A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

  “You have got to be kidding! I’d give up not smoking to meet Julia Crab. What was she like?”

  “Don’t know. She put a mask over her eyes and slept the whole way. The only time she said anything was when we almost crashed. What she said was not something I can repeat to a lady.” I leaned over the desk and lowered my voice as if I were sharing a state secret. “I’m here to see Mr. Fontenrose.”

  “I could have guessed that,” she purred, eyeing me with interest. “We’re the only ones on the floor. Which Mr. Fontenrose?”

  “How many are there?”

  “Seven, not including the two sons-in-law with different last names.”

  “R. Russell is my man.”

  “Whom shall I announce?” she asked with a slightly breathless Marilyn Monroe lisp.

  “DSC Lemuel Gunn.”

  She screwed up her mouth in disbelief. “And what, pardon the prying, does the DSC stand for?”

  “Deputy station chief, darling, which happens to have been the last rank I held before the Central Intelligence Agency fired me for conduct unbecoming.”

  As her pointed bosom thrashed around inside a blouse that had been bought one size too small or had shrunk in the wash, she directed me to an enormous leather couch and then stabbed at numbers on her house phone. There was a shoelace-high aluminum-and-glass table in front of the couch with copies of an economic review set out on it like cards in a game of solitaire. I flipped through one to pass the time. It was filled with pages of graphs showing that if the money supply got tighter, interest rates would get looser. Or was it the other way around? Either or, I didn’t understand a word. France-Marie, my lady accountant in Las Cruces, would have felt right at home.

  After what seemed like an eternity, a well-groomed older woman with white hair tied up in a bun and one ankle bound in an ACE bandage limped through a door I hadn’t noticed the existence of. She lowered her head, a gesture that suddenly added a second chin to the one she already had, and sized me up over the silver rims of large oval eyeglasses. I was wearing faded khakis, loafers without socks, and a threadbare sports jacket over a particularly shabby sports shirt that I was very attached to because the collar didn’t chafe my neck.

  Apparently my attire brought out the latent arrogance in her. “Naughty, naughty,” she purred, wagging an accusing finger. “You haven’t phoned ahead to make an appointment, Mr. Gunn.”

  “Who are you, dear lady?”

  “My name is Miss Godshall. I am the secretary to Miss Wyman, who is the principal secretary to R. Russell Fontenrose. If you care to state your business, perhaps I can put you out of your misery.”

  “Are you a trained attorney?”

  “I am a trained secretary. I am trained to spot people who are unable to afford three hundred dollars an hour to talk with the gentleman who employs me.”

  “Look, Miss Godshall, why don’t you duck back through your secret door and tell Miss Wyman to tell R. Russell that Lemuel Gunn has come all the way up from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to talk to him about a bail jumper name of Emilio Gava. I lay you odds he’ll squeeze me in.”

  Pouting in disapproval, Miss Godshall raised her head in a huff, reducing her chins to the number God had distributed at birth, pivoted on the heel of a sensible flat-soled lace-up shoe and limped back through the secret door. Five minutes later I was ushered into the presence of Miss Wyman, a tall, elegant, flat-chested woman who looked like the dowager madam of a high-class brothel. Her hair was dyed red but I suspected it was already rusty underneath. Miss Wyman, in turn, ushered me into the presence of the man himself, R. Russell Fontenrose.

