Black Alley Part 7

I should have listened to Morgan. My body wasn't fifteen years old anymore. It was injured and hurting bad and all I could do was sweat it out until nature fused with medication and I could reach a normal peak again. Twice, I had to run more hot water into the tub and an hour later the relief started. I sat there for another ten minutes, then eased out and sat under the infrared light in the ceiling until I was dried off.

Even thinking about what could have happened at Le Cirque gave me the jumps. Either of those guys could have cleaned my plow if they had gotten past my reputation. Luckily, all they could see was that single .45 slug. If I had a bullet, then I had a gun. If I had a gun, then I sure would have used it if those clowns had made a move. That was real positive thinking for them. For me it was stupid. I looked at my face in the mirror over the sink. It was pretty haggard looking. I said, "No more, Mikey boy. Quit being a wise guy."

4.

VELDA WAS ALREADY AT THE OFFICE when Pat and I walked in. It was ten after nine, a breakfast of coffee and hard rolls was ready for us, then we would see Marcos Dooley off at the funeral parlor. I asked Pat about the flowers and he said, "Dooley left orders. No flowers. He said it reminded him of a funeral."

"Since when did he think ahead, Pat?"

"He'd changed in the last few years. I found out from the director at Richmond's that he had paid for his own ceremonies in advance, delivered his own urn for his ashes . . ."

"Ashes! Come on, Pat, he hated fire, you know that."

"The war is past, Mike. He probably got over that phobia. So he opted for cremation. Besides, where the h.e.l.l can they bury you in the city anymore?"

Getting turned back to pure dust again wasn't my idea of Dooley's mentality. Watching him the time we got trapped in a burning building with no way out made me realize how much he hated the kind of fire that could char you to shriveled, roasted meat. Somehow he'd opened a hole in the wall with a grenade, squeezed out and blasted the four enemy infantrymen who had cornered us and we had gotten back to our company without any trouble. It was months after that when Pat and I saw the rippled burn scars on his back while we were showering that it all made sense.

At her desk, Velda was dunking a bagel into her coffee cup. Pat walked over, saw the gimmick she had laid out on her blotter and mumbled around his hard roll, "What's that?"

"The latest in telephone bugs," she told him.

"Who'd give you guys an order to tap a phone?" We were good buddies, but he was still a cop.

For a minute we let him stew in it, then I said, "n.o.body, pal. That was laid on us."

Velda tapped the desk phone in front of her. "This one."

"Nice," Pat said. "Who'd do that?"

I told him, "We know when, we know why, but we don't know who."

"Great. Now explain." He took another bite of his hard roll.

"That press conference was a pretty public affair. We only made a few calls and let them spread the word. Let's face it, me coming back all of a sudden was an interesting news item. Somebody who was at ease thinking I had been knocked off suddenly got the jumps to find out it hadn't happened. That one had an employee in the bunch that showed up here. Planting a bug would have been a snap during the interview when all eyes were focused on me."

"So?"

"So let me feel important, will you?"

Pat finished his roll and nodded. "Be my guest."

"By the way, how big a bundle would a million bucks in hundreds make?"

He looked at me like I was kidding, but my eyes said I wasn't.

"A big cardboard carton full. Clothes dryer size."

"Then a billion would take a thousand cartons like that."

Pat seemed puzzled now. "Yeah, why?"

I chose a smaller number for easier figuring. "Then how big a place would you need to store eighty thousand cartons that size?"

"Mike," he said, "getting shot has plain screwed up your mind."

"That's no answer."

"How about a great big warehouse, then?"

"That's what I figured." I grinned at him and said, "What would you do with a bundle that big, Pat?"

"Buy a new car," he growled, wondering what brought all this on.

"That is what I thought," I said, grinning at his answer.

Velda didn't get the exchange either and shook her head at us. "What do we do with the bug, Mike?"

"Can you put it back?"

"I took it off, didn't I? Only let's not use the same phone. This gadget is a miniature transmitter so it will work off any unit, except that it will transmit only what we want somebody to hear."

"Good," I said. "Do it."

While she inserted the bug into the phone on the other desk, Pat and I finished the goodies, had a last half cup of coffee and checked the time.

Downstairs we caught a cab over to Richmond's funeral parlor, saw DOOLEY neatly lettered in on a mahogany sign with an arrow pointing to the chapel on the left. The quietness that sat on these moneyed morgues was dank. Like a fog. Faces would go by dripping with grief or rigid with stoicism, determined to fight a terrible sorrow. Only the attendants seemed human. They were good at pretending grief or consolation, even when their shorts were too tight. But that was not out of place because somebody had to hold the pieces together.

I was expecting to find the place empty, but that wasn't the way it was at all. There must have been two dozen people there. Two were women. They were in a corner together talking softly and one was crying. Not much, but the grief showed. Most of the others were ordinary guys. They could have been workers who came out during their lunch hour or maybe neighbors of old Dooley. Four of them were gathered around a chest-high display table that held a graciously carved urn.

I knew what that was. Marcos Dooley was in there.

And the guy looking at me was wishing it was me instead. He was almost as tall as I was and from the way his six-hundred-dollar suit fit you knew he worked out on all the Nautilus equipment and most likely jogged fifty miles a week. He had the good looks of a Sicilian dandy and the composure of a Harvard graduate, but under that high-priced facade he was a street punk named Ponti. The younger.

I walked over to him. We had never met, but we didn't need an introduction. I said, "h.e.l.lo. Come to pay your respects?"

Under his coat his muscles tightened and his eyes measured me. There was a wary tautness in the way he stood, ready for anything and hoping it would happen, and the sooner the better. He was like an animal, the young male in the prime of life and now he wanted to challenge the old bull. He knew that the longer nothing happened the less chance he had to win and an expectant anxiety showed in the lines around his mouth. He looked just like Drago and Patterson at Le Cirque.

