“Bastard get away?”
“Yeah, guy pulled loose, left part of his coat sleeve behind and got into a car that was running outside the office. An old man, a light sleeper, heard the car’s engine going and looked out the window to see what was happening and caught the end of the action. Couldn’t identify the car and didn’t see the plates.”
I put the phone down and stared at the wall.
How would they get the connection between Bettie and the vet?
And why? That part was easy... she could have hidden the information that was so critical to the mob there and a hit man was sent to search the place, knocking off anyone who tried to interfere.
There was only one answer. I called Bettie and after four rings she answered.
I said, “Bettie, this is Jack. Did you call Dr. Brice recently?”
“Why... yes. The other day. With my memory returning, I just... just had to. Why? Was that bad?”
“No, kid. Just tell me what happened.”
“It was just to say hello and we didn’t talk for more than five minutes. He had a sick animal he was tending to.” She stopped, then asked quizzically, “Why?”
“You call Darris over now. Like right away. Tell him I said to clean your phone circuitry.”
“But...”
“Please, doll, do it. Now.”
“Very well.” After a brief pause she said, “Is everything all right?”
“It will be,” I told her and hung up.
Technology.
It had changed most of the criminal minds so that they knew how to use the greatest scientific advances for their own ends. They had the money to do it and the manpower to make it work. How they knew to tap Bettie’s phone was a mystery right now, but all mysteries finally get solved sooner or later.
There was another part of the puzzle that was evident now. If they knew where she was, why didn’t they kill her?
Because she still had something vital they needed, and that was buried in her lost memory.
Then something else flittered through my mind. How did the mob know she had lost her memory? Nothing was ever printed in the papers except the fact that she had been presumed killed when the car went over the bridge.
There was a damn leak.
Someplace in her past, someone knew of the infirmity and somehow passed word to somebody else and the news went unheeded until someone recognized it for what it was. It couldn’t have been a reporter because that was a story that would never be suppressed. The whole affair was damned accidental and had taken a long time before it raised its head from the dust.
For a few minutes I thought about it and the conclusion had to be one thing. An employee at the veterinary hospital had overheard something, or was told something in confidence, and had unknowingly passed the information to someone who realized the implication and went to the right people with the story.
But... The big but was still there. Where did she hide the essential piece of information that had disrupted so many lives? And what was it?
You can hate coincidences all you want, but they happen.
There was one oddball piece of information nobody had bothered to investigate. Big Zappo Padrone’s name had come up, like a wild throw from left field. He’d been dead for generations, a lousy racketeer from the days when they were throwing bombs into saloons selling the wrong guy’s beer and blasting away with sawed-off shotguns and outrunning the Coast Guard boats with those hot rod, Liberty-powered engines left over from World War One.
He’d lived on the same street I’d worked on. His old house had been the headquarters for the New York mob action. Smaller then, not nearly as efficient as now, but just as deadly.
I glanced at my watch, then grabbed a cab and took it to the big library on Forty-second Street. I didn’t even have to show my credentials. The librarian recognized me, gave me a big welcoming smile and directed me to the area where all the old newspapers had been filmed and were on file for immediate usage.
It didn’t take long to zero in on Big Zappo’s background. There were old photos of his house on a nearly empty street, and one close-up with Big Zappo himself on the porch trying to hide his face behind a newspaper. I was just about to turn the dial on the microfilm reader and see the next page, when my eye caught something that damn near made me sweat.
The house number was plain as day. It was 4428. Hell! I remember Bucky painting on 703 when I was at the station house at the corner!
This old street ran crosstown and in the wild, hairy days of Big Zappo, one end of the street was growing and the other end just dropped into the East River. When the building boom started to corral the immigrants, streets got numbered and houses were re-identified. 4428 turned into 703. So, who hung onto the old number and why? There was a connection, all right. It was Big Zappo himself. He had lived there under both addresses.
But Big Zappo was dead. He had been dead a long time.
Then what was so blasted important about that house?
Bucky Mohler.
He’d lived in that house but took nothing from it. He’d helped kill another kid so he could disappear. Why? Where had he gone into hiding? There was one place... a decent job. Nobody would ever suspect Bucky Mohler of being able to get and keep any kind of respectable employment.
I let out a little grin and said silently to myself, okay, Captain of the station house, big cop with medals, well trained to recognize clues and twists of circumstance, how did you miss this one? You saw the picture, wrinkled your nose at the partial face shot because you thought he looked familiar to you and didn’t push it any further.
You saw pieces of him in two pictures, didn’t you? That Credentials anniversary pamphlet and the office photo.
No wonder you’re retired.
Bucky Mohler was the young guy, the computer whiz, the fix-it guy at Credentials, the one in the office photo Bettie had shown me!
Chapter Nine
The street was a rubble-strewn war zone now. The utilities were off and the vagrants chased out and on the stretch down from where the station house used to be, only two buildings remained.
Old Bessie’s former domain was five vacant lots away from the tenement that had once belonged to a gangster named Padrone.
John Peter Boyle at the development office took my questions over the phone and called back with the answers. He confirmed that a charitable organization operating homeless shelters owned the building. This had held things up, but the charity rep said a deal had been worked out with both the city and the new Saudi ownership. In two days, the building known in its time by two numbers — 703 and 4428 — would be just another pile of debris.
“But here’s the funny thing,” Boyle said. “Funny odd, I mean — the kind of circumstance that doesn’t get into the public record.”
“Not following you.”
“It’s just this, Captain — the rep of that charitable group mentioned that they had a sort of silent partner in that old building. Dating back to when the ownership was transferred over to them.”
“Interesting.”
“The old tenement was renovated twenty years ago, you know — nothing fancy, just efficiency apartments. Still, it generated decent revenue.”
“Housing in the big city always does.”
“Yeah, until lately. You know what that neighborhood’s been like, last five or six years. That building either needed another renovation or a wrecking ball.”
“And the latter is what it’ll get.”
“Cheaper for these developers to put up new buildings than try to gentrify these old tenements, even one that had been renovated a couple decades ago.”