Operation Bamboozle (15 page)

“Frankie Blanco,” Gibson whispered to his dripping fingers.

“Blanco was dumb,” Moody said. “You're smart.” He got up and padded away. The best part about this steam room was the draft beer he had afterward. He could taste it already.

Julie had a map of Los Angeles and she showed Sterling Hancock III where Santa Marta Canyon Road was: south of Pasadena, east of Glendora, forty miles away as the eagle flies. More like fifty by road, feels like sixty in the rush hour. Stevie had gone upstairs to get dressed. Princess had come to the library to find out what the action was about. She asked Hancock how far he'd come. He pointed to Newport Beach, halfway to San Diego. “Looks like I'm in the wrong county,” he muttered.

“It's worse than that,” Luis said. “You're in the wrong job.”

Hancock had finished his sandwich. He used his fingertip to pick the crumbs from the plate and he ate them one by one. “We got blueberry pie,” Princess said.

His eyes widened. “You're too kind, but … Really, I couldn't impose myself further.” They all knew he could. “Unless perhaps … just a fragment. With ice cream?”

“Vanilla.” Princess said, and he raised his arms, totally defeated. She went out.

“This Daniel Scripps Todhunter,” Luis said. “You ever met him?”

“He's the father. He's dead. How could I meet him?”

“Yes, of course. My mistake.
Norton
Scripps Todhunter. Met him?”

“That was my goal, to meet him here. The place looked right. You looked right. I assumed …”

“A natural mistake.” Luis stood in front of a mirror. He turned his head slightly and examined himself with amused and insolent eyes. “Breeding cannot disguise itself.”

“Yeah,” Julie said. “Luis is the bastard son of the Duke of Zanzibar and I'm Miss North Dakota of 1937.” That was when Stevie came in wearing torn jeans and a tank top that was as busy as freshly caught trout. “This is Stevie,” Julie said. “Don't marry her. It's fatal.”

Stevie looked him over. “You in the movies?”

“Lay off him,” Luis said. “He's a Boston lawyer. Not your type.” Princess arrived with blueberry pie. When Stevie saw it, she lost interest in Hancock and headed for the kitchen. Luis put an affectionate arm around Julie. “Let's you and me take a stroll,” he said.

They went outside. Othello came too: there might be food out there. Never had been, but maybe today was the day, a lamb
chop might fall out of the sky, a dog has to have hope or why go on? “Mr. Sterling Hancock III is working a con,” Luis said. “Very badly. But the idea's a good one.” He repeated Hancock's shocking news of the sickly illegitimate son, needing a thousand bucks for doctor bills in Switzerland. “Simplicity. That's what I like.”

“Uh-huh. Dad's hardly cold in his grave, least thing the family needs is a scandal. Money's no problem, he was loaded. Pay up and move on. Right?”

“Right.” Luis picked up an old tennis ball and lobbed it. Othello raised a hind leg and scratched an ear. Did they think he was stupid? He knew what old tennis balls tasted like. “Oh well,” Luis said. “Let's go and talk business.”

He took Hancock up to the belvedere. “Los Angeles,” he said. “A lot of people. Some rich, most not. My guess is you read the obituary pages.”

Hancock didn't like the sound of that. He polished his bifocals and put them on. He twitched his nose, which shunted his glasses up and down. “None of your business, sir,” he said. “With all respect.” He had food inside him; he felt stronger.

“No, that's where you're wrong. It's exactly my business. It's how I make my living. I separate people from their money by solving problems they never knew they had. This enhances their life and makes them happy. So you and I are brothers. The only difference is I'm hot stuff, while you, if I may say so without offense, are only luke-warm.”

Hancock found half a cigar in his coat pocket. “That's right,” he said, “kick a man when he's down. Story of my life.”

Luis struck a match on the battlements and fired up the man's cigar. “You win on strategy but you lose on tactics. Your mapreading was suicidal. Rule one in this business is: check everything, trust nobody. Especially yourself. Then, when I opened the door you didn't make sure I was Todhunter. You
asked,
but you didn't wait for an answer because you were in a tearing hurry to give me your card. That was not professional. An excellent card, by the way.”

