The mustached one said through a flat smile, “How you doing, sport? All right?”
I didn’t say anything. It was not the kind of question you can respond to in circumstances like these without sounding defensive. That was one reason. The other reason was that I did not trust myself to speak just yet. The edge was back, sharp, and along with it the now familiar bleak rage.
The mustache came over to where I was. The bed was on one side of me, a chair on the other, and the wall a few inches beyond my back; I had nowhere to go, even if I’d been inclined to give in to the rage and do something stupid. I stood stiffly until he said, “Turn around, let me see what you’re carrying.” Then I turned around.
Quick, expert frisk. The only thing he found that interested him was my wallet. He backed up with it, and when I turned again he was studying the photostat of my investigator’s license. He looked at my credit cards, too; he even looked at the photos of Kerry. All without blinking or changing expression.
The clean-shaven one was checking through my suitcase. Not rummaging, not making a mess—just looking. He didn’t take anything; and he closed the case again when he was done.
The mustache finished with my wallet, held it toward me without moving so that I had to come forward to get it. I put it away inside my coat with a hand that was steadier than I felt inside. Afterward I stayed where I was: no more backing off.
“Now what?” I said.
“Now we go for a drive.”
“Where to?”
“You’ll see. Nice day for a long drive.”
“How long?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get you back in time for supper.”
“Arthur Welker,” I said. “That who buys your time?”
The two of them glanced at each other, then back at me. Neither one answered. They’d been programmed to do certain things and telling me where they were taking me and who employed them wasn’t included.
I said, “All right. But I’m going to make a call first.”
“What for?”
“My own protection.”
“You don’t need protection, sport.”
“I do if we’re going to keep this peaceable and friendly.”
They looked at each other again. “Hassling with us would be a mistake,” the mustache said to me. “You know that.”
“I know it,” I said. “But I’m still going to make the call.”
He thought about it. “Nobody official?”
“Nobody official.”
“Go ahead then.”
But I didn’t head straight for the telephone; I walked to the window first, pulled the drapes aside. They didn’t try to stop me. After a few seconds I went back around the bed to where the phone sat on the far nightstand, tapped 8 to get long-distance, and then dialed the number of my flat in San Francisco. The answering machine cut in on the third ring. When my own voice finished telling me I wasn’t available and the beep sounded, I said, “I’m at the Starburst Motel in Reno. It’s four-twenty, Wednesday afternoon, May twenty-first. I’m going with a couple of guys in a Cadillac limousine, California license number one-GDJ-three-two-six, probably to see Arthur Welker.”
I put the receiver down. The two of them were grinning at me, the way you’d grin at a circus clown who had just squirted himself with a fake flower. The mustache said, “You ready now?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m ready now.”
WE DROVE SOUTH out of Reno on 395, through Carson City and then into the mountains. Heading for Lake Tahoe. The hired help sat in front, the clean-shaven one driving; I had the rear seat to myself. Back there was a telephone and a combination radio and tape deck and miniature TV and a little portable bar, but I didn’t touch any of them. I just sat, waiting it out with the tension so acute that my skin felt too tight, as if it were slowly shrinking. None of us said anything—not a word the whole time. We’d said all we had to say to each other in the motel room.
We rode south along the lake, toward the Stateline casinos. But long before we got there—a few miles outside Zephyr Cove —we turned off on Lobo Point Road and wound through timber and past expensive summer homes. A third of a mile beyond the last of the homes was a private road with a chain across it and a sign attached to the chain that told you it was a private road and warned you to keep out. We swung in there, stopped, and the driver got out and unlocked the chain and then drove us through and stopped again and put the chain back in place before we went on.
The road curled in through more woods to where a pair of closed wrought-iron gates set in a high stone wall barred the way. Spikes and pieces of broken glass were cemented into the top of the wall. The gates were electronically operated; the driver used a remote-control device to open them so we could pass through.
On a rise up ahead was a huge house made of light-colored wood, roughly circular in shape and modernistic in design: odd jutting angles and lots of glass. Across the front was a cleared area with fountains and wildlife statuary, ornate but not ostentatious, and half a dozen cars, the least expensive of which was a Mercedes. We pulled in next to a silver-gray Aston-Martin and the driver released the rear-door locks so I could get out.
I stood flexing my shoulder muscles to ease some of the stress-lock. Sounds of minor merrymaking drifted up from the rear of the house; otherwise it was quiet here. Steps led to a front entrance but we didn’t go that way. We angled off on another set of steps that ended in a path made of broad stone flags; the flags skirted the north wall and brought us around back.
Three long, wide terraces back there, each on a different level overlooking Lake Tahoe. A vast black-stone swimming pool took up half of the uppermost level, the one we were on; half a dozen people, all but one of them women, were lounging around it. None of them paid any attention to me or the two hirelings. The second terrace was a jungly garden of ferns and bushes and bright tropical flowers, all in tubs so they could be moved indoors during the winter. The third level was a redwood deck on which were several pieces of wrought-iron outdoor furniture. Below that I could see a brush-tangled slope with wooded arms jutting into the lake on either side, forming a cove where there was a fringe of beach thinly slimed with algae, a big boathouse, and a dock with a good-sized cabin cruiser tied at the end of it. Stairs led down to the cove, but if you weren’t in a mood to climb them, you could always ride the chair lift that was strung on an adjacent cable.
