My King The President (12 page)

That was a question I had a hard time trying to answer. I couldn’t tell her that three ghosts and the blue fire in my belly made such a tempting act impossible. The best I could do was, “You’ll be safe at the cabin. We both will.”

I stopped at Wal Mart stores on the outskirts of Hickory, Statesville, and Asheville, sending Liz into each one with cash to buy a few warm clothes, hiking boots, and personal toiletries. Using a credit card was out of the question, and I didn’t want to drop a large amount in any one place, but thankfully, money was not a problem. I still had better than two grand in my wallet, left over from the five I’d taken out of the bank when I’d deposited Helene Fordham’s down payment.

And so, we arrived at the cabin’s oak gate just before dusk. The first thing I noticed was the difference in temperature. Much colder than usual. The first thing Liz noticed was the noise. “What is it, Jeb? Sounds like the ocean.”

“It’s the river. Come on, I’ll show you.”

I took my time driving down the zigzag macadam driveway to the house, explaining to Liz that Cal had bought the cabin and the sixteen acres of sloping wilderness right after my mother had died. “There were no neighbors within ten miles then, and even fewer now. We always came up here for a few weeks each summer, and every other year Cal would bring his Boy Scout Troop up here for camping, fishing, and rafting. After we unpack, I’ll show you the cave we found, too. Real Robinson Crusoe stuff.”

I set the handbrake and we got out of the Chevy. Liz was impressed with the five-room cabin; solidly constructed of real logs and indigenous rock, actually built in two levels, right into the slope of the mountain, thirty feet above the river. We walked, carefully, down the narrow footpath as far as we could go.

“My God, it looks like the Colorado!” Liz shouted. She was right. The flooding rains had turned the Quail River from a pebble-bottomed trout stream you could sometimes wade across into a raging, mud-yellow express train, fifteen feet above its normal bank. So close to the cabin in fact, that it almost reached the small shed and the four-man Zodiac hanging under it.

“Cal is an expert with that boat, Liz. We liked to take her downstream through the mild rapids to the reservoir, about eight miles from here. We called it ‘shooting the moon.’ He always keeps her in tip-top shape, too. Come on; let me show you our cave. We can unpack later.”

In certain areas, from New York to Georgia, the great eastern mountain range is pocked with caves; some tiny, some enormous; a spelunker’s delight. We had discovered ours the second summer up here, its entrance nearly hidden by a cluster of pine, now grown even bigger. It wasn’t a large cave, maybe thirty square feet of slanted floor, and anyone over five-three would have to stoop to walk in it. Liz poked her nose inside once and said, “I’m not going in there, Jeb Willard. Besides, it stinks.”

I laughed. “You’re right. We didn’t bring a light, anyway. Let’s go back. I think it’s going to rain again. Careful, now, I don’t want you slipping. It would be hard to fish you out of that river right now.”

It didn’t take Liz long to adjust to the rustic life. Well, hardly rustic. Cal had long ago installed a power generator—with a backup—in plus a freezer and fridge, always kept well stocked, and a pantry full of canned goods with a hanging wine rack. While I got the fire going in the living room fireplace, she busied herself with throwing together a meal worthy of any chef, and we ate every bite of it. The bottle of decent Cabernet finished me off. I hadn’t realized how exhausted I was, having had so little sleep. This of course, was a good thing. I was too bushed to think about anything. I was also too tired to argue when Liz came into Cal’s room where I had collapsed, sat down on the bed, and began massaging my neck and back. “I want to sleep with you tonight, Jeb, but not to make love. I just want you to hold me. That’s what will make me feel safe.”

I managed to move my head up and down a little. Her fingers were supple. Magical. “Where did you learn how to do that?” I don’t know whether I actually said that or simply felt it. In any case, I fell asleep before she could answer. I think she held
me
all night.

* * *

The following morning was a different day. I swallowed the sensual dreams I’d had of her along with the breakfast she’d cooked. I silently helped her with the dishes, dressed carefully, and ignored her angry outburst at my request. Pouting, she drove me to the Trailways station at Knoxville, dropped me off, and burned rubber turning around to go back, after promising not to answer the phone. “Why not?”

When the Chevy was out of sight, I went in and bought a round trip ticket to Miami. Mr. Mafia didn’t know it yet, but he was about to have a visitor.

Chapter 11

The long bus trip to Miami was a hell of a way to spend my birthday, and I seriously wondered if I’d live to see forty plus one hour. I hadn’t bothered to shave the past two days, or to shower, hoping that the apparent lack of personal hygiene, along with my costume, would discourage any fellow bus passengers or anyone on either side of the law from attempts at either conversation or something worse. I boarded wearing worn-out jeans with no belt, a dirty western style shirt left over from my Mexican adventures, a faded blue windbreaker with a busted zipper, and an equally filthy Dekalb seed cap. I’d had the foresight to also stash five C-notes in each sock before putting on my old hiking boots, and distributing the rest in various pockets. My billfold held nothing but my New Mexico driver’s license, which had already expired anyway, and I’d carried no baggage at all.

My precautions worked, too. No one recognized or bothered me, and I was happy that I was even able to take a few short naps. The bus pulled into Miami around ten, and the flophouse hotel I spent the rest of the night in asked no questions. The following morning, I ate a couple of sausage biscuits at a nearby Hardee’s restaurant, washed down with two cups of bad coffee, then hailed a cab. The condescending Cuban driver was reluctant to take me anywhere, so I surprised him twice; first by handing him a crisp fifty dollar bill, then by telling him where I wanted to go. I couldn’t have begun to guess his thoughts as he dropped me off at the steel gate of one of the largest estates on Biscayne Bay. He wasted no time leaving me there either.

