Sharky's Machine (27 page)

Chapter Seventeen

The Majestic Grill was an obscure and unrecognized landmark that had endured on the same Street corner since 1934, oblivious to the changes that had occurred around it. The shoe repair shop beside it had become .a magazine store which had become a head shop which had become a natural food store which was now a pinball parlour; the theatre up the Street had declined from first runs to double features to porn; and if the Majestic was a monument to early Thirties style, the hotel across the street was a sixstorey monument to Early Nothing architecture. It had been boarded up for years. But the Majestic never changed. It had resisted time and transition, catering to a clientele that defied demography or caste. A bum nursing a cup of coffee received the same curt service as a college president.

Inside, bacon and sausage sizzled on ancient grills, the odours spicing the heady aroma of roasting coffee. The decor was nondescript, a well-worn combination of stainless steel, formica, pale green walls, and dark green vinyl seats. A dining room had been added to the rear of the diner years before and there Papa sat, at a corner table, mesmerized by the menu from which he was about to order a breakfast big enough to delight an entire Marine brigade. Sharky and Livingston joined him and a few minutes later Friscoe arrived, an apparition in scruffy corduroys, a peaked deep sea fishing cap, and a scarred jacket that predated antiquity.

He appraised the ragtag bunch, their eyes charcoaled from lack of sleep, their cheeks scraggly from not shaving, their bodies sagging under the weight of a sleepless night.

‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘you all look like you just got sprung from Auschwitz.’

‘And thank you, Cinderella,’ Livingston said.

‘So where’s Abrams? He ain’t gonna be one of those late guys, is he?’

‘On his way,’ Sharky said. ‘He got hung up on a phone call.’

A gargantuan waitress with arms like a wrestler’s hovered over the table. ‘Are we ready here?’ she said. It was more a demand than a question.

‘We’ll have coffee all the way around while we’re deciding,’ Sharky said and she padded off towards the coffee urn on slippered feet.

Friscoe leaned back in his chair and looked at the other three detectives. ‘I’ll tell you what. I hope to shit you guys did better than me. I musta put in five hours trying to get a line on this Neil and what do I get out of it? Sore feet and a fuckin’ goose egg, that’s what.’

Papa took a tattered notebook from his pocket and licking a thumb, flicked it open. ‘His name’s Dantzler,’ he announced. ‘With a t.’

‘What’sat?’ Friscoe said.

‘Dantzler with a t. D-a-n-t-z-l-e-r. He lives in a condo in The Courtyard, which, if you’ll remember, is also where Tiffany lives. That’s because she’s Dantzler’s girlfriend. She uses her apartment mainly for tricks. She also has another boyfriend on the sly and she occasionally shacks up at Domino’s place. Dantzler’s a rich kid gone sour. His game’s pimping and scam. He’s outa town, be back a week from tomorrow.’

Friscoe stared at Papa with a hint of indignation. ‘Sounds like a pornographic soap opera,’ he said. ‘Where’d you come up with all that shit?’

‘A snitch.’

‘You got all that from one fuckin’ snitch?’

‘Had a little help from the security guard at The Courtyard.’

‘Maybe I just should have stayed in bed,’ Friscoe said, feeling suddenly inadequate.

‘Sometimes you get lucky,’ Papa said.

‘Well, sometimes wasn’t last night for me,’ Friscoe said. ‘Is there anything else?’

‘Dantzler’s sporting a new Ferrari, braggin’ on the street how he took some cowboy to the cleaners. Domino is out. Didn’t know about it.’

‘And just how did you find that out?’ Friscoe said.

‘Snitch.’

‘Shit, who is this fuckin’ stoolie?’ Friscoe said. ‘Maybe we oughta put him on the goddamn payroll.’

‘One more thing,’ said Papa. ‘Dantzler hasn’t got the guts to kill anybody or get it done. Rule him out. Ditto Tiffany.’

‘Same snitch?’ Sharky said.

Papa nodded.

‘You sure he’s reliable, Papa?’ Friscoe said.

‘Yes. When this guy talks, it’s bankable.’

‘So that retires Dantzler, Tiffany, and the mark in Texas as possibles,’ Livingston said.

Friscoe shook his head. ‘Too bad. They would have been the easiest shot we bad.’

At that point The Nosh arrived, alert, ebullient, and smiling. Friscoe glared at him sourly. ‘You look like you just come back from a week at the beach,’ he said.

‘I think I’m on to something,’ The Nosh said.

‘Okay, everybody gets their turn. Papa there just made himself an A-plus. Now it’s Sharky’s turn at bat.’

