Sleeping Dogs (49 page)

“His name is Gilbert O’Mally. He has four arrests: grand theft, assault, aggravated assault and a parole violation.”

“That isn’t what I’d figured,” said Jack. “I didn’t think they’d even have him on file.” It was going to take him some time to give this the proper amount of reflection. Elizabeth Waring didn’t look the way he thought she would at all, but she was exactly the way he had hoped she would be. The suspect looked pretty much as he had expected, but nothing else about him was right. “I expected no arrests, no convictions.”

“You were right,” said Elizabeth. “Ten years ago was when this man was serving his time for aggravated assault. He’s a local criminal.” She waited for this to sink in, but Jack didn’t say anything. What was he feeling—disappointment, relief? “It isn’t him. This isn’t the Butcher’s Boy. He’s still out there.”

“I
t’s happening again,” said Elizabeth.

Richardson shook his head. “We don’t think so.” He looked at Hillman, the deputy assistant, for a sign of agreement, but the deputy assistant was staring at something that had besmirched his shirt cuff without actually becoming visible. Elizabeth wondered if this was a rebuff for Richardson’s being presumptuous enough to postulate a “we” that included a deputy assistant attorney general of the United States of America. It was possible; short men were protective of their right to speak for themselves, as though if they were not heard, they would disappear. But Richardson was pressing on. “Martillo worked for Detroit. He was here at the sufferance of Vico, and that sufferance simply wore itself out. Is that hard to believe?”

“Yes.”

Richardson’s lips didn’t quite smile. “The phone company says a call was made on Martillo’s car phone after he was dead. You know who the call went to? Vico.”

“Does Vico have a car phone?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’d know that they list all the outgoing calls.”

“He was caught literally red-handed. The car was found full of blood in his back yard, for Christ’s sake.”

“With three of his own men inside.”

“It was a reprisal. Toscanzio’s people were telling him that he shouldn’t have killed their boy.”

“Okay,” said Elizabeth. “Let me get this straight. You honestly think that Vico had Martillo killed, and then his soldiers called him on Martillo’s car phone to tell him that the deed was done. Then Toscanzio’s people arrived from Detroit and killed the three killers. Then what? Did they put the bodies in the car and deliver them to Vico’s back yard, or did Vico do that himself?”

“Choice number one. They also booby-trapped the fence so that whoever touched it would be electrocuted.”

“Was anybody?”

“Two people, actually,” said Richardson. “Both of them soldiers of Vico’s, and both heavily armed, incidentally, as though they were expecting trouble.”

“And you’re going to try to bring Vico to trial on the basis of this evidence?”

Without warning, the deputy assistant suddenly satisfied himself that he had found the fault on his cuff. He straightened his short arms so that the cuffs would retract into the sleeves of his jacket, then raised his eyes. He never let them move to Richardson, but instead let them gaze into space for a moment, then settled them on Elizabeth. “What do you think happened, Elizabeth?”

“Ten years ago the Butcher’s Boy got into trouble with the Mob. Specifically, Carlo Balacontano hired him, then tried to have him killed instead of paying him. What he did in response was to lash out violently and senselessly, killing several people who had little or nothing to do with the dispute. Since the various families were all suspicious of each other anyway, this created confusion and allowed him some breathing space. What he did with the time he had won was to kill a man named Arthur Fieldston and bury his head and hands on the estate of the man who had betrayed him in the first place.”

“Who was convicted in a court by a jury,” snapped Richardson. “And the conviction held up under appeal.”

The deputy assistant restored silence by staring straight ahead without acknowledging that he had heard Richardson. Then he looked once more at Elizabeth. “And that’s what you think is happening again?”

“Yes. I know he killed Talarese, and I think he killed Mantino and Fratelli. Two of them were creatures of Carlo Balacontano. I think he made an attempt at somebody in Gary, Indiana—maybe Cambria or Puccio—and the policeman, Lempert, got killed in the scuffle. I don’t know what Martillo had to do with anything, except that I’m told he worked for Toscanzio in Detroit, which would add to the mess. I think that Vico didn’t do any of this, and that he’s been framed just like Carl Bala was ten years ago.”

“Here’s the crux,” said the deputy assistant. “It’s Occam’s razor.”

“It is?”

“You have two possibilities. First, that we’re witnessing the periodic internal strife that occurs inside the Mob for the usual reasons of fear and greed, and that they’re using their many foot soldiers to pursue a power struggle. The other possibility is that one man, for no known reason, comes back after ten years and kills lots of heavily armed and protected people in different places in different ways, and then frames still another for some of the killings. One theory is simple and based on familiar behavior; the other is complicated and based on unknown quantities. One is likely and the other is unlikely. No?”

“Not this time.”

“Why not?”

“Because a man like Vico isn’t stupid. You’re accusing him of killing Martillo, which would start a gang war, and then forgetting about it long enough to let the man’s car be delivered to his back yard with his own casualties inside. He doesn’t make mistakes like that.”

The deputy assistant’s face seemed to soften with a kind of paternal sympathy. “You have to look at this logically, Elizabeth. We’re in the business of taking men like Vico off the street. In order to do this, we have to wait until he makes a mistake. When he finally makes one, can we say we won’t prosecute because we don’t believe he’d make that mistake?”

