Operation Bamboozle

by Derek Robinson

  “Screw the general,” Moody said.

  “They did their best,” Luis said. “Not easy.”

  “Tell us about the money. How much, who got what and how.”

  Luis walked over to Fisk and stooped and looked him in the eyes. “I don’t trust this man. I operate on the basis of need-to-know. He told me he is a garbage contractor called Thomas G. Duffy.”

  “Need-to-know,” Denny said. “I wondered when we’d get around to need-to-know.”

  “Four o’clock,” Luis said. “Any chance of some tea?”

  Even with the car windows open, Nicky couldn’t stop sweating. He could feel it dribbling from his armpits. His body was cold but he couldn’t stop sweating, and it worried him. He wasn’t a sweaty sort of guy normally, so what was going on? A fever? He never got fevers. The wheel was slippery. He dried his hands on his jeans.

  There was no car outside Konigsberg. Didn’t prove anything. Maybe they had a garage somewhere. He parked, and mopped his face and his neck, and looked at the house. Big and ugly. He asked himself how he got into this situation. Yesterday life was routine Mob business, today was all blood and sweat and cleaning up Vito’s shit. “Jeez,” he said. “Mother warned me there would be days like this. But not like this.”

  Half the sawed-off shotgun went into his jacket pocket and that left the other half poking out. No good. His hip pocket was worse, the jeans being new and stiff. Jacket inside pockets were too small. He thought of tearing a hole in the lining. The gun would drop to the bottom and it would be a bastard to get out in a hurry. He tucked it into the waistband of his jeans, the muzzle just touching his left hip-bone, and buttoned his jacket. Well, it worked in the movies.

  Julie opened the front door. “Why, Nicky,” she said. “You alone? Vito let you off the leash?”

  “I need to meet Mr. Cabrillo. Things to discuss.”

  “Not home yet. Want to come in and wait?”

  He followed her. Two suitcases stood at the foot of the stairs. “You leavin’?” he said.

  “Yeah. We got this place on a short lease. Nearly up. Gotta go. Story of my life. Look, that chair’s pretty comfortable.” She gave him a magazine. “You okay? You look sort of … shabby.”

  “It’s nothin’. Touch of stomach flu.” Nicky smiled, which was a really bad idea. He still looked shabby but now he looked shifty too.

  She pointed to the drinks cabinet. “Help yourself. Gotta get back to work.”

  He poured himself two inches of Johnny Walker Red. The armchair she’d recommended was deep and comfortable. He settled into it and sipped the whisky, enjoying it to the maximum, because let’s face it he deserved some reward after the last couple of hours. Resting was a wise decision. He slowly felt much better. The day wasn’t over, Cabrillo had still to be cut down to size. He closed his eyes to help him think. They were very grateful for being closed. It was the kindest thing he had ever done for them.

  Ukraine didn’t look like Ukraine, it looked like Fort Pershing, Ohio, where Pfc Nicky Zangara had done military service. But it had to be Ukraine because here was the KGB general and everyone was saluting him. He kissed Nicky on both cheeks. “Ukraine looks like Ohio,” Nicky said and the general laughed and when he laughed, you could see daylight through the bulletholes in his tunic. Nicky had ten breadsticks, he was the pfc in charge of bread on this base, and he poked the breadsticks into the bulletholes, they would be safe in there. New holes appeared Men came running up with more breadsticks. Nicky got bored. “I’m bored, Ivan,” he told the general. “Gimme the two hundred grand and I’ll blow.” The general gave him a balloon. “Blow that,” he said. It was an act of war, because warning shots were fired, bang! bang!

  Nicky fell out of his chair, spilling the last of the whisky, and lurched across the room. Someone was hammering on the front door. Julie was coming downstairs. He waved her away. “I’ll get it, I’ll get it,” he said. He opened the door, and it wasn’t Cabrillo. Of course it wasn’t, Cabrillo wouldn’t knock, Cabrillo lived here. This was a young guy in a raincoat when it wasn’t raining. “Mr. Cabrillo,” the guy said.

  “Not you,” Nicky said. “And not me. Neither of us. So beat it.”

  “I know he’s here. Tell him … Just say Michael Stagg. He’ll know.”

