The One a Month Man (11 page)

P
art of the deal with Sharkey was that I should call him once a day with a progress report.

On the morning after our first meeting with Charley, I could tell Sharkey no more than we were still ‘bedding in’ – not a very clever choice of words, but he resisted reacting coarsely, much to his credit and unfamiliar restraint.

‘Don’t forget, you’re not on holiday,’ he once more reminded me, as a footnote.

I decided not yet to mention Charley to Sharkey. Tactically, it made sense to leave her out of the equation until I was able to ‘sell’ her as an indispensable asset and ally.

It was a further forty-eight hours before we heard again from Charley. Sarah took the call on the bedside telephone of her room, just as we were about to head for breakfast. After exchanging a few mundane pleasantries, she passed the phone to me.

‘OK, I’m making headway,’ said Charley, going straight to the viscera. ‘The subject entered the USA as Tina Chekov. She rented a duplex in the Valley, not far from where I live, as a matter of fact. Blue-collar neighbourhood. She was in LA less than a month.’

‘Where did she move to?’ I enquired, eagerly.

‘Vegas. She got a job in a casino. Front of house.’

‘Without a work permit?’

‘No, it was legal. She’d been issued with a Green Card.’

‘How did she swing that?’ I asked, fascinated. ‘I’d have thought it necessary for her employer to prove that the job couldn’t be done by an American?’

‘You’re missing a crucial factor: in those days, the Vegas casinos were Mafia-controlled. They had all kinds of
government
officials on their payroll, not just cops, politicians, judges and mayors. For them to get someone a Green Card was as easy as buying a hot dog.’

‘But why should they have gone to that trouble for Tina? She was a looker, undoubtedly, but there’s nothing exceptional about that in LA or Vegas, surely?’

‘Not many with a cute English accent, though; a precious commodity in certain jobs over here. Something a lot of people, me included, are envious of.’

‘Where did you get all this info about Tina?’

‘Sources. You know the drill, you should know better than to ask me that.’

‘Of course. Sorry.’

‘Pardon granted. However, there’s more.’

‘You have me salivating.’

‘Spare me such details, please! The casino was the Sandstorm. On The Strip, but only just. Not one of the biggies. However, it was Mob-owned and there was a big push to improve its Strip cred. Heavy investment was underway. The Mob was using its muscle to get celebrities like Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jnr to show up, not necessarily to sing, but just to mingle and be photographed purporting to be playing the tables. Punters were flown from here, LA, San Diego and San Francisco, with their air fares paid for them. Accommodation rates at the Sandstorm were drastically pruned. Booze was free and
plentiful
; anything to entice the high-rollers. Once at the tables and plied with alcohol, the casino’s outlay would be recouped tenfold. This is all documented history. Vegas folklore. The
important handle for you to hang on to is the inherent
corruption
within the state of Nevada, where the Mafia was king, not Presley, during the relevant era. Elvis merely sang for the king. So putting Tina on the payroll, securing her a Green Card, making her legit, was a kind of daily transaction, something left for a Mob minion to deal with.’

‘Is Tina still in Vegas?’ I said, hoping not to sound impatient.

‘No, but I’ll come to that. Let’s stick with chronology.’

‘You’re the storyteller,’ I said, amiably.

Meanwhile, Sarah had drifted to the balcony, where, to the west, she had a view of the ocean and the beach, under a
cloudless
canopy. To the east, however, downtown LA and the Valley were almost totally obscured by a shroud of
sulphur-bloated,
low-hovering smog. Somewhere in that lung-congesting pollution was Charley, on the end of a
phone-line
, talking with me; in another climate. Might as well be on another planet. Life in LA could be deadly dangerous, long before taking a bullet.

‘I’ve been talking with a guy who was a dealer at the Sandstorm.’

‘A drugs dealer?’ I cut in.

‘No, no, a dealer at the tables; blackjack and a roulette croupier.’

‘Got you!’ I said, feeling a shade foolish.

‘He left Vegas when the Sandstorm closed. Later, it was
bulldozed
and is now a medical clinic. He’s retired and lives alone in LA in a rented, two-room rat-hole, but he remembers Tina Chekov.’

