Gone, No Forwarding

Eighteen

Benny Nicoletti looked like a good pro linebacker gone to seed. He sounded like your Aunt Ethel getting ready to faint over a mouse. Only the eyes said cop. His 230 pounds overflowed Kearny’s client chair. It was Tuesday morning and Kearny was not at all happy to find him on the doorstep. He said in total delight, “Congrats on the promotion, Benny, and what the hell do you want?”

“Can’t an old friend drop around to say howdy?” asked Nicoletti in his reedy voice.

“When he’s just been put in charge of the Police Intelligence Unit? No.”

To Kearny’s surprise, Nicoletti looked almost embarrassed. “Do you owe me any favors, Dan?”

Kearny said nothing. Nicoletti sighed and drew himself erect. He had a cop’s slightly seedy hardness, not so much of conditioning as of having dished it out and taken it for a couple of decades.

“I didn’t think so. But I need one.”

Kearny pushed Giselle’s intercom button, then realized it was the first time he’d thought of that signal as Giselle’s instead of Kathy’s. “Could you bring down some coffee for the three of us?”

“On the way, Dan’l.”

Her voice sounded sprightly. Kathy had begun her inevitable fade from everyone’s consciousness. Nicoletti grunted to his feet when Giselle entered with an insulated pot and three plastic cups. “When are we off for that weekend together, babe?”

“When you hadn’t gotten married to a wonderful woman and had those four great kids.”

He shook his head sadly and sat down to sip his coffee. “It’s my middle-aged charm.” He slapped his belly. It sounded like a board being struck. “And this ten pounds I picked up since I ain’t got time for handball any more.” He sipped and sighed. “Now your witness is here, Dan, you ready to go?”

Kearny feathered smoke, unembarrassed. “I start to get wary when you bureaucrats show up.”

“Bureaucrats!” Nicoletti snorted. “And the hell of it is, you’re right. Anyway, remember that Mex dude got blown away down on Fisherman’s Wharf last November fifth?”

“Everything that happened that particular day is engraved on my brain,” said Kearny. “Yeah, I remember. Espinosa, was it?”

“That’s him. Adán Espinosa. This coffee’s pretty good.”

“Larry kicked up such a fuss about the instant that we got a Mr. Coffee,” said Giselle.

“His real name wasn’t Espinosa.” Nicoletti’s specialty was mob activity in California. “He was actually Phil Fazzino.”

Fazzino! Kearny felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. The man he’d fingered to Hawkley two years before. He said, with a poker face, “Good old Flip?”

“Good old Flip. Coroner tells me he was an easy autopsy.”

Giselle almost choked. Abstract approval of Kearny’s phone call to Hawkley was one thing; somebody being an easy autopsy because he’d been blown all over the front of a motel dresser was something else. She said, “Why was it kept out of the papers?”

“It wasn’t easy. But we had witnesses. A woman, a kid, a linen-truck driver who started running the same afternoon. He had to know something, because he didn’t even stop to deliver his towels. We caught up with him when he phoned his wife from Canada on her birthday. The kid didn’t see the killer, just his car. The woman just saw the corpse and lost her lunch. So we needed the driver.” He reached for the coffee pot. “This guy, he’s a survivor, he wants to keep on living. So we had to pry him open.”

“How?” asked Kearny.

“Yeah, well, we’re a little ashamed of that.” Nicoletti sounded as ashamed as a cardinal at a canonization. “We told him we were putting six uniform people, four shifts around the clock, on his wife and kids. They don’t go to the bathroom, one of our people is holding their hand, get it?”

“No,” said Giselle. Kearny was silent. He got it.

“Then we told him that we’d let drop on the street how he was fingering the Espinosa hit man, and then we’d pull the protection and give odds on how long his family lasted.”

“You should be ashamed!” burst out Giselle.

“Yeah, well, it opened him up. What he seen was somebody he knew. The triggerman. Well, didn’t really know. By sight at the union hall, like that. You’re in paying your dues, you see a guy around. But the big thing is, we got a face he can recognize.”

“So he went through the mug books and—”

“No way,” said Nicoletti, “this one is under the hat because, way we figure it, we nail down the hit man he’s gonna have to start trading — otherwise he’s got himself a death penalty without the jury leaving the box, and they ain’t gonna keep stalling executions in California forever. So we got a list of all the members of the Teamsters local our linen-truck driver belongs to, and had DMV pull all their driver’s license photos, and we copied ’em and couriered ’em up to Canada. And our witness come up with a make.”

Kearny saw it first. He stood up and solemnly reached out to shake hands with Nicoletti. It took them right off the hook. But Giselle said, puzzled, “So who was the hit man?”

And Nicoletti said, “Kasimir Pivarski,” and shook Kearny’s hand all right, but also added, “Only you don’t understand. The one thing our three witnesses agree on. Time. It went down at 5:55 P.M. on Friday, November fifth, last year.”

