Operation Bamboozle (23 page)

While he was indoors, phoning, they stayed outside, preparing their stories. “Stout denial,” Hancock said. Luis and Julie had met the deceased once, briefly, in Texas. Princess had given him a beer. Stevie knew him slightly from old Mob meetings. Forget the DiLazzari house. Didn't exist. Where had they been all day? Sightseeing in the Foothills. True, in a way. “Stout denial,” Hancock repeated.

LAPD detectives were there until midnight. Agent Moody sat in a corner and listened. Different cops asked the same questions. Nobody knew nothin'. What was the body doing on this property? “Very little,” Hancock said. “In that condition.” They didn't smile. He went back to stout denial, and eventually they all left, Moody last of all. Luis and Julie walked him to his car.

“Come again, when you can't stay so long,” she said.

“I think I'll be back. Thanks for the sandwich.”

“Por nada”
Luis said. “On Tuesdays our special is shrimp jambalaya. How did you know there was a body in the Buick?”

“Me? I didn't. Not until I looked in the trunk. Goodnight.”

They watched his headlights disappear down the canyon road. Somewhere, high in the hills, a coyote made its sad, unlovely howl. “Cue wildlife,” Julie said. “What's happening? Wherever we go, it's always bodies in the begonias.” The coyote howled again. “Oh, save it, you idiot,” she said. “You're on the cutting-room floor.”

Next day Moody telephoned Fisk.

“No teletype,” he said. “I can't put anything in writing, because I've got nothing definite on Cabrillo-Conroy. You heard about Tony Feet.”

“Just like E1 Paso,” Fisk said. “Makes three.”

“No evidence they did any of them.”

“But they're linked with the Fantoni family and with Giancana's people. There's got to be a pattern somewhere, surely. What are they doing in LA?”

“Running an artist's studio. Best damn female nude paintings I ever saw.”

“Pornography?”

“Gauguin painted nudes. Nobody threw him in jail.”

They kicked it around some more. The homicidal-counterfeiter-thing was just rumor. Moody said his informant had ducked out, amscrayed. “Which doesn't fit,” he said, “because now nobody's running the guy's business. Classic cars. Worth a few bucks. Why quit? Not smart, not in LA.”

“Maybe he got what Tony Feet got. Or maybe he
gave
Feet what Feet got. Or maybe they were both victims of casual opportunistic slayings. Not unknown in LA, I believe.”

“Too many maybes,” Moody said.

Forgery in Tennessee, Luis read, could be committed by typewriter. Now that was interesting. Did you forge the typewriter itself or did you type your fraud on the other man's machine?

The LA Public Library was big, but it didn't guarantee to answer every question.

He turned a page. In Illinois a special sort of forgery had developed. It involved connecting together different parts of several banknotes so as to produce one additional note, and then pass them all as genuine. What a performance! Seemed like hard work for not very much return.

Pennsylvania had a lot of problems with bank bills, checks, drafts and floating lumber. Counterfeit the brand on lumber floating in a river, and you got two years in prison. Like rustling cattle, only with wood. Interesting. Presumably the challenge of applying a red-hot branding iron to a floating log was part of the appeal.

Then Luis saw the heading
United States
and he forgot about slippery lumber. Forgery of banknotes was a crime by Federal statute … He skimmed to the end. Fifteen years with or without hard labor. That hurt.

He was about to leave when he saw an item about forgery in Vermont.

To get a drink in Vermont, you had to find a licensee authorized to sell intoxicating liquors and show him the written prescription of a legally qualified physician stating that the liquor “is given and necessary for medical use.” He chuckled softly. Forgery was alive and well in Vermont.

A woman sitting next to him said: “I never saw anyone get so much pleasure out of the Britannica.”

“Oh, well. Research for a screenplay. Background on counterfeiting. Nothing much here.”

She looked in the front of the book. “Very old edition. Probably obsolete. If I were you, I'd go to the LA Times building and check out their back issues. All human life is there.”

Luis went to the Times building and got a lot of ink on his fingers before he found a half-page article on Ernie Studd Bligh, the best counterfeiter of currency in California in living memory. Best, but still not good enough. Did twenty years in St. Quentin until released on parole. Now living in Salt Lake City. Luis made a note. There couldn't be many Blighs in Utah.

Julie drove Luis to the airport. “Why Salt Lake City?” she asked.

“I plan to marry several Mormon women,” he said, “and transport them to the utmost heights of physical ecstasy.”

“That's good to know.” They kissed goodbye. “For a moment I thought you were having an affair.”

By midday Luis was shaking hands with Ernie Studd Bligh. The man was tall and slim and dressed by Brooks Brothers. This surprised Luis: he had expected much less of a retired crook called Ernie. Luis introduced himself. Researching a screenplay for United Artists. “Of course, I realize you may not wish to talk about—”

“What else would I do?” Bligh said courteously. “Too hot for golf. Too early for martinis. Too old for hanky-panky. Please come in. No man ever tires of talking about himself. It is an endlessly fascinating subject.”

The apartment had soft autumnal colors and the chairs offered the kind of comfort that only money can buy. They talked for a while of Bligh's early years in the family business, designing and making printing machines. Good at it; prosperous. Then young Ernie went off to war—the first one, the Great one—and while he was in France getting slightly blown up by a
German shell, his father died. Friends moved in to run the company. They stole, and they ran it into the ground. When Ernie came home he had to fight to get it back and then fight to save it. He failed.

