Cat on a Cold Tin Roof (20 page)

“Are you fully aware of what you're saying, ma'am?” I asked.

“Hell, I'll say it in court! I'm leaving that bastard! He can have the bimbo
and
the diamond, and I hope they'll keep him warm in his goddamned jail cell!”

Sorrentino and I exchanged looks. Each said the same thing:
I do believe we're in business
.

21.

She gave us permission to search the house. Not many people are as good at tossing a room or a house as I am, but Sorrentino was one of them. We found a lot of stuff that didn't belong in the house of a wealthy, happily married business tycoon—love letters from a pair of girlfriends hidden in one of his business folders in a desk drawer, a warning from the electric company that they'd be cutting off his service if he didn't bring his bill up to date, dunning letters from half a dozen stores and creditors, all of them relatively recent. I turned the love letters over to his wife to thank her for her help and to give her a little extra ammunition against him.

But when we'd finished two hours later there were two things that we hadn't found—the diamonds and anything that might conceivably have been the murder weapon. Mrs. Delahunt was almost as disappointed as we were and told us we had carte blanche to come back, alone or with the cops, whenever we wanted. I asked where her husband was, but all she could answer was: “In one of his offices that hasn't been shut down yet, or with one of his whores who hasn't been shut down yet. I don't know and I don't care.”

I dropped Sorrentino by his car, and he followed me to a bar in Clifton, the university area, about four miles away. We both parked on the street, tried not to feel too ancient as we made our way past all the late teens and early twenty-somethings standing at the long bar, and took a table as far from the noise as we could get.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked as we waited for the bearded waiter to approach us.

“We've probably got enough for Simmons to arrest him, especially with his wife on our side,” I said. “But with no gun and no diamonds . . .” I just shook my head. “He'd be lawyered up and out the next morning. Always assuming he has enough money to hire a lawyer.”

“I don't give a shit about that,” said Sorrentino. “I'm not a cop, and neither are you. What about the diamonds?”

I shrugged. “He sure as hell doesn't have them in the house. If he's hiding them, we have to figure out where. If he sold them—and he has to have sold at least
some
of them, since none of his creditors have taken him to court yet—we have to figure out who he sold them to.”

“Okay,” he said. “Our next step is easy enough. I get him alone and beat the shit out of him until he talks.”

I shook my head. “This isn't Chicago, Val,” I said. “The cops won't look the other way. You beat the information out of him, at worst you'll be up for battery, at best the cops will claim you were trying to steal the diamonds and you'll lose all claim to a finder's fee.”

He frowned. “Then what do
you
suggest?”

“We keep trying to find the diamonds,” I said. “They're what we're after. If we don't have any contact with Delahunt, no one can claim bribery, extortion, intimidation, or anything else.”

“Your cops would actually do that?” he asked.

“Absolutely. Like I say, this isn't Chicago.”

He shook his head in wonderment. “Strange city.”

“We'll look for the gun, too,” I added.

“Why do we care?” replied Sorrentino. “All we want is the goddamned diamonds.”

“We find the diamonds and you're in Chicago a few hours later. But I'll be staying in Cincinnati with a very bitter man who's already killed someone with that gun and who will be convinced that I'm the only reason he couldn't stop his life from going down the tubes.”

“I hadn't thought of that,” he admitted.

I smiled. “Why should you? You're going to be safe and sound three hundred miles away.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “So what about the diamonds?”

“I think if he'd left them with any of the Cincinnati fences I'd know by now, and while I haven't spoken to Simmons I'm sure he has a man on the job too,” I said. “So I have a feeling we're going to need your organization's connections to find them. We'll keep looking here, of course, and I think it might make sense for us to take turns keeping an eye on Delahunt, but I really don't know what else we can do.”

“You think his wife knows anything?”

I shook my head. “She's so mad at him, she'd be first in line to tell us anything that would put him away for life.”

