The Last Cop Out Read online

  “That thirty thousand dollars they found hidden in my father’s home ... he never could have saved that. Every cent he made went to pay medical bills for my mother. Everything I could afford I sent on too.”

  “It made a pretty picture for the headline hunters, though,” Gill reminded her. “There you were starring in a mob-operated showplace, dating some of the top echelon hoods, glamorizing their social events ... ”

  “Only part of the business. There were others who did it too. I told you, my mother... ”

  “People only look at what they want to see,” Gill said. “When you testified for Scobi that tied the knot in the cat’s tail.”

  “But he was there!”

  Gill watched her a moment and nodded. “If you had cut loose from them after your father died he wouldn’t have been there.”

  “Damn it, Mr. Burke, I needed the money, don’t you understand that? Where else could I have gotten it? Mother died two weeks after my father and left medical bills that wiped everything out.”

  “Okay, I believe you.” And he did.

  Her clenched fist pressed into her thigh and her breath seemed caught in her throat. When she regained her composure she said, “The night I heard them booing from the audience I knew it was over. So did my agent and the management. I took a month off and came back to New York, but it was the same here. Nobody except the scandal writers even wanted to speak to me. One day I ran into Roller . . .”

  “Vic Petrocinni?”

  “Yes. He was dice happy. They called him Roller out there. He introduced me to some people and I got the job at Boyer-Reston as a receptionist.”

  “Well paid?”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “They were mighty considerate of me.”

  “That outfit,” Gill told her, “is one of the legitimate fronts for the syndicate operation.”

  “Boyer-Reston runs parking lots, a chain of funeral parlors, dry cleaning establishments and two major restaurants.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Gill mused. “How well do you know Frank Verdun?”

  “I met him once in Vegas. He’s a public relations director.”

  “He’s a first-class funeral director, baby. He makes his own clients, or didn’t you know that?”

  “Receptionists don’t ask questions.”

  “But you’ve been around long enough to hear things and recognize faces. After a while facts and rumors start to make sense and you can ask yourself a question and answer it at the same time. You might not like what comes out of your mental computer and shrug it off, but don’t tell me you don’t know about it.”

  “I try not to think, Mr. Burke.”

  “You got emotional enough about it when you told me off.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “No need for an apology.”

  “Perhaps not,” she said, “but I have a strange sense of moral values my father instilled in me.”

  “That’s why you testified for Scobie,” Gill stated.

  “Yes. It was true.”

  “Tell me,” Gill asked her, “do you like those people?”

  “Nobody ever hurt me.”

  “I didn’t ask that.”

  She made a noncommittal gesture with her eyes and spread her hands. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  After a few seconds she met his eyes again. “Because, as you said, I’ve been around long enough to ask myself a few questions.”

  “Then why stay with them?”

  Helen Scanlon got to her feet and tossed her raincoat over her shoulders. “Mr. Burke ... there’s no place else to go.”

  Gill’s expression said that it wasn’t so, but he didn’t put it into words. He got up and walked to the door with her. The sound of her heels tapping on the hardwood floor and the faint fragrance of her perfume were things foreign to the place he had lived these past years and he felt a sudden loss of wasted time.

  She held out her hand and he folded his fingers around hers. “Good-bye, Mr. Burke.”

  He tried to tell her good-bye, but the words wouldn’t come. Those liquid brown eyes were sinking into his and he could feel the frown knit across his forehead. There was a lightness in his stomach, a little crawling sensation across his shoulders and another person that wasn’t him at all drew her closer and closer until their bodies touched and her breasts were against his chest with the curve of her belly and thighs matching the outline of his own. Just before their mouths touched she closed her eyes slowly and made a little cat sound and he felt the tremor in her hand. It was a soft, languid kiss that only took a few seconds of time, but it was like water rushing through a breech in the dam that threatened to grow into turbulent violence.

  He let his fingers slide away from hers and she let her breath out, deliberately controlling herself. She smiled, but there was a puzzle in her eyes. She had been kissed before, many times, but no kiss had ever made her react like that at all.

  As she stood in the open doorway she turned, still smiling, and said, “You aren’t at all repulsive, Mr. Burke.”

  Gill put the night latch on and stuck the Fox bar in place. He looked around his apartment, still aware of her perfume. “Someday I’m going to clean this dump up,” he muttered.

  4

  Stanley Holland was feeling very pleased with himself. It was raining and even though he hated rain because it made his sinuses drain and his temples pound, he still felt pleased. Even the smog and the smell that hung over Cleveland, Ohio, couldn’t make him feel otherwise. A year ago, when Papa Menes transferred him here from Los Angeles to put back together the narcotics operation the Cleveland police had broken, he was unhappy, but no longer. The new setup was structured so carefully and organized so efficiently that the roots of it would be imbedded too deeply into Ohio soil for anybody to dig out again.

  And it had been all his doing. He had given his life to his work, he thought. It should have been good. Papa Menes would be grateful. The entire board would be grateful. There would be a better town now, a bigger town where his rewards could be well spent in the pleasures he enjoyed.

