Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery (32 page)

THE HOUR WAS
not late; it was not his normal bedtime, but Philip Lombro, hoping that tomorrow would appear and then vanish with invisible speed,
took two sleeping pills and, in his silk pajamas, slipped into his bed.

He lay awake for a long time, tormented by thoughts of what he had done, thoughts about the witness’s betrayal, thoughts about how he was soon going to have another man’s blood on his hands. But under the sedation of the Valium, he calmed, and eventually the man who was going to die tomorrow did not occupy his thoughts. Nor did Vincent Gaudia nor Ralph Bales. Philip Lombro was in that netherworld between sleep and waking. Bits of dreams floated past like the papers caught in the fickle currents around the Maddox Omnibus Building. He saw faces, most of them grotesque. Melting into other shapes. They were real to him, intense, three-dimensional. They reminded him of the images seen through those plastic three-dimensional viewers he used to buy his nieces and nephews thirty years ago, the ones that held cardboard disks of fairy tales and cartoons.

One of these faces, though, was not grotesque. It was a girl’s face, a young girl’s. She was beautiful. Her features did not melt. Her eyes simply looked toward him. Lombro was powerless to touch her or speak. He was merely observing; you don’t participate in dreams like this.

Then the girl’s face suddenly grew so terribly sad that Lombro became completely awake, pierced by an urge to cry, and he sat up abruptly.

This was the hardest part of living alone, Philip Lombro knew. Waking from dreams by yourself.

PELLAM WAS UP
at seven-thirty. He had slept in a location van—one of the big Winnebagos used for
makeup. He rose silently and walked into the bathroom, where he took a tepid-water shower. Then he brushed his teeth with his fingers and a spoonful of Arm & Hammer. He felt groggy and hoped he would find something energizing in the medicine cabinet—diet pills, NoDoz. But there was nothing other than a prescription drug he had never heard of. The label warned against operating machinery or driving a car while taking the medicine.

It would be coffee or nothing.

Pellam dressed in the bathroom, the cloth of his shirt and jeans darkened by the water he had failed to towel off. He brushed his damp hair and forwent the noisy blow dryer. He was here as a spy or, at best, refugee, and wanted his presence kept secret. Slipping outside, he hurried down the front steps and shivered in the cool fall air. There was a rich, loamy scent of water, which he knew would be the river though he could not see it from here.

At the curb he paused to let pass a powder blue car, slowing as it passed the trailer. On the side was a sign.
Out of Work 117 days.
The number 17 was on a separate piece of cardboard, freshly taped over the previous day’s record. “I do odd jobs,” the man called but he drove on before Pellam could say a word.

RALPH BALES FOUND
his heart was beating like the wings of a panicked sparrow.

He looked at his wrists, focusing on the veins, surprised that they were not vibrating with blood. His hands returned to the steering wheel. Ralph Bales was waiting downtown—in a stolen Chevy—outside
the Federal Building on Mission, waiting for John Pellam to arrive. And the reason his heart was beating so fast was that this was a terrible site for a hit.

On the way here, he had passed a car wash whose name was World O’ Wash. The phrase kept going through his mind, and all he could think of was World O’ Cops. FBI, Treasury agents, federal marshals and city cops and probably Missouri Bureau of Investigation agents all over the place—them, plus court security guards who had never fired a piece except to get their tickets and had been waiting for years to draw first blood in the line of duty.

World O’ Cops.

Inside the entryway of the building were two white-shirted guards, big men, with large, square heads crowned with fade cuts. Secretaries and clerks and lawyers in running shoes over their dress socks or stockings were streaming into the office. Everyone looked young and eager.

There were several entrances to the Federal Building but Ralph Bales was parked in front of what seemed to be the main one. He supposed there would be a service door or two. He could see a driveway that seemed reserved for garbage pickups. That would be a good place to sneak a witness in. But he had no partner—Stevie still had not shown—and all he could do was cover the main entrance.

He had arrived early, thinking the beer man would get here well before nine-thirty for security reasons. For an hour Ralph Bales sat in the car, the engine running. He moved it only once, when a meter maid waddled by. She held her citation book out like a gun,
threateningly. He did not let her get close enough to see his face. He pulled away slowly, did an around-the-block and by the time he got back—maybe three minutes later—she was gone. He parked again in front of the building.

