Mike Hammer--King of the Weeds Page 3

  For now, the dons kept this knowledge to themselves, and the capos of all five families convened in Miami to find a remedy, and a bloodbath of their own children and grandchildren was not acceptable. The youngest of the old dons, Don Lorenzo Ponti, suggested a solution so radical, so simple, that it brought immediate smiles and nods.

  Cash out.

  Empty everything out of banks, both here and abroad, from safe deposit boxes to numbered accounts. Turn as much capital into cash and other paper as possible, and hide it all away from the punks who betrayed them, but who they dared not kill or even replace, needing their expertise and not wanting to slaughter their own. The only thing more unforgiving than a mob boss, after all, was a mob wife-and-mother.

  Hell, computer gymnastics could be played by anybody knowledgeable, no matter how old and infirm. Cash flow would be business as usual, from Wall Street to Colombia, and what was emptying out of Switzerland, the Bahamas, and the Cayman Islands could be concealed.

  When that process was complete, the capital behind the conglomerated empire that was the five New York Mafia families would be hidden away till some later date and decision.

  Soon cash and valuables were moved by truck to secure warehouses until it was time to transfer everything to a single, even more secure location. That location would have to be immense as well as secret—no small task—because a million in hundreds would fill a carton the size of a clothes dryer.

  And a billion meant a thousand such cartons.

  Eighty-nine thousand such cartons would together contain, more or less, eighty-nine billion in cash, stocks and bonds.

  * * *

  This was where Marcus Dooley came in.

  Dooley was no mob guy. If he’d had his way, he’d have been a cop… once upon a time, anyway. Twenty years ago, he was just a middle-aged guy with a dead wife and a dead business, and when old Don Angelo hired him on, as the handyman and gardener at the apartment house the don owned as well as lived in, getting any kind of gig must have seemed a gift from God. Or, anyway, Godfather.

  Of course, Dooley being ex-military intelligence meant that the old don now had a handyman/gardener who could pack a gun and add some security to the mix. Everybody coming up a winner. And after Don Angelo died peacefully in his bed, Dooley was happy to go to work in the same capacity for Don Lorenzo Ponti.

  This was a step up—Dooley would not be in charge of an apartment house, but Ponti’s Long Island estate, several New Jersey rental properties, and the don’s apple farm in the Adirondacks. Dooley could hire and fire additional help, order any supplies he needed, even set his own hours—a trusted employee who Ponti took a real shine to. That was not to say Dooley didn’t rake grass, plant shrubs and take out the garbage, and he remained a general handyman. But an inordinately valued one.

  In his glorified gardener’s role, Dooley made twice Captain Pat Chambers’ yearly salary, and bought a house of his own, a nice old fixer-upper in a crummy Brooklyn neighborhood.

  No doubt Dooley had been told not to live suspiciously high on the hog—dons like Ponti worked at not showing off their wealth. Mob royalty like Lansky lived peasant-like existences in little houses or apartments, their wives doing the cleaning and cooking; but they had estates in Sicily, and when they traveled, it was first class all the way.

  The don’s home on Long Island, for example, suited a middle-level exec, and his Adirondacks estate was an unpretentious two-story farmhouse, made to look smaller by the vastness of its yard—a yard maintained by that trusted employee, Marcus Dooley.

  Don Ponti found a trusted friend in his hard-working caretaker, a man who seemed not interested in money beyond a fair paycheck generated by steady work. Ponti had on occasion clued Dooley in on quick easy scores, but Dooley showed no interest. This convinced the don that Dooley was the man for a particular job.

  On a mountainside near the Ponti estate was a vast cavern, large enough to house those eighty-thousand cartons. Dooley did not share with me the exact details of the transfer of cartoned-up cash, but I gathered that Dooley was at the wheel of the lead vehicle of a caravan of rental trucks driven by lower-echelon mob soldiers.

