They were passing the rest stop just east of Akron on Interstate 80. Lockington jerked his head to his left. He said, “That’s where Vince Calabrese shot Billy Mac Davis.”
Natasha said, “Probably the only decent thing he ever accomplished. Lacey, let’s get back to the beginning of this thing—I’ll have explanations to make.”
Lockington said, “The beginning was probably in the state of Mississippi, in late ’sixty-six—you said that Rufe was working that area then. That’d be when he got Bobbie Jo Pickens pregnant.”
“He walked out on her?”
“I doubt that he knew that she was up the creek.”
“If he didn’t know, when did he find out?”
“About four years ago when he ran into Bobbie Jo at the Chicago Stadium where she was singing with Billy Mac Davis’s political campaign. He recognized her, he made contact, and he learned that he was the father of a bouncing seventeen-year-old daughter. That may have bumped Rufe off the tracks.”
“Conscience? I don’t believe it.”
“Well, there’s so much good in the worst of us—Rufe had a conscience. It was calloused, but he had one. He became determined to make amends to the Pickens woman and to the daughter he’d never seen—it probably developed into an obsession.”
“Where was the girl at that time?”
“Possibly in Mississippi with relatives, growing up, trying to emulate her mother, practicing to become a country singer. I’m not sure of that—I didn’t ask her.”
“It was Bobbie Jo who got Devereaux involved with LAON?”
“Yes, but I don’t believe it was intentional—she probably introduced Rufe to Billy Mac Davis, and I’d imagine that they hit it off like a pair of cattle thieves. They were southern boys with similar leanings. In addition to that, Rufe needed money to set things right and Davis had a ton of it. Eventually they struck a deal—fifty grand a hit. Then, somewhere along the line, Rufe found out that he had cancer and from that point on it was Katie, bar the door—Rufe didn’t give a damn. He knew his way around the shady fringes, he had a man to kill in Miami, and he decided to cut a fat hog in the ass. After he’d knocked off Wallace Vernon he drove across town and wasted a Mafia drug supplier named Juarez. He helped himself to a few kilos of cocaine. He owned a house in Leyden Township, a pop-off valve, good for any number of reasons including cooperative ladies—you know about that, of course.”
“Stop it, Lacey—you’re rubbing it in.”
“Rufe drove the coke through from Miami and when he’d dumped it at the place on North Onines Avenue, he was sitting on a potential of something in the vicinity of two million dollars.”
“And he was running it to Youngstown a kilo at a time.”
“Right. He’d fly to Chicago and come back with an attaché case full of cocaine. There’s a ready market for it in the Youngstown area.”
“And the Mafia was furious.”
“To put it mildly—somebody was stealing their thunder, invading their marketplace, and selling Mafia cocaine. They went to work on it and they learned that the slug killing Juarez matched ballistically with the one killing Wallace Vernon.”
“But how did the Mafia learn this?”
“How did the KGB get it?”
“Through a leak in the Miami police department.”
“That’s how the Mafia found out.”
“But how did they single out Devereaux?”
“How did the KGB single him out?”
“Lacey, the KGB has three hundred thousand operatives in this country!”
“Uh-huh, well, the Mafia has fifty times that many sources of information—every tenth person you meet has Mafia connections of one sort or another. If they aren’t genuine Mafioso, they know somebody who is. Killing Juarez was a serious offense—you just don’t knock over a Mafia drug shipment and get away with it. The outfit turned all the dogs loose on this one!”
“All right, so they knew that Devereaux had killed Juarez and stolen their cocaine. Did they know that Devereaux was the Copperhead?”
“Of course—they knew it long before we did, but the Mafia didn’t give a damn about the Copperhead. The Mafia wanted the man who’d grabbed their coke. They knew it was Rufe, but they didn’t know where Rufe was.”
“And they believed that you did.”
“Yes, but they were working from other angles—a Mafia enforcer named Bugsy Delvano back-tracked a basket of flowers that Bobbie Jo Pickens had sent to Rufe’s phony CIA wake. That revealed a link between Bobbie Jo and Rufe. Delvano went to Bobbie Jo’s apartment above the Club Howdy, and he beat her to death in an effort to learn Rufe’s location. She held the line—all he got was blood on his hands. The same ape cornered me in the funeral home parking lot later that night. My partner cold-cocked him.”
“The Mafia believed that you were an accomplice of Devereaux’s?”
“Probably not, but they believed that Rufe had turned to me when the going got rough.”
