Dead Money (45 page)

He nodded warily.

Yeah, I said, shaking my head. He was some fucked-up sick kid.

Ramon showed a glimmer of assent.

So anyway, I said. That means two things. I know you figured this out already. Because you’re a sharp guy. But let me lay it out for you. Can I lay it out for you?

He nodded slowly, twice.

Two things, I said. One, I don’t have a client anymore.

Ramon allowed himself a half-smile.

So I’m in the market for a new client, I said, slapping him playfully on the arm. If you get my meaning. But more important, I said quietly, leaning in to whisper into his ear, like I said, we got a dead guy. We stick the dead guy with it all.

I leaned back. I gave him a triumphant grin.

Whadya think? Is that rich, or what?

He looked at me. I looked at him. I kept grinning. My face hurt.

Yeah, he said. That’s good.

I knew you’d see it that way, Ramon, I said, with another conspiratorial lean in his direction. You’re a smart guy. But then we gotta get our story straight. If we’re going to pin it on Jules, we gotta make sure everything fits.

Sure, he whispered, looking at the one-way glass. I know that.

Don’t worry, I said. We just keep our voices low, it’s okay. Listen, I whispered, that’s where I come in. I’m a lawyer. I know how their minds work. You give me the stones, I build the wall.

I got the blank stare again.

I gotta have the facts, I said. What really happened. So I know where the weak points are. Then I make up the story. A story that fits whatever evidence they might find. There’s a million stories in the big city. We got to pick the right one. Can’t have any holes in it.

Ramon said nothing. I could see the brick in his head struggling mightily to turn itself into a brain. To figure out what was going on.

Hey, I said. I know what you’re thinking. What’s in it for Rick Redman? That’s an easy one. You’re going to get the money, right? You’re inheriting the dough. And I need a client. I need a client can pay the bills.

He still said nothing.

Anyway, I said, you got two choices, right? You sit here. You say nothing. The cops come back. They grill the shit out of you. You don’t say nothing. I know you won’t. You’re a tough guy. But then what happens?

He didn’t respond.

I’ll tell you what happens. They’re pissed. You don’t say nothing, they draw one conclusion: guilty as charged. So they charge you. They shake down everybody and his dog. They turn over every rock. Because they don’t like you. They don’t like you at all. They get very, very serious when somebody doesn’t help them out. They’re vindictive bastards.

I thought I saw a glint of understanding in his eyes.

You know what happens then, don’t you Ramon?

Silence.

Don’t you?

Silence.

I’ll tell you, then. I go to Raul. You don’t take my offer? Raul does. And you’re high and dry, man. You think Raul’s going to protect you? When he knows he can pin it on a dead guy and you? You know Raul. He’s a slick motherfucker. He could talk his way into Fort Knox.

Silence. A slow shaking of the head. Hard to interpret.

Think about it, Ramon. When you were there, after Mr. FitzGibbon went over the balcony. You guys saw the e-mail. It pointed to Veronica. What’s the first question they’d ask? Where the hell’s this Veronica? Why didn’t you just get rid of it? Why didn’t you throw it away, delete it from the computer?

He gave me a stony look.

Because Raul told you not to. If it’d been sent somewhere, they’d get it eventually. And they have ways to figure out what’s been deleted. That if you deleted it, they’d know. You’d look bad. Raise suspicion. Right?

He said nothing.

Anyway, what the note said wasn’t so bad for you. Suicide. Better than murder. Maybe you’d get away with the Veronica thing, Larry Silver. Pin it all on Jules.

Silence.

That’s what he told you. Am I right? Or am I right? Is he a smart sonofabitch, or is he?

Slowly, painfully, Ramon got it.

Yeah, you’re right, he sighed.

He’d finally figured it out. He was fucked, either way. He had to trust me. It was his only chance.

I don’t know that much, he said.

What do you mean?

It was Raul. It was Raul and Jules. They cooked the whole thing up.

Tell me about it, I said.

He talked.

WE GOT TOGETHER
in a big, anonymous room. Bright fluorescent lights. Hard wooden chairs. Linoleum. I insisted that Dorita be there. The ADA asked Butch to stay. They were probably taping the meeting. I didn’t care. Maybe I’d ask for a copy afterwards. For the movie. The one about my stunning legal career.

