The Fall-Down Artist (33 page)

Another shot was fired, a loud, forceful cough. Not the automatic, Dorsey was sure. He peeked carefully over the wall and saw, two back yards down from Damjani and the beagle, a short round man dressed in T-shirt and bath-robe.
In the man's hands was a deer rifle, complete with telescopic sight. Dorsey turned to see Damjani dropping back into the walkway, a billow of brick smoke coming from the wall where the bullet had struck.

“Later, motherfucker!” Damjani's voice rang inside the walkway. “Can't hide for fuckin' ever. I'm on you forever!”

Dorsey listened to Damjani's footsteps running toward the street. So it takes a rifle shot to break through his madness. Thank God for the rifle-toting neighbor. Wonder how many friends and relatives he bags each season?

He turned and slid down the wall and sat on his ass, his back resting against the cinder blocks. At rest he could feel the shaking in his legs and hands, and the wise-ass comments weren't coming through. The shaking moved inward; Dorsey felt as if the organs in his chest were vibrating. The copper taste of blood rolled down his cheek and across his lips.

He hadn't been followed to Gretchen's, Dorsey was certain. Not in this weather and traffic, he told himself, not with the precautions you've learned to take. No way; Damjani was watching the building. Watching for you or for Gretchen? Would it make a difference to that flipped-out bastard? The psycho knows where she lives and she comes home tomorrow. And Damjani's on you forever.

That was the moment Dorsey decided he would have to kill Ed Damjani.

Two uniformed
officers took a shoulder each and firmly lifted Dorsey, wet and limp, from the yard's brick floor. Grabbing him by the belt, one officer turned him to face the cinder blocks while his partner forced Dorsey's hands to the wall and kicked his feet out wide. Each took a turn at frisking him, apparently disappointed when they came up with only a wallet and key ring. Even in his state of near collapse, emotional and physical, Dorsey was sufficiently coherent to critique the officers' performance. Lazy and in a hurry, he decided; they never checked the small of the back, right along the spine, where a bright guy could dangle a razor blade or even a small flat knife along a thin thread looped around the shirt label. Probably disappointed with the night's catch. Hoped for more than a scared and bloody and sopping mess.

Again taking Dorsey by the arms, the officers led him across the backyard fences and through the walkway. The street was alive with porch and stoop lights where old men and women watched the flickering red and blue lights of four prowl cars. Stepping out of one of the cars was a burly officer in his mid-fifties, as far as Dorsey could figure, wearing a white cap with a plastic cover and a white uniform blouse. Another officer draped a black slicker over his shoulders. Dorsey recognized the uniform and manner of a
precinct inspector. In command at the scene, Dorsey was certain, and politically attuned.

The inspector gave Dorsey a quick look, then examined the wallet handed to him by the officer on Dorsey's left. He flipped through some cards and passed the wallet back to the officer. “He's your old man, am I right?” the inspector asked.

“Yeah,” Dorsey said, seizing one of the few moments in which he was glad of Martin Dorsey's pull.

“Give it to me slow,” the inspector said. “I warn you, no bullshit, or maybe the old man don't mean shit to me.”

Dorsey gave it to him quick and dirty, a simple chase story. After hearing him out, the inspector stepped away, buttonholed one of the officers, and towed him along. Dorsey trained an ear at the hushed conversation, only able to overhear one phrase, the inspector saying, “No dead bodies this time around, right?” The inspector motioned for two other officers on the scene to join him, listened for a few minutes, and dismissed them to their cars. He then returned and spent a few moments examining Dorsey's cut.

“That'll need stitches.” The inspector took a nightstick from one of the officers. “Which is yours?” he asked, indicating the line of parked cars. Dorsey motioned toward the Buick.

The two officers moved Dorsey along, trailing the inspector to the Buick. Approaching the driver's side of the windshield, the inspector took a firm grip on the baton, his knuckles four inches from the business end. With the index finger of his free hand he sighted a spot directly over the steering wheel, reared back, and jammed the end of the baton into the glass, sending spider webs from the point of contact. He regarded his work, looked satisfied, and walked back to Dorsey, returning the officer's baton.

“And that,” the inspector said, “is how you came to cut your head. Accidentally.” He instructed the two officers holding Dorsey to get him and his car to the emergency room at Allegheny General, far across town.

“Inspector,” Dorsey called, as one of the officers moved
him into the Buick's front passenger seat. “The guy with the rifle did us both a favor when you think about it. I'm alive, and you're saved the bother of cleaning up a messy dead body. Go easy on him, okay?”

“Never saw him, never heard anything,” the inspector said. “Not a noise or a word.”

One officer drove the Buick while the other followed in the prowl car. At the hospital they took him directly to an examination room over the protests of the triage nurse. Dorsey's key ring was slipped into his hip pocket as he was placed on the examination table, and after one of the officers checked him in they both left.

The cut took three butterfly stitches. Flat on his back and looking up at a ceiling light fixture, Dorsey listened to the resident assure him that he was the ER's best stitchman. “The fingers,” the resident said. “These fingers are very limber. From piano. I play, or used to play, at a couple of local clubs.”

Dorsey considered asking the resident which clubs these were, but his mind was already too deep into the plan he was hatching. It was pulling together, each segment of equal importance. The gun, the knife, the phone call, and the meeting. And the acting job, he reminded himself. Sell it to Damjani. The naked fear, the absolute fear of God. Sell that, sell it hard, or the rest is of no consequence. And it won't all be acting, this fear, will it?

