Sammy played with this pipedream for a few days, while he and Marcy went over various casting possibilities to play him. Jimmy Caan? Harrison Ford? Clint? Pacino? Why the hell not? It was all pie in the sky anyway.
But even the pleasure of pleasing the woman he was in love with or telling a United States marshal to go fuck himself didn’t compensate for his blowing his cover. One way or another, those vultures would unpeel the onion and Salvatore Didziocomo would emerge. With a big bull’s-eye on his head. They would bury him with his seven figures.
No, it was back to Plan A. Get Diddly Shit out of the way and move in on the prize. Let Charlie Berns’s fixer clean things up for him. When the time came, he’d break the news gently to Marcy that there would be no Sammy Dee story at the local Cineplex.
Marcy Gray happened to be there when Kermit Fenster showed up at Paradise Gardens to fix Sammy Dee’s problem. Sammy had left a message on the answering machine in Uruguay, as instructed by Charlie Berns, leaving his WITSEC cell phone number—in direct violation of his agreement with them. It couldn’t be helped. Sammy wasn’t answering his land line, which rang a dozen times a day with interview requests.
How the man found out just where Sammy lived without calling was obviously not beyond the talents of a man who could get you out of Azerbaijan without a passport. Sammy and Marcy were sitting out on his patio talking about the upcoming Christmas holiday, which neither of them was looking forward to.
Sammy wasn’t happy about being besieged in his own home, reduced to eating casseroles and watching TV. Though the tabloid coverage had died down, he was convinced that all it would take would be one sighting of him—at Vons, on the golf course, at a restaurant—and the jackals would be all over him.
For her part, Marcy claimed to be suffering from her annual seasonal depression. The Holiday Blues, her shrink called it.
“I don’t have any family, except my actor friends,” she bemoaned.
“That’s more than I have.”
“Sammy, everybody at Paradise Gardens likes you.”
“Your friend Didier isn’t a big fan.”
“You know, it would be nice if the two of you got along better. I mean, why not? You’re about the same age, you’re both smart, well-informed men.”
If only he could tell her she was sitting on ceramic tile that constituted the down payment for Sammy’s contract on the African. Is there anything more flattering to a woman than a man passionate enough to have his rival killed?
These thoughts were interrupted by his doorbell. He chose to ignore it.
“You’re not going to answer it?”
“It’s probably some reporter. Eventually, they go away.”
The ringing, however, did not go away.
“Let me answer it,” Marcy volunteered. “In case they have a camera.”
She’d never met a camera she didn’t like, Sammy thought, as Marcy walked inside, crossed the living room, looking delectable to him, as usual, in a pair of well-cut toreador slacks and platform shoes.
She opened the door to a short, slender man in a Dacron summer suit and Panama hat. The man had no visible camera or recording device. He took his hat off, revealing a seriously receding hairline, and said, “Kermit Fenster. Nice to meet you.”
At the sound of the name, Sammy walked into the living room, surprised to see Charlie Berns’s fixer standing in his doorway.
“Come in.”
Fenster entered, closing the door behind him. He took a long, admiring look at Marcy and then smiled. “Marcy Gray, am I right?”
Marcy nodded eagerly.
“You’re even better-looking in person,” Fenster said.
She blushed a beautiful pale burgundy that Sammy wanted to sip slowly.
“Marcy was just going,” Sammy said.
“Nice meeting you,” she smiled thinly, clearly a little miffed at his not-so-subtle dismissal of her.
“Likewise,” Fenster said, his eyes following her out the door. “Good-looking broad,” he said to Sammy as Marcy disappeared.
“How’d you find me?”
Fenster looked at him as if Sammy had asked how he had managed to walk in the door. “This place secure?” he asked, ignoring the question and looking around the condo.
“Secure?”
“Can anyone hear our conversation?”
“Doubt it. Mrs. Epstein next door can’t even hear when you’re shouting at her.”
“Bugs?”
“Who would bug me?”
