The Singapore Wink

Chapter IX

After that there was some more conversation, but nothing important, and Joe, the ubiquitous bodyguard, escorted me to the elongated Cadillac where I was faintly surprised to find that the polite Mr. Ruffo was absent, but I decided that even Yale law school graduates needed their rest.

At the hotel I undressed and sat in a chair by a window and stared out at the quiet Washington scene. I thought about Charles Cole in his huge white-columned house and wondered why there wasn’t a family and a wife in a pleasant room in one of the wings, playing Monopoly perhaps, while the head of the household plotted in the library to keep himself from getting killed. I thought about Cole for a while and what he wanted me to do, and then I thought about Angelo Sacchetti and speculated about how he was spending all of his money. Unwisely, I hoped. Then I quit speculating and went to sleep and I was doing quite well at it until eight o’clock the next morning when somebody started to bang on the sitting room door. I got up, struggled into a robe, and stumbled towards the noise.

“Who is it?” I yelled through the door.

“The FBI. Open up.”

“Christ,” I said and opened the door.

He needed a shave for one thing, and for another his blue suit, stained and unpressed, had a hard time buttoning itself over his belly. He shoved past me into the room, asking: “How’s it going, Cauthorne?” as he moved.

I slammed the door shut. “You’re not the FBI. You’re not even the house dick.”

“Don’t kid yourself, buster,” he said and tossed a shapeless felt hat on one of the chairs.

A few thick strands of black hair were matted across a wide, white dome and the rest of the hair was going grey above the ears. He had a big round face and a double chin with a Major Hoople nose that glowed merrily. Some capillaries had exploded in his cheeks and his eyes, despite the redness of the whites, offered deep blue pupils that were steady and calculating.

“I’m Sam Dangerfield.”

“Not Dangerfield of the FBI?”

“You got it right.”

“Never heard of you. Is there anything to prove it?”

Dangerfield looked up at the ceiling. “Every goddamn one of them has seen that lousy TV series.” Then he looked at me and his eyes seemed not only calculating, but curiously alive and intelligent. “I’ve got something to prove it. You want to see?”

“Even then I wouldn’t believe it.”

Dangerfield started to search his pockets, finally produced a folding, black case from his hip pocket, and handed it to me, but even it was a little dogeared. It said that he was Samuel C. Dangerfield, special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I handed it back to him.

“So what can I do for you?”

“You can offer me a drink, for one thing,” Dangerfield said and headed for the Scotch that still sat on the coffee table. “I got a bad one.” He poured three fingers of Scotch into a glass, emptied some of the melted ice from the bucket into another, and downed the drink, chasing it with the water. Then he poured another one, moved over to the chair where his hat rested, tossed it on the floor, and sat down with a sigh. “That’s better,” he said. “Much better.”

I went over to the phone. “I’m going to have some breakfast sent up. Do you want some or will you just drink it?”

“You buying?”

“I’ll buy.”

“Four fried eggs, a double order of bacon, home fried potatoes, lots of toast and some coffee. And see if you can get another bottle.”

“At eight in the morning?”

“I’ll try when the bellhop gets here.” He gave the bottle on the table a judicious glance. “There’s enough left to coast on.”

“How about some ice?”

“Never use it.”

While I phoned the order in Dangerfield searched his pockets again and finally found a crumpled package of cigarettes in one of them, but it turned out to be empty. “You got a cigarette?” he asked after I had hung up.

I found a pack on the coffee table and tossed it to him. “Anything else?”

“If you got an electric razor, I’ll borrow it after breakfast,” he said, running a thick-fingered hand over his stubble.

“Did you really want to see me, or is it just that your check was late this month?”

“I want something,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ll tell you later. Go take a shower, get dressed. You look like a goddamned ponce in that silly looking robe.”

“Go to hell,” I said and started towards the bedroom. I paused at the door. “If the breakfast comes, forge my name. You ought to be pretty good at that. And add a twenty percent tip.”

