Class Act

27

Vinnie sat in his luxurious new trailer and watched his assistant, Maria, count the money. She could count a hundred grand in hundreds in a flash; her fingers flew, and Vinnie could never keep track, but she didn’t make mistakes. It took a couple of days before Vinnie caught on. The reason Manny had loved his job so much was that Maria did all the work, while he watched old movies on satellite TV and occasionally ambled down to the track and watched a few races run, just so he wouldn’t forget what a horse looked like.

What’s more, Vinnie was making nearly three times what he had in his old job. On his third day on the job, he gave Maria a big raise and got her to promise not to retire while he was still alive.

Maria was a pretty, quite buxom woman who hadn’t gained a pound since she was sixteen. It didn’t take Vinnie long to discover that she had a keen interest in sex. Apparently, her husband had forgotten how, and after all, she was entitled to a sex life, wasn’t she? He took it upon himself to see that she got the attention she craved, and she craved him, too. If he had known about this, he would have knocked off Manny years before.

It was obvious to Vinnie that Manny had not taken retirement and run off to an island somewhere, and his suspicions were confirmed when Manny’s house burned down with him in it. The medical examiner had taken one look at his remains and diagnosed lead poisoning.

Those were the rules of the game, Vinnie figured: you pissed off somebody higher up the ladder than you, and you got your brains scrambled. Vinnie tried never to piss off anybody.

Stone and Hilda were having lunch at La Goulue, in the East Sixties.

“How long have you known Jack Coulter?” Hilda asked.

“I don’t know, a while. A client who was a friend of his recommended him to me.”

“He reminds me of somebody I once knew,” she said, “but I can’t place him. What do you do for Jack, exactly?”

“Jack is one of those clients who has the whole firm of Woodman & Weld at his disposal: He wants to buy a house somewhere, we find him a Realtor to write the offer and close the sale. He gets himself a new wife and wants his will rewritten, it’s done. He’s looking at an investment and wants the seller investigated, the man is gone over with a fine-tooth comb, and so is the deal. Why does Jack interest you?” He thought it better to encourage this than to appear to be withholding information.

“As I said, he looks familiar, something about the way he moves around, the broad shoulders. Not the face, though. Maybe somebody my father knew: Does he spend time in Florida?”

“I told you: Palm Beach. He and Hillary have a big apartment at the Breakers.”

“My father wouldn’t know anybody at the Breakers, unless he was collecting a debt for a bookie.”

“Your father did that sort of work?”

“He was a sort of Jack-of-all-trades, I guess you’d say. Somebody wanted something done, my dad saw to it.”

“Was he mobbed up?”

“He certainly knew people in that milieu,” she said, “but he wasn’t a member of anything.”

“A freelancer then.”

“Exactly.”

Stone took a deep breath. “Did he teach you things?”

“He taught me to play every card game available and showed me what a fast horse looks like. That was about it.”

Stone exhaled. He didn’t want to be seen shying away from her background, but he wanted to know about it anyway. He changed the subject. After all, she wasn’t going to tell him how her father had taught her to shoot people in the head, not just once, but twice.

After lunch, he turned Hilda loose in Bloomingdale’s with a credit card, then went home. Dino was waiting for him, and he almost never dropped by the house in the daytime. Something was up.

“Is it too early for Scotch?” he asked Dino.

“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” Dino replied.

Stone handed him the drink.

“You’re not having something?”

“I had wine with lunch. I don’t want to sleep the afternoon away.” Dino wanted to tell him something; he could feel it.

“So, what’s new?” Stone asked, nudging him a little.

“Not much. Oh, I did hear something interesting, but it’s just a rumor. I can’t prove it.”

“Oh?”

“It’s about Hilda.”

Stone nodded. “Sure, it is.”

“Do you know what her father did for a living?”

“Funny, we just had a conversation about that over lunch. He handicapped horses and did odd jobs for the boys.”

“What sort of jobs?”

“Debt collection, that sort of thing. He wasn’t mobbed up, he was just a resource for them, near as I could tell.”

“A resource, huh.”

“Sort of like that, I think.”

“I heard something a little more definite,” Dino said.

“Well, you have big ears, Dino. Come on, spit it out.”

“I heard he was what you might call a ‘sought-after’ hitman.”

“Really?”

“You think Hilda knew about that?”

“You think she’d tell me if she did?”

“Maybe not.”

“It’s not the sort of things she’d tell the kids at school, is it?”

“I guess not.”

“Then why would she tell me? Would she think that would impress me?”

“I guess not.”

“I’m willing to believe that’s true, Dino. What I’m not willing to believe is that being a hired killer is the sort of thing a father passes down to his daughter.”

“How about if Dad got sick, or was just old and feeble and couldn’t earn anymore?”

“Is that what you heard?”

“It was intimated.”

“That would make it understandable,” Stone said. “But that doesn’t mean I want to hear it.”

“Wouldn’t you rather know the truth than not know?”

“No, Dino, I would not. And I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that in mind.”

“I’ll try to do that,” Dino said. He knocked back his Scotch and left.

Stone felt a little unsettled, in spite of himself.