Kill Fee (22 page)

"And tipped him off you were on to him," Eberhart groaned. "Hey, don't do our job for us. Just call us, okay?"

The clerk scowled at him. "I was trying to help you."

"And I'm trying to help
you.
The next time you spot somebody in a police circular, don't ask questions. Play dumb. This guy here kills awful easy—he could have popped you without thinking twice about it."

"Just trying to help." The clerk was sulking.

Time for fence-mending. "Yeah, I know—and we appreciate it. Most people we ask for help don't give us the time of day. We depend a lot on civilians like you, the ones who do help." The clerk was looking a little happier. "Anything else?"

"Well, he said he did all his target shooting in Jersey, but I think he was lying."

Eberhart grinned. "He probably practices anywhere but
Jersey.
Look, thanks for calling us. You've been a big help." Out on the street, Eberhart hurried along, secretly exulting. In spite of the mild scolding he'd given the clerk, he was grateful to the man; now they had a new place to look.

Pistol ranges.

Pluto stood before his bathroom mirror. He turned his head as far to the right as he could and still see his image; left profile looked all right. He turned his head the other way and checked his right profile. Well, all right indeed! Oh, yes.

The salon had done a good job. First the perm, then the dye job. Instead of longish dark blond hair, Pluto's head was now covered with tight brown curls. The mustache was gone, and he'd bought a pair of tinted glasses. Pluto was quickly getting used to his new look; truth was, he liked it better than the old one.

Satisfied that he was no longer in danger of being identified from the police circular, he turned his full attention to the matter at hand. Pluto went into his study and stood staring at the corkboard-lined wall. Dead center was a picture of Lieutenant James T. Murtaugh. Pinned around the picture were newspaper clippings and neatly typed lists of what other information Pluto had been able to garner. Snapshots. Of the people Murtaugh worked with—Ansbacher, Eberhart, Billings, Montoya, a couple of dozen others. Of Murtaugh's wife, Ellie. Of the few friends Murtaugh had outside police circles. Murtaugh's only living relatives were a brother and his family who'd moved to Pittsburgh nearly thirteen years ago; forget them. Pluto felt he was coming to know James Timothy Murtaugh quite well.

"Ah, Lieutenant, Lieutenant," Pluto shook his head.
"
Make a mistake. Goof. Get off on the wrong track." He sighed. "Don't make me do it."

Murtaugh raised his eyebrows. "Pistol ranges?"

"Man doesn't buy eight dozen rounds just to scare off burglars," Eberhart said. "So he's gotta have a place where he goes to keep his eye sharp. So we check pistol ranges."

"Does he need to?" Murtaugh asked. "Keep that kind of sharp, I mean. Jerry Sussman was shot up close—he went right up to the car Pluto was driving. William Parminter was shot in an elevator—another close job. Roscoe Malucci's hand was shot off from the other side of the street. But it's a narrow street and Roscoe had gone out
into
the street to stop a cab—shooting distance was only twenty feet or so. Hardly sharpshooter range."

"What about that Canadian singer—the one who got shot at Lincoln Center?"

Murtaugh frowned, concentrating. "You're right. That was a distance shot. But we don't know that was one of Pluto's jobs."

"Oh, come on, Lieutenant—you know it was!"

"I think so, but we don't
know.
It's damned tempting to hang every unsolved killing we got on our elusive friend. But okay, let's say Pluto needs to practice on a more-or-less regular basis. Our circulars for gun-related killings automatically go to firing ranges as well as gunsmiths. But they get so many of the damned things they hardly look at them any more. Your clerk in the gun store paid attention, but nobody else did—so, we go jog their memories for them. We'll need a list of pistol ranges and addresses—"

"Got it." Eberhart waved a sheet of paper in the air.

Murtaugh grunted approval. "Give me half. Captain
Ansbacher's
letting me have five more men, but we don't get them until Thursday."

Eberhart folded the sheet of paper, tore it in half. "Here."

Murtaugh glanced at the paper and scowled. "For chrissake, Eberhart, don't you ever use a typewriter? I can't read this."

