V is for Vengeance

by Sue Grafton

  Pop and Cappi had used the same phrase, “rolling over on us.” Dante wasn’t sure who’d come up with it first. “I don’t get where you’re coming from. You tell him to take care of it and he goes out and whacks a valuable employee. That doesn’t seem right. Does it seem right to you?”

  “That might have been a bad call. I won’t argue the point. You delegate responsibility, you can’t come along after and second-guess what went down.”

  “I didn’t delegate anything. You did that. I can’t have you undermining my authority.”

  “What authority? Anything you have, I gave you.”

  “That’s right. I run the operation. He doesn’t know the first thing about business.”

  “So you teach him.”

  “I’ve tried! He has the attention span of a gnat.”

  “He says you’re condescending. He says you belittle him.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Don’t argue the point with me. I’m just telling you what he says.”

  “And I’m telling you, he’s not cut out for this. I promote from within the company based on merit and seniority. He’s sitting on a felony conviction. How does that look?”

  “You’ve been accused of a thing or two yourself.”

  “All the more reason to keep the lid on.”

  “You’re the strong one. You’ve had all the advantages. Your brother wasn’t as lucky.”

  Dante tried to bite back his response. Anytime his father was losing an argument, he shifted to this old saw. Dante couldn’t help himself this time. He said, “He wasn’t as lucky about what?”

  “Your mother ran off and left him.”

  “Jesus. You know what? She ran off and left me too. I don’t see you cutting me any slack. Just the opposite. I gotta carry Cappi on my back whether I like it or not.”

  “Now that’s the kind of selfish attitude I’m talking about. He can’t help what happened to him. He was a little kid. What she did crushed his spirit. He’s never gotten over it. So he’s touchy, you know, because she ripped his heart out. He’s had a tough row to hoe, which you were spared.”

  “I was spared? News to me. How so?”

  “You never said a word about her. Name one question you ever came to me with after she walked out. Every day Cappi asked for her and every day he bawled his eyes out. You never shed a tear.”

  “Because you told me to buck up.”

  “That’s right. Twelve years old, it’s time to get a grip. You knew when she left, it had nothing to do with you. Cappi was four and what’s he supposed to think? One minute she’s there, the next minute she’s gone. He’s never been the same.”

  “I have four sisters who turned out all right. How come they’re okay but not him? And what about me?”

  “Even then, you knew better. Women are like that. About the time you think you can count on ’em, they take off without a word. She didn’t even leave a note.”

  “So Cappi’s a loser and everything goes back to that? He gets a free ride off that one event? I should be so lucky.”

  “You watch your mouth. You be careful what you wish for.”

  “Forget it.” Dante got up. He had to get away from the old man before he blew his stack.

  His father stirred with agitation, his tone peevish. “Where’s Amo?” Dante stared down at him, caught off-guard. “Amo?”

  “I haven’t seen him since breakfast. He wants me to take him shooting. I said we’d go up to the firing range and get in some target practice.”

  “Amo’s been dead forty years.”

  “He’s upstairs. I told him to find Donatello and come down here, the both of them.”

  Dante hesitated. “I thought you said Donatello didn’t like to shoot.”

  “He’ll get used to it. Make a man out of him. You know him. Wherever his brother goes, he’s right behind.”

  Dante said, “Sure, Pop. If I see either one of them, I’ll let ’em know you’re waiting.”

  “And tell ’em I don’t have all day. Damn inconsiderate if you ask me …”

  Dante went into the library and poured himself a bourbon. Maybe the slip was momentary. His father was sometimes confused, especially late in the day. He’d forget a conversation they’d had fifteen minutes before. Dante had written it off, thinking the mental stumbling was a side effect of his being tired or out of sorts. It was possible he’d suffered a small stroke. Dante would have to find a pretext for bringing a doctor in to check him out. His father had no tolerance for sickness or infirmity. He’d never admit he might be subject to weakness of any kind.

