The Raiders

by Гарольд Роббинс

  She was—

  What the hell was this? A car had come up behind him and was blinking its lights. The guy wanted to pass. Yeah? Well, he'd play hell, too. Whatever that was back there, it was what men who knew cars called Detroit Iron, and no Plymouth or Dodge was gonna pass this Porsche, no matter how much somebody had souped it up.

  On the other hand— He was in no condition to race, really, Porsche or no Porsche. He was in firm control of it, for sure, but he'd had too much vodka to stretch the car or himself. What the hell? Let the guy pass. If he had any brains, he'd know he'd been let past.

  Ben slowed a little and edged to the right. The car came up on his left. It was a Plymouth — what a car to be passing a Porsche! — but obviously modified, its unmuffled engine roaring. He glanced, trying to get a look at the driver. What? Some crazy kid?

  Crazy! Running alongside of him, the Plymouth suddenly lurched right and slammed the Porsche. Ben fought for control and kept away from the guardrail. He floored the accelerator, knowing he could, if he had to, outrun any goddamned Plymouth ever modified; but as the Porsche gained speed the Plymouth veered right again and slammed hard. Ben couldn't control it. The Porsche rammed the guardrail. Metal flew. Glass flew. He hurtled forward and felt his arm break against the steering wheel.

  6

  Jonas sat across the desk from a thirty-two-year-old assistant district attorney named Carter. The bespectacled young black man was sufficiently awed to have crushed his cigarette when he noticed that Mr. Cord did not smoke.

  "Have you heard my name, maybe?" Jonas asked.

  "Yes, sir, Mr. Cord. Absolutely."

  "Well, don't think of me as a guy who's come in your office to throw his weight around. That's not why I'm here. You're going to do what you have to do, your duty, and I didn't come to suggest you do anything else. I'm hoping, though, that my name suggests to you that I'm not the kind of man who'd come to your office and make wild, stupid statements he couldn't back up."

  "Your name suggests anything but that, Mr. Cord."

  "So, what was his blood-alcohol percent?"

  "Point-one-seven."

  "Drunk," said Jonas.

  "Yes. The statute says you shouldn't drive if you've got point-one-five."

  "Marginal?"

  "I took part in a test, drinking and blowing in the meter, so I could relate to those numbers when I have to present a case to a court," said Carter. "Frankly, Mr. Cord, if I had point-one-seven in me, I couldn't find my car, much less get the key in the ignition and start it."

  Jonas nodded. "Okay, schnocked."

  "Yes, sir. I'm afraid that's what Mr. Parrish was."

  "Kinda depends on the man, doesn't it?" Jonas suggested. "I'd be willing to bet I could drink enough to make the meter show one-point-seven, and I could take a cop out in the car with me and pass a driver's license test."

  The young district attorney smiled. "I'm skeptical about that, Mr. Cord," he said. "But what's the point?"

  "When a man knocks back as much vodka every day as Ben Parrish has been doing for years, he develops a certain tolerance for it. I don't like the son of a bitch much, but I'd be willing to ride in a car with him after he'd had six drinks. My point is, I don't think what he had to drink is what caused the accident."

  "I'm listening, Mr. Cord."

  "I don't mean to put down your investigators. I know they're honest and did what they believed was right. But I have investigators, too, and I think yours missed some facts. They missed some because they'd made up their minds what had happened and only looked for the facts that sustained their theory. They missed others because they couldn't have known them and couldn't have found them — unless they know what I know."

  The young lawyer reached for his cigarettes, then quickly put them back in his pocket.

  "Go ahead and smoke," said Jonas. "I quit for good reasons, but you don't need to be uncomfortable."

  "Thank you." Carter lit a cigarette. "So, what facts have we overlooked, Mr. Cord?"

  "Ben Parrish's car was smashed in thoroughly on the right side, where it hit the guardrail, which your investigators' report emphasizes. But why was the driver's-side door smashed in, too? Doesn't that suggest something?"