“Well, they must have known that Devereaux was somewhere in Ohio—they were waiting at O’Hare when he flew in from Cleveland.”
“He could have flown from Minneapolis to Cleveland and then to O’Hare. And knowing that he was holed up somewhere in Ohio wouldn’t have helped much. Ohio’s the most densely populated state in the country.”
“But how did they know that he was coming to O’Hare?”
“There might be a hole in the CIA.”
“Chawrt vuhzmee, nobody’s honest!”
“I had the cocaine, but I didn’t know it. Rufe had given everybody the slip at Mike’s Tavern—he’d taken a cab to his house on North Onines Avenue, he’d loaded up, he’d stopped near my apartment building and jammed the stuff behind the backseat of my car. Then he baited me to Youngstown with an empty matchbook and a thousand dollars. I was Rufe’s delivery boy.”
“The Mafia could have killed Devereaux when he was in Chicago. Why didn’t they?”
“A matter of economics—there was a couple million dollars’ worth of cocaine floating around. In Chicago, Rufe’s luggage amounted to an attaché case—obviously he wasn’t carrying the entire stolen shipment. The Mafia had it ass-backwards—it thought that the cocaine was in Youngstown and that he was bringing it to Chicago, when it was the other way around. It tried to kill Rufe but only after it was certain that it’d located the remainder of the stuff.”
“Where did they think it was?”
“They believed that Peggy was storing it.”
They rolled westward through a twenty-minute silence. Natasha’s brow was furrowed. She was readying another barrage of questions, Lockington thought. Lockington was right. She asked, “Why did Billy Mac Davis try to kill you?”
“Davis thought that I was onto Rufe. Rufe was Davis’s top gun—as the Copperhead he was invaluable. When Davis was sure that I was headed for Youngstown, he went for me.”
“But if Devereaux and Davis were close, Davis would have known that Devereaux had sent for you.”
“They weren’t that close—Davis wouldn’t have gone with the drug business. He’d have seen it as a focus of unwanted attention. No, Davis didn’t know that Rufe wanted me to come to Youngstown.”
“But Davis knew that Devereaux was alive, that his murder had been staged?”
“No doubt about that—Davis wouldn’t have been attempting to shield a man he believed to be dead.”
“And then the Mafia killed Davis.”
“Right—the Mafia was tagging me, figuring that I’d lead them to Rufe and to the cocaine shipment. If they’d lost me, the trail would have gone cold. Davis was interfering. Davis had to go.”
“When did they think they’d located the cocaine?”
“Night before last. When Peggy picked me up to take me to Rufe, Mercurio and Calabrese followed us. She dropped me off and they trailed her back to the New Delhi. They saw her take the coke from my car, they added two and two and came up with thirteen. They planned to kill Rufe and me, then beat the facts out of Peggy when she returned to Rufe’s—clean sweep.”
“Where’s that kilo of cocaine now?”
“Peggy had it—if she’s smart she doesn’t have it now.”
“Do you think that the word got back to Chicago?”
“No, there wouldn’t have been time. Mercurio and Calabrese are gone, courtesy of your friendly KGB.”
“Don’t knock the KGB, Lacey—it watched over you.”
Lockington swapped subjects. “You reached Youngstown ahead of schedule.”
“Yes, I was concerned because of the LAON contract on you. We made the trip at night—I phoned from an Austintown restaurant, not from Chicago. We followed you to the Flamingo Lounge, back to the New Delhi, to the Flamingo again, then to Hubbard and Warren. You were busy!”
“So was the KGB man who searched my motel room.”
Her half-smile was sheepish. “Standard procedure—I didn’t dare violate it. My men kept a protective eye on you that night. When Peggy picked you up they realized that a green Trans Am was on your trail. When she delivered you to Devereaux’s place, they parked up the road to the west, staying close to you. When Peggy came back to the motel, the Trans Am was with her, but it returned to Devereaux’s property before she did. It pulled into the drive, and after the gunfire my men pursued the Trans Am, eliminating its occupants.”
“On your orders, of course.”
“If your life was endangered, yes—on my orders.”
Lockington felt icy fingers tickle his spinal column. She’d been very ho-hum about it. He said, “Look, just what was the KGB’s stake in the game? Rufe had circulated word that he’d written a book. You appeared to be interested in that story, but you weren’t.”
Natasha shook her head. “His ploy was as obvious as the CIA’s mock murder and wake. Devereaux thought that he’d be safe so long as he held the threat of a revealing manuscript. It was wishful thinking on his part, nothing more.”
