Never Say Die

Chapter 5

Another westbound flight, departing from O’Hare at half-past seven in the evening, bound for Reno. They could just as easily have flown direct to Carson City, but the choice had been a conscious one on Remo’s part. Nevada’s capital was small enough that new arrivals could be watched with ease, and he was not entirely sure Devona Price, would keep. her mouth shut. If she reached out to someone from her past and blew the whistle, Remo stood a better chance of slipping through the net in Reno, with its larger airport, larger crowds. And if the enemy was. looking for a G-man, he would have another edge.

For once, the presence of Chiun would qualify as cover.

How many federal agents traveled with an old Korean dressed in native garb?

Reno’s Cannon International Airport is named for a man, not a weapon. Howard Cannon was once a big gun in the U.S. Senate, though, scrutinized for his connections to casinos and the Teamsters, once a central figure—unindicted—in the trial that sent a union president to federal prison for attempted bribery. His was the kind of reputation that sits well with voters in Nevada, proud defiance in the face of condemnation from outside.

Remo had another rental car on hold, a Mazda Protege LX from Hertz. He also had a room booked at a “family” hotel downtown, a block from City Hall. The “family” part of it included clowns who hung around in the casino, goosing cocktail waitresses, together with a claustrophobic video arcade where loving parents could deposit Little Johnny with a roll of quarters while they slipped away to drink and lose their hard-earned money. Life was good.

The desk clerk barely noticed Chiun as they were checking in, and no one in the hotel lobby paid him any mind. The elevators were strategically positioned so that new arrivals had to walk through the casino, passing banks of slot machines, crap tables and roulette wheels if they planned to go upstairs and find their rooms. Chiun might have been invisible, for the attention he attracted in that setting. Everyone around them was distracted, mesmerized, by the pursuit of easy cash.

We ought to work Nevada more, thought Remo as they reached the elevators, riding, up to nine. Those suckers wouldn’t notice if I took somebody out right there, in the casino.

It was true. Some years ago, in one of the Nevada “carpet joints,” it was reported that a gambler had collapsed and died while betting on a crap game. Heart attack. The guy was dead before he hit the floor—and just as well, because his fellow players left him where he fell, and went on with their game. Some of them literally stepped across his prostrate body, moving in to place their bets.

Chiun crinkled his nose disdainfully on entering their room. “A lavatory stall would be larger than this,” the Master of Sinanju complained.

“They’re calling it a suite.”

“One bedroom with a tiny bath is a hostel, not a suite,” the Master of Sinanju said. “You should refuse to pay.”

“I think that curtain is supposed to close an alcove off, for privacy.”

“Curtains are made for windows and showers,” said Chiun. “And look. There are marks from burned tobacco products on this filthy plastic furniture.”

“That’s fiberboard,” said Remo. “I think.”

“Fake is fake.”

“They’ve got TV.”

Chiun switched it on. “Poor color,” he declared, and started channel surfing with the small remote control. A Jackie Chan movie caught his eye, the hero throwing high kicks at a gang of greasy-looking hooligans.

“Impostor!” Chiun accused the screen, and kept on searching for a program he could stomach.

“Try not to break the set while I’m gone,” said Remo.

“I make no promises,” replied Chiun. He had found yet another psychic-hotline infomercial.

As Remo headed out the door, the Master of Sinanju called to him. “If you find one of Smith’s walking dead men, do not bring him back here. It is enough that my delicate nose should have to sniff you in such close quarters. With two of you, I fear my nostrils would drop off.”.

“Har-de-har-har,” Remo said as he closed the door.

A phone call from Chicago had confirmed that the morticians known as Cristobal and Son were still in business, planting stiffs from Carson City and surrounding, smaller towns. Remo had the address when they left O’Hare, confirmed it from another telephone directory upon arrival, plus the home address and number for a Yuli Cristobal—in fact, the only Cristobal in town whose name was listed in the book.

It was a toss-up: make a house call or sit tight until tomorrow rolled around and catch the guy at work. Remo was curious enough to push it, and the house call won. He aimed the Mazda south along Virginia Street toward Carson City, twenty miles away in Ormsby County.

If Las Vegas is a painted whore, then Reno is her older, smaller sister. Once upon a time, it was the largest city in the Silver State, a few miles from Lake Tahoe and the California border, boasting trees and elevations where the heat was bearable in summertime. Nevada means “snow clad” in Spanish, but you’d never know it from the sunbaked desert that comprises eighty-five percent of the state.

