Icepick Read online

‘His name was Brady,’ she growled at him, swishing her knife.

  ‘No,’ Robert said quickly. ‘It was that nice Officer Watkins. He was so sweet to the women who worked here, you know, asking them about their commute and worrying about their families. He’s the one who told us they were unhappy. And then they just didn’t show up for work after that. What’s all this about?’

  ‘Aw, Christ,’ I muttered.

  ‘What?’ Sharp asked me. ‘Watkins is the other policeman who was with us last night, right? What does this mean?’

  ‘I’m afraid it means I was an idiot for a minute,’ I confessed, heading for the door. ‘But I’m better now.’

  ‘What?’ Sharp asked.

  ‘Let’s pick up your brother and go to the police station.’ I sighed, and headed out the door.

  SIX

  The Fry’s Bay police station was something out of the Dragnet TV show: all exposition and no nuance. Nothing on the walls but sick-beige paint. Nothing on the floor but linoleum made of scuff marks. Three desks, broken blinds, fluorescent lighting. Brady and Watkins were there. One other guy, new to the office. The whole place smelled like burnt coffee and bus station cigarettes.

  I motored in, sat right down at Brady’s desk. The kids flanked me.

  Brady grinned. It was awful.

  ‘Glad you’re here, pal,’ he said. ‘We just got the trace from that plate, the one this kid gave us last night. It’s got a punchline. Want to hear it?’

  I glared.

  ‘Brooklyn plate.’ He shook his head and his ugly grin got bigger. ‘Car belongs to one Sammy “Icepick” Franks. Sound familiar?’

  And just like that, it was 1965 and I was standing in Washington Cemetery, the old place at 5400 Bay Parkway. All my relatives were buried there; it had been a nice Jewish cemetery since the mid-1800s.

  I was standing there with Pan Pan Washington, my best Brooklyn pal. I had just boosted a prime black Lincoln town car in flawless condition and Pan Pan was working on it. The cemetery was a fine and private place to alter a boosted chariot, and the work was proceeding nicely, when all of a sudden there was Icepick Franks, a genuine urban miscreant.

  ‘I always wanted a ride like that,’ he said.

  It surprised us both, me and Pan Pan, and Pan Pan came around with a .44 in his hand, open for business.

  Icepick was a cucumber. Just smiled.

  ‘I meant I would buy it from you,’ Icepick said.

  Pan Pan didn’t move.

  ‘You are Sammy Franks, are you not?’ I asked him in my most elegant manner.

  I always thought it was a good idea, when I was that age, to insert a dash of elegance into everything.

  ‘I am,’ he confirmed, ‘and thank you for not using my street moniker, an appellation which I abhor.’

  It turned out that Icepick appreciated a dash of refinement as much as I did.

  ‘Make us an offer,’ Pan Pan said, all business.

  ‘Five thousand,’ Sammy snapped back.

  ‘Dollars?’ Pan Pan squawked before he could think better of it. He’d been hoping for five hundred.

  ‘You are fiddling with the VIN, are you not?’ asked Sammy.

  Pan Pan shrugged.

  ‘And you can produce a bogus title that will stand up under scrutiny, as well as just enough alteration to the ride so as to make it less recognizable to the previous owner,’ Sammy went on. ‘I know your work. You and Moscowitz are famous all over the borough for your acumen.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ Pan Pan said, ‘and I realize that I’m shooting myself in the foot here, but five thousand dollars is a lot of cabbage.’

  ‘Oh. Well. A story goes with it.’

  I was wise. ‘You would like this to be a forgotten transaction.’

  ‘I would.’ He smiled. ‘No talk around the neighborhood about it, or me – or my business.’

  It was Sammy’s business that was the primary concern. He was called Icepick because that implement was his chosen method of carrying out his business, which was putting people on ice. One smooth shove right at the base of the medulla oblongata, and there you were: dead.

  ‘If you truly know our work,’ I told him, ‘then you know that we have a very strict policy of amnesia: we never remember anybody we do business with.’

  ‘I believe you,’ he said. ‘My offer stands. I like this car.’

  And when you thought about it, the Lincoln town car was perfect for his work: elegant enough to say I have money, leave me alone; a trunk big enough to accommodate his victims, and it looked a little like a hearse.

