The Informant (25 page)

It didn't even have to be a man. It could be a woman. In that world, it might make the invitation seem less dangerous. In his days as an active killer for hire, he couldn't have had a girlfriend that other people knew about, and he couldn't have had a relationship with any female relative of the men he met on business. They saved their sisters and daughters to marry other members of LCN, or at the very least, other Italians. Any women he had would have been prostitutes, or women he met on a temporary, semi-anonymous basis. He couldn't have had emotional ties with a woman of the sort that made his visits to her habitual or predictable, or he would be dead.

No, it felt like VP had to be one of the two hundred men at the ranch, and she had the feeling that nicknames weren't likely to be conveyed as initials. She returned to her list. Victor Perrone. He was old enough and was prominent enough to be the one they'd use as an ambassador. But he was a capo in the Balacontano family, and a brother-in-law of Antonio Talarese, a man she believed the Butcher's Boy had killed ten years ago, the last time he was active. Even if he wasn't a supporter of Frank Tosca, he would certainly not be a friend of Tosca's killer. A challenge from him might work; an invitation wouldn't.

That left Vincent Pugliese and Vito Pastore. She didn't know much about Vito Pastore. She went to the NCIC site. There were two Vito Pastores and neither was the right man. One of them had been born in 1901. He had a criminal record that began in 1919 and stretched for sixty years. He had been picked up in a bootlegging raid. He had once been convicted of robbing a train. He had been dead since 1979.

The second Vito Pastore's record consisted of convictions for importing and selling counterfeit designer clothes, watches, and handbags, extortion in connection with a music distribution deal. He was questioned and released in the killing of Ronald Sturtevant, a bass guitar player for a band called Scuffle. He was twenty-six years old. He would have been about five or six years old when the Butcher's Boy was still meeting people. It occurred to her that he might be a surrogate for somebody who was the right age, but how would the Butcher's Boy know that?

She turned her attention to Vincent Pugliese. He was just about the right age—fifty—and he was an underboss with the Castiglione family, the highest he could go without being named Castiglione. She had no knowledge of how he had met the Butcher's Boy, but she supposed all the ways were unlikely but one.

She scrolled to the thumbnail pictures and clicked on a few to enlarge them. There was a set of mug shots from 1980, when he was convicted of violating the Illinois concealed-firearm laws. On the day of his arrest he had been very well dressed, with an expensive haircut and a calm, relaxed expression. He had been handsome in those days.

The Justice Department file on him had more recent photographs, all surveillance photographs taken with a telephoto lens. There was nothing very revealing. Here he was coming out of a Chicago restaurant called Rangione's Villa Venetia. A parking attendant had just brought up a black Mercedes sedan that was probably his.

There was another of him on a golf course waiting to tee off—again looking prosperous, relaxed, and calm. He was leaning on his driver and holding his ball and a tee in his right hand. She recognized two of the men with him as Castiglione brothers. The third, who was teeing off, was unfamiliar to her. She looked at the note below. It said the man was Wilson McGee, the professional golfer. Of course, it would be somebody like that. Mafiosi loved celebrities.

She was almost positive now that VP was Vincent Pugliese. There were no other candidates who had all the qualities and who felt right. She had heard twenty years ago that the Butcher's Boy had grown up in the Midwest. To her that meant at least some relationship with LCN, most likely including some members of the Castiglione organization. Even if they weren't the employer, they would demand that anybody who made his living murdering people in their territory check in with them. They wouldn't want somebody collecting on a relative or a vital business associate. There would have been plenty of opportunities for the Butcher's Boy to meet Vincent Pugliese when they were both young.

There was also the complicated relationship between the two Chicago Mafia families and the five families in New York. From time to time for nearly a century the New York families had claimed some kind of primacy over the Chicago families. All of those claims had been denied and all incursions repelled. There had been nothing she knew of in the past twenty years, but maybe there was one Chicago capo who was not unhappy to see Frank Tosca die and the Balacontano family in confusion.

