The Mafioso doth protest too much. I thought it. I didn’t say it.
“But this can’t always have been your attitude about her,” I tried playing shrink for a bit. “I heard you two were in love once.”
“Sure, at first my father was out for blood,” he confessed in an almost placid voice. “She tried to hurt me and my family. But that was a lifetime ago. I can’t even remember what she looked like.”
“Here,” I produced the white-bordered Polaroid of Gandolfo and Azrael taken two decades ago, “maybe this’ll help job your memory.”
“Where’d you get this?” His tone was cool, detached, but his face had gone white.
“Let’s just say I inherited it. Keep it.”
“I told you to listen carefully,” he was up, around the desk, standing over me. “Apparently, you didn’t hear me,” Gandolfo crumpled the photo like last week’s grocery list and threw it in my lap. “I don’t care if you know where she is. If you thought you were gonna get any money outta me or my people, you were wrong. Grandstand plays like yours only work in the movies. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that believing in the movies can be detrimental to your health?”
“No and we never discussed cooking soup either.”
“Huh?”
“Forget it.” I waved carelessly at nothing in particular.
“I suggest you do the same. Forget why you dragged me down here and forget that we ever met. Forget—”
“Coffees, bosth,” the lisping Adonis barged in.
“Mr. Klein won’t be staying for his, Vinny.”
I stood to go. I was being dismissed. Vinny remained frozen, coffee in hand, just inside the door. He gave new meaning to the term “dumb waiter.”
As I got just past Vinny, Gandolfo called for me. I turned around.
“I know who you are, Mr. Klein. I know about you and that cop, that no good donkey prick, MacClough. I hope you’re not here doing his bidding.”
“Johnny doesn’t know I’m here,” I couldn’t hold down my contempt. “He’d probably kick my ass if he did.”
“That’s good. I’d hate to think that potato-eating motherfucker sent you here to stir things up, to cause a little anarchy,” Gandolfo rubbed his hair with his palms. “I had a professor that used to say it was easier to shout anarchy than to create it. Do we understand one another, Mr. Klein?”
“We do.” I closed the door behind me.
Outside the door I smoothed the crumpled snapshot and put it back in my pocket. Mary was back at her desk typing; her face had resumed its normal gargoyle pose. Larry stepped toward me but I shooed him away and headed for the bathroom. Pissing, like love, is better the second time around. Before I could get most of me out of the bathroom, Larry descended. He locked my left arm in his bony right and guided me into an adjoining office.
I took it to be a conference room. There were twelve mahogany and camel leather chairs with a matching table slightly shorter than most par fives, more audio and video equipment than at a third world television station, a small bar, a refrigerator and a cappuccino machine. It was sort of a yuppie version of heaven. Larry key-locked the door and slunk to the far end of the room like a cat prancing on bayonets. I just sat down. My bullshit threshold had long since been passed.
Larry produced a fairly stuffed envelope from the inside pocket of his suit jacket, sneered at it, squeezed it like a cantalope and slid it down the table at me.
“You’ll make a hell of a shuffleboard player,” I picked up the package. “What is it?”
“An en—”
“This isn’t a sitcom, Larry, so spare me the straight lines. What’s in the envelope?”
“Gelt, cash money,” he yawned as he was wont to do.
“I’m a writer not a dentist. Don’t make me pull teeth. Who from and who for?”
“He says you’ll understand. You’ll know who it’s for.”
“Gandolfo says?” I twisted my eyebrows into a question mark.
“Gandolfo says,” lean Larry confirmed. “Open it up.”
I did. The thousand dollar bills were so crisp and fresh that it was nearly impossible to separate them.
“There’s one hundred of ’em,” the lawyer offered matter-of-factly. “I’ve been instructed to inform you that five of those bills are yours as a tip for delivering the remainder to the proper party and that any debts owed by you to me have been taken care of, wiped clean.”
“Nice tip,” I palmed five bills off the top and put the rest back in the envelope. “Problem is, I’m still a little unclear who the cash is for.”
“I’ve not been given any details on that matter,” Feld spoke to me in his courtroom voice.
“But if you had to make a guess . . .” I trailed off.
