Hooligans, Page 2

  It was raining, a steady downpour, as the small jet swept in low over the marshes. I squinted through the oval window, tear-streaked with raindrops, looking for something to orient me in time and place. I suppose I was expecting that same one-room shed that passed for a depot, with its coffee machine and half a dozen chairs they jokingly called a waiting room. Time plays crazy head tricks on you. In your head, time is a freeze frame. People don't grow older; the paint on houses doesn't chip or fade; trees don't get taller. The grass doesn't even grow.

  What I really expected to see through that window was the past. What I saw was a low, glass and chrome terminal, exploding strobe lights limning the runways, other jets jockeying for position. There was more action on the runway than in Las Vegas on a Saturday night. Twenty years is a lot of reality to swallow in one dose, but that's what I got.

  As I scampered down the stairs from the plane and across the ramp through the rain, I remembered something my father used to say:

  "Anything that comes easily isn't worth having."

  Well, actually it was my mother who said it. My father died in action in the Pacific three months before I was born. I was never very much for geography, but by the time I went to school, I knew just about everything there was to know about the island Guadalcanal. I knew its geographic coordinates, its shape; I knew it was barely one hundred miles long and thirty miles wide and that it was our first offensive target in the Pacific. And I knew that on August 20, 1942, at 22:15 hours which is quarter past ten at night, Captain J. L. Kilmer, First Marine Division, ceased being my father and became my mother's legend. I grew up with his Purple Heart and Navy Cross framed beside his picture over my desk so I would never forget him. Guadalcanal will always be an ugly, worthless, sliver of real estate in the middle of nowhere that nobody should've died for. Later, I was to learn firsthand about that kind of dying.

  Anyway, his LST was blown out from under him on the first wave going in. He never even got his feet wet.

  But I know about my old man, about what he believed, and about the place where he died. My mother made sure about that. The lessons she taught me while I was growing up always started the same way: "Your father used to say . . . "

  Then she'd hit me with the payoff line.

  I was probably sixteen or seventeen before I figured out that in order for my father to have passed on to my mother all the bromides fed to me during my formative years and attributed to him, he would have had to talk constantly, twenty-four hours a day, for the entire two years they were married. My father image was created by my mother. But it worked. By the time I got on to her, I figured my dad at twenty-two was wiser than Homer, Socrates, Newton, and Ben Franklin all rolled up in one. Funny thing is, I guess I still do.

  "Your father used to say, 'Anything that comes too easily isn't worth having.'"

  I should have listened to that reprise as I ran through the rain, but I had other things on my mind. It went in one ear, out the other, and never slowed down along the way.

  When I entered the Dunetown terminal, I was slapped back to reality in a hurry. It was a city block long, with a moving sidewalk, a twenty-four-hour snack shop, a fancy European-type restaurant, and two bars.

  In the time it took me to walk the length of the terminal and pick up my bags, I saw a first-class dip from Albuquerque named Digit Dan Delaney, two hookers from San Diego whose names eluded me, and a scam artist from Detroit named Spanish Eddie Fuereco, spinning the coin with a mark in a seersucker suit and a Hawaiian shirt.

  They were all working. That told me a lot.

  The lady at the airline counter had an envelope for me with car keys, registration, confirmed reservations at the Ponce Hotel, and a map of the town showing me how to get there. There was also a message that had been phoned in twenty minutes earlier:

  "Urgent. Meet me at emergency entrance, city hospital, soon as possible."

  It had been phoned in by a Lieutenant Morehead of the local police. And that reminded me of why I was there, which certainly wasn't to weep over my lost youth. A man named Franco Tagliani was the reason I was there, a mobster who headed an outfit called the Cincinnati Triad. For five years I had dogged Tagliani; for five years I had listened to his voice on wiretaps, watched him through binoculars, snapped pictures of him through a telephoto lens. For five years I had tried to bring Tagliani and his bunch down. I had tried everything due process would allow.

  Zip.

  In those five years I never got close enough to him to tip my hat good morning. It was embarrassing, five years and nothing to show for it but a goose egg.

