Money Men (18 page)

"You asshole!" Tears glistened in her eyes. "You've
never
meant anything you said! You are sick! You did the one thing to me I could never forgive, and here you are back again. Maybe you've forgotten. I was your wife and you made me turn tricks to pay off
your
debts. I became a whore to save
your
ass! Not that my life had been a bed of roses
...
but I had never been a goddamn whore. Sucking off ten stinking-fat businessmen a night until I got you off the hook.
And what did
you do? Pulled another of your capers, one of your 'operations,' and you went to prison anyway." The tears almost jumped from her eyes.

Red put his hand on her waist. He had to touch
it. It
felt the same as ever. The tears were, psychologically speaking, a good sign, he thought. The barrier was breaking down.

She sobbed loudly. Suddenly, she stuck a hand into her purse and pulled out something with a red wooden handle. "Get out!" she screamed, and stabbed toward his chest with an ice-pick. He used his hands to shield himself. The ice-pick pierced his palm. "You asshole! I hate you"' Mona shrieked.

Red sprang out of the car. The ice pick was stuck through his hand. He stared at the speared hand and gave a deep animal moan. "Bitch, bitch, dirty bitch!"

Mona started the rattly engine of the VW. He jumped out of the way. The car sped out of the parking lot.

It took a few minutes to get up the courage to pull the ice-pick out of the wound so he could drive himself to a hospital.

"How did it happen?" said a nurse in her thirties with a hair-do like Mona's. She pushed his hand into a mixture of hot water and disinfectant. It stung so much he almost passed out.

"Chopping ice in a freezer at a party," Red said. "Hated to leave. All my friends were there. Henry Winkler, Larry Hagman, the Gabors."

"Really?" She pulled his hand out of the water.

"Actually, they're my clients. I run an advertising agency. TV commercials, that sort of thing."

"Must be an interesting job." She smiled and filled a hypodermic syringe.

"I guess you could say that," he said.

The clerk was prematurely bald and attempted to hide the fact by wrapping his few remaining hairs in a circle on top of his head. He spoke, balancing a pipe between his teeth.

"Sorry, Charlie, I can't allow you to review any files unless you have a warrant or a subpoena. Federal Parole Office regulations in accordance with the privacy act. You know how it is." Having said this, he returned to his newspaper-covered desk and sat down.

Carr and Kelly walked past the clerk and found a file cabinet marked "D." Kelly pulled open the drawer. The clerk turned a page of the newspaper.

There were three files bearing the name Diamond. Only one was current.

Carr glanced quickly over reports in the file: "sociopathic personality," "reacts in a hostile manner," "blunted emotional effect" "lacks positive value judgment," "poor communicative skills."

He opened a large envelope stapled to the inside of the file. He removed a thick stack of typed pages titled "Counseling Session Transcript. Prisoner Rudolph Diamond (#40398654). True Name: Rudolph Spriggs." The first page was a statement signed by Diamond giving permission to record the session for "study purposes."

Carr read:

Counselor: Had this ever happened before?

Diamond: It happened a lot when I was a kid. I think it had something to do with the sound of a train whistle. This may sound weird, but my mother's house was near the railroad tracks and when a train whistle would blow I could feel it all the way through my body, sort of as if the sound entered through the hole in my pecker. I had this terrible feeling of fear at my mother's house. And the train whistle was part of it somehow. I had trouble urinating when I was afraid. That was my first memory of having problems taking a leak.

Counselor: And you believe this affected your working life?

Diamond: After I quit high school I went to work in a bottle factory in Oakland and when I went into the bathroom to piss...uh, urinate, I just couldn't. I couldn't relax enough to urinate when other people were around. So I quit.

Counselor: And this affected your subsequent employment?

Diamond: What would you do if you worked in a factory with one of those giant cement bathrooms? You know, lots of urinals, and every time you went in to take a leak there were other people there and you couldn't go. Like there was no way. Well, you'd do what I did. You'd quit. This happened to me over and over again. I couldn't hold a job and I started to get into trouble to get money. The first thing was the phony raffle tickets. I sold them and kept the money. I got caught. You can see that on my rap sheet there. I did twenty days. I was just a kid.

Counselor: Uh-huh. What were these other arrests...there? In the fifties.

Diamond: Pyramid schemes. You know, chain letters. At the time everyone was doing it. I didn't even know it was illegal until it was too late.

Carr skipped fifteen or so pages.

Diamond: So after I got out...it was my second prison sentence...I bought this bar in Long Beach. Nice place, but eventually guys I knew from the joint kept coming around and got me involved in phony race-track tickets. I didn't have anything to do with printing, you understand. It was a wrong-place/right-time sort of thing. They got me on a conspiracy.

Counselor: The rap sheet says accessory to murder.

Diamond: That's the way it wound up. It was an argument over the tickets. They used a gun I had behind the bar for protection...I'm not trying to make excuses. I don't want you to get the wrong idea...

Carr began flipping pages rapidly.