“From the very beginning, it was your assignment to kill him, wasn’t it?”
“No, not from the very beginning—only from the time we realized that he was the Copperhead.”
“That would have been after the killings in Miami.”
“Yes. On instructions from LAON, Devereaux was murdering Communist sympathizers in this country. These people have been the backbone of the Soviet movement here—they’re in every walk of life, particularly the media. They doctor the news, so that the news disseminated is slanted. Eighty-five percent of America’s news distribution is Communist owned or controlled—press, radio, television.”
“Misinformation.”
“Yes, misinformation.”
“The Communists aren’t doing too badly on Capitol Hill, either—there’s a couple hundred left-leaners up there.”
Natasha was nodding. “The Soviet Union has a strong foothold in the United States but LAON and Devereaux were knocking a hole in the infrastructure.”
“You couldn’t kill Devereaux before you found him. I found him for you.”
“You were our best bet—probably our only bet.”
“I didn’t spring the trap, but I put the noose around his neck.”
“Regrets?”
“Of course.”
“He had every intention of killing you, try to remember that.”
“He was sick—try to remember that!”
“Lacey, a rabid dog is a rabid dog.”
“Enough of this. Why was the CIA chasing Rufe?”
“The CIA was the only organization really taken in by his manuscript hoax—it actually believed that he’d written a damaging book. It knew that others were interested and it attempted to throw them off the scent by staging his assassination—it intended to hold matters in abeyance until it could determine how harmful Devereaux’s writings might be, until it could round up all copies of the manuscript. Then the CIA would have killed him—depend on it. He was an agent gone bad and there’s just one way to deal with that type in any branch of secret service.”
Lockington said, “Yesterday evening, when you went to Room 5 to change for dinner—your men were there and you keyed them for this morning’s action.”
Natasha winked at him. “Yes, that would have been when you were keying the CIA men in Room 8.”
They hammered along Interstate 80, the old Pontiac eating up the miles. In a few minutes Natasha said, “What was your clincher, Lacey—the names of those old baseball players?”
“That was it—you’d mentioned that the Copperhead had killed a Wallace Vernon from an apartment he’d rented under the name of Sam Sheckard. You said that he’d killed a man from an automobile that’d been rented by an Orval Overall, and that he’d knifed a man in a restaurant booth that he’d reserved under the name of Carl Lundgren. At that time these names were meaningless to me. Then I learned that the Club Crossroads had been bought by a man named Jack Taylor, that Peggy’s red Porsche was owned by a Patrick Moran, and that the property on North Dunlap Avenue belonged to a Harry Steinfeldt and I still hadn’t caught the brass ring, but I should have!”
“Why?”
“Because that’s a standard baseball trivia question, one that I’ve asked and answered dozens of time—‘Who was the fourth man in the Tinker to Evers to Chance Chicago Cubs infield?’ The answer is Harry Steinfeldt.”
“I’m afraid that I’m not with you.”
Lockington went on. “Then, when Rufe told me that he was using the pseudonym of Joseph Tinker, I had a hunch, and when I said that he should write a sequel to his book under the name of John J. Evers, he gave me a strange look. He passed over my remark but I got the impression that I’d hit a nerve.”
Natasha said, “John J. Evers—the property on Western Reserve Road is owned by a John J. Evers! Devereaux thought that you’d cracked his cover—he had to kill you!”
“He’d have tried anyway—what the hell, fifty G’s is fifty G’s. An old baseball encyclopedia wrapped it up. The Copperhead was using the names of the 1906 Chicago Cubs—Sheckard, Overall, Lundgren—and so was Rufe—Pfiester, Schulte, Taylor, Moran, Steinfeldt. There comes a time when coincidences cease to be coincidences. The Copperhead and Rufe Devereaux were the same person—the nineteen-oh-six Chicago Cubs were Rufe’s favorite baseball team!”
“A slender thread.”
“Also, there was the fact that his instructions for receiving the manuscript had been too damned explicit—I was to be sitting in my car, waiting for Peggy’s delivery at precisely six o’clock. Why did it have to be that way? Why couldn’t she have brought it to my door and let me take off for Chicago when I was ready? He was setting me up.”
“Do you think that Peggy knew that he’d try to kill you this morning?”
“No—she showed no surprise at my visit.”
Another ten miles had fallen behind them when Natasha said, “Lacey, you’re a good man.”
Lockington said, “No, but once in a while I get lucky.”
Natasha squeezed his arm. She said, “So do I.”
They were west of Toledo, bearing down on the Indiana line.