Hades (34 page)

33

Bruno drank his second beer and then his third while he talked.

He confirmed most of what Lenny Rube had told Justin and Reggie, but he was able to elaborate and provide more detail.

Bruno had indeed started going to Ronald LaSalle because of his stellar reputation as a financial adviser and money manager. He explained that he wasn’t exactly in a business that provided long-term health care and retirement funds, so he wanted a legit place to stash his money—of which there was a considerable amount—and help it grow. He wasn’t getting any younger, and he knew he couldn’t depend solely on muscle forever. So he gave a couple of hundred g’s to LaSalle, who did a hell of a job. Bruno made money, probably the first legal money of his life, he said, except once when he was a kid and he washed cars. Even then, as he thought about it, he used to steal anything inside the cars that wasn’t nailed down—including once taking a spare tire from someone’s trunk while the person was still sitting in the car—so he guessed that didn’t really count.

He got Lenny Rube involved, he said. At first, just with the mob boss’s own money. Also totally legit. And just as profitable as Bruno’s initial investment. LaSalle had started his own business and was definitely looking for investors, so Lenny went to him and said they were putting together a fund and wanted LaSalle to handle it. This was Lenny’s idea. Several families from around the country needed a place to put their cash; Lenny had the rep and the clout, so the other families knew he’d look after them. It was a good deal all around. Everyone made money; it was a good way to pay taxes and make everything look nice and tidy; and Len took a sweet little cut off the top for brokering with the broker. But then LaSalle began to realize what he’d gotten into. At first, he really believed that Lenny’s businesses were legit. Then he was asked to do things, Bruno said.

“What kind of things?” Reggie asked.

Bruno said, “Things a guy like LaSalle wasn’t used to. Doctoring profits, moving money around. Mostly he was asked to guarantee our investments. We got a monthly statement one time and the pot had gone down. Lenny didn’t like it. LaSalle said he couldn’t do that. Lenny told him, ‘Sure you can.’ Lenny figured that if LaSalle was taking an automatic cut of our investment, he could guarantee us a certain profit. LaSalle said, ‘That ain’t the way this thing works,’ and the Rube said, ‘That’s the way it works now.’”

When Reggie asked why LaSalle went along with it, Bruno said, “We had him by the short and curlies. All I had to do was point out that he’d been doing business with some members of a known criminal organization. It didn’t matter whether he knew about it or not, it wasn’t gonna be good for his reputation. But the thing is, the guy had some stones. He still didn’t go along with it.”

“What did he do?” Reggie wanted to know.

Bruno told them that LaSalle came to Bruno and Lenny with a proposition. He said he’d find someone else who could do the job. Someone who’d go along with what they wanted. Someone who might fit in with them better. They could move their money from LaSalle’s investment company into this new person’s company. All LaSalle wanted was to untangle their business relationship. He had a wife and they were thinking about starting a family and he was too honest for this kind of work. It was because he was honest that he said he’d get them an acceptable replacement.

“I thought the Rube would never go for it. But he liked this guy. And, between you and me, I think he gets off now on bein’ this kind of benevolent godfather type—you know? He’s startin’ to think he might actually be a respectable businessman, you know, with all his Palm Beach shit and joinin’ country clubs and all that. So he said okay. With one condition. He said that for the first year, LaSalle had to keep his hand in and make sure whoever this new guy was wouldn’t fuck up. Lenny said he’d make sure that the new guy hired LaSalle—so LaSalle wouldn’t be doin’ business directly with us but he could still look after our interests. And still make some money for his new company. And LaSalle agreed. Not that he had a lot of choice—you know what I mean. He knew he was gettin’ a good deal.”

“And so the person he came up with was Evan Harmon,” Justin said.

“Harmon jumped at it,” Bruno told him. “Len met him down in Palm Beach and said the guy had greed written all over him. So we cut a deal.”

“The same kind of deal Ron LaSalle wouldn’t go along with.”

Bruno nodded.

“And what went wrong?” Reggie asked. “What happened?”

“You get in business with a rattlesnake, you can’t be surprised when he bites you. And then you really can’t be surprised when the bite turns out to be poison.”

“Which side are you referring to as the snake?” Justin asked.

“I’ll give you your point, but I’m talkin’ about Harmon. He was the rattler.”