  Then he had disappeared. And with him, his whole bunch. Poof, just like that. The magic trick of the year. And now, nine months later, he had popped back up. And in Dunetown, the last place on earth I cared to be. Thanks a bunch, Franco.

  This time we were going to play hard cheese. This time the score was going to be a little different.

  I finessed the hotel and drove straight to the city hospital. The lieutenant was waiting at the entrance, an enormous man who towered over me.

  "I'm Morehead," he said as my hand disappeared into his. "Call me Dutch."

  "Jake Kilmer," I said.

  Five minutes later I came face-to-face with Franco Tagliani for the first time. He was in a drawer in the basement freezer with a hole in his back, a nick in the shoulder, one more in his forehead, and an insurance shot in the right eye.

  The tag on his toe said his name was Frank Turner but I knew better.

  In the drawer beside him and just as dead was his number one boy, Nicky Stinetto. He had been shot three times, two of them good-bye hits. His tag said he was Nat Sherman, another lie.

  Both bodies were badly burned, both had multiple body hits.

  Two different guns. You don't need to be a coroner to tell the difference between the hole a . 22 makes, and one made by a . 357.

  "Couple of pros?" I suggested.

  "That or Wyatt Earp," Morehead said. He went on, sounding like an official police report. "The homicides occurred at approximately seven fifteen p.m. at the residence of the deceased, Turner . . . or Tagliani, whichever way you want it. The shooting was followed by an explosion. We're working on the bomb angle now. Tagliani's old lady got caught in the blowup. She's up in ICU, hangin' on by her pinky."

  I looked at my watch. It was a little after nine.

  "You've put together a pretty good sheet on this thing, considering it happened less than two hours ago," I said.

  "We got a play-by-play on tape," he said and winked. Billy Morehead, head of the Special Operations Branch, local police, had Kraut written all over his battered face. He stared down at me through pale blue, hooded eyes that lurked behind gold-rimmed glasses. Morehead was the size of a prize bull with hands like cantaloupes, sandy hair going gray, a soft but growling voice, and a penchant for swearing in German, all of which had earned him the nickname Dutch. He was cordial, but cautious, and although I had known him for only thirty minutes, I was beginning to like his style.

  I said, "Well, so much for them. Let's hope his widow makes it. Maybe she saw something."

  "She'll never stool if she did. They're all alike."

  There was nothing more to do there until the autopsy, so we went up to the intensive care unit on the second floor. Mrs. Tagliani looked like she was on her way to the moon; lines sticking out of both arms, a mask over her face, and behind the bed, three different monitors recording her life signs, what was left of them. The coronary reader seemed awfully lazy, bip, bip, bipping slowly as its green lines moved across the center of the monitor screen, streaking up with each bip.

  Nobody from the family was in sight. I asked Dutch about that. He shrugged and smoothed the corners of his Bavarian mustache with the thumb and forefinger of each hand.

  "Probably hiding under the bed" was his only comment.

  The intern, a callow young man with a teenager's complexion, told us the widow had suffered first-degree burns over seventy percent of her body, had
glass imbedded in her chest and stomach, and had been buried under debris which had caused severe head injuries.

  "What're her chances?" I asked.

  "A Kansas City shoe clerk might take the odds," he said, and went away.

  "I got a man on the front door, another one in a green robe on this floor," Dutch said. "Nobody can get near her. Whyn't ya come with me? I gotta debrief my people."

  Mrs. Tagliani made the decision for me. While we were standing there the heart monitor went sour. It stopped bipping and the green lines settled into a continuous streak.

  The machine went deeeeeeeeee.

  "Schmerz!" Dutch muttered. I had heard the expression before. Roughly translated, it meant a sorry state of affairs. I couldn't have put it better.

  A moment later the intern and two nurses rushed in, followed by the trauma unit with their rolling table filled with instruments.

  We stayed around for ten minutes or so until they gave it up.

  "Eins, zwei, drei," Dutch growled. "One more and we'd have us a home run. Looks like you made a long trip for naught, Mr. Kilmer. "

  "Yeah," I said.

  "I gotta call homicide, tell 'em Tagliani's missus went across. I'll be a minute. You're stayin' at the Ponce, right?"

