Hooligans Part 8

Dutch stood in front of the room, a Teutonic frown etched into his heavy features.

"Thanks," he said.

"Any time."

"I don't want to upset anybody," he said, turning to his troops, "but these . . . ash lochers have been under our surveillance two weeks. A whole family of them, and we didn't even know it!"

The group looked stricken, none more than Charlie One Ear.

"I can't believe it," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "Not so much as a hint from any of my canaries about this. I should think somebody, somebody, would have heard some G.o.dd.a.m.n thing!"

The rest of them stared at the floor and moved imaginary objects around with their feet. All except Lewis, who stared at a corner of the room through squinted eyes, and Callahan, who spoke up again.

"Why you getting steamed up, Dutch?" he said. "We didn't know who they were until last week. Up till then we were just following them because Charlie One Ear had a hunch."

"I'm including myself," Dutch said. "We been making a lot of racket for these past nine months. Busting pimps and pros, dropping dealers with a nickel bag in their shorts. We got a little too big for our hats."

"We didn't know until-" Salvatore started.

"He's right," Charlie One Ear said. "We were much too casual about this mob. I was one of the worst."

"You, Chino, you were on Tagliani tonight, right?" Dutch asked.

"Who?"

"Franco Tagliani," Dutch said, leaning an inch from the Mexican's face. "He's the one got killed tonight while you were parked in his front yard. Remember?"

"I keep forgetting the new names," Zapata said.

"Well, stop forgetting them. I don't want to hear any more about Frank Turner or Nat Sherman or any of the other monikers their people are using. From now on, we use their real-life names, okay?"

The group nodded in unison.

"So what happened?"

"On Sundays, uh . . . Tagliani and . . . uh . . . Nicky Stinetto go to . . . Bronicata's joint for dinner, so I went there and waited. s.h.i.+t, you stand out like a blind man at a t.i.t show, out there on Thunderhead Island. There's only one other house on Tur . . . Tagliani's street. Twice I been ha.s.sled by the f.u.c.kin' downtown blue and whites, fer Christ sakes."

"So it's your call to jump ahead of your mark that way?" Dutch asked.

"It was just a routine surveillance, Dutch. s.h.i.+t, I was hungry, nothing to eat for seven hours. I went ahead, grabbed some groceries so I'd be ready when he split. Who had any thought he was gonna get hit?"

"I'm sorry you didn't get a printed invitation!" Dutch said. "How about Stinetto, who had him?"

Charlie One Ear sank a little lower in his chair.

"I'm afraid I have to plead guilty," he said. "It was a double-up, Dutch. We knew they were going to dinner together, so I told- "

"So you told Chino to go to the restaurant and you'd cover the house," he said, finis.h.i.+ng the sentence.

"Right. "

Callahan said, "It's routine with him, Chief. Tagliani goes to Bronicata's every Sunday for dinner. He usually meets one or two of his capi there. Draganata, Stizano, Logeto. Like that. Bronicata usually sits with them."

"Big deal, so who does the dishes? What I want to know is who was at dinner?"

"Logeto and, uh, the red-haired guy . . . " Chino said.

"O'Brian," I coached.

"Yeah. And, of course, Bronicata."

"I suppose you was eyeballing Bronicata, too, right, since you was there anyway," Dutch growled at Chino.

"I had Bronicata," Callahan said quietly. "They all split together. I put Bronicata home before I came back here."

"Who had O'Brian?"

Lewis raised his hand. "Same thing," he said. "He went straight home too."

"What happened there in the restaurant?" Dutch said.

Chino said, "I was inside, watching the whole team. So Bronicata gets this phone call, comes back looking like he just swallowed a jar of jalapea peppers. There's some chi chi-"

"Chi chi? What the h.e.l.l's chi chi?" Dutch asked.

"They was whispering."

"Oh."

"Then the Irishman and Logeto both split like the place was on fire. Coupla minutes later the waiter brings the check, tells me the joint's closing for the night. 'What the h.e.l.l's goin' on?' I say. He tells me the chef had a heart attack. I guess the call was to tell them the old man got aced."

Dutch, who was twirling one side of his mustache and staring at the ceiling, said, "It don't make a lot of sense, y'know. Tagliani follows the same procedure every Sunday. There he is, in the car with only Stinetto and the chauffeur, who couldn't shoot the s.h.i.+t with the pope. An easy mark, yet the shooter chooses to waste two guard dogs and blow up Turner and Sherman in the house."

