You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  I went and got the hubcap/doggie dish and started slopping the water over the both of us. The wetter the better. Then I collected various rags from around the room. I discarded the ones that had paint and what might be oil on them. That didn’t leave me enough. I had a T-shirt under my shirt, and I stripped that off. With a knife from my kit, I cut it up. I needed a face mask and Mario needed shoes. I didn’t believe that I was making shoes for a dog, but I was. If he survived at all, his coat would protect most of him, but the pads of his paws, tough as they were, would almost certainly suffer. Then he would lie around the house while he convalesced, expecting to be catered to, Joey or me having to carry the son of a bitch out every time he wanted to piss or shit. Not a chance.

  Having cut his cute little doggie slippers, I didn’t have any rope to tie them on. I sliced up telephone line. The building was going to be out of service anyway.

  The smoke kept getting thicker. I was staying low as I could, but it was already stinging my eyes so badly that I was blinking more than looking, and I was holding a rag to my face to breathe through. The dumb mutt was shaking the water off himself.

  I tied my face mask on like Jesse James, splashed myself one last time for luck, and tried to think of what else I should do before I made my exit in a puff of smoke. There was something. My hands. I wrapped them in rags. I stuck a couple more into my collar and made sure my jacket was zipped up all the way.

  I wasn’t entirely sure that Mario would follow me, so I put the leash on him. If he had too much sense to leap into a blaze just because I did, I was going to drag him. Carrying him would be a bit much, but no way was I going to go home and explain to Joey how I’d left the hound behind.

  I hadn’t closed the swollen door all the way the last time I had opened it. This time it was going to be easier. I tried to breathe deep and ended up coughing and choking.

  I yanked the door open. Sure enough, there was a fire out there. Smoke rushed in. Heat hit us in a wave. I made a whimpering sound, then shut it off because I was losing precious air that way, and started to make my dash. After a brief hesitation, probably due to incredulity, Mario followed, then leaped ahead. As long as he was going to do it, he was going to spend as little time doing it as possible. He was brighter than I had given him credit for.

  I didn’t see much.

  My head was tucked down. Smoke and heat hurt my eyes so that I only dared to look in blinks, intermittent strobes of terror.

  The footing was terrible. Fallen pieces of whatever uttered the floor, and the floor itself was buckling.

  I stumbled. My feet went out from under me. I caught myself on my hands and kept going, crouching, slipping, tripping, running, trying to hold what air I had and taking very shallow breaths through the cloth.

  It was noisy. Terribly, terribly loud. Around me and in me, as fear-propelled blood pounded in my head. It was not a long time. It was also forever. I was getting dizzy from lack of air, I guess, because I banged into a wall.

  But I was doing fine, by the standards of the situation, until I got to the stairs. They were partly burned away and partly still burning. Certain that the center would give way, I went up staying close to the wall. My jacket was starting to go, and I kept brushing my hands over my hair, thinking it was on fire.

  Then a step, or steps, did give. I was down, trying to yank my foot out of some kind of mess. Then I think I was crawling, my hands clenched in fists inside the rags to protect them. I didn’t want to die.

  There was barking. Barking? I had hoped there was sex after death, but dogs? Hands, good, big, strong hands, grabbed at me. They pulled at me. I was up the final bumps and out of the fire. The noise stopped. The big hands still held me. I kept my eyes closed, and someone slapped an oxygen mask over my face. I breathed.

  I like oxygen. Some folks like their whiskey, some swear by food, good coke can be a Rolls-Royce cruising, Demerol is peace, the opiates are sweet dreams, acid heads chat with gods, but me, give me that stuff we breathe. Talk about sniffing, my oh my oh my …

  I sat up and opened my eyes. A very large person with black skin, in one of those costumes—big gloves, big boots, long heavy coat, and a funny hat—was looming over me. Mario was there too. Singed all over, and sooty to boot, but very nonchalant about it. I started coughing and spitting.

  “Your buddy here,” the fireman said, ruffling the beast’s neck, “he saved your ass.”

  “Yeah?” I said. Mario looked positively smug, considering that he’d lost his whiskers.

  “I heard him barking at the basement stairs. Then I seen you stumbling at the bottom and dragged you up,” he said with excessive admiration. Mario hadn’t made any effort to drag me out himself. But he had made the call. That was something, I guess.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He’s a credit to his race.”

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Is this something official?” I asked. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was start filling out forms.

  “Nothing like that,” he said, so I told him. He pulled off his gloves and took a tiny spiral pad and a little stub of a pencil out of his pocket and wrote it down. He asked me how many s’s and how many l’s.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Well, you just come out of there, so maybe you know what it takes to go in. For some, it seems it’s easier than for others, to keep on going in. For me, it’s not so easy. So what I do is, every time I get somebody out, I put their name on my list. See, your name is going on the list now, and that is going to help me keep on going in.”

  “Yeah,” was all I could say.

  “Then I give them my card, if I have the opportunity to do so,” which he proceeded to do, his big hands fumbling inside his coat to get one. “And I ask them if anything good should happen to them, if they would be so kind as to drop me a postcard and let me know.”

  “Like what kind of thing?”

