Mickey Spillane - Dead Street

“I remember it all right. Cocky little punk. He didn’t do it when I arrested him.”

“So arrest him again. He’s around somewhere.”

“He got buried in a city plot, what was left of him,” I told her.

“Baloney,” she told me.

“Okay, then. What was he looking at?”

She gave a big shrug, hunching her shoulders. “Beats me. He always was a nosey pig.”

“Bessie, Bucky Mohler is dead and buried.”

“He’s up to something,” she said as if she didn’t hear me. “Go look. Maybe you’ll see what he was after.”

It was the only way I was going to get away from the old biddy, so I gave her a wave and walked down the street and across the pavement to the front of Bucky Mohler’s old house. I looked back and Bessie wasn’t even watching me.

As the guy used to say on radio, “So it shouldn’t be a total loss, I’ll take a look.”

There was a sign on the porch to the demolition crews. The place was not to be disturbed until further orders. Clear enough. They had stayed away. But somebody had been looking. The imprint of shoes on the dusty sidewalk onto the ravaged ground led from one side, stayed close to the house, went completely around it, then turned back almost in the same tracks and stopped by the side door. There was little shuffling around in the dirt. Whoever made those tracks knew exactly what he was doing.

When I checked the dirt residue around the door, scraping it out with a pocketknife, one thing seemed to make sense. That door had been opened recently. There were no indications of forced entry, so someone had a key. It was good lock with a reliable name, a new model, probably installed by the last inhabitants and they wouldn’t be hard to check on.

Something was screwy and I didn’t like screwy things. Bessie’s life was the Street. She knew everything that was going on. If she said she saw Bucky, I’d damn well better check it out.

The city kept pretty good records and it didn’t take long for the attendant to locate the book that recorded the death of Bucky Mohler and she gave me the number of his burial plot and its location. But Bucky, or whoever was buried in that plot, would be nothing identifiable by now.

Somehow I couldn’t quite discount old Bessie’s certainty about seeing Bucky. He’d aged, she’d said, but had still been recognizable — to her, anyway. And if it was Bucky, what was he doing down here on that dead street? A guy like that wouldn’t show any nostalgia for a place like this. At least he’d never expect anyone to identify him. The block was almost gone now, the buildings demolished, the few left about to come down. He must have figured there’d be nobody left who could tag him.

Cell phones are great for an area like this. The compartmentalized city of New York had a place for everything and everything was in its place. There was a cubicle where a cop kept track of every known street gang in the city, had IDs on their members, knew their codes and recognition signs and every record of arrests and convictions any of those punks had.

I called the department number and a voice said, “Officer Muncie here. How can I help you?”

“Captain Jack Stang, retired, from the old—”

“Hey, Captain! Good to speak to you. We were talking about you the other day. Somebody saw you down at your old precinct...”

“It’s torn down now.”

“The new place is pretty nice, I hear.”

“Maybe, but not my bailiwick. I got to learn to be a civilian again, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess so. What can I do for you?”

“There was an old Bronx gang, the Blue Uptowners. What happened to them?”

“Hell, Jack, they’re still active. A few of the originals are still around, but they’re out of the loop. The new kids aren’t too bad. Very little trouble.”

“Who can I see about something that happened twenty-some years ago?”

“Just a second.” I heard him pull some folders out and rustle the papers in them. He wasn’t a computer guy either. When he was satisfied, he said, “There’s one guy, Paddy The Bull, they called him. His real name was Patrick Mahoney...”

“I recall him,” I said.

“He’s square now. Has a painting business. Want his address and phone number?”

I said yes, wrote them down in my note pad and thanked Officer Muncie for his time.

Patrick Mahoney was a far cry from Paddy The Bull. He was respectable now, a burly, bald, hard-working guy who had his own business, owned a pickup truck and had a wife and two kids and a big smile when he saw me.

“Damn,” he said with a laugh, outside the house in Queens he and a crew were painting, “did I do something wrong?”

“Nope,” I said. “You did something right. You grew up.”

“It’s been a long time, Captain Jack. I coulda been wearing an orange jailhouse jumpsuit, not these painter’s whites, wasn’t for you. Now, I know that you’re retired and that this isn’t a social call, so what’s happening?”

“Remember Bucky Mohler?”

He made a face and spit out a dirty word. “He was a lowlife scumbag. Bad news. I tried to tell Wally Chips who ran our club to stay away from him but he wouldn’t listen to me. Or a couple of the other guys, either.”

“So?”

He paused. His eyes locked onto me, hard. “Look, Captain. You did me a favor once.”

“Yeah?”

“You probably don’t even remember. You coulda hauled my ass in and I’da done a stretch, a real one — I was over eighteen. You gave me a one-time pass.”

I had no memory of it, but if he thought he owed me, fine. “Know something, Paddy?”

He swallowed, then jumped in. “We had a bad apple in our bunch. A squealer. Turned the cops on to us four different times. The guys wanted to bump him, but that would only pull more law down on us, so the rough guys in the club figured out a cute dodge. Bucky, he wanted out from his family and he suddenly had a load of dough to lay out, so if the Uptowners could fake a kill on him and get somebody else in his place, and like really mutilate him up bad, Bucky would put his ID on the body and two birds would be killed with one beer bottle.”

“How did Bucky know about your squealer?”

“Man, word gets around, you should remember that.”

I bobbed my head in agreement. “What happened?”

“This a clean game you’re playing, Captain?”

I squinted at him.

“That was a long way back,” he said. “But there’s no time limit on murder, is there?”

“No.”

“I wasn’t in on this play. I came in right after the hit and got details from another member. I don’t remember who, either.” Something tightened his face. “Captain, there’s such a thing as accomplice after the fact, and—”

“Consider this a civilian inquiry.”

“You swear it?”

“I swear it.”

“Okay,” he said and took a deep breath. “I don’t know who drove the car, but the deal was when Bucky came up the street the Uptowners would send a member out to identify him and bring him back to us. Our guy would walk on Bucky’s left so when the car made the move, Bucky would jump clear and the squealer would get mashed. Well, it worked. The driver went over the body four times and when he finished you couldn’t even tell it was human. Bucky took the guy’s ID, put his own in its place dropped his jacket or something down and took off.”

“No accident investigation?”

“Come on, Captain. Who cared a hoot about a street gang in those days? Just one more punk out of the way. Remember?”

“I remember, but you guys asked for that attitude.”

His eyes were steady, unblinking. “And that’s why and when I got out of that life, Captain.”

“What happened to Bucky?”