“I gave it a lot of thought.
Eagleston
is strong,
Chappell
is religious,
Hart
sounds honest.”

“Your finest moment. After that, everything went downhill in a hurry. No small talk, no effort to make me like you or trust you. Wham-bam straight into the con. Too sudden, too
hard.”

Hancock blew cigar smoke at a cobweb and made it tremble.

“And a thousand dollars was wrong,” Luis said. “The bastard son is seriously ill. Needs specialist attention. Round-the-clock nursing, expensive drugs, private rooms. Have you no idea what surgery costs?”

“Five grand?”

“No. Six thousand four hundred and twenty dollars. Round figures send the wrong message. Our boy is an
individual
and he comes at his own special, individual price.”

Hancock smiled, partly in admiration. “I never looked at it that way.”

“How d'you feel about going into partnership?”

They shook on it, went downstairs, walked to Hancock's car. “Let's get to work tomorrow,” Luis said.

“So soon?” Hancock was surprised. “Doing what?”

“Doing Norton Scripps Todhunter,” Luis said. “He's out there, waiting. Why waste him?”

Back in the days when a man could ride a horse clear across town, witness two gunfights and help put out a burning house, buy a sack of avocados and still be home in time to hunt grizzlies in the Pasadena wilderness, somebody built a house in Beverly Hills and called it Hungerford Manor. Not so much a house as a pile. Built to last and it refused to fall down.

In the 1920s a bootlegger called DiLazzari bought it because the walls were granite and the windows were small, which was a serious advantage in a business where you sometimes couldn't hear the radio soaps for the rattle of Tommy guns. He liked the soaps and the privacy which his skill at making and moving booze in industrial quantities had earned him. He'd cracked the great secret of American capitalism: make your second million first. When Prohibition ended he was ready to move into fresh rackets. LA was growing. Someone had to service its natural needs.

Vito DiLazzari II was born in the Manor, grew up there, never lived anywhere else, and he felt trapped in the dump. “How much to get the wreckers in?” he asked. “How much to flatten it?”

“You're not thinking straight,” his uncle said. “Wreckers ain't cheap. You don't like it, then just sell it. The way the market's going you'll get a million easy.” He sipped his lemonade. They were sitting at a rustic table, under an oak tree. “But it's your house. Your money.”

“Money's no damn good when you can't use the stuff. It's got so I'm afraid to spend fifty cents on a good cigar. Goddamn Revenue men.”

“You're not alone,” his uncle said. “Jimmy Lanza's wife, up in San Francisco, wanted a mink, had to settle for a plain woolen overcoat. Jimmy was scared the Revenue would want to know where the money came from. It's called reverse accountancy.”

“It's persecution. It's un-American. Can't we get into some legit racket that has a cash flow we can turn on? Carnivals, dancehalls, movies …”

“Stay away from the studios, Vito. Those guys are trained thieves. Every picture they make turns a fat loss, it's an art. Speaking of art, we still have those hot Picassos in a warehouse in Anaheim …” For a while they talked business: interstate cigarette smuggling; offshore casinos; protection involving trucking and agriculture, both of them highly sensitive in California where any delay could turn a load of lettuce into a heap of green mush. Overall, the local economy was healthy, although his uncle was a little worried about the rise in street crime in LA. “Too many Latinos,” he said. “They'll knife you for a dollar. Got no work ethic. Reminds me …” He took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket. “Remember Milt Gibson? Ran with your father in the Thirties, did a stretch. Kind of mouthy. We used to call him Gee-Whiz Gibson.”

“Another gabby old bastard,” Vito complained. “This ain't a home for the aged. Why don't the sonsabitches die?”

“Your father liked Milt. Put bits of work his way, fencing and stuff … Thing is, he came to me with a name. Cabrillo. Guy just moved into town. Was in El Paso when Frankie Blanco cashed his chips. Happened right outside this Cabrillo's house.”

