The Last Cop Out

8

She relaxed on the bed in total languor, naked and satisfied, feeling Gill’s hand stroking the smooth contours of her body. She murmured and rolled her head to lay in the muscular hollow of his shoulder. The lingering pleasure of the past hour made a tremor go down her thighs and his fingers, sensing it, kneaded her flesh gently.

Never before had it been like this, she thought. Never so beautiful, so good, so strong. Never had it been her own emotional demand... no, that was the wrong word... her desire that led her into the wild gyrations of love that was so incredibly sensuous she could hardly believe that it was part of her own self.

At fourteen she had been indoctrinated into sex by a street punk who liked to be called Killer Miller, who had attacked her in the vestibule of their own apartment. When Joe Scanlon caught up with him in the parking lot of the supermarket it took four men to drag him off a pulpy body so mutilated and so brain-damaged, that when Killer Miller was released from the hospital seven months later they all called him Silly Millie.

There were no screams of police brutality in those days, either.

At eighteen sex was something Kiernan said was part of love and she fought down the horror and the sickness because she believed him until he dumped her for the big chested nymphomaniac who ran the liquor store on Broadway.

At twenty-two sex became a necessity to sign a contract, see her name in the gaudy lights outside the theaters or any place the agents and managers decided to book her and she learned to accept it as she would a bad dream, closing her mind off from the experience and completely forgetting about it afterward. She had neither wanted it nor sought it. Actually, she had avoided it, learning all the tricks possible that could void a man before he could culminate his intent, even to the point where they blamed themselves for their own overexuberance rather than her expertise.

Never, never before had it been like this.

The wetness was still there, the satisfied glow in her body that centered directly in the full brunette triangle that was the apex of all her immediate being. Her breasts quivered with delight and a dreamy exhaustion seemed to flow from her fingers to her toes.

Gill felt it too, letting his thoughts drift through the smoke from his cigarette. He didn’t know whether he liked it or not, because for the first time there was an infringement on his perfect sense of independence. Always, he had been alone, capable of independent and solitary action, accountable to no one. He had never known a want that he couldn’t dismiss, never known anything he couldn’t do without.

Now there was something clawing at him he didn’t understand and wondered why her warm flesh felt so damn good under his hand and why he was beginning to get a fullness in his groin again when he should have been completely worn out.

No, he told himself, it had happened much too late. The button had already been pushed and the missile was flying. You don’t try to board after the launch. If you did, you’d be dead, and he didn’t want that to happen to her.

He stubbed his butt out and took his hand away slowly. “I have to leave, Helen.”

She put her arm through his and held on tightly. “It’s too late.” Her voice was drowsy.

“I have work to do.”

“Tomorrow.”

He kissed her gently. “Now, you gorgeous doll.”

She let her eyes drift open and looked at him. She wished she could see more than just the outside. She wanted to know everything about him, everything inside his mind and body. But too many years had gone into building the same kind of façade her father had had and the inscrutable mask that shielded all those things was too opaque to dislodge.

“Say it again,” she asked.

“Now?”

“No, the rest.”

“Beautiful doll.”

“I like that,” she said.

She watched him get dressed, snap the holster on his belt and slip into his jacket. In the half light of the room he looked huge and she could still imagine the weight of him on her and inside her. It was all new and so different that she quivered again.

“You’ll be back?”

“How can I stay away?”

“You could if you wanted to.”

“I don’t want to. In a way, I wish I did, but I don’t want to.”

“I understand,” Helen said.

“No, you don’t at all.”

The delightful quiver suddenly had a cold chill to it and she knew how Mother must have felt when Joe Scanlon had to get up in the middle of the night to do what he had to do.

Nobody had to tell the Frenchman the score. What he didn’t know already he had been briefed on, but when events that should have stayed buried came back to throw a ghostly shadow over the vital workings of the organization his life was dedicated to, he felt annoyance turn to wrath at the bunglings of the incompetents who tried to take on assignments better left to the experts.

Half the night had been spent going over the details until he was satisfied that everything was in order, and now the scotch was beginning to blur his vision and make him forget he was in New York for a more primary purpose than having one ex-cop eliminated.

