Something Borrowed, Something Black
Page 15
Maggiore wasn’t afraid of public servants. If pressed to be truthful, he would say he even liked them as a class, and thought everybody should own one. It was the pilot fish that swam in their wake he feared: The puffed-up TV reporters who blocked your path with their people and equipment on the sidewalk and pressed their rhinoplasties against the windows of your car when you tried to pull away, the reptilian district attorneys who couldn’t be bought unless you promised to whack the governor and everyone else who stood before them in the line of succession, issuing subpoenas and seizing your books and computers and convening press conferences to call you names you’d have blushed to spell in the presence of a child. They and their accomplices built you up into a celebrity in order to suck your famous neck in a ten-second sound bite. They were the best goddamn press agents in the world and if Maggiore thought there was a Gangster Heaven he’d exterminate them all, take his conviction and his death sentence, and wash down his dead blessed mother’s homemade linguini with wine from God’s private stock for all eternity. But since that wasn’t an option, he was going to San Antonio.
Tonight he was attending a fund-raising affair—he couldn’t remember for what, some broken-down actor running for the Senate or one of those dumbshit animal-rights organizations, or maybe AIDS, God forbid the fags should die out and force Jennifer Lopez to go to a straight designer for her Oscar undress—and since he was bound to be tapped for not less than ten thousand he chose a gaudy pair of diamond-horseshoe cuff links and the ruby studs. He dressed carefully before the full-length mirrors that covered the sliding doors of his closet, pausing as he often did before putting on his shirt to examine the pink semicircular scars on his left pectoral, one stacked on top of the other and a little to the right, leaving a depression where the nipple used to be. Either one of the two .38-caliber bullets would have been fatal if he hadn’t been born with his heart on the right side, a little secret he’d managed to maintain on the theory that someday it might save his life. The surgeon who’d patched him up had explained it had something to do with his being a twin, and that his congenital hump had been mostly made up of the undeveloped fetus of his sibling. In which case, he supposed, he owed his life to a brother he’d never suspected he had. Well, why not? He’d been carrying the little son of a bitch his whole life.
He finished dressing and spent some time reseating his tuxedo jacket until the padding lay naturally across his unafflicted shoulder. He was picking up Téa Leoni’s ass in thirty minutes and if he caught her looking away from him, avoiding the freak, it would spoil the evening. Perfection was more than a necessity in Hollywood. It was an obsession, with specific goals fixed along mathematically precise lines: size twos had to be zeros, for instance, lest they photograph more like Marilyn Monroe than a victim of the Holocaust. The stars raised hundreds of thousands of dollars—never their own—to treat Asian infants born without palates and those darling Ethiopian children with skeletal features and swollen bellies, but the threat of one of their offspring developing an incisor one degree off ninety sentenced the miserable little bastards to twelve years in orthodontia. The actors’ eyes welled up over the bravery of plucky hunchbacks, but as for going to bed with one of them he had to be an executive producer, minimum.
When the telephone rang, he assumed it was his driver informing him his car was waiting. He’d arranged for unlimited use of the limousine service employed by Warner Brothers in return for settling a caterer’s strike last year. He lifted the receiver off the imitation Louis XIV table an assistant director had diverted to him from the set of the DiCaprio remake of The Man in the Iron Mask and listened. He never initiated the conversation on incoming calls. He flattered himself that in the little pause before the caller spoke, he could hear if anyone was picking up on a wiretap. He had his home and office swept twice monthly and never, never discussed other than legitimate business over the telephone, but he liked to know when he was under surveillance.
The pause this time was too brief for him to detect any odd clicks or dropouts. The caller was aware of his idiosyncracy. “Charles, this is Len Brightman. You need to spare me a few minutes.”