“This time, yes. Because this, all of it, has happened before—ten years ago—and Vico had nothing to do with it.”

“So if what you say is accurate, what the Butcher’s Boy will now do is to use the confusion he’s caused to disappear, possibly forever.”

“I don’t know that, but I do think Vico’s innocent.”

“I don’t think so,” said the deputy assistant. “Logically I can’t think so and still do my job. I’d like to have everyone in this room working on preparing this case.”

It was happening again. Ten years ago the people who had sat in this room had made the decision to believe that the one who had disposed of Arthur Fieldston must be the big, powerful gangster, rather than the solitary killer. Their logic had brought them promotions and public notice, and eventually had elevated them right out of the Justice Department. Now the ones who had replaced them were making the same decision. The Butcher’s Boy was going to disappear again. She tried not to think about Jack Hamp, waiting downstairs to hear where he was going next. Home was where he would be going.

Elizabeth cleared her throat. “I … I’d like to be excused, if I could. I’ve been on loan from my own office, and I’ve got cases of my own coming to trial.”

The deputy assistant looked at Richardson, whose face was expressionless. “I hope it’s not hurt feelings?”

“Me?” said Elizabeth. “No. I think you’re wrong, but I always do my job. It’s just that my regular job is the one I ought to be doing, and I’ve probably been away too long.” She added, “Besides, my son has heard Richardson’s name so many times that he’s been having bad dreams about him.”

T
he Immigration officer at Heathrow Airport studied James Hart’s face, then compared it to the photograph on the passport. The gentleman in front of him looked notably older than the one in the two-year-old photograph. Perhaps it was the fact that he had changed his spectacles, or that he had allowed his hair to grow a little. His flight bag had been vetted by the X-ray machine, his pockets had been emptied, and clearly he was bringing nothing into the country but two thousand American dollars, all declared as required. This Mr. Hart didn’t fit any of the profiles of undesirables. The money was sufficient for him to have a short holiday, but not enough to do anything that was not on. The Immigration officer applied his stamps to the passport: “Given leave to enter the United Kingdom for six months,” which was five and three-quarters months longer than Mr. Hart had said he intended to stay; and the other, “13 September Heathrow (3).” The officer handed the passport back and watched Mr. Hart take two steps away from the counter. He had considered suggesting that Mr. Hart have another photograph taken, but it would have been absurd. The next three people on the same flight from Kennedy would undoubtedly have restyled and dyed their hair and be wearing contact lenses that changed their eye color.

James Hart stopped at the door and looked out at the cool, damp, gray morning, and then ceased to exist. Michael Schaeffer walked out along the asphalt pavement to the red double-decker Airbus and gave his fare to the Pakistani conductor on the steps.

Schaeffer settled into his seat and let the vaguely familiar sights of the ancient western suburbs go by. He liked Hammersmith particularly. It had something to do with the profusion of wet brick that always reminded him of cities in the northeastern United States. It began to rain as they moved into London, and the architectural trophies that the Empire had awarded itself began to appear, all of them old and built on top of foundations that were even older.

When the bus pulled to a stop on the street outside the huge barn of Victoria Station, Schaeffer got off with the others, moved quickly through the doors and down to the tube, looking at nothing and at no one, maneuvering himself into the right stream of people. He took the Circle Line to Paddington Station. When the train came to a stop, he went upstairs, walked over to the BritRail window and bought a ticket to Bath.

“Schubert, Octet in F Major for Strings and Winds, D. 803.” The concert in the Deanery Gardens was exactly what Schaeffer had expected, merging in his mind with a hundred others he had sat through in the ten years in various green spots around Bath. Since they had moved to the north, he had let Meg drag him into York only for an occasional shopping trip. After all, you couldn’t hire somebody to try on clothes for you. But now that life had settled down a little, he didn’t mind concerts. All he required was that they park the car west of the River Ouse, beyond the medieval city walls, so that they wouldn’t have to cross any of the little bridges to get out to the A59.

Schaeffer knew that Eddie Mastrewski would have told him he was crazy. “Are you telling me you’re going to sit here on your ass in the sunshine like a superannuated tortoise listening to a bunch of Germans playing violins? Look at you, for Christ’s sake. You’re practically dead already, because let me tell you they don’t forget. You’re not trying to save your life; you’re just waiting to sell it at the top market price.”

There was an explosion of applause, and Schaeffer added his few pats to the general uproar. He missed Eddie. He still liked to argue with him, and Eddie’s arguments had improved in the years since he had died.

Between concerts he forgot about music, but whenever he went to another concert it felt as though it were continuous, one long book that he was picking up where he had stopped last time. He was learning more about music, but he had trouble associating the dry, meaningless numbers that served as titles with the little tunes that entered his head. He would sit and listen, and by now he could form the themes and changes into complex spatial structures in his mind. But then, amid the obfuscating blare and blast, he would hear a little melody begin to form, tentatively at first and then gradually taking over, until it obscured the rest. Then he would realize that he had heard it before, recognize it like an old acquaintance and feel frustrated. It was as though he had opened the book and read two or three pages before discovering that he had read them already. Once, when Meg had asked him to take her to a concert, he had asked what they were going to play. She had recited a bewildering string of B flat majors and opus 106’s, and when he had said, “What’s that?” she had hummed them to him, one after the other, as though they were popular songs.