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

  ***

  I preferred to dip my beak at Dempsey’s Broadway Restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. There, Louie Roundino’s counterpart was Salvatore Spitieri. The two men, other than being the same, were as different as night and day. Sal Spitieri was known and respected far and wide, and he still had all his mental faculties. As ‘Spitfire’ Spitieri, he had been a welterweight contender. At forty-nine years old, he was as strong as any three others; I had seen Sally Spit pick up an anvil by the horn with his bare hand.

  After Mike Sekach briefed me on the Braun Case, I had it mapped that there must be more to the story, and that somebody must’ve seen something. It didn’t track that an experienced, eight-year-veteran motor cop would ride across the state line looking for two fugitives. He would use proper procedure despite the report they bugged out in that direction. I reviewed the official report. The witness list jumped from Patrolman Adams in North Manhattan to the unlucky homeowner in Fort Lee, New Jersey. I took it on the hoof to re-interview them and anyone else vaguely associated. I started by meeting with Anna Braun, the widow.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A double sawbuck slipped into Sally Spit’s gnarled hand got him shaking the trees in the underground to see what fell out. I had hired Sal for muscle on a couple of cases and we’d learned to trust each other. Six days had passed when he approached me one night at Dempsey’s.

  “Hey, Woody. How’s by ya.”

  “Good, Sal. Spending way too much time at the Court House with the Gallo trial.”

  “Won’t be no loss when they flip the switch on that gavoon.”

  “Don’t think it’ll come to that, bo, but it’ll make life better with him up the river.”

  “Okay, got a call two hours ago. Got a name and number for you,” he took a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket. “Name’s Roundino, Lou Roundino. Hackensack pug. Used to be a pretty good puncher, but he’s a bleeder. Fair skinned - nuthin but scars now. Works at the Flamingo Club in Jersey.”

  Sally Spit was the real deal, a fireplug with a buzz cut. He always wore a white shirt, if not a necktie. His grandmother raised him in poverty on the island of Malta. When she grew old, she used her life savings, twelve British pounds, to book his passage to New York City, America. He was fourteen years old and alone.

  He literally fought his way into adulthood, and had a better than average at being the welterweight champ. A trainer convinced him that a little nose candy would extend his legs in the later rounds. All that did was put him on the ropes - down and out, a needle in his arm for years until he decided to kick it or die trying. He beat it, but he was back on the skids. As a devout Roman Catholic, he accepted his fate. He stayed sober, worked at Dempsey’s and was a fixture at the local gyms. He became more valuable to me every time I employed him.

  ***

  With clean clothes, a fairly clean body and a fresh shave, I was feeling aces. I wished I had let Gina run to the deli earlier. But, I had to get to the West Bronx, and that twenty-mile drive wasn’t eggs in the beer with some of the traffic out there. I had it doped the best route was to head north through Queens and take the Triborough Bridge.

  The phone rang in the outer office as I was sliding the knot up on my tie. As I put on my coat, Gina appeared at my open door, “Woody, Line Two. It’s Miss Riley from the Manhattan DA’s Office.” Then she added in a stage whisper, “It’s the one with the funny voice.”

  Rita Mae Riley was Dan Logan’s secretary and what a tomato. She was five feet of dynamite who lacked nothing in the looks department. Her only shortcoming was a voice straight out of Munchkin Land. It was like the good Lord created such a humdinger, she’d never survive in this world if He didn’t give her a way to drive all the men away.

  Rita Mae and I had our fling. We did the horizontal boogie at an ADA Christmas party a few years back, except it wasn’t horizontal and it wasn’t exactly at the party. Rita Mae showed up at the shindig in a skintight red dress. When I noticed that two drinks put her out on the roof, we wandered off and found the Thermofax room. Every time I get a look at her, I make a mental note to give her a call, but, eventually, she always speaks.

  “Hello, Rita Mae.”

  “Hi, Woody.” ‘Follow the yellow brick road…’ “Mr. Logan had to go to court, but he wanted me to call you with a message. I’ll just read his note, ‘Judge Bell, Criminal Court, set hearing at 1400 on Thursday to consider Gallo’s petition for new trial. Dixon says all witnesses should stay in contact. Diapolito notified this morning. Bell’s tired of his stalling ass’. Those are Mr. Logan’s words, not mine, Woody.”

