Sleeping Dogs (18 page)

“What did they do?”

Balacontano sighed. “They arranged a meeting to pay him, but it was really a setup to lure him out on the Las Vegas Strip and blow his head off.”

“I take it this was without your knowledge.”

“Damned right. They only had it half figured out. They knew he could be terrible trouble and had to be out of the picture as soon as possible. They also knew that nobody strolls up to a professional killer and says, ‘Sorry, pal. It was all a mistake. The man who hired you had no right, so we’re not going to pay you.’ But what didn’t occur to them is that there’s a reason why these characters keep going into dark places with people where you know only one of them is going to come out, and it’s always the same one. I’m not saying my people should have known what the reason was, because I sure don’t. I’m saying they should have known that there
was
a reason, and accepted it, and given the son of a bitch his lousy two hundred thousand and prayed to God they never saw him again. It’s like watching the same dog go down a hundred rabbit holes and always come out with a belly full of rabbit. When you come to the hundred-and-first hole, do you bet on the rabbit?”

Elizabeth could see the frustration and anger growing in the old man as the story began to move closer to his own defeat. What he didn’t know was that it was hers too, seen from the other side as though through one-way glass. “What happened?”

Carl Bala smiled a sad little half-smile, and snorted as he thought about it. “You probably wonder why I can tell you all this, don’t you?”

“The question did occur to me,” Elizabeth conceded.

“Because they’re dead. Harry Orloff, all of the people I’m talking about. He killed six or eight people that night. I think he didn’t get Orloff until the next morning.” Carlo felt a little twinge at the mention of Orloff because he had ordered his death personally, but it was the same thing. He wouldn’t have had to if it hadn’t been for the Butcher’s Boy, by that time running amok: a man who had shown that he could and would do anything, who had no allegiance to anybody, no discernible fear and nothing to protect. Balacontano had simply reasoned that if Orloff were gone, the hired killer might not be able to figure out who he had been working for. That had turned out to be his third mistake. “But he didn’t stop there. He went across town to Castiglione’s house.”

“I thought the Castigliones were a Chicago family?”

Balacontano looked at her, distracted, then seemed to collect himself. He spoke patiently. “This is old Paolo I’m talking about. He was retired. Don’t get me wrong, though; Castiglione was still a very important man. In the old days he used to run Chicago. I don’t know how old he was ten years ago, but he had to be in his late eighties. He lived in a big brick house at the edge of Las Vegas because it was supposed to be good for his emphysema. Vegas was under a truce. All the families had business there, and anybody could go there. Castiglione was one of the old ones—strong, didn’t know what pity was. When he retired, he had generations of enemies. You should have seen the place he had there. From the street all you could see was a big wall. When you got through the gate it looked like the Maginot line. There were floodlights and windows like slits in a pillbox. I wouldn’t be able to swear he didn’t have the place booby-trapped too. Somebody new bought it a few years ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someday they flipped a switch in the den and half the lawn blew up.

“Anyway, it’s late at night, and this character has just finished turning my friends’ little ambush into what looked like a busy day on the Eastern front. But he doesn’t go away. Instead he takes a little drive over to Castiglione’s. The rest of it nobody knows much about, because everybody there is, as usual, dead. This includes old Castiglione, his four bodyguards and—get this—a special agent of the FBI who just happened to be there because his job was to sit in a car down the street and take pictures of everybody who came to the old man’s house.

“So when I wake up the next morning, not only is Senator Claremont still dead, but so are five or six men who worked for me, and the lawyer who set up some corporations for me and who hid Arthur Fieldston so he couldn’t accept a subpoena. So I’ve got millions of dollars in accounts that only Arthur Fieldston can sign on, and no living people on the spot to find him, and my little tax problem has turned into a multiple-murder case involving a federal officer. Then around noon things got ugly. I didn’t get any phone calls; I got visitors. All day and most of the night, lots of very important men pulled into my driveway and came into my parlor and sat in my chairs and asked me what the hell I was doing breaking a truce that had kept Las Vegas open for forty years. Some of them thought I’d killed Castiglione, some of them didn’t know what to think, but all of them knew that when the sun came up in Vegas there were about a dozen corpses lying around out there, and that maybe half of them belonged to me and the others were Castiglione’s.” Balacontano seemed to be out of breath, but he added quickly, “Except for the federal cop, who was going to attract such an army of federal undercover types that even the pay phones would be tapped for the next hundred years.”

