"It sounded like just what I said. Don't stray off the dime, Jake. I want information, period. You're a lawyer and you always stick to due process. I'd like a little of that to rub off on Stick."

"I got a feeling he's not going to get a lot of help in that respect from Morehead's bunch."

"That's what I mean," Cisco said. "Give the lad a little balance, okay?"

"What if I need some professional backup?" I asked.

"He wouldn't be in the Freeze if he wasn't first cla.s.s, and you know it," Cisco growled. "You get in trouble, he's as good a man to have at the back door as you could ask. All I'm saying is, if we do happen to turn up a RICO case, I want it to be airtight. No illegal wiretaps, no hacking their computers. Nothing that won't hold up in court."

"Yeah, okay," I said.

Cisco couldn't resist throwing in a little jab.

"Maybe he can get you to file a report now and again, once a week or so, y'know."

"Mm-hmm."

"Dutch has a computer setup. You can tie directly into our terminal in Washington."

"Right," I said, and before I could move on to something else, he added sarcastically, "Maybe he can help you a little in that area."

"Sure thing."

"Stick sent the Tagliani photos up to me in his weekly report; that's how we made them."

I was beginning to hate this kid they called Stick, already. He sounded like a miserable little eager beaver.

"How long you in town for?" I asked.

"I'm in town to say h.e.l.lo," Cisco answered. "I head back to Washington tomorrow."

"Aw, and just when the fun's starting."

"Somebody has to put food on the table. We're in the middle of the annual battle of the budget-which reminds me, you're two months behind in your expense reports and you haven't filed a field report for-"

"Tell me more about this Stick fellow," I said, trying to avoid another issue.

Mazzola paused. "I want those expense reports," he said. "Clear?"

"Right. You got 'em."

"Now, about Parver. Before he came with us, he was a D.C. plainclothes, then a narc, then he worked on the D.C. mob squad. Before all that he did time in Nam. Army intelligence or something. He's tough enough."

"Not too jaded, huh?"

Cisco chuckled like he'd just heard a dirty joke. "I loaned him to Dutch. I don't think anybody else in the outfit knows he's one of us. Dutch'Il fix it so the two of you can pair up. You'll like him."

"Says who?"

"All the ladies do."

"Great."

"Sorry about Tagliani," Mazzola said. "I know how long you been working on his case."

"Well, saves the Fed a lot of money, I suppose," I said. "But it would have been nice to put the b.a.s.t.a.r.d in Leavenworth with his brother."

"One more thing," Cisco said before hanging up. "You're not here to solve any murder cases. You're here to find out if there were any outside mob strings on Tagliani and who holds them. That's number one. We could have a cla.s.sic case working here, Jake. "

"Morehead said something funny," I told him. "He said, 'I've got the whole thing on tape.'"

"What whole thing? You mean the Tagliani hit?"

"I guess so. He was evasive when I asked him."

"Well, ask him again. You can fill me in at breakfast."

"Sure."

"I'll meet you in the hotel restaurant. Eight o'clock suit you?"

"Nine might be better."

"See you at eight," he said, ending the conversation.

6.

INSTANT REPLAY.

When I got back to the Kindergarten, Dutch Morehead's SOB's were beginning to gather in the room. One or two had drifted in. Dutch had a handful of photographs which he was about to pin on a corkboard. A quick glance confirmed that the Tagliani gang was in Dunetown and was there in force. Only two pictures were missing: Tuna Chevos and his gunman, Turk Nance. And as I told Cisco, I knew they had to be in Dunetown somewhere.

"That's Tagliani's outfit all right," I told Dutch. "All but two of them. Otherwise known as the Cincinnati Triad. Mind if I ask you what put you on to him in the first place?"

"Ever hear of Charlie Flowers?" Dutch asked.

"Charlie 'One Ear' Flowers?" I asked, surprised.

"Could there be more than one?" he said with a smile.

"Everybody in the business has heard of Charlie One Ear," I said.

"What've you heard?" he asked.

Charlie One Ear was a legend in the business. It was said that he had the best string of snitches in the country, had a computer for a brain, was part Indian, and was one of the best trackers alive. If rumor was correct, Flowers could find a footprint in a jar of honey, and I told Dutch that.

"Ever meet him?"

"No," I said, "I've never met a living legend."

"What have you heard lately?"

