The Scarlet Ruse (3 page)

"Willy?"

"I don't know how much you know about the way things are. For all I know you think that soft, romantic crock of shit, The Godfather, was for real."

"I thought it was real, like a John Wayne western."

"There's hope for you. All the action is divided up. There are independents, and when they get big enough, they are absorbed or smashed. There are three neutral areas. Places where anybody can go who is part of the national action and not get pressured. Sanctuaries. Miami, Vegas and Honolulu. There are hits sometimes, but outsiders, amateurs. Discipline situations. 'Do not crap in your own nest' is the motto. There's enough for everybody in the sanctuaries. That's how come you have maybe nine different groups from elsewhere, owning lots of pieces of property and pieces of action along the Beach here. Like there are twelve groups operating side by side in Vegas. Other areas are strictly territorial. That's how come all the trouble in New York lately. Now suppose every one of the nine organizations operating here sent down their own bag men and bankers and enforcers? It would get too hairy. People would start pushing. People would push back. It would stop being a safe place for the topside people to come and relax, and it would hurt trade. So there's been a working arrangement for maybe thirty years. The local group has their own operations, like a franchise area, but you can see how it wouldn't be fair to cut the out-of-town groups out of the picture entirely because a certain substantial piece of business comes through their owning certain situations here."

"Example?"

"Okay, say that Minneapolis has substantial points in a couple of hotels and owns a steak house franchise and a taxi company. The local group will be scoring from every part of the operations. Hookers and games and drugs at the hotels on top of linen service, union dues, kickbacks, dozens of angles. And they will work the steak houses and the taxi company pretty good too. So it works almost like a money-room skim. The extra costs of doing business get built into the books as legitimate expenses, and then out of the unrecorded cash flow, an equal amount gets bundled up and couriered to Minneapolis. The profit is minimized, which cuts taxes, and the rebate is under the table, ready for more investment."

"And somebody has to be the bookkeeper and enforcer, somebody everybody agrees on, to see that the skim is honest?"

"For the last six years, Frank Sprenger. Phoenix. Before that it was Bunny Colder, for years and years. He died of a stroke. I heard that some kinky girlfriend got him smashed and then ran a sharpened piano wire into his brain through the corner of his eye, but nobody ran an autopsy to check it out."

"What is Sprenger like?"

"I'll tell you what he's like. He's like exactly the right man for the job. He doesn't use anything, not even booze or tobacco or coffee. He's a body freak. Not muscle building. Conditioning. He lives like a good heavyweight six weeks away from a title shot. Except for women. He takes care of more than his share. He spends a lot of time crosschecking the action. He's found some people clipping off a little as the money went by them, and they are not seen around anymore. I hear the local group has stopped trying to con him, because it isn't safe or healthy."

"What's his cover?"

"Investment consultant. He has a second-floor office on Lincoln Road. He's in the yellow pages. He pays his taxes. I think maybe he has some legitimate clients. He's a careful man."

I waited until I thought of the right kind of hypothetical question. "Willy, I want you to listen to some stuff I am going to make up and tell me if it could happen. Let's say that in the past year and a half Frank Sprenger has been buying important paintings. He has been using an expert and paying a fee for his judgment. Four hundred thousand worth of art. It's been going into a storage warehouse.

"Possible?"

"Sure," Willy said. "Especially if it's on a cash basis."

"Say it is."

"Money makes more problems every day. You hear how they want banks to report everything over five thousand? Now they are beginning to crack the Swiss and get the numbers. The islands used to be good, but what's going to happen to the Bahamas, the Caymans, Jamaica the next couple of years? It's very hard to set up a corporation and feed cash into it in such a way you can get past an audit. You put cash in a jar in your back yard, it isn't working for you. It's shrinking all the time it's buried. Dry-cleaning money gets more expensive all the time. One way they are using lately is you buy yourself a broker, one who'll fake back records for the sake of the commission and a little present. Then you set up a buy five years ago for something that has gone up like eight hundred percent. Then you have the sale records faked too and pay capital gains, and what you have left is legitimate and you can invest it legitimate. You have to be your own fence, for God's sake. So why not paintings? I like it. He would be handling it for one of the out-of-town groups or individuals. He handles investment money right here. The local group has legal talent he can use. Raw land has been good. Pieces of home-building outfits have been good. In-and-out marinas have been good."

"How much would he be supervising in a year? I mean, how much would the total skim be, the amount he'd be watching?"

"McGee, this has to be absolutely horseback. I could be off, way way off."

"Take a guess."

"Well… working it backward and saying that the total take for the Florida group in this area is seventy-five million with fifteen million expenses, and maybe twenty-five percent of the net is reimbursed on account of special ownership… Sprenger keeps an eye on maybe fifteen million."

"And invests that much?"