“Why did he go to Castiglione’s? Did he think Orloff was working for Castiglione?”

“Hell, no,” said Balacontano. “He did it because he knew it was going to create confusion. And it worked. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he had any idea who those guys were working for. But he was sure that as soon as the newspapers printed their names, there’d be people a whole lot scarier than he was who would know. The thing that scared me wasn’t who showed up at my house; it was who
didn’t.
I spent the next few days kissing powerful asses because I was going to need them on my side if things blew up. Even after I did, it was a near thing.”

Elizabeth prompted him. “What did you do about the killer?”

Balacontano studied the little woman who sat across from him and had a thought, but then dismissed it. She was a bureaucrat. “I did what anybody would do. I hunted him with everything I had.”

He stared at her for a reaction, but she waited in silence. Balacontano shrugged. “He found Arthur Fieldston before I did. I don’t know how far he was thinking ahead. Maybe he knew that I couldn’t get my money back if Fieldston was dead, and then he thought of the rest of it after he’d killed him. He buried Fieldston’s head and hands behind the stable at my farm, then made a phone call to the Justice Department. Nobody ever saw him again until now.” He looked at Elizabeth. “You’ve got to help me.”

“I’ll do my best to find him.”

“I’m not talking about
him;
I’m talking about
me.
He’s just the way to get me out of here.”

“I’m not your attorney, but if you do get an appeal, I wouldn’t tell the judge everything,” said Elizabeth.

“I shouldn’t have to tell the bastard anything,” Balacontano said. “I’m not … wasn’t some errand boy. Does anybody seriously think I went out and shot Arthur Fieldston, then sawed off his head and hands in Arizona and brought them across the country to bury them in my yard? The only two parts you can use to prove who it was? What do you think I am, Edgar Allan Poe? Well?”

“I’m wondering who you think Edgar Allan Poe was,” said Elizabeth.

“You know what I mean. I was an important man. When they have those cars with power surges that kill people, do they go to the president of the company and dig up his back yard to see if he’s buried some suspicious carburetors? No. Does anybody even wonder who made the anonymous phone call to the Justice Department?”

Elizabeth had asked the same question in as many words ten years ago, but her superiors had been too eager to convict Balacontano to listen. She had asked it so many times that they had sent her on a vacation and deleted her name from the record of the investigation so that the defense couldn’t call her to testify. “Can you tell me where to find him?”

The old man’s anger and frustration were barely controllable now. “If I knew that, do you think I’d be sitting here talking to you? You’re the one who’s got to hunt him down.”

Elizabeth stood up and glanced at her watch. “Just for the record, do you want to tell me his name?”

“No,” said Balacontano. “I don’t know his name. What the hell does he need a name for?”

H
e hated to throw away the name Charles Ackerman. It had been a comfort since Eddie Mastrewski had given it to him as a child, and it was his oldest possession. Eddie the Butcher had always assumed that someday a lapse of professionalism would put an end to him, and the young boy he had taken in would be alone and running. The first thing he would need was money, and the second was a plausible identity, and Eddie knew how to provide him with both. The money Eddie wrapped in a package that looked exactly like the ones he kept in the freezer for the cat. Like them, it was marked “Giblets and Gizzards for Cat.”

