Separate Cases, page 15
“What the fuck?” he said.
“I want to turn off the stove,” I said. “The water might boil over.”
“Fuck the water, friend,” he shouted, spraying me with spittle. He pushed the barrel of the gun under my chin and said, “I should blow your fucking head off.”
“Don’t kill him,” Wiseguy shouted from the living room, “just bring him the fuck in here!”
“Move, damn it!” Jethro said. He grabbed my jacket and propelled me towards the door. “Shut off the water,” he muttered, walking behind me. “What a dipshit!”
In the living room Linda was sitting on the edge of a sofa. I was sort of surprised at how calm she was—surprised and pleased. When it came time to move, maybe she wouldn’t fall apart on me.
44
“Now,” Wiseguy said, “let’s do this the easy way, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “What’s the easy way?”
“The easy way,” he said, “is for the lady here to give us what we want.”
“Not much chance of that, dickbreath,” Linda said.
I closed my eyes. Just what I needed, a woman who used to watch Hillstreet Blues and thought Mick Belker was cute.
“Ooh,” Wiseguy said, “I just love a tough talkin’ broad. Don’t you love a tough talkin’ broad?” he asked his friend.
“No,” Jethro said, “I don’t.”
I noticed they were being careful not to call each other by name. Still, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t kill us after they got what they wanted, it only meant that they were being pros.
“I take it that means you want to do this the hard way,” Wiseguy said to her.
I answered before she could. There was no telling what she was going to call him this time.
“That depends,” I said. “What’s the hard way?”
“The hard way,” Wiseguy said, “is when my friend here takes the lady into her bedroom and fucks the shit out of her until one of you gives us what we want.”
I looked at Jethro, whose eyes were shining as he undressed Linda with his eyes. He cupped his balls and said to her, “That’s really the hard way.”
“Your dick wouldn’t interest me in a million years, asswipe.”
Asswipe?
“Believe me, honey,” Jethro said, shifting his gun to his left hand and taking her by the arm and yanking her to her feet with his right, “you’re gonna love this.”
“Now wait a minute—” I said as Jethro starting dragging her away.
“Yeah, wait a minute,” Wiseguy said.
“What for?” Jethro demanded.
“Well, I don’t want to spoil your fun,” Wiseguy said to his friend, “but there might be a faster way to do this.”
“Like how?” Jethro asked.
“Yeah, like how?” I echoed.
I was wondering if I had remembered wrong about aerosol cans. Wasn’t there a warning on the back of the can to keep them away from extreme heat? And I had one in a pot of boiling water!
“Well,” Wiseguy said, “if the lady has already given Jacoby what we want, then it will be on him. And if it’s on him, then it’s as good as ours.”
He was very pleased with his logic.
I, on the other hand, was not.
“I don’t have anything, partner,” I said, “but feel free to search me.”
The damned envelope was burning a hole in my pocket!
He frowned, puzzled for a moment, but then he brightened.
“Play it to the hilt, friend,” he said, moving towards me. “Come on, get up. I want to go through your pockets.”
“I know how your friend gets his jollies,” I said, standing, “is this how you get yours?”
“Keep laughing, pal,” he said, grinning, “because pretty soon you’re gonna get yours.”
He was still grinning, reaching for my jacket pockets, when there was an explosion from the kitchen.
Linda moved faster than I did, lifting her knee and planting it in Jethro’s crotch. I don’t know if she scored a bull’s-eye, but it was hard enough to double him over, anyway. She pushed him then and he fell backward, landing on her glass coffee table and going through it.
I grabbed Wiseguy’s lapels and pulled him towards me, butting him with my head. He cried out as I pushed him aside.
“Run!” I shouted to Linda.
45
I know what you’re thinking.
I’ve watched this scene a lot on TV shows, too. I always ask myself why the hero runs instead of bending over to pick up the bad guy’s gun. Now I understand. Running is an instinct, and in adverse situations, people act on instinct.
Also, Jethro hadn’t let go of his gun when he fell. We would have had to wrestle with him to try to get it away from him. It was better for all concerned—especially Linda and me—to put as much distance between us and them as we could.
I grabbed her hand and we ran for the hall. I started to press the button for the elevator but she snapped, “Forget it!” and pulled me to the stairs.
What the hell, it was only five flights, and I did use to be an athlete.
She was ahead of me on the stairs. I noticed that somewhere along the line she had kicked off her shoes. I was impressed with her coolness under fire. No wonder Andy liked her.
When we reached the main lobby I thought I heard someone shouting from the stairwell, and then I heard a shot.
“Shit,” I said.
“Come on,” she said, pulling me toward the front door.
When we got outside we stopped, trying to figure out which way to run.
“It’s your neighborhood,” I said.
“This way,” she said, pulling me to the left.
We ran to Eighty-first Street. I looked back once and saw Wiseguy and Jethro come running out of her building. We turned the corner then, but they might have seen us.
As she reached the corner of Eighty-first and Broadway I noticed there was a bookstore there, and it was open.
