True Grift
Page 23
“Why?” Fangs asked.
Seeing Al at Der Wienerschnitzel, J.T. knew he’d done the right thing. The guy looked like Death’s syphilitic cousin. His head was the color of newsprint, dull gray paper beneath dark wisps of hair. His shoulders were bony. J.T. could only guess how much weight Al had lost, not that he could afford to lose any in the first place.
“I told you, he’s scared. He’s a weak man, Mr. Fegangi. He got caught up in something bigger than himself. He just wants to walk away and not be afraid. He’s terrified that this meeting will get back to Mr. McElfresh and that…. You appreciate what a delicate position he’s in.”
Fangs looked at the file cabinets seated across from him; then he turned back to J.T. “How’d you know to look for me here?”
“Meshulam Razin was kind of a hero of mine. I didn’t know him personally. When I was in law school, and later, when I was working in the DA’s office, I used to go to court and watch him. He wasn’t a young man, but he was just…” J.T. surprised himself when his voice caught. “Just the best lawyer I ever saw.”
Fangs nodded.
“I’d read somewhere that you and he were close. I thought you’d come by to pay your respects.”
“He was a good friend,” said Fangs. “A very misunderstood guy.”
“But he made that work for him in the end, didn’t he?” said J.T.
“I guess you’re right, counselor.” Fangs extended his hand to J.T. “Now I don’t mean to be impolite, but I’m afraid I have some things…”
File Cabinet Two tapped the window twice with his pinkie ring, and the door opened from the outside.
FORTY-THREE
It was after 9:00 a.m. when the green-and-white cruiser pulled into the parking lot at Mira Vista. The two Riverside County sheriff’s deputies, Johnson and Reyes, pushed their sunglasses back in unison as Johnson reached to open the door to the 19th Hole. There was no one behind the bar and no patrons in the grill, so they just stood waiting and looking around until Wanda came out of the kitchen with two oranges.
“Ohmigod, did you find him?”
“Yes, ma’am, we did,” Johnson said. “I’m really sorry.”
Wanda took a deep breath. Her eyes filled. She put the oranges on the bar and rubbed her eyes against the sleeves of her pink golf shirt. She pinched her nose and sniffled. “I’m sorry,” she said, her dimpled chin trembling.
“Hey, c’mon,” said Reyes. “It’s okay. Come out here and have a seat.”
Wanda walked from behind the bar, wiping her hands on her apron. “Where did you find him?”
“Twentynine Palms. Just like you said.”
“Ohmigod.”
“We pulled up this morning and there was the Firebird and the trailer, just like you’d described.”
“So where was—”
“There’s no nice way to say this,” said Johnson. “He was smashed up halfway down the southwest side of the hill. Must’ve just gone over the top. No other way he could’ve gotten there, short of being dropped from a plane.”
“You’re kidding.”
“For what it’s worth,” said Reyes, “he was killed instantly.”
Johnson nodded. “It took a helicopter an hour to get him out of there. Looks like he just shot over the top and landed upside down.”
“He wanted me to go with him.”
“Good thing you didn’t,” said Johnson. “You’d have been killed too.”
There was a rush of noise from the hand dryer’s motor down the hall as the door opened to the men’s locker room.
“So what happens now? Where is his body?”
“Because of where the accident occurred,” said Johnson, “they took him to a mortuary in Blythe that the county uses to hold remains until autopsies or whatever.”
“They don’t need to do an autopsy, do they?” Wanda asked.
“On what?” said Reyes. Johnson backhanded him in the chest. Reyes winced. “Sorry. This is my first time doing this.”
Johnson shook his head. “No, ma’am, I can’t imagine there’d need to be an autopsy. You don’t have any reason to believe he was on drugs, do you?”
“No chance,” Wanda mumbled. “He’d had an operation a while back, but he wasn’t even taking pain meds anymore.” She looked down at the table. “He’d wanted to be in the Coast Guard.” Wanda sniffled and dabbed her eyes with a cocktail napkin.
