The Case Of The Lumbee Millions (Woody Stone, Private Investigator, Series) Read online

  The Case Of The Lumbee Millions

  (Woody Stone, Private Investigator, Novel #2)

  By R.D. Herring

  Text copyright © 2013 R.D. Herring

  All rights reserved

  Cover by R.D. Herring

  Barn Dog Art

  The Case Of The Lumbee Millions

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Blood Gushed

  Chapter Two: A Yellow Notepad

  Chapter Three: Close Friends

  Chapter Four: A Double Sawbuck

  Chapter Five: Running Strong

  Chapter Six: Bronx Park

  Chapter Seven: My Bar

  Chapter Eight: Brilliant Morning Sun

  Chapter Nine: A Little Coaxing

  Chapter Ten: King Street Junkyards

  Chapter Eleven: Thick-necked Eyetalian Kid

  Chapter Twelve: The Booth Waitress

  Chapter Thirteen: The Last Dance

  Chapter Fourteen: Mid-town Parking Garage

  Chapter Fifteen: One Irishman

  Chapter Sixteen: Billion-dollar Business

  Chapter Seventeen: It Rained Overnight

  Chapter Eighteen: Eviction Notice

  Chapter Nineteen: Shortage of Oxygen

  Chapter Twenty: Past the Whorehouse

  Chapter Twenty-one: The Sweat Trickled

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Pine Needles

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Hotel Dining Room

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Butter on My Grits

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Oxendine Cemetery

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Moment of Truth

  Epilogue

  PREFACE

  To the Corps

  The wonderful love of a beautiful Maid,

  The love of a staunch true man,

  The love of a baby, unafraid,

  Have existed since time began.

  But the greatest of loves,

  The quintessence of loves,

  Even greater than that of a mother,

  Is the tender, unspoken, infinite love,

  Of one drunken Marine for another.

  Captain Louis Hugh Wilson, Jr., USMC. Marianas Islands. July 27, 1944.

  PROLOGUE

  (Sunday, June 9, 1907. Robeson County, North Carolina.)

  Rosalee didn’t want to miss a thing, her big green eyes unblinking. Blue ribbons gathered her long dark hair into ponytails. At sixteen, she loved the whole world, but she was deeply in love with the boy whose arm she gripped and whose heartbeat spoke through her fingertips. The light afternoon rain had moved inland leaving behind the airish, humid North Carolina evening as it always did.

  The old mottled horse clipped and clopped along the dirt road toward the river, and the sun sank lower beyond the green-black swamp. Dense summer growth had turned the woods to a solid wall on either side of the hard-packed thoroughfare.

  Rosalee scooted to the right on the smooth buckboard seat, closer to the most handsome young man she had ever known, Rayford Allen. The strong hands of her beau reined old Lucille off the big road. Ahead, the Lumber River twisted past their secluded picnic clearing where they often lay in each other’s arms.

  The horse shook her head and whinnied when they entered the shady lane. Flared nostrils filled with the sick, sweet smell of the Mother Swamp, the source and final arbiter of all life. Rosalee’s bare feet steadied the pot of chicken and paysta and the two chilled Co-Colas she had wrapped in a red wool blanket.

  “Rayford, look a-yonder,” she pointed to the faint full moon hanging over the swamps, a smoky marble darting behind the cottony, scudding clouds!

  Rayford turned and she heard the dull thud, then the sharp report as the rock bounced off the footboard. Bright red blood dripped when Rayford slumped forward into his own lap. She screamed when three men with flour sacks tied up as masks ran from the tree line and dragged Rayford to the ground. She was still screaming as she grabbed the reins and snapped the horse on the rump. A muffled voice yelled, “Stinkin Indian! You won’t touch a white gal again.” ‘Cille got moving as one man forced the noose around Rayford’s neck and the others delivered vicious kicks to his body. Shock engulfed Rosalee. Ol Seely squired her home to tell her daddy.

  CHAPTER ONE

  (Monday, June 5, 1961. 481 Wythe Avenue, Brooklyn.)

