Silent Scream

PART TWO
CHAPTER 11

A few days later I got a job from an old man who ran a delicatessen on Third Avenue. His grandson, who worked in the store and went to college nights, had left his apron and classes and disappeared. The old man wanted the boy to come home.

It took me a week to trace the grandson to a communal farm outside Los Angeles. He had a girl with him. He was a nice kid, she was a nice girl, and they wanted to work on the farm. I told the old man. The boy was his only relative, he had big hopes for him, and he was heartbroken. What could you do? The old man paid me, I had most of Mia Morgan’s thousand, and I wanted some peace and clean air. I went north to the snow.

With one arm I don’t ski or skate well, and my money was limited, so I picked Great Barrington, Mass. The food was good in a boarding house, it was quiet, and I liked to walk in the snow woods. I stayed two weeks, eating, sleeping, and walking in the woods. I tried to forget the city, clear the grime and the crime from my brain. Why did I stay in New York anyway, with Marty gone? Maybe I should find a ship, ship out, try being a sailor again.

I was thinking about where I could ship to, maybe on a South American voyage, and walking in the woods, when I saw him coming across the snow toward me. It was three weeks since Andy Pappas had kissed me off, and I wasn’t happy when I recognized who it was walking up to me. John Albano.

“How’d you find me?” I said. “Mia fired me.”

“I asked around,” Albano said. “Your friend Joe Harris.”

“He’s not supposed to tell.”

“He thought it was important enough, Mr. Fortune.”

His turtle-neck was black, he wore the same light topcoat even here, and his hair was whiter than the snow. It was still hard to believe he was seventy, solid in the snow like a short, wide tree. He watched some skiers in the far distance across the snow, didn’t even blink in the wind.

“You knew Mia was Andy Pappas’s daughter all along,” I said. “That’s why you advised me. Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“I don’t interfere, not directly. Not when I didn’t know why she hired you. Maybe it had nothing to do with Andy.”

“Just indirectly? General advice, keep watch on her?”

“Mia is my granddaughter, Mr. Fortune.”

“Granddaughter? Then… You mean Andy Pappas is-?”

“Stella Pappas is my daughter. Andy was my son-in-law.”

“Was?” I said. “He got the divorce already?”

“Andy’s dead, Mr. Fortune. Shot down three days ago.”

All right, no big surprise. Not for the shooting of Andy Pappas. A little, Andy had been boss a long time. I’m not a hypocrite, the world would be better off, but I’d been mixed with Andy too recently to ignore it. And I’d known him a long time. When someone you know dies, even Andy Pappas, a small part of you goes with him.

“Two men?” I said. “Professionals?”

“Professional enough,” Albano said. “I want to hire you.”

“For a gang killing? What do I care?”

“Maybe not a gang killing,” John Albano said. “The girl was murdered, too. Diana Wood. They were shot together.”

I walked back to the boarding house for my things. John Albano drove me toward New York in his car.

“The police are asking questions about Mia, about Stella,” John Albano said. “A Captain Gazzo took Mia downtown for questioning because she hired you.”

“Hate and anger are good motives. Jealousy.”

“Hate and jealousy would fit the husband, too.”

I’d thought of that. I also thought of Sid Meyer and maybe some big deal. Greed, revenge, and fear are good motives.

“Max Bagnio was on guard in the apartment vestibule,” John Albano said. “Now he’s missing.”

Little Max? A new loyalty? “There’s an underboss. Close to Andy. Charley something, wears yellow gloves.”

“Charley Albano,” the old man said, watched the highway.

“Your son?”

“He means no more to me than any of them.”

“Them? What are you, Albano?”

“An engineer, Mr. Fortune. Honest, I hope, and on my own. A normal man. It’s too late for my son and daughter, but I’ve got a granddaughter who’s going to be normal. I want you to help Mia, find the truth.”

I said nothing more, and the snow on the ground got dirtier as we neared New York.

When I walked into Centre Street, Gazzo was on his way out. He scowled at me. It must have been a bad three days.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m going up there.”

We rode in the back of his car. He carried a large, flat envelope, stared out at the city as if it had failed him.

“He’d filed for the divorce, set Diana Wood up in this apartment,” he said. “About two A.M. Andy and the girl were alone in the apartment. Guard in the corridor, Bagnio downstairs. Someone shot the guard in the corridor, shot up Andy and the girl. With an automatic rifle.”

“Gang war? Sid Meyer, now Pappas?”

“The Diana Wood girl just caught in the cross fire? Maybe. I’ve been waiting for the next killing. But there hasn’t been one. Nothing except Max Bagnio’s vanishing act. Quiet.”

If he had a reason to doubt a gang war beyond the absence of a second killing, he’d tell me in his own time.

We turned into a quiet block of Twelfth Street off Fifth Avenue, and stopped in front of a four-story brownstone in a row of brownstones. On the sidewalk I looked up at the building.

“Hard to guard,” I said. “Open and ordinary.”

“I guess the girl wanted a quiet place,” Gazzo said. “No guard in the apartment with them. Trying to please the girl, his vigilance down. Someone took advantage.”

“If they never made a mistake, they’d never get killed.”

The vestibule was narrow, carpeted stairs going up.

“Max Bagnio was here inside the vestibule,” Gazzo said.

“You talked to Bagnio after the killings?”

“He came to Centre Street the next day. Vanished after that.”

We went up to the top floor. There were no corridor windows, only two apartments on each floor. The top landing was straight and clear, and the stairs went on up to a door out to the roof. We stopped at the door of the rear apartment.

“The corridor guard was out here in front of the broken door,” Gazzo said. “Shot up good.”

Inside, the apartment was a large living room, with a bathroom, small kitchen, and single bedroom off it on the far side. The furniture was new and rich. We went into the bedroom.

