He found the key and opened the courtesy bar.
Gloria never heard the phone.
She was lying in a tubful of hot water and her own blood.
She had told him everything, of course, while he was forcing her to gulp the scotch down. She told him about the one-armed man and the phone call long before he told her to swallow the pills.
Overtime heard Withers’s message, though. He had just finished wiping the knife handle and pressing her fingerprints onto the handle.
Poor drunken slut, he thought. Prey to the sad but banal combination of booze, drugs, and guilt.
He erased the message tape and left for the airport.
22
At about the time Gloria died, a black limousine pulled up to an iron-gated courtyard off St. Claude Street in New Orleans’s French Quarter. The driver’s window rolled down; the uniformed guard checked out the driver and the three passengers and waved the limousine in.
The driver parked at the top of an oval driveway next to a three-story Spanish neoclassical building, replete with terracotta-tiled roof, wrought-iron balconies, and creeping ivy. Two bodyguards walked Joe Graham up the stone steps and into the building.
The floors were highly polished octagonal black-and-white tiles. The walls were painted chalk white and held large gilt-framed oil paintings of New Orleans street scenes. A marble staircase, flanked by a wrought-iron railing, curved up to the right, and the bodyguards led Graham up these stairs. Video cameras were recessed on swivels in the plaster ceiling.
A guard sat at an antique table at the top of the stairs, the bulge of a pistol prominent under his jacket. He nodded to the two guards, pressed the button on the intercom, and said that Mr. Bascaglia’s two o’clock appointment had arrived. A feminine voice replied that he should be sent right in.
They walked past the table, down the hall to a large mahogany door. The first bodyguard knocked. There was an electric buzz, the lock sprang open, and they were in a narrow waiting room decorated in a blue Napoleonic theme.
An attractive older woman in a blue business suit sat at another antique table. She smiled at them, knocked on a door behind her, stuck her head in, and announced them.
“You can go right in,” she said.
Carmine Bascaglia sat behind a large table. Behind him, a floor-to-ceiling window of thick bulletproof glass allowed a splendid view of old New Orleans, from the private courtyard garden directly below to the shabbily genteel old buildings of the French Quarter down the street.
Bascaglia’s desk was spare except for two stacks of paper—one on the left, one on the right—a gold fountain pen, a pitcher of water, and a single glass.
One wooden chair, smaller and plainer than the Queen Anne Bascaglia sat on, had been set directly in front of the desk. The walls of the office were covered with thick gold-and-blue wallpaper. Portraits of Spanish ladies, also gilt-framed, hung on the walls.
Bascaglia looked tall even sitting down. He wore an elegantly tailored slate gray suit with subtle white striping, an off-white Italian shirt with cuff links, and a blood red tie. His gray hair, starting to thin, was brushed straight back and he wore gold-rimmed glasses on his Roman nose.
The bodyguards led Graham to the chair in front of the desk and then took their places in the corners.
“I have fifteen minutes for you, Mr. Graham,” he said without introduction. “I will begin. One: You think you are a funny son of a bitch, but you are not a funny son of a bitch.”
He paused to let Graham agree.
Graham nodded.
“Two: When we want comedians, we hire them and they perform in nightclubs. They tell humorous jokes and we laugh. They do not tell allegorical anecdotes in restaurants or shove people into rivers.”
He paused again and stared at Graham.
Graham nodded.
“Three: I have no sense of humor. I don’t have the time for one. Neither do you. Are we in agreement?”
“Yes, we are, Mr. Bascaglia,” Graham said.
“Good,” Bascaglia said. “The only reason I gave you an appointment is that Dominic Merolla requested it. I required that you represent your organization because I wanted to tell you personally that the antics in San Antonio are to stop forthwith.”
“There won’t be any more, Mr. Bascaglia.”
“Now, what seems to be the problem, Mr. Graham?”
Graham felt butterflies in his stomach the way he used to when he was sent to the Mother Superior’s office as a kid, except worse. The nun might hit you with a ruler; Carmine Bascaglia might make you a concrete lawn ornament at the bottom of the Mississippi.
