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  Praise for

  Dead Bang

  “A hard-hitting novel. . . . [It] goes far beyond the usual mystery, combining espionage, intrigue, and thriller elements into the detective formula. Perfect. . . .”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Good writers write what they know and Robert E. Bailey knows about the world of Private Detectives. Using his own knowledge and experience he depicts a believable tale that is entertaining and intriguing. This is gritty, smart storytelling that forces the reader to participate in the story rather than simply observe it. Fans of hardcore detective novels will enjoy this latest installment in the Art Hardin Mystery series.”

  —The New Mystery Reader

  “All the time Dead Bang is fast, lively and surprisingly informative and ingenious. . . . If you like your mysteries peppered with the bizarre and hilarious, with side dishes of history, then Dead Bang is a dead-on read for you!”

  —Rebecca’s Reads

  “When a copy of Robert Bailey’s new Art Hardin book Dead Bang came into my hands, I knew I was in for a thrill-ride. Not many authors since the great Chandler and John D. MacDonald of Travis McGee fame have the ability to write a book I know beforehand will not disappoint.

  “In the third book in his Art Hardin series, Robert Bailey does not disappoint. This tale keeps the reader racing along with howls of laughter and seat of your pants excitement.”

  —Reader Views

  Also by Robert E. Bailey

  Private Heat

  Dying Embers

  Dead Bang

  Robert E. Bailey

  San Diego

  Dead Bang

  Ignition Books

  Published by arrangement with the author.

  Copyright © 2007 by Robert E. Bailey.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. For information please contact: [email protected] or by writing Endpapers Press, 4653 Carmel Mountain Road, Suite 308 PMB 212, San Diego, CA 92130-6650.

  eISBN: 978-1-937868-03-1

  Visit our website at:

  www.endpaperspress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, or events either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, corporations, or other entities, is entirely coincidental.

  Ignition Books are published by Endpapers Press

  A division of Author Coach, LLC

  The Ignition Books logo featuring a flaming “O” is a trademark ™ of Author Coach, LLC.

  Dead Bang

  Acknowledgments

  FEW WRITERS LABOR in a vacuum—me, least of all. Thank you to my son Adam for his wit and to my son Eric for his critique. Thank you to my sister Mary Sue, who bought me a computer and printer when her faith was my best asset.

  Thank you to my publisher, M. Evans and Company, and my agent, Andy Zack, without whose attentions this book would not be in your hands.

  I cannot fail to thank David Poyer and his wife, Lenore Hart, who, together, are the beating heart of the Florida First Coast Writers’ Festival. Without their kind attention and generous encouragement, there would be no Art Hardin Mystery Series.

  Special thanks to Darby Grover, a fellow writer, who has mentored me through three novels. Extra special thanks to JoAnn Grover, Darby’s wife, who tolerates my visits and the manuscript pages Darby and I flood over her kitchen table.

  Thank you to Heather McClees, who, after slogging through the line edit of Dying Embers, was still talking to me. Heather helped me through the first three chapters and the outline for Dead Bang.

  Thank you to Linda Lyons, who picked up the red-pen stroke when Heather was forced to bow out of this project by a family tragedy. Linda provided valuable insights, critique, and hilarious “margin doodles.” I could hardly wait to review the pages she had marked up.

  Thank you to Joe Erhardt, the chairman of my writer’s group, and the members—Kaye Carrithers, John P. Carter, Denise Golinski, Eric Giles, Cathy Hill, Pamela K. Kinney, Linda Lyons, Heather McClees, Mark Pruett, David Swift, and Richard Thomas. Also a special remembrance here for two members of my group who have passed away since the publication of Dying Embers: first, Maurice Reveley, a writer’s writer who wrote every day and lived to see his short stories published online and in print, and last but hardly least, Meredith Campbell, whose novel, Righteous Warriors, won the Missouri Historical Novel Award.

  Thank you to Frank Green and the members of the Bard Society for their critique and encouragement, especially Steve Brown, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Private Investigating, a must read for mystery fans, private investigators, and anyone who hires a private investigator. Steve has always been generous with background information.

