Payback (24 page)

There was silence for a time.

Mitchell made the turn at Suvretta Haus and headed into town. “On the other hand, whatever you do want …” he said.

“A pepperoni pizza.”

“Seriously, Mack. I owe you anything you want.”

“A pepperoni pizza and a half-million bucks.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“
Okay
?” Mack threw back his head now and laughed. “That's beautiful. What happens? You want to pull over now and write me out a check?”

“It's more difficult than that, but I can do it.”

“You can do it in your hat,” Mack said. “Hey listen. Get it straight. You don't
owe
me a fuckin thing, man. You didn't
do
anything to me, man. What happened to me was chance. It was physics, okay? Laws of falling bodies.” He lit the cigarette. “We were dice coming out of a shaker that day, and that's everything that happened.”

“I don't think so,” Mitchell said.

“What else?”

“I don't know. I think it's … murkier than that.”

“Yeah? Well you can turn it into anything you want. What're you lookin for, kiddo? A crutch …? a whip …? a cop-out …? a cross …? A half a million bucks?” Mack waited. “Okay—you want to talk a little murk?”

Mitchell didn't answer.

“See, for a long time, I went to bed with that story. I mean, bedded it, kitty. Unnatural Relations—you follow what I'm saying? I groped it all over and it fucked me up the ass.
Then
I could turn around and bitch I'd been raped.—Okay?” Mack grinned. “Got the picture on the wall? I was victimized virtue. I was the victim and you were the victor and there wasn't anything I could do about it. No. I take it back. I could do smack … booze … robbery …” He laughed. “And I could pass it off to you. ‘Look what you did to me.' ‘Look what you made me do.'”

“Yeah,” Mitchell said.

“
Yeah?
Are you
nuts?
”

“No.”

“That is crap. That is
Mickey
Mouse crap. That is not even bullshit, that is mouse turds, buddy. That is small-time shit. You can trust me,” Mack said, “because I've shoveled it for years. I have shoveled it to Mecca. I have slouched towards Anaheim, the poet might've put it. I have worshipped, as it were, at the great shrine of the great mouse, and I've been hit with revelation. I was out in California—seeing visions of sugarplums dancing in my head—and then suddenly it hit me. I said, Let it go. He's got nothing to do with you. I said, Let it go, and these little black pellets came tumbling out of my ears, that's how full of it I was. So no—to get back to where we started this discussion—you don't owe me a fucking thing. I want to earn it, okay?” Mack cocked his head. “I want the half-mil reward.”

Mitchell looked up at him. “You know where he went?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, that's a start,” Mitchell said.

***

Carol said to Burt, “Would you
please
get up and call him?”

Standing with her arms tight-folded on her chest.

“Christ. Call him what?” Burt said. “I gotta tell you something. Remind you of something. It was
you
that called your brother to begin with—remember? So it's your responsibility.” He was trying to watch a Lakers game.

Carol turned it off. Not only that but she was holding the remote, and the set was so modern it didn't have a knob. Burt stood up and said, “Give it to me.” Carol turned and threw it out the window.

“If you call him,” Carol said, “I'll go down there and get it. If you don't, Burt, I'll throw it in the swimming pool. Now …” she said, smiling as she handed him the phone.

***

The Diamond was alive. A Golden Age rockfest blasted from the jukebox and bounced off the walls and whanged around the tables and a bar six-deep in international adolescence. Rusty came over now and grimaced his surprise, at the blacked-over faces and the cat-burglar caps, and said, “Christ, is this a stickup?”

“Basically it's more like a wash-up,” Mitchell said. “You got a powder room?”

“Over by the kitchen. Hurry up. Before you spook the whole atmosphere.”

“Spook it?” Mitchell said. “We got so many rape-fantasies going, you could warm yourself for years. Be grateful.”

“And try not to ruin all the towels.”

“Hey listen. I got another problem,” Mitchell said.

“I don't think I want to know about your problems anymore. They look dangerous.”

“No. Very easy,” Mitchell said. “Your friend Paolo-the-pilot.”

“What about him?”

“I wondered if you knew where he was going.”

“No.” Rusty looked at him slowly. “Is he gone?”