Anything could be happening, but what she believed was that there would be a moment when Vincent Pugliese would meet with the Butcher's Boy to talk about his future. It would take place within a few days, and it would be in or near Chicago, where there was some assurance that Pugliese could offer protection.

She walked down the long hallway. It occurred to her that this was the third time in about a week when she had, in advance, seen the path of the Butcher's Boy converging with the path of someone else in a certain place at a certain time and not been able to do anything about it herself.

She stopped at Ed Morris's office and knocked. Morris's assistant, Mike Tucker, looked up, then looked surprised, and stood. "Ms. Waring. What can I do for you?"

"I'd like about five minutes of Ed's time, if it's possible."

"Let me ask if he's able to see you right now." He knocked on the inner door and then stepped inside, and then came back out with Ed Morris.

Morris said, "Elizabeth, please come in." Elizabeth wasn't surprised by the way he treated her. Morris was, in his heart, a cop, and he had that almost courtly manner that a lot of them had. As he held the door for her, he appeared to almost bow.

When she was inside, he said, "Can I have Mike get you anything to drink—a coffee? Bottled water?"

"No thanks," she said. "The walk to this end of the hall is all of a hundred and twenty feet. I came to ask for some closely held information. I want to know if there's anybody—us, the FBI, the Chicago police—doing any surveillance on a man named Vincent Pugliese right now. He's an underboss in the Castiglione family."

"We're not," he said. "I mean not on him personally. We might get him because he's half of somebody else's phone call, or he might be noticed by the airport surveillance teams. But let me get Mike on this. It takes about ten minutes and a couple of phone calls, but when he gets the answer, you can rely on it."

"Thanks, Ed," she said.

He went out for a few seconds, then returned. "He's on it. If there isn't a surveillance operation on Vincent Pugliese, do you want us to start work on authorizing one?"

"I don't know yet," she said. "I'll get back to you if we need one.
Thanks, Ed." She had no probable cause for any kind of search or eavesdropping on Pugliese. "I'll be interested to know if somebody's already doing it."

As she walked back along the hall toward her office, she considered the issue of retirement. She had put in more than twenty years at this job, but she wasn't old enough yet to take retirement payments without a tax penalty. Both kids were going to be ready for college soon. She had saved for their tuition, but certainly not enough. She was going to be trapped in the Justice Department for at least the next six years. Or maybe it was seven years.

She was going to do it. She could hardly ignore a chance like this, but there was no way Hunsecker would approve an operation to turn the Butcher's Boy. The idea that she intended to lead it—go to Chicago and direct an armed arrest—would make him crazy. But she would have to find a way to do it.

She went to the computer and looked at maps of the area around the address of Vincent Pugliese, then looked at it from the air, and finally at ground level. She printed everything and put the copies into her briefcase. She would have to show Ed Morris the VP personal ad she had seen in the newspaper so she went onto the
Los Angeles Times
website and printed the ad.

Years ago, under a very different deputy assistant AG, she had been issued a carry permit. But the compact .32 she carried in her purse wouldn't do. She would have to go to the gun safe that her husband had installed in their basement and get the nine-millimeter pistol that had been locked in there for years. After that, she would have to talk Ed Morris into putting the operation under his aegis and lending her a couple of his investigators who were up to this kind of work.

MAYBE THE EASE
of the old men's lives had made them forget how it felt to be vulnerable like other people. A human being was a small, pink, weak creature that trained itself from its first discovery of death to keep changing the subject, and they seemed to have forgotten this.

Or maybe it was the theatrical quality of their daily existence. From the time they came into power they were placed one level away from real dirt and blood and tears, and became actors in a pageant. They strutted down city streets with big stone-faced bodyguards who looked like bulls to exemplify their power. As long as they were awake, there were people opening their doors and driving their cars and pulling out their chairs as though they were eastern princes. They sat at tables in the backs of restaurants that were kept empty just in case they came in, their faces set in an imperial scowl. They were surrounded by oily advisors and lieutenants who whispered schemes in their ears while messengers stood by waiting for the chance to deliver some bad news to somebody. Now and then one of them would go into a tantrum, a barrage of threats and curses intended to make an audience feel fear strong enough so the jolt would be conducted down the branching circuits of the organization to the people who did the work.

