“He have anything to say, any statement?”
“He never regained consciousness...”
Malleck swiveled around in his chair and looked hard at the three men. “Then the lieutenant is no longer a part of our problem, is he?” He stared at Salmi. “You don’t know me as well as my men here, Salmi, but I’ve always been a positive thinker. So now I’m gonna tell you what I like about our current situation. We are all in on this and we’re going to stick together. Nobody can save himself by second thoughts anymore. Who fired the bullets is immaterial. Might have been Neal, might have been the Mex here. They both used imported, foreign-made guns so ballistics can’t trace anything back to army issue. But we’re all in on it.”
Eddie Neal grinned and said, “Let’s give credit where credit is due, Sarge. Castana’s the hot shot, he won all the medals in the division shootout.”
“You shit!” Castana said, staring at Neal. “You rednecked, two-timing shit!”
Eddie Neal chuckled in an embarrassed fashion, as if deflecting a compliment, and said, “Kind of hard words you’re laying on your best buddy, Mex. I’m not saying for sure it was you put him down...”
“Shut up, both of you,” Malleck said. “We don’t say one more fucking word about this, you understand? I knew it was going to happen, so I’m an accomplice, Frank Salmi set it up...” He paused. “Detective Salmi buzzed Weir on the police radio, said he was a concerned citizen, that he had a tip on the Private Lewis case. It was Salmi who asked his compadre for a meet at Cabrini Green...”
“I told him what you said I should, that I was kin to Mrs. Lewis. I thought you wanted to meet the lieutenant to make a deal. That’s all I knew.”
“Did you go into a bad-ass nigger act on the phone for your buddy, Salmi?”
The detective’s face went gray. “I’m not a clown, Malleck,” he said. “I’m an officer of the law. I made a certain phone call because you asked for it.” He took a step toward Malleck and lowered his voice. “Listen, sergeant, those other wipeouts, you said they were matters of expediency. I understand that. But Weir... a fellow officer. You didn’t tell me you were blowing him away.”
“Spare me your man-with-a-badge shit, Salmi,” Malleck said. “You don’t give a damn what happened last night just so long as you keep on collecting your paycheck. We both know that.”
Malleck took a bottle of whiskey from his desk drawer and poured a shot into a canteen cup, his face flushed with anger. “Like I just said, that part of our operation is over and done with. Weir was getting too smart, he was crowding us. Now we go on to the next phase.”
He tapped the paper in his typewriter. “I’m preparing a report to cover Lasari.”
He began to read in a mocking, singsong voice. “Our first tip came from Chicago Police Detective Frank Salmi who noted a suspicious car near an unofficial veterans’ office and checked plates. Such information was turned over to us and we checked Army reports. Learning the subject was a deserter, currently employed in Calumet City, Privates Neal and Castana, operating on orders from First Sergeant Karl Malleck, went to Calumet City to attempt to locate the deserter, checked place of business, local bars and so forth. Army personnel located subject’s rooming house, hoped to apprehend subject and bring peacefully into custody. Subject attempted to elude our surveillance and was declared fugitive.”
Malleck looked at the other three men in the room and controlled an almost diffident smile. He was pleased with himself because this was an area of expertise he had mastered and felt at home with — the “truth” of records, the “sanctity” of clerical reports issued in quadruplicate on official paper, fake or real, marked and stamped and sealed with proper endorsement.
“Subject was surveilled from Indiana to state line and then to center city Chicago. Surveillance lost when subject left car. However, acting on an anonymous phone tip, we had reason to believe that the subject had barricaded himself in an apartment rented by one Bonnie Caidin.”
Malleck smiled. “I added that little variation of the truth about a tip just to make the civilians look good. We never lost Lasari. When he parked his car in the lady’s neighborhood, we knew exactly where he was going.”
Malleck sipped his whiskey. “And on and on and so on and so on. When I finish the report, it’s gonna read that Lasari resisted violently and had to be subdued with force. That’s our story. It’s clean, it’s legal, and I can swear by these six stripes I wear that it will go down with the brass like a cold beer after a hot march.
“We got him by the balls on this. If Lasari doesn’t buy the proposal I’m gonna make him, he’s facing five or ten years minimum in a federal pen.”
Malleck smiled easily. “Okay, get out now, all of you. Castana, tell Homer Robbins I’ll want to see him in about an hour. Salmi, adios and buena suerte. Neal, go get yourself a real GI haircut and make a request for some new uniforms. You may be doing some traveling. But first, tell Scales to bring Lasari in here. I want to talk to him alone. I’m gonna take that yellow prick up to the mountaintop and show him the promised land.”
Salmi said unexpectedly, “I want to make one thing clear before we break up this meeting. You guys think you got some kind of protection because you wear the same uniform. Well, don’t try to double-cross me just because I’m not part of the club. If it ever slips that I fingered Mark Weir — even if I didn’t know I was doing that — he’s got a lot of friends in this town who might want to shorten my life expectancy. Nobody likes going down alone, just remember that.”
Malleck said, “Frank, if there’s one thing I got no use for, it’s a whiner. As I remember, you came to me with a sad story, wanting in on this action cause you had good contacts with Mr. M. Me and my soft heart, I bought your story — five kids that you want to educate and you gotta keep feeding them first. You don’t want ’em on drugs, you don’t want ’em turning into the kind of spies that’s made this city a cesspool. You wanted to be Santa Claus, the big daddy. You wanted a better shake for your kids. Well, you’re going about it in the American way, Salmi. You’re paying for it.”
The report was typed in quadruplicate in stilted Army language on appropriate forms without erasures or strikeovers, addressed to one Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Facknor, Special Processing Department, Fort Lincoln, Illinois. The subject was Francis Durham Lasari.
Seated in front of Malleck’s desk, his face and lips dark with dried blood, Duro Lasari read the account of the charge against him. The report was studded with ponderous, quasi-technical jargon — “subject was observed,” “surveillance commenced at 1900 hours,” “acting on information received” and “subject advised of charges according to Articles of War.” It ran four and one-half pages.
When Lasari finished reading the report, he looked directly at Malleck, waiting for him to speak. Lasari had spent the night on the floor of an old tack room at the Armory, a chill, dark place that still smelled of saddle soap and horse leather. About an hour ago, a black orderly had brought him coffee and aspirin and whispered, “I’m not going to wash you up, man. Tops don’t want me to do you nothin’.”
Lasari was unclear about what had happened at the apartment last night only minutes after Bonnie had left. There had been the turn of a key, the door bursting open suddenly, and the crunch of a zap against the side of his head. He had been aware of two men, but the movement had been so swift he hadn’t really seen them. They must have struck him again, adding other injuries after he was unconscious from the first blow. He had been dimly aware of sick, antic laughter.