Going Nowhere Fast (17 page)

''I'm sorry. I overreacted."

"Yes. You did."

I let her feel uncomfortable for another minute or so before warming up to say good-bye.

*     *     *     *

When we had taken to the road again, I spent the next forty-five minutes poring over the latest issue of
People
magazine. A nine-year-old boy who had swallowed his mother's diaphragm and lived to tell about it, was on the cover. The caption was a quote, something the child had said to explain himself that the media had by now made famous: "I THOUGHT IT WAS A DONUT!"

Reading the overly homogenized news stories that
People
passed off as journalism had long been a guilty pleasure of mine. It was like being a tabloid junkie without having to deal with the inferiority complex. You could indulge in all the sensationalism and not feel like a total idiot doing it. No Martians or miracle cures for heartburn; no pregnant six-year-olds or Big Foot sightings at Kmart. It was always just Hollywood marriages on the rocks, unruly television teen throbs on the loose, and the exploits and capture of the Criminal of the Month. With pictures.

For instance, this latest issue of the magazine featured a story about a multiracial lesbian couple who were trying to adopt an adorable pair of Korean twins in Colorado, where the law firmly frowns upon such things. I was three paragraphs into the article, and we were two hundred miles out of Flagstaff, when—

It hit me.

"Joe, pull over," I said.

"What?"

"I said, pull over. At the next exit with a gas station, pull over and stop!"

"For what? We just stopped for gas!"

"We're not stopping to get gas. We're stopping so I can find a
phone
."

"Dottie, you just got through using the phone, too. Now, what in the hell—"

"You miss this turnoff, Joe Loudermilk, and I'm gonna have your behind!"

He only had about eight seconds to make the turn, but he made it with room to spare.

*     *     *     *

The first thing Mo said when she realized it was me was: "Danny Gottifucci."

"Yes! Yes!" I said. "When—"

"About three minutes after I hung up the phone. I guess it must have struck you roughly around the same time."

"No. It was more like five minutes ago, for me. I was looking through the latest copy of
People
magazine, when something you said—"

"About Bad Dog always shooting himself in the foot."

"Yes. When that made me remember the story they did on Danny Gottifucci a few years ago. The mob informant who'd lost part of his right foot when his friends and family just barely missed having him killed."

Gottifucci hadn't been seen or heard from since. He had been a mid-level crime boss somewhere out on the East Coast who had placed himself at the mercy of the Justice Department by making one simple mistake: He had done some of his own killing. Murdering an old mistress who had belittled his virility in public had given him no out from a date with the state executioner other than to rat on his friends, so he had done just that—reluctantly so before the failed attempt on his life, not so reluctantly afterward. Then he had disappeared. One more satisfied customer of the FBI's vaunted witness protection program.

"You think Gottifucci is your Philly Gee?" Mo asked me, sounding like she already knew the answer.

"I don't know. Was Gottifucci from Philadelphia?"

"It could have been Philadelphia. I'm not sure. But I seem to recall it was Baltimore."

"Then you
don't
think he's Philly Gee."

"On the contrary. I think that makes a lot of sense. It certainly would seem to explain a few things, anyway. Like why both the FBI and the mob are so interested in his whereabouts. And the house, of course."

"The house?"

"Yes. The house. The one you said was missing."

"Oh."

"I mean, if that's where Gottifucci has been living all this time, and someone like Geoffry Bettis found out about it—"

"The FBI would get him out of town and try to cover up their tracks afterward."

"Yes."

"So Mr. Bettis was trying to blackmail Gottifucci."

"That's what it sounds like to me. You said Bettis was always on the lookout for a fast buck, and that his room was full of true-crime magazines and stuff. If he'd spotted Gottifucci on the street one day, depending on how much Gottifucci's changed over the years, it isn't too hard to imagine Bettis recognizing him. Is it?"

"No. But if all he did was spot him on the street—"

"How would he know what Gottifucci's foot looked like?"

"Yes."

"Simple. He could have seen a picture of it in one of his magazines, or something."

