The Undertaker (44 page)

“How does Patillo figure into this?”

“The first thing they teach a young prosecutor is to ask who benefits. So far, it is Rico Patillo who keeps coming up the big winner. Him, Senator Hardin, and your friend Ralph Tinkerton, and I would dearly love to find the link that ties them all of them together. As for the losers? Jimmy is in Marion and I'm walking around with two bodyguards.”

“That's why you are going to help me, Charley.”

“Me? And why would I want to do that?”

“Because I'm your last hope. Yours and Jimmy's. I need you to pull together everything you have and everything you can find on Panozzo and his wife, Clement Aleppo, Richie Benvenuto, Johnny Dantonio, Paulie Mantucci, and their wives. I need medical records, dental records, blood types, all that stuff. I also need you to pull together everything you can find on the Greene Funeral Home, the Varner Clinic, and Oak Hill Cemetery in Columbus. Who owns them, their tax records, everything.”

“Is that all?” He chuckled.

“No, I need you to do a little research for me,” I said as I handed him a slip of paper.

He opened it and read the names, “Skeppington, Brownstein, Pryor, and Kasmarek, Atlanta, Phoenix, Portland, and Chicago?... Kasmarek?” he looked over at the doorway.

“I'm not keeping her around for personal comfort, Charley. They buried “the Mole” under her ex-husband's name in Oak Hill Cemetery in Columbus, and she's got proof. Louie Panozzo and his wife are buried under my name and my wife's. He won't match my Army records, and his wife won't match my wife's hospital records in California, either. They buried your other New Jersey friends under those other names. Tinkerton murdered them, and you'll find his signatures all over the records. And I think those guys barely scratch the surface. There are more graves up there.”

Billingham stared at me, perhaps with a newfound appreciation. “You never cease to surprise, Mr. Talbott.” We had come around full circle to the arch, and I stopped. Billingham pulled a long, Cuban cigar out of his coat pocket, bit off the tip, and lit it slowly with a wooden match. As I watched his face, I could see the wheels turning.

“You are a sharp lawyer with plenty of resources,” I told him. “Dig out the two sets of death certificates, get photos of the two sets of headstones and find a sympathetic judge. That ought to be enough to get a warrant to dig up the Talbott graves in Columbus. That should bring Tinkerton's house of cards crashing down, and give you the wedge you need to file some prosecutorial misconduct charges to get your boss out of jail.”

“Prosecutorial misconduct?” Billingham looked down at the slip of paper, thinking. “Possibly, but it's a stretch.”

“Really?” I reached in my pocket and handed him the Massachusetts driver's license. “Who's this guy?”

Billingham frowned. “Tony Grigiatto, “Tony G,” a button man for Rico.”

“He was waiting for us in the alley last night in Boston with a gun and a silencer. They had a whole crew up there and that means Rico Patillo is working for Tinkerton.”

“No, Mister Talbott,” Billingham shook his head sadly. “You have that backwards, it means that Tinkerton is working for Rico Patillo. As I said, this is all about power and if you do have those computer files, you should tread very, very softly.” He started to turn away and then he looked back and paused. “But, if you don't mind my asking a personal question, why are you doing all this?”

“Because I want off the merry-go-round. I want us both off,” I pointed across the street. “They won't leave us alone, so I'm going to bring them down.”

“You? You are going to “bring them down?” Billingham smiled, amused by the naiveté of my answer. He took a deep drag on the cigar and tipped his head up, exhaling a thick cloud of cigar smoke. It hung around his head under the umbrella in the damp air. “Then I wish you good luck, Mister Talbott,” he said. “We'll both need it.”

Billingham had just tipped his umbrella to the east and turned away again, when I heard a loud, painful grunt come out of him. His eyes bulged and he lurched forward as if he had been punched in the back. He staggered forward with a puzzled expression as the blow drove him to his knees. He dropped his umbrella and toppled into me. As thick and bulky as he was, the best I could do was to catch him and slow his fall, lowering him to the sidewalk in front of me. I knew immediately that he had been shot in the back. He was lying on his side looking up at me, wide-eyed, trying to breathe.

