High Stakes (13 page)

Chapter Thirty-one

Wiems made Marco Three wait nearly ten minutes. Sitting quietly on his cycle in a dark corner of Shorty and Lammy's large parking lot just before eight that Tuesday night, he'd watched Scaravilli's dark gray MG being received by the valet parker, and its lone occupant hurriedly walk to the entrance. He checked his watch at 8:09, locked the bike and his helmet in the bike's tank bag. Walked casually inside and found Marco at the far end of the long bar, first drink already half-finished, eyes up on the television screen with its first Major League baseball game of the night.

Wiems said, “Marco.”

Scaravilli, startled, said, “Hey, man. Didn't see you coming. Listen…” He was interrupted as Wiems tapped Marco's elbow and motioned with his head, saying, “Over there.” He led Scaravilli to a small, two-chair table next to the wall. Stefanie, the waitress for the area, walked toward them with an empty drink tray and an order pad, eyebrows up expectantly. Wiems waved her off.

Marco Three protested, “I wanted another drink, man.” Wiems silenced him with a look. Said, “You have the money?”

“Yes. Jesus, you don't have to be so impatient.”

Wiems sighed. Little did this Outfit scion realize that he was hiring a young man in a hurry. Wiems had carefully observed what he believed to be tremendous yet currently unexploited opportunities in the furiously expanding world of Internet developments. He had ideas that would knock those geeks sideways, ideas for a truly revolutionary computer program that would take advantage of society's raging hunger for self-aggrandizing connections. Working to gain capital for his eventual start-up and envisioned IPO, Wiems had been fortunate enough to connect with two major Kansas City bookmakers he'd heard about at Cartridge Central Range. He'd carefully made himself known to them, one by one. Over the course of a couple of months, he was delighted to discover that each wanted the other dead—by a “new shooter, somebody nobody around here would think about afterwards, you know?”

Wiems assured them that he did. He shot the first bookmaker dead on a dreary early November evening in the driveway of the man's suburban ranch house. Next day, he collected the five thousand dollars he'd been hired with. Eight days after that, acting on behalf of his victim's vengeful sister, he'd murdered the other bookie, the man who'd initially hired him, in similar fashion, on another dark Kansas autumn night, for a slightly larger fee. These two apparently connected events confounded local law authorities. Wiems happily welcomed such synchronicity, it reminding him of his end game dealings with his hated mother and step-father.

He occasionally chided himself for being so slow to discover this killing trade, his avocation really, that he was so remarkably efficient at. But he was quite confident that he could lucratively make up for lost time.

The Kansas City Royals fans in Shorty and Lammy's whooped as their star shortstop homered to left with a man on. Marco Three celebrated along with them, saying to Wiems, “Go Royals! I've got them for a dime tonight.”

Marco Three tried to fist-bump his companion, who kept his hands on the table. Wiems said, “The money.” Marco Three reached down to grab his briefcase. As he did, he rapidly reviewed what he had come to learn about this imminent transaction.

Some rich desperado in federal prison was paying fifty grand for a hit. Word was that the man doing the hiring of the killer had no problem with the announced price, having declared that the fee “would be cheap at the price to kill that devious son of a bitch who put me here.”

Once the prime number had been established, the chopping up of it began. Wiems was promised twenty thousand dollars with half in advance. Marco Jr. and Marco Three were down together for another twenty thousand dollars, with the remaining ten grand reserved for Aldo Caveretta's finder's fee.

Marco Three leaned across the table. “I've got your ten K here. We should do this outside.”

“No.”

“What do you mean no? That was the deal, man.”

Wiems brushed his hand across the table as if he was extinguishing a candle flame. “I'm not arguing about the deal. But I don't want ten now, I want you to give me nine. You'll give me the rest later. That's what I want now. Just nine.”

Marco Three took a long look at the young man he'd described to his father as “That crazy but apparently efficient red-haired mother fucker.”

“Let me get this straight,” Marco Three said slowly. “Our deal is still good, right?”

“Correct.”

Marco Three started to slightly perspire in the blue Kenneth Cole plaid shirt he was wearing under his gray Calvin Klein bomber jacket. Looking at the placid yet menacing figure across the table, he thought not for the first time,
What the fuck am I dealing with here
?

Marco Three said, “Do you mind if I ask you why? Why you'd rather not take the full ten grand promised, but knock the payment down to nine? For now, I mean?”

“You know, Marco,” Wiems said softly, “I'm under no obligation to explain myself to you. Or anyone else. But I'll make an exception here. I want just the nine K tonight because nine is my lucky number. Has been most of my life.”

“Oh.”

