A Nasty Piece of Work (17 page)

When I got back to the Toyota, I found Ornella watching me through her night-vision goggles. “You were right about the goggles,” she said. “Everything looks as if it’s underwater. You looked as if you were swimming when you came back to the car.” She gestured toward the Cadillac. “Why were you messing up a perfectly nice green Cadillac?”

I slid back behind the wheel of the Toyota. “It’s biblical,” I said. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

The penny dropped. “Oh, I get it. A fender for a fender! Now I know where the scratch on your Studebaker comes from. That’s the famous Mario’s Cadillac.” Ornella studied me through her night-vision goggles. “Actually, you look good green.” She took off the goggles and fitted them back into their case. “So you think vengeance is okay?”

I was following the arrows marked
WAY OUT
on the tarmac. “I’m not saying it’s okay, I’m only saying that it’s satisfying.”

“As satisfying as crushing the metal cap of a beer bottle between your fingers?”

“As,” I agreed.

We were waiting for traffic to let up so we could cross back to the Baldini side of the highway. The headlights of passing cars turned the front window of the Toyota opaque but filled the interior of the car with yellowish light. I became aware of how dirty the car was, crumbs, stains, smudges everywhere. I became aware of the fleeting smile performing live on Ornella’s lips—it conveyed trepidation, or was it anticipation? Hard to tell as the two are kissing cousins. We often dread that we’ll get what we think we want. Lemuel Gunn, the philosopher-detective, running off at the mouth again! I caught Ornella having a conversation with herself. She repeated the word “satisfying” a few times, sometimes with a question mark after it, sometimes with an exclamation point.

Punctuation, as they say in the gag trade, is everything.

I finally managed to cross back across the highway and pulled into a parking space near the Baldini casino. Water cascaded down man-made falls on either side of the gaudy main entrance. Two doormen wearing livery that went out of fashion in the Middle Ages tugged open the enormous imitation bronze doors with sculpted nymphs cavorting in their birthday suits on them. The effect was about as sensual as flushing out a septic tank with a self-priming pump.

I know what sucks good people into these giant hangars of iniquity, with their floor-to-ceiling windows draped in thick curtains so customers won’t know it’s morning and time to go home: It’s unadulterated greed, it’s the get-rich-quick, bet-now, pay-never mindset that has polluted the American spirit. Something tells me this is not what our ancestors were looking for when they crossed the Continental Divide. The presence of more losers than winners on the casino premises on any given night doesn’t seem to discourage customers from thinking this is their night to break the bank. Which is to say the great majority of bettors checked their brains at the door. Prosecution exhibit number one: an intense young woman dressed in a particularly short minioutfit methodically inspecting the slot machines trying to figure out which one was due to come up triple sevens. Two rows down, people flocked to congratulate a gray-haired woman when her one-armed bandit started spitting quarters into her paper cup. Overhead a siren yowled and the voice of an excited jerk of an MC boomed over the loudspeaker, “Ladies and gents, we have got us a
winner
in aisle four!”

I bought Ornella ten dollars’ worth of quarters and parked her at one of the one-armed bandits. “If you win big, you do solids
and
liquids,” I said.

“You going to be long?” Ornella asked worriedly.

It’s been a while since anyone besides Kubra worried about me. “That depends,” I said.

“Depends on what? Depends on whom?”

“On whether the local godfather, Giancarlo Baldini, will buy into my sales pitch.”

“What are you selling, Lemuel?”

“Vengeance.”

I looked around to get my bearings. You couldn’t miss the bozos in shiny tuxedos posted around the floor like potted plants that only needed occasional watering. You had to be naive not to realize that the two young women in low-slung dresses giggling about how much they won were casino shills trying to lure bettors over to the roulette wheels. You had to be brain dead not to notice the long, narrow mirror high in the wall above the tables—it was the one-way mirror behind which the casino’s professional gamblers watched for players who might be cheating the house. And you had to be blind not to spot the narrow door at the back of the hangar of iniquity and the lean, mean thug guarding it. A white wire snaked up from his starched collar to the tiny receiver in his ear, from time to time he spoke into a microphone on the inside of his left wrist. Nobody went through the door without him checking first with someone inside.

That was the portal to seventh heaven. Or maybe seventh hell.

