Money Men (4 page)

Nothing was said for a long while. Eventually Carr took over as dealer, Howard as scorekeeper.

"Partner, there's something I gotta say," Howard said. The blue eyes flashed. "There were rough times in here, particularly the first few months. I had to fight every day. Once, I found out they were going to put ant poison in my chow. I didn't eat until I found out who it was. A big husky guy. I caught him in the yard and kicked his teeth out. Got almost all of 'em." He hesitated. "I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't know if I would have made it without the card games. I know I can make it now."

"Pick up your cards," Carr said.

"There's something else," Howard said. "Since the day I was arrested, you're the only one who's stuck by me, and you've never asked me one question about it. I really appreciate that...But I want you to know. A year ago I walked into my apartment with a few drinks under my belt and my old lady is fucking the next-door neighbor. I killed her because I had my gun on. I was a federal cop and my gun was right there in a holster on my belt. Now I'm in the joint for it...but I'm the same now as I ever was, and like you and everybody else in the whole goddamn world, I'm never going to change...My wife is dead and I'm alive and one year older. It's as simple as that. A set of circumstances."

A bell sounded. A guard opened a gate in the chain-link fence, and visitors began to depart.

Howard stood up and put the deck of cards in his shirt pocket. They shook hands. "Drop me a line when you get your transfer orders," Howard said.

The Treasury field office was located in the stodgy-looking Federal Courthouse on Spring Street, just a few blocks up from L.A.'s skid row. Jack Kelly waited in the technical shop. He gazed out the window.

The view from the field office was clear, up to a point. Things over a half-mile or so away were blurry. Boyle Heights was in haze the color of oatmeal.

Below, on Spring Street, the "Blue Goose," a large police van, headed toward the tenderloin. Years ago, when Kelly had been on the force, the old-timers used to make the recruits drive the Goose, to avoid the body lice.

He looked at his watch and sipped coffee. For some reason he thought of the Timmy Fontaine incident.

He remembered being on the duty desk the night a young ponytailed hitchhiker marched into the field office and told him about how she was picked up by a "Timmy," who drove her to his Malibu bachelor pad, which had giant stereo speakers.

After she posed for photos in the bedroom, Timmy masturbated while standing over
her (Kelly remembered her describing this as being "far out") and then showed her a suitcase full of phony ten-dollar bills. Probably to show off.

Later, the brass said that before Kelly went to a federal judge and obtained a search warrant, he should have determined who Timmy was. The second-guessers figured that if Kelly had known that young Timmy was the son of the Honorable Augustus Fontaine (D., Calif) he might have handled it differently.

That's where they were wrong. Jack Kelly wouldn't have cared if it had been Prince Charles with the suitcase full of green. He would have done exactly the same thing. Filed the search warrant, knocked on Timmy's door, announced his purpose, kicked Timmy's door down, found the suitcase, and arrested Timmy for possession of funny money, just as though he were any other street punk.

Just that alone would have started a major flap, but it burst into epic proportions when Timmy made the mistake of punching Kelly on the side of his head, during the arrest, breaking a manicured thumb. Kelly counterpunched the unfortunate Timmy on the point of the chin, breaking the attached jaw in two places and causing Timmy's mouth to be wired shut during the trial.

The pressure from above hadn't worked on the judge, and Timmy was sentenced to a year in Lompoc, which Kelly attributed to the fact that the judge had been appointed by a Republican administration.

The honorable congressman got back at them by having one of his old law partners sue Kelly and Uncle Sam in a trumped-up civil-rights and personal-injury case. They even alleged that Kelly broke Timmy's thumb in order to make him talk.

The suit failed, but Kelly ended up in cold storage indexing counterfeit notes and answering calls from bank tellers about what to do if "
In God We Trust
" was missing from the reverse of a twenty-dollar bill.

After a year he was offered a chance to return to field duties, but he told the agent-in-charge thanks anyway, but that he got the same pay for pushing a pencil as for cracking heads, and that he preferred to remain behind the desk.

It was Carr who had kept Kelly's interest piqued. He eventually enticed Kelly away from the desk and back into the street by little things, such as making sure that copies of interesting reports crossed his desk. Kelly knew what he was up to. Carr was his only real friend.

When Carr walked in now, he removed a cassette tape and a plastic envelope containing a counterfeit ten-dollar bill from a file folder marked "Evidence."

Kelly pushed aside a radio chassis and other odds and ends on the workbench and plugged in the tape recorder. He had heard the motel recording many times during the past three days, but realized that when other leads don't pan out a man has to start all over again.

The hours he and Carr had spent looking through mug books of known strong-arm men and rip-off artists had been useless.

They had read the reports of interviews with the residents of the street facing the rear of the motel. No one had seen anything out of the ordinary.

At the Police Crime Lab Kelly had been told there was no physical evidence. No footprints, no fingerprints, no hair. The man in the black leather jacket had walked in the door of the motel room, killed Rico, stolen the buy money, and departed like an actor in the final scene of some bizarre stage play.

Sure, Kelly knew he and Carr had seen the killer, but unfortunately a face is of no use without a name, except perhaps to Kojak or Dick Tracy.

The words floated from the tape machine like the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.

