by Thomas Perry
“A few days after that, this hit man went to Las Vegas, where he was expecting to be paid for these jobs, and possibly others. The man he was to contact was a Las Vegas attorney named Harry Orloff, who often served as a middleman for the Balacontano family’s western interests. There are several versions of what happened next. The version I’ve found most likely is that when Orloff asked for the money to pay the killer, his employer, Carlo Balacontano, decided that he could save a great deal of that money by having a group of thugs ambush this high-end killer instead of paying him.
“That was a mistake. The hit man killed several run-of-the-mill shooters on the Las Vegas Strip, and then he was both scared and angry. He had to get away somehow, and decided that the best way was to cause as much trouble and confusion as he could for his enemies, who, as far as he knew, included the entire La Cosa Nostra. He committed what we would probably label now as a series of acts of terrorism.
“He would arrive in a city and murder the head of the local Mafia family and one or two members of a nearby rival family or a tributary or splinter group. He moved so quickly that the LCN, the local and state police, the FBI, and the task force, which was what we were back then, had no idea what was going on. We would show up at a crime scene a few hours after the fact—often with the body still on the ground and the police technicians bagging evidence—and learn that another important gangster had also just been found dead five states away.
“Our leading theory was that some factions of the organized crime world had attacked some others, and now a war was rapidly heating up. Some people even called it the Second Mafia War. It wasn’t exactly an exaggeration. Bosses who thought they might be next on somebody’s list went after their favorite enemy to head off a surprise. Others who had people in their organizations they didn’t entirely trust saw this as a time when cleaning house might be imperative.
“The angry hit man stayed angry. He kept searching. He found the man who had been fronting the Las Vegas company that Carlo Balacontano owned. He had been hiding in the house of Harry Orloff, the go-between lawyer, and his name was Arthur Fieldston. The killer also learned that the man who had ordered his death was Carl Bala himself.”
Elizabeth could see that some of the faces along the table looked dazed and might have lost the thread, but she was nearly done. “The killer murdered Arthur Fieldston and buried his head and hands on Carlo Balacontano’s horse farm in Saratoga Springs, New York. Then he called in a tip to the state police, telling them where to dig.”
John’s eyes widened. “Oh my God.”
Bill said, “That’s the case. Our case.” He held his head in his hands.
Delia said, “You’ve known Balacontano was innocent all this time? He’s been in jail for a quarter of a century.”
Elizabeth said, “Actually, about thirty years. I didn’t believe he’d done it at the time, but I was the only one, and they thought I needed to get out of the way.”
Holstra said, “When Elizabeth told me about this yesterday, I ordered all the existing department records. They show that she was ordered at that time to take a leave of absence, which lasted through the run-up and the trial. She also filed memos asking the department to push to reopen the case. All requests were denied.”
John said, “But now Balacontano is up for parole. We’ve prepared to oppose it, of course. But what now? What do we do?”
Holstra said, “We’ll get to all that. It’s a question, but not the question. Elizabeth, please go on.”
She said, “I had no evidence, only my common sense, to suggest that Carlo Balacontano would not have buried the head and hands of a victim on his own farm. And he certainly didn’t call the New York State Police to tell them he had. Somebody else did both. But the federal court in New York, which tried him, and the appeals court were immune to an argument that made a mob boss into a victim.”
“I can understand that,” said Bill. “While we’ve been preparing to oppose his parole, we’ve been studying his record. Even if he didn’t kill his own front man to keep him from talking to law enforcement, he certainly ordered dozens of other killings for years before that. He was known for avoiding trials by having witnesses killed. He also killed rival bosses and suspected turncoats.”
Elizabeth nodded. “And after he was in prison, he was still doing that sort of thing. He was still the head of a major family. He had stand-ins on the outside pass on his orders.”
“How did we get to where we are now?” asked Bill.
“The man who framed him—the one they call the Butcher’s Boy—did a very effective disappearing act. After about ten years, somebody in the criminal world found him.
“From what I can piece together, mostly from things he’s said, he had been living somewhere remote—apparently overseas, where he had been left alone for years. But a young man named Talarese spotted him. He and two others attacked. The Butcher’s Boy killed them and then flew to New York, where he killed a Mafia soldier named Tony Talarese, the father of the young man who had recognized him. Then he launched himself on a second wave of killings, much like the one that got him out of the country the first time. He killed at least ten important gangsters and kept the police, the FBI, and the LCN confused long enough to disappear.”
“How did he get away?”
“I have a theory,” she said. “He introduced himself as a new neighbor of mine. He helped me get my car started on a winter day, so I invited him to dinner. He was a reasonably pleasant guest, helped with the dishes and so on, and then went home. I didn’t run into him again. About a year later, I happened to be looking at some photographs and things that I had shown him that night after dinner—pictures from a trip to Europe—and I noticed that my late husband’s passport, which had been in the box with the photos, was missing. I suspect he stole it to get out of the country.
