“Sure,” Dennison said, “that’s exactly what I’m telling you, at least to think about. Something that could happen, and happen any time, even if it wasn’t involved this time. The badger game’s been around a long time you know, ever since Samson got involved with the hairdresser there, and there’s a reason: it works. Wouldn’t be too surprising if Mossi decided to try out a little of the neighborhood poon-tang on the new boy on the block, see if that was his weakness.”
“Mossi doesn’t know anything about me,” Dell’Appa said. “Didn’t even know who I was. Only what. He did know that I was a cop.”
“Yeah,” Dennison said, “well, I don’t wanna shock you or anything here, but as much as it may surprise to you hear it, you wouldn’t be the first cop, or the only State cop, either, who’d ever let his glands take over decisions his brains should’ve been making. Mossi if he sent her over could’ve figured: ‘Hey, maybe the guy’s got a weakness.’ Anyway, learn anything from her?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah, I did,” Dell’Appa said. “For one thing that when Mossi recommended a certain group of dogs, the ones from Error Kennels, he wasn’t giving me the swerve. I said: ‘Don’t come here that often, myself. Don’t know my way around yet. Guy I know said: “Bet Error’s. They give you your dollar, every day you need your dollar.” He givin’ me the leg there?’ She said: ‘No, those’re good dogs. Don’t always win but nobody’s dogs do. Error’s’ll give you a good race.’ So I bet ’em, and damn, they’re both tellin’ the truth. I won almost forty bucks there.”
“Turn it in at the Evidence locker,” Dennison said.
“Fuck you,” DellAppa said.
“Funny name for a kennel though, huh?” Dennison said. “Who owns it, Don Buddin or some other guy, played short like a man fightin’ bees?”
“No,” Dell’Appa said. “It’s a father-daughter combination. He bankrolls it. She trains the dogs. Everett R. Rollins, Olivia Rollins. ‘It’s her fulltime job,’ my new girlfriend tells me, ‘dogs’re what this lady does. She’s very good at this, too. You come down in the morning some time, see her out there schoolin’ them, you know? Very nice hand with the dogs. Figures of course. Just what you’d expect,’ talkin’ out of the side of her mouth, one Marlboro after another, ‘we’re better at nurturin’, stuff.’ Then she gives me this look and says: ‘Right? That’s why we’re so good with men. That’s what all men’re too—dogs.’ ”
Dennison snickered. “Yeah,” he said, “she’d be dangerous all right.”
“Maybe not quite as dangerous as the dog-lady’s daddy, though,” Dell’Appa said. “Last night, I got home, I modemed his name up into the system here. After all, he’s a registered breeder and so forth, his kennels’re licensed, all kinds-ah rules in that racket. Must be some files on him, right? You bet there’re files, files up the gump-stump. Stuff was all ready this morning. Waiting when I came in. This guy’s also a lawyer, practicing lawyer, and I think I saw him yesterday. The guy in the blue shirt with Mossi. I think furthermore I now know why Joe goes there, visits the track twice a week. I think he goes there to see Rollins.”
12
“Well, yeah, he does that, he sees Rollins,” Ernie said. “But also the dogs, they’re half his. It’s not only Ev Rollins he goes there to see, and that’s why it’s on Tuesdays and Thursdays: their dogs mostly race on those days.” The thick wooden door made it relatively quiet in the chapel/conference-room/library on the third floor at the rear of the main building at the Plymouth County House of Correction, but Dell’Appa could still hear the muffled distant din of over five hundred men locked up together in cell-blocks designed to hold about three hundred, their shouting and heavy footsteps on the black steel spiral staircases and corridor balconies in the central guardhouse, the intermittent crashing of the steel cell-doors opening and closing, tier by tier.
“I dread it,” he had told Gayle the night before. “As many times as I’ve done it, as many times as I’ve gone in, it’s never gotten one bit easier. I’ll never get used to it, if I lived to be a hundred and went in every day religiously, like some monk singing vespers or something, I still’d never get used to it. I hate everything about it. The noise; the stink, hundreds of men all jammed in together, good many of them probably none-too-clean when they were on the loose, but at least then they weren’t all packed together in a closed space; they were separate and out in the open air, and if they did start to cluster indoors, well, you could still get upwind of the bastards; spending at least eighteen hours of every day, stacked in bunks crammed in two to a room that isn’t big enough for a single in even a second-rate flophouse; yellin’ at each other all of the time, runnin’ their TV pillow-speakers just as loud as they can; sweating and hawking, belching and farting, greasy-meat and vile vegetable gases, jerkin’ off in their blankets; takin’ a shower in too much of a big hurry to get really clean, so they don’t take a dick up the ass, couple of times a week, max; the crowding, the being-confined all the time—Jesus, I hate all of it. Every time I go in I’m scared to death the guards’ll get confused, let the guy out that I went in to see and make me stay to finish his time.”
