The Butcher's Boy (22 page)

"Belonged?" she said. "Is the house destroyed?"

"No," he said. "Castiglione is dead. So are five other men who were apparently staying there. Four of them were shot with a high-powered rifle. We found the rifle in the swimming pool. Agent DiGiorgio and Castiglione and one other man were shot with something smaller. Maybe by each other. We won't know until they finish with the ballistics reports and the autopsies."

Elizabeth thought for a moment. Castiglione dead. She tried to put it together. DiGiorgio is spotted, Castiglione orders him killed, and DiGiorgio puts up a fight, killing—six men? And besides, there was the rifle in the swimming pool. And Castiglione had been watched for years. It was a fact of his life. He wouldn't panic now. No. Try again. DiGiorgio is watching Castiglione's house, and for some reason a fight breaks out between the men in the house. Shooting starts, one of them has a rifle; DiGiorgio goes to stop it and gets hit. But what about the fire? Try again. DiGiorgio is watching the house. Men come and try to burn the house, to kill Castiglione. Castiglione's men fight back. DiGiorgio is there, tries to stop it or at least to apprehend somebody, and is wounded. She kept trying the combinations, trying desperately to ignore the one that kept coming back into her mind: DiGiorgio is standing outside the darkened house with a high-powered rifle in his hands, waiting for the old man to come through the door to escape the fire. DiGiorgio has spent too many years sitting in cold cars outside fancy restaurants, checking license numbers on parked limousines, translating taped conversations into English. DiGiorgio is an avid hunter.

The policeman had the microphone in his hand and said, "Go ahead."

The radio clicked and farted, then the voice said, "You may proceed to the hotel directly."

The policeman said, "Copy," and slipped the microphone into its slot.

"What's that about?" said Elizabeth .

"I guess your man didn't make it."

"That was quick," said Brayer. "What have you got?"

"Not much," said Elizabeth . She was standing at the glass door to the balcony. It overlooked the swimming pool, where people were lying immobile in long deck chairs, their bodies glistening with oil as though they were being rendered for their fat. But what she was thinking about was that the layout was just like the room where Senator Claremont had been killed. She edged along the wall to catch the light so she could study the finger smudges on the glass.

"DiGiorgio died before I could get to the hospital. I just got off the line with the local homicide people and they said he'd been in a coma since shortly after they brought him in." She waited, but he didn't say anything. She added, "I'm sorry."

"So he didn't tell them anything either." Brayer's voice was gruff.

"Nothing anybody can use," she said. "In the ambulance he was just raving. I think what he said was 'a fucking war.' “

“What?" said Brayer.

"A fucking war. Over and over again. It could have been that it reminded him of something in Viet Nam . I didn't know him well, but he was an ex-marine, wasn't he? Although from what I've been told, that wouldn't be too far off. You wouldn't have to be delirious to make the connection. There were six besides DiGiorgio, and the house was a ruin."

"Including Castiglione," said Brayer. He paused for a moment. Then he said, "Look, Elizabeth . There's the possibility that he was just describing what it looked like. Agreed. But there's also a chance he was describing what he thought was happening. What if this Orloff character was involved in something? Say he was working for Castiglione, and somebody, maybe Toscanzio or Carl Bala, decided to take over and killed him? Then there was that family killed in their car. A reprisal? And there was another shootout in front of the Tropicana last night. Nobody knows what happened because when it was over the ones who were left standing put the ones that were hit into cars and drove off. But there was blood all over the pavement. So far nobody has been reported missing and no doctor within a hundred miles of Las Vegas has treated anybody for gunshot wounds. We're monitoring for it. What's it sound like to you?" He didn't wait, just kept talking. "I'll tell you what it sounds like. 'A fucking war.' "

"You think so?" asked Elizabeth . "But who? And what do we do about it?"

"Well, obviously Castiglione was on one end of it. And I'll bet whoever comes up top dog is on the other end. God knows what we're supposed to do about it. I'll tell you what I'd like to do. I'd like to pull all our people, you included, about a thousand miles eastward and let those bastards kill each other off. If it weren't for the chance that it has something to do with Senator Claremont I think I'd damned well do it."

