The Last Cop Out

16

Lederer got there with the medical examiner and stayed while the detectives took everything down and the morgue crew moved out the bodies. The TV crews and the reporters were covering everything and this time Lederer was glad to have them on tap, because he was able to throw them a big one for holding down the news about the murder of Richard Case. Now he could blow everything in one grand gesture and in the back of his mind he could see the upcoming election and almost see his name up there for the Big Seat.

He even had good words for Burke and his admiration for Bill Long’s action was apparent to everyone. Having a witness in Helen Scanlon made it even better and when Burke said he had more to do and would finish the report in the morning, Lederer was more than happy to turn him loose.

In the car, Bill Long chewed on his lip with amazement. “He bought it,” Long said. “They all bought it. They bought the biggest con I ever saw. They bought it and they have to keep it. I even have to back you up on it and I know better.”

“You don’t know anything, Bill.”

Helen squeezed his arm. “Please, Gill.”

“Want me to tell you what I know?” Long asked. There was a near-note of humor in his voice, like that of a man who has seen just too much and had to laugh at anything that was anticlimactic.

“Yeah, Bill. Tell me.”

The captain leaned back in the seat, his head resting easily against the cushion. “Not too long ago, in a certain South American country — and you read about this in all the papers — mobsters were being found dead all over the place. Big hoods, little hoods... sometimes singly and sometimes in bunches. Occasionally they were in the open, other times they were in hiding, but they were carefully tracked down, shot to death and left lying where everybody could see them.

“For a while they thought it was another gang war, but it wasn’t that at all. They finally found out that an execution squad was at work and the only pros that could handle that kind of action were part of the police force.

“Oh, the crime rate sure dropped down to zero and the mobsters got the hell out of that country in one big hurry and maybe the situation was the better off for it, but it left a funny feeling in everybody’s stomach because the more you kill the easier it gets and with a force that big, powerful and deadly, it could turn its talents someplace else when it ran out of punks to gun down.

“Luckily, it didn’t seem to go any further, and it was pretty damn effective, so not much more was said about it. It was practically forgotten. But let’s suppose it was well remembered by somebody who saw how the pattern could be used right here in the United States. Not only used, but modified and sophisticated to such an extent the ramifications took on unbelievable proportions.

“First, it would take a pro who was familiar with as many details of the syndicate operation as anybody could be. He had to have knowledge, the time, the ability and the money to plan it out and put it into effect without ever risking exposure himself. He had to work them against themselves and when only a few were left, put the frosting on the cake with a completely legal maneuver that left him successful and satisfied.”

Burke drew into the curb outside the apartment building and cut the switch. When he got out, Helen and Bill Long followed him. The captain looked at the building and Burke said, “Shelby had an apartment here.”

“It’s not in our files.”

“It is in mine,” Burke told him.

As Burke expected, there was no apartment listed under Shelby’s name, but when he flashed his badge and gave his description, the doorman remembered Mark and said he visited Miss Helga Piers in 21A. In fact, he added he was there that very evening and had left quite hurriedly a little after ten o’clock.

“You have a passkey?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Then you’d better come with us.”

“Sir,” the doorman said, “don’t you have to have...”

“We can get a warrant in five minutes or you can do it the easy way,” Burke told him.

One look at those eyes of his and the doorman didn’t hesitate. He led them to the elevator, took them up to the top floor and pointed out the door. While Helen and the doorman stayed to one side, Burke and Long flanked the door and looked at each other.

A thin line of light lined the sill and from inside a TV program rambled on. There was another sound too, an intermittent wail of hysterical laughter coupled with an overtone of anguish.

Burke pushed the doorbell and waited. Nothing happened. He tried it again and there was no answer. He snapped his fingers and the doorman opened the lock with his passkey. Gill turned the knob, threw the door open an inch and looked back at the doorman. “Beat it,” he said.

They went in together, guns ready, spreading out inside, poised like cats, taking in the entire situation in a fraction of a second.

Nobody came at them.

All they heard was the TV and the strange wail, with an odd aromatic smell permeating the air. With professional caution, they picked their way through the area to the living room until they got to the arch and saw the remains of the furniture and the nearly naked wreckage of the woman who squatted on the floor in a pool of her own blood, rocking and writhing in pain, a lit candle in front of her that she kept hacking at with a knife in ineffectual, weary motions.

