The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [61]
“Pardon,” he said, picking up the entire guest register and setting it to one side. At the same time the desk telephone rang and the clerk picked up. Quickly Kanarack ran down the register. Under the O’s he found what he needed. Paul Osborn was in room 714. Quickly he set the register back in place, picked up his toolbox and walked from behind the desk.
“Thanks,” he said again.
McVey stared out the window at the fog, tired and disgusted. The Charles de Gaulle Airport was socked in and all flights had been grounded. He wished he could tell if it was getting darker or lighter outside. If it was going to be socked in all day, he’d grab a nearby hotel room and go to bed. If it wasn’t and there was the chance he’d get off, he’d do what everybody else had been doing for the last two hours—wait.
Before he’d left Lebrun’s office, he’d put in a call to Benny Grossman at New York Police Department head-quarters in Manhattan. Benny was only thirty-five but was as good a homicide detective as McVey had ever worked with. They’d jobbed together twice. Once when Benny had come to L.A. to retrieve an escaped killer from New York, and again when the NYPD asked McVey to come to New York to see if he could figure out something they couldn’t. As it turned out, McVey couldn’t get to the bottom of it either, but he and Benny had done the fumble i work together and afterward had a few drinks and a few laughs. McVey had even gone to Benny’s house in Queens for a Passover seder.
Benny had just come in when McVey called and had jumped on the line.
“Oy, McVey!” Benny said, which is what he always said when McVey called, then after some small talk got around to things with “So, boobalah, what can I do for you?” McVey had no idea if he was trying to sound like an old-time Hollywood agent or if he said that to everyone when they got down to business.
“Benny, sweetheart,” McVey had quipped, thinking that if Benny was a frustrated agent why not play along, then explaining that he was not in Manhattan or L.A. but sitting in the headquarters of the Paris Préfecture of Police.
“Paris, like in France or Texas?” Benny asked.
“Like in France,” McVey replied, and took the phone away from his ear at Benny’s extended whistle. Afterward he got down to specifics. McVey needed to know what Benny could come up with on an Albert Merriman who had supposedly bought the farm in a gangland killing in New York in 1967. Since Benny was eight years old in 1967, he’d never heard of Albert Merriman, but he’d find out and call McVey back.
“Let me call you,” McVey said, with no idea where he was going to be when Benny retrieved the information.
Four hours later McVey called back.
In the interval since they’d talked Benny had gone to the NYPD Records & Information archives and come up with a solid smattering of information on Albert Merriman. Merriman had been discharged from the U.S. Army in 1963 and very shortly afterward teamed up with an old friend, a convicted bank robber named Willie Leonard who’d just been released from Atlanta. Merriman and Leonard then went on a free-for-all and were wanted for bank robbery, murder, attempted murder and extortion in half-a-dozen states. They were also rumored to have made a few hits for organized crime families in New Jersey and New England.
On December 22, 1967, a body, later identified as Albert Merriman, was found shot to death and burned beyond recognition in a torched-out car in the Bronx.
“Mob job, looks like,” Benny said.
“What happened to Willie Leonard?” McVey asked.
“Still wanted,” Benny Grossman said.
“How was Merriman’s body identified?”
“It’s not on the sheet. Maybe you don’t know, boobalah, but we don’t keep extensive files on dead men. Can’t afford the storage space.”
“Any idea of who claimed the body?”
“That, I got. Hold on.” McVey could hear a rustle of papers as Grossman looked through his notes. “Here it is. Looks like Merriman had no family. The body was claimed by a woman who’s down on the sheet as a high-school friend. Agnes Demblon.”