by W. T. Tyler
“Oh, shit, yes,” Buster said.
“Typical,” Wilson muttered.
“Yeah, typical. I can’t believe this guy, not when he tells me how he’s heard I’ve got some real close ties with the government still and this would help me land the contract. So I tell him O.K., business is bad, sure I’ll talk to them. I’ll talk to anyone. I can hardly pay the rent on this big office I’ve got upstairs. So he says he’ll set it up.”
“So you go see your friends down the street,” Wilson said.
“I end up with Fred Merkle and he tells me about this Caltronics firm, how they’ve got big problems with the U.S. Attorney’s office in L.A., with the Labor Department, with the FBI. He gives me the brief, Merkle-style. But they haven’t made the cases yet. They’re still working on them, but it looks like a dead end.”
Larabee had set up the meeting with the Caltronics agent in from California to locate an office. He and Klempner met at the Hyatt Regency for lunch. Larabee was also supposed to be there, but didn’t show up. The Caltronics representative was a young man named Morris—cocky, aggressive, and something of a smart-ass, according to Klempner, who’d spent most of the two hours listening to Morris describe his sales exploits, how many government contracts he’d landed for Caltronics since he’d joined the firm. “The guy bugged me, for some reason,” Klempner said. “Too flashy, too much talk—a goddamned latrine lawyer. He told me how much money he’d made the last ten years since he got back from Vietnam, every year his commissions bigger. He sold insurance for a while, then took a year off to study computer science, but even then made more money on the side than he’d made the year before. He was a manipulator, the kind who thinks he can hustle anyone, including me while he’s sitting there drinking Cold Duck, giving me all this shit. Maybe it was all that money he made, I don’t know, but he pissed me off.…”
They’d ended up back at Potomac Towers, where Morris had looked at a suite of offices available on the fourth floor. He’d looked at Klempner’s office on the floor above.
“We’re standing up there in my office,” Klempner said, “in my goddamn office, and this Morris kid, twenty-four hours in Washington, tells me I’m getting ripped off on the rent I’m paying. Then he takes me downstairs, down to this manager’s office, the same cheapskate I’ve been knocking heads with for five years, hustles this dude for that suite next door at a knockdown price, negotiates a contract on these two rooms if I want it, we sign and walk out. I’ve never seen anything like it. When this Morris tells me he’s going to be a millionaire by the time he’s thirty-three, I believe him.…”
“A real hustler, then,” Wilson said.
“Hustler! This guy Morris could sell warts at a beauty contest. You can’t believe the kind of nerve that kid has.”
“So it was his idea you move next door?”
“Not his idea, it just happened. I mean, he just wanted to show me he could do it. Afterwards, he said it would help swing the contract with Caltronics if I was interested, but that was just talk. That kid could make you believe anything. That’s why I was surprised when I found out that Morris was the Caltronics agent suspected of bribing that GSA contracting officer.”
“People like that have to succeed,” Wilson offered. “They can’t fail, ever. Go ahead.”
The Caltronics office opened a few months later, with Morris in charge. Klempner did a few small jobs for them as the office was being set up, on a straight fee basis, and Morris told him that the Caltronics lawyers in Los Angeles were drawing up a longer-term contract. “A couple of times we talked about the long-term contract. He asked me about a price, what I got when I was handling those pharmaceutical companies, and said I should go for something bigger. He says this is going to be a special contract. Real special. A complete study of Caltronics’ security situation—that’s what he called it, ‘security situation’—all of it wrapped up in this big report I was to do for them. Then one day at lunch, he tells me what he’s got in mind. Eighty thousand up front when I file an outline and fifty to follow when the final report is in. Can you believe that shit?”
“I think so,” Wilson said. “What kind of report?”
“What else?” Klempner asked.
Morris wanted to buy the status of the government’s case against Caltronics—wiretaps, FBI logs, summaries, anything in the dossier. He thought Klempner could get it for him.
“He tells me it’ll take a week to get the money together, the eighty grand, only he’s not saying how he’s going to make delivery. He’s slick, cagey, real sharp, not a guy who’s gonna make a mistake. All he tells me is that I’m to get this outline together and have it ready in five days. I’ll get a call on the fifth day, maybe late, maybe seven o’clock, and he’ll tell me where to drop the outline and where I can pick up the briefcase.”