  "I suppose it does," said Carter. "What did you have in mind?"

  "Simple enough. Somebody rammed Ben Parrish and forced him into the guardrail. The big dent in the left door is at the height of an automobile bumper. Right above that is a smaller dent, with traces of green paint in it. Somebody rammed him."

  "Why would somebody do that?"

  "To kill him," said Jonas. "If that guardrail hadn't held — held really beyond what they're expected to do — Ben Parrish would have gone into the ravine."

  "And what are the facts we couldn't have known?"

  "This is where I ask you to believe I'm not the man to come to you with wild and stupid accusations. Ben Parrish is my son-in-law, as I suppose you know. Off the record, I'm not very happy about that, but that's the way it is. I think somebody may have tried to kill him to get at me. I've made some tough people very angry."

  "Can you be more specific?" Carter asked.

  "Well ... How much specificity goes with the smashed-in door on the left side of the car? If he'd gone through the guardrail and rolled down into the ravine, no one would have noticed that left door. Even my guys wouldn't have. It would have been so simple. Drunk driver hits guardrail, rolls down rocky bank. The guardrail fouled somebody up."

  Carter used his cigarette to give him a moment to think. He inhaled deeply and let the white smoke trickle out of his mouth. "What do you want me to do, Mr. Cord?"

  "Whatever is right," said Jonas. "Have your investigators look at the car again. If they and you conclude the accident wasn't an accident, then the drinking wasn't so significant. Was it?"

  "He broke the law, Mr. Cord. Drinking and driving is dangerous."

  "But if he was a victim of attempted murder, that puts a little different complexion on the case, doesn't it?"

  "You're suggesting I drop the drunk-driving case?"

  Jonas shook his head. "I don't want to say anything that so much as suggests I'm trying to exert improper influence. I brought an additional fact to your attention: the left door. I brought you an idea as to why someone might have tried to force Ben Parrish off the road and kill him. I hope you'll agree the case may not be a simple matter of drunk driving. It may be more."

  "All right. I'll look into it."

  7

  Dave Amory sat with Bat in the Chrysler Building office. Most of Bat's endemic clutter was hidden under the covers of the rolltop desks. He faced Bat across the big table that served as desk for the chief executive officer of Cord Enterprises.

  "It's war now, Bat," said Dave. "Teamsters drivers in four cities — Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Newark — have refused to make deliveries to InterContinental loading docks, claiming they are non-standard and unsafe."

  "Let independents haul our air freight," said Bat.

  Dave shook his head. "We tried it in Chicago, figuring that would be the safest. They hit the trucks. Somebody dropped concrete blocks on them as they went under overpasses. Non-union companies are afraid to touch our air freight."

  "Well, Hoffa is not the only guy who can play that game," said Bat grimly.

  "Be goddamned careful, Bat," said Dave Amory. "Be goddamned careful."

  8

  Detroit Free Press:

  Jay Fulton, vice president of the International Union of Teamsters and Warehousemen, was seriously injured last night when a concrete block, dropped from an overpass on the Jeffries Freeway, shattered the windshield of his limousine and disabled his driver, causing the car to veer across the center divider and into the path of an oncoming sixteen-wheeler.

  Fulton, 46, is also a trustee of the Central States Pension Fund. Hospital officials removed him from the critical list early this morning, but he remains in guarded condition with fractured ribs, a punctured lung, a concussion, and a broken arm.


  Teamsters President James Hoffa described the attack as "A cowardly attempt on the part of certain bosses to prevent this union from protecting its members. Such outrages will never succeed."

  9

  Detroit News:

  Early arrivers at the executive offices of the International Union of Teamsters and Warehousemen knew something was wrong as soon as they entered the building this morning.

  That smell—

  It was the stench from a gooey mixture of tar and kerosene and maybe some other things, that had been poured into all the drawers in some sixty file cabinets.