Sharky quickly described the deal on red devils made by Shoes and the layoff bets made by Arnold, the bartender at the Matador. Before he was through, the waitress returned with the coffee and demanded their orders while The Nosh complained bitterly that they might at least have selected a place that had bagels on the menu.

‘This here’s a diner, not a deli,’ Friscoe said.

When the waitress had gone again, Sharky said, ‘We didn’t make Shoes. He never showed up on the street last night. But both these leads tell Arch and me that the shooter’s still in town.

‘Could be coincidence, Shark,’ The Nosh said.

‘if it was just one or the other, I’d agree’ said Livingston. ‘But here we got information from two completely different sources and it dovetails.’

‘Yeah,’ Friscoe said, ‘I never been big on coincidence myself. It’s like circumstantial evidence. Where there’s smoke there’s fire.’

‘Arch and I are going to move on Shoes tonight,’ Sharky said. ‘But we need somebody to get on this Arnold, find out who the big better is.’

‘Can you maybe get a line on this Shoes before tonight, bit him in his nest?’ Friscoe asked.

‘It’s pushy. If we move too bard on him we could blow Ben’s cover,’ Sharky said.

‘Okay, I’ll worry about Arnold, there, sc. what I can come up with,’ Friscoe said. ‘We just don’t have time. We got nothing but maybes and probablies, and what we need, we ain’t got. We ain’t got a face, we ain’t got a name, we ain’t got a motive, we ain’t got shit.’

‘Is it my turn yet?’ The Nosh asked.

‘Jeez, you’re like some kid in grammar school thinks he’s got all the answers,’ Friscoe said.

‘Go ahead, Nosh,’ Sharky said. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Okay, I got a positive make on the prints.’

Friscoe almost swallowed his coffee cup. Sharky, Livingston, and Papa froze in mid-bite, like sculptured figures.

‘You know who the killer is?’ Sharky said.

The Nosh nodded. ‘Howard Burns. Male Caucasian, age 59, owned a short-haul trucking outfit in Lincoln, Nebraska.’

‘A trucking company?’ Friscoe said, ‘This Mafia button owns a trucking company?’

‘What do you mean, owned?’ Sharky said.

The Nosh smiled. ‘According to the Bureau, Howard

Burns was killed in an automobile accident on October twentieth.’

Again silence, broken finally by Friscoe. ‘That ain’t possible.’

‘That’s right. It sure ain’t,’ The Nosh said. ‘I checked it out again with George Barret. He says the prints are fresh, no question about it.’

‘What kind of accident?’ Sharky asked.

‘A single-vehicle wreck on the outskirts of Omaha. Car went off the road, bit a tree, and exploded. Burns’s wife made the identification using dental charts.’

‘Ub oh,’ Friscoe said, and a smile began spreading across his face.

‘Neat,’ Livingston said.

‘Now that ain’t a coincidence,’ Papa said.

‘And think about the date,’ Livingston said.

‘Yeah about two weeks before he surfaced here looking for red devils and a healthy bookmaker,’ Sharky said.

‘There’s more,’ The Nosh said.

‘I shoulda stayed in bed,’ said Friscoe.

‘Look at this Bureau telex on Burns. Notice anything funny?’ The Nosh asked.

They all looked it over, reading the lines, the background information on the questionably deceased Howard Burns. Born in Newark, raised in Philadelphia, worked as truck driver and then in the navy yard there during World War
II,
returned to trucking after the war, left Philadelphia in 1960, worked at various trucking jobs until 1968 when he purchased the Interstate Van Lines in Lincoln. It was sketchy, but a resumé nevertheless.

‘What do you see here that’s stranger Sharky asked The Nosh.

‘Well, he’s got no criminal record. So why the package?’ They reread the telex.

‘He’s right,’ Friscoe said. ‘Why would they have his prints on file’?’

Sharky tapped on his coffee cup with a spoon, lightly, a rhythmic tattoo that accompanied his thoughts.

‘It’s a cover,’ said Friscoe. ‘It fits. It’s hand in glove. It makes sense. It’s the
only
way it makes sense. This shooter has a Mafia pedigree. We figure he bad to be a
capo,
right? An old-line hitman. So what’s he doin’ running a truck company?’

‘A cover,’ The Nosh said.

‘Damn right,’ said Friscoe. ‘This shooter, whoever the fuck be is, he did a turn for the Feds and they fixed him up. He musta been in hot with the mob so the Feds give him Howard Burns and a whole biography to go with it.’

‘And then something happened and he had to drop out again, only this time he did it so even the Feds thought he was gone for good,’ Sharky said.

‘And showed up here,’ Livingston said, ‘not two weeks later.’

