‘What do you see here that’s stranger Sharky asked The Nosh.
‘Well, he’s got no criminal record. So why the package?’ They reread the telex.
‘He’s right,’ Friscoe said. ‘Why would they have his prints on file’?’
Sharky tapped on his coffee cup with a spoon, lightly, a rhythmic tattoo that accompanied his thoughts.
‘It’s a cover,’ said Friscoe. ‘It fits. It’s hand in glove. It makes sense. It’s the
‘A cover,’ The Nosh said.
‘Damn right,’ said Friscoe. ‘This shooter, whoever the fuck be is, he did a turn for the Feds and they fixed him up. He musta been in hot with the mob so the Feds give him Howard Burns and a whole biography to go with it.’
‘And then something happened and he had to drop out again, only this time he did it so even the Feds thought he was gone for good,’ Sharky said.
‘And showed up here,’ Livingston said, ‘not two weeks later.’
‘Okay,’ Friscoe said, ‘now I got a little something. What I got is dessert, buckos. Something that makes it all go down, so it ain’t so hard to swallow. You remember Twigs tellin’ us Riley bad a coupla John Does to keep him busy down in the icehouse?’
They nodded.
‘Well one of these John Does was dug outa the city dump yesterday. And it wasn’t no accidental John Doe. What I mean is somebody went to a lotta trouble to make him into a John Doe, like blowing up his face with a shotgun and removing both his hands.’
‘Jesus!’ Papa said.
‘Yeah, ain’t it a pretty picture? What makes it. . . the reason, see, why we’re maybe interested is that what really put this stiff on ice was a .22 bullet that was soaked iii garlic.’
He leaned back, satisfied at having brought something to the party at last.
‘And,’ he added, ‘the illustrious Mr. Grimm says this stiff got kayoed around the end of October sometime.’
More silence, then a babble, everyone talking at once. Sharky held up a hand. ‘Hold on,. hold on. Shit, we sound like a bad church choir here. Let’s add it up, see what we got. Barney, sum it up for us.’
‘Okay, we got a Mafia shooter goes underground with the help of the Feds. On October twentieth subject the same wraps a tree around his car and goes up in smoke. His wife I.D.’s him with dental plates and plants him. Ten days later this Burns or whoever pops outa the toaster in Atlanta and puts the freeze on victim number two, fixes up the stiff so it can’t be identified and plants him in the city dump.’
‘How come Victim Two?’ Sharky said.
Friscoe shrugged. ‘Somebody burned up in the car on the outskirts of Omaha.’
Sharky whistled between his teeth. ‘I missed that one.’
‘Okay. So then six, seven weeks more pass by and this same Howard-Whoever-the-Fuck.-He4s..Burns comes outa the woodwork again and dumps Domino. The question ls, why? Why? That may be the toughest donkey of all to pin a tail on.’
‘Why don’t we just take it to the Bureau? Tell them this Burns dummied up his own death, came here, and wasted two people already,’ Sharky said.
Friscoe shook his head. ‘I veto that one. For a lotta reasons. First place the Feds don’t really give a shit about our problems unless there’s something in it for them. Right now this is a local problem, so they don’t stand to make an brownie points by bustin’ their ass tryin’ to help us. Also, i this son of a bitch was in the Feds’ alias programme, it’ take an act of fuckin’ Congress to get anything out of them All they’ll do, is come in here hot-shittin’ around and the next thing you know, Riley, D’Agastino, the fucking Bat everybody in the goddamn world’ll be in on it. We took it this far, let’s take it all the way. What the hell, we got our nuts in the door jamb anyway.’
Sharky had been toying with an idea. Now he threw it out to the machine. ‘This is a long shot, okay. I know that going in. But just supposing this shooter was in the service in World War Two. He’s the right age for it. His prints could be in the inactive file.’
‘Wouldn’t the Bureau have cleaned that package, too?’ Livingston asked.
‘Why?’ said Sharky. ‘They didn’t need to. The Bureau created Howard Burns. But, when I was in military intelligence there was a couple of times when we turned up an ID in the old files. The FBI doesn’t have it all.’
‘I say we try everything,’ Papa said. ‘You never know when something’s gonna work.’
‘And you got the kalibash to get in there, right Sharky?’ Friscoe said.
‘I’ve got a couple of good pals out at Fort McPherson in the intelligence unit there. What’ve we got to lose?’
Friscoe rubbed his hands together. His weariness was temporarily replaced by a surge of adrenalin. He had expected a few bunts, but the four of them had actually bit a couple of long balls.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘tuck this in the back of your minds while you’re out there. This John Doe, here’s what Twigs gave me on him. And remember, Riley’s workin’ on him, too. And Riley ain’t gonna stop until he knows chapter and verse on him. Anyways, John Doe was five-ten, a hundred and fifty-five to sixty-five pounds, black hair going grey, in his late fifties. A very hard guy in good physical condition. Has two old scars down here, just under his ribs, one in front, one in back. Twigs says It’s an old gunshot wound, could go back thirty years.’
Sharky said, ‘Same age as the shooter.’
‘Just about,’ said Friscoe. ‘Also he was suffering from some respiratory ailment. Bad lungs caused by inhalation