Now I became wary. Vegas casinos were awash with women: gaming addicts, croupiers, waitresses, hostesses, showgirls, man-hunters and hookers. Why should he recall one of them, someone very low in the pecking order, from all those years ago? Despite O’Malley’s endorsement, I began to wonder if Charley was spinning me an elaborate yarn just for the
commission;
taking me for not just an out-of-town sucker, but an
out-of-country
sucker.

‘Why should he remember her?’ I challenged Charley, though not overtly aggressive.

‘Because she didn’t stay front of house for very long. Because she made a name for herself. In addition to making a nuisance of herself.’

‘Pray tell how did you make a name for yourself at a Las Vegas casino, unless you were Elvis or one of the Rat Pack?’

‘Simple. She became the favourite of the boss, the chief exec.’

‘You mean she became his mistress?’

‘And in doing so made an enemy of the woman she deposed. Apparently, the catfights were legendary. Front-row seats could have been sold for big bucks. One night a couple of blackjack tables were overturned, spilling all the chips and cards, and the two women had to be pulled apart by a couple of Security heavies. Tina eventually became known as the “Duchess” because of the way she lorded it around the joint, flicking fingers at waitresses and getting people fired if she took a dislike to them.’

‘Did the boss have a wife?’

‘A long-suffering one, but trying to divorce a mobster is
tantamount
to breaking the Mafia law of
omerta
; you’re likely to lose a lot more than an arm and a leg.’

‘So tell me how it all ended in tears in Vegas for Tina?’ I said, echoing my guess, which I estimated was an educated one.

‘One night, as she climbed out of her white convertible in the casino’s parking lot, someone stepped from the shadows and flooded her face with acid.’

Momentarily, I was speechless. I was transported in a mental time-machine to Mrs Marlowe’s home in Bedford, where I was looking at the portrait of that truly beautiful young woman, Tina. A face that since then had been deliberately scorched with acid. I remembered everything that Mrs Marlowe had said about
her daughter and everything was skewed. But that was life, I’d learned. Every sinner had once been a saint in a mother’s eye.

‘What was the outcome?’ I said, with a sinking feeling, fearing that Tina had gone to the worms and maggots years ago.

‘She was rushed to hospital, naturally. Doctors saved her life.’

Relief!

‘They didn’t save her face, though; nor all her sight.’

Renewed consternation. If we did trace Tina, would she be up to testifying against ‘The One-A-Month Man’?

‘So she was partially blinded?’ My question was a cocktail of panic and hope, in just about equal measures.

‘She lost all sight from one eye.’

‘Permanently?’

‘Permanently, yes.’ Cold-bloodedly and even heartlessly, she added, ‘Quite a price to pay for fucking around with people.’

‘Did they catch the assailant?’

‘No. It could have been a man or woman. There were no witnesses. The attacker didn’t speak. Tina screamed, but no one was seen running from the crime scene. The boss’s ex-bedroom playmate and wife were questioned, but their alibis were
bulletproof
. Someone was probably paid to do it, which is the way it works around here. Standard MO.’

‘Was there no money trail? Someone would have been paid. Not the sort of thing someone would do just for love.’

‘Maybe not for love, but most certainly for hate or lust.’

‘Lust
?’ I said, baffled.

‘Yes, you know, a promise of action between the sheets could have been a sufficient temptation. If the truth be known, the cops were probably not too fussed.’

‘Why’s that?’ I asked, for no other reason than professional curiosity.

‘Because of what she was. Because the Mob didn’t like bad publicity. And any story that frightened away punters was the worst possible publicity. It hit the place it hurt most – their
pockets. Tina was in hospital for weeks, her face swathed in bandages. She received flowers daily, but in all that time not one visitor.’

‘Did that info also come from your dealer contact?’

‘No, I’ve spoken with a Nevada sheriff. He pulled the file for me. I promised him a Christmas card.’

I smiled knowingly. The world was turned by the same axle and grease wherever you stood or worked.

