Christmas preparations on her shoulders.
At least he hadn’t left his two Organized Crime Task Force inspectors in the lurch. Yesterday they’d broken a ring of Asian car boosters who had been plaguing the malls during the last-minute Christmas rush. The Asians stole Christmas presents from parked cars and returned them to the stores where they had been purchased to get cash refunds. If the store refused to refund, they kept and later fenced the goods.
A cruising Danny Banner saw two of them crowbar an auto trunk at the Stonestown mall, was behind them when they were refused cash for their plunder and went to store the stuff. He called Dante, baby-sat the drop house until Dante got there with the warrant.
When they went in, they got five of the ring, with more to come as the busted ones started to sing. A major coup for his task force, and after getting back from the raid, Dante had been up to his ears in processing paperwork until just before his mad dash to SFO for the eleven-thirty red-eye to Newark.
Now he was turning up the snow-covered drive to Mae’s Place, yawning with fatigue but driven by the same obsession that had sent him to Minneapolis after Spic Madrid had been killed. His tires spun briefly on the ice-slick surface; the coating of new snow over everything was kind to the joint, but it still looked tawdry in the bright cold December sunshine.
The local police had long ago come and gone, the feds had come and gone; none of them had found a damn thing giving them any lead to the identity of the man whom Mae’s girls had dubbed the P.W. Dante was there only on sufferance, because of a phone call to the local feds from Rudy Mattaliano, his convention-buddy federal prosecutor in Manhattan.
Mae turned out to be a blowsy overblown perfume-drenched broad with glittering fingers, glittering eyes, and a chest you could eat lunch off of. Dante was talking to her in the bar of her roadhouse, a funky ornate intimate room with red plush on the walls and lushly painted nudes of surprising quality above the bar. She was so hostile he knew it had to spring from fear; he could see it glinting in the depths of those glittering eyes.
“You know I don’t have to tell you a fucking thing, cop!”
Dante made a great display of checking around his belt. “Shit,” he said, “I left my rubber hose back in San Francisco.”
She cracked a little grin in spite of herself, jerked her head toward the back of the bar.
“I got coffee-nothin’ stronger while we’re closed down.”
Around them the roadhouse was silent as a tomb. He was sure the girls were moving around upstairs, but he couldn’t hear them. Mae, he knew, would soon reopen. Such sops to public conscience were bad for business, and she obviously had something heavy on the local power structure.
Dante made the thick black coffee blond and sweet, took a big gulp. “Why the red carpet for me all of a sudden, Mae?”
“You’re the first one didn’t look at me like I was shit on a stick.” She gave a big belly laugh that reminded him of Tim’s. “I’m insulted they didn’t try’n’ look down the front of my blouse while they were trashin’ me.”
Dante looked, bugged out his eyes. “Wow! Dolly Parton!”
Tears suddenly came into her eyes, impatiently wiped away with the back of a bejeweled hand. “Thanks, even if you’re shittin’ me. I miss the little fucker, is the thing.”
“You guys go back a ways?”
“Christ, almost forty years.”
“Then you just gotta have a few ideas who wanted him dead.” He added almost diffidently, “It ties in with a dead woman I got out in San Francisco that I figure maybe Popgun did.”
“Listen, he was retired from all that stuff years ago! He was an old man, for Chrissake! He sold wholesale meats!”
Dante stopped her with a palm-out traffic cop hand.
“Hey, Mae, I gotta ask, he was the best in his day. I was just hoping you knew how he stood with the boys these days.”
“Hell, top of the heap! Why the night he got it…”
Mae stopped herself abruptly. Dante didn’t even try to follow up on it. He didn’t want to let her know he had caught anything significant in her stifled sentence.
“So there was no reason for them to put out a hit on him.”
“Not a fuckin’ reason in the world.”
“Somebody from years ago, getting even?” mused Dante. “Trouble with that, the guy was so damn patient. Waiting around two, three weeks-”
“Fuckin’ freak, is what he was!” she burst out bitterly. “Comin’ around with his Soo Li shit…”
“Soo Li?”
She told him about the P.W.’s coming, his strange habit of seeing if each girl was some lost love named Soo Li.
“He scared me-and now see what he’s done!”
Leaving, Dante went downstairs to find Old Mose in the basement, tending a water heater that didn’t need tending.
“Don’t want to talk to me, huh, old-timer?”
“Jus’ doin’ my job, boss,” said Mose vaguely. “Yassah, dat’s de troof, jus’ doin’ Old Mose’ job. Pow’ful lotta work.”
“Ashcan the Amos and Andy, Mose. I know you liked the guy. But he’s a bad dude, going around killing innocent people-”
“People like Popgun Ucelli?” The Stepin Fetchit was gone from Mose’s voice. “Then I say, give that man a medal!”
He had Dante there. They chatted for half an hour about the great old blues men of Mose’s youth whose 78s Dante had grown up on because his grandfather had been a “race record” fan. Pegleg Howell, the Atlanta street singer who made twenty-eight sides between ’26 and ’29; Jaybird Coleman out of Gainsville, eleven sides in about the same years; Blind Willy Johnson, thirty sides, the best bottleneck guitarist of his day…
Mose extended one of his shattered claws to shake Dante’s hand when they parted, then called after him.
“Whatever that fat woman upstairs tell you, that Popgun was still doin’ people.” The faded brown eyes suddenly blazed with joyous light. “I’d wish you luck, Mist’ Stagnaro, but that wouldn’t be the truth. P.W. done me a mighty big favor.” Mose held up his claw. “Was Popgun Ucelli did this to me, nearly thutty years ago.”
Old Mose shuffled closer.
“Thutty years, then here come that P.W., take care of that little chore for me. When they laid Popgun to rest, I be taken me to the cemetery, had me a little dance on his grave.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Dante drove back toward South Orange’s urban sprawl through the bleak, snowy landscape. What was he to make of Mae’s slip of the tongue, old Mose’s insistence that Ucelli had still been working? Had Popgun aced all of them? None of them? Some? Why was he hit? To keep him from talking about what he had done? Or to keep him from talking about what he hadn’t done?
Dante had no idea of how to get to Raptor, even less idea of how to get to who had hired Raptor, but he was starting to get a pretty good idea of why. Somebody in Martin Prince’s arm of the mob wanted to move up or was trying to keep somebody else from moving up. As Tim had surmised, Moll Dalton had known something, probably unwittingly, that had placed her in the way of that grand design. If Lenington had been used in setting up her hit, he would have been a potential danger to be eliminated.
By this scenario, the first real target had been Spic Madrid. Solidly ensconced in four northern states, ambitious, ruthless, building a power base. Had just gotten elevated to the board. Had he let his ambition show too much at the Vegas meet?
Dante stopped at a truck stop called the Highway on the outskirts of South Orange. A low flat building with gas pumps out in front, the slush-covered blacktop lot crowded with semis from all over the country, some puffing
