The Pact: A Detective Locklear Mystery Page 18

  Vincent Lombardi was blind.

  “Who else is here?” Locklear barked.

  “No one,” Lombardi replied quietly. “That you, Locklear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, you better come in.”

  Locklear did not take his eyes off the sullen youth as Vincent Lombardi poured them both a Jameson. The boy placed it in front of Locklear and gave him a look that only someone young and stupid would do. A look of defiance in the face of unbeatable odds. Locklear was big and had a gun. The boy had tiny fists and a ten-stone body.

  Locklear ignored the drink and fixed his eyes on the old man. It was more than thirty years since he’d laid eyes on him and was surprised that he was even alive. Locklear looked around the room that was once filled with the Lombardi family. He had arrested Nick in this very room countless times and had dragged him down from the tall boundary wall as the young criminal tried to escape. It was the same four walls but everything else had changed. The lace curtains on the window were grey and dirty and the room was filled with empty bottles of whiskey. The smell of stale smoke hung in the air.

  “Where are all the family?”

  “All gone,” Lombardi replied quietly.

  “Gone where?”

  “I heard you were dead – shot somewhere in Virginia,” Lombardi said.

  Locklear shook his head. “No, I survived that.”

  “Pity,” Lombardi replied.

  The old man grinned and lifted the amber fluid to his lips. He put the glass down and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. The boy reached forward and tried to take one from the pack. Using what little sight he had, Lombardi raised his hand and slapped the boy before his light fingers reached the packet.

  “So?” he said as he dragged heavily on the cigarette. “What do you want?”

  “Where is the rest of the family?” Locklear asked again. He had to be sure none of Lombardi Senior’s three other sons would arrive and finish what their weak nephew tried to start.

  Lombardi blew the smoke in long, even puffs. It reached Locklear’s face. He coughed.

  Thick sticky phlegm shot out of Lombardi’s mouth and landed on his creased shirt. He felt around until he found the spot, took a dirty hankie from his pocket and dried the drool with it.

  “Lung cancer. Doc says I got months, tops.”

  He took a deep breath, spat again and placed the hankie back into his trouser pocket.

  “It’s just me and the kid now. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him when I’m gone.”

  “Whose kid is he?”

  Lombardi leaned forward and placed his hands over the boy’s ears. The boy tried to pull away.

  “Ah, Pops, I’m nineteen! Twenty in the fall.”

  “No one knows how old you are, kid, so quit it!” The old man looked at Locklear. “About fifteen or sixteen years back this tramp knocks at the door. Looked like a whore. Pushed the kid up to the front door and took off. Note on him said he’s Nick’s kid. Never saw her again.”

  Locklear studied the kid. He was the image of Nick Lombardi.

  “We didn’t even know what his name was. Nona said he was about three years old. Didn’t look for a birth cert because the whore couldn’t have registered him as a Lombardi if she registered him at all. Kid was too young to tell us his name so we just called him Nicky. Celebrate his birthday same day as Nick’s.” Lombardi took his hands off the youth’s ears and tossed his hair.

  “Pops!”

  “I don’t know where my Nick and Rosa is. Nona’s gone now – she died not knowing what happened to our eldest boy. Fredo is away. Doing twenty-five in Rikers.”

  “How about Alfie and Leo?” Locklear asked. Lombardi’s two youngest sons were more troubled and more dangerous, more ruthless, than Nick or Fredo ever were.

  Lombardi took another puff on the cigarette. “They’re where you can’t do them no more harm.”

  Locklear looked away and focused his eyes on a fly caught behind the dull net curtains.

  “What happened?”

  “They were hiding out in Sicily, waiting for things to cool down here. There was trouble here between them and the Lucchesi family. Lots of accusations, most of it untrue. I sent them away until things blew over.”

  “And someone got to them?”

  “Not just them – their wives – Alfie’s kid, my granddaughter – she was just eleven. All dead. Leo’s wife was pregnant. She was going to have a boy.”

  “I never heard about it,” Locklear said.

  “They was all in a limo. Tyre blew out. They went over a cliff. Looked like an accident. A guard I sent with them survived. He said he saw someone on the highway shoot the tyre. Police there said there was no sign of a bullet in the tyre. Case closed. No one cares who killed almost an entire family. People is just happy they’re gone.”

  “What happened to the guard?”

  Lombardi looked in the direction of his grandson. “Go upstairs, Nicky.”

  “Ah, Pops!”

  “I said go upstairs!” Lombardi shouted.

  The door banged shut. Lombardi waited until the boy’s feet banged heavily up fourteen stairs and a door slammed. He flicked his ash onto the floor and took a deep swig of whiskey.

  “I want the boy to go straight. It don’t help hearing me talk about what is the past. What happened to the guard, you ask? I heard he met with an unfortunate end.”

  “Because you didn’t trust the fact that he survived?”