‘When she was eventually discharged, Tina called the boss man at the Sandstorm. He agreed to meet her at a diner off the Strip for a coffee and doughnut. On the phone she’d said she wanted to talk about returning to work. Of course, he’d long ago engaged a new sleeping partner. Apparently, when he saw Tina’s face, he told her she was fired and barred her from ever setting foot again in his casino. He walked out, leaving his drink and doughnut untouched – and the tab for her to settle.’

‘A real charmer,’ I said, ‘but how would the police have known about that conversation?’ I needed to forensically test the veracity of everything I was being told in order to form a view about Charley’s credibility.

‘They didn’t. I got this from the retired dealer. Apparently, the casino boss strutted around the joint, boasting about how he’d booted off the payroll the world’s ugliest whore, whose only chance of making a living was in a freak show.’

I had a suspicion that the story was winding down. ‘OK, so what became of her?’

‘Well, there was nothing left for her in Vegas and that’s the end of the first chapter, which comes free. Anything else, you’re going to have to pay for.’

‘So you don’t know where she went?’

‘Not yet.’

‘The problem is, as I see it, Tina could have flown literally anywhere,’ I said, downcast. ‘And how long ago was that? At least twenty years.’

‘A big hole to fill, I admit,’ she said. ‘But not as deep as it was twenty-four hours ago and when you left the UK.’

‘Spoken like my kind of philosopher,’ I said, agreeably.

‘Call you same time tomorrow. Ciao.’

‘I’ll be here,’ I said, into a vacuum.

I postponed breakfast for a few more minutes while I phoned Sharkey to update him, deciding that the time was now ripe for introducing Charley to him vicariously. By then, Sarah was squatting beside me on the bed, a hand on my shoulder.

‘You’ve done what!’ thundered Sharkey.

‘Only way we were going to get anywhere,’ I said, equably.

‘You have no authority.’

‘Used my initiative,’ I said provocatively, winking sideways at Sarah. I could have taken a blood-pressure reading over the phone.

‘What about our special relationship with US law
enforcement
?’

‘Doesn’t come on the cheap any more. They’re too busy fighting their own crime. Now let me give you the good news.’

As I brought him up to date, so all symptoms of
astronomically
high blood pressure receded.

‘And what’s our national debt come to so far?’

‘Zero,’ I said, giving time for this to sink in.

‘Nothing!’ he enthused, as ecstatic as a man facing bankruptcy whose debt had been wiped out by a mysterious benefactor.

‘A goodwill gesture,’ I said.

‘From a PI? I don’t believe it! Are you bullshitting me again or have you found a fairy godmother among thieves?’

‘No bullshit and she’s no fairy.’ Without histrionics, I sketched for him the arrangement with Charley.

‘Well, as long as you dig up Tina, alive and serviceable, I suppose we’ll be able to get it through our tight-arsed
accountants
,’ he said, grudgingly. Then, with a rare flourish of kinship,
he added, ‘Not like it used to be, when there was a bottomless pit to fund speculative fishing trips. Now it’s like running a pawnbroker’s shop, always trying to undervalue everything and getting things on the cheap.’

Hyperbole, of course; nevertheless, it captured the mood of most of us who were supposed to sanitize the streets with a
decimated
workforce – sweepers with fewer and fewer brooms.

‘So he bought it?’ said Sarah, as I hung up.

‘Sharkey isn’t buying anything. He hasn’t the beans to buy. We’re the peanut cops.’

‘But we continue?’

‘For now. He can’t afford to keep us here indefinitely. Neither can he afford for us to give up the chase. Like the world economy, he’s in a black hole. However, if Charley comes up with the goods, we’ll ensure he honours
that
liability.’

‘And in the meantime?’

‘We hit the restaurant for a mega breakfast and make a further dip in Sharkey’s black hole.’

‘If we’re going under, we might as well go down like the
Titanic
, in style, band playing.’

A kindred spirit, indeed.

F
or the next two days we were able to continue swanning around as if on holiday, despite Sharkey’s little lecture. We lounged around the pool, sunbathed on the beach, ate late
breakfasts
and lunches, and dined alfresco at leisure. We were rudderless until Charley returned to give us a steer.

