Dead Street Page 9

  “You did,” I repeated.

  “Mass destruction,” she said. “I’ve heard that on the news.”

  “Often, probably,” I said. “It’s a common enough expression today. The civilized world is shaking in its boots, hoping the more aggressive nations don’t get weapons to cause it.”

  I was watching her closely now. Her mind was trying to break through its barrier and tell her something. “What else?” she asked me.

  “You opened an envelope and read it there.”

  She frowned and nodded.

  I added, “Where is the envelope, Bettie?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. She was like a computer whose electronics were on a search pattern, making thousands of contacts a second to find the answer to a query the operator typed in. A minute passed, then another. They seemed like hours. Then she simply shook her head and let her unseeing eyes stare at me. “I don’t know.”

  “You hid it,” I said bluntly.

  Her answer was a quiet, “Yes.”

  “Good!”

  “But... I don’t remember where.”

  When you interrogate a crime suspect you don’t have to do it all at once. Fear and aggravating circumstance can block his memory, so you give the suspect a chance to recover the information you want. He may try to disguise it, but the interrogator is an expert and can spot the opening when it appears, and then he’s up to bat and the right pitch will come along and the ball will go over the fence. Bettie wasn’t a crime suspect, but the situation was damn near identical.

  Out of the blue she said, “Jack... tell me about us.”

  “Us?”

  “Before you came here. It didn’t just ‘happen,’ did it?”

  When I said no she noticed the quietness in my voice and didn’t say a word. She was waiting for me to explain another part of her life that had been taken from her. She was rational, she could think, she could reason, but would she be able to comprehend the details of the past without losing any of the progress she had made?

  Now the ball was in my court.

  I said, “Twenty years ago you and I were in love. We were going to get married.”

  Damn... she was smiling!

  I felt a little bit nervous. She was waiting so I continued. “At work you uncovered something in the files that was so important to the public welfare that you pulled it out and carried it home with you. You knew I was a cop and planned to show it to me. Unfortunately, I figure the guy who had left that information at Credentials returned, discovered what had happened and the finger led right to you. He employed some hired killers to wipe you out... after snatching you and retrieving those files. It had to be a quick move, simple torture would have made you talk, then your body would have been disposed of.”

  Bettie’s face didn’t show any deep concern at all. She was digesting the details and studying them; then she asked me, “What happened?”

  “Good neighbors. They suspected what was happening. Deliveries of rugs don’t happen at that time of night. Somebody notified 911, the police responded and a squad car came immediately. The chase went on until the truck crashed, went over the bridge and into the river. Somehow you survived by grabbing hold of an inflated inner tube that was in the truck.”

  “And?”

  “You know the rest. The good veterinarian in Staten Island rescued you. He prepared for your future. His son, your adopted brother, carried the doc’s wishes out into the present. And here you are.”

  “We are,” she told me very quietly. Tacos’ tail thumped the floor again and just as softly as her first remark, she asked me, “Jack, are you in love with me?”

  “Incredibly so,” I said. “Now, may I ask you something?”

  I didn’t have to repeat her question at all.

  She simply said, “Incredibly so.”

  We both had our eyes closed when I kissed her. We were blind but all-seeing and now we had the world in our hands.

  At least for the moment. It was like surviving the monstrous blast of an A-bomb.

  And that thought put me right back on the track again. Somewhere, secreted away, was a hoard of nuclear material that could blast a major city wide apart.

  It was time to start calling in favors. When I got back to my house the first one went to NYPD police tech Paul Burke.

  He told me that enriched uranium the size of a football could be designed to wipe out a vast area. With the right secondary devices incorporated into the main device, subsequent devastation could cause intense radiation injury that could wipe out an entire country. In some arenas of scientific speculation, it was considered possible to eliminate nearly all of the world’s population.

  “Except for the small group who planned to do the repopulating,” I suggested.

  “That would be the general idea.”

  “Feasible?” I asked.

  “If you want to speculate,” he said. “There are always wise guys like cops who seem to bust things up.”

  “Quit being so damned cheerful, Paul.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Now, what do you really need?”

  “That nuclear material was probably enriched uranium. It has to be stored someplace. It had to have been transported in a secure manner with no radiation leakage and that would be in a mobile compartment inside the truck. Now, the truck was found empty. The cargo, being mechanically mobile, was taken in another vehicle and brought to a secure location. What would that be like?”

  “Interesting question,” Paul responded. “The uranium itself isn’t very large, but the container that held it would be of good size. How it was structured so as not to leak radiation is probably a scientific secret, but since it has not been found or used, it may still be secure. Where it is being held is the important thing. Commercial storage areas are out of the question. Too many inspections. Sometimes they burn down. Sometimes they are selected for destruction when a new project is planned and they are in the way.”

  “So?” I put in.

  “So it would wind up at a privately owned location not selected for any development and as secure as it is possible to be.”

  “That really tips the scales in the bad guy’s favor, doesn’t it?”

  “Bad guys like it that way. That’s why they’re called bad guys.”

  “What do we do about them, Paul?”

  “Hell, buddy, you know the answer to that. You shoot them.”

  “Great,” I said before I hung up.

  This may be the information era, but getting the information you want isn’t all that easy. You have to give something in order to get something back.

