Dead Man Page 5

  “You’re right. I was a fool. I wasn’t ready. But that won’t happen again.” Dain had stopped pacing. His face, voice, eyes, had lost their impassivity; there was an almost guttural intensity to his words. “Now I know how to create the sort of reputation I want. Trust me on that. With a screen, a filter, I can say no easily. That’s all I need from you.”

  He sat down with that looseness of muscle that typifies all big predators off duty. Both men sipped their coffee. They exchanged pleased looks over its quality.

  Four years ago Sherman would have laughed in his face if Eddie Dain had come to him with such a proposition. But not now. Now he couldn’t even think of him as Eddie any more. He spread his hands in deprecation.

  “Even if everything you say is true, why do you think I’m the man for this sort of thing?”

  “You were born for it. Everybody knows you, you know everybody, you love to gossip, you love intrigue. And I can trust your judgment. Maybe I even can trust you.”

  “I’m flattered by your confidence,” said Sherman coldly.

  Dain ignored his pique. “If a recovery of some sort is involved—skim money, stolen narcotics, whatever—my fee will be ten percent of recovery against a twenty-five K floor. That’s sixty-two hundred fifty minimum per case for you—tax-free.”

  “Do you really think you can…” Sherman paused. He rubbed his eyes. He fidgeted. The offer was actually intriguing, not for the money, but… but he didn’t want to show he was interested. “The thing is…”

  He fell silent in midsentence. He knew he was going to do it. Dain was righC it was the sort of offbeat situation he couldn’t resist. To know all the dangers beforehand… to ride the tiger… Yes! Absolutely delicious…

  “Well… against my better judgment…”

  Dain didn’t do any cartwheels. There was that cold center Sherman hadn’t adjusted to yet. He merely picked up his book from the desk and stood up. Standing, he drained his cup.

  “Wonderful coffee,” he said.

  “Another cup—”

  He shook his head. His eyes sought the tall grandfather clock in a shadowy corner of the room. Something flickered momentarily in those eyes, then was gone. Some feeling that might have been described as deep purple had it been a color.

  “I’m due at Homicide in fifteen minutes,” he said.

  Sherman was on his feet also. “Deja vu.”

  Dain nodded. He stuck out his hand. Sherman took it. He was delighted with the way he had handled himself. He loved the image of himself at the edge of the precipice. He gestured at the chessboard.

  “Did you notice this endgame problem? The thirteenth game of Fischer versus Spassky World Championship match at Reykjavik, nineteen seventy-two? Extraordinary encounter.” He moved eagerly to the nine pieces left on the board. “Look here—”

  Something flashed in Dain’s eyes that drove Sherman back an involuntary step as if the tiger had suddenly crouched to spring. But Dain spoke in flat, almost disinterested tones.

  “I don’t play chess any more,” he said mildly.

  Sherman was silent, measuring him for a long moment, pushing it, relishing it. Riding the tiger! He nodded slightly.

  “Of course,” he said. “A pity.”

  So it had worked with Sherman, the tough-guy image behind which Eddie Dain could live and function. He felt uneasy to be using his friends this way; but the gamesman part of him was excited by his initial success. Sherman’s lively imagination had done a lot of Dain’s work for him, but Randy Solomon would be different. To enlist Randy’s cooperation for information only the cops could provide, he had to project the same stainless-steel image using very different tactics.

  Homicide had a new percolator. It made good coffee, so the trade from out-of-town departments had slacked off. And sure enough, according to the load of bullshit Lieutenant Randy Solomon was trying to sell a trio of Homicide dicks when Dain walked in, out in the boonies the bullets and switchblades now were finding their mark with disconcerting regularity.

  Four sets of indifferent cops’ eyes swept over Dain, making professional assessment without interest since no threat was perceived. Three sets turned away. One set remained fixed on him. Staring hard. Harder. Suddenly Solomon broke away from the water cooler gang and went across the bullpen toward him.

