The Fools in Town Are on Our Side (51 page)

“Jesus Christ!” a wire-service man said.

“Would you call that a crime wave, Chief?”

“I would, but I'd rather have a crime wave than a race riot and that was the choice we had to make.”

“What's been the total take so far?”

Necessary looked at me. “Close to a quarter of a million,” I said.

The wire-service man said Jesus Christ again.

“The mayor says you're more interested in protecting blacks than you are in protecting whites and their property.”

“The mayor's sick,” Necessary said.

“What's wrong with him?”

“Ask his psychiatrist.”

“Has he got one?”

“If he doesn't, he should.”

“He says he's going to call the National Guard in.”

Necessary smiled and circled his ear with a finger. I watched the cameras zoom in on that for a close-up and then I rose and said, “That's it, gentlemen. The press conference is over.”

“Hey, Dye,” a wire-service man called to me, “You think the mayor's nutty?”

“As peanut brittle.”

“Can I use that?”

“I hope you do,” I said.

It was nearly 5
P.M.
before the call came from our man who was watching the Lee-Davis Hotel. “They're coming out now,” he said, his voice tinny over Necessary's desk telephone speaker.

“How many?” Necessary asked.

“I counted thirteen.”

“Schoemeister with them?” Necessary said.

“He's in the first car. They got three cars.”

“Okay,” Necessary said.

“You want me to follow them?”

“No,” Necessary said. “We know where they're going.”

He switched off the speaker and looked at me. “How long's it take to get from the Lee-Davis to that old house of Lynch's?”

“Fifteen minutes,” I said. “Maybe sixteen.”

He nodded. “You'd better tell Ferkaire that I want every ambulance in town there in forty-five minutes.”

“When'll we get there?” I said.

“When do you think?”

“In about forty-five minutes,” I said.

Carol Thackerty came in a quarter of an hour later and told me: “I didn't know any place else to go.” She looked at Necessary. “I saw you on television, Homer. You came over well.”

“I know,” Necessary said. “Sincere.”

“Extremely,” she said.

“I wonder if it'll go network?” he asked.

“Why?” I said.

“Well, I'd just sort of like the wife to see it.”

The second call came from a plainclothes detective that we'd stationed in a house across the street from the Victorian one that Ramsey Lynch had once occupied. It was now home for Giuseppe Luccarella and nearly two dozen assorted friends.

Necessary turned on his desk telephone speaker again. “Okay, Matthews,” he said. “We just want you to tell us what you see—not what you guess. I'm not going to interrupt with any questions except this one: You know what Schoemeister looks like?”

“He's the one with the mustache and the funny looking lips.”

“That's right. It's all yours now.”

“Well, there's not a hell of a lot to see. Sometimes one of them will come out on the porch and look around and then go back inside. I figure that there're maybe a couple of dozen of them in there—at least that's what I counted since I've been here and that's been since ten this morning. Luccarella got here about noon, I guess. I haven't seen him since. Wait a minute. There're some cars coming down the street now—three of them. They've stopped in front of the house now. About four guys in each car—maybe five in the back one.

“It looks like Schoemeister in the front car getting out on my side. Two guys are getting out with him. One of them's got what looks like a pillowcase. He's waving it around and he seems to be yelling something
at the house. Let me get the window open and maybe I can hear what he's yelling.”

We could hear Matthews' grunts over the phone speaker as he tried to open what must have been a stubborn window.

“I got it,” he said. “He's yelling for Luccarella to come out. That they want to talk. The pillowcase must be some kind of a truce flag or something. Anyway, they're still waving it. Now somebody's coming out of the house—a baldheaded guy. He's carrying some kind of white handkerchief or something. He's yelling something about halfway— that they'll meet halfway.

“I guess that's okay with everybody. The door to the house is opening and it looks like Luccarella—let me get the glasses on him. Yeah, it's Luccarella. Schoemeister's moving around his car now—the two guys with him. One of them's carrying the pillowcase. They're on the sidewalk now and Luccarella's at the porch's screen door.”