“Yeah. I suppose so,” he agreed. “Well, my people aren't without their resources. I can find out within, say, forty-eight hours how much he's got in the bank. I can probably even find out if he's visited a safety deposit box. He must have one; there was no safe in the house. And of course we can check his business accounts too.”

And suddenly, as he was speaking, I began to get an idea. Maybe it would amount to nothing, but we were running out of approaches. And if I was right, I'd have to do it alone.

We talked a little more, wound up comparing the Big Red Machine to the 1959 White Sox, and Walter Payton's Bears to Boomer Esiason's Bengals, and finally we finished our beers and walked out to where we'd left the cars.

“So where do we meet for lunch?” he asked.

I knew it would have to be within a few minutes of the river, so I thought for a moment and answered, “Joe's Diner, over on Sycamore Street.”

He laughed. “Come on, Eli. Where are we really meeting?”

“I just told you: Joe's Diner. You've got a Global Whatever. You'll find it.”

“There's actually a place called Joe's Diner?”

“It's a landmark,” I told him.

He snorted. “Is there anything in this town that
isn't
a landmark?”

“Not much,” I answered.

“Okay. Noon?”

“Make it one o'clock,” I said. “I'm running a little short on sleep, and I don't want you waiting alone at a table for half an hour. Hell, you might get so bored you decide to run off with Mrs. Delahunt.”

He grimaced. “Okay, one o'clock.”

He climbed into his car, and a moment later I did the same. I'd bought myself maybe three and a half hours before lunch tomorrow. I hoped it was enough time.

22.

When I left the bar I waited until Sorrentino was out of sight, then drove straight to police headquarters. Jim Simmons had gone home for the night, but Bill Calhoun was there, and I walked over and sat down opposite him at his desk.

“You know, Eli,” he said, “you really ought to learn to use a computer one of these days.”

“I'm a detective, not a typist,” I said.

“Well, I'm a police officer, not a typist—but I know how to work a computer.”

“Good!” I said. “Then you're just the man I want.”

He signed deeply. “Okay, okay, what do you need this time?”

“The guy you hunted up for me . . .” I began.

“Delahunt?”

“Yeah.”

“What about him?” asked Calhoun.

“I got to thinking,” I said. “He's got a bunch of real estate offices.”

“
Had
a bunch,” Calhoun corrected me. “Most of them are closed now.”

“I know. But they're all in Cincinnati, right?”

“Right,” he said, looking at me curiously.

“His house—hell, the whole Grandin Road area—can't be more than five or six miles from the river, right?”

He frowned. “Yeah, I'd say six miles, tops.”

“And half the Reds and Bengals live just across the Ohio River in Kentucky because it's convenient for them to get to the stadiums, so there's got to be some expensive real estate there,” I continued.

“Yeah, I suppose there is.”

“So does he have any offices there?”

“There?” repeated Calhoun. “You mean in Kentucky?”

I nodded. “Right.”

“So what if he does?”

“So what I'm looking for may not be in Ohio,” I answered.

“You know, you could just look in a Northern Kentucky yellow pages,” he said.

“If that was all I needed, I'd look,” I said. “Now, are you going to help a tax-paying citizen or not?”

“When did you ever make enough to pay taxes?” he shot back, but he began typing and studying his screen.

“Yeah, he's got an office in Covington, on Third Street. Looks like a big one.”

“How can you tell it's a big one?” I asked.

He smiled. “Three phone numbers.”

“Any other offices across the river?”

He typed again. “No. He had one two years ago, but he closed it about twenty months ago.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now I need you to do something that won't show up in your system.”

He stared at me, frowning. “Eli, everything I do from this office shows up
somewhere
in the system sooner or later.”

“Damn!” I muttered.

“What was it?” he asked. “Maybe there's a work-around.”

“I need to know if he's got a bank account, either personal or business, in Kentucky.”

“I can check on the bank account, but I can't keep it secret.”

“How about a safety deposit box?”