Dangerfield waved his drink at me and grinned. “Fifteen percent’s plenty.”

Mr. Hoover’s finest was attacking his breakfast when I came out of the bedroom. I pulled a chair up to the room-service table and took the metal cover off my plate and regarded my poached egg without enthusiasm. Dangerfield poured a shot of Scotch into his coffee and sipped it noisily.

“Eat up, but if you can’t, I’ll take care of it for you.”

“I need the strength,” I said and started on the egg.

Dangerfield finished the four eggs, the bacon, the potatoes, the toast and a third cup of Scotch-laced coffee before I finished my egg and one cup of coffee. He leaned back in his chair, patted his belly, and said: “By God, I might live.”

I put my fork down and looked at him. “What do you want?”

“Information, Brother Cauthorne, information. It’s how I make my living, such as it is. You know what I am after twenty-seven lousy years in the bureau? I’m a lousy GS-13, that’s what. And you want to know why? Because I haven’t got what they call managerial potential. You know what a GS-13 makes? With a five-step increase like I’ve got he makes a lousy $16,809 a year. Christ, punks right out of law school make that much. And you know what else I’ve got to show for it? I got a Levittown house out in Bowie with a twenty-year mortgage, two kids in college, four suits, a five-year-old car, and a fat wife.”

“And a thirst,” I said.

“You got it right. A thirst.”

“But for more than booze.”

Dangerfield grinned at me. “You’re not as stupid as I thought, Brother Cauthorne.”

“I studied hard at night school. But one thing I don’t get. Why the fake lush act? You’re no lush; not even a good fake one. You eat too much and the last thing a lush thinks about is food.”

“I thought it was a pretty good show,” Dangerfield said, grinning once more. “It’s supposed to disarm people — make them think that maybe I’m not really listening or don’t understand what they’re saying. It usually works.”

“Not with me,” I said.

“Okay,” Dangerfield said, unlodged a morsel of bacon from between his teeth with his little finger, and inspected it carefully before flicking it to the carpet “You’ve got trouble, Cauthorne.”

“Everyone has trouble.”

“Not your kind.”

“It’s got a name?”

“Sure,” Dangerfield said. “It’s called bad.”

“Thank God you’re here to help, Special Agent.”

He looked at me sourly. “You don’t like it much, do you?”

“What?”

“The fat man in the forty-nine fifty suit who busts in and drinks your booze at eight in the morning.”

“You can drop the lush act,” I said. “They wouldn’t keep you on the payroll five minutes if you were a real drunk.”

Dangerfield grinned at that. “I think I’ll have another small one just to settle the nerves,” he said. He poured one, rose, and walked over to a chair, taking the bottle with him. “Care to join me? The hop’s bringing up a refill at ten.”

“I’ve got a plane to catch at ten.”

“There’s another plane at twelve. You’ll catch that one. We’ve got some talking to do.”

“About what?”

“Don’t start being dumb again, just when I got my hopes up,” Dangerfield said as he raised his glass and smiled at it contentedly. “I don’t get much Chivas Regal. Can’t afford it.”

“Neither can I.”

“But Charlie Cole can, huh?”

“So they say.” I got up from the table and moved over to one of the couches.

Dangerfield watched me over the rim of his glass. When he finished his drink he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and put the glass down on the coffee table. “That’ll do for a while. Now we’ll talk a little.”

“What about?”

“About you and Charlie Cole and Angelo Sacchetti. How’s that for a start?”

“That’s all it is.”

Dangerfield leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling some more. “You flew in yesterday on United and were met at Dulles by Johnny Ruffo in that hearse that Cole spins around town in. Ruffo dropped you here at the hotel at six-thirty and picked you up an hour later. You got to Cole’s at ten to eight and stayed till eleven when the hearse brought you back here. You didn’t make any phone calls and I didn’t get to bed until two and got up with a hangover at six to get here by eight. I live in Bowie.”