Graham said, “One of your subordinates in Texas, a Mr. Foglio, is engaged in business practices that are proving harmful to interests we represent.
“Mr. Foglio’s business is to make money,” Bascaglia answered. “I assume you’re referring to that amusement park?”
“Candyland, yeah.”
‘”Joe Foglio is a contractor on the project,” Bascaglia said. “It’s all aboveboard.”
Graham coughed and said, “As a matter of fact, sir, there’s quite a bit that’s uh, below-board.”
“Let’s not play games,” Bascaglia said. “In recent years, we have made a successful effort to move our monies into legitimate businesses such as construction, trucking, entertainment, and various investments. If Joe Foglio traded on certain names to acquire business …”
Bascaglia held his palms up.
“Our client is happy for Mr. Foglio’s various companies to have the work,” Graham continued. “They’d be happier, though, if he’d stop robbing them blind.”
“I don’t make it my habit to pry into the details of my associates’ businesses, and Mr. Foglio’s profit margins are a detail best left to him.”
Graham started to rub his artificial fist into his real palm. He thought for a minute and then said, “Years ago, I worked for a guy who owned a chain of movie theaters. He hired me to see how much the staff was stealing. And he told me, ‘Joe, if they’re just stealing supper, let ’em. I don’t want to know.… It turned out that they were stealing dinner money. They were happy; he was happy. But Joey Foglio is stealing supper, lunch, breakfast, midday snacks, the table, the chairs, the cabinets, and the kitchen linoleum.
“Sir, when the old men threw Joey out of New York, you took him on because you thought he could make money, I know that. But now he’s got his hands around the throat of the golden goose. If that’s not enough for you, he’s also ordered a hit on a young woman who isn’t involved in your business, and he’s aligned himself—and you, I guess—against the direct interests of the Merolla family.”
Graham saw a scary, cold look come across Bascaglia’s eyes.
“What’s the Merolla family got to do with this?” he asked.
“The grandkid is Jack Landis’s partner.”
“The grandson isn’t in the family business,” Bascaglia said.
“His grandfather loves him, anyway.”
Bascaglia took his sweet time thinking this over while Graham pictured chunks of himself floating into the Gulf of Mexico.
“I’ve always believed,” Bascaglia finally said, “that violence is the first recourse of the foolish man and the last resort of the wise man.”
Graham was relieved to hear that.
“I don’t want a war with the Merolla family,” Bascaglia concluded.
“No one’s talking war here, sir.”
Bascaglia seemed to be thinking out loud when he said, “But I can’t take Joe Foglio’s business away from him.”
Graham was thinking that a man rumored to have arranged the assassination of a United States President could probably blow off a bum like Joey Beans, but he didn’t voice the opinion.
“We believe that there’s a lot of room for negotiation here,” Graham said. “Funny, but it all kind of hinges on this woman who says Landis raped her.”
“Paula somebody.”
“Polly Paget, yeah.”
“How is she ce
ntral to this dispute?”
“She’s got FCN by the short hairs, and if she takes the company down, everybody loses,” Graham explained. “See, Joey’s trying to whack her; we’re trying to protect her; Merolla and Hathaway are trying to use her.…”
“Can you deliver her?” Bascaglia asked.
I hope so, Joe thought.
“We have influence,” he said. “With the right deal—”
“Yes or no, Mr. Graham.”
This in a voice telling me that I deliver her to a deal or you deliver her to a morgue, and somehow I don’t see Neal standing by waving olé to a hit on this woman.
“Yes,” Graham said. “But—”
“No buts.”
“But I need an absolute guarantee of a truce while we negotiate,” Graham insisted. “You have to put Joey Beans on a short leash … sir.”
“I think you made that point to him already,” Bascaglia said. “You’ll be our guest in New Orleans during the negotiations. My secretary will make hotel reservations for you and you’ll have an office in this building during the day. I’ll have her contact your Mr. Kitteredge to get started.”
“Mr. Bascaglia, with all due respect, I think we better get started right now,” Graham said. “This is one of those things that gets hotter the longer it goes.”
