Naked in LA (27 page)

The goons came after me, and they were halfway across the street when they realized they wouldn’t make it. One of them kept after us though. The cabbie saw him in his mirror. “Just drive!” I shouted at him but he didn’t need encouragement. He was as scared as I was.

“You know that guy?”

“My boyfriend.”

“He looks pissed.”

“We just broke up.”

The goon had given up chasing us and looked around for another cab. When he didn’t see one, he actually drew his gun a second time. The other guy made him put it away. It was quite a pantomime.

“Planning on getting out of town for a while, I guess,” the cabbie said.

“I was thinking the East Coast,” I said.

“Good idea, lady.”

After he left me at Los Angeles airport, I wondered how long it would take Angel’s people to trace the cab and then shake down the driver. They must have got the cabbie’s tags. Once they found him he would tell them he took me to the airport and that I told him I was planning to fly to New York. They would check all the flight desks, then call their people in New York and have them get out to La Guardia and Idlewild to check all the incoming flights. They would waste a lot of time looking in all the wrong places.

As soon as the cab was out of sight I came back out of the terminal, walked over to the car park and checked under the wheel arches and behind the tags of all the cars. It took me longer than Reyes--almost ten minutes--until I found a Fairlane with a key taped under the bumper. I drove away from the airport and back up to the Hills. I headed for Reyes” place, praying that he would be there.

Sure, I was terrified, but there was another part of me that was angry as hell. At least Angel wasn’t in control anymore.

When I reached Reyes” redwood hideaway on Mulholland I pulled into the drive and pressed the buzzer on the security gate. I held my breath.

“Yes?”

“Reyes, it’s me! I need your help.”

A long silence. I hoped he hadn’t walked away from the intercom in disgust and gone back to bed. Finally: “There’s nothing left to say, princess.”

“I’m in danger, Reyes. I mean it, there’s people who want to kill me.”

“Yeah, I don’t blame them. Can I join the queue?”

“I’m not joking, I’m in real trouble.”

Another long silence. I imagined him standing there, a cheroot in his hand, thinking it over. How many times do I have to save this broad’s skin?

Finally the doors swung open. I drove through.

Chapter 37

Reyes sat with his feet in the pool, a bottle of Havana Club beside him. He listened while I told him what had happened. He didn’t look surprised.

When I’d finished, he said: “So what are you doing here?”

“I need your help.”

“Well that’s a good one.”

“No one else in the world can help me now.”

He drank straight from the bottle. It seemed he’d been drinking alone for a while before I got there. I’d imagined that he had been out having a good time ever since we broke up, that he’d forgotten all about me, as he said he would.

Perhaps that wasn’t quite true.

“Where did you get the car?”

“I stole it.”

He grinned. “Yeah?”

“From the airport, after I gave those guys the slip. I remembered what you said about where people hide their spare keys.”

He laughed. “You are a piece of work. You’re also a very good student.”

“You’re a good teacher.”

He handed me the bottle. I kicked off my shoes, sat down next to him and put my feet in the pool. I took a swallow of rum. I hadn’t realised how much I needed alcohol. Somehow Reyes always managed to calm me down, no matter what kind of fix I was in.

“I can’t believe Angel would do this,” I said.

“Really? When a guy decides to take orders from someone else, no matter what, he’ll do anything.”

“Salvatore?”

“No, it goes higher than that. These people don’t play games--if you don’t do what they say, they’ll kill you. Angel is just their blunt instrument these days.”

“But couldn’t you...”

“Couldn’t I what?”

“Your friends. In the government, if you told them, couldn’t they stop this?”

“Some of them would try, and some of them are probably right behind it. But see, I don’t know which ones.”

“Is Angel serious, about the pills?”

“If that’s what he said, I’d believe him. I know the Agency had some kind of poison they were going to use on Castro, they handed it over to Trafficante's guys a couple of years ago. This guy I know, Ruby, he works for Junior, he was the go-between for some of that. It was supposed to happen before the Bay of Pigs but it went bust. The invasion wasn’t supposed to happen until Castro was dead. That’s why Kennedy pulled out at the last minute and cancelled the air strikes.”

“The Kennedys were working with the mafia?”

“Well, old Joe always did, back in his bootlegging days. Jack and Bobby use them when it suits their purposes. What They’re doing now is called biting the hand that feeds you. Looks like They’re going to get bit right back.”