“Let’s see . . . how about the United States Marshals Service? Or the Finoccio family out of New York? For starters.”
Sammy looked at the man incredulously. What the fuck?
“How’d you know that?”
“Mind if I sit down? I got a bunion on my foot that’s killing me. And I could use a cup of coffee. Two sugars, low-fat milk.”
Kermit Fenster helped himself to one of the kitchenette stools while Sammy scooped some coffee into the coffeemaker.
“You know everything?” he asked.
“I know what I need to know.”
“What did Charlie tell you?”
“That you needed something fixed. I told him I’d take care of it, as long as it wasn’t a hit. I don’t do hits.”
Sammy closed the sliding glass door to the patio and then lowered his voice, as if someone could actually overhear them. “I need to get this story of me and the bombing out of the news, at least enough so I can go outside without being photographed.”
“That’s all?”
“You can do that?”
“I can do that.”
“How?”
“That’s need-to-know, Sammy, and you don’t need to know.”
“How long will it take you?”
“A week, maybe ten days. Depends on what else happens over that period. Of course, if the North Koreans lob a warhead at Hawaii, or Angela and Brad break up, it’ll be a lot faster. You’ll be buried in the ashes.”
Fenster elaborated: “You need to be overshadowed by something bigger. And that shouldn’t be very hard. You see, celebrity is a zero sum game. There’s only so much of it to go around. One person gets famous, someone else fades into the woodwork. Never fails. July 18, 1969—Mary Jo Kopechne gets drowned by Teddy Kennedy. Two days later, Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, and it’s Mary Jo who?”
“Charlie told you that I didn’t have any money?”
“Sammy, I am not a whore. I’m a fixer. I fix things for people I like or friends of people I like. Charlie and I go back a long time. He’s a standup guy.”
“That’s great,” Sammy said, pouring the coffee. “If there’s anything I can do for you, now or later, just let me know.”
“I will. You can count on it.”
Ten minutes later, having drunk his coffee, Kermit Fenster left. Sammy sat wondering how this strange man was going to manipulate the media and get him out of the spotlight, and decided he didn’t want to know. There were a number of things in life he didn’t want to know—his cholesterol count, whether the Iranians really had nuclear weapons, just what had transpired between Marcy Gray and Diddly Shit when he wasn’t there . . . and he didn’t want to know how Kermit Fenster was going to make it possible for him to go into Vons without people aiming camera phones at him and posting his picture on the Internet, where Phil Finoccio and his band of underemployed, vengeful goons would see it and send a guy out to Palm Springs with a high-powered assault weapon.
Or why.
In the week following the bombing at Vons, replacing his car was the last thing on Sammy’s mind. He hadn’t even bothered to report the loss to the insurance company, assuming—erroneously, as it turned out—that everyone, including his friends at State Farm, knew what had happened to him.
The day after Kermit Fenster paid his visit and eight days after the incident, he finally made the call and, after surfing through endless automated options on the 800 number, got some woman who was apparently operating out of a bunker in Kansas.
“May I have your policy number, please?” she asked.
“I don’t have it handy.” He didn’t. To the best of his knowledge, it was somewhere with his papers in one of several places in the condo, or, just as possibly, he may have thrown it out along with other superfluous pieces of paper.
“Name, last name first, and social security number?”
He gave them to her and waited for what seemed a very long time. Then, she said, “Dee, Samuel. Date of birth and mother’s maiden name, please?”
The DOJ had given him a fictitious mother’s maiden name, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember it. “I just have my date of birth, okay?”
“You don’t know your mother’s maiden name?” She uttered these words, as if to say, What kind of son are you?
“She got remarried a bunch of times. I keep getting them mixed up.”
“Maiden name, not married name.”
“Gimme a break . . .”
“Is this for a claim, Mr. Dee?”
“Yes.”
“Involving the 2012 Lexus?”
“Yes.”
“Date and time?”