“Wait,” I said to her, and ran into the bookstore, no doubt leaving her puzzled.
I approached the girl seated behind the desk where people were supposed to check their bags and handed her the envelope.
“I’d like to check this.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “You only have to check bags and—”
“I want to check this!” I insisted.
She jumped at my harsh tone and quickly took the envelope and handed me half a playing card. She must have thought I was another New York sickie.
“Thank you,” I said. I stuffed the card into my pocket and ran outside. I didn’t look at it. If it was the ace of spades, I didn’t want to know.
“What the hell—” Linda started, but I took her hand and said, “Later. Let’s run.”
We started running down Broadway and I was looking for a cop. Behind us I heard some yelling and I figured Wiseguy and Jethro were right on our tail.
I suddenly realized that Linda was pulling me. I was holding her back.
I released her hand and said, “Keep going.”
She turned and said, “Come on,” reaching for me, but I pulled by hands back from her.
“Keep going,” I said. “Look for a cop.”
She gave me an impatient look, then turned back around and ran. She steadily increased the distance between us even though I was running as hard as I could—and she was wearing a skirt. Granted, she had hiked it up so she could take longer strides, but still . . .
I sneaked a look behind me and saw that even as Linda was increasing the distance between her and me, Wiseguy was decreasing the distance between him and me.
Shoot, I thought, I was a boxer. This bozo was probably a track star.
I looked ahead and could no longer see Linda. Good, maybe she’d turned a corner somewhere and was well on her way to getting away.
Now if only I could get lucky.
Lucky, hell. Just when I didn’t need a cab I ran right into one. I was about to cross the street—I didn’t know where we were. Seventy-seventh, maybe Seventy-sixth—when a cab pulled right in front of me and stopped for the light. I couldn’t stop and ran right into the damned thing. I banged my knee, cried out, and then bounced off, losing my balance and falling to the pavement.
I tried to get up, but my knee wouldn’t cooperate, and then I was hit from behind. Wiseguy and I rolled around for a while and then suddenly I heard a woman shout, “Freeze, dirtbag!”
We stopped and I looked up. Somehow Linda had tripped Jethro as he went by, and he had skidded on the ground, dropping his gun, which she now held in a perfect military stance.
“I wouldn’t move if I were you, pal,” I said to Wiseguy.
“Fuck,” he said, under his breath.
I was pleased to see that he was huffing and puffing just as much as I was. I reached into his jacket and relieved him of his gun, then limped over to where Linda was standing. Jethro was lying on his back and his face was a bloody mess as a result of his skid on the concrete.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m . . . fine,” I said, leaning against the wall behind her.
“Somebody call the police, please!” she shouted.
“Tell me . . . something,” I said between panting.
“What?”
“Just what do you do for a living?”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” she said. “I’m a cop!”
“A . . . cop?”
“Yes,” she said, and proceeded to announce this fact to all of the bystanders, once again asking them to call the police.
“Where did you learn . . . dirtbag?” I asked. “Hill Street Blues?”
“No,” she said, without looking at me, “Police Academy Two. Or was it Three?”
46
Nothing turned out the way I thought it would.
A week later Caroline and I were having dinner at Bogie’s. There was still some color on her face from the bruises and she still had a bandage on her cheek and tape on her ribs, but she swore she was feeling a lot better.
That fella Seidman was sitting at what I found out was considered Table One with a whole group of mystery people—again. I thought that if I told them the way things had turned out, they’d think it was too unbelievable, even for fiction.
For one thing, when I went back to the bookstore to get the envelope, they had closed and I had to wait until the next morning to pick it up. Once I had it, though, I realized that it was Andy’s report on Van Voorhies and his definite connection with Don Salvatore Scalesi. Andy had given the file to Linda Matella without telling her what it was. It had been Linda’s idea to turn it over to me.
It was true that Linda was a cop, but she worked at Police Headquarters, collating facts and figures. That was how she’d met Andy. He had gone to Headquarters for some figures and Linda was the one he ended up talking to.
Caroline had made a lot of noise at Police Headquarters when Andy was first killed, and periodically she went back there and tried again. Before long, Linda became aware that Caroline was investigating Andy’s death.
Linda had also felt that there was something fishy about Andy’s death. Still, she had not thought anything of the envelope he’d left with her until recently. The contents meant nothing to her but she wanted to get it to Caroline without actually talking to Caroline, so she asked a detective friend of hers to find out about Caroline’s investigation. The detective friend turned out to be friends with Detective Vadala from the Backshooter Task Force, who asked around and found out that I was helping Caroline.
“He wasn’t very complimentary about you, Jack,” she confided to me later, “but once I got your name I called Bogie’s and left a message.”
Vadala had apparently told her that I hung out at Bogie’s.
When Linda heard about Caroline being beaten up she’d decided she had to call me. I had run up there so fast I hadn’t even noticed I was being tailed by Van Voorhies’s men. He had gotten tired of looking for the file and had dispatched them to find me and see if I had it, once and for all. They had gone to Bogie’s, and two other men had been sent to my house. When they arrived I was just leaving, and they had tailed me and broken in on Linda and me.