“I’m not a guessing man, Dylan.”
“But if you were?”
“I’d say there are some women some men never get over no matter how much hurt passes between them.”
“Gandolfo just got done calling her a cunt and now you’re telling me he wants me to fork over ninety-five G’s to her.”
“Mr. Gandolfo is a very complex man, Dylan,” Larry’s courtroom manner returned. “Sometimes it is in his best interests to say certain things and have me say others. I’m certain you understand.” Feld looked at his Piaget like a buffoonish actor.
“I get the feeling class is out,” I caught his drift.
“Yes, well . . . I do have other appointments. Oh, I almost forgot,” the lawyer snapped his fingers, “Mary has a file for you. It contains that information on the Barnum woman. Interesting stuff. She was pretty close to needing my services. You’ll see. And please be careful with it. The file contains, shall we say, certain documents that should have been impossible to obtain.”
“I understand,” I put my right hand out for Larry to shake. “I owe you one.”
“No, Dylan. You don’t owe me a thing,” he shook my hand more firmly than I can ever remember his doing previously.
“One more thing, Larry. What if the envelope turns out to be undeliverable?”
“Apparently, you don’t understand,” Cassius screwed his face up. “There’s no options here. You deliver that envelope one way or another. Good-bye, Dylan.”
The typing gargoyle barely noted my presence when handing me the Barnum file. I didn’t inspect the package but rather just stood there a moment observing the sour woman at work.
“Will there be anything else, Mr. Klein?” she asked, still refusing to look up. Actually it was more a dismissal than a question.
“Yes, Mary, there is. Why do you hate me?” A hundred thou in cash in your pocket makes such queries seem perfectly natural.
She ceased typing and looked directly in my eyes. “Hate is such an ugly word. I prefer contempt. That’s better. Yes, much better. It’s appropriately legalistic.” She was almost gleeful.
“Contempt, then.”
“Because you’ve known him your whole life,” she pointed at an enlargement of the cover of the Post showing Larry triumphantly holding forth on some courtroom steps. Above his picture the headline read: ‘Babysitter Strangler Slapped On Wrist.’ “You know what he is.”
“Better than most,” I confessed to the truth.
“Then you have your answer,” she stated as if she were Moses delivering the commandments.
“What about you, Mary?”
“Even whores judge people, Mr. Klein,” she winked. “But don’t fret, I have enough contempt for the two of us.”
“He pays you well. I imagine you need the money. I need the kind of information he’s good at getting. What’s wrong with needing?” I wondered weakly.
“Sometimes, need’s not a good enough excuse,” the secretary shook her head sadly. “Besides, we don’t really need him. His clients, they need him. We choose him, Mr. Klein.”
I walked to the elevator, envelope in pocket, file in hand. I didn’t argue with Mary. What good is it to argue with the truth?
Hickory Cure
&nbs
p; Vinny, Don Juan’s bodyguard cum coffee boy, was waiting impatiently by the lift doors, pressing the buttons like a hungry rat in Skinner’s lab, looking to the arrows for a cue. My brain was too busy treading water to care much. I noticed him and I didn’t. If he noticed me, Vinny didn’t show it. Labs rats are like that. I decided the walk down would do me good.
When did I ever know what was good for me? The steps made my knees sore and my sore knees reminded me that healing ribs prefer elevators. Hell, my aches and pains were the up side of my descent of Everest. There are protozoa streetwise enough not to carry a tenth of a million bucks down deserted stairwells. Hello! I could’ve been rolled easier than a bagel and my body wouldn’t’ve been discovered until the next fire drill.
So, I wasn’t thinking straight. I was too preoccupied by today’s episode of the Dante and Larry Show to think straight. Those two had blown enough smoke up my ass to hickory cure my colon. If Gandolfo truly didn’t care about Azrael, why bother to meet me at all? Not coming would have made the point with more elegance than threats and denials. And if he did care, again, why meet me? Why give me an audience of lies and then turn me over to Larry for the big payoff? Why not let Larry do the bidding from the get-go? Why dress it up with whistles and bells and cheap theatrics?