I lingered at one of the blackjack tables long enough to watch a totally bald man double down on nines, which was probably his lucky number, and lose both hands to the dealer’s back-to-back jacks. I moseyed over to the roulette tables and stood for a while behind a young man wearing designer blue jeans and farmers’ suspenders jotting down the winning numbers in a minuscule notebook, as if the past of a roulette wheel could provide information about its future. Red or black. Odd or even. Go figure.

I drifted over to the narrow door.

“’Sup?” the lean, mean thug demanded.

I wasn’t immediately able to translate his question into the king’s English but I offered what I thought might pass for an explanation of my presence there. “I need to talk to Giancarlo Baldini,” I said.

“He know you?”

“He would like to know me.”

“You a wiseguy or something? Mr. Baldini don’t appreciate wiseguys.”

“I am answering your questions to the best of my ability.”

“Name?”

“Gunn, with two
n
’s. I’m a private eye.”

The lean, mean thug said something to his wrist. He must have gotten an answer because he glanced up at the long, narrow mirror and nodded. “They need to know about what you want to talk to Mr. Baldini,” he said.

I looked up at the mirror and snapped off a casual Kabul two-finger salute, then turned back to the thug. “Tell them I want to talk to Mr. Baldini about the murder of his son Salvatore. I want to talk to him about the guy who set up Salvatore, Silvio Restivo.”

The
they
watching from behind the one-way mirror must have had a microphone near the door because it clicked open before the thug could repeat a word I said. He seemed as surprised as I was to discover the door ajar. He looked up again at the mirror, listened to the tinny voice in his earpiece with his mouth drooping open, then reluctantly backed up to let me by. I walked into a white vestibule with small spotlights embedded in the ceiling and two more lean, mean thugs with
BALDINI
and
CLINCH CORNERS
emblazoned over the zippered pockets of their immaculate white jumpsuits. Both of them had skintight surgical gloves on their hands, which, I have to admit, made me uncomfortable—for a moment I was afraid they might be proctologists posted there to explore body cavities. Happily they concentrated on the usual places where firearms might be concealed when they frisked me: ankles, inner thighs, three-sixty degrees of waistband, small of back, armpits. I can say that the body search was very professional. I can see how when you do only one thing—when you specialize in patting people down, for instance—you wind up doing it well. One of them, a smirk of apology on his face, even threaded his fingers through my hair. Seeing I was weapon-free, he pushed a button in the wall and an elevator door opened. I stepped into it and turned back to confront the closing doors. The elevator rose one floor with excruciating slowness. The doors finally opened onto an enormous circular room with a high ceiling. What I took to be stereophonic Italian opera came at me from every direction. Off to my left, an accountant type wearing a green eyeshade was counting out stacks of money piled on a billiard table and securing each stack with a paper band. Off to my right, a very saddle-soaped saddle sat on a wooden trestle. Two teenagers dressed in identical blue school uniforms and ties were kneeling on cushions playing checkers on the floor. An ancient gentleman with a long beaked nose and a shirt that was several sizes too large for his neck—or had his neck shriveled since he bought the shirt?—sat in a wheelchair between them, tapping the squares on the board with the tip of his cane to suggest moves. Facing me, sitting in a plush leather swivel chair behind a shiny mahogany desk and in front of a picture window that followed the curve of the wall, was a young man with a face so pinched it looked as if it had been resized in a vise. Two computers were open on the desk in front of him. “You want to talk to Mr. Baldini,” he said, “you need to talk to me first.”

Getting past Baldini’s gatekeepers was turning out to be almost as difficult as getting past Fontenrose & Fontenrose secretaries. I approached the desk. “I’m used to working through a chain of command,” I said.

“You said your name is Gunn. You said you’re spelling Gunn with two
n
’s.”

“I have a New Mexico private investigator ID, if you want to see it.”

He leaned forward to read something on the screen of one of his computers. “There are seventy-three Gunns listed. Three of them are associated with the words ‘private investigator.’ One of the private investigators name of Gunn lives in Hawaii and is twenty-two years old. That’s not you. The second is an actor named Gunn who plays a private investigator in a television series. That’s not you. Which narrows it down to the third private investigator named Gunn. First name, Lemuel. No middle initial. Forty-eight years of age. This particular Gunn runs a shoestring detective operation out of a mobile home in Hatch, New Mexico. Before that he was registered as a Department of State security officer stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan. Before that he was a detective sergeant assigned to the homicide division of the New Jersey State Police.” Pinched Face looked up. “That’s you, right? Department of State security officer is a common CIA legend. When did you stop being CIA?”