He asked it the way people who already know the answers ask questions.

I hesitated for a moment, then said, "Word is, he got on the sauce and had to retire."

"You been listening to a bunch of sheiss kopfes," he said. "That gent in the tweeds, second row there, that's Charlie One Ear. He's never had a drink in his life."

I looked at him. He was short and squat, a barrel of a man, impeccably dressed in a tweed suit, tan suede vest, and a perfectly matched tie. His mustache was trimmed to perfection, his nails immaculately manicured. He had no right ear, just a little bunch of balled-up flesh where it should have been. I had heard that story too. When Flowers was a young patrolman in St. Louis, a mugger bit his ear off.

He was chatting with a middling, wiry tiger of a man who was dressed on the opposite end of the sartorial scale: h.e.l.l's Angels' leather and denim. His face looked like it had been sculpted with a waffle iron.

"Flowers remembers every face, rap sheet, stiff he's ever seen or met," said Dutch. "Photographic memory, total recall-whatever you call it-he's got it. Anyway, he didn't make Tagliani, but he made a couple of Tagliani's out-of-town pals. A lot of heavyweights from out of state spent time with Tagliani at the track, none of them exactly movie-star material. Tagliani was also a very private kind, but he flashed lots of money. Big money. So Charlie One Ear got nosy, shot some pictures one day out at the track. Stick sends the photos up to D.C. to Mazzola and tells him Turner, which is how we knew him then, is keeping fast company and spending money like he owns the Bank of England. Cisco takes one look and bingo, we got a Tagliani instead of a Turner on our hands. That was last week."

"Great timing," I said.

"Ain't it though," Dutch said woefully.

"Who's that he's talking to?" I asked.

"You mean the dude in black tie and tails?" Dutch said with a snicker. "That's Chino Zapata. He mangles the king's English and thinks Miranda is a Central American banana republic, but he can follow a speck of dust into a Texas tornado and never lose sight of it. And in a pinch, he's got a punch like Dempsey."

"Where'd you find him?"

"LAPD. The story is they recruited him to get him off the street, although n.o.body in the LAPD will admit it. When I found him, he was undercover with the h.e.l.l's Angels."

"How'd you get him down here?"

"I told him he could bring his bike and wear whatever he pleased."

"Oh. "

By this time the room had gathered three more men-about half of Dutch Morehead's squad-a strange-looking gang whose dress varied from Flowers' tweeds and brogans to Zapata's black leather jacket and hobnail boots. They stood, or sat, smoking, drinking coffee, making nickel talk and eyeballing me. It was my first view of the hard-case bunch I would get to know a lot better, and fast.

Morehead sidled around so his back was to the room and started quietly giving me a rundown on the rest of his gang.

"Sitting right behind Zapata is Nick Salvatore, a real roughneck. His old man was soldato for a small-time mafioso in south Philly, blew himself up trying to wire a bomb to some politician's car. You'll probably get the whole story from him if you stick around long enough, but the long and short of it is he hates the Outfit with a pa.s.sion. Calls our job the dago roundup. He's more streetwise than Zapata. I guess you might call Salvatore our resident LCN expert. He doesn't know that many of the people, but he knows the way they think."

Salvatore was dressed haphazardly at best: a T-shirt with GRATEFUL DEAD printed over a skull and crossbones, a purple Windbreaker, and jeans. A single gold earring peeked out from under his long black hair. It was hard to tell whether he was growing a beard or had lost his razor.

"The earring is his mother's wedding band," Dutch whispered. "He's touchy about that. He also carries a sawed-off pool cue with a leaded handle in his shoulder holster."

On my card it was a split decision whether Zapata or Salvatore was the worst dresser, although Dutch gave the nod to Salvatore.

"Zapata doesn't know any better," he said. "Salvatore doesn't give a d.a.m.n. If you blindfold him and ask him what he's wearing, he couldn't even guess."

Dutch continued the thumbnail sketch of his gang: "Across from him is Cowboy Lewis." The man he referred to was as tall as Dutch, thirty pounds trimmer, and wore a black patch over his left eye. He was dressed in white jeans and a tan Windbreaker zipped halfway down, had very little hair on his chest. A black baseball cap with a gold dolphin on the crown covered a tangled mop of dishwater-blond hair. There wasn't a spare ounce of fat on the guy.