Bill Long had seen a lot of things, but this one almost made him sick. The terrible beating she had taken was beyond anything he had witnessed before and whoever did it had to be so twisted he never should have lived through his own birth.

Gill yelled for Helen and this time there was no fear or disgust in her. It was a woman recognizing the emergency and becoming equal to it. She didn’t even give them time to phone, making them help her get Helga on the couch, finding the towles, the compresses and the medication until the eyes that were so blanked out from shock suddenly became alive from pain and all she could say was, “No... no... please, no more.”

“You’re all right,” Helen told her. “We’re friends and we’ll help you.”

“Help... me?”

“That’s right.” She waved to Gill and said, “Better get the ambulance now.”

He made the call, then followed Long over to the bar. The entire back section was wrecked, a large religious picture and a plaster statue lying in smashed pieces on the shelf. The cop said, “Crazy. She dragged herself all over the place in that condition. You see that blood trail?”

“I saw it.”

“It doesn’t seem possible.”

Burke looked at the red splotches around the back of the bar and on the shelving. There were other smears on the end table and the arm of a chair were she had propped herself as she pulled her wracked body around the room. “Maybe she was motivated,” Burke said.

“What... to get to a religious picture?” He kicked over a four-legged metal holder, looking at the wax fragments in its base. “Maybe you’re right.” He picked the holder up and showed it to Burke. “I guess people who got a strong religious conviction can do damn near anything. She thought she was dying and wanted to light a candle to herself.”

“Then why was she chopping at it with that knife.”

“Maybe it’s part of her religion,” Long said sourly.

“Gill...” Helen was waving him over to the couch.

“She coming around?”

“He told her his name was Norris. He was keeping her, all right, but do you know she knew who he really was?” Before he could answer she held out a cheap magazine folded open to a full-page picture of recognizable faces. “She had it under the couch. She pointed him out to me.”

He glanced at it, flipped the cover over and tapped his finger under the issue date at the top. “This is this month’s copy.”

Helen got the message and nodded. “She just found out who he really is. That poor kid.”

Burke said, “Come here, old buddy.” When the captain walked up Gill showed him the photo. “There’s your man,” he said and tapped the photo of the one in the background.

“Mark Shelby,” Long said softly.

“I hope you feel better now,” Burke said.

“About him,” Long grated, “but not about you. You’re still a bastard.”

Helga’s hot eyes stared at the two of them, her mouth working, trying to form words. Bill Long had to be sure. He held the picture out, his finger indicating Shelby. “That the one who did it?”

Her nod was affirmative. “He...”

“Don’t try to talk,” Helen told her.

She made a feeble motion with her hand and her mouth worked again. “He got... mad about... something. Then he... found about... Nils.”

“Nils? Your husband?”

She shook her head. “Friend. We were... going to... marry. Take his... money and... run away.”

Burke said, “You want me to call this Nils for you? Look if...”

The pain in her eyes washed out into one of incredible sorrow and tears flowed slowly onto her cheeks. “Nils... was here. He saw me... and he... ran away... too.” She managed to force a gruesome smile to her lips. “All gone. Nothing left... at all. Only his... beautiful candle. He... loved the candle. Now I... kill that... damn thing.”

It hit Burke first, the entire implication of the whole thing, the beauty of the way Shelby had disguised it. He walked to the middle of the floor, blew the candle out and picked up the blood-stained knife she had tried to kill the candle with. He ran the tip of it down the side of its foot-long length, rammed the blade into the crack and pried the waxen cylinder open.

The rolls of microfilm were stacked one on top of the other and when Burke held it up for Long to see he said, “The ultimate proof, friend. We just got it in time. If that candle kept burning it would have destroyed the whole bundle. Old Shelby was covering every angle, even to a built-in self-destruct. Who the hell would blow out a religious candle anyway?”

“Someone with no religion, maybe,” Long said. “Or no conscience. Like you.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Burke said.

Bill Long gave him a tight smile. “You see I’m right. You are the one. A whole execution squad wrapped up in one man. There was a time when you would have jumped me for saying what I just did, but you can’t now because you know I’m right and you never could fake me out.”

