Mortal Bonds (19 page)

“Come on, don’t embarrass me, okay? I gotta live here. I can’t have my tough-guy visitors having fainting spells.”

I managed a small smile. “Sorry, boss.”

“Jeez, I got cred to maintain in here.”

I took a few deep breaths. “It was the suits that did it.”

“No shit. They are ugly, aren’t they?” He laughed. Vinny was thin, gray, and ageless but had always looked good. My father would have called him a “natty” dresser. Always put together but never showy. The jumpsuit hung on him like a shopping bag.

I fought my way to some semblance of normalcy. “How you doing, Vinny? Nobody knew where you were. We asked around, but it was like you just disappeared after the old place closed. People just figured you were drinking someplace new.”

“Yeah, well. They shut down my shop on account of this bullshit over the Internet business. I don’t even want to talk about it. I told my lawyer to get me a deal, and I took it.”

“How much longer will you be here?”

“I copped to three—two and a half to go. I’m hoping it gets crowded, though, and they send some of us home early.”

“You’ve got somebody rooting for you?”

“I’ve got some friends—investors, I guess—who owe me, ’cause I neglected to mention their names when the Feds were asking. They got me a very good lawyer and they’re working pulling in favors.”

I never knew just how connected Vinny was, or with whom. He ran a betting shop over the OTB on Seventy-second Street for a bunch of years without any interference from the NYPD. Someone must have been watching his back. The place was ostensibly a private club, but that was pure fiction. They’d take anybody’s money. There was fresh coffee all day long, comfortable couches and chairs, and when Madison Square Garden put their first flat-screen TV in one of the VIP booths, Vinny already had six of them in his shop.

“And how’s things here?” I asked. “You getting by?”

“I got no problems. I’m bunked with a three-hundred-pound ex-boxer from Albania with a wife and a two-year-old kid up in Hartford. I’ve arranged for her to get a check every month. It’s not a lot, but Vllasi appreciates the gesture. No one bothers us. It’s a quiet kind of place, anyway, you know?”

I filled him in on the community news. Chitchat. Gossip. When my Pop had come up to visit me, I had found myself hanging on his stories of bar denizens I didn’t know, just to hear a kind voice talking about something almost normal. I stopped when I heard myself telling a story about MaJohn’s mother’s knee operation.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why you would care about that.”

He smiled. “Nah, it’s okay. Tell John, if she needs anything, she should call my cousin, Al.” He rattled off a phone number. “He works in Boca. He’ll take care of her.”

“Is he in the same business as you?” I could not imagine why an eighty-five-year-old widow with bad pins would need a bookie.

Vinny laughed. “No. Al’s legit. Well, quasi-legit. He’s a medical supplies distributor. He can get her a walker, or whatever she needs. One of those go-cart things. Scooter? Whatever.”

What could be more profitable than your own casino? A medical supply house in Florida.

“I’ll pass that on,” I said.

“So, give me something juicy. You working on anything? Something with lots of rich people getting screwed, that’s what I want to hear.” He gave a mad grin.

“I was hoping to pick your brain.”

“I got the time.”

“What I say goes no further.”

“Come on, who you talking to? Tell me a story. A good one.”

“I’ve got just the thing,” I said.

I filled him in on the last three weeks of my life—from the helicopter ride to Newport through dropping the Kid at school and convincing the formidable Mrs. Carter, who guarded the front desk and logged in every student, teacher, and parent who passed in front of her, that the two guys in suits and Terminator sunglasses were okay and would be hanging around outside all day to see my son back home. I left out the debacle of the theater, because I didn’t think Vinny would care. And I left out Skeli’s good-bye picnic, because it was none of his business.

He interrupted with a few questions as I went along, but when I was done, he was quiet for a long time.

“So,” he finally said. “What are you thinking?”

“Well, first, I take it as a given that no one is telling me everything they know.”

“You include your buddy Paddy in that?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Right.” He gave a slow blink of approval.

“The dead lawyer is important.” I described the method of meeting in the café and returning to the bank to place the bonds back in the safe-deposit box. “But I don’t see yet how to bust it open. He’d have a key, I guess.”

