‘Yes... there’s too much talk for it not to. It’s my guess he pulled a hijack... that’s why there’s been no complaint.’
Outside, they heard an excited voice bawclass="underline" ‘Is the Chief in?’
‘Lepski,’ Beigler said with a grin. He got up and opened the door. ‘Come on in Sherlock.’
Lepski shoved by him and rushed up to Terrell’s desk.
‘Chief, I’m on to something hot!’ Concisely, he told the three listening men of his interview with Danny O’Brien, carefully omitting how he obtained his information, knowing his method would have been frowned on by Terrell. ‘So I did a quick think and came up with Cherchez le femme.’ He too had been slightly influenced by Jacoby’s efforts to better himself.
‘La femme, stupid,’ Hess said.
‘Who the hell cares?’ Lepski cut the air impatiently with his hand. ‘I knew Baldy had to have a piece of taiclass="underline" that wig of his pointed to it. So I dug around and found her name and address. I went out there after her but she had scrammed and in a hurry. The old biddy who runs the apartment block told me she went off with Baldy on Thursday afternoon in her Volkswagen car.’
Terrell absorbed this, then turning to Beigler, he said, ‘Let’s pick this woman up, Joe. We know her, don’t we?’
‘Sure. Mai Langley. One time taxi dancer. Three times convicted for possessing reefers. Now working as a hostess at the Spanish nightclub.’
Lepski gaped at him,
‘How the hell did you know that?’
‘She’s well known as Baldy’s girl. I keep tabs on girls like her.’ Beigler looked insufferably smug. ‘That’s why I’m a sergeant, Lepski.’
The telephone hell rang stopping Lepski’s frustrated retort.
Terrell scooped up the receiver.
‘Frank?’ Terrell recognised the voice of Chief of Police, Miami. ‘I thought I’d save you the run out. The lab report’s just come through.’
Terrell listened for some minutes while the other three officers watched him.
Then Terrell said, ‘Fine... thanks, Phil. I’ll get my boys moving. No, thanks... I can manage. Tell your boys from me they’ve done a good job and I appreciate it.’ He hung up. ‘That was Franklin. The Mustang is clean of prints. Someone has gone over it very carefully: not one print, but the Lab boys have identified the sand found in the tyre treads. It’s from Hetterling Cove: that out of the way bay outside Miami.’
‘I know it,’ Beigler said, getting to his feet. ‘It’s a good place for a burial.’
‘That’s right, Joe. So we get a dozen men with spades and we’ll take a look.’
Beigler left the office, went to his desk and picked up the telephone receiver.
‘Fred, when the gang’s ready, you take charge,’ Terrell went on. He turned to Lepski. ‘I want Mai Langley. Find her car number and put out an alert for her.’
Lepski went tearing out of the office to his desk.
‘That guy sure works at it,’ Hess said sourly.
‘When I eventually promote him,’ Terrell said, shaking his head, ‘he probably won’t work at all.’
By 17.00 that evening, Baldy Riccard’s tortured body had been lifted out of the sand dune.
The group of policemen who had dug him out, sweat streaming off them from their labours in the sweltering sun, stood back, some with handkerchiefs to their noses while Dr. Lowis, the Medical Officer, with two Interns, had the unenviable task of examining the bloated, half-cooked body.
By 22.00 Terrell was reading the M.O’s report while Beigler, a carton of coffee in his hand, sat opposite him and while Hess stared out of the dusty window at the ribbon of traffic moving along Main Street.
Finally, Terrell sat back and laid down the report.
‘Looks like you’re right, Fred,’ he said. ‘It smells of a hijack. His left foot was held in a fire until his heart gave out. He had three minor stab wounds, not enough to cause death, but he bled a lot. There are no bloodstains in the Mustang so he wasn’t carried to the Cove in the Mustang, but in some other vehicle.’ He paused to think, then went on, ‘Fred, check along Highway 1. See if you can find anyone who saw the Mustang. Check every bar, café, gasoline station... I don’t have to tell you... check.’
Hess grunted and moved his short, heavily built body with surprising swiftness from the small office.
Terrell leaned back in his chair and reached for his pipe.
‘Any ideas, Joe?’
‘A few.’ Beigler sipped some of the half-cold coffee. ‘This Commie angle... the Cuban angle... the fact Baldy wanted a boat. If you want to go to Cuba these days, it’s dead easy to hijack a plane... so why didn’t he do it? Danny says he had stuff with him... too heavy to take on a plane. So I’m asking myself what did he steal that was too big and too heavy to take on a plane and something Castro would want?’
‘You think he was working for Castro?’
‘It adds up, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ Terrell looked worried. We’ll give it a couple more days, then if we don’t come up with something, we’ll have to hand it over to the C.I.A.’
Beigler grimaced.
‘So let’s come up with something in a couple of days, Chief,’ he said.
The guidebook tells us that Vero Beach is a citrus shipping port, extending across Indian River to the open sea. It is also a small, busy town with streets bordered with coconut trees, date palms and flowering shrubs.
Lepski arrived at the waterfront around 18.00. He had driven fast with his siren blasting, taking a delight in scaring the traffic the hell out of his way: Lepski still had something of the little boy in him.
During his years as police officer, he had made it his business to develop contacts in every town within two hundred miles of Paradise City. His contact in Vero Beach was Do-Do Hammerstein who ran a waterfront restaurant called The Lobster & The Crab which was a meeting place for the big and little crooks, the drug pushers, and the hot boys who stopped off at Vero Beach to find a motorboat that would take them out of reach of the long arm of the F.B.I, and the C.I.A.
The Lobster & The Crab was a shabby three-storey wooden building sandwiched between a Bottled Gas Suppliers and a Deep Sea Fishing Tackle Emporium. Even as Lepski approached it, he could smell lobsters grilling and the whiff of garlic that Do-Do used in all her sauces. His stomach rumbled with appreciation, but he knew he would have no time for a free meal.
He shoved open the double swing doors and entered the big room, crowded with tables at which sat an assortment of Do-Do’s regular clients: flashily dressed men, most of them dark skinned, small with flat gangster eyes and their raucous women, most of them wearing stretch pants and minute bras which squeezed their soft breasts into gross balloons.
There was an immediate hush as Lepski made his way to the bar. Four men, sitting near the entrance, abruptly got up and slid out into the fading sunshine. The rest, their faces sudden blank masks continued to pick at their lobsters. Even the women, compulsive talkers as they were, lowered their voices so the roaring sound that Lepski had first encountered as he had entered was like a bellowing transistor abruptly tinned down.
Do-Do regarded him with a furious how-could-you-do-this-tome expression as Lepski came to rest at the bar. She was a big woman with an enormous, floppy bosom, dyed red hair and an uninteresting face that could have been carved out of hard pig fat. Only her eyes showed that behind the facade of fat and floppiness, she was as hard as teak and as unreliable as a greased pole.
‘Scotch,’ Lepski said, resting his elbows on the counter. ‘How are tricks, Do-Do? You look good enough to be stuffed and put in an oven.’
Do-Do poured the drink.
‘Do you have to come in here?’ she asked, keeping her voice low. ‘Haven’t you enough brains to see you are ruining my business?’