Hooligans

  Looking back on it, he was right. Maybe we were just jinxed from the start. That Saturday that changed my life, I was going wide to the right with Teddy in front of me and I made one of those hard stopping turns I had become known for. The foot hit wrong. I could hear the ankle go before the pain knocked my back teeth loose. It sounded like a branch cracking. All I remember after that is the backfield coach staring down at my face, saying, "Shit! So much for this halfback."

  I got the letter from Chief Findley while I was still in the hospital. "Too bad, son," it said. "Keep the car. Doe sends her regards." The pink slip for the MG was attached. That was it. That's how I found out what an ex-running halfback with a bum ankle is worth in Dunetown. Findley had been my sponsor. They couldn't pay us for playing football at the university, but there was always some rich alumnus willing to provide a sports coat now and then, a car, a summer on the hose. Sometimes even a daughter.

  She didn't even send a card.

  Twenty years. I hadn't seen or heard from her since, not even when Teddy was killed. I can understand that; I can understand not being able to deal with that kind of pain. Hell, I can understand it all. When you love someone you forgive everything.

  I had kicked most of the other monkeys off my back, all but Doe. I couldn't purge her from my fantasies, what was left of them. Vietnam was bad for the soul. It was bad enough, what you saw and did, but the worst thing was what you thought. You get over the rest of it but you never forget what it does to the soul. Teddy Findley was the best friend I ever had, from the day I arrived at Georgia until the day in Saigon that he bled to death in my arms. Teddy was a golden boy. Teddy hadn't hit a false note. He was Chief's hope for immortality. The plan was perfect: football for four years at Georgia, show what the kid could do, then law school somewhere in the north to erase the jock image. Then back to take over the reins and keep the Findley hand in the Dunetown pot.

  Vietnam screwed it all up. Instead of Harvard Law School, Teddy ended up in Nam with me, a couple of shavetail lieutenants doing the best we could to keep sane and alive.

  Then all of a sudden Teddy was dead and the moment it sank in that he was dead, what I thought was:

  Christ, Teddy, how can you do this to me, how can you leave me to tell Doe and Chief about this?

  I still remember thinking that. I have pretty much erased everything else from my mind, but I still remember that when Teddy died, I didn't think about Teddy, I worried about me. That's what I mean about Nam and your soul.

  Eventually, of course, I wrote the letter. I told them what I knew Chief wanted to hear.

  I created the lie and I wrote the letter and I never got an answer, not even an acknowledgment that he had received it.

  So I started forgetting in earnest. Football heroes exist only on bright fall afternoons, and pretty girls stay young only in picture frames.

  Except there was Doe, who hadn't changed a bit. She still had that young, amazed look she'd had in the early sixties. Still had the long, golden hair. Silk. Slim, firm body. Breasts that some women would pay a fortune to try to imitate. Skin like cream. And suddenly she was no longer out of reach. She wasn't a sylph or a fantasy; she was as painfully real as a shin splint and just a phone call away.

  And now, twenty years after the fact, she expected me to come trotting to the boathouse like it never happened.

  Meet her in the boathouse? Who am I kidding, of course I'd meet her in the boathouse. I'd walk from Pittsburgh to meet her in the boathouse.

  Shit.

  I got in bed with a copy of Donleavy's Meet My Maker, the Mad Molecule and read myself to sleep. At two a.m. the phone woke me up. I put the book on the table and turned off the light.

  The phone rang twelve times before it finally quit.

  Fuck it, it had to be bad news.

  16

  BAD DREAMS

  I had the dream again that night. The first time in four or five years. It had been so long I had forgotten it. It had started a year after I got back from Nam. I understand that's normal. It's called delayed nocturnal shock or something like that. At first it was just this one persistent dream. I could never remember all of it, just bits and pieces. After a while it was such a familiar nightmare that I knew I was dreaming and it didn't bother me as much.

  Then it changed.

