The Raiders

by Гарольд Роббинс

  Angie handed Ben a vodka martini.

  "What?" Jonas asked. "You a public-relations guy? You got connections? You can plant stories?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Jonas flared. "Don't call me sir. Or Mr. Cord. Or, God forbid, Dad. My daughter calls me by my first name, and so do you. Now— I've got some pictures. And I've got a piece of tape. You don't have to be a genius to figure out what I want done with them. Here. Look at these."

  Infrared flash had penetrated Glenda Grayson's bold sheer costume even more than bright stage lights did. In the six 8 x 10 prints Jonas handed Ben, she appeared to have gone on stage stark naked, with nothing covering her but the strings of beads.

  "Jesus Christ," Ben murmured.

  "It's her, okay?" Jonas asked. "I mean, you oughta know."

  "It's her, all right. What did she have in mind?"

  "Ask Angie."

  Angie shrugged. "What do you suppose she has in mind? She thinks she's been had. I guess I don't need to say how and by whom."

  "Listen to this tape," said Jonas.

  Angie pressed the button and started a tape rolling between reels. The voice of Glenda came out clear. "So, the guy says, 'I got one like a baseball bat.' And his wife says, 'Naahh. More like a softball bat.' The old guy asks the cute young chick for a date. She says, 'I don't think so. You're too bald.' He says, 'No. What I'm gonna show you is, I'm two-balled.'" The tape rolled on silent. Then a little laughter broke out, then more, and then more and more. "Took you a while to catch it, huh?" asked the voice of Glenda Grayson.

  Angie switched it off.

  "Old burlesque routines," said Jonas. "They say she was once a stripper. I guess she was."

  Ben nodded. "You want this stuff placed."

  "You got it."

  "Okay, Jonas. I can do it."

  "Keep your ass outa trouble, Ben. When you signed on with this family, you signed on for a war."

  4

  "Goddammit! Goddammit!" Jimmy Hoffa slammed his fist down on the table in the dining room of the house on the private airport. There were only three men in the room — Hoffa, John Stefano, and Morris Chandler — and Hoffa's outburst drew the attention of no one but the single hooker sitting at the bar, forlornly hoping for business.

  "You knew the Cords are bastards," said Chandler.

  "Well, so am I! Aren't I? Aren't I a bastard?"

  "It's been suggested," Stefano replied dryly.

  "Am I supposed to be afraid of those bastards? By God, I came up from the streets! I worked to get someplace. My daddy didn't leave me nothin'. He couldn't. I wasn't handed my living on a silver platter. Were you?"

  Chandler shook his head. "I never ate a mouthful of bread I hadn't earned."

  Hoffa's mood made another abrupt swing, and he grinned. "That somebody else hadn't earned," he said. "I've heard stories about you."

  "All right, guys," said Stefano. "A plane just landed. It's maybe the guy we're waiting for. Time for you to blow, Maurie. I mean, go. You can't have a look at this guy."

  Chandler shrugged. He took a final slug from his drink and stood. "I'm gone," he said. "Have a good meeting."

  Five minutes later a sad-faced man entered the room.

  "Here's Malditesta," said Stefano nodding toward the door. "Be careful how you talk to him."

  No one — with maybe an exception or two among the dons — knew the real name of the man called Malditesta. In street talk, to shoot a man in the head was called giving him a major headache. The Italian words for headache were mal di testa. Combined they made the pseudonym given this man after he had shot three or four people in the head. At fifty or so, Malditesta was aging but still handsome, taller and broader in the shoulders than the average man, with gray at his temples but sleek black hair not in the least thinned. His face was long, his nose and chin sharp, his eyes heavy-lidded, and he wore a lugubrious expression. His long raincoat was rumpled, as if he had worn it on the plane. He wore a brown hat.

  Before he came to their table to join Stefano and Hoffa he stopped to listen to a proposition from the hooker, and from her smile it looked as if he had agreed to visit her a little later.

  Stefano and Hoffa stood and shook hands with the hit man.

  "Well ... Glad you're here," said Hoffa. "You talk with Don Carlo?"

