Hard as Nails

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"So why'd you want to meet me here?" asked Detective Rigby King.

"I like the food here," said Kurtz. He glanced at his watch. It was just ten A.M.

They were in the small restaurant area—a long counter and a long, narrow dining area just across the aisle from the counter—set amidst the sprawling, indoor Broadway Market. The market was a tradition in Buffalo, and like most traditions in America, it had seen better days. Once a thriving indoor fresh meat, fruit, flowers, and tchotchke covered market in the old Polish and German section of town, Broadway Market was now surrounded by a black ghetto and really came alive only during Easter time, when the many Polish families who'd fled to Cheektowaga and other suburbs came in to buy their Easter hams. Today, half the market space was empty and there was a halfhearted attempt at some Halloween exhibits and festivities, but only a few black mothers with their costumed kids wandered the aisles.

Kurtz and Rigby sat along the mostly empty counter at the aisle-side restaurant. For some promotional reason, all the waitresses behind the long counter were wearing flannel pajamas. One of them had a sort of sleeping bonnet on. They didn't look all that happy, and Kurtz couldn't blame them.

Kurtz and Rigby were drinking coffee. Kurtz also had ordered a donut, although he nibbled without enthusiasm. Little kids in drugstore Star Wars and Spiderman costumes would glance at him, then look again, and then cringe against their mothers' legs. Kurtz was still wearing the Ray Charles glasses, but evidently the raccoon bruises were turning orange today and creeping out farther from beneath the glasses. He was wearing a black baseball cap to cover most of the small bandage he'd left in place.

"Do you remember coming here as a kid?" asked Kurtz, sipping his coffee and watching what little movement there was in the cavernous space. Many of the mothers seemed morose and sullen, their kids hyperactive.

"I remember stealing stuff here as a kid," said Rigby. "The old women would scream at me in Polish."

Kurtz nodded. He knew other kids from Father Baker's who'd come up here to grab and run. He never had.

"Joe," said Rigby, setting down her coffee mug, "you didn't ask to meet to ramble on about old times. Did you have something you wanted to talk about?"

"Do I have to have an agenda to have coffee with an old friend?"

Rigby snorted slightly. "Speaking of old friends and agendas—you know another ex-con named Big Bore Redhawk?"

Kurtz shrugged. "Not really. There was some guy in Attica with that absurd name, but I never had anything to do with him."

"He seems to want to have something to do with you," said Rigby.

Kurtz drank his coffee.

"Word on the street is that this Indian's been hunting for you, telling people in bars that he has a grudge to settle with you. Know anything about this, Joe?"

"No."

Rigby leaned closer. "We're hunting for him. Maybe the grudge he had with you got itself worked out in that parking garage and Peg O'Toole. You think we should question him?"

"Sure," said Kurtz. "But the Indian I remember in Attica didn't look like the twenty-two caliber type. But that's no reason not to talk to him."

Rigby sat back. "Why'd you invite me here, Joe?"

"I'm remembering some of the details of the shooting."

Rigby looked skeptical but kept listening.

"There were two men," said Kurtz.

The detective folded her arms across her chest. She was wearing a blue oxford shirt today and a soft, camel-colored jacket with the usual jeans. Her gun was out of sight on her belt on the right. "Two men," she said at last. "You saw their faces?"

"No. Just shapes, silhouettes, about forty feet away. One guy did the shooting until I hit him. Then the other grabbed the twenty-two and started firing."

"How do you know it was a twenty-two?" asked Rigby.

Kurtz frowned. "That's what you and the surgeon told me. That's the slug they pulled out of O'Toole's brain and found next to my skull. What are you talking about, Rigby?"

"But you weren't close enough to make out the type of twenty-two?"

"No. Aren't you listening? But I could tell from the sound—phut, phut, phut."

"Silenced?"

"No. But softer than most twenty-twos would sound in an enclosed, echoing space like that. Sort of like they'd dumped some of the powder in each cartridge. It wouldn't make much difference in muzzle velocity, but it sure cuts down on the noise."

"Says who?" asked Rigby.

"Israel's Mossad for one," said Kurtz. "The assassins they sent out to get payback for the Munich Massacre used reduced loads in twenty-twos."

"You an expert on Mossad assassins now, Joe?"

"No," said Kurtz. He set the remaining half of the donut aside. "I saw it in some movie."

"Some movie," said Rigby and nibbed her cheek. "All right, tell me about the two men."

Kurtz shrugged. "Just like I said—two silhouettes. No details. The guy I hit was shorter than the guy who picked up the pistol and kept firing."

"You're sure you hit one of them?"

"Yeah."

"We didn't find any blood on the garage floor—except yours and O'Toole's."

Kurtz shrugged again. "My guess is that the second shooter crammed the wounded man in the backseat of their car and took off after I went down."

"So they were shooting from behind their own car?"

"How the hell should I know?" said Kurtz. "But wouldn't you?"

Rigby leaned closer, her right elbow on the counter. "I sure as hell wouldn't use a twenty-two to try to kill two people from more than forty feet away."

