Money Men
( Charles Carr - 1 )
Gerald Petievich
Gerald Petievich
Money Men
ONE
The tiny motel room had the odor of mildewed carpet. Charles Carr waited, peeking out occasionally through the yellowed Venetian blind at the room Rico was in. An ancient air conditioner rattled outside the window, filtering warm August smog into cool August smog.
Carr's partner, Jack Kelly, slouched on the bed in rumpled suit and tie, watching the Johnny Carson show on a television set that was bolted and chained to the wall. The room needed painting, and the ceiling mirror reflected a stained bedspread with a cigarette burn.
Each time Carr peeked out he could see the neon sign. It proclaimed SUNSET MOTEL-WATERBEDS, TV, FREE ICE, as if the hookers and their johns who slithered in and out of the rooms cared about such extras. Carr preferred to use the Sunset for undercover operations because the rooms were easy to observe from either of the buildings that faced each other across a small parking lot.
Across Sunset Boulevard was a dingy hot-dog stand surrounded by Hollywood's new breed-runaways with no bras, shirtless punks in vests, skinny men dressed as women. Farther down the street a dwarf hawked phony maps to movie stars' homes.
He remembered bringing dates twenty years-even ten years-ago to the classy theaters on Hollywood Boulevard, stopping for a drink near Grauman's Chinese.
Now, he saw the town as a population of crooks and victims. The street people had taken over. The old ladies who lived on the side streets had either moved to Newport Beach or put up wrought-iron window bars.
In fact, eight years ago, when he had first met Sally, she had lived in an apartment in Hollywood. Awhile back, when she had moved to an apartment near his in Santa Monica, she said it was because of the street people. But Carr knew that was only part of it. She had wanted him to get used to her being close. It had worked.
He wanted to call her tonight, but didn't know quite what to say. He didn't look forward to the explanation of why he hadn't phoned in almost a month. There was no particular reason except that he had been busy making arrests because of Rico. Plenty of arrests: pimps and pushers, blacks and whites, anyone who had counterfeit money for sale.
The underworld had bought Rico hook, line, and sinker. It had been Carr's idea to give Rico plenty of leeway, and it had worked. Rico's answering-service phone hadn't stopped ringing for a month. The word of a solid buyer had spread fast. The project chart showed twenty-one separate hand-to-hand buys in a month. Twenty-one trips to the federal lockup for the sellers. Even in court, with Rico on the witness stand, some of them had difficulty believing the surly Rico was a United States Treasury special agent.
"Why cause misery?" Kelly said during a commercial. "Ever think of it like that?" He folded meat-hook hands behind his head. "Everything we do causes shit for somebody. You get a call to a liquor store … somebody passed a phony twenty. You give the liquor-store man a receipt for the twenty. He is pissed off. You find the guy who passed the twenty and arrest him. He is pissed off. You find the printer and arrest him. Now you have enemies. In court the federal prosecutor doesn't like the case, so he's pissed off, and the judge hates you on general principles. So I ask you: Why should we break our ass making cases? Why cause misery?"
"Because it's a lot of good clean fun," Carr said, with a wry smile.
"Yeah, and so is cancer," said Kelly.
Carr looked at his watch. It was 11:30 P.m. He tested the volume knob on the Kel Kit radio receiver on the table next to him. If the batteries held out, he would be able to hear every word in Rico's room.
Straddling a chair, he leaned closer to the Venetian blind. He removed the gold Treasury badge from his pocket and clipped it to his coat pocket so it would be in plain sight for the arrest.
The radio receiver blared. Rico's voice was young and upper Bronx. "I'll make the phone call now," Rico said. "Better tell Kelly to wake up." He laughed.
"Wise ass," Kelly said to the television.
Rico dialed the phone.
"Hello, Ronnie? This is Angelo," said the young undercover agent. "I got your message. I'll see you in room seven at the Sunset Motel near California Street within a half hour. I'm ready to deal and I'm not going to wait any longer than thirty minutes… Right… I will show you my ten-grand buy money before you show me the funny money… You have nothing to worry about if what you deliver is like the sample you gave me."
