The Junkyard Dog (Jimmy Flannery Mysteries Book 1) Page 5

  "You know about her?"

  "Why would I not know about somebody dies by violence in the Twenty-seventh, Jimbo? It's like you should ask me would I know if there's a corpse in my parlor."

  "I did what I could. She had nobody ."

  "There was also a young woman. Helen Caplet."

  "You know about her, too?" I says.

  He wipes his weeping eyes. "Oh, yes, I know all about the poor misguided girl who was foolish enough to be in such a place when some overzealous Christian made a miscalculation."

  " 'Miscalculation'?"

  "Well, you don't suppose anybody was trying to kill a pregnant waif, do you? You don't suppose somebody had it in for a nice old Jewish grandmother?"

  "Somebody cut the head off the cat which belonged to the nurse who works in the clinic part time," I says.

  "A cat is not a person, is it, Jim?" he says. He's dropped the "Jimbo" and is being avuncular. "We got to keep these things in perspective. Now, let this matter rest. Go on to other things. And, remember, I'm always here to help."

  "On the subject," I says, "maybe you can help me with the case of the widow of a fireman named Warnowski who . . ."

  ". . . was drunk . . ."

  ". . . was a loyal employee of the city for one month short of thirty years . . ."

  ". . . and wrecked his goddamn car and busted a light pole."

  ". . . and died trying to avoid a cat in the road."

  "Who says so?"

  "There was a witness," I says.

  "I didn't know that."

  "Even a man who knows everything can't know everything. Not about a thing like a cat, begging your pardon," I says.

  "So what do you want?"

  "Full pension for his widow."

  "Well, I don't know. Where do you draw the line? A man dies thirty days before full retirement, and you make an exception, so the next thing you know another man leaves forty-five days, maybe sixty days before retirement. Maybe ninety. Who's got the case? Does everybody got a case? Besides, Warnowski was a drunk."

  "I don't know if that's written down anywhere."

  "But he was a drunk?"

  I don't confirm or deny.

  "You know how the citizens is up in arms about drunk drivers these days."

  "As well they should be," I says.

  "Well, then," Delvin says, as though that is his entire winning argument.

  "Warnowski comes out of the Polish working class, like you and me come out of the Irish working class," I says. "What did we grow up with? A man was expected to be a heavy drinker. If he was a heavy drinker, as long as he don't beat the wife or neglect the kids, everybody says, 'Old Stash, old Paddy, can really put it away, but he never beats the wife, he never neglects the kids, and he never misses a day's work because of the drink."

  "You got a sweet tongue, Jimbo. My God, you're Irish."

  So old legends about what the Irish are like, and the Jews are like, and the blacks are like, just keep on rolling along, because I don't want to have a discussion about stereotypes; I just want to win my cause.

  "Well," Delvin says, "I mean, thirty days. What's thirty days?"

  "Four weeks," I says.

  "One month," Delvin says.

  So we now got it down to a practical minute. "All right," Delvin says, "I see what I can do."

  "And maybe a citation?"

  "A what?"

  "Not a medal, but maybe just a little citation signed by his grand ward leader."

  "How the hell do we get to where we're honoring the sonofabitch?"

  "He kept a police radio in his car. He could've heard a call and was rushing to the firehouse to do his duty even though it was his day off," I says.

  Delvin looks at me with real admiration. "By Christ, Jimbo," he says, "you can sure pile it high."

  I found out from some back copies of the Chicago Tribune that Asbach's staying at the Essex House Hotel. I go over there and find Harry Chickering, who is the house detective.

  "Do you want my marker?" I says.

  "I'd rather have fifty bucks," Chickering says. "But that depends."

  "On what?"

  "On the favor you want for me to do you."

  "I want to get into a room."

  "Not to steal?"

  I don't even bother to answer. There's not a soul in the city who knows me who doesn't know I wouldn't steal a pin. I hand him a folded twenty.

  "Give me the key and the number. The name is Joe Asbach."