  Left atop one of the cabinets was a box of wooden kitchen matches, suggesting that the files could have been burned if the intruders had so intended. One secretary, who asked not to be quoted by name, said the files would not have been any more completely destroyed if they had been burned. "Who can separate one paper from another?" she asked. "Who can read anything?"

  The Teamsters Union takes some pride in its security. An official who similarly asked to be unnamed said it was apparent to him that someone had been paid more to let the files be destroyed than that someone was being paid to protect them.

  "If the bosses can do this to us," he asked plaintively, "what can't they do?"

  10

  "Bat ... Did you do it?"

  Bat drew a deep breath and blew it out noisily. They were in bed. In the past she had not wanted to bring up things like this when they were in bed. Priorities. Why now?

  "Bat ... ?"

  "What do you want me to say?"

  "I just want to know if— Off the record. I'm not asking as a newspaper reporter. I'm asking as the woman who loves you."

  He sighed again. "Look. Jimmy Hoffa is a thug. Am I supposed to let thugs destroy my business?"

  "Would you kill him?" she asked.

  He shook his head. "I won't have to."

  "That's not the answer. Would you? Could you?'

  "No."

  Toni lay silent for a moment, not sure if she believed what he had just said. "What does your father think?"

  He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her. She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. "I had a Catholic friend once who used rubbers so his girlfriend wouldn't get pregnant. I asked him if that wasn't against the rules, and he said, 'The pope doesn't know everything.' "

  "So ... You out-Jonas Jonas."

  Bat reached for the glass that sat on the nightstand and took a sip of Scotch. "Toni," he said. "Don't try to make judgments about what I do in business. Sure I mean to out-Jonas Jonas. I'm gonna out-Jonas him. I'm going to take it away from him. When he dies. Or sooner."

  "Which would you rather?" she asked.

  "Sooner," he said.

  26

  1

  JONAS SAT ON THE COUCH IN HIS SEVEN VOYAGES SUITE facing a stack of files and two telephones on the coffee table that by now had become his favorite of all the desks he'd ever had. It was ten at night, and the suite was closed now to everyone but him and Angie. He still wore the blue blazer and crisply creased slacks he had worn during the business day. Angie was naked. That was what he wanted. He still had Bat on the telephone from New York, where it was 1 a.m., but his eyes were on her.

  "He's gone," he said to Bat. "Gone like the legendary Arab who folds his tent and disappears in the night. It's good riddance, of course, but I imagine it has some meaning."

  He was talking about Morris Chandler. During the day, Chandler had simply disappeared. His clothes were gone from his suite. He had taken little from his office, but Jonas surmised he had copied any papers he wanted. He had left no word. His departure had been abrupt and unexpected.

  "What? Well, let me ask Angie." Jonas turned from the telephone and asked her, "Bat wants to know if we can supply anything that would have a clear set of Chandler's fingerprints on it. In his office, you think?"

  "We don't have to look in his office," she said. "He left a bottle of absinthe under our bar. His private stock. He had the damned stuff smuggled in from Hong Kong, you know. Nobody else ever touched those bottles, except maybe me when I poured him a drink."

  "Angie says we can send you a bottle that will have his fingerprints on it. I'll have her wrap it so the New York courier can deliver it to you in the morning. So ... You can go to bed now. I'll talk to you in the morning."

  Angie had already gone to the bar and was looking underneath for the bottle of the illegal liquor. She slipped a paper napkin under it and lifted it by the cork.

  "Absinthe," Jonas muttered. "The stuff is supposed to fry your brains. I always wondered why he liked it."

  "Why do you suppose Bat wants Chandler's finger-prints?" Angie asked.

  She had picked up another bottle and was pouring them two bourbons. Jonas was aware of her little trick. She knew he would want a drink about now, and if she poured it, it would be smaller than if he poured it himself.

  "He didn't say, and I didn't ask," said Jonas. "But if I were Morris Chandler I'd watch my ass. Bat's got a mean streak in him."

  "Like you never did." Angie laughed.