We heard it then. It was the long crack of a submachine gun. “Oh Jesus Christ Goddamn sonofabitch!” Matthews moaned over the speaker. “Jesus Christ! Oh, God!”

“Quit praying and tell it!” Necessary snapped.

“They shot ‘em. They shot all three of them. Luccarella dove back through the door and they used a submachine gun and they got all three of them. I mean Schoemeister and the guy with the pillowcase and the other one. Schoemeister's guys are firing at the house now and a couple of them are dragging Schoemeister back to the car. The one with the pillowcase is crawling back. They shot the baldheaded one on the steps. He was one of Luccarella's. I think he's dead. I know goddamned well Schoemeister is. They're dragging him into the car and still firing at the house. Aw, Christ.”

Necessary didn't seem to be listening anymore. He was busy strapping on an open holster that held a .38 caliber revolver. When he was through with that, he reached into his desk drawer, brought something out and offered it to me. I just looked at it. “It's a gun,” he said. “A Chief's Special.”

“I know what it is,” I said.

“You may need it.” He gazed at me curiously. “You know how to use it.”

“I know.”

“Then take it, for Christ sake, and let's go.”

My hand moved toward the gun and an hour or so later I was holding it and when I looked at it, that was all that it was, a gun. I dropped it into my coat pocket.

“Just you and me?” I said.

“That's right, Dye, just you and me.”

 

 

By the time we got to the old Victorian house eleven ambulances jammed the
street and their white-coated attendants were wandering around looking for someone to cart off to a hospital—or the morgue. A crowd of around two hundred or two hundred and fifty persons had formed and they were all telling each other what had happened. One of the ambulance attendants spotted Necessary and pushed through the crowd toward him.

“I can't find anything or anybody, Chief,” he complained in a whining, nasal tone. “Everybody says they heard a lot of shots and there's sure as hell a lot of blood on the sidewalk, but there's nobody dead. There's not even anybody sick.”

“Must have been a false alarm,” Necessary said.

“With all that blood?”

“That's right,” Necessary said, “with all that blood. Now tell the rest of those ambulances to get on out of here.”

The attendant shrugged and disappeared into the crowd. We pushed through it and made our way up the walk, skirting the bloody spot where Schoemeister must have died. I wondered if the man with the white pillowcase had been his oldest sister's kid, Marvin.

I let Necessary do the pounding on the door. It was opened cautiously
by the man called Shorty. He grinned when he saw who it was and opened the door wide. “Worked out real nice, didn't it?”

“What worked out nice, friend?” Necessary asked.

“Yeah. Well, come on in—he's expecting you.”

We followed him into the stiff parlor where the man from New Orleans with the squeezed-together face wore the broadest smile he could manage. There was a magnum of champagne on the coffee table. Samuels, the lawyer, was fiddling with its cork.

“Just in time,” Luccarella said happily. “You just made it for the celebration.” He nudged Necessary in the ribs. “The way you got rid of the cops out in Niggertown. That was something, Chief, really something, let me tell you.”

“There could have been a riot,” Necessary said.

Luccarella snuffled. “A riot,” he said. “I thought it was a real riot when I saw old Schoemeister's face. You should've seen it—it was really something.” He turned to Samuels. “Give the chief a glass of champagne. We're gonna celebrate, by God, because it all worked out so nice. It worked out so nice that I even sent all the boys back home except what you see right here.”

There were six of us in the room now. Necessary, Luccarella, Samuels, the man called Shorty, and another one whom I didn't know and didn't particularly want to meet. He leaned against the wall across from me and smiled pleasantly at everything.

“I haven't got time for champagne, Mr. Luccarella,” Necessary said.

“What do you mean, you haven't got time? And what's this mister shit? You don't have to call me mister. I don't like it that you should call me that.”