  How long the unloading took, Dooley also did not specify. His deathbed story had understandable gaps. My guess is it took many trips over many weeks, and to preserve the secrecy of the location, Dooley led the city-boy drivers through a circuitous backwoods route to a spot where those drivers would unlikely be able to return on their own. Probably work lights were set up to go through the night, the cave’s entrance allowing trucks to be driven in and unloaded, which they were, deep into the cool, dry natural cathedral, and then backed out again.

  Finally, when the last boxes had been arranged into a cardboard fortress six cartons high and fifty feet wide, disappearing into darkness like a train into a tunnel, all of the workers were assembled for their reward.

  Final reward.

  My guess was that Dooley looked on aghast as some other trusted Ponti delegate presented the don’s thanks for a job well done, and it wasn’t a gold watch—more like a good old-fashioned tommy-gun massacre, creating echoing thunder in that cavern, scaring the bats, spilling shells that would still be there, sharing space with scattered corpses long since turned to skeletons.

  It was like old pirate days, when those who buried the treasure were slain without benefit of burial themselves; or back when the Pharaohs paid off their workers in similarly harsh fashion, locking them in a tomb within a pyramid.

  Why had Dooley lived as long as he did, with his secret?

  Seemed that the ex-military intelligence man had already exercised a precaution—or was it a betrayal?—by switching locations on Ponti. After dummying road signs and covering up paths, and other methods of disguise and deception, Dooley had not led the trucks to the mountain cavern on Ponti’s property, but to a similar one a mountain over… a cavern used in Prohibition days by an old pal of Dooley’s, the late bootlegger, Slipped Disk Harris.

  The five dons likely had a plan for that money—there was talk of trying to buy Cuba back, or some other Caribbean island where they might create a new Havana. It wasn’t like them to just let that kind of capital sit—in the old days, it would have gone into business, unions, casinos.

  But over the decade that followed, the dons of the five families were busy dying—perishing by natural causes, or causes that were made to look natural. Heart attacks, falls down stairs, preceded a succession of gaudy funerals right out of 1920s gangland days, reminiscent of a criminal life passing into history. What media cameras did not record were the faint smiles on long faces of younger family members who were finally about to come into their own.

  My conversation with Marcus Dooley on his deathbed did not fill in every blank. At what point Don Ponti realized he’d been had, I did not know. But apparently about six months before that waterfront war I got caught up in, the Young Turks had put in new upgraded, more sophisticated computers that uncovered the missing $89 billion.

  I never did find out exactly why Marcus Dooley, who held such a valuable secret, was murdered even as Don Ponti and his renegade son Ugo were both looking for the mountain hoard, with the U.S. Government clambering right behind. Why kill the man who alone on the planet held the $89 billion secret?

  I still didn’t know the answer to that. But a clue Dooley left, by putting me in charge of returning his earthly remains to his son, had led Velda and me to that cave, and its secret.

  On the urn containing Dooley’s ashes was what purported to be his army serial number, but in reality were longitude and latitude indicators. They led us to that cave on Slipped Disk’s mountainside, which had been examined by mob guys and government experts alike, but did not give up Marcus Dooley’s final secret: that he had used explosives to block off half of the cave, and that eighty-nine thousand cartons of loot were behind what appeared to be a landslide of boulders and rubble fallen from above along a far wall.

  Velda and I had rented a backhoe and done the excavation ourse
lves. I had opened a single carton and removed some walking around money—basically enough to buy Velda her own rock, that fifteen-grand diamond on her left hand, and to generously pay me for a case conducted for no client.

  Using some plastic explosive that had been thoughtfully left in my heap a while back to kill my ass when I turned on the ignition, I sealed that damn cave back up. Don Ponti had, at this stage, been killed by his own homicidal son Ugo, whose ass I had delivered to Pat Chambers and a prison cell.

  And now, with the exception of a few hundred grand or so, that eighty-nine billion was still back there, hidden away in a mountainside cave, with nobody to look after it but the bones of dead gangsters.

  * * *

  We were back on the couch again, in the outer office, sunshine fingering through window blinds. As we waited for Pat to show, we kicked around the possibility that the $89 billion had somehow sparked this morning’s hit attempt.