  "Don't ask who I talked to," said Malditesta. "I won't tell anybody I talked to you, either."

  Hoffa fixed a hard glance on Malditesta, but he might as well have fixed a hard glance on a tree for all the reaction he got.

  Malditesta was a pro. In the past twenty years he had killed eighteen men and three women. It was said of him that he had never failed to hit his target. What was more important, he had never so much as been suspected. He had never been arrested, never questioned. Stefano had heard of him but had never met him. Jimmy Hoffa had never heard of him, until now.

  "This has gotta be done fast and clean," said Hoffa.

  Malditesta summoned a waitress. "A Beefeater martini on the rocks with a twist," he said. "Medium dry. Tell the bartender I do like about a quarter of a teaspoon of vermouth in my martini — assuming he's using a good vermouth." He spoke to Stefano. "What do you eat here?"

  "Steak."

  Malditesta nodded. "Rare. And a good red wine? Whatever's the best you've got. Dry. I'd rather have a Bordeaux than a Burgundy."

  "It may have to be a California, sir," said the waitress.

  Malditesta wrinkled his nose. "If there's a problem, tell the bartender to come out and show me what he's got."

  When the waitress had left, Hoffa spoke impatiently. "You wanta talk business or not?"

  "There is nothing to talk about, Mr. Hoffa. I work one way and one way only. You name a person and set a date. You hand me money, the down payment. What happens after that is none of your business."

  Hoffa grinned scornfully. "What if the guy dies of typhoid?"

  "If by the date you set the man is shot by a jealous wife, you still owe me the balance of the fee," said Malditesta coldly.

  "You mean even if you didn't do it?"

  "How would you know I didn't do it? Things can be arranged in a variety of ways."

  "How do I contact you?" Hoffa asked.

  "You don't. You can't. When you hear word that the job has been done, you hand over the balance of my money to Don Carlo Vulcano."

  "How do I know you won't take the money I hand you today and scram?" Hoffa asked.

  Malditesta turned his heavy-lidded eyes on John Stefano.

  "Jimmy," said Stefano solemnly, in a voice so low Hoffa had to frown and strain to hear it. "Don't even talk like that to this man."

  Hoffa pondered for a long moment, then shrugged.

  "No offense," he said. "But if Don Carto is handling the payout, why am I sitting here with a briefcase full of cash I'm delivering personally?"

  "I always meet personally with the people I do business with," said Malditesta. "I want to know what they look like, in case I have to hunt for them later."

  5

  Angie reached over from the driver's seat and put a hand on the hand of the weeping and trembling blond girl. "Look. We'll take care of you," she said. "It's over. We'll take care of you and protect you."

  A little later she led the girl from the black Porsche to the private elevator that carried them from the garage under The Seven Voyages to the suite where Jonas waited.

  "The bastard beat her," said Angie to Jonas as she brought the sobbing girl into the room where Jonas sat at his coffee table desk.

  "What? 'Cause he found out?"

  Angie shook her head. "No. Because it's the kind of guy he is."

  Jonas stood and walked toward the trembling girl. "She need a doctor?" he asked.

  "Nuhh," said the girl. Her lips were swollen and bleeding, her right eye was turning black, and she had a growing swelling on her right cheek. "Nuh doctor. Gimme a drink! Gin!"

  He took her hand and helped her to sit down on the couch. Angie went to the bar.

  "Did you
get pictures?" Jonas asked.

  The girl nodded. "I think so."

  "The guys are souping the film," said Angie. "We should know before long."

  "We had no idea he'd beat you," said Jonas. "I figured it was just a regular deal. This— What's your name?"

  "Vicky," the girl mumbled.

  "This multiplies our obligation to you, Vicky," said Jonas.

  "The money will be better, and we'll get you out of Vegas, set you up someplace else. Maybe we can get you out of the business, if you want out."

  Vicky nodded. "Want out. Second time I've been busted up."

  "Are you really sure you don't want to see a doctor?"

  The girl shook her head firmly. "Teeth okay," she said. "Just fat lip, cuts— Like new in a couple weeks." She seized the glass Angie handed her and drank three big swallows of gin. '"Gain," she mumbled, handing the glass back.

