Catch as Cat Can

by Claire Donally

  Sometime later, she decided it was time to put her plan into action. She slipped into her parka and headed next door, just another shopper looking for something out of the ordinary to make for supper.

  Immediately, her plan hit a snag. Someone else was at the counter, shopping ahead of her. Sunny noticed that the display cases were pretty bare. Between the ice storm and Deke Sweeney’s embargo, Neil must really be hurting for merchandise.

  He brought out a tray with triangular pieces of pink, grooved flesh resting on the crushed ice. “Have you ever tried skate wings?” Neil asked the older woman on the other side of the counter. “I’ve already prepared it, so you have no skin or bones to remove. Actually, it’s not a bone, but a piece of cartilage. Anyway, you can see it’s nice and thin, you can sauté it quickly. I can give you some recipes—”

  “Does it smell fishy?” the customer, obviously a meat-and-potatoes type, interrupted.

  “It shouldn’t, because this is fresh.” Neil held out the tray and waved a hand over it. “If you’re worried, though, I’d suggest soaking the fish in water and lemon juice. Skates are related to sharks, and like them, they urinate through their skin. The soak will neutralize the slight trace of ammonia that sometimes turns up in even fresh skate—”

  The woman shook her head.

  I suspect you lost her at “urinate,” Sunny thought.

  Neil’s other offerings didn’t pass muster either, and the shopper left, heading in the direction of Judson’s Market. The shopkeeper stared after her. Sunny wondered whether the fury on his face was aimed at her or at himself.

  It turned out to be aimed at the fish. Neil jammed the tray of skate into the display, muttering, “This is what I get for going into this business. Trying to sell people on something we used to cut up for bait.”

  “Maybe you cut it up for bait on the west coast,” Sunny said, “but we New Englanders have been eating it—probably since we arrived here.”

  “Yeah, but you New Englanders are cheap.” Neil had the grace to look embarrassed for letting that slip out. Then he did a double take. “Wait a minute. How do you know I’m from California?”

  Sunny smiled. “How do you think, Nicky?”

  Garret deflated behind the counter. “I guess your friend Price told you.”

  “Well, I was looking into things, after that California detective tried to kill my cat.” She leaned across the counter. “That made a lot more sense when I learned your real name—Gatto.”

  Neil gave an embarrassed shrug. “Guess there was a cat involved somewhere in the family tree. My grandfather’s people were fishermen in the Mediterranean, and he’d take me and my dad on fishing expeditions. That’s where I learned the business.” He gestured around the shop.

  “But you wound up in the stock market.”

  “My dad was a blue-collar kind of guy, like a lot of the folks around here,” Neil said. “I wanted the things a white-collar job could bring.”

  Like a stint in prison for white-collar crime, Sunny thought.

  “Dad couldn’t pay my freight through school, so I tried a little entrepreneurship—pharmaceutical sales.” He smiled at the reminiscence, but then his expression went sour. “Until somebody got caught with a bag of pot. Then those fine legacy students got a stern talking-to, while the blue-collar kid got a couple of years as a guest of the California penal system.”

  Neil carefully rearranged the trays of fish on display. “By the time I got out, my old school buddies were starting careers as brokers and wouldn’t have anything to do with me. But I made a couple of connections in the joint.”

  “Jimmy DiCioppa?” Sunny asked.

  “Nah, someone way down on the totem pole. But he got me in the door. When I met Jimmy, he was still in the dark ages. He thought robbing banks was a big deal. But he saw where the other crews were going, and he didn’t want to be left behind. I came along at just the right time.”

  “To do what?”

  Neil actually laughed. “That’s the funny thing. What I did for Jimmy was what a lot of my honest, upstanding classmates were doing. Pump and dump—singing the praises of a particular stock to investors so they’d buy and push the price up, then selling out at the top of the market and making a killing. They had B-list small customers they could play that with, while we had to do boiler rooms, selling over the phone, like that Leonardo DiCaprio movie. Nowadays, I suppose they do it over the Internet. Cold calls. It got easier when we had our own stock-trading firm. We could get the ball rolling on a hot IPO then get out fast when the price inflated enough. Or a few guys could control the market for a stock by trading it among themselves—”

  “I thought the stock market was a little more sophisticated than that,” Sunny said.

