Tony Bones and his little entourage were easy to spot on the sun-sodden terrace of the Bal Harbour Inn. Karp watched them for a moment from the shaded entranceway. Occupying two tables of the twenty or so arranged around the curving terrace, they wore suits in pastel fruit colors, darker shirts opened down to the chest, considerable gold showing amid the hair there, bad shaves, and sharp razor cuts. Karp himself was wearing an inappropriate dark Washington-lawyer suit and tie.
There was a churning among the population of the two tables. Men rose and left in pairs and trios, other pairs and trios arrived. One man only was stationary amid this movement. Tony Bones was dressed in a pale tan suit and a dark red open shirt, and over this he wore a long, thin hatchet face, the mouth a lipless V like a shark’s, flat black eyes, same fish. A central casting Mafia don, thought Karp; with a face like that he should have gone into installing carpeting and let the guys who looked like the family grocer run the Mob.
Karp walked slowly toward the two tables. As he approached, all the button men stopped what they were doing and looked him unsmilingly over.
Then Tony spotted him. Big grin, a wave. He didn’t stand, he shook Karp’s hand sitting. He was very short; he didn’t want his people to see him standing next to Karp. Aside from that, the gangster seemed genuinely glad to meet him. As Karp had expected; this was an odd aspect of his long-standing relationship with the Honorable Society, in New York and, so it seemed, here in Miami. They always gave him a smile and a big hello, whether he had sent them to prison or not; maybe especially if he had sent them to prison. This confirmed Karp’s impression that wise guys were essentially insane people.
Now Karp was being introduced to a covey of Joeys, Jimmies, Jillies, and Johnnies with indistinguishable vowel-terminating names. Tony Bones gestured him to a chair. The others drifted away.
“How’s it goin’, Butch? You want something? Coffee? You eat yet? Sure?”
“Yeah, I just ate, Tony. I guess you heard already.”
“Yeah, yeah, hell of a thing. The girl called me in the morning. Fuckin’ Colombians!”
“Why do you think it was Colombians?” asked Karp.
“Hey, Colombians, Jamaicans, Cubans, whatever. The fuck I know! I’m gonna find out who and then they’re gonna wish they was still back in the fuckin’ jungle.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t an outfit?”
Tony looked insulted. “Nahh! What’re you talkin’, outfit? What, somebody wants to send me a message, send Santos a message, they whack Jerry Legs? Hey, why’nt they whack my dry cleaner, my liquor guy? It don’t make no sense, follow? You’re sending somebody a message, it don’t make no sense to send it in Chinese, you know? They want me to fuckin read it. They want to whack somebody, they go for somebody with some weight on him. Him, for instance.” Tony pointed out one of the Joeys.
“The other thing, it could be, maybe Jerry burned somebody. But I think, no, that wasn’t his thing. He wasn’t interested in business, he wasn’t a hustler. You wanna know, Jerry didn’t have much goin’ for him upstairs, tell the truth. So why whack him, except some fuckin’ jungle spic don’t know any better?”
“You know this guy?” Karp slid the photo of Angelo Guel across the table. Tony looked at it carefully.
“This the one you think did Jerry? What, a Colombian, right?”
“Cuban. And I’ve got no reason to believe he had anything to do with the murder. In fact, I happen to think that whoever hit Jerry is going to go after this guy. Angelo Guel his name is.”
“You know who he is? The shooter.”
Karp passed him another eight-by-ten. “I like this guy for it. He calls himself Bill Caballo.”
The capo stared at the photograph. “How come you like him for it?”
“Mostly gut feeling. This guy’s turned up in a lot of places, connected to the Kennedy thing in various ways. We were talking to Jerry about stuff that might pin down the connection between Cuba, the CIA, and the assassination. It turned out he knew a lot of good stuff. He got whacked for it, so I look at who benefits from having him killed, and who among all those people has a rep as a serious shooter, and I come up with Bill here. Of course, they could’ve hired some kid off the street too, but I doubt it. You wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t what?”
“If you wanted to kill somebody and you didn’t want it traced back to you. Would you hire some kid for a couple of grand or would you get Jilly over there to do it? I mean, what’s the best way of keeping it close?”
Tony nodded. “Yeah, right, I see what you’re saying. Not Jilly personally, to tell the truth, but let’s say I got a guy of that type.” He tapped the photo of Caballo. “So, you think this scumbag is the hitter for … for what? The people did Kennedy?” He looked at the photograph more carefully. “Yeah! This guy looks like what’s-his-name, the scumbag they framed, Oswald.” He compressed his lips thoughtfully and nodded several times. Tony Bones had dropped out of school in the tenth grade but he was a full professor with tenure in the Department of Comparative Conspiracy. It gave Karp a peculiar and disturbing sense of satisfaction to find that Tony Bones was not an adherent of Warren.
