The Gin Palace Read online

  “Do you think your doctor will be home?” I asked. I couldn’t think of what else to say. I glanced at her and saw that tears were spilling down her cheeks. Once more I felt like I was invading her privacy.

  “I want to tell you something,” she said.

  “Maybe you should just try to take it easy.”

  “Don’t ask me how I know this. Okay? I won’t tell you, so don’t ask. I only know what I overheard yesterday. But I owe it to you to tell you that at least.”

  “Try to take it easy and get warm.”

  “I think maybe you should leave town for a while, Mac. For the next few days anyway. Just go somewhere.”

  “Why?”

  She waited a moment, watching me closely. Finally, she nodded once, decisively, then looked away and said, “Some men are coming to town tonight.”

  I waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, I said, “What men?” I could hear the caution in my voice.

  “Just do what I say. You don’t want to be around for the next few days. Tomorrow night, anyway. I’ve got enough on my conscience as it is. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything sooner. I didn’t know——”

  “Who are you?” I said. I spoke quickly. Caution was replaced with urgency.

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I know what you must think of me right now. I know you think I’m fucked-up, and why should you believe a person who’s so fucked-up? But you really need to trust me.” She drew the blanket more tightly around her shoulders. It seemed to me that she could have been settling in for sleep.

  I said, “What exactly are you saying?”

  “I think you know. Take me to my doctor in Southampton, then get yourself somewhere safe, somewhere far away. Okay? That’s all I can tell you. I’m sorry. You need to believe me. I may have just tried to kill myself, but I’m not crazy. You need to believe me. Okay, Mac?”

  I said again, “Who are you?” But she didn’t answer. She just turned her head and looked away. We sat there for a while, saying nothing, listening to sound of the running engine and feeling the force of the wind rushing my cab like a mob.

  Of course I knew what she meant, what it was she was trying to tell me. I’ve lived every moment of my life, certainly every moment since the night Augie was killed, in anticipation of what she was telling me, of what was now finally coming.

  They were on their way, maybe even here already, gathered somewhere on the East End, under this same night sky, waiting in the dark to do their work.

  It took me a moment, but finally I reached up and grabbed the column shifter, dragging it down into drive. There wasn’t a lot of time to waste now. That same soft jolt went through the drive shaft again, and I took the wheel with both hands and pressed down on the accelerator with my right foot. My cab took off then, kicking up stones and dirt as we left the parking lot and headed back down that long, narrow road toward civilization.

  Lee Avenue was a few miles east of Southampton Village, just south of Montauk Highway. The house my passenger said belonged to her doctor was an English cottage set on a wide yard bordered by bare trees, modest by neighborhood standards, but still more than I could ever hope to own. I pulled to a stop at the end of the long white gravel driveway that ran alongside the house, and as I did the front door opened, then closed again, and I saw a figure in an overcoat moving down the pathway toward us. My passenger and I were getting out of my cab, once again out in the cold night air, when the figure reached the end of the pathway. It stopped there and waited for us.

  I had radioed to Angel on the way back and asked her call to ahead and tell the doctor what had happened and that we were on our way. I didn’t want to waste time going there if he wasn’t going to be in. And I didn’t want to delay my getting out of there with any unnecessary conversation. I was glad that he had come out to meet us, if this was in fact him. I would be glad to have this off my hands. The only outside light was at the other end of the pathway, mounted by the front door, but I could see the figure well enough in the spill of my headlights to tell that he was a man in his mid-fifties. He was standing with his hands deep in his overcoat pockets. His collar was turned up against the wind, framing a broad and dark face. Though the overcoat was closed, I got the sense that he was powerfully built. He was taller than I by a few inches, heavyweight to my middleweight, and stood with the kind of confidence men of his size often displayed.

  My passenger and I crossed the gravel toward him. The rocks shifted noisily beneath our feet. I walked beside her, my hand just above the small of her back, as if she might stumble. We stopped at the edge of the driveway. The man looked at her with steady eyes, in a way that made me think he was more eager to scold her than to help her. It seemed maybe he was holding back because of me, more annoyed with her than concerned. I saw all this but told myself I didn’t care, it wasn’t any of my business. Still, I had to be sure that he was who she said he was, that I was handing her over to someone who would take care of her, or was at least qualified to do so. It was the least, and the best, I could do. Before the man could say anything to either of us I told him I’d need to see some identification.

  He nodded but barely looked at me. He removed his wallet from his back pocket, pulled his driver’s license and AMA card, and handed them to me. There was just enough light for me to make them both out. The name Arnold Furst was printed on each card, and the signature on the photo license matched the one on the AMA card. That was good enough for me.

  Furst told his patient to go inside. His voice was low, almost monotone. Without looking at me or saying anything she started up the pathway. We had ridden in silence for most of the way back, and whatever intimacy we had shared was gone now. Still, I watched her as she went, keeping an eye on her till she had stepped inside and closed the door. After that it was just me and her doctor standing face to face.

  “What is your name?” Furst said.

  “You can find that out easily enough if you need to,” I told him.