  I slouched in my big chair. I took out my t... .45’s, the Combat Commander and the standard 1911 model. I cleaned and oiled them again, checked the action in each and shoved in full clips. I was a New Yorker even though I didn’t like the place, and being in the quietude of Florida’s playground didn’t exercise my mental facilities at all. I wondered how the hell the other guys could stand it. Maybe I was just too damn mean for retirement.

  Telling Bettie that I had to go back to the Big Apple again so soon wasn’t easy, but she smiled like she knew this was coming and didn’t argue. The way she squeezed my hand told me that she knew this had to be and that she was going to be right here waiting for me to come back wearing a CASE CLOSED smile.

  The next morning when I kissed her so long, all I could think of was that she sure would make a great wife for a cop. Even a retired one. And would we be the first retirees in Sunset Lodge to consider starting a family?

  The dog gave a puzzled look and whined, but when I petted his head he banged the floor with his tail again.

  Chapter Seven

  Davy Ross met me at the airport in an unmarked squad car. When I sat back against the seat and buckled up the safety belt, I had that “old times” feeling again.

  Davy said, “I know you’re not carrying, so I brought you a Glock to wear. They’re getting to be standard weapons these days.”

  I popped open the dashboard
compartment and took out the automatic. It was a good gun, but I missed ... .45. I opened my belt a notch and bedded it down against my stomach and felt like I was on patrol again.

  I told him thanks and he asked me where I wanted to go. He didn’t seem at all surprised when I told him to go by our old street again. “Most of it’s gone, pal.”

  “So I’ll see the rest. Any vandalism so far?”

  “Just some kids breaking windows. Hell, they’re going to be smashed up anyway. A couple of vagrants flopped in one house. They have about two weeks occupancy before the wrecking crews get to that building.”

  “Why so slow?”

  “Politics, Jack. Contractors fighting the city, some former occupants still putting up roadblocks, trying to get more money from the local government.”

  “Think they will?”

  “They’re still trying,” he said. “You know that place where Bucky Mohler lived?”

  “Sure.”

  “Know who built it?”

  Davy loved stupid little surprises. “Tell me,” I said.

  He turned his head. “Big Zappo Padrone, that’s who.”

  Talk about ancient history. “The booze king of Manhattan?”

  “The same. Ran a dozen whorehouses, and twenty-three speakeasies in operation, and even before the big crime families got started was the bank for the hoods. Big hoods, that is. Early mob stuff.”

  “Where do you get all this information, pardner?”

  “I read a lot.”

  “Cops read?”

  “Sure. When they’re not shooting bad guys.”

  We turned in the old street at the open end. The station house was gone except for the old brick foundation. Looking toward the other end was like staring in an old fighter’s mouth full of broken teeth and a few good ones. Charlie Wing’s place was gone, but old Bessie O’Brian’s house was still up, and down a ways the restored tenement Bucky Mohler had lived in was intact. Not even the panes were broken in the windows.

  “Who’s keeping it up, Davy?”

  “One of those old city laws. The place was deeded to some big charitable organization. Padrone had a thing about helping down-and-outers.”

  “Anybody in there now?”

  “Hell, even the bums won’t go near the place. It’s supposed to have some sort of a curse on it.”

  “Great,” I said. “I heard fancy apartments were going in.”

  “Yeah. And guess who’s behind it?”

  Another stupid little surprise, I supposed. “Tell me.”

  “A Saudi investment group.”

  “Only seems fair.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They took down two buildings, didn’t they? Ought to put up a few.”

  Davy just looked at me.

  Right behind us a city Yellow Cab pulled up in front of old Bessie O’Brian’s building and a middle-aged woman and old Bessie got out. Davy and I both yelled a big hello and Bessie waved back with a happy yell. “Damn me if it ain’t old Shooter! What you doing here, Captain Jack?”

  “Saying so long to a friendly old street, Bessie.”

  “Not so friendly any more.”

  I walked over, said hello to her daughter from Elizabeth and asked Bessie how she liked the New Jersey countryside.

  “Country,” she practically screeched. “It’s as bad as the Bronx! It’s crowded, that’s what. No different from the city here.”

  “You like it?” I asked.

  She gave a sly look toward her daughter and whispered, “It’s free. My kid’s a good cook, too.”

  I glanced up at the old building she had inhabited for a couple eternities. “What are you back for, Bessie?”

  She frowned and tapped her mouth with a wrinkled forefinger. “Left my damn lower teeth behind a slot in the wall back of my bed. Can’t eat right without ‘em. Not going to let any more dentists play with my mouth anymore, either. Damn teeth.”

  “Come on, Bessie, you look great.”

  “Don’t lie to me, sonny. I’m an old hag, I am. You know, I even knew Big Zappo Padrone, you know that?”

  I said, “Nope.”

  “That’s his house over there. I was just a kid then.”

  I nodded.

  “Saw that little punk, what’s his name... Bucky Mohler over there not long ago. He didn’t go in. He was just looking, then he walked away.”

  “Bessie,” I said to her, “Bucky Mohler’s been dead a long time. He was killed up in the Bronx years ago.”

  “The hell he was,” old Bessie insisted. “I ain’t got teeth, but I sure got eyes, and that was Bucky over there. He was older, but his damn swagger was still there. You remember the way he walked?”

  “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 dow
n 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?”