“Most people do,” she said. “Hate it, I mean. That’s why it’s such good punishment. Well, pretty much the best we’ve come up with so far; put it that way—for most people, just the idea of being locked up’s enough. And especially people who’ve had some secondary experience with confinement, visiting naughty relatives or something. They all hated it too. Well, all but a few of the ones I’ve had any contact with, at least. There were those two strange women that I saw out in Framingham, of course, those two who claimed to be witches and also claimed not to mind being in jail, but then they were all-around strange anyway. World-class strange. And who knows? Maybe they really were witches. Not Hallowe’en witches, I mean; real, honest-to-God, witches—after bedtime they were dematerializing themselves, flying out for a night on the town.”
Ernie Nugent was a thin sallow man in his late twenties. He had long, dull, black hair that he appeared to have combed only with his fingers, and his face was narrow under it. His torso did not fully occupy his clothing; both the collar of his dark-gray cotton work-shirt and the tee-shirt under it gaped away from his neck and collarbone. His eyes were grayish-green and lifeless, deeply-socketed like commercially-stocked samples of diseased tissue preserved for laboratory studies in pathology. His facial muscles were restless, paramecial, randomly moving the flesh around his mouth and on his forehead without any apparent purpose of communicative expression. “Him and Rollins’ve been partners in them dogs six-eight-ten-twelve years now, I guess. Long’s I ’member, least. Ever since before I’ve known him. Knew Ev Rollins, I mean, and that was back that summer there when Tyson got lugged out in Indiana there. For rapin’ that black girl that was in the beauty contest.”
“That wasn’t that long ago,” Dell’Appa said.
“What,” Ernie said distractedly, as though asking solely in order to appear polite. He sat in the oak chair across the broad dark conference table from Dell’Appa, his back to the safety-glassed–barred window overlooking the exercise yard and the two-story annex beyond it where the trusties were housed, closer to the crop fields and the pastures that they tended inside the chain-link perimeter. A steady gray rain ran down the glass; it seemed to dissolve the fluorescent light in the room, so that it was leaking out through the wet window into the dull sky beyond, above the cyclone fence and the concertina razor-wire, and Ernie, monochromed and insubstantial, looked as though he might be able to leak out along with it, if he wasn’t carefully watched.
“That Tyson got convicted in that rape case,” Dell’Appa said. “That wasn’t twelve years ago. Not even close to it.”
“No?” Ernie said. “Huh. I thought it was. You know? That’s what I thought it was.” He spoke softly and almost wonderingly, inspecting each of his words before fabricating the sound of it from the idea he had in his mind.
Dell’Appa cleared his throat. “Well, it doesn’t
really matter” he said. “What concerns me’s not so much when Joe Mossi bought his interest in the greyhounds as what else he does with Rollins.”
“ ‘With Rollins,’ ” Ernie said.
“Yeah, with Rollins,” Dell’Appa said. “Is Rollins his lawyer for him? Does he handle his legal work for him?”
“Oh, geez,” Ernie said, looking worried. “I wouldn’t think he’d be doing that, no. I mean, maybe he could, but I doubt it.”
“Why?” Dell’Appa said. “Why would that be so far-fetched an idea, a lawyer doing the legal work for a guy that he’s partners with? Rollins is a lawyer, isn’t he? Be the most natural thing in the world, I should think, him doin’ Joe’s legal work. ’Stead of him going out, hirin’ somebody else, payin’ out money, you know? And plus: They already know each other. So that’d be another advantage—better’n tellin’ someone else all his business.”
“Oh yeah,” Ernie said, “there’d be that, I guess. That could be, I suppose. That they could be doin’ that there.”
