His geniality was as misplaced as his accent, which was Brooklyn. I told him there was no one in the john.
“Well, get her in here then. Let’s have a look.”
“There’s no one with me.”
“No?” His voice lost cheer. “Beat it, mac. I handle broads. This is a modeling agency, not a hiring hall. Get lost.”
“Fawn Forest,” I said.
“Who?”
“Fawn Forest.”
His brow wrinkled, and a bit too much light came from behind the puffy lids that shaded his eyes. “Never heard of her.”
“Sure you have.”
“Says who?”
“Teresa Blair.”
“Who?” His eyes hopped on coals of guilt.
I put my hands on the desk and leaned toward him. “You signed Fawn Forest to one of those personal services contracts you negotiate, and copped her five hundred, then let her rot except for a stint at a used car lot and some laps around the desk. In other words, business as usual. But all of a sudden Teresa Blair came to see you, and all of a sudden Fawn had her money back. Am I helping you remember?”
A line of sweat broke out on Starr’s upper lip. “So? The chickie was upset. I want my clients to be happy—a happy model means a happy layout. She wanted the money, I gave her the money. Big deal.”
“Bullshit.”
“Hey. What kind of talk is that? Listen, you from the state? The DA? Who? I got a legitimate business here, you know what I’m saying? I provide chickies to guys who get their jollies looking at tits and ass. And that’s no crime. I treat my girls right, too. No rough stuff. Not like some guys in the business, send the chickies anywhere and half the time they come back looking like hamburger patties, you know what I’m saying? Sure, I take a little out in trade when I can, but what the hell? What’s a piece of ass, anyway? The chickies expect it. I don’t come on to them right away they pull out a pocket mirror and start looking for zits.”
I leaned even closer to him. His breath threatened to melt my teeth. “I just want to know what Teresa Blair told you that persuaded you to give Fawn her money back.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Starr nodded twice, then reached into the desk, pulled out a cigar and lit it, then puffed mightily to get it fueled, making sounds of milking machines and offset presses. Finally he looked at me again, through a milky cloud. “You live here in town?” he asked carefully.
I shook my head. “San Francisco.”
“Yeah. Nice town. Compared to Frisco’s skin men I’m an Eagle Scout, you know what I’m saying? Well, this Blair broad, what she does is she mentions some names to me.”
“What names?”
“It don’t matter,” he said, throwing my words back at me. “What matters is that these were names that broads like this Blair woman don’t usually know. These were names that my life wouldn’t be worth fish heads in this town if I went up against them. For five yards it didn’t seem worth finding out if she was trying to stiff me, you know what I’m saying?”
“What else did Mrs. Blair say?”
“Nothing. In and out in thirty seconds. What’s her story, anyway?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I said, then left. The clatter of someone else’s footsteps preceded me down the stairs.
8
When I walked out the door of the Moran Building, the green car was double-parked beside my Buick and a pair of Grinder’s men were standing on the sidewalk, hands in pockets, waiting for me. One of them was below average in all visible respects, with a hairstyle that prevails at boot camps and prisons. The other was big and bald. They both wore double-knit suits, wide ties, and Hush Puppies.
“What’s the matter, men?” I asked heartily. “Grinder afraid I’ll find her before he does?”
The smaller one smiled, displaying the chipped tooth that my friend in the pith helmet had seen, but the big one just stayed big. “We just want to ask you a question, Mr. Tanner. And then give you a tip.”
“What’s the question?”
“The question is, what does this guy Starr you’ve been visiting have to do with Teresa Blair’s disappearance?”
“Nothing as far as I know,” I said, knowing I would not be believed. “Now what’s the tip?”
The small one glanced briefly at the big one. The big one shrugged. The small one crossed his arms. “The tip is to leave town, Tanner. Right now. Forget you ever heard of Teresa Blair or Tony Fluto or El Gordo, either. Go back to San Francisco and ride a cable car or dress up in drag or do whatever else turns you on. Get the picture?”
He was serious, and it meant he and his partner weren’t from Conway Grinder at all. Which meant they could be from another faction of the El Gordo police, or, even more likely, from Tony Fluto himself.
I looked at the men more closely. They seemed used to giving orders and used to being obeyed. I couldn’t figure it out, but the east end of El Gordo wasn’t the best place to be doing the figuring. I moved toward my car. “That all you got to say?” I asked.
“If you’re smart, that’s enough,” the small one answered.
“The last tip I got wasn’t worth a damn,” I said. “Horse called Fleet Foot. Flat Foot was more like it. Ever since then I’ve been real leery about gratuitous advice.” I opened the door to the car and got inside.
The small one followed me and leaned in the window, his breath hot on my neck. “You don’t want to counteract us, Tanner. Believe me, you don’t.”
“Who owns you, pal?” I asked. “Tony Fluto?”
He frowned. “Fuck you,” he said, and backed away and slid behind the wheel of the green car. The big one clambered in beside him and they drove the green car away, leaving me alone with a cloud of hydrocarbons.
I let the engine idle and my thoughts along with it. They both needed a tune-up. Something had been strange about the case from the beginning, the waves far too big for the tiny and fortuitous pebble that supposedly had launched them. But as yet I didn’t have enough boards to build a lifeboat.