"Oh, hell no! The groups mostly have got their own way of handling a cash rebate. It goes back by messenger. Frank might have to find a home down here for one mil, or one and a half, or even two."

"Okay. Now here is the final suppose. Suppose that right now all those paintings in that bonded warehouse are fake."

He snapped his head around, eyes wide open for the first time that evening. "You have some weird sense of fun there, McGee."

"Think out loud."

"Well… Sprenger wouldn't know it. He wouldn't get into that kind of a con. Unless, of course, he had orders to spoil somebody's day. But I don't think they'd use him for that. He's too good doing what he does. Okay. Sprenger doesn't know. Then he's dead."

"Literally?"

"Literally. Because there are only two choices when the news gets out. Sprenger is either getting cute or getting stupid. And they can't take a chance either way. The only reverse leverage he has is what he knows. So he has to be taken dead before he can get a chance to use it. It's a standard risk. A man like Sprenger makes as much money as the president of Eastman Kodak. He accepts the occupational risk. If he goofs, he gets more than fired. And if he goofs and has any small chance of covering himself before the news gets out, he would gut his brother, peddle his sister and feed his father and his godfather to alligators, a hunk at a time, to earn that small chance."

"Why are you so sure Sprenger will do what he's told to do?"

"Where have you been? They never let anybody close to the money unless they've got a good lock on him. Sprenger will always be some kind of errand boy. Somewhere there is something in writing or on tape or on film that some prosecutor can't ignore. Like with the talent they own. Nobody goes looking for a new manager if the one you already have owns your ass."

In silence he looked down at the eroded beach. He said dolefully, "They want to pump umpty-seven billion yards of sand in front of all the hotels, a big beach like in 1919 they had. Bond issues, big assessments, more taxes, just so all the clowns can go parading by on public beach land for maybe two years before a hurricane takes it all back out to sea. And after next season this old crock hotel will need a quarter mil of maintenance and redecorating. With luck I'm out by April."

"Willy?"

"Uh?"

"You've got me wondering. You have to get a rebate from Sprenger."

"I should sidestep it and give up the edge?"

"But how?"

"Maybe there is a little spin-off group of like investors in St. Louis, and maybe they have sixteen points. So a hundred percent of the skim goes there, and they take twenty-two percent instead of sixteen, in return for running it in and out of some accounts before it ends up in something which could be called maybe Acme Management Associates or Scranton Development Corporation."

"Which could be you?"

"Not entirely, but mostly. There's no other way I can go and still make out. You can't fight the establishment."

"Funny thing to call it."

"Why? It's the way things are. They put a night bell captain on. I don't have to pay him a dime. What's your pleasure? Hash-candy from Calcutta? A Greek virgin? Table-stakes poker? Cuban cigars? A quick abortion? Mexican gold? An albino dwarf? If you can afford the ticket, you've got it. I can't get rid of him. The cops probably know he's dealing. But if they charge him, if the case is airtight, it still goes all the way to jury, and after the jury is picked, it takes two phone calls. Or three. Cash money if you vote to acquit, Pancho. And if Alfred gets convicted, you'll come home from work some day and find something that'll give you a weak stomach the rest of your life. Who stands up to that? Nobody. The klutz with no connections cops a plea, and they process him into the slammer. Alfred, my special employee, will never do a day of time unless he gets smartass and they want to settle him down. Nobody really gives a goddamn anymore, McGee. Everybody wants to keep his own ass safe from harm." He paused and made a sound which was like a suppressed gag. Maybe it was laughter. I'd never heard Willy Nucci laugh before, so I couldn't tell. "Even me," he said. "Especially me."

He came reluctantly back to the lesser reality of here and now and, as I drove north up A-l-A, he told me he had a confrontation with urchins. They had a needle-sharp icepick and thought a protection price of five dollars per tire was a good place to start the bargaining.

"We had a nice conversation," Meyer said.

"You had a nice conversation."

"I told them that theirs was a profession mentioned in the first writings of mankind over thirty centuries ago. Roving bands of barbarians would demand that a village pay tribute, or they would sack it."

"They listened to the lecture?"

"A discussion, not a lecture. Questions and answers. There is a parallel, of course, in Vietnam, where the Viet Cong would spare villages in return for food, shelter, and information. And I told them about the Barbary pirates extracting tribute from our merchant vessels. Then they went away finally. After they were gone, I remembered we hadn't decided on any dollar figure. I guess they forgot."

"Three of them."

"Age twelve, thirteen, and fourteen."

"Meyer, did it ever occur to you that one of those half-size hoodlums could have shoved an icepick into you?"

I could sense he was genuinely startled and upset. "Into me? But why?"

