Shadow Woman

10

It was nearly noon. The three men at the far end of the enormous conference table had begun to look bored. Calvin Seaver watched Stella Olson’s eyes sweep down the page of her report to the summary. This was one of the reasons why Seaver was in awe of Stella. Some of the people in this room would have decided to hold the big guys’ attention by tickling them with cheerful patter, or just droned on, insisting that if these three persisted in owning a casino, they would have to hear all about how it was run. Stella just said in her clipped, soothing voice, “Thirty-two hires, two terminations, eight on medical leave, four resignations, for a net gain of eighteen, which will cover all existing positions until the end of September.” She sat down, closed her folder, and watched the three men attentively. Seaver saw Max Foley’s eyes slip to one side, then the other, and come to some understanding with his partners. “Are the salary figures in the report?”

Seaver couldn’t tell whether the three partners had decided to humiliate her because she had been the one to hire Pete Hatcher or to ask a polite question because Stella had earned the right to their attention, but he knew that probably Stella could tell which it was. She was a poker player, and she seemed to have a gift for reading faces. She came back at them without looking down at her papers.

“Salary and benefits on the eighteen new hires adds up to an additional $52,500 a month. Lower starting salaries on the fourteen replacements offsets $5,833 of it. So the extra cost is $46,667 for this month only. On September first we lost eight regulars who went back to college for additional work, and eight shifted from full to part time. We have three scheduled retirements. We’ll make up the $46,667 on October fourteenth.”

Peter Buckley smiled. “That’s marvelous work, Stella.” Even Salateri seemed to make an exception to his habit of never praising and gave her a reluctant nod. Seaver decided they must have given Stella a slow one over the plate. That way when she walloped it out of the park, the others would see how it was done.

Max Foley looked around expectantly. “Anybody have anything to talk about that’s more urgent than lunch?” The men and women around the table looked like statues. “No? Then you know where we are.”

All of the twenty managers stood up and began to glance at watches, gather papers, and file out. A few of them chatted affably, but Seaver knew it was all harmless banter. He knew because he had periodically tape-recorded the whispers and murmurs, amplified them, and listened to them to be sure nobody said anything once the soundproof door opened that constituted a violation of security.

As Seaver stood to join the queue, Buckley caught his eye and lazily gestured at a chair near the end of the table. Seaver set his papers on the table and pretended to put them in order until the others had gone, then walked over and sat down.

This was one of the times when the three partners looked like one entity, some Hindu deity with six arms and three faces. They all turned to watch Seaver, but Salateri was the face who spoke. “Cal,” he said. “We’re wondering what stage we’ve reached on the Pete Hatcher thing.”

It was Seaver’s impulse to say, “It’s taken care of,” but he knew that was not what the triumvirate had held him apart to hear. He pursed his lips thoughtfully, then said, “I made the arrangement I mentioned. I gave them one hundred for expenses. We agreed on an eventual price of three hundred, plus any overhead they incur beyond the hundred.”

“And?” prompted Buckley.

“They haven’t asked for the rest yet.”

Foley frowned. “What does that mean?”

Seaver said, “They haven’t finished yet.”

Salateri shook his head in disgust but said nothing. To Seaver’s surprise, it was Buckley who pursued it. “Doesn’t that make you … a little uncomfortable?”

Seaver resisted the glib, easy answer. “It’s not as quick as I had hoped,” he conceded. “But I’m not concerned. I picked these people because I was confident that they would be able to find him and take care of it quietly, without the sorts of problems these matters can sometimes cause.” He held his palms up. “I still think so. The delay just means that the professional who helped Hatcher disappear also helped him stay hidden for a while.”

Foley snorted. “I think it’s time to ask a few specific questions. Just who are these people?”

“Their names are Earl Bliss and Linda Thompson. They have a detective agency in Los Angeles.”

“Why did you pick them?”

“They’ve done a few things for me and for acquaintances of mine, and they’ve always delivered. The choice of specialists isn’t very good. They’re the best of a bad lot.”

Foley’s brows knitted. “A bad lot?”

“As a rule, paragons of mental health don’t do wet jobs. Usually the people available for that kind of work have felony records. They look like they’ve spent a lot of time lifting weights in some exercise yard and have lots of memorable tattoos. They’ve all learned that you can get out of just about any sentence if you’ve got something juicy to tell the authorities about somebody else, and they’re all certain to be in trouble again. So they can be a problem that doesn’t go away.”

