Mystery: The Frank & Ernest Box Set - Mystery and Suspense Novels (The Frank & Ernest Files, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense Book 6) Read online

  The Complete Series

  Drive-By

  In Deep

  Mickey Finn

  Dead Ends

  Closed Casket

  David Archer

  www.david archerbooks.com

  Book I

  Book II

  Book III

  Book IV

  Book V

  The Frank & Ernest Files Box Set Copyright © 2015 by David Archer.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews.

  Disclaimer

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, or transmitted by email without permission in writing from the publisher.

  While all attempts have been made to verify the information provided in this publication, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretations of the subject matter herein.

  This book is for entertainment purposes only. The views expressed are those of the author alone, and should not be taken as expert instruction or commands. The reader is responsible for his or her own actions.

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  Any perceived slight of any individual or organization is purely unintentional.

  BOOK I

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  “Good evening, Sir, am I speaking to Mr. Paul Sankowski?...I am? Good. I wonder, Mr. Sankowski, if I could get your opinion on the mayoral primary. Do you have a favorite candidate?,,,Yes, well, we think Mr. Green is a good man, but if we want to win the general election, we think Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo would give our party a far better chance. You know Thatcher Longstreth has got the fat-cat Republicans giving him all kinds of dough. If we don’t pick a guy who can get out the vote, the Republicans will take over for sure. Have you thought about Mr. Rizzo, Sir?...Yes, Sir, he absolutely agrees with you on that score. We gotta do something about all those riots, and that’s what Mayor Rizzo plans to do. Please give him your serious consideration…You will? Well, thank you very much for your time, Mr. Sankowski. It was a pleasure speaking to you.”

  Ernie Campanella grunted with satisfaction as he put another check-mark on his tally sheet. He looked briefly at the next name—a broad and probably some stone-deaf old biddy, the way his luck was running. Christ, this was like pulling teeth, but slowly, bit-by-bit, those checks in the “For” column began adding up. He looked quickly from side-to-side, then withdrew a flask from his inside jacket pocket for what he called “the pause that refreshes.” Nothing like a good belt of Jack black to help you get through to those senile old bats, he figured.

  “I can’t believe it!” Fred Campanella raged. “A bright boy like you; a boy who coulda gone to Harvard or Penn if he’d of half tried, and now you get kicked out of Drexel of all places? Jeez, I thought even a lazy bum like you could get through a rinky-dink school like that, but I guess you can’t.”

  “Come on, Pop,” Ernie whined, in a feeble effort to get his old man to lay off. Ernie, by this time, had grown a good deal bigger than his father, but his low self-esteem kept him from asserting himself the way he might have in better circumstances.

  “Come on, nothing! You know what you are? You are a failure, plain and simple. You’re gonna be worse off than your grandpa, who came here from Naples with caca and made a decent life with hard work and staying sober—something you oughta try for once. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. That’s the story of the la famiglia Campanella, folks.” Ernie’s dad was only a community college grad, but he had made a nice enough living selling insurance. Now what was his son going to do? Thank God they had ended the draft, the father thought, or else we’d know good-and-well what the boy would be doing and where he’d be doing it.

  “Hey it’s not the end of the world,” Ernie tried to argue. “I could still get a good job”

  “Doin’ what?” Fred snarled.

  “How about I become a cop like Charlie? They do OK.”

  “Fat chance of that,” Ernie’s older sister chimed in. The two men weren’t sure how much of the conversation she heard after she had quietly come into the kitchen, but she obviously caught the cop part.”

  “You don’t need a PhD to patrol the streets,” Ernie told her.

  “Yeah, but you do need not to be a screw-up. Not only did you flunk out of college, you’ve been fired from every summer job you ever got. Who gets fired from a summer job, for God sakes! If you think my husband’s gonna put his ass in a sling by recommending you, you better think again.”

  “Get bent, Valerie! You don’t know from Shinola!” Ernie screamed at her. The next thing he knew he felt a hard slap on the back of his head.

  “Hey!” their father scolded him. “I will not have that kind of language bein’ used in my house! Is that clear??

  “Sorry, Pop, I didn’t mean to use such a bad word. I promise not to say ‘Valerie’ ever again, OK?”

  “Oh, great, now he’s gone from thinks-he’s-a-cop to thinks-he’s a comedian. Well, Shecky, your particular brand of comedy is not gonna fly in this house. I suggest you go and stay with one of your punk friends for a while. I want you outa this house until you learn a little respect. Now, get going, I mean it.”

  If allowed some time to think matters through, Ernie Campanella may never have considered joining the police force, where you might get yourself killed, when there were so many other options, where you might not. But because of his father’s goading and his sister’s scorn, suddenly becoming a cop was the only thing that would do.

  His obvious first move was to draw his brother-in-law out for a one-on-one conversation, far away from his sister. Ernie did not know as much about their private life as he should have, now that this situation had come up, but he hoped he could reason with Charlie Zuel.