I stood there for a minute or two, noting the closed-circuit cameras perched on top of both towers that framed the massive double gate, and the fifteen foot-high wall stretching practically into infinity on both sides of it. The two well dressed men who appeared instantly on the other side of the bars when I rang the speaker bell must have also thought some derelict had first gotten drunk and then lost. “Beat it, buster,” one of them said. “This is private property.”

I grabbed the bars in both hands. “I have a good reason to be dressed like this, and I want to see Don Cancelossi.”

The two men looked at each other, then laughed. The first guy looked back at me and said, “Bums in hell want ice water, too, but they ain’t likely to get none. Beat it. Get outa here.”

“Look, I don’t want to cause you guys any trouble. Just please call your boss and tell him Jeb Willard wants to see him. When he knows my name, he’ll want to talk to me. You can take that to the bank.”

The second man, a little younger than his partner, unbuttoned his suit jacket. I knew why, but I hadn’t come this far to be intimidated. I put up my hands. “I’m not carrying, or anything like that, boys, but you’d better hit that call button right now, or you’re gonna be in deep shit.”

A few more heated exchanges ensued, and when I saw the big Lincoln come roaring down the drive toward us, I knew the closed circuit system boasted state of the art audio as well, and somebody had been listening. It stopped five feet from the gate, and from it emerged one of the biggest men I’d ever seen. He had no hair and no neck, must have weighed close to three hundred, and didn’t look as though any of it was fat. The two guards stepped aside and he walked right up to me. His voice was surprisingly soft, though tinged with an Italian accent. “Who are you, mister, and what do you want?”

I repeated my demand, and added, “Tell your boss Senor Hemiola missed a beat this time, and wasted the wrong guy. Also, tell him that Snow White told me he was the ugliest dwarf of them all.”

The giant’s expression didn’t change a bit. “Wait right there.” He went back to the car, picked up the car phone, and spoke into it. A moment later, I saw him nod. He replaced the phone, got out and ordered his flunkies to open the gate. I went through, and was instantly frisked more thoroughly than President Fordham’s men had.

I thought he was going to put me in the Lincoln, but he didn’t. He led me up the drive maybe a hundred yards, then turned abruptly to the right. I followed him across an acre of manicured lawn into an equally perfect flower garden. Fifty more yards of winding gravel path led to an ornate gazebo, complete with an overhead fan which moved sweet air over twin padded loveseats. Big Bruno, polite as he could be, told me to “have a seat,” then took up an arms-folded, feet-apart position ten paces away, on the path toward the mansion. From where I sat, I could only see one rose-colored wing of it.

But I didn’t have to wait long.

Salvatore Cancelossi was nothing like I had imagined him to be. The few photographs I had seen of him had suggested a much younger, larger man. In fact, he wasn’t more than five-three, and probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds. He looked like a mummified jockey! And the bags under his eyes seemed as though they carried nearly a century’s worth of sadness. He was dressed in a loose, flowery shirt, open at the collar, which hung well over a pair of ridiculous red shorts. Between the bottom hem of those shorts and the sandals on his small feet, two legs the size and shape of gnarled walking canes propelled him along at a funereal pace. In one bony hand, he was carrying a book. When he reached the loveseat opposite me, I was amazed to see that the book was my first one! My photo was on the dust jacket.

He didn’t bother to shake hands, but he gave me a look that without the smile that accompanied it would have frozen my blood. Eyes like he had didn’t belong in a human being. Maybe an Osprey. Or a crocodile. “I read this with great pleasure, Mr. Willard. Your second one, however, was rather disappointing.”

I couldn’t for the life of me find a voice.

“I’ll give you ten minutes to tell me why you have come here.”

May as well be shot for a sheep as for a goat, I thought. “I came to see what kind of man would kill me, not to mention those two good friends of mine. And to tell you that if anything does happen to me, I have made arrangements for copies of Robert McCarty’s diaries to be published in every major newspaper in the country. Can we negotiate?”

The leather face never even twitched, nor did his eyes or voice. “I have been called worse than an ugly dwarf in my time, and it is true that in the past I have been suspected of many kinds of unsavory actions, but I have never been convicted of anything illegal, including murder, and I am not guilty of trying to kill you or hiring anyone else to.”

He fished in his pockets for a pack of Camels, shook one out, and waited while Bruno rushed over to light it. He inhaled deeply two or three times, then squinted through the smoke at me. “First things first. To bring you up to date, my confederation of families, which I like to call our brotherhood, stopped doing that sort of thing many, many years ago. Since those wonderful twenty years preceding the millennium, we have also found it to be a good deal more profitable to be involved with legitimate business and the stock market. And, with far less risk. The reason I have reached, let us say, my current position in our organization is because I was able a long time ago to convince my family friends and colleagues that owning resorts and casinos all over the world along with healthy investment portfolios produces far better balance sheets. They saw the logic of having much less overhead than running silly numbers rackets, prostitution, or losing so many of our people fighting street wars with ethnic types, minorities, and even ourselves over the sale of certain imported commodities. The often romantic and sometimes horrendous image of the so-called
Cosa Nostra
portrayed in old movies and by writers like the dear departed Puzo hasn’t existed for fifty years. What ordinary Americans like to call ‘The Mafia’ is colorful, but ancient history. I will readily admit we are somewhat insular, but our organization is now as benign as masons and shriners, though possibly not quite as benevolent, except for the church.”

I sat there listening to this bullshit with a straight face. When the Camel burned down, he promptly had Bruno light another. So the old man was a chain smoker as well as a great salesman. Though there was a certain element of truth in what he was saying, I knew he was only spouting the party line. Of all the world’s great sins, greed is well ahead of whatever is in second place, and there would never be a limit for people like Sal Cancelossi.