‘Okay,’ Friscoe said, ‘now I got a little something. What I got is dessert, buckos. Something that makes it all go down, so it ain’t so hard to swallow. You remember Twigs tellin’ us Riley bad a coupla John Does to keep him busy down in the icehouse?’

They nodded.

‘Well one of these John Does was dug outa the city dump yesterday. And it wasn’t no accidental John Doe. What I mean is somebody went to a lotta trouble to make him into a John Doe, like blowing up his face with a shotgun and removing both his hands.’

‘Jesus!’ Papa said.

‘Yeah, ain’t it a pretty picture? What makes it. . . the reason, see, why we’re maybe interested is that what really put this stiff on ice was a .22 bullet that was soaked iii garlic.’

He leaned back, satisfied at having brought something to the party at last.

‘And,’ he added, ‘the illustrious Mr. Grimm says this stiff got kayoed around the end of October sometime.’

More silence, then a babble, everyone talking at once. Sharky held up a hand. ‘Hold on,. hold on. Shit, we sound like a bad church choir here. Let’s add it up, see what we got. Barney, sum it up for us.’

‘Okay, we got a Mafia shooter goes underground with the help of the Feds. On October twentieth subject the same wraps a tree around his car and goes up in smoke. His wife I.D.’s him with dental plates and plants him. Ten days later this Burns or whoever pops outa the toaster in Atlanta and puts the freeze on victim number two, fixes up the stiff so it can’t be identified and plants him in the city dump.’

‘How come Victim Two?’ Sharky said.

Friscoe shrugged. ‘Somebody burned up in the car on the outskirts of Omaha.’

Sharky whistled between his teeth. ‘I missed that one.’

‘Okay. So then six, seven weeks more pass by and this same Howard-Whoever-the-Fuck.-He4s..Burns comes outa the woodwork again and dumps Domino. The question ls, why? Why? That may be the toughest donkey of all to pin a tail on.’

‘Why don’t we just take it to the Bureau? Tell them this Burns dummied up his own death, came here, and wasted two people already,’ Sharky said.

Friscoe shook his head. ‘I veto that one. For a lotta reasons. First place the Feds don’t really give a shit about our problems unless there’s something in it for them. Right now this is a local problem, so they don’t stand to make an brownie points by bustin’ their ass tryin’ to help us. Also, i this son of a bitch was in the Feds’ alias programme, it’ take an act of fuckin’ Congress to get anything out of them All they’ll do, is come in here hot-shittin’ around and the next thing you know, Riley, D’Agastino, the fucking Bat everybody in the goddamn world’ll be in on it. We took it this far, let’s take it all the way. What the hell, we got our nuts in the door jamb anyway.’

Sharky had been toying with an idea. Now he threw it out to the machine. ‘This is a long shot, okay. I know that going in. But just supposing this shooter was in the service in World War Two. He’s the right age for it. His prints could be in the inactive file.’

‘Wouldn’t the Bureau have cleaned that package, too?’ Livingston asked.

‘Why?’ said Sharky. ‘They didn’t need to. The Bureau created Howard Burns. But, when I was in military intelligence there was a couple of times when we turned up an ID in the old files. The FBI doesn’t have it all.’

‘I say we try everything,’ Papa said. ‘You never know when something’s gonna work.’

‘And you got the kalibash to get in there, right Sharky?’ Friscoe said.

‘I’ve got a couple of good pals out at Fort McPherson in the intelligence unit there. What’ve we got to lose?’

Friscoe rubbed his hands together. His weariness was temporarily replaced by a surge of adrenalin. He had expected a few bunts, but the four of them had actually bit a couple of long balls.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘tuck this in the back of your minds while you’re out there. This John Doe, here’s what Twigs gave me on him. And remember, Riley’s workin’ on him, too. And Riley ain’t gonna stop until he knows chapter and verse on him. Anyways, John Doe was five-ten, a hundred and fifty-five to sixty-five pounds, black hair going grey, in his late fifties. A very hard guy in good physical condition. Has two old scars down here, just under his ribs, one in front, one in back. Twigs says It’s an old gunshot wound, could go back thirty years.’

Sharky said, ‘Same age as the shooter.’

‘Just about,’ said Friscoe. ‘Also he was suffering from some respiratory ailment. Bad lungs caused by inhalation of hemp,

‘Hemp?’ Livingston said. ‘You mean rope?’

‘I mean hemp, which is what rope is made out of.’

‘He worked in a hemp mill?’ Sharky said.

‘Yeah. And the most common place to find a jute mill is in prison. So we could be looking for an old con here.’

‘We could check the county and federal probation officers. Maybe if this guy was paroled he had to register here.’