And he had my sympathy.
The answers he was going to get from me were not going to satisfy him one little bit, and no amount of pressure was going to make them any better, because I didn’t have any clearer idea of what was going on than he did.
But I did have more information...
Carefully measuring the words, I set the front part of my mind to work giving logical and—mostly—accurate responses to whatever the homicide investigators said or did, and wandered into the back room to take inventory.
It was a real mess back there.
Keeping my mouth closed when Maxey identified the dead man in the hospital bed as her husband had seemed like the best thing to do at the time; I had assumed that she would have a good reason, and if the one she had wasn’t the best in the world, it was at least good enough to keep me from walking over to the nearest phone and dropping a dime on her. The craziness with the aces and eights that had turned up there and in the Voice of Heaven’s mail just before his wife’s car blew up connected the two killings, of course. But it hadn’t changed my mind about letting Maxey keep her secret as long as she thought she had to. She was scared. She had a right to be. And I couldn’t see enough of the cards yet to do anything but check.
And then there was the part that not even Maxey knew about yet. My own hole card.
Jorge Martinez.
Little Trouble.
Try as I might, I could think of no reasonable way to connect him with anything that had happened. It made no sense at all. Danny DiMarco was dead, and Jorge had helped to make him that way, but I just couldn’t believe he had ever met the man. Poor dumb Terrence Lyle McDuff was dead, and Little Trouble had helped make him that way, too. But he hadn’t quite got it done and someone else—presumably a phoney nurse in an outdated uniform—had finished the job for him.
Now there had been still another killing, one he’d had nothing to do with because he was already dead, but the letter containing the aces and eights made it part of the same pattern. And turned it all into nonsense.
So why hadn’t I told Corner Pocket that I knew him?
Don’t ask me, brother. I’m a stranger in these parts myself.
“Preacher...”
The homicide team had gone away and Corner Pocket was standing in front of me. His face was blank and his hands were hanging loose at his sides, but he was tense as a coiled spring and I could feel the heat rising in him. His turn had finally come.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
It seemed as good an idea as any. I stood up and waited for him to lead off, and he did that without further comment. One of the detectives from Las Vegas made a vague move in our direction as we went out the door, but seemed to think better of it when he got a close look at Corner Pocket’s face. Smart cop.
Corner Pocket didn’t seem to be in any hurry, and I made a mental note that he was no stranger to the byways of Holy Joe’s tightly guarded Heaven on Earth compound for he took a series of shortcuts that brought us almost immediately to a semi-secluded grove of trees in the ersatz woodland screening Notre-Dame of the Desert.
“Now, then,” he said, leaning comfortably against the trunk of a well-tended pine tree.
That didn’t seem to call for a reply.
“I hear tell,” he said, “that you are some kind of expert at Oriental martial arts. T’ai chi for exercise, plus some training in kung fu, karate, t’ai kwon do...?”
“I try to keep in shape,” I said. He wasn’t making sense. But he wasn’t required to.
“Uh-huh.”
He looked away for a moment, seeming to find something of interest along the pathway we’d followed to get into the grove, but as a gesture of dissimulation it was a total failure. His wawas fire-hot now, feeding on the anger in him and ready to do something about it.
“Never went into any of that myself,” he said with a continued effort at casual control that must have been expensive. “But I tell you right here and now, Preacher man, I have taken all the shit off you that I am going to. So believe this: In the next five minutes, you are going to tell me every goddamn thing you know or think or can remember about your old Vietnam buddy, Sergeant Jorge Martinez...or I am going to do my very best to break both of your legs.”
So much for my hole card.
Identifying an individual through fingerprints alone can take weeks. I knew Little Trouble’s set would be on file in Washington because of his army service, but I’d counted on at least the time it would take to check them out there. And I had been wrong.
Jorge Martinez, it seemed, had spent some time working as a security guard at one of the Glitter Gulch casinos after he got out of the army, and his prints were still on file with the Las Vegas police. Their computer confirmed his identity a few hours after his death, a routine teletype query brought his service record into their hands, and the decoration he’d won in the second battle of Khe Sanh had rung bells for Corner Pocket.
Checking Little Trouble’s record against my own, he said, was no more than a formality.
“You son of a bitch,” he added conversationally.
Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.
Step by step, I walked him again through my reasons—the real ones; I’d told him the truth about them from the first—for coming to Las Vegas, and how Sam Goines’s invitation to a table-stakes game with people who could afford to lose seemed to come at just the right moment.
Explaining why I hadn’t told him that I knew the dead machine gunner was a little more complicated, but a slight cooling of the hot-rage aura he had been projecting told me that my reasons at least made sense to him, even if he didn’t agree with the logic. He wasn’t ready to break my legs anymore. But he still wasn’t exactly ready to pronounce absolution, either.
And that was all right, too. It balanced some of the guilt I was feeling for not telling him Sam Goines was still alive.
“I ought to lock you up,” he said.
