The Death at Yew Corner (7 page)

“We're going to Maginacolda's apartment this morning. I'm meeting Sergeant Pasquale over there in half an hour.”

“Mind if I come?”

“Wish you would.”

As they walked toward the parking lot and Rocco's car, Lyon saw Kim and Bea go out the front door. Jamie Martin leaned out of the processing room doorway to look at Bea's legs, which were still barely encased in skimpy shorts. Lyon didn't know whether to be pleased at his wife's figure or angry at the officer.

Rocco parked the cruiser in front of a high-rise apartment building in Hartford. He was approached immediately by a uniformed doorman who leaned in the driver's window. “Help you, officer?”

“Sergeant Pasquale here?”

“He's with the super getting a key to five-oh-eight.”

“My friend and I will be going with him. Tell him we're here.”

The doorman gave a two-fingered salute to the brim of his cap and picked up a phone in the vestibule. Lyon and Rocco went into the lobby to wait. Lyon walked across the marble tile to examine a statue in a corner lit by recessed spots. It was a modernistic figure chiseled from Vermont marble.

“You know what I'm wondering?” Rocco said behind him.

“Yep. How a nurse's aide making one hundred fifty dollars a week could afford to live in the ‘Towers' where the apartments start at five hundred a month.”

“Yeah, that too. But why would anyone steal a dump truck? Kids, I guess. Always the kids.”

Detective Sergeant Pat Pasquale of the Hartford Police stepped out of the elevator. The short officer thumped Rocco on the shoulder. “Christ, you wop bastard! I think you're still growing.”

“Rose let you out of the house this morning with your pop gun, Pat?”

The sergeant cocked his head. “I got to think about that one before I decide how insulted I am.”

“You got the key to the Maginacolda place?”

“Let's go.” They walked into the waiting elevator.

Apartment 508 had obviously been furnished by a decorator. The small vestibule, living room, kitchen, and bedroom were done completely in white and black. A massive curved sofa covered with a tufted white material rounded one wall. Casual pillows of black were strewn intermittently along its length. The carpet was white and the drapes black. Pasquale stepped into the bedroom and looked up at the ceiling where a large mirror was positioned directly over the bed. He whistled. “A goddamn French whorehouse.”

Lyon sat on one of the steps that led down from the front door to the living room. He leaned against a wrought-iron rail. The two police officers began a meticulous search of the apartment. With inflation, it would be difficult to make an estimate as to the cost of the apartment's furnishings, but the expense was considerable. Maginacolda lived well.

Rocco found two savings account passbooks and a checkbook in a table drawer. He rapidly flipped pages to check their last balances. “How much?” Lyon asked.

“Fourteen in one, nineteen in the second, and a balance brought forward in the checking account of five.”

“Total assets of thirty-eight thousand.”

“That we know of.”

Pat came out of the bedroom with a .45 automatic held in a handkerchief. “Hey, look at this.”

“Loaded?”

“Full clip.”

“If you look near where you found that, you'll also find a pair of brass knuckles or a blackjack,” Lyon said.

Pat looked at him sharply. “How do you know?”

“I have the feeling that Maginacolda was more than an aide and shop steward. He was probably involved in more than a little strong-arm work.”

Rocco glanced around the apartment. “It must have paid well.”

Jason Smelts hid behind an unlit cigar and glared at the two police officers and Lyon seated before his desk. His salt-and-pepper hair was waved and styled, while the seersucker suit seemed almost a caricature of what the well-dressed union president should wear. The union headquarters was located in Hartford in a neat one-story building centered on a well-landscaped plot. Smelts's office was a large room with a broad mahogany desk, which was free of any work clutter, and a neat row of garishly upholstered side chairs, which were a testament to bad taste. Lyon wondered if Smelts and Maginacolda shared the same decorator.

Smelts waved the cigar like a brandished cutlass. “Find Rustman and you've got the guy who blew Maginacolda away.”

