Madman's Thirst (12 page)

“Would your partner, Chris, know
anything you don’t?”

“I doubt it.”

“Do you keep in touch?”

“Through the Internet,
occasionally. He’s in New Zealand.”

“I know.”

“You’re going to call him anyway,
aren’t you?”

“It’s the call that you don’t make
that you later find out you should have.”

“Well, don’t forget the time
difference. He’s 13 hours ahead.”

***

As Scarne headed back to New York,
he called Chris Tighe. If Sandy Doyle was right about time zones, it would be about
9 AM in New Zealand.

“I’m just heading out,” Tighe said
when he answered. “Surf’s up.”

Tighe obviously had his priorities
right.

“Listen, Chris, can I call you
Chris?”

“Sure.”

“Well, Chris, I’ll make this
quick. I’m doing a follow up on a story that you and Sandy Doyle were working
on together at the
Richmond Register
, the proposal for the NASCAR track.
I just spoke to her.”

“How is Sandy?”

“She fine. Expecting twins.”

“Yes, I know. We Tweet. You at the
Register
?”

Scarne didn’t want to go through
the whole private eye rigmarole. Tighe might be more comfortable opening up to
another journalist.

“Yeah,” he lied. “Just started.
They gave me some old stories to revisit. NASCAR, the Home Port, you know the
drill.”

“Sure. Been there, done that. We
all have to pay our dues. How’s the weather back there?”

Scarne knew that people living in places
with gorgeous weather always get off on hearing about lousy weather elsewhere.
It wasn’t a bad day in New Jersey, but Scarne wanted to make Tighe feel good so
he said, “Sucks.”

“Figures. Did they replace Bob
Pearsall yet?”

“No. Mr. Popp said his shoes are
hard to fill.”

That did they trick.

“He’s right about that. So, what
can I do for you?”

“Well, I think I got everything
from Sandy, but is there anything you found out that maybe you didn’t mention
to her?”

Scarne could hear a woman’s voice
in the background urging Tighe to get a move on.

“You mean other than finding
Amelia Earhart’s body under Nathan Bimm?”

The kid had a sense of humor.

“Old news,” Scarne retorted,
laughing. “But how about anything that would have gotten someone’s balls in a
twist.”

“Not really. The track project
was, and I guess still is, controversial. But I mean a kid can’t open up a
lemonade stand on Staten Island without some yahoo sounding off about it. My
guess was that it’s never going to be approved. Bob wasn’t so much against the
track as he was suspicious of anything Bimm had his hands in, which is why we
looked at the Home Port, too. But I have to tell you nothing we came across
looked illegal. Doesn’t mean that something wasn’t kosher, but what the hell in
New York isn’t when big money is involved? If you spoke to Sandy, you know we
had nada.”

Well, that’s that, Scarne thought,
as the background female voice became more insistent.

“Uh, I really have to go, Mr.
Scarne. Sorry I couldn’t be more help, but I think we were on a wild goose
chase. I guess Bimm is an acquired taste, but I really have nothing against
him. He was polite to me when I talked to him.”

“Sandy told me the interview with
him fell through.”

“It did. But I called him
separately about something I found on the Web.”

“What was it?”

“Nothing important.”

“Humor me.”

“Well, I came across some old news
clips from the 1920’s about plans to build rail tunnels from Staten Island to
New Jersey and Brooklyn. The entrances would have been located on or near the
property for the Home Port or the NASCAR track. Some work was even started on
the Brooklyn tunnel before they ran out of money or something. I thought it
might make a humorous story, add some history and color to both projects. I
asked Bimm whether he knew about it.”

“What did he say?”

 “Said it was news to him.”

“Did you write it up?”

Tighe laughed.

“I ran it by Mr. Pearsall,” Tighe
said, laughing at the memory. “He pitched a fit, which was unlike him. Said the
Internet was a bottomless pit of cockamamie story ideas, and mine was one of
them. He was right; it was a stupid idea. I never even mentioned it to Sandy.”   

C
HAPTER 15 – MOO SHU POKER

“Moo Shu” Silman was at the bar in
the Richmond Hotel, reflecting, as usual, at how far he had fallen. The lounge
at the Richmond Hotel is definitely not the “in” place to be on Thursday – or
any – night. Small, dimly lit and usually vacant but for the occasional
salesman too lethargic or discouraged to seek out Staten Island’s better
nightspots, it stopped just short of being seedy. That distinction went to the
lobby.