“On what charge?”
“Try obstructing justice,” he said. “Or maybe second-degree murder. You were fighting with Martinez when he died.”
“He was shot by someone in the helicopter.”
“So you say. Christ on a crutch, Preacher, you think I need to be choosy about the kind of charges I throw around in a town like this? I’ll slap you in a cell for barratry on the high seas and keep you for a month if I take the notion, and that’s no joke!”
It wasn’t, of course, and I decided to shut up.
“The trouble with keeping a thing like that to yourself,” he said, cooling down a little more, “is that you don’t have the whole picture, so you have no way to know whether it fits with something else or not.”
“Does it?”
He thought for a moment before he answered, and I think it was in his mind to say it was none of my business or maybe tell me to go and attempt a physical impossibility. No one ever had a better reason. But in the end he shook his head and relaxed a little.
“Not that I can see,” he admitted. “But all the same, this is something you ought to leave to the professionals. Do I tell you how to trim a rich poker chump?”
I felt myself bridle a bit at his choice of words. There are nicer ways to describe my chosen profession. Still, it was at least technically accurate, and the point well taken.
“Okay,” I said. “But you didn’t bring me here—away from the homicide dicks and out of range of the security cameras—just to cuss me out or even to bust me up a little for holding out on you. There is something else on your mind, old friend, and you are looking to play a little holdout game of your own.”
He snorted. “Smartass,” he said.
“You said it, I didn’t.”
He took a deep breath and didn’t look at me while he spoke his piece, and I had sense enough for once to keep still and let him do it. Despite all he’d said about keeping my nose out of his business and leaving investigation to the professionals, he was having to ask for help. And it burned his
butt to do it.
“Of the seven people who were at that poker table last night and this morning,” he said, “at least four—Danny DiMarco, Happy Apodaca, Joe Gillespie, and Manny Temple—all had connections to Francis Carrington Shaw.”
I nodded. The same thing had occurred to me.
“Danny DiMarco,” he went on, “had just bought a hotel from Shaw, and my spies around town tell me that it was Shaw who put out the word to get the old guy bookings and keep the publicity ball rolling when it looked like he might be going down the tube a year or two back.”
I’d known about the hotel deal, but not about the other—though it didn’t really surprise me much. Shaw might not be a philanthropist, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d taken a quiet interest in one falling star or another. Rumors like that had been around for years.
“Judge Apodaca’s another example,” Corner Pocket continued. “Maybe even a bigger one, in his day. People tend to have short memories hereabouts, it’s the kind of town where that can be a real advantage, but there was a time when old Happy Apodaca really rated the title ‘Judge.’ He was a distinguished member of the federal judiciary. A US district judge. And when he resigned it wasn’t exactly by choice.”
He was right this time. And wrong.
I did remember. But I hadn’t known that Francis Carrington Shaw figured in the story.
“A few years later,” Corner Pocket said, “another federal judge who was in a jam got stubborn when it came time to resign. Wound up having to be impeached while he was actually doing time in a federal slammer.
“Happy Apodaca was smarter than that. Or luckier. Feds had him on a bribery case that was airtight, but he was allowed to resign and go into private practice because Shaw wanted it that way and he owned the senator who had put the federal prosecutor in his job. Turned out the private practice Apodaca went into had just one client—Francis Carrington Shaw.”
I thought it over. “Seems like it’s worked out pretty well for both of them,” I said.
“Doesn’t it?”
He stuck his hands in the hip pockets of his trousers and looked at the sky, and for a moment I thought he’d run dry.
“Everyone knows the story about Shaw and Manny Temple,” I prodded, hoping he wouldn’t let it pass.
And he didn’t.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “They know half the story is what they know—and not the best half. They know Manny was supposed to be retired when he came here. Retired: that’s what you call it when people who are bigger and tougher than you are crowd you out of your home territory but let you live through it. And they know that Francis Carrington Shaw set Manny up as front man for the Shaw hotel and casino operations here in town. Set a thief to catch a thief, right?”
I didn’t have to nod. Just standing still was enough.
“Wrong,” he said. “The part people don’t know is that Manny Temple had a son who was strung out on speed and coke—methamphetamine and cocaine, mixed and injected in seven percent solution—a guaranteed mind-warper. Manny couldn’t do anything with the kid. So it was Shaw who looked up the best clinic in the country and got the boy in there and paid the freight and sent him back to his old man all clean and shiny.”
I shook my head as if hearing it all for the first time. “Kid still around?” I inquired.
Corner Pocket shrugged. “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “The clinic Shaw sent him to turned out to have connections to the Hare Krishnas. About a month after he got back, the kid disappeared again and floated to the surface a little later in one of their temples. You can see him most days just outside the entrance to the main terminal at McCarran, walking around in a yellow sheet with his head shaved, banging on a gong and hustling the incoming and outgoing chumps for change.”
“Manny must love that.”
