Lullaby Town

  I said, "If you want out, go to the cops. You're in with Charlie and Sal. That's worth something. You could cut a deal."

  She shook her head again and walked back to the window and looked at the boy. The cat followed her. He wasn't as big as the cat who lives with me, or as scarred, but he was okay. "No. Going to the police means witness protection. We'd have to give up everything we have."

  "Looks like you're giving up a lot right now."

  Her eyes hardened and an edge came to her voice. "All I had when I left Los Angeles was my son and a lot of bad memories. I wanted a job with a future. I wanted an education. I wanted to work and see the work pay dividends and be a worthwhile person. I am. I have a good home. I do a good job with my boy. He's not on drugs and he does all right in school. Witness protection means we change our name and our life and start over. I won't do that. I've already started over and I've built the thing I wanted to build and I don't want to lose it. I've come a long way from stupidville."

  "Far enough to make it worth being owned by the mob?"

  The eyes went back to the boy and turned red again. "I don't know what I can do, but I'll find a way out. It's been eight years, but I will find a way out I promise you." She wasn't saying it to me. She was saying it to the boy.

  I looked around the house. I looked at the cat. I looked at the boy bouncing the ball. It was a good house, well put together and warm and filled with the things that a family home should be filled with. It couldn't have been easy. Peter, do I havta? I said, "I know what you can do."

  She made a tired little laugh and looked back at me. "What shit. You're here, and Peter's here, and any chance I might've had to get away from these people is gone. There isn't anything else I can do."

  "Sure there is. You can hire me to get you out of this mess."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We were sitting on the Early American furniture across from the fireplace, me on the couch, Karen on one of the wingback chairs, drinking white wine from glasses that were simple and without adornment. The cat had left the room. She said, "They give me money, and I transfer it out of the country without reporting it to the Treasury Department. Any deposit over $10,000 we're supposed to file a form with the Treasury Department, but I don't. That's what it's all about, taking in the money and not reporting it. I put the money into an account, then transfer it to a bank in Barbados. In, then out. It doesn't seem like much, does it?"

  I said, "Who gives you the money?" I was looking for a way out for her. I didn't know what that would be, but maybe if I heard enough, something would present itself. It's the scattershot approach to the detective business.

  "Either Charlie or a man named Harry. It's usually Harry, but sometimes it's Charlie."

  "Who's Harry?"

  "Just this guy. He works for Charlie and he's usually the one who brings the money."

  Outside, the sun was dropping down and the sky was taking on a deep blue cast, but there was maybe a half hour of good light left. Toby was still working the ball. "I'm surprised you see Charlie. The top guys like Charlie and Sal always stay away from stuff like this. They use guys like Harry. Something goes wrong, Harry takes the fall. That's what he's paid for."

  She sipped some of the wine, then set down the glass as if the wine had lost its taste. "This is common to you, isn't it? You deal with things like this all the time."

  "Not exactly like this, but close enough. People look for ways to trap themselves and they usually find what they look for. I see people at their extremes."

  "Are you good at what you do?"

  "Not bad."

  "I'm surprised you found me. I took great care to hide myself. I erased my maiden name from all my credit records. I took the name Lloyd from a billboard."

  "You left a trail a mile wide."

  She picked up the wine again and had some, as if she needed the wine to help her talk about these things. "I want you to know that what I've built, I've built without their help and without their money. I didn't use Peter's help and I didn't use theirs."

  "All right."

  "Three days after I made the first transfer, a man came to the bank and gave me an envelope containing one thousand dollars. I called Sal and told him to take the money back, but he wouldn't. He told me that friends have to take care of one another, that kind of thing. He was sweet and charming, and it was a thousand dollars, so I let myself get talked into keeping it. That first time, after I got used to the idea, it was even sort of exciting. Do you see?"

  I nodded.

