The Clairvoyant Countess (13 page)

“No, but I’ve been finding out a hell of a—excuse me, a heck of a lot of other things.”

“Such as what, may I ask?” said Madame Karitska, returning from the kitchen with a tray.

“Well, for one thing,” confessed Pruden, “I have to swallow my considerable pride and admit this isn’t the small neighborhood affair I thought it would be last Saturday night. My apologies to you,” he added, picking up a sandwich, “but I honestly didn’t think it would amount to more than an ex-boy friend of Maria’s, or a neighbor who was jealous of Arturo’s success. Now it looks like the biggest case I’ve tackled yet. The Syndicate appears to be involved somehow.”

“The Syndicate! Holy cow!” said Gavin, eyes widening. “You know about the Syndicate, don’t you, Madame Karitska?”

She seated herself on the couch beside Gavin and inserted a cigarette into a long holder. “It is, I believe, very organized crime?”

“
Very
organized crime,” Pruden said dryly. “And not, I might add, a group that usually dabbles in voodoo. We’ve been working our tails off today and it looks as if for some reason they’re after the Jack Frost ice-cream business here in Trafton.”

Madame Karitska laughed. “What a strange thing to be after!”

He nodded. “Both Arturo and Luis drove ice-cream trucks, remember? Here, look at the facts,” he said, and brought from his pocket a condensed list of Carlos Torres’ activities. Handing it to Madame Karitska he said, “Two years ago in the Dell section there was what came to be known in the media as the ‘ice-cream war.’ One of the vendors was kidnapped and then released, three ice-cream trucks were bombed on the streets, and the Mr. Freezee garages broken into and expensive machinery stolen or destroyed. This went on for six or eight weeks and then suddenly stopped.”

“You were not told why?” asked Madame Karitska.

“No, but one looks for patterns. In this case shortly after the turbulence ended the Mr. Freezee distributorship was taken over by Harold Robichaud of Amusement Enterprises. We know nothing about him except that he bought it, but about the attorney who handled the purchase we know a great deal. His name is John Tortorelli and he’s a Syndicate man.”

Madame Karitska frowned. “But you are speaking of the past, of something that happened two years ago.”

“Yes, but we begin to suspect the scenario is about to be repeated.”

“And this Carlos Torres?” asked Madame Karitska, glancing through the memo. “Who is this Carlos Torres?”

“He paid a call on Luis twelve hours before Luis took to his bed. In fact he was the only stranger who ever paid a call on Mendez. He lives just off Fifth Street and he’s Puerto Rican.”

“Ah,” murmured Madame Karitska. “A link—I see … and
he led you to these others? But this Tortorelli and Robichaud … do they seem to you the sort of men learned in voodoo?”

Pruden laughed. “Absolutely not, but we’ll get to that eventually.”

“This Carlos Torres then, perhaps he would kill by voodoo?”

“Carlos?” He shook his head. “Not likely.”

Madame Karitska said with a hint of exasperation in her voice, “You are no longer investigating what has happened to the Mendez brothers, then?”

Pruden sighed. “Look, you’re missing the point. This has broadened into Syndicate stuff. It’s big, bigger than the Mendez brothers. It could turn into the biggest case I’ve uncovered.”

She said gently, “On the contrary, I think
you
are missing the point, Lieutenant. You speak of patterns and scenarios and what took place two years ago but you do not see that suddenly a very original mind has become involved now. The past is
not
repeating itself. You speak of bombings and kidnappings, but someone has entered the picture who side-steps physical violence. Now there is violence against the spirit. One cannot help admire the originality, do you not agree? The perfect crime.”

“You keep saying that,” he said crossly, and gave her a resentful glance. He was tired and he had expected approval, even admiration; instead she insisted on returning him to Luis Mendez, who was only a link to something greater.

“You do not feel,” she went on crisply, “that the mind of a man who could conceive of such a murder is infinitely more subtle, infinitely more sophisticated and
dangerous than your Syndicate criminal?”

“We’re only starting,” he pointed out defensively. “It’ll all unwind like a spool of thread. Luis is still alive, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said, “but so is the willow tree, and gives every evidence of remaining alive. Why do you believe they want the Jack Frost ice-cream business, or any ice-cream business?”

“We don’t know yet but we’ll find out.”

“This Ramon,” Madame Karitska said, glancing at the list. “You have looked into him too?”

