The Informant

by Thomas Perry

  "'So you think he's planning to kill Catherine too.'

  "'All of this stuff takes a lot of time to pull off. If she's dead, he's got a lot.'

  "'So you're killing him tonight?'

  "'They said to do it, but if I do it after he gets her, I'm dead too. Now that I see you're in town, it's like a sign from God.'

  "'You want a minute to think that through again?'

  "'You know what I mean. You can do it for me.'

  "'Not interested.'

  "'Look,' he said. 'I've killed two people in my whole life. One was a son of a bitch in Brooklyn who owned a pawnshop. Somebody's niece noticed it was suddenly full of stuff that had been stolen in our neighborhood. One of the Lazaretti soldiers took people past the front window for a week or so, and they identified what was theirs. So I got sent to handle it. The guy wasn't even armed. He just sat behind his desk and I shot him in the chest. The other one I don't want to talk about. I've got no experience. I'll give you fifteen grand to go with me and act as a consultant. I'll do all the shooting. Then we'll drive down and catch the cruise. Those ships are full of pairs of women who pay good money just to meet somebody like us, dance and drink a little, and get laid. They say a weekend like that is just the thing. It sets them right up and they're good for a month.'

  "I said, 'We can skip the cruise, but I'll help you out.' So we left. He drove, and we picked up a big van. Inside it was a plastic container, maybe four feet by two and a half, with a vacuum top that latched. We went by Chickie Salateri's house, then a couple of clubs. At the third we found him. The club was a problem because a lot of people stay very late. So I told Lonzio, go in and buy him a drink, act like his friend, and persuade him to go to another club with us. He went in, and about twenty minutes later they both came out. So there were now three of us in the van, and the big plastic tub. I sat on that, and Chickie seemed to pay no attention to the thing, as though it were a piece of furniture. Sam drove up into Griffith Park. The place is huge. Sam said the route we were taking was a shortcut to get from Los Feliz into the Valley, where a great new club had opened, but it didn't feel like a shortcut. The road was weird and winding, and went up into the hills by the observatory. Then Sam says he's got a tire that seems funny, so he pulls over to check it. This struck Chickie Salateri as more than suspicious. But he thought the one assigned to kill him must be me. He started to pull out a gun to shoot me so I gave him a quick jab to the nose. Sam opened the passenger door beside him and stabbed him. Sam was not good with a knife so he just kept trying to kill him while Chickie fought back. It took four or five minutes before the bleeding got to him and he died. The van was a mess, and so was Sam. His shirt was soaked. He ended up tossing it in the plastic bin with Chickie."

  "Where did you bury the box?"

  "We didn't. Sam knew about this old cemetery in the middle of the city. It wasn't little bronze plaques set in a lawn. It was full of big gravestones and crypts. Sam drove right to a crypt. It was the kind that looked like a little marble building. He'd had somebody come through and saw the lock off in advance. The box fit right on this shelf in there. We put it in, went out, and Sam put on a brand-new lock."

  "Do you remember the name on the crypt?"

  "O'Hara. The newest date carved on the wall was 1956."

  "That's a pretty respectful burial for the Mafia."

  "He was a made guy, and he had family still around. They don't usually mutilate the body unless the guy talked to the cops."

  She changed the subject. "So if I find the O'Hara crypt in a cemetery in the middle of Los Angeles, there will be Chickie Salateri in Tupperware."

  "I think it was Rubbermaid, actually. The point is, the body is in there with Sam Lonzio's shirt with his blood and Chickie's on it."

  "Why are you giving this to me?"

  "You're welcome. It's because, for whatever reason, you've been trying to help me stay alive. And because, when the time came to vote in Arizona, all the bosses of the Lazaretti family, including Sam Lonzio, voted to get together and kill me."

  "You don't ever forget, do you?"

  "It was a memorable evening."

  "Maybe the vote in Arizona was a moment of weakness for Lonzio. He was surrounded by his bosses."

