Free The Dirty City by Jim Cogan Page A

Wails, I was tucked up in my bed like a good little boy.”
    “Cut the crap, Jerome. You met up with Marcio Riccardo yesterday, when and where?”
    “Around 11am, lower East side. In a bar that I believe none of us are supposed to know or talk about.”
    Everyone knew of the Speakeasy, but as long as the mob paid its dues to the right people, no-one would ever do anything about it, so it remained neutral territory to mobsters, and off limits to the cops.
    “What did you and Marcio discuss?” Glenn was doing his best to keep things moving and prevent Wails from getting too excited.
    “My latest case, missing person. Anton Jameson, the lawyer’s son.”
    “Richard Jameson? His son is missing? He hasn’t filed a report with us.”
    “And he won’t. The kid was in some deep shit. Wouldn’t look good for the legal practice if it became common knowledge.”
    “So he hired you to find him? And I thought lawyers were supposed to be smart?” Sneered Wails, obviously pleased with himself and his cheap little jibe. I gave him an ironic faux-smile, which I hoped would convey at least some of the dislike I held for him.
    “Johnny, did Marcio tell you where Anton Jameson was?”
    “Not exactly, he knew that the mob had gotten hold of him, but he had no idea what they’d done with him.”
    “Why were they so interested in him?”
    “All Marcio said was that he had seen some things he shouldn’t have, and then had made the mistake of shouting his mouth off about it.”
    “Okay, Jerome, lets skip forward a few hours. You say you had a call from Marcio in the early hours, tell us about that?” Wails was getting impatient with Glenn’s subtlety.
    “He didn’t make much sense, kept saying for me to drop the Jameson case. It sounded like the kid might have been in deeper than he suspected.”
    “He was trying to warn you off?”
    “That’s how I took it, yeah.”
    “Which leads us up to around 4am this morning, when someone caved Marcio’s skull in with a blunt object and dumped him in the river on the lower East side. Got any opinions on that?”
    “Why should I have, Lt?”
    “I don’t know, Jerome, but my instincts are telling me that there might be more to this than you’re letting on?”
    “You know what I think about your instincts, and where you can stick ‘em. You know I didn’t kill him, right?”
    “Do we, Jerome?”
    “Well, I assume so – I mean, if there was a shred of evidence then you would be waving that in my face about now, wouldn’t you?”
    And so it went on and on. For over an hour Wails tried to trip me up on silly little details, trying to pry open my story. I didn’t have a verifiable alibi, but I had no motive either. And at the same time, I had to play it careful and remain consistent - I had to conceal quite a lot of the details as I simply didn’t want the cops to know too much about my business.
    Eventually Wails got bored of wasting all of our time and cut me loose. If I thought my day might improve at that point I was severely mistaken.
    *
    I had to flag down a cab to get back to my apartment. Once there I called the office to let Lydia know I was running late - she was suitably unimpressed, then I grabbed a quick shower and headed out again.
    I always parked my car a block away from my apartment, just to make it generally harder for people to keep tabs on me. As I turned into the street where my car was parked up I noticed someone quite blatantly staking it out, no doubt waiting for me to make an appearance. He was a skinny guy, late twenties, neatly attired – not muscle but definitely mob. If it had simply been a tough guy I’d have not been so cautious, tough guys are almost always pretty damn stupid. No, it’s always the more innocuous looking goons who are the ones to worry about – in my experience they’re almost always smarter than tough guys, and often what they lack in physical presence they make for by being either ruthless or downright psychotic. However, in