Hooligans Part 12

"With Tagliani, Stinetto, and Draganata out of the way, that just about takes out all the old line. Except for the Barber," I said.

"They gotta figure it's Nose," said the Stick. "Some hothead Tagliani torpedo will take a pop at one of Graves' boys and we'll have a three-way war on our hands."

"That's if they don't start shootin' each other," said Dutch.

"h.e.l.l," the Stick said. "It's probably a coupla Philly shooters on their way home already."

"Or a coupla China soldiers with nothing to do right now," Dutch said.

"s.h.i.+t, it could be anybody," the Stick sighed.

"Which is why I'm finis.h.i.+ng my meal and going home," I said. "We can sit here all night speculating on who shot who. Let's. .h.i.t it fresh in the morning."

We paid the check; the Stick said good night and left. Dutch and I drove the ten minutes back to the hotel in silence.

The black limo was still parked under the marquee of the Ponce when we got back. As I got out of the car I noticed the tag: ST-l. I told Dutch I would check my messages and meet him in the bar for a nightcap.

There was a phone call from Cisco and a hotel envelope, sealed, with my name printed meticulously across the front.

I called Cisco, gave him the latest body count, and told him I'd give him the details over breakfast.

As I started toward the bar I finally saw him, the first of several specters from the past. I was tired and getting irritable and I wasn't ready to face up yet, but there he was in his three-piece dark blue suit and a gray homburg, leaning on a gold-handled ebony cane, his snowy hair clipped neatly above the ears, his sapphire eyes twinkling fiercely under thick white brows.

Stonewall t.i.tan, sheriff and kingmaker of Oglethorpe County, Mr. Stoney to everything that walked on two feet in the town, was standing under the marquee wiggling a short, thick finger under the nose of a tall and uncomfortable-looking guy in a tweed jacket and gray flannels. t.i.tan had made or destroyed more than one political dream with a wave of that finger. The man in tweeds went back into the bar.

Finished, t.i.tan turned and, leaning on the cane, limped toward his car, where a tall and ugly bird in a tan and black county policeman's uniform held the door for him. As he was about to enter the car, he saw me and hesitated for an instant. His bright blue eyes glittered in brief recognition, then his hard jaw tightened and he climbed into the limousine and was gone.

Then I saw her.

I moved behind a fern, watching her through its slender leaves, like a high school swain eyeing his first crush. I don't know what made me think I could have avoided seeing her. It had to happen sooner or later. Later would have been better.

Doe Findley still looked eighteen, still had the long blond silky hair, the caramel tan, eyes as gray as ever. A flash of memories tumbled through my mind: Doe on water skis, her silken hair twisting in the wind; roaring across the beach in a dune buggy; playfully wrestling on the boat dock with Teddy and pus.h.i.+ng him into the bay in his best sports coat and pants, then chasing me across the wide lawn down to the edge of the bay.

Doe watching the sun set off the point at Windsong, an image as soft and fragile as a Degas painting.

Time had erased a lot of images from my mind, but those were as clear as a painting on the wall, even after twenty years.

It came and went quickly.

She was talking to a chic blond woman; then she laughed and turned and joined a tall guy in Ultrasuede who was holding open the door of a dark blue Mercedes sedan.

So that was Harry Raines. My dislike for him was intense and immediate, a feeling I didn't like but could not control. I looked for flaws, blemishes on the face of this golden boy who had it all. His blond hair was thinning out the way a surfer's hair thins out, and he had traded his tan for an office pallor, but he was a handsome man nonetheless, with the bearing and presence that most powerful men exude. Harry Raines wore success the way a beautiful woman wears diamonds. If he had flaws, they were not apparent. I watched as he helped her into the car, trying to ignore the feelings that hit me in waves, like the aftershock of an earthquake. A handsome, good-looking pair. I tried to shove my feelings down in the dark places where they had hidden for all those years but it didn't work. As the Mercedes drove off into the dark I was aware that my hand was shaking.

Easy, Kilmer, I told myself; that was then, this is now. The lady probably doesn't even remember your name. I tried shrugging it off and joined Dutch.

