The Junkyard Dog (Jimmy Flannery Mysteries Book 1)

by Robert Campbell

  "And who knows but maybe someday I'll be a ward boss when you want to be a superior court judge, am I right?"

  "No, you're not right. I try to conduct my business a case at a time and my life a day at a time. I like where I am when I'm there. I don't spend a great deal of time speculating about the future."

  "But you spend some time? You got to spend some time thinking about where you're going to be ten years down the road—twenty years down the road."

  "One has an inventory of prudent expectations."

  "I couldn't of said that better if I thought about it for a year," I says admiringly. "You know a girl named Helen Brickhouse?"

  "Is she part of your difficulty?"

  "No. It's more like she's part of your difficulty." He don't even twitch.

  Benny, the waiter, comes over in his rusty tuxedo and stands there with his pad in his hand like he'll stand there for a century waiting for us to tell him what we want.

  "You say that you recommend the kidneys and sausages?"

  "The best."

  "A minute steak, medium rare. Thick-cut potatoes. Peas, but only if they're fresh . . ."

  "Everything we got is fresh," Benny says.

  ". . . French-roast coffee, half and half, not cream."

  "I'll have the same," I says.

  "Benny lies, you know," Streeter says. "Sometimes the peas are frozen."

  "How about Helen Brickhouse?"

  "I don't know a Helen Brickhouse."

  "How about Helen Addison?"

  "I don't know a Helen Addison."

  "How about Helen Caplet?"

  This time he ain't so good at the game. His old eyes give him away. "Are these all the same girl?" he says.

  I take a picture of Helen Brickhouse out of my pocket and put it on the table in front of him. "Same girl, different names. Professional names."

  "Is she an actress?"

  "She was a whore."

  "Was?"

  "She's dead."

  "If you're involved in a homicide or a willful death, I'm not the lawyer for you, Mr. Flannery."

  "You might not be the lawyer I need. You might not be the friend I'd like to have. But you're the man I want to talk to."

  His head snaps around and he's looking for the waiter while his right hand is fishing a fat fountain pen out of his pocket.

  "Benny, he says, "bring me the check right away." Then he turns to me. "I'm not going to eat the lunch we ordered. I'm going to pay the check because I'm not going to eat it and I don't want you to be able to say you incurred any expense on my behalf while seeking council which I could not give."

  "Eat, don't eat. Pay, don't pay," I says. "That's up to you, but I'm telling you that you're going to talk to me. Here or someplace else. Here or maybe one night when you're sitting breaking bread with your friend Judge Ogilvie, who I think maybe does you a small favor by having the case against Joe Asbach put in a drawer . . ."

  "Wild speculations . . ."

  ". . . or maybe when you're kissing up to Velletri or DiBella . . .".

  ". . . and even wilder accusations are defensible in a court of law . . ."

  ". . . or maybe when you're with your very good friend Danny Tartaglia and a couple of playmates like Helen Brickhouse."

  "I don't know any Helen Brickhouse."

  "Ah, you're lying to me, Counselor. Maybe you didn't know Helen called herself Caplet or Addison, but you knew her when she was Helen Brickhouse. You knew her before, or maybe just at the time, she got into the life. You fixed up your very good friend Danny Tartaglia with Helen Brickhouse."

  Benny brings the check and the lunches.

  "Do you want I should put the plates down or did you decide you don't want to eat?"

  "Put the plates down, Benny," I says, "and give me the check. Attorney Streeter's decided to let me treat him to lunch after all."

  "Why would I be doing all this?" Streeter says.

  "A handle's a handle. You do a special favor for Tartaglia, maybe someday he's in a position to do a special favor for you. That don't work, you always got DiBella, who'll maybe thank you a lot if you talk sense to his horny son-in-law, which ain't got brains enough not to dirty the sandbox. One thing you lawyers learn in law school, that's how to come out ahead no matter who loses, no matter who wins."

