Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery Page 6

  “Wait,” Peter Crimmins said.

  The lawyer stopped and turned.

  “This witness. I don’t care what you have to do. What it costs . . .”

  The lawyer was suddenly very uncomfortable. His hand went to his belly and he rubbed the spot where presumably his sumptuous breakfast was being digested. “You want me to—”

  “Find out who he is.”

  “And?”

  “Just find out,” Peter Crimmins whispered very softly as if every lampshade and picture frame in the room contained a microphone.

  Chapter 5

  “HE’S LYING,” DONNIE Buffett said into the telephone.

  Detective Bob Gianno said, “No doubt about it.”

  “What he did,” Buffett continued, “he bent down and looked into the car from just three feet away . . . No, not even. One foot away. If he says he didn’t see anything he’s lying.”

  Gianno said, “All he’s gotta do is talk and the case’s a grounder. Nothing to it. A hose job.”

  Buffet said, “You’ll keep on him?”

  “Oh, you bet, Donnie boy. You bet.”

  They hung up. Buffett’s stomach was growling regularly but he didn’t feel hungry. They were giving him something from a thick plastic bag, a clear liquid that dripped into his arm. Maybe glucose. He wondered if that was a good idea, because glucose was sugar and before the shooting he had been meaning to lose a few pounds.

  He thought about the doughnut and coffee Pellam had brought him. Was it just last night? Two nights ago? It could have been a week. Why was Pellam lying about seeing the killer’s partner? Afraid probably.

  The door pushed wider open and a doctor came into the room. He was a compact man, about forty, with thick black hair. Trim, with muscular forearms, which made Buffett think that he was an orthopedics man. Buffett loved sports, all kinds of sports, every sport and he knew jock docs; they were always in good shape. He pulled a chair close to the bed, sat down and introduced himself. His name was Gould. He had a low, pleasing voice.

  “I guess I met you before,” Buffett said. “You operated on me?”

  “I was one of the neurosurgeons, yes.”

  Gould lifted the chart from the rack and flipped it open. He skimmed it, set it down. He leaned forward and, with a penlight, looked into Buffett’s eyes. He asked the policeman to watch the doctor’s finger as it did figure eights then to extend his arms and touch his nose.

  Donnie Buffett did as he was told.

  The doctor said, “Good.” Which did not mean good or anything else, then he asked, “How you feeling, Officer?”

  “Okay, I guess. My shoulder stings.”

  “Ah.” He examined Buffett’s chart again and he examined it for a very long moment, it seemed to Buffett.

  “Doctor . . . ?” Buffett’s voice faded.

  The doctor did not encourage him to continue. He closed the metal cover of the chart and said, “Officer, I’d like to talk to you about your injury, tell you exactly what happened, what we did. What we’re going to do.”

  “Sure.”

  “You were shot in the back. Several slugs hit your bullet-proof vest. They were small—.22-caliber—and shattered right away. A third bullet hit the top side of the vest. It was deflected but it grazed your scapula, your shoulder blade. That’s the pain you feel there. It’s a minor wound. We removed the bullet easily. There’s some risk of sepsis—that’s infection—but the odds are that won’t happen.”

  Gould was taking out a pen, a fancy gold and lacquer pen, and was drawing what looked like the lower half of a skeleton on the back of a receipt.

  “Donnie, three of the bullets hit you below the vest. They entered here, that’s where the lumbar region of the spinal cord joins the sacral region. One shattered and stopped here.” The pen, top replaced, was now a pointer. “The other two lodged in your intestine but missed the kidneys and bladder. We removed all the pieces of lead. We’ve repaired the damage with sutures that will absorb into the tissue. You won’t need any further surgery, unless we have a sepsis situation.”

  “Okay,” Buffett said agreeably. He squinted and studied the diagram as if he’d be tested on it later.

  “Donnie, the bullet that shattered—it entered your spinal cord here.”