I figured there were three viable explanations for the song and dance, all of them as appealing as a ruptured spleen. The first possibility was Don Juan’s being truly ignorant of Azrael’s demise; that, as far as the Gandolfo crime family was concerned, Azrael Esther Wise was a bad memory still living under the auspices of the Witness Protection Program. But logic and the manner of her execution made that a difficult pill to swallow. The next possibility also depended upon the Gandolfos’ being ignorant of Azrael’s circumstances. In this scenario, however, the Gandolfos are still very interested in Azrael’s whereabouts. Using me as a delivery boy, they flush her out of hiding to settle an old score. I found this one particularly unappealing since they’d have to get rid of me, too. The final possibility didn’t hinge upon the Gandolfos’ ignorance or good graces. In this version Dante knows Azrael is dead, but he’s trying to protect himself by playing dumb and concocting an elaborate charade. It sounded nice, but it was too big a reach. Dante hadn’t killed Azrael himself and besides the triggerman was busy turning into fertilizer under Dugan’s Dump. And hey, a hundred grand is a pretty expensive charade even for a Gandolfo. Like I said, none of them seemed very credible explanations. Maybe there were other possibilities I just wasn’t seeing. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I sat on a bench in the metal and glass courtyard of Larry Feld’s office building. Some people ate their lunches, some read the Wall Street Journal. Some couples kissed in dark corners. I drummed my fingers on the Barnum file and stared at the crinkled photo of Azrael with Don Juan.
“Who were you, really, Azrael?” I asked the girl in the snap, the girl from two decades past, not the made-up mannequin I had found by the tracks. “What was it about you? What is it about you that controls men from the grave?” I wanted to know. I was one of those men.
She did not respond. Maybe that was her secret; silence.
I had come for answers and came away with more questions. Maybe there were no answers. And that frightened me, maybe more than anything.
The Phoenix Myth
The Scupper lights fairly glowed in the blowing snow of blue dusk. MacClough stood behind the bar trying to flip quarters into a shot glass. Bob Street, proprietor of the Star Spangled Deli, and Stan Long, operator of Sound Hill’s lone service station, sat belly-up and side by side next to the beer pulls. Stan was in his usual four-Scotch foul mood and refused to take the always jovial Street’s action on MacClough’s quarter-tossing prowess.
“Fucking snow,” Stan Long muttered as I walked up.
“Bad for business?” Bob Street wondered and winked hello to me.
“Nah,” the scotch drinker barked. “Business is too damned good. Snow don’t give a man time to relax. After I leave here, I’ll be making tow calls till sunup tomorrow. Fucking snow.”
“Life’s like that,” Johnny commiserated.
“Black and Tan.” I ordered out loud, although MacClough had poured the stout and ale before I spoke. “Yeah, Stan, I just drove in from a meeting in the City,” I looked Johnny in the eyes as I spoke. “Cars stuck all over the place.”
“Meeting?” MacClough nibbled at the bait.
“Must’ve been important for you to drive all the way into New York,” Bob Street added as if on cue.
“Very important,” my gaze fixed MacClough in his tracks.
“Fucking snow,” Long slammed his rocks glass on the bar along with a likeness of Alexander Hamilton. “Tomorrow,” he spit an ice cube on the floor and exited.
“I’ll be over there,” I told MacClough, pointing to a table under the impotent harpoons. “Safe home, Bob,” I patted the deliman on the back.
I laid Barnum’s file open across the unsteady table. It was actually two files bound together with rubber bands. One dealt exclusively with the Pulitzer fiasco; the other with her husband’s alleged suicide. Larry was amazing. J. Edgar Hoover had nothing over Feld when it came to obtaining inside info. Between them, the files contained internal memos from the New York Times, confidential reports from the N.Y.P.D. and personal notes passed between Pulitzer committee members. And to make things more accessible, each file came with a word-processed brief explaining certain intricacies that a layman might neglect and/or misinterpret.