“Oh?”
“Mr. Kitteredge is standing by on his phone,” Graham said.
Bascaglia actually smiled.
“You’re an extraordinary man, Mr. Graham,” he said.
“You’re the extraordinary man. I’m a working stiff.”
“If you ever want to work for me, I’ll have a job for you,” Bascaglia said. He took a piece of paper from the left pile, glanced at it, initialed it, and set it on the right pile. Then he picked up the phone.
Nothing, Graham thought, better go wrong with this deal.
23
“No,” Polly said.
“What do you mean, no?” Neal asked.
“You know—no. N-O,” Polly insisted. She sat on the bed in Neal’s room, looking defensive and hostile. Neal sat on the bed beside her, Candy watched from a chair, and Karen stood beside the television set, on which Jack and Candy were hawking time-shares at Candyland. “No means no.”
“Isn’t that where this whole thing started?” Karen asked.
“Right?” Polly asked.
Candy nodded vigorously.
“If the NOW meeting is over …” Neal said.
“What’s NOW?” asked Polly.
“The National Organization of Women,” Karen explained.
Polly said, “That’s a good idea.”
“You ain’t kidding.”
The exchange stopped at the sound of Neal’s head rhythmically smacking into his hands.
“Polly,” Neal said. “Two million dollars. Two … million … dollars.”
All in all, Neal thought, it’s a good settlement, hammered out over a long night. Polly would get the $2 million in exchange for dropping the suit. Neither she nor Jack would discuss the affair, the paternity, or the alleged rape with the press.
On the business level, Jack would sell enough shares at fair market price to give Peter Hathaway majority ownership, but Jack and Candy would own their show and sell it to FCN at top dollar.
As for Candyland, Hathaway would agree to let the project continue. Foglio would retain his contracts but perform real work at reasonable costs. He would also acquire certain maintenance contracts on the same terms. Kitteredge and Bascaglia would appoint a mutually agreeable comptroller to monitor costs.
It was a good settlement and Neal could see Kitteredge’s careful fingerprints all over it.
“All you talk about is money,” Polly said.
“You launched a civil suit,” Neal reminded her.
“Because he should pay for what he did,” Polly argued.
“Two million freaking dollars!” Neal said. “And he loses control of his company! That’s paying!”
Polly chewed on her bottom lip and thought.
Please take it, Neal thought. So I can go back to my life. So Carmine Bascaglia doesn’t kill us all.
His eyes caught Candy’s.
He wondered what she could be thinking, having okayed a deal that would send her back to her scummy husband for two years. She was apparently willing to trade two years of misery to save her life’s work. Such are life’s bargains.
He didn’t have to wonder what Karen was thinking. She reminded him at every private moment. She was pissed off. She thought the whole thing stank. She was a cowgirl who thought they should just shoot it out, in the courtroom or wherever, and take their chances. He loved her madly, but she just didn’t realize that they didn’t have a chance against Bascaglia.
Polly seemed to be wavering.
“I’ll try to get two-five,” Neal said, hoping to push her over the edge.
Karen grunted in disgust.
“I’ll take it,” Polly said.
Thank you, God.
“If he says he raped me.”
Thanks, God. Thanks a lot.
Karen applauded.
“Good for you,” she said.
“Polly,” Neal started again, “if he admits he raped you, ‘The Jack and Candy Family Hour’ will fall off the charts. The network will lose millions of dollars and Candyland will never be built. There won’t be enough money to finance the deal. Jack might as well take his chances in front of a jury.”
And we can take our chances in front of a firing squad.
“That’s fine with me,” Polly said. “That’s what I wanted in the first place. That’s what you were supposed to be helping me with, wasn’t it?”
“We didn’t know the mob was involved,” Neal said.
“So the mob is involved, that makes it okay to rape me?”
“And keep raping her?” Karen asked.
That’s a damn good point, Neal thought.
“This is not the time for tired feminist cant,” he said. “The point is—”
“Oh, goodie,” Karen said. “Neal’s going to tell us what the point is.”