  The way it starts, I am in a hang glider soaring over a city. It could be Saigon, but I don't recognize it. Suddenly people on the ground are shooting at me. I can't see them, but the bullets are tearing through the wings of the glider. Next the bullets are hitting me. They bounce off as if my skin were bulletproof. I don't feel the bullets. I don't feel anything. I don't hear anything either. This is a silent dream. The next thing I remember, I see Teddy. He is on top of a ridge and he's running. I don't know what he's running from. Maybe he's running toward something. He starts waving at me. I try to soar down to pick him up, but the glider won't move up or down. Teddy starts screaming at me, this soundless scream. I feel desperate to get to him. Finally I get out of the seat of the glider and I hang over the side and let go and I fall. There's no ground, just me, falling through an empty space.

  Then I wake up.

  After a while it began to get more complicated, after I got used to it and it didn't bother me anymore.

  There were other hang gliders trying to collide with me. The other gliders were black and the pilots were all masked. It was like an obstacle course in the sky. Before I got comfortable with that version, the people in the other gliders started taking off their masks. One was my mother. Another was a fifth-grade schoolteacher whom I had not see or thought about for fifteen years. Another was my father, only a face in a photograph to me. Then the parish priest in the New Jersey town where I was born. I couldn't remember his name; all I could remember about him was that he had "silent collections"—that meant folding money, no silver. It used to make me angry. And there was also a captain named Grant, a martinet Teddy and I had served under in Nam when we were still second lieutenants.

  They were all yelling at me, but of course I couldn't hear anything. It was a silent horror movie that never ended.

  A couple of years later, when I was working the street in San Francisco, I became friendly with another patrolman who had served in Nam. His name was Winfield. He was a black guy and he was taking college courses in psychology because he thought it would help him make detective.

  One night over too many beers we started talking about dreams, so I told him mine and he gave me a nickel's worth of Psychology 101:

  "Your values are all fucked up, Jake. One thing is, you think you're different. Shit, join the club. I figure it like this: it was one way here, the other way over there, okay? You get a lot of guilt over such shit. Gets so you're afraid to trust anybody because you don't want them to find out. It happened to us all, man. What you do, see, you decide what makes sense to you. Settle for that and fuck everything else."

  After that we talked a lot. The dreams got fewer and farther between. Finally they stopped.

  That night in Doomstown I had the dream again, only this time it wasn't Teddy running on the ridge.

  It was Franco Tagliani.

  17

  PLAYING BY THE BOOK

  The Palm Room of the Ponce Hotel was a big, cheery room, as bright as a hothouse and decked out in as many hanging plants, ferns, and potted flowers. It was decorated in soft hues of green, yellow, and pink, with windows down one side that faced the hotel courtyard. Once, in summertimes past, the cream of Dunetown society had sunned itself and gossiped around the pool. It had since been converted into a giant fish pond spiked with lily pads, and while there were still a few old deck chairs scattered about the area, the place had a forlorn, faded, unused look about it. The restaurant, however, was breezy, cheerful, and buzzing with early morning conversation.

  I showed up the next morning at a few minutes after eight with my head pounding and the taste of old overshoes and amaretto in my mouth. I put on my sunglasses and groped my way through th
e restaurant.

  Francisco Mazzola, the peerless leader of the Freeze, was seated near a window overlooking the courtyard. He had half a dozen vitamin pills of varying sizes and colors lined up in front of his plate and was gulping them down with orange juice. He pumped my hand, threw an arm around my back, and slid the morning paper in front of me as I sat down.

  "I ordered your breakfast," he said. "Fresh orange juice, a dozen dollar pancakes, one egg over easy, no meat. Your system needs a break, I'm sure. She's bringing your coffee now and I got some great vitamins here for you."

  "If I eat all that, I'll die," I said.

  "Got to keep up the old strength."

  "There are enough vitamins here for the whole room."

  He ignored the complaint. "Vitamins do great things for the brain," he said.

