Judging from Dale’s phone records, the person he likely owed money to was loan shark Tommy Tesca. Judging from what happened next, the two of them likely became partners.
In 2005, a Wisconsin artist named Richard Struger died in a bicycle accident. Before his death, three Struger paintings had been bought by Dale on behalf of anonymous clients. Over the next year, the paintings sold at a whopping profit.
Shortly after that, the Caymans shell companies were incorporated. During each of the next four years, one American artist, whose works cost five-figure, then six-figure sums, died from what looked like natural causes or an accident. Always with same pattern of purchases before their deaths and sales afterward—and always through the offshore shells.
Then in 2011 an artist in New Mexico died in her sleep—but this artist’s works cost over a million a pop. More money than Dale’s and Tesca’s shell companies could afford. But suddenly they’re partnered with several new shell companies that do have seven-figure resources.
“The Mastrizzis have that kind of money,” Husak, now almost fully awake, suggested.
“Uh-huh,” Mark yawned, “and that’s the year Dale’s consulting firm starts signing clients that are Mastrizzi fronts and friends.”
“So it’s all peaches and cream,” Husak mused, “but despite that, Tesca disappears, comes back as the Art Critic, and starts whacking artists.”
“But not the quiet way he’d been doing it,” Mark said. “He’s killing in Chicago, every couple of weeks, not making it look like accidents, in fact leaving serial killer signatures that’ll draw attention—and naming his offshores after Gianni and Lou Mastrizzi.”
“Not only walks away from this profitable scam, he wrecks it,” Husak mused.
“They musta hurt his feelings really bad,” Rarey suggested.
“Yeah.” Husak frowned. “But it wasn’t Tesca who hired the Serbs to kill Dale—Tesca wouldn’t have ordered them to use the Hancock. And it ain’t the Mastrizzis—never woulda hired those bozos. So, who?”
“Don’t have a name,” Mark said, “but I have a theory: Scared money. Every year Dale and Tesca kill a more expensive painter. If this year the price goes to eight figures per painting—”
“Might be too rich for even the Mastrizzis,” Husak said.
Rarey nodded. “So they bring in an outside investor—who panics when the Art Critic starts blowing the cover off their scam—and since Mr. Scared Money knows Dale can identify him… Ka-pow,” Rarey said, firing his index finger.
Mark glanced at his watch. “I’ll leave a message for Nardelli, ask if there’s a wealthy friend of the Mastrizzis they’d trust enough to cut in. Right now Nick and I are—” Mark yawned, “—gonna unpack that list of Mastrizzi-connected firms that hired Dale, see if we find a candidate.”
“No,” Husak ruled, “you’re going home.”
“Lieut—”
“The two of you look, sound and smell like a couple of half-dead frogs.”
More like three-quarters. Mark gestured surrender. “Just one more thing, Loo. After what happened at the Art Institute today, the Mastrizzis—”
“—will be looking to whack Dale, before we can catch him,” Husak said.
Husak and Mark shared a dour silence, neither of them wanting to say it out loud.
So Rarey did. “Hey, just ’cause the Mastrizzis got to Tesca before we did doesn’t mean they’re gonna beat us to Dale. We’re gonna win this race,” he predicted, yawning.
Ninety-Three | 2012
Dale entered the walk-in storage unit. Closed the door and opened the wheeled luggage that held costumes, guns and money. And a laptop and two burner phones.
Dale dressed in a full-bag burka with a veiled eye slit. And gloves. He’d stuffed the middle finger of the left glove, so none of his tells were visible. And he’d honed a passable accent by putting in hours reciting along with YouTube videos of Middle Eastern women speaking English.
• • •
After paying cash for a ticket, the devout Muslim woman spent a tense hour in a Greyhound waiting room. The devout Muslim’s tension worsened as she boarded the bus, dreading that someone would start speaking Arabic to her.
A middle aged black woman sat next to the devout Muslim. Then did her best to be sociable in English, a danger Dale presumed the burka would preclude.
Dale pretended to have almost no English. His affable companion made a valiant effort to carry the conversation, pulling out magazines and pointing to pictures of clothing, jewelry, celebrities, cars, then proudly showing cell-phone photos of her grandkids at Disney World, knocking herself out to connect with the bashful foreigner.