  "Everybody gets another chance, every day. If he doesn't like what he's been doing, he can do something different—even do the opposite of what he just did."

  "I hope you believe that."

  "What's your pitch?"

  "Things have just changed for you. Now the people after you aren't a lot of old, fat cigar puffers trying to look tough. And they're not waiting for you to turn up when you happen to get down to them on your list. They're hiring real hitters—people just like you—who will make a professional effort to hunt you down."

  He shrugged. "I already knew. They have connections with people who do this kind of work, and they've got a lot of money to spend. It's not a surprise."

  "The ones they hire may not be as good at it as you, but how good do they have to be?"

  "I'll have to think of ways to keep them to a high standard."

  "Wouldn't it be better to get out of their reach?"

  "If they're good enough, and there's enough money at stake, there is no such place."

  She turned in her seat and watched him as she spoke. "I'm willing to offer you not a perfect thing, but a good thing. We'll put you up in a place that's secret and that would be extremely difficult for anybody to know about, much less get to. There are classified military installations here and abroad. Nobody can overhear the name of the facility and have the faintest idea where or what it is. A lot of these places are somewhere in the middle of huge bases that are themselves remote and difficult to get into. You and I would meet once a day for a few weeks at a time, to chat. This might go on for a year or two, longer if you want. You would have to make your own deal for immunity with your own lawyer."

  "You're not offering blanket immunity?"

  "They approve that for people who give us suspects who are much worse than the informants are. I don't think the attorney general's office would approve blanket immunity for you. Everything you've done is a capital crime. I think I can get you some kind of immunity for the crimes you tell us about. Anything else, and you'd be fair game."

  "And the court testimony?"

  "You would have to testify in the cases where that's the best route to a conviction. If you're the eyewitness, it's unavoidable. But they wouldn't have you testifying against bookies and bagmen and corrupt accountants. The prosecution would look ridiculous bringing in someone like you for that. I'd say you should expect to testify against a few bosses. Just having you in a court saying you know them and have worked for them would be a big strike against them in the minds of a jury."

  "There's a lot of showmanship in your business, isn't there?"

  "Yes," she said. "Right now, we're talking about big, news-making prosecutions of Mafia bosses. This is how we do them. We find somebody who was on the inside, who knows enough details so there can't be a mistake, and we make a deal with him to testify."

  "Is this your whole pitch?" he asked. "Your whole offer?"

  "I can't give you money, except in the form of support while you're working with us."

  "I don't need money."

  "Good."

  "And your bosses have agreed to everything else?"

  "No," she said. "Right now, nobody knows I'm talking to you. This is an emergency. I have to make my best offer to you now, before you're dead. I can talk to them after you're safe."

  "Then what you're offering is theoretical. Your boss isn't behind you on this, or you wouldn't be flying around the country without telling him what you're doing."

  She sighed. "I'll be completely open with you. My boss, the deputy assistant attorney general in charge of my section, is a political appointee. He's still green, and has no experience making deals with informants, and feels suspicious about the practice. He'll learn as he goes. If we didn't make arrangements of this sort
, we'd still be trying to prove the Mafia exists. His bosses know that, and if I can bring in the offer of your services, they'll explain it to him. But no. At this moment he doesn't know what I'm doing."

  "So you haven't actually got any offer."

  "What I've described is what I believe I can get approved, even over the objections of my boss. If his bosses feel reluctant to overrule him, I have other allies I've collected over the years who would help persuade them. Some are powerful people. A call from any of them would almost certainly work wonders."

  "I'm impressed by your commitment," he said. "You'll use up all your markers and call in all the one-time favors. It will leave you without the power to do much else."

  "You'll give it back to me. If I can get convictions of a fair number of the old men, then I'll have more friends than I can use. It will also accomplish what you want most. Putting these people in prison forever, just like you did Carlo Balacontano, is as good as killing them, isn't it?"

  He pursed his lips, and there was a pained expression in his eyes. "I appreciate the offer, and I believe it's real. But I can't accept it."

