Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3)

by C. D. Reiss

“What did you tell them?”

  “Everything.” She opened the door.

  She went in like it was nothing, and I got in behind her and slammed the door closed. We were alone in the darkened room with only the blue light of the monitors highlighting the curves of her face.

  “Like what?” I asked, my tone an accusation.

  “What?” She shrugged. “He came. He brought dinner. To seduce you, I figured. And nice job, by the way…”

  “Were they asking specifically about me?”

  “They’re lawyers. They don’t need to ask. But yeah, that’s what they were getting at.”

  I tapped my fingers on the back of the chair. There was an equation at work, with Daniel sitting to the right of the equal sign.

  “He said he was done protecting me,” I said. “Looks like he meant it.”

  “Have you done anything? What happened with Scotty?”

  The loan shark Scott Mabat, had shaken down Katrina for her post-production money, threatened her life, refused payment, and eventually run afoul of Antonio. He’d landed in the hospital and was back on the street in a week.

  “I pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger.” I said it as if delivering the news at nine. Who knew what looking death in the face had done to him? If he’d felt threatened enough, he might have gone to the cops, which would have eventually led him to Daniel.

  “You what?” Katrina said.

  “It wasn’t loaded.”

  “Okay, Tee.” She held her hands out as if pushing me away. “This is way, way out of my league right now.”

  “I didn’t shoot him.”

  “What do you want, a cookie? Holy fuck. Holy fucking fuck. You’re pulling triggers on people?”

  “He was going to hurt you,” I said.

  “Oh, no. No no no no. Just, no. I would have gone to the cops.”

  “And lost the movie?”

  “Which I’m going to lose anyway, right now, if my script supervisor and the woman financing postproduction shoots people. Holy fuck, no! They can freeze your assets. Then they can stop post. Everything here can go to hell! God dammit, Theresa!”

  “Next time someone threatens to gang-rape you, I’ll just give them your address.”

  She growled, closing her eyes and clenching her fists, as if the anger inside her had to be released before she could say another word. “God, Tee Dray!”

  Quick as a snake, but with better intentions, she wrapped her arms around me, squeezing my elbows to my sides.

  “Can you lighten up? I can’t breathe.” I pushed her away. “Did the lawyers ask how you were financing post?”

  She pulled back and dropped into a chair. It swiveled and squeaked before stabilizing. “No.”

  “Then why do you look so guilty?”

  “They asked if Antonio was involved with the movie. I said no. He just brought dinner that one time, and it looked as if he was trying to get into your pants. They asked if he did, and I said I wasn’t sure. And before you get upset, that’s the best answer to give them, because it’s all about the doubt, and since I never saw you actually doing it…”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “So, they asked every detail of that night, and if I’d seen him again, and I told them I saw him at your loft the night you banged up your car.”

  I sat down. I had entered a non-emotional state, and I just took in everything she said. Much could be missed if I got upset or let her push my sympathies.

  “From beginning to end, Directrix.”

  “They said Scott went to the hospital. He wasn’t coherent for days, but when he started talking, he implicated me in getting the shit beaten out of him but wouldn’t say anything else. Now, I was at my parents’ place in Orange County, and there’s a credit-card trail and a dozen people who saw me getting drunk at my old hangout. So, first they threatened me, but I knew they had nothing. Then they started asking questions about you and Antonio. I denied everything because I never thought you’d be involved. And I still can’t believe it. Still.”

  She looked at me as if I’d just lied when I’d told her what had happened in the shipping container.

  “Wait, wait," I asked. "Did they come because they wanted to know about Antonio’s involvement? Or because they wanted to know if you had something to do with that scumbag getting beaten up.”

  “You said scumbag.”

  “Why did they come?”

  She swiveled in her chair and hit the spacebar on one of the keyboards. The monitor flashed brighter. She faced it.

  “They were fishing.” Tap tap tap. I was being shut out.

  “Katrina.”