Some things never change. The Ponce Bar was one of them. It was a dark, oaken room with a brick floor, a zinc-topped bar, and Tiffany lamps over the stalls and tables. The mirror behind the bar itself ran half the length of the room and was etched gla.s.s. They had built the hotel around it, rather than change a brick of the place. Politicians had been made and trashed in this room, business deals closed with a handshake, schemes planned and hatched. It was the heartland of the makers and breakers of Dunetown. For two hundred years the room had crackled with the electricity generated by the power brokers, arm-wrestling for position.

Only Findley and t.i.tan seemed immune to the games. Together they called the business and political shots of the entire county, unchallenged by the other robber barons of Dunetown. It was in this room that Chief had given Teddy and me one of our first lessons in business.

"Right over in that corner," he had told us, "that's where Vic Larkin and I locked horns for the last time. We owned half the beach property on Oceanby together; our fathers had been partners. But we never got along. Larkin wanted to develop the beach front, turn it into a d.a.m.n tinhorn tourist trap. He just didn't have any cla.s.s. I favored leaving it alone.

"One night it came to a head. We had one h.e.l.luvan argument sitting right over there. 'd.a.m.n it, Victor,' I says to him, 'we're never gonna get along and you know it. I'll cut you high card. Winner buys the loser out for a dollar.'

"Vic turned pale but he had guts, I'll give him that. I told the bartender to bring us a deck of cards and we cut. He pulled a six, I pulled a nine. That nine bought me a million dollars' worth of real estate for one buck."

"You call that good business?" Teddy had asked.

"I call it gambling," Chief had said. "And that's what business is all about, boys. It's a gambler's game."

From the look of the crowd, there weren't too many gamblers left among the Dunetown elite. What was missing was the electricity. There was no longer a hum in the air, just a lot of chatter.

The blond woman who had been outside with Doe had returned to the room and was talking to a small group of people. She was wearing a wraparound mauve silk dress and an off-yellow wide-brimmed hat and her eyes moved around the room as she spoke, taking in everything.

"The blonde you're eyeballin' is Babs Thomas," Dutch said. "Don't say h.e.l.lo unless you want everybody in town to know it five minutes later."

"Local gossip?" I asked.

"You could call her that. She does a snitch column in the Ledger called 'Whispers.' Very apropos. You wanna know the inside on Doomstown's aristocracy, ask her. She knows what bed every pair of shoes in town is under."

I jotted that down in my memory for future reference and then said, "I just saw Stonewall t.i.tan out front."

"Yeah?" Dutch said.

"I figured t.i.tan was probably dead by now," I said.

"Mr. Stoney will tell G.o.d when he's ready to go, and offhand I'd say G.o.d's gonna have to wait awhile. How well do you know him?"

"Too long ago to matter," I said, which was far from the truth. I don't think Dutch believed it either, although he was kind enough to let it pa.s.s.

"I saw him, too, coming out of the bar," said Dutch. "We had words. He gave me some sheiss."

"What does t.i.tan expect you to do?" I asked.

"End it."

"Just like that?"

"Yeah, just like that. 'Get it done before Harry gets wind of it,'" he says.

"Gets wind of it!" I replied. "How the h.e.l.l does he hope to keep Raines in the dark? And why?"

"He's hoping we'll nail this thing down fast so the Committee can shove it under the carpet."

"What Committee?" I asked.

Dutch hesitated, staring into his drink. He rattled ice in his gla.s.s for a few moments, then shrugged. "Local power structure," he said, brus.h.i.+ng it off.

"You just took a left turn," I said.

"Y'see, Raines doesn't think beyond the racetrack," Dutch said, still ignoring my question. "The paper and the TV stations tend to play down any violence that happens. Now we got Mafia here, it could be Raines' worst nightmare come true. I could get my walking papers over this."

"So you said."

The waitress brought our drinks. I decided not to press him on who or what the Committee was for the moment.

"Fill me in on t.i.tan," I said.

He jiggled the ice in his highball.

"Only trouble with Stoney t.i.tan, he's been sheriff for too d.a.m.n long. Forty years plus; that's one h.e.l.l of a long time."

"You think he's on the take?"

