“All right,” Caidin said. “I’ve got a pencil and paper here. Shoot, Doobie.”
“There’s been a lot of coverage, but what I’m giving you is the nuts and bolts, the inside stuff on how we put the case together, the information the other papers don’t have yet. And a lot of credit goes to your boy friend.”
“Don’t call him that, please,” she said and scrawled “Durham Lasari” across the top of the page. “Start with the Chicago end.”
“Okay. We’d been working round the clock, we didn’t know exactly what we were looking for, but we were looking. There were shadows, we were getting an outline. It was part coincidence, part self-indictment, but last Friday we finally threw a net over Detective Frank Salmi, one of the city’s own finest, the bastard, and he broke down and gave us some very pertinent details.”
Grimes came in and set a tray of tea things on the desk. Bonnie Caidin blew him a kiss and said into the phone, “How’d you do it?”
“The damndest thing, Bonnie. We had that voice tape and the man’s voice we couldn’t identify on it, right? Well, by chance I was on the elevators in the police building, on my way up to the office, sharing the ride with some civilian cats, and on the third floor Salmi gets on. Remember, Bonnie, how in those elevators, right over the regular floor number, there’s a little brass plaque with the numbers in braille? It’s the same in all the county buildings.”
“I remember,” she said.
“Well, Salmi sees me, nods hello and then he goes apeshit, puts on some kind of clown act, feeling those braille number plates, making cracks about Lady Justice being blind. He got a couple of laughs from the civilians and then he turned to me and said, ‘I’d like to ask you for lunch today, Sergeant, but my wife sewed razor blades in my pockets. She don’t want me bribing no cops.’ Another big laugh, he’s a real elevator comedian, his nerves just cracked on him.
“Salmi’s a short guy, you know, balding, tan complexion, and I saw that he was sweating like a greaseball. All of a sudden I knew why. That was his voice on the tapes and the fucker was so nervous being in the same car with me that he couldn’t keep still, he had to expose himself.
“So at the next floor I asked all the civilians to step out. Frank and I took a ride up a couple more floors and I pressed the emergency button to stop the cab between floors. I pulled the door open just a little to show him we were all alone between four brick walls. We had our chat. I never laid a hand on him, Bonnie, but in five minutes he was blubbering to get up to Commissioner McDade’s office and give his story to a steno.”
“Okay, Doobie,” she said, “you talk fast but I’ve got that.”
“Salmi told us what we’d suspected all along but could never prove. It was a heroin scam on both sides of the Atlantic, using military couriers, a growing business. They were expecting their fifth delivery.”
“Just a minute,” she said, and then asked a few questions to clarify details on the earlier deliveries. “All right, I’m clear so far. Where was Sergeant Malleck during all this?”
“Right where he should be, running his operation from the armory. We decided our best strategy was to simulate business as usual. Let Lasari try to get through to the armory with the payload and catch Malleck with the goods in his hands.”
“And Detective Salmi?”
“We kept him on ice, so to speak. Once he started talking he didn’t want to stop. He knew he was an accessory to Murder One for setting up Mark with that phone call, though he’s pleading against collusion. He insists he didn’t know an execution was planned.
“It was two of Malleck’s men, Eddie Neal and Joe Castana, who pulled the trigger. We got them both right at the airport, along with that amateur gunsel Mr. M. sent over to pick up the shit for himself.”
“Mr. M.? I thought he was straight syndicate.”
“I guess he wanted something on the side. According to Salmi, Mr. M. bankrolled the operation for Malleck from the beginning. It was going to be comparatively small stuff, but profitable enough for both sides. But Malleck got greedy and careless.
“The first couriers brought in duffels with only three to four pounds of white in the lining. Malleck figured out a new angle for a profit to split between himself and a Sergeant Strasser in Germany. Before leaving Germany, each courier would mail home one or more regulation GI packages, little things, a teddy bear, a fancy pillow, a music box — each with its cache of heroin inside. There’s no limit as to how many packages a GI can send as long as they’re no heavier than seventy pounds maximum and are marked gift with a declared value under fifty dollars. He can take his choice, the German post office or APO, which is a little cheaper. Malleck wasn’t worried about costs, and he was bypassing Mr. M. completely on this extra loot.”
“How did you get onto the mail angle?”
“Lasari corroborated the information, but it came from Frank Salmi first. Finding Salmi was like getting a direct hit at the piñata with a baseball bat. Goodies spilled out all over the place. And, of course, Uncle Andy wanted a chance to cleanse his soul.”
“Uncle Andy?”
“Private Andrew Scales, a soldier and a junkie, the man who shot Malleck. He was billeted at the armory but he hung around Cabrini Green. I’d been checking through Cabrini books and found that Scales had rented four different apartments in different buildings over a five-month period. Each time he got a new mailbox and a new key. He knew I was onto him, but I let him dangle. After the shooting he told us Malleck had alerted him to watch out for four presents from Germany for Uncle Andy this time.”
“Packages they forced Lasari to send?”
“Yes, but the packages never left Germany, Bonnie. Lasari had the right information tucked in his memory bank. He’d memorized the file numbers of the four mail receipts he’d signed and the German officials caught the stuff right at the Frankfurt post office.”
“How did they try to do it this time?”
“Same M.O., Bonnie. Separate packages, all to be mailed on different dates, all addressed to Andrew Scales. This stuff could have fooled anyone — four big expensive cuckoo clocks, painted in Alpine colors, crazy little birds inside, but each pair of swinging weights — they look like pine cones, the Germans told us — each cone is hollowed out and filled with about a pound and a half of heroin.
“The military in Frankfurt put the cuffs on Strasser, Malleck’s opposite number, the German border police picked up the ringleader, Pytor Veyetch, as he tried to cross the Czech border near Cheb.
“Andrew Scales... that poor junkie brother’s got more than heroin possession and Malleck’s murder to worry about. It was Scales who gave Malleck the layout of the Cabrini apartment, the place they got Mark...”
Gordon sighed and some of the animation went out of his voice. “Well, Bonnie, it’s an ongoing investigation, of course, but I think that covers the Chicago end up to date.”
“And Lasari,” she said, keeping her tone impersonal. “Has he been with you all this time?”
“Not exactly. We talked to him on tape the better part of a day, he’s got a mind like a computer for details, you know. Then at Senator Copeland’s suggestion, he and Superintendent McDade flew into Washington. They’ve been holding meetings with General Buck Stigmuller and a Colonel Benton of Intelligence, along with the senator. I’m strictly Chicago law-and-order and not privy to those meetings, but McDade says they’re haggling over the best public relations approach for this matter, whether or not a full disclosure in this country and abroad is the best approach. Intelligence seems to favor a limited exposure, almost a coverup, but Copeland and Stigmuller like the bad apple theory and a major announcement that they’ve cleaned out the whole damned barrel.