Frenzy (24 page)

A woman named Greta Griswold was helping him in this regard. He'd hired her through his girl-friday ad. She was fifty-two. Plain. Timid. Obedient. Reasonably efficient. Not excessively bright or curious. He paid her just enough that she was grateful for the good wage, yet not enough she'd be suspicious. Spain did most of his business with her on the phone, but to avoid appearing too bizarre he had to have some contact with her. As it was, he had her convinced that he was simply a very busy, preoccupied, and eccentric employer who paid well and was willing to delegate a lot of unusual responsibility.

He put on his entrepreneurial hairpiece and glasses and pipe in place headed for their storefront office nearby. The disguise was not enough to fool anyone who knew him, but for someone who only saw him for a few minutes at a time, it might be enough to render him faceless in a police report. Glasses and a pipe and other certain mannerisms and affectations would be what she'd remember about the man himself.

"Good morning," he said, in a clenched voice that he used with her.

"Good morning, sir," she said, immediately starting in on the hundred things she'd saved up to tell him. "I've got your mail from the box there on the desk, and I cashed that check and put it in the deposit with your money from before, and this is the picture of the house," all over him with her little duties fulfilled, handing him a key, while he went, "Ummmm — fine."

"And this is for four-three-one. There's the Xerox of the multiple listings. You can't tell much from it but it has that, uh, unusual roofline and ceiling combination you said, uh, and you can take a look whenever you want. That's five-fifty a month. And this is how I entered that sale in the new ledger for accounts receivable ..." And as she went on with phony business, he tuned out, looking at the grainy picture of the house. He'd seen the rental property from the outside and it looked perfect. The lay of the land was an unexpected bonus.

He let her go on about fake-business stuff until she'd run out of things to tell him. She'd been "running his traps" for him. He had her take care of anything where there was personal contact with others, where a surveillance camera at the bank would retain an image of a depositor, where they'd retain a likeness of the individual who rented a postal drawer, anything like that. Rental properties seemed easier to negotiate than an outright purchase, so he'd had her deal extensively with the realtors. He would be a subject of much discussion there for his idiosyncratic way of having a secretary do his house bunting, but it wouldn't be the first time a busy executive delegated that to another party.

Once he got in the house he'd have no real reason for contact with either a real-estate agent or the home owner, as long as all his checks paid the rent well in advance. He would keep Greta busy with make-work, preparing mailings for his nonexistent business and responding to monies he would funnel into Direct Import Enterprises through another of his mail-drop covers. Keep her available for those unexpected times when a cutout was required.

"I'm going to go look at the house today. Nobody's in there doing repainting or anything, right?"

"No, sir. I was given to understand it would be empty."

"Okay. I'll let you know. I'll call and if I like it you can go ahead and wrap it up for me. Lock up here and just work on that, and when the house deal is settled you can go home early. All right?"

"Yes, sir. Thank you." She brightened at the idea of quitting early.

As he drove toward the home he let himself roar with laughter at the joy of what he'd already accomplished. Setting the mob factions against each other had been a beautiful touch, and accomplishing it, thanks to his assessment of the Troxell report and his own intimacy with the family's weaknesses, had been child's play. He relished the phrase. Child's play.

What made him laugh the hardest was the fact that he'd finessed those dumb shitbrains into whacking Lyle Venable for him. He had his eye on a target for each side that would really set this thing into motion. Blue Kriegal's long-time bodyguard, Johny Picciotti. And his counterpart within the other side of the family, another legbreaker named Tripotra. Their respective deaths, if handled right, would appear to be more gangland retaliation, if only to the cops and media.

He looked at the house and it was ideal. It had been made for his purposes. Both the isolation and the rooms themselves. He'd wanted "an unusual roofline with angles going every which way," he'd told Greta, even given her some sketches. "I like houses with unusual-shaped rooms, cathedral ceilings, sunken living rooms ..." And he'd gone on about his likes. But what he really wanted was a house where a secret room could be built and the walls wouldn't give it away.

