A Present For Santa

by James Burke

  "No gag. I just decided I'd like to take a look at the travel business, and since you'd mentioned it once or twice, I thought I'd see if you'd really give me a job."

  "Patrick, if you're serious, of course I'm serious. Can you start soon? Next week maybe?"

  "Why not? Sure, next week's great. Tuesday be okay? What time do you open?"

  "Nine-thirty, but it's okay if you're not on the dot. We don't really start to function 'til after ten. Oh, shit, what am I saying? Come in when you want to, buddy. Afternoon if you want. No problem."

  ''I'll be here at nine-thirty Tuesday morning."

  "As you wish, my boy, as you wish. Any ideas as to what kind of work you'd like to do?"

  "Yeah, I think so. You mentioned before that you thought I'd be a natural in the European tour line; how about that?"

  Roger beamed. "Super. I still use some of those contacts you introduced me to; I'm sure they'll put out even better for you. I've got some great ideas for the summer season I'd like to float for you. Then let's talk about some specific tours." Roger was getting excited. "But we can talk about that on Tuesday, can't we?"

  "Sure thing, Rog. Sounds terrific. Just what I think I'd like, and the sooner the better. Let's iron out the details Tuesday as you said, but I'd like to get started in the European market as soon as possible."

  "You name it, pal."

  They shook hands, both obviously pleased with their agreement, and Morley left.

  Roger stood thoughtfully, watching Morley through the window as he drove away. What the hell brought that on? he wondered. Not that he wasn't tickled; Pat Morley would undoubtedly be worth five times whatever salary they would agree on. It was the surprise. After needling Pat for two years, knowing that the best possible therapy for his friend was to get involved and busy in some line of work, Roger had almost given up. Then, suddenly, here he was, asking for the very thing he'd tried so hard to force on him. He'd worried about Pat when he'd first showed up down here, still dazed over Monnie's death, with some sort of crazy complex that it was his fault she'd died. Roger had partially succeeded in arguing and laughing Morley out of the depths of his despondence, but only partially. Then, today, in comes Pat, laughing like the old Pat, ready and willing to work. Roger shook his head. Not to question fate, he thought, just count your blessings. He felt so good about the way the day was going he decided he'd take that rich, round-heeled widow to lunch. He reached for the phone, smiling.

  While Roger was making the arrangements for his afternoon's dalliance, Morley was busy with more mundane tasks. He drove to his West Palm Beach bank and removed a number of large manila envelopes from his safety deposit box, putting them in a briefcase. Retracing his route to Palm Beach, he parked in the lot of a second bank, waited for a quiet moment, and then slipped on his old salt-and-pepper wig and attached the matching mustache. Inside the bank he presented a key and signed the entry record card for the perfunctory inspection of the young female attendant. As she was comparing the card with her master signature file, Morley palmed her date stamp, substituting a duplicate he had ready in his other hand. She turned back, stamped the entry card without looking at the date, and placed it in the file drawer. As the woman turned to lead the way to his deposit box Morley reversed the procedure, leaving behind the original stamp showing the day's date.

  He opened the box in a private cubicle, removing from it some envelopes identical in number and size to those he'd brought in his briefcase. He put the latter in the box, the former in his briefcase, and buzzed for the attendant to replace the box.

  Then Morley drove to a third bank a few blocks away, this time switching to a black wig and pencil-thin mustache in the parking lot. Using his false identity papers, he rented a safety deposit box and paid the deposit and rental fee in cash. Again in a private booth he removed the envelopes from the briefcase and locked them in the new box.

  In a fourth bank back on the mainland in West Palm Beach, he repeated the procedure he'd just used and rented another new box, telling the attendant he'd be back early the next week to deposit his valuables.

  Morley was pleased with the way things had gone. He smiled as he drove north toward the Singer Island Bridge. He was thinking about the syndicate boys getting into Cappacino's safety deposit box. He had no illusions about their ability to do so, and when they did - well, it might shake them just a little bit. When they had their experts examine the contents, they'd realize the books were phonies, and they'd undoubtedly conclude since the last recorded entry was by Cappaccino him­ self four days ago, just before he left on his last trip - that the old man had "had" them. That would be nice, and it might give Morley some time, but he knew he couldn't count on this theory holding up for very long. He had to assume that later, when they'd thought it out, they just might conclude that the missing bagman had worked the switch. Then they'd know it was a planned caper and they'd come after him with their first team. At least the disguises should cloud the issue a bit, until he made his move.