“He trusts you by then?” Wilson said.
“I’m his buddy. Hell, yes, he trusts me.”
“Does he ask you whether anyone in Washington is working the case?” Wilson continued.
“Yeah. I tell him me. Just me and a bookkeeper down at the Justice Department, that’s all. The U.S. Attorney’s office out in L.A. may have a few people nosing around, but they’re on a cold trail.”
“When he makes his pitch, did he say why he picked you, why Signet?”
“He said he heard Signet was an FBI front and civil service salaries are lousy. Yeah, I know, that sounds stupid, but not when this kid Morris is talking.” Klempner got up from behind the desk. Wilson got up too and they moved through the door into the outer office, where Klempner turned on the coffee machine. “I think it was Larabee that fingered me for Morris.”
“He didn’t say why he wanted the Justice Department investigation, did he?”
“No, he just said he wanted the whole bag, not just the Justice Department case, not just the bribery case—I mean all of it, everything the Labor investigation unit had turned up, these two insurance companies, this skim that was going on. You figure what he wanted it for.”
“So what happened?”
Klempner shrugged. “I never got the telephone call. I was waiting here, right over there at the bench, rebuilding an old telephone tap. I waited until nine, I think it was. I never got the call. I figured Morris must have gotten cold feet or couldn’t get the money together. The next thing I heard, he’d disappeared with the eighty thousand. The lawyers next door were claiming a hundred, that he’d cleaned out the local Caltronics accounts. They were claiming embezzlement, conversion, I heard, but they don’t file charges.”
Wilson paused at the workbench, piled with electronic equipment, pressure sensors, and an exotic-looking device for reading an electric typewriter’s impulses. He turned to the telex machine, turned it on, heard the circuits come alive, and then turned it off again.
“What about the Caltronics teletype?” he asked. “Were you reading that too?”
“Yeah, but they didn’t use it much.” Klempner turned the dial of a cabinet safe and pulled open a lower drawer. He removed a sheaf of telex messages from a binder.
“Do you remember a telex to Rita Kramer from the West Coast, from her husband, Artie, warning her that I was a fed?”
Klempner didn’t remember. “The first time your name came up was when you walked through the back door over there.”
The snow was still coming down in the dimming light beyond the window, a furious whiteness battling the air. Wilson could sense his breath on the air, as if he were just entering a dark, cold house. “When was the eighty thousand to be delivered?” he asked. “On a Monday night?”
Klempner turned. “Yeah. Why?”
“You say you don’t know how or where the money was to be delivered, whether Morris was to deliver it himself or use a bagman?”
“He didn’t say. How come?”
“I think he had a bagman in mind. Morris to pick up your outline, someone else to deliver the briefcase.” He stood looking toward the window and then turned. “A Marx Brothers movie, like you said
once. It was a heist—a two-way heist. Pete Rathbone was going to heist the Justice Department cases against Caltronics through the front door, using Artie Kramer to do it, perfectly legal all the way, in broad daylight, while Strykker was trying to burgle the safe, find out just how much they had on him. He was nervous. Maybe he didn’t trust Rathbone. Maybe Morris just sold him a bill of goods. Morris is slick, all right, a very convincing talker.”
“You know Morris?” Klempner asked.
“The night Morris was to make the delivery, he got a telephone call downstairs,” Wilson said without answering the question. “Someone warned him off. Whoever it was told him the feds were just waiting to break the case wide open, that you were lying when you told him you could handle it.” He looked at the telex. “He even told him I was a fed, maybe trying to entrap Artie Kramer the way you were trying to entrap Morris. So he told him to hold up, not do anything until they could check it out some more, find out what we were up to. Lie low, just like Pete Rathbone told Artie Kramer. They were falling all over themselves. They still are.”
“Who called him?”
“I’m not sure,” Wilson said. “Probably Larabee knows. I think he lets Strykker use his telex. That’s probably where the message was sent telling Rita Kramer I worked for the Justice Department.”