“Oh yes. No record. Clean as a whistle,” said Pruden, and was glad to have the subject changed. “I visited his shop first thing this morning.”

“Yes?”

“You’d love it,” he told her with a smile. “Books on the supernatural, books on haunted houses. Some spectacular hand-carved masks from Africa and South America.”

“Hey, I’d love to have one of those,” Gavin said eagerly. “Could you take me on Saturday, Madame Karitska? The kids would get a real bang out of something wild hanging on our dorm wall.”

She smiled at him. “I will take you on Saturday, yes, but I think I may stop in there tomorrow to first make certain it is—how do you say?—okay for a young boy?”

“She’s tough,” Gavin said to Pruden, nodding. “She doesn’t want me to know about porno and all that.”

“She’s not tough, she’s cagey,” said Pruden, finishing his coffee and standing up. “She’ll walk in and check out Mr. Ramon for you, admire the ring he’s wearing, ask to hold it, and tell us later what he eats every day for breakfast.”

But it was not a ring that Madame Karitska succeeded in holding when she visited the Bazaar Curio Shop on Tuesday afternoon; it was a fountain pen, and it was only with considerable finesse that she managed this. When she arrived at the shop there were already several customers there, and Madame Karitska moved quietly among the books, from time to time glancing covertly at the man behind the counter. A strange little man, she thought. He gave every evidence of being amiable but she came to the conclusion that of all the masks on display in the shop, his was the most formidable. In the meantime she waited, and when the others had gone she moved toward the counter carrying a copy of Crowley’s
Magick in Theory and Practice.
She had moved quietly and Ramon’s back was turned. She reached for the pen he had been writing with and it was in her hand when he turned and looked at her. Their glances met and locked, and Madame Karitska found it necessary to steady herself against the counter.

He said softly, “You will put down my pen.”

She placed the pen back on the counter.

“Thank you,” he said and with an amused glance at the book in her hand he said, “Aleister Crowley, I see.… You’re interested in black magic, perhaps?”

“Perhaps.”

But he had lost interest, and his mask was back again. “It will be seven-fifty, please,” he said.

She paid him, took the book, and walked out, her heart beating very quickly. She felt curiously drained of energy, as if recovering from a bout of fever that had left her nerves trembling and her body weak. She went
at once to a telephone booth and dialed Pruden’s number. When he answered she said, “Lieutenant, I think you should—I think you must—check out Mr. Ramon again.”

“Is this Madame Karitska?” he said. “Your voice sounds changed. Look, I’m in the middle of a conference but if you can explain—”

A wave of nausea swept her; she dropped the receiver and stumbled outside, Pruden’s voice following her through the open door. Outside she stood drawing in deep breaths of air, her hands trembling as she clung to the door for support. It was necessary for her to remain there several minutes before she felt well enough to return the receiver of the phone to its hook and to begin her walk back to Eighth Street.

Pruden found Madame Karitska’s call frustrating, coming as it did in the middle of a planning session with the Chief, Swope, Benson, and a man named Callahan. He said, “Excuse me a minute,” and called Madame Karitska back at her apartment, but when there was no answer he hung up and turned back to the others. “All right, tell me what you found out about the Hy-Grade Laundry,” he asked Swope.

“Something very interesting.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Right.” Swope picked up his reading glasses and put them on. “Back in November of last year there was an explosion at the laundry.”

“Bomb?”

“No, the investigators traced it to a boiler, but the odd thing is that the owners sold out after it happened,
and rather fast. It wasn’t a bomb, it was a boiler blowing up and yet they sold.”

“Sabotage?”

“It has that smell,” said Swope. “A boiler doesn’t need a bomb to blow it up—there are a dozen things you can do to accomplish the same thing—but in any case they sold. Now it’s under new management, a family named Torres, and guess who the youngest son is.”

Pruden felt a prickling of excitement. “Carlos?”

“You’ve just won the box of Crackerjack. And,” he added, “the attorney who handled the purchase was John Tortorelli.”

“Good Lord,” said Pruden. “The Syndicate
is
moving in.”

“Looks like it. Same pattern.”

“I don’t get it,” said Callahan, baffled. “The Syndicate goes where the money is, and I wouldn’t have thought there was anything to tempt them around Fifth Street. Of course there’s crime there—gambling, drugs, prostitution, numbers—but it’s all smalltime, petty. Nothing worth organizing.”