“We could find this guy, if he’s still in town,” Tony offered.
“The only reason he’d still be in town is if Guel is in town too,” said Karp. “Find Guel before he does and we have a good chance.”
Tony indicated the two photographs lying on the table. “Let me keep these. I’ll put the word out.”
Karp wrote the phone number of his motel on the back of Guel’s picture, and then hesitated, holding the glossy.
“Tony, you’re gonna tell me if you find this Guel, right? And if Caballo turns up, I need to talk to him too. No Johnny Roselli on this one, okay?”
Tony smiled. The flat shark’s eyes were unamused. “Roselli was a Chicago thing. Had nothing to do with any of the outfits down here. I tell you what, Butch. I find this fucker, I’ll ask him did he whack Kennedy. He’ll talk to me.”
Fulton was waiting on Collins Avenue outside the hotel, in the Pontiac, with the AC running. When Karp got in, he asked, “How did it go?”
“Shitty,” Karp snarled. “You were right, we never should’ve gone to see him. Crap!”
“What, he told you to get lost?”
“No, worse. He’s going to look for Guel and if Caballo makes a move, he’s going to grab him.”
“He told you this?”
“No, but that’s what’s going to go down.”
“So, what do we do?”
“Find him ourselves, you, me, and Al. Hell, we haven’t even started. Maybe he’s in the phone book. Maybe he’s on late-night TV selling carpet—Crazy Angelo the Rug King. We could get lucky.”
“Well,” said Fulton, “we’re due.”
“How long do you think you’ll be working on this?” asked Maggie Dobbs. “I mean, it’s been a while and the …” She stopped, embarrassed.
They were in the Dobbs kitchen sharing a cup of coffee as usual, before Marlene went off to do research and Maggie did whatever she had planned with the children. Marlene regarded her closely. “Um, is something wrong, Maggie?”
“No, I just meant … well, I just wanted to know when you’ll be finished.”
This was so lame a request, and so obviously a cover for a deeper distress, that Marlene hardly knew how to respond. She decided to take it at face value, and answered, “Well, that depends on what you want me to do. I could write up what I’ve got so far, and work on developing an index to the various commentaries on the case. That should make it easy on whoever does the actual writing. I’ve got the beginnings of a descriptive index to the films, and I could finish that. The real problem, though, is Gaiilov.” Marlene explained who Gaiilov was.
“But how do you know he’s even still alive?” asked Maggie.
“I don’t. But that’s the only big source I haven’t explored. So I’m looking for him, trying to follow up any traces he might have left.” Marlene didn’t mention that she had set Harry Bello on just this task. He was down at the Library of Congress now, doing searches, to see whether anyone, anywhere, had mentioned the name of Armand Dimitrievitch Gaiilov in any newspaper or magazine or phone book during the last twenty-five years. The reason Marlene didn’t mention it was because it was a hopeless task, and because she did not want to spook the already desperately nervous woman with the information that she had allowed another stranger into the Dobbses’ business.
“Aside from that,” Marlene continued, “I plan to visit your mother-in-law again, and I guess I’d like to go out to Texas and see Harley Blaine.”
“Is that necessary?”
“Yes, I think it is. You’d have to spring for the airfare and expenses, of course.”
“Oh, God! This is so complicated now. When we started, I just thought … I don’t know—organizing the things we had, the story. I didn’t expect all this investigation. It’s like having the police in the house, like we did some crime.”
“Okay, I’ll stop,” said Marlene agreeably.
“You will?”
“Of course. It’s no skin off my ass if you never find out whether sterling Dick Dobbs sold his country to the Reds or not.”
“But he didn’t!” cried Maggie in horror. Inanely, her glance darted around the room, as if she were checking to see if anyone had overheard this blasphemy.
“Yeah, so you say, and I believe you’re right. But I talked to Viktor Reltzin the other day, and he swears he thought Jerome Weinberg wasn’t lying. And why should he lie at this late date, a lonely old Russian gent? He’s got no horse in the race: the Reds killed his whole family, so he’s sure as shit not protecting a Soviet secret.”
“But it’s impossible!”
“No, it’s only hard to believe, which is not quite the same thing. That’s why we need to talk to Gaiilov. Everyone else with direct knowledge of the affair has already weighed in, pro or con, or died. We can make a fair case for Richard’s innocence, true; but a fair case isn’t going to be good enough. We need fresh meat.”