“The point is that we can talk right and wrong, fair and unfair until the sun goes down, but at the end of the day we have to look at what is possible,” Neal said. “This is about the best deal we’re going to get.”
“What do you think?” Polly asked Candy.
Swell, Neal thought. First she’s boffing her husband, now she thinks the woman is her big sister.
“I’m not the one who was raped,” Candy said.
“I don’t know about that,” said Karen.
“Will you stop?” Neal asked her.
Karen shrugged.
“I don’t know,” said Candy. She watched herself whip up a low-fat noncholesterol ‘His First Night Home from the Hospital Dinner’ while Jack made funny faces to the camera. “I’m kind of tired of cooking for the son of a bitch.”
“Will you talk to them?” Neal asked Karen. “Tell them it’s a great deal.”
Karen talked to them.
“This deal sucks,” Neal said into the telephone a few minutes later.
“It doesn’t suck,” Ed answered tightly as he watched Kitteredge look quizzical and Hathaway turn pale. “It’s a terrific deal.”
“It sucks!” Neal repeated. “Two million lousy dollars! He forks over some chump change and walks away from raping her? It’s a terrific deal all right—for Jack! How am I supposed to sell this to her?”
Please tell me, Ed. Nothing I’ve tried so far has worked.
“I’m putting you on speaker phone, Neal,” Ed answered. That would help settle Neal down, if he knew he was talking directly to Kitteredge. “Could you summarize her objections to this proposal for Mr. Kitteredge and Mr. Hathaway?”
“Yeah, it sucks!” Neal bellowed. He repeated the rationale.
“Neal, Ethan Kitteredge here!” Kitteredge shouted. Kitteredge thought the speaker phone was yet another symptom of societal decline. “How are you?”
Oh, I’m trapped in a hotel room in the wise guy capital of the world with three women who want to take on both the Merolla and Bascaglia crime families, the entire Family Cable Network, and you. One of the women is pregnant, another is discovering herself, and the third one is just nuts.
“Fine, sir. And yourself?”
“I’m a bit puzzled. Perhaps you can enlighten me,” Kitteredge said, “as to why Ms. Paget feels this arrangement—how did she phrase it … ?”
“Sucks, sir.”
“Yes … sucks.”
“It eats shit!” Polly yelled.
“Was that Ms. Paget?” Kitteredge asked.
“Yes it was.”
“Your tutorials aren’t going especially well, are they?” Kitteredge asked.
Neal filled him in on Polly’s demand that Jack confess to raping her.
Kitteredge listened and said, “I’m afraid that’s just not possible, Neal. Perhaps she would consider another million as an alternative.”
You’re afraid? You’re not sitting next to the human bull’s-eye here. And you’ve been lowballing us?!
“Three million, no confession,” he said to Polly.
“Eat shit,” Polly answered.
“She declined the offer, sir.”
“I heard her, Neal.”
“Because she pronounced her t’s,” Neal said. Let’s not be defaming my tutorials. “A week ago, she would have said, ‘Eeh shih.’”
“Ask this jerk who he thinks he is,” Hathaway demanded.
“He can hear you,” Ed said.
“Who do you think you are?” Hathaway asked.
“There is some confusion on that score,” Neal admitted.
“I mean, are you her agent now?” Hathaway asked. Now that Polly had served her purpose, he wanted this matter settled quietly. The scandal that was such an asset was becoming a liability. “Are you getting a piece of her settlement?”
“No, Mr. Hathaway,” Neal answered. “The only person who is gaining financially from Ms. Paget’s rape is you. And by the way—”
Ed flicked off the speaker.
“—eat shit,” Neal concluded. “Hi, Ed.”
“Hi, Neal,” Ed said pleasantly. “Neal, a number of highly placed people have worked very hard to put this package together. Just in case you’ve forgotten, we don’t represent Polly Paget; we represent Mr. Hathaway. Mr. Hathaway is satisfied with this arrangement. If Ms. Paget persists in being stubborn, we will just have to walk away from her. She can hire her own lawyer, her own speech coach, and her own security. You can go back to doing whatever the hell it is that you do. Got it?”