  Blood gushed from his face and splattered. I drove my fist into his broken beezer again, “You piece of shit!” He was flat out in the filthy alley with my knee buried in his gut. I grabbed his necktie with my left hand and hammered on his pan with my right. “You shot my Studebaker, asshole!”

  My Drill Instructor at Parris Island told us, ‘Once you get a man down, don’t let the son of a bitch up’. That advice had improved my luck one hundred per cent. But I was dog-tired, so I stood up and smashed my heel into the jamoke’s spread right mitt. The snap was obvious, even through my shoe leather, when his trigger finger and several others broke. He was cooled, so I slapped his bloody jowls until he opened his eyes.

  “Show your fat ass around here again and I’ll kill you, capiche?”

  He jerked a nod, struggled to his feet and waddled off into the shadows, his wing blown out and his hand busted. The real pain would be a lightning bolt when the shock drained off. I hoped he knew how lucky he was.

  A few minutes earlier, he had gimped off sideways like a crab after my bullet mushroomed in his shoulder. I ran the boob down and slammed him to the asphalt without much problem. A slug from a .45 ACP makes a small hole on entry, but when it hits something solid, there’ll be a four-inch exit wound. That goombah wouldn’t be called up to pitch for the Yankees any time soon.

  ***

  ‘BANG - Thwunk’. It sounded just like 1952 when we took target practice in the mountains of Pohang, Korea. My platoon had a rare couple of hour’s downtime and it was spring. Ed Kowalski found, he said, a discarded U.S. Army five-gallon water can. We set the jerry can against a muddy hillside and started firing our side arms, walking back three steps between shots. ‘BANG - Thwunk’ when the projectile slammed into the pressed steel of the can.

  As machine gunners, Ed and I carried M1911A1 Automatic Colt Pistols. Mike Sekach was in possession of a gook nine-millimeter pistol and Dave Cournea bragged about his stolen .38 revolver. Our Platoon Commander walked by and put a stop to the grab-assing. “You Marines might be pissing away the very round that could save your life,” he told us. Lieutenant Logan generally left us to our own devices, but we’d learned to listen when he spoke.

  ***

  It had been pushing eight p.m. when I parked my 1957 Studebaker Hawk in the alley by 481 Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The entrance to my second floor walk-up office was in that alley. At that time of year, daylight still filtered onto the east - west streets, but between the buildings, a shadow world. I walked to the rear of the car to get my 12 gauge shotgun. I had carried it in the trunk since I first testified in the murder trial of Joseph Gallo, mob boss of the Lower East Side. Known on the street as Crazy Joe, he put out the word that he intended to make me room temperature.

  ‘BANG - Thwunk’. The sound delivered a shot of adrenaline straight up my spine. I could never explain how what made the average Joe stress out, slowed the action down for me. I guess what I’m saying is, under stress, I could see things as if they were happening in slow motion. I spun around and kneeled in time to see a sil
houette jerk back behind the corner of the next building.

  I pulled my .45 ACP from its custom leather shoulder rig and sighted in on the spot. When the hat and gun arm reappeared, I launched a half-inch slug of lead traveling at 853 feet per second. The fool had chosen the worst possible ambush spot; he was backlit from the far end of his side alley. There was enough light to see the material of his suit coat explode in the air when the bullet tore through and out.

  I was burned out, mentally and physically, but when I heard the clatter of his gun on the pavement, I holstered my roscoe and ran him down. After talking to the creep, I located his abandoned heater in the growing darkness. It was a .38 Smith and Wesson J-frame.

  The corn popper was no use to me as a primary weapon, but I stuck it under my belt. It was a whole lot newer than my .45 hog leg that came home from Korea in the bottom of my seabag in 1953. My Midnight Black Studebaker sat wounded. The left tail fin sported a through-and-through big enough to stick my little fingertip in. Eyetalians! Should have broken both his paws.

  I grabbed my street sweeper from the trunk, unlocked the fire door and climbed the stairs. At the end of the short hallway, the door read, ‘W.R. Stone, Private Investigations’ in black and gold letters. When I leased the place four years earlier, I had paid eleven dollars to get my name and business painted on the frosted glass. Very professional.