He took Luis to a restaurant and they ate Caesar salad. “One of the worst punishments of prison,” Bligh said, “is never being able to choose one's food.” They talked of many other things, told a few ambitious jokes. “That's the difference between men and women,” Bligh said. “Men try to deflate a crisis with humor, usually fail. Women don't. Either way, the crisis still exists, of course. And so do women, thank God.”

Back to the apartment. “I couldn't save the company, I owed money on all sides, and I was bankrupt, so the law wouldn't let me start up a new business. That's a formula for crime. They wouldn't let me make money their way, so I went ahead and made it my way. Printing was the only skill I had. Paid off the creditors. Then I couldn't see any reason to stop.”

“You make it sound easy,” Luis said.

“Show me a dollar.”

Luis gave him a five-spot and Bligh gave Luis a master class in counterfeiting currency, beginning with the paper, which was very special. Then the printing. Fine lines were unusually sharp, ink had different thicknesses, border designs were fiendishly complex. The choice of US presidents was not patriotic. Look at Ulysses S. Grant on a $50 bill: his beard alone was a minefield for copyists. And so on.

“I have to ask,” Luis said. “Feel free not to answer.”

“How I got caught? Not because of the notes. The notes were perfect. But one night a small fire broke out in my workshop. Probably an electrical fault. The Fire Department came, they called the police, who called the FBI.”

“Pure luck.”

“I did my time. Fortunately, I'd set up a lot of accounts in banks in several states. Still have. I'll tell you the best moment of the whole adventure. In court, my lawyer argued that, since the prosecutor couldn't pick my bills from the government's bills, no actual forgery had taken place. Nice idea. Didn't work.”

Luis flew back to LA. He had the ghost of an idea; but every time he tried to pin it down, it hid in a corner.

“Vito DiLazzari just invited himself to supper,” Julie said.

“He wants something,” Luis said. “He's got his hooks into us. We think quick, remember? What's the Italian for
Arrivederci?
Vito can't remember.”

“That's hogwash,” Princess said. “His sort says it with bullets. I put a couple
habañero
chili peppers in the chow.” They looked at her, trying to find the link. “Makes his eyeballs sweat,” she said. “Can't shoot straight.”

“Just stay away from him,” Julie ordered. “Don't hit the sonofabitch. He's top mobster in LA. Show some respect.”

“He can sit next to Stevie,” Luis said, and looked around. “Where is she?”

“Bubble-bath,” Julie said. “Refreshing her virginity.”

“Yesterday she told me I was the breathless hush of evening that trembles on the brink of a lovely song. She's got to go. I mean, bloody hell.”

“Jerome Kern,” Julie said.

“I'm the angel glow that lights a star,” Luis said bitterly. “No man is safe with her, she's an animal. She played lacrosse for Bryn Mawr, for God's sake.”

“Yeah, but she got skin like peaches,” Princess said. “She goes, I go.”

“Sold many paintings lately?”

“Ain't my department, kid. I just crank out the crap.”

When Vito's car arrived, Stevie came downstairs, wearing slacks and one of Luis's short-sleeved shirts, largely unbuttoned. Julie told her to fasten a few. “Nobody's breast-feeding the guests this season,” she said. “We got ice cream for dessert.” Stevie said nothing, but for a few seconds her eyes were round.

Supper turned out to be very pleasant. Vito, casually dressed in a tennis sweater and wine-red golf trousers, took a second helping of pork and beans and complimented Princess, in Spanish. He asked Julie which were the best jazz clubs in Manhattan. He got Luis's views on Joe McCarthy: a monster, Luis said, but an
interesting
monster. Vito listened carefully. And the nudes on the walls intrigued him. It wasn't difficult to get Stevie to talk about her own body. She knew it, she liked it, she enjoyed his enjoyment. “Must be fascinating to watch the artist at work,” he said. “Come tomorrow,” Stevie said. “Come next day. Come as often as you like.”

“A first for you both,” Julie said brightly.

Luis told Vito he might like the view from the belvedere. Julie went up with them. Princess and Stevie didn't.

They looked at the lights of LA and Vito said, “I want you should buy me a church.”

Luis said, “I didn't know churches could be bought.”

“This is LA. Anything can be bought. Find some place big, busy, good parking. I got reasons.”

“Any particular denomination?” Julie asked.

Vito shrugged. “Not Jewish.” He thought about it. “Probably not Catholic. The Romans wouldn't let you in anyway. Some place sorta independent.” That was that.

“Everyone needs a property portfolio,” Julie said. “A church here, a monastery there, maybe a small cathedral. All tax-free.”

“You handle it,” Luis said. “I can't take it on, my hands are full of cloaks and daggers.”

“Government work.” Vito sniffed. “High risk, low pay.”

“The rewards are absurdly large, and I don't mean the Medal of Honor I might one day get, in secret of course. The bucks are big because the operation itself is massive.”

“Lemme guess. You found a cure for politics.”

Luis laughed. “A nice thought. Your average politician would run a mile from this project. Too hot for the CIA. So … no, we're just a bunch of private, patriotic citizens with the guts to make the Soviets look stupid and the brains to walk away with … Forget it. I've said too much already. Stick to buying churches. It's not half the fun but it's ten times safer.”