“It was a week ago Wednesday—no, a week ago Tuesday, eight days ago . . .”
“You’re first reporting it now?”
“I’ve been kind of busy.”
“Is there a police report?”
He was about to ask her if she had been watching television over the last week, but then he realized that the story may have died quickly in Kansas.
“You bet,” he said.
“Any injuries?”
“None. I mean, people were shaken up, but . . . somebody put a bomb under my car in the parking lot at Vons . . .”
This time the pause lasted a full ten seconds. “Excuse me,” she said finally. “Did you say a bomb?”
“Yes. A bomb. It completely destroyed the car.”
“We’re going to have to get back to you, Mr. Dee.”
“What do you mean, get back to me? This is the claims line, right?”
“Accidents brought about by acts of terrorism are handled by a different department.”
“Act of terrorism? Somebody was trying to kill somebody and they just hit the wrong car.”
It was to no avail. The woman told him that he would be contacted by someone in the policy coverage department within seven working days and disconnected him. But not before saying, “In the meantime, I suggest you try to remember your mother’s maiden name.”
The only person who had that information was someone he didn’t want to talk to. He got the Lone Ranger out and dialed the number.
“What’s the problem, Sammy?” the marshal answered, without bothering to say hello.
“I forgot my mother’s maiden name.”
“That’s not good.”
“I realize that.”
“We’ve stressed the fact that you need to indelibly memorize the data of your new identity.”
“Yes, you have. Now can you just give it to me?”
“Why do you need it?”
“Why do you need to know why I need it?”
More silence. This was a lose/lose strategy. Sammy told him about his problem with State Farm.
“You know, you should have reported the accident immediately.”
“I was in shock.”
“For over a week?”
This time Sammy resorted to silence until he heard the keys of the marshal’s computer. “Lebow,” he pronounced, finally. “We chose it because it’s a swing name. Could be any ethnicity.”
“Thank you.”
His real mother’s name was Angela. Angela “Angie” Didziocomo, née Grazziani. When his father was pissed at her, he would grumble: “She thinks she’s Angie Dickinson, your mother.” And his mother would glare back at him with a look that said, If I didn’t marry you, I could’ve been.
Their mutual hostility was no doubt some sort of mutated form of love, but you could’ve fooled young Salvatore, who felt as if he were growing up in a combat zone. The family apartment in Corona often resembled a rowdy music hall in Palermo, the audience tossing rotten tomatoes onto the stage accompanied by a volley of guttural slurs.
Now he had the opportunity to change all that. His fictional past was his to re-create. Mrs. Lebow could be a warm, nurturing woman, instead of the bitter, frustrated Angie Didziocomo. Why not? It was one of the few things he liked about witness protection: he could reinvent his past. If he did it convincingly enough, maybe he could learn to believe it.
They didn’t give her a first name, so he made one up. Sophie. Sophie Lebow. A nice name. She was a big woman, warm and tender, spent hours in the kitchen preparing dishes for him, a pampered only child whose father sent generous support checks from his home in Oyster Bay.
Jesus. He shut down the fantasy before it got completely out of hand. Maybe he really did need to see one of the Marshals Service’s mental health professionals, revisit the apartment in Corona and his toilet training. And when they got through with that stuff, they could move on to why he had spent a good chunk of his life sitting around in cars and restaurants with a bunch of dumb fucks waiting to do something he never enjoyed doing.
Sammy wasn’t sure he wanted the answer to that question either.
Being without a car was not a major inconvenience for Sammy, at least not until the publicity fatwa was lifted. The fact was he had no place to go. They were still out there, lying in wait with cameras. Marcy did his shopping and brought cooked dishes over. Unfortunately, she often brought Diddly Shit, too.
They became a peculiar ménage à trois, hunkered down dining and drinking wine while the Indians surrounded the stockade. Marcy, for her part, seemed to be enjoying the situation, especially when the odd camera caught her going in or out of Sammy’s place. It was as if she were on the red carpet at Cannes, being snapped up by the paparazzi.