"All right, all right, I'll
type
it," Eberhart muttered, snatching back the paper. Some days even the best of lieutenants liked to make life bothersome for sergeants.

Pluto stepped out of his rented car and looked around for a place to stand—there, in that shop doorway. A man sitting alone in an automobile at night always looked suspicious.

Just as Lieutenant Murtaugh was looking suspicious. The lieutenant was across the street, sitting in his car, alone, at night. And it looked suspicious. Just a man waiting for his wife, but it did look odd.

The front doors of Murray Hill Academy opened and a harried-looking woman with a briefcase came out—that was Ellie. Pluto strained to get a good look at her. She got into the car with Murtaugh and they drove away.

Pluto wrote down the time in his notebook, knowing it was a detail he probably wouldn't be needing. But his methodical approach had stood him in good stead for too long for him to abandon it now. And he had so few details about Ellie yet.

Ellie. What about her? Pluto was having trouble deciding whether Ellie would have a role to play in the new scenario or not.

Dan Grogan was already waiting in Michael's Bar by the time Murtaugh got there. Murtaugh had known
Grogan
for a long time; they'd been rookies together, seventeen—no, eighteen years ago now. Grogan had wanted Murtaugh to meet him.

Murtaugh picked up a beer and went over to Grogan's booth. ''Trouble?'' he asked as he slid on to the wooden seat.

Grogan shook his head. "I got what you wanted to know."

"Why not just call?"

"We're both on open lines, Murtaugh. No telling who could be listening in."

Murtaugh felt a mild shock. Grogan was the investigator Ansbacher had appointed to take over the Parminter case when Murtaugh began breathing too hard on the Sutton brothers and their tainted construction business. Grogan was also in charge of another "Pluto possible"—the murder of Metropolitan Opera tenor John Herman, the Canadian. Murtaugh had asked Grogan to check on the finances of tenor Luigi Bàccolo, to see if he'd had to raise money in a hurry right after the Canadian's death. But now, if Grogan was so afraid anything said over the phone might get back to Ansbacher, afraid that Ansbacher would find out he was doing a favor for Murtaugh—good god, things were even worse than he'd thought! "You didn't step on any Sutton toes, did you?"

Grogan laughed mirthlessly. "I'm not even allowed
close
to those two. You know your files have disappeared? The ones you put together on the Suttons and Parminter. So I'm left with no reason to investigate the Sutton Construction Company."

Damn
that Ansbacher—all that work, down the drain. "That rotten son of a bitch," Murtaugh said bitterly.

Grogan looked uneasy. "Don't talk like that. You don't know who's listening."

Murtaugh
stared at him. "What's the matter with you? You never used to be afraid of your shadow!"

Grogan stared back. "You don't know, do you?" He took a deep breath. "Ansbacher knows you've been investigating him. He knows you're out to get him."

A second shock ran through Murtaugh, a much stronger one this time. "How'd he find out?"

"Know a guy named Hanowitz? Works the Burglary Unit. He told him."

Murtaugh remembered Hanowitz, a weasely man he'd trust about as far as he could throw. "Hanowitz told Ansbacher?"

"Right out in the hallway, where other people could hear. That was weeks ago, Murtaugh. I thought you knew."

"No." Murtaugh was stunned; he'd more or less expected it eventually . . . what was Ansbacher doing, what kind of waiting game was he playing? "Christ."

Grogan looked at his watch nervously. "I've got to be going—"

"What about Luigi Bàccolo?"

"Oh yeah—almost forgot. He raised the money all right—a hundred thousand dollars, the exact amount. He had to be one of Pluto's customers too."

"Mm. What'd he say when you asked him about the money?"

"Well, first he claimed his poor old mother back in Napoli needed a series of operations. When we pointed out his mother has been dead for twenty-one years, he said, Did he say
mother?
He meant
aunt,
and she was in Palermo, not Napoli. He's changed his story a dozen times, and each time it gets a little more farfetched. No question, in my mind—he paid off Pluto. Bàccolo's one
of
those high-strung types—we got him sweating, it's only a matter of time. He'll tell us."