  “Oh, most anything. They have a baby, or graduate from school, get a better job or”—he smiled—“any job. Or do something good, you know.”

  Then I started to shake. I couldn’t help it. My body was just doing it. And to cry. Tears came down my cheeks and mucus from my nose. I put my hands over my face.

  “You’ll be all right,” he said, patting me on my shoulder. “I got to go back in there now.”

  16.

  The Strange Case of Philip Buono

  I WAS A GOOD boy during my convalescence.

  I read the red herring. Which was unfortunate. Before I read it, my distaste was a vague, nonrational thing based on a cluster of half-baked prejudices. Once I had the facts, my instincts were confirmed and I could be righteous. The down payment would exceed what we had on hand. The mortgage payments, plus estimated monthly maintenance, would exceed our rent by 50 percent.

  Glenda pointed out that the red herring was just a first offering. That if the tenants opposed it, then Wirtman would have to come back with a lower offer. Get involved! Organize!

  That was true. It was also true that the monthly maintenance was only Wirtman’s estimate. It was not guaranteed, not stabilized, and would become the responsibility of the new owners. Us. I had one of my apocalyptic visions. A house divided. The Spenders, who want to beautify, improve, maintain. The Savers, who want to save. Then splinter groups. Cold stares in the elevator. Snide remarks in the laundry room. Long harangues from neighbors I’ve never seen before. Leafleting. Board meetings. Open meetings. Closed meetings. Cabals.

  Glenda pointed out that it meant owning something! Rent was money down the drain. We could have something to show for our money! If we couldn’t make the mortgage and maintenance, we could turn it around and take the windfall profit, which would be tremendous.

  But that only works if you don’t live in what you’re selling. If you live there, you have to replace it. Where is the profit if the only available replacements cost as much as or more than what you sold?

  “We don’t always have to live in Manhattan,” she said. “We co
uld actually live better, in a lot of ways, somewhere else.”

  Daddy’s gonna be a commuter. Daddy’s gonna have a lawn to mangle. And a driveway. I wish she hadn’t said it. We all have our perverse tendencies, our dirty little urges. But the courteous thing to do is to keep them to ourselves. I really, really wish she hadn’t said it.

  I also went to the library.

  To read up on Randolph Gunderson. I understood that the downside risk was excessive. But I had just died, almost, on a job where the downside was apparently minimal. Besides, I like reading. I owed it to everyone to make an informed decision.

  My sources were the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the pop magazines like Time and Newsweek. Once Gunderson had his problems, Fortune and Rolling Stone did the best work.

  There must have been an official biography prepared by the White House press people. In the gushy period before the rumors, the special prosecutor, and the Scorcese killing, all the early pieces had come from a single source. Randolph Gunderson was portrayed as the proverbial more or less poor boy, born in the urban equivalent of a log cabin, who made it big.

  His grandfather emigrated from Sweden and bought some farmland about twenty miles north of New York City. One imagines that if he had simply hung on to it, the family would have become rich when the area turned into suburban Westchester. But by the time young Randolph was dirtying his diapers, the family was propertyless and living in a small rented house in Yonkers, about a half block from the wrong side of the New York Central tracks.

  His father was a clerk. His mother was a housewife. At one point she also worked part time at a dry-cleaning establishment.

  The bio went on to say that Randolph had worked his way through school. He attended the City College of New York, which was free in those days.

  He applied to law school, but by the time he was admitted it was 1942. Instead he enrolled in OCS, stout lad, received a commission as a lieutenant, and rose to captain by the time he was demobilized. If he had served in combat, or in any overseas capacity, the bios were the sort that would have trumpeted the information. Nothing was said, so I presumed there was nothing worth saying.

  Still, he was entitled to the benefits of the GI Bill. With that and a job, he was able to afford Fordham Law. He was not in that elite upper sliver of the class that gets invited to join the powerhouse Park Avenue firms or the great Wall Street squabblers of capital. He became a regular, small-time Bronx attorney, doing what they do—your mortgage, Fred’s divorce, Mrs. Mulligan’s probate, my accident claim—mostly pulling generic forms from the file and filling in the blanks with a specific name and number.

  In the mid-fifties he entered that period of his professional life which became the most highly touted when the advice and consent of the Senate was requested for his confirmation. He became a civil rights lawyer, in the forefront of the battle for housing integration, helping deserving persons of color find homes beyond the black and white lines of the ghetto.

  Later, when the policies of the Justice Department seemed to be specifically antiminority, Gunderson and his defenders pointed backward to that period of time, citing it as evidence of his commitment to equal opportunity and proof that the new code words—“anti-quota,” “non-compulsion,” “reserving remedies only for direct victims of segregation”—were expressions of idealism rather than reaction.

  True or false, his altruism did him no lasting harm. It was immediately afterward that his real estate career took form and took off. He started in the Bronx, moved out into the suburbs, down into Manhattan. He got onto what was going up and stepped off before things went down. The PR people had him painted as an astute prognosticator. He was a serious contributor to local political campaigns by then. Real estate money is the leading source of campaign financing in New York City.

  Real estate naturally led to construction, development, and management.

