Shakedown

by Gerald Petievich

  Though Haynes protested, Mabel Kincaid brought food to the table, roast beef, salad, mashed potatoes - hell, he thought, maybe everything she had in the house. They ate and talked.

  "I was at a convention in Las Vegas and this nice young woman, Monica Butler, struck up a conversation with me. She said she'd been raised in Salt Lake and that her father was an Elder in the church ... just like my daddy. We had so much in common," Mabel Kincaid said as she kept an eye on his plate.

  "A big line of bull ... baloney," Haynes said. He finished off his mashed potatoes.

  Mabel Kincaid immediately jumped up, grabbed the bowl of mashed potatoes, and, completely ignoring his protestations, ladled another heaping portion onto his plate. She sat down again.

  "She called me when I returned home. At first we just talked. Then she suggested I invest the money from Daddy's estate-there wasn't much, about three thousand dollars-in the Gold Mining Trust. She said she'd actually been down in the mine and seen the vein of gold."

  Red Haynes forked the last piece of roast beef on his plate, thought better of it, cut the piece in half, then ate it slowly.

  "Looks like you can use a little more roast beef," she said.

  Haynes held up his hands. "Can't eat what I have. Uh... what happened when you finally sent her the investment money?"

  "That was the last I ever heard of her," Mabel Kincaid said as she forked a thick slice of roast beef, slapped it on his plate. "I tried to call, but she'd changed her number. It never occurred to me until that very moment that she was anything but an upright Christian woman. Right now I feel like the dumbest old turkey that's ever come along the pike." Using her cloth napkin, she wiped away a tear.

  "Are there any witnesses to the conversations you had with her? To the times she made representations to you about investing in the trust?"

  Mabel Kincaid shook her head sadly. Then a look of kindness came across her face. "I bet you could go for a nice slice of hot apple pie."

  "Thank you, but there's no way I can eat anything else, ma'am. I mean that."

  Mabel Kincaid carried the empty plates into the kitchen and returned with an enormous slab of apple pie. She stood over him.

  Haynes shook his head. "No. Please. I've never eaten so much."

  "There's something important I haven't told you, Mr. Haynes."

  Haynes looked at her, then at the pie. She set it in front of him, then walked over to a china cabinet and pulled open a drawer. She removed a small cassette tape, handed it to him.

  "What's this?"

  "Before I sent her the money, I recorded some of her calls. Right here on tape are all the promises she made to me about that darn old Gold Mining Trust."

  "Why didn't you give this to the agent you spoke with the first time?"

  "Because I felt underhanded at having recorded the calls without Monica's permission, and I thought there might be an outside chance that she would repent, someday, and give me back my daddy's money." She returned to her seat. "But something changed my mind."

  Haynes shook his head.

  "I was watching you sit here at the table where my daddy used to sit and I remembered something he once told us kids."

  "What's that?"

  "Destroy the seed of evil or it will grow up to be your ruin.

  "I've heard that," Haynes said. And as Mabel Kincaid watched with pleasure, he took a healthy bite of apple pie and chewed slowly.

  TWENTY-ONE

  There was a metallic roar in the Stardust Casino, the sound of one-armed bandits eating money. For the life of him, Tony Parisi couldn't spot even one solitary slot machine that didn't have someone feeding it change. And the crap tables were hot. Plastic dice tumbled on green felt. Stick men changed numbers. Gaming chips were stacked, shuffled, collected.

  Sitting alone at a cocktail table at the edge of the elevated portion of the casino bar, he surveyed the maelstrom of activity in the place. It was standing room only in the keno area, crowds at the busy blackjack tables, even a line waiting to get into the coffee shop. He knew that because of the table odds and the fix on the slot machines, every man and woman in the crowd, no matter how much or how little he or she chose to gamble, would eventually lose. He gazed down the enormous, high-ceilinged, plushly carpeted room full of losers, turkeys, cornball Okies, dumb farmers, cripples, tourists, and working stiffs from L.A. who were getting a charge out of pissing away their bucks. Fuck them and the station wagons and tourist buses they rode in on, he thought.