  The organization was solidly entrenched, the new source of narcotics his own discovery and he was totally, absolutely unknown. He was a respected businessman who operated two hardtop movie houses and a drive-in, made a substantial profit with all and had a foolproof drop for his supplies.

  One week ago today he had finally learned the identity of the informer instrumental in destroying the old layout and had personally taken care of him with a massive overdose of heroin on his own rooftop. Since he was a known addict, nothing was made of it. But the others in the trade got the message.

  Two days later the pair of crooked cops from the neighboring city Holland had used to retrieve nine key code words from the book impounded in the police files had tried to shake down his contact man for a full grand a week apiece. The initial meet was arranged and both cops showed up in time to be dispatched quietly by his own hand via the drugged drink and garrote route, encased in a steamer trunk of cement and dropped in Lake Erie. It had been difficult, but it was done. Papa Menes and the board would have the details by now, the machinery of supply and demand could begin operating in the absolute security of secrecy he, Stanley Holland, had instituted and his star would rise another degree on the organization’s horizon.

  He pulled into the parking lot behind the middle-class office building he occupied, cut the ignition and reached for his briefcase. He was about to open the door when the jungle instinct beat through his self-satisfaction and he remembered that the car in the slot beside his was not the white Caddie that was supposed to be there, but an undistinguished black Chevy. He couldn’t see the face of the person behind the wheel because a hand with a heavy caliber gun in it blocked the way.

  All Stanley Holland could reflect on in that last tiny moment was that he had given his life to his work. Everything should have been perfect. But it just wasn’t good enough.

/>   When Bill Long met Gill for lunch he was still carrying the anger he should have left in his office. “What’s with you?” Gill asked him.

  “They found Stanley Holland’s body in a parking lot in Cleveland.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “His right name was Enrico Scala.” Long waved the waiter over and told him to bring a pastrami on rye and coffee. “Remember him now?”

  Gill doubled the order and nodded. “I thought he died in a car smashup in L.A.”

  “Apparently that’s what he wanted us to think. Identification was made from his personal effects. He had plastic surgery done on his face after he beat that narco rap out there and changed his base.”

  “You sure?”

  “Well, most of his face was gone, but the tissue scars were there and his fingerprints matched. It was him, all right.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “About nine-thirty this morning. The Cleveland police got an anonymous phone tip from somebody about a dead guy in a car behind an office building and checked it out.”

  “Who goes around looking into parked cars?”

  “Somebody did. A couple of the guys who parked there said their cars had been rifled on occasion. Cigarettes gone, some change laid on the dashboard ... things a kid might do.”

  “Then why are you sweating it? Cleveland’s five hundred miles away. We don’t have jurisdiction there.”

  “No, but we’re on an interdepartmental cooperation basis and the commissioners are raising hell. It’s all part of the same damn war and if it keeps up it’s going to explode all over New York.” He stopped, tossed a sharp glance at Burke and said, “I don’t suppose you have anything to say?”

  “Did I ever?”

  “Not unless it was pertinent and provable.”

  “Let’s keep it that way.”

  “That attitude might have gone in the old days, but you’re working under a different department now. The district attorney isn’t me.”

  “Fuck the district attorney.”

  “He can put you back on the street again.”

  “But he won’t, old buddy. He just can’t afford to. Now eat your lunch.”

  Halfway through the sandwich Bill Long said, “Papa Menes seems to have dropped out of sight.”

  “Oh?”

  “Got any ideas?”

  “Sure. He’s got some sense.”

  “The old man could hole up in any one of a dozen of his places and it would take an army to get him out. He isn’t in any of those places. He left Miami and simply disappeared.”

  “Permanently?”

  “He isn’t dead. Orders are still coming through. We’d know it in a hurry if anything had happened to him.”

  Gill grinned and bit into his sandwich. “You know, it’s interesting to speculate on what would happen inside the syndicate if somebody nailed Papa. They’d cut each other to bits in the rush for the top.”

  “Like hell. They got everything worked out in advance.”

  “You used the wrong tense, pal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They used to have it worked out. This year isn’t last year or the year before and there’s a new breed of cat running around. Things are changing just as fast inside their own world as it is everyplace else. Governments and businesses, legal or illegal, are like buildings. You can only make them so big or they’ll crumble or be too unwieldly to be useful.”

  “Don’t you believe it.”

  “No?” Gill said. “Look at them now, scared shitless because for a change they’re the target and they got nobody to shoot back at. Guys who thought their power or protection made them invulnerable suddenly get dead and it’s panic time. Papa Menes quietly detaches himself from the scene and will sit it out until it’s over. A real dependable bunch of people to work for.”

  “Menes will show. A guy like that can’t stay hidden.”

  “Balls. He’s always had a few alternate caves to crawl into. He’ll be packing a bundle in hard cash and won’t have any crowd around him. He’ll just disappear into the scenery somewhere with his own special means of communication to the organization and sit tight.”

