King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  But attaching the bank accounts was only the first of the DEA’s ploys, Dom said. They followed it with a series of warrants to search the home and various other forms of harassment and coercion that the government can employ while still maintaining the fiction of legal and moral propriety.

  “Why didn’t the feds just ask him?” I said. “If they were really interested, I mean. Offer a deal: a reduced sentence in exchange for dollars . . . ”

  Dom nodded and gave me the sickly wraith of a smile. “Always did say you think too much like a cop to be honest,” he said. “Yeah, sure, that was tried. Several times, I think. But Pete wouldn’t play. Stonewalled them—sitting there in a cell at Leavenworth, mind you; one double-tough son of a bitch, for sure—even when they came at him with the straight word that he would do the whole twenty in there if he didn’t come across.”

  “Training and environment,” I suggested, and Dom nodded agreement.

  “Never talk to a cop unless you own him, and never tell him the whole truth even then,” he said. “Sure. Pete was out, as far as the family was concerned, so maybe it would have made sense to go for some kind of deal. But he didn’t. And I don’t think he could have done that—talked—even if he’d wanted to. Couldn’t have lived with it . . . ”

  The federal harassment of Angela Palermo was equally ineffective for the same reasons. And for one other.

  “Angie didn’t know,” Dom said with certainty. “She hadn’t been raised to ask questions of her man and Pete hadn’t been raised to answer them, so I don’t think they ever discussed the deal—the money and how he got it—before he was busted. And afterward all he ever told her was to hang tough, because there were some good times coming when he got out. So she did. Hunkered down there at Glen Ellen and tried to ignore the looks her neighbors gave her, and that’s how it went on for more than ten years.”

  “And then?”

  “And then . . . Pete died.”

  The DEA had kept its word about keeping Pete in Leavenworth, Dom said. The big cage in Kansas is one of the toughest in the federal system, and ordinarily a nonviolent first offender would have rated something better. But Pete was classified as “uncooperative,” and he did hard time there for more than a decade before he was finally moved to a more modern facility in Florida.

  Two years later he was killed in a riot.

  “And there,” Dom said, “is where reality stops and the Twilight Zone begins, because Pete was a genuine hardcase. Cons at Leavenworth include some of the meanest, most vicious human beings who ever breathed. You join one of the prison gangs or you die young. But Pete was strictly a solo hand, and after a couple of run-ins that didn’t end the way they were supposed to, the gangs learned to leave him alone. So . . . how could he get mixed up in a riot at a place like Okagomee?”

  “Okagomee?”

  “That’s the Florida prison where they sent him. Not one of the country clubs—the DEA still didn’t like him well enough to let that happen—but a hell of a big step up from Leavenworth; he should have been able to do the rest of his time with no complaint.”

  “But instead, he died.”

  “Instead, he was killed. Angie thinks it had to be murder and so do I.”

  I let the idea sit there for a while, tasting it and letting Dom do the same. And when I finally spoke, it was after choosing words with more care and precision than I usually needed in talking to him. But he cut me off with an impatient gesture and a snort that might have been laughter, but wasn’t.

  “Christ,” he said. “I’m telling this all wrong! Back up, okay? Murder. Accidental death. A heart attack . . . who gives a damn? Not Pete; he’s gone. And not Angela. She’s a widow—been one, really, since a few months after her husband got back from ’Nam. No, Preacher. I didn’t call you all the way down here to ask you to hire me a detective or write your congressman about prison conditions. And no vendetta, either. That kind of stuff’s for the Famiglia, and I gave it up the day I disobeyed my father and joined the army. Screw it. We got more important things to think about.”

  That was better; I waited for him to go on, and after a moment he did.

  “The thing is, Angie had a lot on her plate,” he said. “Even after she got back in touch, I didn’t see her often. Glen Ellen’s not far from Sacramento—or even from Best Licks, for that matter—but she put wide spaces of time between her visits. Maybe once a year. Twice. Sneak in like some kind of bandit, pretending to be an old friend instead of a relative. Scared the feds would come down on me because they were still watching her. She wrote oftener than that, of course, through a third party; even sent pictures of her and the little girl. Maria Theresa. Terry.

  “But she was busy. With the bank accounts cleaned out and Pete in the slammer, it was up to Angie to make a living for herself and the kid—and that took some doing, you know? Because there were no jobs at all around Glen Ellen and few enough in Sonoma and Santa Rosa, the towns that were in driving distance, and even those jobs dried up one by one. So after a while, more in self-defense than anything else, she started up the old family winery business. For real.”

  It wasn’t easy, Dom said. Angela had to mortgage everything—acreage, house, and equipment—for enough money to give her a year or two of lead time, and then went full tilt at the business of learning the wine trade.

  The University of California at Davis has a full four-year curriculum in oenology and viticulture. But Angela didn’t have that much time, so she enrolled as a special student, and in a year had learned enough theory to take her first faltering steps toward making wines of her own.

  “And a funny thing happened,” Dom went on. “Her neighbors began to help.”

  Angela had been a stranger in Glen Ellen, and when she first went to live there, contacts with the people who had known her husband’s family were distant, in the way of small communities.