  Mickey Greene, dressed in white trousers and a polo shirt, wandered into the bar area, spotted Tony Parisi. Parisi gave him a little wave. As Greene made his way to the table, Parisi took a sip of club soda, swished it around in his mouth, swallowed. They shook hands.

  As Greene sat down, Parisi looked about the surrounding area for signs of the local cops, feds, or DA's investigators who he knew took turns surveilling him.

  "Friends tell me things are nice for you here," Greene said.

  A cocktail waitress dressed in a sarong came to the table. Mickey Greene ordered scotch and milk. She headed back toward the bar.

  "Why'd you want to meet me in the bar?" Parisi said. "I don't like meeting people in public."

  "Because when you're on vacation in Las Vegas you might just happen to see somebody in a bar and join them for a drink. If you go to a room, to the cops it means you know the person-it's a planned meeting. See, I think in courtroom terms."

  "It's good to be careful."

  The waitress returned with the scotch and milk, set it on the table. Greene dropped a ten-dollar chip on her tray. She thanked him, moved toward another table. Greene took a look around, lit a cigarette. "Are you in a position to have something done?"

  Tony Parisi turned his palms up. "What are you talking about?"

  "I'm talking about laying paper on somebody," Greene whispered.

  "Who, why, what," Parisi said, as a statement rather than a question.

  "I have a friend, and this friend is visited by a shakedown man ... a phony-cop play. My friend shells out. This cocker is greedy, comes back, scores again. My friend wants off the hook. He wants the shakeman to disappear."

  "The shakeman ... is he connected?"

  "Not that I know of"

  "No problem as long as the man is not connected. But I can't get involved in a war."

  "This is an independent operator ... a shmeckler, a confidence man."

  "Who are we talking about?"

  "Can this be done?"

  "As long as the guy is not protected by someone else's family, yes, it can be done, sure." Tony Parisi finished off his soda. He belched.

  "How much?"

  "The price is twenty-five large."

  "Twenty-five? I was thinking more like ten."

  "So I guess you wasn't thinking hard enough."

  "Twenty-five is a lot of money."

  "So do it yourself. Then it doesn't cost you shit."

  "I never thought you would try to rip me off on something like this," Greene said. "I'm doing this for a friend."

  "Is your friend broke? Maybe he lives in the poor section of Beverly Hills?"

  "Be realistic."

  "Poor people don't get shaken down," Tony Parisi said, staring at the waitress as she bent over a nearby table and showed cleavage.

  "Let's call it fifteen," Mickey Greene said.

  Parisi gave a little laugh. "Hire a junkie to do it for fifty bucks. Then he can point the finger at you on his way down the river."

  Greene stared at him for a moment. He took out a pen and wrote something on a cocktail napkin. He handed the napkin to Parisi.

  Parisi turned the napkin around and read: "Edward Sands-ex-cop in Vegas."

  "Heard of him?" Greene said.

  Tony Parisi shook his head slowly. "No," he said with a straight face. He checked his wristwatch, pushed his chair back, stood up, stretched, slapped his paunch.

  "But can you find him?"

  "For twenty-five I'll keep looking until I find him."<
br />
  "What's next?" Greene said.

  "I find this guy Sands, then I call you up. You bring me twenty-five. Then it gets done. That's all. What more do you want?"

  It was ten at night by the time Novak discontinued his surveillance of Monica Brown's apartment. He was hungry, thirsty, and stiff from sitting in a car all day. He found himself driving toward Lorraine Traynor's home.

  He arrived there a few minutes later, pulled into the driveway. The near-new two-story house was in one of Las Vegas's exclusive residential areas. Through the front window, he could see her sitting on the sofa next to a stack of thick books.

  "Where have you been all day?" she said as she opened the door.

  "Sitting on the place where Eddie Sands is living," he said, stepping inside. The living room was furnished with Victorian furniture, which Novak never found comfortable.

  "The man you saw meeting with Parisi?"

  He nodded.

  "Learn anything?"

  "His wife is running some kind of a scam."