“On a chopper,” Mitchell said. “An Executaire.”

“Yeah. That was Paolo,” Rusty said. “Only where he was going, even Paolo wouldn't know. He gets instructions on board.”

“You got a phone?” Mitchell said.

“In the men's room. And I only got one roll of towels.”

***

Mitchell hung up and then closed Jackie's phonebook and leaned against the wall. Mack looked at him: “So?”

“He says he doesn't know.”

“Yeah. Either that or he
says
he doesn't know.”

Mitchell thought it over. “What difference does it make?”

“If he
knows
,” Mack said, “we go right back over there and kick him in the balls. We say,
Now
… where's Jackie? We kick him in the balls again and Frangie says—”

“Ouch.”

“Beautiful. The trouble with you is, you're chicken. But we know that. Don't we.”

Mitchell filled a sink and then handed back the phone book: Jackie's initials on a Cartier
Must
. “You want to go back again to pitbulls and goons?”

“Hey listen,” Mack told him. “For half a million bucks?”

“Buys a hell of a funeral.”

“Yeah. I suppose.”

Mack filled a sink.

Mitchell said, “You think it's gonna do us any good?”

“The
phone
book? It's got about four hundred names. We got … how many hours?”

“Thirty-nine.” Mitchell punched the dispenser on the wall. It promised him soap but it handed him a quantity of perfumed sand. Not enough of it either. Mack said, “Asshole,” and ripped it off the wall, poured some powder in the sink and then whipped it into foam. He shrugged. “So you want to try the whorehouse in Paris?”

Mitchell grabbed the soap. “Or how about Vienna?”

“Maybe. I don't know. Only why would he want to leave Tahiti-in-the-snow to go back to his apartment.”

“With an Uzi,” Mitchell said. “What I'm starting to think … he got the Uzi from Frangie.”

“I don't know,” Mack said. “Maybe Frangie gave a Bring Your Own Uzi party, huh? I'm not up on what's in.”

Mitchell rubbed his face. The only thing that seemed to be happening was that his hands were getting black. Mack walked over to the towel dispenser now, sabotaged the lock with a nifty-looking pick, and then jimmied out the roll. He brought it to the sink and then squinted. “Or somebody else is, huh?”

“Giving a Bring Your Own Uzi party.”

“Yeah. I mean, bring it, then leave it. I can see Jackie as a gunrunner but he's no fuckin commando. Gets your clothes all sweaty.”

“Mr. Vanity.”

“True. He do admire his own ass.” Mack grabbed the towel again and deftly, one-handed, unfurled it in the sink. “So you want to try Paris? We could split,” he said flatly. “I could go to the whorehouse and you could go to Vienna.”

“Or you could go to Argentina and I could go to the cops.”

“That's a notion,” Mack said.

They were silent for a time.

“Caracas,” Mack said. “Is that in Argentina?”

“No. Venezuela.”

“So what's in Argentina?”

“Hitler,” Mitchell said. “Evita. Buenos Aires.”

“Then forget it,” Mack said. “I had something more temperate in mind anyway.—Anyway, I'd like to be the cockroach on the wall when you're impressing all the cops. You got what?”

Mitchell turned.

“Oh hey. Forget
me
, man. I'm doing a road company of
Evita.—
What else you got?”

“Well …” Mitchell looked at him. “I guess I got a phoned-in anonymous tip.”

“They're gonna love it,” Mack said. “No shit. They're gonna mobilize NATO over that. No kidding.”

Mitchell laughed.

There was nothing but the slosh-sounds of washing for a while.

“Besides—you don't even know what country Jackie's in. What continent.”

“No, he's in Europe,” Mitchell said. “Within six hundred miles.”

“You know that.”

“Yeah. I know the range of that chopper. And he's not about to switch to a commercial airliner. Not with an Uzi.—Okay?”

“Okay, that's a start,” Mack said.

26

Cy went to see his lawyer, Roger Parfrey, in his downtown office.

