Codes of Betrayal (22 page)

Finally, softly, Richie said, “You playin’ with me, Nick?” The slight smile pulled his lips back into a grimace.

“Richie, even when we were little kids, I didn’t play with you. You know why? Because you cheated. All the time, Richie, you cheated.”

Richie Ventura snapped his fingers, slid his arms into the black leather coat held out to him, his eyes fastened on his cousin. Years fell away and they were the same two boys vying for their grandfather’s approval, the most important thing in their young lives. They should have finished with this shit years ago. Why the hell did Nick turn up in his life now?

“You take
good care
of yourself, Nick, ya hear me?”

“I
always
take good care of myself, Richie.”

I
T WAS A LITTLE
past three in the morning when Nick let himself back into the Tudor. As with all unoccupied houses carried on the Ventura books, lights were programmed to come on and turn off to give potential housebreakers the idea that people were living there. He had no trouble with the burglar alarm; Nick had coded it himself.

He had parked his car several blocks away. It was dead quiet in Forest Hills Gardens. Nick went directly to the office, and with a small-beamed flashlight he studied the computer and then the music system Joe Menucci had installed earlier in the day. The listening devices were inconspicuous. Voice-activated, they looked like no more than another tuner button or selection device. He thought for a moment, then headed for the kitchen, another usual gathering place. He ran his fingertips around the edges of the table, chairs, light fixtures, frames on various pictures. There was a large spice rack placed on the wall near the table as a unit in a decorative arrangement. Next to it was a wreath made of twigs, clumps of dried flowers, and small fruits. Among the dehydrated grapes was a tiny recording device. Completely unobtrusive.

Nick traced the arrangement of music speakers throughout the house. At least one in every room. Then, just out of curiosity, he went to the basement. There was an expensively furnished playroom, a pool table, gym equipment in one corner. Most unusual of all was the small lap pool, fifteen feet long and eight feet wide, about five feet deep. It was connected to a motor that, when turned on, provided a swimmer with a strong current to work against. Someone had put a few outdoor-type chairs and a bundle of white towels alongside the pool.

Nick didn’t worry about light showing. All the basement windows were shuttered. He poked and pried with his hand, then with a penknife. His arm entered the heating duct that led up to the dining room.

He felt around for a moment—and, as he withdrew his arm, his whole body froze in response to the cold circle of a gun barrel that pressed into the side of his neck. He held his breath as he heard the click of a hammer being drawn back, then turned in response to an angry voice.

“What the fuck ya doin’ here, Nicky?” Playboy Pilotti asked.

P
AULY THE PLAYBOY
Pilotti was nicknamed for his spectacular failure to stay married. When he was a kid, he was Pauly Pill, always the strongman of the neighborhood. He grew up demonstrating how he could lift heavy objects and straight-arm them over his head. He made a serious mistake when he was in his early teens, but it was a mistake that ensured him a lifetime job with Richie Ventura.

A kid named Ba-Ba-Boom—which was descriptive of how he liked to punch people out—socked Richie Ventura in the eye. As he readied his fist for the follow-up to the mouth, he was grabbed, hoisted aloft, cursed at, and then dropped from a height of nearly six feet. The fractured jaw wasn’t the Pill’s fault. The kid should have had sense enough to roll when he landed, like cats do to break a fall instead of a bone. When Richie kicked the fallen Ba-Ba-Boom, the bully got a broken arm and three busted ribs. Pauly Pill took the rap for the whole thing and spent nine months in a juvenile detention house. Which didn’t bother his parents too much. They were small, nervous people, and between them they hadn’t been able to manage his behavior since he was four years old and began breaking his little sister’s toys and then his little sister’s fingers.

Pauly spent years perfecting his powerful body. He entered contests and won trophies. To other bodybuilders, he was a thing of beauty. To the uneducated eye, he was vastly misshapen, carrying a small bullet head on a thick neck, set on massive bulging shoulders. His chest was huge, waist narrow, legs much too short for the top part of his body. He had to have his clothing custom-made. He had custom-tailored shirts made by the brother of the guy who made his suits. When dropped on the floor, Pauly’s clothing looked like an outfit for a short, powerful ape.

