A Nasty Piece of Work (18 page)

“When he was living in East of Eden, he used a neighbor’s telephone to call a onetime girlfriend in Searchlight.”

“We know all about this Annabel,” Ugo said from the corner of the desk. He looked at his father. “We tapped into her mobile, Dad—there were no calls from Restivo.”

“He called her at the beauty parlor where she worked,” I explained.

Mr. Baldini turned on his son. “Why didn’t you think of that?”

Ugo just glared at me.

I said, “Annabel was the middleman between Restivo and someone named Mario in the Ruggeri stable.”

“Stable is the right word,” Mr. Baldini sneered. “They are all up to their backsides in horseshit.”

“Mario is Mario Caruso,” Ugo said. “He’s their purse-string consigliere. He cooks their books.”

“He may have been paying off Restivo for services rendered,” I said. “The reason I think that is Annabel was passing on numbers. They could have been Swift numbers and bank account numbers.”

“They was paying the scumbag off for fingering my boy Salvatore,” Mr. Baldini said. He was practically choking on the words. Maybe I was imagining it but I thought I detected a tear in his voice.

“It figures,” Ugo said. “Small amounts in different banks so as not to attract attention.”

I couldn’t resist asking, “How much is small?”

Mr. Baldini answered for his son. “Small is small. Small is ten, twenty grand.” He tapped the tip of his cane on the desk in front of Ugo. “You need to have someone have a conversation with this Annabel person—”

“Talk to her from now to doomsday,” I said, “you won’t get more out of her than I got. She wrote down numbers and read them to Restivo over the phone and threw them out afterward.”

Ugo was nobody’s fool. “Maybe Mr. Gunn here has another lead,” he said. “Maybe that’s why he came looking for you, Dad.”

Mr. Baldini’s beak nose twitched as he eyed me. “You got another lead you want to share with us, Gunn?”

“As a matter of fact, there was something else Mario passed on to Annabel and Annabel passed on to Restivo,” I said. “Does the word ‘whistlestop’ mean anything to you, Mr. Baldini?”

Mr. Baldini was ancient and serving out what was left of his life in a motorized wheelchair, but he had all his marbles. “Whistlestop,” he repeated, “don’t ring no bell—but it will. If it is a place, we will find it. If it is Silvio Restivo, we will wring his neck.”

“Listen, if you wring his neck, you’ll have your revenge that tastes best cold,” I said. “The downside is that the truce between the Baldinis and the Ruggeris is hanging by a thread. If you kill Restivo, the Ruggeri family will consider the truce broken. You’ll be starting a new cycle of tit-for-tat killings in Clinch Corners. Your family business interests—your casino—will suffer. Another round of clan warfare and the Nevada authorities, who don’t bother you as long as you pay your taxes and keep a low profile, will come down on you like a ton of compacted automobiles. The families up in Reno won’t be too happy either. The last thing they want is for some Palermo family to give the state a bad name.”

“He’s right,” Ugo told his father. “That’s not how they settle grudges in Reno. We need to keep the lid on. As long as we keep the lid on, nobody hassles our casino operation.”

Mr. Baldini turned on his son. “I do not need lessons on how to do business from you, sonny boy.” He worked the controls on the arm of his wheelchair and drove it closer to the curved windows, which looked out on the endless procession of red taillights heading back toward Los Angeles after a night of gambling. His wheezing voice drifted back over one of his withered shoulders. “So what are you proposing, that we leave Restivo live so as not to kill business?”

I said, “Mr. Baldini, when you decode ‘whistlestop,’ I’ll take care of him for you.”

His wheelchair whirred as the old man came around to face me.

I said, “I’ll take him back to stand trial on the drug charge, Mr. Baldini. He’ll pull ten, fifteen years for that. And there’s an FBI officer who is persuaded Restivo set up your son for the sniper. He’ll get a turn at him, too. One way or another he’ll wind up behind bars for a very long time.”

“He makes sense,” Ugo said. “Once Restivo’s safely in prison, we have ways—”

“I don’t need to know what’s going to happen to him in prison,” I told Ugo. “In the CIA, we used to have a rule of thumb—don’t share information with someone if it’s above his pay grade.”

The old man wheezed as he weighed the fate of Silvio Restivo. “What is your pay grade, Gunn?” he inquired when he got his wind. “What’s in it for you?”