  He thought about that for a moment, looking at me. Then he nodded once and said, “What exactly did she say to you?”

  “You’d better ask her that.” His eyes were dark wells, deeply set above a nose that turned sharply to the left. It was obvious that it had once been broken. His skin was closely shaved, taut over sharp bones. He was the kind of man who took care of himself. I knew his type well, had dealt with them before. He was wearing enough expensive cologne that I could smell it even in this cold, with three feet between us. It was my hope that he took care of others as well as he took care of himself.

  From the pocket of my barn coat I pulled out the wad of cash his patient had dropped onto my front seat. I held it out to him. He looked at it a moment before taking it. Right away his hand returned to his pocket.

  “It belongs to her,” I said.

  “I’ll see that she gets it. Are you owed anything, for cab fare, for your time?”

  “It’s taken care of.” I nodded toward his house. “She wasn’t fooling around, you know. She jumped. She was serious about doing what she went there to do.”

  “I guess we’re lucky you were there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I trust you’ll be discreet about this. This is a private matter. I’m sure you can understand that.”

  “I’ve got nothing to gain by telling anyone.”

  “That’s most pragmatic of you.” He nodded once more. “Good night, then,” he said. He turned and started back up the unlit path. I watched him for a moment, the cold stinging my ears. I told myself this didn’t concern me. She wasn’t my problem, and he wasn’t my problem. All of this, whatever it was, had nothing to do with me. I repeated that like a mantra as I turned away and walked back to my cab. I got in behind the wheel and backed out of the driveway, then pulled the shifter down into Drive and got the hell out of there.

  But as I drove my mantra quickly fell away, and all I could think of was what my passenger had told me back at the Point, the words she had used. Men were coming to tow
n, she had said. Men were coming to town. These were odd words indeed, but they seemed to have been carefully chosen. And she was right: I knew exactly what it was she meant by them.

  Three months ago men had come to town, men brought in from outside to kill at the command of another, kill not as a last resort, to keep themselves from being killed, but as a matter of business, for pay and profit. Augie was killed that night, shot in the back during a one-night war waged to keep someone’s secret; killed by a man like those now coming for me. Tina and Eddie and I had been there, had seen the whole thing, had been part of it. We three were the only ones to come out of it alive. Six men lay dead in a clearing on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation——Augie, and the man who had killed him in cold blood, among them.

  In the ground beneath them, in unmarked graves, were hidden the victims of a madman, bodies that marked a thirty-year reign of murder in the name of power and gain, and all of it for one man. Only five people ever knew about those bodies, knew that they were there. Only two, myself and another, remained. The rest were killed by the same kind of men I knew were coming.

  The fact that my passenger had said what she had gave me reason to believe that she was familiar with the mechanics of arranging a hit, the machinery of it. Anyone else might have said that my life was in danger or that someone was going to have me killed, and left it at that. But she had said what she had said, and this now led me to believe that it was likely she had some connection to that world, knew these kinds of men and their ways; that she may even have had something to do with the very men she had warned me about. But for now this meant nothing more than to provide me with a good enough reason not to doubt what she had said, and to act——act before it was too late.

  I did not want another war. It was as simple as that. And as dangerous as it sounded, I did not care right then what I had to do to stop it. I would do what I had to do. Nothing else mattered.

  There was only one place I could go, only one man to whom I could turn who would be willing and able to help me keep the recent past from repeating itself, to keep me and those few left around me from being torn to pieces by yet another explosion of senseless, sudden violence.

  I rode west on Montauk Highway, past the Indian reservation and the college, then followed the curving rim of Shinnecock Bay until I crossed the border into Hampton Bays. On the west side of the Shinnecock Canal was a Hess gas station with a pay phone on the edge of its parking lot. I parked my cab in the darkest part of the lot, ran to the phone and called Information. I requested a number, then hung up, dropped a quarter, and punched in the number. The phone rang three times before it was picked up.

  A male voice said, “Hello.”

  I heard TV noise in the background, and the voices of two laughing young girls.

  “It’s MacManus,” I said.

  “Mac. What’s going on?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Can we meet?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s important.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Just outside of town.”

  “Hampton Bays?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know where my office is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”

  Chapter Four

  His office was above a liquor store on the north side of Main Street. I drove there and parked across from it, within sight of the well-lit IGA parking lot. The village was quiet, most of the shops that lined both sides of the street closed up and dark. I sat behind the wheel of my cab with the motor off, in the quickly growing cold, and waited, thinking about everything that had happened tonight, and everywhere all this could go. It was difficult to see exactly what I was into, and even more difficult to see any good coming from it; so it wasn’t long before I gave up on the whole thing and just let myself think randomly, instead of what I really wanted to think about, which was Augie. Sitting in parked cars, watching the dark and waiting for one kind of trouble or another always made me think of him. And besides that, there wasn’t a day when I didn’t think of him, of how empty and unsatisfying the world felt without him in it.