On the assumption I was still being watched, I drove over to El Camino and headed north, then stopped at a Denny’s just outside the El Gordo city limits. I went inside and ordered a patty melt, then squeezed into the phone booth while I waited for the sandwich. LaVerne Blanc, professional gossip and practicing alcoholic, answered after a dozen rings. I asked him how he was.
“If I was any lower, you’d have to dig a hole to kick my ass,” LaVerne answered, his words sloshing like beer in a keg. “What’s on your mind besides premature ejaculation?”
I laughed. “You’re projecting again, LaVerne. I’m calling from El Gordo.”
“My sympathies.”
“You know much about the place?”
“What’s to know? The world ever gets a set of the piles, it’ll get them in El Gordo. And if you got something more specific in mind you better make it snappy. There’s some crazy cunt in here, keeps threatening to wrap duct tape around my pecker so she can mount me again.”
“A man named Fluto, LaVerne. Tony Fluto. Runs a paint contracting business down here. What else can you tell me about him?”
LaVerne was silent for a time, and in my imagination his crazy girl friend carried out her threat. “I can tell you some things you won’t want to know, Marsh. Not if you’re mixed up in his shit. Why don’t you leave it be?”
“Can’t do it, Laverne. You know how it is. Got to save face.”
“Hey. You worried about your face, you stay the hell away from Tony Fluto. A tough old duck. Believe me.”
“What’s the story, LaVerne?” I asked, suddenly not at all eager to know.
LaVerne snorted something through his nose and swallowed it. “What do you know about mob activity around the Bay, Marsh?”
“The mob?” I repeated stupidly.
“Mafia. Cosa Nostra. The syndicate. Are these terms at all fa
miliar to you, Tanner?” LaVerne asked sarcastically.
“It just wasn’t what I expected you to say. I know Duckie Bollo calls the tune in San Francisco, and some guy named Donatelli heads the family in San Jose. There’s one in Oakland, too, I think.”
“Sure. But you’re talking big time. Mafia. Sicilians. East Coast shit. What we’re talking when we’re talking Tony Fluto is the rest of the places around here, the Haywards and Fremonts and San Mateos and El Gordos. The action in those burgs is organized, too. Not by Sicilians, necessarily, but organized all the same. And even though it’s small potatoes in Mafia terms, there’s still big bucks involved. A little graft here, a kickback there, some extortion and loan sharking over there, it adds up to a pretty big number. The way I understand it is, a guy from each of the towns I named, plus San Leandro and Palo Alto, too, they get together twice a month for dinner. Once in Jack London Square, once at the Prune-yard. And they divvy up the action, everything from coke deals to garbage collection to linen service to massage parlors.”
“And the man from El Gordo is Tony Fluto,” I said.
“You got it, Marsh. Been the big man down there for a long time. Plus, Tony’s got a little specialty of his own.”
“What?”
“Arson. Tony’s a torch.”
“Shit.”
Arson. The word was frightening to me, more frightening than murder. I knew the number of arson cases was climbing dramatically, in the Bay area and elsewhere, increasing twenty-five percent a year and more, to the point where fully half of all fires were believed intentionally set. A few years ago the motive usually involved revenge or vandalism, but when the prime rate hit twenty percent and the recession arrived as a result, a lot of businessmen were pushed to the edge, and arson was the best way out, or so it looked to some. If it’s done right, it’s virtually impossible to tell a crime has even been committed, and even if it’s done wrong, there’s seldom any link to the torch that hasn’t been burned to a pile of ash.
But none of that was the source of my fear. When I was about nine, my family’s house caught fire in the middle of the night. When I woke up, my father was carrying me through a sheet of blue and yellow flame that seemed as high as Mars, through smoke that squeezed my throat like a monster’s hand. Even now I see those flames at least once a month, at some time between midnight and morning. I’m told that when I see them I scream.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“That’s plenty for a sane man,” LaVerne said, then cursed. “Christ. Now she’s trying to put an ice cube in my drink. The woman’s a sadist.” LaVerne hung up.
I went back to the counter and nibbled my patty melt, thinking of fires and the kind of people who set them, and about the men who had warned me to stay away from El Gordo. When the last french fry was gone, I got in my Buick and drove north long enough to make sure I wasn’t being tailed, then doubled back to El Gordo and took side streets to the rear of City Hall and parked. Ray Tolson wasn’t glad to see me.
“I’ve got no time, Tanner,” he said when he saw me come through the door.
“If you want me to stay on the Blair case, you’d better make some,” I told him.
He looked at me closely, then gestured to a chair and picked up his phone and said something I couldn’t hear, then put it down. “What’s the problem?” he asked mildly.
“Prevarication.”
“Whose?”
“Yours.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, the local paint contractor who turns out to be an arsonist. The little hit-and-run case that’s more like a vendetta by you and Grinder against organized crime in El Gordo. Little things like that.”
Tolson grinned.
“I suppose you’re throwing in the towel,” he said.
“I don’t know yet. If it wasn’t for one thing I would.”
“What thing is that?”