  “Jesus Christ! Eddie Dain! Where in the hell…”

  Like Sherman, he moved to embrace Dain. Unlike Sherman, he was attuned to physical rather than intellectual threat signs in people and so managed to turn the bear hug into a handshake without embarrassment on either side. He jerked his head at the big office dominating the far end of the room. They went in. His name was on the glass, with

  LIEUTENANT

  HOMICIDE

  under it in capital letters. Randy sat down behind the desk.

  “Congratulations on the promotion,” said Dain. “I didn’t know. Nobody could ever deserve it more.”

  “That’s what all the boys say.” Sherman leaned across the desk and said, “Thanks just a fuck of a lot for all those cards and letters over the past four years. Where the fuck you been?”

  Dain waved a dismissive hand. “Around.”

  “Not around here.”

  Dain shrugged. He leaned forward. There was a whipcord quality to the movement, as if he could pluck a fly from the air with his bare hand if he wished.

  “Hospitals, mostly. Here you know about. Stanford. Arizona. The Big Apple. Even Mexico.”

  “That’s a lot of hospitals.”

  “There was a lot to fix,” said Dain.

  Randy said darkly, “Got a hunch wasn’t just double-ought buckshot that hurt you, Hoss.” He gestured. “But you look like these days you could knock down a bull with a good right cross.”

  Dain was silent. Randy leaned back in his swivel chair and locked his hands behind his big square black head and chuckled.

  “What ever happened to Shenzie the wonder cat?”

  “Older but no wiser. I left him with Marie’s folks down in La Jolla while I was…” He stopped, considering his word. “Recuperating. I brought him back up with me when I came back.”

  “They glad to see you?”

  “Their daughter’s dead. Their grandson’s dead. I’m still alive. Would you be glad?”

  “Fuck ‘em they can’t take a joke,” said Randy without heat or apology. He paused. “So you’re stay in’ a while.”

  “Foreseeable future.”

  The cop in Randy made his face and eyes get elaborately casual. “Plannin’ on doin’ what, exactly?”

  “What I did before. Private-eye stuff.”

  Randy suddenly got up and went to the door and made sure it was shut, then came back and leaned his butt against the edge of the desk, so he could speak in lower tones than his usual pane-rattling decibels.

  “It’d be my ass the department knew, Eddie, but these four years I been looking. Not every day looking, y’know, but… Anyway, I got a sort of a hint that maybe a guy down in L.A. ordered that hit. But shit, Hoss, you gotta go dig him up you wanta do anything to him. He died two years ago.”

  “Mario Pucci,” said Dain. Randy stared at him for a long moment, then nodded and went back around the desk and sat down again. Dain went on, “Grimes was running dope up from Mexico for him in his powerboat. I imagine Pucci wanted him blown up to keep him from talking, and the boat blown up so nobody would find the compartments the dope had been stowed in.”

  Randy opened his arms like a priest giving benediction, but his face wore a puzzled expression.

  “Guess I ain’t tracking, Hoss. If the man’s dead—”

  Dain was on his feet, leaning across the desk to grip Solomon’s forearm with a force that made the big man wince. But Solomon did not try to pull his arm away.

  “The shooters aren’t dead,” said Dain. His low-pitched voice somehow was like chalk on a blackboard. He let go of Solomon’s forearm. He sat down again. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “At least maybe they’re not dea
d.”

  Randy sighed. “One way, I’m glad. It’s what I’d be doin’, was me, lookin’ for the fuckers. But the other way, I ain’t glad, ‘cause I can’t help you. I don’t think anybody can. Pucci was like all these guys now—about ninety percent legit.”

  “Too legit to quit,” murmured Dain.

  “You got that right. If he did have some old-time shooter around for laughs, he’d have him up in Washington State picking Granny Smiths in front of three hundred school kids when the hit went down. What’s that phrase those fuckers in Washington love? Deniability?”

  “Tin mittens,” said Dain.

  Solomon chuckled.

  “I ain’t heard that one since I was a kid. My grandfather used to say it.”

  “I had a lot of time to read a lot of old detective novels while I was recuperating,” said Dain. “Who would Pucci use?”

  Some cop’s hardness came again into Solomon’s face. “You ain’t gonna make the same mistake twice, are you, Dain?”