“His second visit came about ten years after that. He appeared in the middle of the night at my bedside and told me he had been hunted down and attacked again. He said he had lost track of the day-to-day changes in the Mafia—who was moving up, who was taking over what, which leaders were too old to fight or too young to know how. He said he needed an update, a briefing. In return he would give me information about murders he had known about or witnessed in the past, in which living gangsters had taken part. He said he had evidence or witnesses enough to convict them.”
“So you were to give him the present and he would give you the past.”
“Yes. Murder, of course, is the crime that has no statute of limitations, so we would be able to prosecute all the cases he could give us. There were also hidden benefits that I couldn’t accurately predict. He would have to tell us some very detailed stories. The stories would include information about people other than the victim and the perpetrator. And there would be information about illegal activities that might still be going on. Once a man like him begins to tell a story, it might go anywhere.”
Holstra said, “And what did you decide?”
Elizabeth said, “I decided to keep him interested long enough to go to my superiors in the department for permission to pursue his offer. I held his interest with a tidbit. The man who was working hardest to get Carlo Balacontano’s blessing to take over as surrogate boss of the family was Frank Tosca. I also asked the FBI to keep an eye on Tosca, to keep him safe for the moment.”
“How did that work out?”
“When I went to Deputy Assistant Attorney General Dale Hunsecker the next day, he ordered me to end the operation and close the door to further talks with the killer. To him, it seemed immoral to deal with a professional killer. He also felt that by starting an investigation of Tosca, I was helping the killer get an enemy arrested.”
“Did you disagree?”
“Strenuously. The problem with investigating organized crime is that all the people who know about it are criminals. The worse they are, the more they know. The man I had talking to
me knew a lot.”
“And the final outcome of the operation?”
“Largely because of our prospective informant, the FBI was able to surround and intervene in a Mafia meeting at a mountain resort in Arizona. Agents arrested and photographed over two hundred LCN members, including the leaders of the twenty-five families. I participated in many of the interviews. The problem was that because the Organized Crime Section was not allowed to work closely enough with the informant to keep an eye on him, he got to the conference first. When the FBI found Frank Tosca, he’d already had his throat cut. The hit man also killed a Mafia soldier who had been posted to guard the back way into the resort.”
“Is he in prison? I thought you said you visited him this week.”
“He visited me. He’s not in prison. He left no evidence that he had ever been in Arizona. And he was not caught, taken into custody, or even seen by any official but me.”
Elizabeth’s memory of the last times she’d seen him flashed through her mind. She couldn’t tell her colleagues any of it. He came to her house to see her two more times on that trip. The first time he came because the LCN bosses could not help knowing that she was the one who had made the raid on the Arizona resort happen. The bosses sent three murderers of their own to Elizabeth’s house to kill her and her teenage kids, Jim and Amanda.
The Butcher’s Boy—she still had no other name for him—had entered her house on the first floor and silently killed the leader of the group, who at that moment was trying to rape and murder Elizabeth. Then he and Elizabeth had sneaked upstairs with pistols ready, flung open the doors to both her children’s rooms at once, and fired. The second and third men died at her children’s feet.
She told the FBI that the man who had burst in and saved her and her family was a handyman named Pete Stohler, who worked for her. With their help, she manipulated WITSEC, the protection program, to get the killer out of Virginia by passing him off as her heroic handyman. The FBI and State Department got Stohler two passports in the names David Parker and Paul Foster.
She had paused for only a second or two, before Holstra prompted her. “What do you think he wants this time?”
“Somebody has found him again after all this time. It’s probably because Carl Bala’s fate is in play. What he wants is to keep on living. My question is, what do we want?”
18
Schaeffer had made some progress. He knew that the attempts on his life had been prompted by the fact that Carlo Balacontano was due for a parole hearing on August 1. But Schaeffer didn’t know who was sending men out to kill him—a boss who wanted Balacontano out of prison, a boss who wanted him to stay in prison, or a boss who hated Schaeffer and thought the hearing would bring him within reach. It was possible that Elizabeth Waring had found out something that would help him by now, but if he wanted any favors from Elizabeth Waring, he would have to give her something. He needed to search his memory for an organized crime figure he could give her as a present, somebody big and important she could convict of murder.
He lay on the bed and closed his eyes, letting himself wander in his memories. It was late winter of the boy’s senior year in high school. The smart girls in his class were already accepted into teaching, nursing, or liberal arts programs at colleges. The smart boys were mostly going to attend engineering schools; the ones who weren’t smart or weren’t interested in school planned to join the Marines. But Michael planned to stay where he was.
It was during this period that Rocco “Big Rock” Paglia in Newark, New Jersey, hired Eddie to kidnap a man named Boccio. It was an unusual request because Eddie was a killer. He wasn’t a private detective or some low-ranking gang guy who did errands. Usually a customer would make Eddie an offer—the name of a man and a sum of money. If Eddie liked the offer, he would take half in advance, go make the man die, and then collect the other half.
This time, because Rocco Paglia was a cousin and protégé of Victor Castiglione’s, Eddie had decided to take the unusual job. Castiglione had shielded Eddie and the boy after they had killed Taddio and his friends about three years before. At the time, Taddio had been preparing to unseat Castiglione, so the relationship wasn’t one-sided, and that made it stronger and more important to Eddie.