Spain thought it was perfect. He stood there in the quiet house imagining what it would be like to hear the tortured screams of filth like Blue Kriegal and he laughed out loud. Most of all, to bring Ciprioni here . . . Oh, what a pleasure it would be to cut him open and slowly pull his guts out, make him watch as he was slowly, gently disemboweled and fed his own poisonous, shit-eating guts.

He went back to the motel and removed his Greta Griswold hairpiece and picked up the phone.

"Direct Import Enterprises," the woman said with enthusiasm, in one of her two or three contacts with the outside world each day.

"It's me," he told her unnecessarily. "I love it. It's nice. So go ahead and pay them the two months and get all the keys. Sign for me if you can."

"Okay. What if they have to have you come in and sign?"

"Explain to them I'm too busy. That I'm involved in a very delicate business deal with many meetings where I have to be available all the time — and just get anything that needs a signature and I'll sign it and have it returned to them." They hung up and Spain went out to the car and took a large sack of heavy items from the trunk.

He worked on hardware the rest of the day. By late afternoon he was parked down the street from the apartment house where Tripotra lived. He could see the man's fancy car in its parking stall. He'd be real tough to tail with a black Mercedes and the sophomoric vanity plates BADTRIP.

Spain felt his head falling to the side and he woke up. It was night. Shit. He'd dozed off. The Mercedes was still there. Forty-five minutes later and getting very uncomfortable, somebody comes out and gets into the black car. Spain follows him from a distance when he pulls out. Fifteen more minutes and he stops and talks to somebody Spain doesn't recognize. They get in their cars and he follows them out to the boonies.

The other car is a dark-colored Caddy, and it passes the Tripotra car, so Spain stays back with BADTRIP.

It was getting dark now and more difficult to tail. The lights of the traffic were starting to hurt Spain's eyes. He'd been in the car for hours and he was getting sore. His neck and back hurt and his butt was getting numb and he had a slight headache. He rolled down the window a bit and rubbed his eyes.

He had lost the black Mercedes momentarily with some idiot trucker darting in front of him, and then he saw it again and moved a little closer. He'd lost sight of the dark Caddy completely.

Suddenly they're both going up an off-ramp and Spain has no choice but to stay with them. It's a three-car convoy now. He can make the Caddy out. He's wide awake now and his mind is working very fast. Trying to figure what they'll do. If they stop at the top of the off-ramp, will they go left or right. Right. He has no choice. He'll have to go around them. No telling.

They don't stop, they keep moving to the right. Spain hangs in there.

The traffic up on the highway sung along in the nighttime symphony of semis and fast cars. The black Mercedes swung sharply around a curve and over a concrete-and-steel bridge, coming down off the blacktop a little too fast and fishtailing a little as it hit the gravel.

The driver braked behind a parked vehicle and killed the lights, getting out and looking up and down the road. He gets in the other car. Spain, who has been following the Mercedes, sees the man get into the parked car and he pulls over just on the other side of the curve. It looks deceptively close but he knows what it will be like trying to move through the wooded area there beside the highway; the grass looks fairly short but he has no idea what he'll be getting into. It's worth the effort, because if they'll stay in the parked car awhile it's a perfect grenade shot from the woods.

Even as he starts stomping through the high grass as he goes down the steep berm he thinks he might go back and just drive down past them, turn around as if he was lost, and pitch it in at them as he goes back. No, he decides, he'll use the tube and thump a round or two in on them with that. It's a perfect piece of terrain for the tube. He can turn right around, come back up the hill, get in his car, and he won't appear to have been anywhere near the other vehicles. The traffic and the insect noises are covering his sounds as he nears the edge of the trees.

Condensation from the driver's breath has formed a little frosty
O
on the inside of the windshield and he sits there listening to the other man talk, seemingly mesmerized by the spreading windshield fog from their hot breath.

