Clint Faraday Collection C: Murder in Motion Collector's Edition (14 page)

“
Franconi? I know him. I talked with him.”

“
He told
you about us and Napoli?”

“
No. He
doesn’t talk about that kind of thing. Ever. Anywhere. Under any
conditions.”

“
What the
hell did he carve Danny up like that for?!” Catherine wailed. “If
he was just supposed to kill him, why do that?”

“
He
didn’t kill him. He’s professional. It would be fast and clean.”
Clint said.

“
Oh, dear
god! Then there’s someone else?” Catherine cried,
wide-eyed.

“
Someone
who’s not professional? Maybe it really was some nigger,” Dickerson
said. “Maybe we got our shorts in knots over nothin’! I’ll be
dog-damned!”

“
Well, if
you’re going to demean people like that I suppose you have to
expect that some day you’ll insult the wrong one,” Clint
replied.

“
I hate
nights here,” Catherine wailed. “Henry drinks a few beers and can
sleep through an atomic attack. I need a quart of tequila and still
can’t sleep long. Oh, I
hate
this place!”

“
C’est la
vie,” Clint replied.

They didn’t catch anything. Clint gave them a
large yellow snapper he caught for their supper. Dickerson asked if
he could arrange for them to go to David for a few days. Catherine
said there wasn’t any point. It wasn’t from Napoli. She never
really thought it was. He had too much to lose. They never carried
much cash because these people would murder them all for fifty
dollars. They could get the cash from any ATM. They could get
enough for the plane at the airport or they could stop at the
national bank. It had a Clave machine and was on the way.

Clint explained that there weren’t flights to
Bocas Town from David anymore. There wasn’t really a reason to
run.

“
It might
hit the fan because somebody else snuffed him, though,” Dickerson
suggested. “It still means the stuff he had gets out.”

“
What do
you have?” Clint asked.

“
No
comment!” he fired back. Clint grinned. He dropped them off at the
dock and talked to the officer stationed there to say they couldn’t
go anywhere with luggage for more than a night or two.

“
But
they’re millionaires. They can buy all that stuff anywhere,” he
replied.

“
That
leaves a paper trail others can follow. They don’t have cash. They
use the ATMs.”

Clint went back home. He had hoped to get
some kind of clue about Lesterinni, but they all were expert with a
fileting knife. He did get confirmation that he knew what was going
on. He just didn’t have a clue as to why. He wondered greatly why
Danny Lesterinni was dead.

Revelations

Manny had reached a dead end with Napoli. He
said that would have worried him a couple of years ago, but he
didn’t care. He didn’t need to try to keep up with those stateside
mobsters. He had enough in untraceable accounts that he could
totally disappear from the world. Marko Boccini was dead and gone
so far as the world knew. He was a totally different person. He was
a family man with a beautiful wife and two great kids. His kids
could wear the name “Mathews” that would get true respect for their
father, not fear.

“
Okay.
What happened?” Clint asked.

“
Nothing,
really, and everything. I woke up this morning when the baby gave
its five thirty wake-up call and Sylvia made me some coffee made
from beans from right here with a little chocolate mixed in that
was also from this place and some natural brown sugar grown right
here. There were those fishcakes Judi taught her to make from fish
I caught off my own dock right here and some patacones from
plantains from right here. The sunrise would blow your
mind.

“
Anyhow,
I was in the kitchen washing up my own dishes and thinking like I
talk now. I understood right at that moment that the cheap two-bit
gringo hood, Marko Boccini, was dead and gone and that the
not-so-bad Panamanian, Manny Mathews, was alive and
kicking.

“
God!
What a feeling! I never knew before how true what you said when we
met was. I’m
free
! Nobody
owns me and I don’t answer to anybody. Nobody and no money can own
me anymore. No matter how much money I got, I was still that cheap
two-bit hood.

“
Clint, I
was never responsible for anything before. Now I’m responsible for
my family and friends – and, most of all, for
me
!

“
See, it
didn’t matter what I did before. It wasn’t my fault. It was the way
of the world or Joe Blow or sex on TV or whatever. I was a damned
slave to that life and didn’t know it. The song Dave sang the other
night said what it really is. The line, ‘the freedom of my chains’
is a
fact
!”

“
Your
first religious experience and you’re not religious.”

“
That’s
just another form of slavery. Anyhow, I don’t care about that stuff
anymore. For real. Anytime I use those old connections it’ll be to
help the normal Joe.

“
What
made me see it was looking for that Napoli character. I just
all-at-once saw how he’s a slave on the run from himself. I’m like
your – our – Indio friends. I pity him. Probably a billion dollars
cash and still a slave with no way out.

“
I found
a way out. All it took was one true friend. Thanks for being that
friend.”

They chatted. Clint had watched the change
from one of the world’s most powerful and feared mobsters to Manny
Mathews, the regular nice guy living over on San Cristobal. He saw
it in him when he first came to Panamá. He’d known his father in
the states, had done a favor for him (he still didn’t know what
that favor was) and had a vow that anything Clint ever needed was
his for a word. That promise carried to his son. Clint saw the
longing for a decent life in Marko’s eyes when he was here and
helped him establish the new identity.

That still left him with a wonder of why any
of this happened.

“
Manny,
what has he done that makes him so afraid of being found? Do you
even have an idea? Anything at all?”

“
That
life. He feels like he had it made. He’s worth millions or billions
and nobody ever knew it was crooked. He now feels like he’s been
more clever than anyone else in the whole damned country and
managed to screw all of them in one way or another and never got
caught at it. Now there’s someone or something that can bring it
all out. Probably everyone around him thinks he’s a great person
who beat the odds.