He watched the mist in the air, the sunlight flashing off the tall arch; he smelled the burnt metallic air laced with exhaust. The factories on the east side of the Mississippi were busy this morning. His heart fluttering . . . Maybe it was the caffeine in the coffee. He glanced down. He had left the cup in the car, the cardboard carton, blue and white, with pictures of Greek gods or Olympic athletes or something. A cup with his fingerprints all over it. Careless.

He reached down and picked it up, crumpling the cardboard and slipping it into his pocket.

It was then that the trash basket—one of those big, filthy orange things—went through his back window.

Jesus Mother Holy . . .

Not exactly
through
the window. Even cheap American cars had strong glass. The bottom rim of the basket pushed the window in a couple inches, and the glass turned opaque with frost from the fractures. The basket rolled off the car and onto the street.

“Son of a—”

When he turned back to pull the door handle up, there was a gun muzzle in his face, and the man’s other hand was shutting the engine off.

He understood. Ralph Bales knew exactly what had happened.

“Put your gun in the back,” the beer man said. “On the floor.”

Ralph Bales said, “I don’t have a—”

The man’s voice terrified him with its serenity. “Put your gun on the back floor of the car.”

“Okay, whatever you want.”

“Put your—”

“I heard you,” Ralph Bales said, “I’m going to do it.”

“Now.”

“Okay.”

This reminded Ralph Bales of when the cop caught him just after the Gaudia hit. Only today there’d be no Stevie Flom acting like a madman and stepping out of an alleyway to save him. With a sudden sickening feeling, he had a good idea about what had happened to Stevie Flom.

He dropped the Colt in the back. The man opened the back door and scooped it up. He sat in the backseat and pressed the muzzle of his gun, an old one, against his ear. “Turn all your pockets inside out.”

What if the meter maid shows up now? Christ, this guy could panic and shoot them both.

“I don’t have anything, I mean, like a weapon or—”

“All your pockets.”

Ralph Bales did, dropping the contents on the seat. The beer man prodded the money and the wallet and the crumpled cup and the Swiss Army knife. “Okay, put it back in your pockets. Except the knife. Leave the knife.”

Ralph Bales laughed. “The knife? You’re kidding.”

He was not kidding. Ralph Bales did what he was told.

The man put his seat belt on. “Drive to Maddox. Now.”

“But—”

“Drive.”

Bales reached for the shoulder strap.

“No belt.” He rested the gun against the back of Ralph Bales’s neck. “This is a single-action gun. You know what that means?”

“You have to cock it before you can pull the trigger,” Ralph Bales said like a student answering a teacher’s question.

“I have it cocked. It goes off real easy.”

“Okay, listen. If we hit a bump . . .”

“Then I’d drive real slow if I were you.”

THE DREAM WAS
wonderful.

She was beautiful.

Nina Sassower believed that although men came on to her—and did so quite frequently—they did so only because of the size of her breasts and her thin legs. She believed they tolerated her face, which she saw as pointed and narrow and pinched.

But in the dream, something had happened. Perhaps she had had an operation, maybe she had just been mistaken all her life. She did not know what had changed. But the person she was in the dream was tall and willowy and had sharp, intelligent, beautiful eyes.

The image didn’t last long. It shifted into something else, a street she couldn’t identify. Then other people began milling around and the dream ended.

She woke up.

For perhaps two seconds she felt the afterglow of the dream.

She sat up straight, looked at the clock, and spat out, “Oh, no! Son of a bitch!”

It was nine-thirty.

She pulled off her nightgown and yanked open the drawer to her dresser. Panties, bra—no bra. She couldn’t find one. She kept looking.
Forget it!
She slipped a sweater on, thinking that it was the first time since the age of thirteen that she would leave the house without a bra. Slacks, anklet stockings . . .
They don’t match, where’s the mate, where? Hell with it! Go!
Beige pumps.

Go, go, go! . . .