  “They warmed up a little when Pete got back,” Dom said. “He was local, and if he’d been able to stay in town I suppose they’d have been okay. People are people. But he didn’t stay, and nobody likes having their town full of federal law, so they left Angie pretty much alone after Pete went to prison. Now, though, everyone seemed to want to help.”

  In particular, he said, two elderly vintners who lived nearby offered their services in producing the first vintage.

  The result was not great. But it was salable—for enough money to pay interest and servicing costs on the loans—and, far more to the point, the experience was educational.

  “After that first year,” Dom said, “Angie knew she was on the right track. She could make wine. Not the best, maybe; that first year’s product was sold in bulk to a commercial blender, to make what you might call generic dago red. But that didn’t matter. She’d taken the first step and from then on it was a matter of refining the type and taste.”

  Angela Palermo sold her second year’s production to the bulk dealer, too, her brother said. But this time she kept some of the grapes separate for experiments in the production of a white zinfandel.

  “ . . . and knew she was onto something,” Dom said. “She took the result back to Davis for evaluation and advice, talked to the old guys who’d been helping her, and finally made her own decisions—and learned how to hold her breath for months at a time because if she was wrong, she was dead. Everything, including that year’s production, was hocked to the limit and if the gamble didn’t pay off, she and little Terry would be eating zinfandel grapes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Or picking shit with the chickens.

  “County fairs up in the grape country are a bigger gamble than you ever took on a poker hand, Preacher. Results of the wine judging and testing are more than a matter of prestige. Everyone in the business knows who won and who lost and who’s new and hot and who’s had a bad year. The wine judges’ decisions affect the price of the wine, and the difference for a big winery can run into millions.

  “Angie wasn’t in the million dollar category, of course. She hadn’t even been able to use gra
pes from her own vineyards yet, because they were still under lease, and the first wine she made from grapes bought on the open market didn’t win its first gold medal until it was three years old. Took that long to give it the proper aging, even though what she was making was a blush—which is a white that has been turned salmon color by contact with its own pulp and held in cask. For all that time she had to stiff-arm the lenders who wanted her to sell in bulk again for a quick profit. If the blush hadn’t won big, she’d still have gone into the dumper despite all the work.”

  “But she did win?”

  “But she did win, and for a while it all seemed to be going her way. She bottled that vintage and made her own deal with the distributor, and suddenly the bankers who’d been giving her trouble started smiling when they saw her and wanting to know if she needed more money to expand—which she did. Five, six years later she was running one of the most successful small wineries in the industry and even thinking about taking over her own marketing, which would have put her right up there in competition with the best and biggest in the business . . . ”

  Dom’s voice, which had grown stronger as he recounted his sister’s success, faded abruptly to a whisper and then stopped altogether. I found myself once again looking at a friend with the mark of death on him.

  And suddenly I was angry with Angela Palermo.

  Just where the hell did she get off giving her brother this kind of grief? What kind of love is it that would allow him to face the kind of odds he was facing with more than half his mind and spirit occupied in some craziness beyond his control? And what was he getting at, anyway? Surely not a simple cheer-and-reassure mission to the wine country.

  All I could do was keep him talking. And hope for the best.

  “But all that changed when Pete died?” I prodded.

  “Yeah. I guess.” The voice was still and faraway, the voice of a man already half in shadow. But it strengthened again as he turned the question over in his mind. “And no,” he said after a moment. “Pete’s death was a bummer, yeah. What else? Angie really loved the son of a bitch, I guess, and it had to be like closing the door on one whole part of her life when she got the news. So maybe that was where things started to go wrong.

  “But he’d been gone a long time, remember, and Angie was still young—only sixteen when she and Pete got married, and just over thirty when he died—so it wasn’t like she was going to go around the rest of her life dressed in black with a shawl over her head. You know?”

  He paused for breath, but the shadows had retreated once again and I kept still.

  “I mean, she was sad—but getting over it,” he said. “What really went wrong began two years later, maybe more. There are some of her letters in the nightstand; you can read them later. The thing is, it started the day a guy turned up at Glen Ellen, claiming to be a friend of Pete’s. From Okagomee.”

  “Friend?” I said, remember what Dom had told me of Pete Palermo’s loner status.

  Dom nodded.

  “Yeah—got me wondering, too,” he said. “And I guess Angie didn’t bite too hard at first, either. But what she said, the guy explained to her that Okagomee wasn’t like a regular prison. No cells, no dormitories, either. The place had started out as a small-scale army base and they were living in the old barracks, which had been converted into a bunch of two-story rooming houses. That wouldn’t of cut any ice, of course. No cellmate had ever lasted with Pete at Leavenworth. But the guy said the rule at Okagomee was two to a room, and get along with each other or go back to Leavenworth. Or maybe even Atlanta.”

  “Uh-huh. And now the roommate was looking up Angela for old times’ sake . . . ”

  Dom shook his head. “I didn’t buy it either,” he said. “And neither did Angie, at first. Later, though, things changed.”

  “Changed how?”