  "But after more calls, and more money, it wasn't. I knew it was wrong and I was scared, and finally they said, okay, if you don't want to get paid, we won't pay you. But they had already paid me a total of sixty-five hundred dollars, and I had spent it." She got up and went back down the hall again and came back with a 5x7 manila envelope. She opened it and shook out a small stack of papers and handed them to me. "Over the past three years I've put forty-two hundred dollars into various charities. I didn't want to keep any of the sixty-five hundred. That's all I can do."

  I looked. The receipts totaled forty-two hundred dollars. Twenty-three hundred dollars until a clean conscience. Extremes.

  She said, "Does this help at all?"

  "If you got caught and went to trial, or if you went to the cops, maybe. Other than that, no."

  She nodded. "Oh."

  "Has Charlie ever mentioned any other way he launders money?"

  "No."

  "How about the woman who hired you, was she in their pocket?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Do they own anyone else at the bank now?"

  "No."

  "Does anyone else at the bank know what's going on?"

  "'No."

  "Is there a paper record that passes between you and the DeLucas?"

  "No."

  Maybe the scattershot approach wasn't going to work so well. Sort of like trying to find intelligence. "How about a record of the bank transfers?"

  "Not for the first few times. The first few times, I was scared and I didn't want there to be a record so I erased it from the computers. Then I got scared to not have a record and I started keeping a file."

  "Okay. That's something. I'll need to see it."

  She nodded. "All right. I can print out a transaction record at the bank."

  I said, "Is there anything you can think of that maybe I'm missing?"

  "I don't think so."

  The cat came down the hall and walked across the dining room and into the kitchen. Karen Shipley Nelsen leaned toward me and clenched her hands together. "What about Peter?"

  I spread my hands. "I have what we in the trade call an ethical dilemma. I've taken Peter's money to find you, and now I have. I owe him that information."

  She stared at me, still clenching the hands.

  "I've found people before and kept their secrets, but that won't work here. Peter wants to find his son and he has unlimited resources with which to do it. If I tell him that I couldn't find you, he will simply hire someone else and they will find you. You weren't that hard to find."

  Her jaw tightened. She wasn't liking it much, but she knew that she didn't have to like it.

  I said, "What does Toby know?"

  "He doesn't know anything about the DeLuca family or how I'm involved with them. I don't want him to know."

  "What does he know about Peter?"

  "He knows that his father's name is Peter Nelsen, and he knows that his father left us because he didn't want a family and he didn't want to be married. We don't talk about it. He doesn't know that his father is the guy who makes movies and has articles written about him."

  "You should think about telling him."

  She stood up and went to the window and looked out at her son. The ball was sitting motionless on the drive and Toby was sitting against one of the birches. She said, "Tell me the truth. Do you see any way out of this?"

  "Guys like the DeLucas, they won't do something out of the goodness of their hearts. If we
want something, we'll have to give something."

  "Like what?"

  "They might let you go if we could put one of their people in your place. That way they don't lose anything. Would you walk away from the bank?"

  "Yes. Yes, I'd walk away." Her face was pale when she said it.

  I nodded. "Okay. That's a place to start. I'll ask around, find out about the DeLucas, see what's there that we can give them or what we can use as leverage. What you can do is get together all the information you have about the accounts and about what you know about Charlie and Sal. Don't leave anything out. Even if it seems small or silly or beside the point."

  "Okay."

  "I'll go to Charlie and give him a little push and see what happens. Charlie won't like it, but there isn't any other way. Is that all right with you?"

  She nodded.

  "Maybe I can get you away from the DeLucas before we bring Peter in. If they're away and you're not a part of them anymore, it might work."

  She nodded again.

  "If it works, Peter doesn't have to know about the DeLucas and they don't have to know about Peter."

  She was looking hopeful. "That's what I want."

  "But it may not work out that way. It may get messy and you have to be ready for that, too. Focus on DeLuca. DeLuca is who is important. Not Peter. Do you understand?"

  "Of course."

  "We'll take it a step at a time."