  His corner office came with wraparound windows double glazed to keep out everything except the sob of sirens, and even those sounded as if they came from another planet. The room was so vast I thought I’d need a motorized golf cart to get across it before he went out for his two-martini expense account lunch. Picture ankle-thick wall-to-wall carpet. Picture a king-sized mahogany desk. Work in the usual family photographs in the usual mother-of-pearl frames, a small Chinese bowl filled with monogrammed matchbooks, the usual law books in the usual leather bindings, a collection of antique globes on a long low glass shelf. Don’t forget to include the smell of saddle soap and furniture polish and money. Especially money. Through a partly open door, I caught a glimpse of a minigym—a rowing contraption, a pile of towels, a set of golf clubs. On one side of his desk was an electronic monitor listing the waiting phone calls, which were stacked up like jetliners in a holding pattern. R. Russell was perched against the edge of his desk, his back toward me, murmuring into a telephone. “I’ve laid the options out for him, Kenneth. He can snipe at them from the safety of the trees with writs of this and that, which will slow them down but won’t stop them. Or he can grab the bull by the horns and sue the trousers off them for breach of contract and watch them squirm.” He noticed my reflection in the window behind his desk. “I have someone with me. Let me get back to you.” He hung up and dog-paddled around to the front of the desk to get a better look at me, during which time I got a better look at him. R. Russell was an ungainly man—wide waist, broad chest, broad in the beam—in his late thirties or early forties. Neither his seventy-five-dollar haircut nor his nine-hundred-dollar suit could disguise the fact that he was seriously ugly, which is how Ornella Neppi, who’d seen him that one time in court, had described him. He had fat jowls and beetle brows and tiny eyes and a gnarled nose, all of which gave him the allure of a hagfish, which is one of those eel-like creatures you come across now and then in the Bermuda Triangle. If you’re lucky, you come across it when it’s dead. Its most distinctive feature is a mouth filled with horn-shaped teeth for boring through the flesh of fishes in order to feed off their innards. For some reason I couldn’t put my finger on, this accumulation of ugliness only seemed to make R. Russell very, very sure of himself. I’d run into people like him before—they think, for their ship to come in, they only have to put to sea. He didn’t offer to shake hands. Neither did I. He glanced at a wafer-thin wristwatch that he wore on the inside of a fleshy wrist. I supposed he was checking the time so he could bill me later.

  “Your secretary’s secretary told me you get three hundred bucks an hour.”

  “That’s correct.” He gave me the once-over, guessing the size of my bank balance from the cut of my trousers. I was very fit and reasonably tan, both attributes that come in two basic models—playboy prosperous or down-on-his-luck indigent. It was easy to see which he had me pegged for.

  “The three hundred an hour put me off,” I admitted. “I was worried you couldn’t be much good at what you do if that’s all you charged.”

  He didn’t crack a smile. He didn’t even look as if he had one in his inventory of expressions. “Perhaps you ought to get to the point. I’m a busy man. What’s this about Emilio Gava jumping bail? And what does it have to do with you?”

  “I represent the Neppi bail bond company, which stands to lose $125,000 if Emilio Gava doesn’t turn up for his trial. We have reason to believe he skipped out on his bond. He never returned to his condo in Las Cruces after you pleaded him not guilty. Nobody seems to have any idea where he is or how to get in touch with him. Being his lawyer, I thought you might have an address or a phone number.”

  “Are you familiar with the legal concept of attorney-client privilege, Mr.—what did you say your name was?”

  “Gunn. Lemuel Gunn. I’ve heard of attorney-client privilege but I thought, all things considered, you might waive it in Mr. Gava’s case and give me a helping hand. As his attorney, you are also an officer of the court. You asked the judge to release Gava on bail. As I understand it, it’s not in your interests to have him jump bail.”

  R. Russell stabbed at the sleeve of his jacket and took another look at his watch. “Thank you for stopping by, Mr. Gunn. I’m sorry I can’t be of assistance to you. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll have my secretary show you to the elevator.”

  “I do mind.” The horns of our stares lock
ed. “In fact, I mind a great deal. I came a long way to see you. It would be a blow to my ego to have to go home empty-handed.” I drifted over to the glass shelf running along one wall and absently plucked one of the antique globes off of its cradle.

  “Be careful with that—it’s a three-hundred-year-old Lorenzo da Silva. It’s worth more than you earn in ten years. There are only three da Silvas in the world in anything like this condition—the second is in the Louvre, the third is in the Metropolitan. I’ll sue the trousers off you if you so much as scratch it.”

  “I don’t know much about law but I know enough to know the difference between actionable and collectable. If I were to drop this—always assuming the judge doesn’t buy my story that you tried to physically throw me out of your office and the globe got busted in the altercation—you could sue the trousers off me, as you put it. But as I own nothing in the way of equity, and as my bank balance, last time I looked, was in the neighborhood of minus seven hundred and fifty dollars, the only thing you’d collect would be my trousers. I’m not sure they’d go with your haircut, Mr. Fontenrose.”

  “I could attach your income for the rest of your life.”

