“Sure,” he said, and we hung up.
I made one more call and then drove across town to a little bar called Murphy’s Eight Ball, which was a hangout for off-duty cops and newsies. It was 3:30, too early for any action. The bartender was unloading bottles of beer in a cooler behind an empty bar. In the rear, a tall, rangy guy chewing on a wooden match was practicing side-pocket bank shots at one of the two pool tables. Up front, the dozen tables and booths all were empty. Jimmy Dorsey’s “Amapola” was muttering from the jukebox, its volume turned down to a whisper. The bartender looked up through bored eyes and gave me half a smile.
“Zee,” he said with a nod. “Little early for you, isn’t it?”
“I’m meeting Jimmy Pen,” I said. “Draw me one, will you?”
He took a frosted mug from the refrigerator and tilted it under the beer spigot and jimmied the glass full without putting too much head on it. I picked up a rumpled copy of the early Times edition and retreated to a booth as far away from both men as possible. Under a wall lamp that put out about as much wattage as a penlight, I read the banner head: bismarck attacked. The lead graph told me all I needed to know: the British Navy had hunted down the German juggernaut, which had sunk the HMS Hood and all its hands three days earlier. A battle royal was going on somewhere in the North Atlantic. I leafed back to the obits but there was no follow-up on the Wilensky story.
The door opened and a shaft of sunlight cut through the dark interior as Jimmy Pennington strolled in, hat on the back of his head and a newspaper folded and stuffed in his jacket pocket. He was carrying a brown nine-by-twelve envelope. The door swung shut behind him and he peered around the room until he spotted me.
He pointed to my glass and said to the barkeep, “Hey, Jerry, gimme one of these, will you please?” as he sat down, dropped his hat on the seat beside him, and laid the envelope by his elbow. Then to me, “I don’t believe it, you can actually read,” as he pointed to the dog-eared early edition.
“I can count all the way to ten, too, if I take my shoes off,” I said.
“You must want something awful bad to offer to buy me a drink.”
“I’m going to do you a favor, pal,” I said.
“ And pay for my drink? You don’t believe I believe that, do you?”
“Why are all you newsies such cynics?”
“If I am, I learned it from you. So what’s the scam for today?”
“No scam. I’m offering you a trade.”
“Uh-oh.”
Jerry brought the reporter his beer and a dish of pretzel sticks. I told him to put it on my tab.
“The last time a cop bought me a drink, we still had Prohibition.”
“That’s worth an item right there.”
“I assume all this has something to do with the stuff you asked for.”
“A reasonable assumption.”
“What the hell are you interested in Mendosa for? It’s off your beat by about a hundred miles.”
“I’ll get to that. First, I’m going to offer you an exclusive story. Your end is, you can’t break it until the five-star tomorrow afternoon.”
“How big a story?”
“It’ll put a smile on your face.”
“Front page?”
“Hell, I’m not an editor, I…”
“Don’t hand me that shit, Zee. After fifteen years you know a banner story when you see one. Above the fold or below it?”
“What do I know about folds? Do we have a deal?”
“It’s a pig in a poke. What’s your angle?”
“You’ll understand when I finish. After we’re through talking, I’ll go back and write my report, which will back up everything I tell you. You can write the story ahead of time but you have to hold it until 4:00 tomorrow. I’ll file the report then, and that’ll give you a scoop.”
He thought for a minute and said: “Make it 5:00. We hit the street at 5:30 and all the competition’ll be off and drunk by then.”
“I can work that.”
“This some kind of undercover job you’ve been working on?”
“You want to listen or play twenty questions?”
He took a sip of beer, took out a little green pad and the stub of a Ticonderoga pencil, and stared at me.
I gave him a pretty straightforward rundown on how we found Verna Hicks Wilensky, Bones’s initial reaction, then got into the stuff in the strongbox, and finished with the five-hundred-a-month and the cashier’s checks. That got his attention. I continued with my trip to San Pietro, how the bankers were giving me the cold shoulder, left out the encounter with the two cops, and then dropped the second shoe: Bones’s reanalysis of the situation. He stopped writing and took a long swig of his beer when he realized he was on top of a murder case.
I then recounted the Wilma Thompson murder case, the appeal, and the missing witness, Lila Parrish; Eddie Woods’s probable assassination of Fontonio, his connection with both cases; and finally the fact that most of the checks came from San Pietro. I didn’t tell him I knew Eddie Woods had sent at least one of the checks; I kept that for my hole card.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“For Christ sake, you want me to write it for you?”
“You’re trying to tie this to Culhane’s tail,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
“I can’t tell you that, it’s privileged.”
He chuckled. “The hell you say.”
“You didn’t get to be top-slot reporter on the Times by having somebody else do your thinking for you,” I said.
He tapped his pencil on the table several times and stared at me, then said, “You want me to grease the tracks for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t act dumb. You’re going up against Brodie Culhane and you want me to point the finger in his general direction.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, I said it.”
“You want the story or not, Jimmy?”
“I got the story. Question is, what am I gonna do with it? And how are you going to tie this to Culhane?”
“You’re beginning to sound like Moriarity.”
“I’m sounding like my editor. Can I quote you that you’re looking for a connection up in the San Pietro area?”
I juggled that around for a minute. Before I could answer, he said, “And how do you plan to tie Woods into this? So he lives in Los Angeles, so do a million and a half other people. And what’s the connection with Mendosa?”
“Let’s talk about that for a minute. What’ve you got for me?”
He slid the envelope over, opened the clasp, and pulled out a sheaf of clippings. “Most of this stuff was written by Matt Sorenson, who covered state news,” he said.
“Where is he now?”
“The big time lured him to New York. But he used to talk about Mendosa. He wanted to blow the roof off the town, but it’s outside our circulation area and the publisher squeezes every nickel so hard the buffalo gets a hernia. Most of what Matt wrote was what he could get over the phone, mixed with AP and UPI reports.”
“You need these back?” I asked, lifting a handful of clippings.
“Yeah, but there’s no rush.”
“Tell me what you know about Mendosa.”
He finished his beer and ordered another.
“Since when did you start drinking on the job?” I said.
“I’m through for the day. I’m gonna take full advantage of your tab.” He lit a cigarette and started: “When Culhane got rid of Riker and Fontonio, the number-three man in the mob was Guilfoyle. He took a powder. He moved down south to Mendosa. It’s in Pacifico County. It wasn’t much of a town, a lazy little place. Its main claim to fame is a sanitarium, mostly a spill for drunks, druggies, and senile old folks their kids want to dump. Guilfoyle didn’t have much trouble taking over and turning it into another Eureka. It wasn’t quite as wide open but the town turned dirty from head to toe.”
Pennington rooted around in the clippings and found a photograph. “Take a gander at Guilfoyle. He’s a real package.” He slid it across the table to me. I held it under the anemic light and saw a tall, beefy mutt in a light suit, uglier than a cross-eyed moose. He had thick features over a bull neck and two hundred pounds of muscle and flab. A cigar was tucked in the corner of his mouth and he wore a derby low over weasel eyes. His lips were curled into a smile that was closer to a sneer.