  I’ve never known a man tougher than he was, nor have I known a better one. He had served two tours of duty in Vietnam, then spent twenty years working for the DEA in Colombia. After he retired he had moved back to the East End, to raise Tina here, away——or so he had hoped——from crime and violence. He had grown up out here and remembered this place as it used to be, as it was before he left it thirty years before——just a quiet community of writers and artists and middle-class laborers. The East End has been built up since then, made into something chic, a place to be, at least for the summer months. To Augie’s horror crime was here now, and not just any crime but drugs and all the violence related to it; the exact crime he had spent his adult life fighting and from which he had hoped to protect his only daughter. I suppose he wanted to do something about it——it wasn’t his nature to just sit around——and that was why he started working for a P.I. named Frank Gannon, to have access to Frank’s resources. I had worked for Frank too, but only a couple of times, once out of financial need and once because I was indebted to him. Frank’s whole business, and his personal fortune, were based on favors. My working for him, however, didn’t turn out well, to say the least. I didn’t have the heart for it. I didn’t want to make my living off the misery and mischief of others. But it was through Frank that Augie and I met and become friends. With the exception of my partner Eddie, Augie was the only man I completely trusted. By that I meant he could always be counted on to be there, and to be himself, for better or for worse. He was a big man, powerfully built, blacksmith to my scarecrow, as capable as he was reckless. And my world just wasn’t the same without him.

  The man I had come to Hampton Bays to meet tonight wasn’t anywhere near what Augie had been to me. But I trusted him, in that limited but still significant way you trust the man with whom you share a common enemy. I didn’t know much about Ron Long’s personal life except that he had a wife and two daughters and had lived in a house on Moses Lane before he was fired from the Southampton Police Department at the end of last summer. He had risen to the rank of sergeant, was the right-hand man to the chief of police. But Long didn’t much care for the Chief’s ever-growing corruption and, when he saw an opportunity to expose his boss, Long took it. Things didn’t go as Long had hoped. The Chief came out on top, as he has always done. After Long was fired he fell upon hard times and lost his house and moved his family to a second-floor apartment on the far west side of Hampton Bays. One late afternoon last December, while driving a fare through that town, I saw a sign in the window of an office above a liquor store. It read LONG AND ASSOCIATES, and below it was the single word, INVESTIGATIONS.

  I knew then what had become of Long, that he had gone the way of many a disgraced cop and opened his own P.I. shop. Unlike Frank Gannon, Long was a decent guy. He and I had crossed paths a few times in my life, and even before he went up against the Chief, I had him marked as a man blessed, or cursed, depending on how you saw it, with compassion. And while Frank Gannon had done very well for himself financially, through influence-peddling and coercion, Long was working fraud cases for small-time insurance companies and running background checks for employers. From what my partner Eddie had told me, Long was struggling just to get by.

  I knew it was only a matter of time before someone with money to spare would appear and ask Long to do something, something Long knew better than to do. It was only a matter of time before he would have to decide if being the man he wanted to be was something he could still afford.

  It was the nature of that business, of P.I. work, the risk that comes with seeing, day in and day out, people at their worst, at their most desperate and vulnerable. It was why I did everything I could to stay as far away from that world as possible. Not even my friend Augie, as decent and compassionate a
man as he was, was at all times impervious to that very temptation.

  I was banking that Long was still the man he was when he went up against the Chief, when he decided that looking his wife and daughters in the eyes was more important than anything else, more important even than his career, or his life. This hope that the job hadn’t gotten to him yet, that he hadn’t fallen into someone’s pocket, was all I had.

  I was slouched behind the wheel when I finally spotted a car driving toward me I thought could be his. I hadn’t seen Long since the end of last summer, but if he was still struggling financially, as Eddie had said, than it was likely that he’d be driving the same car now he’d been driving then. I sat up so I could see better, but didn’t get out. There was no reason to take any chances. When the car was nearer I was able to make out that it was a ten-year-old Volvo wagon and that it had a long, zig-zagging crack in the windshield. This was Long’s car. It passed by my cab, then turned into the driveway that ran alongside the liquor store to the fenced-in parking lot at the back. I got out then and hurried across the wide street and started down the dirt driveway. The Volvo was parked by then, its lights off, and Long was waiting for me by its back bumper, at the dark end of the narrow driveway. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket and jeans and blue running shoes. When I reached him we shook hands, then entered the two-story building through a back door and headed up the steep stairs to his office.

  It was just one room, the air sharp with cold but stale. I wondered if Long had closed it up for the winter. On the large window that overlooked Main Street were the stenciled words I had seen last December, but by the look of the place I was certain there weren’t any “associates,” unless you were willing to count his two five-foot-tall filing cabinets and unplugged fax machine.

  Long clicked on a small desk lamp. It was dim, just a reading light, but it was enough to see him and everything around us clearly. He sat behind his desk, which was made of laminated particle board. I took a seat in one of the two chairs that faced it. Aside from these things, and the filing cabinet and fax machine behind him, the room was empty. There wasn’t even anything on the paneled walls. Long leaned back in his chair and was a good three feet away from me, but I could still smell the scotch on his breath, and the cheap cologne he had splashed on before leaving home to hide it.