“You told me.”

“But there’s something I didn’t tell you.”

“What?”

“I don’t want anything to happen to Charlie Cole.”

“Neither does he.”

Dangerfield snorted. “You can bet your sweet ass he doesn’t. Outside of you I don’t know of anybody who’s in more trouble than Charlie Cole. Not only has he got Angelo putting the blocks to him somehow or other, but he’s got Joe Lozupone down on him and that’s about as bad as news can get. He tell you about that?”

“A little,” I said.

“You know something,” he said. “I knew a guy that Joe Lozupone got down on back in the early fifties. So you know what Joe did? He invited this guy out to his house for a big party. And when the party was going good down in the rec room all of Joe’s friends took out their knives and carved this guy up into little pieces and then the wives got down on their hands and knees in their party dresses and scrubbed up the mess.”

“So what did you do about it?”

“Me? I didn’t do anything about it. In the first place I couldn’t prove it and in the second place Joe didn’t break any federal law.”

I got up and walked over to the coffee table. “I think I will have a drink.”

“You can fix me another one, too.”

I picked up two of the clean glasses and made another journey to the bathroom for water. When I came back I asked Dangerfield if he wanted his mixed and he said no. I poured him another three fingers and a smaller amount for myself and then added water to mine.

“You don’t look like the type that drinks in the morning, kid,” he said as I handed him his drink.

“Don’t tell the coach.”

“You are healthy looking,” Dangorfield said. “I just wonder how long you’re going to keep that way.”

“I thought you were worried about Cole, not me.”

“I’m not worried about old Charlie. I just don’t want anything to happen to him until he comes through.”

“With what?”

“With some information that he’s been promising for two years.”

“About who?”

“Joe Lozupone, that’s who.”

“He hasn’t got it anymore,” I said and sat back to enjoy Dangerfield’s reaction.

It wasn’t what I expected. He grew very still and then he put his drink down carefully on the table beside his chair. He looked around the room slowly, leaned forward, rested his arms on his thick knees, stared at the carpet, and then asked in a very quiet voice: “What do you mean he hasn’t got it anymore?”

“Angelo’s got it. In Singapore.”

“Cole’s got copies,” Dangerfield insisted to the carpet.

“Not this time.”

“He told you about it, didn’t he?”

“How else would I be telling you?”

“You’re not lying,” he said to the carpet. “No, you’re not lying. You’re not smart enough to lie.”

He looked up then and for a moment I thought that there was anguish in his eyes and on his face, but it passed too quickly for me to be certain. “I’ve never been in that house, you know,” Dangerfield said.

“What house?”

“Cole’s. I’ve been dealing with him for twenty-three years and I’ve never been in his house. I’ve listened to his fuzzy crap about accommodation and compromise in half the crummy bars in half the jerkwater towns in Maryland, and I listened to it because he always came through. I sat there in those lousy bars and drank cheap whiskey and listened to his crap about ‘shared goals’ and about how ‘appeasement is not bad in itself if it works’ because I knew at the end of the crap he’d hand over what I was after and then ask some two-bit favor in return. And all the time I was buttering him up for just one thing. Just one goddamned thing.”

“Joe Lozupone,” I said.

Dangerfield stared at me with reproach. “You think it’s funny, don’t you? You think it’s really funny that I should get shook just because something I’ve been after for twenty-five years has been snatched away. You got a real sense of humor, Cauthorne.”

“Twenty-five years is a long time, and I didn’t say it was funny.”

Dangerfield started talking to the carpet again, holding his big domed head in his hands. “It started during World War II. Blackmarket gasoline stamps, B stamps, but you’re too young to remember about that.”

“I remember,” I said. “My old man had a C sticker on his car.”

“I got on to Lozupone then. He had more than a hundred million gallons worth of B stamps that he was peddling, but he dumped them wholesale on small timers before we could get him. We busted it up all right, but we never got close to Lozupone.”