“What’s different about the ones you hired?” asked Foley. “Are they paragons of mental health?”

“I can only guess, and I would guess not. But they don’t seem to have problems that get in the way. And these people fit the Pete Hatcher problem.”

“How?”

“They’ve done a lot of skip-tracing and bail-jump cases, so they’re set up to find people quietly and without fuss. If they get noticed while they’re looking, they can say they’re on that kind of case, and show licenses to make it believable. There are two of them, and this kind of work is best done in pairs, which is why police officers work that way. If you have to, you can watch a building twenty-four hours a day, and it’s very hard to slip behind someone who can look in two directions at once. And one of them is a woman. Two men together are probably a team of some kind, but two people of different sexes are just ‘a couple.’ ”

Salateri seemed to be bursting, but he confined himself to a measured tone. “If they’re so good, why is it taking them so long to find one guy? It’s been almost four months.”

Seaver sighed. “The Justice Department has seventy thousand people, and sometimes it takes them twenty years.” He saw that this did not please the three men, and he regretted having let it slip out. “I don’t mean to be flippant. But the problem isn’t going out and finding the Pete Hatcher we knew. He has professional help. She’s probably been doing everything for him. At some point he’ll stop paying her, and he’ll be on his own again. He’ll float to the surface.”

Max Foley blinked his eyes, took off his glasses, and set them on the table, then produced a white handkerchief and meticulously cleaned the tinted lenses. “How do I put this?” he asked himself. “The world is a complicated place, full of pieces that somehow fit together, and each one affects the others. Most people just don’t know how.”

Seaver could sense that what was coming was terribly important, and that he would need to catch every word and remember it. Then it seemed to him that they might be about to fire him. He waited anxiously.

Foley put on his glasses and his eyes widened to look at Seaver. “That’s what we do—the three of us here. Together we know how the pieces fit. It can’t be written down. It’s too much for one person to keep in his head, so we each know one part completely, and some of the rest.”

Buckley said, “We think we haven’t explained our problem well enough to you.”

Seaver began to wonder. There were worse things than being fired. Maybe he was about to hear a description of one of them. “Explained what—Pete Hatcher?”

Buckley nodded. His arm came up in one of his vague, limp gestures. “And so on.”

Seaver could feel the danger. “All my life I’ve operated on orders,” he said. “If I got the orders wrong, I apologize. Repeat them, and I’ll do my best. But I don’t need to know any more than I do.”

“Who said you had a choice?” snapped Salateri.

Peter Buckley gave a deprecating smile and said, “You think we’re going to tell you something that will make you a liability. That’s perceptive, but I’m afraid there’s nothing we could tell you that would make you more vulnerable than you already are.” A moment went by. “Now you’re thinking that we’re going to tell you something intended to give you a better appreciation for the importance of Pete Hatcher: what we win if we win, what we lose if we lose. If that happened we wouldn’t be sorry, but that’s not why you’re here. We’re hoping that if we tell you more, you’ll think of new ways to help us.”

“I’ll try,” said Seaver.

“You know we gave Pete Hatcher quite an education,” said Foley. “We started him in personnel with Stella. Then we had him work customer service on the hotel side for a while. First the tennis shop, then he was a starter at the golf course. Then we shifted him to the casino side. He worked the floor as a runner for the pit bosses.” He turned to his partners. “Help me here.”

“Finance,” said Buckley. “First purchasing, then accounts. Then I think it was entertainment.”

“Right,” said Salateri. “Ticket sales, then booking.” He glared at Seaver. “I think that was when we sent him to you.”

Seaver nodded.

“Then we started promoting him. He seemed to have potential,” said Buckley. “He was young, not a genius, but not stupid. He didn’t care how hard he had to work, he seemed to get by just fine. He had one rare and special gift. That was the way he got along with people. Everybody liked Pete Hatcher: grandmas, little kids, people from foreign countries who might interpret some normal gesture as an insult.”

Salateri looked as though he were sucking on something sour. “We gave him a taste of everything. We trusted him with little things, then tried bigger things. He never let us down.”