  Morley smiled again as he remembered the first time he'd seen the contents of those envelopes - the real ones that now reposed in his own box. Morley had only been in the Casper apartment four times, including the two visits the day of Dan's angina attack, but it had been enough. He'd noted that Dan did not like to keep things in his pockets, and his first move on entering his apartment was to empty them-keys, wallet, change, everything - into a small velvet-lined box on the dresser in his bedroom. Morley had also noted that one of the keys on Dan's ring had the distinctive size and shape of a safe deposit box key. Instinctively he had known this was important. From then on Morley had carried a small box of modeling clay to every meeting, and it was not long before he got the opportunity to use it. Dan had asked him up, and during the course of their visit he had excused himself to go to the bathroom.

  That had been the easy part; once Morley had located the right bank (it was not the one in which Dan maintained his checking account), it had been a matter of timing and luck. He'd chosen the most crowded time of the day and had helped his luck along by hours of practice forging Dan's signature. When he presented the key and signed in, the busy young lady hadn't given him a second look.

  Two days after that, with Dan and Ernie Pro still out of town, he'd returned the originals to that box and put the phonies in his own box against the day when they might prove useful. Today was that day, and useful they'd be.

  Back home again, Morley ran through the hazy plan taking shape in his head once more. Step one was to make the pickup in normal fashion and then disappear from Miami airport. He had some misgivings when he thought about how much the success of his plan depended on a number of assumptions. If even one of them was wrong, he was in grave trouble, and grave was the right word. He was assuming that Dan had left no records concerning him or this pickup. He was assuming that Ernie Pro had not identified him before or after the shooting to any of Dan's "friends." He was assuming the foreign clients had had no contact with the domestic boys; last of all, he was assuming the syndicate killers could not gear up their search too quickly. That was quite a packet, but he concluded that the odds were good enough to warrant a try.

  That afternoon Morley made more phone calls from a pay phone, as well as a trip to Palm Beach Airport. Later he sought out a neighbor and dropped hints about a routine fishing trip, laying the groundwork for an alibi for Saturday. He had a superb dinner at a newly opened restaurant in West Palm and was back in plenty of time to buzz in Terry's man when he called from downstairs at ten on the dot. The disguise kits were as good as he'd expected them to be. He was glad; his life might depend on them tomorrow.

  3

  About the time Morley was making his arrangements at West Palm Beach Airport, some fourteen hundred miles to the northwest a man sat behind a large desk, chair tipped back, legs across the desk corner, staring out through a huge picture window at the snowflakes sifting lazily through the gray sky over Lake Michigan. His perch, eighteen stories up, all but eliminated the street nois
es of the late afternoon traffic below, but every so often he could hear the faint wail of a siren. He never had liked that sound, but there was a certain comfort in knowing that this time it couldn't affect him in any way. He remembered the not-too-distant days when a siren was a signal to run, hide, and shiver – to somehow get away.

  James Matthewson "Jammy" to his friends - had been born Gennaro Giamatteo in the testing ground of Philadelphia's South Side forty-five years earlier. Now, on this dreary afternoon, he was a study in success, syndicate style. Jammy had done it all. He'd long ago stopped counting the people he'd had killed, killed himself, ruined, had ruined, stolen from, maimed, and walked over. He had never forgotten, however, anyone who had threatened or tried to do any of these unspeakable things to him. Jammy had been a hired thug at seventeen, a hired thug leader at twenty-one, and by the time he was twenty-five was hiring other twenty-year-old thugs to do it for him. He chose sides often and wisely during the shake-ups of the sixties, and when Mr. Henry, the top man of the new ­ look syndicate, the "Corporation," was making his power grab, Jammy was at his side at all the important times. The conquest was swift and the rewards spectacular. Mr. Henry gave Jammy Corporation control of the Midwest, running out of Chicago, and Jammy ran an efficient, tight ship for six or seven years. Then there'd been a hotel incident where Jammy and a couple of lieutenants had topped off an area Corporation meeting with a drunken party. There were some prostitutes involved, and one of them was badly beaten up. She got a smart lawyer and sued Jammy, because his cover firm was the registered renter of the party room.