“Looks like it’s getting organized now,” Pruden said grimly. “I take it the laundry is headquarters, and Carlos their bag man. What’s the latest on him, by the way?”

The Chief handed him a sheet of paper. “Same pattern. He moves between his hotel, the laundry, Robichaud, Tortorelli, and the Caballeros Club.”

“So what do we do?” asked Benson.

Pruden said, “I’d like to see Robichaud and Tortorelli placed on round-the-clock surveillance, informers rounded up and questioned, and a camera put on Hy-Grade
Laundry twenty-four hours a day.”

“We’ve already got Jack the Lip downstairs,” Benson said. “The guys thought you’d want to question him, although Jack insists he doesn’t know anything about a Syndicate moving into Fifth Street.”

Pruden nodded and rose. “I’ll go down and see what I can get out of him. I don’t,” he said wearily, “think we’re going to get much sleep for the next few days.”

“So what else is new?” asked the Chief in a kindly voice.

It was seven o’clock before Pruden finished interviewing the handful of informants that had been brought in, and the only thing he’d learned was that an ice-cream vendor out in the northern section of Trafton had been taken ill and was dying. He was a Jack Frost man, and his name was Raphael Alvarez, and he was six months out of Puerto Rico. “Enough to give a guy the whammies,” the informant said with a shiver. “Just says he’s going to die and lies there.”

Like Luis, he thought.… It reminded Pruden of Luis and then of Madame Karitska’s aborted phone call during the afternoon. She’d said Ramon ought to be checked again—that much he’d heard, and then they’d been cut off before she could explain why. He stood on the steps at headquarters debating whether to eat, grab a few hours’ sleep, or visit the Bazaar Shop.

Swope, coming up behind him, said, “Where you off to now, Lieutenant?”

Pruden made his decision. “I think I’ll just take a look at the Bazaar Shop again. Look around a bit. Care to come along?”

“Why not?” said Swope affably, falling into step
beside him as he began walking. “I told the wife she wouldn’t be seeing much of me for a few days. Place is closed, though, isn’t it?”

Pruden nodded. “Yes, but on Sunday night it was closed and Torres went around to the back. I thought—”

“I dig,” said Swope. “How much further?”

“Next block, on the left.”

As they neared the store a small truck passed them and slowed down, signaling a turn to the left. Its sides were painted bright scarlet; in gold carousel script were printed the words
BAZAAR CURIO SHOP
—Everything Bizarre—1023 Broad Street, R. Ramon, Prop. The van turned into the alleyway beside the shop and disappeared.

“Not altogether closed,” pointed out Swope.

“No,” said Pruden.

Crossing the street they reached the alley in time to see the scarlet truck park in the dilapidated garage at the end of the driveway. Two young men climbed out, picked up their caps and lunch boxes and began walking down the alley toward the street. “Hey,” one of them said sharply, turning and pointing, and his companion hurried back to the garage and swung the doors closed; then they continued out to Broad Street, passing Pruden and Swope, and walked up the street and turned the corner.

“They didn’t lock those doors. I wouldn’t mind taking a look inside,” Pruden said hopefully.

“It does seem like a gift from heaven,” agreed Swope. “Let’s go.”

The layout of the building was surprisingly simple: it had once been an old house to which the shop had been
added in the front. The rear contained a yard, a side porch, a garage, and all the accouterments of a conventional frame house, including an ancient apple tree. No lights shone in the windows; the place looked deserted. They very casually swung open one unlocked garage door and slipped inside.

Swope, testing the back doors of the van, said, “Locked.”

Pruden peered into the front seat of the truck. There was a bunk behind the driver’s seat for sleeping on long trips, but the wall behind it was windowless and seemed to be solid, with no point of entry into the storage behind it. He decided to climb inside and make certain of this, and had one foot on the floor of the garage and the other in the cab of the truck when he lost his balance and fell against the door.

Behind him he heard Swope exclaim, “What the hell!”

Pruden, looking down, realized to his astonishment that the floor of the garage was moving. He regained his balance, looked for Swope, and found him several feet above him: the garage doors were suddenly at a level with his waist as the floor slowly descended like an elevator. Swope had jumped clear and was standing in the doorway. He shouted, “For God’s sake jump, Lieutenant!”