Just a quiet walk in the park…
It was 4:50. I took a seat on a wet park bench facing south toward the NYU Law School buildings, where I had a good view of the entire park. If Tinkerton's men came at me out of the late afternoon gloom, they had better come in numbers and be wearing track shoes, because they would have a tough time cornering me in all that open ground. In the distance, I heard the chime of cathedral bells and knew it must be 5:00. Shaggy college kids with long hair, book bags, and that all-important second-hand grunge look poured out of the NYU class buildings to the east like a jailbreak. After the flood of the great unwashed had ebbed, I saw another group of older and more prosperous students emerge from a building down on Sullivan and scatter. Three men dressed in top coats and business suits followed them out the doors. They crossed 4 ^th Street and marched straight north into the park.
Barrister Billingham was the man in the center, dressed in a stylish, mohair topcoat over a navy-blue pinstriped suit, and a red silk tie. His deep Florida tan completed the outfit, and he was right. Even if I hadn't seen him on television, there was no mistaking him for anyone else in the park. Towering above his bald head were two very large, mono-brow hulks dressed in dark, loose fitting, unbuttoned raincoats. The muscle on the left held a large, dark-green golf umbrella over Billingham's head, his arm straight out, chest high, like the Russian wrestlers carrying their flag at the Olympics. The muscle on the right had his hands in his coat pockets. What else was in there I wasn't sure, but his eyes swept back and forth like two nervous radar dishes until he picked me out of the gloom from a half-block away. He must have said something to Billingham because the lawyer looked my way and gave a brief nod as he continued on to the arch.
I looked around the park one more time and then looked over at Sandy. Satisfied that the three men had come alone, I stood up and headed for the arch where they waited for me at the wrought iron fence at the monument's base. Flanked by the two hulks, Billingham greeted me with a pleasant smile, but there were no hugs or handshakes.
I looked up at the inscription carved on the pediment high above us. “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair,” I read aloud. “George Washington, 1798. Which one are you, Charley?”
A thin smile crossed his lips. “Gino said you were an irreverent smart-ass, Mister Talbott, and I have always found Gino an excellent judge of people.”
“Yeah, a real prince.”
“Before we begin, Harvey here has something he needs to do.” Billingham motioned to one of the beefy bodyguards. “Don't be alarmed, he won't hurt you, unless I tell him to.”
With that, the bigger of the two hulks stepped behind me and quickly frisked me: back, sides, legs, groin, chest, neck, the works. His hands moved quickly, efficiently, and very professionally. Satisfied, Harvey nodded to Billingham. The other goon handed Billingham the green golf umbrella and the two bodyguards walked away, taking up positions far enough away, but not too far, their eyes constantly moving, scanning the surrounding area.
“Now that I know you aren't armed or wearing a wire, we can have that little talk you wanted,” Billingham said pleasantly as we walked off down the sidewalk, side-by-side, each of us under his own umbrella.
“I'm the one they're trying to kill,” I reminded him.
“And for very good reasons.” He pulled what looked like a small transistor radio from his jacket pocket and turned it on. “This little gadget doesn't play any of your favorite rock music, Mister Talbott. It emits a bubble of 'white noise' that drives the neighborhood dogs crazy and renders a directional microphone useless. These days one never knows what they might have set up in a parked car, on a roof, or in some window.”
“It's a little warm for a topcoat, isn't it, Charley?”
He smiled. “I don't mind the extra protection, Mr. Talbott. You never can tell what the weather will bring here in the city.” He looked across the street to the west. “I assume that is Mrs. Kasmarek hiding in that doorway over on MacDougal — the attractive, young woman with the large, shoulder bag?” I made no reply. “Gino was quite smitten by her, so she must really be something. Personally, I am surprised you still have her with you. The comfort factor aside, it is very dangerous for a man in your situation to keep a companion. Inevitably, it affects one's judgment, for the worse I am afraid.”
“Gino said that too.”
“Gino is a very smart man. By the way, you'll be happy to know he is recovering nicely in a clinic up in Montreal.”
“Canada? You don't take any chances do you?”
“Not when it comes to prying little minds with unlimited budgets. By the way, I understand you and Mrs. Kasmarek saved his life. I am personally very appreciative, and I assure you it gained you some good will in other quarters as well. Gino is a lot like Harvey and Tomas over there, it will take a lot more than one bullet to kill them. Be that as it may, I assure you Mrs. Kasmarek is in no danger from us. Neither are you, Mister Talbott.” He paused and looked me in the eyes, “But I wonder how much danger are we in from you?”