"Good, glad to hear it. And Grogan—thanks for letting me know."

"Sure. We owe you for the tip." Grogan wanted to get away. "Uh, tough luck about Ansbacher. I thought you knew."

Murtaugh shrugged a good-bye. Grogan left, and Murtaugh sat on for a while, watching his beer go flat.

Thursday.

Pluto was torn. He wanted to avoid taking any risk he didn't absolutely have to, but he also wanted to pick up his new suit. The tailor had promised it for two o'clock—but the tailor knew him as P. N. Wolfe and that could get sticky. The new police circular had the name listed right under the sketch that now would no longer identify him. But the false name—would his tailor know about it? Police circulars went to gun shops and like places, including (obviously!) private clubs with pistol ranges in their sub-basements. But what possible cause would the police have for notifying a toney haberdasher on Fifth Avenue? There was no reason for Lieutenant Murtaugh to connect the killings with Farrell Custom Tailoring—Farrell's Apparel, Pluto called it.

Pluto wanted that suit; he wanted it in the worst way. Irish tweed, softer than any he'd ever seen. From a distance the material appeared gray, but up close it was an understated green. Pluto didn't have any green clothing; green tended to make him look chubby. But not this green, not this masterpiece of soft-pedaling. It did make him look just a tiny bit sallow—but now with his newly brown hair . . . he decided. He'd go get the suit.

He
approached the tailor's cautiously, stopping to look in store windows as he tried to spot any signs of a stakeout. The trouble was, he didn't really know what to look for. He peered around, looking for Lieutenant Murtaugh and those of his cohorts Pluto knew, but all he saw was an ordinary street scene, Fifth Avenue at two in the afternoon on an ordinary Thursday.

Pluto studied a window display of men's formal footwear and thought about using a messenger service to pick up the suit. But his tailor was such a prima donna Pluto knew he wouldn't let the suit go without one last fitting. At the very least sending a messenger would stir up a fuss, and the last thing Pluto needed was a fuss. So, no messenger.

Nothing ventured.
Pluto pushed through one of the two main entrances to Farrell Custom Tailoring and—well, well. Look who was over there pretending to be a customer. Eberhart, David J., Sergeant. Lieutenant Murtaugh's right-hand man, talking to Pluto's tailor. Pluto bought a sixty-two-dollar pair of socks and left, going out the other main entrance and displaying prominently his designer plastic bag with the word
Farrell
on it.

This time Pluto spotted him: Lieutenant Murtaugh, standing in a phone booth, doing a good imitation of a man looking up a number in the directory.
Ah well,
Pluto thought philosophically. Maybe he just wasn't destined to wear green.

He moved off down Fifth at a brisk pace, leaving Murtaugh and Eberhart and five other men watching over Farrell Custom Tailoring, watching and waiting.

Watching. Hoping.

CHAPTER

13

Murtaugh sank down into his desk chair spiritlessly. He'd finished his half of the list of pistol ranges. Nothing.

Eberhart still had a few to go on his half, but Ansbacher had put the sergeant to work on something else the minute he'd come in. Eberhart had been on the telephone all morning; he'd been phoning when Murtaugh left, and he was still phoning when Murtaugh got back. After lunch Murtaugh would get the names of the pistol ranges Eberhart hadn't gotten to and take care of them himself.

The five men Murtaugh had been given for the futile stakeout of Farrell Custom Tailoring—they'd been reassigned the next day. Now Ansbacher was stripping him of his only remaining help; when Eberhart finished his current assignment, Ansbacher would come up with another one for him. And then another one. And another one after that. When Pluto failed to show, Murtaugh had lost his last defense against Ansbacher. The Captain would win. It was only a matter of time.

Pluto,
Pluto
—
where are you?
Why hadn't he shown up at the tailor's, how had he known they'd be waiting for him?
How had he known?
No matter how close they got, Pluto was always one step ahead of them. Was he psychic? There couldn't be a leak inside the Department because only Murtaugh and Eberhart knew where the investigation was heading—Eberhart? No, out of the question. But only he and Eberhart knew . . . until he'd gone to Ansbacher for help with the stakeout.