As long as Gill Burke had been off the force he hadn’t constituted a menace, but now he was a fucking badge-carrying piece of officialdom whose death could initiate an investigation they didn’t need at all. He was a nuisance when he had directed all his efforts at getting the top syndicate men, but the ones he had nailed they could afford to lose and twice they had dropped pretty well-known troublemakers in his lap. If they had stopped there and promoted him to a desk job like they thought they would have, there would have been no more trouble at all. Paperwork can grind any machine to a halt. But they didn’t and Burke kept pushing until he hit such a sensitive nerve in trying to nail down Mark Shelby that they had to take away his teeth. Luckily, he provided his own grease and built his own skid. All they had to do was give him a shove and bureaucracy did the rest.

Now he was back pushing again and that fucking overeducated Shelby was getting the jumps because Burke had picked up where he left off and Mark didn’t trust the cover they had laid out for him. Frank Verdun didn’t like Shelby in the first place. Him and that Primus Gladatori shit because he had punched a few holes in a handful of guys. The old dons liked it, but he had quit counting the bodies so long ago that Shelby looked like a damn amateur.

Asshole. The Frenchman thought. Knocks off two Jew photographers because he thought they had taken pictures of him and some cunt. They had plenty of that stuff in their files, but Shelby wasn’t in any of it. They were working in the room next to his in that fucking fleabag hotel and that hole in the wall came from a slug that drunken sailor had let loose the week before.

Now they had to tap out Burke before he could get too nosy. That was always the trouble. No matter how you tried, you couldn’t kill everybody involved. Somebody always had a little piece and if somebody was nosy enough and smart enough, he could put those pieces together. It was law-and-order time with soft courts and liberals all over the place protecting this right or that, but with a guy like Burke all that was a lot of garbage and if he was satisfied the pieces fit he’d go in shooting and take his chances with an explanation later.

And they couldn’t afford to scratch Mark Shelby. The dons still had the power and they raised him from a pup to mind their affairs. He had made his bones and made their millions and he was still their boy and boys had a way of getting into trouble once in a while and he was supposed to take care of it.

He’d like to give Mark Shelby, Primus Gladatori, one swift boot in his tail and shove a gun barrel down his throat far enough to make him gag. Except that Papa Menes or the big board might order his balls dipped into a pan of boiling water for his arrogance and he didn’t want that at all. Not since he had seen it done to Malone, his Irish upstart predecessor.

The Frenchman picked up the phone and tried to call Slick Kevin for the ninth time. The phone rang until he tired of the buzz in his ear and he slammed it down, cursing. He didn’t need it, but he was annoyed as hell, so he poured a shot of scotch over two cubes of ice and sat down in front of the TV set that was running the late, late movie and thought about his plan for killing Gill Burke.

The more he thought about it, the less he liked it. Then he remembered something special and smiled to himself. Yes, the board would like this one. He could walk Burke right into an open grave and he’d never know how it happened... nor would anybody else.

Soon he’d speak to Helen Scanlon. There was no better bait than a big-titted broad with an inviting pussy who was all for the company and had such a yen for show business she’d do anything to get back in front of an audience. In due time she would disappear into a hole in the desert outside of Vegas and that would take care of it.

He picked up the phone and tried Slick Kevin one more time.

It rang for two minutes before Verdun gave up.

He could have let it ring for an hour without doing any good at all. Slick Kevin was lying on the floor not five feet from his desk where the phone was, but Kevin was dead with a single hole between his eyes, an unfired automatic in his hand and a huge section of skull like an obscene ash tray propped up against the wall near him. Stuff still dripped from it.

The move came from a strange quarter. It was premature and stupidly overt because the insurgents didn’t recognize the time, money and effort that had gone into establishing the fairly new Arando family. All they saw were the openings because the Big Board had called in the button men from Sal Roma’s territory and they filled in the vacuum with what they thought was pure, ripe power and muscled the lucrative businesses outside the pale of legality into their own sphere of influence.

They were tough, kill-happy and working in their own backyard, the kind of punks Capone used in the beginning, who didn’t know how to be afraid. They were the new Gallos toppling the established thrones that had been ruled too long by age and outmoded experience. They wanted their share and they wanted it big... and now.

So they made their move and they were able to hold because the flux of Miami jelled under their hands in its newness, and they couldn’t care less if Pasi Arando had been given the territory because his cousin Steve was ruling over the northwest sector or his Uncle Vitale was on the Big Board itself.

Herman Shanke, the big-muscled, wide-shouldered punk who hated himself because he was only five feet seven, ran the revolution with a brace of nine-millimeter Lugers, a hatred of the world and a burning ambition to revenge a paperhanger who had been dead a long time.

He liked to be called Herman the German.

Luckily for the public, the winter crowd was moving out and there were fewer bystanders around.