Buckley sighed wistfully. “We began to rely on him. That was where we got into trouble. Las Vegas is a special place. There’s never been anything like it in the world. When the country goes into a recession, we do better. People flock here in the summer, when you can burn your hand on the roof of a car. Sometimes it seems as though the laws of economics don’t apply here. But they do.”

“This is a business like any other,” said Foley. “If this company is going to survive, it has to diversify, expand, form alliances. Staying put means dying. We’ve presented Pleasure Island as a family attraction. We may have done ourselves incalculable good for the future, but in the meantime, it has cut the number of dollars we take in per customer. Kids don’t spend much. All they use is the beds and the food, which we practically give away to attract business.”

“We’ve looked into other areas,” said Buckley.

Foley said, “One we’ve been studying is off-site gambling. The attraction is obvious. At some point, the number of people who can fly here and bring serious money to the tables will reach a peak. Other companies have already figured out that they can start casinos near big population centers—first in New Jersey, then on riverboats in the Midwest, then Indian reservations. Each casino somewhere else clogs one healthy artery and turns the flow from there into a trickle. So we looked into growing some new arteries.”

“You’re thinking of building more casinos? When?”

Foley shrugged. “This has been in the works for several years. After some study, we decided that the most promising idea was Indian reservations. We put fifteen reservations under scrutiny, and came up with one we want.”

“Where is it?”

“Upstate New York. Draw a triangle from Rochester to Buffalo to Niagara Falls, and it’s in the middle. It’s less than two hundred miles from Cleveland and Toronto, less than four hundred from New York and Philadelphia, less than five hundred from Baltimore, Detroit, Hartford, Indianapolis. It sits just off the New York State Thruway. If you go by car from one of those cities to the other, you may very well have to go past it.”

Seaver looked at the three men, keeping his expression empty. He had no way of knowing whether it was a good idea or madness.

Buckley seemed to read his mind. “You’re thinking that we’re not exactly diversifying. But we are. Think of a full-service world-class resort. Casinos and hotels, of course. That’s our strength. Only this time they would be exclusive, on land only we had access to. But best of all, we could offer things that nobody else can do, anywhere.”

“You could?”

“An Indian reservation is a peculiar place, in the law. They can already sell tax-free gas and cigarettes. Why not foreign cars? High-ticket jewelry? Designer clothes? Appliances? Besides the tariffs, the sales tax in New York is eight and a half percent.”

“Are you saying that’s legal?”

“It hasn’t been tried yet. We think we could use the precedent of those companies that sell tickets to police benefits. As long as they give a cent to the police, they can keep ninety-nine for overhead and profit. We give a cent to the Indians and they still make millions a year. This could all be in the open. But what would not be in the open is even more intriguing. Indians have exclusive hunting and fishing rights on their land, with no external regulation. We could have live hunts with game we release: bag a rhino in Upstate New York. We could build a private port a few miles north, on Lake Ontario, connect it to the resort by rail, and offer cruises: package tours for Mom and the kids. For Dad, maybe a members-only junket with high-stakes games and even some exotic companionship. We could rotate girls in and out maybe once a week. The port would also give us access to the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Atlantic. We could take anything out, bring anything in.” He looked sad. “It was all intriguing. Very intriguing.”

Seaver shook his head. “I never heard a word about any of this. I’m amazed.”

The three smiled. “The world is a complicated place,” said Foley. “No one head can carry all of the pieces.”

“What about Hatcher’s? Is this what he knew?”

Salateri muttered something to himself that could have been a curse. “Hatcher knew nothing about this, because none of it has happened yet.”

“There have been delays,” said Foley. “The Indians have to accept the idea, and we haven’t really approached them yet, just left our card, you might say. First we needed to do feasibility studies, find out what wasn’t possible, then make it possible. The big delay has to do with the Indian Gaming Act. The federal law says that gambling is okay under conditions established by the state where the reservation is. Before we go handing money to a bunch of Indians we needed to be sure that we could get the state legislature’s approval. And we had to make friends in Albany and Washington.”

“How do you do that?”

Buckley smiled. “We’ll have to learn about the Indians—keep them in the dark while we study them. Politicians, on the other hand, are a tribe whose customs we know.”

“Hatcher handled the payouts,” Salateri blurted.

Seaver frowned. “I thought he didn’t know anything.”

Salateri scowled defensively. “It was all indirect. We didn’t want to see a videotape with a time and date in the corner and a shot of Hatcher counting out hundred-dollar bills to some New York politician in a hotel room. We set up a fund.”