Maggie wished this disturbing woman had never come into her life. She wished the great Dobbs case were still a pile of dusty papers and films into which she might dip from time to time after Hank had needled her. He really hadn’t needled her that often anyway. Now she had Marlene needling her too. She felt an absurd urge to run back and lose herself in the aisles of her greenhouse. Suppressing it, ashamed of these thoughts, she swallowed hard and said, “I’ll talk to Hank.”
The following day, Marlene awoke to the smell of coffee and the sound of domestic clatter in the kitchen. She pulled on a kimono and went to investigate. Her daughter was instructing Harry Bello on the preparation of the royal toast.
“You have to make the jelly even,” said Lucy.
“Good morning,” said Marlene. “What’s going on?”
“There’s coffee,” said Harry.
“Okay, even,” said Harry, as he finished coating the two squares of crustless toast with a millimetric layer of perfect purple. “Is that it?”
“No,” said Lucy, “now you have to make them into triangoos.”
The triangoos were cut. Lucy nodded in approval and tossed one of the pieces to Sweetie.
Marlene said, “Lucy, go watch cartoons. And take the dog. And eat your breakfast yourself, understand?”
The child trotted off with the beast and soon the little apartment was filled with the sounds of cute characters killing one another.
Marlene poured herself a cup of coffee and took a welcome swallow. “This is nice of you, Harry. Did she get you up?”
“Nah. I don’t sleep. I enjoy it.”
“She’s a monster. Triangoos, my ass!” Marlene laughed. They sat down across the battered table.
“So, Harry, any bright ideas?”
“No. The guy’s gone. I couldn’t even find his name, from the time when the Dobbs trial was big news. It’s all this ‘Mr. X’ crap in the papers from back then. He’s not in any phone directory. He doesn’t run a business, not under Gaiilov anyway. He’s got no credit. He doesn’t have a gas card. He’s got no criminal record. I’m thinking they covered him.”
“What, like witness protection?”
Harry nodded.
“Yeah, well,” said Marlene, “that’s it then. Fun while it lasted.”
“So, did he?” asked Harry.
“Dobbs? Nah, what it was, I think they just squeezed this pisher Weinberg, waved the chair at him—this was just about when they toasted the Rosenbergs—and told him they’d let him cop if he gave them Mr. Big and he just pulled Dobbs’s name out of a hat. The guy just doesn’t say ‘spy’ to me. I mean, why the hell should he? He had money up the ying-yang, a wife, a kid, a good war record. He was planning on going into politics, for crying out loud! He was golden.”
“There were those guys in England. Same story.”
Marlene stared at him. It always surprised her when Harry Bello proved to be other than a mobile machine for solving crimes in the greater metropolitan New York area. “You mean Burgess and McLean. And Philby. Right, but they were commies from the beginning. Way back in college.”
“And he wasn’t. Dobbs.”
Marlene shook her head, but then realized with some surprise that she knew relatively little about Richard Dobbs’s early life. Some films from college days, some anecdotes from family and friends, but nothing that gave her a picture of the man’s formative years. Of course, she had focused on the events and circumstances surrounding the spy case. On the other hand …
“The widow,” said Harry, and Marlene laughed.
“Harry, stop doing that!”
“What?”
“Reading my mind. As a matter of fact, I was going to see the Widow Dobbs anyway. I could do it today, except … Maggie Dobbs has been acting a little, I don’t know, not exactly hostile but like she’d be just as happy if I was involved in a fatal accident. Something’s scaring her.”
“You.”
“Me?” Marlene fluttered her eyelashes fetchingly. “Little me?”
“Yeah,” said Harry. “You scare me, and I got a gun.”
“Hmm, maybe you’re right,” Marlene agreed after a moment’s thought. “I’m probably not the most suitable companion for a proper Washington matron. Of course, Lucy’s going to miss playing with Laura—for about six minutes. They’re heartless at this age, and now she has the dog too. It’s going to create a jam in the short run, though. I can’t exactly take her to Mrs. Dobbs… .”
“No problem,” said Harry, which was what he always said when Marlene asked him to watch Lucy.
She dressed in her one Washington lady outfit again, with a different shirt and a scarf to oblige the tradition that it was tacky to show twice at the same place wearing the same clothes, called, was told to come over, and headed to the house on L Street.
A whey-faced redheaded young woman in a pale green uniform and apron greeted her at the door with a suspicious stare.
“I’m here to see Mrs. Dobbs.”
“An’ who shall I say?” said the woman in a thick brogue.