He was a perfect man for Richie Ventura, who didn’t really like to do his own dirty work. He was good with a bat, a cleaver, a gun. His hands could get a lock on a guy’s neck that was a killer. Literally.

Wherever Richie went, Playboy Pilotti was either far ahead, for safety’s sake, or slightly behind for backup. He worked long erratic hours, took vacations whenever Richie wanted a change of scenery. He went through three marriages before he decided he didn’t really like having some woman asking when he was gonna come home. He had a nice apartment near Richie’s house in Massapequa, Long Island, a good car with a cellular phone. He loved to eat at all of Richie’s favorite restaurants, where no one would insult you with a menu. He also had a part ownership in a health and fitness club, and at times worked out for hours to the admiring gaze of club members. It all depended on Richie—his hours, his whereabouts, his activity.

He did a lot of different things for Richie. One of the main things was he kept his mouth shut. Whatever he knew, or thought he knew, was buried deep inside his closed mouth. Richie Ventura trusted him almost completely. After all, you have to trust someone in your life—and this guy had taken a rap for Richie when they were just kids. That kind of loyalty cannot be faked.

Nick turned and raised one hand toward Playboy’s gun, palm out in a pacifying gesture. He knew—Christ, he hoped—Pauly wouldn’t shoot him without Richie’s okay.

Playboy stepped back, admiring Nick’s cool.

“You doin’ a little plantin’ of your own, cop?”

The tough-guy smirk, the wide-legged stance, the chin thrust forward, eyes narrowed, were standard for someone in the Playboy’s line of work. He was known to have killed at least seven people, possibly as many as ten, for various reasons and on various orders. In his early days, he had occasionally strangled a guy to keep others in line. When Richie pointed, his man acted. He had been charged, but never convicted, of murder a few times; but aside from the open-dormitory time of his adolescence, the only slammer time he served—eighteen months—was for a botched burglary that was someone else’s fault.

It was recorded for future reference that Paul the Playboy Pilotti had nutted out in prison. He couldn’t handle confinement. He had slammed his head against concrete walls, steel bars, cement floors. He claimed he couldn’t breathe or swallow; couldn’t sleep; couldn’t eat. His time was spent mostly in the prison hospital for various self-inflicted injuries; for hysteria; for bizarre behavior.

Nick took a calculated risk. “Playboy, ya wanna call my cousin, call him. But I think I better tell ya what I’m gonna tell him.” Nick gestured to the open grille of the heating vent. “I don’t know who the fuck you guys got to check for bugs, but the guy was a real amateur. I bet no one ever checked out this basement, right? I asked Richie if every room in the house had been checked and he said no. Just the dining room and kitchen. Anybody with any sense would check the whole house. I figured I’d start at the bottom and work my way up. The guy he paid to check shoulda done all this.”

“Yeah? That’s your story?”

“Hey, you want to call Richie right now, three
A.M.
, and tell him you found me here checking, go right ahead. But I don’t think he’d appreciate getting waked up for this little news flash.”

“You find anything?”

“I just started. But like Richie said to me, ‘I had a feeling.’ Hell with it. Maybe I was wrong. It’s none of my business anyway.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s Richie who decides, not you. Why didn’t you tell Richie about
your feelin’?”

Nick shrugged. “The less my cousin and me have to say to each other the better. For both of us.” He studied the hulking thug, then thoughtfully asked him, “What about you, Pauly? What are
you
doing here? What the fuck you up to?”

The Playboy seemed uneasy; like a back-alley bully, he covered by getting very angry. “What the fuck that got to do with you?”

As they left the house, it hit Nick that Pauly must have been up to no good. Nick said, “You want I should tell Richie, I will. Maybe better neither one of us should say anything about being here.”

“Don’t try to pull any o’ your wise-ass shit on me, Nicky. I ain’t forgot you used to be a cop. Once a cop—”

“Like once a housebreaker? There are some pretty nice things here. Who owns all the stuff, the pictures and the silverware and such?”

Playboy Pilotti kept walking. When he reached his car, he turned and the scowl seemed scarred on his face.