"No, but I don't think they planned to shoot so soon," said Kurtz. "They were waiting for O'Toole to go to her car just past where they were waiting. Then the shooter would have stepped out and popped her from a couple of yards away."

Rigby's dark eyebrows went up. "So now you know they were after the parole officer, not you. You're conveniently remembering a lot today, Joe."

Kurtz sighed. "My car was down the ramp to the right. The shooters were on the ramp where O'Toole's car was parked."

"How do you know that?"

"She was walking in that direction," said Kurtz. "We both saw it on the tape." He braved another nibble of donut.

"Why two men but only one shooter?" hissed Rigby. They'd been whispering, but they were speaking loudly enough now that one of the waitresses in red polka-dot flannel pajamas looked over at them.

"How the fuck should I know?" Kurtz said in a conversational tone.

Rigby plunked down a five dollar bill for the two coffees and donut. "Do you remember anything else?"

"No. I mean, I remember pretty much what we saw on the security video—trying to drag and carry O'Toole back to the door, or at least behind that pillar, and then getting hit."

Rigby King studied his eyes. "That bit about rescuing O'Toole, risking your life to carry her to safety, didn't strike me as the Joe Kurtz I used to know. You were always the living embodiment of the theory of sociobiology to me, Joe."

Kurtz knew what she was talking about—his wino mentor, Pruno, had given him a long reading list for his years in Attica and Edward O. Wilson had been on the list for year six—but he wasn't going to show her he understood the comment. He gave Rigby the flattest gaze he was capable of and said, "I draped O'Toole over my back like a shield. She's a hefty woman. She would have stopped a twenty-two slug at that range."

"Well, she did," said Rigby. She stood. "If you regain any more memory, Joe, phone it in."

She walked out through the southwest door of Broadway Market.

His phone rang as he was driving the Pinto back to Chippewa Street.

"Errand is all done," came Angelina Farino Ferrara's voice.

"Thanks."

"Fuck thanks," said the female acting-don. "You owe me, Kurtz."

"No. Consider us even when I give you the down payment back, and spend the fifteen wisely. Go buy a new bra for your Boxster."

"I sold the Boxster this spring," said Angelina. "Too slow." She disconnected.

The office smelled of coffee and cigarettes. Kurtz had never picked up the habit for the second and felt too queasy to enjoy more of the first.

O'Toole's computer memory had divulged everything under questioning—password-protected files on her thirty-nine clients, her notes, everything except the password-protected e-mail. Most of what they got was garbage. O'Toole obviously didn't use the company computer for personal stuff—the files were all business.

The files on all the ex-cons, including on Kurtz himself, piled up the usual heap of sad facts and parolee bullshit. Only twenty-one of the thirty-nine were "active clients"—i.e., cons who had to drop in weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly to visit their parole officer. None of O'Toole's notes for the last few weeks' visits started with—"Client so-and-so threatened to kill me today…" In fact the level of banality was stunning. All of these guys were losers, many of them were addicts of one or many things, none of them—despite the veil of O'Toole's cool, professional summaries—seemed to show any real signs of wanting to go straight.

And none of them seemed to have a motive for killing his parole officer. (All of O'Toole's clients were male. Perhaps, Kurtz thought, she didn't like ex-cons of the female persuasion.)

Kurtz sighed and rubbed his chin, hearing the stubble there rasp. He'd showered this morning—moving slowly through the haze of pain and queasiness—but he'd decided that the stubble went with the purple and orange raccoon mask and dissolute visage. Besides, it hurt his head to shave.

Arlene had left the office after their meeting this morning—on Fridays she usually went to have coffee with her sister-in-law, Gail, often to discuss Sam's daughter, Rachel, for whom Gail now acted as guardian. So Kurtz had the office to himself. He paced back and forth, feeling the heat from the back room filled with humming servers at one end of his pace and the chill from the long bank of windows at the other end. Yesterday had been brisk and beautiful; today was cold and rainy. Tires hissed on Chippewa Street, but there wasn't much traffic before noon.

He kept shuffling the five pages with their thirty-nine names and capsule summaries and considered ruling himself out as a suspect. The honed instincts of a trained professional investigator. No other strategies or conclusions came to mind. Even if he just cut the list to the twenty «active» clients she was seeing weekly or bi-weekly—and there was no logical reason to do that, nor any logical reason to think it was just one of her current clients who did the shooting since it could have been any of the hundreds or thousands who had come before—it would take Kurtz a week or two to get a door-to-door investigation under way.

But something was gnawing like a rodent at Joe Kurtz's bruised brain. One of the names…

He shuffled the pages. There it was. Page three. Yasein Goba, 26, naturalized American citizen of Yemeni descent, lives in a part of Lackawanna called "back the Bridge," meaning south of the first all-steel bridge in America, in what was now one of the toughest neighborhoods in America. Goba was on parole after serving eighteen months on an armed robbery conviction.

Kurtz tried to remember what his bag lady informer, Mrs. Tuella Dean, had said—rumors about "some crazy Arab down in Lackawanna talking about wanting to shoot someone."

Pretty thin. Actually, Kurtz realized, thin was too grandiloquent a word for this connection. Invisible, maybe.