  This didn't cause much of a problem with Mr. Henry, since they were able to stifle most of the publicity and he expected his "boys" to be a little frolicky sometimes, but it was the beginning of the end for Jammy's marriage. That did bother Mr. Henry. Gina Matthewson (she'd gone along with the name change reluctantly) was the only daughter of Mr. Henry's best friend from his early New York days. He'd given her in marriage as substitute father and was the godfather of her first­ born. Mr. Henry was unhappy with the way Jammy was treating his family, but he remained on the sidelines because he considered it their personal business; when it began to affect Corporation business that would be a different story. Mr. Henry watched the cash register closely, and he feared that this moment was not far away. It made him sad, but he was, above all, a businessman.

  The conservative lettering on the hall door leading into the reception room of Jammy's office suite read JAMES MATTHEWSON ASSOCIATED. INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENTS AND SECURITIES. It did not seem important that neither the host nor most of the visitors to this office had even a nodding acquaintance with the subject. The three men who had just entered the reception area looked, at first glance, as if they might raise that average. They looked like businessmen.

  Jammy stirred lazily as the intercom on his desk buzzed. He punched a button without interrupting his snowflake inspection and mouthed a guttural, "Yeah?"

  "Jammy, there's some guys here to see you."

  His brow wrinkled with agitation and the fine red lines in his swarthy cheeks became more prominent. "You stupid broad. How the fuck many times do I have to tell you not to call me 'Jammy' when we got visitors. And who the fuck are these 'guys'?"

  "Yessir. It's Mr. Banducci and Mr. Conners and Mr. Ragusi. Can they come in?"

  "Oh shit, Sandy! Shit! Shit! Shit! Why'n't ya say who it was inna first place? And yeah, they c'n come in fer Chrissakes. What the shit would happen if I said 'no' after you've already told 'em I'm here? Dammit, you've gotta decide whether I should see somebody before you call me and ask right in front of 'em. I told you all this. Oh shit, send 'em in."

  "Yes, Jam - Mr. Matthewson, sir."

  The inner door opened and three men walked into his office: a short dark man, well dressed and barbered; a tall blond man, similarly groomed; and a medium-sized thug with curly black hair, long sideburns, and a flashy European-cut suit that was too youthfully cut for his age and his paunch. Jammy motioned with his hand, feet still up on the desk, and they sat down in chairs spaced around its front, waiting for him to speak.

  "Well, what the hell's happening? The fucking cat got yer tongues?"

  The well-dressed dark man answered without looking directly at Matthewson. "No sweat, Jammy. The soldiers got away. No strings."

  "Yeah, great.." Jammy's guttural voice dripped with sarcasm. "Now tell me about the fucking books - and the dough."

  "No books yet, Jammy, but we'll find 'em, I'm sure. Same with the dough."

  Matthewson looked hard and steadily at his impeccably dressed, college-educated nephew. He didn't much like what he saw. A nice kid, Mario, but stupid; he'd have been better off selling stocks or shoes or insurance. Took after his father, that useless bastard that filled Katty with five brats and then got himself killed in a goddam barroom fight. None of those fucking Banduccis had enough brains or guts to fight or figure their way out of a paper bag. If it wasn't for Katty . . . Shit, even the money he'd put up to send Mario to college was a waste. All it did was give him fancy ideas about what he was worth.

  Mario Banducci was finding the carpet's deep pile very intriguing. Finally he looked up at his uncle's stormy eyes. Jammy spoke. "You're sure, are you? Tell me about it."

  Mario looked down again. "I took the Chicago places ­ both his and the woman's; Conners took Florida; and Rags cleaned out the hotel in Washington. We went over cars, garages, storage lockers, everything."

  "So why you so fucking sure you'll find 'em?"

  Mario's jaw set. "I jus' know it, Jammy. Besides, Conners's got a key that we think is it."