When Hocus confronted him, Van Voorhies fell apart like a cheap watch. He explained that Andy was blackmailing him. The file in the envelope had directly linked Van Voorhies to Scalesi, and that was what the man was trying to hide. He said that Andy wanted big corporate cases sent his way, and the big retainers that would go with it. He’d had my friend Wiseguy—whose name turned out to be Lenny Anderson—pull the trigger on Andy to avoid the blackmail.
I didn’t tell this to Caroline. I told her that Van Voorhies was afraid that Andy was going to blackmail him. I didn’t want to believe Van Voorhies myself, but why was there a button marked “Tower” on Andy’s phone. That certainly indicated that he would be calling Van Voorhies regularly, didn’t it? If I dug around some more, would I begin to nail the answer down?
I mean, that was like looking further to find out why Andy had a direct line to Scalesi? Perhaps Andy was just working regularly for the Don. Maybe Andy’s practice was tapering off, and he had decided that politicians and Mafioso weren’t so bad? Their money was green, too wasn’t it? And Andy didn’t seem now to have had as many scruples as we’d thought. If I looked further, would I find out?
Maybe I would. Maybe I’d find the answer to all of that, but did I want to prove to Caroline that her husband had turned into a blackmailer and a Mafia associate?
The answer to that was, shit no!
Her husband’s murder had been solved, and she had been right all along. He had not been a victim of the Backshooter.
Let’s just leave it at that.
“What about Scalesi?” she asked.
“He’ll probably be convicted of killing his wife.”
“Did he do it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “His attorney doesn’t know, either. I think he did.”
“If he did it, why would he give Heck Two-John Wheeler’s name as an alibi?”
“So maybe he didn’t do it,” I said, with a shrug. “So he serves time for something he didn’t do. There’s plenty that he did do. That’s called balancing the scales of justice.”
“I guess so,” she said. “So who killed Two-John?”
“The cops have made an arrest on that. It was a bad john she had taken up there to turn some quick getaway money. Apparently, in her haste to build herself a big enough stake to get out of town, she wasn’t very careful about who she was, uh, doing.”
“How’d the cops get him?”
“He tried it on another hooker, and she stabbed him.”
“Dead?”
“No, he’ll likely serve time.”
“Who was in her room when we got there?”
“I don’t know, probably a junkie.”
She started to look confused. I knew exactly how she felt. I had felt the same way when Hocus started explaining it all to me.
“So her murder was just a coincidence?”
“Looks that way.”
“What if it wasn’t the john who did it? What if one of Scalesi’s men did it?”
“It doesn’t matter, Caroline,” I said. “Either way she’s dead, and Scalesi’s doing time.”
“So Andy’s death and Two-John’s death were not related?”
“No.”
“And Scalesi had nothing to do with Andy’s death?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Andy’s case and Scalesi’s were totally separate cases.”
Did I believe that? Remember, I knew that Andy had a direct phone line to Scalesi and Van Voorhies. The fact that everything had been wrapped up didn’t mean that it had all been wrapped up right.
Still, there was something to be said for things being wrapped up. Look at Binky7s death. That had been closed out as Binky being killed by some poor homeless bozo in a fight over the box Binky’d been found in. Case closed, on all counts. Right or wrong.
What could I do about it? There was no fucking way anything could be confirmed for sure, so why beat my head against a stone wall?
Andy was dead. The rest of it wasn’t important and I didn’t want Caroline wondering about it for the rest of her life.
I couldn’t keep Linda Matella from her, though, so I told her that Andy had left the file with Linda to safeguard, and she hadn’t figured out what to do with it until now. Caroline didn’t ask me any questions about Linda—like “What is she like?” or “What does she look like?”—for which I was grateful. Linda had asked me to call her sometime. I didn’t know yet if I would. I mean, I liked both women . . .
There was just one other small question that had to be answered, about Andy having the Backshooter Task Force phone number on his phone. As it turned out, it wasn’t the Task Force number so much as Detective Vadala’s number. Vadala was Andy’s P.D. contact, and didn’t that surprise me, knowing how Vadala felt about P.I.s. Maybe it was just me Vadala disliked.
“Here,” Caroline said.
I looked down and saw that she had slid a white number 10 envelope across the table from me.
“I’ve had enough trouble with envelopes,” I said. “What’s in this one?”
“Your fee.”
“Oh.”
“I figured it out, deducting the days you, ah, weren’t working.”
The days I was drunk, or rescuing myself from becoming a real drunk.
“Caroline—” I said, touching the envelope but not picking it up.
“You’re not going to argue with me about this, are you?” she asked. “You put a lot of time into this. You’ve got to be compensated.”
“I was paid by Heck Delgado for the work I did on behalf of his client,” I said.
“Well, take this anyway,” she said. “Remember, I know how hard it is for a P.I. to make ends meet.”
I tapped the envelope a few times and then said, “Oh, all right,” and slid the envelope into my pocket, “but I’m buying dinner.”