Uncle Vitale got a call from the Big Board and phoned his son Steve to tell his cousin Pasi that if he didn’t put the insurrection down he’d be in trouble. By trouble he meant that he would be dead, and in this case, family connections didn’t count.

Now that the Big Board knew where the trouble was stemming from, they were able to put things in their proper perspective. A month ago Herman the German’s best friend had left for New York, the killer who had taken those independents from Cuba and eliminated the witness in the Lindstrom Company case. He had a private collection of guns, the natural instincts of a hunter and the physical abilities of a chameleon to adapt to the environment for protective coloration.

His name was Moe Piel.

When the various families heard of Slick Kevin’s death they put the word through the right channel and every police department was alerted to look for Moe. A fifty thousand dollar contract was let out on Herman the German who laughed when he heard about it and tightened the reins on the Miami operation. Bevo Carmody came in with a cardboard carton of money he had lifted from the garage where the Cuban refugees had been collecting it for another assault on Castro and after giving Bevo five grand, he parceled out the rest to his few associates to begin a reconnaissance in the area of Manhattan he knew so well. Ever since that old son of a bitch Papa Menes had had his head beaten bloody and tossed for dead in that Newark garbage dump, he had been figuring out how he was going to get even.

Now he knew.

And it was going to be easy.

They all thought he was behind the big trouble. He wished he were.

The district attorney had taken charge himself. The pressure had blown the lid off and he was passing it on down the line. The commissioners were feeling the heat the press and TV commentators were laying on and wore an edge that was ready to slice into anybody. Robert Lederer was acting as spokesman, since his boss had run out of expletives and was sitting there glowering at the assembly of police brass and the sardonic face of Gill Burke.

“We’ve had two informers in Chicago for seven years,” he told the group. “They were holding for something like this and nothing else. The one who passed the information on about the Miami uprising made the mistake of calling from a windowed booth where a deaf mute lip reader we suspect of being connected with the mob could see him. He was dead an hour later. So far, they don’t know about the other one, but he isn’t connected high enough yet to get inside things.”

The tall inspector from uptown said, “Who else has this information, Bob?”

“At this moment it’s confined to this room.”

“How about Miami?”

“We’re assuming they’re taking the same security precautions. Right now they have special detachments out covering all areas. They can’t move in on Herman Shanke because they haven’t anything definite to go on and they don’t want to provoke a shooting spree.”

One of the other inspectors asked, “Any outsiders moving in yet?”

“That’s the trouble, right there. The airports and other terminals are covered, but nobody’s showed. If they go in, they’ll probably go by private transportation and that won’t be easy to spot. It’s between seasons and there’s enough travel activity to conceal anything. With all the living quarters available it’s going to be one hell of a job to check everything, especially if they have their own safe places to stay in.”

“Chicago and St. Louis called,” Bill Long told him. “They’re missing some top soldiers they thought they had under surveillance. Evidently they saw this coming and had things set up.”

“Miami’s going to blow,” Lederer said solemnly.

Gill Burke’s voice was flat and quiet. “Miami isn’t the place.”

All the eyes swung toward him, waiting for the rest. “Miami’s just the teaser,” he said. “A smart vulture waits for the beast to die before going in for the remains. The young stupid ones make an early try and get their feathers full of claws, then get eaten themselves.”

“This isn’t exactly the place for analogies, Burke,” commented Lederer.

“Look at it this way. The action is where the money is and the money is in New York.”

“The facts don’t...”

“Frank Verdun is in New York too.”

“Burke, I think...”

“Mark Shelby is in New York too.”

Irritation drew Lederer’s face into a flushed scowl. “This is not a personal affair, Burke. Damn it all, so far you haven’t...”

Gill didn’t let him finish. “How about the belly-button man, Mr. Lederer?”

Captain Long had been waiting for that and smiled. He opened the folder on his lap and said, “Denver gave us the lead and the F.B.I. confirmed it. They had three other mutilations with the navels torn out and we have an APB out for a white male caucasian, age forty-five, medium build, slightly balding, with a slightly crossed left eye. The only name we have is a probable alias of Shatzi. A definite identifying mark is a large scar where his navel formerly was. That last bit of information came from a woman he cohabited with.”

“I suppose you’ll have spotters in the turkish baths to look for the scar,” Lederer said sourly.

“Sure,” Long told him. “We’re checking all the whores, too.”

“When you find him, there’ll be an easy way to make him talk,” Burke said.

“Oh? And how is that?”

“Tell him you’re going to sew his belly button back on.”