Marlene gave her name and was ushered to the study at the back. Mrs. Dobbs was seated at her husband’s desk talking agitatedly on the telephone. She motioned Marlene to a chair and went on talking for a few minutes. When she put down the phone she said, “Miss Ciampi, I’m terribly sorry, but something’s come up. A dear friend of mine has been taken to the hospital and I’m afraid I have to go out right away. I tried to reach you at home, but you’d already left. Would it be possible for you to come back another time?”
“Oh, gosh, Mrs. Dobbs, I really wanted to finish up this week,” said Marlene. “I mean, I’d hate to overlook anything, even some little thing; it might just be the one piece that brings it all together. Would it be possible for me to just look through things around here—the office … ?”
Marlene could see by the curl of the woman’s mouth that it was not going to be possible. Time for a lie.
“By the way, I got in touch with Viktor Reltzin,” she said quickly, “and he said he thought Weinberg was lying about your husband because he had a grudge against him, something, um, from back in the past.”
“What? That’s ridiculous! Richard never knew that man. If he did, don’t you think it would’ve come out at the time?”
“No, I didn’t say Richard knew him. Reltzin just said that Weinberg had a grudge against him, from something that happened in the past, which could mean anything. Maybe Weinberg was a waiter, or a relative of someone who thought Mr. Dobbs had wronged him. Anything. But, see, it’s a new lead, actually our only new lead, so I just thought it might be worth looking through old material with that in mind. It could be anything, a photo, or a souvenir, something to connect the two men and give us more leads. Otherwise …” She let the word hang.
“Otherwise, what?”
Marlene shrugged. “There’s no point in going on. Hank doesn’t have a viable book, in my opinion. All we have is the old assertions, which amount to ‘Richard Dobbs was a nice guy and Weinberg lied.’ Not prime time. Hank’ll be pretty disappointed.”
She watched Mrs. Dobbs’s face working, as if from far away, as the older woman balanced the violation of her privacy against the chance of hurting her son yet again. Why am I doing this? Marlene wondered. It wasn’t a case. It wasn’t even a real job. A habit, maybe. An itch that made her want to get to the bottom of secrets, even if she had to he to and browbeat a dignified old lady at a vulnerable moment, when she was concerned about a sick friend. She thought briefly about what Harry had said, about being scary. It might be true, although right now she didn’t feel frightening as much as simply nasty. Which didn’t mean that she was about to stop.
“Oh, I suppose it’s all right,” Mrs. Dobbs said with a sigh. “Although I can’t imagine what there might still be in this house that’s of relevance. Hank cleaned out the desk and the files in this office long ago. All that’s here now is mine. There’s the attic, I suppose. You can poke around up there—there are some photo albums and some of Richard’s old books and other, I suppose you could call it junk, but I’ve never been able to get up the energy to throw it all away. It’s in cartons, and on some old bookshelves up there. I’m afraid you’ll get awfully dirty.”
“Don’t worry about that. And thank you,” said Marlene, without a blush.
Mrs. Dobbs rose, as did Marlene. “I really must be going. Kathleen will show you out.”
She paused. “Oh, one thing. There’s a high-backed wooden trunk up there that contains some of my personal things. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t disturb it.”
“Of course,” Marlene said.
The attic was low ceilinged and lit by a dusty round window and a bare forty-watt bulb. Marlene found the high-backed trunk right away, a construction in blond wood and dark iron bands of the type that wealthy people used in the twenties to take their clothes to and from the resorts. Searching around in the dark corners she found a short piece of angle iron, which she used to spring the lock.
The chest was nearly empty and smelled of dust and the ghost of some light sachet. It contained a yellowed, moth-eaten V-necked sweater with a blue Y on it, several packets of letters tied with faded red ribbons, a black portfolio, a shoe box full of postcards and photographs, and, in the very bottom, a set of leather-bound, identical diaries for the years 1930 through 1948.
Marlene sat down in the dirt and began to explore the secret life of Selma Hewlett Dobbs.
The day after he killed Mosca, Caballo drove through the quiet streets of Hialeah, squinting in the bright sun, looking for house numbers. Like much of Latin America, Hialeah was not overly concerned with precision of address. Your friends and family knew where you lived and it was no one else’s business.
He spotted a likely house, a small, lime green concrete-block-stucco with a gray tile roof, barely visible behind a wall of purplish crotons. He drove past it, stopped, and walked back to check. The number was printed on a sheet of shiny tin half-buried in the croton bushes. It was the right number. The people for whom Caballo worked had kept good track of Angelo Guel
Caballo went back to his car and drove to a gas station on Flamingo, where he bought a tin two-gallon fuel can and had it filled with gas. He put it in his trunk, next to his golf bag. Then he visited an auto parts store nearby and made a few more purchases. Next he had lunch in a Cuban restaurant, and after lunch found a movie theater and watched two features in Spanish, twice. During the second show he had a refreshing nap.