  "Right."

  "Nice digs," Dutch said.

  He went into the ICU office, made two phone calls in the time it took me to straighten my tie, and came back.

  "I hear you know the town," he said as we headed for the parking lot.

  "I do if it hasn't changed in twenty years," I answered.

  He laughed, but it was a sardonic, humorless laugh. "You're in for a surprise," he said. "Follow me over to the hotel. You can plant your car and run out to the Warehouse with me."

  "The Warehouse?"

  "That's what we call our layout."

  I told him that was damn white of him and we headed out into the hot, rainy night.

  2

  SIGHTSEEING

  It was only a few blocks back to the hotel but I saw enough through the windshield wipers and rain to tell me what twenty years had done to Dunetown. These were not the wrinkles of time; this was a beautiful woman turned whore. Tagliani's death had started the worms nibbling at my stomach. One look at downtown Dunetown turned the worms to writhing, hissing snakes, striking at my insides.

  Twenty years ago Ocean Avenue was a dark, romantic, two-lane blacktop, an archway of magnolias dripping with Spanish moss, that meandered from Dunetown to the sea, six miles away. Now it was Ocean Boulevard, a six-lane highway that slashed between an infinity of garish streetlights like a scar. Neither tree nor bush broke up the eerie green glow, but a string of hotel billboards did, their flashing neon fingers beckoning tourists to the beach.

  Front Street was worse. I was so shocked by what had happened here that I stopped the car, got out, and stood in the rain, staring at a street gone mad. It was so far from the Front Street in my freeze frame, I couldn't relate to it.

  The Front Street I remembered was like the backdrop of a Norman Rockwell painting. There were two old movie houses that showed double features. There was Bucky's drugstore, which had a marble-top soda fountain where you could still get a milkshake made out of real ice cream and sit in an old-fashioned wire-back chair to enjoy it. And there was the town landmark, Blaine's Department Store, which filled an entire block. The people of Dunetown once got everything from their diapers to their funeral clothes at Blaine's.

  Gone. No more Bucky's, no more Blaine's, and the two theaters were twenty-four-hour porno houses. A neon blight had settled over the heart of the town like a garish cloud. Hookers peddled their bodies from under marquees to keep out of the rain, hawkers lured out-of-towners and footloose horseplayers into all-nudie revues, and "bottomless" and "topless" signs glittered everywhere. The blaring and oppressive beat of disco music was the street's theme song.

  I had been there before, along Hollywood's strip and in the Boston combat zone. The scenario was always the same. You couldn't buy a drink in any bar on the street without staring at a naked bosom or getting propositioned by a waitress—or a waiter, depending on your inclination.

  My God, I thought, what's happened here? How could Chief and Titan have let this happen to a town they had once treated like a new bride?

  The neon blight held the next six blocks in its fist.

  And then, as if some medieval architect had built an invisible wall right through the middle of the city, the neon vanished and Dunetown turned suddenly elegant. It was as if time had tiptoed past this part of town with its finger to its lips. Old trees embraced mansions and two-hundred-year-old townhouses. The section had been restored to Revolutionary grandeur with spartan and painstaking accuracy. Gas lamps flickered on the corners, the streets were mostly window-lit, and there were flower-laced squares every three or four blocks, fountained oases that added a sense of symmetry and beauty to the place.

  My reaction was simple.

  The town was schizo to the core.

  3

  DOOMSTOWN

  Dutch was waiting for me under the awning in front of the Ponce, the political watering hole of Dunetown, a grand, old, creaky hotel, dripping with potted plants, and one of the few things in Dunetown that hadn't changed. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of a bagged-out, nondescript suit, and a Camel was tucked in the corner of his mouth. If he had a care in the world, it didn't show. I parked behind a large black limo, gave the keys to the garageman, checked in, gave a bellhop five bucks to drop my bag in my room, and tossed my briefcase into Dutch's backseat.

  As I crawled into the front seat, I was still shell-shocked from the sights and sounds of Dunetown.

  "Okay, let's roll," he said, pulling into the dark, palm-lined street.