Gayle had asked what Ernie had done “to get him locked up in the first place. Is he some kind of career criminal, like this killer you’re after? Or was this just an unlucky break? A temptation too strong to avoid, so he snapped and he did it, got caught?”
“Oh no,” Dell’Appa had said. “He’s not in for anything he did. He’s been charged with doing something that they haven’t gotten around to trying him for yet, but what he’s in for right now’s for not doing something. A federal judge told him to do something, and our Ernie wouldn’t do it. He was quite impolite to her honor. He told her to go fuck herself. Or might as well’ve, at least.”
“Gracious,” she had said, “what brought that on?”
“He didn’t think they were treating him respectfully,” he had said. “What they’d done to him was catch him cashing winning pari-mutuel tickets, big bets good for large amounts, five hundred on a longshot that then leads from wire to wire, or two-buck bets on the exotic wagers—Pik-Six, all that stuff. Good for even larger. You cash one of those things, and you’ve got a year to do it after the winner comes in, you have to show identification and sign all kinds of tax forms before you get your money. And you don’t get all of it, either. They withhold income taxes for you, a convenience it’s not likely most appreciate.”
“Phony ID?” she had said.
“Oh no,” he had said, “it was Ernie’s ID. His Social Security, too. And the taxes they took out went on his return. All of that was in complete good order. That wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was that the tickets weren’t his. So the winnings weren’t either, you see.”
“Oh, he’d stolen the tickets then,” she said.
“Nope,” he had said, “no, he hadn’t. Hadn’t counterfeited them, either, which’s also been done by bad boys. He didn’t get them from their owners, didn’t even know who they were, lots of times, and the owners usually didn’t know specifically that he was the guy who was cashing them, but that was perfectly all right with them. They’d turned them over to a gentleman name of Chico, Chico Pell. Chico’s sort of a, well, I guess you could say he’s a factor. Chico handles investment accounts; paying and receiving. Most of his accounts are receivables. Some, but not many, ’re payables. Most of the time he collects. Everyone trusts Chico, all the sportin’ bloods. They invest in their expectations of the outcomes of athletic contests among humans and also contests of speed and ability of beasts, such as horses and dogs.
“Chico is a bookie, mostly, but he’s also an obliging, full-service kind of fella who keeps fungible people like Ernie around on his dance-card to perform other small services for his clients. They appreciate the extra attention, and they show that by paying Chico to provide it.
“One of those services is ten-percenting: in exchange for ten percent of the actual net-, not face-, value of a major winning ticket, Chico will have one of his flying squad of Ernies pretend to be the rightful owner of the ticket and collect the lovely boodle. Ernie’s an obliging lad and a hardworking one, within reason, but because very few of his financially rewarding occupations can be found on the books of any corporation or other business entity with a taxpayer-ID number, and none of his usual employers—very much including Chico—makes it a practice to withhold income taxes, Social Security, health insurance, or anything else from his wages, Ernie’s annual gross income reported to the IRS and the State Revenue Department consists solely and entirely of what’s withheld from his gambling winnings and reported by the tracks. All the rest of his cash is off the books.
“Ernie’s Ten-forty-EZ tax return—I assume it’s the short form he files—says he’s a gamblin’ man. Gambler’s his stated occupation, what he says he does for a living. It’s fairly hard, of course, for anyone to make a real good living off of gambling unless he not only works very hard at it but becomes very good at it, and also’s as lucky as hell. Certain kinds of gambling, I guess, lend themselves better’n most others do to being someone’s principal means of support, because if they didn’t the casino operators wouldn’t worry so much about blackballing card-counters from the blackjack tables. And high-stakes poker and bridge, I guess; skillful players with steel nerves can do pretty well. But pari-mutuel betting? For most people, a real sometime thing. They lose a lot more than they win.
“Now,” he said, “the law says you can deduct what you lose from what you win, but only to the extent of your winnings. So if you lose ten thousand bucks during the year but win five grand in bets taxed at the track, you can deduct only half of your losses. Which means that if you earned the other five grand you lost, by digging ditches or something, well, tough shit; even though it’s gone, you blew it at the track, you still owe the income tax on it.”
“Doesn’t seem quite fair, somehow,” she had said.
“It’s a tax law, Gayle,” he had said. “If it were fair it’d be a contradiction in terms. And to the Ernies of this world? Unfair, yeah, but they can live with it. They don’t play fair themselves. They’re used to the cracks and the crevices, you know? That’s where they spend their whole lives.