The company was so old and had been there for so long that the neighborhood had gone down and come up again half a dozen times. It was a company so old that one of its first clients had been Eagle-Lion Studios. Old-line but hip. Show biz but Wasp. Roger, for instance, was a guy in a conservative Brooks Brothers flannel, had the thin blond hair and the thin blond lips and the cold blue eyes and could talk about stock debentures on the one hand and where to get a good line of coke on the other. Old-line but hip.

Roger, in a double-breasted gray flannel suit and a turkey-red tie, in a wood-paneled office with the Old English hunting prints lined around the wall, saying, “So—that's the story?”

Cy said, “I swear it on my mother, it's the truth.”

Roger scratched his chin and said, “The boy who cried truth.—All right,” he said. “Go on. What's your question?”

“My
ques
tion,” Cy said, “is I'm sitting with a quarter-million dollars in my head and should I put it in my hand. That's my
ques
tion, Roger. I've got a quarter-million profit. That's if I move
now
. Three o'clock tomorrow comes and all bets are off. I've got expired options. Zip. Nada.” Cy looked at Roger who was just sitting there; bland. “All right,” Roger said.

“All
right?
”

“What's your question?”

“My
ques
tion,” Cy said, “is what the hell should I be doing? What am I getting into here? What kind of position am I in?”

“Oh.” Roger nodded now. He swiveled in his chair and built a steeple with his fingers. “Well …” he said agreeably, “let me put it this way. To begin with, you've got the rock and the hard place. Then, on either end, you've got the pillar and the post. Up above you've got the devil, down below you've got the creek.—Am I making myself clear?”

“Can we open a window?” Cy said.

“They don't open. Why don't you take your jacket off?”

“No. Never mind. That's not the problem,” Cy said.

Roger shrugged his shoulders. “Let me give you the bottom lines. If you're caught, and if they
can't
prove you knew about the murders, you're looking at approximately five years in jail and a fine of, say, conservatively, two hundred thousand. I don't want to imply you'll break even here either. That's in addition to returning all your profits to Tate Pharmaceuticals. If you want to know the exact technical name for all that, it's felonious violation of the Securities Law. Making a bet against your own company is a no-no. Keeping the profits is a no-no. Using offshore banks. Using inside information, and forgetting for a second what
kind
of information, is a plain fucking felony.” Roger took a breath. “Is what you're getting into.” He swiveled in his chair. “If your involvement's any deeper …”

“Like I told you—”

“Oh Cy. Doesn't matter what you've told me, it matters what they've got. You have to notice,” Roger said, “that I'm not questioning your story. I'm your lawyer, not your priest. I'm also ostensibly an officer of the court. I'm supposed to advise you about the law and not tell you how to break it. I can warn you, however. I can warn you, if you actually profit from the options, you are A—increasing the chance that you'll be caught, and B—increasing the depths of liability. I hope that answer is sufficient to the day.”

Cy didn't move. He looked at the picture of the guy in the jodhpurs and the little red jacket leaning forward on the horse. There were hounds in the picture but there wasn't any fox. Maybe, he was figuring, the fox got away. He swiveled back to Roger. “So you're telling me to pass. Just skip it. Is that it?”

Roger shook his head. “I'm not telling you to do anything, Cy. It's your decision. I'm saying where you are is an explosive situation. The money's like a fuse that's gonna tie you to a large bomb.” Roger spread his hands. “Maybe you'll get away with it. Who knows?”

“People do,” Cy said.

“Absolutely.” Roger nodded. “On the other hand you have to understand if you're indicted on this par
tic
ular securities fraud, you'll have a tough time proving that you're innocent of murder. And in that case you'd better make your will out, Cy, because the legal fees'll kill you.” Roger leaned back.

Cy looked over at the hunters on the wall. His eyes tracked the series till it got to the credenza where the fox was at bay.

***

Ortega broke up.

Ortega had been looking at the telephone transcript—chair tipped back, crepe-soled Hush Puppies planted on the desk.

His partner looked up at him and said, “What's funny?”

And Ortega said, “Life.”

Death wasn't funny but life, Ortega saw it, was a vaudeville routine. It could offer you a number like Tammy and Jimmy and their air-conditioned dog. It could offer you red-wigged burglars in the Watergate. Or Oliver North putting contraband money in a top-secret Zurich-based numbered account and he fucks up the number.