Money Men

by Gerald Petievich

  "On the other hand, counselor, I have nothing to gain," Waxman said, smirking.

  Carr waited a few minutes before speaking. "Yes, you do."

  "What's that?"

  "You will have our word that we will not put you completely out of business."

  Waxman took out a monogrammed handkerchief and wiped his head, neck, and mouth.

  Kelly accelerated onto the freeway at Ninth Street.

  "Who are you people? Where are we going? What do you mean put me out of business? Jesus Christ!" Waxman said. He rolled his window down a few inches.

  "I'll tell you what I mean," Carr said, leaning back in the seat. "If you don't tell us, the heat will be on full blast the minute you get out of this car. Tomorrow you and your secretary get subpoenas to the federal grand jury. I guarantee TV cameras will be there when you appear. I'll contact every one of your clients and ask them the same questions I asked you. I'll put the word out on the street that you are a snitch; that you're ready to turn on all the big dealers in town. We'll camp out in front of your office and your home. I'll dedicate my life to fucking you over. No one in his right mind would want you to back a deal. You'll be back to chasing ambulances."

  Waxman grabbed the front seat with both hands. He spoke to Kelly.

  "Stop the car! I want out. Let me out right this minute! Right now! I said right now!" He tapped Kelly's shoulder.

  Kelly speeded up. "Keep your hands off me, you dirty, shit-eating bastard. You filthy, rotten, mother-fucking Communist shyster," he snarled.

  Waxman's eyes became big.

  Carr misted in the back seat and faced him.

  "Your crummy little brain has figured everything out, hasn't it?" Carr said. "You are going to pull every political string in town the moment you can get to a phone. You're going to call the United States attorney and every political hack in town and tell them how the T-men threatened you. You think you can get us reprimanded and taken off the case. Well, if your connections are as good as everybody says, you're probably right. We would be taken off the case. Nothing else would happen to us though, because you have no evidence. If we'd talked in your office, you could have recorded everything, but as it stands now, it's your word against ours, and I guarantee that we will have our story together."

  The lawyer folded his arms and sat back. "I want to go back to my office. Right now. I demand to go back right now. I insist that..."

  "But here's the punch line," Carr said. "After you get us taken off the case, we're going to wait until everything is just right and then we're going to catch you alone and beat you to death."

  Waxman's jaw dropped. "What?"

  "Beat you to death," Carr said. "We're going to beat you to death with our bare hands because we will be so pissed off. You have so many enemies in town no one will even suspect us."

  Waxman turned his head. "You are threatening me," he said to the window.

  "That's right, you subhuman, chickenshit pimp," Kelly said.

  He took the Alvarado Street off-ramp. A few blocks farther he slowed down and stopped next to Echo Park Lake. He turned off the engine. Smog-colored ducks coasted on greenish water. The lake was outlined by graffiti-covered palm trees and overflowing trash cans.

  Kelly parked and leaned an arm on the back of his seat. "I say why put off till tomorrow what you can do today?" He smiled strangely at the lawyer.

  The lawyer swallowed and turned his head. He stared out the window. He cleared his throat three times. "You people are up tight for nothing. You're off base. I don't know anything that can help you. You may not believe me, but I actually have no information on the topic you are interested in. I swear to God. You're wasting your time talking to me... and your threats don't frighten me. You want this guy pretty bad, don't you?" The lawyer's lower lip trembled. He quickly rubbed it with the back of his hand.

  "All I want is what you know," Carr said. "No more, no less."

  "Once I had a client who was charged with stealing some of those ducks over there; he was charged with grand-theft duck, believe it or not," said Waxman, with a nervous laugh. "He never did say what he was going to do with them. He wouldn't cop out even to me." He paused. "What makes you think a red-haired guy was involved?"

  "You first," Carr said.

  Waxman spoke in a monotone. "There is a chap named Red Diamond, just out of T. I., a con man, who is hurting for bucks. The sharks are after him. He came to see me a few days ago and wanted money. I shined him on. He's the only red-haired guy I can think of. Ronnie was a walk-in. He came in yesterday. I'd never seen him before. I never would have guessed Red Diamond. Red lives in Hollywood somewhere. That's all I know."

