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  "Zapata doesn't know any better," he said. "Salvatore doesn't give a damn. If you blindfold him and ask him what he's wearing, he couldn't even guess."

  Dutch continued the thumbnail sketch of his gang:

  "Across from him is Cowboy Lewis." The man he referred to was as tall as Dutch, thirty pounds trimmer, and wore a black patch over his left eye. He was dressed in white jeans and a tan Windbreaker zipped halfway down, had very little hair on his chest. A black baseball cap with a gold dolphin on the crown covered a tangled mop of dishwater-blond hair. There wasn't a spare ounce of fat on the guy.

  "Pound for pound, the hardest man in the bunch. He doesn't have much to say, but when he does, it's worth listening to," Dutch said. "He thinks in a very logical way. A to b to c to d, like that. If there's a bust on the make, Lewis is the man you want in front. He's kind of like our fullback, y'know. You say to Cowboy, we need to lose that door, Cowboy, and the door's gone, just like that, no questions asked. I suppose if I told him to lose an elephant, he'd waste the elephant. He's not afraid of anything that I can think of."

  "Are any of them?" I asked.

  Dutch chuckled. "Not really," he said. "Lewis is kind of . . . " He paused a moment, looking for the proper words, and then said, "He's just very single-minded. Actually, he started out to be a hockey player but he never made the big time. His fuse was too short, even for hockey. Y'see, if Cowboy was going for a goal, and the cage was way down at the other end of the rink, he'd go straight for it. Anybody got in his way, he'd just flatten them."

  "Doesn't sound like the perfect team man," I said.

  "Nobody's perfect," said Dutch.

  The last man in the room was also lean and hard-eyed, in his mid- to late thirties, and over six feet tall. He looked like he had little time for nonsense or small talk.

  "The tall guy in the three-piece suit and the flower in his lapel, that's Pancho Callahan," Dutch continued. "He's a former veterinarian, graduated from UCLA, and can tell you more about horse racing than the staff of Calumet Farms. He spends most of his time at the track. He doesn't say too much unless you get him on horses; then he'll talk your ear off." Callahan seemed restless. It was obvious he would rather have been elsewhere, which was probably true of all of them.

  Altogether, about as strange a bunch of lawmen as I've ever seen gathered in one room. And there were a few more to go: the Mufalatta Kid and Kite Lange, more of whom later, and, of course, Stick, who was still an enigma to me. Eight in all, nine if you counted Dutch.

  "Tell me a little about the Stick," I said. "What kind of guy is he?"

  Dutch stared off at a corner of the room for a moment, tugging at his mustache.

  "Very likable," he said finally. "You could call him amiable. Bizarre sense of humor. But not to be messed with. I'll tell you a little story about Stick. He has this old felt hat, I mean this hat looks like an ape's been playing with it. One day he leaves the hat in the car while he goes to get a haircut. He comes back, somebody lifted the hat. Don't ask me why anybody would want the hat, but there you are. About a week later Stick is cruising up Bay Street one afternoon and there this guy is, strolling up the boulevard wearing his hat.

  "Stick pulls up, starts following the guy on foot. The guy goes into a record store. At that point Stick remembers he left his piece in his glove compartment. So what does he do? He hops in a hardware store, buys a number five Stillson wrench, and when the little putz comes out of the record store, Stick falls in behind him, shoves him in the first alley they come to, and whaps the bejesus out of the guy. The guy never saw him and never knew what hit him, but he sure knew Stick got his hat back."

  He paused for another moment and then added: "Resourceful, that's what Stick is, resourceful."

  I filed that information away, then said to Dutch, "Look, I don't want to seem pushy this early in the game, but I know this Tagliani mob. There's something I'd like to run by your people. Maybe it'll help a little."

  He gave the request a second's worth of thought and nodded. "Okay," he said. "But let me ease you into the picture first."

  "Anything you say."

  I went over and grabbed a desk near the side of the room.

  Dutch, as rumpled as an unmade bed, stood in front of the room.

  "All right, listen up," he told his gashouse gang. "You all know by now what happened tonight. We lost the ace in the deck and we had a man sitting two hundred yards away."