  Buffett was nodding. He was a cop. He had seen death. He had seen pain. He had felt pain. He was totally calm. His injury couldn’t be serious. If it were he’d be hooked up to huge machines. Respirators and jet cockpit controls. All he had was a tube in his dick and an IV that was feeding him fattening sugar. That was nothing. No problem. He felt pain now, a wonderful pain that ran through his legs, playing hide-and-seek. If he were paralyzed he wouldn’t be feeling pain.

  “Donnie, we’re going to refer you to a Dr. Weiser, one of St. Louis’s top SCI neurologists and therapists. SCI, that’s spinal cord injury.”

  “But I’m okay, aren’t I?”

  “You’re not in a life-threatening condition. With upper SCIs, there’s a risk of respiratory or cardiac failure . . . Those can be very troublesome.”

  Troublesome.

  “But your accident was lower SCI. That was fortunate in terms of your survival.”

  “Doctor, I’ll be able to walk, won’t I? The thing is, my job, I’m a cop. I have to walk.” He lifted his palms as if he were embarrassed to be explaining something so simple.

  “Uhn, Donnie,” the doctor said slowly, “your prognosis is essentially nonambulatory.”

  Nonambulatory.

  “What does? . . .” Buffett’s throat closed down and he was unable to complete his question. Because he knew exactly what it meant.

  “Your spinal cord was almost completely severed,” Gould said. Buffett was looking directly into his eyes but did not see any of the intense sympathy that was pouring from them. “With the state of the art at the present time I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about it. You won’t walk, no.”

  “Oh. Well. I see.”

  “Officer, you’re very lucky. You could easily have been killed. Or it might have been a quadriplegic situation.”

  Sure, that’s true.

  Gould stood up. The chart got replaced on the bed, the doctor’s nifty pen went back into his shirt. “Dr. Weiser is much more competent to talk about your injury than I am. You couldn’t ask for a better expert. A nurse will be coming by to schedule an appointment later.” He smiled, shook Buffett’s hand. “We’ll do everything we can for you, Officer. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  It was several minutes later that Donnie Buffett said, “No. I won’t,” and only then realized that the doctor was no longer in the room.

  PHILIP LOMBRO HAD this habit. He would polish his shoes at least twice a day. He kept a big horsehair brush in his desk at work and a smaller pig-bristle brush in his attaché case, along with chamois squares. Sometimes he would polish the shoes three, four, five times in a single day. He used Kiwi a lot. His favorite, though, was Meltonian. Crème à chaussures.

  He had no obsession over the shoes themselves—he owned only seven pairs—and he did not have a foot fetish. (He was not even sure what a foot fetish was or what somebody with a foot fetish did.) What he liked was shiny shoes and the process of getting them that way. Putting your feet into newly polished shoes was a regal feeling.

  This morning he sat in the office of Lombro & Associates in downtown Maddox and absently ran the brush over his oxblood wing tips.

  The office was in the shadow of a huge redbrick building that had started life as Maddox Omnibus and Carriage Company and had become, through the generations, Maddox Electric Automobile Company, then the Maddox Clutch Company, and recently the Maddox Machinery Division of Fujitomo Limited.

  Several stiff brush bristles became dislodged from the brush and fell to the floor. Lombro bent down and picked them up, then flicked them into the waste-basket. He wiped his fingers with a spit-moistened Kleenex. Outside the window, a piece of newspaper floated past and vanished. Lombro stared at the sides of the Maddox Omnib
us Building. Lombro remembered, from ten years ago, the Reporter photo of a young man who killed himself by jumping off one of the factory’s huge smokestacks. Wearing a suit, he had died crumpled in the roof of a delivery truck. It enfolded him like a blanket.

  This was what the Maddox Omnibus and Carriage Company Building signified for him: death. And this thought, in turn, led to Ralph Bales.

  Lombro had met Ralph Bales at the wedding of his sister’s daughter. Lombro, never married, regretted that he’d never been a father; nieces and nephews in the St. Louis area became surrogate children. He doted, he spoiled them, he took them on outings. He was more astonished than their parents to see them become adults. When his brother-in-law could not pick up the tab for the girl’s wedding Lombro himself paid for the function.

  One of the guests had been Ralph Bales and what caught Lombro’s attention was that Ralph Bales had brought a gun to the wedding.