  She nodded some more, then we stood up and went to the door. When we got there, she said, "How much?"

  I looked at her.

  "How much do you want for this?"

  "Fifty billion dollars."

  She stared at me and then she nodded and made a little smile. "Thank you, Mr. Cole."

  "Don't mention it. We're a full-service agency."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I called Joe Pike at seven-thirty that night, L.A. time. "It's me. I'm in New York on this thing, and it's heating up. Looks like the mafia is involved."

  "Rollie George."

  "You got his number?"

  Pike gave me a phone number. "Where are you staying?"

  I told him.

  "Wait ten, then call Rollie. Try to survive until I get there."

  He hung up. That Pike. Some partner, huh?

  Fifteen minutes later I called the number and a deep male voice said, "I've got an apartment on Barrow Street

  in the Village, just east of Seventh. You need a place to stay, it's yours." Roland George.

  "How ya doin, Rollie?"

  "Can't complain. My friend Joe Pike says you want to know some things about your classic, all-American-style mafia." He dragged out mafia into three long syllables. Street black.

  "The DeLuca family."

  "Figured it might be the Gambinos, you being the guy who burned Rudy when he was out on the coast." Nobody in the rest of the world refers to Los Angeles as "the coast." Only New Yorkers.

  "A woman named Ellen Lang did him. I was just along for the ride."

  "They after you?"

  "No. This is something else."

  "Whatever you want, it's yours, you know that"

  "Sure."

  "Whatever I've got, whatever I can get for you or for Joe, it's yours."

  "I'm coming in tomorrow morning. From Chelam, Connecticut."

  "Come in after the traffic, say about ten. Take you an hour. I'll meet you downstairs in front of the building at eleven-thirty."

  "All right."

  He gave me the address and we hung up.

  The next morning I retraced the route I had driven before, this time turning off the West Side Highway on Twelfth and picking up Bleecker at Abingdon Square

  and following it down through the Village to Barrow.

  Two black men and a very old Boston terrier were standing in front of a redbrick building at the east end of Barrow by Fourth Street

  . One of the men was younger and tall and muscular in a plain navy suit with a white button-collared shirt. The other was in his early sixties in a dark brown leather trench coat and had maybe looked like the younger guy a couple of lifetimes ago, before twenty-two years with the NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau and two 9mm high-velocity parabellums in the liver had taken it away from him. Roland George. The little black and white Boston terrier sat at his feet, rear legs stuck out at odd angles, its pushed-in, once-black face white with gray, staring at nothing through eyes heavy with cataracts. Its tongue was purple and didn't fit in its mouth. It drooled. Roland's dog, Maxie.

  Eleven years ago, Roland George and his wife, Liana, had been driving up the Rahway Turnpike from a weekend at the Jersey shore when a dark brown Mercury had pulled up alongside them and two Puerto Rican hitters had cut loose with a couple of Sig automatics, payback from a Colombian dope dealer whom Roland had busted. Roland survived the bullets and the subsequent crash, but Liana did not. Maxie had been left in the care of a neighbor. They had had no children. Roland George took a forced medical retirement, drank heavily for a year, then sobered up to write thick, violent novels about New York cops tracking down psychopathic killers. The first two didn't sell, but the last three had ridden the New York Times bestseller list to a couple of penthouse apartments, a twenty-eight-room home on a lake in Vermont, and substantial contributions to political candidates favoring the death penalty. Fourteen weeks after Liana George died, the two Puerto Rican hitters held up a Taco Bell in Culver City, California, and were shot to death by a uniformed police officer named Joe Pike. That's how Joe and I knew Roland George. Roland still wore the wedding ring.

  I pulled to the curb, got out, and Roland shook my hand. His grip was hard and firm, but bony. "You hungry?"

  "I could eat."

  "Let Thomas here put your car in the parking garage across the street. There's an Italian place we can walk to not far from here."

