Michael Collins - Silent Scream

I said, “What do you think he should do?”

“I think he should let her go.”

There was a tone in his voice. Heavy, like… what? A kind of knowledge? He knew more than Harold Wood? About Diana?

“You know an Irving Kezar?” I asked.

“Kezar? Vaguely. A lawyer, I believe. Represents a client of ours sometimes. It’s getting late, Mr. Fortune. We must-”

“Sid Meyer?”

He got up. “No, sorry. Harriet?”

The wife stood. She smoothed her skirt, busy. To avoid looking at Dunlap and me? Sid Meyer meant something to her?

I said, “How about a dapper type, wears a black overcoat, gray hat, yellow gloves?”

“Good God!” Harriet Dunlap said. “Yellow gloves?”

“I don’t know him,” Dunlap said. “We’re hungry, Mr. Fortune. Remember, short of the police, I’ll say Diana was with me.”

“I’ll remember,” I said. “Just when do you think she might be coming back from Philadelphia?”

“Perhaps today,” Dunlap said, and ushered me out.

The winter afternoon sun didn’t penetrate into Captain Gazzo’s dim Centre Street office. He says it’s always 3 A.M. in his work, and he works behind drawn shades.

“The gun on Kezar’s stairs traced to a warehouse robbery ten years ago, unregistered since. End of that,” Gazzo said. “Sid Meyer hadn’t been picked up even for questioning in three years-here or in Jersey. The Newark cops-that’s where his trucking company is-watched him, but he was clean as far as they know. Their informers say Meyer had been dickering for some new trucks lately, but the pigeons don’t have a whisper of why. All they can offer is that Meyer had been running around a lot, was nervous, seemed to have something going.”

“He had reason to be nervous,” I said.

“I wish we had the reason,” Gazzo said. “Irving Kezar’s a funny bird. I found he’s been picked up a lot of times, mostly on business ethics cases, frauds, stock manipulations, yet no one remembers him. The little man who wasn’t there, part of the scenery like the mailman. For all the pick-ups, he’s never even been booked, not once-no evidence, the innocent middleman.”

“Some power somewhere, Captain? Protection?”

“It doesn’t show, but when you put it all together, it looks like the pattern. Only if there’s power, it’s not Kezar himself. He’s had that cheapo apartment for twenty years, the records in his office are about as interesting as a bird-watcher’s diary, and just as clean. Almost never has a direct client, works for other lawyers, bigger firms. A plodding attorney, with a plodding income. Only he’s got a second apartment midtown, and I smell a second set of records somewhere. I smell money somewhere, too.”

“You can’t dig deeper?”

“Not without a clue, a lot of work, and a court order. For that I need some reasonable suspicion to show a judge,” Gazzo said. “Dan, I’ve got to have some names. Leave out the bios for now, but give me the names. Okay?”

It was more of a break than I deserved, or than he would have given anyone else. He liked my mother, and he’s human.

“Okay,” I said. “Try Mrs. Mia Morgan.”

He ran the name through his mental data-bank of thirty years of crime and criminals. He scowled. “Morgan? It doesn’t connect to Sid Meyer, but I’d swear I know it. Morgan… but, something else, too.” He shook his head, amazed. A blank, yet…?

“Levi Stern?”

A shrug. Stern in New York was as useful as Jones in Wales. The shrug also said Sid Meyer had no Levi Stern in his history.

“Lawrence Dunlap.”

The data-bank clicked out a card. “Blue-chip broker, from out west, but Harvard Business School. Financial whiz-kid once. Married into Pennsylvania blue blood-bankers, public service. Local Jersey politics, community boards, trustee, all that. How does he fit with Sid Meyer and your wife-tail?”

“I’m not sure he does. I told you.”

“I haven’t turned him up,” Gazzo admitted. “Who else?”

“John Albano.”

“Albano?” Gazzo sat alert. “You’re sure it’s John? I know a lot of Albanos, best and worst. Youngish? Say, thirty-five?”

“No, say seventy but looks younger. White hair, short with shoulders, worked abroad a lot he says. Lives East Side.”

Gazzo sighed, shook his head wearily. I named the Woods last, uneasy. I watched him, and felt better. He showed no reaction. Diana and Harold Wood didn’t tie in with Sid Meyer, not yet anyway. I gave him a description of yellow-gloves, and of my adventure in the St. Marks Place alley. His eyes snapped.

“Hoods, Dan? Pros, like Sid Meyer’s killers?”

“Sure,” I said, “but what hoods, and why?”

In the dim office I sensed that all at once he had some kind of answer to that question. Or, at least, he had a more direct question to ask. He got up like a man with work to do. Work that didn’t include me.

“Keep in touch, Dan,” he said.

By midafternoon I was back in the lobby of Diana Wood’s building. I waited, and wondered what Gazzo had heard in what I’d told him? I wondered if Sid Meyer’s murder had anything to do with Diana Wood? I wondered about Diana Wood.

I felt sad for Hal Wood. I felt very bad for Wood-and I felt excited. She had two men, why not three? Hal Wood had lost her, and maybe she and I…? I wonder if we’ll ever change, most men? Or maybe it was only me? I waited, feeling dirty but still excited, and a little after 4 P.M. I saw her.

She got out of the big, black car in front of the building, still carrying the flat box. A man came into the lobby with her. They stood in front of the elevators for a moment. She had a look in her eyes few men ever see-big, soft, happy. Then she went up. The man glanced around the lobby once before he went out to his car, got in the back, and the car drove off.

I knew what was familiar about the back of the man in Mia Morgan’s snapshot. I knew the answers to a lot of my questions. I’d seen the man.

I only hoped he hadn’t seen me!

I stopped in the first bar. My hand shook. I slopped the Irish. I swore. Because I couldn’t steady the glass with two hands. Because I’d seen the man-homburg, silk scarf, dark blue suit, dark blue coat, hundred-dollar shoes and all.

Andy Pappas.

I’ve known Pappas all my life. We’re the same age. We grew up together, he knows how I lost my arm. But we don’t move in the same circles, and that’s why his back in the snapshot had been only familiar. I don’t see him much these days. Nobody does.

For the record, Andy Pappas runs a big stevedoring company on the docks. Off the record, he runs something else. Some people say he runs everything else, legal and illegal, in Manhattan and other places, but it’s hard to be sure. What is sure is his true occupation-extortion. Legal or illegal, the base of his business was the same-threat and terror. Fear. A racketeer. Mafia.

I had another Irish. Had Andy seen me? I watched the door, but no one came in. After a third drink I got up the nerve to walk out. (Not as brave as it looked. I’m a privileged character with Andy, a sort of sacred madman, but I’d been tailing a woman of his, and I never knew when the privilege would stop.) No one was outside. In the darkening afternoon I walked across town toward my office.

No wonder I’d been warned, “advised,” and offered money for my client’s name. The name of someone who would hire me to tail Pappas would be worth gold. Who the hell was Mia Morgan? A jealous girl? Andy liked them young. And Sid Meyer? Maybe Gazzo could tell me. I was ready to tell him now. All I knew. But not quite yet. Andy had seen me.

The little man leaned on my office door. About five-feet-two, stocky, with a flat nose, eyes hidden in scar tissue, and an easygoing smile. Relaxed, no weapon in sight. Max Bagnio, Pappas’s number-one aide since Jake Roth was buried unclaimed some years ago in Duluth. I could have run. But Little Max had a weapon somewhere, of course, and he’d find me sooner or later.