  "What's wrong? What is it that's missing? I'm offering to keep you alive for as long as you want federal protection. If you don't get off the streets to a place where they can't reach you, they'll kill you."

  "They'll keep trying, certainly."

  She watched him as he drove back along Ventura Boulevard to Lankershim and then up the steep hill to her hotel. As he pulled into the circle in front of the entrance, she said, "Maybe this isn't the best I can do. Give me a chance. You haven't said what's missing. Just tell me, and I'll try to get it."

  "Freedom," he said.

  "I don't know how to give you that," she said. "The things you've done don't leave me a way."

  "Exactly."

  He stopped in front of the entrance and looked at her expectantly. She got out of the car and then stood for a moment, watching him as he moved the car forward and turned to leave the circular drive.

  30

  HE DROVE OFF the circle and onto the driveway, watching her in the rearview mirror as she turned, walked into the hotel, and disappeared. He felt a small twinge of regret as he turned from the driveway onto the sloping road down the hill. He had begun to feel a kind of interest in her. It wasn't affection, just a kind of sympathy for her position in this mess. He thought about the little he knew about her. She had, about twenty years ago, signed on at the Justice Department. Since then, she had apparently given her job an honest effort. She had lost her husband somehow—cancer, if he remembered right—before he had even become aware of who she was, and she had raised her two kids alone. He was glad she hadn't done anything foolish to try to get him captured. He would have hated killing her.

  He coasted down the long hill from the Universal complex, keeping his speed from increasing too quickly. The steep road headed due west to Lankershim Boulevard, then flattened and crossed it onto the bridge over the freeway. As he reached the level pavement at the bottom of the hill at the intersection, he looked in his rearview mirror and saw something that disturbed him. The car coming down the hill behind him was a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria. There was a driver wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, a tan short-sleeved shirt over a black T-shirt. A man in the passenger seat wore a brimmed cap that was a drab beige. He had a moustache and wore a pair of yellow shooting glasses.

  It was this man that disturbed him. He was fiddling with something that rested on his lap. The fact that the car was pointed downward on the hill allowed Schaeffer to see through the windshield over the dashboard into the front seats. What the man in the passenger seat had on his lap appeared to be a small automatic weapon with a long silencer fitted on the short barrel. It looked like an Ingram MAC-10. He lifted it slightly, barrel upward, and slid a long magazine into the handle. Then he turned the weapon slightly and fiddled with the selector lever.

  The light turned green, but Schaeffer didn't cross Lankershim. Instead, he quickly turned right just as the first of a large group of pedestrians was stepping off the curb into the crosswalk that led to the Universal Studios entrance from the bus and subway station across the street. He glanced in the mirror and saw that the stream of people that had spilled into the wake of his car had blocked the blue Crown Victoria. He memorized the car's exact color and shape as he sped up Lankershim.

  He veered to the right at the fork onto Cahuenga, then turned right again to try to lose himself in the residential streets on that side. He had no real knowledge of the neighborhood, but he had the sense that in the flats of the east valley, there was a grid of north-south streets crossed by the big east-west boulevards—Ventura, Moorpark, Riverside, Magnolia, Burbank. He made a zigzag pattern as he sped away from Universal. He turned right on Riverside and drove east. He remembered that in this direction were Griffith Park and Burbank and Pasadena.

  He had to find a telephone. As he drove along Riverside, he saw a Marie Callender's restaurant. He swung into the parking lot, trotted into the building, and put coins into the pay phone by the men's room. He dialed Elizabeth Waring's cell number. He heard her say "Hello?"

  "It's me," he said.

  "Have you changed—"

  "No. Just listen. When I drove away from your hotel, two men in a blue Crown Vic pulled out after me. If they don't belong to you, then they're more shooters."

  "How can you be sure?"

  "One of them has what looks like a MAC-10 with a silencer. Are they yours?"

  "No."