But not much could be expected
from the hotel, one of the few independently owned hotels in the city of New
York, if being mob-owned fit that description. A barely break-even operation,
it survived on small government and corporate contracts (military recruits
awaiting destination orders; pilots and attendants from a Bulgarian airline;
tour operators who lied about the borough’s “proximity” to Manhattan), as well
as ill-informed salesmen and, incredibly, given Silman’s checkered history,
sequestered juries.

Without asking, the barmaid
refilled his glass of tomato juice. She looked past him and said, “Oh, Christ.”

Dr. Nathan Bimm waddled in and sat
next to him.

“You should lay off the menstrual
fluid,” Bimm said pointing to Silman’s glass. “Isn’t that right, honey?” The
barmaid gave him a tired look. She was used to Bimm’s vulgarisms. “Muddle me an
Old Fashioned, Maker’s Mark, extra cherries.” He didn’t put any money on the
bar, ran no tab and never paid for a drink, which annoyed the hell out of
Silman, who managed the hotel.     

 “Chang cut me off the booze,”
Silman said.

“The only thing he cut off was
your balls. Serves you right for going to a Chink doctor. Is the room set up?”

“You ask me that every week,” Silman
said, as Bimm reached for a bowl of trail mix, which he quickly emptied, and
signaled for another. “And every week I tell you the room is the same as
always. And the result will be the same. So can I skip the game and just give
you my $300 now? I’ve got work to do.”

“Who are you kidding? This place
is as busy as my colon and I can’t remember the last time I shit. What business
you do, I send your way. I need bodies upstairs.”     

The two men made small talk for
half an hour, during which time Bimm inhaled three Old Fashioneds and three
bowls of trail mix. Silman knew plenty of doctors who didn’t take care of
themselves. Some even smoked. But he’d never met a doctor with more bad health habits
than Bimm. Come to think of it, he’d never met an obese plastic surgeon. Bimm
had his reasons for selling his clinics, Silman knew, but his girth probably
prevented him from getting near an operating table anyway.

Silman’s real first name was Alfred.
A onetime lavishly paid mob lawyer, he had been disbarred and served two years
in Sing Sing for trying to poison a jury. Literally. The lead lawyer for
several mobsters accused of over-billing the city for $10 million worth of
windows in the third phase of a Bronx high-rise housing project, Silman had
been genuinely outraged when the judge refused to allow him to introduce
evidence that the minority contractors who monopolized such construction jobs
during a previous administration had over-billed the city by $30 million for
the project’s earlier phases.

“At least my clients put the
windows in,” he had argued in the judge’s chambers, pointing out that the
earlier contractors hadn’t even done that, with the result that blocks of
buildings had turned into the world’s largest birdhouses. When his arguments
fell on deaf ears – it didn’t help that the judge was a former black activist,
Silman admitted – he hit upon a scheme to derail the trial entirely, on the
theory that justice delayed might be justice denied. Witnesses often disappeared,
judges could be bribed, elderly Mafioso could more reasonably act senile.
Unfortunately, the scheme was more brilliant in conception than in execution. 

It being a mob trial, the jurors
were sequestered from the start in a Holiday Inn in Queens. They were allowed
to order dinner out twice a week, alternating among three nearby restaurants:
Italian, Mexican and Chinese. For reasons of national pride, the Italian
restaurant was left out of the plot, which involved planting pliable (meaning
threatened) undocumented kitchen workers in the other two establishments.

It was easy enough for Silman to
find out from a court officer on what days jurors used a particular restaurant.
On the day when it became apparent that, despite his best legal efforts, the
guilty-as-sin defendants were going down the tubes, he passed a note – in a
specially altered fortune cookie – to the designated kitchen worker in the
Chinese restaurant. Following careful instructions, the worker had mixed up a
batch of E-coli impregnated chicken, pork, beef and shrimp and put it in a
blender. The resultant noxious stew was hidden among cartons in a storage room,
where it continued to “ferment.” Since it was a Chinese restaurant, nobody
noticed. When the time came, the worker, armed with an eyedropper, managed to
taint an entire order of takeout, including a carton of Moo Shu Pork, which was
the origin of the nickname with which Silman was now permanently saddled. He
counted himself lucky that it wasn’t “Taco” Silman.

