thought, which in the event was untrue, because as soon as he reached the end of the dock he was shot once through the heart from across the wide channel.
FIFTEEN
'I still say,' said Karp, 'we should've flown back yesterday and made Mosca go with us.'
Fulton, who was checking out the hang of his jacket and the tuck of his sport shirt in the motel room mirror, gave him a look. It was not the first time since their interview with the mobster that Karp had expressed such sentiments, nor the sixth either. It was starting to get on his nerves.
'Will you relax, for Chrissake!' Fulton snapped. 'I should've left you in the office. Look! We're gonna go out now and get in the car, and drive somewhere and have a nice breakfast out on the beach, somewhere where we can get a decent bagel, like you're always bitching about, and then we're gonna drive out to Mr. Mosca's little house and pick him up and if his girlfriend's there we'll look at her tits for a couple minutes, and then we'll drive to the airport and be on the ten-ten flight to National.'
'I don't want any breakfast,' said Karp. 'I want my hands on Guido Mosca. I want his head cradled on my lap. I want him up there in front of the committee, tying Paul Ashton fucking David to Bishop, and to a shooter who looks just like Lee Harvey Oswald and to Cuban shooters who didn't like Kennedy, and to Oswald himself and to whoever this Turm character is. This is the case, Clay. It's coming together-I can feel it.'
'Can I at least get some coffee?'
'Yeah, if you can find a drive-through. And I want you to roll by the window,' said Karp, and strode out of the room.
Fifteen minutes later they were at the house on the canal. The patio was deserted. A slight breeze ruffled the water of the pool. Fulton went to the glass door and rang the bell. After a minute, he rang again and rapped on the door with his knuckles. 'Jerry's a late sleeper,' he remarked.
'I hope so,' said Karp, rapping on the glass himself. Fulton said, 'Keep ringing. I'll check the front.'
Fulton's shout brought Karp running around the side of the house. The detective was at the end of the dock, kneeling over a brightly colored mound. Karp felt his heart wrench around in his chest. He slowed his step. There was obviously no hurry anymore.
'Shot through the middle of the chest at long range,' said Fulton, rising from the corpse. 'Probably from those bushes across the canal.' He looked at Karp and shrugged. 'Okay, I was wrong. Who knew?'
'I'll take that literally. Who did know? The only people I told at the Washington end about coming down here to get Mosca were Crane… and Hank Dobbs. You tell anyone?'
'Hell, no! But you forgot one thing-Tony Bones knew all about it.'
'Yeah, but why would Tony have his own guy whacked? He wants to take over South Florida when Trafficante kicks off. There's no damn reason for him to give us the go-ahead, and then give Mosca the go-ahead to talk to us, if all the time he was planning to kill him. The whole thing is too small-time. We do Tony a little favor, go easy on his kid, he does us a little favor, gets one of his guys to talk to us. It's not serious Mob business.'
'Somebody Tony told, then?' offered Fulton.
'Yeah, and we're gonna have a talk with Tony about that. But what I think is, this isn't a Mob hit at all. This is a guy who likes to stand off and pop people with a rifle.' Fulton thought about this for a while.
'You think the same guys, the Kennedy guys?'
'It's a possible, yeah, and it means somebody's following us. Or knows what we're doing.'
Fulton gestured toward where Mosca's body lay. 'Whatever, we got to call the sheriff.'
'No, call Al Sangredo. Let him call the sheriff and explain the situation here. A little professional courtesy would go down pretty good, and besides, the last thing I want is to get our names involved in a local investigation. Meanwhile…' Karp gave the house a long, significant look.
'We toss his place.'
'You toss his place, Detective. I'm a lawyer. My place is lounging by the pool, contemplating the majesty of the Constitution, and feeling like an asshole.'
Later that afternoon, Karp and Fulton were eating pastrami in Sheffler's, a large, bright, highly chilled eatery on Collins in North Miami Beach. Al Sangredo was sitting across from them, sipping on a cup of coffee brewed at about a third of the octane rating he was used to, and listening to the two of them bring him up-to-date around mouthfuls of greasy pink meat. When they were finished, Sangredo said quietly, 'That's quite a story. I hope you're not holding anything back from the sheriff about this hit. I vouched for you guys and I have to live in this town.'