  "A key! Why the fuck didn't you say so? Key to what? Or is that one of your fucking secrets, too?" He turned to the tall blond man. "Well?"

  "I found a key taped underneath a vegetable tray in his refrigerator. It looks like a lock-box key, and I'd imagine the box would be somewhere in that area-around Palm Beach. But I had a duplicate made and we'll try here, too. Krupa will be on it first thing Monday morning in Florida - can't get in 'til then anyway because of the time locks. Mario's contacts will check it out up here."

  Matthewson raised his eyebrows and grunted. "First good news I've had today. Keep me posted-soon's y'hear anything Monday." He turned to the gaudily dressed thug. "Nothin' in the hotel, huh?"

  "No, Jammy. We went over that place inch by inch. We took it apart." The curly-haired man spoke quickly in a surprisingly high, raspy voice, punctuating his sentences with lots of hand gestures.

  Matthewson looked at him long and hard, then spit out, ''And who in the name of shit is 'we'?"

  "Tommy Winona helped me."

  "And who the fuck tole you t'use Tommy Winona?"

  "Hell, Jammy, Tommy was in all the way. He was the contact for the soldiers. He's solid as hell."

  Matthewson stared, unblinking, until Ragusi's eyes dropped and his fidgeting stopped. "All right. You found nothin'?"

  "Just some dough and some airline tickets. Nothin' else. I gave it all to Mario." Mario nodded and started to reach in his pocket, but his uncle's eyes stopped him.

  "Okay. If it ain't there, it ain't there. Rags, get back to Washington and keep all the buttons on. Don't do anything, an' I mean anything, without you check first with Mario. Just go to the movies or play with yourself or whatever the fuck your bag is these days. Don't meet with Winona. Don't go to any of the hangouts. Cool. Cool. Cool. Got it?"

  "No sweat, Jammy."

  "And, Connors . . ."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Lemme hear Monday." He turned to his nephew. "Mario, stick around a minute."

  As soon as the heavy door clicked behind the two men, Matthewson got up from the desk and walked to the window. The snow was getting heavier and the lights of the city were already blinking through it. His hands were clenched as he struggled to control his anger. Finally he turned, and in a disarmingly soft voice began to flay the oldest son of his oldest sister.

  "Mario, you are a simple son of a bitch. You let Rags use that fucki
ng hophead Winona on somethin' this important? Shit! We're lucky those soldiers hit the right people. Fer Chrissakes, with Winona tellin' 'em what to do, we're lucky they didn't drive away into the fuckin' White House garage. Mario, I got a good mind to make you hit Winona before he spills his guts all over that town. You know he's a crazy bastard - can't keep anything from his broads or his friends. Yeah, I oughta make you hit him, but you'd probably fuck that up, too."

  "My God, Jammy, Winona's been clean for two, three years. He's one of our best boys. And contacts-man, does he have contacts. Honest to God, Jammy, Tommy's as solid as a rock."

  "You'd better pray that he is, kid, 'cuz if he isn't, it's gonna be your ass and Rags, too. You know - I'm not kidding."

  "Yeah, I know. But, Jammy, Rags and Tommy are in as deep as anybody. They talk and it's their own ass. They're safe." He smiled. "You know what you always told me. 'The pay's good, but the punishment's swift.' "

  "Okay. I hope so.''

  "And I got hold of the doc like you said. He's got the run of the whole place and he'll visit the broad tonight. There's no guard after visiting hours.''

  "You told him what we need?"

  "Yeah, Jammy. I went over it with him - fine-toothed. The books, the dough, the code, the delivery, everything. And I told him to knock off the broad soon's he got it."

  "Knock her off! In the hospital? Holy shit, Mario!"

  "No sweat, Jammy. The doc's got some stuff he uses - he puts it into those tubes, y'know, and it acts slowly then disappears. It's the same stuff they use sometimes to knock you out for an operation.''

  "You sure you told this quack what we need?"

  "Yeah. Of course.''

  "You sure he understands I want all that stuff more'n I want the broad dead?"

  "Sure I'm sure. I told him myself."

  "All right, when's he calling you?"

  "Soon's he leaves the hospital."