The timing was impeccable. On the
morning of closing arguments, one after another the jurors began to complain of
nausea, fever, blurred vision and, most disturbingly in a courthouse short of
workable toilets, projectile diarrhea. Two Federal marshals who were guarding
the jurors also became ill, as did several members of their families who ate
leftovers. Within an hour the courthouse resembled – and smelled like – the
emergency room at Baghdad General. It was days before the trial could resume,
and then, with three jurors and two alternates still in the hospital, a mistrial
was declared.

Food poisoning was immediately
suspected but the trail so obviously led back to the Chinese food no one
considered foul play.  The unfortunate restaurant was drummed out of business
by the Health Department. (“The place didn’t even have a Zagat rating,” railed
the frustrated trial judge. “What else could the cheapskate city expect?”)

Silman and his clients were home
free – until the INS unexpectedly raided the Mexican restaurant and started
deportation proceedings against the illegal immigrant who was the E-coli
alternate. Anxious to stay in America, where his mother, father, wife and eight
children lived, he called the FBI and proposed a deal. In return for a
“get-out-of-jail-free, no deportation” card – and witness protection for his
entire clan – the worker rolled on Silman. The lawyer took the fall but kept
his mouth shut, which earned him respect from his employers.

The subsequent death of the worker
in the Chinese restaurant compromised the case against Silman. Nothing
nefarious was involved; the worker had neglected to wash his hands after
handling the container of rotting E-coli soup and ate an egg roll so tainted
that his immune system collapsed. With a major witness gone, Silman pled down
to a felony charge of attempted assault and some misdemeanor health violations
still on the books from the days of Typhoid Mary. After being paroled, Silman
was too hot to handle in his home borough, so his mob contacts sent him to Bimm,
a silent partner, along with the Lacuna crime family, in the hotel. It was the
Lacunas, Silman subsequently discovered, who had financed the expansion of
Bimm’s clinic empire.

“The hotel is perfect for you,”
Bimm had told him. “Skim some from the lounge, but not too much. Lacuna can be
touchy. Join the Rotary, the Chamber and all that bullshit and keep your eyes
open. You’ll be back on top soon. Nobody out here gives a shit about your past.
They’re too busy scamming. And if you get the urge to poison another jury,
they’ll deliver one right to you.”

***

“C’mon, let’s head up there,” Bimm
said now, as he struggled his 320 pounds out of his seat. Nattily dressed, in his
signature white linen suit made in Hong Kong, with a pink Charles Terwhitt
shirt and powder blue silk tie, he dwarfed the slightly-built Silman, who wore
a beat-up sports jacket and didn’t feel particularly dapper after a day spent
handling guest complaints and plumbing problems. Moo Shu also felt a cold
coming on and wasn’t looking forward to his 90-minute drive back to the Bronx
in the chilling rain. He often day-dreamed of running into the Mexican snitch
in the witness protection program – somewhere  in sunny Arizona no doubt – and
shoving a chili pepper up his wetback ass. 

As they passed the reception desk,
Silman nodded at the assistant manager he’d inherited from the previous
management. He fired the woman before he found out she was related to the
politically active pastor of the largest African-American congregation in the
borough. Forced to take her back, she now treated him will ill-concealed disdain.
She picked up the house phone.

“Laurel and Hardy are on the way
up. Make sure the room is ready.” She listened for a second and then,
exasperated, said, “Moo Shu and Bimm the Blimp, dummy. Laurel and Hardy were
silent film … oh, forget it.”

***

  Bimm always sat with his back to
the huge plasma TV on the far wall of the suite. By necessity most of the other
players sat across or at angles to the big man, and could see the TV, which
dominated the room and played a constant stream of porno videos. And not just
any porno movies. Bimm had scoured the Internet for the most graphic
professional hard-core videos available, and supplemented them with the
raunchiest amateur downloads from Youporn.com and other sites. He loved porn
and had a large collection in his home, but that’s not why he featured it at
the poker game. The action on the flat screen was a distraction to the other
players, and covered up his cheating.  