“Have another drink,” I said. “It’ll cheer you up.”

Dangerfield went on talking to the carpet. “Then after the war he started branching out. The bureau kept me on him — on all of them. I made the contact with Cole and with what I had and with what he gave me I knocked a lot of them off, but I never got close to Lozupone and he kept on getting bigger and bigger. He’s in everything now. Trucking firms, clothing manufacturing, banks, unions, even investment houses, and all the time it’s still rolling in from the gambling and the loansharking and the garbage collecting and God knows what else. Millions he’s got. And you know something, we’re just about the same age, me and Lozupone. He sent his daughter to Wellesley and I’m lucky to get mine into the University of Maryland. He’s got an eighth grade education and I got a law degree. He’s got at least thirty-five million stashed away and I’ve got $473.89 in my checking account and maybe two grand in savings bonds which I haven’t had to cash yet.”

“You’re on the wrong side,” I said.

He looked at me then and shook his head sadly. “Maybe you’re right, Cauthorne, but it’s too late to switch now. Take a good look at me. Twenty-five years of it, screwing around with punks and chiselers and half-witted hoods. It’s rubbed off on me. I talk like them. I even think like them. Christ, don’t kid yourself that I didn’t know what you were expecting when I said ‘FBI’ through the door. You were expecting something young and neat with lots of hair in a nice suit with manners to match. And what do you get? You got a fifty-one-year-old fat man in a Robert Hall outfit with a pig’s manners, that’s what you got.”

“Have another drink,” I said.

“You know why I look like I do?” Dangerfield asked.

“Why?”

“Because they don’t like it.”

“Who doesn’t like it?”

“The waspwaists down at the bureau. To hell with them. I got twenty-seven years in with three years to go and I know more about it than anybody else so they’re not going to say anything. And I got Charlie Cole for them and because of that they damn sure won’t say anything.”

I walked over and picked up Dangerfield’s glass and poured some more Scotch into it. “Here. Drink this and then you can cry on my shoulder.”

Dangerfield accepted the glass. “I hear you’re a little nuts, Cauthorne. A little screwy in the head.”

“Really?”

“The boys out on the coast say that you went a little crackers because you thought you’d killed old Angelo.”

“What else do the boys say?”

“They say that Callese and Palmisano have been leaning on you.”

“I sat back down on the divan and crossed my legs. “You can tell the boys that they’re right.”

“What’s Charlie Cole want with you?”

“He wants Angelo off his back for one thing.”

“Angelo’s in Singapore. Doing real well, I understand.”

“You got the pictures of him for Cole, didn’t you?”

Dangerfield nodded. “I got them. I hear that Charlie’s been moving big money through Switzerland to Singapore. I figured it was to Angelo. Am I right?”

“You’re right,” I said.

“What’s Angelo got on him?”

“Everything. Everything he ever gave you and unless Cole keeps paying, Angelo’s going to give it to your friends in New York.”

Dangerfield thought about that for a moment. He rubbed his big red nose and frowned. “And Angelo’s got the stuff on Lozupone?”

“The only copy — or copies by now.”

“And where do you fit in?”

“Unless I get it back, Cole is thinking about having some acid thrown in the face of my partner’s wife.”

“What did you tell him?” Dangerfield said.

“I told him I’d go to Singapore. But I was going anyway when I found out about Sacchetti. I was going wherever Sacchetti was.”

Dangerfield nodded his big head slowly as if confirming something to himself. “They said you were a little crazy. They were right.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t know how much trouble you’re in.”

I got up and poured the last of the Scotch into my glass. “You mentioned that before, I think.”

“I didn’t go into details.”

“But you will.”

“Later,” Dangerfield said. “Right now we’ve got some planning to do.”

“Planning what?”

Dangerfield smiled. He looked cheerful and relaxed, even happy. “About how you’re going to get that stuff on Joe Lozupone away from Angelo Sacchetti and back to me.”