  "They didn't follow me to your hotel today. I was watching for somebody like them. That means they knew where you were staying, and after they lost me in Pasadena this morning, they went to your hotel. They must have assumed that at some point I would show up."

  "I can call the—"

  "Don't call anybody. You've got to get on a plane and go home now. Right now. As soon as they realize they've lost me, they'll be back at your hotel. You're all they've got. So go."

  "But I—" Even as she began to argue, she knew she was talking to dead air. She pressed the button on her phone, stepped to the closet, laid each outfit in her suitcase, and folded it over once. She went into the bathroom, got her toiletry kit, set it in the suitcase, and shut it.

  She lifted the suitcase off the stand and set it on the floor, extended the handle, then picked up the hotel phone and punched the number for the front desk. "This is Ms. Waring in room 802. I'm checking out now. Could you please hold a cab for me? I'll be going to LAX."

  As she rode the elevator down to the lobby, she reviewed what had just happened and what she was about to do. She was satisfied. She had no doubt that the Butcher's Boy, of all people, would recognize a pair of professional assassins if he saw them and would make a reliable guess about how they had come to be where they were. If professional killers knew who she was, then he was right that it was best for her to leave Los Angeles. If he lost them—when he lost them—they could only go back to her hotel looking for her. They seemed to see her as their easiest link to him. They probably assumed she would be a valuable hostage, or at least bait for an ambush.

  They obviously didn't get it. They had no way of knowing that he was incapable of forming personal ties to people like her and that, most of the time, he cared very little which people died and which didn't. For him, death had always been a commodity to sell and be paid for. At the moment he was only interested in killing as many of the men who had voted to kill him as he could.

  She strode quickly to the front desk, accepted the printed bill, and said, "Leave it on my credit card." The clerk at the desk said, "Your cab is at the door, Ms. Waring. Have a pleasant flight."

  "Thank you," she said, and kept going. She had not exactly stopped, just walked along the counter on the way out. As the driver put her suitcase into the trunk, she sat in the back seat and scanned the lot, the sidewalks, the long drive. The driver got in and asked, "Which airline are you going to?" and she answered, "United. Terminal Seven." As he drove, she looked out
the back window for a long time, hoping that the absence of the team of shooters didn't mean that they had caught up with the Butcher's Boy.

  Schaeffer walked out of the restaurant with his head down and crossed the parking lot. He got into his car and pulled out of the lot onto Riverside Drive and headed eastward. He drove with determination, but was careful not to go too far over the speed limit. No matter what was chasing him, he couldn't afford to be pulled over with about a dozen stolen guns, all of them loaded, and some of them the property of dead men.

  He drove to Victory Boulevard, turned right and then left onto the long parkway into Griffith Park. The speed limit was twenty-five, but the road was nearly empty at midday on a weekday, so he went forty. He took the long curve around the parking lot of the Los Angeles Zoo, but when he was nearly around the curve he looked across the lot and saw the blue Crown Victoria just starting toward him at the beginning of the curve.

  He sped up, goading the Camry along the straight stretch that bisected the golf course. There was a stop sign ahead, and it looked like the perfect spot to hide a police car, so he stopped for it. As he did, he saw a sign that said CAROUSEL. He cranked the wheel to the right and drove up the side road in the direction the arrow pointed. There was a rise, and then the road dipped and turned into a little vale. There was a parking lot to the left, over a low grassy hill away from the carousel. He parked, got out of the car, took his messenger bag full of guns and ammunition, and ran for the wooded hillside above the carousel. He took cover and looked down at the lower ground. The carousel looked like the real thing, a relic of the early 1900s that had been restored at some point by people who at least cared how it looked. The horses had a layer of bright, shiny paint, and the brass poles were worn by hands but polished. A few feet away from it was a small ticket booth, and beyond that was a snack bar, but he couldn't see anyone inside either structure. Finally, he saw a sign on the booth that said OPEN WEEKENDS with smaller print beneath that was unreadable from this distance. He supposed that when school was in session, there was no reason to keep the carousel running.