  “I’m not going to make any mistakes at all.”

  Solomon nodded. “Good enough. Somebody good, it’d be, from one of the families back east. Contract guys, fly in, bang! bang! fly out the same night. With Pucci gone, you got nobody to pressure. They’ll of been paid out of some corporate slush fund somewhere with only Pucci knowing what they were gettin’ paid for. May as well chase a fart in a whirlwind for all the chance you got of finding “em.”

  “That’s the way that I had it figured, but I had to ask.”

  “What now, Dain?” He had started to say “Eddie,” but somehow the name didn’t fit any more.

  “Dialing for dollars. I got a lot of medical to pay off.”

  Dain stood up. He seemed quite recovered from the emotional turmoil of a few minutes before. He stuck out his hand to Solomon. They shook.

  “Thanks, Randy. For everything. Now and four years ago.”

  “Shit,” said Randy. He brightened. “Handball?”

  “I’ll call you,” said Dain.

  Randy stared at him for a long moment. “Sure you will, Hoss,” he said.

  He walked Dain to the door of his office. Stood there watching him thread his way out of the room between the desks.

  He went back and sat down. Heavily. And sighed.

  7

  His first commission didn’t come until three months after Sherman had started acting as his go-between. Six months before, a drug-money courier had skipped with the cash he had been carrying between New York and Chicago. Dain found him in two days on the Caribbean island of Curacao, and had a lot of sleepless nights over the man’s unknown fate.

  But it got him a rep. What cemented it was a Mafia don’s private pilot who had testified against his boss and had gone into the federal Witness Relocation Program two years before. In seventeen days, Dain found him on a fishing boat in Alaska.

  After that he had more of his curiously specialized work than he could handle, and in the intervening months had really become much more the image he projected: harder, colder, more indifferent to the fate of those he found. Still plenty of sleepless nights, but not over them. They were all scum. Just not the scum he was seeking.

  Then, a year later almost to the day, Dain’s game began—although he didn’t know it at the time.

  It was 9:01 a.m. in Chicago on a bright glary summer morning headed toward the century mark by midday. An early-thirties man went into the First Chicago Bank of Commerce on South Wacker a few blocks from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He was slender, weak-chinned, bespectacled, suited, carrying an attache case. His eyes were close-set, which weakened the face even more.

  He went to the window with SAFE DEPOSIT BOXES over it. Unlike the tellers’ windows, there was no line. Holding a key in his hand, he fidgeted until a round-faced girl in a frilly blouse came over to use her twangy Midwest accent on him.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  He displayed the key. “Six-two-three-eight.”

  The teller riffled the signature cards. Took one out.

  “Adelle Lorimer or James Zimmer are authorized to—”

  “James Zimmer—obviously.”

  His chuckle was so nervous it was almost a cough. She compared his signature with that on file with the bank, then pushed the buzzer to let Zimmer into the vault area. They went through the double-key ritual. Zimmer shut himself into one of the private cubicles with the long oblong green metal box. As he opened both it and his attache case, he had to wipe sweat from his face with his display handkerchief.

  From the box he took a dictionary-thick sheaf of bearer bonds. From the attache case, a much smaller stack of bonds. Laboriously and individually he checked their numbers against the larger stack, winnowing bonds from it until apart from the original he also had two small stacks that were, bond for bond, identical. He substituted new for old, returned the doctored sheaf to the not-so-safe deposit box, put the originals removed from it into his attache case.

  Zimmer emerged from the bank moving briskly and with confidence, case in hand. Starting to cross a quarter block short of the crosswalk, he had to wait for a grimy Cicero bus to pass. A tip-nosed Irish meter maid following the bus and blue-chalking tires from her three-wheeler yelled at him.

  “Hey—you!” She revved her engine beside him a couple of times. “Didja really think you could get away with that?” Zimmer stared at her through spectacles that, luckily for him, darkened in bright light so she could not see his wide and terrified eyes. “Didja ever hear of crosswalks?”