In Reno you could breathe and gamble all at once. Throw in the great six-week divorce, and it was perfect. After World War II, however, things began to change. The Mob discovered Vegas; air conditioners and airplanes made it practical to plant a new oasis in the middle of a wasteland. Movie stars from Hollywood could cut their travel time in half, get married in a flash. Strangely enough, although the same laws held throughout Nevada, Reno held the edge on broken marriages, while Vegas rang with wedding bells. Go figure. By the 1970s, Las Vegas housed three-quarters of Nevada’s population, putting Reno squarely in the shade.

The big fade was more obvious in daylight, when the neon wasn’t glaring in your eyes, but Remo recognized the signs by day or night. The town’s main drag was small, perhaps one-sixth the size of that in Vegas, and you didn’t need a tank to force your way through tourist traffic. Near the edge of town, he found the most convincing evidence of all: a failed casino, dark, arid, vacant.

Any time a gambler couldn’t make a living in Nevada, there was definitely something wrong.

There was twenty miles of nothing on the drive from Reno down to Carson City. This was the real Nevada, empty space that seemed to stretch forever, with the city lights no more than a reflected glow on the horizon. You could almost close your eyes and picture wagon trains, all hot and dusty, weary scouts in search of water fit to drink.

He pushed the Mazda, holding it at seventy until a highway sign announced that he was rolling into Carson City. If Las Vegas had diminished Reno, the state capital was nothing but a fly speck by comparison. Aside from the casinos jammed together on a few short blocks downtown, the view reminded him of something lifted from the dry plains of Wyoming, maybe Kansas or Nebraska. It was cow town all the way. Or maybe sheep.

He drove through town on Carson Street, paused in the parking lot of a convenience store to double-check his street map, then proceeded south until he hit Kings Canyon Road. A right turn there, and Remo drove another few blocks till he found the address he was looking for. There was a Lincoln Town Car in the driveway, pale light spilling through thin curtains from the living room’s broad picture window.

Remo killed his lights, pulled in and parked behind the Lincoln. Took it easy when he closed the driver’s door behind him, then circled around the Mazda’s nose and moved toward the front door of the house. The curtains weren’t designed with privacy in mind, but he saw no one in the living room. More lights were burning in what Remo took to be a dining room and kitchen area beyond, but he was not prepared to scramble through the flower bed to peer inside.

He rang the bell instead, and waited half a minute before a stocky man with thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses answered. Charcoal slacks and white dress shirt, the collar button fastened, but no tie in evidence, as if the doorbell had distracted him midway through taking off his business suit.

“Good evening. Mr. Cristobal?”

“What do you want?”

“That’s Yuli Cristobal?”

“And who are you?”

The man had a knack for answering one question with another. Remo palmed the bogus federal ID and gave him time to read the fine print.

“FBI?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you want?” he asked again.

“Your name, for starters. Are you Yuli Cristobal?”

“l am.”

“In that case, I have several questions for you. May I step inside?”

“What? I mean, yes, of course.”

The house-revealed a woman’s touch, but from the dust and scattered magazines in evidence, the touch had not been all that recent.

“We’re alone?” asked Remo.

“Yes, My wife is visiting her parents, down in Beaver,” Cristobal informed him, adding “Utah,” almost as an afterthought.

“Can we sit down?”

“Yes, please. I’m sorry.”

He was nervous, this one. Remo wondered how much of it was the natural result of being startled by an unexpected—and unwelcome—visit from the FBI. Was there a guilty conscience underneath the soft exterior, complete with oily sheen of perspiration?

“Mr. Cristobal, are you the owner of the local mortuary known as Cristobal and Son?”

“I am.”

“Which one are you?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, are you ‘Cristobal’ or ‘Son.’”

“Both, I suppose. My father died in 1986.1 never got around to changing names.”

“How long have you been working in the family business?”

“May I ask what this is all about? I mean, if there’s some kind of problem, why not come directly to the point?”

“That’s what I’m doing, Mr. Cristobal, if you’ll allow me to proceed.”

“Of course.” He slumped back in his La-Z-Boy, thick fingers drumming on the padded arms. “What was the question, please?”

“How long have you—”

“Oh, right Since I was born, in one way or another.” Yuli Cristobal displayed a fleeting smile that could have been mistaken for a grimace. “Dad was always talking shop, you know? I started working holidays and summers at the home when I was nine or ten. Two years of junior college on the technical procedures, just to satisfy the state. I went full-time in 1970…no, make that ’69.”

