State’s Evidence Read online

  “Have the fire marshal call Deputy DA Tolson. He can tell him.”

  The fireman put a finger on my chest. “Who are you, mac?”

  “Tanner.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was going to try to talk to the owner. Looks like I picked a bad time.”

  I tried a smile but the fireman wasn’t in the mood. “You better stick around,” he ordered. “The fire marshal will want a statement. I’ll tell him how to find you.”

  Someone called out a name from behind one of the trucks and the fireman gave me a narrow look and trotted off. When he was out of sight, I nosed around a bit longer, tense as always in the presence of fire. I didn’t see anyone I knew except Wadley. He was standing in a group of fire officials. I waited till he moved away from them and then went up beside him. “Mr. Wadley?”

  “Yeah? I’m busy. Who the hell are you?”

  His face was well tended, determinedly young; his attire casual but expensive. His curly locks were scrambled and speckled with ash. “I’d like to talk to you a minute,” I said.

  “About this?” He gestured toward the pyre, which chose that moment to make the sounds of steam.

  “No. About a boy,” I said.

  “A kid? My kid? What about him? He swipe something again?”

  “Not your boy. A boy named Quilk. Gus Quilk.”

  “Don’t know him,” Wadley said, shaking his head. I didn’t see the flash of awareness I’d been looking for.

  “I think I might have some information of use to you,” I lied. “I’d give it up in trade for information about the boy.”

  Wadley shook his head impatiently. “I got all the information I need, pal. What I don’t got is full coverage on my fire and casualty plan. Now excuse me.”

  “I just came from a meeting with Tony Fluto.”

  The name got me his full attention for the first time. “Tony, huh. My old pal Tony. What’s on his mind?”

  “The boy.”

  “This Quilk?”

  I nodded.

  “Tell him I’m real sorry, but I don’t know anything about it. Now I got to talk to these guys about the fire.” He started to walk away and then turned back. “Tony. That gets me thinking. And what I’m thinking is that Tony might know a lot about this fire himself. A whole lot. What do you think about that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Tony and me, we haven’t been getting along. Maybe he mentioned it to you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It occurs to me,” Wadley went on, “that Tony might have done this as some sort of warning. Of what, I don’t know. But these people here, if they tell me it was a torch job, well, the first name I think of will be Tony’s. You tell him that, at your next meeting. You tell him if I find out my place was torched I’ll be talking to him. And it won’t be about kid stuff.”

  Wadley swung abruptly away from me and stomped back to the group of firemen. I decided I’d better leave before someone told me I couldn’t. I also decided that Wadley didn’t have Gus, because even in these circumstances he would have toyed with me longer if he had. I thought of someplace else to go and headed back toward my car.

  They were walking side by side, speaking in low tones, the large one tilted slightly to his left so he could hear the small one’s words. They almost stepped on me before they saw me. “You,” the big one blurted when he looked up and saw my face instead of the sun.

  “Welcome,” I said. “Always glad to see a federal presence at a disaster site.”

  The little one smiled and bowed. “What happened up there?” he asked stiffly.

  “Fire. Wadley’s Restaurant. Everything on the menu tonight comes well done.”

  “Anyone injured?”

  I shook my head. “The place was closed between meals. The fire people think it was a grease fire.”

  “And you?”

  “Me, I think it was anything but.”

  “Specifically?”

  I smiled. “I never like to be more specific than the occasion requires.”

  “We should talk,” the little one said simply. His eyes never quite met mine. He seemed to read his words off a cue card held somewhere behind me.

  “I agree,” I said.

  He frowned. “Not here. We’ve got to go up there and investigate on a level two basis, then we’ve got to get back to the city by seventeen hundred hours. We could meet you in our office then. Would that be acceptable?”

  I checked my watch and thought about it. “Do you know about the Quilk boy?” I asked.

  “We know.”

  “Has he been found, by any chance?”

  “Not that I am aware.”

  “Are you looking for him?”

  “Incidentally, yes. Specifically, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “No jurisdiction. Our mission doesn’t cover nonspecific criminality.”

  “It’s a kidnapping. That’s federal, right?”

  “The victim must be held twenty-four hours, first of all. Second of all, we’re not FBI.”

  “Then who?”

  “Justice. Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. Strike Force Twenty-two.”

  “How many are there, for God’s sake?” I asked.

  “Twenty-six. One short of the number of LCN families in the country.”

  “LCN?”

  “La Cosa Nostra,” the big one blurted, tripling my collection of his words.

  “And here you are in El Gordo,” I said. “Hard to believe this town is that big a deal.”

  “Let’s not go into that just now. See you at strike base?” the little one pronounced.

  “Where is it?”

  “Federal Building. Turk and Larkin. Room sixteen-twenty-four. The door is not designated. Just walk in.”

  “See you then.”

  “Roger.”

  They marched away like toys. I drove to a filling station and tried to call the Blairs and then Ray Tolson and I didn’t reach any of them. I tried to think of what else I could do to turn up Gus Quilk but I couldn’t come up with anything, so I got some lunch and drove back to the city I live in.