  Carr nodded to Kelly in the rearview mirror.

  Kelly started the engine and drove in the direction of Waxman's office. During the trip, Waxman told them three times that threats of any kind had no effect on him. Neither Carr nor Kelly spoke. Kelly pulled up in front of the modern glass structure, and Waxman got out without saying a word.

  Kelly drove two blocks to a coffee shop. The waitress smiled when he asked for extra hash browns, and an extra bottle of ketchup.

  "Do you think he will cause a stink?"

  "I don't think so. But that's the chance you take. It's a possibility."

  "Jesus, I hope not," Kelly said. "Why do you think he talked?"

  "I think he just figured why not? Nothing to lose for him, and after all, they did snuff out one of his people last night."

  "What if what he told us was bullshit, and he makes a complaint to the U.S. attorney, says we coerced him?"

  The waitress poured coffee.

  "As the U.S. attorney would say, that's an 'unsubstantiated allegation,'" Carr said. "Not enough evidence for prosecution. I think we would beat the rap."

  ****

  SEVENTEEN

  It was dark. Red Diamond's insides fluttered as if a flock of birds was trying to fly out his ass.

  He sat behind the wheel of the Cadillac and waited. The coffee-shop parking lot was half full. He watched the back door. It was shift-change time.

  He had no particular strategy. It would be strictly "play it by ear."

  Mona, looking tired, in a spotted waitress uniform, came out the back door carrying a purse. She headed for a battered Volkswagen.

  Red got out of the Cadillac and rushed across the lot. He opened the car door and slid into the passenger seat.

  Mona was starting the car engine. "What do you want?" Her jaw was set.

  "I just wanted to talk for a few minutes."

  "Get out of my car."

  "I know what you probably think of me, but that's what I want to talk about. This last stretch has brought me to my senses. No lie. I've finally wised up." He wished she would at least look at him.

  "Get out of my car." She folded her hands across her chest.

  "Maybe you don't have any feeling for me now, but there was a time you did. You shouldn't forget that. You owe yourself a few minutes just to listen. For the sake of the way we used to be."

  "You are a liar. You aren't capable of telling the truth. You're sick. Get out of my car."

  "All I want to say is that I have some great things in the fire now, some really positive things. For once, I actually have cleaned up my act. I know this idea will sound far-out, but I would like to see us together again. I promise you'll be able to live well, even better than when I had the place in Long Beach. I don't like to see you slinging hash. It hurts me. You deserve better. We could move into a nice place in Burbank or somewhere right now. I've got some cash. I mean you wouldn't even have to sleep with me at this point. That would be up to you. Completely your choice."

  Her face turned red. She faced him.

  He stared at her panty-hosed legs, the tiny waist that his hands once fit perfectly around, the firm breasts that had been his to tease.

  "Why should it make any difference if we sleep together?" she said with a strained smile.

  "Well, I..."

  "I mean, it shouldn't make any
goddamn difference who I sleep with ever again, should it?"

  "That was something...a one-in-a-million situation. It would never happen again, as God is my witness, and I wouldn't say that if I didn't really mean it..."

  "You asshole!" Tears glistened in her eyes. "You've never meant anything you said! You are sick! You did the one thing to me I could never forgive, and here you are back again. Maybe you've forgotten. I was your wife and you made me turn tricks to pay off your debts. I became a whore to save your ass! Not that my life had been a bed of roses...but I had never been a goddamn whore. Sucking off ten stinking-fat businessmen a night until I got you off the hook. And what did you do? Pulled another of your capers, one of your 'operations,' and you went to prison anyway." The tears almost jumped from her eyes.

  Red put his hand on her waist. He had to touch it. It felt the same as ever. The tears were, psychologically speaking, a good sign, he thought. The barrier was breaking down.

  She sobbed loudly. Suddenly, she stuck a hand into her purse and pulled out something with a red wooden handle. "Get out!" she screamed, and stabbed toward his chest with an ice-pick. He used his hands to shield himself. The ice-pick pierced his palm. "You asshole! I hate you"' Mona shrieked.