  A giant thank you to Berni Aziz for her candid answers to my many questions and for a killer recipe for sheckel-meshi.

  Thank you to “Red Hat” ladies Anita Bickle, Teri Bowman, Jan Frazier, Jean Meyers, Ellen Neihoff, Diana O’Dell, Gail Phillips, Vickie Smith, and Nancy Sylver for their kind encouragement. Thank you to Linda Dewey—the jingle lady—for her critique. Watch for Linda’s new book Aaron’s Crossing.

  Thank you to my sister Gloria and brother, Bill, who were among my first—and remain my best—fans.

  God bless my parents.

  Prologue

  ONCE UPON A TIME, in the great Wolverine State, a short stretch of Dunn Road divided the city of Hamtramck from the city of Detroit. On the west side of Dunn Road, in Hamtramck, the old Dodge Main plant churned out midsized Detroit iron twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. On the east side of Dunn Road, the Detroit side, Great Lakes Sugar and Warehousing stored a million square feet of Uniroyal tires, but not one packet of sugar.

  One night—in those days—a Hamtramck police cruiser idled near a bus bench on the west side of Dunn Road with its single blue light trolling the chilled darkness of both cities.

  “Jesus, Arny,” said Hamtramck patrolman Harold Smolinski, “this guy is effing dead.” Smolinski played the shaft of light from his six-cell down from the corpse’s vacant eyes, past a massive exit wound in the side of the corpse’s neck, to two thumb-sized bullet holes in the chest. “Somebody shot the poor bastard with an effing cannon.”

  “So much for our ‘drunk on the bus bench’ call,” said Hamtramck patrolman Arnold Dancek. “What’s that in his mouth?”

  Smolinski flashed the light up to the corpse’s mouth and revealed a thin sheaf of protruding dark feathers. Dancek, gritting his teeth, flexed the corpse’s lip with the tip of his ballpoint pen and exposed a flash of yellow.

  “It’s a canary,” said Dancek. “This is a Mob job. That bird and this guy are all done singing.”

  “You know who this is?” asked Smolinski. He grabbed the brim of his hat with both hands. Pulling down on the hat he said, “Oh, shit. I think I know who this effing is.”

  “Who?” said Dancek, wiping his pen on the still-clean right shoulder of the corpse’s blood-stained shirt.

  Smolinski chopped with his index finger. “Was in the Free Press. Monday. His picture on the front effing page.”

  “Naa,” said Dancek.

  “Yeah,” said Smolinski, with a nod. “Jack Vincenti—Jack the Lookout. He took an effing racketeering bust.”

  “Man,” said Dancek, “We’re going to be up to our ass in feds.”

  “Wish it had been a drunk,” said Smolinski.

  “What if it was?” said Dancek.

  “He would have flashed us the bird and shuffled over to the bus bench on the Detroit side.”


  Dancek turned his head to look at the Detroit bus bench and then turned back to fix Smolinski’s eyes with his.

  “What?”

  Dancek arched his eyebrows. “He did flash us the bird.”

  They dragged Jack the Lookout across Dunn Road and heaved him onto the Detroit bus bench. Returning to their cruiser they settled on the nearest place to wash their hands. The rest of their shift amounted to a domestic call and taxiing home a drunk driver who turned out to be a city councilman. On their way back to the barn they couldn’t pass up the chance to take a peek and see if the Detroit boys had found their surprise package.

  They found the Detroit side of Dunn Road dark and desolate. Jack the Lookout sat racked on the Hamtramck bus bench with his chin on his chest and his arms hooked over the back rest.

  “Sweet Jesus!” said Dancek.

  “The fuck?” said Smolinski.

  “Somebody moved the body back,” said Dancek.

  “Ya think?” said Smolinski. He invested a couple of minutes squeezing the radio hand-mike like a lemon. When his hand started to shake he called in the dead body, but kept his suspicions about the corpse’s identity to himself.

