“Lieutenant,” said a voice behind him. Delamo turned and saw a young patrolman named McElroy coming toward him with a woman. He had sent McElroy around the neighborhood to knock on doors and ask the neighbors the usual “Was it two shots or ten shots?” questions, but he had done so principally to give the kid a chance to pick up his second wind. McElroy had been held over for this mess after working a twelve-hour shift which had, according to his sergeant, included a twenty-minute wrestling match with a particularly nasty pair of drunks, followed by a gruesome car accident on the Father Baker Bridge in which a family of four had been roasted in their station wagon, and he was beginning to get that peculiar look where he was forgetting to blink his eyes regularly.
“Lieutenant? There’s someone here,” said McElroy. “This is Miss Elizabeth Waring of the Justice Department.”
“Thank you, McElroy,” Delamo said. He looked at the woman. She was very young, he decided, then changed his mind and revised his estimate to the middle thirties. “We haven’t met, have we?”
The question took Elizabeth by surprise. Then she realized he must be assuming she had come from the Buffalo office. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I just flew in from Washington.”
Now Delamo was surprised. “How did you get here? How did you know?”
“I was expecting something like this, so I was waiting for the right sort of report to come over the wire.” She couldn’t wait any longer. She tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice, but she had to know. “Have you confirmed that it’s Angelo Fratelli?”
“I don’t have to confirm it. I’ve seen him before.”
She could hear the annoyance in his voice, but she couldn’t allow herself to think about him yet. “Then it’s the third.”
“The third?” Delamo asked. His face was flattening into an exaggerated expression of incredulity, so there could be no question that she would interpret it correctly.
Of course, she thought. How could he know? “A week ago a man named Antonio Talarese was killed in New York. He was an underboss watching things there for Carlo Balacontano while he’s in jail in California. Two nights later, Peter Mantino was killed in Santa Fe. He was the family’s western regional boss. I haven’t had time to find out what he was doing in Santa Fe. And now Fratelli.”
“Miss uh—Waring. I’m a simple honest-to-God policeman. I’ve got to confess that I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I assume you do. I know who Carl Bala was—or is—but that’s about it. If you people knew that there was a war on, why the hell didn’t you say something?”
It was starting to feel to Elizabeth like one of those moments when cops made suspects admit things they hadn’t known they were accused of. “I still don’t know anything about a war. I think this is somebody we heard about from an informant ten years ago, and I think he’s alone. He’s a killer for hire that people call the Butcher’s Boy—no real name, no record, not even a description. One of the witnesses says that’s who killed Tony Talarese in New York. We know he was somewhere in the West when Mantino was killed.”
“So who hired him?”
“I don’t know if anybody hired him, and I don’t know what it’s about. The others were from the Balacontano family, and Fratelli wasn’t.”
“So what am I supposed to expect—a couple of hundred new faces from Chicago or New York moving in and carving up Fratelli’s estate?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think that’s what it’s about.”
Delamo took a deep breath, let it out slowly and then said it anyway. “You people don’t have a whole lot of useful information, do you?”
Elizabeth wondered if he would have said that to Jack Hamp. It wasn’t that another man would have punched him, but there was something about her being a woman that made it easier for them to behave like this. If she answered the same way, she would be a bitch. She explained patiently, “There are too many things happening at once. Some of them are contradictory, others are meaningless and some are probably fake. In any case these people don’t always make long-term plans and stick to them. When they feel threatened, they lash out at somebody, and when they see an opportunity, they take it.”
Delamo sighed. “Come on. You might as well see what we’ve got.”
He walked her over to the grove of trees and stopped where the yellow police tape was stretched from tree to tree. He pointed to the three body bags. “This one is Fratelli. Shotgun blast to the head, took off the top of the skull. Ditto this one. He was a bodyguard named Salvatore Gamuchio, age thirty-eight, twenty years of rap sheets for strong-arm robbery, extortion, assault, et cetera. He was carrying a submachine gun in his coat and a pistol in an ankle holster, neither one fired. This one over here is a puzzle. He seems to have a broken neck. The coroner will have to tell us how that happened. No identification. One of the guys said he looks familiar, but so far we can’t place him.”
“All this happened here? In the park?”
“Yeah. Lots of calls from people living around here—loud gunshots, yelling, the whole bit. Units in the area responded, but this is a big park, and by the time they could sweep it with lights nobody was standing up anymore, so the patrolmen didn’t find them until they walked the area on foot.”
“Have you figured out … how?”
“I think some people over there in the trees shot them with shotguns. With the exception of this one. How he died I can’t imagine.”
Another voice came out of the darkness behind them. “Lieutenant …”
He turned toward it in a leisurely way. “Yeah?”
“We found a shotgun over there in the bushes.”
“Anything interesting about it?”
“No, sir. Twelve-gauge Remington pump. Not sawed-off or anything.”
“I know I don’t need to say this, but be careful with it. I’d sure like to get a print off it.” As the patrolman walked away, Delamo turned to Elizabeth. “I guess that eliminates looking for a man with a shotgun.”
“Lieutenant?”
As Delamo turned in the other direction, Elizabeth had a sense of what a Homicide lieutenant’s life must be like. They would bring him items one after another, and he would evaluate them and sort of put them into his pockets. “Yeah?”
“They just called in with the IDs on the other ones.”
“And?”
“The two on Grant Street were Fratelli’s too. The house was owned by the old man they found in the river.”
“Thanks,” Delamo said, then turned to Elizabeth. “I think your theory’s starting to look a little weak.”
“Why?”
“Well, there’s an old black man we found in the river about suppertime with a thirty-eight bullet in his head. It seems that two other guys got killed in his house. With one or more shotguns. Then you got Fratelli and Salvatore Gamuchio, and this other guy who got his neck broken. All in the space of about three or four hours. It’s a lot of work.”
“Lieutenant,” came another voice. “We got some more blood way over there.”
“Get a bunch of it on slides,” Delamo said, “and then look for some more bodies. I think we’re going to have to drag the damned lake as soon as the sun comes up.”
“I think there may be some way to drain it,” said the voice.
“Find out. Call the Parks Department.”
“Right.”
Delamo turned back to Elizabeth. “I guess that once again the ‘lone gunman’ theory doesn’t hold up.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I don’t care who this no-name-no-description guy is. It’s pretty unlikely that he came in ail by himself and wasted six-plus men in at least three locations in three different ways in one night, And if he came here because he hated Angelo Fratelli, he would have killed Angelo Fratelli. He wouldn’t have killed three men who worked for Fratelli first. Do you disagree with that?”
“I’d have to know what he was thinking to answer that.” Oh, God, she thought. I’m only a few hours behind him, and this man is sending the police to look for a gang while he wastes time convincing me.
