Микки Спиллейн - The Last Cop Out

When Bill Long met Gill for lunch he was still carrying the anger he should have left in his office. “What’s with you?” Gill asked him.

“They found Stanley Holland’s body in a parking lot in Cleveland.”

“Who’s he?”

“His right name was Enrico Scala.” Long waved the waiter over and told him to bring a pastrami on rye and coffee. “Remember him now?”

Gill doubled the order and nodded. “I thought he died in a car smashup in L.A.”

“Apparently that’s what he wanted us to think. Identification was made from his personal effects. He had plastic surgery done on his face after he beat that narco rap out there and changed his base.”

“You sure?”

“Well, most of his face was gone, but the tissue scars were there and his fingerprints matched. It was him, all right.”

“When did it happen?”

“About nine-thirty this morning. The Cleveland police got an anonymous phone tip from somebody about a dead guy in a car behind an office building and checked it out.”

“Who goes around looking into parked cars?”

“Somebody did. A couple of the guys who parked there said their cars had been rifled on occasion. Cigarettes gone, some change laid on the dashboard... things a kid might do.”

“Then why are you sweating it? Cleveland’s five hundred miles away. We don’t have jurisdiction there.”

“No, but we’re on an interdepartmental cooperation basis and the commissioners are raising hell. It’s all part of the same damn war and if it keeps up it’s going to explode all over New York.” He stopped, tossed a sharp glance at Burke and said, “I don’t suppose you have anything to say?”

“Did I ever?”

“Not unless it was pertinent and provable.”

“Let’s keep it that way.”

“That attitude might have gone in the old days, but you’re working under a different department now. The district attorney isn’t me.”

“Fuck the district attorney.”

“He can put you back on the street again.”

“But he won’t, old buddy. He just can’t afford to. Now eat your lunch.”

Halfway through the sandwich Bill Long said, “Papa Menes seems to have dropped out of sight.”

“Oh?”

“Got any ideas?”

“Sure. He’s got some sense.”

“The old man could hole up in any one of a dozen of his places and it would take an army to get him out. He isn’t in any of those places. He left Miami and simply disappeared.”

“Permanently?”

“He isn’t dead. Orders are still coming through. We’d know it in a hurry if anything had happened to him.”

Gill grinned and bit into his sandwich. “You know, it’s interesting to speculate on what would happen inside the syndicate if somebody nailed Papa. They’d cut each other to bits in the rush for the top.”

“Like hell. They got everything worked out in advance.”

“You used the wrong tense, pal.”

“What do you mean?”

“They used to have it worked out. This year isn’t last year or the year before and there’s a new breed of cat running around. Things are changing just as fast inside their own world as it is everyplace else. Governments and businesses, legal or illegal, are like buildings. You can only make them so big or they’ll crumble or be too unwieldly to be useful.”

“Don’t you believe it.”

“No?” Gill said. “Look at them now, scared shitless because for a change they’re the target and they got nobody to shoot back at. Guys who thought their power or protection made them invulnerable suddenly get dead and it’s panic time. Papa Menes quietly detaches himself from the scene and will sit it out until it’s over. A real dependable bunch of people to work for.”

“Menes will show. A guy like that can’t stay hidden.”

“Balls. He’s always had a few alternate caves to crawl into. He’ll be packing a bundle in hard cash and won’t have any crowd around him. He’ll just disappear into the scenery somewhere with his own special means of communication to the organization and sit tight.”

“Where, for instance?”

Gill blew on his coffee and grunted. “He had one place in New Paltz, New York. Don’t bother checking it because I did and it’s empty. The power’s on and the phone is live. A maid cleans the place once a week, runs the pickup truck in the garage to keep the battery charged and gets paid by money order once a month. She’s never seen the owner, although he’s occupied the place several times. Anybody with the time to be an amateur pirate could hit that place when she wasn’t there and with enough house wrecking or garden digging, pull up a small fortune in cash.”

“How did you get that tidbit of information?”

“Using my spare time checking on visitors going into a certain spaghetti joint at a certain time on a certain day.”

“When Papa Menes was there?”

“Very astute, pal. One of those visitors was an upstate real estate broker. The rest was sneaky, but easy.”

“That doesn’t give us Menes now.”

“You couldn’t charge him with anything anyway. Besides, there’s better game to hunt.”

“The game preserve is going to be pretty crowded,” the captain said sarcastically. “The families got the orders out and all the shooters are going onto the streets. They’re shifting all the soldiers around to the hot spots and most of them are coming here. Last night there was a job pulled at National Guard Armory in Jersey and twenty-two tommy guns with sixty thousand rounds of ammo were lifted. The same thing happened in a naval depot in Charleston, only there it was grenades. Gill... we’re sitting right on the shady side of hell.”

Burke finished his coffee and nodded.

“You could say something about it,” Long prodded him.

“Sure,” Gill said. “Want some dessert?”

The supper he had at Cissie’s wasn’t sitting too well with Mark Shelby. Ordinarily he would have enjoyed the specialty dishes she served the patrons who had originally financed her East Fifty-fifth Street retreat. The gourmet magazines played her up regularly and she had been on the local TV channel twice with her own brand of Mediterranean cooking.

He tried the wine again, an imported rose that cost twenty-five bucks a bottle, but it went down like water without improving his digestion a bit. It had always been like that when he had to look at the Frenchman. He had made his bones and kept his hand in whenever it was necessary to prove a point, but essentially he was an organizer, a compiler of facts, a recorder and adviser.

Essentially the Frenchman was a killer.

Nothing else mattered.

The Frenchman was a homosexual killer and nobody could ever prove it because whoever he went down on suffered the same fate as a male black widow spider, except that there was never any drained corpse to identify. It was only rumored, of course, but nobody had the temerity to challenge the accusation because the Frenchman had an unusual penchant for killing people in lieu of sex, without regard for position or reputation, and as long as it didn’t interfere with the machinations of the organization, his private life was his own.

Murder, to the Frenchman, was the same as an orgasm. He enjoyed it best when one followed the other, but he could take each separately if the need arose, but inevitably one would follow the other anyway.

If he had to take his choice, Frank Verdun would rather murder. The orgasm was much more intense then.

And at that moment, Mark Shelby didn’t like the way the Frenchman was looking at him.

“Whoever hit Holland was on the inside,” Mark said flatly. “Only two people could recognize his new face and they’re both dead — the doctor and the nurse.”