  I tossed the globe from my right hand to my left and then back again. I could hear him suck in his breath. “I don’t have an income,” I explained. “I don’t go to an office, I don’t draw a salary. How about it, Russell? All I want are simple answers to simple questions.”

  I gave the globe a spin and tried balancing it on the tip of my middle finger. “For Christ’s sake put it down,” he whispered hoarsely. “I’ll tell you what I can.”

  I kept the globe in the palm of my hand just in case. “Who hired you to represent Emilio Gava?”

  He made his way around his desk and collapsed into a leather chair that appeared to fold itself around him. “Our firm has an ongoing relationship with—” He sucked air in through his nostrils and started over again. “Over the years Fontenrose & Fontenrose has taken on some special clients—we deal with their legal problems, we manage their financial portfolios.” His hagfish mouth clamped shut. He was clearly having a hard time spitting it out. I played catch, left hand to right hand and back again, with his three-hundred-year-old Lorenzo da Silva. He groaned. “This is the first time one of our special clients has been arrested after going into the program. Certainly no one in the program has ever jumped bail—”

  “What program are we talking about?”

  “The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s witness protection program. That’s as much as you’re going to get out of me, Mr. Gunn. If you require more information, I suggest you go to the horse’s mouth.”

  “Would you care to identify the horse’s mouth?”

  “Talk to Charles Coffin. He runs the witness protection program for the western states out of the FBI’s Albuquerque office.”

  I could actually hear his sigh of relief when I deposited his precious globe back in its cradle.

  “Please leave now, Mr. Gunn.”

  I looked at my watch. “Twelve minutes. Which means I owe you one-sixth of three hundred dollars, which is fifty bucks.” I pulled two twenties and an Alexander Hamilton from my billfold and dropped them onto his king-sized desk. “That makes us even-steven, pal.”

  I plowed through the carpet to the door. Miss Wyman led me down the corridor to Miss Godshall, who led me back through the secret door to the elevators. Heading back toward earth in one of the Cresswell Building’s silver time capsules, I felt like a sap for having paid for Fontenrose’s twelve minutes. As gestures go, it’d been pretty dumb—I was out of pocket fifty bucks, all to feel superior to an eel.

  In the words of D.D. back at the Blue Grass, go figure.

  Twelve

  Ever since the honcho himself, J. Edgar Hoover, fired an agent he spotted in the hallway for wearing tight trousers, every FBI field office that I’ve been to has been an island of haberdashery conformity. The New Mexico field office, on Luecking Park Avenue in downtown Albuquerque, was certainly no exception. The men circulating in the corridor sported dark two-piece suits with button-down shirts and conservative ties. The two female secretaries at the main desk wore jackets that flared at the hips over sober dresses that plunged to midcalf. Maybe it was my imagination working overtime, but even the men on the Ten Most Wanted list posted on the wall next to the elevator seemed comparatively well decked out, which made me wonder if casual apparel like mine could keep you off the Most Wanted list. The way the secretaries sized me up, I wondered if casual apparel could keep you out of the New Mexico field office.

  “There’s no agent here by the name of Coffin,” the older of the two secretaries informed me with nasal finality.

  “I have it on good authority that the agent in question, one Charles Coffin, runs the FBI’s western witness protection program out of this field office,” I persisted.

  “Everything all right here, Miss Pershing?” a two-piece suit passing the reception desk asked.

  “Gentleman here seems to think we have a Mr. Coffee working out of this office,” the second secretary said.

  “Mr. Coffin,” I corrected her. “Charles Coffin.”

  “Sir, who are you?” the two-piece suit demanded.

  I reached into my hip pocket for my wallet to come up with some ID.

  “Sir, I need you to keep your hands where I can see them,” the two-piece suit said. The pleasant smile never quit his lips.

  “Last time someone told me that, we wound up having an altercation,” I said.

  “Sir, is an altercation anything like a fight?”

  “It starts off with insults. It moves on to pushing and shoving. Where it ends depends on the parties involved.”

  A second two-piece suit materialized in a nearby doorway. I wondered if the secretaries had little buttons under the rim of the reception desk that they could push if someone with casual apparel turned up on the premises.

  “What’s going on here?” the second agent demanded.

  “This … gentleman … wants to see an Agent Coffee,” the second secretary said.