I played the old bull's part perfectly. I said, "Your buddies left my calling card on their table. I took it back."

His eye twitched, so he wasn't as cool as he thought he was. "Oh?"

Real Harvard-like, I thought. "Tell them I'm saving it, Ugo."

His eyes flicked to see if anyone was listening. "I'll do that."

The old bull said, "You didn't answer my question."

"Dooley worked for my father."

"I know that." I got a frown again, strangely concerned this time.

"And how do you know him?"

"We were in the army together. So was that cop over there." Ugo didn't have to look. He knew who I meant. Pat was looking right at us. He got that twitch again and I knew the young buck had lost the confrontation. But there would be another time and the young buck would get stronger and the old bull would be aging out of the picture. He hoped.

At the display table, I got a close look at Dooley's encapsulation. It was a dulled metallic urn, modestly decorated at the top and bottom with a plaque in the middle engraved with gold lettering.

His name, age and birthplace were at the top, then under it a brief history that gave his GI serial numbers in eight digits and a record of his service aboard the U.S. destroyer Latille. Nothing about his army time at all. h.e.l.l, both Pat and I knew Dooley had come from someplace else he wouldn't speak about before he was attached to our outfit. Now we knew. He had served in, then ducked out of the U.S. Navy. The son of a gun probably got seasick and called it quits, but was patriotic enough to get right back into the mess with another combat unit.

The funeral director for Richmond's sidled up next to me and asked, "Can I see you a moment, Mr. Hammer?"

I nodded and followed him to the far side of the room. He stood there primly, wondering how to explain the situation. "When Mr. Dooley purchased our . . . accommodations, he asked that you see to his . . . remains."

"Be glad to," I told him. "What did he want done with them?"

"He said he had a son named Marvin and wanted you to find him and deliver his ashes in the urn to the boy."

"I never knew about a kid."

"Apparently he had one he never mentioned."

"Well," I said to him, "if that's what he wanted, that's what he gets. I sure owe him that much."

He looked at his watch. Half the crowd had signed the register and already left. The others would be out in a few minutes. "I'll box the urn for you and you can pick it up in my office."

The three of us left the parlor with Dooley in my arms, packed in a box like a specimen of some kind. Pat wanted to know what I was going to do with him and I told him there was a private repository for jars of dead people in Queens. You paid a lifetime fee and visitors could come see your remains in a niche on a concrete wall. Pat wanted to split the fee with me because of our past relationship, so I agreed and took Dooley home with me.

Women are strange people. They are inbred nesters, ready to make a home the minute they have the chance, cleaning and changing and stirring up dirt where none was at all. Velda was doing this right now. Not physically, but with her mind and eyes. Mine was a bachelor's apartment. You knew a man lived here. It was expensive, but it had no frills. The decorations had a masculine nature, all in good taste. But Male. Now that was being softened with feminine overtones. She had been here often enough, but now it was different.

When the inspection was finished she said almost casually, "When are you planning to marry me, Mike?"

"You in a hurry?"

"Like you couldn't believe."

"Then help me to finish this Dooley affair," I said. She sat down and I slid into the cushion next to her. I told her about Dooley's tying in with Lorenzo and what he had said about the dons. In a general way I described the discord in the families and what they were going to do with their funds. Right then she turned quickly, her eyes narrowed, and said, "Did you notice that little fat guy as we went into Dooley's area?"

"Grey double-breasted suit, pink shirt?"

"That's the one."

"What about him?"

"He was either a Treasury man or an IRS agent. Six months ago I covered a trial at the Kings County Courthouse in Brooklyn and he was a witness for the prosecution."

"What was he doing at the funeral home?"

"He was watching, Mike."

A little hiss seeped through my lips.

"What's happening?" she asked me.

"You sure about that guy? The fat guy?"

"About ninety percent," she stated. "Now tell me what's going on."

"The leaks have started, kitten. One of them got picked up by Uncle Sam. The tax boys have a scent and they'll follow it all the way through."

"To what?"

"To where eighty-nine billion dollars are stashed." It was the first time I had mentioned the numbers to her and she opened her mouth in an expression of utter disbelief.

"Mike . . ."

"Don't play it down, kid. The annual take from California's biggest cash crop would knock your socks off."

"What crop is that?"

"Marijuana. Happy gra.s.s."

"Mike . . . you said billions. Each billion is a thousand million."

"Pat thought so too."

"Then you weren't kidding . . . ?"

"Not about something that big." I gave her hand a gentle squeeze of rea.s.surance. "Right now they're looking for dinosaurs. There aren't any. All they can find are fossils. Interesting to look at, but that's all. The only one who could tell them about it is dead."

"You believed Dooley, didn't you?"

I agreed with her. I did believe Dooley, all right. He told me what he did with all that loot, but he didn't tell me where. How he did it was another matter. How would you move eighty thousand cartons of pure, spendable cash and valuables in a way that was totally sight unseen? It was like watching Karloff in The Mummy when he was buried alive beside the lady who cheated on her husband. To keep the grave secret all the slaves were killed by the soldiers.

I always wondered what happened to the soldiers. They had sworn loyalty to the pharaoh so they were considered beyond suspicion of acting traitorously. At least until a stronger pharaoh came on the scene.

I shook the thought out of my head and stood up. "Tomorrow I want you to go down to the Veterans Administration and run down Dooley's service record." I scanned the serial numbers on the urn and wrote them down, handing the slip to Velda.

"What am I looking for?"

"His kid. He's supposed to have a son. All that information would have been recorded when he signed up."

"Where do I look first?"