“Me? You're worried about me?” I laughed.
He gave me another thin, cold, smile. “Please understand. Between the Justice Department and the Patillo Family over in Newark, I am not without enemies. At last count, I had two undercover police officers in my class, a boyish-looking FBI agent passing as a student intern in the department office, a new janitor, and I am not too sure about my new neighbors in Connecticut. As for the Patillos? Attorneys are supposed to be off limits, but if Rico thought for one instant that I stood any chance of getting Jimmy Santorini out of jail, he'd have a contract out on me before nightfall.”
“An occupational hazard. You should be more careful about the clients you take.”
“True enough,” he sighed as we continued walking around the park. “So tell me what you want. And tell me what you have that I am supposed to find so interesting.”
“What I want is some information on Louie Panozzo. What was it that he had on Jimmy Santorini?”
Billingham looked at me for a moment. “Suffice it to say that this meeting never took place, Mister Talbott. I spoke to my client. Frankly, I advised him that we should not talk to you, but a man can get very disconsolate when he is locked up inside a Federal Penitentiary, surrounded by all that barbed wire and knowing he will be very, very old when he finally does get out.” Billingham stopped walking, his eyes drilling into me. “But be advised, if you are playing games with him, you will learn that Jimmy has no sense of humor what-so-ever.”
“Neither does Ralph Tinkerton,” I answered. “And if I don't stop him, it won't matter who Jimmy is pissed at.”
We resumed our walk. Every time we crossed a new sidewalk, he led us off in a new direction, like a freighter in an old war movie zigzagging to avoid submarines. Until a few days ago, I would have thought Charley Billingham a paranoid nut, but that was when I still trusted funeral directors, doctors, and county sheriffs. I never did trust lawyers. Who does?
“All right. You asked me about Louie Panozzo,” Billingham began his story. “He worked for Jimmy in Newark. He was not “family” or a “made man” or anything nefarious. He was merely an ordinary, nine-to-five bookkeeper, but he had access to all the financial records and all the accounting. No, that is not quite correct. They were his financial records, his “books” if you will, and he knew where every dime came from and went. That means all the drugs, women, numbers, the unions, loan sharking, money laundering, the scams, guns, booze, the bookies, the legitimate businesses Jimmy ran and the crooked ones. Panozzo had the details of everything that went into the till. More importantly, he kept “the pad”: the record of the payoffs Jimmy made to the police and half the elected and appointed government officials throughout eastern New Jersey and New York. Unfortunately, the FBI seized Panozzo on a trumped-up wire fraud charge. Instead of trusting me to get him off, he accepted a plea bargain from the U. S. Attorney and rolled over, first to that bastard Hardin, if you'll pardon my language, and then in court.”
“I know that.”
“Of course you do,” Billingham smiled, making me feel like a complete idiot. “And as I think you are aware by now, when Louie left Newark, he took an electronic copy of all of Jimmy's master accounting records for the past five years with him.”
“That's what this is all about? The bean counter's books?” I asked.
Billingham looked at me as if I was a first year law student who had just farted in the middle of one of his lectures. “No, Mister Talbott, this is not about the books, it is about power. Those records not only include the various items about Jimmy's operations I enumerated, they also include dozens of transactions with the other “families” in the Tri-state area — joint ventures, as you might call them — so those computer files can put many, many people in jail. No one knows that. Jimmy does, of course, I know it, Gino does, and now you do.”
“Tinkerton knows too. He tried to carve them out of me with a scalpel.”
“Not exactly. He knows the files exist and that they contain information on Jimmy's operations in New Jersey, perhaps the payoffs as well, but that is all he knows.”
“So who has them, Charley?”
“We had been hoping you do, Mister Talbott,” he smiled. “The Feds don't have them. If they did, they would have used them by now, and half the politicians and crooks on the Atlantic seaboard would already be in jail. And Rico Patillo doesn't have them. If he did, he would already be squeezing and muscling people.” He stopped and looked at me. “I know you are still skeptical about the value of those records, but did you ever see the “Untouchables” movie? The one with Kevin Costner as Elliot Ness and all that?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well, in real life, when Al Capone was convicted and sent to prison, it was for income tax evasion, not the murders or numerous violent crimes he committed. It was the accountants who got him, the “bean counters” as you call them. With Louie Panozzo's accounting records, you could control a five-state area, perhaps even the government in Washington itself. That's what makes them the most explosive bits of computer code since the Manhattan Project, and whoever has them has his finger on the trigger.”