  “I don’t know you anymore. I mean, I thought at first it was all crap. I thought they had it all wrong about everything. You know, like it was just Danny being a dick. But you? You? You scare me.”

  When she looked up at me, her eyes were big and scared and determined all at once. She’d grown up with good parents in a bad neighborhood and had a healthy fear of anything illegal. “This is all I’ve ever wanted my whole life. I had it and lost it. I’m getting it back. My job. My work. This movie is happening. I can’t let anything get in the way.”

  “Is my financing it getting in the way?” It hurt to even say it. Giving her money felt like the only productive thing I’d done in my life.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Fine. We’ll talk about this later.”

  “Don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not. I understand. I can’t…” I swallowed. I could barely continue. “It’s not right if I sully your work.”

  “It’s not that.” She turned toward me then away.

  “It is, and you know it,” I said.

  “I keep thinking it would be easier if I could just get a studio to back me again. Even without LAPD hanging over the thing and the paper trail back to a loan shark. Michael’s amazing. I might cut together a trailer and see if I can get Overland behind this picture. The odds are impossible, but what the hell, right? I mean, after I got Scott involved like some film-school amateur, I deserve the problems I’ve gotten. It’s my responsibility to get out of them.”

  “Just let me know.” My voice must have been thick, because she stood up and put her hands on my shoulders.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  I backed up. I didn’t want her hands on my shoulders, and I didn’t want to talk anymore. I felt filthy, and I had a compulsion to leave before she saw the depth of my wickedness.

  She was worried about hurting me, but she had it backwards. I was the one who wound up hurting her every time I tried to help her. God damn Daniel for not just leaving her alone, and God damn me for not finding a way to shut him down. I went downstairs with my head held high and my shoulders lowered from the weight on them. Otto opened the car door for me. I was a princess with unearned graces, a sparkly package with a bomb inside. I couldn’t live like that. I couldn’t go about my business and watch people get hurt without taking action.

  When Otto stopped at a light, I leaned forward. “Are you going to eat lunch?” I asked.

  “Now that you mention it…” He patted his stomach.

  “How about In-’n-Out? You can get me an Animal Style.”

  His eyes lit up. “Great idea.”

  I know I smiled, but I was so angry I could barely think. I transmitted none of that in my face or body language. I knew anyone who saw me wouldn’t know what was going on in my mind, or sense my heart palpitations. Except Antonio. From day one, he knew what my body was doing when no one else did. Good thing he wasn’t there to see me thinking through what I wanted to do to Daniel.

  Otto pulled into the lot, and while he was waiting on line, I slipped away. I didn’t like doing it, and I knew he’d get into trouble, but I needed to breathe and to make my own decision about how to handle Katrina.

  sixteen.

  antonio

  tried to make peace with Paulie because Theresa had asked me to and because she was right. Doing things for Th
eresa’s sake was getting to be a habit.

  Donna Maria Carloni agreed to broker the peace, and surprisingly, Paulie agreed to show up. I’d been Donna Maria’s consigliere for two years, and I was convinced Paulie wouldn’t let her broker anything. I was wrong.

  I never should have been in the life. My father saw that it would eat me alive, but from the minute I walked in to him and demanded vengeance for Valentina, and he took the demand from me and gave it to one of his men, I was in. I didn’t even want to be, but I had changed, and the power and freedom that came with being camorrista became a need. He had no other way to protect me from myself and from the people coming after me.

  Since then, not one second of my life had been my own. I was the property of Benito Racossi, his consigliere. His right hand, protected and enslaved. Then I moved on to be Donna Maria’s consigliere as payment for a debt. I was never my own man.

  I must have been confusing for Theresa. I had to appreciate that. I was reluctant to expose her to the life but, at the same time, drew her in. I worshipped her virtue while destroying it. I murdered men even as I feared God’s justice. My mother had told me that a man who held the idea that he was good in his right hand and the knowledge that he was damned in his left was destined to live half a life.

  The hills were a sunbaked brown and dark grey-green, thick with brush and spotted with chunky rocks, like Naples, without the ever-present shadow of Vesuvio, still and silent but boiling inside.

