Michael Collins - Silent Scream

Two men came into the den-office. I had a tiny space between the hinged door and the frame, like seeing a movie screen through a keyhole. A back, a shoulder, the creak of the desk chair, and the sigh of the couch. A few seconds of silence that seemed like an hour. The snap of a cigarette lighter, smoke billowing.

“I told you I don’t like you coming here.” Irving Kezar’s voice. “I take the risks, I say when we contact.”

“You don’t contact,” a crisp voice said. “We don’t like it.”

“I report when I’m ready, damn it.”

“We like to keep better touch. It’s what we pay for.”

“You pay for results,” Kezar said. His voice was worried. “You’re sure no one saw you waiting down in the lobby?”

“We’re not amateurs,” the crisp voice said, disdainful. “The building’s watched.”

I tried to see through the narrow crack of the partly open door. I could see Kezar’s hand, pudgy and flashing with his diamond rings. I saw a foot and ankle of the other man-a well-shined brown shoe and a neat gray sock.

“Well, do you have a report on the operation, Kezar?”

“It’s moving just as planned.”

“Even with the complication?”

Silence, then Kezar’s voice again, “Pappas doesn’t change anything. A little slowdown, that’s all. No real change.”

“They know who killed him?”

“Not a clue,” Kezar said.

“That’s good,” the crisp voice said. “Ramapo Construction Company has the contract?”

My ear twitched-a name! I listened for another name. It takes two to make a contract. It didn’t come.

“All signed,” Kezar said.

“But not paid yet?”

“I’ll tell you when it’s time.”

Another silence, and I watched the brown shoe and neat ankle swing in the air, impatient or annoyed or both.

“So you have no real information to give me?” the crisp voice said. “Sometimes I wonder who you really work for, Kezar.”

“I work for me, I told you that all along,” Kezar said.

“Dangerous work,” crisp voice said. “Everyone cheats everyone in this kind of thing, but don’t cheat us too far.”

“You’ll get your money’s worth.”

“After you cream off your share from the other side,” the unseen man with the well-shined shoe said. “When do you plan to see Dunlap again?”

“When it’s right,” Kezar said. “It’s not so easy with a guy like Dunlap. I have to step careful around him. He’s not dumb.”

“Yes he is,” crisp voice said. “Dumb enough.”

“All right, but I need a few more days. He’s the one place Pappas matters, slowed it down. You don’t want him suspicious.”

There was movement. The unseen man with the crisp voice had stood up, and now I saw him. He leaned on Kezar’s desk.

“That’s for you to handle, and don’t make a mistake. No mistakes, but get it moving. We’ve waited long enough now.”

He was a tallish man, authority in his crisp voice. In his early fifties, dressed like a low-echelon executive in an ordinary brown suit, with close-cropped graying hair and the command of a man higher up than he looked. An Anglo-Saxon face, more mid-western than Ivy League. He reminded me of a successful small city lawyer, an older version of the young man I’d tailed to the building. Some Anglo-type gang, moving in on the brotherhood?

“You’ll get your results, make your score,” Irving Kezar said, not backing down. “I have to go on working, cover myself.”

“Make sure you do,” the stranger said.

He vanished from my narrow view, and a moment later I heard the outer door close. Out in the den-office, Irving Kezar’s hand tapped the desk, his rings shining. He sat there for some time in the heavy silence. I breathed as quietly as I could, it was the critical time. If he heard, sensed…

Kezar got up. I tensed.

He walked around his desk-and out of the den-office. The outside door closed once more, and the whole apartment became as silent as when I’d come in. I didn’t wait. I went out the way I had come in, down the seventeen flights, and out the side. I went to the corner of Central Park West. The young man across the street was gone, the park bench empty in the rain. I took the subway down to my office.

I checked the street carefully, and the entrance. No one was around I could see, especially not Max Bagnio. I went up, and someone was in the corridor. He came out of the shadows. Hal Wood. His face was neither boyish nor ruddy anymore. As tight and constricted as his eyes.

“The police called Emily’s folks, made me wait,” he said. “They hate me, Emily’s folks. I don’t blame them. They brought her up strict about men, and then I came along. Corrupted her, then got her killed. I’d hate me, too.”

“Come on in. You shouldn’t be wandering around.”

In my one-window office I sat behind the desk. Hal stood, paced. He was wound so tight he could break apart at any moment. If he was a danger to anyone, they might not have to kill him, he’d do their job for them.

“What should I be doing?” he said. “Hiding in an empty apartment? Try again, Dan? Pick a girl I don’t really care about this time? When she gets killed, it won’t matter?”

“Go back to work.”

“I can’t work! I want to know!”

“All right. You ever hear of Ramapo Construction Company?”

“No, never.”

I called Lawrence Dunlap’s office. He’d gone for the day. I got his home address-32 Elm Drive, Wyandotte, New Jersey. I called John Albano. He was there. I told him about Emily Green and Max Bagnio, asked when he’d left Mia and Levi Stern. He’d left right after I had. All of them alone when Emily Green had been killed. With maybe just enough time?

“You know a Ramapo Construction Company?”

“One of Charley’s companies,” John Albano said. “Out in North Caldwell, New Jersey. Charley lives there, too.”

“Get your car, pick me up at my office. When I talk to Charley, maybe it’ll help to have you with me.”

My map showed that Wyandotte was a medium-sized city-not far from North Caldwell, or from Newark, where Sid Meyer had run his trucking company. This time I took my old gun.

“I’m going, too,” Hal said. “I can’t just sit around, Dan.”

His face was almost hollow. Maybe he’d be as safe with me as anywhere. We went down to the street to wait for John Albano.

We drove through the Lincoln Tunnel and out across the Jersey Flats, the salt marshes and automobile graveyards and smoking factories stretching in all directions. Past Newark and Elizabeth, and into the rolling hills and open fields farther south where low buildings of the new, clean, light industries dotted the landscape among the bare trees.

The rain had slackened, and we reached Wyandotte first. It was a city from the past-wide, tree-lined streets, older brick buildings, and the sprawl of supermarket and automobile franchises confined to a separated strip on the northern outskirts. Some cheaper tracts had gone up around the town, and some large signs announced the coming of light industry, but the city was still spacious on its meandering river, pleasant even in the slow rain.

Elm Drive curved up a series of hills in what was one of the richer residential sections, and Thirty-two was an ugly, three-story brick mansion that had stood among its trees and lawn for a long time. Lawrence Dunlap’s blue Cadillac was parked in front of an open garage, a smaller red Mercedes was inside. John Albano stopped under a porte-cochere at the front door.

An elderly woman with floury hands and rimless glasses answered our ring. There was nothing subservient about her manner.

“And what can I do for you, eh?” Brisk.