When we last spoke, Charley promised to phone ‘same time’ next morning, and she didn’t let me down, but it was only to say, ‘I’ve put out lots of feelers; still waiting for call-backs. Talk with you tomorrow,’ which she did, bang on cue, but only to repeat, almost verbatim, the previous message.

And then:

‘Have you two had breakfast yet?’

‘No, Charley, but we’re just about to.’

‘If you can hold fire for another forty-five, I’ll join you at the banquet.’

‘Will it be worth our suffering hunger pangs?’ I answered, convivially.

‘Yes, oh, yes … on my life!’

‘Then we’ll happily starve,’ I said, speaking for Sarah as well as myself.

‘I’m already on my way to my car.’

Sarah’s face and eyes were ablaze with questions, which I addressed as we headed for the lifts.

We waited in the lobby, sharing sections of the
Los Angeles Times.
Charley came through the entrance as if propelled by a
hurricane
, hair flowing like that of a galloping thoroughbred. Her cop’s eyes vacuumed the scene in one sweep and she made us without breaking stride.

‘Hi,’ she greeted us, as I tucked the newspaper under my arm.

‘Let’s eat,’ I said, dispensing with formalities.

Charley was dressed similarly to our first memorable encounter, though now she carried a suede briefcase, which suited her better than the weapon in her shoulder-handbag and snub-nosed miniature that caressed her calf.

‘Lead the way,’ said Charley, which I did.

A waitress poured us coffees. The food, hot and cold, was at the buffet counter. Charley snapped open her briefcase, which she’d rested on her legs. I was famished for food, but even hungrier for information.

‘Business before we eat or after?’ said Charley, removing papers from her briefcase.

‘Before,’ I said, overruling my grumbling stomach, which gave me an acidic-kicking for being so inconsiderate.

‘OK, what I’ve been doing is exploiting my contacts in the IRS and other similar agencies, plus banks, credit card companies, and cell-phone network providers. Only people living rough on the streets can ever avoid the radar of national bureaucracy, Big Brother, the ultimate voyeur. The most important news for you two is that Tina is alive.’

‘Where?’ I said, on the edge of my seat now, unable to restrain myself.

‘Still in this country. She became a US citizen some ten years ago. She pays her taxes. She has no sheet. She has two bank accounts, three credit cards, and a Blackberry. Oh, and she’s a pillar of society, with one child, a daughter. Although not
married, she’s in a longstanding, stable relationship. After fleeing Vegas, she underwent cosmetic surgery here.’

‘In Santa Monica?’ I enquired, for clarification.

‘Don’t know … and that’s the truth. Suffice it to say, it was somewhere in LA.’

‘Was it a complete reconstruction job?’ Sarah asked, always one for the minutia.

‘Apparently.’

‘Very expensive,’ intoned Sarah, half-question,
half-statement.

‘Maybe not as much as you think. The surgeon is the father of Tina’s child.’

Stick my face back together again and you can fuck me to the moon.
Not an unreasonable assessment of mine, I reckoned.

‘So Tina’s in LA?’ I said, arguably upbeat.

‘No, she’s in New York City. Queens district.’

‘Living with her creative knifeman, the designer surgeon?’ I surmised, as if stating the obvious.

‘Oh, no; that was an affair that lasted under a year. He was already married and remains so; well, that’s my limited
understanding
.’

Another twist in the maze. Where were we heading now?

‘What’s she doing in New York?’ Sarah asked.

‘She runs a refuge for women victims of domestic violence. Any abuse, really.’

‘Very laudable,’ Sarah commented, without spin or undertow.

‘So when did she find God?’ I wondered aloud,
argumentatively
.

‘Good Samaritans may be rooted in biblical legend, but since when has a religious belief been mandatory for
humanitarianism
?’ said Charley, her question both abrasive and rhetorical.

I raised my serviette as a white flag of surrender. ‘What’s her partner do for his daily bread?’

‘She’s
a management risk assessor,’ said Sarah, without blinking.