“So it wasn't simply a matter of Panozzo holding a news conference and saying he made the whole thing up?”
“That was pure propaganda. Do you think Jimmy Santorini would let that little weasel off the hook just because he stood up and said he didn't mean it? No, no, it was the books. It was always the books. Panozzo couldn't trade them to the Feds or to Rico Patillo, and he couldn't give them back to Jimmy, either. That was their little secret you see — Louie's and Jimmy's — and the only thing keeping him alive. As long as Louie had them, no one could touch him.”
My mind flashed back to that night on the embalming table. “Tinkerton did.”
“When Tinkerton learned that Panozzo was coming back to us, he grabbed Louie before he could get away. Perhaps he said something wrong, perhaps he tried to run bluff; but Tinkerton decided to torture the truth out of him. If he knew what was really on them, he would have been more careful, but Panozzo was overweight and out of shape. We assume he had a heart attack. Whatever, we know Tinkerton failed to get them.”
“Tinkerton told me it was an accident, he went too far.”
“That is quite likely the truth. And then you showed up,” Billingham turned and studied me. “Permit me to be blunt, Mister Talbott, but do you have them? Everyone believes you do. We can make you fabulously wealthy, and I will personally guarantee your safety and Mrs. Kasmarek's. All we want to do is destroy them. We'll even permit you to destroy them, if I can be there to watch. However, your clock is ticking. If Rico Patillo catches you first… well, you saw what he is capable of doing in Boston. He would kill you, kill her, and kill your mother, your dog, and your mother's dog, and that would be on a good day.”
“How does Patillo figure into this?”
“The first thing they teach a young prosecutor is to ask who benefits. So far, it is Rico Patillo who keeps coming up the big winner. Him, Senator Hardin, and your friend Ralph Tinkerton, and I would dearly love to find the link that ties them all of them together. As for the losers? Jimmy is in Marion and I'm walking around with two bodyguards.”
“That's why you are going to help me, Charley.”
“Me? And why would I want to do that?”
“Because I'm your last hope. Yours and Jimmy's. I need you to pull together everything you have and everything you can find on Panozzo and his wife, Clement Aleppo, Richie Benvenuto, Johnny Dantonio, Paulie Mantucci, and their wives. I need medical records, dental records, blood types, all that stuff. I also need you to pull together everything you can find on the Greene Funeral Home, the Varner Clinic, and Oak Hill Cemetery in Columbus. Who owns them, their tax records, everything.”
“Is that all?” He chuckled.
“No, I need you to do a little research for me,” I said as I handed him a slip of paper.
He opened it and read the names, “Skeppington, Brownstein, Pryor, and Kasmarek, Atlanta, Phoenix, Portland, and Chicago?… Kasmarek?” he looked over at the doorway.
“I'm not keeping her around for personal comfort, Charley. They buried “the Mole” under her ex-husband's name in Oak Hill Cemetery in Columbus, and she's got proof. Louie Panozzo and his wife are buried under my name and my wife's. He won't match my Army records, and his wife won't match my wife's hospital records in California, either. They buried your other New Jersey friends under those other names. Tinkerton murdered them, and you'll find his signatures all over the records. And I think those guys barely scratch the surface. There are more graves up there.”
Billingham stared at me, perhaps with a newfound appreciation. “You never cease to surprise, Mr. Talbott.” We had come around full circle to the arch, and I stopped. Billingham pulled a long, Cuban cigar out of his coat pocket, bit off the tip, and lit it slowly with a wooden match. As I watched his face, I could see the wheels turning.
“You are a sharp lawyer with plenty of resources,” I told him. “Dig out the two sets of death certificates, get photos of the two sets of headstones and find a sympathetic judge. That ought to be enough to get a warrant to dig up the Talbott graves in Columbus. That should bring Tinkerton's house of cards crashing down, and give you the wedge you need to file some prosecutorial misconduct charges to get your boss out of jail.”
“Prosecutorial misconduct?” Billingham looked down at the slip of paper, thinking. “Possibly, but it's a stretch.”
“Really?” I reached in my pocket and handed him the Massachusetts driver's license. “Who's this guy?”