  I walked past the old brown leather couch where I planned to crash. I was too beat to drive back to the Hotel Taft in Midtown. Entering my private office made my gut hurt. The small room was starting to depress the shit out a’ me. I leaned the shotgun against the bookshelf where I kept my Jim Thompson paperbacks and plopped down in the heavy oak desk chair. I found my friend, Jack Daniel, in his drawer-nest and tipped him into the coffee mug that sported the Marine Corps Emblem. The same emblem was tattooed on my shoulder.

  I fired up a Lucky with the Suribachi desk lighter, stood and opened the small window that overlooked the brick wall of a warehouse fifteen feet away. As nightfall draped over the building, the shaded red bricks turned to the color of dried blood. Tossing back the liquor, I had envious thoughts of the Manhattan skyline view from the front office windows. “Got to get out of this coat closet,” I mumbled to myself.

  I tipped the bottle again and sat down to mindlessly scuff a brush across my wingtips. Gumshoeing was the business I loved, but I was bone-weary. The past summer Crazy Joe Gallo framed me for the murder of his cousin, Victor Spillazzo, another scumbag Eyetalian hood. Gallo walked Vicky into the Bronx sunset and stacked the evidence against yours truly.

  I managed to tie a knot in Joey’s tail and got the heat off me. But, Joey pulled the wool on the five organized crime families as well as the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, or so he thought. At the time, I seemed to be the only one in the know about Gallo’s long con.

  For me, getting out of the crosshairs of a dragnet by New York City’s Finest had been a relief. But it stuck in my craw that, while I had to hide like a sewer rat and sweat bullets, Gallo got himself ‘promoted’. He assumed a position of tremendous power within his shithead organization.

  I dropped the shoe brush under my desk and lit another pill. The summer heat, a month early this year, was billowing through my open window. The hot breath of the city and the mocking maroon brick wall stirred my claustrophobia.

  My friend, Dan Logan, an Assistant District Attorney, laid out the politics for me. Everyone, from the Mayor on down, was happy to see Gallo replace Vito Rossi as Boss of the Lower East Side. Gallo, although a murderous, treacherous thug, was a known entity who forbid the sale of street drugs. Rossi had been a loose cannon for years - unhinged as a shithouse rat.

  I thought they gave Gallo a pass on whacking his cousin. Turned out, the DA’s Office was well aware of his deeds and misdeeds. Dan kept me informed as they tightened the noose on Gallo in the months to come.

  For two weeks, Gallo had been cooling his heels in an eight by ten caboose at Rikers Island, convicted of second degree murder. His mouthpiece, a mobbed up goober named Diapolito, jumped straight up after the foreman announced the verdict and made a motion for a new trial. Two days later, Attorney Diapolito filed eighteen reasons in support of that motion with the Clerk of Court. Within two weeks, a total of twenty-two ‘reasons in support’ had been lodged on Gallo’s behalf. The reasons mostly revolved around technical questions of law.

  I poured myself another decent drink and took a pencil and yellow pad from the middle desk drawer. Thinking, ‘If I owned this building’, I drew a big square representing the office out front. The room held little more than Gina’s desk, a couch and three small chairs. A big bookcase, a refrigerator and a counter sat against the opposite wall.

  A line, drawn from the middle of the front wall straight back, connected the spots where weight-bearing posts still existed. It looked to me that they had once supported a dividing wall. My pencil line created two rooms with two windows each - a great view of the Manhattan skyline and Williamsburg Bridge from both rooms. Gina’s new office would have the entry door and the small bathroom. My great big office would sit beyond that, with a small storage room, my current office, for ammo and a cot.

  I might move the old leather couch in there and buy a new one for Gina’s office. It was almost fun to think about. I felt calmer than I had since I started ducking Eyetalian lead late that spring.

  Again I poured the amber liquid until my coffee mug was full. Looking at the Eagle, Globe and Anchor on the cup, my mind flashed on Staff Sergeant Robert E. Holeman. He had been the top enlisted man in my platoon in Korea and the most squared-away Marine I ever knew. When the surviving members of my platoon returned from war, Holeman bought my first shot of Jack Daniel’s in a juke dive in San Diego. He taught us many things, and I rate that first taste of Jack right up there with the other tips that saved my life. ‘Here’s to you, Bob, wherever you are’.