Well? Russell Graham, ADA, asked with a skeptical air. Did you get anything?

You weren’t watching? I asked, surprised.

Something came up. Lee was there, he said, nodding to the beady-eyed detective.

The Nose had a name.

Couldn’t hear a thing, he said.

Okay, I said. Here it is. As best I can figure it.

As I started putting it all on the table, Russell Graham gradually lost his stiff and wary air. Moved on to surprised. Impressed, even. Sidled up to warm and cuddly. He even started contributing to the discussion.

Collectively, we put it all together.

Jules, it was obvious, was a hell of a lot more sophisticated than he let on. He knew Raul for what he was. Somebody for whom other people’s feelings and values didn’t exist.

Well, Dorita interjected, takes one to know one.

You’re talking about Jules, I presume? I replied.

As opposed to?

Me, for instance.

Sure, she said. Whatever gets you through the night.

We got blank looks from the rest of the crowd. They didn’t seem to be entirely tuned in to the Rick and Dorita show.

Like your average rich psychopath, I surmised, Raul hadn’t had the need or opportunity to break the law. To go over the line. The club stuff kept him busy. Decorating the Park Avenue pad. He’d got his ego stroked enough that he hadn’t needed to go anywhere else for it.

But when Jules came to Raul with his scheme, Raul couldn’t resist the idea of all that easy money. As he saw it, Jules was taking all the risk. He and Ramon could maintain plausible deniability all the way.

They’d snatch Veronica, Jules proposed. Raul could find out her itinerary easily enough. Jules would arrange the grab. They’d tell FitzGibbon that Veronica had been kidnapped – that much, of course, would be true. The kidnappers wanted ransom, but were crazy, fanatical religionists, and couldn’t be trusted. They might even come after FitzGibbon himself. They had to be dealt with very carefully. Ramon, Mr. Security, would deliver the ransom, which quite naturally would then disappear, along with the kidnappers. But FitzGibbon would get Veronica back. He’d be happy. To him, it would have been worth the price.

Raul bought it. Putting one over on the old man. The prick who had the gall to make him work for a living. He couldn’t resist. And with Raul came Ramon. As always.

And when FitzGibbon fell for the scam too, he fell for it like Hepburn for Tracy. They’d read him well. Veronica was his one true love. That much of what he’d said was true. He’d been heartbroken when she’d left. It had eaten him up. He wanted her back in a desperate way. And then, by happenstance - or maybe by design – I wasn’t sure how much credit to give the three little shits – he had an enemy to blame for her absence, instead of himself, in the guise of the dastardly terrorist kidnappers.

FitzGibbon having a paranoid streak to begin with, they hadn’t even needed to prompt him to circle the wagons. It was only natural to rely on family in a crisis. By means of which Ramon could make sure that FitzGibbon never had any second thoughts, or if he did he didn’t act on them. No surreptitious phone calls to the cops. No midnight doubts about the whole outrageous scheme. Because Ramon was always there.

Ramon himself, of course, couldn’t be trusted to decide anything.
Too damn stupid. So Raul kept him on a very short leash. On the other hand, Raul was sure, he could count on Ramon not to betray the plan. He knew that from a lifetime’s experience with his brother. Raul had always been the smart one. The charming one. The one who could get them what they wanted. Ramon followed Raul like a well-trained hound. And Raul, in his hubris, his absolute self-regard, had no doubt at all about his ability to control everyone: Ramon, FitzGibbon, Jules and, when it came down to it, me as well.

The Larry Silver thing had thrown a big wrench into the plans. When Ramon called Raul to report on his successful mission, Raul told him to leave the body there, where it could be easily found, three blocks from Jules’s place. Then they’d have something to hang over Jules, if they needed it later. But that, it turned out, was a big miscalculation. Raul didn’t know the neighbors had called the cops about the noise. That the cops would make the connection.

Once the cops were all over Jules, Raul figured he’d be sorely tempted to cop a plea by implicating the twins. So Raul, pulling the double switch, convinced Jules that he had a plan to make sure Jules wouldn’t get pegged for the murder. Said he had some homeless sucker he’d frame for it. That way, Raul controlled the situation from every angle.

Hence Jules’s sudden calm and arrogance, I said. If he believed Raul, he figured he was bulletproof on the Larry Silver thing.