When he emerged it was past eight and dark. He drove to Guel’s house and went past the low, chain-link gate and through the dark wall of the crotons. Then he walked around the house to the back.
At the rear door, he pulled from his pocket the paper bag from the auto parts store and removed a four-inch flashlight, a roll of gaffer’s tape, and a heavy pliers. He taped one of the narrow jalousie panes of the rear door, snapped the pane in two silently with the pliers, pulled out the pane, unlocked the door, stripped off the tape, and replaced the pane in its slot. Then he went in.
Guel was not at home. The thin man checked the refrigerator, which contained half a paper case of Bud and some condiments. He took a can, cracked it, and settled down to wait in the dark.
“This is bullshit,” said Karp. “I’m not going to wait around this goddamn motel for Tony to decide if he’s going to tell us did he find Guel or not. And just you and Al cruising around town trying to find him is hopeless.”
It was the afternoon of the second day after Mosca’s murder, and Karp and Fulton were indeed hanging around their government-rate motel, the Arrowhead, off Brickell in Miami proper. They were at the side of the tiny pool, sitting in uncomfortable aluminum armchairs. When it had become clear that they were stuck in Miami for some time, Karp had broken down and purchased a pair of wash-and-wear tan slacks and a couple of short-sleeved shirts. The sporty look was constrained by the thick cordovans he continued to wear on his feet. Fulton was a good deal more Miami in flip-flops, plaid Bermudas, and a Hawaiian shirt printed with a banana motif.
“What do you suggest, boss? It’s police work. It requires patience, which you ain’t got. I tell you what, why don’t you go back to D.C. and I’ll stay down here and work the streets with Al. You can wear your suit again.”
Karp seemed not to hear this. He was staring at the water, lost in thought. Suddenly he sprang up and walked quickly back to their room. He returned fifteen minutes later.
“Let’s go!”
“Where’re we going, Butch? We told Al we’d meet him here at four.”
“FBI. They have a tap on Tony’s phone.”
Fulton gaped in surprise. “How the fuck did you find that … oh, yeah, your buddy in New York. You called what’s-his-name, Pillman. The Feeb.”
“He’s a Feeb, but he’s not my buddy. He’s an unindicted felon and I have his ass in my hands and I get to squeeze it in the public interest about once a year. He set things up so we can get a feed from the phone tap. We have to see a guy named Lorrimer.”
Lorrimer was a tall, clean-cut gentleman with graying brown hair who treated Karp and Fulton like a pair of piss-bums who had wandered in off Flagler Street.
“You’re not going to screw up this investigation,” he stated in steely tones when they arrived at his downtown office and explained what they wanted.
“Of course not,” said Karp. “All we’re after is any information that’s conveyed to Buonafacci about a man named Angelo Guel.”
“How come he’s looking for Guel?” asked Lorrimer.
“Pure coincidence,” Karp lied. “We got a tip that he was, is all.”
“Uh-huh. And this Guel figures in the Kennedy investigation? What, as the umbrella man?” He used the tone that the FBI adopts when citizens offer accounts of being abducted by flying saucers.
Karp ignored this. “Timing is the thing. We need to get to him before Tony does. I want to be at the tap site.”
After some meaningless argument—meaningless because in the FBI, New York swings a deal more weight than Miami, and both of them knew that Karp was going to get what he wanted anyway—Lorrimer made a couple of phone calls, and half an hour later Fulton and Karp were sitting in a room in a house on Sixty-third Street in North Miami Beach, across from the La Gorce Golf Course, off of which Tony Bones had his spacious home.
The observation house was vacant and unfurnished except for some camp beds and folding chairs and tables. The Feds had rented it because it afforded a good view of the front of the target dwelling and because it was convenient to the phone lines that served the gangster. In an upstairs room, several agents took turns looking through an immense tripod-mounted telescope, while in the back, another set of agents manned the tap.
“What about the phone at the Bal Harbour?” asked Karp when the agent at the tap had explained the layout.
“We got that too,” the man replied. “The material from that line is fed into that machine over there. When the sun goes down, they’ll break from the hotel, fart around at a couple of clubs, and get home about eleven, twelve. We got bugs on his usual tables, and a couple trucks that follow them around and pick up the radio feed from the bugs and send them to this radio here. That gets taped too. This is Tony Central.”
They spent the next day there, Fulton and Karp sleeping on the camp beds in shifts, listening to Mafia talk over the taps, growing bored and seedy. Each of them went out once to get toilet things and a change of clothes.