"Pound for pound, the hardest man in the bunch. He doesn't have much to say, but when he does, it's worth listening to," Dutch said. "He thinks in a very logical way. A to b to c to d, like that. If there's a bust on the make, Lewis is the man you want in front. He's kind of like our fullback, y'know. You say to Cowboy, we need to lose that door, Cowboy, and the door's gone, just like that, no questions asked. I suppose if I told him to lose an elephant, he'd waste the elephant. He's not afraid of anything that I can think of."

"Are any of them?" I asked.

Dutch chuckled. "Not really," he said. "Lewis is kind of . . . " He paused a moment, looking for the proper words, and then said, "He's just very single-minded. Actually, he started out to be a hockey player but he never made the big time. His fuse was too short, even for hockey. Y'see, if Cowboy was going for a goal, and the cage was way down at the other end of the rink, he'd go straight for it. Anybody got in his way, he'd just flatten them."

"Doesn't sound like the perfect team man," I said.

"n.o.body's perfect," said Dutch.

The last man in the room was also lean and hard-eyed, in his mid- to late thirties, and over six feet tall. He looked like he had little time for nonsense or small talk.

"The tall guy in the three-piece suit and the flower in his lapel, that's Pancho Callahan," Dutch continued. "He's a former veterinarian, graduated from UCLA, and can tell you more about horse racing than the staff of Calumet Farms. He spends most of his time at the track. He doesn't say too much unless you get him on horses; then he'll talk your ear off." Callahan seemed restless. It was obvious he would rather have been elsewhere, which was probably true of all of them.

Altogether, about as strange a bunch of lawmen as I've ever seen gathered in one room. And there were a few more to go: the Mufalatta Kid and Kite Lange, more of whom later, and, of course, Stick, who was still an enigma to me. Eight in all, nine if you counted Dutch.

"Tell me a little about the Stick," I said. "What kind of guy is he?"

Dutch stared off at a corner of the room for a moment, tugging at his mustache.

"Very likable," he said finally. "You could call him amiable. Bizarre sense of humor. But not to be messed with. I'll tell you a little story about Stick. He has this old felt hat, I mean this hat looks like an ape's been playing with it. One day he leaves the hat in the car while he goes to get a haircut. He comes back, somebody lifted the hat. Don't ask me why anybody would want the hat, but there you are. About a week later Stick is cruising up Bay Street one afternoon and there this guy is, strolling up the boulevard wearing his hat.

"Stick pulls up, starts following the guy on foot. The guy goes into a record store. At that point Stick remembers he left his piece in his glove compartment. So what does he do? He hops in a hardware store, buys a number five Stillson wrench, and when the little putz comes out of the record store, Stick falls in behind him, shoves him in the first alley they come to, and whaps the bejesus out of the guy. The guy never saw him and never knew what hit him, but he sure knew Stick got his hat back."

He paused for another moment and then added: "Resourceful, that's what Stick is, resourceful."

I filed that information away, then said to Dutch, "Look, I don't want to seem pushy this early in the game, but I know this Tagliani mob. There's something I'd like to run by your people. Maybe it'll help a little."

He gave the request a second's worth of thought and nodded. "Okay," he said. "But let me ease you into the picture first."

"Anything you say."

I went over and grabbed a desk near the side of the room.

Dutch, as rumpled as an unmade bed, stood in front of the room.

"All right, listen up," he told his gashouse gang. "You all know by now what happened tonight. We lost the ace in the deck and we had a man sitting two hundred yards away."

He did an eyeball roll call and then bellowed loud enough to wake the dead in Milwaukee: "Sheiss, we're missin' half the squad here. Didn't they hear this is a command performance?"

"They're still out on the range," a voice mumbled from the back of the room.

"Hmmm," Dutch muttered. "Okay, you all know about Tagliani and Stinetto getting chilled. Those are the two we knew as Turner and Sherman. Well, first, I got a little good news, if you want to call it that. Then we'll talk about who was where and how we screwed up tonight. Anyway, we had the house bugged and as happens, one of the rooms on the wire was the den, which is where the hit was made. So I've got the whole thing on tape, thanks to Lange, who did his telephone repairman act."

Dutch punched a b.u.t.ton on a small ca.s.sette player and a moment later the room's hollow tone hissed through the speaker.