  Dante carried his drink into the kitchen, where Sophie was cleaning up the dinner dishes, loading plates into the machine.

  “You seen Lola?”

  “An hour ago. She was in workout clothes, heading for the gym.”

  “Great.”

  Dante went down to the basement level. One of the appeals of the house had been the elaborate underground rooms. Not many California homes had basements. Digging twenty-five feet down was a nightmare of rocks large and small, sandstone boulders sunk in heavy clay soil that cost a fortune to remove. This house had been built in 1927 by a guy who made his money in the stock market and held on to it through the Crash. The house was solid and gave Dante a sense of safety and permanence.

  He came up the stairs into the pool house. He knew Lola was on the treadmill because the sound on the TV had been jacked up to account for the grinding noise of the moving platform and the thumping of athletic shoes. He paused in the corridor, watching her through the half-open door. It had been a mistake confiding in Talia. He might have gone his whole life without opening himself up to her candor and her acid tongue. He’d done it because he knew she’d play straight and shoot from the hip. He thought he’d blocked Talia’s comments, but she’d changed his perception in twenty-five words or less. He could already feel the difference, how Lola had looked this morning, sprawled across the bed in sleep, and how she looked now. She wore makeup when she worked out even knowing she was alone. She still had the same dark eyes, lined with charcoal and looking enormous in her narrow face. She still had the mane of dark hair. It was straggly at the moment because she was sweating heavily, but he didn’t mind that. What he saw, thanks to Talia’s remarks, was how tiny she’d become. Her shoulders were narrow, her head incongruously balanced on a neck as thin as a pipe. She looked like one of those elongated creatures who steps out of a spacecraft, moving languidly through mist and smoke, oddly familiar and at the same time not of this world.

  When she caught sight of him, she muted the sound but continued to run. She was wearing sweatpants and an oversize long-sleeve T-shirt with the cuffs turned back to expose wrists that were all bone, fingers strung together with tendons that lay along the tops of her hands like piano wire.

  He said, “Hey. Come on. Pack it in for tonight. You look pooped.”

  She checked the readout on the machine. “Five more minutes and then I’ll quit.”

  She popped the mute button again and the sound blared as she ran on. While he waited he puttered around the place. The room was twenty feet by twenty, lined with mirrors and fitted out with weight-lifting equipment, two treadmills, a recumbent bike, and an upright stationary bike. How many hours a day did she spend in here?

  When her time was up, the machine put her through a five-minute cooldown and then she finally shut it off. He handed her a towel, which she pressed against her face. When she blotted the sweat that trickled down her neck a peachy beige foundation came off on the towel. He put an arm across her shoulders and walked her to the door, shutting off light switches as they passed.

  Lola put an arm around his waist. “So what’d Talia say?”

  “About what?”

  “Come on, Dante. You know what.”

  “She wasn’t thrilled.”

  “Of course not. She thinks I’m neurotic, temperamental, and self-centered. I’m sure she thinks I’d suck as a wife and suck even worse as a mom.”

&
nbsp; “She didn’t say that.”

  “Would you stop trying to protect me? I’m a big girl so spell it out. I want to know what she said.”

  Dante sorted through Talia’s objections and picked one. “She wondered about the weight gain. She thought a pregnancy would be hard on you.”

  “And?”

  “She might have a point. I worry about you.”

  “I know you do and you’re a sweet guy. You can tell her the baby’s a nonissue. I haven’t had a period for a year. She’ll be tickled to death.”

  “Let’s not talk about that now. We have time once you get healthy again.”

  “Ha.”

  “You know there’s help out there if you’re interested.”

  She leaned her head against his shoulder, matching her step to his. “That’s what I love about you. You never give up hope. You think if you keep at it long enough, everything will turn out all right.”

  “You don’t see it that way?”

  “Here’s my view: I think this relationship has run its course. I’m releasing you from any sense of obligation because that’s the only thing keeping you here. The rest has been gone for a long time.”