  "What do you want?"

  "I want to know what happened with Tartaglia and Helen."

  "How will you use it?"

  "To squeeze. Maybe to put him behind bars if I can. To punish him good for what he done, one way or another."

  "If this ever goes to trial . . ."

  "Then you admit there's a crime?"

  ". . . I'll deny telling you anything."

  "I'm asking you do you think he did murder?"

  "What I think and you think has no force in law. I can't place him at the scene of the bombing. Can you?"

  "Can you place him at a flat in the Twenty-seventh over to Benjamin Alley?"

  "When?"

  "Three nights ago."

  "I have to think about it. I can't just drag up an itinerary of the week and spell it out."

  "It's what you lawyers ask people to do on the witness stand."

  "That's the courtroom. This is real life. I'll think about it. If I remember, it might give him an alibi, you know."

  "I'm not out to hang anybody without cause. I got an idea you'll decide about what an alibi for Tartaglia would be worth to you. Tell me about him and Helen."

  He starts to tell me about himself and Tartaglia and Theresa. And the story of Helen Brickhouse is in it, too. You got to understand, the way it's being told to me maybe isn't altogether the way it happened, because Streeter's doing his best to make himself look as good as he can.

  "I knew Danny in law school. We were not exactly close, but I suppose you could say we were more than acquaintances, perhaps even friends."

  Streeter tells me how ambitious Tartaglia is even when they was in school. How hungry for success and money and the best of everything.

  "The schools are pouring out lawyers," Streeter says. "We have the most litigious nation in the world, but even before Danny and I graduate, there aren't enough cases to go around because we also have more attorneys per capita than any nation in the world. Incomes are falling. Positions with top firms go to the superstars. You start to think about chasing ambulances."

  "I can get lawyers plenty of work, they want work. Poor people who can't find their way through the system, who get their houses stolen away from them because they sign the wrong paper or don't sign the right paper. Old ladies who . . ."

  "Certainly. Young lawyers talk about . . ."

  ". . . get tossed in the gutter because they can't fight the landlords."

  . ". . . doing storefront work. You quickly learn you can't eat good works."

  "Or drive it around, or live in it by the lakefront."

  "Whatever you say."

  I work on the steak while Streeter tells me how both he and Tartaglia decide that the best place to make it after they get out of law school is in politics. Not as candidates, but as advisers, political managers, image-makers, patronage brokers.

  "Danny decided to take an even shorter route. He met Theresa DiBella and got her to marry him. Did he love her? Don't ask me. I don't know. He didn't say."

  "But you've got an idea."

  "Danny loves money and power above everything else. He uses women like food and drink, to keep him charged up. Theresa was a key to the room with the ladder that led to the top. If there'd been an easier way, he wouldn't have bothered with a wife. He should have loved her. I don't see how he couldn't have loved her, but maybe it's just not in him."

  He lets his eyes go soft, like he's suffering a secret pain, and I know this Streeter as good as I'll ever know anybody. He's an actor and a liar. He'd tell a lie to an elephant in Africa on the long shot that the elephant is shipped to a zoo in Chicago, and tells the story to a talking giraffe which tells it to somebody who might come to Streeter with a dea
l.

  "You met Theresa DiBella the same time that Tartaglia met her?"

  "I didn't meet Theresa until I appeared as best man at their wedding."

  He makes it sound like it was love at first sight for him, but that he swallows his envy and plays the good friend through the years. Patiently waiting, faithful and true, until maybe Theresa needs him.

  "When did Tartaglia start to play?"

  "He'd have started before the last note of the wedding march faded away if he hadn't known he couldn't get away with it. DiBella was watching him like a hawk in the beginning, waiting for any sign that this sonofabitching vandal from the East Coast wasn't doing exactly right by his little girl. So, at first, Danny played it very straight. Why not? He was playing for very high stakes and Theresa wasn't hard to take, even as a steady diet, until he got her pregnant."