Vinny was shaking his head. “But that leaves a trail, don’t you see? The bank clocks in every visitor to a safe-deposit box. There’d be a paper trail. Video cameras. I don’t buy it. These guys are too smart for this.”

“They’re passing tens of millions of dollars of bearer bonds at a time, Vinny. They’d want to keep them fairly secure, ya think?”

“When you went away, you probably stashed a little something for when you got out, am I right?”

I nodded. “And my good watch.”

“And did you put all that in a safe-deposit box?”

“No,” I said, ready to concede the point. For the two years I was away as a guest of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, my father had kept my briefcase “hidden” on a shelf in my old bedroom upstairs over his bar in College Point. The briefcase had held fifty thousand dollars in crisp fifties, still in the bank wrappers.

“Whyzat?”

I was being schooled again. “So there would be no record for the Feds. They’d be able to trace a box.”

He smiled.

“Okay,” I said, “but I wasn’t dealing in billions. I had fifty grand in my old briefcase. I left it in my Pop’s apartment. He’s lived there fifty years and never had a break-in. I think it’s the safest place in the universe.”

“So why would this lawyer do things any different?”

“Size matters. I would think they’d be a bit smarter about it than I was.”

He shook his head. “You’re thinking like an investor. These guys aren’t collecting interest. They’re
hiding
principal. Their greatest fear is what? Losing their shirt? No way. Their only concern is having some cop put together an evidentiary trail. They’d rather keep the money under a mattress. They can always get more money. What they won’t be able to buy is their way out of prison.”

“We’re talking about one hundred million dollars. No one takes that kind of hit and brushes it off.”

“Where do you hide sand?”

“What?”

“At the beach. You with me? When you’re that big, your number-one problem is visibility, not security. Trust me.”

“All right, I hear you. But I’m not a hundred percent. Yet. And I still have a half-dozen other trails to chase down.”

He shrugged. “Go back and talk to the girlfriend. She’s the only one speaking the truth, the way I hear you tell it. She knows more than she said, but she may not know that it’s important.”

I dreaded going back there. “She’s nucking futz.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Gotcha.”

“First, you’ve got to eighty-six the muscle. They don’t work for you, they work for this other guy who works for your client. When something bad happens, they’re not gonna be there for you—or the Kid.”

“Any suggestions?”

“You want me to take care of it? It’s done. There’s people who owe me favors. Let me talk to Vllasi. He’s very creative this way.”

•   •   •

THE BIG WHITE SUV
with the dark tinted windows picked me up as I drove out of the forest. It came out of the driveway of an abandoned house, the roof sagging so badly it resembled a pagoda. The driver hung back three or four cars once we were up on the Thruway, but he was still there as I came across the GW Bridge and turned down the West Side Highway.

I lost him getting off the Highway at Seventy-ninth Street. Or he kept on going because he’d never been following me in the first place. Or it was a succession of similar-looking vehicles. Or a second vehicle picked up the tail. Or I was turning into a first-class paranoid. I left the rental in the Ansonia garage and stopped by Hanrahan’s before heading home.

A
ngie and I waved to the Town Car as it pulled away from the curb, taking Mamma and Tino to the airport. The trunk held two suitcases more than when they had arrived—Angie had made sure to take Mamma shopping. Our smiles lasted until the car was halfway down the block.

“I don’t think there is much for us to say right now,” Angie said. “I don’t know why, but I thought you would be more supportive.”

Two more weeks, I reminded myself. Two weeks and she would be gone, back to Louisiana. I could do it. I could make it two weeks.

“I’m going to be busy wrapping up some work things the next few days. Have some fun with the Kid. I’ll be out of your hair.”

“You’re not going to miss his graduation?!”

It wasn’t really a question—more an expression of annoyance.

“It’s not graduation. There’s no ceremony. No awards. It’s his last day of school.”

“And you would miss it?!” She did it again.