  He did an eyeball roll call and then bellowed loud enough to wake the dead in Milwaukee:

  "Sheiss, we're missin' half the squad here. Didn't they hear this is a command performance?"

  "They're still out on the range," a voice mumbled from the back of the room.

  "Hmmm," Dutch muttered. "Okay, you all know about Tagliani and Stinetto getting chilled. Those are the two we knew as Turner and Sherman. Well, first, I got a little good news, if you want to call it that. Then we'll talk about who was where and how we screwed up tonight. Anyway, we had the house bugged and as happens, one of the rooms on the wire was the den, which is where the hit was made. So I've got the whole thing on tape, thanks to Lange, who did his telephone repairman act."

  Dutch punched a button on a small cassette player and a moment later the room's hollow tone hissed through the speaker.

  For maybe two minutes that's all there was, room tone.

  Then a doorbell, far off, in another part of the house.

  Seconds later someone entered the room.

  Sounds of someone sitting down, a paper rustling, a lighter being struck, more paper noises. Then a voice, getting closer to the room:

  "Hey, Nicky, bom dia, how ya do at the track?"

  It was Tagliani's voice; I'd heard it on tape enough times to know.

  "I dropped a bundle." Stinetto's voice.

  "How the fuck you lose? It was a fix. I gave it to yuh just this morning. Din't I tell yuh, it's on for the four horse, third heat. Huh?"

  "Ya to!' me. Too bad the other seven heats wasn't fixed."

  Laughter. "I don' believe yuh. I give you a sure thing, you turn right aro- "

  At that point there was a sound of glass crashing, a lot of jumbled noise, swearing and yelling . . .

  Tagliani: "God-no, no . . . "

  Stinetto: "Motherfu- "

  Several shots, from two different guns.

  A man's scream.

  "Nicky . . . "

  Brrrddt. A muffled rapid-fire gun, probably a submachine gun. It fired so fast it sounded like a dentist's drill.

  Two screams; terrible, terrified, haunting screams.

  Two more shots.

  Bang . . . bang. Something heavy, a .357 maybe.

  Somebody gagged.

  Something heavy hit the floor, crunching glass as it fell.

  Two more shots, spaced.

  Bang . . . bang!

  Footsteps running and the sound of something else hitting the floor.

  The something else was sizzling.

  A woman's voice,

  screaming,

  getting closer,

  entering the room.

  Baroomf!

  The explosion blew out the mike. Dutch punched the off button.

  "That's it," he said.

  Charlie One Ear said, "Utterly charming. Too bad about the woman."

  "Too bad about all of them," Dutch snapped caustically. "They were worth more to us alive than dead."

  Dutch ran the tape back and played it again. We all leaned forward, hoping to hear something significant, but there wasn't much. I listened to the shots, counting them.

  "That one, sounds like a dentist's drill, I make that some kind of submachine gun," Zapata said.

  Dutch played it again.

  It was a chilling tape. Just when you think you've seen it all and heard it all, you run across something like this, listening to three people die. Mobsters or not, it raised the hair on my arms.

  "Definitely two guns," Charlie One Ear said.

  "That's pretty good, Charlie. Stine
tto's gun was still in his belt when we found him," Dutch said. "Loaded and clean. The old man was light."

  "Pretty good shooting," Chino ventured.

  "Had to be two of 'em," said Salvatore.

  "Or an ambidextrous marksman," Charlie One Ear said.

  "Fuckin' nervy one," Zapata added.

  "Any other ideas?" Dutch asked.

  I kept mine to myself.

  "Okay, now pay attention. We got a man here can maybe shed a little glimmer on the night's proceedings, so everybody just relax a minute. This here's Jake Kilmer. Kilmer's with the Freeze and he's an expert on this outfit."

  A moan of discontent rippled through the room.

  "You wanna listen to him, or stay dumb?" Dutch snapped without a hint of humor in his tone.

  The room got quiet.

  And colder than an ice cube sandwich.

  7

  EXIT SCREAMING

  The house was a two-story brick and stone structure nestled against high dunes overlooking the bay. The backyard was terraced, rising from the swimming pool to a flat that looked like a child's dream. There was a gazebo and an eight-horse carousel and a monkey bar set and a railroad with each car just large enough to accommodate one child.