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?” Charlie asked. “Take it from me, there’s lotsa easier ways to make a living.”

  “Yeah, Charlie, that’s what I want, to serve and protect,” Ernie replied, “and make a pile of money taking bribes, just like you,” he kept to himself. “I know I got a spotty work history and all that, but, I’m thinking that if, you know, you put in a good word for me and all…”

  “Wouldn’t do a bit of good,” Charlie was quick to reply. “I’m just a lousy beat cop. That means my place on the flow chart is, like, whale shit on the bottom of the ocean. Besides, and I’m not saying you would, but if you did mess this up, I’d be in a worl
d of hurt for telling the brass they ought to hire you.”

  “So there’s nothing you can do for me?”

  Charlie sighed and thought for a moment. “Okay, there is something, maybe I can do. Maybe I can talk to somebody who can talk to somebody else.”

  “Wait you mean like Mayor Rizzo? That’s a great idea! I campaigned for him, you know.”

  “Mayor Rizzo? Are you nuts? Like he’s got plenty of spare time between trying to run the City of Philadelphia for a feeb like you! Christ, Ernie, I always thought you were a pretty bright guy, but sometimes you sound like you got rocks in your head. No, here’s what I had in mind. I know a guy who works for Jim Tayoun. I gave the guy a break once on a DWI I coulda run him in for, so maybe he might be willing to return the favor and talk to his boss.”

  “Yeah, fine, but who the hell’s Jim Tayoun?”

  “He was a state legislator from South Philly, but now he functions as a guy who gets things done for Frank Rizzo. He gives the nod and you’re in like Flynn.”

  Chapter 1

  “Hey, Leroy, did you hear the news? Your roomie just got promoted to detective third,” Ernie’s friend Greg told him after he had ordered his beer. He often called Ernie “Leroy” for Campanella’s imagined middle name. Actually the L stood for Lawrence. Ernie had been named after Ernest Lawrence Thayer, the author of his dad’s favorite poem, Casey at the Bat. Greg Martin thought it the height of sophisticated humor to stick his friend with a name you would associate with a black person. Occasionally, Ernie would strike back in the same vein, calling his friend Martin Luther Coon, or sometimes Dr. Coon for short, at least when no one who might take offense was around.

  “What, Frank’s a detective now?” Ernie asked about his former police academy roommate.

  “That’s right, lucky bastard. I guess now that means we’ll have to call him Detective Francis the Talking Mule.” The three guys had long since graduated from the academy, but the sophomoric nicknames they had given each other would stay with them for a good deal longer than a lot of their training.

  “Only trouble is, he got transferred up to jig town,” Greg added.

  “Really, where?”

  “Strawberry Mansion, the worst of the worst.”

  “Yeah, nowadays,” Ernie agreed. Time was, it used to be the Jewish neighborhood. That wouldn’t of been so bad.”

  “No it wouldn’t. After all, there’s no Jewish criminals. All the white crime is from you wops, am I right?”

  “Sure there’s no Jewish criminals. Only wops like Bugsy Siegel, Mayer Lansky and don’t forget the greasiest dago of them all, Dutch Schultz.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but still you gotta admit, Strawberry Mansion is a hell of an assignment these days.”

  “You’re right. That’s not good, not good at all,” Ernie said. “So, is he gonna take the bump and go north, or turn it down, stay here and live the good life?”

  “Oh, he’ll take the bump alright. You know Francis always was pretty much color-blind, am I right?”

  “That’s true. I just hope the poor son of a bitch doesn’t end up getting stabbed to death in some dark alley.”

  “Well, I guess you gotta take the good with the bad.”

  “Still, that’s a hell of a boost. Now he’s making the big bucks deluxe, while we’re still getting by on doodly squat. Hey, maybe I should take the detective’s exam. I bet I’d ace the son of a bitch.”

  :”You could ace it and king it and give it the old royal flush, good buddy, but you know damn well they’d never give you the badge, all the screw-ups you got on your record. Mind you, I got nothing against beatin’ up niggers, the way you did that time, but, then I’m not the big brass.”

  “Man, I took the suspension, paid my debt to society, so to speak. Besides, there was a reason, two reasons for that. One, the guy was drunk and very disorderly and two, I was drunk as a skunk myself when it all went down.”

  “And with a perfectly good excuse like that, they still put the screws to you. Man, I tell you, bein’ a cop sucks.”

  “Do I detect sarcasm?”

  “Only just a little bit, but, come on, man, you get what I’m saying, right?”

  “Yeah, the hell of it is, I do. Oh well, let’s drink to Frank the big-shot detective. May he thrive and prosper…and not get knifed too much,” Ernie said as he raised his glass.

  Chapter 2

  “Man, you see this shit?” Ellis Washington raged as he waved the note at his boss

  “I know I’ll see it a good sight better if you get it out of my face and just hand it over,” Spencer Bennett calmly told the agitated dealer who had had the effrontery to interrupt the great man mid-lobster during his standing appointment at Bookbinder’s. “You come all this way just to show me a damn piece of paper?” Bennett berated his subordinate. This had better be important.”