“Don’t you ever quit?” Gill asked him.

“Not on this one. I think I’m going to burn your ass on this one, Gill. I won’t even have to try hard because I know what’s been on your mind since the very beginning. There’s only one guy you’re really after, the top man of the whole schmear... Papa Menes. He’s still alive and still holds the power and even if what’s on those films can indict him he’ll get away before he can be convicted. There are plenty of places he can go and still be head man in the operation. Luciano did it, a few others did it, living out their old age in lush comfort in the old country, still pulling the strings to stay on their ego trips.

“But you can’t let that happen. You started it all rolling and now you have to finish it. Someday, when I have time, I’m going to make a project out of you. I’ll backtrack every move you made. I’ll dig up everybody you ever contracted or used... I’ll have your entire operation detailed down to the last iota and perhaps the civilized world will realize what kind of a terror they harbored.”

Burke gave him a flat grin. “Maybe the uncivilized world will realize it too. The joke would be on you then... if all the crap you’re spouting was true.”

“It’s true enough,” Long smiled back. “The past might be too difficult to prove at the moment, but the future move will be easy because I know it has to happen.”

Annoyance was in Burke’s voice. “What has to happen?”

“You have to kill Papa Menes.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I’d be wrong, wouldn’t I?”

“You can still go fuck yourself,” Burke told him.

From across the room Helen was watching them both, something in her eyes vacillating between belief and disbelief.

The big house on Long Island had been built by a New York banker during the two years he had been a multimillionaire. He was the son of a middle European immigrant and had been put to work shining shoes in downtown Manhattan, turning over his entire income to his impoverished parents so they could live in a cold water tenement, existing on day-old bread and inexpensive grocery leftovers. Once a week they had a Sunday treat of tough boiled beef or wrinkled frankfurters and he hated the tentacles of poverty that enveloped him.

But he was a good shoe shiner, with a flair and a flourish, a memory for names of the Wall Street tycoons who enjoyed his streetside show and tipped heavily from their fat wallets. He began to save, then, until he could afford a two-chair cubicle in a narrow space between buildings suitable for nothing else.

With two chairs occupied there was always an interesting conversation above his bowed head and one day he listened carefully at what was being said, took sixty dollars he had accumulated and purchased a few shares of the stock that had been under discussion. That afternoon he had a profit of two thousand, seventy-four dollars.

He kept listening and within a month his bank account totaled over six figures. He kept the shop for another thirty days, sold out to his assistant and spent his time at the ticker tape.

When he had made his third million he sent his parents back to the old country with enough for them to live on, established himself in a fabulous office with an apartment on Riverside Drive and commissioned an architect to build him a tasteless, fortress-like mansion on six acres of waterfront footage on Long Island.

He had shined shoes for twenty-four years. He was then thirty-eight years old, a multimillionaire with a grand estate and ready to marry the most beautiful showgirl on Broadway. The year was nineteen twenty-nine.

When the stock market crash broke the backs of the paper rich, the girl laughed at him and he jumped out of his own office window. The house on Long Island went through six owners before a company that was a personal front for Papa Menes obtained it. It was an address no one knew, a fortified castle no enemy could take and a luscious retreat where Papa could operate from until the heat was off and the lawyers could bring things back together again while they snarled the workings of justice in its own red tape. All he needed was time and he had plenty of money to buy that little commodity.

And having bought it, he was going to use it well with the lovely hunk of flesh he had imported from Miami, his own three-way woman who improved with each session, always having something new and different ready for him until he began to wonder if coming so much would drain him like pulling the plug in the bathtub.

That wild Louise Belhander would tease him until he was ready to blow his mind apart and had the shakes like some palsied old man, then at the right time she would whip herself over into that delicious position on her hands and knees, offering her own lewdness to his and he’d bury himself inside her in a frenzy of passion so exhausting that he’d collapse on top of her and she’d have to roll out from under him and wipe him down with a cold wet rag to revive him.

She had already pocketed a little over five thousand bucks of Papa Menes’ generosity, which was about all she needed to make sure she could get clear of the retribution that mighty possibly come after her final act revenging herself on Frank Verdun. Or his friends.