  “Di preciso.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re not,” Lombardi said quietly. “I was fifteen when I came to this country with only the clothes on my back. Mama sent me to her brother but when I got off the ship he was already dead. Shot in a street fight between his gang and some Irish hoodlums. His boss took me in. I slept in a car in his garage at night. He taught me everything I knew and mechanics along with it. If it wasn’t for him I’d have died of starvation. I tried to go straight. But everywhere I went doors closed in my face. I was too dark, didn’t speak right, too Catholic, too foreign. I understood early that I wouldn’t ever fit in – that what I wanted I had to take by whatever means I could. I brought up the boys to think that too. Take, take and do as little as you can to get what you want.”

  Lombardi felt for the top of his glass to pour himself another whiskey from the open bottle beside him.

  Locklear stood to help him.

  “Sit down, god damn it. I can get it myself.”

  “So you regret bringing your kids up like that?”

  “I regret nothing!” he spat. “You gotta do what you can to get by in this life. I wanted more than ten hours a day under the hoods of rich people’s cars, only getting by on measly wages. I wanted to buy my Christina nice things. I wanted a house, education for the boys – but it don’t work like that for people like me … or like you.” He raised his glass. “It don’t work like that.”

  “I know where Nick is,” Locklear said.

  Lombardi put his glass down on the dirty coffee table. He coughed. Phlegm rose up into his throat. He pulled the hankie from his pocket and spat into it. His eyes welled with tears. He tried to speak but could not formulate the words he wanted to say.

  Locklear eased his pain.

  “He’s living in a small town in Virginia. Rosa is dead.”

  “But … why … when … we thought they was dead.”

  “He wanted a better life,” Locklear replied.

  “Did he get it?” Lombardi asked.

  Locklear pondered this. No, he didn’t think Nick Lombardi got the peace he was looking for. It was too late. Too much had happened. All Nick Lombardi got was a few years in the desert to cogitate his crimes. Even so, it was an opportunity neither of his younger brothers had had a chance to experience. “Maybe,” he answered.

  “Does … does he want to see me?” Lombardi asked.

  “He doesn’t know I’m here but … he’s alone now. I’d say he’d like it very much.”

&n
bsp; Locklear stood and slipped a piece of paper into Vincent’s hand. “Nick’s address.” As he passed the stairwell he saw the boy sitting at the bottom of the stairs.

  “So long, kid, and next time don’t pick fights you can’t win.”

  “Fuck you, mister!”

  Locklear laughed and opened the door onto the busy street. The smells of New York City greeted him. The aroma of pizza shops and hot-dog stands, the whiff of clogged-up sewers, the scream of cars and the hot, suffocating summer air.

  Locklear headed west until he reached Park Avenue and walked along the side of the park until his foot ached. He weaved in an out of the crowded sidewalks, heaving with home-time commuters, all battling their way back to tiny apartments all over the crowded city. He did not miss this place or its chaos, its noise, its constant tension. He stopped for dinner in a familiar diner.

  As dusk fell and the crowds dispersed, he hailed a cab to the hotel. Tomorrow he would track down Letitia Grant and hope that the woman could fit another piece into his never-ending puzzle.

  When he returned to the hotel, Mendoza was lying in a white cotton nightdress on her bed in the darkened room. He tiptoed in and lay down fully dressed in the next bed. Within seconds he realised that his trooper was not asleep.

  Mendoza got up and pulled on a dressing gown.

  She flicked the switch on the electric kettle and made herself a coffee.

  “Want one?”

  Locklear shook his head.

  She sat at the end of his bed and told him about her search for the Ropps – the last family on her “missing” list. This time he did not move away.

  The address she had was a dead end, as were two further addresses given to her by the occupants of places the Ropps had previously lived in. A mailman sent her to a church across from the last apartment she visited to a Father Fernandez who he thought knew the Ropps. The priest was helpful but unfortunately Anna Ropp, when she found her in Creedmoor psychiatric centre, was not. The Ropps had not been siblings as Mendoza had previously thought but were actually father and daughter. Anna’s widowed father was only seventeen when she was born and the two shared a closeness that was broken only when her father died of his injuries three weeks after he fell onto the subway line.

  “How come they ended up in New York?”

  “The priest seemed to think David had a cousin there, but I couldn’t find any record of that. I went to the nearest police station to where the accident happened and spoke to a cop named Petros. He interviewed Anna straight after the accident. Witnesses said she started to scream and was pointing to a woman on the other side of the track. Another witness said he saw two men push David Ropp onto the tracks.”

  “Did they give a description?”

  “Yeah, but it was too general – two fat men with black coats – New York in winter, most of the men at the station would probably fit that description.”

  “What about the woman Anna was pointing at?”

  Mendoza shrugged. “Long fairish hair, slim. Young. That was about as much as they could say from what they saw across a crowded station. But you and I know who it was.”

  “We do – but we can’t prove it.”