I wonder about that, though, said Butch. I can’t see Jules buying that story.

Yeah, I said. He was a wily little fucker. Much more probable that Raul told Jules he was going to pin it on Ramon. Told
Ramon
the homeless guy story.

His own twin brother? said the ADA.

I wouldn’t put it past him, Butch said.

I wouldn’t put it past him to actually do it, either, I said.

After all, said Dorita, Ramon actually
did
kill Larry Silver.

Didn’t even have to frame him, really, I said. Just needed to make a phone call.

And
that
was a scheme Jules would have no trouble believing in, said Dorita.

And then Veronica. At first it must have seemed a total disaster. But Jules didn’t see it that way. He just revised the plan. Because, apart from

Jules’s emotional motivation, which was real and, truth be told, understandable, now there was an even bigger pot of gold at the end of this particularly twisted rainbow: control of FitzGibbon’s corporate empire. With Veronica out of the way, and Jules disinherited, the only thing standing between the twins getting the whole damn thing was FitzGibbon himself.

And we had to believe, though we’d never know the details, that Jules had some plan to take it away from them.

Yes, I mused, it makes perfect sense. The two little geniuses, Jules and Raul, each no doubt believed that in the end he’d outwit the other.

But something doesn’t jibe, said the Nose. Why would Jules hold her in his own place? Maybe he could prevent her seeing him, but she’d hear him, wouldn’t she? You told us Lisa had to make a bunch of noise to prevent you from hearing Veronica. It had to work the other way too. She must have heard Jules talking. Wouldn’t she know his voice?

And even if she didn’t, the ADA said, she’d have overheard enough to figure out who he was.

I was thinking the same thing, I said. But there’s an explanation.

Which is? asked the ADA.

There’s only one way it all makes sense, I said. Jules never intended for her to live. His plan was never to just get the ransom. That was the lure. To get Raul and Ramon on board.

He intended all along to kill her, said Dorita.

And engineer FitzGibbon’s death as well, I said. Daddy was the real target. Right from the beginning.

Jesus, said Butch. Nicely done.

And, remarkably enough, the little prick had almost gotten away with it. But in any Byzantine scheme, there are always imponderables. Stuff you can’t predict. Lisa. The weak link.

Raul didn’t even give her a thought, Dorita said.

Actually, I said, we don’t know if he even knew she existed.

Good point, said Butch.

Jules saw the danger, though, I said. Hence his clumsy attempts to scare me away from her.

Didn’t work, said Butch.

Not lucky, said the ADA.

Not lucky enough, I said.

We talked through the rest of it. The whole thing could have come unraveled much earlier, of course. FitzGibbon was a hard-headed, and sophisticated, man. Controlling. As the thing dragged on, he started questioning Raul’s tactics. He wanted his Veronica back. He started talking about going to the cops. So Raul went to Jules, who had another brilliant idea. Or, more likely, it had been his plan all along. He began supplying the twins with psychotropic drugs. Whatever came to hand. Mescaline. Psilocybin. LSD. And Raul began spiking FitzGibbon’s food and drink with the stuff. Those things are hard enough to deal with when you know you’re taking them. For FitzGibbon, it must have been utterly disorienting, terrifying. He started to question his own sanity. He became more and more afraid, and Raul played on his fear, kept him off balance, and malleable.

In spite of their efforts, though, FitzGibbon had continued to display signs of suspicion, and, ironically enough, it seems that he really
had
become enamored of me.

Must have been the drugs, Dorita interjected.

No doubt, I said.

FitzGibbon had gotten increasingly insistent that I be hired to help with Veronica and the kidnappers. The twins didn’t for a minute think that FitzGibbon had figured out the scam – he was too far gone by then for that – but they were terrified that somehow, some way, FitzGibbon was planning to communicate to me the fact of the supposed kidnapping. To get me on the team. And they couldn’t take the chance that somehow I might stumble onto what was going on. On at least a couple of occasions Ramon had caught FitzGibbon trying to call me, and managed to cut off the call in time.

And I didn’t pick up the calls, I said.

You’ve lost me, said the ADA.

I kept getting these calls on my cell, I told him. ‘Private number.’ I ignored them. If I had answered the phone the first time, one time …