"I gotta crank down the fucking window here," he says, and lowers his window, inhaling the night air with its wet redolence of tree fogs and crickets and mosquitoes. " Motherfucker stinks."

"Why doncha turn the goddamn motor back on and run your fuckin' air-conditioning, then."

"I could put the defrost on," the driver says, but he makes no move to do so.

"Yeah. You could do that. Then we wouldn't sit here be havin' the fucking mosquitoes eating on us and shit. Why doncha turn the fucker back on and get som'p'n goin' in here. Or just leave it alone and let the fucking thing fog up. One r'the other."

"Fucking weird time a' d' year, you freeze to death if you run the air-conditioning and you goddamn melt from the heat if you don't or —"

"Yeah, okay, well, look, I got to drive way the fuck out in the county yet tonight. Let's get it done, can we?"

"Hey, no shit, I ain't got all fucking night either. Do it." The man behind the wheel turns and with some effort lifts a heavy sack from the floorboard in back of him, lifting it over the seat.

"Whatcha got?"

"Eight and a half each I gotta get on these. Thirty-four cents."

"Jesus. That's fuckin'
LUGERS.
I don't want fuckin' Lugers."

"Hey. Dem's fucking P-Thirty-eights. Dey ain't fucking Lugers."

"Whatever the fuck dey are I don't wannum. Dey look like fuckin'
LUGERS.
I want Thirty-eights. Fucking REVOLVERS, for Chrissakes."

"These are not fuckin' LUGERS, goddammit. This is my business here. We're talking genuine fucking Walther Parabellum P-Thirty-eights."

"I don't care if it's a paregoric model don't wave the motherfucker around f'crissakes."

"Yeah. The fuckin' chipmunks might see it out here. Look: you fire this bitch in a Holiday Inn and the round goes through your lady's head and through the wall and the headboard of the next-door-neighbor's room,
his
ole lady's head, the round comes outta her skull and goes
bop
onto a tit, bounces off the tit and lands on the fucking bedspread. You can send room service over to get the lead for you. We're training
penetration
here. A Luger isn't jack shit."

"I don't need no Holiday Inn gun, man. I wanna go through the wall of a Holiday Inn and clip somebody's ole lady I'll fucking
drive
through the sono-fabitch. I need a revolver."

"You don't know guns, man. No offense. I coulda got you garbage here. The sears that crystallize and shit. When the hammer is down you turn the thumb safety it locks the sear. But you turn this with the bitch cocked, a little steel arm trips the sear and the hammer falls on the safety not on the fucking pin like some of that postwar shit. You can jack a round in and BA-BOOM it fires the fucker. Suicide guns. Thirty-four is
stealing
these fuckers. These are
rare.
You say no I can do another thing and have nine hundred fifty apiece by
domani,
you understand?"

"Hey, all fucking due respect to you an' that shit, ya know, but you don't know guns any better'n me. You just a fucking thief same as me, ya know? All dis shit about how you got to go to Sears an' get a hammer an' that shit. But that's awright. I'll take the paregoric Lugers or whatever and I'll give you twenty-five for the sack, and I'll take the merch an' live with it even if they ain't fucking revolvers. So what'll it be? We gotta deal or what?"

"Hey, tell ya what,
paisan,
you give me twenty-five hundred, I give you a great piece. I got a brand-new Colt Government Model in forty-five ACP, fucker's customized, gunsmith blueprinted, tight as ten-year-old snatch and clean as Mary Green. Got checkered grips, got the ejector port'n' feed ramp ground down, got the wide spur hammer on it, speed-shooter safety, Pachmayr mainspring housing, adjustable trigger, speed-load lever, adjustable rear and combat blade sights, and I throw in a couple mags with special springs and cutaway feed lips. Twenty-five bills and you got it."

"I give you twenty-five for the four Luger deals here."

"Pasadena."

"Say what?"