At eleven-thirty on the afternoon of the second day, the home phone rang and was answered by a man the tap agent identified as Joey Cuccia. The caller said, “This is Vince. Tony there?”
“No, he ain’t. Vince who?”
“Vince Malafredo. Who’s this, Joey?”
“Yeah. What you got, Vince?”
“Yeah, that picture? Jimmy Ace and a couple of the fellas was by couple nights ago showin’ it around. I know the guy. I thought I knew him, but like, I wasn’t sure, you know. Now I know. He came in the joint and placed a bet on the dogs.”
“So? He got a name?”
“Yeah.” A pause. “This is for a yard, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, a yard. What, you don’t think we’re good for it? Who’s the scumbag and where can we find him?”
“Right. He calls himself Angie Cruz. Runs a bunch of those Cubano coffee stands, sandwich joints. Lives here in Hialeah.” The man gave an address on Fifty-fourth Street. “It’s off Flamingo Way.”
Karp and Fulton were in the Pontiac forty seconds later, tearing off east on Sixty-third, Karp flapping through a street map, calling out directions.
It took them forty minutes to get to Hialeah via the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway and 823, and twenty minutes more to find the lime green house among the numberless others on the identical streets.
Karp leaped out of the car and trotted up the path and rang the bell.
“He’s not home,” Karp said after five minutes of ringing.
“Maybe he’s at work,” said Fulton. “I mean, it’s the middle of the day.”
“We’ll wait.”
“Let’s get something to eat. Then we’ll wait.”
“Takeout,” said Karp. “We’ll eat in the car.”
Fulton sighed. “Man, you ever done a stakeout before?”
“No. Why, is it hard?”
“With you in the car, it’s gonna be a bitch,” said Fulton, and stalked off down the path.
They bought a couple of Cuban sandwiches each, two six-packs of Coke and a bag of ice and a styro box to keep the ice and the Coke in, and called Al Sangredo to come and relieve them at eleven that evening.
They waited, watching the breeze shift the crotons, watching the shadows change on the street. It was not too warm, about seventy-five; they kept the windows open. Karp learned how to pee into a can.
Around two-thirty, a green Plymouth rolled down the street slowly and pulled into a space opposite Guel’s house. The driver kept the motor running. This attracted the attention of the two men in the Pontiac.
“Crap, it’s Tony’s guys,” said Karp in a pained voice.
“Nah, no way!” Fulton scoffed. “Wrong car. You ever see wise guys in a Plymouth?”
“Not touring, but who knows what they use when they whack people? What should we do?”
“Just wait,” said Fulton. They waited, watching the blue exhaust from the Plymouth curl up into the air. “Uh-oh, he’s getting out.”
The man in the green car had turned off his engine at last and now stood on the curb, slowly looking both ways.
“It’s Guel,” said Fulton between his teeth when the man looked their way. He had gained some weight since his guerrilla days, and was now a tubby man, with a higher hairline and a thicker mustache. He wore heavy sunglasses, a white guayabera shirt, and rumpled gray slacks. He hadn’t shaved in a while.
Karp doubted he had just returned from gainful employment. “What’s he so nervous about?”
“You’d be nervous too, if the word was out on the street that a Mafia don wanted a personal interview, plus a hood you knew in the old days had just been whacked. Okay, he’s decided the coast is clear, he’s crossing the street. What I think we sh—Hey, Butch, what the fuck!”
Karp had flung open his door and was heading at a good clip down the street after Guel.
“Ah, excuse me, Mr. Guel?” he called out. “Could I talk to you a—”
Guel whirled, his eyes wide.
Karp stopped talking as something big and heavy struck him in the small of the back. He saw the pavement rise up at him and he threw his hands forward to protect his face. He heard several loud sounds as he crashed into the asphalt.
There was a devastating pain in his midsection, and he struggled to bring air into his lungs. His hands stung from road burn and a weight was bearing down on his back. He was strangling. Another explosion, much louder. His ears rang. There was a brown forearm braced in front of his face. Fulton.
“Clay, goddamn it … ,” Karp choked out. He could barely hear his own voice above the ringing in his ears.
“Stay there!” Fulton ordered. Karp felt the weight leave his back. He lifted his head and saw Fulton dash, crouched, gun in hand, across the street to Guel’s house, kneel behind the croton hedge, and look cautiously around it. A door slammed, sounding very far away.
Karp rose painfully to his feet, took a few deep breaths, and inspected his scraped and bleeding hands. He walked to where Fulton knelt. Fulton motioned him down with an abrupt gesture. “Christ, Butch! Didn’t you see he had a gun?”
