picture.'
'You know her?' asked Karp, amazed.
'Not exactly. But I know people who know her. She lives here in Miami, in what they call seclusion. My advice is, get your ducks in a row before you go see her. Find Guel and get a decent picture of him, him and this Carrera, instead of the fuzzy shit you showed me, then go see her. Because you're only going to get one shot at her and it better be right.'
They all thought about this for a while. Then Karp said, 'Okay, let's go for Guel. What'll it take to find him?'
Sangredo considered this in his cautious way. 'Um, well, I'm one guy. I have some contacts with the sheriff and Miami PD. I could run checks.'
'And we have guys in New Orleans and Dallas could do the same thing,' said Fulton. 'But it's going to take some time.'
'Which we don't have,' said Karp. 'Mosca was aced right under our noses. It could happen to Guel too, if we start getting close.'
Sangredo looked at him sharply. 'It sounds like you're saying you guys got a leak up there.'
'It's a possibility,' replied Karp. 'That, or we're being followed. Which is one reason why I don't want you to do what you just suggested. I don't want the cops involved.' He held up a hand against the expostulations of the other two men. 'No, listen! This isn't business as usual. The assassination nuts have made a lot of hay about all the people connected to the Kennedy thing who've died under mysterious circumstances over the years; I'm not saying I'm buying that whole line, but I'll go with some of it, especially after what happened this morning. So the fewer people who know we're after Guel and Carrera, the better.'
'But, hell, Butch,' Sangredo complained, 'if I got to work alone it's going to take years to find the bastards.'
'I didn't say alone,' answered Karp. 'My thought is we should have a talk with Tony Buonafacci.'
They stared at him, stupefied. Fulton stuck a finger in his ear and screwed it around vigorously. 'Hey, sorry,' he said, 'I must be getting deaf. I thought you just said we should bring the fucking Mafia in to look for this potential key witness.'
'I did. No, wait! It makes sense. Tony's going to be pissed somebody whacked a made guy on his turf, one, and two, Tony doesn't particularly like Cubans and he'd be glad to finger one of them. A couple of years ago, when a bunch of Cuban gunslingers were taking potshots at me, Ray Guma sent a material witness in the case down here to Tony and she was fine. So…'
'Damn it, Butch,' said Fulton, 'that's not the same thing. We still haven't cleared up the possibility that the Mob is involved in this thing. We set them loose on this and even if they do find our guys they're just as likely to end up like Johnny Roselli did last summer. They cut his legs off and stuffed him into an oil drum and threw his legs in there too. He was still alive when they dumped the can in the water. You want to work with these assholes?'
'No, but there's Mob and Mob. Look, Tony told Mosca to spill the beans. Mosca did. Did you think he was shitting us? No, me neither. There's a possibility that Marcello in New Orleans was involved in it. Some Cubans who might've worked for Trafficante may have been involved in it. And I bet if we had the old man, Santos, on a hot grill he could tell us a lot about what really went down. But Tony's not connected to that end. He's out of the Bollano outfit in Brooklyn. Marcello's New Orleans, which is part of the Chicago outfit. There's not much love lost between New York and Chicago, especially since Chicago's got the gold mine in Vegas tied up tight. No, if Tony can slip it to Chicago in some minor, undetectable way, he's not going to lose sleep over it.'
'This is incredible,' said Fulton. 'In all the years I worked with you, you always made it a rule not to get in bed with the Mob, and now here you're diving in and pulling up the covers.'
'Oh, that,' said Karp airily. 'That's for a regular investigation, where you're eventually going to do some serious law. What we're doing now is some kind of political horseshit. At this stage I just want to find out who killed Kennedy and how they did it. As for rules-no rules.'
After lunch, Karp called V.T. in Washington.
'Butch, am I glad you called!'
'Why, what's up?'
'I can't find the file. Tell me you took it with you!'
'What file, V.T.? All I have here are the stills from the Depuy film.'
'Oh, God! We've been ripped off! The file with the original Depuy film and documents and the original CIA stuff is missing. The last time I used it was the day before yesterday, and I went to add some stuff to it, and I pulled the phony jacket in the health insurance drawer where we kept it, and it was gone.'
'Who knew where we kept it?'
'Hell, I don't know, Butch,' said V.T. irritably. 'This isn't the KGB. People are in and out of here all day. It wouldn't take a master spy to notice that we always head for the admin files after we use that material.'
'But we have copies.'
'Yeah, sure,' said V.T. 'I had a copy of the film made, and Xeroxes of all the other stuff, one set. I've got it stashed in the-'
'No! Not over the phone. Just keep it safe, for God's sake. Without that film we've got zip.'
'Mmm, I detect new levels of paranoia blossoming. Not that I blame you. Okay, ready for some good news? I think I found PXK.'
'You did? Great, great! What is it?'
'It's a Baton Rouge trucking concern. Right area, convenient to New Orleans and its colorful fascists. It's owned by a gentleman named Patrick Xavier Kelly.
'I'm having Pete Melchior check him out, find out if he knew Depuy, and run his name by the local cops, see if there's any connection to Ferrie or that Camp Street crowd.'
'That sounds good, V.T.,' said Karp, his mood lifting slightly. 'Here's the situation down here. By the way, this is for you, me, and Bert-nobody else.' Then he related the gist of what Mosca had revealed, and what had happened afterward. V.T. was silent throughout this narration, and afterward he made no response but to ask when Karp would be returning; and, after having been told two or three days, he said good-bye and broke the connection, as Karp had expected. V.T. was smart enough to understand that Mosca's murder and Karp's warning meant that there was a leak at the Washington end. Then Karp called home.
Marlene was actually relieved when Karp informed her that he would be away for several days, maybe a week. She felt she needed the time to see if Sweetie was going to work out. Marlene expected a lot of her mate, but even she thought that adding a dog the size of a young bear to the household, that dog being uncontrollable, might be an excessive demand.
But Sweetie, as it turned out, proved more than controllable, and was, in fact, eager to please. Marlene got some dog-training books out of the library and bought a leash and a long line, and she and Lucy devoted an entire day to the first few chapters. We learned 'no'; we learned to go on the leash without jerking Mommy off her feet; we almost learned 'down'; we learned 'come,' which is easy, but we failed miserably at 'stay,' which is hard. We also learned our name is Sweetie. We got to eat a cubic foot of kibble, and rode to the store in the back of the VW hatchback, and did a good deal of face-licking and general running around. Heaven.
'Let's knock it off, honey,' said Marlene to her daughter as the four o'clock sun began its descent into the trees.
'Is Sweetie trained now?' asked Lucy.
'Um, well, we made a start. We'll do some more tomorrow.'
'Could we, could we train him to bite bad people, like on TV?'
'It's a possibility,' said Marlene cautiously. 'Do you have any bad people in mind?'
'Yes, Jeremy,' said Lucy in a low and menacing voice.
'Jeremy Dobbs? But he's just a little boy. I thought you liked him.'
'I hate him. He broke my pink crayon. On purpose!'
There followed a discussion of criminal intent and the nature of just punishment, which Marlene thought went pretty well, and they drove back from the park where they had been running the dog to their apartment. The mention of Jeremy Dobbs had raised in Marlene's mind the problem of what she was going to do with her new monster while she worked at Maggie's. Maggie had no dog, and Marlene suspected she was a cat sort of person, and one who would not appreciate Sweetie being given the run of her lovely gardens, winter or not. Even Marlene