Good job, Carr thought. Set the time limit and the rules.
The waterbed made a sloshing sound as Kelly lumbered off it. He looked a little like an old bear. The parts of his body were oversized. Enormous hands and feet, big nose and jowls.
"Sounds like your star pupil is catching on," he said, tucking in his shirt.
Carr nodded and stuck his hand in front of the Venetian blind, giving Rico the thumbs-up sign. Rico returned the gesture, then closed the curtain of his room-, standard procedure.
The bedsprings creaked. Rico sat down on the bed in his room to wait. Everything having been planned, everyone having been briefed, there was nothing else to say. The arrest signal would be the usual one. Rico would say, "That seems to be all of it," after he had counted the counterfeit money. Then the door would go down.
"Does Rico have an undercover piece?" Kelly said.
"Two inch in an ankle holster," Carr said. The question caused him to reflect for a moment on the fact that he had found it necessary to remind Rico of safety precautions a little too often. He had chalked this up to the "Elliot Ness syndrome," which he had surmounted over twenty years ago. He figured everyone went through it. Running a finger through flame.
"You know why Rico's been doing so well in this project?" Kelly fiddled with the handcuffs on his belt.
"Why?
"Because he looks more like a crook than the people who sell him the counterfeit money. Olive complexion, black hair, pinky ring; a real Richard Conte."
"He's too young to know who Richard Conte is," said Carr as he stared out the window at the hot-dog-stand freaks.
"Walking entrapment. That's what Rico is. Some shyster will probably bring that up as a defense someday." Kelly lowered his voice. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, look at this mean-looking Italian. He scared my poor client into selling him counterfeit money. How's that for a defense?" Kelly rubbed his barrel stomach. "I'm hungry," he said.
"He sounded real nervous over the phone," Rico said. The transmitter gave his voice a hollow, metallic tone.
Carr wished he could say something back, thought for a moment of phoning Rico's room, but decided against it. The seller would be arriving any minute.
Kelly peeked out the opposite end of the Venetian blind. "This room smells like the dog pound. They should rename this place the Dog Shit Motel. The Hollywood Dog Shit Motel."
Carr shook his head.
Over the radio came the sound of Rico lighting a cigarette.
Kelly began pacing around the room to kill time, running his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair at regular intervals.
"There he is!" said Carr. A young man carrying an attaché case approached Rico's room. The man appeared to be about thirty, medium build, and wore a stylish black leather jacket. He glanced behind him nervously.
Standing at the door, Kelly undid the inside latch and tested the handle, making sure it was unlocked. He pulled his revolver from the shoulder holster and held it next to his leg.
The man in the leather jacket took a final look behind him and knocked on the door. He went in.
Carr turned up the radio.
"Well, here I am," said the man. There was a quaver in his voice. "I've got the funny money right here in the case. Let's see the real stuff."
"Take it
easy," Rico said. "I've got the ten grand…Look."
Carr heard the crinkling of the paper bag he had given Rico earlier containing Uncle Sam's marked ten thousand dollars. He guessed Rico had poured the money out on the bed for the count.
Carr turned the volume on the radio even higher. There was the unsnapping of the latches on the attaché case … a frenzied moment of scrambling. A loud blast made him jump out of his chair. He instinctively pulled his gun. Ears throbbing, he dashed out the door and across the parking lot to Rico's room, Kelly a few feet behind.
Attacking the motel door with powerful kicks, they entered the room guns first.
Rico was lying on the floor next to the bed, hands clutching his face. Kelly ran to the open window.
No one else was in the room.
Tires squealed outside. "He's gone!" screamed Kelly. He ran to the phone.
Revolver still in hand, Carr moved closer to Rico and began to kneel down. He was involuntarily repulsed. Rico's face was blown back and away like a skinned rabbit. A distorted eye socket was gouged open to meet the ear, and bits of brain matter and blood made a circular design on the corner of the cheap bedspread.