  2

  Glenda opened her new club show in the Nacional Hotel in Havana. Sam Stein had tried to book her into the Riviera, but Meyer Lansky vetoed the idea. "The long arm of the Cords," Sam complained.

  Glenda told Sam she was tired of television and wanted to do a bold act, in the kind of costume she used to wear, doing a monologue with words and subjects that were taboo on the little tube. Sam was dubious, but she swept aside his cautions, wrote her own lines, and designed her whole production.

  "I'm gonna be a sensation," she told Sam.

  For the first half of the show, she returned to a costume that had always worked very well for her and was something of a Glenda Grayson signature: a simple black dance leotard, this one cut very high on her hips, dark sheer stockings, blood-red garters, and black hat. Her hips and upper legs were bare, emphasizing as always the theatrical contrast between white skin and black costume.

  After she had danced and sung, she climbed on a stool, took off her hat and shook her blond hair, then put the hat on again, now on the back of her head.

  "God, I feel like I've come home!" she cried. "Do any of you have any idea how goddamn boring making a television show is? The first guy who yells 'About as boring as watching it' is gonna get a kick in the nuts. Anyway, I feel like I'm back where I belong, entertaining a live audience. And, hey, you are alive! And I thank you."

  Her audience applauded.

  "Television is supposed to be family entertainment. But if you make any reference as to how families come to be, they cut that from the script. Right? The TV father nearly faints with surprise when the wife tells him she's preggers. 'Really? Really, honey? Gee, that's great! I can't believe it!' What the hell did he think was gonna result from what he's been doin' three times a night for the past six months?"

  The audience laughed, then applauded again.

  "Margaret Mead, I think it was — you know, the anthropologist — writes that some primitive people just don't make any connection between doin' it and getting pregnant. But ... Americans, in the twentieth century yet? Television. Jesus!"

  She took a break, while an act featuring trained chimpanzees amused her audience.

  When she appeared on the stage for the second half of her show, she walked out into the beam of a spotlight wearing fifty strings of tiny glittering black beads that cascaded from her neck to her ankles. Under the thousands of beads she wore a diaphanous straight black gown. When she moved, the strings of beads shifted, and her audience could see she was wearing nothing under the gown. The sheer fabric blurred what they saw of her, but no one doubted they were seeing everything. The applause rolled up as a roaring wave before she sang a note.

  She did not dance in the second half of the show. Or do a monologue. She walked around the stage singing, while four handsome, muscular young men in skin-tight flesh-colored panty hose danced a balletlike routine behind her.

  The au
dience called her out for two encores and four extra bows.

  "I'm better than ever!" she exulted in her dressing room afterward. "Thirty-six friggin' years old, and I'm better than ever!"

  "You're dead for television," said Sam grimly. "That deal that was made for you is dead. No network will touch you. You're too hot."

  "I'm too good!"

  "That, too. But television won't dare. This is the time of Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, and of President Eisenhower, who thinks this country is a 'God-fearing one.' Presley appears on the Sullivan Show, and they don't let the cameras show him below the waist. You just went out there naked, sis. You're using bad words on stage. You think a network is going to let you in front of its cameras?"

  "The great unwashed won't even know about it," said Glenda. "Only the people who can afford to come to clubs like this will know — and they will appreciate it."

  "Let us hope you're right. And this act has got to be toned down before you take it back to the States."

  3

  "Never mind, never mind, never mind," said Jonas to Ben Parrish. "And I didn't put a fix in. Get that idea out of your mind. You see to it that Jo-Ann cooperates one hundred percent with those guys I've assigned to her. Until this mess is straightened out."

  Ben nodded solemnly. His broken left arm was in a sling. He couldn't drive. Jo-Ann had delivered him to the airport in Los Angeles, and Angie had driven him from the Las Vegas airport to The Seven Voyages. He wore a lightweight blue-and-white checked jacket, a white polo shirt, and gray slacks. He was subdued.