The bashful foreigner whispered, “Very thanks you. But must make sleep. Sorry. Sorry. Much, much tired.”
The affable woman’s eyes narrowed. She muttered a sarcastic, “Uh-huh,” feelings bruised by what she knew was going down. Same old same old.
Dale felt like shit. Murder, money laundering, interior decorating and now casual racism. Dale made a silent vow to Allah that he’d send a big fat check to that museum guard who saved his life.
• • •
When the devout woman got off the bus she wasn’t the only modestly dressed Muslim rolling a suitcase through the terminal. Which is why Dale had gone to Detroit; significant Middle Eastern population.
Dale took a cab with a Latino driver. Handed the driver a printout bearing the name and address of a motel. The motel wasn’t in an Arab-American neighborhood, where someone might try to chat him up. The motel did accept cash, a full week in advance plus a deposit to cover extras.
Dale ordered in a halal meal and washed it down with beers from the mini-bar—wearing gloves to he wouldn’t leave prints. For the sake of dexterity he’d switched to a pair of latex gloves. But after a few hours sweat was pooling in the fingertips. Was there such a thing as trench finger? Dale went back to the cotton gloves from his burka ensemble.
The latex crisis dealt with, Dale resumed grappling with a somewhat more disastrous complication: His face was all over TV and the web. He’d only prepared for hiding from the Mastrizzis. Not from them, the police, and much of the Earth’s population.
He had fifteen thousand in cash. Plenty more in accounts and safe deposit boxes in the Caymans and Liechtenstien. Two passports, one in his name and one an alias. Unusable; both sported photos of his now famous face.
Shit. Dale had discovered a breathtakingly expensive Swiss clinic that specialized in deeply private facial renovations. But that plan assumed he’d be able to get his face to Switzerland. Now, best Dale could do was sneak into Canada and hire a bent plastic surgeon who did quality work, and wouldn’t sell him to the Mastrizzis. Did they have bent surgeons in Canada? They must. Even Canada. But how do you find one?
Dale needed sleep. Turned out the lights. Closed his eyes.
No fucking way.
Dale turned the TV on. Breaking news: The Art Critic’s vehicle had been found. But it was empty. Police refused to say if they had an idea where the Art Critic might be.
Dale had an idea where Tommy might be. Dale tried not to think of what the Mastrizzis were doing to Tommy at this moment. Tried to calmly assess his options to avoid that same treatment.
A) Negotiate with the Mastrizzis. Hope his carefully dispersed copies of their art transactions would provide enough leverage to save his life.
B) Negotiate with the cops. Hope they weren’t too corrupt and/or incompetent to save his life.
C) Suicide. His only pain-free death option… Nah. Didn’t have the stones. Plus he knew he’d die hearing the far-off sound of Dorian’s derisive snickering…
Dorian. The museum.
The memories Dale had been repressing all day—easy enough while he was a hundred-forty-pounds of adrenaline obsessed with escape—came flooding in. The goon’s hand clamping on his shoulder. Him fleeing, lungs heart head pounding. Shooting and being shot at, flailing through that madhouse crush of berserk tourists. Shaved Head leveling his gun
at Dale’s forehead. A bullet hitting Shaved Head instead of him. Then him running gasping terrified again.
When dawn came Dale was still awake, but the trembling had subsided.
Ninety-Four | 2012
The park bench the well-tailored English gentleman chose wasn’t favored by tourists. Trees and a statue obstructed its view of an arrogantly pretty Swiss lake. They also obstructed tourists’ view of the bench, which made it a favorite of young lovers and pot-heads.
Stephan Densford-Kent wasn’t young, though he did sometimes smoke pot, and still owned a full head of sandy-colored hair only partially streaked with gray, and the ruddy-cheeked face of a charming, wrinkled, contentedly corrupt seventy-year-old schoolboy.
Soon after Densford-Kent sat he was joined by a casually but expensively dressed thirty-two-year-old. Not his lover or dealer. His favorite shooter.
Densford-Kent said, “A nearly perfect afternoon, don’t you think?”