  "Can you tell me what you saw and heard?" Jonas asked.

  "Heard nothing," said Vicky. "Saw ... Three guys came first. One of them was Chandler. Another one was Jimmy Hoffa, I think. I'd seen the third guy before, remembered him for his big cigars. Chandler left before the fourth guy — the one — came in."

  "Set up a photo array," said Jonas to Angie.

  Angie laid out half a dozen pictures. She identified the photo of John Stefano as the man she remembered for his cigars. None of the pictures was of the man who had beaten her.

  Jonas's security men had located Chandler the day after he abandoned his office in The Seven Voyages. Thereafter they tailed him. He made no great effort to hide himself, and it was easy enough to keep track of him. They heard a rumor that Chandler was to be the manager of a big, new, as-yet-unnamed casino-hotel that was to go up next year. When he went to the airport, it was certain he was meeting somebody important.

  Having used the private airport himself, Jonas knew the private club in the old house off the ramp was a meeting place for a variety of men coming into Las Vegas for a variety of reasons. Some months ago he had managed to place one of his men in the club as bartender. That man had recruited Vicky as a spy, at five hundred dollars a month whether she did anything or not. Jonas's men had installed a hidden tape recorder and camera that could be activated by a button in the girl's bed. Until now Vicky's tapes and film had produced what Jonas had described as "high entertainment" but nothing significant.

  The bartender had given Vicky instructions to work especially hard to sell her services to anyone who came to the club with Morris Chandler. This was the first time she had earned the bonus Jonas had authorized if she got pictures and tapes of a Chandler associate.

  "Did he say anything worth hearing?" Jonas asked.

  Vicky shook her head. "You can listen, but— "

  "You can sleep in Mrs. Wyatt's suite tonight," said Jonas. "Have a bath and some soup or something. Like I said before, we'll work something out for you. You don't need to go back to the airport, ever. Do you know who I am?"

  "I know ... Mr. Cord."

  "Then you know that when I say I'll take care of you, I'll take care of you."

  6

  Half an hour after Vicky, now a little wobbly from gin, went to Angie's suite, the lab men brought the photographs she had taken.

  The equipment was good, and Vicky had known when to press the button to take a picture and advance the film. From 35-mm negatives the darkroom technicians had produced 8 x 10 prints of a middle-aged, muscular, well-hung naked man.

  "I want to know who he is," Jonas said grimly. "Send a set of these to Bat. Somebody take a set to Lieutenant Dragon at LAPD, and somebody show them to Detective Baker, Manhattan North. Show a set to Ben Parrish. That hustling idiot knows everybody. Any other ideas?"

  "Send Bat two sets," Angie suggested. "He can send a set to Toni. Maybe somebody at The Washington Post will recognize the man. She might— "

  "Good thinking," said Jonas. "Put two sets in the New York courier bag."

  They listened to the tape. They heard the sounds of the punches Vicky took, of her screams and grunts and coughing and begging; but from the time he entered her room until he left the man had said nothing that suggested who he was — except that he was a vicious bastard.

  7

  Lorena Pastor lifted her veil and peered intently at the bland face of Ben Parrish. He smiled faintly at her and took a sip from his vodka martini. His left arm hung in a sling, and she had driven the car to bring them to this restaurant in Malibu.

  "I really can't believe you, Benjamin," she said. "I really cannot believe that you threw in the towel and went to work for Jonas Cord."

  "I don't work for him, Lorena. But I think you know that Jonas has a way of getting people to do what he wants them to do. Anyway, I'm married to his daughter."

  "You two are naughty," said Lorena. "She married you to spite her father. I can't imagine what your reason was."

  "If she married me to spite her father, it didn't work," said Ben. "He was furious at first, but he seems to have accepted it."

  Lorena had ordered a vodka martini, too, to see if she would like them, she said. She lifted her glass and drained the last of her drink, and by a nod to the waiter she ordered a second round. "You say you have something for me," she said. "I can't imagine your motive. Why would you want to feed me a story? I have to know the truth, Ben. Is it really from Jonas?"

  Ben nodded.