  “Thanks, Rita Mae. Tell Mr. Logan I’ll stop by and see him.”

  “Oh, that would be swell, Woody. I’d like to see you.”

  “I’m tied up with a case right now,” I sorta lied, “ but I’ll stop by soon.”

  “Bye, Woody.” That voice would run a starving badger off a gut truck.

  While I was thinking about it, I dialed the new office number for the 32nd Precinct Mike Sekach had given me. Three rings, “Homicide, Detective Sekach.”

  “Dee-tective? Say, ain’t you the one Staff Sergeant Holeman almost skinned alive cause you couldn’t get a shitter clean.”

  “I have that distinction on my résumé. Hey, you ol rattlesnake, whaddaya know good?”

  “Mike, it is good this time. I’m calling about the Braun case. Have you talked to Wilkerson at the Benevolent Association?”

  “Not in a while. What’s up?”

  “He called me yesterday. After the Pension Fund Board read Matthew Morrell’s affidavit and checked out his bona fides, they reversed their ruling. The widow’s going to get the full ‘line-of-duty’.

  “Jesus and Mother Mary, that is good news. Does she know?”

  “I left a message with her babysitter yesterday. I told Fred Wilkerson I’m headed there this morning to make sure she understands and see if she needs anything.”

  “That’s good. Wilkerson can help her with the forms. Outstanding, Woody! Those dipshits on the PF Board put her through a lot.”

  “Yeah, they sound dumber’n a sack a’ rocks.”

  “I owe you, Wood. Coy and Anna were always good to me. Let me know the amount of time you spent on the case.”

  “Tell you what, bo, we’ll call it square if you’ll tell me the God’s honest truth. Did that hooker you picked up in San Diego that time have a ding-dong or not?”

  “Okay, the truth is, I was so close to shootin my wad in her mouth when I reached down and felt the pickle, I told her to hurry up and finish what she was doing, then get the hell out.” I heard him bellow with laughter. He loved to tell that joke, and it cracked me up every time.

  “Well, then we’re square.”

  “Never happen, Woodrow. I’ll catch you at Jack Dempsey’s. Good job, bo.” His receiver clicked in the cradle.

  I made sure my flask was full and stuffed a couple extra decks of Luckies in my pocket. After I locked my window I picked up Fred Wilkerson’s phone number and my 12 gauge and headed for my newly ventilated Studebaker.

  Gina looked up from her typing, “Did she?”

  “Did she what?”

  “Did she have a ding-dong?”

  That stopped me in my tracks, “Soooo, little pitchers have big ears.” I couldn’t help but smile.

  She held her palm up to her cheek and faked astonishment. I just shook my head and grabbed my hat. If I had told her Mike’s answer, she would’ve jumped out the window.

  As I turned the doorknob, “By the way, hon, if you see Dupree Davis, tell him I want to talk to him.” She wrote that down.

  ***

  (Two weeks earlier. Tuesday, May 23, 1961. Brooklyn, NY.)

  Gina Kowalski’s grandmother, Audrey DeCamp Collins, received an artifact from her father as he lay on his deathbed. Doctor Wesley DeCamp, MD, spent his youth in Robeson County, North Carolina, but died peacefully in New York City in 1936. Audrey was the older of his two daughters. Spanish influenza took her only brother in 1918. I
n the hospital, her father asked to talk to her alone. He pointed to a rough wooden box on the bedside table and mumbled, “Millions… the grace of man”; then he closed his eyes forever. Just like that - no preamble and, certainly, no postscript.

  Family legend had it, the artifact was a clue to the burial place of a million dollars in Spanish gold bullion that shared the grave with one dead Indian. Her Papa had seldom before spoken of it, and never at length. She remembered her mother once referring to ‘the treasure’ her father ‘left behind’, or something like that. Time and paranoia clouded the details, but the rust-encrusted, pointy relic remained, wrapped in a towel, under her wedding dress in a cedar chest.

  She and her daughter, Lois Kowalski, played whist every Tuesday with a set of friends, elderly ladies of South Brooklyn like herself. The location of ‘The Game’, as the girls called it, rotated weekly. Her widowed daughter, Lois, with whom she lived in the Bath Beach Neighborhood, drove her to the designated friend’s house. Lois also helped her entertain when it was Audrey’s turn to host.