There had been a send-off the night before. I should have enjoyed it. The Kid stayed home with Heather and the bodyguards, while Angie and I took her mother and Tino out to Brooklyn—to Peter Luger’s for steak. Pop and his honey met us there. I immediately liked her. They were both a bit formal with each other, but also comfortable—as though they’d been together years instead of weeks. Mamma had had two martinis and declared the creamed spinach to be “sinful.” Judging by how much of it she had put away, “sinful” was a supreme compliment. Tino and my father swapped funny horror stories about the demands of dealing with customers in a retail service business. Angie and I had sat at opposite ends of the table and did our best to pretend we weren’t there. It was the kind of night I would have enjoyed if Skeli had been there. A bit loose, a bit liquid, surrounded by funny, interesting people that I liked. But Angie—by her presence alone—managed to suck every bit of pleasure out of it.

“I’ll be there,” I said. “And listen, I don’t like those bodyguards any better than you do, but they are there to keep the Kid safe. Just let them do their jobs.”

“This is some paranoid fantasy you’ve come up with to interfere with my time alone with my son. I will give this nonsense just two more days, and then I will put a stop to it.”

She gave me a smug, victorious smile and walked back into her building.

I shook my head three or four times, took some deep breaths, unclenched my fists, and went home.

I had just walked in the door when the house phone rang—the front desk.

“There are two men here to see you, Mr. Stafford. I thought I should check before I sent them up.” The concierge sounded nervous.

“Thank you, Richard. Did they give their names?”

“No, but they say they were sent by Vinny. Is this okay with you?”

“Keep them there, Richard. I’ll be right down.”

I saw immediately what had made Richard nervous. While Blake’s thugs were big men, muscle-bound and angry-looking—like giant trolls—these two were slender, wiry, and dark. They were polite, a bit formal, and oozed menace. I could see the trolls beating someone to death in slow motion, taking their time. These two would just get it over with.

“Jason Stafford,” I said, holding out a hand.

They nodded in unison. They both wore expensive-looking light leather jackets, despite the heat outside. The darker of the two stepped forward. His eyebrows met in a single straight line, further defining a face that was all planes and angles.

“You call me Tom,” he said in a coarse Slavic-sounding accent. He smiled without warmth or charm or humor. “Is not my name, but is easy for you to say.” He took my hand and shook. It felt like gripping a boa constrictor—all muscle.

“Vinny sent you?” I said.

“We have mutual friends.” He enjoyed saying the words.

The other man hung back, his eyes occasionally flickering side to side, keeping the entire lobby in view from where he stood.

“Does he have a name?” I asked.

Tom shrugged. “Is not important.” He spoke for a moment in a language that might have been Russian—or any of a half-dozen other Eastern European languages. The other man smiled.

“You call me Ivan,” he said.

They both laughed quietly. I joined in. It seemed the politic thing to do.

“Follow me,” I said.

We talked as we walked up Amsterdam. Other pedestrians tended to move out of our way, but when we overtook and briefly startled a twenty-something couple, strolling and holding hands, Tom and Ivan apologized in an almost courtly manner.

“What do I pay you two?” I said.

“No pay,” Tom said.

I stopped. So did they. “That doesn’t work,” I said. “I need to know you’re working for me. If I’m not paying the bills, how do I know you’re going to be there when I need you?”

Tom looked bored. “No worries.”

“But I am worried. You guys are going to be guarding my son. That tops anything else. I’m no Donald Trump, but I’m ready to pay. Name your price.”

Tom thought while Ivan kept scanning the street and sidewalk. “Okay, Mr. Trump. You pay.”

“Fine,” I said. “Now, how much?”

“One dollar.”

I had the good sense to see that I had been outmaneuvered. This was a gift from Vinny, and I should have the grace to accept it.

“For the two of you?” I said.

Tom almost smiled. “Each.” Then he did smile.

“Are there any more of you at home? I want twenty-four-seven on my son. And I may want someone else guarded.”

Tom rattled off a cell-phone number. “You call. One hour.”

“Same rate?”

He shrugged. Of course.

I explained about seeing the Kid to school, watching out front, seeing him home, and keeping watch in the building. “Maybe one in the hall. One in the apartment. It’s not easy to get by the front desk, but it’s happened. How many shifts do I need?”

“No shifts. You have us. Is enough.”

I believed him.

•   •   •

THE CHANGING
of the guard was awkward—Blake’s men initially refused to leave and I had to call Virgil to order some firm instructions. It was further proof, if I needed it, that Blake’s people didn’t work for me and getting Vinny’s associates to act in their stead was the right move.