Chapter 29

IT WAS 11:03 P.M. in downtown Los Angeles. Since I’d come in about twelve hours ago with Samuelson, I had talked with three detectives, two assistant D.A.‘s, a sheriff’s investigator, a homicide captain, the chief of detectives (who called me “a bush-league fucking hot dog”), the department public relations officer, a guy from the mayor’s office (who said something about “civic responsibility” that I didn’t fully follow but seemed to be in substantial agreement with the chief of detectives), and a lawyer who KNBS had sent over to protect my constitutional rights, the same one they’d sent before. Now I was in Samuelson’s office with the door closed, drinking maybe my eighty-third cup of really despicable black coffee and watching the latenight news with Samuelson on a nine-inch TV on top of a file cabinet in the left corner of the room.

On the screen Frederic, the news director, looking bigger and more natural, was sitting on the edge of a desk in what was obviously the KNBS newsroom, speaking directly into the camera.

“Every reporter covers stories of sudden death,” he was saying. “But for all of us at KNBS News this has been a different story. This time the victim was one of us.”

Samuelson was coatless, his tie was hanging unknotted, his shirt was unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled up above the elbows. He had his feet up on the corner of his desk as he watched, and he drummed with the fingers of his left hand softly on the desktop. I sipped some coffee. I didn’t want it, but there wasn’t anything else to do while I watched.

“KNBS feature reporter Candy Sloan was killed last night in the course of an investigation that linked motion picture industry figures to organized crime,” Frederics said. I looked at myself in the dark window behind Samuelson’s desk. My clothes had dried on me in complex wrinkles, my hair was stiff and angular. I had a two days’ growth of beard, and I hadn’t slept for a couple of days. I looked like a doorman at the drunk tank.

“Tinsel Town,” I said. “Glamor.”

Samuelson looked at me. “Land of dreams,” he said. On the tube Frederics was summarizing the events that culminated in Candy’s death.

“You ever notice that they never get it quite right,” Samuelson said.

“Not even this one,” I said.

“You want any more coffee?” Samuelson said.

“No.” I felt a little sick from all that I’d drunk that day. I hadn’t eaten in nearly as long as I hadn’t slept. Samuelson got up and turned the sound down on the television so that Frederics was reduced to pantomime. “You want to know what we got?” Samuelson said.

“Yeah.”

“Okay. We got lucky. Brewster couldn’t wait to blame Simms for everything. We read him his rights and warned him about using what he said and told him he needn’t talk without his lawyer, but he was in such a goddamn sweat to get it on record that Simms was the one who did everything, that he just kept right on bleating, and Simms got mad and started replying, and we got about everything they had. They might have been a little punchy from having been forcibly apprehended.”

I nodded.

“Anyway,” Samuelson said, “we got the files out on Simms, and he’s got a yellow sheet, looks like it belongs to Attila the Hun. He’s a Mob enforcer. Brewster’s tied into the Mob and that means they’re tied into him. They put Simms into Oceania to keep an eye on things.”

“Can you use what you got in court?” I said.

Samuelson shrugged. “Ain’t my department. D.A.‘s guys say maybe. But you know how it goes. There’s going to be expensive lawyers defending Brewster. They’ll say he was coerced by you. They’ll say he was not competent when he spoke without a lawyer. They’ll mention the fundamental concepts of American justice. Our side will be argued by some kid two years out of U.S.C.” Samuelson shrugged again.

“Start earlier,” I said. “Why did Franco kill FeIton?”

“Franco was a collector. Most recently for Ray Zifkind. About five, six years ago, Summit Studios was going down the chute, and Ray Zifkind bailed them out. That put the head of Summit, guy named Hammond, in the Mob’s pocket.”

“I know Hammond,” I said. “Zifkind the stud duck out here?”

“Yeah. Anyway, one thing led to another, Brewster got in on it. The way you might if you were playing cards and caught a guy cheating. Instead of blowing the whistle, you play along with him. Let him make you money too. You ever play cards?”

“Yeah. I get the idea.”