  "Doesn't sound like a very profitable day. Hungry?"

  "Starving."

  In the well-equipped kitchen, Novak stared outside at the pool as Lorraine pan-broiled a steak. He sipped a beer.

  "I listened to the tapes of Parisi," she said. "I made some notes for you. There's nothing there. The tapes alone aren't enough to have him indicted for anything."

  "He talks about people paying off."

  "Nothing is definite. Not once does he make a definitive statement that could be used against him in court."

  "Hoods don't make definitive statements about crimes they've committed."

  She forked the steak out of the pan, set it on a plate, and put it in front of him.

  "I can give you another eavesdropping order," she said.

  He unscrewed the top of a bottle of steak sauce, poured it on the meat. "Parisi is too cagey on the phone. And he never uses the same room for longer than a day or so, which makes it almost impossible to plant a bug." He cut into the steak and ate.

  "How about a search warrant?"

  "Won't do any good."

  "You sound as negative as Red Haynes," she said, sitting down at the table with him. She refilled his beer glass.

  "Somehow or another I've got to get next to him."

  "You sound like a crook talking."

  "The game isn't all cut-and-dried like the case law you read," he said as he chewed. "Sometimes it gets real nasty."

  "Taking cases personally isn't good for one's mental health," she said.

  "Easy for a judge to say."

  Nothing was said for a while.

  "May I ask you a question?" Lorraine said.

  "Shoot."

  "Am I just a judge to you? Someone to bounce cases off of, someone to sign search warrants for you? Just an acquaintance?"

  He stopped eating, looked into her eyes. "I didn't mean it like that, Lorraine. I'm sorry." Novak reached across the table and took her hand.

  "You look beat," she said.

  "I am."

  She squeezed his hand. "You'll make the case. Don't worry.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The parking lot of the Stardust Hotel and Casino was full, and Eddie Sands had to park his car under an enormous billboard which faced the street. He looked up. The marquee had a ten-foot-high color cut-out of a curly-haired young comedian.

  Carrying a cheap airlines flight bag-he'd picked it up at a tourist gift store on Las Vegas Boulevard-containing the counterfeit gaming chips, Eddie Sands moved through the sea of automobiles. Inside, he wandered through the busy casino to the elevator bank. He stopped where he knew he could be seen from the bar area. A minute or so later, Vito Fanducci approached him from out of the darkness of the bar. He was wearing a black sport coat and a white linen shirt buttoned at the collar. His purple birthmark looked as if it were growing from under his shirt like a disease. "Tony says you got something," Vito said.

  "That's right."

  He reached for the bag. "I'll take it."

  Eddie Sands shook his head. "I'll give it to Tony."

  "Do you know who I am?"

  "You're not Tony."

  Vito Fanducci stepped close to Sands. "I'm asking you a question, Slick."

  "You're Vito Fanducci. Fuck you," Sands said. "Now tell Tony I want to see him."

  Vito Fanducci's face became red as he glared at Sands for a moment. Then he headed toward an elevator. Without saying a word, he led Sands to Room 1487, unlocked the door, and gestured Sands inside. A shirtless Tony Parisi sat reading the newspaper on the balcony. Sands found himself staring at the yellowish flab which hung lewdly on Parisi's bloated torso.

  "The feds are all over the place. I have to change rooms every couple of days to keep them off my ass," Parisi said without looking up from the newspaper. Then he slowly folded the newspaper, set it down on the table. He made a gimme gesture. Sands handed him the bag of counterfeit gaming chips. Parisi unzipped the case, reached in. He took out a handful of chips, examined them.

  "This is all he had?"

  "We cleaned him out," Sands said.

  "The dumb shit actually believed you were the cops. This is beautiful."

  "You should be able to off the chips at face value, right?" Sands said.

  "Face value?" said Parisi with a look on his face as if Sands had spoken in Farsi.

  "If I were you I'd have someone in the count room turn the chips to cash ... slip them into the system and let the casino take the loss, right?" Sands said.