“Give us the specifics,” Justin said.

“It started out as a sweet deal. He did a lotta business with the Chinks. Family ties, business ties, all that shit. He was investin’ a lot of money for ’em. And he knew what they were gonna be investin’ in. He said the Chinese car business was gonna take off. The numbers were amazin’. I mean, we’re talking huge. Puts us to fucking shame. I saw the numbers. They more than tripled the number of cars over there in the last five years—from somethin’ like six million to twenty million. And that’s gonna keep goin’ up like crazy. They’re sellin’ a thousand new cars a day in Beijing. A thousand a
day
! I didn’t even know that was a city! And you know what’s gonna happen over here? We’re fucked and Europe’s fucked and the Japs are fucked most of all. I’m talkin’ good passenger cars for ten grand and an SUV for under twenty.”

“Okay,” Justin said. “You’re hired. You can do the infomercial.”

“I’m just sayin’, this is a business that had our name all over it. Harmon said he could move a few things around, take our money and invest in platinum, which had to keep goin’ up because all of a sudden China needed it—and needed a lot of it. They had to have it for all those fuckin’ cars! It’s makin’ me crazy just to fuckin’ think about it!”

“Try to keep your head in the game, Bruno.”

Bruno did his best to calm down. “Yeah, yeah, all right. So Harmon said that if we put money in with his fund, he could arrange it so that we always made a profit. Other people could go up and down but we’d always stay up. He’d keep us strictly in platinum and slant cars.”

“Why was he so willing to make that deal?” Reggie wanted to know. “His fund had plenty of money.”

“It wasn’t just our money,” Bruno said.

“What was it?”

“It was our . . . expertise.”

“Let’s hear it,” Justin said.

“Again . . . off the record. But it’s not so complicated. Harmon’s tied into China big-time. China doesn’t want to just import cars and import car parts, they want to make their own fuckin’ things, right? That’s what they do. They take things over. They make ’em themselves ’cause that’s where the money is. They’re takin’ over the whole world! So Harmon’s helpin’ them. He’s shippin’ parts to them on the sly. ’Cause Ford and Chrysler and nobody in the fuckin’ U.S. governments wants to be helpin’ them take over the whole car industry. So the exportin’ is a little, let’s say, dicey. I mean, they’re gonna do it, you don’t stop the Chinks once they get rollin’, but the good ol’ USA wants a share, right? They don’t want ’em makin’ all the parts we know how to make ’cause then what do they need us for?”

“So he lets you into his fund, he promises that you’ll make a steady profit, and in exchange you provide a little smuggling expertise. For which you also get a share off the top?”

“Hey, we’re a business just like everybody else.”

“And where’d you smuggle the parts to?” Justin asked.

“Mexico. There was a plant there. Auto parts. The Chinese would fly their planes in there and Harmon could ship ’em whatever he wanted to ship ’em as long as he could get it to the plant.”

“And how about your profits in the fund? Did they stay up?”

Bruno nodded. “Until recently.”

“What happened?”

“He said that some of his other investors had gotten unhappy. And he said that a couple of people had gotten suspicious of the way he was playing fast and loose with their dough. I mean, I don’t know exactly how he was working it, but he was basically taking profits from someone else and giving them to us.”

“Did he say what people were suspicious?”

“He tried to keep things quiet but, you know, we’re very inquisitive. I got the kind of face people eventually open up to.”

“You are a charmer,” Justin said.

Bruno shrugged. “He said it was his father. And a hotshot Wall Street guy. A guy who threw a lot of money his way, a guy connected big-time to China.”

“Lincoln Berdon?”

Bruno nodded. “The guy who runs Rockworth and Williams, yeah. Berdon had put a lot of Chinese people, including the Chinese government, into the Ascension fund. He had a lot of Rockworth dough in it, too. And he wasn’t happy with the results of his investments. Or the investments Harmon was making for his Chinese connections.”

“Because a big chunk of the profits were going to you.”

“Hey, he was givin’ the Chinks what they needed—the platinum and the auto parts. He was just chargin’ ’em top dollar and makin’ a profit.”

“So what did Evan propose to do about it?” Justin asked. “How was he going to deal with the pressure from his father and Berdon?”