  ‘I’ll be finished in forty minutes,’ Pan Pan said, returning his .44 to its holster. ‘My associate Mr Moscowitz will handle the paper.’

  And I did.

  So, I knew exactly what car Brady was talking about, but my bond, both economically and morally, forbade me to admit it.

  ‘Brooklyn plate,’ I said. ‘That’s something. What’s the guy’s name, again?’

  ‘They call the guy Icepick, for Christ’s sake,’ Brady complained. ‘Knowing your history as I do, I believe you ran in the same circles up there in New York.’

  I looked him right in the eye. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’

  He glared back. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’

  I shook my head. But my mind was running a hundred miles an hour. Why in hell would Icepick choose my little corner of obscurity in which to dump a dead body? Seemed like he’d done it on purpose. Was it a message?

  I didn’t want it to distract me from the kids and their missing mother, but it was certainly not helping my concentration. So.

  ‘Look,’ I told Brady, ‘we’re here because these kids have a mother.’

  Brady stared.

  ‘The mother’s missing,’ I went on. ‘And she scrawled a message to them in the vacant building where they were staying last night. Where you found them.’

  ‘What does it have to do with the dead body in the bay?’ he asked, loudly.

  ‘Nothing.’ I leaned forward. ‘I’m telling you that you have a problem here in town. Three Seminole women are missing from the Benton Inn.’

  Brady looked down. It was only for a second, but I saw his expression change. He fixed it right away, though.

  ‘Maids?’ he snapped, louder. ‘So what?’

  ‘So they’ve been kidnapped!’ I said, matching his volume. ‘Somebody’s kidnapping women and shipping them out of town from that abandoned bakery. The one, PS, where I saw you half an hour ago. So, either you’re investigating that crime, or something is rotten in the state of Denmark!’

  ‘Demark?’ He blinked. ‘You think someone is shipping women to Denmark?’

  ‘Look, Brady!’ I stood up. ‘If I find out you’re involved in some sort of human trafficking, I’ll have your badge, your house, and your money, while you spend the rest of your life in prison.’

  I was making just enough of a scene to make the kids nervous and to attract Watkins. He came over and stood beside Brady.

  ‘Come on, Foggy.’ Watkins sighed. ‘You know we got a hard job here. And you know we can’t discuss an ongoing investigation.’

  I smiled. ‘So there is an investigation.’

  Watkins rolled his head around. ‘Yes. All right. There’s an investigation. I’ve spoken with the night manager at the Benton.’

  ‘That would be Robert,’ I said, mostly so he’d know I was wise.

  ‘You know, then, that I was actually helping those women,’ Watkins went on. ‘The hotel was stiffing them – underpaying, overworking. They didn’t like it. They came to me to see what recourse they might have under the law. I gave them advice and talked with Robert.’

  ‘Robert wouldn’t really know much about what upper management does,’ I said, ‘but it was nice of you to come to the aid of … Look, the kids are scared half to death about their mother. Can you give us a little sunshine here or not?’

  Taking my cue, God love them, the kids did their best to look pathetic.

  ‘Look,’ Brady g
rowled, ‘the sunshine we’re giving away here is that I didn’t incarcerate these two vagrants. But that could change real good if you don’t get the hell out of my face!’

  ‘I know you got a job to do, Foggy,’ Watkins said sympathetically. ‘Why don’t you just take care of the kids and let us take care of the crimes?’

  I shook my head. ‘See, all this is connected. For example, the kids saw the car that dumped a dead body.’

  Watkins rubbed his face with his hands. ‘Yeah. Yeah.’

  ‘My bet is that you know the owner of the car,’ Brady said. ‘And when we prove that, you’re in jail.’

  ‘For what?’ I asked.

  ‘Obstruction,’ Brady shot back.

  ‘What about our mother?’ Duck asked, sticking to his sad-child shtick.

  Watkins licked his lips and started three times before he said, ‘The problem is, we think they just went … I’m sorry, kids, but your mom and the two other women went on a bender.’

  Sharp looked up at me. ‘What’s a bender?’

  ‘There was some missing money at the hotel,’ Watkins went on, ‘and three Seminole women were seen at the bus station. We think your mom’s in Miami on a kind of vacation, see.’