A couple of patrons came in and stood at the bar. Wanda made no move to get up.
“You’ll want to call a funeral home to make the arrangements. They can take care of everything,” said Johnson. “Again, I’m really sorry.”
Hector was surprised to get a call from Brad Fojtik, the deputy he’d met with only days before.
“You’re not going to believe this. That guy we were talking about? McMahon? The dumbass with the busted headlight?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Dead.”
“What?” said Hector. “You’re kidding. How?”
“Asshole drives some kind of dune buggy up a mountain out by Twentynine Palms. Crashed the fucking thing going over the top.”
“I would say this is unbelievable, but then again it totally sounds like the guy’s MO, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t want to speak ill of the dead or anything, but what a fucking dumbass.”
“And there’s no question of foul play, as they say?”
“I guess you’ve never seen this thing. It’s called Joe Frey Hill. It’s not the Matterhorn or anything, but hippies like to go down there and smoke dope and pretend buzzards are condors.”
Hector leaned back in his chair and tossed the file he was reading onto his desk.
“There’s a hiking trail with a lot of switchbacks that you can walk up to the top,” Fojtik continued. “It’s only a coupla thousand feet high.”
“So why drive?”
“Exactly. This shitbrain obviously never re-conned the hill. The slope’s easy enough to get up in low gear, that’s not the point. The problem is there’s no way to turn around once you get up there. From below it looks like there’s a little area at the summit, but it drops off like three hundred feet down into a bunch of jagged-ass rocks. What I heard was the guy just flew right over the top.” Fojtik chuckled. “What an asshole.”
Wanda was walking out the door to the parking lot with her purse when Frankie Fresh wedged through the door with his new sidekick, Ellis, behind him. Frankie gave Wanda his usual bluff morning greeting. Wanda nodded and wiped away a tear as she stepped past him.
“No breakfast today, hon?”
“No, I’ve got to go,” she said over her shoulder. “Sorry.”
Dee, Wanda’s replacement, came out from the kitchen carrying a rack of glasses. “Hey, Frankie. You having breakfast?”
“I was. Where’s Wanda going? She can’t be taking a second honeymoon this soon, can she?” Frankie’s gut rose and fell, his man-tits flapping like windsocks.
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“What?”
“Mack’s dead.”
“What?”
“He was killed yesterday out in the desert. Riding his dune buggy or something.”
Frankie looked at Ellis. Ellis’s mouth was open. Speechless.
Frankie put his hands on his hips. “Tell me this is some kinda joke.”
“You’re a sick man, Frankie,” said Dee as she carried the empty rack of glasses back to the kitchen.
Al was on his way to the office. He wasn’t getting any closer to getting rid of his stack of paperwork. Why did they keep giving him work when he had no incentive not to fuck it up? His cell phone rang. Frankie.
J.T. had warned him that under no circumstances was he to go back to the club until further notice. Then, after Al had agreed, J.T. made Al swear that he should get ass-raped by every member of the Oakland Raiders, dead or alive, should he go back to Mira Chiste without J.T. giving him the okay.
“I swear.”
“Not good enough. I need verbatim.”<
br />
“J.T.” Al whined.
“In haec verba, Al. I am not fucking kidding.”
“I swear that I should get ass-raped by every member of the Oakland Raiders, dead or alive, should I go back to Mira Chiste without J.T.’s okay.”
J.T. had kept Al in the dark about all the cloak-and-dagger stuff with the recording. Al couldn’t figure out J.T.’s angle. He couldn’t take it to the cops. He couldn’t blackmail Frankie with it—J.T. was in the scam even deeper than Frankie himself. Al had no choice but to believe J.T. when he said it was going to work out. Either way, Al was sure he’d be felled by a heart attack or a perforated ulcer soon enough.
Al debated whether to answer Frankie’s call. What if he insisted Al come back to the club? The hot breath of Frankie McElfresh on his neck, or an eye-patched John Matuszak mounting him from behind with a machete in his teeth?
Al let the phone ring out.
Thirty seconds later it started ringing again. Frankie.