  He didn't have anything to volunteer; his attitude was still cooperative but cautious. And while I was interested in getting the lowdown on Tagliani-Turner, for the moment I was more interested in what had happened to the local landscape.

  After a block or two of silence I asked, "What in hell happened to Dunetown?"

  He stared over at me with a funny look on his face, then, as if answering his own question, said, "Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting you lived here once"

  "Not here," I said. "Not in this town. Anyway, I didn't live here. I was, uh . . . I guess you could say was a summer guest. "

  "When was that again?"

  I was trying to be casual, trying to keep away from personal history. I didn't know him well enough to show him any scars.

  "Twenty years ago, just for a couple of months. It's hardly worth mentioning," I answered in an offhand way.

  "You were just a kid then."

  "Yeah, a senior in college." While I didn't want to get too personal, I didn't want to play games, either.

  "Teddy Findley was my best friend," I added after a second or two.

  "Oh," he said. "Then you know what's been going on."

  "No, I got out of touch with the family," I said.

  "You know the Findley kid is dead?"

  "You mean Teddy?"

  "Yeah. "

  "Yes," I said. "It's after that I kind of lost track of things."

  "Well, what happened was the racetrack, that's what. The town got bent. Twenty years ago there was probably, what, seventy-five, a hundred thousand people?"

  "Sounds about right."

  "Probably three hundred thousand now, about half of 'em from the shady side of the tracks. What you got here, you got a major racetrack, and a beauty. Looks like Saratoga. A classy track, okay? That's a gimmee."

  "Where is it?"

  "Back behind us, on the other side of the river. It's dark now, anyway. "

  "Okay, so you got a classy track. Then what?"

  "I think maybe what the money in town expected was kind of another Ascot. Everybody standing around sipping tea, wavin' their pinkies in the air. What they got is horseplayers, which come in every shape, size, and variety known to mankind, and about half of them smoke tea; they don't drin
k it."

  "So that's what Front Street's all about?"

  "It appeals to some of that element. It isn't Front Street's gonna make your gonads shrink. It's what happened to the rest of the town. They turned it into a little Miami."

  "They? Who's they?"

  "The wimps that took over. Look, Chief Findley's an old man. Most of the rest of the old power structure's dead. They turned it over to their heirs. Keepers of the kingdom, right? Wrong. Wimps, the lot of 'em, with maybe an exception or two."

  "I probably know some of them," I said.

  "Probably. But it wasn't just them, it was anybody had a square foot of ground they could sell. Condos all over the place. High-rise apartments. Three big hotels on the beach, another one going up. Real estate outta sight. Two marinas as big as Del Mar. You feel bad now, wait'll you see Doomstown in the daylight."

  That was the first time I heard it called Doomstown, but it was far from the last.

  "I'm still surprised Chief Findley and the old power structure let it happen," I said.

  "Couldn't do anything about it," Dutch growled. "They died or were too old to cope."

  An edge had crept into his tone, a touch of anger mixed with contempt. He seemed to sense it himself and drove quietly while he calmed down.

  I tried to fill in the dead space. "My father used to say you can inherit blood but you can't inherit backbone."

  For the first few blocks we drove through the Dunetown I wanted to remember, the large section of the midtown area that had been restored to its Revolutionary elegance.

  I remembered driving through the section with Chief and Teddy one Sunday afternoon a long time ago. It had fallen on hard times; block after block of broken-down row houses that were either boarded over or had been converted into cheap rooming houses. We were in Chief's black Rolls convertible and he was sitting on the edge of his seat, shoulders square, his white hair thrashing in the wind.

  "We're going to restore this whole damn part of town," he had said grandly, in his soft, Irish-southern accent, while waving his arm at the drab ruins. "Not a damn museum like Williamsburg. I mean a livin', breathin' place where people will be proud to live. Feel like they're part of her history. Share bed and board with her ghosts. This is the heart of the city, by God! And if the heart stops, the city dies. You boys just remember that." He paused to appraise the street, then added, half under his breath, "Someday it'll be your responsibility." And Teddy looked over at me and winked. In those days I was one of the boys.