  The office was empty and cold, without light or sound or things that needed doing or even a note from Peggy. I fixed a drink and turned on the radio and tried to put together a mental map to Gus Quilk’s whereabouts. Somewhere in the middle of my musing something occurred to me and I looked up a phone number and dialed it. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Therm,” I said to the woman who answered.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Therm is not in,” she replied.

  “When do you expect him?”

  “Not for several days. He’s been called away to consult on a non-obvious occupation. May I take a message?”

  I guessed she meant a haunted house. “Tell him Mr. Tanner called. Tell him he said thanks.”

  “Will he know what it’s in reference to?”

  “I think he will,” I said, then left the office and took my Buick out to Turk Street and put it in a lot that charged five bucks for the first hour. It was ten minutes before five when I walked through the door of the Federal Building, smiled at the guard checking bags and briefcases for bombs and took the express elevator to the sixteenth floor.

  Room 1624 was the only one in the corridor that didn’t have a sign beside it identifying the department it was charged to. The office on the near side was the NLRB and on the far side was the Securities and Exchange Commission, which put the Mafia right in the middle of labor problems and the stock market. Which was about where they were anyway.

  The door opened onto a two-room suite, bureaucratically barren, a jar of daisies on the desk the only pleasant thing in the room. There was a chart on the wall with words like caporegima and soldato written on it, and a map of California with some red pins sticking in it. There were a lot of pins in San Francisco and San Jose, and even a few in El Gordo. A picture of Jimmy Carter still hung on the wall, as though it had refused to be removed.

 
The young woman standing in the middle of the office was either coming or going, and when she took her rabbit fur jacket off and hung it on the coat rack, I decided it was the former. After a quick glance and a nod at me, she took the seat behind the gray metal desk, put her purse in a bottom drawer, and looked up at me with the almond eyes and kneaded features of a Ming princess. The plastic sign on the desk in front of her said her name was Arlene Wong. A small curved scar beside her left eye looked like it had been made with a spoon.

  “My name’s Tanner,” I said. “Are either of the, ah, agents in? I have an appointment.”

  “Agent Lucas has just returned,” she said brightly. “He’s down the hall a moment. Please have a seat.”

  I collected dust and my thoughts for the next five minutes. The girl busied herself with typing from a tape cassette, head phones wedged in her ears, her foot pedal squeaking merrily as she moved through the dictation. When she stopped to change tapes, I asked her a question. “Which one is Lucas?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Which one of them is Lucas? The big one or the little one?”

  “The little one.”

  “Who’s the other guy?”

  “Armbruster. Agent Armbruster.”

  “Is he around by any chance?”

  “No. He’s … no.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “Yes, but I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t know who you are.”

  “I’m Marsh Tanner.”

  “I know, but who are you?”

  “I’m helping the Strike Force with the Fluto investigation.”

  “I see.”

  “So where’s Armbruster?”

  She shook her head reluctantly, embarrassed at her continued opposition. “I still can’t say. Reginald doesn’t like me to talk about our work. He says anyone in the building could be a double agent. He says the LCN has penetrated every department of government. Even ours.”

  “Reginald?”

  “Agent Lucas.”

  “Just tell me this,” I said. “Has either of them come up with anything on Gus Quilk?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Okay,” I said. “How long do you think it will be before Reginald shows up?”

  She said what they always say: “He should be here any minute.”

  I took out a cigarette. When I couldn’t find a match, I asked her for one. She dug a book out of her desk and told me I could keep it. I said thanks. She put her headset on again and typed. Twenty minutes later the door opened and Agent Lucas hurried in. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Washington on the line.” He motioned me toward the inner office. “Anything?” he asked the girl.

  She shook her head. The look on her face indicated that Agent Lucas was more than an agent to her.

  “Midnight okay?” Lucas asked her.

  “Sure,” she said. Her smile was beautiful and as real as the daisies. Lucas nodded, told her she could leave, and guided me into his office.

  Sets of the United States Code Annotated and the Federal Supplement climbed the walls. Behind a glass-fronted bookcase were row upon row of spiral notebooks with the names of cities on their spines—New York, Buffalo, Miami, Las Vegas, and San Jose were the ones I could see. On the corner of the desk nearest me was a stack of file folders. The nearest label had a man’s name on it: Angelo Bruno. He was dead, I knew that. He’d supposedly been a big-time Philadelphia hood. If each of the files on the desk was for a different Mafia boss the Strike Force wouldn’t run out of work for a century.

  Lucas saw me looking at the files. “Know what I’m doing here?” he asked, a queer smile on his face.

  “What?”

  “Answering a request under the Freedom of Information Act. Know who made the request?”

  “Who?”

  “Tony Fluto. Or, more precisely, his lawyer.”

  I laughed. “You mean Fluto has filed an official request to see what you have on him in your records?”

  “That’s a roger.”

  “And you have to give it to him?”

  “Some of it. Lots of it, in fact. You know what kind of problem that causes?”

  “I’d say it plays hell with keeping an undercover agent in place inside his operation.”

  “Right. Once Fluto knows what raw data we’ve collected on him, he can easily calculate its parameters and determine its locus.”