  Late in the evening, Lombro, standing at the urinal in the men’s john of Orsini’s restaurant, was aware of someone entering behind him and going into a stall. He then heard a clunk of something falling and glanced under the door. A hand was quickly retrieving a pistol. Lombro washed his hands quickly and left the men’s room. He waited outside, hiding behind a plant, to catch a look at the intruder. A few minutes later Ralph Bales emerged, slicking back his thinning hair with damp hands. Lombro didn’t know what to do. A friend of a friend on the groom’s side, Ralph Bales had been invited, true, so he probably was not a robber. On the other hand, Lombro felt responsible for the safety of his four hundred guests.

  Finally, after an agonizing half hour of indecision, Lombro had walked up to Ralph Bales and, as the children were cutting the cake, struck up a conversation. He learned that Ralph Bales had grown up in St. Louis. He was orphaned young—as Lombro had been—and had made a career of various riverfront jobs. They talked careers, real estate, making money, losing money. Ralph Bales mentioned, vaguely, unions and shipping companies and waterfront services and Teamsters. He lived in a house not far from Lambert Field. He enjoyed working in his garden. Lombro did, too, he said, though he hated the sun.

  Ralph Bales said he loved the sun.

  Lombro was satisfied that the man represented no danger and said good-bye. Ralph Bales touched him on the arm in a special way and offered his card. “You say you’re in real estate,” he said with ambiguous significance. “If you ever need any security consulting, let me know.”

  So the card, Ralph Bales, Consultant, was filed away in Lombro’s Rolodex. He thought he might have a need for a consultant at some point.

  A month ago, he had.

  And now, as he put the shoe brush away in his bottom drawer and vacantly watched the papers blowing outside the windows of his office, he foresaw that the transaction that arose out of that wedding might have been the only serious mistake he had ever made in his life.

  “Okay, kind of a problem,” Ralph Bales now said.

  Philip Lombro listened, his head immobile, eyes moving slowly around the face of his visitor.

  “He snuck up on us, the cop.”

  Lombro said, “There was nothing you could’ve done?”

  Ralph Bales was deferential to clients. He didn’t roll his eyes or sigh. He said, “No, he came up out of the blue.”

  Lombro opened his desk. He pulled out a thin envelope containing $25,000. He handed it to Ralph Bales.

  Ralph Bales said, “Thank you.”

  Lombro nodded.

  Neither man seemed grateful, or pleased, by the exchange.

  “How much of a problem is it?” Lombro sounded reasonable. Men like him tend to stay calm when they have problems.

  Ralph Bales chewed on the thin lip that was cut into his round, padded face. “Well, you don’t want to shoot a cop. Whatever happens, you don’t want to do that.”

  Lombro’s eyes settled on Ralph Bales’s naked upper lip. He realized the mustache was gone.

  “I’m not being, you know, cute,” Ralph Bales continued. “The cops don’t get mad when you kill a DA witness because witnesses are scum. When the cops get mad is when you shoot a cop.”

  “And?”

  “And there’s some things we have to do.”

  “Such as?”

  “Okay, we’ve got to find the guy that saw us.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy walked into me when I got out of the car. The one with the beer.”

  Lombro lifted one ankle to his other knee and touched his heel absently then rubbed it.

  “He saw me,” Ralph Bales said. “And he saw you.”

  “They might not find him, the police.”

  “No, that’s—”

  Lombro continued an argument that seemed to reassure him. “Why would he volunteer? Why would anyone do that?”

  “He might not,” Ralph Bales agreed. “But some people are funny. They do weird things.”

  Lombro said, “The way you’re talking, it sounds like you’ve decided something.”

  “Excuse me, it isn’t really a decision. I mean, we don’t have a choice, okay?”

  Hit Man Shoots Cop in Back. The newspaper sat prominently on Lombro’s desk. Ralph Bales had been wrong. There was no photo of Vince Gaudia’s body. Just the shot policeman’s wedding picture.

  “I don’t like this at all.”

  “With all respect, Mr. Lombro, when you—” he looked for words that weren’t too incriminating “—take on a project like this there are potential downsides. Okay? Like you buy a building and find out it’s got termites or something. It just happens. You can’t run away from it.”

