What a Week!

Anita laughed. "Poor old guy, he's lucky that having you within a couple of feet of him didn't do him in. Maybe he was afraid that might happen and wanted you to know what do to save his life."

"Hey, what about me?" I asked. "Maybe I'd better get some of those dynamite pills so she doesn't kill me with kindness. I could go out with a bang, just like Nelson Rockefeller."

"But what a way to go!"

We were a little early for our tour of the cavern when I got off at the exit five miles from the state park. There were a couple of fast food places right there, so we stopped for the all-American lunch, a cheeseburger and fries and a medium Coke. After eating, we took the time to dig out our jackets from the cargo compartment. We had all worn long pants because the cavern is about 70 degrees and 99% relative humidity all year round, cooler and stickier than we were accustomed to.

One thing we found out is that Arizona isn't taking any chances with the biggest tourist magnet they have for the southeastern part of the state. They gave us a lecture before we could set foot into the cavern, and they kept an eye on everybody, with a guide up front and a watcher a few yards behind us. The underground formations were amazing, but what I hadn't expected were the colors of the limestone shapes that had formed over the eons, as drop by drop the water had dripped down and left behind miniscule amounts of calcium carbonate, tinted by other minerals in the groundwater from the soil and rock above. By the time we came back out into the sunshine, we had walked a mile underground, over surfaces that were mostly not level. And it hadn't been continuous, but rather walk a little and then stand still listening to the lady in the uniform who told us what we were looking at. I was tired, my calf muscles were ready to rebel, and my sinuses wanted to explode.

The girls had come through the tour better than I had, and Anita volunteered to drive. I told her to head due south on the state highway, away from the interstate and toward the Mexican border. About ten miles before we would have had to learn Spanish, we came to a medium sized city with a bunch of motels and one good, modern hotel where I'd stayed once before. We were on the northern edge of the oldest active military reservation in the US, which as unlikely as it seemed, is also one of several centers of Army Intelligence. I'd been there on business some years back, although I can't reveal any more details about the visit. The hotel is first class and there are good restaurants nearby, including a shabby looking steak house that serves steaks and chops that could melt in your mouth.

We got two adjoining rooms and took our luggage in, then went to the steak house. Relaxing in their comfortable chairs, we ate at a leisurely pace and reminisced about our childhood and college days, far into the evening. The drive back to the hotel, all ten blocks of it, took us over streets that were deserted by that hour, and after kissing Anita good night at her door, Mel and I stepped into our room and immediately began to get undressed. In the king size bed, we had a little foreplay and then snuggled together, happy but too tired for sex. We managed to recite our mantra and fell asleep.

Something was stirring in my arms, and I opened one eye to see Mel turning over to lay her head on my chest. The room was streaked in thin, weak daylight, as the early morning rays filtered through the curtains to assure us that we'd survived another night. "Pete," Mel whispered, "do you realized that we've gone two nights without sex? We must be getting to be old married people."

"Or maybe we're tired married people. I can't believe it's morning already."

"I'm going to make a trip to the bathroom and then come back here and cuddle with the man I love."

"Great idea. I'll hit the bathroom right after you, and cuddling sounds like a winner."

Half an hour later I heard a door open, which seemed alarming until I remembered that we had adjoining rooms with an interconnecting door. Anita walked in, clad in a T shirt/nightgown, slipped into our bed behind Mel, and joined in the snuggle fest. I know I went back to sleep and woke up a few times, but I was really surprised when I heard Anita tell Mel that it was half past eight. The girls slipped out of bed and went to Anita's room, where they ordered breakfast from room service. When it was delivered, I slipped on a pair of boxers and joined them. I rolled some huevos rancheros up in a couple of tortillas, and while sipping my coffee, reflected on what a pleasant way this was to start the day.

After breakfast I called Vincent. He had a little info for me, including the ID of Mel's corpse. "His name is Grady Warren. He is, or was, a small time crook, mostly dealing with stolen plastic and paper. We show that he did time in Illinois, and his cell mate was Bennie Maxwell. That's interesting because we ID'd the burglar who was shot as Bennie Maxwell, plus some other names.