“He doesn’t talk about it. But about the time the kid turned up there for the first time was when he stopped using commercial airlines...always charters a plane nowadays, or has someone drive him in and out of town in that air-conditioned limo.”
I had known about the boy’s addiction; I hadn’t known about the Krishna angle.
Well.
It could have been a lot worse. But maybe not from Manny’s point of view.
“Okay,” I said, hoping to keep the ball rolling a little longer. “But what about the Voice of Heaven on Earth?”
Corner Pocket’s wa was down to room temperature now, and the eyes he turned in my direction were positively chilly.
“Never kid a kidder,” he said.
“Right! I know Shaw set Holy Joe up out here,” I said. “But I thought there might be more to the story—and that you might know the rest.”
That was as close to a compliment as you wanted to come with Corner Pocket. Suspicious soul. But the words were honest, even though the intention might have left a lot to be desired.
“Nothing much,” he said evenly, “except the word is that things have been pretty cool there lately. Don’t know why. Thought you might.”
The game works two ways.
Fair enough.
“I don’t,” I said. “But if I find out—”
That heated things up again.
“If you find out anything,” he said, never taking his eyes from my face, “about the Reverend Holroyd Josiah Gillespie or his deceased wife, no matter what, I want to hear about it. You owe me one, Preacher.”
He was right. But I wanted him to spell it out, and he did.
“I told you I could land your skinny butt on a jail cot and I can do it. And I will, too, if I find out you’ve been holding out on me again.
“So far, all I got is four dead people and three poker hands and a little information that may or may not make sense.
“That leaves you loose on the street. For now.
“But I don’t believe in coincidences and I don’t believe anyone was in that game by chance. So until further notice, I want to hear anything that you hear and anything that you think, and I want to hear it before anyone else does—especially if it’s about the bearded guy. The hot-goddamn-shot mercenary.”
“Colonel Connor?”
“Him.”
I must have looked as surprised as I felt.
“Missing,” Corner Pocket said. “The colonel hasn’t been seen since he helped move the Voice of Heaven out of that shot-up penthouse suite.”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
And in any case, who among us is wicked? Don’t answer too quickly! We all think we can define the word “wicked,” and perhaps even nominate someone as an exemplar. But how valid is our definition? How did you pick your nominee...?
TWENTY
Maxey was white-faced and preoccupied on the way back to town, and I thought I knew why.
Losing a friend is never easy. And this has been especially sudden. Especially devastating.
But I was wrong, and I found out about it just as we were turning off Paradise Road toward the Scheherazade.
“You must be crazy,” she said.
That left me stumped for a moment, and when we had to stop for a red light I filled the time trying to relate the words to what had happened back at the Heaven on Earth compound. But I couldn’t, and the next thing she said was no big help.
“He’s going down the tube,” she said, “and this will just make the slide faster. He was just barely able to hold it together with her there to steer. No way he can survive without her. Dammit, you’re the only chance he’s got!”
Still lost.
But she wasn’t done.
“You came to Las Vegas because you were broke. Income tax collector breathing down your neck; embargoed your bank accounts and left you high and dry. Then you get an offer, a legitimate one that could turn the whole thing around, and do you grab it like any sane man would do? Like hell you do!”
She was really angry and working herself up to be more so, but at last I knew what we were talking about.
“You set it up,” I said as we turne
d into the hotel’s unwalled VIP garage and started looking for my assigned parking space instead of turning the car over to the valet service. “You and Sue Harriet Gillespie. That’s why we went out there this morning.”
“Hoo-ray! You have your choice of a new refrigerator or a trip to—”
“Maxey.”
“—beautiful Tahiti, all expenses paid. Or would you rather try for our sweepstakes?”
“Maxey, dammit!”
She stopped talking but still didn’t look in my direction, and I let it stay that way until I had the car in its own slot with the engine off and the brake set.
“Why?” I said then.
No response.
“What have I ever done that would make anyone—you, of all people—imagine that I’d ever consider joining Holy Joe Gilles pie’s television circus?”
That finally got the ball rolling. She turned toward me with an expression of combined anger and frustration that should have fried the fillings in my teeth.
“Liar,” she said.
“No doubt about it,” I said. “But on what subject this time?”
She shook her head, and I couldn’t help noticing once again the way her eyes seemed to change color with her emotions. They were purple now. Almost black.
“Holy Joe’s a con man and a slimy little bastard,” she said. “So what? That wasn’t marriage he was proposing back there. The man’s got a high-hat cocaine habit he can’t kick and if someone doesn’t take over for him—I mean take over the whole shebang, get him off the air, at least for the time being—he is going to blow it.”
She paused, and I had a minor urge to butt in with an explanation or two. But the emotion spilling off her was so heavy that I was glad I didn’t smoke. Lighting a match around there could have been dangerous.
“And don’t tell me it’s not something you could do,” she went on. “You’re doing all of it and more right now. For peanuts! I’ve heard tape recordings...”
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