“Just the way we found it,” Gazzo said.

A blue-and-white bedroom, Andy hadn’t spared the cost, and a wreck now. The dark red of dried blood splattered the wall behind an enormous bed, stained the blue rug and the unmade bed itself. Two tall lamps and a mirrored dressing table had been smashed. Andy’s clothes lay on a long blue couch. I saw no gun.

“Andy wasn’t carrying a gun,” Gazzo read my mind. “For the girl, I guess.” He looked back through the open bedroom door to the front door directly across the living room. “They must have been asleep. The killer, or killers, shot the man in the corridor, kicked the door in, cornered Andy in here.”

“Maybe held the man in the corridor, shot him going out.”

“Possible. Andy still should have had some time if he wasn’t asleep. Killer just lined them up next to the bed.”

“The bodies were beside the bed?”

Gazzo opened his flat envelope, handed me a series of glossy photographs. Bodies in violent death are torn and bloody, seem flat and not human, as if whatever makes us human had slipped out of them. But there are some that seem just asleep, and you want to tell them to get up. Diana looked like that. Andy didn’t, his face exploded into a bloody mess. Diana wore a robe. The robe had fallen open, she was naked under it, her blonde hair flung about her dead face. Andy was naked, too.

“She had time to put on a robe?”

“Maybe she slept in it, women do,” Gazzo said. “Or maybe she grabbed it by reflex. A matter of seconds, modest.”

A nice girl, gentle, and now…? I forced myself to study the photos, be objective, the detective. Diana was deeply tanned, with stark white bikini areas across her breasts and lower pelvis. Her tanned hands were lying on her belly, a pale ring mark on her right ring finger.

“Where’d she get so tanned? She wasn’t when I saw her last.”

“Miami. Two weeks down there, they just got back,” Gazzo said. “Max Bagnio heard the barrage, got up here in maybe twenty seconds, saw no one on the way. They must have escaped over the roofs. Bagnio checked to be sure Andy was dead, ran around the apartment. He kicked down the door of the next apartment in case the killer was hiding there, but it was empty, the tenant out. The roof door was locked inside, but it’s a spring lock. The roof was clean. Bagnio went to report to the mob, came in to us the next day, told his story, and vanished.”

“Who called the police?”

“Tenants downstairs.”

“How’d the gunman get in the building past Little Max?”

“We figure he had to be hiding inside somewhere. None of the tenants will admit anyone hid in their apartments, but there was another empty apartment on three.”

“Bagnio and the other guard didn’t check the apartments?”

“Andy wouldn’t let them bother the girl’s neighbors. They just checked the corridor and roof door and watched.”

A risk for the sake of Diana. It had cost Andy. It had cost Diana, too-for the sake of Andy and what she wanted. An abnormal action for Andy, but, then, he’d already filed for divorce, which was abnormal already. I wondered if that had been what cost him?

“You’ve got another reason for doubting a gang war,” I said.

“Come on,” Gazzo said. He led me out into the corridor. He pointed at the landing, at the stairs, both down and up to the roof. “A clear view everywhere, Dan, yet the guard here was shot with his gun still in his holster. Maybe the killer was hiding in an empty apartment, got around Max Bagnio that way, but how did he get near the guard up here without a battle?”

“You think it was someone the guard knew?”

“And trusted. No rival mob,” Gazzo said. “I think he knew the killer, thought Max Bagnio had already passed him in.”

“Or maybe someone was with the killer,” I said. “Stella Pappas, or Mia, or Charley Albano.”

“Andy was getting a divorce,” Gazzo said. “This John Albano you talked about, any relation to Charley?”

“Father. An old man, not Mafia, he says. I believe him.”

Gazzo thought. “None of them have decent alibis. Mrs. Pappas was in town visiting an old friend, but the friend wasn’t home that night. Mia and Stern were together, out on the town, but they can’t prove where they were.”

“Stern’s a trained soldier. What kind of rifle was it?”

“The M.E. thinks an Army M-16. Not Israeli, but M-16s aren’t so hard to get. Charley Albano was playing cards-with two hoods.”

I finally asked the question. “What about Hal Wood?”

“Would the guard have let him close? Didn’t he want her back?”

Hal Wood had wanted Diana back, it had sounded like that anyway. But if she wouldn’t come back? His perfect woman?

“Anyway,” Gazzo said, “I thought of him first, right? He’s got the only real alibi. Had been out of town for two days, on vacation up near Woodstock. Not alone. A girl named Emily Green was with him. They had a cabin.”

I felt a weight lift off me. The husband is always the first suspect. Now I could stay out of it. Or could I?

“You thought about Irving Kezar and his wife?” I said.

“Sure. No alibis, but no visible motives yet. Nothing new on Sid Meyer. If he was in some deal, it doesn’t show.”

I started for the stairs down. “If you need me, call.”

“We’ll badger them all, look for the rifle, wait for one of our informers to tell us who did it,” Gazzo said. “Like always.”

I stopped. “You know, one person could have gotten past Bagnio and walked right up to the guard here with a smile.”

“Who?”

“Little Max himself.”

“We’re looking for him,” Gazzo said.

I went down and caught a taxi. Little Max Bagnio had been with Andy Pappas most of his adult life. A loyal retainer, without ambition. Only maybe Max had found ambition, or maybe he’d found a new loyalty. In the taxi going to my office, the winter light fading thin and cold into night, I wanted no more part of the mess, but I went on thinking about it. Curiosity? Habit? Call it anything, damn!

John Albano was waiting in my office. I thought about John Albano. He wanted to hire me-but where had he been when Andy was shot down? What if Andy had been some danger to Mia Morgan?

I swore at myself. What did I care? A police job. They get paid for it. But I went on thinking.