I turned to Sarah. She turned to me. Eyes locked, before we both eyeballed Charley, who was enjoying the moment, playing us like an angler with two stunned fish on one teasing hook.

‘You mean her lover’s a woman?’ I said, trying not to sound incredulous, but failing.

‘It’s not exactly a phenomenon,’ Charley replied, searchingly. ‘Why should you be surprised?’

I had to think about that because it was an iceberg question, with hidden implications and the ability to sink reputations and credibility. ‘Because of what she was doing in Vegas. Because of what she’d been doing in London. Because of her having a child.’

‘Proclivities change, you know,’ said Charley, turning me into a Stone Age relic.

I held up my serviette yet again.

‘Now to a much more sensitive matter,’ said Charley,
roguishly
and fidgeting, head bowed as if in prayer. She crossed her legs, left over right; then right over left. She twiddled a pen, rearranged her paperwork, and pitched a sightless gaze
somewhere
over my head.

‘Tina’s partner is a Laura Farrow. A little younger than Tina, but not much. She’s away from home a lot – on business.’

‘Assessing risks for companies, I assume?’ I interjected with what seemed to me a logical assumption.

‘That’s what Tina believes.’

‘You mean Laura’s two-timing on Tina?’ said Sarah, female angst festering.

‘Not the way you’re imagining. Laura isn’t a management risk assessor; that’s just a cover, but, for it to be foolproof, not even her closest family must be privy to the truth.’

‘Then what the hell is she?’ I said, wanting an end to this suspense.

‘She’s with the CIA, but you don’t know that, OK?’

By mid-afternoon, following breakfast with Charley, we were aboard a United Airlines flight to New York.

By the time I called Sharkey from my cell-phone at 36,000 feet, an hour after take-off, it was gone midnight in the UK. I had Sharkey’s home number and my call woke him up.

‘Hello,’ he growled, gravelly, in a tone that translated into:
Who the fuck is this? Have you no idea what the time is?

‘It’s Lorenzo,’ I said, a tad too cheerfully for someone just
earbashed
from their sleep.

‘What’s up?’ he said, startled, reasoning that a call at this hour could only be from a harbinger of woeful tidings.

‘We have an address,’ I said, starkly.

There was silence as his brain, still sleeping, struggled to compute such a skeletal statement.

‘What the fuck are you blathering about?’ he demanded, steaming; his voice rattling like a kettle on the boil. ‘I know you have an address: you’re at the Holiday Inn, Santa Monica. Are you on the juice again?’

‘We have an address for Tina,’ I said, spacing out the words, as if talking to an idiot or someone who barely understood English. ‘She’s in New York. We’re on a flight there right now. With luck, we’ll connect with her first thing tomorrow, local time.’

‘Christ!’ Suddenly he was wide awake, fuelled by an
adrenaline
rush. ‘Is this straight up?’ he added, a stupid question prompted by the need for reassurance that he wasn’t dreaming.

I didn’t bother answering. Instead, I said, ‘I’ll make contact again as soon as we’ve talked with her.’ I was about to warn him that there were complications, none less than Tina living with a female CIA agent, a kindred spirit of our ‘One-A-Month Man’. Just in time, I realized that giving him a middle-
of-the-
night
rollercoaster ride wasn’t one of my better ideas.
Leave him on a high,
I counselled myself.

We landed at JFK just before 1 a.m. and bedded down for the rest of the night at a nearby budget motel, being economic with the public purse.

Neither of us had much sleep. Our brains were tossing and turning even more than our bodies. The thrill of the chase never diminished for me. The closer I got to my quarry, the quicker the pulse of the countdown.

We didn’t talk in bed, but I bet our thoughts travelled the same tramlines: what would Tina look like after all those years and cosmetic surgery? How much of her strength and vitality had been sapped and warped by the toll and toil of her past wanton life? What kind of reception would we be walking into? Would we be welcomed or would we represent ghosts of the past that she believed had been exorcized decades ago?

We were powerless to make Tina do anything against her will. Success or failure would hinge on our diplomatic adroitness. Our prospects would depend, I suspected, on how much she had confided in her partner about the dark side of her previous life.