“I get ninety-five dollars a day plus expenses,” I said. “I supply receipts for the expenses.”

The younger Baldini scrutinized the expression on my face. “He is not making a joke,” he told his father.

“I need Restivo to take a fall,” Mr. Baldini said. “Then I can pass away in peace. In the good old days vigilantes who brought in killers got paid a bounty. You organize Restivo’s fall, Gunn, there will be a packet in it for you.”

“A not-so-small amount in an out-of-the-way bank,” Ugo said.

Nobody shook hands when I left. Ugo stabbed at the button on the wall with his pinky. The elevator doors sprang open as if they’d been expecting the summons. “You and your lady friend come back this time tomorrow,” Ugo said. “By then we’ll know who or what or where this ‘whistlestop’ is.”

I did my best to look perplexed. “What lady friend?”

“The one you parked at the slot machine.” Ugo smiled a compact smile that fitted nicely onto his pinched face. “I take it we are on the same page, Mr. Gunn?”

I shrugged one shoulder. “I think we are.”

He looked at me peculiarly. “You’re a piece of work, Lemuel no middle initial Gunn from Hatch, New Mexico, waltzing in here with a cockamamie scheme to take out the rat who set up my brother Salvatore.”

“You are, too, Ugo Baldini from Clinch Corners, Nevada, for taking me seriously.”

Twenty-one

With the two other couples overnighting in Nipton—dog-tired, dewy-eyed honeymooners from upstate New York and older evangelicals (judging from the giant 3-D crucifixes painted on the sliding doors of their minibus) driving to L.A. to see the palm prints of film stars on the sidewalk—we scrounged rations and beer in the general store and fried up burgers on the stove in the hotel’s common room. There was some strained table talk as the people we were breaking bread with tried to figure out where the others were coming from, I’m not talking geographically. The evangelicals, who hailed from a small pushpin-in-the-map township in Iowa, didn’t turn around the pot for long. “I couldn’t help but notice you’re not wearing a wedding band,” the woman remarked to Ornella. “You and your friend here common-law husband, wife?”

“Not that it’s any of your business,” I said, “but we’re lover and lovee.”

“Don’t pay attention to him,” Friday said without missing a beat. “He’s cranky because we’re winding down an eight-year marriage.” She smiled one of her cheerless signature smiles. “It may seem over-the-top sentimental,” she went on, “but hey, as we’re both big fans of Clara Bow, we decided to consummate the divorce in her bedroom.”

Ornella said it all with such a straight face the others couldn’t tell if she was pulling their leg or what. The honeymooners got it before the evangelicals. They grinned, then began laughing so hard the girl got hiccups. “That’s rich,” the young man allowed. “C
onsummate
a divorce! I totally gotta try that out on my mother-in-law.”

“Henry, don’t—hic—go there,” his young wife admonished.

After supper Friday and I crossed the railroad tracks and walked out into the dunes under an awning of desert stars that somehow managed to look as if they were shooting without even moving. Ornella quoted a line from an English poet whose name didn’t mean anything to me at the time and is lost to me now—something about stars still dancing. Obviously the poet had been looking at the same stars as us but seeing them better. We settled onto the overhang of one groundswell of a dune and watched the last of a last-quarter moon skulk out of sight into the haze obscuring the horizon—it left a track of light in the sand glistening like the wake of a ship at sea, not that I’ve ever seen the wake of a ship at sea. My luck, I’ve always crossed oceans by plane. Just before eleven, one of those endless freight trains passed between us and Nipton. It was so long it needed two locomotives to inch it across the surface of the planet Earth. Once it had gone by we crossed back over the tracks and bedded down for the night in the Clara Bow room.

I thought again about the meeting with the Baldinis, godfather and son. I thought about the withered old man trapped in a motorized wheelchair. “What does ‘Googled’ mean?” I asked my girl Friday.

“Where did you pick up ‘Googled’?”

“From Baldini’s son Ugo. He had computers on his desk. One of them told him who I was.”

She explained something about a search locomotive, whatever that was. I must have drifted off midexplanation because I still don’t know what ‘Googled’ means. What I do remember is that I fell asleep—
w
e fell asleep—without consummating our divorce. How relaxed can you get, sleeping in the Clara Bow bed with a female of the species, especially an extremely attractive specimen, without making whoopee?

I can’t speak for Friday. For me it was an exhilarating experience.