  I said, “Let’s suppose the latest revision of the mob scene has the idea I’m sitting on their nest egg. How does killing me lead them to it?”

  Velda’s forehead creased in a frown. “Maybe they figure if you know the whereabouts of the hoard, so do I. Killing you might shake me up enough to spill.”

  “Naw, you’re just another dumb chick to them. They don’t figure a guy lets a dame in on an eighty-nine billion dollar haul.”

  The frown disappeared and she grinned at me, shaking her head. “Well, maybe they’re from a different century than you are, lover. This is the new generation of mob, remember?”

  “Let’s hope the new bunch has my old-fashioned ideas. I don’t want you on the firing line.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “So can I, and the purple blotch on my chest says how far that takes us. Look, honey, any way you slice it, there’s still no reason for the mob trying to knock me off.”

  “They know we know, Mike.”

  I shook my head. “They only think we know.” I grinned up at her. “We show any signs of sudden wealth? Las Vegas vacations? Trips to Europe?”

  “No.”

  “We drop any longstanding clients, to lighten the work load? We buy fancy new cars or move to Park Avenue digs?”

  “Maybe they’ve been waiting for you to make a move like that. And now that you haven’t, they’re trying the direct approach.”

  I could read her mind. “So you think this shooting was supposed to nudge me into making a move, like grabbing a chunk of the loot and getting out of town?”

  She made a wry face. “It’s an idea.”

  “Bullshit, baby. They’ll keep an eye on me, but they’re not going to cut me down until that mother lode is pinpointed. They won’t take chances with that kind of capital.”

  “Maybe that shooter planned a wounding shot.”

  I shook my head. “If he figured I was carrying a rod he wouldn’t take the chance. No, he had planned for a straight back-of-the-head kill and never expected me to dodge it. He was quick to pick a secondary target and lay down those slugs where they would have counted. No, doll, somebody wanted me dead.”

  She was nodding. “Okay, then. Not the mob. But, Mike… what about Uncle Sam? You think those spook types you used to run with wouldn’t ice a civilian if that’s what it took?”

  “You’re right, the government has had its best teams out to look for that dough. They’ve had every agency with the greatest technology imaginable scrounging all over the state for the hoard. What have they found? Jack shit. But we’re back to the beginning, baby—if they still think I’ve got a string on it, what good would killing me do?”

  She didn’t answer me for a full minute. Something was buzzing around in her head and she wasn’t liking what her thoughts were chasing.

  I said, “What is it, kid?”

  “I said it before, Mike, suppose somebody else knows where that money is.”

  “Like who?”

  She stared straight at me a few seconds, then asked, “Could Dooley have had a helper?”

  Just the thought of it gave me an eerie feeling. I didn’t think Dooley would have entrusted anybody with what he was planning, but it was a possibility. I had known my old friend well, during the dark hours of war, but the sleepy hours of slow aging during peacetime was something else again.

  No, not peacetime, but a time filled with non-participation in things military, that warm, soft civilian blanket that diffused the memory of bullets whining and the abrupt, terrifying crash of a bomb blast. He’d been a man’s man who combat fatigue had sent into the trivial, peaceful occupation of a gardener…

  A helper. Somebody who could wield a shovel or hold a light. A close friend. A relative, maybe. Somebody to sit and talk to or have a cold beer with. Somebody like Dooley who didn’t care at all about eighty-nine billion dollars in cash.

  But somebody who knew where it was.

  In that case, I would be better off dead. And they’d take out Velda, too, just to be safe.

  * * *

  It was Pat’s day off, but he came directly to my office from his apartment, his expression telling me that a New York City cop is always on duty, but did it have to be so damn early in the morning?

  The big rangy Captain of Homicide had the slightly tired manner of a guy who’d seen everything. This was my oldest friend, a guy closing in on retirement age but still sharp, with street savvy and scientific training second to none.