Leonard Brightman was senior partner in the oldest firm of entertainment lawyers in Los Angeles, which in keeping with the general flux of things locally meant it went back less than two generations. His father, Josef Brechtmann, had emigrated from Berlin in 1940 to escape the Nazis and organized his firm along lines borrowed from Hitler. When the old studio system fell before white-collar invasion from the East, the firm had added personnel versed in corporation law. More recently, the need for criminal attorneys on the part of a growing number of its clients had necessitated it branch out in that direction as well. The imperative nature of Brightman’s wording—You need, rather than I need you—told Maggiore the summons did not involve entertainment or business.
“Okay,” he said. “How’s tomorrow morning at nine? I got a thing tonight.”
“You’ve got more than one.”
Shit. He knew that dry tone, which in anyone but Brightman would be shrill panic. “I’ll drop by on the way. You know where.” He hung up.
Eighteen minutes later, he shook the old lawyer’s hand in the basement room where the firm kept the backup files to the information stored in its computers. It was built like a vault, with poured-concrete walls two feet thick, zinc-lined and impossible to wire, although Brightman made it a point to inspect the built-in steel cabinets and plain table and two chairs personally before each meeting with Maggiore, just in case the technology had gotten ahead of him. Under RICO, federal agencies bugged arenas formerly protected by the Bill of Rights, including lawyers’ offices and Catholic confessionals. In a way, this jump-wire around the Constitution was a compliment to Maggiore and his colleagues, as it admitted that they had defeated the United States according to its own rules. Instead of celebrating, he and Brightman chose to take measures which twenty years earlier they would both have considered paranoid.
The senior partner, a fit man of sixty-one despite the low-grade skin cancer that made him shed patches of flesh in scales that appeared even in his thinning white hair, dressed in a combination of southern-California fashion and Harvard Ivy League, exquisitely tailored houndstooth tweed over a knitted polo shirt buttoned to the throat without benefit of a necktie. When they were seated opposite each other he folded his flaking hands on the table and said, “Your man Skeets called me from County. He breached security at LAX. Weapon involved. Specifically, a knife with a six-inch blade.”
Maggiore nodded, as if his people hijacked planes daily. Under the table he was gripping his thighs hard enough to fuck up the seams in his formal trousers. “What in the goddamn hell was he doing there?”
“He didn’t say. He was in custody, so the conversation wasn’t private. He didn’t use any names.”
“He’s smarter than that. But then I figured he was smarter than to try to smuggle his Arkansas toothpick through an airport.”
“Apparently he did more than try. They caught him coming out of the secured area.”
“How the fuck did they do that?”
“Details were lacking.”
“Can you bail him?”
“It’s more complicated than that. It’s always complicated when federal authorities are involved. Airports are U.S. jurisdiction.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Maggiore willed his hands to relax. “Talk to Bob Wydra in Sacramento. He’s with the FBI office there. You shouldn’t have to tell him why he should take an interest.”
“Good. I don’t want to know. I’m an officer of the court.” He said it without twitching. Maggiore admired that.
“Send someone up. Don’t call. Draw up a writ or whatever. It needs to be legal.”
“I’ll put Salerno on it. He’s a partner.”
“Just so long as he doesn’t serve it. Use a busboy for that. Some associate. Guy shows up in Armani, it gets back to Justice, and my face pops up over Dan Rather’s shoulder at six o’clock Eastern Time.”
“I don’t form habits, Counselor. I make my buck off them.” He rose and shook the lawyer’s hand again. He felt like crushing it, but it was Abilene he was thinking of. It was a simple enough job: Button yourself to the Macklin cunt and don’t turn loose until you hear about Johns Davis on the news. It shouldn’t have to involve the feds.
TWENTY-ONE
“Forgive me for asking, dear. Are you by any chance part Indian?”
Laurie looked up from her writing. The only other person in the dining room was the old woman who had been introduced to Laurie by the owner of the bed-and-breakfast as her mother-in-law. She was a small-boned woman with a slight hump, flesh-colored hearing aids in both ears, and bright black eyes like a sparrow’s. Her white hair was brushed back neatly and she wore a brocaded jacket over a tailored dress and pearls around her neck that were a fraction too large to be genuine. She was looking at Laurie with a cringing kind of smile, as if she expected to be batted down for speaking out of turn.