  “Back in the day, small-capital shares moved around more like a flea market than the stuff you see in the movies. Guys would offer a price that they’d hope to get for a stock—the ask. Guys representing buyers come in with a bid, the price they want to pay. A broker is supposed to go around to every stall in the flea market and find the best ask they can. But here’s the thing. The difference between the ask and the bid in big financial represents the brokers’ profit. So if you run the sales between you and your friends, you can keep the spread wide and make some nice change.”

  “That’s what you did?” Sunny asked.

  “That’s what a lot of guys in the market did,” Neil said. “But when I brought Jimmy into the market, we didn’t threaten to blackball people at the country club like the so-called legit brokers did. We smacked heads.”

  Sunny stared. “As simple as that?”

  Neil smiled. “You ever hear the saying, ‘The market is driven by fear and greed?’ Well, we used fear. After getting roughed up, a lot of those big, bold masters of the universe peed themselves and fell in line. As for greed, a lot of them wanted to know what their cut would be.”

  “That’s all you needed to make a lot of money.”

  “Oh, there are more wrinkles. We could use offshore accounts to buy stocks at special low prices for foreign investors. Then we’d sell it to make big profits.” Neil went silent for a moment. “At least Jimmy the Chopper made big profits. The rest of us got crumbs. At first I figured he brought the money into the deals.”

  And the leg-breakers, Sunny silently added.

  “But as time went on, I realized I was never going to see much out of this. Maybe you’ve heard another saying about the market, how there are bulls, bears, and pigs. Jimmy really turned into a pig. He wanted tribute, he wanted kickbacks, and he thought the market was like his turf. We had a situation where another crew was trying to sell short on a stock we were playing with, driving down the price when we wanted it to go up. They leaned on one of the brokers we had, um, persuaded to help us, and Jimmy went crazy. I saw him lose it completely and order a hit on the guy.”

  “That’s how you wound up in witness protection?” Sunny asked.

  “That, and the fact that I knew where a lot of Jimmy’s money was parked,” Neil said. “Jimmy should have had a sit-down with the other crew rather than start shooting. But instead he had to be a pig about it.”

  And some broker got killed, Sunny thought. A crooked broker, but he got killed.

  “Still, I’d have probably kept my mouth shut, but he took the one legitimate thing I had and ruined it,” Neil went on. “I used my little cut from all these various deals to open a restaurant. It was a nice little place. I know a lot about fish, I had some recipes, got a good chef, and we were doing pretty well. But Jimmy wouldn’t leave us alone. He started hanging out there, with all his friends. They drove off the other customers. And Jimmy, well, you just couldn’t hand him a bill.”

  Neil’s expression went dark. “Then Jimmy got interested in one of the hostesses, a nice kid trying to make it in Hollywood. That got really dangerous. You don’t say no to Jimmy the Chopper. I managed to get
her out of town, out to the Valley, but Jimmy wasn’t happy. After that, he screwed me on some deals I set up for him.”

  “Sounds as though you kind of liked this girl,” Sunny said.

  Neil’s face softened. “She was a good kid—bright, talented. But she wasn’t getting anywhere. I managed to find her a job in a different field. At the time, I was going through a nasty divorce. Then some federal prosecutor thought it was time to do something about the various crews getting involved in the market and decided to make an example out of me.”

  His shoulders rose and fell. “I could see the handwriting on the wall, so I let my ex-wife Terry have everything, the house, the restaurant. Then the feds floated the idea of testifying against Jimmy. Hell, what did I have to lose?”

  “Everything you were,” Sunny said. “Your name, your family . . .”

  Neil shook his head. “My father wanted nothing to do with me after I threw in with Jimmy. My wife just wanted my blood after she got everything else. The only one who might miss me was Abby—the girl I helped. But let’s face it, she was better off without me, and in her new line of work, being involved with a mobbed-up guy wouldn’t help her career. I did my best to keep my other business away from the restaurant, and a lot came out in the trial that, well, it wouldn’t impress a girl.”