  “Where, for instance?”

  Gill blew on his coffee and grunted. “He had one place in New Paltz, New York. Don’t bother checking it because I did and it’s empty. The power’s on and the phone is live. A maid cleans the place once a week, runs the pickup truck in the garage to keep the battery charged and gets paid by money order once a month. She’s never seen the owner, although he’s occupied the place several times. Anybody with the time to be an amateur pirate could hit that place when she wasn’t there and with enough house wrecking or garden digging, pull up a small fortune in cash.”

  “How did you get that tidbit of information?”

  “Using my spare time checking on visitors going into a certain spaghetti joint at a certain time on a certain day.”

  “When Papa Menes was there?”

  “Very astute, pal. One of those visitors was an upstate real estate broker. The rest was sneaky, but easy.”

  “That doesn’t give us Menes now.”

  “You couldn’t charge him with anything anyway. Besides, there’s better game to hunt.”

  “The game preserve is going to be pretty crowded,” the captain said sarcastically. “The families got the orders out and all the shooters are going onto the streets. They’re shifting all the soldiers around to the hot spots and most of them are coming here. Last night there was a job pulled at National Guard Armory in Jersey and twenty-two tommy guns with sixty thousand rounds of ammo were lifted. The same thing happened in a naval depot in Charleston, only there it was grenades. Gill ... we’re sitting right on the shady side of hell.”

  Burke finished his coffee and nodded.

  “You could say something about it,” Long prodded him.

  “Sure,” Gill said. “Want some dessert?”

  The supper he had at Cissie’s wasn’t sitting too well with Mark Shelby. Ordinarily he would have enjoyed the specialty dishes she served the patrons who had originally financed her East Fifty-fifth Street retreat. The gourmet magazines played her up regularly and she had been on the local TV channel twice with her own brand of Mediterranean cooking.

  He tried the wine again, an imported rose that cost twenty-five bucks a bottle, but it went down like water without improving his digestion a bit. It had always been like that when he had to look at the Frenchman. He had made his bones and kept his hand in whenever it was necessary to prove a point, but essentially he was an organizer, a compiler of facts, a recorder and adviser.

  Essentially the Frenchman was a killer.

  Nothing else mattered.

  The Frenchman was a homosexual killer and nobody could ever prove it because whoever he went down on suffered the same fate as a male black widow spider, except that there was never any drained corpse to identify. It was only rumored, of course, but nobody had the temerity to challenge the accusation because the Frenchman had an unusual penchant for killing people in lieu of sex, without regard for position or reputation, and as long as it didn’t interfere with the machinations of the organization, his private life was his own.

  Murder, to the Frenchman, was the same as an orgasm. He enjoyed it best when one followed the other, but he could take each separately if the need arose, but inevitably one would follow the other anyway.

  If he had to take his choice, Frank Verdun would rather murder. The orgasm was much more intense then.

  And at that moment, Mark Shelby didn’t like the way the Frenchman was looking at him.

  “Whoever hit Holland was on the inside,” Mark said flatly. “Only two people could recognize his new face and they’re both dead—the doctor and the nurse.”

  “The hit man knew,” Verdun reminded him with a tight smile.

  Shelby’s irritation got the better of him and he leaned forward on the table. “Listen, Frank, there were no photos and no files. It was cash in advance and a guaran
tee of safety. The only ones on the outside who knew about his operation were Papa Menes, you, me and six members of the big board.”

  “We know Papa wouldn’t talk, and the board wouldn’t talk, so that just leaves you and me, doesn’t it, Mark?”

  The little .25 Mark Shelby always carried was aimed at Frank Verdun’s gut under the table and his finger was almost ready to squeeze the trigger.

  “Put it away,” the Frenchman said through his curious smile. He lifted his glass in a silent toast and drained it, then refilled it from the bottle in the ice bucket.

  “You think Papa hasn’t figured that out already?” he told Shelby.

  Mark’s finger came off the trigger and he looked at his supper partner. Verdun’s hand was under the table too and he wondered what he held in it. He was being stupid and knew it, said “shit” softly and stuck the little automatic back in its holster. “Somebody’s getting to us, Frank,” he said.

  Both of the Frenchman’s hands showed on the table and peace was declared. “Sure it’s inside,” he said. “It has to be inside. The only thing is, how far inside can you get? Who knew everything about Vic Petrocinni and Taggart and Holland ... you know how many people we lost so far?”

  “I’m the one who keeps the records, remember?”

  “Yeah, so you know, but who’s that far inside?”

  “What are you getting at, Frank?”

  “The Big Board’s getting shook, Mark. They don’t like what’s happening. The first time out they figured they were fooling with some wise ass son of a bitch, then they saw a raid coming on and got all set for it, now they can’t put it together at all unless some outfit is just lining us up for an all-out war and trying to take out the generals before they commit the soldiers.”

  “Don’t be silly. That’s impossible.”