“Pretty soon Summit Pictures and Oceania products were getting the edge in the marketplace, and Zitkind was making dough and Brewster was making dough, and Summit was making dough. Now and then some theater owner in Omaha would get roughed up, or a lumber wholesaler in Olympia, Washington, would have his warehouse burned, but that’s business, and everything seemed jake to everybody-except maybe the lumber wholesaler or the movie theater guy in Omaha-until Candy Sloan comes along.”

On the silent TV screen Frederics had stopped speaking. The camera zoomed back and held for a long shot of the whole newsroom, then the screen went gray. I got up and turned it off.

Samuelson kept on talking. “Some of this I picked up here and there-we been looking into this for a while ourselves. We picked Hammond up this afternoon-some of this I got from the two crooners downstairs. She talks to Felton, and Felton gets nervous and tells Hammond, and Hammond bucks it along to Brewster, and so forth, and eventually Franco Montenegro gets sent out to slap Sloan around a little and scare her off. They don’t want to burn a reporter if they can help it.”

“I still don’t know why Franco burned Felton.”

“Patience,” Samuelson said. “I’m getting to that. What me and you don’t know is that Felton has been the conduit for profits from Summit to Zifkind. And what nobody knows, including Brewster and Hammond and Zifkind, is that Felton is skimming. But Franco knew.”

If I’d been a cartoon character, a light bulb would have appeared in a balloon above my head. “And Franco cut himself a piece,” I said.

“Smart,” Samuelson said. “Smart eastern dude. You go to Haavahd?”

“I have a friend who’s taking a course there,” I said.

“Must rub off,” Samuelson said. Through the clear glass door of his office I could see a wall clock in the squad room. It said eleven thirty-eight. “So Felton and Franco are nibbling some vigorish of their own off the Mob’s vig. And nobody knows this.”

“And when we got so close to Felton that he was sure to take the fall, Franco had to kill him,” I said. “‘Cause if the Mob found out what they were doing, it-”

Samuelson nodded. “Yes,” he said, “slow, painful and certain. The part I like is that Felton puts in a call to Franco to come bail him out and of course invited in his own killer.”

“Franco was right,” I said. “Felton didn’t have the stuff. He’d have told everything he knew to everybody who asked him about thirty seconds after you got him in here.”

“The thing is that what Sloan’s boyfriend-what’s his name?”

“Rafferty,” I said, “Mickey Rafferty. But he wasn’t her boyfriend.”

“What Rafferty saw when Felton gave Franco some dough wasn’t what they and you and me thought it was. It was just Franco’s private little gig with Felton. But it got the whole thing rolling, and it got Hammond scared and Brewster and, I suppose, eventually Ray Zifkind, but we’ll never get close to him.”

“And Brewster,” I said. I felt as if I would never leave the chair I was in. As if I were slowly fossilizing, the living part of me dwindling deeper and deeper inside. All my energy was focused on listening to Samuelson. “Franco try to shake him down?”

“Yep. Needed the dough, I suppose, to get out of here and away from Zifkind and us.”

“And Brewster figured Candy was getting too close?” I said.

“Yeah. He didn’t believe she was as taken with him as she acted.”

“So he got Simms, and maybe somebody else-anybody else?”

“Yeah, soldier named Little Joe Turcotte. We’re looking around for him now.”

“So he got Simnxs and Little Joe to go out early and wait for Franco, and when Franco showed up, they gunned him. One of them used an automatic.”

“Turcotte,” Samuelson said.

“And they killed both of them while I was wandering around in the oil field.”

“Don’t make you happy, I guess,” Samuelson said.

“Nope. I haven’t been right since I got here.”

“Can’t see how you could have done much better,” Samuelson said.

I didn’t say anything.

“She was going to keep at it,” Samuelson said. “No way you could have kept her from it.”

“The thing is,” I said. My voice didn’t seem to be very closely connected to me. I paused and tried to think what I wanted to say. “The thing is,” I said, “that she did what she did because she didn’t want to be just another pretty face in the newsroom, you know. Just a broad that they used to dress up the broadcast. She wanted to prove something about herself and about being a woman, I guess, and what got her killed-when you come down to it-was, she thought she could use being female on Brewster. When it came down to it, she depended on-” I stopped again. I couldn’t think of the right phrase.

“Feminine wiles,” Samuelson said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Feminine wiles. And it got her killed.”

Загрузка...