  Mazzola did vitamins like a speed freak does amphetamines. He was also fighting a losing battle with his hair. He spent an hour every morning weaving what few strands were left over a pate as bald as a kitchen table. To compensate he had grown a beard which made his dark Mediterranean looks and intense brown eyes more intimidating than usual. He slid a handful of vitamins across the table to me.

  "These are yours," he said. "This stuff's from China. Incredible, has all kinds of—"

  "Cisco, I'm not into vitamins, okay? I'm into coffee and a little booze, an occasional lay, rare steaks, wine, mashed potatoes and gravy..."

  He looked like he was going to throw up.

  "I'm not into vitamins and weird herbs."

  "In two days you'll notice an improvement."

  "If I got a good night's sleep I'd notice an improvement. I was up half the night thanks to the sudden departure of half the Tagliani clan."

  "We'll get to that," he said, digging in to his breakfast, a plate of health food that looked like it had been dredged from the bottom of a swamp.

  "Besides," I said, "I read where overdosing on vitamins makes your hair fall out."

  He looked up, aghast.

  "Where did you read that?"

  "In the paper. One of those health columns. Rots out the roots of the hair."

  I tried to keep the gag going but I started to laugh. He leaned back in his chair and narrowed his eyes.

  "No more jokes about the hair, okay? Do I joke about your knee?"

  "It's my ankle."

  "See, you're touchy about that."

  "I'm not touchy about it. I happen to have shitty ankles. Great wheels, shitty ankles; otherwise I wouldn't be here, I'd be a retired millionaire football player living in Tahiti. On the other hand, you only have about four strands of hair left, although I'll say the beard helps."

  "Fuck you," he said. "Fill me in."

  I gave him a fairly thorough walk-through of the events of Sunday night.

  "You're the expert on the Triad—what the hell's going on here?" he asked.

  "I'll tell you what I don't think's going on," I said. "I don't think it's an outside mob and I don't think it's an inside job."

  "That's interesting," he said. "That just about rules out everybody. Who do you think did it, the tooth fairy?"

  "It's logical. The last thing the Triad wanted to do was create attention. They uprooted their families and sneaked in here. If it had been a family feud, it makes more sense that it would have been done before they left Cincinnati. Besides, this thing just doesn't read like a Mafia hit. Salvatore agrees with me."

  "Salvatore's an expert, huh?" he said, looking over his breakfast plate and raising his eyebrows.

  "He knows their style. Hell, he ought to, his father was an LCN cannon in south Philly."

  "I know that." He went back to his breakfast, waving a fork at my plate. "Talk and eat, it'll get cold."

  "The only exception to that is that maybe it could be Chevos and Nance."

  He looked up, surprised.

  "I didn't know they were here."

  "They're here somewhere."

  "Oh, you're guessing again."

  "It's logical."

  "You and your logic," he said. "You can make any argument sound good. One minute you tell me you don't think it's internal and the next you tell me it is."

  "Chevos and Nance are different."

  "That's 'cause you want them to be," he said, pointing a finger at me. "This is department business, pal. I didn't bring you in here to carry out a personal vendetta."

  "I'm just running the possibilities past you. Chevos is devious enough to try it and Nance is psychotic enough to do the work. So, if the shot fits . . . " I let the rest of the sentence dangle.

  "It's 'if the shoe fits,'" he said.

  "Not in this case."

  "All right, tell me more."

  "We have reason to believe whoever's in on this did time in Nam."

  "How do you figure that?"

  "Weapons, MO, style."

  "Uh-huh."

  "Nance was in Nam, right in the thick of it."

  "Uh-huh. And so were you, Stick, and half of Dutch Morehead's bunch. Hell, even I was in Nam. That doesn't make Nance an assassin. Some people might even consider him a hero."

  "The war's over," I said.

  "I think maybe you're shagging flies," he said.

  "Maybe," I said with a shrug.

  "Anything else?"

  "Well, uh . . . "

  He leaned over the table and dropped his voice to a whisper.

  "Before you go any further," he said, "let me remind you that you're not here to solve homicides. Just between us, I don't care if Yankee Doodle Dandy's doing it, unless it's relevant. I want the package on Tagliani."