"Well, here I am. I've got the funny money right here in the case. Let's see the real stuff."

Kelly had already decided there was no detectable accent. No use calling in dialect experts.

"Take it easy," he heard Rico say as the tape continued. "I've got the ten grand...Look." Rico's voice was reassuring. He had learned the lesson well: always show confidence before the buy, to take the crook's mind off protecting himself. Makes him slower to react when the door goes down, gives the arrest team an edge.

Kelly heard the crinkling of the paper bag containing the buy money, then a "ping, ping" sound. Attaché case latches. He figured the case was probably opened on the bed, with the cover facing Rico so he couldn't see the sawed-off shotgun.

With the sound of the shotgun, Kelly crushed the empty plastic cup he was holding and slung it into a wastebasket.

"Turn it off for a second," Carr said with a wave of his hand. Kelly slapped at the plastic buttons, and the tape stopped.

"There was no sound of a round being chambered or a safety being clicked off from the shotgun. That means it was ready to fire when he walked in the door. He didn't come to bluff He intended to kill somebody."

Kelly nodded and turned on the machine again. By turning up the volume, they could hear the killer slam the case shut, run across the room, scramble out the window. Mixed with the sounds of the door being kicked in, they heard the killer's feet making crunching sounds as he ran down the gravel-covered driveway; then the sound of a car door, squealing tires.

"He must have cased the motel and seen the open window of room seven; otherwise he would have parked in the
lot. It
would have been easier," Kelly said.

"Wait a second," Carr interrupted. "Play it again. I think I've got something."

Kelly frowned as he snapped the cassette back in the machine. Listening to the tape made him sick to his stomach.

As the tape ran, Kelly noticed Carr looking at his watch. Finally, the tape ran out.

"He didn't start the engine," Carr said. "The sound of footsteps ended and the car zoomed off. The car door hadn't even closed."

"You're right," Kelly said. "He had to have had a getaway driver." Kelly wondered why he hadn't thought of that himself.

The wall phone rang, and Carr picked it up.

"Freddie Roth-are you sure? Okay, thanks."

Carr hung up the phone, walked to the workbench, and picked up the counterfeit ten-dollar bill.

"That was Delgado. A Teletype just came in. The D.C. lab says these tens are from an old Freddie Roth printing. It's the first time these particular notes have shown up in over five years."

"Now we have a lead," said Kelly.

****

FOUR

Red Diamond sat on a barstool and sipped straight soda because it was easy on his stomach. The cocktail napkin under the soda read "The Paradise Isle-Hollywood's Friendliest Tavern," though to Red neither the five-foot-tall slimy-haired bartender nor the two puffy-eyed bookies at the other end of the bar looked particularly friendly.

The place smelled like beer-soaked wood and wet ashes.

A wilted cartoon drawing of a giant-headed jockey (the bartender) astride a horse covered part of the spotty bar
mirror. It
was next to a chalkboard with scribbled messages. "The Commander--call Jimmy J." "Gloria--call your P.O.
" "Flaco--call the answering service in Vegas."

Red removed a half-dollar-size gambling chip from his pocket and tried to make it finger-walk on the back of his hand. The chip had inlaid red, white, and blue spots and bore a Sahara Club Casino camel trademark. He had discovered the chip in a satchel of personal belongings handed to him by a guard a half hour before he was released from Terminal Island. It had been nine days ago.

Obviously, he had overlooked the chip when he reported to the prison five years earlier to begin serving his sentence. Of course, in those days he considered a ten-spot as nothing more than toke money for the bellman, waiters, bartenders, and cocktail waitresses who had their mitts out when they saw him coming. That's the way it had been before everything went sour.

No period in his life had been more rewarding. For a while it seemed like the suckers had literally been
throwing
their money at him...For once he had been accepted and protected by the big boys, and at home the Cherokee-blooded Mona had wrapped her velvety tippy-toe legs around him every night.

The prison stretch had certainly not been the first, but it had hurt more-Red attributed this to the age factor. After all, what in the world wasn't easier at twenty-five than at fifty-plus?

Red's sensitive colon gurgled. He restrained an urge to run for the men's room because he knew it was just nerves. Ronnie was an hour late. How long could it take to ditch a goddamn car?

The feeling in his bowels reminded him of the time he had posed as a bank courier and convinced a bank branch manager to give him three gold bars for delivery to Canada. As he stood in the bank's churchlike vault filling out the phony paperwork, he felt like he was going to mess his pants right then and there. It had been mind over matter.

And mind over matter was why, at fifty-four years old, after serving five years flat for extortion, he was still able to come out fighting. He had slipped back five steps, but with a little luck, combined with good planning, he would soon be back in the running.

First he had to pay off Tony Dio, the loan shark.

During his first years in Terminal Island he had made himself believe that by the time he got out Dio would have died or something, and he would no longer owe the twenty-five grand. When he had borrowed it, he had had no problem paying the ten percent per week. Cash flow with the phony desert-land caper had been adequate to cover the nut. Then the rug was pulled out, and silk-tie Tony came to see him in the lockup and told him not to "worry" about paying it back until he got out of prison. Red had been out for nine days and he was worried. Maybe Ronnie's ten-grand score would keep Dio off his back for a while.