  “No, I… I mean, yes, sorry, Officer, I was just…”

  But she was gone. The minute hand of a big wall clock on a brick building across the street jerked solidly forward to 9:24. At the corner he crossed with the light, turned right, trying to regain his casual, jaunty stride; but the encounter had left the hand holding the attache case white-knuckled with tension.

  He looked around rather furtively, then ducked into an alley. A kid carrying a cardboard tray of Styrofoam cups had to make a matador-with-the-bull move, the cover came off a cup to slop hot coffee over his wrist.

  “Jesus Christ, man, why don’t ya look where ya…”

  Zimmer, oblivious, scuttled down the midblock alley at the far end of which a dirty and dented five-year-old red Porsche was parked facing the street. A lush-bodied platinum blonde in her mid-twenties, exotic as a tropical bird, was adding blood-red lipstick to full, sensual lips by the tipped-down interior mirror. Her dark and magnificent eyes were almost obliterated by too much mascara and liner, but even so she was vivid, alive.

  A swarthy short-order cook came from a greasy spoon’s kitchen door to dump something into a garbage pail with a nasty splashing plop, and the passing Zimmer leaped two feet in the air. The blonde shook her head at his antics in the driver’s side mirror, pressed a Kleenex between her lips to blot them.

  Zimmer got in beside her and put his attache case on the floor. Now that danger seemed past he was high on excitement, a hell of a fellow.

  “Smooth as fucking silk.” His lips curved around the dirty word his squeaky voice didn’t quite fit.

  “My mighty hero of romance,” she said lightly.

  Her irony was lost on Zimmer. He leaned over to kiss her. She pushed his face away with the back of her hand.

  “What’s the matter with you, Vangie?”

  “What’s the matter with you? This was the easy part.”

  Her skirt had ridden up as she worked the pedals, exposing long, beautifully muscled dancer’s thighs in sheer black pantyhose. She tapped the horn twice as she edged the low red car out across the sidewalk. Zimmer, the coolest dude on earth, put his hand up between her legs.

  “In an hour, sweet thing, I’m going to—”

  Vangie slammed on the brakes so hard he bounced off the dashboard, thus effectively removing the offending hand. She glared at him with glacial eyes.

  “Touch me again when I don’t want you to, sweet thing, and you’re going to need a prosthesis to pee.”

 
A black teenager just coming out of a clothing shop with a mop, pail and squeegee heard Vangie’s voice carry through the open window and started to laugh. She winked at him, then goosed it to send the beat-up little red Porsche zipping from the alley mouth.

  Zimmer was angered by the black boy’s laughter. As Vangie skillfully threaded the car through Loop traffic under the cool shadow of the El on Van Buren, he sneered, “No guts, baby? Shit, I did it, while you sat here peeing your pants! I’m—”

  “Just what did you do, Jimmy?”

  “I ripped off two million bucks in bearer bonds from T. J. L. fucking Maxton!” he exclaimed with defiant triumph.

  She looked over at him and her face softened.

  “Oh Jimmy-honey, don’t you get it? When Maxton realizes what has happened here and picks up his telephone, somebody very good at finding people is going to be on the other end.”

  Dain still lived in the modest bungalow in Tarn Valley, but now also leased a convenient loft over a dilapidated pier next to the firehouse on the San Francisco waterfront. The loft had a bed, dresser, wardrobe in one corner, bathroom in another, a kitchen in between. At 8:30 A.M., two hours after he had fallen asleep, the phone jerked him upright out of nightmare.

  Albie’s legs were blasted back down the hall out of sight as the door frame was splintered and pocked and ripped by the edges of the shot pattern

  His shoulders slumped. His eyes became human again.

  “Bad one, Shenz,” he said.

  Shenzie the wonder cat, his head sideways on the pillow and his front paws over the top of the blanket like a sleeping person, got up with a huge jaw-creaking yawn, stretched fore and aft, and stalked off in search of kibble as the phone rang again. Dain had not heard him purr since the day, five years before, when he’d been dropped off at Randy Solomon’s Victorian.

  Dain blew out a big whoosh! of breath, fumbled for the phone with one hand while dashing sweat from his face with the other.

  “Dain.”

  “Sherman here. A call just came for you.”