“You and me, we better have no more business together, you got that?”

Nick smiled. “Business? What business? I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I guess Richie don’t need you or me to tell him what to do. See you around, Playboy.”

The man with the short legs seemed to disappear as he slumped into the driver’s seat. Through the window, he looked to be about five feet tall, hat included.

Driving home, Nick thought about his grandfather. He was a man accustomed to dealing with colleagues face to face, either as friends or enemies. He found the Chinese unreadable. To him, everything about them was modulated: soft voices, quick, tight, meaningless smiles, slight head nods, controlled body movements. Obviously, he distrusted Chen and the men working with him. Joe Menucci was so good at what he did, it would take another electronics genius to discover all the hidden devices.

Richie clearly had no idea that Chen’s house was very expertly bugged. Papa Ventura trusted no one completely.

When he got back to his apartment, Nick punched the button on his answering machine.

“Guess who’s coming home? I’ll call you from JFK tomorrow night. Around eight. Go to school on the morning shift, okay?”

Even from across the world, she was calling the shots. What the hell, he’d take an office break, go to his class, come home and wait for her call. Just the way you want it, Laura, right?

A
T THE END OF
the class, Professor Caruso handed his students their graded midterm exams. There were a few groans, a few sighs of relief—or resignation—as the students went through the blue books to see why they got the mark that was printed in red ink inside the cover. Nick stared at the B-. He flipped the pages; didn’t see many comments or checkmarks. He glanced at Caruso, who nodded slightly.

“I’ll be in my office for the next hour or so. Anybody want to dispute the grade, see me then. Try to convince me; I’m a reasonable man.”

Nick waited as the last of three students in line left the professor’s study. He closed the door behind him and Caruso crossed the room and turned the lock.

“I’ll change it to a B plus. I just wanted to get your attention.”

Nick felt a little annoyed. His exam was certainly worth an A. He hadn’t realized how important it was to him. He’d been doing some thinking about what would follow his current assignment.

Caruso told him that he was getting information from Chinese police and West Coast narcotics agents. Everyone was gearing up: a massive amount of China White was going to enter the United States very soon. By boat, by plane, in large shipments of consumer goods, commercial equipment, hidden in passenger carry-ons. Some would be picked up at LAX by a veritable army of sixteen-wheelers, which would cross the United States with stop-offs at various cities, unloaded at designated storage areas, and then distributed by various dealers into the communities. Some would be flown east to New York and Newark—large crates of merchandise consigned to warehouses throughout the area. Ships would be offloaded at major ports, designated as bulk items. Included with the valid material, unestimated kilos of China White.

He asked Nick if his grandfather seemed about to include him in the operation. Would he be in a position to gather crucial evidence?

“The information about the indictments, Tom, that really impressed him. He’s also worried, I think, that his mole let him down.”

“Good. That leak, by the way, has lead to a mountain of inside investigations. The two guys disappeared into thin air. No one, not their wives or kids or friends, seems to know where they are. There’s even some talk going around that they’ve been … offed.”

It was logical. It just hadn’t occurred to Nick. “All I know is that my grandfather was pretty upset about the news. And very … happy with me.”

“Good, that’s what I did it for.”

He told Caruso of the Forest Hills Gardens house rented for Dennis Chen, but they both thought it was too obvious a location for any real business to be occurring there.

“They’re not gonna use a place we could stake out around the neighborhood, where it’d be easy to take videos of them arriving and leaving. That would be stupid. By the way, what the hell are you doing in my babies’ day class instead of with the grown-ups tonight?”

Nick smiled. “I got other plans for tonight.”

Caruso seemed hesitant. “Nick, there’s one thing. I just want to sort of skim this past you, okay?”

Nick could feel the sudden, deepening tension. “What?”

“It’s none of my business—except in a way, it
is
my business. About Laura Santalvo.”

Nick sat up straight; his eyes narrowed and his voice went very low. “You’re right, it isn’t your business. Not in any way.”

“But it might be, Nick. Laura might be connected. We know she’s funded her own businesses, but she makes a lot of trips to the hot spots. We haven’t been able to keep close tabs on her …”