through the door. Hastings could feel the fight-or-flight reflex pulsing on the other side. But played out in a suburban landscape, where drama constituted a neighbour’s dog shitting on your lawn, it had lost its fatal resonance. It was about avoiding the landlady or hiding the bottle of gin under the bed, not taking a copper-jacketed .45 to the chest. Hastings rang again. Stark decided to speak, his voice dry with apprehension. ‘Who is it?’
‘Groceries.’
A long pause. Stark wasn’t supposed to be there. He was weighing risk and consequence. It couldn’t be the cops, because they would have just kicked the door in. The shrink who lived there was with his receptionist at the Hotel Bel-Air. Who could it be but the delivery guy? ‘Just leave it outside.’
‘Right next to the tip?’
A laugh. Stark’s sense of humour was about to get him killed.
The door unclicked.
Stark had a sheepish smile on his face and two coins in his hand as he opened the door, his eyes meeting Hastings’s through the screen, the smile gone with the flash of realisation: in a moment all of this would end. The shadows in the house from the drawn blinds; the glimpse of blue sky through the screen, the red Dodge passing on the street outside; the smell of newly-mown lawn and the insistent bark of an unseen dog. The mild headache he had endured those last three days, the throat raw from smoking; the hard-on he woke up with that morning.
Memory was about to end. The sound of his parents fighting through their closed bedroom door; falling on his first bike ride then, only three years later, singing papers through the air and slapping doors like targets; kissing down in the clearing by the river, solving the mysteries of adolescence. Early marriage—unhappy, broken. War. Survival. Women; mostly paid for. Work: always begrudged until he started with the crew. Then work became the thing most lived for. Almost a love. The best part was always the run at the end to the jingle of treasure inside black satin bags.
And it was that elation that Walter Stark took with him as the two holes appeared in the screen, the bloom of fragmented metal powdering the air, inconsequential as the butterfly’s dusty trace; the shots swallowed inside the silencer with the soft, soothing plop of a falling pillow, the best burglar in California already dead on the floor. Inconsequential for the neighbours who later thought they might have heard something; for the cops who chalked the outline of the body on the floor; for the newspaper subs who argued over the layout before it got pushed to page eight anyway; for everyone except the victim. Balloons exploding at a birthday party. A father on his knees finishing the decking out back. It sounded like something normal, not a killing.
Hastings closed the door behind him and pulled out the shower curtain. He combed the man’s pockets. Some cash. The usual ID, both real and phony. A hatcheck receipt from The Carousel Club. Dallas. That took Hastings one step closer to understanding why. A book with phone numbers: very reckless for a man in Stark’s position. Another possible why. Hastings collected the two shells, bundled the body in the shower curtain, and started the scrub-down of evidence. It was an oddly domestic scene.
Thirty minutes later, all was in order. No prints. No trace. No clues. Every year thousands of people disappeared. Lonely people, crazy people. Those who estrange; and those who are estranged. Stark would be just one more in that sad numbers game.
Hastings sat on the sofa, going through Stark’s address book. Chicago names . . . Momo. Alderisio. Nicoletti. Accardo. Dangerous names to speak out loud, let alone write down. No wonder they wanted him dead. Stark was originally from Chicago. But he’d drifted towards Texas and the West Coast. Why put up with shitty weather when there were easy pickings in Hollywood and Vegas. The west was the best.
There were lots of Dallas contacts: Adam Granston; Jack Ruby; Joe Civello. LA names. DeSimone. Roselli. Hastings. New Orleans names. Carlos Marcello was the only one Hastings had heard of. Alek James Hidell kept reappearing, always with Lee Oswald and OH Lee.
Hastings started connecting names to towns. Miami won by a long shot. Maurice Bishop. Orlando Bosch. Bill Harvey. Felipe Vidal Santiago. David Sánchez Morales.
He turned to the last few pages of the book, filled with notes, when a name reached out from the past and slapped him hard across the face. Nick Alston. Stark even had his address, which was impossible. No one knew where Alston was. Hastings went back to the Miami names. Now they were making sense. They weren’t connected to the Mob, they were connected to the Company.
Hastings was officially out of his depth. He tore out the page with Alston’s address and set it alight. Then he went upstairs to the shrink’s study. It was time to get the second part of the job done.
Hastings had already been to the doc’s Beverly Hills office the night before. The locks on the fi
ling cabinets had been comical. He had simply levered up the tongues with a knife blade. At home, the shrink had added a combination padlock to the top shelf of his filing cabinet, a red flag that told Hastings everything he needed to know. Access was easily obtained with the help of a simple tin shim. Hastings went through the files, starting at the middle, coming quickly to ‘M’. As he was taking the Monroe documents another name caught his eye: Marlowe. That file went too. He closed the cabinet and was about to reapply the lock when an instinct hit him. He went through the files once more, this time starting at the beginning, stopping at ‘B’ for Bannister.
He reinserted the lock and was doing the final wipe-down for prints, when he noticed the unsealed stamped manila envelope on the desk. Stuffed full of legal documents. He rifled through them. The wife must have found out about the receptionist. He emptied the contents, hiding them behind a row of encyclopaedias on a bookcase, then wrote his pseudonym and his address in Chula Vista on a piece of paper and pasted it over the address on the envelope. He went downstairs and got to work fast, going through all three files, lifting the documents he wanted, including all the notes from Eva Marlow’s last session, when she talked about the visit he and Luchino had paid her in New York. He slipped the documents and most of the photos into the empty manila envelope and sealed it. He would drop it off at the first mailbox he saw. There was enough dynamite left in the files to keep Roselli busy.
Hastings looked up from the envelope, his gun already in his hand. But all he could hear was the loud putter of a refrigerator struggling against the heat, and the distant splash of an outdoor swimming pool. He was jumpy. Hastings turned on the radio low, wiping the switch with his handkerchief. Midnight by Hal Singer. Sensual. Stirring. A dangerous place to be. He looked at his watch. It’d be dark in an hour. The shrink had booked a table at the Dresden for eight. Plenty of time to get rid of Stark’s body. To go through all the details one more time. Fly to Dallas the following morning. Meet up with Luchino. Stop the hit. Escape to Houston by car. Fly back to LA. Pick up Bella from the kennel. Go straight to Big Bear Lake. Wait for her; then run. It was so clear. It was so risky. Hastings closed his eyes and, without seeking it, fell asleep to the lament of Charlie Shavers’s trumpet.