The game featured a variety of
poker variations, including the ubiquitous Texas Hold ‘Em. Most were played
high-low, which meant that a player could win with either a high or low hand
(the lowest being Ace-2-3-4-6, of different suits). Thus, pots were usually split
two ways. Bluffing was an art form, since even the weakest low hand might
actually wind up high, as a hidden straight or a flush. Mediocre players – Bimm,
an expert card player, stacked the game with them – hardly ever folded. To win
consistently, a player needed to concentrate. Hence, the porno movies. Deciding
when to play, what cards to draw, what to bet and whether to declare your hand
high or low wasn’t easy when some sexual stud was delivering his money shot on
the chin of his naked partner on a plasma screen on the far wall. And none of
the players would ask to turn the movie off, and risk being labeled wimps, or
worse.  

Only one other player could fit on
the side of the oval table with Bimm, because of his girth and the fact that he
kept the space between them empty of chairs. In that spot was a small chest in
which he kept playing cards, chips and a ledger listing the amounts various
players owed him. The top of the chest was crammed with the detritus of his
disgusting lifestyle: a nasal inhaler that threatened to disappear up either of
his huge nostrils when he jammed its tip in; an ugly green horseshoe-shaped
ashtray in which resided a particularly pungent cigar; various mints, antacid
tablets, peanuts and jellybeans in respective bowls; an ever-present half-eaten
sandwich dripping with both mustard and mayonnaise; a box of Russell Stover
chocolates – and Diet Cokes.

Bimm was always seated when the
first player other than Silman arrived. It was Tony Porcini, a cousin of mobster
Salvatore Lacuna. He ran a small property appraisal firm secretly owned by Bimm
for the express purpose of providing above- or below-market appraisals on
properties Bimm either wanted to dump or buy. He was Bimm’s regular poker shill,
and was expected to play a staid, unspectacular game, occasionally losing a
small pot to one of the other players to add verisimilitude to the proceedings.
Bimm, who made sure he lost a few dollars in those pots, would then gripe
loudly, so that the others would remember his loss. But Porcini’s main job was
to catch unsuspecting players in a crossfire when he and Bimm had unbeatable
hands high and low. That only happened a few times a night, but with unlimited
raises the poor suckers could be stripped of hundreds of dollars on one pot.

Most times, the victims would fold
disgustedly and switch their attention to the fellatio on the screen. Between
the sexual distractions, the plethora of drinks and food (which everyone had to
chip in for), the cheating and his own uncanny card memory skills, Bimm
cleared, on average, $2,000 every week. He was wealthy, but $100,000 a year,
undeclared, was not chump change.

Better yet, some of the players
were soon deep in debt to Bimm, including the head of the local school board, a
political reporter for the local paper and the president of the Chamber of
Commerce. While gambling debts in private games did not have the power to ruin
a man as they did, say, in Victorian England, being labeled a deadbeat in the
closed society of Staten Island would be humiliating.

“So what’s new at the Chamber,”
Bimm said, directing a smirk at a small, nervous man who was raking in half of
a small pot. “How’s the contract negotiation going? They gonna fire your ass,
or what?”

“Haven’t heard anything,” Press
Stephens replied. “The exec committee is studying my performance review from
the mentoring committee.”

“Mentoring committee, performance
review, what kind of bullshit is that? What’s wrong with those jerks? Your
membership is growing; the Chamber is showing a profit for the first time in
years. They should kiss your ass in Macy’s window.”

Bimm knew he could afford to sound
supportive. Stephens owed him several thousand dollars and didn’t know that
Bimm had instructed his political friends on those committees to deliberately
make the Chamber president’s life miserable. In fact, the sadistic mentoring
committee had been his idea. Preston Stephens, whose family on Staten Island
went back seven generations, had to meet once a week with board members who
critiqued everything from how many phone calls he made to the mileage he put on
the Chamber’s leased car. It was humiliating to a 60-year-old man who had
rescued the Chamber from near bankruptcy during his eight-year tenure. But that
was the idea: The more distracted the president was, the less likely he could
offer opposition to Bimm’s latest economic development schemes. We’ll limit him
to one-year contracts from now on, Bimm decided. I can dump him if he gets too
feisty.