“What kind of fund—cash?”

Buckley said, “It was a corporation that received some of its money in cash. We had a lot of land—here, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles—which we sold to the corporation for an imaginary sum before we brought Pete in. We converted various plots to parking lots—put asphalt over them. Pete was in charge of taking the money we said came in, and paying it to people we said were investors or creditors. He paid it to other corporations, middlemen, girlfriends, relatives, some to bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.”

“And Hatcher didn’t know what he was doing?”

“Never,” said Foley.

Salateri said, “He might have suspected that the money that started the corporation came fresh from the casino tables. There were a couple of times when he told us the numbers on the official slips were lower than the count that night. Max told him that it was because we needed a lot of cash in the vault in case somebody hit the million-dollar jackpot on the big slot. That way we could take publicity pictures of the guy up to his ass in hundreds. The money only gets reported when it’s taken out of play.”

“He bought that?”

“Maybe for a while, maybe never. He stopped asking. The worst he would have thought was that we were still skimming cash and mixing it in with the take on the parking lots.” Salateri shook his head. “Can you imagine that, after all we did for him? He turned his back on us because we were taking money out of our own casino—our own money! I still can’t believe it.”

Buckley shrugged. “We should make it clear that the corporation with the parking lots and so on wasn’t the problem. There was nothing wrong with it but where the money came from, and there’s no way he could have traced it. I think he resented the fact that he was the one who signed the slips with a short count on them.” He gave a puzzled little smile. “You see, that was enough to cost him his virginity.”

Seaver stared at the floor for a moment, then looked up at the row of three faces. “So the problem is that he can say he’s pretty sure that at one time, money was being diverted from the games and put into his own corporation. Then he paid it to a lot of people he didn’t know? I’d say let him.”

“Let him?” Foley looked troubled.

Seaver said, “When I was a cop, we needed evidence of a crime.”

Peter Buckley looked at him kindly, sympathetically. “I’m afraid you’re missing the problem. Pete Hatcher doesn’t know anything. If he somehow strained his capacities and figured out the names of the people in New York State who ultimately received the money, he never heard of them. They’re state legislators and bureaucrats and party functionaries in a distant place. People in their own state wouldn’t know who they are. But the F.B.I. would. And if they heard the little that Pete Hatcher could be assumed to remember—say, four or five names, dates, and amounts—they could trace the money backward to the accounts Hatcher controlled, and then forward to find out where the rest went.”

“But even if they did, the most they would be able to prove was that Pete gave money to politicians. Maybe that it came from here, but not who took it. If he signed for it, then he took it. And half the equation is missing. You have no interests in their state, and they aren’t doing anything in return for the money.” When he saw that the three men were looking at him without changing their expressions, he said, “You abandoned the project, right?”

“No,” said Max Foley. “Unfortunately, it isn’t right.”

“Why not?”

Salateri’s impatience made him look as though he were swelling up. “There are people in New York State who are already in the gambling business. They are big, scary people. In the twenties, if they didn’t like you, they mixed a tub of cement and put your feet in it. Now, if they want cement, they make a phone call and five hundred cement trucks arrive, with fifty government building inspectors to certify they did it right.”

“What have they got to do with this?”

Salateri’s eyes narrowed. “You think we can go into their front yard and set up a business they’ve been in for a hundred years and expect them not to notice? They needed to be consulted, mollified.”

Seaver was beginning to sense the gravity of the partners’ predicament. “Did Hatcher pay them too?”

“He doesn’t know that either,” said Foley. “The Justice Department would take about thirty seconds to figure it out. And what Hatcher paid them wasn’t to buy them out. It was to buy them in. Without their help we wouldn’t have known which politicians could be paid off, how to approach them, where to put the money.”

Seaver frowned and considered. “I know I’m being slow, but let me be sure I understand where we are—”

“For Christ’s sake!” Salateri shouted. “Hatcher doesn’t know he knows anything! But if the F.B.I., the New York State Police, the Nevada Gaming Commission, or the fucking dog-catcher hear a word of it, they’ll know everything!”