  Red sprang out of the car. The ice pick was stuck through his hand. He stared at the speared hand and gave a deep animal moan. "Bitch, bitch, dirty bitch!"

  Mona started the rattly engine of the VW. He jumped out of the way. The car sped out of the parking lot.

  It took a few minutes to get up the courage to pull the ice-pick out of the wound so he could drive himself to a hospital.

  "How did it happen?" said a nurse in her thirties with a hair-do like Mona's. She pushed his hand into a mixture of hot water and disinfectant. It stung so much he almost passed out.

  "Chopping ice in a freezer at a party," Red said. "Hated to leave. All my friends were there. Henry Winkler, Larry Hagman, the Gabors."

  "Really?" She pulled his hand out of the water.

  "Actually, they're my clients. I run an advertising agency. TV commercials, that sort of thing."

  "Must be an interesting job." She smiled and filled a hypodermic syringe.

  "I guess you could say that," he said.

  The clerk was prematurely bald and attempted to hide the fact by wrapping his few remaining hairs in a circle on top of his head. He spoke, balancing a pipe between his teeth.

  "Sorry, Charlie, I can't allow you to review any files unless you have a warrant or a subpoena. Federal Parole Office regulations in accordance with the privacy act. You know how it is." Having said this, he returned to his newspaper-covered desk and sat down.

  Carr and Kelly walked past the clerk and found a file cabinet marked "D." Kelly pulled open the drawer. The clerk turned a page of the newspaper.

  There were three files bearing the name Diamond. Only one was current.

  Carr glanced quickly over reports in the file: "sociopathic personality," "reacts in a hostile manner," "blunted emotional effect" "lacks positive value judgment," "poor communicative skills."

  He opened a large envelope stapled to the inside of the file. He removed a thick stack of typed pages titled "Counseling Session Transcript. Prisoner Rudolph Diamond (#40398654). True Name: Rudolph Spriggs." The first page was a statement signed by Diamond giving permission to record the session for "study purposes."

  Carr read:

  Counselor: Had this ever happened before?

  Diamond: It happened a lot when I was a kid. I think it had something to do with the sound of a train whistle. This may sound weird, but my mother's house was near the railroad tracks and when a train whistle would blow I could feel it all the way through my body, sort of as if the sound entered through the hole in my pecker. I had this terrible feeling of fear at my mother's house. And the train whistle was part of it somehow. I had trouble urinating when I was afraid. That was my first memory of having problems taking a leak.

  Counselor: And you believe this affected your working life?

  Diamond: After I quit high school I went to work in a bottle factory in Oakland and when I went into the bathroom to piss...uh, urinate, I just couldn't. I couldn't relax enough to urinate when other people were around. So I quit.

  Counselor: And this affected your subsequent employment?

  Diamond: What would you do if you worked in a factory with one of those giant cement bathrooms? You know, lots of urinals, and every time you went in to take a leak there were other people there and you couldn't go. Like there was no way. Well, you'd do what I did. You'd quit. This happened to me over and over again. I couldn't hold a job and I started to get into trouble to get money. The first thing was the phony raffle tickets. I sold them and kept the money. I got caught. You can see that on my rap sheet there. I did twenty days. I was just a kid.

  Counselor: Uh-huh. What were these other arrests...there? In the fifties.

  Diamond: Pyramid schemes. You know, chain letters. At the time everyone was doing it. I didn't even know it was illegal until it was too late.

  Carr skipped fifteen or so pages.

  Diamond: So after I got out...it was my second prison sentence...I bought this bar in Long Beach. Nice place, but eventually guys I knew from the joint kept coming around and got me involved in phony race-track tickets. I didn't have anything to do with printing, you understand. It was a wrong-place/right-time sort of thing. They got me on a conspiracy.

  Counselor: The rap sheet says accessory to murder.

  Diamond: That's the way it wound up. It was an argument over the tickets. They used a gun I had behind the bar for protection...I'm not trying to make excuses. I don't want you to get the wrong idea...

  Carr began flipping pages rapidly.