  Audrey seldom thought of the inherited artifact and even less of the legend of fantastic riches crammed into a grave with the bones of an unidentified Indian. When she was younger, she might have daydreamed of finding the treasure and splitting it between her grandchildren, Edward and Gina Kowalski. But Ed had joined the Marines ten years earlier and been killed by a sniper’s bullet one frigid morning in Korea. Gina, now twenty-three, worked as a secretary for a private investigation firm operated by a man she was head-over-heels about, whether she admitted it or not. Gina knew nothing of that old corroded piece of iron that looked like a spear tip nor its association with a buried fortune.

  Had it not been for the second glass of sherry that Tuesday evening at Mildred Scalise’s house, Audrey would never have recounted the DeCamp family myth in such detail. Mildred regaled the girls with highlights from the National Geographic article she’d read about the Lumbee Indians in the swamps of Robeson County, North Carolina.

  On the first glass of sherry, Audrey found herself thinking of her father’s stories. He had grown up around those Carolina swamps and talked of the Lumbees, a mysterious tribe of folks, indeed. Some said they were a mixture of American Indians, descendants of the 16th Century lost Roanoke settlement and run-away slaves.

  ***

  After living in the Bronx for her first fourteen years, Audrey’s father returned the family to Robeson County in 1899. He had been seriously wounded in the Spanish-American War and could no longer perform as a surgeon. She loved living in the South and was intrigued by the strange and delightful Lumbee dialect. To her, it sounded so much like the banter of spirited, maybe drunken, Englishmen or Irish.

  While attending the Peabody Normal College in Nashville, she met Andrew Collins. She seemed to have everything in common with the handsome Vanderbilt engineering student from Long Island, New York. In 1905, after Andrew graduated, they married twice, once in Lumberton, North Carolina, and, two weeks later, in Great Neck, New York.

  ***

  As Audrey was sipping her second glass of sherry, Mildred Scalise declared her doubt that such a primitive band of people could even exist in these modern times. Audrey assured her that the Lumbees did exist and that five times their number might secretly exist, such were the swamps of North Carolina’s Coastal Plains. She proceeded to describe the contents of her cedar chest and explained that it was the key to the location of a million dollars in gold bullion; perhaps the location was right in the Lumbee swamps of Mildred’s magazine article.

  Then, for shock value, because she had the floor, she included the account of the Lumbee Indian who had fallen in love with a white girl. He had been hanged for his troubles and made to spend eternity buried with that fortune in gold. That hushed up Mildred, Mildred who was forced to live vicariously through magazines and then act like a great adventurer in the recounting.

  But Miss Audrey wouldn’t have been so pleased with her social coup had she been aware of Mildred’s scheming, eavesdropping son. Adam Scalise slouched, reading the racing form, in a chair in the next room. He was hard down on his luck, nothing new for him. He had moved back in with his mother as much to hide from his creditors as to reorganize and scam the old woman out of as much as he could.

  “Gold bullion. Buona fortuna sorride, fortune smiles…” he mumbled.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  (Tuesday, June 6, 1961. Triborough Bridge. Northbound.)

  My Studebaker Hawk ran strong as I neared the East River in Queens. The raised level of 31st Street zipped overhead as I hit the long inclined ramp up to the Triborough Bridge. Rain fell early that morning, but it was hard to find a cloud in the big blue sky. I drove thinking of the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson, central to the Braun case; it was also the route to visit my mama over in Englewood, New Jersey.

  The Hawk didn’t bat an eye at the ascent. I reached down and pushed the stick back into second. The four-barreled V8 mill gathered all 225 horses and took off like a rocket ship. Traffic on the bridge was light and I punched it. When she started to unwind out over the river, I thought, ‘Hope there’s no Coy Braun threading his way through traffic behind me’. The Studebaker purred. A better vehicle would never be built.

  The bridge turned into a raised roadway high above Wards Island, with the Manhattan Funny Farm down on my left. 500 feet to my right, the elevated train streaked north to the Bronx. Beyond and below the El tracks, the Wards Island Wastewater Treatment Plant occupied a third of the island. I was making good use of the sparsely populated fast lane - A. J. Foyt had nothing on me. The Hawk accelerated and the force pushed me back into the red leather. It occurred to me to listen; but there was no sign of whistling from the new bullet hole in my tail fin. Damn Eyetalians!