“
It’s
about reputation and respect. He did it all for respect, same as I
did. The difference is that nobody actually respected me, they were
all scared shitless of me. I didn’t have real respect to lose. He
does, but it’s a lie and he knows it. The most important thing in
the world is that no one ever knows.

“
I’ll bet
another thing. He probably has kids by a couple of women, but never
loved anyone in his life. That means no one ever loved him, which
means it’s all for nothing. Respect is the only thing he has and
he’d lose everything else in the world to keep that
respect.”

“
That’s a
cold psychological argument that’s probably right on the money.
Depending on what he’s done I might try to arrange that he doesn’t
lose the respect if I can find out what it’s about.”

“
He’d be
smarter to blow his brains out before it comes out, probably. He
will if it comes out.”

“
Maybe he
deserves that, too. I pity the type. That’s real.”

A few minutes later they said their “Good
lucks!” and hung up. Clint wanted to know what Napoli was hiding.
When it came to killing even such as Lesterinni it had gone too
far. That he had arranged that was pretty clear. The look of
torture about it was a warning to the rest of them. “Shut up and
stay shut up or....”

Clint also wanted to know which one was so
coldblooded he or she could continue the act so easily. That was
going to take some digging. He had three suspects. There was
something ... there always was.

Now that
he had a complete name and the company name he could use the
computer to trace a lot about him. There was simply no way to keep
everything off the net. Sometimes it seemed like there was no way
to keep
anything
off the
net. You don’t have to worry about Big Brother watching you, you
have to worry about everyone and his dog watching you.

Clint sat at the computer and brought up
Google Search. He tagged everywhere he wanted to go on that one,
then brought up Yahoo! Search. He repeated it with lesser-known
search engines. Four hours later he had a starting point so perked
a large pot of coffee and started on it. He would take Napoli
Diversified (that had grown to A. Napoli Diversified Investments
and Services, Ltd/SA).

The company mostly made recommendations for
investments. It seemed to have a good streak of luck after being in
business for four years when it found a client who wanted to invest
in international development of business and real estate. It
suddenly showed a profit of four point two million dollars in the
last five months of 1986, nine million for 1987, twenty one million
for 1988, etc. There was some question of one client who seemed to
be selling a lot of things more than he could hope to account for.
He was investigated for fraud, but nothing was found. The
investments were in other countries and the money sent to the
states after being banked in other countries for a certain period.
When the accounts reached a certain point the money was transferred
to LA banks. In 1989 the accounts were consolidated into an
international bank account so that fees were cut in half or more.
The records were then open to the proper agencies and
investigations showed it was legitimate when sent to the US
branches.

Clint spent seven hours tracing money for
that client and found that once the international bank was used and
the accounts simply transferred to other branches the source of the
money wasn’t watched much at all.

He played it close to the line until he
shifted the attention to movements, not sources. It was laundered,
probably from drugs.

Napoli had cut himself into it all with the
origination of the scheme: very likely. He then handled the
accounts of more and more such sources and ended up with a cut of a
major part of the drug supply business. He was known as a very
liberal spender for causes and was helping several hundred people
with scholarships and medical and so forth. It was all in his
community not far from Carmel, California. He was known as a person
who was “No tolerance!” with drug dealers and for spending
excessively large sums for rehabilitation. He was strong against
sexual abuse situations, particularly rape and pedophilia. He was
strong for the “Three strikes and you’re out!” police policies
where violence was a part of it. He was dead-set against
pornography. Period. Not in his community.

Trying to
atone? It still didn’t quite connect. This stuff wasn’t handled
anywhere near the place. It wasn’t at all likely that he was seen
and recorded with some known drug dealers or such. That could be
explained away with the, “I didn’t have any
idea
!” line. He was at a party, they were there, he
spoke to other people at parties. He didn’t invite anyone like that
to his parties. They came with someone else.

It was going to take a lot of digging, that
was sure. There was something other than laundering that was behind
it. Maybe they had recordings of him using drugs?

No. He wouldn’t be at any parties with that
bunch on Bastimentos. They moved in entirely different circles. It
was strange that they ever were in the same place at the same time
for them to make any recordings.

Maybe a brothel? He was so adamant about
sexual matters. Maybe they would meet him by chance in a whorehouse
somewhere. That would mean Bianco or Herman having a connection.
The men, it was obvious why they would see him. They might well be
clients of such places, but the women wouldn’t be connected there
except as madams or working girls. That was a line to investigate.
Look at it from the other side.

He worked on Julia Bianco. She seemed to be a
girl from a small town in Alabama, had left the state to go to
college in Houston, Texas, had never finished for a degree,
dropping out in her third semester when her grades made it plain
she wasn’t going to get any degree there. She went to Southern
California to a small college where she finished her degree in
Agriculture and was a registered veterinarian there for two years
before moving to LA. Little was known of her since. She
communicated with people she knew from college and back home with
letters or phone calls until three years ago when she started using
the net and Skype. She had a blog for awhile. It was actually very
dull. She didn’t say very much and communicated with people she met
at her trade. She mentioned pets now and then on it, giving advice
on cures and training. She liked rodeo and stock car racing and was
somewhat into country music, trying to play the piano, but hadn’t
gotten anywhere with it. She admitted she couldn’t sing and wasn’t
very good as a pianist. She hung around a place near where she
lived for awhile in Santa Clara called the Streetcorner Bar. She
dated a man once in awhile and seemed to keep her relationships to
one at the time for a minimum of several months.