  "Then he started looking around?" I says.

  "That's what he wanted to do, but the first child was a girl and didn't take the old man's attention the way a grandson would've done. The next was a girl, as well, but I think Danny was already playing around on the sly by then, and the hell with the chances of being found out. I suppose he thought if a man's careful enough . . ."

  "When did he start getting less careful?"

  "After the third child was born. It was a boy. As far as DiBella was concerned, his son-in-law had done his duty by his daughter. The old man's little girl and princess was a mother now. Three times a mother. And the mother of the next generation that would carry on because DiBella had no sons to have sons."

  "Now he doesn't watch Tartaglia so close," I says.

  "That's correct. These old men are realists. They respect the mother and protect the wife. But what a man does outside the home, he does because he has the juices running in him. Because he has big balls like a bull. Because it's what men do."

  "So, now Tartaglia starts coming home late and going off on long business weekends," I says.

  "That's right."

  "And sometimes you go along?"

  "That's also right." He calls for Benny. "Benny," he says, "this steak is cold. Bring me another."

  "You'll pay for it," Benny says. "You waited too long to complain."

  Streeter nods and waves him away.

  "Tell me the good parts," I says. "You introduce Tartaglia to Helen?"

  "Yes."

  "Where'd you know her from? Cicero?"

  "I met her the first time in New York."

  "You was a customer?"

  He shrugs.

  "I met her again in Chicago through, my interest in art. She was at a showing with a detritus assembler . . ."

  "Is that what they call a junk artist now?"

  ". . . by the name of Bo Addison, a black man of considerable verve."

  "Who piles up old tires and bedsprings and who's got a brother that sells women."

  "Who has a brother who runs a social club in the Twenty-fifth," Streeter says.

  "You're a member?" I says.

  "Addison provided privacy and discretion for a price. That's where Danny saw Helen at first."

  "Why not use her own flat?"

  "She shared with two other working girls. Danny didn't want that."

  "You'd think he'd like the chance for special fun and games."

  "He didn't treat Helen that way. He treated her like a girlfriend. He almost courted her. Maybe it was just another tricky notion. Acting. You know, like some men have girls dress up like schoolgirls or nurses."

  I wonder if Streeter is describing one of his own preferences.

  "Anyway, that's how he treated Helen. And she fell for it."

  "The whore bought the act?"

  "That's how it seemed. She made herself available to him even though it meant cutting down on business."

  "What about the loss of revenue?"

  "Danny made up for that, I think."

  "And anything else?"

  "You mean did he set her up in a flat? I don't think he'd gone that far, but I can't swear to it. Danny stopped giving me a play-by-play description of the games they played. That was different for him, too. It might have been on his mind, though."

  "He was buying into the routine, too?" I says.

  "It looked that way to me. But then she told him she'd stopped taking precautions one weekend when they went to Atlantic City like newlyweds. She told him she'd gotten pregnant that weekend."

  "How did he take it? Did he say?"

  "He started confiding in me again. It shocked him out of whatever fairy tale they'd cooked up together. She was a whore and he was one of the up-and-coming young men with a wife, three children, and a powerful father-in-law. She was a whore playing the 'game' on him. Trying to screw a big payoff out of him. Maybe ready to do blackmail."

  "He was asking you for advice?"

  "Oh, no, he knew what to do. He told her to get it taken care of. He told her to take care of it or he'd have it taken care of."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Because I was there when he told her."

  "Did his father-in-law know anything about this?"

  Streeter shrugs and shows the palms of his hands up and empty.

  "Did Theresa know?"

  "She wouldn't have believed it, even if Danny told her himself."