Al let the phone ring out.
When the phone rang a third time a minute later, and a fourth time a minute after that, Al felt like he was losing his vision. Everything seemed cloudy. Blurry. He pulled off the 60 and into the parking lot at Jack in the Box. He hyperventilated for about thirty seconds until he felt like he might black out. He rolled down the window. That helped.
Al stared at the phone. Fuck it. Be a man. He called Frankie, determined not to get pushed into going back to the club.
“Jesus, Frankie, what is it? I’m on the highway with the CHP riding right next to me. I had to pull off the highway to call you back.”
“Number One, who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? I gotta call you four times to get my call returned? You fucking kidding me?”
“I just told you. I couldn’t talk on the phone because the CHP was either right behind me or right next to me. What is it? What’s so important it couldn’t wait till I got to the office?”
“Mack’s dead.”
Al sensed he was going to pass out again. He opened the door wide and swung his legs out of the Honda.
“What? What? What do you mean?”
“What do you think dead means? He’s gone. Flipped a fucking jeep off a mountain in Coachella or something. Anyway, he’s dead, so you’re going to need to get back here pronto so we can talk strategy.”
“I can’t. I’ve got meetings all morning. I’ve got to have all my shit cleared out by Friday.”
“Al? Get back here.”
“I can’t, I’m sorry. Now I’ve got to go.” Al hung up.
Frankie called back in three seconds.
“Listen to me, cocksucker. You hang up the phone on me and I’ll go Hannibal Lecter on your ass. You got me, motherfucker?”
“Frankie, I—”
“Shut up and listen. Our newest team member, Jolly Roger here, tells me Mack’s claim on the busted dick from the golf course will survive even though Mack didn’t. You beat that?”
“Frankie—”
“No wonder GSAC dumped your ass. You don’t listen real well. Try again.”
Al gasped for air. He rubbed the side of his head. His palm was covered in hair.
“Okay,” said Frankie, “now if the claim is still alive as far as his estate’s concerned, we’re still in business. Rog says your settlement authority is two hundred K. Settle the fucking thing for two hundred K and get my money.”
“It’ll never work.”
“It will work. By the way, that sportsman’s discount you got when we started this? You lost it when you hung up on me. Fifteenpoints, motherfucker. That makes thirty large from the score; another thirty for the principal you cocksuckers borrowed. That’s sixty grand you owe me, asshole. First dollar payout, remember? Plus, you’re giving fifteen percent of your end to our friend Roger here for getting this fucking thing out of the ditch.”
“Frankie, I can’t come back to the club.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that anymore. Rog and I are coming to meet you.”
Al heard one car door slam, then a second. “What?”
“Yeah, we’re on our way. We’re leaving right fucking now, so don’t let me down again. We’ll meet you across from GSAC’s office at the Starb—”
The call dropped.
Al leaned out of the car, put his head between his knees, and threw up.
FORTY-FOUR
J.T. turned on the TV in his office just for some background noise. Shari happily took the day off when he insisted. He was too bummed out about the Mercedes to feel like talking to anyone.
He took it on faith that Vinnie Fangs wouldn’t tell Frankie about the visit or even give Frankie a chance to talk his way out of the shit storm that was about to befall him.
When J.T.’s disposable phone rang, he reached for it, hoping it was Mack. J.T. was bothered that he’d never gotten to the bottom of whether Buddy had talked to Aza, and now Buddy was MIA. J.T. looked at the phone. Al.
J.T. fell back on his telephone patter, as much to distract himself from the loss of the Mercedes as anything. “Al, what’s the good word, my man?” J.T. could hear coughing, retching, and spitting in the background, along with what sounded like trucks zooming past. “Al?”
“It’s bad. It’s fucking bad.”
“C’mon. Get a grip. What’s the problem?”
“Mack. Frankie.”
J.T. heard Al throwing up. “Are you okay?”
“Frankie’s coming after me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Mack’s dead.” Al retched again.
“Al. Al. Listen to me. What’s going on? What about Mack?”