  ‘You think our mother stole money and went to Miami?’ Sharp laughed.

  ‘Could have been one of the other women who actually stole the money,’ Watkins said.

  ‘One of those women is a pregnant seventeen-year-old,’ Sharp told Watkins, a little incredulously, ‘and the other is almost a hundred.’

  Duck’s face grew dark. ‘Is he saying my mother stole money?’

  ‘And left town,’ Brady snapped. ‘She don’t care about you. She stole; she went to Miami to get liquored up the way you people do, and makum whoopee.’

  ‘Look! In spite of what you goyishe cop racists like to think,’ I snapped, maybe a little too hot, ‘the Seminole people just don’t steal, and not one of them I ever met is a drunk. So why don’t you keep that bender talk to yourself and your white-hood buddies!’

  Brady rose out of his seat. ‘I’ve had just about enough of your attitude, Jew-boy!’

  Sharp, suddenly playing the part of the adult in the room, put herself in between me and Brady.

  ‘What Foggy means to say,’ she told Brady, ‘is that he disagrees with your theory about what happened to our mother.’

  ‘We really do have eyewitnesses who saw the women at the terminal, Foggy,’ Watkins intervened. ‘All three.’

  ‘Check it yourself if you want to waste half an hour,’ Brady went on. ‘Ask the night clerk. See where they went. See if it’s not Miami!’

  ‘Come on, Foggy,’ Sharp said, taking my hand.

  ‘Yeah, run along, Foggy,’ Brady sang out. ‘But don’t leave home. As soon as we have something on you for the real crime here in town, I’ll be wanting to talk to you a whole lot. You and your buddy, Icepick.’

  I locked eyes with Brady.

  ‘When I find out what’s really going on here,’ I said quietly, ‘you’re going to find out what some people use an icepick for. And I’m going to dance on your grave in red shoes.’

  Brady grinned and turned to Watkins. ‘Does that sound like the threat of bodily harm directed at an officer of the law?’

  Watkins glared at me. ‘Get out, Foggy. Go on, seriously. Go home. Cool off.’

  Sharp was tugging on my hand; Duck was already headed for the door.

  ‘Yeah, you just go to the bus station,’ Brady repeated. ‘See what the new night guy says!’

  As I turned to leave, I finally realized what he was saying.

  SEVEN

  ‘Where’re we going?’ Sharp asked when she realized I wasn’t headed home.

  ‘Bus station,’ I mumbled.

  ‘But the mean man said that was a waste of time,’ Duck told me.

  ‘Yeah, he did.’

  Sharp turned to her brother. ‘He knows something. Look at his face.’

  Duck looked up at me and then nodded. ‘That’s how I look when I know I’m on the right trail of something or other.’

  Sharp nodded. ‘You added up two and two and something came out wrong.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Duck complained.

  ‘It’ll make sense in a minute,’ I told him.

  The bus terminal in Fry’s Bay was a relatively dismal affair: cleaned once a year, smelled like a locker room, gave the word ‘dingy’ a bad name. Crushed cigarette butts all over the floor, pictures of exotic ports of call on the walls: Cleveland, Ohio, Hollywood, Florida, and one that just said Maine. No picture.

  The day clerk was a seventy-year-old man with bad teeth and a funny eye. When the three of us came through the door, he jumped. He’d been asleep.

  There was an older woman with a scarf on her head looking down at her hands; a teenaged poster boy for acne slumped down beside her. Otherwise, empty.

  ‘Hello, Howard,’ I said to the ticket guy.

  ‘Mr Moscowitz?’ he said like he wasn’t sure it was me.

  ‘You got a new night guy,’ I told him. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Melvin.’

  ‘Where’s Melvin now?’

  ‘How would I know?’ Howard shot back.

  I reached in my pocket and fetched a fiver. Held it high.

  He glanced at it and then blinked.

  ‘Oh, Melvin. Yeah. He’s at the Flamingo Motel. Room three.’ He reached for the five.

  I pulled it back. ‘Got a bus to Miami?’

  ‘Every day.’

  ‘What time?’ I asked, handing him the bill.

  ‘High noon,’ he said, snatching the money out of my hand.

  ‘No, I mean the night schedule,’ I said.