“Blanco was disloyal,” Vito said. “I hate that. A man who betrays his family betrays himself, and ends up a nothing. I wrote a paper on loyalty when I was majoring in ethics at UCLA. Got a lousy B for it. College professors ain't so smart.”

“Uh-huh. Well, Tony Feet from Chi was in the house too. Also Jerome Fantoni's girl, Stevie. Now she's here with Cabrillo. Doing what, we don't know and don't much care, but the Bureau
does. Back to Milt Gibson. The Bureau helped put him away, now they use him as a kind of go-between. He dishes the dirt to the FBI but he clears it with us first.”

“Semi-disloyalty,” Vito said. “That I can live with.”

“Yeah. Your father knew the set-up, but he reckoned it helps to know what the Feds are thinking. Right now it's Cabrillo, and we got nothing on him, but Milt needs something to sing about.”

“Well, hell. Tell 'em homicide. Tell 'em the guy's counterfeiting currency with reckless endangerment leading to multiple homicide. We're not in that racket, so let the Bureau go chase the bums who are. They need the exercise.” Vito looked with gloomy satisfaction at his home. “I'd burn it down, but the goddamn Revenue would audit the cost of the kerosene.”

“It's granite,” his uncle said. “Try a small nuclear weapon.”

The painting was incomplete. Luis took a long look at it and said he was sure it would be jolly nice when it was finished, and Princess Chuckling Stream punched him the belly so hard that he fell backward over a chair and made a gurgling noise like the last of the dishwater going down the plug hole. “Don't expect any sympathy from me,” Julie said. “Nice ain't in this artist's vocabulary.” She cracked open some more peanuts and ate. He relaxed on the floor and got his breath back.

Stevie said to Princess, “Just because he talks this funny sorta English, you don't need to hit him. His kinda nice don't mean your kinda nice, it means, in England, holy shit, get a load of that, you an' me, we can make sweet music baby. That kinda nice.”

“Keep that woman away from me,” Luis wheezed.

“Which one?” Julie asked.

He righted the chair and sat on it and looked at the picture again. “I like the feet.” He said. “No shortage of toes. But she's only got three fingers on one hand.”

“Art is not anatomy, you dummy,” Julie said.

“All the same …”

“Ain't the same,” Princess growled. “And the kind of guy who counts his girl's fingers before he drops his pants ain't gonna buy my crap.”

“Princess paints
sex,”
Julie said. “Steamy sex. I love it.”

“Me too,” Stevie said. “Don't deny your body's honest longings, Luis, it ain't healthy. I read that in
Scientific American.”

“I can't see the sex for the steam,” he said.

Princess took the painting and wrapped it in velvet. “Your trouble, you want everythin' too damn easy,” she said. “Like every man I ever knew.”

The Todhunter residence had a butler, which was a good start. He took their card and their hats, and invited them to wait in the dark and highly polished hallway. Hancock could have parked his Oldsmobile in it and left room for a Sherman tank without moving the pair of black horsehair couches. These looked as if they couldn't be moved easily. Maybe the house had been built around them.

The butler returned. They followed him to the library, everyone marching in lock-step.

Norton Scripps Todhunter was standing in the middle of the room, hands in his jacket pockets, thumbs hooked outside. He was about forty, and he gave that solid impression of someone who hasn't run a step since he was twelve and carries an extra twenty-five pounds as a result. The weight was disguised by lightweight tweeds but his tailor could do nothing about the jowls.

Todhunter held the card at arm's length. “Eagleston, Chappell and Hart. I knew a David Eagleston at Harvard. Somewhat …” He searched for the word. “Unreliable,” he decided.

“Our Eagleston is a Yale man,” Luis said. “Henry Eagleston.” Short pause. Todhunter seemed a little disappointed. “And Chappell was at Columbia,” Luis said. “As for Hart …” He frowned.