The nice specialists Captain Bill Long had assigned to locate the whereabouts of Papa Menes had put out feelers all over the city without being able to make contact. The legitimate enterprises owned and operated by the shattered underworld kingdom were all functioning normally so there was an active hand still behind it and that only hand had to be the old man’s.

Legal advisers for the many corporate structures readily admitted having orders transmitted to them, but had no knowledge of the source except that the coded identification was authentic and all they could do was carry out instructions. Across the country, city and state attorneys were working day and night trying to break down the barriers of ownership other attorneys had set up and found themsevles up against a dead wall on every occasion. The other side had bought better men, they had a longer time to prepare for the eventuality and long before any breakthrough could be made, the actual owners could liquidate their holdings and leave without having to face any criminal action.

Downstairs in the lab the microfilms had been cleaned and put on the enlarger with a select audience of viewers from federal officers to local police personnel and within minutes after the final slide was shown, warrants were issued for various persons in thirty-two states in the union. There would have been more, but the rest were dead in the Chicago blast, or wiped out before the open war had started.

Robert Lederer sat at the head of the table opposite Bill Long and Burke looking at the check marks he had made on his list, indications of persons beyond prosecution now. “It’s that damn root you have to watch out for.”

Long scowled at him. “What?”

“You can kill the fruit and cut down the tree, but leave the root in the ground and it can start all over again. So we can hit all their drops and put a dent in the narco trade. We can close some bookies and lock up some prostitutes. What good does it do? With all those legitimate assets bringing in the money one big guy can finance the entire operation in a matter of months... just one guy big enough for the foreign operators or the big locals to fear enough to trust.”

“We’ll knock off Menes yet, Bob. Relax. Take your time.”

“There isn’t any time, damn it. You know that as well as I do.”

“Something...” he glanced at Burke who sat there impassively, “... or somebody will break.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that the old man isn’t long for this world. Right, Gill?”

Burke’s eyes barely flicked up at him. “I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute.”

The tap of Lederer’s pencil went on for ten seconds before he said, “You two know something I ought to know?”

“Not really, Bob. It’s pure speculation.”

The D.A. got up and scooped his papers into his attaché case. “You’d better hope something happens.”

When he left, Bill Long leaned back in his chair, his hands folded behind his head. “When is it going to happen, Gill?”

“How many times do I have to tell you to go fuck yourself, buddy?”

“As many as you want. I’m too damn curious to see how you work it to get insulted. I really want to see how you kill the old man. I want to see how you react, how it affects you.”

“You ought to know, Bill. How did Shelby’s death affect you?”

“Ah, that wasn’t my kill, friend. That was yours, all yours. It was my finger on the trigger, but your mind that pulled it.”

Burke stood up and slipped into his coat. “Bill, I hope that brain of yours is good enough to snap back when you really know the answers.”

The party on Long Island had gotten more boisterous with every network news flash. From the time of Mark Shelby’s death to the daily recapitulation of events, the wine and booze had flowed freely throughout the house, celebrating the sole ownership of Papa Menes’ empire. The guards outside had to wait their turn to indulge, and their replacements brought out enough refreshment to hold them over until they, too, were relieved again.

It had been a long time since Papa had been drunk. Artie Meeker had started too early and was snoring away beside the stupid redhead he picked up in Brooklyn and Remy was dragged away by the two broads who took care of the office work.

Not that Papa minded. He was alone again with Louise and the champagne had gotten to them both and Louise was giving him a rubdown with those agile fingers of hers and he could feel the sensation all the way down to his balls. The communiques from his legal advisers assured him that all was well and as long as he wasn’t available to accept a subpoena there was nothing much that could happen to him. His men on the outside had already squelched a couple of the Philadelphia outfit who were talking big and Moss Pitkin from St. Louis stopped the raid he was making on the dry cleaning joints there when he had his head banged around for him. By now everybody knew the old man meant business, knew his business and they were happy to sit back and let him run things.

Louise giggled when her fingers made Papa squirm and she got her hands under his shoulders and pushed. “Roll over, Papa.”

“No... keep doing what you were. I like that.”

“I’ll make it better for you,” she teased. “I can’t do it while you’re lying on your stomach.”