Karp shook his head.
“You gotta be blind! It was in his belt under that shirt. He could’ve had a fuckin’ sign on him, armed and dangerous. And antsy. Didn’t you see him go for it?”
Karp cleared his throat and took several deep breaths. “Hell, no! All I saw was him walking away and then he turned and then you sacked me. I guess you had to do that, right?”
“Unless you wanted another eyehole. Goddamn, Butch! Talk about dumb-ass stupid …” He flapped his mouth soundlessly, as if unable to find words adequate to the stupidity.
“Hey, what do I know? I’m not a cop,” objected Karp weakly, flushing now with embarrassment.
“You sure the fuck ain’t. And speaking of which, Counselor, neither am I anymore, and especially not in this fucking municipality which we is now in. What the fuck’re we supposed to do now?”
Inside the darkened house, Caballo stood flat against the kitchen wall, barely breathing, his little pistol cocked in his hand. He had been awakened from a light doze by the ringing of the doorbell some hours since. He had no idea who had rung the bell or where they were now. Obviously it was not Guel, and just as obviously somebody else was expecting Guel to return home. After the bell ringers left, he had eaten some cold beans from a can. Guel apparently liked black Cuban beans; Caballo had found a dozen or so cans in a cupboard and he had been living on them for the past three days, that and beer. He had also searched the back bedrooms and the bathroom, just to keep himself busy. He had found a tin box full of cash, which he’d taken, but nothing of significance.
When the shots outside sounded, he had placed the food and utensils under the sink and pressed his back against the kitchen wall to the left of the doorway. It was the right place to be. Behind the wall he leaned against, the living room led to the front door on one side and a Florida room opposite. The back door opened on the Florida room. The kitchen was to the right of the living room, connecting by an open archway. Another archway led from the kitchen to a short hall and two small bedrooms and a bath.
He heard the front door opening, then slamming shut. Steps. Heavy breathing. A rustling sound. Guel was looking out his front window, pushing aside the rattan blinds. Caballo tensed. More footsteps, coming closer. Guel rushed by him on the way to the bedrooms. To get his cash.
Caballo took a silent step, extended his arm, and fired twice at the back of Guel’s head at a range of about four feet. The man collapsed. Caballo leaned over the prostrate Cuban and fired three more shots into the base of Guel’s skull. Then he walked out through the rear door.
“What the hell was that?” asked Fulton, peering cautiously around the foliage, his pistol clutched high in both hands.
“What?” Karp was still crouched next to him, holding his hands out as if he had just done his nails, so that the blood dripping from his palms would not get all over him.
“Didn’t you hear it? It sounded like shots. From in the house.”
“Well, shit, Clay, we know he’s got a gun.”
“No, not his gun, another gun. Guel had a big piece, a .38 or a .357. This was like a little gun, a .22, four or five shots. Didn’t you hear it?”
“No, my ears are still ringing from when you shot at him over my head.” He paused and listened, trying to ignore the ringing. “Hey, I heard that.”
“Yeah, the door; our boy just went out the back.”
Karp jumped to his feet and started to walk around the hedge, but Fulton cursed, grabbed him by the belt, and yanked him back down again. “Stay here, damn it! I oughta cuff your damn ankle to the fence, and I would, if I had cuffs.”
“Clay, I—”
“Just don’t move, okay? If he gets by me and goes for his car, you just stay there, understand?”
Karp nodded.
Fulton, still crouched, moved in a quick rush down the concrete path to the door, flattened himself at the hinge side of the doorway, waited for a few seconds with his ear pressed to the door, and then slipped in.
Karp sat down on the pavement and worked on recovering his breath. He had a hole in his pants at the knee, where blood oozed, and his palms were beginning to sting fiercely. He pulled out a handkerchief and used it and a little spit to clean the road grit out of the scrapes on his hands and knee. Across the street an elderly Cuban woman observed him incuriously from her front step. In a solid Cuban working-class neighborhood like this, nearly everyone would be at work or school now; those that remained seemed in no hurry to report a gun battle on the street to the authorities.
At the end of the street a battered red pickup stopped and let out a man in stained work clothes. A school bus from a parochial school came down the street and dropped off three kids, who ran into houses. Another man, in khakis, a blue ball cap, and sunglasses, walked around the corner of the block, entered a tan sedan, and drove away. An elderly man came out of a house with a small dog on a lead. Then the street was quiet.
Fulton called to him from the doorway, and Karp rose stiffly to his feet and joined him.