  Chickering has no faith. He unfolds the bill.

  "I don't want to buy the room," I says. "I just want to look at it."

  "Three-oh-five. I'll take the twenty, but I've got half a marker on you."

  Chickering is the kind who always collects a little extra. How do you call in half a marker?

  I go into Asbach's room. He's a very neat person. His papers are all tucked away in a briefcase that opens up into an expandable file. I find his Chicago membership list. It's typed out except for three names at the bottom. Two of them are women. The other is a man named Gino Ciccone who lives on the West Side in Vito Velletri's Twenty-fifth.

  The phone rings and I lift it up.

  "Asbach's on his way up," Chickering tells me. "Now you owe me a full marker."

  I'm standing in front of the elevator when the door opens and Asbach steps out. At first he looks startled, then self-satisfied.

  "I come to get that name," I says. "I heard you was out on bail."

  "Well, you can whistle for it," he says. "I'm not out on bail. I'm out clean."

  "The cops believed your alibi? They believed your witnesses?"

  "There's no case against me."

  "Are these witnesses anyone I maybe would know?"

  "The witness is a young lady I doubt you would ever have occasion to meet."

  "Are you staying in town?"

  "Maybe I'll stay, maybe I'll go. I'm a respectable citizen with the right to come and go as I please. The police didn't even warn me about leaving town."

  "Then I hope you're staying," I says, "because it ain't over with us."

  "Oh, yes it is. You're so dumb you don't know enough to fall down and roll over when you've been shot."

  NINE

  I've got no appetite for Dan Blatna's kielbasa and cabbage.

  "Are you in love?" my old man says.

  I jump like he stuck me with a hot nail. It's only just that minute I think maybe that Mary Ellen is more to me in one night than any other woman's ever been to me in a month of Sundays.

  "I got a little heartburn," I says.

  He grins into his cabbage. "She's not Irish, is she?" he says.

  "You got an eye like an eagle."

  "So, what is she?"

  I don't want to tell even my old man the story, not because it would put a mark on Mary Ellen, but because you tell a story to me and I take it with me to the grave unless you say otherwise.

  So I only says, "She is half and half."

  "What's the other half?"

  "Hebrew."

  "Well, all Irish or not, I know the right goods when I see it. Now that you know what I already knew, you can eat."

  He's right. My appetite comes back. Also I start thinking about other things except the funny feeling that was fooling around my heart which I thought was indigestion but which I now find out is love.

  "You'll do something for me?" I says.

  "Favor for favor?"

  "Whatever," I says.

  "Ask me."

  "You know every fireman in the city?"

  "It was my calling."

  "Will you ask the boys at the firehouse what answered the alarm to the clinic what kind of bomb it was? How big? Where it was planted?"

  "Why don't you ask them? Only one company rolled on that one, and it's in your precinct."

  I'm not all that quick to answer.

  "It's that way, is it?" my old man says. "Who's doing the stone-walling?"

  "Delvin called me in for a talk."

  My old man is th
oughtful.

  "Joe Asbach walked out of the police station with out a leash," I says. "He's home free and there's not even a good beginning to the instigation yet."

  "You know what it could be? It could be Delvin don't like what they do at that clinic so he gives this Asbach a pass."

  "I don't like it either, but I don't think it's any of my business. Neither do I think it's any of Delvin's. One way or the other way, though, nobody should get away with setting a bomb."

  "Delvin ain't got any kids of his own. He's got a soft heart for kids. When you was little, every time he sees you he gives you a quarter."

  "He laid the foundation of my fortune," I says.

  "Don't crack wise with your old man when he's giving you reasons why."

  I fold my hands and look polite like I did at the table just before Sunday dinner while my mother—God love and keep her soul—said grace.

  "Maybe Old Man Delvin thinks about it and sees every one of them little kids what will not get born like it could be one of his own kids that never was."

  "The way the story goes, it was his own fault he's got no kids."