  Much to Dancek and Smolinski’s surprise, the shit never hit the fan. They were never up to their asses in feds. The detective who caught the case, Helen Kopinski, asked them not to discuss the matter. They happily obliged.

  Two years later Arnold Dancek keeled over dead at age fifty-two, while shoveling snow from his mother’s driveway. Harold Smolinski manned the police security lines the day they imploded—the Sugar Shack—Great Lakes Warehouse. Later, he smiled as he watched end-loaders deposit Dunn Road into dump trucks, a bucket-load of broken concrete at a time.

  By the time Harold Smolinski retired from the Hamtramck police force, the Poletown Cadillac Plant had erupted at the edge of Detroit and flowed into Hamtramck, smothering the place where Dunn Road had divided the cities. Harold moved to Florida—wore black socks and police brogans with his khaki shorts—and lived happily ever after because he never gave another thought to the wandering corpse of Jack the Lookout.

  1

  “SOME STORIES don’t need to be told,” I said.

  Mark Behler said, “Sure they do.” He leaned toward me and folded his hands on the table. “I do it all the time.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “My clients pay for discreet inquiries. I keep the secrets.”

  “Some things shouldn’t be secret,” he said. “The public has a right to know.”

  “Mark Behler, Channel Six, Champion of the People,” I said, and pegged my straw through the “X” in the plastic lid on my soft drink. “Wreck one life, and on to the next.”

  A hint of the basset hound shimmered onto his face. “I help people,” he said.

  “You pander to morbid curiosity and dwell on the politically correct.”

  “Only during sweeps week,” said Mark, letting his head tilt to one side. “C’mon! This was thirty-three years ago.” He showed me his palms. “In Detroit, for God’s sake. John Vincenti was fifty-eight when he disappeared. He’d be ninety-one now!” He shrugged. “Who’d care?”

  “You care,” I said.

  “I have to fill a half-hour show every day,” said Mark. “I care about petunias and chipmunks.”

  “Don’t you have associate producers for that?”

  “Cable news is killing us,” said Mark. “I have to do a lot of my own legwork.”

  Two Mark Behlers occupied the same body. The one seated across the table—the “trust me, I’m a cuddly curmudgeon” Mark Behler—put me in mind of a battered teddy bear. His sports coat, just a little too small, hung open, revealing a necktie knotted just a little too short. Childhood chicken pox had left him with a scoop-marked complexion. The hair on the top of his head had retreated from the onslaught of a fourth decade.

  I rocked back in my chair and tried to measure the intent in Behler’s eyes. Had I stood up and walked out right then, had he followed me out blistering me with questions, we might have saved some lives, an international incident, and Mark Behler’s career. But we didn’t. I talked. He listened. I said, “Jack the Lookout Vincenti?”

  Behler spun up “JACKPOT” in both eyes.

  “Small-time bookmaker and a sometimes Teamster organizer—probably reported it the other way on his taxes?”

  Mark made a reflexive pat of the tape recorder concealed in the breast pocket of his raincoat.

  “Never heard of him,” I said and took a sip of my soda.

  “Who’s to protect?” asked Mark. “You weren’t a PI then. You worked for the government.”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “I’m not asking for state secrets,” said Mark. “Help me out here. Something? Anything! How come they called him Jack the Lookout?”

  John Vincenti, a.k.a. Jack the Lookout, had one eye that looked dead at you while the other jerked around like a chameleon searching for a fly. “Beats me,” I said. “All them mobbed-up guys had nicknames.”

  “If you were going to be like this, why did you agree to an interview?” asked Mark.

  In his “Channel Six Champion” persona, Mark Behler wore tailored double-breasted suits that made his visage square instead of round and a rather good toupee that took a decade off his odometer. Pancake makeup leavened his cheeks for an on-air countenance reminiscent of Jimmy Hoffa on a picket line. And, on air, he wielded the phrase “Isn’t it true?” like Jimmy wielded a baseball bat.