Two men sat at one of the tables on the third level, drinks in front of them; their attention was on the lake, ablaze now with silvery orange light from the westering sun. The mustache conducted me down to where they were, leaving his partner to wait topside. Neither of the seated men looked our way as we approached, or at us when we stopped. The mustache said, “Here he is,” and then moved away without waiting for a reply, to stand watch at a respectful distance.
Most people seem to think all Mob bosses are either full-blooded Italians or Sicilians, communicate in grunts and broken English, and act like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. False perception on all counts. Some of the Mob underbosses are part Italian, part Sicilian, or WASPs who have been accepted into the Families by virtue of marriage or favor; and image is everything nowadays, especially for those who are responsible for the operation of multimillion-dollar gambling combines. The new breed of crime boss, no matter what his nationality, looks and talks and acts like a successful corporate businessman; cultivates the businessman’s air of quiet but forceful respectability. It is only when you slice through the veneer that the corruption oozes out to where you can see and smell it.
These two were no exception, even at their leisure. Both were in their forties; one thin, almost skinny, with a prominent Adam’s apple and carefully barbered dark hair, dressed in fawn-colored slacks and a blue silk shirt; the other of medium height and fair complexion, well-rounded without being fat, apple-cheeked, with flaxen hair and a bow-shaped mouth, wearing a polo shirt and white shorts and amber-tinted sunglasses. If I’d had to guess which one was Arthur Welker, I would
have said the well-rounded one—and I’d have been right. The skinny one looked as if he belonged in a place like this; the round man looked as though he owned it.
Welker let me stand there for fifteen or twenty seconds before he raised his head, casually, and looked at me. He used up another fifteen or twenty seconds taking my measure, with the impersonal insolence of a banker studying an inner-city loan applicant. He said at length, “So you’re the private eye.”
“And you’re Welker.”
“Mr. Welker to you. You’re about what I expected. Older than fifty-seven, though—closer to sixty-five. Close to retirement age.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What do you make a year?” Welker asked. “Thirty, forty thousand in a good year? You don’t have much in the bank. A few thousand, is all. You’ll be living off social security when you do retire.”
I didn’t say anything.
“This house cost three million, not counting the land,” he said. “That was another million and a half. The furniture inside the house is all antique, mostly Early American, worth approximately two hundred thousand. I also have a collection of antique gambling devices worth about the same. All of it is protected by a sophisticated security system that set me back a hundred thousand. You, on the other hand, live in a five-room flat; good neighborhood but you couldn’t afford the rent if you hadn’t been there thirty years and didn’t have a generous landlord. Your furniture is cheap—all of it, including the secretary desk you incorrectly consider to be an antique. You have no security system. You neither carry nor own a handgun. Your office on O’Farrell Street is rather shabby and contains no modern investigative equipment. Your partner, Eberhardt, owns a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver but doesn’t carry it; he keeps it in his house, in the bottom drawer of his desk.”
The rage was in my throat now, like a swelling on the edge of my windpipe. I was having difficulty breathing.
“Don’t you want to know how I know all of that?”
“No,” I said.
“Or how I found out where you were staying in Reno?”
“No.” He had ways; men like him have even more ways to find out things than men like me and we both knew it.
“Did you notice the swimming pool on your way in?” he said. “All the beautiful women? One of them is my wife, the young blonde who looks like Shelley Long. I can have the others any time I want them, only I don’t want them. I’m a faithful husband.”
I didn’t say anything.
“How about you?” he said. “Are you faithful to Kerry Wade?”
The rage was gagging me. I had to cough, clear my throat, to keep from strangling on it.
Welker got to his feet, yawned, stretched, and then waved a casual hand toward the lake. The thin man didn’t move; he hadn’t moved or looked at me the whole time I’d been there. He might have been dozing, except that I’d seen him take a sip from his drink.
“That boat down there,” Welker said, “the Arthur III, is the baby of the little fleet I own. One of the other two is an oceangoing yacht. I own five cars, including a Rolls. The car you drive is a cheap domestic model, fifteen years old. And you don’t own so much as a rowboat.”
I managed to say, “Am I supposed to be impressed?”
“I would be if I were you. Yes I would. I’d be particularly impressed by this fact: I have three hundred people working for me in one capacity or another, among them another half-dozen who perform duties similar to Jimmy and Carl, the two who brought you here. I pay my gardener, my chef, my masseur, my wife’s couturier, and Jimmy and Carl more than you make in any given year. You have no one working for you. Just you and your partner—two little fish in a sea full of sharks.”
“Is that why you brought me here? To tell me what a little fish I am?”