"It's Tagliani and Stinetto," Charlie One Ear said sedately.

All that bought him was a dirty look.

"Salvatore," Dutch went on, "who was your mark?"

"Stizano," he said. "He's home also. I left his place when you called us in."

"Cowboy?"

"The playboy-what's his name?"

"Logeto?" I suggested.

"Yeah, him. He's home too."

"Everybody's home tonight," Zapata said with a chuckle.

"Is any of this stuff from the past few weeks, from when you started watching these guys, is any of this on paper?" I asked.

Dutch said, "We don't make reports. You put it on paper and somebody can read it."

"Like who?" I asked.

"Somebody, anybody," he said vaguely.

"You know what burns me?" said Chino. "What f.u.c.kin' burns me is that these a.s.sholes have got themselves watertight alibis and they don't even know it."

"Wouldn't it be fun not to tell them," Charlie One Ear said wistfully.

Dutch said, "Okay, Charlie, put your good ear to the ground, see if you can turn up something. The rest of you, back out on the range; see if we can stop this daisy chain before it goes any further. If you run across the Mufalatta Kid, Kite Lange, or the Stick, tell them to get in touch. Any questions?"

There weren't any.

As the gang started to disperse, Cowboy Lewis got up and walked straight toward me. He moved two desks out of his way to get to me.

"It's Jake, right?" he said.

"Yeah. "

He stuck out his hand.

"My name's Chester Lewis. They call me Cowboy."

"Right."

"You want this a.s.shole Nance, right?"

"Yeah, I want him, Cowboy."

"Then he's yours."

"Thanks," I said, pumping his hand.

"You got a right," he said, whirled on his heel, and headed straight out the door. As he left, a new face appeared in the doorway.

I knew who it was without asking.

10.

STICK.

The new guy was ignored by the rest of the bunch, who were too busy talking about the tapes to notice him. He came straight toward me.

He was what some women would call a primal beauty. Indian features, high cheekbones, long, narrow face, hard jaw, brown eyes, thick, s.h.i.+ning black hair that tumbled over his forehead and ears. Six feet tall and lean, he was my height and ten pounds trimmer. His seersucker suit looked like he balled it up and put it under his pillow at night; his tie had a permanent knot in it and was hanging two inches below an open collar. The points of his s.h.i.+rt collar curled up toward the ceiling, and I doubt that his loafers had ever seen a shoes.h.i.+ne rag. Obviously, dressing wasn't a real big thing with him.

He looked bagged out, and not just from a bad night. The circles under his eyes were permanent and his dimples were turning into crevices. He had the deep, growling voice that comes from too many drinks or too many cigarettes or too many late nights or all three. He was wearing a battered old brown felt hat, and a cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth.

Twenty-nine going on forty. One look, you knew he drove the women crazy.

Not jaded yet?

"I'm Parver," he said. "Everybody calls me Stick."

We moved away from the rest of the bunch, back toward the coffeepot.

"You a poolshooter?" I asked, to get the conversation off the ground.

"Not really, why?"

"The moniker."

"It's short for Redstick. Everybody thinks I look like a d.a.m.n Indian," he said with disgust. "Truth is, I'm Jewish and I'm from Boston. "

"I'm Jake Kilmer," I said. "That's all I ever was."

We shook hands.

"This about the Tagliani chill?" he asked. He said it casually, as though murder in Dunetown were as common as sand fleas on the beach.

I nodded.

"It looks like two gunners," I said. "They killed a couple of guard dogs, got by a couple of armed guards, and killed all three of them."

"Three?" Stick said. "When Cowboy raised me, he said Tagliani and Stinetto got it."

"After wasting Tagliani and Stinetto, they dropped off a bomb to finish the job. Tagliani's wife walked in. She died in the hospital."

"Too bad," he said. "Though I can't say as I'm too upset over the two goons." So much for sympathy. "How do you figure there were two shooters?"

"The house was wired. Dutch has the whole scene on tape, what there was of it. It was all over in about thirty seconds."

"Not so great for you. In town for an hour and your mark gets snuffed out from under you."

"That's the breaks."

"Guns and bombs," he mused. "Sounds like the Lincoln County war. "

I said I hoped not.