  Two men smoked quietly in the gazebo.

  From high above, on top of the dunes that separated the house from the bay, the sound of the child laughing could be heard, followed by his grandfather's rough laughter. Their joyous chorus was joined by the sound of a calliope playing "East Side, West Side, All Around the Town." The child was on the carousel, his grandfather standing beside him with an arm around the boy. The horses, eyes gleaming, nostrils flaring, mouths open, jogged up and down in an endless, circular race. Below them, in the pool, an inner tube floated, forgotten.

  The figure, dressed entirely in black, crouched as it moved silently and swiftly through the sea grass on top of the dune to a point above the house. Only the swimming pool was visible. The figure was carrying a weapon that had the general conformity of a rifle but was larger.

  The figure slid to the ground and eased quietly to the edge of the dune, looking down at the old man and the child. He waited.

  A woman appeared at the sliding glass door at the back of the house.

  "Ricardo, bedtime," she yelled.

  The child protested but the woman persisted.

  "Once more around," the old man yelled back, and the woman agreed and waited.

  The figure on the dune also waited.

  His last ride finished, the little boy ran gleefully down the terrace and then turned back to the older man.

  "Come kiss me good night, Grandpa," he called back.

  The grandfather smiled and waved his hand.

  "Uno momento," he called back, and then motioned to the men in the gazebo to shut down the carousel.

  The child skipped to his grandmother and they entered the house together.

  The figure on the dune fitted what looked like a pineapple onto the end of the weapon and adjusted a knob on the rear of the barrel. There was the faint sound of metal clinking against metal.

  The old man looked around, not sure where the sound had come from.

  One of the men in the gazebo stood up, stepped out onto the terrace, and looked up.

  "Something?" the other one said.

  The first one shrugged and walked back into the gazebo.

  There was a muffled explosion-

  Pumf!

  A sigh in the night air over their heads.

  Then the terraced backyard of the house was suddenly bathed in a sickening orange-red glow.

  The two men in the gazebo were blown to the ground. The grandfather arced like a diver doing a backflip as he was blown off the terrace. He landed in the pool. The merry horses were blown to bits.

  The night calm was shattered by the explosion, by a crescendo of broken glass, by the screams.

  8

  THE CINCINNATI TRIAD

  Morehead had pinned seven photographs on a corkboard in the front of the big room, each one identified with a felt-tip pen. Since we had already made Tagliani and Frank Turner as one and the same, ditto Stinetto and Nat Sherman, Dutch crossed them out.

  Until a couple of hours ago Tagliani had been capo di tutti capi, "boss of all bosses" of the Cincinnati Tagliani family, known as the Cincinnati Triad.

  For fifty years the Taglianis had ruled the mob world in south-west Ohio, operating out of Cincinnati. The founder of the clan, Giani, its first capo di tutti capi, died when he was eighty-three and never saw the inside of a courtroom, much less did time for his crimes. The empire was passed to his son, Joe "Skeet" Tagliani. While the old man had a certain Old World charm, Skeet Tagliani was nothing less than a butcher. Under his regime the Taglianis had formed an alliance with two other gang leaders. One was Tuna Chevos, who married Skeet Tagliani's sister and was also one of the Midwest's most powerful dope czars. Across the Ohio River, in Covington, an old-time mafioso named Johnny Draganata controlled things. When a black Irish hood named Bannion tried to take over, Skeet threw in with Draganata. The war lasted less than three months. It was a bloodbath and to my knowledge there isn't a Bannion hoodlum left to talk about it.

  Thus the Cincinnati Triad was formed: Skeet Tagliani, Tuna Chevos, and Johnny Draganata.

  I had put Skeet away for a ten spot, but it had taken three years of my life to do it and I had spent the better part of the next two trying to prove that his brother, Franco, had taken over as capo in Skeet's place. It was a nasty job and costly. Several of our agents and witnesses had died trying to gather evidence against the Taglianis.

  Then Franco had vanished, poof, just like that, no trace—and another year had gone down the drain while I chased every hokum lead, every sour tip, up and down every dead-end alley in the country. The Cincinnati Triad had simply disappeared.