I thought about that for a moment. "Okay. Let's say he did. Assuming the things we found in his safety deposit box were what he was going to threaten Gottifucci with, what was a drawing of his own supposed to prove? The photos were hard evidence of Gottifucci's presence in Flagstaff, all right, but if anyone with the same magazine could have described the appearance of Gottifucci's foot…"

"Yes, yes, I see your point. Why bother with the drawing? He couldn't have expected it to have any real impact on Gottifucci, unless the exact appearance of Gottifucci's foot was something a person could know about only after seeing it in the flesh, with their own eyes."

"Exactly. And as Mr. Bettis was a shoe salesman—"

"He very well could have done that. Providing he had once been lucky enough to have Gottifucci for a customer, anyway."

"Pops said to get off the phone and come on," Bad Dog suddenly said. I turned around and there he was, chewing on a Mars bar. Beyond him, through the service station's dingy windows, I could see his father propped up against our truck's front fender, arms crossed and blood boiling as he returned my stare.

"I've got to go, Mo," I told my daughter. "Your father's having a fit."

"Go where, Mother? What are you going to do?"

"I don't know yet. But I'll think of something."

"Mother, put Daddy on the phone. I want to talk to Daddy."

"We have to go, Mo. I'll call you later."

"Mother, don't you dare even think about going back there, you hear me? Don't you dare even
think
about it!"

"I love you, too, baby. Kiss my grandchildren for me."

I hung up the phone.

"You better hurry it up. Pops is pretty pissed," Dog said, showing me the way out.

I told him he hadn't seen anything yet.

*     *     *     *

As I expected, Big Joe let me walk two miles up the interstate with my thumb in the air before it sank into his thick skull that I was going to return to Flagstaff, with or without him and Dog. He'd turned a deaf ear on everything Mo and I had deduced and told me if I wanted to travel north instead of south, I'd have to do it on foot, because he wasn't going to drive me. So I'd promptly stepped out of the truck and started walking. North.

I thought he might try to pull a fast one—wait until I was back in the cab again, then make a quick U-turn and floor it for Texas—but he didn't. Mad as he was, he knew better. I'd only been mildly tempted to go back to Flagstaff before, when a
feeling
that something was amiss there was all I really had eating at me, but now that I had a theory to go along with my suspicions, nothing was going to stop me from going back there to prove it out. Nothing. If the car thief and armed robber they were holding in the Flagstaff jail had not killed Geoffry Bettis, his only hope of ever being cleared of the crime was me.

The trouble was, I didn't have a clue as to how to go about it.

Imagine my surprise, then, when Big Joe did, and actually went so far out of his way as to say so.

"We've got to go back to the Coconino County Sheriff's Department and tell them what we know," he said. "If we can convince them we're telling the truth, their hatred for the Feds alone will persuade them to reopen the case. Nothing gets a cop hotter than the idea that he's been used, in one fashion or another, to do the Feds' dirty work."

I couldn't help but grin. Finally, it had happened: the long-awaited reemergence of Inspector Joe Loudermilk II of Scotland Yard.

"So how do we convince them we're telling the truth?" I asked.

"I don't know. But I have an idea," Big Joe said.

And he did.

11

"Is this what you wanted?" Geoffry Bettis's widow asked.

She tossed a thick manila folder on our table and sat down. The late afternoon lunch crowd at our favorite restaurant in Flagstaff, Perkins, was light, so our waitress appeared almost immediately to ask if our new guest needed to see a menu. Mrs. Bettis said she didn't.

I reached for the folder before Joe could and began to leaf through it. Sure enough, just as we'd hoped when we called Mrs. Bettis two hours ago, it was a poor man's dossier on Danny Gottifucci: news clippings, photographs, the works. No illustrations of Gottifucci's three-toed right foot, though. And no mention of the nickname "Philly Gee," either.

"Well?" Mrs. Bettis asked me.

"This is it, all right. The Danny Gottifucci file. You found this in your husband's room?"

"Yes." She nodded her head.

Joe took the folder from me to look it over himself. Bad Dog kept right on shoveling chili into his mouth and ignoring everything else.