In Klempner’s office, Wilson called Fred Merkle at home.
“Bernie Klempner and I want to talk to you, Fred. Could we get together at eight?” He listened and turned toward Klempner. “Tomorrow may be too late,” he said. “Tonight, O.K.? A U.S. marshal and a warrant.
“Do you think you could get Chuck Larabee to meet us at Fred Merkle’s office? Eight o’clock?” he asked Klempner after he hung up. “If you could, we could wrap this up tonight. I’ve got to go out to St. Elizabeths to check on something.”
8.
The exercise rooms of the men’s health club on the sixth floor of the K Street office building were deserted that snowy Friday evening except for the weight and body-bag room. Chuck Larabee had been working out alone when Klempner surprised him.
“Dog food,” Klempner said, pumping the leather medicine bag so violently against Larabee’s midsection that he went down again, his flushed face drenched with sweat, his lip cut, his gray sweatshirt soaked. “You don’t wanna go talk to Merkle, we’ll try dog food for a change. What do you figure people spend a year—ten, fifteen million? Come on, Larabee, tell me about dog chow. How much?”
He lifted Larabee by a limp arm, eased him back against the padded wall, and bent to retrieve one of the leather gloves that had fallen from Larabee’s dangling hand. “Come on, Chuck babe, try again. We go three rounds this time, you do the talking. I’ll only use my left, O.K.?”
Larabee, seeing his opportunity as Klempner pulled on the body-bag glove, swung groggily with his right hand but missed. Klempner, in coat and tie, did a small shuffle as he moved in. “Left hand up, right. That’s it, except higher. Now you’re getting it. Coming at you now, Chuck. Ready? That’s it, keep the left up there.” He dropped his own left and feinted with his right. Larabee took the feint, moved his hands, and Klempner smashed him sideways along the padded wall. Larabee reeled drunkenly along the wall, stumbled, and collapsed to his knees.
“What are you trying to tell me—you don’t know dog chow, is that it? What about something you know about? Something easy—like Morris. You don’t wanna talk to Merkle about Morris? Shit, you’re a tough customer, Chuck. You’re really making it tough on me. How about kid prostitutes—that your category? What about runaway kid prostitutes in the U.S.—a hundred, two hundred thou? Come on, Chuckie.…”
“Keep away from me,” Larabee muttered, drooling blood from his cut lip as he leaned exhausted against the padded wall.
“What do you say—a hundred thou?” Klempner continued softly. “Don’t be wrong, Chuck, I wanna keep you in one piece for Merkle. What do you think—got any ideas?” He picked Larabee up and draped him across the leather vaulting horse, walked around to the other side, and lifted Larabee’s chin with his ungloved hand. “Got an answer yet, Chuck? No? It’s the old gong show for you.” He knocked him off the vaulting horse. “Six hundred thousand kid prostitutes in the U.S.—runaways. Read about it in the barbershop magazine. Doesn’t that turn your stomach, Chuck? I mean, even a shit like you’s gotta have feelings. How about video games? You like Atari, Chuck. You play a little Atari over in that Crystal City pad of yours? Come on, man, there’s gotta be something you know about. You don’t know about Morris and that scam of his, we’ll play video games, right?”
“Leave me alone, you crazy …”
“Crazy what? Get it out, Chuck. Crazy what?” He dragged Larabee across the room and lifted him up against the body bag. “Hold on right there, just stand up, Chuck, like someone was taking your picture. That’s it. So how much are these video games gonna gross this year—two million, three million?” Larabee held to the swaying bag. “Come on, Chuck, give it some heavy thought. How much?” Larabee didn’t answer. Klempner hit the bag softly once, then a second time, then battered it away from Larabee’s embrace. Larabee stood there, exposed, and Klempner slammed him in the stomach.
