Corruption of Blood (36 page)

Leaving the gun shop, he drove further along the Trail and found a junk market, where he bought an old golf bag and a miscellany of unmatched clubs. He put his new rifle in the golf bag, and bought a meal at a nearby diner.

He then took the Trail to 1-95, went north on that freeway to 922, and then took that east across the Broad Causeway, exiting at the Indian Creek Golf Course. He parked and walked around the southern edge of the golf course with the bag slung over his shoulder. He did not look very much like a golfer, but attracted no particular attention. Indian Creek is a public course and they get all kinds there.

He sat down in a mass of scrub behind a large cabbage palmetto, and smeared himself liberally with insect dope. Then he waited. Night fell. He dozed in short snatches. The sky turned gray, then became streaked with red, then the palest possible silvery blue, flecked with small clouds. He stretched and pulled his rifle out of the golf bag, wiped the scope, inserted four rounds into the magazine, and chambered one of them. He crawled around the side of a palmetto and lay prone in the short grass and looked through his scope at Guido Mosca’s house.

At around six-thirty, Guido Mosca, dressed in Bermudas and a flowered shirt, with fishing rod in hand, walked barefoot out of his house and onto his little dock. He did this every morning, although he rarely caught a fish, and he saw no reason to interrupt his routine simply because, in a few hours, he was scheduled to fly to Washington to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He would have plenty of time to get ready, he thought, which in the event was untrue, because as soon as he reached the end of the dock he was shot once through the heart from across the wide channel.

FIFTEEN

“I still say,” said Karp, “we should’ve flown back yesterday and made Mosca go with us.”

Fulton, who was checking out the hang of his jacket and the tuck of his sport shirt in the motel room mirror, gave him a look. It was not the first time since their interview with the mobster that Karp had expressed such sentiments, nor the sixth either. It was starting to get on his nerves.

“Will you relax, for Chrissake!” Fulton snapped. “I should’ve left you in the office. Look! We’re gonna go out now and get in the car, and drive somewhere and have a nice breakfast out on the beach, somewhere where we can get a decent bagel, like you’re always bitching about, and then we’re gonna drive out to Mr. Mosca’s little house and pick him up and if his girlfriend’s there we’ll look at her tits for a couple minutes, and then we’ll drive to the airport and be on the ten-ten flight to National.”

“I don’t want any breakfast,” said Karp. “I want my hands on Guido Mosca. I want his head cradled on my lap. I want him up there in front of the committee, tying Paul Ashton fucking David to Bishop, and to a shooter who looks just like Lee Harvey Oswald and to Cuban shooters who didn’t like Kennedy, and to Oswald himself and to whoever this Turm character is. This is
the case,
Clay. It’s coming together—I can feel it.”

“Can I at least get some coffee?”

“Yeah, if you can find a drive-through. And I want you to
roll
by the window,” said Karp, and strode out of the room.

Fifteen minutes later they were at the house on the canal. The patio was deserted. A slight breeze ruffled the water of the pool. Fulton went to the glass door and rang the bell. After a minute, he rang again and rapped on the door with his knuckles. “Jerry’s a late sleeper,” he remarked.

“I hope so,” said Karp, rapping on the glass himself. Fulton said, “Keep ringing. I’ll check the front.”

Fulton’s shout brought Karp running around the side of the house. The detective was at the end of the dock, kneeling over a brightly colored mound. Karp felt his heart wrench around in his chest. He slowed his step. There was obviously no hurry anymore.

“Shot through the middle of the chest at long range,” said Fulton, rising from the corpse. “Probably from those bushes across the canal.” He looked at Karp and shrugged. “Okay, I was wrong. Who knew?”

“I’ll take that literally. Who
did
know? The only people I told at the Washington end about coming down here to get Mosca were Crane … and Hank Dobbs. You tell anyone?”

“Hell, no! But you forgot one thing—Tony Bones knew all about it.”

“Yeah, but why would Tony have his own guy whacked? He wants to take over South Florida when Trafficante kicks off. There’s no damn reason for him to give us the go-ahead, and then give Mosca the go-ahead to talk to us, if all the time he was planning to kill him. The whole thing is too small-time. We do Tony a little favor, go easy on his kid, he does us a little favor, gets one of his guys to talk to us. It’s not serious Mob business.”

“Somebody Tony told, then?” offered Fulton.

“Yeah, and we’re gonna have a talk with Tony about that. But what I think is, this isn’t a Mob hit at all. This is a guy who likes to stand off and pop people with a rifle.” Fulton thought about this for a while.

“You think the same guys, the Kennedy guys?”

“It’s a possible, yeah, and it means somebody’s following us. Or knows what we’re doing.”

Fulton gestured toward where Mosca’s body lay. “Whatever, we got to call the sheriff.”

“No, call Al Sangredo. Let
him
call the sheriff and explain the situation here. A little professional courtesy would go down pretty good, and besides, the last thing I want is to get our names involved in a local investigation. Meanwhile …” Karp gave the house a long, significant look.

“We toss his place.”

“You
toss his place, Detective. I’m a lawyer. My place is lounging by the pool, contemplating the majesty of the Constitution, and feeling like an asshole.”

Later that afternoon, Karp and Fulton were eating pastrami in Sheffler’s, a large, bright, highly chilled eatery on Collins in North Miami Beach. Al Sangredo was sitting across from them, sipping on a cup of coffee brewed at about a third of the octane rating he was used to, and listening to the two of them bring him up-to-date around mouthfuls of greasy pink meat. When they were finished, Sangredo said quietly, “That’s quite a story. I hope you’re not holding anything back from the sheriff about this hit. I vouched for you guys and I have to live in this town.”

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.”

“This is incredible,” said Fulton. “In all the years I worked with you, you always made it a rule not to get in bed with the Mob, and now here you’re diving in and pulling up the covers.”