“I’m looking into something that occurred before that time,” said Remo.

“As I said—”

“Specifically in 1965.”

The undertaker shut his mouth so quickly, it reminded Remo of a snapping turtle. He could almost hear the teeth snap, and it took a moment for his grudging host to speak again.

“In ’65, you said?”

“That’s right.”

“And it’s about a client?”

“Yes.”

“My father would have handled any business details,” Cristobal informed him.

“Still, you might recall the case. It was…unusual.”

More perspiration beaded on the undertaker’s forehead. Trying to be casual, he took a swipe with his right hand, and must have smeared some in his eyes. It left him blinking, for a moment, blushing with embarrassment.

“Unusual?”

“An inmate from the prison who was executed. Thomas Allen Hardy:”

“Executed? Hardy? No…well, hmm, perhaps I do remember that one.” Cristobal was jamming mental gears, a vain attempt to get his story straight without appearing foolish. “Yes, in fact. The name would have escaped me, but I do recall we got a client from the prison, back around that time.”

“Your father would have done the paperwork on that?”

“Or Mom. She kept the books in those days.”

“And is she…?”

“Passed on in ’81,” Cristobal answered.

“My sympathies.”

“I’m curious,” said Cristobal. “This gentleman—well, maybe not—this fellow has been gone for thirty years. Are you investigating him?”

“It’s technical,” said Remo, judging that the time had come for some selective bullshit, seasoned with a dash of truth. “He was a contract killer in the sixties, with a number of suspected cases still unsolved. New evidence suggests we may be able to indict a couple of his past employers, but we have to start at the beginning.”

“With his funeral?”

“I’ve spoken to the individual who claimed his body from the prison,” Remo said. “It turns out she was paid to make arrangements for the funeral, specifically instructed that the body should be sent to Cristobal and Son.”

“Instructed by…?” The undertaker cocked one eyebrow, looking rather like a sweaty bam owl.

“I was hoping you could tell me that,” said Remo.

“After all these years?”

“Mr. Cristobal, please believe me when I say this is a very serious investigation. We have reason to believe the men who paid for Hardy’s funeral are involved in large-scale racketeering and a list of other crimes, including several very recent homicides. It is most important that you cooperate with our investigation.”

“Yes, well, there’s confidentiality to think about.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“No.”

“A lawyer?”

“No.”

“A priest?”

“Well, hardly.”

“Then you have no privilege of confidentiality. Of course, if you insist on a subpoena, we can always treat you as a hostile witness, Mr. Cristobal. The average penalty for an obstruction charge, if it’s your first offense, should come down in the neighborhood of eighteen months.”

“In jail?”

“No, sir. Jail’s where they book you, prior to trial. You serve your time in prison. It’s another world, entirely.”

“Good God! You can’t be serious!”

“I’m deadly serious.” The smile on Remo’s face would have unsettled Norman Bates.

Cristobal thought about it for another moment, then said, “All right. What do you want?”

“I’ll need to see the paperwork on Hardy’s funeral.”

“Impossible.”

“Now, Mr. Cristobal-—”

“I’m telling you, there is no paperwork. My father saw to that, all right?”

“I’m listening.”

“I was sixteen years old in 1965, already working weekends, nights and most of my vacations at the home. As I explained, my father liked to talk about his clients—how he fixed them up, the damage he restored, which relatives were cheapskates, who he talked into a more expensive casket, all that sort of thing. You understand?”

“Go on.”

“With Hardy, it was something else. It was the only time he ever got a client from the prison. Most were sent to Tolson’s for cremation at a discount rate, or relatives came in from out of state and took them home. This time, though, I remember Dad explaining that the client’s people were avoiding Tolson. Someone didn’t trust him, all that business he was doing with the state.”

“I see.”

“Not yet, you don’t. My father agonized about that deal. A hundred times, at least, I heard him say he should have turned the offer down, but it was twenty thousand dollars for a funeral that would otherwise have cost about eight hundred, tops, in those days.”

“Why so much?” asked Remo.

“Less is more, you might say.” Cristobal released a kind of wheezing sound that could have been a sigh or throttled laughter at his own expense. “They bought the casket and a plot, but that was all, you understand?”

“Not quite.”

“I’m telling you, the client wasn’t buried.”

“What? You mean he wasn’t dead?”

“Oh, he was dead, all right. My dad was clear on that. He wasn’t going to involve himself in breaking someone out of prison, even for that kind of money. No, the buyers wanted Thomas Hardy’s corpse, dead on delivery, no embalming. Nada. Zip.”