“The CIA are in on this as well?”

“They’ve been doing deals with the mafia ever since Luciano helped them with the Sicily landings in “44. It was mafia that killed Trujillo for the CIA. Fidel’s just another dictator, it would have seemed like the logical thing to someone to get them involved. Bobby told them he wanted Castro dead, for a Boston Irish he sure understands what a vendetta is. Someone’s going to die soon, princess, and my bet it’s not going to be Fidel.”

“But I thought you all wanted Castro dead.”

“I don’t give a damn either way, don’t include me in this.”

“But you work for the CIA.”

“I work for everyone. That way no one can make me do something I don’t want to do. That’s why I’ll never be like Angel.”

“But is that why you went to Miami?”

“I was in Miami on my way to Havana. I was running messages for people who couldn’t be seen to be talking to the Cubans themselves. It gets complicated. Bobby has to talk to Fidel even while he’s telling the Agency to kill him.”

“Don’t Angel and his bosses want Castro dead? He ruined their whole party in Havana. I heard he cost them a fortune.”

“They did want to kill him, but now - not so much. Bobby’s their major threat, he’s the one who declared a war on crime and it looks like he means it. He’s already nailed over two hundred of them, some of them bosses. He got Marcello deported, and he was the biggest mob guy in Dallas, sent him to the Guatemala jungle. He even has a Get Hoffa squad, for Christ’s sake. Hoffa’s been bankrolling the mob guys in Las Vegas straight out of the Teamsters pension fund. You can’t take out Hoffa, that’s like taking away their bank. These guys are scared for the first time.”

“Then why not kill Bobby?”

“Because then Jack will come after them. But once Jack’s dead, they don’t need to kill Bobby, because they’ve taken away his power. It makes sense if you’re in the business.

“But Kennedy is our president.”

“No, he was
their
president. At least that’s what they figured when they won him the election. Now they figure he’s turned on them. “Get the stone out of the shoe.” It’s a Sicilian curse.”

“Aren’t you angry about this?”

“Why? Political assassination isn’t like re-inventing the wheel, not in the world I live in. They killed Caesar, didn’t they? They killed Lincoln. For Angel’s guys, killing people is just a way to better business--it’s their first option. With governments at least it’s the second or third option.”

“Can’t someone stop this?”

“I would bet my last dollar anyone who could stop it already knows all about it, probably even Hoover. But to stop it, you have to
want
to stop it. You just don’t get how many people hate the Kennedys.”

“I thought people loved him.”

“Not the people who matter: the CIA, the Pentagon, the mafia. That’s the electorate, princess. Everyone else is just crowd control.”

I put my head in my hands. “Why don’t they just do it, why do they need me?”

“Because it’s not an easy hit. You can’t walk into a barber shop in Little Italy and find Jack Kennedy sitting in a chair having a shave. But if you did it, then they would get rid of you - they’d make it look like an overdose - and then no one could ever trace it back to them. It’s a very good plan.”

“I’ve been a fool, haven’t I?”

“Not for me to say.” He stood up.

“Reyes, what’s your part in all this?”

“I don’t have one. I know what goes down, I’ve run money, I’ve run guns, I’ve even run dope to pay for the guns. I do the dirty, dangerous jobs that pay well. I walk the line. But I’m not a contract killer, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Don’t you ever get sick of it?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Will you ever get out?”

“That’s not my main concern right now, is it?” He put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re the one that needs to get out.”

“But the picture...”

“Forget the movie, that’s finished. Your career’s over. You have more important things to worry about right now. Even if you did everything Angel asked you to do, you’re dead.”

“You mean if I killed the President?”

“When they do this thing, they won’t leave witnesses. Do you understand the fix you’re in? You have to disappear.”

“How?”

“I can make you vanish if that’s what you want. In fact, you don’t have a choice.”

I stared into the pool. All my dreams gone, before they’d even begun. “I can’t believe you’d help me after what I did.”

“Neither can I, but it looks like I’m going to.”

I caught his wrist and stood up, put my arms around his neck. “Reyes, please forgive me.”

He untangled himself. “Saving you from the mob, getting you out of the country and hiding you someplace they can’t find you - that I can do. But don’t ask me to forgive you. There are some things that are impossible, even for me.”

Chapter 38