  She smiled and for a moment closed her eyes. "I have a fond memory of that man. I was just making the transition from would-be actress to columnist, and he pumped me full of energy. He's ten years younger than I am, you know. I was all but forty, and to have a handsome rich young stud after me was a marvelous boost to my sagging self-confidence. He took me flying and nearly scared me to death."

  "He's a scary man in some ways."

  "Nevada Smith introduced me to Jonas," she went on. "Talk about studs, there was another one?"

  "You didn't miss many, did you, Lorena?"

  "In my day," she said. "If I wasn't so damn old and hadn't got so damn ugly, I'd want a go with you. You could at least let me have a look at what you're reputed to have."

  "In the car on the way back," he said.

  "Promise? Look and touch?"

  "Promise. Look and touch." He laughed.

  Their second round was delivered. She took a sip, then asked, "Well, what've you got for me?"

  "A piece of tape. And some pictures. Of the new Glenda Grayson nightclub act that opened in Havana. She's been going out on the stage all but naked. And wait till you hear some other monologue. She's kissed television good-bye."

  "Okay. I get it now," said Lorena. "What she kissed good-bye to was Cord Productions. So Jonas wants her ass."

  "She's doing the show," said Ben. "The pictures and tape are real."

  Lorena sighed. "I don't think I can do anything with it, Ben."

  "Why not, for Christ's sake?"

  "I don't think Walt will publish it. He's got something against Jonas. He wanted the Margit Little story. Off the record, he ordered me to use it. I don't think he'll want this one. I don't think he'll help Jonas hurt Glenda Grayson."

  "I think I know why," said Ben.

  "Then you know more than I do," she said. She sighed again. "Take the story to Edna. She won't have my problem."

  "She doesn't have sixty-eight newspapers either," said Ben.

  "She's got forty-six. That's enough to break a story. After she breaks it, Walt may have to let me do something with it. Let me see the pictures, anyway."

  Lorena Pastor opened the big brown envelope that Ben handed her and glanced through the photographs of Glenda's nightclub costumes. "This is the end of her in television," she said. "The papers that won't publish pictures like this will publish descriptions. And if her monologue is raunchy the way you say, the guardians of our public morality will go into a frenzy."

  8

  Bat brought the FBI fingerprint report to Las Vegas. He checked the distant rooftop through the telescope while Jonas read the document
Toni had obtained.

  FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  J. EDGAR HOOVER, DIRECTOR

  The fingerprint laboratory of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has examined the unlabeled wine bottle submitted this date and reports its findings as follows:

  Four sets of fingerprints exist on the bottle, two indistinct and two distinct. The conditions of the indistinct prints make it impossible to state with certainty that they are not the fingerprints of a known person whose fingerprints are on file with this Bureau. The two distinct sets of fingerprints are those of the following persons:

  (1) One set are the fingerprints of one Angela Burns Damone Latham. Angela Burns Damone Latham was born in Yonkers, N.Y., on May 21, 1918. She was arrested by Postal Inspectors on March 11, 1941, in White Plains, N.Y., on a charge of stealing from United States postal facilities, i.e., mail boxes. Counterfeit money was also found in her possession. She pleaded guilty to mail theft and was sentenced to five years imprisonment. She entered the Federal Reformatory for Women on June 20, 1941—

  Jonas flipped the sheet. He didn't want to read any more about Angie.

  (2) The second set of fingerprints are those of Maurice Cohen. Maurice Cohen was born in New York, N.Y., on April 26, 1882. This Bureau possesses fingerprint records of Maurice Cohen as follows:

  a. Subject was arrested on May 3,1900, in New Orleans, La., on a charge of larceny by fraud. This charge was subsequently dropped.

  b. Subject was arrested on August 8, 1900, in New Orleans, La., on a charge of larceny by fraud. Subject was convicted on this charge and sentenced to one year of imprisonment. Subject entered a Louisiana state prison farm on September 21, 1900, and was released on September 21, 1901.

  c. Subject was arrested in Houston, Texas, on March 17, 1903, on a charge of public vagrancy. He was sentenced to thirty days on a road gang and was released on March 18, 1903.