"What does it mean?" Mrs. Bettis asked. Unlike the last time we had seen her, today she sounded like she had a genuine interest in what we had to say.

"It means we're at least half right," Joe said, more to me than to her. "Your husband did know about Danny Gottifucci."

"Who is Danny Gottifucci?"

We told her the mobster's story and much of our own in abbreviated terms.

"We think your husband waited on Gottifucci at the shoe store where he worked, got one look at the three toes on his right foot, and recognized him," Joe said. "Then, knowing he was in hiding from the mob—"

"He tried to blackmail Gottifucci."

"Yes. Our guess is, he followed Gottifucci out of the store the day he came in, found out where he lived, and then came back later to take some pictures of him around the house."

"And once he had the pictures, we think he set up a meeting with Gottifucci for last Tuesday at the Canyon. Only something went wrong," I continued. "Either Gottifucci double-crossed him, the mob tried to squeeze him, or the FBI stepped in to protect Gottifucci. Whichever of the three it was, your husband ended up dead."

"And Gottifucci?" Mrs. Bettis asked. "What happened to him?"

"His friends the Feds have probably already got him set up in a new home somewhere," Joe said. "On the other side of the continent, most likely."

Mrs. Bettis made herself some time to think by lighting up a cigarette. I'd been wondering what had happened to her smoking habit. Fanning a match in the air to put out its flame, she said, "You say the mob was up at the Canyon looking for Gottifucci?"

I nodded.

"How did they know he was up there?"

I looked at Joe, and he looked at me. It was a question we hadn't given much thought to before now.

"We don't know," I said finally.

"But it isn't really too surprising, them finding out about it," Joe said. "They've got ears everywhere. Everything the Feds know, they know, eventually."

Mrs. Bettis nodded slowly and blew a stream of smoke over her left shoulder, apparently content with Joe's explanation. "So where do you Sherlocks go now?"

"Back to the Sheriff's Department," I said. "We're hoping once they see this"—I gestured with the file she'd brought us—"they'll admit their investigation into your husband's murder is worth reopening. What happens after that is out of our hands."

She just nodded her head again.

"You're free to come with us. if you like," Joe said. "The more the merrier, i always say."

Mrs. Bettis smiled. "Thanks, but I'll pass," she said, getting to her feet. She stood there looking at the three of us for a long time. "You people are okay. Nosy as hell, but okay."

"Thank you," I said.

"But you should know one thing before you go see the Sheriff's Department."

"Yes?"

"Well, it couldn't have happened exactly the way you described it. How Geoff found out about Gottifucci, I mean. You said Geoff must have sold him a pair of shoes at the store, and that's how he saw his foot. Right?"

"That's what we suspect happened, yeah," Joe said.

"Well, I don't think it happened that way. It couldn't have."

"Why not?"

"Because Geoff didn't sell men's shoes. He sold ladies' shoes. That's the only kind of shoes his store sells." She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray at our table and said, "Just thought you might like to know."

She turned around and walked out.

*     *     *     *

Twenty minutes later, we were pulling into the visitors' parking lot of the Coconino County sheriff's station in Flagstaff. Learning that Geoffry Bettis had sold shoes to women and not to men had thrown us off stride for a moment, but not to the point that we ever considered changing our plans. It had been so nice and neat, the idea that Bettis could have stumbled onto Gottifucci in his capacity as a shoe salesman, but that didn't mean it had to have happened that way. Judging from the newspaper photographs in the file Mrs. Bettis had given us, Gottifucci hadn't changed much in the four years since his disappearance; the man in the photos Bettis had taken was a little slimmer and his hair loss more advanced, but other than that, he looked about the same. Had Bettis bumped into him on the street, there was no reason to believe he wouldn't have been able to recognize him, with or without his shoes on.

That was the line we were going to hand our old friends Detective Crowe and Detective Bollinger in a few minutes, anyway. And if it flew, great. If it didn't… we'd start for Texas again, this time with a clear conscience.

As usual, we ended up parking our truck and trailer in a far corner of the lot, where multiple spaces were readily available. The three of us stepped out of the Ford's cab and just stood there for a minute, exchanging nervous glances.