  A clever move, Taglianis selling out and hauling stakes like that. Clever and frustrating. Now, almost a year later, he had turned up in Dunetown-stretched out in the morgue with a name tag on his toe that said he was Frank Turner. The name change was easy to understand.

  What he was doing on ice was not.

  The other five faces in Dutch's photos were familiar although their names, too, were new. They were the princes of Tagliani's hoodlum empire, the capi who helped rule the kingdom: Rico Stizano, who was now calling himself Robert Simons; Tony Logeto, who had become Thomas Lanier; Anthony Bronicata, now known as Alfred Burns; and Johnny Draganata, the old fox, whose nom de plume was James Dempsey. The subject in the last picture was less familiar to me, although I knew who he was: Johnny "Jigs" O'Brian, a nickel-dime hoodlum who had been doing odd jobs for the mob in Phoenix until he married Tagliani's youngest daughter, Dana. At the time the Triad had done its disappearing act, O'Brian was doing on-the-job training running prostitution.

  Cute, but not all that original. The new names helped explain initials on suitcases, gold cuff links, silk shirts, sterling silverware, that kind of thing. The Tagliani bunch was big on monograms.

  Then there were the two missing faces, Tuna Chevos and his chief executioner and sycophant, Turk Nance. In the whole mob, Chevos and his henchman, Nance, were the most deadly. The setup here seemed too perfect for them to be very far away. Besides, Chevos was a dope runner and the coastline of Georgia from South Carolina to Florida was the Marseilles of America. Dope flowed through there as easily as ice water flowed through Chevos' veins.

  "Recognize these people?" Dutch asked, pointing to the rogues' gallery.

  I nodded. "All of 'em. Cutthroats to the man."

  "Okay," he said, "let's get on with it."

  I decided to play it humble and sat down on the corner of the desk.

  "I don't want to sound like I know it all," I said, "but I've been hounddogging these bastards for years. I know a lot about this mob because I've been trying to break up their party ever since I got out of short pants."

  Not a grin. A tough audience. Salvatore was cleaning his fingernails with a knife
that made a machete look like a safety pin. Charlie One Ear was doing a crossword puzzle.

  "Just what is the Freeze?" Charlie One Ear asked without looking up from his puzzle.

  They were going to make it tough.

  "Well, I'll tell you what it's not. It's not the Feebies or the Leper Colony," I said. "We have two jobs. We work with locals on anything where there's a hint of an interstate violation. And we go after the LCN. We're not in a league with the Leper Colony. We don't kiss ass in Washington by victimizing some little taxpayer who can't protect himself, and we don't hold press conferences every five minutes like the Feebies."

  "What's the LCN?" Zapata asked.

  "La Cosa Nostra, you fuckin' moron," Salvatore taunted.

  Zapata looked back over his shoulder at Salvatore. "Big deal. So I never heard it called LCN before. My old man didn't suck ass for some broken-down old mafioso."

  "That's right," Salvatore said. "Your old man swept floors in a Tijuana whorehouse."

  "You shoulda been brung up in a whorehouse," Zapata shot back. "Maybe you wouldn't wear an earring, like a fuckin' fag."

  "Hey, you're talking about my mother's wedding ring!" roared Salvatore.

  "All right, all right," Charlie One Ear said, holding up his hand.

  "You keep outta this," said Salvatore. "At least I got an ear to put it in; some dip didn't eat it for dinner."

  I wondered why Dutch didn't step in and stop things before they got out of hand. Then Zapata started snickering and Salvatore broke out in a laugh and Charlie One Ear smiled, and I got a sudden sense of what was happening. You see it in combat, this kind of barbed-wire humor. It's a great equalizer. It says: I trust you; we're buddies; you can say anything about me you want; nobody else has the privilege. It bonds that unspoken sense of love and trust among men under pressure, a macho camaraderie in which the insult becomes the ultimate flattery.

  I was beginning to understand what Dutch meant. This was a tight little society and they were letting me know it in their own way.

  They all got into it except Pancho Callahan, who never cracked a smile. He stared at me over a pyramid of fingers through cold gray eyes, the way you stare at a waiter in a restaurant when he forgets your order. I got the message. "Screw the buddy-buddy humor, hotshot," he was saying. "Show us what you got."