Carr, on his knees, stared at the ruined body.
Kelly yelled, gasped, into the phone, "I want an ambulance! Sunset Motel, Sunset at California Street! A federal officer has been shot."
Carr placed his fingers gently on Rico's neck. No pulse. No breathing. He stared at his fingers, now wet with blood.
Rico's pants leg was up and the small revolver, the undercover gun, was showing. It was still in the holster.
Kelly stood next to him and crossed himself. "Holy Mother of God," he cried, turning his head away. "He must have used a sawed-off shotgun."
To Carr, the squalid room became more unbearable with each group that arrived-ambulance attendants shaking their heads, young policemen running about, and, finally, coroner's deputies in olive-drab overalls.
Later, as police detectives and Treasury agents cordoned off the motel room, combing for evidence, Carr and Kelly stood together outside the door. They were unable to look at one another. The motel lot was full of men and women who had come out of their rooms to gape.
Across the boulevard the habitués of the hot-dog stand pointed and gawked like children watching a puppet show.
A coroner's ghoul walked from a black station wagon carrying a blue rubber body bag.
"Don't use that," Carr said.
"Whaddaya mean?" mumbled the ghoul. He looked at Carr's eyes for a moment.
"Oh, yeah, sure."
A few minutes later Carr stepped out of the way as the man pushed the gurney toward the station wagon. The body of Rico de Fiore was wrapped in a sheet and blanket.
The fatigue had set in.
On the way back to Hollywood from downtown, Carr leaned back in the passenger seat and closed his eyes. Kelly weaved in and out of freeway traffic and rambled fitfully about the lack of clues.
Though early in the morning, it was already hot enough to turn on air conditioning or jump in a pool. They had been up all night, going from county morgue to field office to police department; a headachy night of repeating the story, making reports, phone calls, composite sketches. Kelly pulled into a no-parking curb zone in front of Rico's apartment building. A sign posted in the middle of an ivy lawn read APARTMENT FOR RENT. ADULTS ONLY-NO PETS.
Carr opened a window inside the studio apartment, thus furnishing the room with a shaft of dust-reflecting light and a view of a cement retaining wall. "When you rent a place, make sure there are no windows facing the street," Carr had told Rico, as if the young agent hadn't known better.
The furniture was neat and impersonal-a painted chest of drawers, flower-patterned sofa, and small wooden desk. On the wall above the sofa hung a desert-scene print in an aluminum frame, which came with the room.
The apartment reminded Carr of scores of the easily forgettable "temporary duty" places he had rented in his early career. A trailer in Las Vegas, the two-bedroom hovel in San Francisco's mission district, a brownstone walk-up in Baltimore; the duty was temporary because it ended when everyone except the undercover man was suddenly arrested. He remembered the loneliness brought on as much by the environment of self-interest as by solitude. He had learned to take the edge off the loneliness by working harder, meeting more paper pushers, pressing more strongly for the hundred-grand buys.
Kelly rummaged through pots and pans in the kitchen. He pulled a large roaster pan from a bottom drawer of the stove and removed the lid. "Here's the issue equipment," he said. He sat down at a chrome-legged dinette table and removed items from the roaster pan: a government-issued cassette tape recorder with telephone attachment, a shoulder holster, binoculars, expense voucher forms, government transportation requests. He put the items in a cardboard box.
Carr found one of Rico's phony driver's licenses hidden under army-rolled socks in the chest of drawers. He picked it up and handed it to Kelly.
Carr remembered picking Rico up at the airport two months ago and handing him the license. "Don't forget to memorize the date of birth on the license before you fill out the rental application," he had said. It was always the little things.
Kelly was up and crashing about, pulling drawers out of cupboards, turning them upside down, spilling things. "His daily reports have got to be here somewhere."
"They're here somewhere," Carr said.
He had met Rico late every night at the hot-dog stand on Alvarado to check them. Rico's reports were always up to date.