Although Larry had neatly separated both incidents into distinct files, the circumstances surrounding each ran together like fingerpaints in the rain. Barnum was a hot young talent at the Times and she had been doing an investigative series on how organized crime directly affected the price of almost anything purchased within New York City. There was a set of articles on mob/union activities, a set on the garment district, a set on the airports and trucking and a set on the construction industry, the banking industry and a high profile set on the Mafia’s infiltration of government and the courts. There were copies of her work in the file. Like I said before, Kate Barnum had teeth and she knew how to use them. But beyond her style, what gave Kate an edge were her sources. She claimed, in memos to the editorial staff, to have the highest-level sources within the unions, the Mafia and even in the government. She’d spent a lot of time doing these pieces, too much time.
Mike Tallenger was an attractive man in a beatniky sort of way. He had a gray pony tail, a salt and pepper soul patch, long sideburns that resembled Italy on an atlas and empty blue eyes. He was a jazzman, a sax player, a manic-depressive and the late second husband of Kate Burnum. Larry had provided a publicity picture. Tallenger had been at Juilliard, Berkeley and Bellevue. He met Barnum at the latter while she was working up a piece about New York’s treatment of the homeless. Kismet it wasn’t, but they got hitched anyway.
Between the two files, I worked out a rough chronology of their lives together. The first two years of marriage had been relatively uneventful. Uneventful, that is, if you allow for Tallenger’s two trips to private hospitals out on Long Island. No more Bellevues for Mike, not with Kate’s corporate insurance. The big trouble came in year number three, the year Kate began researching the Mafia infiltration series.
I didn’t have to infer or deduce or read between the lines. It was all here in police reports, shrinks’ reports and Barnum’s own letters of confession and resignation. The reporter had started to spend a copious amount of time away from home. Tallenger was becoming delusional and increasingly paranoid. He told his psychiatrist that his wife was having an affair and that she and her boyfriend were planning to kill him. He confronted her. Her time away increased as did the confrontations.
She moved out. She began drinking. She began dating other men. She told one of her new beaus she was having trouble sleeping. He got her a script to ease that problem. The pills worked for awhile. In the end, nothing worked. Tallenger tried making nice, wanted to reconcile. Sh
e nixed the idea. One night a cop from the Fifth Precinct called her at her desk and suggested they meet at Tallenger’s.
Tallenger had done his last gig. He’d never have to play another wedding or bar mitzvah to make ends meet. His end was met. The unstable sax man had consumed enough sleeping pills to kill a standing-room-only crowd at Shea. Cops didn’t find a note, but they did trace the pills back to Barnum and the prescription her new beau had supplied. Odd thing was, Kate swore never to have given any of the drug to Tallenger. Another odd thing happened. Three days after they found the permanently sleepy Tallenger, the cops received a package in the mail.
You guessed it. The package was from Barnum’s late husband. In it they found a note repeating Tallenger’s accusation that Kate was plotting to have him executed. In addition, the deceased jazz man charged that Kate Barnum had recently had meetings with several known felons; some suspected of contract killings. Tallenger also claimed that his estranged wife had been busy trying to take out a life insurance policy in his name. It was all very dramatic, very Hollywood, but the cops looked into it anyway. And when they did, things got curiouser and curiouser.
Kate Barnum admitted to the meetings with the known felons, but asserted she was researching a story. When pressed for the names of these felons, Barnum refused on the grounds that these people were confidential sources. And a few insurance companies had records of calls from a woman asking if their firms covered people with a history of mental illness; specifically, manic depression. Even Tallenger’s doctors thought there might be something to his suspicions as people suffering from his condition tended not to be paranoid or delusional. The cops smelled a rat, but the D.A. liked the case. He was sort of partial to fat headlines and reelection. The Grand Jury was less impressed and didn’t have to worry about reelection. They refused to indict.
The victory was a small and fleeting one. In spite of the Times’ best efforts to keep the Barnum business hushed, some of the details reached the ears of Kate’s confidential sources. Fearing she might be forced to roll over on them to save her own neck or might subpoena them to testify in open court to corroborate her story, Barnum’s sources cut her off and dried up like the Great Salt Lake. Without their help, Kate’s big series was deader than Kelsey’s nuts. She completed the work anyway. Unfortunately, it was a considerable batch of lies pieced together by an alcoholic journalist who was under police scrutiny and whose husband had recently committed suicide. She neglected to clue her editor into that fact, and he ran with it.
Little Easter Page 12