Wiems leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Do you know what a unique number nine is? I didn't think so. Think about this. If you multiply nine by any natural number, and add up the digits of the result, you will
wind up with the
number nine.”

Marco Three did a couple of quick calculations. First nine times eight, seventy-two, added together came to the number nine. Then he tried six times nine.
Son of a bitch
,
he's right.
Marco Three laughed for the first time since Wiems' arrival. “I get it. It's your lucky number, why not?” He opened the brown envelope he'd been holding in his lap and took out a hundred hundred-dollar bills. He extracted ten of them and put one back in the envelope. “There,” Marco said, extending the envelope across the table. “Nine it is.”

“Good.” Wiems got up quickly. As he turned to leave he looked back over his shoulder to say, “I'm going to do some research on this project. I'll give you a progress report when I'm done with that.”

Marco Three got to his feet. “Wait. I just changed cell phones yesterday. I've got a new number I'll have to give you.”

“No need,” Wiems said with a smirk. “I obtained that number thirty minutes after you began to use it.” He walked out.

***

Two mornings later, Wiems flew on Southwest Airlines from Kansas City to Chicago. He wore his school clothes, lightweight dark blue windbreaker, long-sleeved checked shirt, pressed khakis atop dark brown Rockport walking shoes. He'd spent the early morning hours using scissors to cut off all of his thick red hair. He spread lather on his head and used a straight razor to denude it. Before each of what he thought of as his “job assignments,” Wiems always transformed his appearance this way. He was getting good at spacing contract killings with hair growth and then removal.

Seated in the mid-section of the plane, next to the window on the right side, Wiems avoided conversation with his seat mate, a middle-aged woman who before takeoff had tried twice to engage him. He rebuffed her by plugging his earphones in and pretending to listen to the generic airline music crap. Given the choice, he'd have activated his cell phone and listened to some of the groups he'd put in that device's memory vault. Some of his favorite punk/grunge/garage bands. Meat Rot was currently atop his list, closely followed by Puppy Guts and Dorsal Morsels. He looked forward to the day he could promote these largely ignored artists on his envisioned Internet empire.

At Chicago's Midway Airport, Wiems used a credit card in one of the several aliases he'd created to rent a nondescript two-door brown Kia from National and drove north on Cicero Avenue to the east-bound ramp on the Eisenhower Expressway. He'd used the Internet to find Jack Doyle's address on Chicago's near north side, as well as a reasonably-priced motel located only eighteen blocks west of there.

He had pre-registered, using a different credit card. Upon arrival, he told the clerk to make his “an open registration. One day for sure.”

“Thank you, Mr. Vincent.”

***

Shortly after seven o'clock the next morning, Wiems waited patiently for a parking place to open up on Doyle's block a few doors from his condo. He had to circle the block twice. The wait took nearly eleven minutes before a harried-looking junior executive type sprinted out his door and into his Ford Focus before U-turning south toward Chicago's Loop.

Wiems had provisioned himself with two Subway sandwiches, a pair of thirty-two ounce bottles of Mountain Dew, binoculars, dark glasses, ball cap with its brim shielding his forehead, and an empty Mountain Dew bottle for urine if needed.

He maintained the same routine that day and the next two days, observing Doyle coming out of his condo each morning, usually just after seven, stretching, limbering up, then jogging at a brisk pace south for a block before turning east toward the lakefront. Wiems cautiously drove slowly in Doyle's wake before pulling in to a city lot fronting the bicycle, jogging, and walking paths. Doyle returned after some forty-five minutes each time. On the third of these mornings, Wiems watched Doyle jog slowly back to the start while chatting with a pretty young black woman also in exercise clothes. They seemed to know each other. The other two mornings, Doyle had walked directly back to his condo. This routine took an average of forty-six minutes, according to Wiems' careful calculations.

Late in the third day, Wiems returned his rental car to National's north Clark Street office, walked two blocks south to a Hertz outlet, and rented another undistinguished-looking import.

Next morning Wiems followed Doyle's Accord to the Fat City health club. Ninety minutes later, Doyle came out with a short, Jewish-looking man. Doyle walked to a nearby newsstand. Wiems, using his binoculars, saw Doyle emerge opening a copy of
Racing Daily
as he walked to his Accord. That afternoon, Wiems followed five or six car-lengths behind the Accord as it made its way out of the city and north on the Edens Expressway to Willow Road, where Doyle turned left toward Heartland Downs. At the track, Wiems let three cars go ahead of his before he approached the parking lot attendant and paid. He saw Doyle park, then drove to a row three rows back and to the left. He waited for three hours, taking an occasional stroll between the rows, until the races were over. When Doyle came out of the track, Wiems carefully trailed the Accord out of the track parking lot and onto its route back to Chicago.