  He didn't wait for me to say anything.

  "This used to be a nice, quiet, historical tourist trap," he said. "It's turning into Rotten City, U.S.A. I want to know how deep Tagliani had his hooks in. What did he own? Who did he buy? How did he pull it off? Hell, I don't have to give you the lecture, you know what the Freeze is all about."

  "If you're interested in what I think," I said, "I think the homicides have to be relevant."

  He pointed at me with his fork.

  "Don't get lost on me, Jake. And don't lead Stick astray."

  "Lead Stick astray! You got to be joking. And what's all this shit about him not being jaded?"

  "What do you think of him?" he asked with a smile.

  "He's as off the wall as the rest of Dutch Morehead's hooligans," I said.

  "He's just like you were," he said. "Eager, tough, a lone wolf. You two can help each other. Working with Dutch and his boys'll give you both a sense of team play."

  "I know all about team play, remember?"

  "You been playing your own game for a while," Cisco said. "Now you got plenty of help. I want to nail the Cincinnati Triad. I think we got a giant washing machine here, Jake, and I want to see the inside of it. I want to know how it works. That's what this trip is all about, okay?" He paused for a moment and added, "And I'd like to find out while a few of them are still breathing. Seen the morning paper?"

  Cisco could change the subject in midsentence. When he had said all he had to say on a subject, he just dropped it and moved on.

  He laid the paper beside my plate. It was turned to page 12, where the Tagliani killing was reported quietly, under a one-column headline:THREE DIE IN

  HOUSE ROBBERY

  I read the story, which was vague, inaccurate, and short. The police weren't saying anything except that they expected an arrest "shortly."

  "They're expecting an arrest, I see," I commented.

  "Keep reading," Cisco said. "It gets worse."

  Tagliani was identified as Frank Turner, a Cincinnati businessman with interests in racehorses. Stinetto-Nat Sherman in the story—was listed as "a business associate of Mr. Turner's." Robbery was the suspected motive. Not a mention of the Molotov cocktail the killer had dropped on his way out. According to the story, the police believe that Turner and Sherman surprised the robbers and were killed in so doing. There was a very fuzzy picture of Tagliani and his wife getting into a car, obv
iously shot from somewhere in New Jersey and blown up until the grain was as big as the moon.

  "Not a mention of Draganata."

  "That's on page eighteen," Cisco said without looking up from his breakfast.

  The Draganata story, identifying him as John Dempsey, a retired businessman, was even more ludicrous. It was three paragraphs long and said he died in his swimming pool. The police did not suspect foul play.

  "Well," I said, "the police got the Draganata kill right. He certainly did die in his swimming pool."

  "Point is, that's the kind of reporting you can expect here. Nobody's gonna dig for anything; they'll print what they're told to print."

  "Dutch told me this would happen and I as much as laughed in his face."

  "Yeah, well, he's got the last laugh. Just keep this in mind, pal, everybody supported the track. The press supported it and the businessmen's association and the chamber of commerce and the local politicians. Even the board of education endorsed it. Don't you get it? They don't want anything to make their town look sour. So they'll play it down, make it look like exactly what they want it to look like, and hope somebody will solve the case so they can cover it up. Let the killer cop a plea and keep his mouth shut."

  "That's bullshit," I said.

  "It's the way the world turns," he said. "That's why I don't want you spinning your wheels on the homicide angle. Just find out how the Tagliani clan got their foot in the door and how far in it is now, Okay? Forget local politics. Things here haven't changed in two hundred years, and a little massacre isn't gonna make a bit of difference."

  "These islands have been raped," I said bitterly.

  "Maybe so," he went on, "but look around you. These are the people who pull the strings in Dunetown. When you talk about the rape of paradise, these are the people who are doing the raping. They're the ones making the big bucks. Tagliani didn't ruin the place. He just got in on the kill. " Then he did another fast change-up. "Anything else for now?"