Laurie smiled back. “No, I’m American.”
“That’s what I meant. They’re the only true Americans, you know. Perhaps you thought I meant Indian from India. You have such lovely cheekbones, that’s why I asked.”
“I’m not, as far as I know. I was told my ancestors were German.”
“Too bad. Not that you’re German; I’m part Austrian myself. Having an Indian in the house would be a nice change. We get almost everyone else. Not many black people, though. It’s the decor, I think. I told Alicia the place looked too much like a Southern plantation.”
The room had Victorian touches: sepia-tinted photographs in mahogany oval frames, cabbage roses on the wallpaper, quite a lot of chintz. Laurie’s bedroom upstairs was more of the same. She’d had to remove a dozen mohair and tapestry pillows to make room for herself on the bed. She preferred a more streamlined look, but going back to the hotel was out of the question and she’d called six other places listed in the L.A. directory before finding a vacancy here. The owner, a tall horsey brunette named Alicia, had told her she was lucky, they’d had a last-minute cancellation. Otherwise she’d have had to go to another hotel, and she thought Abilene, or someone else if he was in custody, would check all the area hotels first. She’d registered as Lauren Rothmiller, using her mother’s surname and a Christian name no one ever called her. (She was Laurie on her birth certificate.) She’d paid cash.
At the time, she’d just wanted a place to sleep. The airport had exhausted her, physically and emotionally, and without rest and a chance to collect her thoughts she was afraid she’d dash off in a direction that would put her right back in danger, like a panic-stricken horse running back into a burning stable. Now, having slept six hours, showered, and put on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans she’d bought at a nearby K-Mart, she felt more in control.
She was writing Peter a postcard to tell him she was all right. The strong tea she was drinking had hardened her resolve, formed under the shower’s bracing spray, not to flee Los Angeles after all. This Major-Maggiore person would know where she came from, she couldn’t go there, and she hadn’t the means or the desire to go someplace new and start all over again under a different name like someone in the Witness Protection Program. She couldn’t trust the police. That left only one person.
Peter was one of them. Peter loved her. He hadn’t lied about that. It was the one thing he’d told her that he had nothing to gain from—except her—and the reason he’d lied about everything else, to keep her from finding out whom she’d married. At this point she was more sure of his love for her than of hers for him, but he was her one ally. He’d gone back to his old life to save hers. That he was interested in her welfare was the one thing she could count on, after the evidence of the past few days had destroyed her faith in all the others. Peter loved her. And he was one of them.
“My grandparents wouldn’t have been so happy to see an Indian.”
This time, Laurie pretended she hadn’t heard the old woman. She was concentrating on her writing. She wanted to word the message so Peter would think she still cared, but not to let anything slip that would give anyone else a clue to her whereabouts. Hotel clerks could be bribed. That’s why when she’d gone through the rack in the foyer she’d ignored the picture postcards that featured the bed-and-breakfast, selecting a funny one instead, showing a group of teenagers with spiked hair and metal studs in their faces, captioned, WILDLIFE OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.
“When I was a little girl, my grandmother told me their train was attacked by renegades from the reservation. My grandfather scared them off by firing his shotgun out the window. That’s it, over the fireplace.”
Laurie looked up despite herself. A double-barreled shotgun rested on pegs above the bric-a-brac on the mantel. It had a pair of large curled hammers like the ones she’d seen in western movies.
“Alicia didn’t want to put it up, but I shamed her into it. I told her she owed it to her late husband, my poor Herbert. It’s his heritage.”
“A gun like that ought to be in a museum.” Right away she regretted having said anything. Encouraging conversation was the last thing she wanted to do. She was trying to think of a way to suggest a meeting place with Peter that wouldn’t tip off anyone else.