"I think that Grady came in with Bennie when he pulled the original burglary on Saturday. Probably the idea was for Grady to go after plastic while Bennie was stealing physical objects that could be fenced, starting with the silverware and progressing to TV sets and other electronics."

"Do you have a cause of death for Grady?"

"Tox tests are being run on his blood. Visual exam of the body shows no signs of violence and no visible needle marks. We think he may have died of natural causes, possibly had a heart attack when he heard the gunshots just outside the office where Melanie found him. I've requested medical records from the prison to see if they mention anything about his heart."

"Any capsules on him, that might have been nitroglycerin?"

"I don't know. I'll have somebody look through his personal stuff that we bagged and boxed. I expect that we'll know those answers in a day or two. Since he seems like a dead end in the investigation, getting his COD isn't a top priority right now."

"What about the other burglar, the one you took alive. You were about to talk with him when we spoke yesterday."

"So far we haven't been able to get a peep out of him. We have his prints. The girls had a hard time getting him printed, too. He fought them, tried to smudge the prints. We had to use three big guys to do it. His name is Bailey Franklin. We don't have a record on him. He may have worked with the Leo Francis mob, but he couldn't have been one of the guys who got their hands dirty, because we don't have any prints from him on any crime scenes in the state. We got his ID from the FBI.

"Do you know what became of Leo Francis and his friends? Like when and why he sold the house at 1226? Seems odd that he'd walk away from a bag of money, close to what the house was worth."

"No, we're as puzzled as you are. Maybe when you get back home I can have a sitdown with your sister and see if she can get any answers for me. Oh, one thing I can tell you is how much money there was in the closet. Some of the bills are hundreds, wrapped fifty to a bundle, and some are twenties, also wrapped fifty to a bundle. We counted $68,000 total. So I lost that bet, too. Just wasn't my day to gamble, I guess."

"I'll have to check, but I think Mel had the high dollar amount at $65,000. If that's true, she won both the pots, and of course Anita won the side bet. Let's make a note not to second guess the ladies."

"I'll say. Call me when you get home. I think I need some more of Anita's magic."

"Okay. It could be late."

"Makes no difference to me. You get onto a case like this, and simple words, like 'day' and 'night' start to lose their meaning.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

AND EVENING

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Instead of going directly home, I went thirty miles out of our way to take the ladies to Tombstone, "the town that's too tough to die." We walked around the old part of town, and oohed and aahed over the rosebush that covers a city block or whatever. Walking down Allen Street we looked in at a couple of restored saloons, remnants of the hundred or so that were in the town at the peak of the silver mining boom. On our way out of town I stopped at the Boot Hill cemetery, where we looked at the grave of Wells, Fargo station agent Lester Moore, with his famous epitaph:

HERE LIES LESTER MOORE

FOUR SLUGS FROM A 44

NO LES, NO MORE

We stopped at a restaurant near my house for dinner. On the way out I called Vincent. He showed up at my house a half hour later and asked Anita if she could get some information on Francioso for him. While they were working on that project in my office, I took my backup laptop to the family room to check my email. Mel was taking care of our dirty clothes, and I could hear her humming contentedly while she was doing it. Ask yourself some time why a woman will hum or whistle while doing a simple domestic task, and if you come up with any answer but love you're missing the point.

I didn't have much email, so when I finished I stayed at the dining table playing cards on the laptop. That lasted until I heard Anita screaming excitedly. I found her and Vincent staring at the monitor as if they couldn't believe what they were reading.

When I stepped into the office, Anita yelled, "Hey, we think we know what became of Francioso." Mel and I got to the door of the office in a photo finish tie. Anita was so excited that she couldn't get the words out fast enough. "This is an old report from Criminal Gangs. The name Bailey Franklin comes up, as an alias for Francis/Francioso. That's the name we've got for the burglar that was arrested at the house. So our mysterious mob boss is locked up in jail already!"

"What about Francioso's prints. Aren't they on file?"