The heartbeat of the night around JFK differed very little from its rush-hour tachycardia. The thump and throb of traffic were relentless. There was a rhythm to its drone that I found soothing; most city folk should understand that. Silence, not noise, disturbed me. For many years I’d lived under the Heathrow flight-path. And an overland ribbon of Tube lines had served as a boundary to the bottom of our backyard when I was a boy. Every time a train clattered past, the lopsided window of my mini-bedroom would vibrate, making the frame shift, almost cracking the glass. Aircraft flying overhead, either on take-off or landing, would make the whole house shudder, as if being uprooted at the epicentre of an earthquake. Those noises and disturbances would tranquillize me more than any
medication or bedtime story. It was the middle-of-the-night stillness that would wake me with a frightening start. Silence was a suffocating kind of death, where there was no pulse and the city ceased to breathe, all oxygen wrung from its lungs. But New York, like London, never needed the kiss of life. Its elixir for eternal, high-octane living came from kinetic energy. Like LA, New York lived on its nerves. Bizarrely, congestion cleared its lungs and kept it breathing. Crime and pollution killed its people, but kept it collectively alive as an entity, against all odds. The city’s blocked arteries were those of a corpse, yet it ran with the constitution of a finely tuned athlete.

The faint, first light of the new day was creeping around the blinds and across the foot of the bed before I finally dozed off, only to be nudged awake by Sarah less than two hours later.

‘It’s six-thirty,’ she said, in a wide-awake voice, devoid of early-morning phlegm. Neither of us had slept enough to be burdened by night-time debris, such as gritty eyes and dusty throats.

It was imperative that we made an early start. We showered together and were ready in half an hour for breakfast in the 1950s-styled diner that adjoined the motel. We didn’t have far to drive to Queens. The previous night, we’d hired a car at the airport and a detailed street-map of the city came with the vehicle.

Tina’s home was in a tree-lined avenue, where all the houses were detached, with small but neatly manicured front lawns; mostly open plan, except for a few examples of low, white picket-fencing. Each property had a double garage or car-port. Sprinklers were already hissing and spinning on a few lawns. Cars were a mix of American, European and Japanese. This was a stolid, middle-class suburb, populated by professional people. Middle everything, I guessed. Middle-aged with middle-
of-the-road
values and politics. Then I cautioned myself against such lazy stereotyping. Criminal history showed that this
neighbourhood
was the type that harboured spies and white-collar crooks, hackers and rogue City traders, and top-league fraudsters. Often a nest of vipers. Never judge a plant by its flowers. The most attractive could be the most poisonous and the same applied to people – another of my parents’ homilies.

‘No car in the driveway,’ observed Sarah, casually; a
meaningless
fact, really, but it helped to maintain our concentration level.

One or two cars could have been in the garage. Although Charley had done a good job for us, there was a lot of unfinished homework. For example, we didn’t have the location of the refuge that Tina ran. Neither did we know the hours she worked or whether some nights she slept at her business premises, although this was unlikely. In all probability, she employed a manageress or some kind of overseer.

The clock on the dash told us it was a couple of minutes before eight o’clock.

‘The daughter should be leaving for school soon,’ said Sarah.

‘And Tina could be doing the school run.’

We were parked on the opposite side of the road, about fifty yards from Tina’s place, a two-storey, clapboard and brick
property
, with a couple of slanting windows in the roof. Net curtains twitched in a couple of houses, but not in Tina’s. Eyes were watching us. Jungle drums on a wavelength beyond our reach would be alerting neighbours.

‘Do we have a plan?’ said Sarah, aware that we didn’t.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Let’s just play it. Last thing we want to do is rush things and blow it.’

Sarah nodded in agreement.

‘I’m hoping we’ll catch her alone,’ I said.

‘What happens if the garage opens and Tina drives out?’

‘We let her drive off.’

‘We don’t follow?’ said Sarah.

‘No, we let her go. If she senses she’s being followed, chances
are we’ll scare her. Our aim should be to put her at ease. Any case, it would be counter-productive to approach her at the refuge or any public place. We’re in no hurry. We’ll just wait for her to return.’