  I turned in to a nondescript dirt driveway that any casual observer would have missed, which led to the ass end of Whittier Narrows. No one was supposed to live there. It was a preserve, not meant for residences, but Donna Maria Carloni’s dead husband had worked it out forty years ago and created an inviolate right-of-way. To attack Donna Maria, a person would have to trespass on government land, and then pass a gantlet of cameras. She ended four underbosses with her own hands to regain her husband’s perch at the top of East Los Angeles’s mafia pyramid.

  I made a hand sign to the tree-perched camera: one thumb pressed against the center of my pointer finger, where the scar was. The white gate appeared a hundred feet later with another camera mounted on top of it. It opened.

  A quarter mile along the brushy dirt drive, I tipped my head right, then left. The still unripe fruits of the olive trees hung heavy. The last time I’d been there, two weeks before, they’d been harvesting on rickety wooden ladders. I’d been politely summoned and told that Vito had to be dealt with. I found him trading in pictures of girls—babies—and threw him hard enough to dislocate his shoulder. We didn’t do that. Camorristi did not keep prostitutes or traffic women. We did not make money on the backs of children, and we did not ever sexualize them.

  But although that was offense enough to get Vito killed, what broke my crew was the valet parking. Men opened little businesses like that to make extra cash. It was a simple thing, but ended with him betraying Paulie and me.

  He started the valet business to do something honest. The little shit pedophile was trying to go legitimate, and for that, for doing what I wanted to start but didn’t think I could finish, I destroyed him. I let my temper get the best of me. I chased him. I shot at him. I pulled him out of his house in Griffith Park and threw him down a hill. And from that point on, my reputation as a man who kept control of himself and his crew spiraled downward. It happened faster than I thought it could.

  In the weakness came an opening, and in the opening, men’s ambitions flowed. One man’s ambitions made him chase Theresa down the freeway to kidnap her. Another trapped her into attempting murder.

  A camorrista accepted that death could come at any time, for any reason. The sins of a boss were visited on his crew. It was a trade we accepted. We could be killed, but our families and our women wouldn’t be touched. And when I became the boss of our corner of Los Angeles, I grew eyes in the back of my head to watch for the knives.

  The camorristi didn’t answer to Donna Maria, but we didn’t ignore her either. We did our business because if we actually had the desire to band together, it would be more trouble for her to fight us than to take the loss.

  The house lay low to the ground with a corrugated tin panel jutting over the doorway. Potted succulents and cactuses covered the cracked concrete and walls. From the outside, with its rows of citrus trees on the right and left and the sweet smell of the olive trees, it felt like being back in Naples.

  I got out of the car. The alarm went on with a chirp. Useless automation. There was no safer car in California.

  “Consigliere,” came a voice from behind me. I didn’t turn around but put my hands out, palms in front.

  “Ruggero,” I said. “That’s not my job anymore.”

  I felt his hands on me, checking my shoulders, waist, back, and heels. He was a big guy and a pussycat. Even though I faced the other direction, I know Skinny Carlo was next to him. Skinny Carlo was sixty-five kilos, drenched in seawater, but he was responsible for much of Donna Carloni’s dirty work.

  “You run around unarmed like one.” Skinny Carlo had a voice like a serrated knife.

  “I left it in the glove compartment.” I turned and flipped him the keys. They twirled in the sun a second before he snatched them out of the air. “It’s loaded and cleaned. Treat her nice.”

  “We wasn’t expecting you for an hour. She’s not seeing no one,” Ruggero said.

  “Right.”

  I walked into the house.

  Donna Maria was not interested in how things looked. She preferred misdirection. So, her home looked like a Sicilian ghetto house, decorated with faded floral curtains and browned crocheted table coverings underneath chipped porcelain figurines of children. She’d had eleven babies and had shipped them all back to the mother country to be educated.

  I walked through the dark house to the backyard. I was convinced she slept in the dirt somewhere on her eight acres.