  Nicky felt for the sawed-off and tugged it up so only the barrel was still in his jeans. “He won’t know,” he said, “because you’ll beat it, chummy.”

  “No, I’ll wait.” Stagg had already waited a very long time. He wasn’t going to be stopped by some bum who stank of whisky.

  “This says you’ll beat it fast.” Nicky opened his jacket so that Stagg could see his hand on the sawed-off. What he couldn’t see was Stagg’s hand holding the shotgun inside the raincoat, or the fury in Stagg’s mind at so crude a threat, and the finger tightening on the trigger. The blast destroyed much of the raincoat and smashed the top of the door. The blaze dazzled Nicky and he staggered as he fired the sawed-off and he missed Stagg completely. Stagg’s gun was double-barreled. He wasn’t thinking straight but he was aiming straight and his second blast destroyed most of Nicky’s vital organs. The rest of Nicky got flung back into the house like something the garbage men had refused.

  Julie waited for five minutes and then looked over the parapet of the belvedere.

  Michael Stagg was lying on his back, arms outstretched, looking at the sky. Othello had found something interesting on one hand and was licking it.

  “You down there,” she called. He moved his head. “That’s a start. Is there gonna be any more shootin’?”

  “No.” He began to say more, but gave up on it. “No.”

  “That’s a shotgun lying there, isn’t it? Break it, empty it, throw it all away.”

  He got up and hurled the gun a good twenty yards.

  “You might have a sidearm,” she said. “Take your clothes off.”

  If he thought it was an extraordinary demand from a woman unknown to him, fifty feet above, he didn’t show it. He stripped naked. It had been a terrible afternoon. This was nothing. “Get dressed,” she said. “I’m coming down.”

  At the bottom of the stairs she stopped and looked at what was left of Nicky Zangara, fifteen feet away. The average adult male has 7 or 8 pints of blood. Nicky had leaked most of it. There was a small lake with Othello’s pawprints around the edge.

  She found a half-full bottle of brandy and went out by the French windows. He was sitting on the grass and his hands were locked into each other with a fierceness that looked exhausting. His shoulders were hunched, his legs were trembling.

  “I’m Julie Conroy. You look like shit. Want a drink?”

  “Michael Stagg.” Apart from the shakes, he hadn’t moved.

  “Take a swig of this.” She showed him the bottle. “Take two.”

  The first swig did him good. The second made him gag a little, and the choking released his voice. “That killing,” he said. “That killing.” He looked at her with the clear, wide stare of a small child just awakened from a huge nightmare.

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” Julie said. “I heard gunfire. Saw nothing, beat it to the belvedere, hid, waited. All quiet, saw you, came down, saw the stiff. He was Nicky Zangara. Mean anything? No? Local hood. Worked for Vito DiLazzari’s Mob.”

  “Gangster.” Stagg’s afternoon suddenly got worse.

  “Yeah. Now what in holy hell are you doing here?”

  “Dad was Stagg Aviation. I inherited. Mr. Cabrillo came to see me, with another man.” He shook his head. “It’s complicated.”

  “Relax. I know the whole story. The lousy B strain and everything.”

  “I wasn’t going to kill anyone,” Stagg said miserably. “I wanted … I don’t know what I wanted. An apology would do. I only brought the gun to …”

  “Yeah, sure, look serious, I understand. Now think hard, Michael: does anyone else know you’re here? Nobody? Good. Okay, listen, here’s what’s gonna happen. There’s a sawed-off lying by the door. So Zangara shot
himself. End of story. You’re all bloody, so go get cleaned up. Stay out the house, wash in the sprinklers, I’ll get you a clean shirt. Then take your gun, take everything you brought, everything, get out of town, fast. Is there somewhere remote? Private?”

  “Ski lodge. In the Sierras.”

  “Perfect. Stay there for six months. Write a book.”

  He hurried. In ten minutes he was in his car. She threw his ravaged raincoat in the back. “The guy tried to kill me, you know,” he said. A poor thanks, but it was all he had to give.

  “I don’t know. Who the hell are you? Get off my goddamn property, for Chrissake.” He drove away.

  She called Charlie Denny’s number. “Tell Luis there’s another body at Konigsberg. Nicky Zangara.”

  “I surely shall,” Denny said. “And I expect the FBI will be interested too.”