Pat flipped a pad from his sport jacket pocket. “Exactly what were your dealings with Mr. Maginacolda, Mr. Smelts?”

“Friend and advisor.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Week ago. He came in here right after he lost the election with Rustman.”

“Did he say anything that might make you think he was fearful for his life?”

“Yeah. He said that Rustman was real trouble. Not that that fact was news here.”

“How's that?”

“Ever since Rustman broke away from this union and formed his own, he's been attacking our locals whenever he gets a chance.”

“By attacking, what do you mean?”

“Trying to get control.”

“Through NLRB elections,” Lyon said.

“Same difference. Who's he?” The cigar made a rapierlike thrust toward Lyon.

“Wentworth's from Murphysville,” Rocco said with an unspoken implication that Lyon served on the force.

“Did Maginacolda receive any salary or fees from the union?” Pat asked.

The cigar was thrust in the mouth. “That's union business.”

“It's police business now,” Rocco said.

“I can have a court order in thirty minutes,” Pat said.

Jason Smelts shrugged. “A little here, a little there. Mike was what we call one of our troubleshooters. You can't expect a guy to do that without a little extra on the side.”

“How much is a little?”

The shoulders shrugged and the cigar waved expansively. “I'd have to ask the bookkeeper. Come back in four or five …”

“A ball-park figure,” Rocco said in a tone that Lyon had heard so often in past interrogation sessions.

“Forty or fifty. Somewhere in that area.”

“Forty what and how often?”

“Thou a year.”

“I was led to believe that he was a shop steward at the Murphysville home,” Lyon said. “In that case, he would have been elected by the workers there.”

“What do the rank and file know? When we get a small shop not big enough for a full-time BA, we put our own man in there to get things going. We put out the word we want him elected.”

“BA?”

“Business agent. A paid member like me.”

“You transferred Maginacolda from one shop to another—when you needed him?”

“That's right. And when Rustman attacked in Murphysville, I put my best man in there—Mike.”

“Doesn't sound very democratic.”

“When Rustman came after us, we fought fire with fire.”

“Can you be more explicit about that?”

“Huh?”

“Exactly how did you combat Rustman's union?”

“Well, hell! The usual ways. We talk to the rank and file, hold elections, work through the NLRB, the usual.”

“And lean a little on people?”

“Them's your words, not mine.” Jason Smelts leaned back in his chair and observed them warily through a protective haze of cigar smoke.

“Are you affiliated with the AFL-CIO?” Lyon asked.

“We're an independent.”

“Where are your members located?”

“We got members in a couple dozen nursing homes, five hospitals, maintenance workers in about fifty buildings, a few places like that. We're still growing.”

Pasquale flipped the pages of his pad and cleared his throat. “Mr. Smelts, since Maginacolda was involved in …” The detective fumbled for delicate wording. “Strong-arm tactics.”

“I didn't say that. He was a trained representative in personal persuasion.”

“In his attempts at persuasion, is it possible that he developed enemies?”

Smelts shrugged and stubbed out the cigar. “You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Or heads, Lyon thought. He didn't care for the tone and aura that seemed to surround this union and could understand why Kim and Rustman were so bitterly opposed to its existence. If Kim's knowledge was correct, this maverick union was involved in sweetheart contacts and probably was siphoning off union dues and using brutal tactics to keep the membership in line. It stank.

“Do you have any names, Mr. Smelts?”

“I gave it to you when you first came in here. Rustman. Find Rustman and you got the guy.”

Curt Falconer drove his sports car too fast as he thought about what had just happened back in the apartment.

She had called him a goon again. Screw her! He'd locked her in the closet. So what if he was a goon? It put the bread on the table and she never had it so good.

She had pounded on the closet door. What the hell? Let her stay in there for four or five hours and she'd calm down. Then he'd gotten tired of listening to her whimpering and had opened the door and jerked her out so fast she fell across the floor and lay in the corner crying. He'd pulled her clothes from the closet and thrown them in a heap on top of her.

“Get the hell out!”