“I’ll get to it later.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Tolson asked.
“Start at the beginning. And this time try the truth.”
“Okay,” Tolson said. “I would have in the first place but I thought you’d refuse the job if you knew.”
“If you thought that, then I wasn’t the man for the job anyway.”
“I suppose not,” Tolson agreed. “First, Fluto. You’re right, he runs things here and on top of that he’s a torch. We estimate he’s been responsible for at least fifty fires in the area over the past couple of years. The losses come to more than twenty million, give or take. You can imagine the pressure we’re under from the insurance companies. They shell out two billion a year on arson claims and they’re getting real tired of it. We’ve been after Tony for years, for arson and other things. Our office has a special Arson Task Force and Tony’s their number one priority. But so far, nothing.”
“How does he operate?”
“Tony’s a bit obvious, but he’s not stupid. He leaves the actual torching to his son and the scum he hangs around with. Tony’s more the broker. A finder, so to speak, peddling fire for hire. He buys off clerks in fire and casualty companies in Dallas and Omaha and in financial institutions all around the Bay. From them he learns which businessmen are flirting with Chapter Eleven of the Bankruptcy Act and what their fire insurance arrangments are. When he has the poop, Tony knocks on their door and makes them an offer, right down to the penny. When he throws some crooked public adjusters into the act, men who’ll jack the damage estimate by a factor of three once Tony’s dropped the building, he can present a package that has enough juice in it to make everyone happy. You’d be surprised how many previously upright businessmen take old Tony up on his deal.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
Tolson raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you wouldn’t, at that. Maybe that’s why they suggested I give you a call.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Does it matter?”
“Only to my biographer, I guess. What about the dead guy, Tolson? Was this a hit?”
“I don’t think so. Tony just had some bad luck.”
“And what was bad for Tony was good for you.”
“Right. We were a lead pipe cinch to send Tony to Quentin with a felony conviction, and once we got him there it was better than even he’d never get out. Tony’s made a lot of enemies getting where he is. He cut a lot of guys out of some lucrative action along the way, for one thing, and put some of his more ambitious competitors beneath a monument, for another, so it’s real likely Tony would end up with a fork in his throat at Quentin. Either that or the Board of Prison Terms would see to it he never made parole. Yep, we had it made.”
“You and Grinder. Making El Gordo safe for democracy.”
“Is that something I’m supposed to be ashamed of, Tanner?” Tolson asked soberly.
“I guess not,” I answered, sober as well and not particularly pleased about it. “What’s Fluto been up to?”
“Still no sign of him. But his people are going about their business as though nothing was wrong. How about your end?”
“Not much,” I said. “Teresa Blair’s descended from a long line of chameleons, from all I can tell. A different shade every hour. I’ve talked to several people but I don’t have a line on her at all. It’s not impossible, though, that she just left her husband, for reasons that don’t have anything to do with Tony Fluto.”
“That could make it tough.”
I agreed with him.
“Anything I can do to help?” Tolson asked.
I considered his offer. Normally I like to keep the cops out of my business entirely, even on a case when we’re supposed to be cooperating. But I decided to let Tolson do a little of my legwork. “There’s a chance Teresa Blair spent time in Vegas some time back,” I said.
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know.”
“When?”
“No idea.”
“Where’d you get the tip?”
“Her friend, a woman named Tancy Verritt. When I told h
er Mrs. Blair was missing, she immediately mentioned Vegas, or more precisely, ‘the Vegas people.’ When I tried to follow up, she dummied up. There’s something there, but I can’t guarantee it’ll help you find her.”
“I’ll call the Vegas police and let you know.”
“She was probably using her maiden name back then,” I said. “Goodrum. She’s called Tessa by most of the people who know her.”
“But not by her husband,” Tolson observed.
“Very astute.”
“What people have you been talking to?” Tolson asked.
I didn’t see any reason not to tell him, so I ran through the list of names. I got no reaction to any of them. “What do you know about an outfit called El Gordo Industrial Services?” I asked. “Has a warehouse down on Tenth and Oswego.”
“Nothing comes to mind. What should I know about it?”
“I’m not sure. Teresa Blair was seen going in there a year or so back.”
“What was she doing?”
“I’m not sure of that, either. Neither was the man who saw her. The place isn’t exactly her style.”
“I’ll ask around.”
“Where exactly on Oswego did Fluto run over the guy?” I asked.
“Let me check the file.”
Tolson thumbed through a stack of papers as thick as as a prime filet. “Ninth and Oswego.”
“A block away from the warehouse,” I said.
“So?”
“Who knows? You said Fluto had some competitors from time to time. Who are the current ones?”
“I think you’d best let me worry about that,” Tolson said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be happy to. I just thought the names might help, in case one of them invites me in for tea.”
“Well, this isn’t my area of specialization,” Tolson said, “but there’s a guy named Moskowitz, he’s into hot cars and gambling, and a guy named Wadley, owns a restaurant and controls food and liquor distribution, things like that. And a black guy named Buck, he’s into drugs. But Fluto’s still the king.”
“How old is he?”
“Seventy, give or take.”
State’s Evidence Page 9