  The sun seemed brighter back there. Not just vivid, but merciless. Stacks of hutches on both sides stretched back into a distant orchard, and in the wood and wire boxes were animals. There were rabbits to the right and, to the left, small creatures with fur so sleek they could only be minks.

  In front of me stood a table three feet high with wood sides and wire mesh stretched over the top. The mesh was crusted with black.

  The boss of the biggest Sicilian family east of the Los Angeles river was a handful of sticks wrapped around the middle with twine, no taller than five-two and starvation thin with hair that had more salt than pepper. She made her way to us with the surefootedness of a woman whose feet hadn’t bothered with pavement in a while. In her right hand she carried a twitching white rabbit by its hind legs and, in her left, a two-foot shaft of hard wood. As soon as I saw it, I took my jacket off and draped it over the back of a chair.

  “Consigliere,” she called out. Even though we both spoke Italian, I could barely understand her; the Sicilian accent was as thick as tomato paste. “I expected you.”

  “I’m here, but you have no consigliere.”

  “There are no Italian lawyers to be had. Not for love or money.” She wiggled the rabbit back and forth. It squirmed a little, dropping its ears.

  “American ones know the system well enough.” I rolled up my sleeves. This was not particularly messy work, but I still needed to be cautious, and I couldn’t avoid the work altogether. If I demurred, I’d lose the advantage of my lineage and culture.

  “I won’t lower my standards.” She handed me the club. It was blacker on the business end and slicked brown and smooth on the grip side. “Americans are weak and mouthy. They don’t show respect, and they die with secrets on the way out of their mouths.”

  She held the rabbit out over the wire-mesh table.

  “They love life too much, Donna.” I tapped the back of the rabbit’s head, getting my aim right, favoring accuracy over strength. It was the only humane method, and if I hesitated for one breath, she’d notice. This, like everything, was a test.

  “And you
,” she said. “Do you like running your crew more than sitting by my side?”

  “I do.” I brought the club to the back of the rabbit’s head, where the ears met the neck. The death was soundless, with only a hollow thud to alert the universe that it had happened.

  “You were doing fine at it, too.” She held out the rabbit and let it bleed out of its nose and mouth onto the black gravel. “Until a couple of weeks ago.” She shook it a little, letting the last of the blood fall away.

  “I had it under control.” I took the dead rabbit from her and held it over the grass by its heels as she twisted a valve on the side of the house and picked up a hose. “I admit I failed with Paulie. I didn’t expect him to turn on me.”

  “That’s very grown-up of you. And that’s why you made a good consigliere. You know when you fuck up.” She hosed down the rabbit until its fur was matted and flat, and there was no blood on the surface. I turned it so she could get the back, letting the fouled water drip onto the gravel until it flowed clean. She shut off the hose, and I put the rabbit on the grate.

  Back home, small animals peeked out of the ruined mountains to peck at the garbage and city families were so poor that a piece of meat didn’t get away just because it ran fast. Despite my father’s position, my mother had run the house as a single parent, and rabbit and raccoon were frequently on the menu.

  “So,” she said, opening a small knife. “You came early for the rabbit cacciatore, yeah?”

  “I came here for an indulgence.”

  “Ask.” She passed me the knife by the handle side. She wanted me to do the honors. That was her way of saying I was favored because of my background, and to refuse would be to throw her favor back in her face.

  “I have a woman.” I cut the skin inside the rabbit’s thigh and up to the gut.

  “I’ve heard.” She smiled and took out a beedie, a short, black cigar with a smell that reminded me of the garbage piled on the side of a Neapolitan highway.

  “She’s a good woman.”

  “She was in bed with that sbirro.”

  I slashed inside the rabbit’s other thigh, right through the animal’s penis. “That’s over. She’s loyal to me.” I held the rabbit’s hind legs and yanked the skin off it then looked at my boss with the inside-out animal in my hands. “Once this thing with Paulie is done, I don’t want her looked at or questioned. She’s with me.”