  Dante squeezed her shoulder, but he had no reply. There was a time when the remark would have cut him to the core. Now his thoughts reverted to Nora with a flicker of joy.

  He drove Cappi to the Allied Distributors warehouse in Colgate to the shipping and receiving department. Pop had acquired the brick-and-frame complex in the days when he was running booze. Dante had adapted the structure for his purposes, expanding the square footage by incorporating a prefab steel addition across the front. The mechanicals were below ground, a largely unfinished area that Pop had always referred to as the catacombs. Dante suspected there were actually more than a few bodies buried there. He’d take a flashlight down and explore the space from time to time, occasionally coming across dusty cases of whiskey and gin tucked away in the odd corner.

  As the two walked from the parking lot to the loading dock, Dante filled him in on the basics. “Audrey was a trotter, the middleman between the whips and the baggers. She covered the tricounties, coordinating the central coast operation with San Francisco and points north. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have been on the scene, but one of our pickers was arrested on a bad check charge and she was filling in. You tossed her off the bridge and the entire circuit was thrown into disarray. We’re still scrambling for coverage.”

  “How was I supposed to know?”

  “Cut the whining. I’m done hassling you on that score. You fucked up big-time. You should’ve asked, but we’ll leave it at that. I’m trying to get you to understand how the system works. That’s what you’re so hot to hear about, right?”

  “Well, yeah. If you want me to be useful.”

  “All right. So the trotters pay the pickers for a day’s work, usually runs about three grand in cash. The goods are called ‘the crop’ or ‘the bale,’ sometimes ‘the bag.’ Workers we call ‘crop dusters’ strip tags and remove identifying marks. They meet every couple of weeks.”

  “Where?”

  “Couple of places we rent. There’s a regular route we call ‘the tour.’ The guys who drive it, we call ‘cabbies.’ Don’t worry about job titles. I know it’s a lot to take in. It’s a tight fit. Take out any one of the players and you got a problem on your hands.”

  “How many people are we talking about?”

  “Enough. We make sure each crew knows as little as possible about the other crews so if there’s a breakdown, no one’s in a position to expose the rest. Eventually, the crop comes off the circuit and lands here for distribution.”

  “To where?”

  “That depends. San Pedro. Corpus Christi. Miami. At every point along the way, the crop’s passing through the hands of people I know I can trust. Doesn’t always work that way here. This is the current trouble spot. We’ve been hit twice. Last week, someone walked off with a pallet of pharmaceuticals. Now we’re short cartons of infant formula. I can’t even get a count on that. I thought it was a clerical error, someone puts a decimal in the wrong place and it throws everything off. This’s not a paper loss.”

  “Somebody’s stealing from us? You gotta be kidding.”

  “We don’t recruit help from vacation Bible schools. Point is, we have to limit access to the loading docks. This is the area where we’re most vulnerable. Guys come out for a smoke and end up hanging around. It doesn’t look like they’re doing much, but they’ve got no business being here. We’re initiating new oversight procedures, which is where you come in.”

  Cappi’s tone of voice took on an edge. “And you want me to do what, stand here with a clipboard, counting widgets and making sure everybody has a hall pass?”

  “If you want to look at it like that, yes. Once a shipment’s inside the building, somebody has to reconcile the goods with the manifest—”

  “What’s with the lingo? What the fuck is a ‘manifest’?”

  “A list of goods. Same as an invoice, an itemized account of what’s been shipped to us and where it goes next. In the meantime, we hold everything here until it’s ready to be moved.”

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I can’t learn anything with you lecturing me. You yap, yap, yap, and what goes in one ear goes out the other. I can’t retain if I don’t see it written down. Like I learn with my eyes. I need facts and figures so I can understand how all the pieces fit. You know what I’m saying? The pipeline. Accounts payable and stuff like that.”

  “I have bookkeepers for that end of the business. I need you here.”

  “Yeah, but you haven’t really said where these shipments are coming from or where they go. I know it’s Allied Distributors, but I don’t have a clue what we distribute. Baby food? That don’t make sense.”