  "Sure." I gave the younger man my keys, then leaned down and patted Maxie on his little square head. It was like petting a fire hydrant. "How ya doing, old boy?"

  Maxie broke wind.

  Roland shook his head and looked concerned. "He's not doing so well."

  "No?"

  "He's gone deaf. He's got the arthritis, he's blind as a bat, and now he can't hear. I think he sees things."

  "Growing old is hell."

  "I bear witness to that."

  Thomas said, "Shall I pick you up at the restaurant, Mr. George?"

  "That's all right, Thomas, I think we'll walk back. Be good for old Max."

  "Very good, sir."

  Thomas climbed into the Taurus and pulled away. I said, "I never heard anyone say 'very good, sir' in real life before."

  "I keep trying to break him of it, but, you know, he's working his way through Columbia Law."

  Roland and I turned off Barrow onto Fourth. To get Maxie going, Roland had to lift him to his feet, then give little tugs on the leash to point him in the right direction. Maxie's tongue stuck out and a ribbon of drool trailed along the sidewalk and his back legs lurched along with a mind of their own. The arthritis.

  As we walked, Roland's eyes flicked over faces and storefronts on both sides of the street, sometimes lingering, mostly not. Still a cop. He said, "Sal DeLuca is your old-line dago. Came up as a hitter through the Luchesi mob back in the forties, and by the time that broke up, he had a big enough crew and enough power to form his own family. Sal the Rock, they call him. These dagos are big on the names."

  "What are they into?"

  "Gambling and loan-sharking and the labor rackets here in lower Manhattan. We're in DeLuca family territory right now."

  I looked around for shadows lurking in doorways or people with tommy guns, but I didn't see any. "How can you tell?"

  "Over in OCCB they got a territory map hung on the wall with New York carved up so it looks like its own little United States, here to here the DeLucas, here to here the Gambozas, here to here the Carlinos, like that. A bunch of guys called capos each have their own crew of soldiers and run their own businesses, but the cap
os all answer to the capo de tutti capo, the boss of the bosses."

  "The godfather."

  "That's it. In the DeLuca family, that's Sal. Charlie's got his own crew, and his own business, but he's still got to answer to Sal. Most of the time, the capo de tutti capo retires, he passes it on to his kid. He's lined things up so that the kid has the biggest crew, the most money, like that. Sal bought Charlie a meat-packing plant"

  "I've been there."

  Rollie made his hand like a gun and touched his temple. "He's a nut case. Absolutely out of control. They call him Charlie the Tuna. You see, with the names? They call him the tuna because he's put so many guys in the ocean."

  Great. Just what you want to hear.

  We turned off Fourth onto Sixth and started south toward Little Italy. When we were waiting for a light to change, Maxie suddenly growled and ran sideways, back legs moving faster than his front legs, drool trailing from the corners of his wide shovel mouth like wet streamers, trying to bite something that wasn't there. A couple of guys in watch caps waiting next to us traded looks and moved out of range.

  Roland looked sad and said, "It's hardest when their minds go."

  Maxie snapped at the air until he wore himself out and then he broke wind again and sat down. One of the guys who had moved away frowned and shook his head. I said, "Sounds like digestion problems, too."

  Roland made more of the sad nod. "Yes."

  When the light changed, Roland helped Maxie up and got him pointed in the right direction and we crossed.

  We turned off Sixth onto Spring and went into a little place called Umberto's. A bald guy in a vest hustled up to Rollie with a lot of smiling and a lot of buon giorno and brought us to a booth across from the bar. A couple of dozen people were already eating and more than half of them were speaking Italian. Dark eyes moved with Rollie and voices lowered. The maitre d' snapped his fingers and a kid with spots on his face brought water. Maxie sat on the floor next to Rollie and panted. When the maitre d' and the kid were gone, I said, "They don't mind the dog?"

  "Max and I been eating here for years. When I was with the cops, I kept book on half the guys in this place. We nod, we smile, it's like a game we play. This place is owned by the Gamboza family."