Sangredo was a big man, six-four, two-seventy. He was a retired NYPD homicide cop who had worked with Fulton for fifteen years in Harlem, a datum recorded in his black eyes, which, under an enthusiastic growth of eyebrow, were hard, suspicious, and intelligent. He had the usual tan of the region and his skin was smooth and relatively unlined for a man of fifty-seven. In a city full of 'Spanish,' he was distinguished by being an actual Spaniard, and he carried himself with the requisite dignity. Fulton assured him that he was not withholding anything germane to a homicide investigation, although he might have had he found anything worthwhile in his quick search of Mosca's house. Jerry Legs was, however, not the sort of mafioso who keeps careful records.
'So,' Sangredo continued, 'you really think it was the Kennedy people did this?'
'It's our working assumption,' answered Karp. 'The question is, what do we do about it. You ever run into a Cuban named Angelo Guel?' He pulled out the photograph of Guel. 'He'll be older, of course.'
Sangredo studied the picture and slowly shook his head. 'It's not a face that sticks in my mind. You think he knows something?'
'I don't know, but I'd like to speak to any Cuban mercenary who was standing on a street corner in New Orleans with Lee Oswald in the fall of sixty-three. Of course, there's no way of telling if he's in Miami or not. We should've asked Mosca if he knew where Guel was. Shit, now there's a million things I wish I'd've asked him, but I thought I'd have plenty of time to pump his brains.'
'So, what do we do?' mused Sangredo. 'I could try to find that girlfriend of his. She wasn't in the house, but she'd been there. She must've taken off as soon as she found the corpse.'
Karp shrugged. He wasn't interested in girlfriends. 'No, it's Guel we need. And this other Cuban, Carrera. And the mysterious Mr. Turm, whatever his real name is. I'm thinking this is the Sylvia Odio team, the three guys who stopped by her house in Dallas right before the assassination and told her they were going after Kennedy. Two Cubans, one named Angelo, one named Leopoldo, and an American named Leon. If Angelo was Guel-God, he even used his real name! — and Leopoldo was Carrera, then we know who Leon was, for sure. Odio IDed that Leon was Oswald to the FBI after the shooting. Mosca must've seen them in New Orleans just before they left for Dallas.'
'Wait a second,' said Fulton. 'The problem with the Odio story was that at the time she got that visit, Oswald was on his way to Mexico-' He stopped. 'Oh, shit!'
'Right,' said Karp grimly. 'It wasn't Oswald in Mexico at all. It was our lookalike-Caballo. He was on the bus, and he made sure that people on the bus remembered him. He's the voice on the tape the CIA sent to the FBI and then conveniently erased. He's the reason why the cameras outside the Soviet and Cuban embassies happened to go down on the day he was there, because even if he's a close match to Oswald, an actual photograph could've been analyzed to show that it really wasn't Oswald. And that, of course, explains how Oswald was identified leaving a rifle at a gun shop, cashing a big check at a little grocery store, going to a rifle range, and driving a car, even though he was other places at those times and even though he didn't know how to drive. Yeah, that was a slipup! Who would've believed that a macho American man couldn't drive a car? No, guys, this is it. This is the case. V.T. told me early on that Oswald was the key, whether he did it or not, and he was right.'
Fulton had been nodding enthusiastically as Karp spoke, and his bloodhound instincts were aroused. 'Okay, then the first thing we got to do is find this Odio woman and flash the pictures we got of Guel and the other people on that film, see if any of them ring a bell.'
'I wouldn't do that,' said Sangredo. They stared at him.
'Why the hell not?' asked Fulton.
'Because the woman's burned out. She's been telling the same story for twelve years and all it's got her is grief. She's had threats from the nutso Cubanos. Every assassination buff in the country wants to show her a