At a few minutes past ten the next morning, in a light snow that had just begun to fall, Dorsey crossed the intersection of Carson and Twelfth streets, and entered the Iron and Glass Bank. His head ached with tension and the butterfly stitches nipped at his skin, but he managed to keep his composure when the assistant manager, a young man in a gray suit, asked for two forms of identification and a signature sample to check against the one on file. The assistant manager asked Dorsey to remain seated as he went to a file cabinet to check the signature. While he sat, Dorsey cut through the pain and anxiety to admire the bank building
itself, classifying it with the Wheel Café. The floors and counters were white marble and the tellers' windows were framed in copper that gleamed in the light coming through long high windows. And the vault, Dorsey thought: good as any, even without an electronic timer. The way you like it, he told himself, old and maybe just a little older yet.

The assistant manager returned to the desk with a white index card and, while Dorsey watched, compared the signatures. “Will you be taking the contents with you?” The assistant manager asked. “If you're only interested in viewing the contents, we do have a private office you can use. You won't be disturbed.”

“There's no need.” Dorsey absentmindedly ran a finger across his cut, following the contours of the stitching. “I'll be taking it with me.”

Both men rose and took key rings from their pockets. Dorsey followed the assistant manager into the vault, which was lined from floor to ceiling with numbered boxes; Box 487 was near the ceiling in the far left corner. The assistant manager inserted his and Dorsey's keys, turned them, and handed the box and his key to Dorsey.

Dorsey set the long thin metal box on a nearby stepstool and flipped open its hinged lid. Inside were three blue flannel bags that had once clothed fifths of Crown Royal. They were gifts from Al when Dorsey had mentioned that he wanted something soft, nonabrasive, in which to store his goods. While the assistant manager stood by, Dorsey took a plastic grocery bag from his pants pocket, shook out its folds, and put the three flannel sacks inside. The manager slipped the safety deposit box back into its perch and inserted the keys, closing both locks. Taking his key back, Dorsey put the bag under his arm and left the bank.

The snowfall began to pick up in intensity, and a stiff wind funneled along the row of cramped storefronts on Carson causing a near white-out. Dorsey hurried along with his chin tucked to his chest against the weather, assuring himself that no one following him could keep him in view. Winter's early, he thought. Autumn is all done in and so
nearly are you. But if you pull this off, you'll at least last long enough to finish your Christmas shopping.

At Seventeenth Street, Dorsey turned right, walked half a block, and crossed the mouth of the alley where Russie had been killed. It came full circle, he realized: one dead last week and another, Damjani, very soon. And if it doesn't happen soon, there will be more deaths.

Dorsey covered the rest of the block and knocked firmly at the barroom door, knowing Al never opened before eleven o'clock. He waited a moment, knocked again, and heard Al hustling down from the second floor. Seconds later he heard the deadbolt slide free.

“Sorry, sorry.” Al motioned Dorsey inside and started for the back room. “The apartment, Russie's place, I was up there. Gettin' it ready, in case anybody wants to look at it. Not that Russie was anything but army barracks clean, but things need freshenin' up.”

Heading for the back room with Dorsey in tow, Al stopped for a moment and took a white canvas bank deposit bag from behind the bar. He directed Dorsey to the last of the booths and slipped in across from him, placing the deposit bag on the table.

“How much did it come to after all?” Dorsey asked.

“Three thousand.”

Dorsey worked open the bag and pulled out a wrapped stack of twenties.

“That's good, real good. You only figured on two.”

“Checked the accounts after we talked,” Al said, sounding distracted. “Kind of surprising to see how well Rose and me been doing. I figured I could pull out three and get it back in tomorrow without much notice.”

Dorsey shoved the wad of bills back into the bag and yanked the cord, cinching it closed. “Thanks, Al. I figure it'll find its way back to you tomorrow; next day, tops.”

Al ran a hand across his bald head and rubbed at his eyes. “Slept bad last night. Kept Rose up too. First time in years I didn't drop off soon as my head hit the pillow.
This thing, I guess I had to run through it a few more times. Well, maybe more than a few.”

“Don't like it any more than you.” Dorsey met Al's eyes and spoke softly. “If it could go otherwise, I'd try it.”

“It's a bad thing,” Al said, “but it's not the first time. You ever hear about a guy named Joey Nikita? His real name was Nikowicz, something like that, but everybody called him Nikita. Like the Russian guy.”

“Maybe once,” Dorsey said. “Must've been one of the older guys mentioned it. One of the guys you get in here.”

“That sounds about right,” Al said. “Had to be one of the older guys. After all, it happened in 'sixty-one, maybe 'sixty-two. The mill was going good again, just after Kennedy fixed the strike. Anyways, this Nikita, he was a lot like this guy you're tellin' me about. He worked at the mill, at J and L, and he thought he was a big mountain man, wore these bib overalls all the time. Maybe he was from West Virginia originally, who knows?”

“What about him?”

“Looked for trouble. All the time.”

“Did he find some?” Dorsey asked.

“More than expected,” Al said, nodding his head. Dorsey picked up the signal. This was solemn truth. “Like most guys,” Al said, “guys like Nikita, he got a hard-on for one particular guy, a little guy named Danny Kelso. One of those real quiet guys, you know the type?”

“I'm followin' so far.”

“Kelso was at the mill too, and Nikita rode him all shift and then picked it up again afterward at the bar—not here, they drank at one of the places on Carson. Nikita got physical when he was drunk, and one night he started slappin' Danny around. And Danny was on the light side so he couldn't put up much of a defense, not right away. So he left, or so Nikita thought. An hour later Nikita is climbing into his car and Danny catches him over the head with a piece of pipe, or maybe a rod of rolled steel. Nobody knows for sure and nobody knows how many times he hit Nikita, but it was a closed casket funeral.”