The Second Assassin

by Paul Christopher

  But then it was time to go. He finished the last drops of the brandy then let the uniformed doorman under the hotel portico whistle up a taxi. He rode back to the Pan American terminal on the docks and boarded his flight with time to spare. Slipping away from the harbour’s embrace and climbing high above the dark blue water of the Florida Straits, Raines found himself looking down towards the sea, searching for Spindrift’s wake, knowing he wasn’t going to find it, and thinking about the last sight he’d had of John Bone and the odd expression on his face.

  Pity.

  Chapter Four

  Sunday, April 16, 1939

  New York City

  Jane woke up to the nightmare sounds of Ponce de Leon, her screaming parrot, and the ear-splitting clatter of the telephone a few feet away on her desk. She groaned, threw off the thin blanket covering her and sat up on the couch. Her head was pounding from the effects of one too many bourbons the night before at the China Doll and her tongue felt like the bottom of Ponce de Leon’s cage. She realised she’d gone to bed with her clothes on and made a small noise of self-disgust. Torchy Blane would definitely not sleep in her clothes, except under very trying and worthwhile circumstances. Jane pushed the palms of her hands into her eye sockets and tried to swallow away the taste in her mouth but it didn’t do any good. The telephone continued to ring and the bird screeched out a stream of foul-mouthed Italian, shuffling back and forth on its hanging roost in the open-doored cage at the far end of the couch.

  The bird made a grating, ratchet noise somewhere at the back of its throat then swore again. ‘Eh, paisan! Fungulo mi!’

  ‘Shut up,’ Jane croaked weakly. Neither the bird nor the telephone paid any attention. Jane stood up, staggered over to the desk and dropped down into her ancient wooden swivel chair. She picked up the phone, and when the ringing fell silent, so did Ponce de Leon.

  ‘What?’ said Jane.

  ‘It’s Hennessy.’ Dan Hennessy was a detective sergeant on police commissioner Lewis J. Valentine’s so-called Confidential Squad and the best contact Jane had at police headquarters on Centre Street. His hobby was making passes at her and being told exactly what he could do with himself. Still, he persevered.

  ‘I don’t care who it is, you Mick snatcher. It’s Sunday.’ Jane blinked at the old Lady Bulova on her wrist. ‘Jesus, Dan, it’s eight-thirty in the morning.’

  ‘And I don’t care what day it is or what time.’ Hennessy laughed. ‘Get your sweet ass off that flea-bitten couch of yours. I’ve got one you might be interested in.’

  ‘One what?’ Jane asked. She reached out, tapped a Camel out of the pack on her desk and lit it. It made her mouth taste even worse but each drag of the stale cigarette woke her up a little more.

  ‘A corpse.’

  ‘What’s so interesting about a corpse?’ She reached out again, this time pulling her notebook closer and picking up a pencil. On any given day there were all sorts of corpses in New York to choose from but a corpse from Dan Hennessy was probably going to be a special one.

  ‘This one’s in Englewood.’

  ‘As in Englewood, New Jersey?’ Jane asked, surprised. What was a headquarters cop doing on the other side of the Hudson?

  ‘Closer to Tenafly, actually,’ Hennessy answered. ‘The Palisades on 9W. A little roadhouse called the Rustic Cabin.’

  ‘Sounds charming. A Jersey Copacabana?’

  ‘More like a black and tan,’ said the detective. A black and tan was a nightclub that catered to white people as well as coloured. In Tenafly the whites would probably be Italians since they weren’t allowed in most of the right nightspots.

  ‘Who is it?’ Jane asked.

  ‘A lawyer. His name is Howard Raines. According to his business card he works for Fallon and McGee.’ There was a grim little pause. Jane felt her heart give a little flip. ‘He also happens to have your business card in his wallet. You mind giving me the skinny on that, Jane, before I have to answer some awkward questions from upstairs?’

  Fallon and McGee was a company with well-known connections to both Tammany and the Mob. Jane swivelled around in the chair and looked out the grimy window and down to the street. Six storeys down Fifth Avenue, Broadway and Twenty-third Street came together in a deserted, Belgian brick plaza. As usual there were a couple of two-tone Checker cabs parked in front of the Walgreens Drugstore at the foot of the Flatiron Building’s pointy end.