"Not the way you mean," Dutch said. "Nothin' goes down in this town he don't know about. Not a card game, not a floating c.r.a.p game, not numbers. Not a horse parlor. He knows every hooker by her first and last name, every bootlegger, dope runner, car booster. A man can't be around that long, know that much, he isn't bent just a little, know what I mean? On the other hand, he's a tough little bantam, not a man to take sides against."

I remembered t.i.tan differently. I remembered him on soft summer afternoons with his coat across his knees, drinking bourbon with Chief and talking on the porch at Windsong. I remembered he always put his gun in the trunk before coming up to the house and took off his coat because he wore his badge pinned on the inside pocket and I guess that was his way of saying it was a friendly call. And I remembered him as thinner and not as gray, a wiry little man with a fast step and twinkling eyes. h.e.l.l, I thought, he's pus.h.i.+ng hard on eighty. Funny how people never age in your memory.

"I wonder if he was on Tagliani's payroll," I thought aloud.

"He isn't bent in that direction. No way," Dutch said. "Stoney doesn't need money or power. And he's too old to get sucked into that kind of game. t.i.tan coulda been a state senator, probably governor. G.o.d knows he's got the power. But he's like a man who can't swim-he never goes in over his head."

"Then maybe he had Tagliani killed," I suggested.

"Not his style. Squeeze Tagliani out, maybe. But this high-style execution isn't gonna be good for Dunetown. And I don't see a hope in h.e.l.l of cleaning this up right away, do you?"

I admitted that there was very little to go on at that point. I also told him I didn't think the town could keep the gang slayings a secret for too long.

"A day or two," I said, "maybe."

"When Cherry McGee and Nose Graves were going at it, the press kept it buried," he said. "As far as most folks know, the hoods that went down during that melee were robbers and thieves, part of the body count that can be chalked up to your normal, everyday crime statistics."

"Can't you sneak some of this information to them?" I said. "Having the press on your side can help sometimes."

He leaned over the table toward me and said, "You don't understand, Jake m'boy. They know it already. It's their option to underplay it. It's the way things have always been done here."

"As I recall, a sheriff is a very big man in this state," I said.

"Nothing like Stoney. Big doesn't even cover it. The way I hear it, he's delivered the swing vote for two governors, half a dozen senators, and this county helped give the state to Kennedy in 1960."

"A lot of people owe him then," I said.

"Yeah."

"He could probably put Raines in the statehouse."

"He could give him one h.e.l.luva shove."

"And the town blowing up around them could sink Raines, right?"

"Yeah, I suppose you could say that. But Raines is a heavy hitter. He might could slug his way out of a scandal if it didn't touch him directly."

I leaned across the table and said very quietly, "You know as well as I do they can't ignore this. It's going to blow up bigger than Mount Saint Helens."

"Stoney's point is well made," said Dutch. "The sooner we stop it, the better."

"For Raines?"

"For everybody."

"Do you like t.i.tan?" I asked bluntly.

"He's a relic," Dutch said. "And I love relics."

14.

THE COMMITTEE.

Dutch looked as if he were getting ready to pack it in for the night, but there was still a question left hanging in the air. He had avoided it. I didn't want him to. I decided to back into it with a shocker.

"You think there's any chance Harry Raines is behind this?" I asked. It worked. He looked up as if I had thrown cold water in his face.

"I'm just trying to get a fix on all the players," I said.

"Why would Harry want to create this kind of problem for himself? I told you, it's his worst nightmare come true."

"Maybe he thinks he can keep it quiet like the Cherry McGee affair. Get rid of these hoodlums and pa.s.s it off as some kind of kook slaying."

"You're reaching, son," he said. "Harry Raines has more to lose in this than anybody."

"Maybe that's what he wants everybody to think."

"You're serious, aren't you."

"You can look at it two ways. He's got the most to lose when this gets out, but he also has the most to gain by getting rid of the Triad."

"You know, if I didn't know better, I might think that's the way you want it to play out."

"Just asking. Like I said, I'm trying to cover all the bases."

"You're out of the ballpark on that one," he said, scowling at me over his drink. He looked around the room and jiggled his ice some more.

It was time to force the issue. Dutch Morehead knew more than he wanted me to know, I was sure of it.