“Partly. And to let you know what a big fish I am.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Now then,” he said. “I understand you’ve been asking questions about matters that don’t concern you. For instance, you were asking about someone named Manny at Ekhern Manufacturing last Saturday. Have you found out who Manny is?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell you then. It’s no secret; I want you to know. Manny is Manny Atwood, one of my assistants. That’s him sitting right there.”
The thin man looked my way for the first time, for about two seconds and with an expression of utter disdain. Then he put his gaze back on the lake and took another pull at his drink.
I had my hands in my pockets now, to keep them from shaking, maybe twitching toward Welker’s throat. “All right,” I said, “you’ve answered a meaningless question. How about answering one that isn’t meaningless?”
“And that is?”
“How did David Burnett get hold of two hundred thousand dollars of your money?”
It didn’t faze him. You don’t catch men like Welker off guard, not on their home turf. “You see?” he said. “Just what I’ve been saying—matters that don’t concern you. Questions like that are how little fishes get swallowed up by big fishes.”
“Little fishes like Burnett.”
“And you.”
“So you’re not going to answer the question.”
“Of course not. It’s a dead issue, and none of your business in any case. Don’t you listen? Do you really need any more convincing?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You strike me as a moderately intelligent man,” he said. “Certainly not a dummy. You do understand what we’ve been talking about here, the crux of this whole conversation?”
“Yeah. I understand.”
“Well, then, let me finish up with a piece of excellent advice. Tonight, or first thing tomorrow morning, go back home to San Francisco and forget about David Burnett and those friends of his you’ve been asking about. Forget about me, too, and I’ll forget about you. Then you’ll go on swimming in your little comer of the ocean and I’ll go on swimming in my big one and we’ll both live happily ever after. How does that sound to you?”
I said between my teeth, “It sounds like what it is—a threat.”
“Good. Will you take the advice?”
“I don’t seem to have much choice, do I.”
“No,” he said. “No, you don’t.”
“Then I’d be a dummy not to take it.”
He liked that answer. He nodded and smiled and said, “Good, good,” and patted my arm the way you’d pat a dog on the head. And then he moved away, around the table and around me so that I was looking at his back, and called, “Jimmy.”
The mustache came hurrying over.
Without looking at me, Welker made a thumb gesture over his shoulder. “Take this back where you found it,” he said.
Jimmy came my way and cupped a hand around my elbow, not too hard or tight, and nudged me gently toward the stairs. It took all the willpower I possessed not to pull loose and break his arm if I could, knock him on his ass if I could, and then go after Welker. There was sweat all over me; I could feel it trickling down my cheeks and under my arms. I was shaking too. Jimmy saw the sweat and felt the tremors and grinned at me the way he had back in Reno. He thought I was afraid.
We went over to the stairs. I did not look back at Welker and Manny Atwood, because if I looked back, it was still possible I would lose control. Up the stairs, through the garden, up more stairs to where the other muscle, Carl, was waiting. Laughter from over at the swimming pool; laughter from behind me, down where Welker and Atwood were. My step faltered. Jimmy said, “Careful there, sport, you don’t want to hurt yourself,” and tightened his grip on my elbow.
Around to the front, down to the Caddy limousine, me into the back and Jimmy and Carl into the front. And we began to move, and I sat there sweating and shaking, feeling as humiliated as I was supposed to and thinking what I wasn’t supposed to—thinking that I was not going home to San Francisco, I was not going to forget about David Burnett and the two hundred thousand, my involvement in this business wa
s a long way from being finished and to hell with Arthur Welker and his intimidation and his threats.
I was a dummy after all.
But I was my kind of dummy, not his.
Chapter 16
IT WAS NEARLY SEVEN-THIRTY when they let me off in front of my room at the Starburst. None of us said anything; dead, brooding silence all the way back from Tahoe. Carl unlocked the rear door, I got out, they drove away, and that was the end of it. For now. And for now, I was alone and in command of my life again.
I went inside and into the bathroom and washed my face and hands. I felt dirty and I needed to be clean. Then I sat on the edge of the bed, with the room close around me, and did a series of slow stretching exercises to try to relieve the knots of tension in my upper body. All the while, I kept seeing Welker’s smug, contemptuous face and hearing the things he had said to me in his mocking voice. Calm, rational, dehumanizing—sugarcoated evil. Sitting up there in his three-million-dollar fortress, looking down on the rest of us, looking down on the law; as guilty of killing David Burnett as if he had personally forced those pills down the kid’s throat, and yet immune, secure, untouchable. I hated him as much, right now, as I’d hated the man who had imprisoned me for those three months last winter.
But it was an impotent hate, an impotent rage. What could I do against a man like Welker, with all his power and all his “people”? Go after him like Mike Hammer in Vengeance Is Mine ... the same sort of crazy vendetta I had embarked on last winter? I knew better than that, now more than ever. It was a fool’s game, even when the stakes were intensely persona!—and I had no personal stake here, nothing to avenge except a small injustice and a few hours of humiliation. You don’t fight the Arthur Welkers of the world with righteous anger, a gun, and a prayer. You can’t beat them that way.
Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) Page 13