“That who you talked to?”
“That’s who I tried to talk to. He gave me the Heisman.” Smoke strikes the trophy pose before dropping his hands back to his lap.
“You gotta work him…”
“I don’t have the tongue Archie has… you’ve seen that.”
“I think you’re selling yourself short.”
“Man, I don’t know.”
Risina pulls the file out from under my hands and starts skimming it. “There’s a lot of solid information here, Smoke.”
Smoke shrugs, his eyes downcast. “I need a cigarette. Excuse me.” He climbs out of the booth and heads for the exit.
Risina starts to read the first page in the file, then stops. “You don’t think Smoke…?” She pauses, trying to figure out the best way to say it. “You don’t think someone maybe got to Smoke, do you? Or that he’s been involved from the get-go? I mean, this note says to bring you to Chicago, and here you sit.”
I shake my head. “I think he needs to find his footing. Gain some confidence. This job is… it’s not for everyone. It’s one thing to watch Archie put files together, another to get out and beat the streets all by your lonesome. I’m sure I rattled him in that alley in Manila. Maybe he’s putting one toe in the pool and finding out the water’s a little too deep. Being a fence is a lot harder than it looks. Psychologically, I mean.”
“Hmmm.” Risina goes back to reading, her eyes floating over the page. I like the way she’s thinking now, even if I don’t agree with her. She’s starting to engage her intuition, a weapon as important to a hit man as his gun. She’s asking the right questions, at least.
After a moment, Smoke returns to the booth, smelling like his namesake. “Sorry ’bout that. I tried to quit smoking once, but that didn’t work out for me. Anyway, while I was out there I was thinking there was a nugget I found in this Flagler file that stuck with me. It’s in there and you’ll come across it, but I’ll tell you anyway. This cat didn’t pick up his money himself. Both times, the commencement pay and the completion-he gave instructions where to drop it. Now, most of Archie’s regular guys on the payroll, Archie pays ’em direct. They’re tight, you know? They’re… like I said before.. ”
“In the stable.”
“Yeah. Not this guy.”
“You know where the drop-off was?”
“Yep. I took the duffel myself. Trailer park goes by ‘Little Arizona’ near the Indiana border.”
“And you handed it to him?”
“No, that’s the thing. I never met him.”
Smoke’s file gave me part of Flagler’s story, but it had holes in it big enough to drop a body through. He started as a bagman in Maryland, Virginia, and DC, and stayed mostly in that area up until about a year ago. Smoke didn’t know what he looked like… and if Archie did, he didn’t put it in his file. Archie was good about keeping notes on all his contractors, but for some reason, hadn’t gotten around to recording much on Flagler. Smoke was sure Flagler wasn’t his real name, but didn’t know where, when, or why he chose it.
There was scant information regarding the jobs he’d worked on the East Coast, just that he had a fence named Spellman who died of colon cancer, allowing Flagler to become a free agent. He must’ve pulled a few jobs for the other fence named Talbott, who gave the recommendation to Archie, but like Smoke said, Talbott wasn’t talking.
What Smoke did find were details on the two jobs he pulled for Archie prior to the one that went sour.
The first was the owner of a bar in Minneapolis, a sixty-year-old lothario. From the file Archie cobbled, the man was juggling six different women in various parts of the city. Three of them were married. I have no idea who ordered the killing: a jealous woman or a cuckolded husband, but the barkeep’s Don Juan lifestyle caught up with him. He was shot in his car at one-fifteen in the morning after he closed down the bar and put his key in the ignition of his Cadillac. Robbery was the police department’s initial suspicion; the safe inside the bar’s back office was open and empty. But as details of the bar owner’s social life emerged, the police shifted their attention to his spate of lovers. A dozen people were brought in for questioning, but all the suspects seemed to have strong alibis. The case remains unsolved and open.
The second assignment was a bit of a high-profile case. It involved the violent death of a professional athlete. Again, Flagler used the robbery angle to throw the police off the scent. This is not an uncommon tactic; hired killers have been utilizing it for centuries. Make it look like a petty theft gone wrong and the cops will spin their wheels for weeks, staking out pawnshops and flea markets, trying to find the killer by tracking what was stolen. All the while, the trail grows as cold as a frozen pond. Robberies are supposed to be about money; the goods have to be fenced at some point. So nothing drives a detective more insane than when the stolen items simply vanish.
In this case, the athlete was a cornerback for the Bears, a guy who mostly worked on the punt and kick-off teams, but occasionally made it on to the field in nickel packages or long-yardage situations. He was in his sixth year in the league, and hadn’t made a fortune, but had done all right for himself. He lived in a decent-sized house in Cabrini and was into guns, amassing dozens of handguns and rifles.
He was shot in the foyer of his house, just inside his front door, while wearing a bathrobe. He lived alone and his body wasn’t discovered until he missed his second day of practice. Most of the athlete’s weapon collection had been stolen from the home, and the police went the robbery/homicide route.
The cops staked out gun shows and various shops around the city, but none of the weapons ever surfaced. Flagler was smart enough to bury them in the woods or drop them in the bottom of a lake, making the stolen guns a trail that would only lead to frustration. Half of a bagman’s job is to escape cleanly after a mark is hit. A good killer’s best weapon against the police is to behave illogically.
Contract killers know how homicide cops think. They want to keep their “closed” case percentages up, and nine out of ten murderers are handed to them on a silver platter. A boyfriend kills his lover. A husband kills his wife. A drug dealer pops his rival. A couple of days of work, someone cracks, someone steps forward, and the homicide is solved. Case closed. A contract killer has no personal connection to the victim, and if he’s good, he makes it look like the intention of the killing is something it’s not. When the case goes infuriatingly cold, it’s human nature for a homicide detective to move on to greener pastures.
Despite Smoke’s misgivings, he had given me quite a bit to go on; in fact, Flagler’s modus operandi helped fill in the blanks on why he went missing.
Flagler was contracted to kill a man who owned a strange, expensive collection of human skulls. I think Flagler finally found something worth stealing he didn’t want to bury.
Little Arizona is located in Hegewisch, smack between Powder Horn and Wolf lakes, on top of an old landfill near the Indiana border. For being so near the city, it’s a rural lifestyle, where fishermen can reel in a blue gill or a carp, and hunters can legally bag birds seeking a drink as they migrate south. For a trailer park and despite the occasional meth head, it’s not a bad life.
I left Risina and Smoke back in the city to do further research on Flagler, to see if the two of them could sift through the silt of Archie’s files and pan out any more gold. Risina was content to examine more of Archie’s work, and didn’t protest when I told her I’d like to make the run to the drop site alone. I have an ulterior motive for leaving her behind though: this is the first time I believe I might head into some violence, and I don’t want to expose her. Not yet. Whether or not the violence is going to be directed toward me or dispensed by me doesn’t make a difference.
The park is quiet and the plots for the trailers are spread out wider and more haphazard than I imagined, like someone dropped a box of matches and just left the sticks to lie as they fell. A black curtain of clouds is gathering in the north and heading this way, and I’d like to scope out the site and uncover any salient information before the skies open. Rain, so often thought of as a blessing, a life-giver, the washer of sins, is no friend to a hit man. It causes fingers to slip, vision to blur, and muddy ground to hold shoe prints in clear relief. Best to get in and get out before any complications.