I ran my hand across his back. I felt a jagged tear in the back of his coat, between the shoulder blade and his spine, but I felt nothing wet. I pulled my hand away. No blood? I put my hand back and felt around in the tear until I found something small and hard. I pulled it out and found myself looking at a spent bullet. That was when I realized he was wearing a bulletproof vest under the top coat. The bullet hadn't penetrated, but might have broken a few ribs as it slammed into him, flattened, and knocked the wind out of him.

“A goddamned Kevlar vest, Charley?” I said. “You gotta be kidding.”

“Like I said.” He wheezed painfully. “In this city, one can never be too careful.”

I turned and tried to determine where the shot came from, but I couldn't tell. Suddenly another bullet zipped past my head and grazed the concrete sidewalk behind me, kicking up chips and sparks. From the way it ricocheted, it must have come from the north, and high above. I looked around the nearly-empty park, but there was no one within several hundred feet of us who could possibly have gotten off a shot like that, much less two. They must be using a rifle with a silencer, shooting from one of the rooftops.

Billingham's eyes were wide open. He clutched my arm and tried to pull himself up, but I pushed him back down. I propped our two umbrellas out in front of him, screening both of us from view to the north and east where the shots must have come from.

“Stay down!” I told him as I crouched behind the umbrella too. The thin nylon would never stop a bullet, but what the gunman couldn't see, he wasn't likely to hit.

Billingham's two guards had been facing away from us, and it wasn't until the second bullet skipped off the pavement that they also realized something was wrong. They dropped into defensive stances with their guns out scanning the side streets.

“No, up north,” I screamed at them, wanting to make sure they knew it wasn't me who shot their boss. “It must be a rifle, up on one of the roofs.” They both nodded.

“Thank you,” Billingham pulled me to him and whispered. “Thank you.”

“Track down that stuff, Charley,” I told him as I scanned the park again. I was already on the “10 Most Wanted List” in the Post Office, so sticking around the park would not do me any good. Neither would getting shot in some noble gesture to protect Charley Billingham, so I took off running west, zigzagging through the trees.

Harvey ran over and plucked Billingham off the sidewalk, threw him over his shoulder as if he were a rag doll, and then sprinted south into the trees. The other guard trailed behind, watching the roofs, waiting to return fire, but there wasn't any.

Billingham had it all wrong; he was so intent on foiling unwanted listeners that he set himself up for a bullet. While we strolled around the small park shielded from view by the heavy overhead cover, the rifleman had found himself a good firing position. He watched and waited and when we looped back through the park and came back into the open, he had a clear shot.

I had spent enough time on the rifle range at Fort Riley, Kansas to know that a rifle shot from almost any distance was difficult in the drizzly fog and half-light of the late afternoon. Add in the thick tree canopy and the fact the closest rooftops had to be at least 500 yards away, and this guy was good. If Charley hadn't been wearing the vest, he'd be dead.

In the backseat of Goutams’ magic carpet…

I
ran west through the trees doing my best UCLA tailback impersonation, cutting left, cutting right, blazing my way through the USC defense. Overhead, the leaves, the big branches, and the misty rain did the rest. Up ahead I saw Sandy. We made eye contact and I continued running through the grass and trees in case they had other shooters stationed around the park. But before I was halfway to MacDougal Street, I knew I was out of range and out of danger. The farther away I got from the arch though, the clearer it became that the gunman was aiming for Billingham, not for me.

This was Rico Patillo's handiwork again. It was unlikely anyone knew I was here. After Boston, if they thought I was anywhere around here, they wouldn't have used a long gun, they would have surrounded the park with an army, because Charley was right. They wanted those flash drives and they needed me alive to get them. It wasn't the same for Charley. Maybe his TV time in front of the Hardin Commission spooked Rico and he wanted to make sure the lawyer never did talk. Maybe Rico wasn't taking any chances. When Jimmy finally did get out of Marion, it would be in a hearse. And the simplest solution to all those problems was to take Charley out, now.