Carr had said, "Keep the pressure on. Make the seller put up or shut up. It’s what real crooks do. Make 'em deliver and give the arrest signal. You know the scenario and they don't. Keep it simple."
"You like to play with their minds," Rico said. "All I want to do is make a few buys, testify before the grand jury, and go home to New York. Times Square at midnight is kindergarten compared to temporary duty in Hollywood." They both laughed.
Rico was the best he had seen-cautious, with the ability to take orders, but, more important, the ability to break them if necessary, to be resourceful, to recognize things as they were and forget the always safe and sure Manual of Operations answer. Like Carr, Rico could feel the pulse.
Kelly, trancelike, sat down at the kitchen table again. He talked into the cardboard box.
Then he slammed a fist into an open palm. "Sheeyit!"
TWO
Carr, a trim man with mournful brown eyes, wove his way through flocks of Chinatown tourists. The smell of incense and fried shrimp was familiar. He headed for Ling's Bar, passing novelty shops with bored-looking Oriental sales people standing in doorways. Having just come from the funeral, he needed a drink.
He paused and noticed his reflection in the window glass of a jade-jewelry shop. He was shocked by his seedy, tired appearance. Darkness under the eyes and a sprinkle of broken blood vessels on his cheekbones. Features fighting age. Temples more gray than brown. Maybe a haircut would help, and perhaps a shoeshine.
Or maybe a new wardrobe… His lapels were outdated. He refused to buy new suits to look stylish while crawling under a house to search for counterfeit money or wrestling a hype.
His appearance had been one of Sally's pet topics. She had even given him a hair blower. He had used it once and retired it to a junk drawer.
As he waited for the light at Hill Street, he thought of the bright stained glass, agents and cops standing in line, the sound of Rico's sisters sobbing.
The light turned green and he continued on, crossing the street among a group of middle-aged women. Hell, he was close to their age. Behind him were twenty years of "street time."
Staying on the street, with his sleeves rolled up, had been his own choice. Asking questions and getting answers was what he was good at, climbing the ladder to the printing press, beating the bad guys. Leave the pencil-pushing to those who took their transfers to the ivory tower of Washington, D.C.
Now, things had changed, Because of Rico's murde
r he knew he was headed for the barn. The first rule of bureaucracy is that somebody always has to take the blame. They would say that his security precautions at the motel had not been adequate. They would transfer him to the Washington, D.C., scrap heap. Had he done the right thing by refusing the promotions that had been offered him through the years?
He passed a penny-stained goldfish pond known as the Chinatown Wishing Well and turned down an alley.
"Charlie!"
A man's voice behind him. Higgins, a muscular man with short blond hair, walked toward him down the alley with a paper napkin tucked over his belt buckle. His pants were baggy and he wore a plaid sports coat with a revolver bulge on the right side. Approaching Carr, he pulled the napkin from his belt and wiped his mouth.
"Just chowing down," he said. "Saw you pass by the window. I need to run one by ya."
"Shoot," Carr said.
"I'm looking for a guy who slit an old lady's throat. Snitch says the guy who did it has a nickname-'Trash-Truck Jimmy.' S'posed to have done time years ago for passing queer twenties and tens. Ring a bell?"
"Jimmy Tortamasi," Carr said. "He did time in Terminal Island about five years ago for passing. Escaped once by hiding inside a trash truck. He walks with a limp now. The truck had a hydraulic compacter, and he figured there was enough room for a body between the pusher and the back wall of the truck."
"I take it he figured wrong."
"Right," Carr said. "It crushed him like a grape. After a year in the prison hospital he was good as new … except for the leg. Jimmy should be about forty-five now. When he's out of the joint, he usually lives in one of the fleabags around McArthur Park."
Higgins was writing the name down on the napkin. "T-o-r-t-a-m-a-s-i?" he said.
Carr nodded.
"I told my partner, if the dude was into bad paper, you'd know who he was." He put the napkin in his shirt pocket and stepped a little closer to Carr. Suddenly he looked embarrassed "I'm sorry about Rico. I didn't get a chance to make it to the funeral…”
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