Vincent answered that one. "No. That's been one of our problems. It took me a bit of digging to find out that he was slick enough to avoid being arrested. He was questioned a few times, but always at his home with his lawyer present. He was quick to hand over his employees who had actually done the crimes, so they were arrested and he wasn't. The police were never able to establish probable cause on Francioso so he was never even taken downtown."

"Well, his prints must be somewhere around 1226."

"Yeah. I'll talk with the techs who dusted the place. They may be able to get his prints from the stuff in the old boxes we took out of the attic, and they may find other old prints around the house somewhere. But we still have some problems with the ID.

"We caught Franklin in the house, and he left prints there the day we arrested him. If Franklin and Francioso are the same person, his prints will match those that were left in the house by Francioso twenty years ago. But distinguishing the old prints from new ones is a delicate proposition. The techs will be able to do it so that we'll know, but since it doesn't come up often in court cases, it might not be allowed as proof by a judge, and even if it is, a jury might not buy it. Then there's the problem of context. Suppose we can find prints in the house that are unquestionably twenty years old, and they match Bailey Franklin. How do we prove that the old prints are Francioso's? It might just be interpreted as proof that Bailey Franklin was in the house a long time ago, and just being in a house isn't a crime.

Anita sat looking at a blank computer screen. She was thinking, and I could tell from that look on her face that she wasn't satisfied with something. She spun around on the computer chair and looked as if she was burning holes in Vincent's chest with her x-ray vision. She asked him, "This Barry Compton, the realtor who owned the house after Francis, how did he come to own it?"

Vincent shrugged. "Well, I suppose he listed the property for sale by Francioso, and it didn't sell in a down market. Figuring that the market would come up again, Compton could have bought it himself as an investment."

"Yeah, that makes sense," said Anita. "And even if there's more to it than that, it makes a good cover story. If Compton just bought it as an investment, he'd use borrowed money and he'd be paying on a mortgage loan. But if he bought it for cash, then he would have been using Francioso's money. No realtor ever buys anything with his own money. So if it was bought for cash, we know that he was fronting for somebody with money, probably Francioso but maybe somebody else."

Anita was still thinking, and then she switched our train of thought onto another track. "The thing that keeps gnawing at me is how the purse snatching and the two separate burglaries are connected. The first burglars had the purse and everything that was in it except cash. The last burglar, the one that's still alive, went in the day after the first two died. The first two were a couple of patsies, but the last one knew the house. He knew right where he was going."

We observed a moment of silence, not out of respect for the departed criminals but because we were thinking of the stations that Anita's train of thought might be chugging toward.

I broke the silence by saying, "This reminds me of Oliver Twist. Remember Fagin, who trained the young boys to pick pockets? Maybe our first two burglars were part of a gang of thieves like that, trained and housed and organized by Francioso, aka Francis, and maybe aka Franklin.

"The more I think about it, the more I can see this Fagin business fitting what we've got here. Think about the stolen purse and what was in it. I remember somebody said on TV that when a thief snatches a purse, he pockets the cash, bundles up the cards to sell to somebody in the identity theft business, sells the address and keys to a burglar, throws the empty wallet into a trash can, and gives the purse to his girlfriend. But that's not what happened here. The purse was in the burglar's van, and everything was in it except for the cash, so that makes me think he brought the whole thing to the boss of the gang, just like Fagin's gang in Oliver Twist.

"Another thing I remember from that TV show was that a purse snatcher never carries a gun, so if he's caught he can't be charged with armed robbery, which would get him twenty years or some such. If that applies here, then the burglar who got shot by the cops wasn't the guy who snatched the purse. That makes it seem all the more like a gang of crooks, maybe like a bunch of specialists. The purse snatchers and pickpockets would be young, athletic guys who can get away in a crowd. The burglars would be older, with experience in getting into locked buildings. Enforcers, if they had any in the gang, would be big, strong guys who could break legs and beat people up.