Sandy's path and mine converged at the corner on MacDougal Street. I grabbed her hand and we ran up Fourth without breaking stride until we were two blocks west of the park. That was where I stopped and pulled her into a doorway to catch my breath.

“What happened back there?” she panted along with me.

“Somebody took a shot at Billingham.”

She wrapped her arms around me. “I was so afraid. You scared the hell out of me.”

“Not as much as it scared the hell out of Charley!”

“Is he okay?”

“Yeah. He was hit in the back by a sniper with a rifle, somebody up on one of the roofs. But the fat bastard was wearing a bulletproof vest, if you can believe it.”

“Has he got two more?” she asked.

“No, but he's got our umbrella.” I looked down at her, but she didn't find that very funny. “The bullet knocked him down and he probably peed in his pants, but he'll be okay. He thinks I saved his life and that's even better. He owes me now.”

“So they weren't shooting at you?”

“I don't think so. I think they were after him. So, let's get out of here.” I took her arm and we walked quickly toward Sixth Avenue, looking to all the world like two shadowy city stick figures heading home from work.

“What did he say?”

“This whole thing is about Panozzo's books, those damned flash drives. Tinkerton, Rico Patillo, Gino, Billingham, and even your pal Hardin have all been looking for them, because Billingham says there's a lot more on them than we think. They tie in all the other east coast families and they're dynamite, add in the payoff lists and they are raw power.”

“And he had no idea they were in your pocket, only a few feet away?”

“Maybe, but it seems I'm the rock everybody wants to turn over now.”

“So what are we going to do now?”

“See Hardin. He's our last chance.”

We reached Sixth Avenue and saw a sign for the subway. Unfortunately, there were two battered, New York City Transit Authority Police cars parked on the sidewalk in front of the entrance with their doors hanging open and light bars flashing. I put my arm around Sandy and we gave them a wide berth. Three exasperated white Transit cops in torn and disheveled blue uniforms were wrestling a huge and very angry black woman up the stairs. She must have weighed three hundred pounds, and she was wearing a short-short, orange, patent-leather mini-skirt, a tube-top that looked like she had been shoplifting basketballs from a sporting goods store, and a pair of chrome handcuffs. Kicking, cussing, and spitting, she was a load, as the two Transit cops pushed her up the last few stairs, dragged her over to one of the cars, and jammed her into the back seat.

One look told me the transit cops were far too occupied to notice two lovers hurrying to the subway. We made a hard right and hurried down the wet, concrete stairs to the station below. I slid a five-dollar bill under the ticket window, dropped two tokens into the coin box, and we scampered through the turnstile, taking the stairs two at a time to the northbound tracks. It was 5:40. The rush hour crowd filled the dimly lit cavern. I found a spot where I could put my back against the wall, pull Sandy up against me, and try to blend in. Fortunately, it wasn't long before a single, white headlight appeared down the track and we heard the distant rumble of an in-coming train. The sound grew louder and louder until the train burst from the tunnel and braked to a halt in front of us. We joined the surge forward and with a shove here and a wiggle there, we pushed our way inside the car. The only people who squeezed in after us were three college students and a couple of gray-haired housewives toting shopping bags. No suits. No sunglasses. No lawyers with Gucci shoes and Florida tans. As quick as it stopped, the car started up with a jolt. I grabbed a silver pole and Sandy grabbed me, wrapping her arms around my waist.

“That had better be
your
hands on my buns back there,” I whispered into the top of her head.

“I certainly hope so,” she looked up and gave me a forced smile.

At Penn Station, half the crowd got off and we let the tide carry us out onto the platform. I peeled off into an eddy as the doors closed and train rolled away down the tunnel. I looked around the narrow platform, but we were the only ones left who had gotten off. The others had disappeared up the escalator. I pulled Sandy close and held her very tight. Billingham was right. She was in a lot of danger and I had put her there.