“I got it off Trevis’s answering machine yesterday,” said Eddie Ucelli. He was a skull-crusher who had worked his way up from union strongarm to made-man to a member of the Board.
“My friend at the police lab voice-printed it,” said Otto Kreiger, the firm’s corporate counsel and also on the Board. “Another different voice — just like all the others.”
“Raptor doesn’t make mistakes,” said Prince in admiration. “He doesn’t give us a handle on him.”
Nearly three years earlier, the Board had determined to put out a contract on Christiansen, who was getting too ambitious, but before they could a man named Raptor hit him — for free. A sample of his work. Since then, he had carried out four other impeccable internal eliminations for the Board, but they knew absolutely nothing about him. From the first he had insisted on a buffer man and a series of mail cut-outs beyond the buffer. The Board had chosen Trevis as buffer man, and it seemed a safe arrangement. But they still kept trying to find out about Raptor, just for insurance.
Ucelli tossed a newspaper clipping on the desk. “I thought I’d snoop Trevis’s desk while I was there, and I found this. Maybe it don’t mean nothing, it’s five or six years old, but she used to work for the Dahlgren subsidiary—”
A woman named Teresa Bianca had been shot and killed instantly in a downtown bar by an unknown assailant who escaped into the Christmas-shopper crowds. One of the dozen listed witnesses was a Dunstan Trevis.
“I remember the case,” said Kreiger. “A very professional-seeming hit. But the Board never ordered—”
Prince was nodding. “Not one of ours.” He shrugged and crumpled up the clipping, tossing it into the wastebasket.
But after the other two had gone, Prince recovered it and smoothed it out on his desk blotter. His shirt was suddenly stuck to his back. Teresa Bianca, Whittington’s secretary and a snoopy little broad. No, the Board hadn’t ordered the hit on her. It hadn’t ordered the hit on Whittington either, but he’d been lucky because everyone bought that as an accident, pure and simple.
Put Driscoll on Trevis, that was it. Driscoll was a small-time private eye owned by Prince. Nothing would get back to the Board from Driscoll, but Driscoll could find out if there was anything to worry about with Trevis. Meanwhile, just for his own peace of mind, he wanted to find a way around Trevis to Raptor, direct, without anyone else on the Board knowing about it. To do that he would have to call a Board on Letterman.
It was a full Board, very formal and full of all that man-of-respect drool they had picked up from The Godfather. Held in the executive boardroom, because who wanted to meet in a drafty warehouse or upstairs over a pizza joint when this was comfortable and secure? Prince, as capo, presided. Around the table were the men who controlled shylocking, porn, whores, drugs, garbage, linen, jukeboxes, trucking, and gambling in the city and the southern half of the state.
“Mr. Ucelli is recommending a contract be let on Lieutenant Letterman,” said Prince. “Our buffer man, Mr. Trevis, opposes such action at this time.”
Trevis, not being a member of the Board, was not present, of course, but his view had its adherents. Gideon Abramson, loan shark and a grandfather eight times over, said, “There is a great deal of heat over this Gounaris thing. The Feds have so many people on the street my collectors keep tripping over them. To hit an Organized Crime Squad cop at this time—”
“He talks, he can hurt us bad,” objected Spignola, garbage and linen.
“Who? Who can he take down?” Friedman’s street-drug sales were being curtailed by the federal heat. “The buffer man? Trevis? Big deal. Mr. Nobody, am I not right?”
Prince, who was worried by the possibility that he wasn’t right, waited while Kreiger made the point that Raptor might not want to hit someone outside the organization itself, then said smoothly, “I believe it should be put to a vote. All those in favor so indicate.” And he raised his own hand.
Following the Board’s directive, Dunstan Trevis typed Mr.Porter Edwards, Edwards’ Tow Truck and Wrecking Service, 4853 Harbor Drive on a six-by-nine manila clasp envelope with first-class postage already affixed. In this he put a small sealed unaddressed white envelope containing a three-by-five index card on which he had typed:
As always, he was using one of the public typewriters in the third-floor stacks of the public library. As he stood up, a young woman with an armload of books ran into him. Her books flew in every direction. She seemed to be in her early twenties and wore no bra under her see-through blouse.
“I’m really sorry,” she said in a flustered voice, retrieving his fallen envelope as he picked up her books.
He assured her it was all right and departed to mail the envelope. The girl, who was actually a woman in her thirties, dumped her books on the floor and dictated the Porter Edwards address into her micro-mini cassette recorder before she forgot any of it. That night, well after dark, her employer Larry Driscoll delivered the cassette to Milton Prince.
Jack Letterman was two-fingering a report while trying to remember if counselor — as in attorney — had one “1” or two when the phone rang. Picking up and barking, “Crime Squad, Letterman,” he heard the high-pitched, high-speed delivery of Burkie, one of his snitches, which could be stemmed only by interruptions.
“This one’ll cost you, sweetheart, it’s hot, in writing. You can use it to cool out the Feds if they come down on you—”
“The usual place?”
“Yeah, the door’s sticking, you gotta almost kick it—”
“Fifteen minutes.”
Letterman checked out a car and drove to Burkie’s latest drop, another deserted tenement. Burkie was just a voice on the phone who had started selling Letterman information about a year and a half before. For the first few times Letterman had gone into the condemned buildings in a rush, with his piece drawn, but there was never anything except envelopes of incredibly good intelligence for which he left envelopes of cash and which he peddled to the Feds and the wise guys with even-handed impartiality.
Letterman huffed up the narrow exterior back stairs to the third-floor landing, where he rammed the sticking door with his shoulder when it refused to open.
Tiny flames spurted from the kitchen matchheads stuck between the edge of the door and the thin strip of flint paper fixed to the frame. With a whoosh, gas from the ruptured line just inside the door ignited.
The explosion rocked the deserted building. Raptor, wearing a repairman’s bulky overalls and a flowing bandido mustache, had to duck back into the ground-floor rear entryway across the alley to avoid being hit by part of Letterman. He was boarding a city bus two blocks away when the first police and fire units arrived on the scene.
I was working late, clearing my desk, and Mr. Whittington left with this man. An hour later he was dead. They’re saying it was an accident, but, Dun, I don't believe that. And now I’m afraid there’s someone following me...
He laughed at her fears.
And be was late for their Christmas-shopping excursion.
Walking into the bar, he saw her welcoming smile, but then the man who’d walked in ahead of him shot her once in the head from a foot away. It was such a heavy caliber the man’s arm flew a foot into the air with the recoil.
Someone is following me. I’m frightened. Help me, darling.
He’d actually laughed.
She'd actually died.