Rocco Paglia said that Boccio was the chief of a minor crew. He was suspected of cheating Paglia on his share of Boccio’s take for a couple of years. He would get money and say he’d taken in less than he had, or he would give Paglia’s collectors a long count of the cash they picked up from him. Now he had a score involving a truck hijacking and had suddenly walked away without paying anything. None of his crew had been paid either. Paglia needed to bring him back to maintain the belief that nobody could steal from his boss and hide for long.
Eddie and the boy drove to New Jersey to look for Boccio’s trail. Eddie went to a lot of bars and asked if anybody had seen Boccio. Eventually he found a bartender who described a woman Boccio had brought in a couple of times. She had been there with some girl friends around a table on a night when a picture had been taken. Eddie bought the group photo from the bartender and spent the next couple of evenings in various bars watching for any of the women in the picture. One of them showed up and said Boccio’s girl was somebody’s cousin from New York. Eventually Eddie tracked down the girlfriend’s address.
Eddie parked on the street outside the apartment and watched. At around five in the morning, the door opened and Boccio came out. The boy approached him as he was walking to his car and asked for directions, while Eddie stepped up behind him, clicked handcuffs onto his wrists, pulled a cloth bag over his head, and locked him in their car trunk.
Later that morning Eddie called Paglia, who told him to deliver Boccio to the back door of the restaurant where Paglia’s crew spent time. When the boy, Eddie, and their captive entered, more than twenty men were sitting at tables in the restaurant drinking. The boy felt a vague uneasiness. What were they all there for?
Paglia came around to the front of the bar, handed Eddie a briefcase, and then took the bag off Boccio’s head and stared at him. He made a face that was supposed to be uncertainty and then called out to the men in the restaurant. “Is this him? Is this Boccio, the man who was robbing me for years and then moved to New York City to work with people who want us all dead?”
The men in the room answered, calling out, “That’s him. Hi, Boccio. Where you been? Nice to see you.”
Then Paglia shocked everyone. He reached under his sport coat and brought out a semiautomatic pistol. The boy could tell from the way that he was waving the weapon around that he didn’t have much experience using one. He had his finger inside the trigger guard, and he let the barrel sweep the room at about the eye level of his men.
Boccio said, “Rocco, I didn’t do any of that. I’ve got a girlfriend in New York and I didn’t want my wife to find out, so I’ve been going there. I haven’t been making a lot of money lately. It’s just a bad time. People in my neighborhood are out of work since the bearing factory closed down this year.”
If Paglia had any doubts, he clearly knew his reputation would not be improved by accepting denials or excuses. He raised the pistol, and Boccio, who was no longer restrained, dodged and ducked as Paglia opened fire. The first round tore a hole in the shoulder of Boccio’s suit but didn’t appear to have hit flesh. The second bullet missed him and struck a man across the room, who slumped and collapsed at his table. Two others crouched beside him and tried to minister to his wound, but to the boy he looked dead.
Paglia didn’t stop. His next two shots hit Boccio, who fell to the floor. It seemed to the boy that Paglia had expected Boccio to take one hit and die, but he was alive. Paglia fired again and again, but Boccio would roll to the side so that even if he were hit, it wouldn’t be where Paglia was aiming. Once he even tried to get up. Paglia gave in to panic. He kept firing, and whenever he did, the bullet’s impact would spray blood onto the tables and the men sitting
at them, who held up napkins and tablecloths to protect their clothes and faces. Finally Paglia realized he had to shoot Boccio in the head or he would run out of ammunition. He stepped within a foot of him, aimed, and fired. He was too close, and the shot produced so much blowback that his own face and clothes were red with droplets.
Then Eddie was pulling the boy out the back door of the place. As soon as he was in the sunlight, the boy wanted to run to get into the passenger seat, but Eddie said, “You drive,” so he did. Eddie opened the briefcase and made a rough count, then closed the case and put it on the floor between his feet.
The boy said, “Where do you want me to go?”
“Toward home. Look for I-78 west. I’ll take a turn in a little while.”
Schaeffer opened his eyes and sat up in the bed. Rocco Paglia was still alive. Schaeffer had seen an article on the Internet about him only last night. It was amazing that a moron like Paglia could be alive when people like Eddie Mastrewski were long dead. But he was. And it was highly likely that some of the men who had been there that night were alive too. He would go online to see if he could locate a few. If he wanted Elizabeth Waring’s help, he was going to have to carve things out of the past and serve them up to her in slices.
19
The second half of the meeting with Deputy Assistant Holstra stretched past its allotted time the next day, as Elizabeth had known it would. Important people were always overscheduled. They had assistants who looked for ways to cut things short, pull the boss out early, and keep people waiting in case an opening appeared.
Elizabeth decided to get to the serious decisions before Holstra got called to his next appointment. “I believe he’ll try to get in touch with me again. I think he’ll want current information about an organized crime figure or two, and that he’ll offer up an important gangster for prosecution, almost certainly for murder. I’d like a consensus on how far to play him.”