Sangredo was a big man, six-four, two-seventy. He was a retired NYPD homicide cop who had worked with Fulton for fifteen years in Harlem, a datum recorded in his black eyes, which, under an enthusiastic growth of eyebrow, were hard, suspicious, and intelligent. He had the usual tan of the region and his skin was smooth and relatively unlined for a man of fifty-seven. In a city full of "Spanish," he was distinguished by being an actual Spaniard, and he carried himself with the requisite dignity. Fulton assured him that he was not withholding anything germane to a homicide investigation, although he might have had he found anything worthwhile in his quick search of Mosca's house. Jerry Legs was, however, not the sort of mafioso who keeps careful records.
"So," Sangredo continued, "you really think it was the Kennedy people did this?"
"It's our working assumption," answered Karp. "The question is, what do we do about it. You ever run into a Cuban named Angelo Guel?" He pulled out the photograph of Guel. "He'll be older, of course."
Sangredo studied the picture and slowly shook his head. "It's not a face that sticks in my mind. You think he knows something?"
"I don't know, but I'd like to speak to any Cuban mercenary who was standing on a street corner in New Orleans with Lee Oswald in the fall of sixty-three. Of course, there's no way of telling if he's in Miami or not. We should've asked Mosca if he knew where Guel was. Shit, now there's a million things I wish I'd've asked him, but I thought I'd have plenty of time to pump his brains."
"So, what do we do?" mused Sangredo. "I could try to find that girlfriend of his. She wasn't in the house, but she'd been there. She must've taken off as soon as she found the corpse."
Karp shrugged. He wasn't interested in girlfriends. "No, it's Guel we need. And this other Cuban, Carrera. And the mysterious Mr. Turm, whatever his real name is. I'm thinking this is the Sylvia Odio team, the three guys who stopped by her house in Dallas right before the assassination and told her they were going after Kennedy. Two Cubans, one named Angelo, one named Leopoldo, and an American named Leon. If Angelo was Guel-God, he even used his real name! — and Leopoldo was Carrera, then we know who Leon was, for sure. Odio IDed that Leon was Oswald to the FBI after the shooting. Mosca must've seen them in New Orleans just before they left for Dallas."
"Wait a second," said Fulton. "The problem with the Odio story was that at the time she got that visit, Oswald was on his way to Mexico-" He stopped. "Oh, shit!"
"Right," said Karp grimly. "It wasn't Oswald in Mexico at all. It was our lookalike-Caballo. He was on the bus, and he made sure that people on the bus remembered him. He's the voice on the tape the CIA sent to the FBI and then conveniently erased. He's the reason why the cameras outside the Soviet and Cuban embassies happened to go down on the day he was there, because even if he's a close match to Oswald, an actual photograph could've been analyzed to show that it really wasn't Oswald. And that, of course, explains how Oswald was identified leaving a rifle at a gun shop, cashing a big check at a little grocery store, going to a rifle range, and driving a car, even though he was other places at those times and even though he didn't know how to drive. Yeah, that was a slipup! Who would've believed that a macho American man couldn't drive a car? No, guys, this is it. This is the case. V.T. told me early on that Oswald was the key, whether he did it or not, and he was right."
Fulton had been nodding enthusiastically as Karp spoke, and his bloodhound instincts were aroused. "Okay, then the first thing we got to do is find this Odio woman and flash the pictures we got of Guel and the other people on that film, see if any of them ring a bell."
"I wouldn't do that," said Sangredo. They stared at him.
"Why the hell not?" asked Fulton.
"Because the woman's burned out. She's been telling the same story for twelve years and all it's got her is grief. She's had threats from the nutso Cubanos. Every assassination buff in the country wants to show her a picture."
"You know her?" asked Karp, amazed.
"Not exactly. But I know people who know her. She lives here in Miami, in what they call seclusion. My advice is, get your ducks in a row before you go see her. Find Guel and get a decent picture of him, him and this Carrera, instead of the fuzzy shit you showed me, then go see her. Because you're only going to get one shot at her and it better be right."
They all thought about this for a while. Then Karp said, "Okay, let's go for Guel. What'll it take to find him?"
Sangredo considered this in his cautious way. "Um, well, I'm one guy. I have some contacts with the sheriff and Miami PD. I could run checks."
"And we have guys in New Orleans and Dallas could do the same thing," said Fulton. "But it's going to take some time."
"Which we don't have," said Karp. "Mosca was aced right under our noses. It could happen to Guel too, if we start getting close."
Sangredo looked at him sharply. "It sounds like you're saying you guys got a leak up there."
"It's a possibility," replied Karp. "That, or we're being followed. Which is one reason why I don't want you to do what you just suggested. I don't want the cops involved." He held up a hand against the expostulations of the other two men. "No, listen! This isn't business as usual. The assassination nuts have made a lot of hay about all the people connected to the Kennedy thing who've died under mysterious circumstances over the years; I'm not saying I'm buying that whole line, but I'll go with some of it, especially after what happened this morning. So the fewer people who know we're after Guel and Carrera, the better."
"But, hell, Butch," Sangredo complained, "if I got to work alone it's going to take years to find the bastards."
"I didn't say alone," answered Karp. "My thought is we should have a talk with Tony Buonafacci."
They stared at him, stupefied. Fulton stuck a finger in his ear and screwed it around vigorously. "Hey, sorry," he said, "I must be getting deaf. I thought you just said we should bring the fucking Mafia in to look for this potential key witness."
"I did. No, wait! It makes sense. Tony's going to be pissed somebody whacked a made guy on his turf, one, and two, Tony doesn't particularly like Cubans and he'd be glad to finger one of them. A couple of years ago, when a bunch of Cuban gunslingers were taking potshots at me, Ray Guma sent a material witness in the case down here to Tony and she was fine. So…"
"Damn it, Butch," said Fulton, "that's not the same thing. We still haven't cleared up the possibility that the Mob is involved in this thing. We set them loose on this and even if they do find our guys they're just as likely to end up like Johnny Roselli did last summer. They cut his legs off and stuffed him into an oil drum and threw his legs in there too. He was still alive when they dumped the can in the water. You want to work with these assholes?"
"No, but there's Mob and Mob. Look, Tony told Mosca to spill the beans. Mosca did. Did you think he was shitting us? No, me neither. There's a possibility that Marcello in New Orleans was involved in it. Some Cubans who might've worked for Trafficante may have been involved in it. And I bet if we had the old man, Santos, on a hot grill he could tell us a lot about what really went down. But Tony's not connected to that end. He's out of the Bollano outfit in Brooklyn. Marcello's New Orleans, which is part of the Chicago outfit. There's not much love lost between New York and Chicago, especially since Chicago's got the gold mine in Vegas tied up tight. No, if Tony can slip it to Chicago in some minor, undetectable way, he's not going to lose sleep over it."