  By the time he left it all—temporarily and in good hands—to become attorney general, most of his holdings were organized into two companies, Empire Properties and the Sun Group, both closely held. Dun and Bradstreet, in the year before Gunderson left for government service, reported that Empire, which operated primarily in the Northeast and included Empire State Estates, Empire Administration, Endview Construction, 28th Street Corporation, and several others, had net earnings of $11,000,000 on property valued at $103,000,000. The Sun Group, named for his wife, Susan “Sunny” Gunderson, controlled Sunshine Properties and Sunrise Developments in Florida, Sunview Developments and Sunview Estates in Arizona, Highrise-Sunrise in Texas, and Sunbelt Industrial Parks scattered around a whole bunch of those type states. According to D&B, it had reaped a return of $9,750,000 on $164,800,000.

  There was a partner and apparently some limited partners, and there were investors, and then each of those companies that the two main groups had controlling interest in was organized in a different way, some of them even publicly traded. No one but the IRS would know how much Gunderson ended up with officially, and even his own accountants might not know how much he actually netted.

  In any case, his self-declared net worth was $18,000,000, making him the second-richest man in the cabinet. That sounded low to me. Maybe it referred to cash on hand and what he had in his NOW account.

  Wealth brought a new political awareness. He abandoned his hereditary affiliation with the party of the urban prole and became a true-believing Republican. Excepting local politics, of course, where business is business and ideology is a press release that comes only once a year.

  When another semi-log cabin legend who had started on the left then seen the right came along, Gunderson got on the bandwagon. Early. Back when Reagan was losing the nomination to Nixon. And then losing to Ford. Still with him in ’79 against a world of nonbelievers. Not many figured that Reagan would ever play the leading man. There were all those chimp jokes. And most of Ron’s favorite anecdotes contained errors in fact gross enough to make Gerald Ford sound like a scholar. Back when James Reston of the New York Times could say things like: “The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken seriously by the media and particularly by the President. It makes a lot of news, but it doesn’t make much sense.”

  Gunderson dug deep into his own pockets, then into his corporate pockets, which were deeper still. When he reached the limit the law allows, he organized some PAC pockets. It added up to $280,000 for the primaries and $960,000 for the campaign against Carter. There were whispers of larger, unrecorded sums, but there always are among campaign gossips, just as movie fans whisper about which star is in the closet.

  Ron liked Randy.

  He wanted him around. Randy became one of the few Easterners on the transition team, then part of a presidential advisory group. When, a year into the first term, the physicians at Walter Reed diagnosed Attorney General Lamont Reever’s cancer, the President selected Gunderson as his replacement.

  An FBI background check is standard practice. The Bureau can then alert the President that his man has been arrested in public rest rooms for solicitation, has been a member of the Klan or the Communist party, or has ties to organized crime. The candidate is then sent to the Senate for confirmation. The appropriate committee queries the nominee’s competence, qualifications, and views. They want to know if he has been unethical, illegal, weird, or perverse, so the senators call in the FBI, to learn what the FBI has already, presumably, told the President:

  SENATE CONFIRMATION HEARINGS

  SPECIAL AGENT VERNON W. MUGGLES: The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in a background check involving 4,220 man-hours, has discovered nothing detrimental about Randolph Gunderson and knows of nothing that would serve to bar him from properly undertaking the position and duties of Attorney General of the United States.

  Even Gunderson’s family came up clean. He was a one-wifer. They were churchgoers. His son had a college degree, a job, no arrests, and since he had a wife and child, was presumed heterosexual. His daughter had never disrobe
d in front of a camera. The family spaniel mated only under the supervision of an accredited AKC breeder.

  Randy was a shoo-in.

  That lasted two weeks. Then Phil Buono saw Randolph Gunderson on television. Buono was a banker turned federal witness. Testifying about his money-laundering schemes, drug money, casino money, and political money had become his full-time occupation. He told federal prosecutors that he had met their new boss.

  Time

  ______________________________

  THE STRANGE CASE OF PHILIP BUONO

  Philip Buono thinks of himself as an artist.

  Federal prosecutors admit that the Ocala, Florida, banker has a “remarkably fertile and agile mind. His schemes have a marked originality.” They concede that they would never have been able to indict Philip, let alone convict him, if he had not come forward himself. “But,” Bill Parkins, the tough, craggy-faced, senior member of the Strike Force team, points out, “that mind was a mind wasted. Think what he could have done if he had used his powers for good.”

  Defense attorneys in cases arising from Buono’s testimony have a different reaction. Cleveland-based Milt Glaser, representing alleged mobster Steve Susman, uses the phrase “delusional paranoiac.” Don Joe Baron, representing millionaire Rafael Ramos Santana de Castro (being tried in absentia while the Justice Department seeks his extradition from Colombia), suggests “premature senility.” Aston Johnson Galt (attorney for Don Liccavolo) has retained psychoanalyst Lars Wittgenstein as an expert witness. “I have not had the opportunity to meet with the subject personally. But I have observed him extremely closely, with great acuteness. I have interviewed intensively with associates and family members. What I might suggest is personality weakened by excess, subsequently distorted by religious mania, falling into a semiotic schizophrenic state. Certainly delusional.”