  He nodded to Velda and slipped out of his damp, rumpled raincoat. When he’d hung it and his hat on the coatrack, he went over to the little table and poured himself a cup of coffee and, with his back to me, asked, “Since when do you come in at six a.m., Mike?”

  “He’s an early riser,” Velda told him.

  “That one’s too easy,” Pat snorted, turning toward us. He sent his gray-blue gaze in my direction. “A hit doesn’t go down when the sun’s coming up.”

  “Tell that to the shooter,” I said.

  I was seated by Velda’s desk and he came over, pulled up a chair, and joined me. She was sitting behind the desk, arms folded over the generous shelf of her bosom, watching us like a vaguely amused schoolteacher.

  I handed him the New American Webster Handy College Dictionary that had been my impromptu flak vest and watched while he fished out the .22 slugs and rolled them around in his palm.

  “You were lucky, pal,” he said. “Let’s see your chest.”

  “Now you’re a medic?”

  “Nope. Just an interested spectator. Let’s see it.”

  Getting my shirt unbuttoned again wasn’t quick or easy, but finally Pat got to see the big purplish splash that flowed around the swelling where the pair of .22s had tagged me.

  “That your idea of lucky?” I asked, beginning the slow process of buttoning back up again.

  “You’d better believe it,” he said gravely. “Those .22 slugs could penetrate four inches of wood, but couldn’t go through a paperback book. Know why?”

  “Educate me.”

  “Each page has independent, equal resistance and slowed the velocity of those slugs to the point where they couldn’t make full penetration.”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

  He smirked at that, letting the slugs bounce in his right palm. “What do you want me to do with these?”

  “Let the lab have them. If that gun has been used before, maybe they can match up the rifling marks.”

  He narrowed his gaze. “With a real pro, he could have changed barrels, if it was an automatic. Some of those heavy hitters get real attached to their tools. Like you and your original .45. You do still have it?”

  “Licensed and loaded, pal, but not carrying it right now.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  Velda said, “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

  Pat was watching me with that wry cop look. “I’ll send a team out so a report will be on file, but it’ll be a short one. No witnesses, no identification, no killing. If you want to show off your bruises, be my gues
t. You sure won’t get much sympathy from these guys. I’ll drop the slugs off at ballistics, but don’t expect any miracles.”

  “What, no police guard?”

  “Like you’d put up with that,” Pat said. He took a little manila envelope from his suitcoat pocket, filled it with the slugs, and dropped it back in. “Twenty-two caliber piece is typical of the breed. And .22s kill just as dead as your .45 but with little recoil to spoil the aim. But one thing doesn’t fit.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Assassins usually go for the head.”

  “That’s what he was doing,” I said. “But I had a fraction of a second to spoil his shot when I dropped, and he just realigned his sights and went for the heart.”

  Pat’s expression asked me why the shooter had taken his eyes off me in the first place.

  “He lost a beat,” I explained, “putting his foot in the elevator to stop the door from closing.”

  Pat let the picture roll around in his mind, then cautioned me, “He may be back, and if not, expect others.”

  “Where would I be without your experience to fall back on?”

  His eyes were moving with thought as he took a few sips of coffee. Then he said in a deceptively calm fashion, “You do realize this could be about that little matter of money you claim not to have found.”

  I gave him a one-shoulder shrug. “Certainly. Eighty-nine billion is one sweet pile of dough to have squirreled away in a single vault somewhere. Every one of those old dons had their fortunes in that pot.”

  Pat’s eyes tightened. “How do you know it’s in a single place?”

  I shrugged, both shoulders this time. “Dooley wouldn’t have had the time to move it to various sites, Pat. This was a studied operation, all right, but it was relatively quick. It had to be.”

  “Why?”

  “The longer it took, the more chance somebody would get wise—like the Young Turks the old dons were scamming. Dooley had a set time frame, the necessary equipment, and the smarts to get it done. The wise guys entrusted him with the mission, but he threw them a curve, and now there’s nothing they can do to him because he’s dead.”