“What the Ernies do for the Chicos is bamboozle Uncle Sam into taxing the fat tickets at the low rates that apply to the Ernies’ tax brackets. They’re not going to come in below the poverty line, practically dare the lawmen to say: ‘What’s this, then? No net income at all?’ And then run a net-worth on them, come after them for tax-evasion? That’s how they hooked Al Capone, for Christ sake, back when the earth was still flat. Uh-uh, nothing showy and stupid like that. But you can be damned sure they’re not going to top out, either, thirty-one-percent marginal bracket. Their adjusted taxable incomes, after deducting their losses, ’re going to come out, oh, between twenty-three and twenty-seven thousand dollars, if a person could live their lifestyle on that, as they make damned sure some straight-shooter they know actually could, ’Cause he does.
“And that’s really all that they need. The federal hit they’re gonna take, depending on whether they’re single or married, it’s going to be somewhere between thirty-six-hundred, forty-eight-hundred bucks a year, all of which of course they more’n likely will’ve paid when they cashed the bets at the tracks. Which means the Big Uncle in Washington there will’ve collected somewhere between sixteen- and eighteen-percent in taxes on those bets, that otherwise would’ve gotten whacked almost double that, if the rich guy who really placed them’d collected them himself.
“It’s a really sweet deal all around. Ernie looks like he paid that seventeen percent. But it really didn’t come out of him; it got creamed off the top of the fat-ticket payoffs, and those payoffs weren’t his. Far as Ernie’s concerned, the only effects on him of cashing, say, fifty-thousand in tickets were first he could deduct twenty-five thousand of his own gambling losses, and then second pay no taxes himself on his fees for cashing the tickets. Which’ll usually run anywhere from two to five of Chico’s ten percentage points and are always under the table.”
She had looked uncertain. “Pete Ro
se, Cincinnati,” he said. “Remember that case, Charlie Hustle, Reds local hero goes down? Sure you do. Guy had a street named after him, the boulevard goes to the ballpark. So then he got himself sent to the can and barred from baseball for life, the can for breaking the law and the game for breaking the rules. What started him down the long slippery slope wasn’t betting on baseball; it was when he had some buddies cash a couple Pik-Six tickets at a racetrack to cut the taxes down, and he got caught at it.”
“Ahh,” she had said.
“Well,” he said, “that’s the kind of goodies Chico’s fat-cat customers get from buying that service from him. Guy with a winning ticket for, say ten-thousand dollars, it costs him ten percent of what Ernie nets, say nine-hundred bucks, so his own net is eighty-one hundred. If he’d cashed the ticket himself, in his thirty-one-percent bracket, doing everything upright and kosher, his net would’ve dressed out at sixty-nine hundred. By going off the books with Chico, paying Ernie to take his place on them, he’s pulled half of the teeth out of the jaws of the tax-bite.
“Now what the feds’d had in mind when they went after Ernie was not to take a piece off of him; he’s small-time stuff. No, what the feds had was a strong desire to put Chico away for a long rest. They thought Ernie might be helpful to them in this enterprise by providing sworn testimony about certain illegal gambling transactions that he’d carried out on orders from Chico. They invited him to come in and have a nice chat with the grand jury present, first taking the precaution of assuring his attention by obtaining an indictment charging him, not Chico, with using interstate telecommunications facilities to violate a State law, to wit: setting up and promoting a lottery. Ernie was registering a few purely local bets himself, sort of on the side, but that’s a federal offense if you use a phone to do it. But he hasn’t been tried for it yet.
“Well, Ernie was shy. He said he understood they most likely’ve got him pretty good on this pisspot charge that’ll get him thirty days, max, as a first-offender, probably not even that, but if that’s how they wanna spend their time and the taxpayers’ money, bringing guys in and convicting them on diddly-shit like that, well, he’d take it like the good sport he’s always tried to be. But as far as telling anybody any stories about this guy Chico they kept asking him about, that he didn’t recall knowing and really wasn’t even sure he’d ever heard of, he said in the first place he’d never been much of a storyteller anyway, and in the second place, even if he had been a well-known raconteur, he didn’t know any stories about any guy named Chico. So, if it was all the same to them, the feds, he thought he’d just as soon not do it and would like to be excused.
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