  ***

  Once I got the business up and running out of the office on Wythe Avenue in 1957, I moved my mama from East Memphis to Englewood, New Jersey. Her father, Pop Gilliam, died in 1948, so she had no one left out there. I wanted her close enough to keep an eye on, but comfortable out in the country. I got her a little house on Orange Street, a small-town block away from a tree filled park.

  The transition went better than I thought it would, thanks in large part to Mama’s new neighbor. Peggy Sue Beagleman was the widow of a railroad engineer; she’d done her share of moving around the country. A sweet lady from North Georgia, she understood Mama’s ways about as well as anyone could. Mama was quiet by nature and cantankerous by practice.

  I bought Mama a Dachshund puppy from Karl Hofmann. He owned Hofmann’s Restaurant and Biergarten on 2nd Avenue in the Yorkville Neighborhood up in the East 80’s. When I stopped by last October, Karl showed me two pups and almost talked me into taking both. Mama protested when I took the little weenie dog to her the next day, but I could see she loved it right off. When I asked why she’d named the dog, Ida, she said, “Because, I’d a’ rather had a real dog.” You almost had to be raised by the woman to even suspect she had a sense of humor. Mama and Ida became inseparable.

  When my big brother, Ronnie, and I were growing up in East Memphis, Mama was quiet even then. Maybe she leaned into the ‘Southern Lady’ thing a little too much, but that was okay. She was a kind and loving mother. Ronnie and I took our cues from our daddy. A big, outgoing bear of a man, he was everybody's friend. Everything he did showed how much he loved Mama.

  Ronnie and I discovered something about Daddy when I was in the third grade; we found a pint bottle of Wild Turkey hidden in a gap behind the workbench in the garage. As we secretly checked on the stash, we’d find it getting shorter, then full again. Thanks to two packs of Camels a day and Juicy Fruit gum, no one suspected a drop ever crossed Daddy’s lips.

  Ronnie was three years older than me. I could tell how proud Daddy was when he graduated high school in 1944 and joined the Marine Corps. The Japs killed Ronnie May 15, 1945 during the Okinawa Invasion, and Daddy was never the same. He died of a heart attack a year later and Mama might have been right - he’
d died of a broken heart.

  ***

  Traffic got thick as soon as I crossed over into the Bronx. To my right, Rikers Island sat in the middle of the East River, a prison fortress. Traffic stayed tight until I got up to the East 180’s and made my way onto the northbound parkway. Again I was enjoying the drive and the air made breathable by the morning rain. My mind drifted back to Mike Sekach and the Marines who would be part of me for the rest of my life - all from experiences we’d shared almost ten years in the past. The time spent with those boys in Korea formed bonds stronger than most blood ties.

  ***

  In the summer of 1953, my platoon returned to the States by ship. I out-processed in San Diego, got my discharge and flew back to Memphis. Then, I got the word of the upcoming memorial service for Ed Kowalski, Gina’s brother. He’d been killed in Korea the previous year. The family didn’t hold a service at that time for several reasons including the bitter New York winter. Eighteen of us who survived Korea traded phone numbers at the 32nd Street Pier in San Diego before we went our various ways.

  The word spread and eight of us attended Ed’s memorial service in Queens. Most had been discharged; a few still wore the Marine Corps uniform. Those who couldn’t make it had family or jobs competing for their time. One had died in a motorcycle wreck on the Pacific Coast Highway in Southern California. He was drunk. After the ceremony, Mrs. Kowalski invited us all back to her house in Brooklyn for dinner. Using early flights as the reason, we begged off. We didn’t have the emotional energy to prolong that mood, even for a sweet old lady.

  Finally we Marines got talking amongst ourselves beside the cemetery chapel. The night before, a couple of us found McDermott’s Bar near our Jamaica Quality Courts motel. We all wanted a drink, and we determined McDermott’s was centrally located and close to Idlewild Airport.

  Back at the bar, Bull McDermott, himself, tended. Bull, a tall man with no wrists, just big hands on the ends of big arms, spotted the uniforms and announced our arrival.