She said, "That and your curiosity." She heard him give a humorless little 107

chuckle.

"You're probably right," he said. "And DiGiorgio."

"Yes," said Elizabeth, "I'm sorry about that, John. I didn't know him well, but I guess you must have."

"Oh. Yes," he said, without inflection. Then his voice became animated again. "Jesus," he said, "I think what bothers me most about it is that he had no business there in the first place. He was supposed to sit tight and watch, no matter what happened. He probably died trying to save that old piece of scum from something he had coming to him for years."

Elizabeth said nothing. She didn't see any reason to remind him that DiGiorgio was the only one found at the scene who hadn't lived there, that he'd been found in the yard, not in his car, where every regulation, every procedure of the department insisted he should be. She knew Brayer had been thinking about that since he'd received the telephone call in the early morning.

"Now we've got to find out as much as we can without wasting time," said Brayer. "But don't do anything stupid." He said it as though he had something specific in mind. "You find out what you can about the company and that's all.

The minute you see or hear anything that might be illegitimate you report it. And if it looks like it might be more than that you get on a plane and talk to me about it in person. You got that?"

"Got it," said Elizabeth . "Don't worry, John. I'm no hero."

"I'll be satisfied if you're not a fool." He hung up.

The building didn't look like a place where there had been a murder. It looked still less like a corporation that would appear in the notebook of a United States senator. It consisted of a single one-story cinderblock structure with a small sign that read Fieldston Growth Enterprises,

and a tiny lawn protected by a frail cordon of thirsty geraniums.

When Elizabeth walked in the front entrance the receptionist stopped typing and smiled with some sincerity, and Elizabeth believed the smile. This had the look of a place where a receptionist could get lonely. There were only the wood-paneled walls, the typewriter, and the telephone.

"Hello," she said. "I'm Elizabeth Waring of the U.S. Department of Justice." She held out her identification, but the woman didn't look at it so she dropped it into her purse.

The receptionist was in her mid-forties but her hair was already tinted with a blue rinse, probably, Elizabeth decided, to draw attention to her vacant blue eyes. The eyes didn't flinch or flicker. Any visitor was obviously a treat.

"May I help you?" asked the receptionist, her smile broadening. Elizabeth 108

revised her estimate when she saw the tiny crinkles at the corners of the mouth—mid-fifties, she thought, but takes care of herself.

"I'd like to speak with Mr. Fieldston, please."

"Oh, I'm sorry, Miss Waring," said the receptionist. She seemed moved by the disappointment she was about to inflict. "Mr. Fieldston isn't in today."

"I wonder if you could tell me where I can reach him? I'd like very much to speak with him."

"Mr. Fieldston is out of town this week," said the receptionist, as though he had vanished into a realm that was out of reach to any form of human communication.

"Do you have a number for him? I'm on a tight schedule."

"I'm sorry," said the receptionist. "Mr. Fieldston is meeting with a client, and I'm never permitted to tell anyone where he is when he travels. I'm sure you understand."

Elizabeth didn't, but she was interested now. "Why is that?"

"The investment business is a difficult one. If Mr. Fieldston's competitors knew in advance what he was buying, the negotiations might be complicated by other bids. If people knew he was acquiring a particular holding, the price of all surrounding holdings might be artificially inflated." The way she added, "And so on," signaled that the receptionist had either run out of imaginary excuses or reached the limit of her understanding of the business, but Elizabeth couldn't decide which it was.

"Let me leave my number then," she said. "I'm staying at the Sands." She fished in her purse and found a calling card, and wrote on the back of it Sands Hotel, Room 219. "If Mr. Fieldston calls, please ask him to get in touch with me."

She turned to go.

"What can I tell Mr. Fieldston?" asked the receptionist, already prepared with a message pad. "Is it about Mr. Orloff?"

Elizabeth hesitated, but she supposed that it was about Orloff, partly. "Yes it is," she said.

"A shame," said the receptionist. Elizabeth could see her write Re: Mr.