Whatever it was that Kermit Fenster did to get him out of the news, it worked. Like gangbusters. A week to the day after the man had paid him a visit, Sammy was watching the Lakers when a news bulletin flashed across the screen: BREAKTHROUGH IN VONS PARKING LOT BOMBING: DETAILS AT 11.
They led with the story. Jason Echeverra, the Latino anchor with the sculpted hair, announced that the police had uncovered new evidence in the bombing. They cut to Tracy Tohito standing at the now-vacant spot in the Vons parking lot—a small crater, set off by construction sawhorses, replacing the police tape—microphone in hand.
“I’m standing here at the site of the terrorist bombing ten days ago. Eyewitness News has learned that Samuel Dee, the retired cement mogul, was not, as previously believed, the target of the assassination attempt. A car belonging to Esfandyar Fahran, an undercover Afghan informant, was parked next to Samuel Dee’s 2012 Lexus, and was the real target of the bombing, the terrorist apparently mistaking his car for one belonging to Fahran. The Afghan national had been on the Taliban’s hit list ever since he furnished allied intelligence with drone targets in Kandahar in the Pashtun region of Afghanistan. He was apparently traced to Palm Springs, where he had been laying low. His whereabouts at the moment are not known, but FBI sources believe he is no longer in the area. Sources at the PSPD are saying little about this new development in the case . . .”
They cut to Tracy Tohito ambushing Detective Sergeant Jorge Melendez exiting Palm Springs Police Department headquarters in a Hawaiian shirt and a plaid bowling ball carrier.
“We have no comment on that, Tracy,” he said, getting into his late-model SUV and driving off—to the Desert Oasis Lanes for his bowling league night.
Then there was some banter between Tracy Tohito and Jason Echeverra: “Don’t know about you, Tracy, but I’m going to look around me a little more carefully before I park my car at the supermarket,” the anchorman said with a little smirk on his face.
“Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she replied, shaking her head ruefully.
“In other news,” Jason Echeverra plowed on, �
��all two-hundred seventeen passengers and the crew of a Chilean jumbo jet were killed when their plane skidded off the runway at Santiago airport this morning . . .”
Sammy hit the remote, turning off pictures of the smoldering carcass of the Chilean airplane and breathing a sigh of relief. Along with relief came a sense of incredulity. How the hell did the funny little man in the wrinkled suit pull it off?
Sammy went to bed that night relieved that he was no longer tabloid bait, but still aware of the fact that someone—and it wasn’t the Taliban—wanted him dead. Whatever bullshit Kermit Fenster managed to get the public to accept, Sammy Dee still had to deal with the fact that Phil Finoccio had tried to whack him, and that there was no reason to believe that he would stop after one failure. We’ll get you in Hell if we have to . . .
He’d been living with this fear ever since the car went up. But he was learning that fear had its own law of diminishing returns. Every day it receded a little farther from his consciousness, overtaken by the events of the day. It had induced in him a sense of fatalism that was actually liberating. If his number was up, it was up. If it wasn’t a hit man, it would be cancer or a Chilean jetliner. No one was getting out of here alive.
The next morning, after making sure that the reporters were, in fact, gone, he walked out of his condo, squinting into the flat desert sunlight like a prisoner who had been locked in a cellar. He knocked on Charlie Berns’s door to thank him and was greeted by the film producer in his bathrobe and slippers.
“Sorry, Charlie, hope I didn’t wake you?”
“I always get up twelve hours before I go to work, gives me time to shower and grab a cup of coffee . . . Old Lenny Bruce routine he used to use when people called him in the morning. Come on in.”
“Thanks, but I got a bunch of things I got to do in town.”
“The reporters gone?”
“You didn’t see the news last night?”
“No. What happened?”
“They found out that the target of the Vons bombing wasn’t me.”
“Really? Who was it?”
“An Afghan double agent. The Taliban are after him.”
Purgatory Gardens Page 17