  “I agreed to have lunch,” I said.

  “Lunch at Sbarro’s,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and raised his chin for a deep draft through flared nostrils. Paradise settled onto his face. “Ahh,” he said, “boiled pasta, toasted mozzarella, and roasted pepperoni.” He lowered his chin to look me in the eye. “You know they’re going to close this place and move down to a booth in the food court. It’s never going to be the same.”

  “It’s in the Woodland Mall,” I said. I’d picked a table in an alcove off the main dining room, a small space made larger with gold-filigreed mirrors on the wall. “Lots of folks. I didn’t think you’d ambush me with a camera crew.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “I watch your show,” I said.

  “You were on my show.”

  “I thought you might be pulling some kind of stunt to get even for the Second Amendment bit we did.”

  “I think I made my point very clear,” he said.

  “You said, ‘any street corner.’”

  “I was speaking euphemistically.”

  “You said that you could buy a handgun on any street corner.”

  Behler made his eyes large and sputtered, “I didn’t mean the street corner outside the studio!”

  “You name the street corner and we’ll do it again,” I said.

  Behler shook a finger. “You know damn good and well the current gun laws can’t keep guns off the streets.”

  “Buying an unregistered handgun on a street corner is a felony. What do you want—boiled in oil?”

  Mark Behler’s face reddened. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and folded his hands on the table. After a silent moment, his complexion returned and he exhaled, “I want to talk about John Vincenti. I’ve got a source. I just need to verify some points.” He threw up his hands and shrugged. “On background, Crissakes.”

  “Maybe this is just some old shit that would be better left undisturbed,” I said. “Besides, all I know is what was in the newspaper.”

  “Jack Vincenti is dead,” said Mark. “Everybody knows that!”

  “If he’s dead, it was a Mob hit,” I said. “You want to solve a thirty-year-old Mob hit?”

  “That would make a good show,” said Mark as if he were considering a new idea.

  “The Mob did it,” I said.

  Mark said, “Oh, I think I know who shot John Vincenti.”

  2

  THE SECOND GUNSHOT stepped on the heels of the first. I knew what it was and still wasted a hot second i
n hoping for a moron with fireworks. Mark’s face froze mid-chew. “Wha’?” he asked, showing me a wad of pasta streaked with red sauce.

  A woman gasped, “Oh God, my baby!” Another woman screamed. I started out of my chair but felt like a wedge of fruit suspended in gelatin. A third shot. Mirror tiles on the wall across the alcove exploded and tinkled onto the floor.

  People frozen to their chairs by the first two shots now dove for the floor. I listened for a robbery demand and discovered my .45 caliber Detonics in my right hand. To my left, past the corner of the alcove, someone rasped for breath over the hum of the exhaust fans.

  “She has a gun!” a man yelled. Another beseeched, “Oh God, please don’t—” The fourth shot interrupted his plea.

  I nested my right fist into the palm of my left hand and pushed the pistol out to arm’s length while I searched over the top of the slide for the front sight. I heard a scuffle and a muffled fifth shot, but the shooter had to be to my left, around the corner and out of my sight. Mark lay face down on the floor at my feet. I sidestepped over him, to my right, to get a better view of the main dining room.

  In the main aisle, a woman on the long cusp of middle age struggled to her feet from under the inert hulk of a man in a tan suit. Not quite five feet tall, she couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds with a brick in her pocket. Her short gray hair had been permed into tight curls. Her blank face and hairdo made her head look like a gray lightbulb screwed into the neck of a cream-colored Windbreaker, which she wore zipped to the neck. A broad wipe of bright red blood swept down the jacket and trailed off onto her white silk slacks. A stainless steel five-shot revolver dangled from her right hand.

  “Detectives,” I growled. “It’s over. Put it down.”

  She passed me an uninterested glance, popped open the cylinder, and shucked the brass onto the body at her feet.

  “Fine, it’s empty,” I told her. “Now just let go of it.” I took a step toward her. “You can give it to me. It’ll be safe.”