At first light we rectified the lapse of the night before.

Fortified by steaming mugs of coffee and home-baked raisin muffins at the general store, we set out to explore the Mojave. I bought five plastic bottles of Poland Spring water (which I doubt came all the way from Poland but what the heck, they quenched thirst) and borrowed a desert kit from the hotel—a tire gauge and small compressor that worked off the Toyota’s cigarette lighter, a folding army shovel, two metal tire tracks and a tarpaulin—and we hit the road. I’d had three weeks of survival training when I joined the CIA, it’d been in the Painted Desert, north of the Mojave, but if you’ve survived one desert you survived them all. The dunes, the flora and fauna, the dry wadis that curl out of wind-weathered canyons, the highways of tamped-down sand with the treads of tires printed on them, the drifts of heat rising off the ground—holy cow, for a boy raised on the Jersey Shore, I must have been a desert rat in another incarnation. How else do I explain that I felt at home where there were no homes?

With Friday riding shotgun, we drove southwest to an abandoned Union Pacific railroad crossing called Kelso Depot. It had a long wooden boom from the days when passing steam engines needed a refill of H
2
O. We couldn’t resist inspecting the Depot’s abandoned hotel. Worn, torn shutters hung off rusted hinges, banisterless stairs wound up to the
bel étage
with gaping holes in its floorboards, a barrel of rainwater sat under a broken gutter on the half of the front porch that still existed. All of this only a few yards from the tracks along which long freight trains still passed.

Emerging from the hotel, Ornella had a faraway look in her eye. “What if…” she said.

“What if what?”

“What if we were to pool our money and buy this hotel. It’d probably go for a song. We could fix it up, turn it into a bed and breakfast, organize day trips into the Mojave on camels or jeep—”

We were standing on the good half of the front porch. I pushed a railing and it gave way, splintering off, falling onto the ground. “It’d go for half a song,” I said. Friday’s seaweed green eyes grew dark with disappointment. “Listen, I like pipe dreams as much as the next man,” I said. “Let’s keep dreaming them, the both of us.”

“You never told me your pipe dreams,” Ornella said.

“It’ll come, little lady. Give it time.”

I drove across the railroad tracks and pulled off the paved road onto a rise above Kelso Depot to let some air out of the tires, then went off-road onto desert trails, and then off-trail into the dunes. At one point a wind came up, nearly blinding us with sand. It felt as if we had driven into a wind tunnel, I needed both hands on the steering wheel to keep the Toyota on what I could see of the track. The wind died down as suddenly as it had come up. Except for an occasional exclamation—
oh, wow, will you look at that!—
Ornella was awed into silence most of the time, taking in the spectacular expanse with its ever-shifting horizon as if she was trying to memorize it. I pulled up on a flat deep in a canyon so we could give our backsides a rest and stretch our legs.

“You’ve been in the desert before,” Ornella said. “I could tell from the way you drive.”

“How do I drive?”

“You slalom over the dunes. You seem to feel where the steering wheel wants to go with your fingertips and don’t fight it.”

“I go with the flow,” I admitted.

“What would you do if the Toyota broke down? Now. Here.”

“I’d survive.”

“You know how to survive in the desert?”

“I was taught. Look at the dry bed of the wadi over there. If you dig at the edges, you’d find wet sand. If you squeezed it in a handkerchief, you could moisten your lips.”

“What about food?”

“Food’s not a problem. You can survive two, three weeks without food. You couldn’t survive two, three hours in the desert without water.”

“We could drink the water in the Toyota’s radiator,” Ornella said brightly.

“That’s a chemical refrigerant,” I said. “It’d kill you for sure.”

“Hey, people stranded in the desert can always drink urine.”

I had to laugh. “Urine is better than nothing. But if you didn’t have a container, you’d need to be two.”

“Oh! Ooohhh. Aw. I didn’t think of that aspect. It’s pretty sexual.”

“Best thing, if we were really lost in the desert, would be to make a still. Urine is ninety-five percent water. You dig a hole yea deep, you put your container—a glass, a pan, whatever—at the bottom and pee into it. Cover the hole with a tarp, a poncho, whatever you have handy. Weigh down the sides with sand or stones. Put one stone in the middle of the poncho so it sags down to the glass of urine but doesn’t touch it. The sun will do the rest. After a while the water in the urine will condense on the underside of the tarp. You could lick it off with your tongue.”