Giselle said. “Oh, no,” and Kearny sat back down again as if his bones were old and brittle.

“Could Pivarski have been in your Oakland office earlier than five-thirty or so?” asked Nicoletti.

Kearny shook his head. “Kathy always wrote her receipts and stamped ’em while the subject was still in the office, and this one is time-stamped at 5:46 P.M.”

“And there’s Jeff Simson’s affidavit to get around, too,” said Giselle. “He covers the time element of Pivarski’s visit.”

“Pretty definite, ain’t it?” Nicoletti had been thumbing through a copy. “He was in your Oakland office when Flip was getting wasted fifteen miles away.”

“What about his background?” asked Kearny.

“Absolutely clean. We worked it over pretty good after we got our I.D. and before we found out about the time conflict. But when we tried to waltz him around a little, here’s his attorney, Hawkley, who does a lot of legal work for guys in the Teamsters. He slapped a show-cause on us, and we had to vacate our material witness warrant without even getting a chance to serve it. We had a screwed-up time element, and only a questionable l.D. from a DMV photo, right? Not even a formal line-up. So I got one interview with him in Hawkley’s office, and that was it.”

“What kind of guy is he?” asked Kearny. “I haven’t laid eyes on him either.”

“Seemed like a big dumb Polack, and I’d by Jesus swear that’s all he is. Divorced, no kids...” He shrugged. “Just a track driver.”

“What was Fazzino doing back in San Francisco?” asked Kearny. He didn’t like knowing that whoever had pulled the trigger, it had been Dan Kearny who had sort of pointed the shotgun. “I would have thought this was the last place he’d show up, knowing...”

Nicoletti got animated. “Money. The Feds have traced him and Wendy back to a little Mexican village, Zihuatenejo, where they laid low for a year while trying to buy Argentinian citizenship. Once that came through, they flew up here as Adán and Elena Espinosa. Flip went to a safe deposit box at Golden Gate Trust, drew out a satchelful of what hadda be cash.”

“And they were watching the box?” asked Kearny. “After a year?”

“A bank v-p named Nucci had a notify flag on it. We can’t prove nothing, but Nucci probably made a phone call to somebody when Flip checked out the box. Whoever he notified blew Flip away and took the money. And just so nobody would make any mistakes about why the hit was made, a penny was shoved up...” He looked over at Giselle and actually colored slightly. “A penny was placed on Fazzino’s body. An old mob trick to mark a betrayer.” So live with it, Kearny thought to himself. He deserved to die and the State couldn’t touch him. So live with it. But to change the subject, he said in a dry voice, “Have we come to the favor yet, Benny? I’ve got to be in the hearing again tomorrow, and the work I’ve got piled up on my desk as it is...”

“It’s about the hearing, as a matter of fact.” Nicoletti cleared his throat. “Y’see, Dan, we figure Hawkley must know we got a witness somewhere to that Fazzino hit, can maybe I.D. the triggerman. So he’s been keeping Pivarski under wraps so we can’t get a formal line-up on him—”

“But he also has to know Pivarski isn’t the triggerman,” said Kearny. “The time element won’t let him be. So why wouldn’t he just let your witness see Pivarski and get it over with? The witness will say, hey, that isn’t the guy, and—”

“What if our witness says, hey, that is the guy?”

Giselle said suddenly, “That’s what I’d say if I was the witness. Then they wouldn’t have any more reason to try and kill me.”

“We still want our witness to see Pivarski,” said Nicoletti stubbornly. “He’s agreed to come down from Canada for it, on our promise he won’t have to testify in open court...”

“And you want him at the hearing, posing as one of our field men, if the Hearing Officer rules that Pivarski has to testify,” said Kearny sourly. Then he shrugged. “Okay, Benny, I’ll let you know if Pivarski’s going to show up.” His voice thickened. “But if he does, for Chrissake don’t let a bunch of rosy-faces from the FBI come sucking around. Hawkley’d spot them from across town.”

“Right you are,” said Nicoletti. He was suddenly on his I feet in an easy movement that belied his appearance of soft I bulk. He nodded, and slid open the glass door. “Thanks, I Dan.”

And was gone. Giselle stood up, ready to go upstairs and get back to work. “I still don’t see why Hawkley wouldn’t just let the witness I.D. Pivarski and get it over with,” she said.

“Hawkley likes to play games,” said Kearny thoughtfully. “And until this license hearing, I doubt he had any way of proving that his client wasn’t over in San Francisco shooting Fazzino. Which makes me feel that, somehow, he’s I behind the State’s move after our license. I just don’t see I how he could have set it up.”

“And I don’t see what good it would do us even if he is,” said Giselle. “We’re still in a lot of trouble.”

Kearny nodded. “What we need is an eyewitness who’ll support the version of events that’s in Simson’s deposition. And at the moment, that’s Bart Heslip’s problem.”