“You're under arrest for the murder of William Morze, Mr. Luccarella,” Necessary said just as Samuels popped the cork out of the champagne bottle. The lawyer looked up quickly. The man across the room from me stopped smiling. Luccarella's face colored—a bit purplish, I decided. Necessary raised a small, typed card that he'd palmed and started to read Luccarella all about his rights. Then he looked at Samuels and said, “Does Mr. Luccarella understand these rights?”

Samuels nodded slowly. “He understands them.”

“Let's go, Mr. Luccarella,” Necessary said, reaching for the man's arm. Luccarella danced away, his mouth working furiously, but making no sound.

Finally he stopped dancing around and pointed a finger at Necessary. “You crossed me, you sonofabitch!” he yelled. “You swore you wouldn't and you crossed me. I didn't have nothing to do with killing any Morse or whatever his name is. You goddamned well know I didn't. You're putting the frame on me, Necessary, you and that slick buddy of yours.”

Necessary turned to Samuels again. “Maybe as his lawyer you should inform him of his rights and make sure that he understands them.”

“I don't think—” Samuels made a helpless gesture with his hands and moved away from the champagne bottle and toward the door to the hall. He looked around once frantically and then darted through it.

“Let's go, Luccarella,” Necessary said again.

“No, by God! It's a frame. I got friends—I got friends just like anybody else.” He hurried over to a small desk and yanked open a drawer. He pawed through it and almost got the revolver out, but Necessary moved over quickly and slammed the drawer on his hand. Luccarella screamed and sank to the floor, clutching his injured hand. Necessary reached down, got hold of an arm, and yanked him to his feet. Luccarella squirmed loose again and danced over to the man by the wall, the one that I kept watching.

“Shoot him, goddamn you! Kill him!” Luccarella was screaming now. “You saw what he done to me!” The man looked at Luccarella and then at Shorty who stood near the door. They nodded at each other. The man against the wall came up with his gun and I shot him twice and then turned and shot Shorty once. Then I looked at the gun for what seemed to be a long time and laid it carefully on a table. Necessary had his revolver out now and was looking around, as if for someone to shoot. He aimed it at Luccarella.

The thin man's face contorted and his mouth worked and he
screamed again. No words, just sounds. His analyst wouldn't have liked those sounds. Luccarella jerked open his coat and held it wide from his chest as he stumbled toward Necessary, still screaming. Necessary slapped him hard across the face and it stopped screaming and lost its distortion. It just looked old and crumpled now. “You shoulda shot me,” he muttered. “You shoulda killed me.”

Necessary turned to me. “You all right?”

“Sure.”

“You didn't bring any cuffs along, did you? I forgot to bring any.”

“You shoulda shot me, you sonofabitch,” Luccarella said. He was whimpering now and I thought he sounded very much like William Morze.

“No,” I said, “I didn't bring any cuffs.”

“Christ,” Necessary said, “I wish I'd thought to bring some cuffs.”

The crowd outside the Victorian house had grown by another hundred persons or so when we came out the front door and walked down the steps that led from the screened-in porch. I pushed my way through the crowd and Necessary followed, his left hand clamped on Luccarella's right arm. Necessary had his gun out and clasped firmly in his right hand. Someone in the crowd wanted to know who the guy in front was and somebody replied that he was with the FBI and then someone else wanted to know why the FBI man didn't have no gun like the chief of police had.

We were halfway to the Imperial when Necessary yelled: “Look out, Dye!” I turned just in time to see him. He was coming at me fast, the familiar triangular-bladed knife held in the acceptable style and I remember thinking that he knew all the tricks that I knew, and then some, and that there wasn't one goddamned thing I could do about it but watch. So I did and, fascinated, heard the sound of the two shots and watched the twin holes appear in his vest. Just above the Phi Beta Kappa key. It was Carmingler. The one they sent when they sent their very best.

He stumbled backwards and dropped the knife and looked down
curiously at the two holes in his vest. He didn't touch them. He looked at me and there was surprise and, I suppose, sorrow in his face. I remember thinking that he looked like a sorrowful horse. His mouth worked a little, but no words came out. He lurched toward me then and there was nothing else to do but try to catch him before he fell.