It was hard for me to buy. But then I wouldn’t have believed a stewardess could bring a pair of guns on a plane. The Colonel waved the incident out of mind and sank back, complacent.
“No matter, really. Thanks to you our president arrived safely and is taking up the reins of government. The army is convinced it is in its best interest to give Dr. Fleming its full support, so our problems are resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. I hope your transition into the job here will be as smooth as ours.” He finished the coffee and stood up. “If I can help you with anything, you’ll find me at the Palace.”
I took the hand he offered and saw him to the door. He knew more about me than he’d admitted. That was clear from his assurance to me that the lid was on the army. Simple gratitude about the skyjacking didn’t require that he discuss political maneuverings with a hotel dick. I suspected he was telling me that the undercover job was no longer necessary.
I gave him time to get clear of the hotel, then left the room. The soldiers were gone from the top floor. So were Lewis’ men. But the Mafia boys still pored over the racing form beside the elevators.
I dropped down to Fleming’s floor. Only the syndicate’s crowd was represented. They said the doctor was still asleep. I walked down to the next flight and found the same personnel. Strange.
I decided it was time to move on to my next stop. The Casino. I was looking for some answers and they might be there.
Roulette tables, faro banks, and crap tables made a rectangle around the pit, connected by velvet wrapped chains. No one except the dealers and pit bosses was allowed inside. Only the chained-off area offered a modicum of clear space. The rest of the floor crawled with humanity.
There were no windows beckoning to the outdoors. No clocks to tick off time. There was only the clatter of chips and glasses and hoarse pleadings that dice, balls, cards fall this way or that. Not my kind of gambling. Mine is a bet every day that when I get out of bed in the morning, I’ll make it back in one piece at night.
Trying to make my way through this raucous crowd, I got bogged down in the crush of milling flesh as it stampeded toward a jackpot winner. Bells rang for the lucky dope, singled out as a come-on to keep the other slots hot. Bells rang for me too. A redhead stood ten feet away, lips curled in scorn, brows arched at the madness.
She stood out like a spotlight. Five nine or ten, sleek shining nipple-length hair, a pantsuit swelled in all the right places.
While I waited for the herd to pass, the space around her cleared. She turned and escaped to the uncrowded pocket around the cashiers’ cages, paused at the end grille for an instant, then shoved open an unmarked door and went through. I was headed that way myself. She added urgency to my visit.
A man whose luck held beat me to the cage. I waited while the clerk racked the chips, then shoved stacked silver to the winner. When the man moved off, the clerk flicked a look at my empty hands and said in a bored voice, “Help you, friend?”
I don’t like being called friend by someone I never saw in my life. “Chip Cappola. I want to see him.”
The blank face went blanker. “Never heard of him.”
I put my new ID card on the counter. It said I was security chief for the Sawyer Grand LaClare. The swarthy clerk sneered and gave me empty eyes. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“You didn’t ask. Mr. Sawyer expects courtesy to the guests from the staff. What’s your name?”
He didn’t like that. But he was the sort of bully who deflates when authority’s pin sticks him.
“Tony Ricco.” It was a mumble.
I said, “You get one warning. Not a second. Don’t let me hear a complaint. Now, Cappola.”
“Right through this door.” He was in a helpful sweat now, indicating the way the redhead had gone, buzzing the electric lock under his counter.
The thick metal door folded back on silent hinges at my shove. I went through to a blind passage. Back here the building looked like a vault and was used as one. A huge black man sat at a desk studded with unidentified buttons along its back edge. He wore a khaki uniform, no insignia, and could have been either island or hotel police. He was just as cordial as the cashier. The cold eyes watched me come toward him.
I said, “Cappola,” and dropped the ID.
He bent toward a speaker that was set flush in the desk, flicked the switch, and said in a deep growl, “A Mr. Carter. New security guy.”
An answer grated back, fuzzed by the intercom. “Shoot him through.”
The man dipped his head, thumbed a button and a panel across the corridor slid aside without sound. Beyond it was a large room, with bare yellow walls, a desk with nothing on it, some empty chairs and a deep couch with the redhead draped against its back. A cigarette set in her mouth, sending blue smoke in a thin straight rise past half-lowered eyes. She showed no surprise to see me.
Chip Cappola tilted his chair back behind the desk, looking like George Raft hoped he did thirty years ago. Dark straight oiled hair plastered flat, deep olive skin over a tight face that was still sleek but would be creviced and jowly in a few years. The coat of his white silk suit hung on a hanger against the wall. His lavender shirt with a maroon monogram on the sleeve was the bright spot in the drab room. His tone was drab too.
“The geese came south early this year.”
“They didn’t stop in Miami,” I told him.
I don’t know who dreams up the recognition signals we use to make a new contact. They’re supposed to sound innocuous and yet not likely to have been spoken by accident, although agents have been known to make mistakes with outsiders. Cappola looked me up and down, a sardonic twist on his brown lips.
“Nick Carter, huh? Killmaster, huh? You don’t look like any hit man I ever saw. That kind of job takes guts.”
I winked at the redhead and asked him, “You like to inspect mine?”
He shrugged. “Not unless you got ’em with polka dots. You see one, you seen them all.”
The girl chortled, and the man at the desk threw a thumb her way “Mitzy Gardner there. Maybe you heard of her.”
I had indeed. But she wasn’t the Mitzy type. She was a bomb, and notorious in her own right. Her rap sheet said she’d been mistress to a long list of top echelon hoods, four of them now dead. An educated guess put her as a bag girl for all of them, trusted to carry Mafia money to Miami, to be moved on to the Bahamas for laundering before it went to Swiss bank accounts.
Chip Cappola now headed her list, a man high in gangster ranks, wanted in the States and unable to go to the mainland. It was a laugh that with his record he was presently up to his thick neck working for AXE.
Cappola wasn’t interested in national security. His loyalty was exclusively to the nation of the underworld. But he decidedly did not want the Communists taking this casino away from him and so it was to his advantage to have Randolph Fleming as president. With Fleming in the saddle, Cappola’s business on Grand LaClare could continue as it had under Hammond.
Cappola waved at a chair and I took it. He said, “I’m damned glad you lucked in on the flight with Fleming. We lose him, we’ll get our throats cut. The casino goes down the drain and Sawyer’s out another hotel.” There was undisguised worry in the flat, rasping voice.
“We didn’t loose him,” I reminded the gangster. “He’s president and Colonel Jerome says everything’s quiet.”
The front legs of his chair hit the floor hard. “You talked to Jerome? Tell him who you are?” He spat the words out. There was fury in his voice.
I said. “Why are you so mad?”
“Did you tell him?”
“Of course not. What have you got against him?” He put both hands flat on the desk and leaned over them. “Carib Jerome ordered Fleming kidnapped.”