The laugh that went around the room broke the tension, except for the boiling anger inside the assistant district attorney. He let it ride with a grim smile and went back to the briefing. They finished an hour later and when it was over everybody agreed they were still up in the air.

Everybody except Gill Burke, and when he had Bill Long across the table in the coffee shop he said, “One, there’s a leak in the department. Two, we have a lead with this Shatzi character. Why not concentrate on those angles?”

“Why not swing at the wind? Hell, Gill, we’re doing all we can, you know that.”

“The lab get anything from Bray’s office?”

“Plenty. Two truckloads of junk. The explosion and the fire destroyed everything. What was left of the tapes didn’t make sense because they were all coded, nothing we could tie together at all.”

“Well, you got something there, haven’t you?”

“Like what?”

“Supposing another mob was moving in. They’d rather have all that information than destroy it. Bray was a key man in the organization and what he knew would give them access to practically every phase of their businesses. The syndicate is big business, pal. They don’t do things in their heads any more. It’s all down on punchcards and tape like the records of any other cartel.”

“You got something there, kid. Got any answers to go with it?”

“Just plenty to speculate about,” he said. “You ought to try it.”

Long stared past his head at the faded yellow wall. “Yeah, I think I will.”

The other girls in the office had been sent out on business matters and Helen Scanlon was alone when the Frenchman called her in. “Helen... can you take dictation?”

“Yes, certainly, Mr. Verdun.”

“Good. Then get your hat and coat and we’ll do it at lunch. That is, if you don’t mind?”

“Not at all.” She closed the door behind her and went to the coat hanger. She thought about it a minute and shrugged. It seemed a reasonable enough request, and if there was anything behind it, she’d know soon enough.

Verdun had his driver take them to a chic cosmopolitan restaurant in the mid-fifties where an accented maitre d’ led them to a walnut-paneled booth, took their orders for drinks and disappeared silently across the plush carpeting. Concealed speakers radiated soft semi-classical music and the conversational hum of the other patrons was almost inaudible.

Before the drinks were even served, a messenger came in, delivered an envelope to Verdun, and less than ten seconds later a waiter brought a phone to the table and told him he had an incoming call. He spoke rapidly about a Boyer-Reston venture in a new plastics industry, gave instructions to complete the merger and hung up. He told the waiter to hold all calls and lifted his drink to Helen.

“Now you see why I must combine lunch with business,” he said.

Helen tasted her drink. “Yes, I certainly do.”

When they ordered their meal he dictated several letters in answer to those she had put on his desk that morning, then finished when the waiter arrived with their food.

“Good?” he asked her.

“Lovely, Mr. Verdun. I’ve never been here before.”

“One of my favorite spots when I’m in town,” he said. “Tell me, how are you making out with your policeman friend?”

This was the reason, she thought. Now she could really find out.

“He’s still curious, but I guess all cops are.”

“Is he charming?”

She had to smile at that. “It isn’t easy for a cop to be... charming. I’ve never known one who didn’t have rough edges.”

Verdun let out a chuckle. “They can be pretty devious, my dear.”

They can be pretty direct too, she thought again. She looked at the Frenchman, busily engaged in buttering his bread, wondering what he knew. There was only one way to find out.

“I tried being a little charming myself.”

He lifted his eyes quizzically. “Oh?”

“As far as I know, he’s all wrapped up in this syndicate thing. All those killings.”

“There isn’t supposed to be a syndicate,” Verdun said casually.

“Not according to him. But he didn’t say much about it. We had supper, then his idea of fun was to visit a hock shop before he took me home.”

“Policemen are notoriously underpaid,” Verdun said.

But his mind was telling him something else. Burke had to be hit fast. He’d sure as hell like to make it a two-for-one and get that stupid Shelby at the same time, but that part was out.

They finished the rest of the meal with just a little small talk and while they had coffee he remembered one more letter and she took down a reminder to the main office to update the billing machines and install two more phone lines. The driver took them back and he disappeared behind his door where she could hear him in occasional conversations. One of the other girls transcribed her dictation while she filed the invoices, delivered envelopes from the messenger service and admitted the clients who had appointments.

At four-thirty Frank Verdun came out with a client, talking about a promotion in Arizona, walked over to her desk. “Did Mr. Clough’s airline tickets come in, Helen?”

She picked up an envelope delivered by one of the messengers and handed it to him. “Ten minutes ago. The eight-ten out of LaGuardia.”