Papa let out one of his chuckles, amazed at how the blonde twist could get to him. His pecker had been hard so many times it was starting to ache and here it was coming up again and he couldn’t fight it back because whatever she did was new and different and worth any ache he might feel. Her naked body was slithering all over him, warm and throbbing, lubricated by the sweat of her unique exertions. Her teeth nipped at his neck and her tongue probed his ear, making his shoulder muscles twitch and gooseflesh stand out over his seamed skin.

“Come on, roll over,” she said again.

This time he was fully prepared and let her flip him onto his back and was pleased when Louise let out one of the funny gasps when she saw him in the full glory of manhood. He didn’t know that the gasp was really a suppressed laugh and she pounced on it too quickly for him to even speculate on it.

She stopped when she felt the signs and he tried to push her back. “Keep going,” he told her. Damn it to hell, don’t quit now. Just...”

“I’m boss now,” she reminded him lightly. “If you like my specialties, you let me do things my way.”

He kept his eyes closed tightly. “Yeah, okay, sure. But hurry up.”

“Oh, no, this is one time we don’t hurry at all because it’s going to be the biggest and best of all. It’s something so very extraordinary I have to build up to it step by step, otherwise you’d never appreciate it.”

This time his eyes opened, bright with anticipation. “What’re you gonna do? You tell me.”

“Lay back, relax, and I’ll show you, big daddy. I just promise you one thing... you’ll never forget it.”

For the first time since he was a little kid, Papa Menes took an order from a woman and did what he was told. He lay back and relaxed, wondering what surprise she had waiting for him.

There wasn’t much to see from the miniature terrace outside Burke’s living room windows unless you understood the raw, primitive nature of the real New York. There was nothing aesthetic about black tarred rooftops with their ugly slanted doorwells gouged into their tops. TV antennas stood barren and angular, reminiscent of a denuded forest held together by stands of soot-dirtied clotheslines.

Here and there patches of green showed where somebody who still had a feeling for soil had tried to grow things, and empty beach chairs were bright splotches of color waiting for those who sought the sun that managed to penetrate the smog.

Even the smell was visible, rising on the heat waves from the streets below, driven upward by the artificial thermals, dancing to the heartbeat of blaring horns and heavy rumble of traffic. Darkness was coming on and when the lights winked out in the towering office buildings uptown, they blinked on again in the high rise apartments and lower silhouettes of the renovated town houses and tenements closer by.

Jet traffic made a mockery of the free sky, creating artificial clouds with their contrails and an illusion of space with their pulsating red and green false stars. Only the emerging moon was real and they had even contaminated that.

Burke said, “Let’s go back inside,” and closed the sliding doors behind them.

For a minute Helen looked back while he made fresh drinks for them, her mind spinning like a centrifuge, trying to throw out the fragments of unreality so there would be some core of true substance left.

How long had she known him? It seemed like a lifetime, but it had only been a little while. And how long had she known the others? She had been exposed to death and destruction since she had been born, had associated with the good and the evil from birth to maturity... so she should be able to make an evaluation herself.

Yet she was part of it all, was there enmeshed in the violence and all she could hear were those deadly words of accusation that Bill Long spoke that made him, if the words were true, the most frightening human being who ever lived.

“Unless there was justification.”

She spun around, her breath caught in her throat. “What?”

“I know what you were thinking,” Burke told her. He handed her the glass and she took it. Her hand was trembling.

“I’m sorry.”

“He made pretty good sense.”

“Gill, I’m going to ask you something. Will you answer me truthfully?”

“That’s a silly question if you think I’ve been lying to you.”

“Have you?”

“No. Do you think I have?”

“No.”

He sipped at his drink. “Good, then ask it.”

“Did you arrange for... or did you even know Mark Shelby would be there?” She watched his face closely.

There was no explanation. He simply said, “Nope,” and she believed him. Nothing in the world could make her disbelieve after the way he said it.

“Don’t you want to ask me some other questions?” he queried.

Helen shook her head. “No, I don’t think I do.” She got a strange look in her eyes. “Frankly, I don’t think I want to know one way or the other. Not now, anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you, Gill. In that street language you enjoy I’m so fucking much in love with you it comes out my ears and that’s all that counts.”