I figured why lie. “When I left Afghanistan.”

“Why did you stop being CIA?”

“Management and I disagreed about something.”

“What thing?”

“Murder.”

“Who murdered whom?”

“A half-assed lieutenant murdered the Taliban who taught English to Osama bin Laden. His men murdered the Taliban’s wife and two daughters.”

“War is hell,” Pinched Face said.

“Isn’t it,” I agreed. “Did you really find all that stuff about me on your computer?”

“I Googled you.”

“What does that mean, you Googled me?”

“You want computer lessons, you go to a computer school. What do you want to tell Mr. Baldini about Salvatore and that scumbag Silvio Restivo?”

“What I have to say is for Mr. Baldini’s ears.”

“You’re talking to Mr. Baldini’s ears. I am his second son. My name is Ugo Baldini. The late Salvatore was my older brother.”

“King me,” one of the teenager checker players said excitedly.

“Hold on,” the other checker player said. “You’ve got to jump me first.”

“King him, damn it,” the old man in the wheelchair told the first boy.

“But he—”

“Nuts to your buts,” the old man said. He spoke in a wheezing whisper. “Do it now, Fabio.”

Ugo looked at the checker players. “When I was your age I kept my mouth zipped.”

“Sorry, Uncle Ugo.”

“It won’t happen again, Uncle Ugo.”

“You’d think they was raised in a sewer,” the old man wheezed.

Uncle Ugo acknowledged the apologies with raised eyebrows. He turned his attention back to me. “What do you know about Silvio Restivo that my father doesn’t know?”

“I know where he’s been for the eight months since Salvatore was shot to death.”

“Where would that be, Mr. Gunn?”

“He was tucked away in an FBI witness protection program.”

Ugo snickered politely. “You’re not telling us anything we don’t know.”

“The Feds gave him a false identity.”

The two boys kneeling on cushions stopped playing checkers and looked up. The ancient man had a toggle steering device on one arm of his wheelchair—there was a soft whirring noise as he backed and rotated and drove around the checker players to be nearer to Uncle Ugo’s desk. He thumped the tip of his cane on the floorboard to get my attention. “You can identify this false identity?”

I turned my head and spoke directly to Giancarlo Baldini. “Yes, sir, I can. He was listed as Emilio Gava. He lived under that name in a condominium called East of Eden Gardens in Las Cruces, New Mexico.”

The ancient man drove his chair so close he had to look up at me. “He still there?”

“No, sir. He got himself arrested on a drug charge, after which a woman put up a phony deed to guarantee bail and he was released. I work for the people who put up the actual bond and stand to lose $125,000 if Gava doesn’t show for trial.”

“Emilio Gava is not going to show up nowhere,” the old man said. “Take my word for it, he was disappearing from the FBI’s disappearment program.” Mr. Baldini backed up his chair and spoke to Ugo. “Get the boys out of here. And turn that damn opera music off. I cannot hear myself think.”

Ugo motioned with his chin. The accountant flicked a switch on the hi-fi behind him, collected the two boys and shooed them into the elevator. Giancarlo Baldini wheeled himself behind the desk. Ugo bounded to his feet and moved off to one side. I noticed the reflection of his ramrod-straight back in the curved window behind him. I’d seen soldiers stand to attention like that in Kabul when body bags were being loaded onto state-bound planes. It was obvious who was in command here.

“If I hear you right,” Giancarlo Baldini said, “you know where Restivo
was
at. The question I have for you, do you know where he
is
at?”

“I’m thinking maybe we can figure this part out together,” I said.

Mr. Baldini’s eyes, what you could see of them with the soft lids of an old man half closed, clouded over with what I took to be hate. “When I was growing up in Palermo,” he said, short of breath, wheezing to beat the band, “we used to say revenge was a dish that tastes best cold. I been waiting eight months to get my hands on Silvio Restivo. I do not plan to die before I do.” He jabbed his cane in my direction. “Start at the start.”