“Nearly. What’s gone wrong?”
“The art project has been temporarily suspended.”
“How temporarily?”
“To be determined. The client has a more pressing need.”
“How pressing?”
“Extremely. Rush job. But far simpler than the project. The subject isn’t famous. And there’s no need to make it appear to be something other than it is.”
“So it pays less.”
“Merely your standard luxurious rate.”
“Damn. But, seeing as how I hate to disappoint you, and I’m suddenly unemployed—I’m there. Soon as you tell me where ’there’ is.”
Densford-Kent gave the shooter a dubious, narrow-eyed look. “You will fly in, do the job, and leave.”
“Where?”
A small, reluctant silence.
“Chicago.”
With a bone-dry hint of amusement the shooter replied, “Not a problem.”
“Have I your word you’ll behave? I must believe that.”
“Yes you must,” the shooter agreed, “because you don’t have anyone else available. If you did you wouldn’t have contacted me.”
“Cheeky cunt,” Densford-Kent complained, fondly. He shook the shooter’s hand, transferring a thumb drive containing a dossier on Jay Branko.
Ninety-Five | 2012
Took a couple of days, but Mark and Rarey figured out Mr. Scared Money’s given name.
Dale Phipps’ most lucrative client was JB Structural. A construction firm that regularly employed a subcontractor whose major shareholder was a trust controlled by the Mastrizzis. JB also favored a trucking firm owned by a Mastrizzi cousin, and construction unions whose execs were Mastrizzi blood brothers.
JB Structural was owned by Jay Branko. According to Ed Nardelli, Branko’s deceased father and Gianni Mastrizzi had always played well together. A meaningful relationship their sons were emulating.
Rarey turned up an FBI surveillance photo of Lou Mastrizzi playing golf in a foursome that included Branko. At a country club to which they both belonged.
Branko owned a luxury box at the United Center. Three doors down from Lou’s.
Branko could afford a multi-million investment in buying art and murdering the artist. Which also meant, for Jay, handing a hit man a briefcase full of hundreds wasn’t elephant dollars, it was loose change.
But wait, that’s not all Mark got when he rush-ordered his very own copy of JB’s financials. Mark also received, at no extra charge, this priceless bonus data: JB’s most lucrative contracts were with the city and county. Deals you don’t land unless you’re seriously wired into Chicago’s political heavyweights.
JB Structural was a nexus of shadowy, complex, big-dollar interactions between the Outfit and the Machine.
When Mark and Rarey laid it out for Husak, Rarey exulted, with a touching blend of joy, ambition and bulletproof youth, “This could be huuuge.”
“Yes it could,” Husak said, to Mark, quietly. A warning.
Ninety-Six | 2012
If any other subcontractor pulled this shit, Jay Branko would’ve fired the son of a bitch, sued his balls off and gone at his shin with a tire iron. All Jay could do to Todd Sullivan, of Sullivan Brothers Concrete, was chew him out. Todd was married to a niece of Cousin Eddie, the second most dangerous man in City Hall. Piss Eddie off, and bye-bye government contracts—like this one, to retrofit crumbling overpasses on the Dan Ryan. A job on which Cousin Eddie’s nephew-in-law had been pouring substandard concrete.
“Goddamnit, Todd! Women, children and Aldermen drive across those goddamn things. If one of those fuckers collapses—”
“Ain’t gonna happen,” Sullivan scoffed.
“—you and me end up broke and living in a cage with big black cocks in our mouths. That’s what ain’t gonna happen, ’cause you’re gonna rip out that mud you poured and re-do every fucking inch.”
Sullivan shrugged. “If that’s what you want.”
“And you’re gonna eat every fucking dime.”
“Dream on.”
Jay dreamed of a tire iron hitting bone. “Every fucking dime.”
“Nah. Tell you what, show of good faith, twenty-five percent discount.” Sullivan gave him a sour, defiant grin. “Final offer.”
“You eat the cost, and I don’t inform Cousin Eddie you’ve been pulling shit that’s gonna kill voters. Final offer.”
The defiance drained out of Sullivan’s face.