  “True. I phoned the transit company – they don’t keep tapes that far back so there’s no way to view video footage now. Anyway, David died three weeks later. Father Fernandez said Anna was lost without him. He put her up in a new apartment because she was afraid to go back to hers. He came to bring her food once and she had slit her wrists. He took her to hospital and shortly after she recovered she took an overdose and was hospitalised again. Fernandez said Anna became paranoid – thought someone was after her. Said the money in her bank account was gone. She had a nervous breakdown and tried to kill herself twice after that. Last time she went back into Creedmoor she never came out.”

  “Was the money gone?” Locklear asked.

  “Every penny of it,” Mendoza replied.

  “Fernandez believed that her funds were missing. He thought everything else was fantasy. Turns out she’s had a history of mental illness even before they left for New York. He went to the police and filed a complaint. Petros looked into it and about three days after David died the money was wired to an overseas account. From there it was routed through Switzerland, Cayman Islands and then to –”

  “Samuel Shank’s account?”

  “Correct. I went to the probate court to confirm this. David Ropp left Shank everything in his will. The account was in his name alone. It was watertight. Legit. The attorney wired the money to Shank after Ropp died. I phoned the station and spoke to Ricci. I asked him to check the Yoders’ will at the probate office. Same thing – Samuel Shank inherited every penny they had.”

  “Were there any complaints to the police?”

  “No – but get this – a few days after the Yoders’ disappeared, Samuel Shank made a complaint to the cops about Luke Fehr.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Saying Luke threatened to burn down Shank’s offices. Guess he was trying to defend the Yoders. The night security guard caught him throwing a package into the mailbox.”

  “A bomb?”

  Mendoza grinned. “No – inside the package were thirty one-dollar coins and a passage from the bible.”

  “What?”

  “Matthew 27.”

  “Which is?”

  “My mom wouldn’t be too pleased if I told her that I had to look it up. It’s where Judas hangs himself after being paid thirty pieces of silver by the High Priests and elders for betraying Jesus. The police investigated. Luke’s prints were all over the envelope. He only received a caution because there was no evidence that he had threatened arson and putting religious verse into people’s mailboxes isn’t against the law.”

  “So there’s some semblance of law operating here after all,” Locklear said dryly.

  “So it seems. But there’s more. And Ricci asked me to keep this quiet. He doesn’t want it getting out that he told us any of this. Luke wasn’t only annoyed about what had happened to the Yoders. Seems like Luke was retaliating for something the Shanks did weeks before he delivered the coins to Shank’s offices. The cops arrested Luke for firing at Jacob Shank when he came onto the Fehr farm with a couple of goons, all three were carrying shovels. Seems like they were about to give up on him finding whatever it is that they are looking for and wanted to take matters into their own hands.”

  “What happened?”

  “Luke fired at them and they left. Shank made a complaint and the cops arrested Luke but they couldn’t hold him on anything because Jacob was trespassing. Luke went to court and tried to get a restraining order to prevent any of the Shank family or their employees coming onto his land. Ricci was in the court the third time Luke showed up there. He said he remembered it because no one hardly saw Luke Fehr anymore. Ricci reckons it took a lot for a man like Luke to go there. He must have been desperate.”

  “Did he succeed?”

  “No. Three times he filed for the order and each time his application was supposedly lost by the court clerk whose father, according to Ricci, is an employee of Shank. Fehr couldn’t win. Fehr then sent Shank another message. A handwritten note saying that if Shank or anyone involved with him came onto his land he would shoot and that next time he would fire more than warning shots.”

  “I wouldn’t say Shank took too well to the threat.”

  “He didn’t. He went back to the police but he was told to stay away from Fehr and to make sure Jacob did the same. There was already a record of them trespassing and, while the police wouldn’t exactly help Luke, they were sick of it and told him that he had no business coming onto the man’s land.”

  Locklear smiled. “Now do you think he’s guilty, Mendoza?”

  “Yes, sarge, sorry but I do. Luke Fehr is no shrinking violet. He’s tough. You think he’s some sort of maverick out there fighting his cause but I think he’s dangerous. I think he’s a man who’s capable of anything.”

  Locklear a
bsorbed the information. Regardless of what his trooper thought, and indeed members of the man’s own community, he couldn’t help but admire Luke Fehr.

  “OK – back to the Ropps. Do I need to ask who the lawyer representing the Ropps’ estate was?”

  “No.”

  “Beth Stoll made it watertight. Anna couldn’t contest it because –”

  “Because she doesn’t have the capacity to understand,” Locklear interjected.

  “Exactly.”

  “Isn’t there a clause where the lawyer can’t be related to a benefactor of a will?”

  “I don’t know, sarge, but these people ... they just keep getting away with murder.”

  Locklear tapped the bedside locker. Mendoza was right. Everywhere they turned, every lead they got, told them something but none of it added up to a whole lot. None of what they knew would result in an arrest.

  “Seeing Anna there – in that state, all alone and knowing how her father tried to protect her, it made me miss my son.”