William Brown - The Undertaker

I sat back and thought about that for a moment. Ralph Tinkerton of Hamilton, Keogh, and Hollister. What was it Lawrence Greene called him? The managing partner in one of “our finest law firms.” He said I should be careful running around “impugning his reputation.” I figured the managing partner of a big downtown law firm would charge three or four hundred dollars per hour easy. So why would a public transit staffer, a motel desk clerk, a car mechanic, a carpenter, and a low-end bookkeeper hire high-priced legal talent like that to handle their estates? Pro bono? Hardly. It made no sense.

I stared down at the obituaries again. What could be the link? Different ages, different hometowns, all big cities far away from Columbus, and each one in a different occupation. Mostly lower income. Fairly generic jobs. Sometimes when you can't see something that's right in front of your nose, you have to ask yourself what isn't there. There was no next-of-kin. Like my own Columbus funeral, I doubted there was any audience, either. No one knew these people and no one else knew or even cared what was going on. They had all come from some place else, some place far away, and they all died in Columbus, mostly from accidents. But why? It wasn't for the money, or at least not mine or the dumb schlep who lived on Sedgwick, because neither of us had any.

Mr. and Mrs. Richard C. Skeppington, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas K. Pryor, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Brownstein, Mr. Edward J. Kasmarek, and the new “Talbotts”. Could it be medical malpractice? Over a ten-month period, did the quacks at the Varner Clinic screw up a whole bunch of operations and accidentally kill all nine of them? Was this some new way to cover up botched surgeries? Was there some new disease cutting a swath through the Great Buckeye Heartland? One that would strike down a husband and the wife at the same time? Maybe biological warfare from Michigan? Nah. There were Health Departments and Centers for Disease Control for all that stuff. Eventually someone would wonder what happened to them. Someone would start asking why so many people were going in the Varner Clinic and coming out dead. Besides, how did that explain me or Terri? We had never set foot in the Varner Clinic. And what was the Varner Clinic to begin with? A fat farm? A nursing home? Maybe a drug rehab center or a private surgery theater?

That left me stumped, so I tried to work my way through it logically a second time. First, scratch any good problem and you will find a lawyer lurking underneath. That was a given. Second, it was impossible to hatch a conspiracy of any size without a really big law firm to confuse things and muddy-up the waters. Still, any self-respecting lawyer's motivation was always money, and lots of it. Could it be that the eminent Ralph Tinkerton, Executor Extraordinaire, had been cleaning out his client's trust accounts and decided to clean out the clients, too? Nah. Any big corporate lawyer worth his salt could figure out a hundred ways to skin a trust account without spilling a drop of blood. Terri and I had no money and neither did CPA Talbott. I couldn't explain it. Why would someone in Columbus, Ohio want people to think Terri and I were dead to begin with? Suddenly, I sat bolt upright. That wasn't it. Terri already was dead and due to that old LA obituary from my trip to Baja, maybe they thought I was dead too. Maybe this whole thing had nothing to do with the names or biographies in the obituaries. Maybe it was all about the bodies. Someone was making people disappear by planting them under the names and IDs of people who were already dead, figuring that no one in Columbus would notice. Who would, especially if the people were already dead and buried halfway across the country, like Terri and I were. If the real people were dead and buried in Atlanta, Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago, who would ever know?

What was it Talbott's neighbor said? That old, gray-haired battle-axe in the denim work shirt? The Talbotts moved in about six months ago, husband and wife, a decent interval after Terri's funeral and my almost-funeral out in LA. The other Talbotts would have started living here in Columbus, living openly under phony IDs, right after that. In Pete's case, he was running an accounting business and using my name. That took help, the kind of big league help that a prominent law firm like Hamilton, Keogh, and Hollister and its managing partner Mr. Ralph Tinkerton could easily provide. Yes, the eminent Ralph Tinkerton was definitely worth a second look.

What were those names Gino Parini threw at me back in the parking lot in Boston? Jimmy Santorini and Rico Patillo? Weren't those the names he mentioned, along with East Orange and Bayonne, New Jersey?

Carefully and without making a sound, I tore the Skeppington obituaries from the newspaper and slipped it into my shirt pocket. I fed the printer a couple one-dollar bills and got copies of the ones on microfilm and then I walked over to the long row of encyclopedias. I tried the Britannica, the Americana, and Colliers, but I found no reference to any Jimmy Santorini. I looked him up in Who's Who, with no better results. Finally, I turned to the big green leather and gold lettered volumes of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and began flipping through the recent issues. I didn't find very much until I got back almost a year and found a flurry of stories. I jotted down the references in Time, Newsweek, and several pieces in the New York Times. I went to the magazine racks and it didn't take me long to find the stories.

Jimmy “the Stump” Santorini was the mafia boss of eastern New Jersey, or he used to be. Lots of color pictures of a short, dark, very dapper-looking guy with a big cigar clamped grimly between his teeth trying to hide his face from the cameras. He had been an underling of the Gotti Mob across the river in the Big Apple and he was up to his eyeballs in the docks, trash hauling, drugs, prostitution, and the unions in Newark, Hoboken, and Jersey City. They called him “the Stump” because of his build and because nothing could knock him down. Probably cute and cuddly like old tree bark, too.

Unfortunately, the last couple of years had not been kind to poor Jimmy. First, he got himself in a bruising power fight with the Patillo Mob out of Philadelphia. That cost him a lot of his coastal New Jersey territory like Bayonne and East Orange and most of his prestige fighting them off. Rico Patillo, Bayonne, and East Orange? Those were the rest of that grease-ball Parini's puzzle pieces and it was all starting to fit now. After Patillo finished battering him, the Feds grabbed what was left and “the Stump” found himself locked away in the big, new, federal maximum-security prison in Marion, Illinois along with a gaggle of his former lieutenants and muscle. Jimmy was none-too-happy about it, and none-too-happy that the Patillos moved in and took over most of the Jersey side of the River with him gone. However, locked up in the cornfields of central Illinois doing fifty-five years to life, there wasn't much poor Jimmy could do about it. He was fifty-three years old when he went in and his prospects didn't look good for him to make to one-hundred and eight.

Jimmy Santorini's troubles started with a series of prominent U. S. Senate Hearings on organized crime. I vaguely remembered all the dramatic TV coverage — bright lights, politicians with make-up, and a ton of demagoguery. A flashy new Senator from Illinois named Hardin led the charge, tanned, fit, and white capped teeth flashing. When he finally got the gumbas under oath in front of the cameras, he patiently painted them into a tight little corner. Someone had done his homework, because the hearings blew the lid off the Santorini mob and goosed the Justice Department into what they later described as, “one of the most intense investigations in the history of the Department.” A year later, “the Stump” was wearing a not-too-stylish orange jump suit in a broom closet of a cell in Marion.