Orloff on the note, then watched, fascinated, as the receptionist stapled her card to the note and placed it in her Out box. It was the only piece of paper in the box.

Someone had brought her suitcase into the room during the day. Taped to it was a note on the front desk's stationery:

Please call Mr. Bechtman, Room 403. The time on it was only four thirty .

Two hours ago.

Elizabeth dialed 403 and the voice said, "Elizabeth, stay where you are. I'll be there in a minute." She sat down on the bed with the dead telephone to her ear. Brayer!

Brayer's seersucker sport coat and sunglasses weren't a disguise so much as a radical change in his personality. After more than a year of getting used to 109

the dark, conservative suits that got shiny and wrinkled in the back from the long days he spent sitting at a desk, Elizabeth was fascinated.

"Great outfit, John," she smiled. "You look like a Cuban spy." But she was thinking something else; he was perfect. He looked like another version of what he was—a middle-aged man from somewhere in the East. A man who had spent most of his years working too hard and not getting enough out of it to soften the signs of wear—but who wasn't at the office today and meant to make the most of it. Maybe he was here for a convention; maybe he'd come with the little woman and managed to slip away from her for a few hours to look for some action at the tables.

But the voice was Brayer of Justice. "What have you got so far?" he said.

"Still very little to go on," she answered. "Edgar Fieldston is out of town checking out some kind of investment. The secretary pretends she can't tell anyone where he is but she's probably lying and doesn't know herself. After that I went to the police station to see what they had. It wasn't much either."

"You didn't ask them about FGE, did you?" Brayer snapped.

"No," said Elizabeth . "But it was just because there didn't seem to be any reason to. I figured you'd want to know about DiGiorgio—"

"Right," said Brayer. "What's new on that?"

"The place was clean. If Castiglione was doing anything special it was miles from his house. Except for Castiglione the men killed had no criminal records and were legally entitled to carry the guns found there. They were officially employees of a private security company—there's no question what they were but you couldn't have proven it in court. The rifle that killed them was manufactured over twenty years ago, and the last time it was recorded as sold was at a gun shop in San Diego in 1967. It'll take time to track down the man who bought it, if he's still alive. DiGiorgio, Castiglione, and the driver were killed with a .32-caliber pistol. What they think now is that it was done by three men—

one near the pool with the rifle, one near the garage with the pistol, and one somewhere near the front of the house who started the fires and then probably stayed with the getaway car to control the front door, driveway, and street."

Brayer listened intently, then nodded. "Okay. So it's probably the three who got the Mexican family. And DiGiorgio saw what was happening but didn't see one of them or got distracted at the wrong moment." Elizabeth could see he was imagining it, re-creating what must have happened, as a man re-creates the scene where he lost something valuable.

He sat down on the bed and took off his sunglasses. His eyes looked tired.

"Okay," he said again. "That's probably all we'll get on that. The rifle will turn out to have been lost or stolen years ago. The pistol was already at the bottom of Lake Mead or sawed into fifty pieces hours before the police got around to investigating. No surprises anywhere."

She said, "Sorry, John. I guess your trip was a waste of time."

He looked surprised, his gaze suddenly widening, but turning sharp and predatory. "No, we're just beginning," he said. "The reason I came is Fieldston 110

Growth Enterprises. All your chickens have come home to roost."

"What do you mean?" asked Elizabeth .

"I mean that there's something wrong with it. When I got through to Justin Garfield, I didn't see much in it. The list was only a statistical fluke. They programmed a computer at IRS to spit out the names of companies that had earned unusually high incomes last year but had reinvested most of them to avoid showing a big profit on the balance sheet at the end of the year—plowed the money back under. Senator Claremont was looking for instances where they might have disguised investments as operating expenses. He wanted to amend his tax bill to close the loophole. Fieldston Growth Enterprises had a high ratio of gross income to net profit and so it went on the list. It was no big deal. Garfield said it was possible the Senator might have decided to call in somebody from FGE to testify in next session's hearings, but it was just as possible he'd have deleted it. It might not be big enough to use as an example. The Senator had a preference for the dramatic." He pulled a notebook out of his coat and stared at it.