Kurtz knew that his search for this Yemeni, if he did it, went straight to the heart of the most pressing question in his world right now—If the odds are that someone was after Peg O'Toole rather than me, why the hell am I looking into that shooting rather than the heroin killer thing? After all, Toma Gonzaga was going to kill a guy named Joe Kurtz in—Kurtz glanced at his watch—seventy-eight hours, unless Kurtz solved the mobster's little serial killer problem. Kurtz had only met Toma this one time, but he had the strong feeling that the man meant what he said. Also, Kurtz could use one hundred thousand dollars.

So why am I fucking around investigating my shooting if O'Toole was the probable target? Get to work on the heroin shooter, Joe.

Kurtz walked over to the four-foot by five-foot framed map of the Buffalo area set on the north wall of the office. Sam had used the map in their old office, and Arlene had put it up here despite Kurtz's protests that they didn't need the damned thing. This morning, though, he and Arlene had gone through the list of murder sites from both Angelina Farino Ferrara's and Toma Gonzaga's lists and stuck red thumbtacks at each site—fourteen sites for twenty-two missing and presumed murdered people.

The hits had been literally all over the map: three in Lackawanna, four in the black ghetto east of Main, but others in Tonawanda, Cheektowaga, four more in Buffalo proper, and more in relatively upscale—or at least middle-class—suburbs such as Amherst and Kenmore.

Kurtz knew that no investigator in the world, even with police forensic resources behind him or her, could solve these murders in three days if the perpetrator didn't want to be caught. Too many hundreds of square miles to cover, too many hundreds of possible witnesses and potential suspects to interview, too many scores of fingerprints to check out—although Kurtz didn't even own a Boy Detective fingerprint kit—and too many possible local, state, and national killers who'd benefit from putting a crimp in the Gonzaga drug empire in Western New York.

If Kurtz were to make a list of suspects in the heroin killings right now, the name Angelina Farino Ferrara would fill the first five places on the list. The woman had everything to gain by destroying the Gonzagas' historical claim on the drug scene in the Buffalo area. She was ambitious. My God, was she ambitious. Her life's ambition had been to kill Emilio Gonzaga—which she had done last winter using Joe Kurtz as one of her many pawns—while weakening the Gonzaga crime family's grip on the city and strengthening what was left of the Farino Family power here.

All this «Toma» and «Angelina» first-name crap made sense to Kurtz only if the woman was playing the old game of being friends with her adversary even while plotting his destruction.

But there were the five blue pins on the map—all Farino Family dealers or users who had disappeared with only bloody stains left behind!

Who said they'd been killed?

Angelina Farino Ferrara. Her family, in the first year of her rebuilding, had grabbed just enough peripheral drug action that it would be too suspicious if only Gonzaga people were being murdered. What was the loss of a few dealers and users if it meant gaining Toma Gonzaga's trust? Maybe they'd all been relocated to Miami or Atlantic City while Ms. Farino Ferrara continued to murder Gonzaga junkies.

But Kurtz was sure that Gonzaga didn't trust Angelina. Anyone would be a fool to trust this woman who shot her first husband and kept the pistol out of what she called sentimentality, this woman who married her second elderly husband to be trained in the strategies and tactics of thievery, and who calmly admitted to drowning her only baby because it carried Gonzaga genes.

Kurtz stood at the window and watched the cold rain fall on Chippewa Street It made sense that Gonzaga «hired» him to find the heroin-connection killer in four days. At the very least, Kurtz's failure would give Gonzaga another reason for whacking him—as if possible collusion in the death of the mobster's father wasn't enough. And Angelina wasn't going to throw a fit when she learned that he'd been whacked—she'd accept Toma's explanation without rancor. The life of one Joe Kurtz wasn't that important in the grander scheme of things for her—especially when that grander scheme included revenge and ambition, which seemed to be the alpha and omega of Angelina Farino Ferrara's emotional spectrum.

Kurtz had to smile. His options were few. At least he'd neutralized the loose cannon that had been Big Bore Redhawk, recording the cell phone conversation with Angelina setting up the hit as he'd done so. Of course, the recording incriminated Joe Kurtz even more than the female don. In truth, they'd both been so circumspect over the phone that the tape was all but useless.

So it came down to the five thousand dollars advance money in an envelope that Kurtz was still carrying around. He'd use that on Tuesday morning—Halloween—when he drove away from Buffalo, New York, forever, buying a different used car before crossing the state line (and violating his parole). Kurtz knew a few people around the country, perhaps the most important right now being a plastic surgeon in Oklahoma City who gave people like Joe Kurtz new faces and identities in exchange for hard cash.

But he'd need quite a bit more hard cash. Kurtz could get fifty thousand dollars in a minute by asking Arlene to buy his theoretical share of WeddingBells-dot-com and SweetheartSearch-dot-com, but he'd never do that. She'd waited for years to start an online business like this, even if the high school sweetheart thing had been his idea in Attica.

Well, he could always get more cash.

Kurtz pulled on his baseball cap, slipped the.38 into his belt, and headed down to the Pinto. He had someone in Lackawanna he wanted to see.