“Knock off that talk. You’re a lady.”

“Not around you, wild man.”

“You know what’s going to happen to you in another minute, don’t you?”

Helen smiled up at him, her tongue wetting her lips. She put her drink down and reached for the zipper at the back of her dress. In one smooth motion she let everything drop to the floor and with the second she threw away the remaining pieces of sheer nylon and stood there in shimmering, naked beauty and said, “I hope so.”

And while the darkness enveloped the city outside, shutting off the ugliness, leaving only the bright shining lights in the window they exploded together in a welter of spilled cushions and knocked-over ashtrays and the two drinks that drenched them in a refreshing bath that made the whole crazy orgasm better than it had a right to be.

They lay on the floor tracing wet lines on each other’s bodies with ice cubes that seemed to give out more heat than they drew and as the last one melted into eternity Helen looked up at him and asked, “What’s Shinola?”

“What a time to talk of shoe polish.”

“No, really.”

“It’s a standard brand shoe polish. Why?”

“It just occurred to me.”

“You’re nuts, Helen. I love you and I’m going to marry you anyway. I’m just glad I found out that you’re nuts first. I’m going to have you treated. What brought that on?”

“One day Mr. Verdun was mad and I heard him shouting. He said he couldn’t get hold of the old fart because he was probably out at Shinola doing the aye aitch bit again.”

She felt him go tight beside her and looked at his face. He wasn’t Gill Burke any longer. He was a machine, a human, thinking machine that had an advantage over any computer an engineer could build because it could initiate its own program and handle the variables any way it wanted. She didn’t know it, but he was reaching back into the recesses of a million cells, trying to resurrect a word he had come across in some obscure item a mechanical computer would never have processed into its tapes. She watched him search it out, locate it, then push himself erect until he found the phone and dialed a number. She couldn’t hear what he said, but saw him nod once, thank the person on the other end and hang up.

He started to get dressed.

“Where are you going?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She waited until he buckled on the gun, then got up and slipped back into her clothes. “You’re wrong, Gill. It does matter. What did I tell you?”

He looked at her, and looked at her, and looked at her. Finally he said, “Where Papa Menes is.”

“I’m going with you. You know that, don’t you?”

He kept looking at her until he decided, then nodded. “If you do, you might get answers to the question you haven’t asked yet.”

“Do I deserve it?”

“You deserve it.”

The ice in his eyes was far colder than the ice they had just made love with.

Downstairs they were about to get in the car when Bill Long came out of the shadows and said, “Looking for company?”

Gill Burke held the door open for him so he could slide in beside Helen. “Not especially, but as long as you’re here you’d might as well enjoy the sleigh ride.”

When they pulled out into traffic, Long asked, “Any special destination?”

“Yeah,” Burke told him. “Shinola.”

The word stirred something in the captain’s memory, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Burke said, “A nutty, extravagant mansion out on Long Island built by a former shoeshine boy who won and lost his shirt in the stock market. His enemies called his attempt at pretentiousness Shinola.”

Long remembered then and threw Burke an odd look. “What’s out there?”

“Papa Menes,” Burke said.

“How do you know?”

“I told him,” Helen said.

He was going crazy. The damn dame was making him go crazy and if he didn’t come in another minute he was going to kill the bitch for teasing him this way and tear her cunt inside out. She had his nuts hard as pebbles and he was hurting in every fucking tube and gland in his withered body and she wouldn’t let it blow out of him. She was stronger than he was now, depleting him with what started out to be gentle ministrations and wound up with him a quivering mass of old flesh and even though he knew she was absolutely wild about the way he had brought her on, indulging her in the perversions he absolutely loved, she was killing him with the very things he had taught her and he was loving every minute of it. He shook and trembled violently when her mouth touched him and when her fingers located the right spot and squeezed just right, his mouth opened and he gasped like a fish out of water. All he could think of was DO IT, DO IT, DO IT, but she wouldn’t let him alone. She loved him so much she was tearing him apart and he couldn’t fight back any longer. He was all hers and anything she wanted to do was all right, but just for the fucking relief of it all, DO IT, DO IT, and she still kept on with those awful things he wished that fat Jew broad he had married could have done and he knew she hadn’t even hardly begun. She was talking to him while her hands and her mouth and her legs worked against him. He could taste and feel every part of her, not because he wanted it, but because she put it there and she was telling him about how lovely it was when he was the first one to tumble her over in the attitude of abject humiliation and stick it up her ass and how wonderful it felt after the initial pain was over and the sensuality of it all began and how slippery it was and how it filled her up until she thought she would burst with pleasure and how each time it got better and better and reached the time when there was no pain at all and only pleasure that was better than anything she had ever experienced in her whole life and how it was a shame only a woman could enjoy it, but if she tried, how a man could enjoy it too and when she asked him if he wouldn’t like it the old man screamed out YES, YES, YES and she rolled him over on his stomach again and propped him on his knees with his head down between his arms.