  “Changed . . . crazy. Suddenly my sister turned into some kind of religious fanatic. A Bible freak.”

  He paused, and I could see him rerunning the last sentence or two.

  I left him to it.

  The words weren’t new; nothing I hadn’t heard—and even said to myself a few thousand times over the years. But in that time I’ve also learned that nothing I can say will take the sting off it, or make even the closest a friend see an ordinary human being inside the clerical collar. I don’t think about it much anymore.

  “Ah, hell,” he said finally. “No offense, Preacher. You know I’m not religious, but I never minded those cockamamie church services you hold up there at Best Licks. Kind of got to like them, even. You give good sermon, for a crossroad gambler.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I love you, too.”

  “So let’s pick out furniture,” he said with the ghost of a smile. “But Angie really did go nuts. Completely off the track. I mean, at first it was just a reference or two to something the guy had said . . . ”

  “You mean Palermo’s ex-roommate?”

  “Yeah, sure. Oh . . . didn’t I tell you? He turned out to be a preacher, too. But, I mean, not like you. Angie said he’d been some kind of baby tent-show evangelist when he was maybe five, six years old. At first her letters were just full of how he’d Opened her Eyes to the Power and all that. But after a month or two you couldn’t get a sentence out of her that didn’t have to do with religion, and never a paragraph that wasn’t about Gideon this and Gideon that, till you’d think she spent her whole life watching the sun rise and set on his ass.”

  I took a deep breath and felt something dark and cold stir in a part of me I don’t visit too often. The name was one I knew.

  “Gideon?” I said.

  “Gideon Goode,” he said. “That’s the dude’s name, but he only uses the front part. Just calls himself Gideon.”

  Well, anyhow, now I knew why he wanted to talk to me.

  Religious hysteria isn’t exactly my bag, and what he needed for his sister was some kind of professional deprogrammer. A Ted Patrick, maybe, or someone of that school.

  But Dom didn’t see it that way.

  “Look, Preacher,” he said, the voice hoarse now with returning pain, “if the religious thing is real—if it’s something that could be good for her—okay. I won’t interfere. She’s got her own life and I won’t try to live it for her. But I got to know! Her letters stopped three months ago, and when I tried to phone, the company said her number was out of service.

  “I got to have someone I can trust, someone who knows the score, take a look and tell me she’s okay. Just make sure my sister’s not in any trouble she can’t handle.

  “No more than that . . . ”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  He’s dangerous, all right.

  Dangerous to himself and to the ones who hear his words but don’t realize they’re being kidded.

  FIVE

  The town of Glen Ellen isn’t exactly off the map. It gets a little tourist trade, mostly from people who want to visit the old Jack London estate, which is located nearby. So the turnoff from highway 12 was well marked and I slowed down to enjoy the rolling countryside with its live oaks and sense of quiet permanence before crossing the bridge that marks the entrance to what might loosely be called the business district.

  But the easy part ended there.

  Dom had never seen his sister’s home and didn’t know the way, so I had to ask directions. And got exactly nowhere.

  “Palermo?” The overweight woman behind the counter at the liquor and antique store showed me a blank, puzzled face with opaque agate eyes, and shook her head slowly. “Eye-talian name, Palermo.” she said. “Lot of ’em around here. Eye-talians. I mean. Mostly over closer to Sonoma, though, and like that. Never heard of no Palermos around Glen Ellen.”

  The name on the front of the store was Tancredi, and I had made it my second stop after striking a similar blankness at the Roggieri service station (and antique store) next door, which could have left me either puzzled or angry if I hadn’t known the reason. And understood it.

  And a
greed.

  Charlatans—witch doctors, holy men, teachers of truth, gurus, priests, ministers, and shamans of whatever stripe—should always be considered guilty until proven innocent, and I was wearing the preacher-black suit and string tie that are my trademark working costume. I nodded courteously to the blank face, tipped the broad-brimmed black hat, and turned to try again elsewhere.

  But a welcoming committee—of one—was waiting outside the store.

  In my car.

  I had rented the wheels, a nondescript little Subaru, at the airport in Santa Rosa and had no emotional or other attachment to it. But I never did hold with looking gift horses in the mouth and the man now sitting at ease behind the wheel looked as though he might turn out to be a perfect fountainhead of information. With a little encouragement.

  He was a classic, wearing the booze belly, battered bulb nose, and bib-alls of the rural Saturday night bar fighter with a kind of sulky inelegance. Type casting in the very worst Hollywood tradition. Cimino might go for it, but not Coppola or Pakula. Too obvious.

  The only jarring note was the eyes.

  It was there that I thought I could detect a glimmer—faint, but real—of intelligence that might make further acquaintance worth the effort.

  I walked to the car and put my hand on the door but didn’t open it, and after a moment he finally condescended to look at me.

  “Somp’n for you, fuckface?”

  Even the voice was from Central Casting, a blurred whiskey-husk he must have practiced for hours along with the other late-show mannerisms.

  Such dedication deserves reward.

  “Why, yes,” I said, smiling him a bright smile with my mouth and bending down as if for intimate conversation. “I was wondering: Do you like to play games?”