It seemed to Schaeffer that they must have forgotten a great many things they needed to remember. The biggest of them this week was whom they had casually agreed to kill. It had been completely unnecessary, and it apparently had been decreed without much thought. Did it even occur to any of them that there might be a price to pay? They seemed to have forgotten that down at street level killing looked different.

There was a simple clarity to killing, and it was his only way forward. He had to remind a group of multimillionaires who had gotten used to thinking of themselves as immortal that death could overtake them at any time. He also had to teach them that even a solitary enemy could do them terrible harm.

During much of the long drive from Denver to Chicago, he had been considering exactly what he wanted to accomplish, and now he had decided. He stopped to buy a pair of thin leather gloves, some hooded sweatshirts, some running shoes.

He had kept the two Beretta M92 pistols he had stolen in Houston. Before he had left Texas he had bought two spare magazines and two boxes of nine-millimeter ammo. He was aware that the brass casings of the bullets loaded into the guns carried the fingerprints of the owners in Houston, and he liked that. He loaded the spare magazines wearing gloves.

He was going to have to work quickly to make the proper impression. He began by thinking about the Castiglione organization in Chicago. All three of the Castiglione brothers had been at the ranch in Arizona, and so they were all implicated in the decision to have him killed. And since Vincent Pugliese was their underboss, he had certainly put the personal ad in all the newspapers with their knowledge and approval. It was not a surprise that the brothers had no love for him. Twenty years ago, when he had been trying to cause enough confusion to get the families to believe a war had broken out, he had killed old Salvatore Castiglione, their grandfather. He had gotten old and gone to live in Las Vegas, where he did little besides meet once a month with the men who oversaw the family's interests there. The stratagem had worked. Schaeffer had gotten out of the country and lived twenty years that they would have denied him.

He drove toward the old Castiglione mansion on Lake Shore Drive. In the days before old Salvatore, the Mafia families in Chicago were insular. They lived in Italian neighborhoods, where everybody spoke Italian. The women went to the big churches in the center of the city. The men went on Christmas and Easter and never confessed or took Communion. There was always the shadow of Al Capone, who was considered to be the prime example of what publicity did to people. But old Salvatore had simply drawn the line in a different place. He bought a mansion that had been built fifty years earlier for the heir of one of the big meatpacking fortunes. He never spoke a word in public and lived conservatively like a bank president—which, for a while, he was. After he retired to Las Vegas, his son took over for him, and when the son was ready to retire, he said he didn't want his sons to split the family three ways, so they shared power.

Schaeffer drove north on Lake Shore Drive, with the bright blue lake on his right and the houses on the left. After a half mile of big old houses, the Castiglione mansion appeared. It looked just about the way it had twenty years ago. It had a shell of brownish-gray stone and sat on a big green lawn behind a fence of the same brown-gray stone. Its slate roofs were steep, like the mansard roofs of French châteaux. Maybe because of the family name, and maybe because of the way it looked, people called it the Castle.

The second time he had been inside was when Vince Pugliese brought him here to get his pay for solving the Milwaukee problem. When the rounded front door opened, he noticed that the wood was three inches thick. Later Vince had told him that the doors were designed to sandwich a quarter-inch steel plate between two layers of oak. The windows were recessed into the outer walls such that the glass was only about five inches wide. It wasn't until he moved to Europe that he recognized the design was a copy of the arrow slits of castles.

He and Vince had followed one of the bodyguards through a big room with long tables and a raised gallery that ran around the room near the high ceiling. At the end of the big room was a smaller room like a study where the old man waited. Another bodyguard stood near the door. The old man was bald with a close-cropped fringe of white hair. He had the eyes of a vulture—penetrating, but devoid of any heat except voracity and irritability.