Why indeed? Conversely, why not? I don't know exactly what it is about Meyer. Sometimes, for fun, when we have been at someone's home, I have seen him do his St. Francis bit, when there has been a bird feeder visible from a window. Meyer goes and stands a few feet from the feeder. The birds come back. They look him over. They talk about him. And in a few minutes they start landing on him. Once when we took a runover dog to a veterinarian, the man told Meyer he had good hands. Meyer could hold the dog still. It snapped at the doctor. I have been on the beach with Meyer and five hundred people and had a frantic girl run directly to Meyer to tell him she was hallucinating and please help me, please. It is a rare attribute, but not all that rare. Lots of people have it in varying degrees. Maybe it is an echo of the remote past when we all lived in the peaceable kingdom. We should find out what it is, how to increase the aptitude, how to teach it to others. It is symptomatic of our times that no one is studying this wild card, nobody thinks it important. In an icepick world, any kind of immunity is crucially important. Any avenue of loving kindness needs some directional signs.

I went up A-l-A looking for a place I had not been to in a long time. Meyer had never been there. It was near Hallandale. I know I made the right turn. I cruised a few blocks. Everything looked strange. I put my old electric blue pickup truck next to a gas island where electronic pumps squatted like skeptical Martians. After extravagant admiration, and several questions about Miss Agnes, the attendant let me ask my question.

"Huh? Oh sure. Hell, it's been maybe two years. That old house was right down there where that big red and white chicken is flapping its wings. Chicky-Land. Let me see. It was Rosa and… and…"

"Vito."

"Right! I took the old lady there plenty of times on special occasions. They could handle maybe twenty-four people, tops. Reservations only. You never knew what you'd get for dinner, but by God it was always delicious and always more than you could eat. They treated you like guests in their home."

"What happened?"

He frowned as he cleaned the high windshield. "Something about the zoning and all. They started giving them fits. Rewire the place, then redo the plumbing, then put in some kind of sprinkler system. Then change the kitchen over somehow. They say somebody wanted that land. Every time something had to be done, they'd have to close until it was all okay and approved. Then Rosa had some kind of breakdown, and Vito went down to a meeting and broke the nose on one of the commissioners. They jailed him, but some of his old customers with clout got him out and got it all quieted down. They went away someplace. I heard one of the commissioners was in the group that bought up that whole two blocks for the shopping plaza and Chicky-Land."

"If you wanted to find a meal that good right now, where would you go?" I asked him.

He took my money and made change as he thought it over. Finally he said, "Damn if we just don't eat that good anymore anywhere. Funny, sort of. Big, rich country like this. Everything starting to taste like stale sawdust. Maybe it's just me."

"We are all living in chicky land," I told him.

Back in the car, heading home, I told Meyer about the little sculpture garden Vito and Rosa Grimaldi had fixed up. White cement statues of swooning maidens and oddly proportioned animals. With a dozen complicated floodlights which all kept changing color, focused on the statuary and the three small fountains and the plantings. "So incredibly vulgar, it was somehow very touching."

"As vulgar as that big red and white electric chicken?"

Meyer is often unanswerable, an annoying habit.

We ate in one of the less offensive steak houses, at a table made from an imitation, wooden hatch cover. They are sawing down forests, strapping thick green planks together with rusty iron, beating hell out of them with chains and crowbars, dipping them in a dark muddy stain, then covering the whole thing with indestructible transparent polymer about a quarter inch thick. Instant artifact.

We talked our way up, over, across and around the Sprenger situation, after I had given him the Willy Nucci perspective.

It was agreed that Sprenger had the contacts to get an accurate reading on Hirsh Fedderman before opening negotiations. So it was possible that he could have set Hirsh up, that by devising a way of switching the rarities, he had invented a way of doubling his money. The stuff had a ready market. And Hirsh would pay instead of run. But it did not seem to be Sprenger's style, even without knowing the man. If he wanted to play tricks and games, wouldn't he rather play them in his own jungle?

We decided that if we could figure out how the switch had been made-and that might involve walking Hirsh and Miss Mary Alice through a typical bank visit complete with philatelic props-it might be possible to work backward from the method to the conniver.

Which would mean letting Mary Alice McDermit know for the first time that important stuff was missing.

"I’d say she's about twenty-seven," Meyer told me. "One of those big, slow, sweet, gentle girls. You know the type? Dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes, expression always on the edge of a smile. A beautiful disposition. Five years with Hirsh. I think I heard him say the other woman had been there fifteen years. She would be close to forty. Jane Lawson. A service widow. Teenage kids, I think. Small woman, quick and cranky and very smart. I don't think Mary Alice has any children. I'm sure of it. She is separated from her husband. This is the way I read that store and the relationship. They are dependent on Hirsh and on the job. He pays them more than they could get elsewhere. So between them they make it up to him by making that little store pay off. It's kind of a family, the three of them. They take care of each other."

We both agreed that any frontal approach to Frank Sprenger had an unhealthy flavor. Nucci had marked him high for hard, high for smart. He was in a slot where he had to be suspicious of any approach from any direction.