  My old man looks at me like he used to look at me when I did something to break his heart with disappointment when I was growing up. He never had to look that way often, and he ain't looked at me that way in years.

  "Bite your tongue, Jim," he says. "This ain't the charity I taught you to hold in your heart. There's not a human being alive who ain't made a mistake or two every day of his or her life. Most mistakes ain't much—you get over them quick—but some mistakes you got to pay off forever."

  "Does that mean Delvin does penance by turning his head when somebody tries to close down an abortion clinic the way they done?"

  "No. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it. I'm saying if Delvin called you off it's because he knows—"

  "'Called me off?'" I nearly shout.

  "—things you maybe don't have to know . . ."

  "I ain't a dog. Two people is dead," I says. "That is a mistake I think somebody should pay for."

  "You're damned right. I'm just saying, for the minute, give your boss the benefit of the doubt and show him a little trust and loyalty."

  "Are we talking one good house dog to another?" I says.

  My old man gets quiet all over. It's something he does like a cat arches its back. His eyes look so blue I expect little bolts of lightning to flash out and hit me between the eyes.

  "I was never anybody's house dog," he says. "I was the mayor's man. I was never a mayor's man. I was never Daley's man. I don't want you should be a dog. I do want you should be loyal."

  After the speech, he sticks his fork in a sausage.

  "There's maybe another thing to this," I says.

  "What that?"

  "Maybe Delvin, maybe somebody else, maybe several somebodies, has relations with that girl, Helen Caplet. Maybe they pass her around like they pass around the name of a new restaurant what just opened up. Maybe she plays with a good many big men and maybe she's got ambitions. Maybe she's using the games what she plays with these old men for a handle to put on the squeeze. Maybe the abortion is part of a blackmail payoff."

  "And maybe you want to change human nature," Mike says, like he wants to snap my head off.

  "This dinner's on me," I says.

  "You don't got to buy me. I ain't going to stay offended."

  "I just want to pay for good advice."

  "In that case I'll have another whiskey."

  After a minute I says, "You don't mind talking to the firemen? Just to satisfy the old curiosity?"

  "It won't hurt," my old man says.

  TEN

  "You're petting me like I'm a cat," Mary Ellen says. "Any minute I'm going to purr."

  "You got' skin like kid leather," I says.

  "So, now I'm a glove," she says, teasing me.

  "Oh, Mary Ellen," I says, taking her hand, "you're the whole outfit."

  "You're a sweet-talking sonofabitch," she says. "Hey, don't use that expression," I says.

  "Oh, James, it wasn't meant."

  "I know that. It's just that people get so careless the way they use words."

  She lays on top of me and puts her mouth on my mouth. "Listen to what I say, James. Look into my eyes so you know how true these words are. You brought me back to life, Flannery."

  "What's that you say?"

  "You crept into my heart."

  "What's that?" I says, like I can't hear too good.

  "I'm in love with you." She stares at me nose to nose. "Say it, you son of a saint," she says, "or I'll bite your nose off."

  "I want you should move in with me," I says. "I got a flat with three rooms and a bath and a half."

  "I get the bath and you get the half?"

  "Except I'm caught short," I agree.

  "What kind of bed?"

  "King size."

  "I get the right side, you get the left?"

  "What is this, a contract negotiation?"

  "That comes later," she says. "This is for openers."

  "Whatever you want, I agree to," I says.

  "Don't," she says, "I don't like everything to come so easy."

  She brings some of her things to my flat, but not all of her things. She's ready to try, but sleeping in my bed instead of hers don't mean we're handcuffed together yet. She's more wary than I am. I like it. Because if she wasn't I probably would have took back the offer.

  The first morning we're sitting at the breakfast table like a married couple, Stanley walks in. He stands there staring at Mary like she's made of sugar. I get up and check the door. I took the night chain off when I ran down for a pint of milk and the papers, and didn't put it back on, but the Yale is still on the catch. I go back to the kitchen and Stanley's still standing there checking Mary out.