The identity had been almost as easy in those days. Eddie took the boy for a walk in the sprawling forty-acre Catholic cemetery at the edge of town one sunny Memorial Day when hundreds of other families were wandering over the grass and looking uncertain about exactly where Grandpa was buried. He’d had the foresight to buy a small bouquet of forget-me-nots on the way, which he carried with just the right degree of discomfort. They had taken a pleasant walk in the sunshine to look for the gravestone of a child born in 1950, ’51, or ’52 who had died after the age of five but before the age of twelve. They had found six of them, and Eddie had dutifully copied down the names, the dates and his estimate of the cost of the stones.

Then they went to look at a couple of graves of men they had encountered professionally, and Eddie had explained his theory of reasonable fees. It was his hypothesis that the cost of a man’s gravestone should be proportionate to the fee Eddie had received for killing him. Important men left lots of money, had lots of admirers—or, at least, associates—and had heirs who would not miss this final chance to remind people that they had been relations of powerful men. Killing these men was potentially more difficult and dangerous than killing the ones with small domestic granite plaques that bore only a name and two dates. Eddie had appeared satisfied, even though two of the men had eight-foot-high Italian marble structures the size of toolsheds, with carved birds, flowers, statues of angels holding trumpets and lengthy passages of verse that might have been copied verbatim from Hallmark Mother’s Day cards.

The next day Eddie had taken him to the county hall. There Eddie had paid three dollars for a duplicate birth certificate for his nephew, Charles F. Ackerman. He had eliminated the other five possibilities because two had names that didn’t seem likely–he remembered that one of them was Wung Cho Fo; two had graves in the middle of huge empty plots, which meant that they still had lots of living family members the boy might someday meet; and one had a gravestone of such massive proportions and extravagant opulence that it must have been a sign of either conspicuous wealth or a memorable death. Thereafter, Charles Frederick Ackerman used his birth certificate to obtain a social security card, used both to apply for a driver’s license, then opened a bank account in a city a hundred miles away, where he also obtained a library card and a post-office box. Then he began to get on mailing lists, and Charles F. Ackerman took on a kind of life, with credit cards, club memberships and finally even a pistol permit.

In later years, he had built a dozen other identities that he had used and discarded, but he had never done much as Charles F. Ackerman. After Eddie had died, the name had begun to seem precious, and he couldn’t think of it without remembering the sunny Memorial Day when he and Eddie had strolled together on the unnaturally lush green grass, playing the game of finding dead children with approximately the right dates of birth.

Charles Ackerman’s existence wasn’t as well documented as Michael Schaeffer’s, but it was older and deeper, started before the age of computers and well established before a policeman would imagine he’d had the need or the capacity for adopting it. The methods he had used to create the identity were now out of date and impossible, because the trick had been done so many times for so many reasons that the police had put a stop to it years ago. He hated to say good-bye to Charlie Ackerman, but he had to. He had rented the car in Albuquerque under the name, and that had to be the end of it.

The gun had been easier. He had found an advertisement for a firearms show in the Albuquerque newspaper, clipped it, then gone into a gun shop and looked around for something that would inspire the right amount of greed in the heart of an aficionado. He settled on an antique Italian shotgun with ornate scrollwork carved into the stock. It even had a carrying case that looked like a briefcase. He had taken it to the show and walked past the booths run by dealers, but lingered at the card tables manned by private collectors until he had found the right one. The man was in his fifties and had a pot belly that he kept in check with a wide belt with a silver buckle that had a bird dog on it with turquoise eyes. He had five handguns to sell, three of them nickel-plated modern replicas of Colt .45 single-action revolvers with white plastic handgrips like the ones the good guys used in cowboy movies—and two shotguns, one of them a double-barreled ten-gauge that his grandfather might have used for hunting ducks. The man had eyed his gun case and said, “What’d you buy?” He had opened it, and the man’s eyes had widened, then narrowed. “I brought it with me,” Ackerman said. “I’m trying to see if anybody wants to trade.” The man asked, “What would you take?” Ackerman indicated that the Ruger .38 police special on the table in front of him looked pretty good, but he didn’t feel like hanging around all day filling out papers for a handgun. The man thought for a long time, then set his jacket over the pistol and said, “Meet me in the parking lot.”