Dead Street

It had changed most of the criminal minds so that they knew how to use the greatest scientific advances for their own ends. They had the money to do it and the manpower to make it work. How they knew to tap Bettie’s phone was a mystery right now, but all mysteries finally get solved sooner or later.

There was another part of the puzzle that was evident now. If they knew where she was, why didn’t they kill her?

Because she still had something vital they needed, and that was buried in her lost memory.

Then something else flittered through my mind. How did the mob know she had lost her memory? Nothing was ever printed in the papers except the fact that she had been presumed killed when the car went over the bridge.

There was a damn leak.

Someplace in her past, someone knew of the infirmity and somehow passed word to somebody else and the news went unheeded until someone recognized it for what it was. It couldn’t have been a reporter because that was a story that would never be suppressed. The whole affair was damned accidental and had taken a long time before it raised its head from the dust.

For a few minutes I thought about it and the conclusion had to be one thing. An employee at the veterinary hospital had overheard something, or was told something in confidence, and had unknowingly passed the information to someone who realized the implication and went to the right people with the story.

But... The big but was still there. Where did she hide the essential piece of information that had disrupted so many lives? And what was it?

You can hate coincidences all you want, but they happen.

There was one oddball piece of information nobody had bothered to investigate. Big Zappo Padrone’s name had come up, like a wild throw from left field. He’d been dead for generations, a lousy racketeer from the days when they were throwing bombs into saloons selling the wrong guy’s beer and blasting away with sawed-off shotguns and outrunning the Coast Guard boats with those hot rod, Liberty-powered engines left over from World War One.

He’d lived on the same street I’d worked on. His old house had been the headquarters for the New York mob action. Smaller then, not nearly as efficient as now, but just as deadly.

I glanced at my watch, then grabbed a cab and took it to the big library on Forty-second Street. I didn’t even have to show my credentials. The librarian recognized me, gave me a big welcoming smile and directed me to the area where all the old newspapers had been filmed and were on file for immediate usage.

It didn’t take long to zero in on Big Zappo’s background. There were old photos of his house on a nearly empty street, and one close-up with Big Zappo himself on the porch trying to hide his face behind a newspaper. I was just about to turn the dial on the microfilm reader and see the next page, when my eye caught something that damn near made me sweat.

The house number was plain as day. It was 4428. Hell! I remember Bucky painting on 703 when I was at the station house at the corner!

This old street ran crosstown and in the wild, hairy days of Big Zappo, one end of the street was growing and the other end just dropped into the East River. When the building boom started to corral the immigrants, streets got numbered and houses were re-identified. 4428 turned into 703. So, who hung onto the old number and why? There was a connection, all right. It was Big Zappo himself. He had lived there under both addresses.

But Big Zappo was dead. He had been dead a long time.

Then what was so blasted important about that house?

Bucky Mohler.

He’d lived in that house but took nothing from it. He’d helped kill another kid so he could disappear. Why? Where had he gone into hiding? There was one place... a decent job. Nobody would ever suspect Bucky Mohler of being able to get and keep any kind of respectable employment.

I let out a little grin and said silently to myself, okay, Captain of the station house, big cop with medals, well trained to recognize clues and twists of circumstance, how did you miss this one? You saw the picture, wrinkled your nose at the partial face shot because you thought he looked familiar to you and didn’t push it any further.

You saw pieces of him in two pictures, didn’t you? That Credentials anniversary pamphlet and the office photo.

No wonder you’re retired.

Bucky Mohler was the young guy, the computer whiz, the fix-it guy at Credentials, the one in the office photo Bettie had shown me!

Chapter Nine

The street was a rubble-strewn war zone now. The utilities were off and the vagrants chased out and on the stretch down from where the station house used to be, only two buildings remained.

Old Bessie’s former domain was five vacant lots away from the tenement that had once belonged to a gangster named Padrone.