Louise Belhander said, “This is for what Frank Verdun did to me,” and shoved four inches of the barrel of a .38 revolver up his ass and pulled the trigger.

The guard stationed outside the door heard the strangely muted sound, the horrible scream, looked inside and shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t care less. He had been paid in advance. He told the others, they shrugged too, picked up whatever they thought could be useful to them and left to go back to where they came from.

It wasn’t their jurisdiction and it wasn’t their right, but it was a different time, a new era, and circumstances had changed all the rules. They went past the place somebody had nicknamed Shinola after that long forgotten Wall Street genius, cruised it twice, looking at the lights in the windows, the open gates and the total absence of sound or motion. The only thing alive was the young blond girl getting on the interstate bus three blocks away and the guy in his pajamas walking his dog. The estate was there, waiting, looking vitally awake, yet having all the signs of death.

Burke drove up in front of the ornate, columned porch and cut the engine. For a few minutes they sat there, guns in their hands, then Bill Long and Burke got up, looked around and went up the steps.

They had been in places like this too many times before and nobody had to tell them it was all over, whatever they expected to happen had already happened. Out of force of habit they obeyed all the rules of entry, covering each other while protecting themselves, absorbing the details of what had gone on, cataloging them for future reference, correlating them for immediate use. Later the experts from the lab could come in and add their findings to the computers and the files.

When there was nothing on the lower floor left to see they walked to the staircase and went up to the second floor. The first door they pushed open was Papa Menes’ bedroom and he was still in that obscene position on his hands and knees with his head twisted backward trying to let out a scream that had died before it had been born because the bullet from the gun that was still shoved up his asshole had tunneled its way right through to his heart and he never really got a chance to remember that special thing Louise had saved for him.

Gill Burke had forgotten about Helen until she came up and took his hand. There was something satisfied in her expression when she turned and looked at Bill Long. “You said it was speculation... just a story you were going to tell.”

It was done, completed, but it didn’t happen right at all. Logic and truth had come apart because the fickle finger of fate goosed the wrong hind ends and there was no answer any more. None at all.

The captain made a vague gesture with his shoulders and said, “Oh, shit.”

Helen didn’t let him alone. “Bill, can we hear the story again... about the execution team... and Gill Burke.”

The cop looked at them both, then focused on Gill for a long time, then he said, “It’s strange the way things work out. I’m glad I’m retiring. I’m glad you’re going back to Compat. I don’t want to think about these things any more because no means justifies the ends, yet here it happened and it turns out for the best. I don’t want to believe or know that any one man could be in back of all this and still walk away without a scratch on his person or his conscience. I don’t want to know that, Gill, but I do. I know it was you all the way and somehow I’m happy and somehow I’m glad. I’m just happy that I don’t know for sure and we can go on being friends even if I still have all those reservations in my mind that never will be resolved because I’m dropping the package right here.”

“Your choice, Bill.”

“Is it over?”

Burke nodded soberly. “It’s over now.”

The captain walked away and they could hear his feet echoing down the stairs, heard him pick up the phone and make the call to headquarters.

The obscenity on the bed didn’t bother her any more at all now. She glanced up at the face of Gill Burke whom she loved so much, smiled gently and asked, “Tell me, was it you?”

Suddenly he was his other self again. “Would it make any difference if it had been?”

“Not a bit.”

He smiled at her oddly. “Then what difference does it make at all?”

Helen nodded and smiled back. “Let’s go home,” she said.