"I guess. Do you like him?"
"Uh-huh. He looks like the Peter Pan dog, but black. Could he baby-sit me when you go out?"
"Maybe. Let's go inside, it's too cold out here."
They went into the kitchen, where the dog downed another quart of water, an elderly Big Mac from the fridge, and four eggs beaten with milk. They all then adjourned to the living room, where the animal plopped himself down in front of the couch where Marlene and Lucy sat, tongue lolling and looking absurdly grateful.
"He looks like Uncle Harry," said Lucy after studying the dog for a while.
"Gosh, you're right, he does," agreed Marlene, laughing. The dog's face-its sad, intelligent eyes and its general air of battered dependability-was the image of the detective, Harry Bello. "Lucy, you know, I'm glad you reminded me. How would you like it if I asked Uncle Harry to come down and visit?"
"Uh-huh," said Lucy distractedly. "His name is Sweetie."
"Who, the dog?"
"Uh-huh." The dog licked the child's face, throwing her into a fit of giggles. "He likes it."
"If you say so," said her mom.
Arriving at Miami International Airport a few hours after Karp and Fulton, the man who called himself Bill Caballo rented a car and drove west on the Tamiami Trail, out past where the Glades began, until he came to the enormous gun shop that is one of the landmarks of the area. There he paid $435.95 plus tax for a Remington Sportsman 78 bolt-action rifle, with sling, mounting a Tasco 40-mm 4 x scope. He also bought a cheap.22 revolver, a box of.22 long rifle cartridges, a box of 308 Winchester Super-X cartridges, and a bottle of insect repellent, paying cash for all his purchases. He also paid in cash for an hour on the range behind the shop, where he zeroed the rifle until he could put three rounds within the diameter of a half-dollar coin at two hundred yards. He fired a dozen or so rounds from the.22 also, to see if it would fire reliably, which it did. He was not concerned with its accuracy.
Leaving the gun shop, he drove further along the Trail and found a junk market, where he bought an old golf bag and a miscellany of unmatched clubs. He put his new rifle in the golf bag, and bought a meal at a nearby diner.
He then took the Trail to 1-95, went north on that freeway to 922, and then took that east across the Broad Causeway, exiting at the Indian Creek Golf Course. He parked and walked around the southern edge of the golf course with the bag slung over his shoulder. He did not look very much like a golfer, but attracted no particular attention. Indian Creek is a public course and they get all kinds there.
He sat down in a mass of scrub behind a large cabbage palmetto, and smeared himself liberally with insect dope. Then he waited. Night fell. He dozed in short snatches. The sky turned gray, then became streaked with red, then the palest possible silvery blue, flecked with small clouds. He stretched and pulled his rifle out of the golf bag, wiped the scope, inserted four rounds into the magazine, and chambered one of them. He crawled around the side of a palmetto and lay prone in the short grass and looked through his scope at Guido Mosca's house.
At around six-thirty, Guido Mosca, dressed in Bermudas and a flowered shirt, with fishing rod in hand, walked barefoot out of his house and onto his little dock. He did this every morning, although he rarely caught a fish, and he saw no reason to interrupt his routine simply because, in a few hours, he was scheduled to fly to Washington to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He would have plenty of time to get ready, he thought, which in the event was untrue, because as soon as he reached the end of the dock he was shot once through the heart from across the wide channel.
FIFTEEN
"I still say," said Karp, "we should've flown back yesterday and made Mosca go with us."
Fulton, who was checking out the hang of his jacket and the tuck of his sport shirt in the motel room mirror, gave him a look. It was not the first time since their interview with the mobster that Karp had expressed such sentiments, nor the sixth either. It was starting to get on his nerves.
"Will you relax, for Chrissake!" Fulton snapped. "I should've left you in the office. Look! We're gonna go out now and get in the car, and drive somewhere and have a nice breakfast out on the beach, somewhere where we can get a decent bagel, like you're always bitching about, and then we're gonna drive out to Mr. Mosca's little house and pick him up and if his girlfriend's there we'll look at her tits for a couple minutes, and then we'll drive to the airport and be on the ten-ten flight to National."
"I don't want any breakfast," said Karp. "I want my hands on Guido Mosca. I want his head cradled on my lap. I want him up there in front of the committee, tying Paul Ashton fucking David to Bishop, and to a shooter who looks just like Lee Harvey Oswald and to Cuban shooters who didn't like Kennedy, and to Oswald himself and to whoever this Turm character is. This is the case, Clay. It's coming together-I can feel it."
"Can I at least get some coffee?"
"Yeah, if you can find a drive-through. And I want you to roll by the window," said Karp, and strode out of the room.
Fifteen minutes later they were at the house on the canal. The patio was deserted. A slight breeze ruffled the water of the pool. Fulton went to the glass door and rang the bell. After a minute, he rang again and rapped on the door with his knuckles. "Jerry's a late sleeper," he remarked.
"I hope so," said Karp, rapping on the glass himself. Fulton said, "Keep ringing. I'll check the front."
Fulton's shout brought Karp running around the side of the house. The detective was at the end of the dock, kneeling over a brightly colored mound. Karp felt his heart wrench around in his chest. He slowed his step. There was obviously no hurry anymore.
"Shot through the middle of the chest at long range," said Fulton, rising from the corpse. "Probably from those bushes across the canal." He looked at Karp and shrugged. "Okay, I was wrong. Who knew?"
"I'll take that literally. Who did know? The only people I told at the Washington end about coming down here to get Mosca were Crane… and Hank Dobbs. You tell anyone?"
"Hell, no! But you forgot one thing-Tony Bones knew all about it."
"Yeah, but why would Tony have his own guy whacked? He wants to take over South Florida when Trafficante kicks off. There's no damn reason for him to give us the go-ahead, and then give Mosca the go-ahead to talk to us, if all the time he was planning to kill him. The whole thing is too small-time. We do Tony a little favor, go easy on his kid, he does us a little favor, gets one of his guys to talk to us. It's not serious Mob business."
"Somebody Tony told, then?" offered Fulton.
"Yeah, and we're gonna have a talk with Tony about that. But what I think is, this isn't a Mob hit at all. This is a guy who likes to stand off and pop people with a rifle." Fulton thought about this for a while.
"You think the same guys, the Kennedy guys?"
"It's a possible, yeah, and it means somebody's following us. Or knows what we're doing."
Fulton gestured toward where Mosca's body lay. "Whatever, we got to call the sheriff."
"No, call Al Sangredo. Let him call the sheriff and explain the situation here. A little professional courtesy would go down pretty good, and besides, the last thing I want is to get our names involved in a local investigation. Meanwhile…" Karp gave the house a long, significant look.
"We toss his place."
"You toss his place, Detective. I'm a lawyer. My place is lounging by the pool, contemplating the majesty of the Constitution, and feeling like an asshole."
Later that afternoon, Karp and Fulton were eating pastrami in Sheffler's, a large, bright, highly chilled eatery on Collins in North Miami Beach. Al Sangredo was sitting across from them, sipping on a cup of coffee brewed at about a third of the octane rating he was used to, and listening to the two of them bring him up-to-date around mouthfuls of greasy pink meat. When they were finished, Sangredo said quietly, "That's quite a story. I hope you're not holding anything back from the sheriff about this hit. I vouched for you guys and I have to live in this town."