  “Doesn’t have to make sense to you. It makes sense to me.”

  “But where are all the records kept? Has to be written down someplace. You don’t carry this stuff in your head. Something happens to you, then what?”

  “Why the sudden curiosity? Years we’ve been doing this and you never gave a shit.”

  “Fuck you. Pop said it was time I learned. I’m here doing the best I can and you criticize me for not showing interest before?”

  “It’s a legitimate question. Sorry if I seem skeptical, but what do you expect?”

  “What kind of shit is that? You either trust me or you don’t.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You accusing me of something?”

  “Why so defensive?”

  “I’m not defensive. All I’m asking is how you run an operation this size without somebody writes it down.”

  Dante dropped his gaze, working to control his temper. If Cappi was pressing for the information, he’d get information. Dante said, “Okay, fuck it. I’ll tell you how. You see that computer terminal over there?”

  To the right, just inside the door that led into the warehouse proper, there was an unmanned desk with a computer keyboard and monitor, the CPU tucked into the kneehole space. Dante could see Cappi’s gaze shift to the darkened computer screen.

  “What, that thing?”

  “That ‘thing’ as you refer to it is a remote terminal with access from the house and the office downtown. In the wall behind, there are dedicated lines laid in. It may not look like much but that’s the brains of the business. It’s how we keep track. We got backup on backup. Password changes from week to week, and the hard drive is purged every Thursday at noon. Clean slate. The only dollar figures left look legitimate.”

  “You wipe out everything? How can you do that?”

  “To all appearances, yes. If files are subpoenaed, they got nothing on us.”

  “I thought files stayed in the machine even when it looks like it’s erased.”

  “Since when do you know shit about computers?”

  “Hey, I hear stuff like everybody else. I thought the FBI had experts.”

  “So do we.”


  “What if there’s a goof?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Power outage, something like that. Computer freezes up before a purge is complete.”

  “Then we’re screwed. Any other questions?”

  Cappi said, “I’m cool.”

  “Good. Now maybe we can move on to the problem at hand. This is the hole needs patching. I’d like to know who’s bleeding us, but more important, I want to put a stop to it.”

  “Why me? What if I don’t want to stand out here in a coverall like some stupid-ass warehouse goon?”

  Dante smiled, wishing he could punch his brother’s lights out. “You have an attitude problem, you know that?”

  “This is chicken shit. Pop said bring me in. What you’re doing here is keeping me out.”

  “This is in. Where you’re standing right now. You want more, you can earn it like I did.”

  He left Cappi on the loading dock while he went up the metal stairs to the mezzanine level, where operations was housed in five offices behind a wall of waist-high windows. From there he could see much of the warehouse operation—guys on forklifts, speeding along the narrow corridors between two-story-high storage bays, guys engaged in private conversations, unaware that he was watching. His office here was crude, the basics, no refinement whatever. Dante didn’t have a view of the loading dock, but he’d mounted security cameras in strategic locations.

  Cappi was trouble. He’d been out of prison for six months, his release dependent on his having a job. Previously he’d worked construction as a heavy-equipment operator, making good money until he was fired for drinking on the job. His response had been to climb back on the bulldozer and plow into the construction trailer, destroying the trailer and all its contents, and narrowly missing the job-site supervisor, who was injured by flying debris. Along with a laundry list of property crimes, he’d been charged with aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted murder, which was how he’d ended up in Soledad.

  Pop wanted him brought into the business, so Dante had put him on the payroll. Cappi reported this to his parole officer without mentioning he’d never shown up for work. He told Pop he needed time to get reacquainted with his wife and kids. What kept him busy was honing his pool skills in the family room of his house in Colgate. In public, he was careful to avoid bars, firearms, and the company of known criminals. At home, he went through two six-packs of beer a day and popped his wife in the face if she complained. After a month of this, Dante had finally insisted that Cappi show up for work, a move he now regretted.