Seventeen minutes later, going east on Willow Road that preparatory afternoon, Wiems spotted what he thought was the perfect spot, right before an intersection with both north and south turnoffs available. He smiled as his plan coalesced. He was confident his target had no inkling he had been followed.

Reconnaissance concluded, Wiems returned to his motel and checked out. He drove to Midway Airport in plenty of time to turn in his rental car and board a late evening flight to Kansas City. Sitting in the rear row and again in a window seat, he plugged in the earphones to avoid the chatter of the two young girls seated to his left. The one next to him in the middle seat had made a friendly attempt to engage him in conversation before takeoff. He ignored her. She gave him an angry look before turning to her friend and muttering, “What a prick!”

Once the plane was settled in the pilot's announced altitude of choice, Wiems pushed the seat-back button, rested his head, closed his eyes. There was a slight smile on his usually somber face as he reviewed what he'd learned.
Not a piece of cake. But, not all
that hard
, Wiems thought,
to kill Jack Doyle
. Then he slept all the way until the uneventful Kansas City landing.

Chapter Thirty-two

Ralph Tenuta looked up from his desk, wondering why the summer sunlight that had been streaming in his Heartland Downs office door was now blocked. He saw a hulking, thirtyish man who slowly looked around the office interior before settling his eyes on the trainer. The man wore a black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, tinted glasses. In ironic contrast to the size of its owner, Tenuta heard a high-pitched voice say, “Tenuta? Are you Ralph Tenuta?”

The trainer stood up. “Yes. Who wants to know?”

The large man crossed the office threshold, the old floor boards creaking beneath his feet.

“I'm Wendell Pilling. We need to talk.”

Without being invited, the visitor walked over to the old, worn brown leather couch. He used one big hand to flip the cat Tuxedo off it and onto the floor before sitting down. She spat out sounds of protest. When the man's wide rump landed, the sound of the creaking couch springs was nearly as loud as the insulted Tuxedo's resentful mewing.

Pilling removed his glasses. His small, brown eyes bored into Tenuta's. “I'm here because of a couple of important phone calls I've made. I don't seem to be getting across to your clients, the Burkhardts, that I intend to buy their horse, Mr. Rhinelander.
I mean buy
. I want you to help me convince them.”

Tenuta said, “You got some balls coming in here like this. Talking like this. What I know is that Charlie Burkhardt already made clear to you that he and his wife are
not selling
that colt. Didn't you get the message?”

“I don't pay any attention to messages like that,” Pilling said. “I get what I want. Period.”

Tenuta said, “Well, not this time. Listen, pal. The Burkhardts have had horses for about fifteen years. They've never had one anywhere close to the ability of Mr. Rhinelander. These people are no spring chickens. Hell, they must be in their early seventies now. They don't need your money. They'd much, much rather enjoy having their horse.”

Pilling said with a sneer, “You mean to tell me a quarter of a million dollars, my last offer, doesn't impress them? I find that hard to believe.”

“Believe it, pal. They don't want your money.”

Tenuta picked up his cell phone. “I've got business to do, Pillars, or Piles, whatever your name is. This meeting is over. Get out.”

Paul Albano, longtime assistant trainer to Tenuta, walked into the office carrying his notes of the workouts from that morning. He nearly bumped into Pilling. “Hey, sorry,” he said, looking up. “Ralph, you want to enter Mr. Rhinelander for that race Saturday? He worked dynamite this morning. Whew! He can run!”

Pilling took this in with a smirk. He turned back at the door. “Tenuta, tell your clients I'm going to make them one final offer for Mr. Rhinelander.”

Exasperated, Tenuta said, “You just don't get it. They will
not
sell. Period.”

Pilling shrugged. “There are things that can happen to make people change their minds. You probably have no idea that somebody who really knew how to manipulate the Internet could cause all kind of shit. Credit reports altered. Internet accounts hacked. Identities stolen. Electronic bank deposits and withdrawals shifted and edited. Oh,” he smiled, “a talented Internet maestro can do an awful lot.
Tell those stubborn cheeseheads
that!
”

Ralph and Paul, standing just outside the office doorway, watched Pilling's big butt disappear into the rear of a white Lincoln limousine that quickly turned past the nearby electrical horse walker and kicked dust back in its wake.

“Ralph, who the hell was that mad man? What was that all about?”

Tenuta said, “Paul, I guess I'm going to have to do my best to find out.” The trainer didn't have to spin through his worn Rolodex to dial Jack Doyle.