“Museums already have security.” The old lady’s face became sly. She leaned closer to Laurie’s table, and in a harsh whisper fully as loud as her normal speaking voice, confided: “It’s loaded, but don’t tell my daughter-in-law. I’ve kept it that way since the riots. I clean it when Alicia’s out. My grandmother taught me how to take care of it, just the way my grandfather taught her. Anybody wants to break in and rape an eighty-two-year-old woman, he’s going to get himself a faceful of buckshot for his trouble.” She snickered. It was an oddly nasty sound.
“You shouldn’t keep it a secret. What if it goes off when she’s dusting?”
“Tush. You could hit it with a mallet and it wouldn’t go off, unless you cock one of the hammers.” She raised her voice suddenly. “You should see the Hollywood Wax Museum while you’re here. Get your picture taken with Rhett Butler.”
The owner had entered the room. She shot her mother-in-law a suspicious look, changed it into a tight-lipped smile for Laurie, and went over to the sideboard to shake the orange-juice pitcher. It made a substantial sloshing sound. She put it down, used a paper napkin to wipe invisible crumbs off the marble serving surface into a wastebasket, and left.
The old woman seemed to have exhausted her store of conversation. She spooned All-Bran into her mouth and made crunching sounds long after even a bad set of dentures should have turned the crisp flakes into mulch.
Laurie worried the end of her Bic between her teeth and stared at the writing: If you get this before Friday, come to … That’s as far as she’d gotten. Then she thought of the seafood restaurant in Santa Barbara, where they’d had a disappointing lunch just hours before he’d left her. There was nothing particularly memorable about that. She couldn’t be sure he would pick up on the vague reference she would have to make. What had they talked about? Peter had suggested the restaurant belonged to the—Combination was the word he’d used. The Organization, I guess they call it here. That took it out of the running. Abilene had said something about Peter having been seen. That might have been the place. No sense repeating that mistake.
What else had happened on that trip? Peter had swerved to avoid hitting a seagull. They’d talked about where they would live. California and Florida were considered. Laurie had suggested they just travel. Peter had asked if they should be Gypsies.
Then she remembered the little shop in Montecito and the painting she had bought of a man wearing a bandanna because she thought he looked like a Gy
psy. Without hesitating, she resumed writing. She signed the card with her initial, then read what she’d written:
Peter,
I got away and am staying somewhere else. If you get this before Friday, come to the place where we found the Gypsy. I’ll wait for you there until dark.
L.
She hadn’t been able to bring herself to begin with Dear Peter and end with Love, Laurie. Not because those things weren’t true, but because she didn’t know. Separated from him, having learned what she had, she thought it was too easy to assume that those things that had held her to him no longer existed, or hadn’t been there to begin with. But she’d come too far and discovered too much to trust him now with those two words that deeded over the rest of her life.
When she rose from the table, the old woman looked up at her with her bright avian eyes. “Forgive me for asking, dear. Are you by any chance part Indian?”
Laurie paused. There was no irony on the pleated face, only a docile blankness she’d seen before, in the features of patients suffering from senile dementia. If suffering was accurate. Most of them had seemed quite contented.
“I am, as a matter of fact,” Laurie said. “Cherokee. Why do you ask?”
The old woman’s lips parted. She glanced toward the shotgun above the mantel, then back to Laurie. She smiled. “No reason. You have such lovely cheekbones.”
Laurie went out to find a public mailbox with a noon pickup. She felt a little ashamed of herself for teasing the old woman. Then she realized the poor soul probably wouldn’t even remember the exchange. That was when she stopped feeling sorry and became envious instead.
TWENTY-TWO
Macklin pulled the Camaro into a numbered slot at National and deposited the keys and rental papers in the dropbox by the door of the little building. It was a warm night, the streets were brightly lit, and there was a bready smell in the air of the day’s departed heat. He turned out of the lot and walked briskly along the sidewalk like someone with a destination in mind but who wasn’t in a mad hurry to get there.