Michael Collins - Silent Scream

“Jesus, how dumb can you be? Don’t you know a fix?”

“Fix? What was fixed?”

Once he’d taken that first step, broken the silence barrier, he couldn’t stop. As if he wanted to get it all out, be left alone to go back to his smooth hustler’s life.

“Bagnio, stupid!” He laughed now. “There never was any memo. Charley Albano faked it. He faked the memo, the money clip, the rifle bullets. He gave you Bagnio-dead.”

My voice sounded odd even to me. “Bagnio didn’t kill Andy and Diana Wood? Charley framed all the evidence?”

“I guess Max killed them all right, Charley and Don Vicente figured so anyway. Charley didn’t care much. He thought maybe Mia paid Max to do the job, and that was okay by him. He wasn’t about to tell Don Vicente and the Council. They didn’t know why Max did it, wanted to question Max. I guess that’s why Max hid out. Don Vicente and the Council don’t question so nice. Maybe Max didn’t have good answers.”

“Charley didn’t bother to find out?”

“Hell, he didn’t like Max anyway, too close to Andy.” He lit a cigarette. “Anyway, you started getting too close to the Wyandotte deal, making waves. Charley tried to get you on the road. When that missed, and you and his old man showed up at the funeral asking about Ramapo, he decided the best way to get you out of our hair was to solve the case, hand you the killer. Don Vicente said okay, Max hadn’t come in to explain.”

“All packaged. Only maybe Bagnio didn’t do it.”

“Max had that wedding ring, so I guess he killed them. Charley was sure, anyway.”

“Charley didn’t care,” I said. “Bagnio had the ring? That wasn’t a plant?”

“Charley found it on Bagnio. What we couldn’t figure was the motive. Maybe someone hired Max. Charley didn’t want to dig too deep on that. So he rigged the fake motive with that memo, added the rifle shells and the money clip. We wanted the case closed, no loose ends. Stop all the snooping around.”

“Yeh,” I said. “Motive.”

“Hell,” Kezar said, “who knows why Max did it? Who cares?”

I walked out. As I closed the door, I heard Kezar start to dial the phone again. A hustler never quits, never stops. He was safe for now. He’d help Jenny all he could, do everything within reason. But if he couldn’t do much for her, well, that’s the way the flag flies.

I stopped in a bar on the avenue. I had my Irish. Someone had Kezar’s gun that had killed Sid Meyer. That wasn’t what I thought about. I thought about Diana Wood’s wedding ring, and why Max Bagnio had had it. I thought about small things: Diana Wood going to Miami after leaving Hal; the police photos of Diana and Pappas dead in that bedroom; the long night in the dump, and how we had all acted, talked; the murder of Emily Green. I thought about how I’d been shot, and about a small slip that rang now in my mind from no earlier than today.

I had two more Irish, and went out to my rented car.

John Albano wasn’t at his own apartment. I walked around the block to Morgan Crafts and Mia’s apartment. There was light in the apartment. I went up.

Levi Stern opened the door. He was in civilian clothes. Had he been here all night?

“Mr. Fortune?” Stern said. A question. Why was I there?

Mia Morgan-Mia Stern now-was making drinks at a garish chrome-and-polished-wood liquor cabinet. She looked very young, looked toward Levi Stern with a kind of doubt, even wonder. John Albano sat in a red womb chair, old and massive and watching me.

“I’ll have a Scotch,” I said.

Mia made me the drink, gave it to me. The other two waited. A team? I drank my Scotch, wiped my mouth.

“What I wonder,” I said, “is what Max Bagnio was really looking for so hard?”

“Not evidence that would show his reason to hate Andy?” John Albano said. “What was in that memo?”

“The memo was a fake,” I said.

I drank, and told them about Charley Albano’s frame-up, about Kezar, Sid Meyer, and the Wyandotte deal.

“He is an F.B.I. informer?” Levi Stern said. “Such a man would be very afraid of Pappas.”

“Sure, but how would he have gotten so close to that guard in the corridor? No, murder by himself isn’t Kezar’s style.”

John Albano said, “When you really think about it, no one but Max Bagnio could have done it.”

“The way it looks,” I said. “Only Don Vicente didn’t like the way it looked to us, to the police. Don Vicente is smart, experienced in these matters.”

“How else could it have happened, Dan?” John Albano asked.

“Yeh,” I said, emptied my glass. “Try this: the killer wasn’t hidden in an empty apartment, didn’t come up those stairs. He was on the roof, came down outside on a rope. A special rope, one of those rigs Commandos use to come down a cliff in combat, with a harness that leaves both hands free. Say the bedroom window was open. Andy and Diana Wood were asleep, or busy. The killer covered them with his automatic rifle from outside the window. A skilled man, a lot better with guns than Pappas.”

I set my empty glass down in the now quiet room. “He’s got Andy cold. Andy didn’t even have his gun, not that it would have mattered. The killer lines up Andy and Diana, makes Andy call in the guard from the corridor. Remember, the front door of that apartment is in a straight line with the bedroom door. The killer had the guard covered the moment he stepped inside. He makes the guard break the door lock, or does it himself with the three of them covered.”

I paced a little. “He lines them up in the bedroom, shoots them all down, drags the guard out to the corridor fast, and goes back out the window on his rope. He closes the window behind him. By now Max Bagnio is up in the apartment, but the killer is gone. He’s outside. A matter of seconds to slide down, disengage his pully mechanism from the roof. Down, not up, because Bagnio might go to the roof at once, and because it was too dark to see him below if Max happened to look out the window. Max didn’t look out, why should he? The window was closed, no fire escape. Max even wasted time making sure Andy wasn’t alive, not that the killer needed that. No, there was risk, sure, but the killer had it pretty well planned.”

I studied their faces. “Only Bagnio found something, a real clue. Later, after he talked to Gazzo, it made him guess what had really happened. The trouble was that what he found in the bedroom wasn’t enough to prove it by itself. So he started to look for the more he needed on his own. That, and the way the killings looked, made the Mafia suspicious of him-who gets past Max Bagnio and the guard upstairs? He realized the real story sounded bad if he told it without full proof, and that the Mafia don’t ask a lot of questions before acting. So he kept trying for more proof, but Charley Albano’s men got to him first.”

Mia drank, John Albano sat without a change, and Levi Stern stood silent and seemed to be considering my story.

“Stern?” I said. “Could you have done it that way?”

“Yes,” he said.

“No sweat?”

“Not much. You don’t forget if you keep in condition.”

I nodded. “That’s what I figured. You know, I think that the search here at Mia’s was a trick. A ruse to hide the fact what Max Bagnio wanted only Hal Wood could have.”

John Albano said, “What would that be, Dan?”

“I think I’ll go and ask Hal. Maybe he’ll remember with all I know now,” I said. “You stay here. I’ll be back.”

I left them all watching the door, not each other. Down in my car I lit a cigarette, then drove south. Another car pulled out behind me. I thought it did. I didn’t drive too fast. At St. Marks Place I parked near the corner of Avenue A, walked back to number 145. I went up to 4-B when Hal Wood answered my ring from the vestibule.