“For twenty grand.”

“In cash, it was. My parents kept it off the books, of course. You did say FBI? Not IRS?”

“Forget about the taxes,” Remo said. “That’s ancient history. I need to know who bought the stiff.”

From the expression on the undertaker’s face, he might as well have defecated on the coffee table. Cristobal sat back and gaped at Remo for a moment, finally found his voice.

“You mean the client.”

“Right. Whatever.”

“I’m afraid I can’t supply the name of any individuals,” said Cristobal.

“You can’t, or won’t?”

“I’m trying to cooperate. My father never mentioned any names, and as I told you, there was nothing written down.”

“You must have something,” Remo insisted.

“I do recall a corporation. There was a business card, I think, before my father threw it out. I know the name intrigued me, at the time.”

“Which was…?”

“Eugenix.”

“Spell it.”

Cristobal obliged, seemed pleased and nervous all at once. “That’s really all I know about the matter,” he continued. “Dad would talk about it sometimes afterward, but always in the context of an easy profit. He was quite the businessman.”

“I gathered that.”

“He had mixed feelings, though. That still came through. It was another eighteen months before he even touched the money. Latent guilt, I think, to some degree.”

Or careful planning, Remo thought. A twenty-thousand-dollar windfall, back in 1965, would certainly have made the tax man curious.

“And that was all you ever heard from this Eugenix Corporation. Just the one transaction?”

“Yes. There was a moratorium on executions in the state, a short while later. By the time they started up again, my mom was gone and Dad was getting on in years. The bottom line is, no one from the corporation ever came around. Got what they wanted, I suppose, and that was that.”

The undertaker stood and watched as his unwelcome visitor climbed into a sedan, switched on the engine, backed out of the driveway, disappeared from view. He didn’t make it obvious, like standing at the window with his nose pressed up against the glass, but he made sure the man was gone.

FBI, for Christ’s sake, after all these years. His father’s chickens coming home to roost when Yuli needed one more headache like he needed cancer.

Shit!

His wife was leaving him—had left him—for another man, and business wasn’t all that hot, besides. You could forget those half-assed jokes about the mortuary business—everybody’s dying to get in, and all that crap. It might be true, more people dying all the time, but fewer of them came to Cristobal and Son for processing these days, and that meant cutting back on certain luxuries around the homestead. No bright, shiny Lincoln when the new year rolled around. Less money to impress the girls down at the Crazy Horse Saloon.

But he had more important problems now.

The Hardy deal had been his father’s contract; that much of his story to the FBI man had been true. There was a catch, of course: the clause demanding secrecy forever. He had blown it, frightened by the talk of prison and obstructing justice, giving up more than he should have to a total stranger.

He couldn’t take the words back now, but he could try to mitigate the damage. Make a call. Spread the alarm. The desk had been his father’s, but the old man hardly would have recognized it, sanded and refinished to a satin shine. The lower right-hand drawer was locked. Inside it, to the back, a smallish metal strongbox, also locked. Two separate keys were required to access the ancient, address book.

It was a weird sensation, thumbing through those pages, reading names of people long since dead and gone. His father’s friends, a handful of the relatives he seldom heard from anymore.

And business contacts.

Near the back, a name. The phone number beside it had been scratched out and corrected half a dozen times. They made a point of checking in, every five or six years. The voices varied, and the number changed with every call, but letting Cristobal keep track of them was not the point. He understood that they were keeping track of him. It had been more than thirty years, for God’s sake, and the bastards never let it go. They weren’t forgetting anything.

Not ever.

Yuli’s hand was on the telephone receiver when he caught himself. The FBI was in it now, and that meant someone could have tapped his phone. He couldn’t place the call from home.

But what if they were watching him, as well? Departure from the house just now would look suspicious. They might follow him, perhaps observe him if he used a public telephone.

They couldn’t hear him, though, he told himself.

Yuli decided he would wait one hour, then go out and make his call. There was a convenience store three blocks away, with indoor pay phones. He could duck in, make the call, then buy some beer and stuff, come out with the goods and look like he was shopping, if he had an audience.

No sweat.

Now all he had to do was fabricate a logical excuse for spilling everything he knew about his father’s dealings with Eugenix Corporation. Maybe claim the federal man knew all about it, going in, and simply pressured Yuli to confirm the details. It was weak, but he could sell it from the heart.

And in the process, maybe he could save himself.