  Jane sighed, remembering. ‘He used to be a friend of mine.’

  ‘Used to be?’

  ‘We grew up together. Went to school together. He was the only friend I had who didn’t make fun of my sister.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  There was a long pause as Jane debated with herself how much to reveal to Hennessy. Finally, she said, ‘I went my way. He went his.’

  ‘And the business card?’

  ‘Just that, business. We talked once in a while.’

  ‘What did you give him?’

  My cherry, when I was eighteen years old in the back of his old man’s Durant, was the thought that ran through her head. But all she said was, ‘Nothing that wasn’t legal. Nothing at all really. We had a drink once or twice at the Plaza. I haven’t seen him in a year, maybe more. I don’t think he had too many friends and I don’t think he was a very good lawyer. Not the way he talked, anyway.’

  ‘Well, he’s a dead lawyer now. You want to come down here and take pictures or not? Kill two birds and all since you can officially identify the body while you’re down here.’

  ‘Give me the exact address of this place and I’ll go get a cab.’ Jane turned around in her chair again and stubbed her cigarette in a Stork Club ashtray she’d filched on her one and only visit to the place. ‘And you can also tell me why you sound like you’ve got the jitters about it.’

  ‘I got the jitters because we’re getting a lot of heat to bury it already. Someone doesn’t want this one getting even close to page one.’

  ‘The address,’ said Jane.

  ‘East Clinton Avenue and 9W,’ Hennessy said. ‘Looks like a big log cabin. You can’t miss it.’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  ‘I’ll be here. Got a couple of witnesses to talk to – the owner and some crooner he hired to sing with the band.’

  ‘On my way.’ Jane hung up the phone. Across the room Ponce de Leon ducked out of his cage and flew noisily to the hat rack by the front door of the office. ‘Shit on my raincoat and I’ll eat you for dinner,’ warned Jane. She picked up another cigarette, lit it and headed for the adjoining bathroom.

  Five minutes later she came out of the bathroom with her hair wet and her teeth brushed. Jane pulled slacks, blouse and a pair of old deck shoes out of the standing cupboard she kept by the door, found some fresh underwear and got dressed. She took an already loaded Contax out of the second drawer of her filing cabinet, grabbed her shoulder bag and left the office, blowing Ponce de Leon a kiss on her way out and locking the door behind her. Two minutes later she was climbing into one of the hacks in front of Walgreens and heading up Broadway towards the George Washington Bridge.

  It being Sunday there was virtually no traffic to slow them down all the way up Broadway and even less on the bridge so Jane wasn’t far off on her predicted half hour. Pulling into the gravel lot of the roadhouse, Jane handed the driver a five and two ones, more than an hour with a Carey Limousine would have cost but fair enough since the driver had to deadhead back to Manhattan from the Jersey side. Jane blinked in the harsh, hot sunlight, dug her Ray-Bans and her cigarettes out of her bag and lit up as the taxi backed and turned, then headed down 9W towards the bridge.

  The Rustic Cabin was pretty much the way Dan Hennessy had described it – a large log building with a wrap-around veranda and a wire frame and light-bulb sign that ran along the roofline. It was set in the middle of a half-acre triangular-shaped parking lot with an entrance on both 9W and the narrower strip of Clinton Avenue that intersected with the highway. The back of the triangle was a scruffy strip
of trees, tall grass and weeds running beside something that looked like a ditch or a small stream. Beyond that, Jane could see a farmer’s field. Not the centre of the universe by any means but Tenafly was only a few miles up Clinton Avenue and Hoboken wasn’t that much farther. Not a bad spot to get away from the wife and kiddies and maybe even bet on a horse or play some poker in a windowless back room.

  There were three vehicles in the parking lot – two Hoboken Police Indian motorcycles and Dan Hennessy’s familiar dark green La Salle. No meat wagon and no sign of any other press. Hennessy, minus his regulation brown suit jacket and wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, was standing with the Hoboken cops by the line of trees at the far end of the property. They were all smoking and staring down into the ditch. A skinny-looking kid with a face as sharp as a hatchet was standing on the veranda by the front door, smoking a cigarette in short, jerky puffs as though he was nervous.