  Parisi reached to an ashtray and picked up a cigar, took a wet puff, blew out smoke. "Sounds like a good idea," he said.

  "There's a couple hundred grand worth of phony chips. If you turn them for full value that means we have a big pie for us to cut up. Out of my hundred grand I'll take care of Ray Beadle."

  Tony Parisi gave a wry glance to Vito Fanducci. "I'm glad you got it all figured out." Vito gave Sands a condescending grin.

  Sands moved deliberately to Vito. "What are you smiling at, huh, sideshow freak? Huh, motherfucker?"

  Vito's grin changed into a glare.

  Sands felt the familiar sense of tingling in his fingers, the flush of awareness that precedes violence, the feeling that, as a cop working a radio car, he had had at least once a day. "I don't want any of your bun-boys around when you and I talk business," Sands said without taking his eyes off Vito Fanducci.

  Parisi nodded toward Vito, who glared at Sands for a moment, then turned and ambled off the balcony into the room.

  Parisi looked amused. He leaned forward, tapped his cigar into the ashtray.

  "It's time you and I got something straight," Sands said.

  Parisi shrugged.

  "I'm no longer a cop hanging around you to make a few extra bucks."

  "Don't let Vito bother you, you know?"

  "I went to the joint and ate months without mentioning your name. That means I passed the big test. Now we deal direct, fifty-fifty splits. That's the way I want it."

  Delicately, Parisi puffed on the cigar. "I don't own this place. The casino people don't want me here. The only way I stay in business is with muscle. And muscle costs money. Maybe you forgot that in the joint?"

  "If you can't down the chips maybe I should take them to somebody else."

  "Certain people have to be taken care of to get the chips laid down without complications. I spread money around so that the people in the count room are covered when the hammer drops. After all that is done real nice, I cut you in for half of whatever's left."

  "And I just take your word for that?" Sands said.

  "That is unless you'd rather go down to a crap table and pass 'em yourself... or drive around town peddling them for thirty percent on the dollar to junkies and whores. You wanna do that?"

  Rather than answer and lose face, Sands moved to the edge of the balcony. He stared down at the ribbon of highway that was Las Vegas Boulevard. In the parking lot of the Circus Circus Casino down the boulevard, trucks and cranes we
re building a temporary jumping platform which he had read was to be used by a motorcycle daredevil.

  "What happened with Bruce O'Hara?" Parisi said, changing the subject.

  "I changed my mind," Sands lied. "I'm not gonna hit him a second time."

  "But you have the man in the jackpot."

  "A rehash is too dangerous."

  There was the sound of sirens in the distance: sirens in the desert.

  Parisi left his seat, moved to the rail. "There's a touch that could be worth a hundred grand, maybe more, staying right here in the hotel."

  "Who are we talking about?" Sands said.

  "Of course, since we're equals now, if I give you the mark and the setup, then we split the shakedown money down the middle, right?" Parisi had a big, shit-eating smile.

  Sands nodded.

  Parisi shuffled to the sliding glass door, shoved it closed. He picked up a Time magazine off a lounge chair, held it up to show the cover, a portrait of a distinguished gray-haired man.

  "I read his book. That's Harry Desmond."

  "None other."

  "What's the twist?" Sands said.

  Parisi removed the cigar from his mouth. "He's a fruit. Can you imagine that? A multimillionaire who has lunch at the White House sucking a prick?" He laughed.

  "How careful is he?"

  "He don't troll around meeting strangers, if that's what you mean."

  "What's the bait?"

  "He has a chicken who works here in the hotel. A bartender. And the bartender belongs to the union. And the union belongs to my people. Isn't it nice how things work?"

  "When I was on the police department, I heard the rumors that he was queer. But I also heard that he has bodyguards."

  "The bodyguards aren't with him all the time."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Because I'm like friends with this fruit. He always asks my advice before he buys something in town."

  "Where does he have his money?"

  "This is the perfect part. When he's here at the Stardust, he likes to play craps. So he always carries a hundred-grand credit line at the cage. If he takes the bait, a hundred K is waiting right downstairs in the cage.