That’s right, you dumb fuck, that Cousin Eddie shit cuts both ways.
After the dumb fuck left Jay’s office, Jay leaned back in his chair, feeling human again. It had been two days since his conversation with Lou. The call had gone well. But did that mean things were okay, or that Lou was playing him? Jay had been obsessing about how much danger he was or wasn’t in—
His secretary buzzed. There was a Homicide detective and an FBI agent asking to see him.
Christ. So busy pissing his pants about the Mastrizzis he hadn’t given much thought to the police. No point; Zerbjka, the only shooter who’d met Jay, was dead.
Then what the hell were they here about? A cop and a Fed?
• • •
“I’m Detective Bergman, and this is Special Agent Rarey.”
“Gentlemen,” Jay said, coming out from behind his desk to shake hands. “Can I get you something? Water, coffee, tea, soda, sports drinks, got the whole fuckin’ 7-11 going on. When my dad built this place he’d put down shot glasses and pour without asking.”
“Thanks, no,” Bergman said. The cop was eyeing photos on the wall of Jay with the Mayor and other heavies.
“Please,” Jay said, gesturing for them to sit at the coffee table; a secure, important man. Not a man with his brain blazing: SHIT, it’s that cop who took out Zerbjka, this is about Dale. But this fucking baby-faced Fed wouldn’t be here about a local hit—more likely international stuff like the art scam—or my deals with the city? “How can I help you?”
Bergman said, “We’re trying to locate Dale Phipps. I understand you’re one of Phipps’ clients.”
“My firm is. In fact Phipps stopped by a couple of times the past few weeks.” Cops would find that in the security logs anyway. “Was pitching me some big lumpy steel sculpture.”
“Remember the name of the sculptor?”
“No. Just that Phipps was advising me to shell out eighty grand for something looked like it came from a plane crash.”
“Do you know of anyone who’d want Phipps dead?”
“If there was he never said.”
“Phipps ever mention places he vacationed, a favorite getaway?”
Jay shook his head. “Wasn’t like we were buddies. Only ever talked business.”
“Got it. Thank you for your time, Mr. Branko.”
“Anything I can do, Detective.”
“If Phipps gets in touch, please let me know,” Bergman said, handing Branko his card.
“Immediately,” Jay promised.
Bergman and Rarey started to leave. Bergman stopped. “Oh—o
ne more thing. How did you choose Phipps?”
Jay’s stomach sank. He furrowed his brow, trying to look perplexed. “Uh… Someone recommended…”
“You don’t remember who?”
“It was… couple, three years ago, trade show at McCormick…” Jay flashed a sheepish grin. “I’m at this bar, late, six or seven of us… Somebody wrote ’Dale Phipps’ on a napkin… Sorry.”
“Which trade show?”
“The construction technologies expo—I think. Been through hundreds of those damn things.”
“But I assume your secretary has a record of every damn one.”
• • •
Jay’s gut churned. He had no clue if Bergman had believed him. Cop had a poker face like a Chinese banker.
And what the fuck was that teenage FBI prick about? Never said a word. Sat there with that snarky smirk, eyeballing Jay like he was a fucking specimen on a slide. The fuck the FBI want with me?
Christ. Gonna have to tell Lou. Bad enough a cop was asking about Dale. But the motherfucking FBI? The Outfit’s favorite guys.
Shit, shit, shit. No way around it. If Jay doesn’t tell Lou the cops and the FBI were here, he’s dead. Which he might be anyway when he tells Lou they were asking who introduced him to Phipps. Because that person was Lou.
Jay took out a shot glass. Opened a bottle of vodka and took a swig from the bottle.
He pulled out his burner. Went to thumb Lou’s number—No!
Had to make one other call first. Also risky. But also Jay’s only possible leverage. The one guy who might have reason and enough juice to protect him.
Jay phoned Cousin Eddie.
Ninety-Seven | 2012
“Did it work?” Husak asked.
“Yeah,” Mark told his boss, “when I asked Branko who introduced him to Phipps, he began quietly, discreetly shitting bricks.”
Mark had to drop some pressure on Branko, because there was no hard evidence linking him to the attempted hit on Phipps.
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