  The kid had a pompadour, his shoes looked like Johnston & Murphy’s and the suit was definitely expensive. Too young to be the owner of the place, which meant he was probably the crooner Hennessy had mentioned. The detective turned, saw Jane and waved her over. Jane crossed the parking lot with the kid on the veranda watching her every step of the way, taking in everything from the way her tits moved around inside the silk of her blouse to the swing of her can as she passed by. She wrinkled her nose like she’d smelled something bad but she knew he was smiling at her with one of those know-it-all grins and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She sighed and wondered if there’d ever come a time when men weren’t wolves and women weren’t sheep.

  She reached the far edge of the property and Hennessy introduced her to the Hoboken cops, who’d been the first ones called to the scene. Jane looked down into the ditch and saw the body for the first time. Her heart did a little flip again but she bit the inside of her cheek, forcing herself not to get the slightest bit teary-eyed, because if she did, Hennessy would never let her forget it. The corpse was lying on its back, feet pointing up the slope, ankles crossed, the back of the head sitting in the slow-moving water trickling down the streambed.

  The body was dressed in a dark brown suit and a white shirt with a large red stain in the middle of the chest. There was another wound in the left temple, a small dark hole and a patch of blood-matted ginger hair marking the spot. It was as hot in Jersey as it was in Manhattan and the dark, sweet scent of rot was already oozing up out of the ditch and into the air.

  ‘That him?’ Hennessy asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ The first dead friend she’d ever had. Probably not the last. ‘Not a lot of blood,’ Jane commented. ‘A dump job?’

  Hennessy nodded. ‘That’s what we’re figuring.’ The detective cleared his throat and gave the state cops a long look. They bobbed their heads and moved back towards their vehicles. ‘You going to take some pictures?’ Hennessy asked.

  Jane nodded briefly, still looking down at the body, the strap of the camera case still looped over her shoulder. She turned and looked back at the cop, suddenly realising how she’d been conned. ‘You really are a son of a bitch.’

  The big, flat-faced Irishman tried to look innocent, eyes widening. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means it’s Sunday and you couldn’t get the regular police photographer to drag his sorry ass out here.’

  ‘He was taking his family to church and then out to his poor old mother’s grave,’ said Hennessy. ‘Besides, you knew the guy.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Jane shook her head and sighed. ‘How much?’

  ‘Dollar a glossy. Eight-by-tens.’

  ‘The hack cost me seven.’

  ‘We’ll pay it.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘At least a dozen.’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Done,’ said Hennessy and Jane began popping the Contax out of its case.

  Jane eased herself down into the ditch and squatted low. She took a close shot of the head wound, trying to think of anything else but whose head it was. ‘Looks like the Mob,’ she said, clicking the shutter. ‘Two to the heart and one to the head, just to make sure.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Hennessy said, standing above her. The big detective reached into his pocket and took out a wooden direction marker. ‘Here, use this,’ he said and tossed it down to Jane. The marker had two arms, riveted together in the centre. At the end of each arm was a letter, E, W, N, S. Jane opened it up and placed it on the soggy ground beside the head with the N lying roughly parallel to 9W.

  ‘That good?’ asked Jane, glancing up at Hennessy. ‘Good enough,’ he said and nodded.

  Jane noticed that Howie was wearing his nice Omega Chronograph, the one his father had given him for passing the bar exam about a week before the old man died. She took a shot of it in case one of the morgue boys got a little light-fingered. Jane continued to shoot. ‘You said there was heat.’

  ‘The owner of the place called the cops. They found Raines’s wallet and radioed the identification in to their headquarters. Since Raines comes from Manhattan they called Centre Street too.’

  ‘You caught it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Hennessy. The Irishman was regularly on the outs with his wife, Maureen, and he often slept on a cot in one of the police headquarters dormitory rooms. ‘I wasn’t even out the door when I got a call from the PC’s office. They already had Raines’s name and they told me to go slow on the investigation. Play it by the book.’