  “And you came from sunny California to here.” Sunny glanced through the store’s plate glass window to the leaden skies outside. Nothing more had fallen after the ice storm, but the clouds remained.

  “Yeah, it’s a shock for a guy with thin blood, but I managed. The feds helped out with some money, and I opened the shop here. They keep an eye on me.”

  Sunny smiled. “You mean, Val Overton does.”

  Neil laughed. “Yeah, she’s a real pistol. Makes me wonder what she’d be like if she ever let her hair down. But she’s all business with me. They’ve got her stretched pretty thin, managing a bunch of us witnesses. Got to hand it to her, she works hard—and you wouldn’t believe how little money she makes. And what are the guys in Washington doing? Cutting the budget.”

  Sunny watched Neil’s face. He seems a lot fonder of Abby than he does of Val, she thought. Unless this is all a line of BS.

  “Still, you got in trouble,” Sunny prodded.

  “Hey, I tried to push the market a little after I got settled in. It should have been good for the local fishermen and for me. I knew the restaurant business. If I could supply some of the big buyers around here, everybody would have benefited.”

  “Except Deke Sweeney,” Sunny said. “Will had a talk with him.”

  “That guy’s a piece of work, from what I hear.” Neil shook his head. “If he had a problem he should have sat down and talked with me. Instead, he tries to kill me—businesswise, I mean,” he quickly clarified.

  “And what about Charlie Vane?”

  “I don’t know what happened with that guy.” Neil shook his head vigorously. “He was a local contact, a guy who was eager to sell a little off the top of his catch for a better price. I treated him square, but after Sweeney lowered the boom, he kept his distance.”

  Sunny took a shot in the dark. “You said you had breakfast with some fishermen the day before Phil Treibholz was murdered. Didn’t that include Charlie Vane?”

  “He was willing to eat on my dime,” Neil said bitterly. Then he broke off, staring at her. “Hey, he pretty much blew me off, telling me I was on my own. You’re not trying to tie him in with Treibholz, are you?”

  “They’ve both ended up dead, and the only thing that seems to connect them is you.”

  “That’s crazy. Vane always talked about his pirate ancestor, and I figured he chiseled around the edges of some shady stuff. Maybe he got in over his head on some deal, but it wasn’t with me.”

  “And how about Treibholz?” Sunny pressed. “Will tells me you’ve been playing dumb about him, but he suspects there’s stuff you’re not telling him. And now, with Vane getting killed . . .” She let the sentence trail off.

  “You can’t lump the two of them in together,” Neil protested. “Charlie Vane was small-time all the way. Treibholz was dangerous, dirty as hell.”

  “Who was he working for?” Sunny asked the question Will couldn’t get answered. “Was it Jimmy the Chopper?”

  Neil surprised her by laughing. “No, Phil was afraid of Jimmy. If he’d been working for him, Phil would have never tried to pull what he did.”

  “So who was he working for?” Sunny pressed.

  “George Foster, esquire,” Neil replied. “My ex-wife Terry’s lawyer. A real lightweight. That’s why Treibholz figured he could play the two of us off each other. He tried to put the bite on me. Hell of a time to do it. I was pretty much broke.”

  14

  Sunny struggled to keep her expression neutral even as her heart began to race. This was something Neil hadn’t told Will. Maybe a little needling will get some more out of him, she decided.

  Curving her lips in a smile, she said, “I wouldn’t go telling everyone a story like that. You could wind up with a big, red check mark in the box marked ‘Motive’ next to your name.”

  Neil made a disbelieving sound. “Come on, you know I’m not that kind of a guy. My big-time criminal career was basically doing market research on small-cap stocks, just like the guys I’d gone to school with. I think my research was better, and we were in a stronger position to push the market—”

  By breaking the occasional head, Sunny thought.

  “But in all the years I worked for Jimmy, I never even touched a gun, much less owned one,” Neil finished. Reluctantly, Sunny had to believe him. Her reporter’s antennae were scanning like mad, but Neil came across as rock-solidly telling the truth. He smiled. “When I had to solve a problem, I used money.”