The heavyset man checked his flight and stuck them in his pocket. “Thanks. Saved me a lot of trouble. Sure hate to leave this soon.” He looked at Verdun, fished around in his coat and brought out a pair of theater tickets. “Maybe you can use these, Frank. Took me a month to get them and Sadie is gonna be mad as hell about missing it, but the trip is more important.”

Verdun took the tickets and shook his head. “Tomorrow I’ll be with the auditors.” He tossed the tickets down on Helen’s desk. “Here, see if anybody can use them.”

When they walked out she looked at the tickets. They were good seats for the top show in town. She asked the other two girls if they wanted them, but one had seen the show and the other had a heavy date, so she stuck them in her pocketbook.

Maybe she could charm Gill Burke into taking her.

A clammy sweat beaded Mark Shelby’s face. It was bad enough having to try to put back all the information that had been destroyed and the job would have been impossible if the orders hadn’t been so explicit and direct. Between the old Moustache Petes and the new breed bucking their way in, there were no exceptions, no excuses, and if you couldn’t cut it, they’d cut you. The more he thought about it the more fierce his anger grew, the only satisfying aspect being that the pressure wasn’t going to last forever and one day they were all going to fold like deflated balloons and be swept into the fucking ash can where they belonged and he’d be the one with the pan and the broom. Damn their hides... they with no class, no education, no natural ability except enjoying a total lack of conscience that enabled them to let death do the ruling. Pricks. That’s all they were. Fucking pig pricks. They held onto Old Country ties when they couldn’t even locate Rome or Naples or Sicily on the map. They sure were going to make some funny faces when they went down. Maybe they’d even do that crazy breast-beating routine.

The thought made him feel better, but only for a second. Oh, he could put everything back together again because he had his mind and more notes than they thought he had. He’d even get bigger when they learned how it had all been accomplished and it was even conceivable that he could accomplish his goal without using his original plan.

What was screwing everything up was that damned Gill Burke, that bastard cop they should have hit and been done with instead of just shuffling off into nobody-land. Now he was back at the pawnbroker’s asking questions and that lousy slob might not be able to take the pressure any more and say more than he was supposed to.

Maybe he already had!

The thought made him sweat again. He never underestimated Gill Burke, not even once, and he wasn’t about to now. He had kept a check on him all the time he had been off the force and there had been no repercussions, but there was always the chance that Burke had figured it that way too and had been a little more artful than he had been. There had been time for him to puzzle it out, too, and he could have reached the right answer. The whole Big Board had investigated too, and they even had access to the police probe, but they had been satisfied with his story.

Nevertheless, he, the Primus Gladatori, wasn’t completely satisfied and until he was he couldn’t concentrate on what he was doing. Shelby picked up the phone and dialed Helga. He knew she had a beauty shop appointment and she was just getting ready to leave. All he did was confirm the fact, exchange a few pleasantries and tell her he’d call tomorrow. He looked at his watch, waited fifteen minutes and took his own special way out of the building.

The little old man who just seemed to be shuffling along picked him up at exactly the last point he had lost him and this time everything was working in his favor. It was no trouble at all to tail Mark Shelby to the building where he kept Helga in her luxurious apartment and when he was satisfied he found the nearest phone and made a call. A tape recorder answered and he left his final message innocuously disguised and felt a little sad that his assignment had come to an end. It had been a lot of fun, had used up his idle hours and made him a lot of friends in odd places. It was now going to bring him a sizable bonus that would finish the payment on the orange grove in the middle of Florida where he would sit in the sun until he mummified.

Mark Shelby made sure the apartment was empty and while he was checking the rooms, automatically looked through Helga’s personal effects too. Whatever she had, he had given her. Except one thing. A new packet of three rubber condoms was in the back of the drawer in the nightstand table. For a second his fist clenched because if she tried fooling around with some punk on him... then he grinned because it was a new pack, discarded in the back, just in case her coil fell out or something like that and it was for him, not some punk.

He went out to the living room behind the bar and lifted the candle from the holder, not paying a bit of attention to the religious statue at all, took it in front of a strong light and tried to peer through it. It was too opaque to see anything, so he inspected it carefully. After five minutes he was sure that nobody had ever touched it since he had put it there.

A great weight was lifted from his mind.

He looked at the statue guarding his treasure and wondered why he didn’t feel the need to genuflect or something. Maybe make the sign of the cross.

Screw that stuff he thought. His faith was in the candle, not the statue.

He went back downstairs to retrace his route.

At that moment the message on the tape recorder was being decoded.