“Hey, Chuck,” he said softly, bending over him again, “you were standing in the nitro zone, pal. Six billion, Chuck, that’s the gross—bigger than the movies. Was that what you were thinking? You gotta get it out, man, like what happened that night Morris disappeared. No use keeping it all in. Six billion, Chuck. That’s a whole lotta money for electric Ping-Pong, isn’t it? A whole lotta money for a bunch of cheesy functional illiterates the schools are turning out just so they can hang around the fucking arcades all day. They won’t turn out any better than me and you did, Chuck—me a sadist, you a goddamn pimp. What do you figure for a country that lets half a million kid prostitutes walk the streets up in New York and then spends a couple of billion dollars a year on dog chow and electric Ping-Pong? How does a shithead like you figure it, a fucking meatball in a classy gym like this that when a guy comes at him can’t think whether to hold up his dukes or his pants. You’re in a bad way, Chuck. So tell me about that Caltronics scam. Who was it warned Morris off that night? I’ve got a reputation to protect, asshole. Some of those guys down there at Justice think maybe I got a piece of that money.…”
Klempner rolled him over, flipped his arm behind his back, and locking his knee against Larabee’s midsection, brought the arm up. “Come on, Larabee. I’m gonna break your fucking arm, you don’t bend—”
But Larabee cried out and Klempner relented. He stood up and crossed the room to unlock the door. He stooped at the water fountain in the hall outside, red-faced. A small Filipino in white ducks, white sneakers, and white shirt padded up the corridor from the locker room with a few towels over his arm. He stopped to look in the door.
“You looking for something?” Klempner asked.
“Mr. Larabee.”
Klempner moved back to the door. “He’s been sparring, shadow boxing a couple of rounds.”
“I have to close up.”
“I’ll tell him, he’s all punched out.”
Klempner went back into the room and shut the door. “Come on, Larabee, let’s go. Where’s your self-respect, lying there like a goddamn douche bag.” He straddled him and lifted him by his waist, pumping air back into his lungs. “You were an old Navy man—right, Chuck? How about Vietnam? I heard you were in Vietnam. What’d you do—run the Saigon commissary?” Larabee’s mouth opened, he stirred crablike on the floor, and Klempner dragged him back against the padded wall. “What about combat stats over there in Vietnam, Chuck? You know anything about that?” He gently slapped his face and Larabee slowly opened his eyes. The knock came at the door. “Think about how many GIs got their wounds in combat, Chuck.”
The Filipino gym attendant stood at the door, wearing an overcoat and holding a gym bag. He said he had to leave.
“Tell you what I’ll do,” Klempner proposed, taking out his wallet. He removed five dollars. �
�It’s Chuck’s birthday. He says take your kids to the flicks. He’ll lock the door after him.”
“Tell him to turn the key twice.”
“Got you—twice. Twice, you hear that, Chuck?” He shut the door.
Larabee had slumped silently to his side, head against the mat as he gazed at the stooping Klempner with glazed, distant eyes.
“You’re gonna get a cardiac,” Klempner said even more softly. “You’re gonna get a fucking cardiac right here and on Monday morning that’s the way they’re gonna find you, just slumped over like that. Your lips are turning blue already; that’s a bad sign. I mean, a guy boozes too much, smokes too much, grunts around in the sack too much with these hookers, and then comes over here to work it all out, and it just breaks him all up inside. You’re feeling that now, aren’t you? Feeling it all inside, like the old ticker’s about to peel its skin. Your knees are dancing, like your chest. Feel your chest, Chuckie. Go ahead, feel it—what they call a fibrillation. That’s tough shit, Chuckie babe, because we’ve still got five rounds to go.…”
He jerked Larabee to his feet, slung one arm over his shoulder, and carried him across the room to drape him over the leather vaulting bar. Larabee grunted unintelligibly, his eyes rolled back in his skull, and he slid back to the floor mat, where he lay on his back, eyes open, blinking at the wire-caged lights overhead.
“You wanna tell me about it now, Larabee?” Klempner whispered, bending near. “Tell me what you’re gonna say when we go down and talk to Fred Merkle. I’m not gonna ask you again.…”
Larabee seemed to respond, holding his chest, his eyes half-open.
“Was it you called Morris that Monday night, told him to lie low?”
He was slow in answering and Klempner grabbed his arm.
His eyes closed again. It was a long time before he answered, as if he were carefully hoarding his breath in lungs that wouldn’t survive the night.