He shook his head. “I can call the bank, identify myself, and ask, but there's no way I can do it with my computer, and they'll probably tell him about the call five minutes later.”

“Oh, well,” I said unhappily. “If push comes to shove, I'll get my friend from Chicago to find out.”

“The guy who showed up the night we brought in the first Bolivian? I heard he was connected to you somehow. Can he really do that?”

“
He
can't,” I replied. “But his people can.”

“I believe it.” Calhoun leaned back. “Anything else I can do for our favorite public-minded citizen?”

“Anything else your machine can tell me about Delahunt?”

“Probably not, but I'll look,” said Calhoun, starting to type again. “Why are you so interested in him?”

“The truth?” I said. “He may have killed Malcolm Pepperidge.”

He turned to me. “That's a hell of an accusation. Have you told Jim?”

“Jim doesn't care about ‘may haves.' He wants proof. I'm trying to get it.”

“Have you got any yet?”

“Not a shred,” I said. “That's what you're helping me to find.”

“From what I hear, Pepperidge wasn't interested in real estate.”

“Pepperidge wasn't even Pepperidge,” I said.

“Yeah, I heard that too.”

“So can you give me anything else on Delahunt?”

“Go outside and have a cigarette—don't deny it; everyone knows you smoke—and give me five or ten minutes to work without having to talk to you.”

I walked out to the parking area, lit up a cigarette, took a deep drag, closed my eyes, and leaned against a brick wall, trying to relax, then took another puff. I smoked it halfway down, tossed it on the ground and stepped on it, lit another, and repeated the process. When I felt I'd frozen my ass off for ten minutes, I went back to Calhoun's desk.

“Well?” I asked.

“Not much,” he said.

“What?”

“Just one thing,” he said. “That diminishing real estate empire of his was incorporated in Kentucky.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Better tax structure. It does seem to be the one office that was never late on its rent.”

“How many employees?”

“In Kentucky?” He shrugged. “No way to tell.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Bill.”

“I don't know quite what I've found,” said Calhoun, “but I hope it helps.”

“You and me both,” I said, heading out of the building. I got into the car, started it up, and headed for home.

Marlowe was snoring so loud I could hear him through the door as I inserted my key and entered the apartment.

He gave me a hurt, angry look that said,
You went out for dinner and then you went out drinking, and you didn't bring me any food or any booze
. Before I could mollify him he was asleep again.

I set the alarm for eight o'clock, then decided I wasn't as sleepy as I'd thought. I walked to the living room, fought Marlowe for a little space on the couch, and turned on Turner Classic Movies just in time to see Orson Welles say “Rosebud!” I decided I'd rather watch some sports and got a sixty-year-old kinescope of a welterweight match between Kid Gavilán and Chuck Davey, a college student who had no business being in the ring with the likes of the Kid except that he was white, personable, and lacked a sense of self-preservation.

When that was over they began showing a kinescope of Rocky Marciano dismantling Ezzard Charles. I fell asleep in the third round and woke up when Marlowe began barking an inch from my right ear, just in case I didn't hear the alarm ringing.

I dragged myself to the bathroom, shaved, brushed my teeth, considered changing shirts and decided against it, then wandered into the kitchen. I opened a can of hash for Marlowe, grabbed a stale donut and a cup of coffee for myself, then decided I'd better walk him since he hadn't been out for a dozen hours or so. He was in full agreement, finished before we got halfway to Mrs. Garabaldi's, and we made it back into the apartment before my landlady-turned-literary-critic could assail me with more observations about the mail.

I got in the car and drove to the Ohio River, then crossed over it on the Clay Wade Bailey Bridge, which is just half a mile past the I-71/I-75 bridge and a hell of a lot less crowded. When you're halfway across either bridge you're suddenly in Kentucky, but the river towns of Covington and Newport are really just extensions of Cincinnati's downtown, with some excellent advantages. Kentucky's where I always went to buy my liquor and cigarettes, and gas was usually a few cents cheaper too.