"He sounds like a confidence man," Kelly said.

"The urinary-problem act shows great imagination," Carr said. "I wonder if he got the private cell he wanted?"

Finally he found a prison status sheet signed by a counselor recommending that Diamond be provided with a single cell for medical reasons. "Here it is," he said.

Kelly laughed.

Carr flipped through to the last page of the
folder. It
read:

Details of Offense-Pre-Release Summary

Parolee Diamond acted as a principal in a major stock swindle involving the fraudulent sale of undeveloped tracts of land near the Colorado River. During the course of this conspiracy he was also involved in a confidence scheme involving the proposed sale of nonexistent smuggled gold to a wealthy Los Angeles jeweler. Diamond and two accomplices drove the jeweler from Las Vegas to a pay phone in San Diego to await a phone call from a supposed Mexican gold smuggler, who was to deliver the contraband. The jeweler refused to part with the money in his briefcase until he saw the gold. When the phone rang, the jeweler stepped out of the vehicle to answer it. At this point Diamond and his accomplices grabbed his briefcase from him and departed in their vehicle at a high rate of speed. The jeweler fired at Diamond's vehicle with a .38 caliber revolver, wounding the driver. The driver was subsequently admitted to a hospital near San Ysidro suffering multiple gunshot wounds. He implicated Diamond and agreed to testify for the government, as did the jeweler. Federal prosecution was authorized since Diamond and his accomplices had crossed state lines during commission of the crime. Parolee Diamond was convicted on all counts and completed the full five years of his sentence, no time off for good behavior.

Carr tore Diamond's photograph from inside the folder.

"This is our man. He's a rip-off artist," Carr said. He took the mug photos of red-haired men out of his coat pocket and flipped through them.

"What are you doing?" Kelly asked.

"Diamond's picture wasn't among the photos we were checking out. We would never have found him." Carr dropped the photos into the wastebasket.

"Here's his current address." Kelly took a pen and small note pad from his inside coat pocket. "It's 4126 Marshall Avenue. If I remember right, this should be just above Hollywood Boulevard; toiletland, U
.S.A.
" He wrote down the address and put the note pad back in his pocket.

****

EIGHTEEN

Carr closed the folder and put it back in the file drawer.

"We headed for Hollywood?" Kelly smiled and rubbed his hands.

"Not yet," said Carr, leaning against the cabinet. He stared at Diamond's mug shot. "I think we'd better talk to the U.S. attorney."

"But we don't have enough for a warrant on Diamond."

"We do for Ronnie, because we can identify him. We saw him go into the motel room. We can get a John Doe warrant for assault on a federal officer. It's best to have the warrant in hand when we make the pinch. Then there'll be no question about procedure when he goes to court."

"You mean we set up a surveillance on Diamond and wait until he meets with Ronnie,
then
make the pinch, right?"

"Right." Carr flicked Diamond's mug photo with his finger.

"If we start a surveillance," Kelly said, "we might end up following him around from now till hell freezes over and he might never meet up with Ronnie."

Carr said, "What happens if we pick up Diamond and he won't talk? You know the odds. He refuses to cop out and we have to let him go; he calls Ronnie and tips him off. Ronnie splits and we'll never find him."

Kelly rubbed his eyes. "I guess you're right. I just don't like he idea of getting the mushhead U.S. attorneys in on the case too soon. You know how they are."

Carr nodded.

"Well, I guess it's up the elevator to the Ivory Tower." Kelly sighed.

They walked past the clerk.

"Wait a second, you guys!" said the clerk. "Whataya say for the game tonight? Dodgers or Pirates?"

"Pirates all the way," Carr said.

"I hope you're right. I've got ten bucks on 'em." He folded the sports page in half

"Good luck," Carr said.

In the elevator, Kelly pushed the button for the thirteenth floor.

"Let me do the talking," Carr said.

The elevator door opened onto a large and handsomely carpeted waiting room. Smiling photos of the president and the attorney general stared at one another from spotless walls. Air conditioning made the room chilly.

A frail secretary showed them into a comfortably furnished office with a Stanford diploma on the wall. John Blair was on the phone, thick lips touching the mouthpiece. Blair was a young man with an abundance of what some would describe as baby fat: rosy cheeks, puffy neck, fraternity-house beer belly. He wore the latest gold-wire-frame spectacles. His hair was a styling-salon natural.

"Gotta go now, hon. See you at five-thirty or so, depending on the freeway, ya know." He put down the receiver and pointed to two chairs.

They sat down.

"Well, well, Charlie and Jack, the old guard of the Treasury Department." His voice was youthful. "What can I do for you this fine day?"

"I want a John Doe warrant for the guy who killed Rico de Fiore."

"Have you found the killer?" he said. He doodled on a yellow pad.

"We're starting a surveillance on a residence in Hollywood where we think he might show up. I want to have a warrant in hand when we take him just so there'll be no legal technicalities popping up later. I want to make sure there are no loopholes in this case."