  "He sounds like a confidence man," Kelly said.

  "The urinary-problem act shows great imagination," Carr said. "I wonder if he got the private cell he wanted?"

  Finally he found a prison status sheet signed by a counselor recommending that Diamond be provided with a single cell for medical reasons. "Here it is," he said.

  Kelly laughed.

  Carr flipped through to the last page of the folder. It read:

  Details of Offense-Pre-Release Summary

  Parolee Diamond acted as a principal in a major stock swindle involving the fraudulent sale of undeveloped tracts of land near the Colorado River. During the course of this conspiracy he was also involved in a confidence scheme involving the proposed sale of nonexistent smuggled gold to a wealthy Los Angeles jeweler. Diamond and two accomplices drove the jeweler from Las Vegas to a pay phone in San Diego to await a phone call from a supposed Mexican gold smuggler, who was to deliver the contraband. The jeweler refused to part with the money in his briefcase until he saw the gold. When the phone rang, the jeweler stepped out of the vehicle to answer it. At this point Diamond and his accomplices grabbed his briefcase from him and departed in their vehicle at a high rate of speed. The jeweler fired at Diamond's vehicle with a .38 caliber revolver, wounding the driver. The driver was subsequently admitted to a hospital near San Ysidro suffering multiple gunshot wounds. He implicated Diamond and agreed to testify for the government, as did the jeweler. Federal prosecution was authorized since Diamond and his accomplices had crossed state lines during commission of the crime. Parolee Diamond was convicted on all counts and completed the full five years of his sentence, no time off for good behavior.

  Carr tore Diamond's photograph from inside the folder.

  "This is our man. He's a rip-off artist," Carr said. He took the mug photos of red-haired men out of his coat pocket and flipped through them.

  "What are you doing?" Kelly asked.

  "Diamond's picture wasn't among the photos we were checking out. We would never have found him." Carr dropped the photos into the wastebasket.

  "Here's his current address." Kelly took a pen and small note pad from his inside coat pocket. "It's 4126 Marshall Avenue. If I remember right, this should be just above Hollywood Boulevard; toiletland,
U.S.A." He wrote down the address and put the note pad back in his pocket.

  ****

  EIGHTEEN

  Carr closed the folder and put it back in the file drawer.

  "We headed for Hollywood?" Kelly smiled and rubbed his hands.

  "Not yet," said Carr, leaning against the cabinet. He stared at Diamond's mug shot. "I think we'd better talk to the U.S. attorney."

  "But we don't have enough for a warrant on Diamond."

  "We do for Ronnie, because we can identify him. We saw him go into the motel room. We can get a John Doe warrant for assault on a federal officer. It's best to have the warrant in hand when we make the pinch. Then there'll be no question about procedure when he goes to court."

  "You mean we set up a surveillance on Diamond and wait until he meets with Ronnie, then make the pinch, right?"

  "Right." Carr flicked Diamond's mug photo with his finger.

  "If we start a surveillance," Kelly said, "we might end up following him around from now till hell freezes over and he might never meet up with Ronnie."

  Carr said, "What happens if we pick up Diamond and he won't talk? You know the odds. He refuses to cop out and we have to let him go; he calls Ronnie and tips him off. Ronnie splits and we'll never find him."

  Kelly rubbed his eyes. "I guess you're right. I just don't like he idea of getting the mushhead U.S. attorneys in on the case too soon. You know how they are."

  Carr nodded.

  "Well, I guess it's up the elevator to the Ivory Tower." Kelly sighed.

  They walked past the clerk.

  "Wait a second, you guys!" said the clerk. "Whataya say for the game tonight? Dodgers or Pirates?"

  "Pirates all the way," Carr said.

  "I hope you're right. I've got ten bucks on 'em." He folded the sports page in half

  "Good luck," Carr said.

  In the elevator, Kelly pushed the button for the thirteenth floor.

  "Let me do the talking," Carr said.

  The elevator door opened onto a large and handsomely carpeted waiting room. Smiling photos of the president and the attorney general stared at one another from spotless walls. Air conditioning made the room chilly.