  THE BLOODY REMAINS

  1

  Moody and Fisk bullied their way through the early rush-hour traffic, lights flashing and siren wailing. It wasn’t a matter of life or death. Julie had said Nicky was very dead, and recent experience made her something of an expert witness. But the agents had spent the afternoon flattening their butts, drinking Charlie Denny’s tea, and they were glad of some action.

  They arrived, the lights died, the siren growled to nothing, they got out and walked to the shattered door. They could study the corpse without going inside.

  “He didn’t linger,” Fisk said.

  “No hat. The Mob won’t like that. And look; new sneakers. New jeans too, the creases are sharp. That’s not the way to go, sneakers and jeans, the Mob expects its own to die in dignity. Well, maybe not in dignity. But in Dacron, at the least.”

  “Look down here,” Fisk said. “There’s a sawed-off.”

  “That makes it worse. Sneakers, jeans and a sawed-off. Hoodlums today got no chic. No chic at all.”

  Luis arrived in the Packard twenty minutes later. By then Moody had phoned LAPD, and a long, tedious, repetitive evening of photographing and measuring and questioning was about to begin.

  After an hour or so, news reached them that Vito DiLazzari was dead, also shotgunned. Then the storeowner who had sold clothes to a bloodstained Nicky saw the news on TV and added his 10 cents’-worth.

  “I think he ran amok,” Luis told Moody and Fisk. “Then he came here and was stricken with remorse and took the coward’s way out.”

  “Yeah, I remember the movie,” Moody said. “Randolph Scott, wasn’t it?”

  “Stricken, you think,” Fisk said to Luis. “Stricken. That front door certainly got stricken.”

  “Perhaps the first shot was a cry for help,” Julie said “Nobody came, so he turned the weapon on himself. I’m only guessing. I was hightailing it for the belvedere.”

  “Tell us again how many shots you heard,” Moody said.

  “I think five, but most of them were echoes,” she said.

  “The acoustics in this house are bizarre,” Luis said. “Slam a bedroom door and it’s a twenty-one gun salute in the kitchen.”

  “And you don’t know why he was here?”

  “He said he was sick,” Julie said. “I gave him a drink and I beat it. He sure looked sick. Abnormal.”

  “That’s how they look when they’re running amok,” Luis said. “I saw a lot of it in Venezuela.”

  The agents went and sat in the car to get away from the smell of damaged intestines. “That was all bullshit,” Moody said. “The woman hid upstairs, I believe that. The man was with us. What it comes down to is they’re both guessing. Like us. It’s bullshit.”

  “Cabrillo can’t help himself,” Fisk said. “He’s a very unusual psychiatric type. If he says something, he believes—contrary to all the evidence—it’s true. I mean, really believes. Saying it makes it so. The condition’s cognitive dissonance.”

  “In New York, maybe. Here it’s called bullshit. And it’s not a neurosis, it’s a racket.”

  Fisk stared out of the window at the crowd outside the house: detectives, photographers, forensics, uniforms, a few newsmen. “Not suicide. FBI statistics for suicide in the Mob are zero. And if these shootings are linked to Cabrillo-Conroy through some racket, who was the victim? The Mob? They won’t talk.”

  Moody started the car. “I need food.”

  Halfway through his steak, he said. “Is there any way we can find out if there is, or is not, a KGB fraud with counterfeit lottery tickets in Ukraine?”

  Fisk worked on his baked potato. “None that I know of.”

  “Me neither. So let’s stop beating our brains out. Pass the mustard.”

  LAPD had a lot of experience in processing scenes of death by gunshot. The investigation was intensive, thorough and speedy. The body got removed by ambulance at 7 p.m. Press and TV had come and gone by eight. The ruined front door went away for analysis, along with the sawed-off and the whisky glass. By 8 p.m. three new gunshot deaths had taken place in LA and most of the detectives had moved on. A carpenter was hammering boards to seal up the doorway as the last detective walked over to Julie and Luis. “You can have your house back now,” he said. “We didn’t find anything to explain what happened. Some homicides, there’s nothing to find, nothing to explain. Probably this is one. I hope you can forget it ever happened. Nothing to do with you.”