  Jane finished shooting, picked up the direction marker and climbed up out of the ditch. ‘What does that mean?’ she asked, ignoring the hand Hennessy was holding out to help her up out of the ditch. She grabbed a root instead and boosted herself back up onto the gravel of the parking lot.

  ‘Send the body off to the morgue and forget about it until I’m told otherwise.’ He shrugged. ‘Gonzales and his people have bodies stacked up like cordwood down there. This one just goes to the bottom of the pile, that’s all.’ Thomas A. Gonzales was the chief medical examiner for New York, with his shop at Bellevue Hospital.

  ‘You going to sit still for that?’ Jane asked.

  ‘I like my job,’ Hennessy responded. ‘I intend to keep it.’ He turned and glanced in the direction of the two Hoboken officers. Both of the motorcycles were pulling noisily out of the parking lot. ‘They want to keep their jobs too.’

  ‘They had the same word come down on them?’

  ‘The order of the day seems to be get amnesia.’ He nodded towards the ditch. ‘Our Mr Raines would seem to swing a lot of weight.’

  Jane slipped the camera back into its case. ‘Anything in his pockets?’

  Hennessy nodded. ‘Claim check from the Ariston and a bar receipt from Gloria’s.’

  Jane nodded. The Ariston was an apartment hotel on the corner of Broadway and West Fifty-fifth Street that had a luxurious steam-bath arrangement in the basement. Gloria’s was a bar on Third Avenue at Fortieth Street. Jane knew about both of them and the kind of men who went there. ‘Somebody want to make it look like he was gay?’ she said.

  ‘Sure looks like it. You knew him. Was he?’

  Jane brushed it off. ‘Not that I know of. What about your witnesses? They see anything?’

  ‘The owner says no.’

  ‘What about the kid on the veranda over there. The one in the swank suit with the gash eyes.’

  ‘Name’s Frankie Sinatra. Also answers to Frankie Satin. The owner says he’s a waiter who sings sometimes. The kid leaves out the waiter part. He’s the one who found the body in the first place.’

  ‘How’d he do that?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Said it was about four in the morning. Place just cleared out. The toilets in the club were plugged up so he came out here to take a leak. That’s when he saw Mr Raines there.’ Hennessy nodded towards the ditch again.

  ‘He see anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe he killed him.’

  ‘Kid’s too skinny to hurt a fly.’

  ‘Sinat
ra,’ said Jane. ‘Italian?’

  Hennessy laughed. ‘Don’t go getting big ideas, toots. I did a little checking. Frankie’s a nobody. His mother’s a rabbit killer and his father is a fireman.’ Rabbit killer was a cop term for abortionist. ‘If they have any connection with the rackets, it’s the wrong kind,’ the detective added.

  A black Willys panel truck came off 9W and crunched its way onto the parking lot. The only marking on the meat wagon was the word MORGUE in white letters across the back doors. Two men in black uniforms climbed down out of the truck and approached Hennessy. ‘Where is it?’ said the older of the two men.

  ‘The ditch,’ Hennessy said and walked back towards his own car, Jane beside him.

  ‘So that’s it?’ Jane shook her head. ‘A junior lawyer for a Mob firm gets bumped and the PCO tells you to bury it. It stinks.’

  ‘Sure it stinks,’ said Hennessy, pausing to light a cigarette. Jane joined him and they both watched as the two men from the morgue brought up Raines’s body on a stretcher and loaded it into the back of the meat wagon.

  ‘You telling me I’m supposed to forget about this? Howie wasn’t much of a friend but he deserves better than this.’

  Hennessy sucked on his Lucky Strike, squinting into the sun as the meat wagon doors were slammed shut. ‘Make two sets of pictures. Send one set to me so I can show something in the tile and keep a second set somewhere safe just in case the ones in the file disappear.’

  ‘And then what?’ Jane asked. The two morgue attendants climbed back into the Willys and drove away.

  ‘This thing smells so bad no cop is ever going to find out anything.’

  ‘So it’s a dead end?’

  ‘I said no cop is ever going to find out anything. I didn’t say anything about reporters.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do? We were friends from a long time ago. I wasn’t married to the guy,’ said Jane. ‘There’s divorce dicks in my building who know more about investigating murders than I do.’