  “Coffin,” I corrected her, “as in casket. Coffin as in sarcophagus. He’s supposed to be the agent in charge of the FBI’s witness protection program in this neck of the American woods.”

  The second agent circled around me. “Are you a police officer?” he asked.

  “I’m a private investigator—”

  “You possess identification?” the second agent asked.

  I pulled back the flap of my threadbare sports jacket and, moving in slow motion, extracted the wallet from my hip pocket. I produced my laminated New Mexico detective license from the wallet and waved it in the air. The first agent snatched it from my fingers. “Goes by the name of Lemuel Gunn,” he told his colleague. “State-certified private investigator working out of Hatch.”

  “A real private investigator, in the flesh,” said the second agent. “We haven’t seen one of those fellers around here in a coon’s age.”

  “Listen,” I said, “if you don’t have a Charles Coffin working out of this field office, you must have a witness protection program.”

  “I’ve read about witness protection programs in detective novels,” the second agent allowed, “but I’ve never actually seen one on FBI premises.”

  “Sir, you fixing on joining the witness protection program?” the first agent asked.

  “I’m trying to track down someone who I have reason to believe was in your witness protection program. His name is Emilio Gava. He was released on bail after being charged with buying cocaine. I have reason to believe he has no intention of turning up for the trial.”

  “Which would make him a bail jumper,” the first agent said.

  “Bail jumpers are a police matter, aren’t they?” the second agent asked the first agent. He eyed me. “Have you tried the local police in the jurisdiction where you expect him to jump bail?”

  I wedged my wallet back into my hip pocket. “I don’t have much experience with the FBI, but if a
ll their agents are like you jokers, the country is in deep shit,” I said.

  “Sir, I need you to watch your language,” the first agent said. “There are ladies present.”

  “Language isn’t something you can watch,” I shot back. “To get the full impact, you need to hear it.”

  For some reason the second agent repeated my name. “Lemuel Gunn, with two n’s.”

  “Sir, is there anything else we can do for you?” the first agent inquired.

  “As a matter of fact there is. Can one of you Bobbsey Twins direct me to a good tailor in Albuquerque? I’d kill for a two-piece outfit like the ones you’re sporting.”

  I got to say this for me, I live and learn. At least this time it didn’t cost me fifty bucks to feel superior.

  Thirteen

  Lady Godiva riding bareback couldn’t have lured me back to that promoter’s idea of kingdom come, East of Eden Gardens, but Ornella Neppi’s predicament could and did. It wasn’t my style to leave a body unburied or a stone unturned. I decided to chat up Emilio Gava’s poker partners in the hope of eliciting a heretofore overlooked detail, a snatch of conversation, who knows, maybe even a lead to the occasional blonde bombshell who turned up at Gava’s condo, obliging him to turn up the radio. In short, I was scrounging for anything that might help me pick up the cold trail of the presumptive bail jumper.

  Frank Uzzel in 4B was the first name on the list I’d gotten from the concierge, Alvin Epley. I pushed the doorbell expecting a buzzer, what I heard were chimes playing the first notes of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” A thin, very young Chicano maid wearing a starched white apron and suffering from terminal acne cracked the door. “You the man what called?”

  “I am the man,” I said, flashing the grin I used to disarm civilians.

  “If it’s that Allstate fellow, Consuelo, show him in,” a voice called from another room. “I’m expecting him.”

  Uzzel turned out to be a square-jawed, crew-cut, gray-haired retiree with ramrod posture, standing or sitting. He wore a short-sleeved polo shirt and had a dog tag tattooed across the biceps of his left arm. (I recognized it because I used to wear two of them around my neck.) He looked to be one of those veterans who had married into the army the way priests marry into the church, he looked like he intended to remain faithful to his dying breath. He received me in a den one wall of which was covered with photographs of him in combat fatigues, another with a gun rack filled with as lethal an arsenal as I’d come across outside of a forward base armory. “I made top sergeant,” he allowed, following my gaze, looking at his photographs as if he were seeing them for the first time. “Thirty-three God-wonderful years in the finest military on Mother Earth. Four of them in Nam.” He motioned me to a chair next to a glassed-in case filled with medals, each one set on a small purple pincushion. “You serve your country, Mr. Gunn?”