  “Fine,” Sunny said, “but you just told me you were broke. That makes it hard to pay blackmail.”

  “I just had to come up with some earnest money, to keep playing along until I could get Treibholz’s investigation shut down.”

  “So you were going to use Val Overton to do it?” Sunny watched Neil carefully and was surprised to see him shaking his head. “Only as a last resort. Yeah, Phil was probably breaking a bunch of federal laws tracking me down. But if Val thought my identity was compromised, she’d be yanking me out of here.”

  “And you’ve come to love Kittery Harbor so much, you couldn’t bear to do that?” Sunny figured she managed to dust that with just the right tone of skepticism.

  But Neil was surprisingly serious. “I couldn’t let this business just go down the pipes. I had too much invested in it.”

  “Don’t you mean the Feds had too much invested in it?”

  Neil laughed, not a happy sound. “You’re years out of date on that, Sunny. This isn’t the seventies, where a guy like Jimmy Fratianno could dig a million dollars out of witness protection. They’ve got it down to a science nowadays. Each week you get a modest stipend to keep you going while you find a job and get settled. And then they tell you to bank the Feds’ money and live off your paycheck.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve used the payments to live on while trying to make a real profit here and earn my money back. The money I came here with.”

  “You just told me you gave everything to your wife,” Sunny pointed out.

  “Okay, not everything,” Neil admitted. “The restaurant, the savings and checking accounts, the portfolio. But I always tried to squirrel a little away, for a—I don’t know if it’s okay to talk about saving for a rainy day when L.A. has been living through a drought for years.”

  His smile faded a little. “It would be nice to say I headed east with a suitcase full of bearer bonds. But it was more like a coffee can half-full of hundreds and fifties. Still, it sounds like a lot, until you start shelling out to get a business off the ground.” Neil jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Do you have any idea what that freeze
r system set me back?” Then he waved his hand. “Better not to ask. The problem is, these expenses soaked up all my ‘buzz off’ money.”

  Sunny’s face must have shown her surprise at hearing such an old-fashioned term, because Neil laughed again. “I’m trying to be polite, Sunny. People usually refer to this kind of fund with two other one-syllable words, and not very nice ones. Besides, I thought that name worked—I didn’t know if I would be the one telling people to buzz off, or if I’d be buzzing off myself.”

  Well, that’s the way it turned out, Sunny thought.

  Neil tried to keep his tone light, but his face was dead serious as he spoke. “If I buzz off now, I’ll have nothing behind me. I can’t do that, Sunny. My whole life, I’ve been my own boss.”

  “What about Jimmy DiCioppa?” Sunny asked.

  “He was just a client, not a boss,” Neil replied.

  Sunny nodded. “Things didn’t work out so well for you when Jimmy the Chopper started throwing his weight around.”

  “You mean, when he decided he was my boss.” Neil frowned for a second. “I rest my case. But look at me, Sunny. Could you see me greeting folks at Big Box, Inc. or wearing an orange apron at Tools R Us? I need my own business, and to do that, I need money.”

  “I hear there are these places called banks where you can get a business loan,” Sunny said.

  “You try to get a loan recently?” Neil asked.

  She shook her head. “Not with my credit rating.”

  “It’s not just a credit rating. They want your life story, references, financials, everything but your DNA—and that might be coming. Val and her people did a good job of creating a backstory for me, but there’s only so far they can go.” He sighed. “And banks want to go a lot farther. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  Sunny stood silent for a moment. “I appreciate that you’re trying to be honest with me, but you’re just making your motive for killing Phil Treibholz stronger and stronger. Claiming you’ve never touched a gun isn’t going to cut much ice when it comes to means. And you’ve got a big fat blank space on your schedule during the probable time when Treibholz got it. That’s opportunity. The storm gives you an alibi for Charlie Vane’s time of death, but you’re a strong suspect in the Treibholz case. Folks around here are going to demand some action, and the sheriff’s department may decide that half a loaf is better than none. They could make a case against you.”