  “Just read the son of a bitch, okay? Those Reggae mothafucks are doin’ some serious cuttin’ up.”

  “You best watch your mouth, boy,” Bennett warned as he opened the note and read:

  Hey, mon, you betta get yo scrawny ass offa our street. Go sell

  yo shit somewhere else. We the kings of this block. We see you

  dealing in our territory again, you a dead man.

  SO JAH SAID!!!

  The Lehigh Avenue Rude Boys

  “What the hell is their beef?” the boss wondered aloud.” I thought we had an understanding with those fucks. We give them the ganja trade, they give us all the other stuff. Everybody’s happy, right?

  “Looks like maybe they want to branch out.”

  “Look here, Els, I gave you the Lehigh Avenue territory ‘cause I thought you had the balls to get the job done. I’m not seein’ a whole lotta balls now. You want me to get someone else to take your place?”

  “Come on, man, you know I can deal. Ain’t nobody you got can deal like me, but I can’t deal shit if I’m dead. Look, it’s your money too that’s at stake. All I’m sayin’ is that I could use a little protection. Suppose you gimmie a shooter to look out for the Jamaicans and I pay him outa my cut?”

  “OK, that’s fair enough,” Bennett agreed. “How about Tyrone? He’s quick and sharp and bad to the bone.”

  “Yeah, get me Tyrone.”

  “Get me Tyrone WHAT?”

  “Get me Tyrone please…um…sir,” Washington said.

  “OK, you got him, now get lost. I’m getting’ way behind on this here lobster.”

  “Yeah, I’m leaving now, but, you know, thanks for the help.”

  “Look here, Washington, I don’t want you going crazy, now that you got some help. I expect you to get this fixed without no gunplay.” Bennett said as he dipped another forkful into the lemon butter, “Last thing I need is a shooting-war with those crazy-ass Zulus.” It was a war he very much doubted he could survive.

  Two weeks before Ellis Washington came to the boss with his imagined problem, Spencer Bennett had found himself dealing with a very real problem of a different nature. In addition to his lucrative drug trade, Bennett had been running a prosperous numbers game. Two months earlier, one of his bagmen, along with the man’s bodyguard, had been murdered and robbed of his satchel, amounting to some $45,000. They still had no idea who had done the deed. Then, a couple weeks later, another one of his paymasters had been shot full of holes along with both bodyguards that Bennett had added for extra protection. This time the take was a good sight bigger. The really galling part was that the three victims were the best guys he had in his operation. Bagman Lewis Hopewell could smell danger a mile away, and his two bodyguards were as alert as they were merciless.

  Bennett thought about going to the cops, but then decided against it. The cash he had been handing them under the table was only to let him operate his game. To track down a dangerous killer like this, they’d really shake him down, beside which, it would show them he was weak. If that happened, it might not be so easy to do business with them in the future.

  As for the police actually doing
their duty, Spencer Bennett could only smile and shake his head. Let some honky get mugged for ten dollars and it was all about how Mayor Rizzo is going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot in the name of law and order, but let a brother get himself killed and it’s, yeah, well, we’ll see what we can do, now good goddamn bye. So instead of the cops, Bennett put his best man on the case: a quick, sharp bad-to-the-bone guy named Tyrone Smith.

  The night after the second bagman robbery, Maytag Mike—so named because his home on the street had been an abandoned washing machine crate—awoke to a pleasant surprise. There beside him lay two bottles of the finest wine that money could buy. It was then he noticed some extra weight in his two jacket pockets. He fished into the left pocket and pulled out a wad of currency. It would come to $5,000, had Mike taken the time to count it.

  “Holy shit!” the man in the crate called out to celebrate his sudden good fortune. And at that, Mike had missed the car keys at the bottom of his pocket—keys to a very expensive sedan, parked just around the corner. Before addressing himself to the wine and the cash, he checked his right pocket to see what sort of prize might be in there. He pulled out a .45 automatic, with an empty clip.

  “Sweet mother of Jesus, what have I gone and done?” he shouted. He tried to search his addled memory for how he may have spent the past few hours, but he did not try for long. Less than a minute later, two shots, muffled by a silencer found their way into what was left of his brain.

  “Hello, Mr. Bennett?” Tyrone Smith, spoke into the phone. “I found the son of a bitch. He dead.”

  Spencer Bennett was massively relieved that Tyrone had put an end to the problem before it got any worse. He was a little puzzled that his enforcer had only managed to recover five grand. Smith had sworn up and down, that’s all there was. Go ahead and search him if he wanted, the shooter told his boss .What had that vent bum done with the rest of the money? Still, the guy was out of the way, and that was what really mattered. Then too, they had recovered the bagman’s fancy car. That was another big relief.