Nina pulled on her blue jean jacket. She hadn’t washed her face and she felt a rim of sweat on her forehead. She paused in the mirror to brush her hair and she did that only because she didn’t want to look conspicuous.

For what she was about to do, conspicuous would not be good.

She left the house and hurried to her car. After she started the engine, she looked into her purse to make certain that it contained what she had put there the night before.

A military-issue .45 semiautomatic pistol, the classic 1911 Colt, sat heavily between an Estée Lauder compact and a pink plastic Tampax container.

Nina knew the gun about as well as she knew her Singer sewing machine. Although she could not field-strip it blindfolded she could dismantle it sufficiently to clean and oil the bore and the parts and did so every time she fired it. This gun happened to be identical to the ones Ross’s gangsters carried in
Missouri River Blues,
although Nina’s was loaded with ten rounds of live ammunition and was not registered with the federal government or with anybody else.

Nina now started the car’s engine and, not even slowing at a single stop sign or red light, sped through the quaint, quiet burg of Cranston, Missouri, then skidded onto the expressway, hurrying south toward where she believed John Pellam would be.

BEING A LAWYER
, he was used to rewriting.

Ronald Peterson never signed off on a letter, interrogatory, complaint, motion, or brief without hours of revision. But the two-page press release describing Peter Crimmins’s indictment for the murder of Vince Gaudia had taken more time, per word, than anything that Peterson had written in years.

He had just learned, however, that this was one press release that was not going to be released to anyone.

“He changed his mind?” Peterson whispered, barely controlling his fury.

“That’s what the message said,” Nelson explained cautiously, looking away from his boss’s enraged eyes. “And there’s no answer at his phone, the phone in his camper. I sent an agent to Maddox. The camper’s not in the trailer park. Somebody in one of the vans said Pellam’d been fired and they don’t know where he is.”

“Think Crimmins got him?”

“Well, according to the receptionist, he didn’t sound coerced.”

“Why the fuck didn’t she put through the call? She’s fired. She’s out of here.”

Nelson said delicately, “He didn’t
want
to speak to you. He wanted to just leave a message.”

“What exactly did it say again?”

“Just that he’d changed his mind. That was it.”

Peterson clicked a fingernail and thumbnail together seven times. “Any hint from the taps on Crimmins?”

“Nothing useful. Business as usual. We can take that one of two ways. Either he’s using a safe phone to talk to his muscle. Or he heard the press conference and for some reason he’s not concerned about the guy testifying.”

Why wouldn’t he be concerned?

One reason: He
wasn’t
the man in the Lincoln after all.

“Why,” Nelson pondered, “would Pellam be jerking our leash like this?”

Peterson had told no one about the free-lancer, a former FBI agent, who had gone after Pellam’s girlfriend and then Pellam himself to “help” Pellam remember about Crimmins and vanished shortly afterward. Nor did Nelson know that there was nothing whatsoever wrong with Tony Sloan’s federal firearm notices. Nelson therefore didn’t know that Pellam had some very good motives for jerking leashes. “Cold feet, I suspect,” the U.S. Attorney suggested.

“What about the first option? That Crimmins got to him?”

Peterson shook his head. “Even Crimmins wouldn’t be that stupid. Hell. The press’ll play it like we’ve got hairy palms.”

“What do you want to do?” Nelson gazed down at the press release.

“What’s your assessment of the case against Crimmins
without Pellam’s testimony? I’m speaking of the Gaudia hit.”

Nelson thought for a minute. Peterson made a cat’s cradle with a rubber band and studied his protégé, whose squinting eyes and pursed lips only partially revealed the lavish anxiety he felt. “I’d say probable cause if we want to arrest him. But we won’t get an indictment.” Nelson cleared his throat.

“And the original indictment, the RICO charges, without Gaudia’s testimony?”

He said, “Acquittal. Sixty-forty.” Nelson’s grimace was the equivalent of hunkering down in a bunker before a bomb detonated.

But Peterson’s sole reaction was to press his teeth together. His breath hissed out from between them and then he chewed on his tongue in rapt contemplation. He slowly concluded that there was as much danger for him in the Crimmins case as there was potential to score one for the good guys.