  ‘Ain’t but one bus to Miami, Foggy. High noon.’

  I looked down at the kids. ‘There’s not a night-time bus to Miami.’

  ‘But …’ Duck began.

  ‘Flamingo,’ Sharp interrupted.

  I headed for the door. ‘Room three.’

  The Flamingo Motel was a genuine Florida relic. It had a giant neon flamingo, no longer in operation, and a vacancy sign that was always lit up. When the town was a haven for a certain type of nouveau riche clientele, the Flamingo had been a kitschy sort of hangout. The rumor was that Kerouac was staying there when he found out that On the Road was going to be published. The fact that everybody knew he’d been in Orlando when he heard didn’t dissuade the local legend one bit. But it didn’t really give the Flamingo’s vacancy sign any relief either.

  The whole place had probably once been pink, but time, salt air and neglect had turned it some color that didn’t really have a name – unless sorrow was a color.

  The number three on Melvin’s door had swung sideways so it looked more like a W. It bounced a little when I knocked.

  Melvin was not immediately in evidence.

  ‘Officer Moscowitz!’ I announced. ‘Child Protective Services! Open up!’

  That produced moaning, a bit of a shuffle and, at length, the face of Melvin in the doorway.

  ‘What?’ He was a runt with a crewcut in boxer shorts and a T-shirt that had the number seven on it.

  I held out my badge. He flinched.

  ‘Brady told me to speak with you,’ I said, voice lowered. ‘It’s about three Seminole women who took a bus to Miami.’

  Melvin looked around, eyed the kids, then stepped back. ‘Come on in.’

  We did.

  The room was dark, with a blackout curtain. He snapped on the lamp beside the bed. Didn’t help much. A bed with one bedside table, a chair with a missing arm, a dresser with no drawer pulls, and a little table that was supposed to be some sort of desk – all of it cracked and scuffed and generally ready for the scrap heap.

  Melvin sat on the bed and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, and when he did the word was shrouded in smoke.

  Sharp looked up at me. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on.’

  ‘The two and two I added wrong,�
�� I told her, ‘involved Watkins and Brady. I got them mixed up. Watkins looks like the good guy, but I think he’s the crook.’

  ‘And how,’ Melvin managed weakly.

  ‘But, he’s so mean,’ Duck said.

  ‘Brady?’ I nodded. ‘Yeah. Chances are he’s playing some kind of part. Don’t know what yet. Or why. But he wanted us to come talk with Melvin here.’

  ‘Watkins give me a hundred dollars to say them three women took a bus to Miami,’ Melvin admitted. ‘To say they’s all liquored up.’

  ‘But you didn’t see them at the bus station?’ Sharp asked.

  Melvin shook his head.

  ‘Kind of a stupid plan,’ I began. ‘All I had to do was ask Howard about the bus to Miami.’

  Melvin shrugged. ‘I’m supposed to say how Howard’s a little addled, which he is. We have a local from Savannah on Thursday nights. That’s when them three women got on. Being a local means it makes every stop between here and Miami, see, but it eventually gets there. Miami. Cheapest way to go.’

  ‘Did Watkins give you any reason?’ I asked.

  ‘You know how he is,’ Melvin said, taking another drag on his cigarette. ‘Said he’s trying to help them ladies.’

  ‘Help them do what, exactly?’ I asked.

  ‘Said they’s trying to get away from Brady,’ Melvin answered. And when he said Brady’s name it sounded like he was cursing – a vulgar noise.

  I shook my head.

  Then, to my surprise, Sharp took my hand. ‘Let’s go back to your apartment,’ she said softly.

  ‘I have a few hundred more questions for Melvin,’ I objected.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but you’re not going to get any answers that matter. Trust me. Come on.’

  Her face was convincing. I didn’t know why, but it was.

  ‘Melvin,’ I said, ‘what would it take to convince you to forget that we paid you a visit?’

  ‘I’d like to forget everything about this town,’ he said. ‘Brady makes me nervous and Watkins is weird and now there’s little Indian children in my room and I don’t understand any of it.’

  It was then that I noticed a distinctive aroma coming from his smoke. They were Kools all right, but he’d packed them half full of weed. Melvin wasn’t sure which end was up.