  "How do you do that?" I says.

  Stanley looks at me.

  "How do you walk through locked doors, Stanley?"

  He won't cop, but just looks at me like he's telling me that even the third degree cuts no ice with somebody as tough as him.

  Mary's looking at him like she thinks he's adorable.

  "Stanley, this is my friend, Mary Ellen Dunne."

  Mary sticks out her hand.

  "How do you do, Stanley?" she says.

  "'Ho, May'en Dunne," he says. Then he looks at me and says, "Don't kid me, Jimbly, she ain' you fwen, you wucking her."

  That evening my old man stops by to tell me about what he found out at the firehouse, and he sees Mary has moved in. For a minute I wonder is he going to get ditsy about us living together without benefit of wedlock. All parts of a man don't grow the same speed with the times.

  "You shouldn't wonder and you don't have to ask," I says. "Marriage is not yet an issue."

  "Don't be old-fashioned," he says. "This ain't the thirties."

  What he's got to tell me about from the firemen is nothing much. The pipe bomb was homemade. It was constructed mostly of heads of kitchen matches packed tight and was set off with a rubber band and some sandpaper. It was supposed to produce more light and noise than damage, but the pipe was old and corroded inside, so it busted all apart like a grenade.

  So, I don't know much, but a little. Enough maybe to run a bluff on this Ciccone, who's one of the newest members of Asbach's crusade. I leave Mary and my old man gabbing away like a pair of old hens.

  Ciccone lives in the back of a candy store. Somebody's working a pinball machine.

  "Isn't that something?" I says when he opens the door and a wall of wet heat hits me. "I ain't heard one of them things for a long time. Everything's lasers and zaps nowadays."

  "Is that what you bring me to the door to tell me?" he says.

  He's a skinny little guy, with ears like a jug and a head already going bald, though he can't be any older than me. He's in his underwear.

  "I won't lie to you," I says. "I come to talk to you about what happened over to the abortion clinic on Sperry."

  "So what about it?
You a cop?"

  "You know what my father used to say when I stood in front of an open door? 'What do you want to do, heat the outside?' he'd say."

  "Your father was some comedian," he says.

  "My father's still alive," I says. "He's an old friend of Vito Velletri. Ask me to come in."

  "I got nothing to do with Vito Velletri," he says, but steps aside and lets me come in.

  A young woman, thin as a bone, half-dressed in a slip, is sitting in a sprung overstuffed chair staring at a color television set that costs the rest of the household furniture put together. Her eyes flick at me and then she goes back to the set.

  The place ain't big, but it still has the empty feeling of an abandoned warehouse or a railroad station toilet. The only pictures on the wall is religious: a bleeding heart wrapped in thorns, a Christ hanging on the cross looking ga-ga with pain, another picture of just His face with closed eyes that, when you look at them hard enough, open up and scare you half to death.

  It's so hot and wet in the flat they could sell tickets to a steam. I take off my coat and hat.

  "You're not staying," Ciccone says.

  "That's right," I says, "but I don't want to melt on the rug. Something wrong with the furnace?"

  "The damned thing's right behind that wall," he says.

  The wall's stained and dripping like it's raining inside.

  "It heats the whole god-damned building, but the pipes what deliver it are right behind that wall and the pipes leak," he goes on.

  There's a lot of running around overhead. I glance up. The busted chandelier is even swinging a little.

  "You got a zoo up there?" I asks.

  "Got a whorehouse," the skinny woman says. "That's why it's got to be so much heat. They running around bare-assed all the time." She don't look at me while she delivers this information.

  "My wife don't know what she's talking about," Ciccone says. "She thinks she's a comedian, too."

  "You buy a lot of matches?" I says.

  "What in the hell is that supposed to mean?"

  "You know the kind I mean? The kitchen matches with the blue-and-white heads."

  "Sure I know the kind you mean. I don't need kitchen matches. What for would I want kitchen matches?"

  "To light your stove."