Billingham frowned. “Tony Grigiatto, “Tony G,” a button man for Rico.”
“He was waiting for us in the alley last night in Boston with a gun and a silencer. They had a whole crew up there and that means Rico Patillo is working for Tinkerton.”
“No, Mister Talbott,” Billingham shook his head sadly. “You have that backwards, it means that Tinkerton is working for Rico Patillo. As I said, this is all about power and if you do have those computer files, you should tread very, very softly.” He started to turn away and then he looked back and paused. “But, if you don't mind my asking a personal question, why are you doing all this?”
“Because I want off the merry-go-round. I want us both off,” I pointed across the street. “They won't leave us alone, so I'm going to bring them down.”
“You? You are going to “bring them down?” Billingham smiled, amused by the naivete of my answer. He took a deep drag on the cigar and tipped his head up, exhaling a thick cloud of cigar smoke. It hung around his head under the umbrella in the damp air. “Then I wish you good luck, Mister Talbott,” he said. “We'll both need it.”
Billingham had just tipped his umbrella to the east and turned away again, when I heard a loud, painful grunt come out of him. His eyes bulged and he lurched forward as if he had been punched in the back. He staggered forward with a puzzled expression as the blow drove him to his knees. He dropped his umbrella and toppled into me. As thick and bulky as he was, the best I could do was to catch him and slow his fall, lowering him to the sidewalk in front of me. I knew immediately that he had been shot in the back. He was lying on his side looking up at me, wide-eyed, trying to breathe.
I ran my hand across his back. I felt a jagged tear in the back of his coat, between the shoulder blade and his spine, but I felt nothing wet. I pulled my hand away. No blood? I put my hand back and felt around in the tear until I found something small and hard. I pulled it out and found myself looking at a spent bullet. That was when I realized he was wearing a bulletproof vest under the top coat. The bullet hadn't penetrated, but might have broken a few ribs as it slammed into him, flattened, and knocked the wind out of him.
“A goddamned Kevlar vest, Charley?” I said. “You gotta be kidding.”
“Like I said.” He wheezed painfully. “In this city, one can never be too careful.”
I turned and tried to determine where the shot came from, but I couldn't tell. Suddenly another bullet zipped past my head and grazed the concrete sidewalk behind me, kicking up chips and sparks. From the way it ricocheted, it must have come from the north, and high above. I looked around the nearly-empty park, but there was no one within several hundred feet of us who could possibly have gotten off a shot like that, much less two. They must be using a rifle with a silencer, shooting from one of the rooftops.
Billingham's eyes were wide open. He clutched my arm and tried to pull himself up, but I pushed him back down. I propped our two umbrellas out in front of him, screening both of us from view to the north and east where the shots must have come from.
“Stay down!” I told him as I crouched behind the umbrella too. The thin nylon would never stop a bullet, but what the gunman couldn't see, he wasn't likely to hit.
Billingham's two guards had been facing away from us, and it wasn't until the second bullet skipped off the pavement that they also realized something was wrong. They dropped into defensive stances with their guns out scanning the side streets.
“No, up north,” I screamed at them, wanting to make sure they knew it wasn't me who shot their boss. “It must be a rifle, up on one of the roofs.” They both nodded.
“Thank you,” Billingham pulled me to him and whispered. “Thank you.”
“Track down that stuff, Charley,” I told him as I scanned the park again. I was already on the “10 Most Wanted List” in the Post Office, so sticking around the park would not do me any good. Neither would getting shot in some noble gesture to protect Charley Billingham, so I took off running west, zigzagging through the trees.
Harvey ran over and plucked Billingham off the sidewalk, threw him over his shoulder as if he were a rag doll, and then sprinted south into the trees. The other guard trailed behind, watching the roofs, waiting to return fire, but there wasn't any.
Billingham had it all wrong; he was so intent on foiling unwanted listeners that he set himself up for a bullet. While we strolled around the small park shielded from view by the heavy overhead cover, the rifleman had found himself a good firing position. He watched and waited and when we looped back through the park and came back into the open, he had a clear shot.
I had spent enough time on the rifle range at Fort Riley, Kansas to know that a rifle shot from almost any distance was difficult in the drizzly fog and half-light of the late afternoon. Add in the thick tree canopy and the fact the closest rooftops had to be at least 500 yards away, and this guy was good. If Charley hadn't been wearing the vest, he'd be dead.