  He makes this Theresa sound like a clay pot. I don't think she's a clay pot. She was raised like a Sicilian princess. I figure she's a woman with hot blood. I think she puts up with what she's got to put up with when Tartaglia starts to stray. She puts up the good front as long as he don't make her lose honor. I think maybe she cools off her blood with a white fish like this Streeter. And I think, maybe, when it came right down to it, she could've taken a pesky whore out like she was nothing but a fly.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Jackie Boyle sends the list of badge-holders over to my flat by messenger. There's only ninety badges with a two in the middle if it's a three-digit number, but there's one hell of a lot more if it's a four-digit number. It don't matter. There's only sixty-eight permutations either way which have been handed out in the Twenty-fifth. And only one of them belongs to Daniel Tartaglia.

  "We're going to Atlantic City," I says to Mary.

  "It's almost winter," she says.

  "I ain't going to go swimming."

  "It isn't gambling, is it? I hope you're not a gambler, James."

  "I want to talk to some desk clerks."

  "Atlantic City is full of hotels. Therefore, it's also full of desk clerks."

  "Just the desk clerks at the Beau Rivage."

  "Can't you call?"

  "I got to bribe them. You can't bribe a person with a marker."

  Mary arranges to take three days off from the hospital with a friend who'll cover her shift for her.

  On the plane, she shoves in under my arm.

  "You want this should be a honeymoon?" I says.

  "Are you so sure of us, James?" she asks.

  "I'm sure."

  She hesitates, and then she looks up into my face like she wonders about my ability to protect myself out in the cruel world. She also looks sad. "I'm not so sure, James," she says, "but there's no reason in the world why this can't be just like a honeymoon."

  Atlantic City is not for October unless you like to watch wheels go around and around taking money out of your pocket.

  We check in at the Beau Rivage. The desk clerk is wearing a maroon jacket and a hairpiece. He hands the key to the bellhop, who takes our bags and heads for the elevators.

  I ask Mary to go to the shop and buy me some shaving cream, which I forgot to bring along.

  "Let me ask you a question," I says to the clerk.

  "A question," he says.

  "How many desk clerks you got working here?"

  "Three shifts, two to a shift, and the man who fills in on days off. Plus the manager and two assistant managers who take a shift now and then."

  "Ten. You hire more in summer?"

  "Three more."

  "How many of the ten peo
ple working here now was here last summer?"

  "I was here last summer. How important is it that you should know who else was here?"

  I put a ten, a twenty, and a fifty down on the counter all in a row. I cover the twenty and fifty with the folded newspaper I got in my coat pocket.

  "Maybe it ain't important at all," I says. "Maybe having a look at the June register does me just as much good."

  "That would mean four fat files. Have you got the time?"

  "The first week maybe will do me."

  "Divorce case?" he says.

  "Missing person," I says.

  He picks up the ten, folds it, and puts it into his pocket. He goes into the office and comes back in three minutes with the boxes of registration cards for the first and second weeks of June, which is to show me he's a thinker.

  I flip through the cards top to bottom like I'm dealing a deck of cards. How do I know what name Tartaglia used? I don't, but I figure people don't make it hard for themselves to remember a false name. Even so, I know I got to get lucky because maybe Tartaglia uses the name of some favorite old aunt when he's out cheating on his wife.

  But he don't. There it is. He uses the name which Helen goes by in her professional life. Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Caplet, it says.

  "You got a copier in the office?" I says.

  "We have."

  "Will you make me a copy?"

  "It's against the rules."

  I take the newspaper off the twenty. He picks it up and folds it and puts it with my ten. He takes the registration card and is back again with a copy in no more than a minute. He knows the fifty is still under the newspaper. He don't know how to get it, so he thinks about it while he puts the cards back in the box.

  I show him the photograph of Helen.

  "I wish I could say yes," he says. "Look around."

  Even a glance shows me there's a half a dozen women in the lobby who could pass for Helen Brickhouse if you was to go by the picture of her taken when she's laying dead.

  I show him the picture of Helen in the summer dress.

  "Still no cigar," he says.

  I show him the picture of Tartaglia. He picks it up and studies it for a minute.