Meyer came up with one faintly promising thought.

"Even though those aren't famous rarities he bought for Sprenger, not things any dealer would recognize on sight, maybe there is some kind of way of identifying them. I don't know enough about it. But did you notice that Philatelic Foundation certificate he showed us? There was a photograph glued to it, and an embossing seal used. If just one of those things can be traced…"

"There were numbers in the margin of those blocks of four and six he showed us."

"We need to know more about it, Travis."

"Do we?"

He leaned forward and peered at me very intently. "Hmmm. A kind of disapproval? That's what's bothered me most. Why should Travis McGee give a faint damn what happens to an elderly party who isn't too careful whom he deals with and inevitably gets stung? The desirable quality of shining innocence isn't there this time. And is it a total disaster? He has a place to go, people to look after him. You could get involved, but it would be going through motions."

"Sometimes it isn't any more than that."

"Are you saying no?"

"Not quite yet."

"But you might?"

"It is a distinct possibility."

He looked tired. He sighed. He pushed a piece of gristle around his plate and finally hid it under his potato skin. I caught the eye of the redcoat who had served us. He had saved up all his cordiality for the critical moment of check and tip. The service had been indifferent, the orders not quite correct. What do you do? If you are cross, tired, and immature, you take it out on the waiter. The world is not enhanced to any measurable degree by one, or by one million, confrontations with venal, lazy waiters. And it impedes the processes of digestion. So you compute the tip and leave in good order and try to remember never to return.

But it had been one more smear on an already dingy day. All day I had been trying not to think of the eviction notice. But it was in the back of my mind. Willy Nucci had depressed me more than I had been willing to admit. He wanted to get out, and he was not at all sure he could. So, out of accumulations of anxiety, he had talked and talked and talked. The old men in the old bar had depressed me. And children with icepicks are not amusing. And I wished I'd gone to eat at Grimaldis' when Vito and Rosa were in trouble. I might have been able to help. It was easy to see that I had a new remorse. It was one of the night thoughts of the future. If I had only… I have a long list of those.

After Meyer had gone to his home afloat, I made myself a hefty nightcap and turned the lights off and went up to the sundeck in a ratty old blue robe and sat at the topside controls, bare feet braced on the dew-damp mahogany. It was a soft night. Car lights, boat lights, dock lights, star light. Sound of traffic and sound of the sea. Smell of salt and smell of hydrocarbons. The Flush wind-swayed under me and nudged against a fender.

"Hey, McGee? McGee?" she called from the dock.

I got up and went aft and looked down at Jenny Thurston under the dock lights, in basque shirt, baggy shorts, baseball cap, and ragged boat shoes.

"Hey, is it really true?" she asked.

"Come on aboard. Want a drink?"

"I got most of this here can of beer, thanks."

She came up topside and took the other pilot chair, beside me, and swiveled it around to face me in the night. "I got back around five, and they showed me in the paper, and all of them were bitching about it. I looked for you to check it out."

"It's true enough, Jen."

"Well, goddamn them! Nobody is going to move me ashore, McGee. I was born on a boat. We'll have to find a place where they're not trying to iron everybody out flat. Maybe down in the Keys?"

"Maybe."

"But it won't be the same as here. Never."

Jenny lives aboard a roomy old Chris and paints aboard her. Jenny paints three paintings. One is of a beach with a long cresting wave, sandpipers, and overhanging palms. One is of gulls in the wind, teetering over the abandoned, stove-in hulk of an old dory on a rocky beach. The last is of six old pilings at low tide, with weed and barnacles on the exposed part, with four brown pelicans perched on individual pilings, and two more sailing in to land on the empty ones. She paints them in varying sizes and frames them in different styles, in order to have a useful range of prices. They all sell. They hang in untold hundreds of northern living rooms, all signed in the bottom right corner. Jennifer Thurston.

She is chunky, forthright, salty, and loyal to her friends. She paints as many paintings as she needs, in order to get along. She has pretty eyes and good legs. From time to time, sturdy young men move in with her, aboard the West Bank. The average tour of duty has been about three months. The old timers have learned to estimate the probable date of departure very accurately. They detect in the young man a certain listlessness, a sallowness, a general air of stupor.

So we sat in the night and talked about old times and people long gone. Sam Taggert. Nora Gardino. A girl named Skeeter. Puss Killian. Remember when… Hey, what about the time… Were you around when…

It was all nostalgia, sweet and sad, and it was good therapy. Sometimes you need that special kind of laughter.

I went down the ladderway with her and walked aft to the gangplank. I bent and kissed her and felt her mouth sweeten and flower under the pressure when she grabbed hold to make it last longer. She sighed as I straightened, and she said, "Sometimes I wisht I didn't have my rule about sleeping with my friends."