  “The woman, too. You killed the woman.”

  “Stevie tells me that was an accident. Gaudia pushed her in front of him.”

  Lombro was nodding. “I don’t care much about her. She knew the kind of bastard she was getting involved with.”

  Outside the window a blackbird settled on the top of a brick facade. The bird’s nervous, glossy head flicked about. It shot into the sky in a gray streak.

  Ralph Bales said, “We did the job for you and there was a glitch. But the fact of the matter is, I don’t live here and Stevie Flom don’t live here but you do. And so this glitch, it’s sort of your problem.”

  Lombro considered this speech unemotionally. “What are you proposing?”

  “I can drive out of here now and you can take your chances. Or you can pay me to take care of this guy, too.”

  “No, absolutely not.”

  “Then . . .” Ralph Bales let the word float through the room like a puff of cigarette smoke. “There’s another option.”

  “What? Go on.”

  “Maybe I could find him. Threaten him. Scare him a little.”

  “Would that work?”

  “It usually does. But I don’t want to do it. It’s a lot riskier than just, you know, taking care of him.”

  “You want more money. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. It’s just a question of risk. Ten thousand and he’s dead. Twenty thousand and I find him, put pressure on him.”

  “Twenty?”

  “What do you want me to say? Nineteen ninety-five?”

  Lombro did not speak for a moment. He gazed at the newspaper, then closed his eyes and flipped his hand forward in a gesture of frustration. “All right.” He looked at Ralph Bales. “But I want your word that you won’t hurt him.”

  Ralph Bales frowned. “You didn’t say you didn’t want him hurt.”

  “I mean,” Lombro said, “you won’t kill him, will you?”

  Ralph Bales nodded and, looking straight at Lombro, said, “Of course not. I told you I wouldn’t.” He had found that when you look somebody in the eye, they will believe anything you tell them.

  THE CAR CRUISED past the camper slowly. By the time Pellam was out of the kitchenette and at the window it had turned off of River Road and was gone. He remained at the window, looking out through the blinds, which he now noticed could use a good clean
ing.

  Maddox offered no night parking and Pellam was forced to keep the camper in this pathetic trailer park. The owners, Annie and Fred Bell, advertised fifty hookups and during some prior vacation seasons they might all have been used. But that would have been before the cement plant went in next door and gouged out five hundred yards of idyllic riverfront grassland, replacing it with bunkers and steel docks. The Bide-A-Wee trailer park was currently occupied by John Pellam’s Winnebago and two clusters of tenters who were obviously—and understandably—tired of the picturesque view of Ochner Cement & Stone and were packing to leave.

  At first Pellam had not much cared about the emptiness. But that was before he was a witness in a murder case. Well, a sort-of witness. Now he wished for a little more anonymity. He looked at his watch. It was only 11:00 A.M. but he had already seen or heard four—no, make that five—cars slow as they cruised past the trailer court. He suspected the occupants were not checking out the Bide-A-Wee for upcoming vacation sojourns in Maddox but were more interested in him.

  Another car now stopped directly in front of the trailer. It was a beat-up old sedan, its fenders attached with gaffer tape. The driver was a shadowy form behind a grease-stained window. The condition of the car told him that this was not the cops come a-calling again.

  Pellam, who had been hacking away at the impossible crust of burnt chili, dried his hands and walked to the front of the Winnebago. He opened a map compartment beside the front door. This tiny space did contain maps, probably thirty of them, all limp and seam-torn. It also contained a Colt Peacemaker .45-caliber pistol. It had a steel barrel and rosewood grips. He lifted the gun out and thumbed open the cylinder cover.

  Pellam put the pistol on half-cock, loaded five of the six chambers, then eased the hammer down on the empty slot. He slipped the gun into his waistband, pulled on his bomber jacket and left the camper, striding toward the car.

  Why did everybody in Maddox have somber cars?

  The driver—Pellam did not recognize him—was a man of about forty with a square face, eyes staring evenly at him. Pellam had hoped that he would see Pellam coming to confront him and burn rubber to escape.