  Gina Kowalski had been fifteen the first time I met her in 1953. Several of us who’d been friends in Korea with her brother, Ed, attended a memorial service for him. The family buried Ed next to his father up in Queens. Gina, a knobby-kneed, skinny kid, lived with her mother and grandmother in a big house in South Brooklyn. Their neighborhood was down by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge that connects to Staten Island. The bridge was no more than a blueprint in 1953.

  In 1958, she graduated from secretarial school and I jokingly said she should come work for me. She’s been my secretary since. She became the reason ‘W.R. Stone, Private Investigations’ had two bank accounts and operated as a real business. And what a looker, but I always kept in mind her brother had been my best friend in the Marine Corps. I always thought of what Ed would want for her. But, what a dish.

  Maybe I’d get that bathroom remodeled and make it nice for Gina. Business had never been better - word of mouth, easy money. We even opened a bank business account; one day Gina told me the coffee can that held our operating fund was so stuffed with cash, no more would fit. Then, the case dough in the can was back to fifty fish, as planned. All good, but, personally, I felt spread thin. More and more, I employed Sal Spitieri to do leg work for me.

  ***

  Two days before my yellow pad exercise in architectural planning, Gina showed me a letter signed by one David Bilstein. From the offices of Bilstein Brothers Real Estate, it said, in a nutshell, my lease expired on 31 October, 1961, no renewal. The property was going up for sale. They gave the option of renting by the month until the place sold. Hell, Bilstein Brothers wasn’t even the company I thought I had a lease with.

  I told Gina not to worry; the new owners would pick up my lease. Doubtful, the value of Williamsburg waterfront property was taking a nosedive. The development vultures circled the carcass.

  ***

  After mulling it over, I decided to buy the whole building. With that decision made, anxiety and stress drained away. I supervised the remodeling of the entire second deck as an apartment for Gina. The new roof had a shaded patio with a tiled floor, th
e big tiles, not the little ones. Gina had no idea I’d done that. When she arrived and piped it all, I could see the deep appreciation in her beautiful blue eyes. Her arms flew around me and she stretched upward to press her ripe red lips onto mine.

  CHAPTER TWO

  (Tuesday, June 6, 1961. 481 Wythe Avenue.)

  I jerked my head up at the sound of a door closing. Confused, I sat at my desk staring at a divided square drawn on a yellow notepad.

  “Woody, is that you,” Gina called from the outer office?

  Glancing at my watch, I ran my fingers through my hair and skinned off my shoulder holster rig. Down to my skivvy shirt, I tossed the blood-splattered dress shirt in the corner. Gina went to her tiptoes to park her pillbox hat on top of the coatrack as I reached my office door. Even in my state of disrepair, the sight of her perfect bunching calves jacked the blood back to my pump.

  “Hey, sugar plum. You’re early.”

  “Woody, it’s after eight,” she said walking in my direction. “What happened to your face, boss,” she reached up and touched my jaw? “It’s a groove. I thought you’d been cut.”

  I glanced in the mirror that hung over the counter. My cheek bore the imprint of a Number two pencil, “It’s nothing. Must’ve slept funny.”

  Then, she was looking at my chest, “What’s splattered all over your undershirt?”

  I depressed my chin, “Mmm, prob’ly motor oil.”

  “It’s blood, isn’t it, Woody? That means you’ve got a suit for the dry cleaner. Just put it all together. I’ve got to make a pickup today anyway.” After three years, she had a pretty good understanding of the business I was in.

  I scooped the coffee into the Percolator basket while she shelved her purse and took casual inventory of the papers on her desk. Walking the coffee pot to the small bathroom to get water, I said, “I had an idea. I wonder if I could buy this building. We could remodel this floor, maybe turn it into two offices. The printing company floor has more space than we’d ever need. And it’s got that indoor loading area - perfect garage for my Studebaker…”