Vince Dooley. Teddy.
Doe.
Time had dulled the blade, sanded down the brittle edges, but it had only sharpened that one persistent
pain. Doe Findley was the last fantasy I had left. I had flushed most of my other dreams, but that one I
hung on to, protecting it, nurturing it, seeking shelter in it, and I wasn‟t ready yet to surrender it to
reality.
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 1 still do.
“Your father used to say, „Anything that comes too easily isn‟t worth having.”
1 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 lust 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