"Getting back to the burglar who got shot, he must have known that nobody was home in 1226. He drove his old Dodge van in almost all the way to the garage, so the sliding side door was close to the steps leading to the back door of the house. If he had any ideas that he'd need a quick getaway he would have parked somewhere else, maybe down the street, and if necessary driven into the driveway at the last minute to load the loot. And if he wasn't planning on stealing household goods that were bulky and/or heavy, he wouldn't even have needed to have the van in the driveway at all. So we know three things about him. He knew what house he was going to, he had a pretty good idea that nobody was home at 1226, and he was going after household goods, like silverware and television sets. How'm I doin' so far?"

Detective Vincent was smiling. "So far, you're doing my job for me. Is there more?"

Before I could say anything, Mel jumped in. "If he was going to go to all that trouble to make a few hundred dollars, certainly not over a thousand, then I don't think he knew about the money hidden in the closet. I mean, if he didn't get shot he would have stolen a whole lot of stuff that wouldn't have got him a thousand dollars, but there was almost seventy times that much in the closet, and it was paper so it was easy to carry."

I was trying to see things from the viewpoint of the dead burglar. "Bear with me for a minute, because I don't have this all thought out. The burglar who got shot brought a guy with him who specialized in plastic and negotiable paper. Why? My thought is that he was ordered to, by the same guy who ordered him to go and break into that particular house. The guy who was giving the orders knew the house, but he didn't know if it would be safe to go in there. These guys were a two man reconnaissance party. Having two guys improved the odds that one of them would manage to get back to the gang hideout to report. This was what the Army calls passive recon, going into an area to see if they'd draw fire, or in this case, trip an alarm - anything that would say it wasn't safe to go there and get the money.

"The two burglars, Franklin and Maxwell, started to do their usual thing. Franklin hit the silverware first, and Maxwell went to shop for paper and plastic. The boss would have told them they could keep whatever they stole, because all he wanted was to know whether it would be safe to enter the house and go after the money in the closet.

"Everybody with me so far?" I got nods and grunts so I kept going. "Maybe it was a coincidence that the purse snatcher picked on Mel, but I lean to the idea that she was the target all along. It seems to me that the boss must have had somebody staked out on 1226 to see who's coming and going, and he's figured out that the professor and his wife are away from home. The only resident is Mel, and he figures his people can handle her. His purse snatcher hands him the purse, and he's got the keys for the house he wants to get into. Mel, knowing this, will be staying somewhere else to avoid being assaulted if the house is burglarized. That means he can avoid a violent encounter. So he sends out his two stooges, but just to make sure he tells Maxwell to take his gun with him.

"The recon team of Bennie Maxwell and Grady Warren park way back in the driveway, get out of the van, and try to get into the house. They're surprised that the keys don't work, but they know how to get in without keys so it doesn't slow them down much.

"And now the boss gets an unpleasant surprise. The recon team is late showing up at the gang headquarters, so he's already worried, when somebody tells him that they're saying on TV that there's been a police shootout on Aurora Avenue. That makes the boss very wary. It's Saturday night, and he wanted to get this burglary over with on the weekend, because wherever the homeowners went to, they might be back Sunday night or some time Monday.

"He doesn't want to send one of his gang out there to break through the closet wall and grab the cash, because the guy would look in the bag, see the money, and light out for the border. So he goes out himself, probably planning to do that very thing.

"Now about the realtor, Barry Compton. I doubt that he was Francioso. If Francioso had actual control of the house all along, he wouldn't have left the loot in there all this time. Suppose Francioso had to get out of there and find himself a new home under a new name, like mob informants who are relocated by the FBI. Then he would naturally want to collect the loot, but there was no easy way to remove the money without exposing the corpse. Even if nobody could see the corpse, they might smell it. So he figured the money was safe where it was, and he could get it any time he wanted to. In effect, Mel's closet was his safe deposit box.

"The idea was to keep the house vacant, and that's not hard to do. Just price it way above the market and refuse to bargain. So Francioso has realtor Barry Compton list the house at a price above the market. But then the market shows signs of life and offers start coming in, so the best way to keep it from getting a new owner is to arrange a contrived sale. Let's suppose that Barry Compton buys it, putting it in his name but using the boss's money.