  “We’re leaving anyway,” Julie said. “Our lease is up.” The tone-deaf coyote, high in the hills, howled his gloomy howl. “No melody,” she said. “No rhythm. No talent.”

  “In the movies,” Luis said, “this is where the cops always say, ‘Don’t leave town, we may need to talk to you again.’ Or something.”

  The detective spread his arms wide. “What’s to say? Nobody’s looking for work here. The Mob has a bad day, ends up minus two. Is the city worse off? I don’t think so. Was anyone else involved? Not that we can see. Should we spend the taxpayers’ money on the Mob’s problems? You tell me.”

  They watched his tail lights get smaller and vanish. She wondered if she should tell Luis about Michael Stagg now. Or ever. It was complicated. “In three days we could be in Kentucky,” she said.

  “In three minutes we could be in bed. That is not a criticism of Kentucky, of course.”

  She took his arm and they strolled toward the french windows. No, forget Michael Stagg. Although, now she thought of him, Stagg had been a very well-built young man.

  Sterling Hancock III saw the news on TV and next day he read about it in the newspaper while he was having his haircut. “I met DiLazzari once,” he said. “He talked a lot. Mostly about himself.” The barber said, “That a fact?” It was a very small fact. Nobody cared. But it confirmed Hancock’s belief that he’d been right to leave LA. Kansas suited him. He bought a dry-cleaning outfit in a good neighborhood and joined the Kiwanis, never regretted it.

  Michael Stagg settled into the family’s ski chalet, high in the Sierras. Winter came early. He skied every day, until he was so damn healthy that a talent scout who saw him on the slopes asked if he was interested in taking a screen test. Instead he enrolled in a drama school and was never heard of again.

  Jerome Fantoni saw Princess Chuckling Stream riding one of his horses, without permission, and was so furious that he leaned on a fence until his pulse stopped pounding. By then he had to admit she rode a hell of a sight better than he did. On a horse, he was a passenger; she was a partner.

  After that, they rode out every morning. Didn’t say much, just rode. He offered her a job, in charge of the stables. “Do I have to shoot anyone?” she said. He laughed, the first time he’d laughed in months. Stevie heard him. “You got hypostatic neurostasia,” she said. “The B strain.” He even laughed at that. Amazing.

  Fisk visited Prendergast in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. “The doctors tell me it was the size of a plumstone,” he said.

  “Doctors always lie. It was as big as a golfball. When I passed it they heard the bang in Queens.” Prendergast looked weary but he sounded better. “I have to drink two liters of water a day. My
stomach thinks I drowned at sea. I hear you had tickets for the dumping of DiLazzari.”

  “Very messy business. No attempt at finesse. I thought they had more style on the West Coast.”

  “If you’re looking for stylish crime, Fisk, you’re going to have a sad career.”

  “Cabrillo’s got style.”

  “You’re back to connect-the-dots again. There’s no pattern in crime. It’s what greedy, angry, lazy people do instead of thinking. Society has crime the way I have kidney stones: it hurts but it passes.”

  “Cabrillo isn’t kidney stones,” Fisk said. “More like gemstones.”

  “Here, drink a liter of water,” Prendergast said. “Help me out.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Operation Bamboozle is fiction containing small nuggets of fact. The reader is entitled to know which is which.

  Nearly all the characters are invented. To my knowledge there is no Mafia family in New Jersey or New York called Fantoni and none in Los Angeles called DiLazzari. Sam Giancana did exist and he was a powerful force in Chicago, but Frankie Blanco, Tony Feet and Eugene Lutz are my creation, as are minor figures such as Milt Gibson.

  The novel is a sequel to Red Rag Blues, where Fisk and Prendergast first appeared. Luis Cabrillo and Julie Conroy go back even further, to The Eldorado Network and Artillery of Lies. Those novels celebrate his extraordinary work for the Allies in the Double Cross Department during World War Two. That department was very real; when I created Luis, I had in mind a highly talented double agent codenamed Garbo, whose true achievements were similar.

  Which take us to the cons. Both the Swiss clinic con and the Ukrainian lottery con are variations on tried and true—or tried and false—ways of making money by fraud. The first certainly dates back to Victorian times. Its success depends on the victim’s willingness to pay quickly in order to conceal a family scandal. The second is more complicated.