She'd only sniffled. When he got back tonight, if she was still there, okay. If not, that was okay too. So, maybe he was a goon—whatever the hell that was. It beat delivering beer kegs to sleazy bars all day. The college football scholarship had looked good at the time, with maybe a shot at the pros four years later, but he couldn't cut the classroom crap no matter how painlessly they tried to set it up. He'd played the one season and had never gone back. That was followed by two seasons with a semipro team in Waterville, and then the beer deliveries for a distributor—rolling kegs into bars eight hours a day—and no real dough at that.

The deal with Smelts had worked out beautifully. He and Mike had worked the local unions where Smelts sent them. After a few days on the job, trouble had always ceased.

That was until the last time. Somebody had gotten to Maginacolda in the middle of the night and wasted him. Falconer shifted in the seat of the convertible and felt the weight of the .38 holstered under his left arm. They wouldn't get him that way. He'd take over where Mike left off and get the local back in the union where it belonged. With Rustman gone that wouldn't be difficult.

He turned off Route 98 and went down the secondary road that led toward the Murphysville Convalescent Home. As the car rounded a bend, Falconer saw a truck stopped in the road. A man in a red safety vest waved a flag at him until he braked the car.

The man with the flag climbed back into the cab of the dump truck and began slowly to back up the large vehicle. With each gear shift the rear of the inclined bed truck seemed to inch closer to his car.

If that bastard backed too far and brushed the hood of the Corvette, he'd break his face.

The truck continued backing and he leaned on the horn until it stopped. He slammed from the car as the driver left the truck cab. Falconer stood on the pavement near the rear of the truck and tried to place the familiar-looking truck driver. The large sunglasses obscured most of the driver's face, but still …

“Move your fucking truck!”

The man in the sunglasses smiled before he jumped back in the cab. “Sure.”

The voice was familiar. Something moved over his head. He looked up.

The rear of the dump truck, angled directly over his head, opened. He tried to throw himself to the side, but fifteen tons of dirt and rock caught him across the back and buried him.

5

Lyon Wentworth rode in terror. His body was rigid as his hands pushed against the cruiser's dashboard. His legs were braced stiffly in the well. “You're exceeding the speed limit,” he said hoarsely.

Rocco drove with tantalizing nonchalance. One bullish elbow protruded out the window while his other hand lightly held the steering wheel. “The state boys respect a badge.”

As if in acknowledgment, a state police car passed in the far lane. Its horn signal of recognition faded quickly as the two cars accelerated past each other. Lyon tried to ignore the speedometer that hovered near eighty and to concentrate on the recent meeting with Jason Smelts. The union leader's conviction that Marty Rustman was responsible for Maginacolda's murder didn't fit his own theory that Fabian Bunting's death was due to her having seen Rustman's kidnapping. If Rustman were dead, who killed Maginacolda? Kim was now acting head of the union, and it was impossible to believe that their friend was responsible for some strange internecine war between the opposing unions.

“Pat is convinced that the robbery of the cash at Kim's union was an inside job,” Rocco said.

“How's that?”

“Whoever broke in there knew exactly where the money was kept.”

Lyon tried to fit that in with the other known facts of the case. In a sense, everything that had happened seemed to be a series of unrelated events, but he had the feeling that somewhere there was an interrelating factor, and that all that happened was, in fact, interconnected. A conflict between two unions, a good guy disappears and a bad one is murdered …

Rocco turned off Route 98 onto the secondary road that led toward Murphysville. Lyon saw a parked dump truck ahead. Its rear compartment was tilted upward and tons of dirt had spewed over the road. Parked behind the truck was an empty Corvette. Several sawhorses had been pulled off to the side of the road.

Rocco slowed down to swerve around the sports car and truck and then jockeyed back into the right lane. Fifty yards down the road past the two parked vehicles he jammed on the brakes. The police car fishtailed for a dozen yards as Rocco spun the wheel into a bootlegger's turn and drove back to the truck.

“What's up?” Lyon yelled over the screech of protesting tires.