“He’s dead. I don’t know, I don’t know, he’s just dead.”
“Who told you that?”
“Frankie.”
J.T. heard more coughing and spitting in the background. “How does he know?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Maybe he fucking ate him.” Al retched again.
J.T. grimaced at the sound effects. “Why do you say he’s coming after you?”
“Because he said ‘I’m coming after you!’ J.T., I’m telling you, I don’t know what to do. I’ve been sitting here in the Jack in the Box parking lot for half an hour puking my guts out. That asshole Roger Ellis has Frankie convinced I can still sign off on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar settlement. It’s all so fucking crazy I can’t believe it.”
A breaking story on the TV across the room caught J.T.’s attention. A helicopter was flying over a plume of black smoke from a parking lot below. Something looked familiar to J.T. The camera panned across the lot. EMTs stood in front of a warehouse with a green gambrel roof. The greenskeeper’s shed. Mira Chiste. The bird’s-eye zoomed in to show a blown-up yellow Lincoln Navigator with jagged strands of metal peeling from the dark center like a black-eyed Susan. He recognized the car. Fat fucking Frankie Fresh.
“Al? You still with me, Al?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I want you to take a deep breath.”
J.T. heard him hyperventilate.
“I’m looking at the TV right now. Frankie Fresh is not, I repeat not, coming after you.”
“What?”
“What was it your granddaddy used to say? ‘Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered’?”
“Yeah.”
“Get yourself in front of a TV. We’re looking at one slaughtered hog.”
Having talked Al off the ledge, J.T. needed to cut the shit and find out what was going on with Mack. He called Wanda’s cell phone. She didn’t even say hello.
“It’s true,” she said.
“How?” J.T. was puzzled. He’d seemed like such a healthy kid. Maybe the doctors at Eisenhower had fucked up the surgery. Oh, shit! Wouldn’t that be a fucking coup?
“He took that dune buggy out to the desert to climb Joe Frey Hill.”
“That place where the hippies go to drop acid and shit in the bushes?”
“Yeah.”
“A dignified exit, I’m sure.”
“Gimme a break. I mean, I feel bad for the kid, but let’s face it, the ol’ gene pool just dodged a riptide.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Wait. We have to talk about the claim. It may have taken a hit—okay, a huge hit—but it was filed before he was killed. There’s still at least some value there.”
“Do what you have to do. I need some time to sort things out, J.T. Goodbye.”
What a bitch. She ought to be kissing my ass. Her nightmare of a sham marriage evaporates and I’m the asshole? Stupid fuck robs me from beyond the grave and I’m the bad guy?
He scrolled through his cell phone for Aza’s number, then called him from the office line.
“Hi, it’s J.T. Edwards. I’m afraid I have some unfortunate news.”
“I’m guessing this has to do with your client’s death.”
Who is this fucking guy? “Yes, tragically, I’m afraid. Young man like that. In his prime. Newly married to a beautiful wife and his last month spent in agony.”
“So much agony that he went off-roading in the desert.”
Maybe there was a wrongful death angle with the dune buggy manufacturer! No, of course not. That dipshit fabricated the thing himself. “Hector, what do you say we just hack through some of this bullshit right now?”
“I’m all for that.”
“The dollar value of my case has taken a significant hit. We can agree on that, can we not?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Conversely, the sympathy factor for my surviving client, the Widow McMahon, coupled with the unspeakable gruesomeness of her late husband’s injury, makes for an acutely compelling narrative when I put it in front of a jury.”
“I don’t know about acutely compelling, but I’ll grant you she might be a sympathetic figure.”
“Well, now, you do know Wanda’s maiden name, right?”
“No, and I’m not sure I understand what that’s got to do with anything.”
“I should have thought it obvious that given the Riverside County demographic, that Wanda Maria Ortega-McMahon,” said J.T., enunciating the t in Ortega like he’d just hopped over the fence from Sonora, “newly widowed, sole support of her wheelchair-bound mother…do you really think the rich gringo resort is going to get off scot-free?”