Bruno raised an eyebrow. “He wanted to back off our deal for a while. Make sure a few other people got their big returns. He said he’d make it up to us in a few months. He swore it’d be bigger than ever. He said he had a scheme that would bring us into the whole Chinese car market, make us more than we’d ever dreamed about.”

“And your reaction?”

“I told him we were capable of dreamin’ pretty big. And I said, hey, it wasn’t anything personal, we could talk about Chinese cars and shit all he wanted but we had a deal. Not for the future but for the here and now. And I explained that the people I work for like other people to respect their deals.”

“So what happened?”

“I’m not exactly what you call a financial expert. But I know people. Harmon thought he could negotiate a deal with anyone. He was pretty surprised when he ran into someone who had a different kind of negotiating technique.”

“Meaning you.”

“Meaning me. And my technique is pretty effective. But I knew this guy Harmon was going to try to cheat us. And once that—how should I say this—once that bond of trust is broken, then we’re not big on doing the repair work, you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Justin said. “I do. So what happened then?”

“We knew he’d invested us big-time in platinum. So before we . . . let’s say severed our relationship with him . . .”

“You thought you’d make a killing. At least a figurative one. And drive the price of platinum way up.”

Bruno nodded. “That’s pretty much it.”

Reggie stared at him openmouthed. “You sunk a ship with how many people on it? Fifty? A hundred? More than that? Just so you could make some money?”

Bruno didn’t look as if he was offended. “I do what I’m paid to do,” he said. “If you wanna know the truth, if things had gone right, nobody woulda died. I didn’t know about that kid who’d hidden out.”

“If you had, would you have cared?”

“You got me there,” Bruno said. “I’m not really a sensitive kind of guy.”

She couldn’t sit still, couldn’t look at the huge man sitting on the couch with a can of beer. Reggie got up, began pacing.

“Okay,” Justin said. “You sunk the ship
Hades,
drove the price of platinum up, made whatever percent profit you made, and pulled your money out of Ascension.”

“That’s where it gets complicated,” Bruno said. “We didn’t get our money out.”

“Why not?” Reggie said from across the room.

Before Bruno could answer, Justin said, “Because Evan sold all your platinum to someone else. He used you the way he’d been using his other investors. You didn’t own it anymore because he’d shorted it so somebody else could make the profit.”

Bruno quietly applauded. “Very good, Sherlock.”

“Who’d he sell it to?”

“The bastard sold it to himself. He fucked us. We were buyin’ the platinum and making money. But he’d bought the fucking company that was using all the platinum. The one we were selling to.”

Justin said, “Bastard, is right. But he was a smart one.” He remembered what he’d been told at the Ascension office. “Harmon bought the company that makes the filter device the cars need. And then he turned around and made an even bigger profit all for himself, by selling the devices to the company in Mexico that makes the final parts.”

“The company he also owned,” Reggie said.

“He had every base covered.”

“You guys are pretty good at your job, I’ll give you that,” Bruno said.

“One thing throws me, though,” Reggie said. “If he’d stiffed you and stolen from you, why were you still smuggling for him? Why agree to keep shipping the platinum to Mexico?”

“We weren’t. And we didn’t.”

“But the truck that crashed . . . that had to be Evan’s platinum.”

“It was.”

“But . . .” Reggie squinted. Her lips turned up in that crooked smile. “He’d started doing it on his own.”

Bruno nodded. “He mighta done it legally at some point,” he said, “but he starts moving it into Mexico on a regular basis, we’re gonna know about it. So he had to keep smugglin’ it in. He couldn’t let us know what he was doin’, takin’ our goods and makin’ a fortune.”

“So when word got around about the truck—” Justin started to say.

“He knew Bruno and Lenny Rube would realize what was going on,” Reggie finished. “He could have paid them back and even kept up paying them a profit on their investment. But they never would have realized what he was doing. Double dipping—giving them the small profit and taking the big one for himself and his other partners.”

“Once the platinum was found in the truck,” Justin said to Bruno, “Evan realized that you and Lenny would figure out exactly what he’d done: played you for suckers and taken you for a lot of money.” He gave a half laugh. “And it would have worked, at least for a little while longer, if whoever was driving that truck in Texas hadn’t gotten drunk and turned the thing over.”