  “Presto,” I said. “One dead agent.”

  “That’s a roger,” Lucas said. “Sometimes I wonder whose team Congress is on. Under our earlier configuration we were able to employ the tax laws and IRS data to prosecute almost any LCN member we wanted. But the Tax Reform Act made that tactic inoperative. Now the IRS can’t interface with us at all. Same problem with the Right to Financial Privacy Act.”

  “But they gave you RICO,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization statute. It’s not inutile, but it’s not nearly pervasive enough, either. Now with Fluto, we’re proceeding under the Continuing Criminal Enterprise law, particularly its forfeiture provisions. That contracting business of his. A negotiated casualty is what it amounts to. In a couple of months we’ll have a prima facie case to present to the U.S. attorney for transmission to the special grand jury.”

  Lucas’s jargon was attacking my brain like a Mix-master, but I had to hang in there. He was the only source I had left. “Who else you after down in El Gordo?” I asked.

  “Well, there’s a branch of La Nuestra Familia down there, and a pretty tough group of Hell’s Angels, but compared to Fluto they’re subordinate considerations. Fluto’s the chief of the conventional LCN operation in El Gordo, and the main feeder into the Bollo family in San Francisco, and that’s what we’re trying to functionally decapitate.”

  “You sound real happy in your work, Agent Lucas.”

  He didn’t even fake a smile. “Organized crime earns a hundred and fifty billion in untaxed income each year, Tanner. I’d like to see some of that go to Uncle Sam. The benefits would impact across a wide spectrum, socioeconomically.”

  “From what I read, you’ve been having some luck lately around the country.”

  “Some. Jersey. Miami. L.A. But hell, it’s still just a few vectors out of many. If you look at the big picture you still see the LCN operating at full capacity, expanding its base. The last statistical bulletin I saw said the LCN had moved into more than seven hundred legitimate businesses in the country. Movies. Records. Insurance. Banking. The increase is geometric.”

  “So why am I here?”

  Lucas clasped his hands in front of him in prayerful solemnity. He was as humorless as anyone I’d ever seen. “Our first encounter was counterproductive, Tanner,” he said. “I was overly sensitive to a possible compromise of our mission. I apologize for my unwarranted remarks.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I was concerned that you would become congruent with an impact area without realizing it, and thereby ruin months of field work. This time I simply want a favor.”

  “What?”

  “Stay away from all phases of the Fluto investigation.”

  “I think I heard that one before.”

  “But now you’ve accomplished the mission Tolson engaged you to do.”

  “True enough,” I said. “Tell me. Did you make the same suggestion to Tolson? That he lay off Fluto?”

  “In a slightly different confirmation, yes.”

  “He go along?”

  “That’s not your problem.”

  “You’re right. My problem is a fourteen-year-old kid. I can’t get out of the Fluto case till he turns up.”

  “I recognize that tangent,” Lucas said. “Believe me. But we’ll locate him. Leave it to the Bureau.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. Here’s the format I suggest. Give us a week. If the subject hasn’t surfaced by then, give me a call. We’ll bring you down and brief you on the fou
r corners of the investigation, including the input of the FBI, El Gordo police, Strike Force, everything. Then you can do as you please. With our full cooperation. But for now, we’re asking you to cool it.”

  In the middle of the buzz words the vernacular was jarring. “You won’t ever find the kid if you think Tony Fluto’s the one who has him,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Fluto doesn’t know where he is.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “Reasonably.”

  “Okay. I’ll plug that into the circuit. It’ll advance the momentum of the investigation.”

  “And pass it along to the FBI?”

  “And lateralize it.”

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Who’s Fluto’s main opposition down in El Gordo? Who wants him out of the way?”

  Lucas smiled. “You mean who besides his kid?”

  “Young Tony?”

  Lucas nodded. “They all have this family component, you know. The way we hear it, Fluto is ill. His son’s the presumed successor, that is if Tony can dictate the succession, which he will unless he goes down first.”

  “Who besides young Tony is in the running?”

  “Well, Fluto’s main competition has had a way of being prematurely disengaged over the years. We’re talking maybe six, seven, corpses since Tony returned to El Gordo from Vegas. The last one, a guy named Moscowitz, jumped from a building in Seattle last October. Halloween. Local law ruled suicide, decided Moskowitz didn’t have a thing to live for. Well, the asset he had was the biggest hot car operation in the West Bay, and enough troops in his organization to threaten Fluto or anyone else, even Duckie Bollo, the head of the San Francisco family.”

  “How about right now, though? Who’s the main contender?”

  “Well, there’s Wadley. He’s smart, and has a great laundry for his cash, but he still charts out a step below Fluto. Then there’s Theopholis Buck, a black who runs narcotics and street numbers. The blacks don’t like to subserve anyone. Then there’s a guy named Abrams, he inherited the Moskowitz car operation. They’re all the secondary units. Of course there’s three times that many tertiary units who want to vertical their way into a higher rank. That’s why the LCN are always looking over their shoulder. They never know where it’s going to come from.”

  “You got undercover men around those three guys?”