“It seems to me that if we could somehow separate the issues—”

Salateri was white with rage. “What did they teach you in the police academy—how to shake down doughnut shops? We have one deal that connects a Las Vegas casino, half the politicians in New York, and the Mafia. In one deal! That blows the politicians, who might have to go get a job. And that blows seven or eight fat old grandpas, who have to spend their last few years locked up with friends and relatives. But not us. We’re not going to jail with them. They’re not going to let us make it up the courthouse steps to hear the charges.”

Buckley looked at Seaver with gentle regret. “It seems to us that we can’t pull out of this and tell them we managed our business badly. We can’t let them get an inkling that anything is wrong. We’re staying alive one day at a time by convincing them that we move slowly, cautiously, prudently.”

“This is something they respect,” said Salateri. “For five generations they’ve been nibbling away at the world like termites, until now you can’t pull a board off a toolshed without finding them behind it. The problem is, the longer we bullshit them, the harder they’re going to take it.”

Seaver squinted down at the carpet.

Peter Buckley said, “You’re thinking we should tell them the truth and ask them to find Hatcher for us.”

“Well,” said Seaver, “I was considering it.”

“Very alert of you,” said Buckley. “They could certainly do it.”

“Sure,” said Salateri. “They have people in every city in the country. He couldn’t run to Europe, because they had that sewn up before Great-Grandpa got on the boat to come here. In South America, Southeast Asia, North Africa they have drug suppliers with armies to protect the crop. I never heard of them having anybody at the South Pole, but I wouldn’t rule it out. They’d find him. But he doesn’t know much, and we know a lot. Who’s the biggest threat? And they don’t have to hunt around and find us to end it.”

There was a moment of silence to give Seaver’s mind a chance to catch up, to understand. “What would you like me to do?”

Foley said, “We’re thinking of hiring a second team. Maybe a third. Pay all of them. Whoever succeeds gets a bonus. How does that strike you?”

“It makes me nervous,” said Seaver. “Earl and Linda are good. Most likely, by now they know where he is, or at least what region. If they find him and there are other people nosing around, they’ll notice them. They’ll have to assume those people can only be bodyguards for Hatcher, or police of some kind. They’ll kill them. Or try to.”

“So what?” asked Foley.

“Then it’s not a clean hit where an anonymous newcomer came quietly and went quietly and nobody notices. It’s a fight between professionals with lots of gunfire and unburied bodies and blood.”

“And?”

“And, as Bobby pointed out, no matter where this happens, it’s in the middle of some Mafia family’s territory. They’re going to want to know who these shooters were, who they worked for, who they were after. It would be hard to imagine them not turning up Hatcher. If he’s killed or wounded, he’ll be identified. If he gets very lucky and escapes while our own shooters massacre each other, somebody will survive, and the local family will hear Hatcher’s name.”

Buckley stared at Seaver with interest. “Any ideas that would get around those problems?”

“Not offhand. I’ll think about it.”

“How about if we had somebody at least as good as Earl and Linda, somebody they know by sight, whose interest in Pete Hatcher won’t require any explanation? Somebody they’ll see as an ally?”

Seaver’s collar tightened and he began to sweat. “I don’t think they’d see it that way. I don’t know where they are. There’s no way to call them off, or warn them.”

“But they wouldn’t shoot you, would they? How could they expect to get paid the three hundred thousand if they killed their employer?”

“They couldn’t, but—”

“Good,” said Foley.

Seaver flailed hopelessly. “But what would happen here? Who would run security for the hotel? The casino?”

Salateri blew out a breath in a mirthless chuckle. “Your errand boy, Bennis, or somebody. Who cares? If you don’t get Hatcher before he talks, we won’t have a hotel and casino,” he snapped. “There’ll be a bunch of U.S. marshals in here running the place for the government, or a bunch of paisans running it for the ones we screwed in New York.”

Buckley’s voice became avuncular. “I think it’s rightly your responsibility now, don’t you?”

Seaver sat in the chair, helpless.

Foley scribbled on the pad at his elbow. “Give this to Eddie downstairs.” He tore off the sheet and held it out.

Seaver glanced at the small note. “Give Seaver whatever he wants. M.F.” Seaver stood up. He took a step, then paused and looked at the three men. He knew that there must be an answer, but he could not bring his mind to stop racing long enough to concentrate and find it.

“Good luck,” said Buckley. His cheeks constricted to bring up the corners of his lips in a false smile, then went slack again.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out,” Salateri muttered.