“He’s dead,” said Fulton. “Our guy was waiting for him. There’s a cracked pane in the rear door with fresh tape gum on it. He broke in and waited and shot Guel when he came in. Guel’s in the kitchen; took a bunch in the back of the head with a small-caliber gun. Then our boy just strolled out the back over a little fence, into the next yard and away, while we were squatting in the fucking bushes. Shit! I hate this, this fucking half-assed police work. We should’ve come in here with a couple dozen guys and a warrant and sealed off … what’s wrong?”
Karp had gasped and was staring wildly. “Holy shit! I saw him. I just saw him! It was Caballo. He was wearing a blue ball cap, a skinny guy with sunglasses. He just walked around the corner and got into a car and drove away. And I was just sitting there, watching him. Christ!”
They looked at each other. There was nothing to say. After a moment, Fulton said, “Well, fuck this! I’m gonna call it in and then we can wrap up and get the hell out of this town.”
“No, wait, I want to take a look around,” said Karp.
Fulton started to object, but then, seeing the expression on Karp’s face, sighed and said, “You’re fuckin’ crazy, you know that? Make sure you get his blood on your shoes and leave plenty of prints.”
Karp did not get blood on his shoes. There was a good deal of it on the kitchen floor and he had to step carefully past the corpse of Angelo Guel. One look at the two bedrooms and the bathroom told him that he was not going to find anything of relevance. All three rooms had been searched by an expert: drawers turned over, closets emptied, the mattresses and pillows slit and disemboweled. There was a blue metal bank box torn open in the mess, empty. Karp poked around desultorily for a few minutes, pausing to collect some Band-Aids and antiseptic in the ruins of the bathroom, and then came back to the kitchen, cursing under his breath.
“The fucker tossed the place too,” he said in response to Fulton’s questioning look.
“You think there was something Guel had that he wanted?”
“Had to be. He did a real pro job on the place.”
“Uh-huh, back there, but not out here. He couldn’t’ve, or the ambush wouldn’t have worked. Guel would’ve seen the mess and been on his guard. He didn’t touch either the kitchen or the living room or the back room that I can see.”
“Let’s do it!” said Karp, brightening somewhat.
“No, let me do it,” said Fulton sourly. “You sit on that couch and if I need legal advice, I’ll ask.”
Karp sat on the couch and practiced first aid. Fulton started searching the Florida room. Forty minutes later, Fulton came out of the kitchen with a manila envelope and tossed it on the couch next to Karp.
“Where’d you find this?”
“Taped to the back of the fridge. Nobody ever looks there. Inside the fridge, yeah, but not behind it. Or under it. It’s as safe as a—”
“What’s in it?”
“Look for yourself. Bankbooks and some papers in Spanish. There’s a ledger there you might find interesting.” Fulton had a broad grin on his face.
“Tell me.”
“Well, as far back as these bankbooks go, Guel’s been depositing two grand a month in cash. Guess who from.”
Karp dumped the contents of the envelope out on the couch. The account book was the old-fashioned narrow black model, with greeny yellow pages ruled for double-entry bookkeeping. Karp was not a bookkeeper and his Spanish was rusty, but it was clear that listing income under columns marked “actual” (verdadero) and “reported to the tax man” (informe a impuesto) was not a generally accepted accounting practice. As far as the IRS was concerned, Guel’s coffee and sandwich business was barely hanging on. But Angelo Guel was making plenty of money, much of it from a source identified in Guel’s neat handwriting as PXK.
Karp shoved the material back into its envelope and stood up. “Great, this is great,” he said. “V.T.’s already got a lead on it, this PXK angle.”
“So what now?” asked Fulton, indicating the feloniously violated crime scene.
“What now,” said Karp pleasantly, “is that I intend to walk down the block and call a cab from the nearest phone booth, pick up my stuff at the motel, and catch the first plane back to Washington. Basically, I’m fleeing, leaving you to clean up the mess here.”
Fulton laughed and sat down, rubbing his eyes. “Some guy!” he said. “He runs like a thief and dumps me in the shit, and after I just saved his life.”
“Hey, what can I say?” said Karp grinning. “I’m a lawyer.”
“You didn’t burn the place?”
Bishop’s voice was calm over the phone, but Caballo could tell he was upset. Extremely upset.
“No, like I said, some people showed up. They tried to get in and then I heard some shots fired. Then the guy, the client, came in at a run with a gun in his hand… .”
“All right, I understand. Let’s not discuss it over the phone. We’ll have to continue under the assumption that whatever material your client had is in the hands of our competitors.”
“So, what should I do? You want me to go down the list?”
“No, not just yet. And I want you to stay out of Texas for as long as possible. Things in Washington will be coming to a head soon. I think I’d like you back here.”