Bloody River Blues Page 9

  The phone rang.

  His lawyer was on the line. Grimmins decided not to tell him about the visit from the FBI. It had been worse than expected, but if he told the lawyer, the man would have a tantrum that he had spoken to the agents alone. But the issue didn't come up; the lawyer wanted to talk, not listen.

  "Pete, I've got some news. Call me on a safe phone, will you?"

  Crimmins grunted and hung up. He walked down- * stairs and up the street to the Ritz Carlton parking garage. Without proffering a ticket, he nodded to a young attendant, who scurried off to retrieve the Lincoln. Crimmins looked at it sourly as it rolled up. He gave the boy a bill then got inside and drove out onto the broad street. He lifted the receiver of the car phone, the number of which was changed so frequently that he was 95 percent sure it was a secure line.

  "News, you said." Crimmins drove leisurely, well under the speed limit.

  "The witness," the nonfriend and counselor said.

  "Yes."

  "The witness to the Gaudia hit."

  "I know that's what you mean. What about him?" Crimmins snapped, angry because there was a 5 percent chance the line was not secure.

  "I found him."

  "How?"

  "I called some favors in."

  Called in favors? Nonsense. Nobody owes a leech any favors. "Who is it?"

  "A man with this movie company that's up in Maddox."

  "Movie company? I never heard about a movie company."

  'They're shooting some gangster film up there." His voice was bright with an irony that Crimmins didn't wish to acknowledge.

  "Well? Tell me about him."

  The man said, "They know he saw who was in the car. Both Maddox police and the FBI. So far, he's been too scared to testify."

  "What did he see?" Crimmins asked slowly.

  "They're sure he saw the driver," the lawyer said, then added, "There's something else I should tell you. I heard from somebody in the Justice Department that Petersons going after him. He's going to jump on this guy with both feet. He's going to jump on him until he burns you."

  A sigh. "What's his name?"

  "John Pellam."

  "Where's he staying?"

  The lawyer hesitated-pehaps at Crimmins's sudden interest in details. Then he said, "He's got a trailer. You know, a camper. He parks it different places but mostly he's staying at the old trailer camp by the river in Maddox. Near the cement plant."

  "I thought that was closed."

  "Maybe for the movie people they opened it."

  "It's deserted around there, isn't it?"

  Now the hesitation grew into a long silence. The lawyer managed to ask, "Why do you want to know that? Tell me, Peter."

  Crimmins said, "I don't need anything more from you for the time being."

  ***

  "Line it up for me, Nels," said Ronald L. Peterson, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri.

  He sat in a large office, done up in functional sixties design. The furniture was expensive. The desk was solid teak, but you could not tell by looking at its top, which was covered with a thousand pieces of paper. On the bookshelves, filling three walls, were dark, wilted volumes. Moore's Federal Practice Digest. Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Case reporters, law reviews, ABA Journals.

  Young Nelson, sandy-haired, solid, a purebred preppy, opened a file stuffed full of scraps of yellow foolscap and began pulling out sheets and organizing them.

  Peterson, forty-four, was wearing a Brooks Brothers navy suit, about one-fifth as old as he, a white shirt, a yellow tie with black dots on it (a summer model technically, but this was his good-luck tie, having been around his neck when he put seven Cosa Nostra leaders into prison, and so he wore it when-as now-he felt he needed luck). Peterson was a solid man, with thick hands and a smooth face. Balding. A roll of belly and midriff that showed taut and pinkish under the thin white shirts he always wore. He was the sort of man whose face revealed exactly the boy he had been at thirteen. And in other ways, too, he was much the same then as now: confident, vindictive, smart, determined, prissy. And manic.

  Ronald Peterson s approach to this job, as well as his approach to the practice of law, was characterized by an almost charming simplicity. He was the chief U.S. lawyer in a major judicial district for the same reason he had worked in the Justice Department for the past nine years: because he thought that people who did bad things ought to go to jail.

  Years ago, in law school, troubled about what kind of practice to go into, Peterson had heard one of his Harvard Law professors say that the best lawyers make the worst judges. Meaning that the practice of law provides its own morality-lawyers do not need to make terrifying judgments about right and wrong; they just apply the rules. This observation was an epiphany for him, and that summer he took a job as an intern in the same U.S. Attorneys office that he now headed.

  He had been applying the simple rules ever since. He went about this task with the devotion of a fundamentalist Shi'ite-with whom he shared a sense of righteousness and an ecstatic appreciation of the abstract.

  The man who was the focus of Petersons present jihad was Peter Crimmins. This campaign actually had less to do with the infamous 60 Minutes program skewering his office than one might think. No, what Peterson resented so much about Crimmins was what the prosecutor had identified as a serious problem in America-a legitimate businessman's cool, conscious decision to move into illegal activities. Crimmins, like the insider traders whom Peterson also loathed, had simply found the profits at his trucking businesses not up to his greed and had expanded into money laundering and other crimes as if that were the next logical step in market expansion

  Nelson, an assistant U.S. Attorney, had reviewed all the sheets of foolscap. He looked into his boss's adolescent eyes. "It's dicey." His voice stopped abruptly and he immediately regretted the word. Peterson continually told his people not to give soft assessments. He wanted specifics. Yeses and nos. Peterson was renowned for his tempe"r tantrums. But today he was not in the mood to beat up anyone for casual lapses like this. He drank more of his coffee and asked, "What do we know about Crimmins the night of the hit?"

  "He denies it all but hasn't got an alibi. We didn't have a tail on him. But there were no phone intercepts in or out for two hours on either side of the shooting. He does have a Lincoln."

  "Match?"

  "Circumstantial. Both the getaway and Crimmins's are dark-colored. But there's no tag or other ID. Not yet."

  "Crimmins's got that bodyguard, doesn't he?"

  "Yep. But he doesn't match the ID of the gunman."

  "What about earlier wiretaps?" Peterson wondered. "Was there a syllable that might be taken to suggest Crimmins was ordering a hit? Was there some talk of accidents? Anything about, oh, cleaning house?"

  There had not been, Nelson reported, as he stroked his young, pink cheek, under which several teeth seemed to chew nervously on his tongue. He added, "But you know how tough surveillance has been. Crimmins makes half his calls from the park and his car phone…"

  A serene Peterson spun in his functional 1960s chair and licked a smear of coffee off the side of his cup. Losing the star witness on whom he had pinned so much hope had been such a blow that it transcended simple rage. Besides, a measure of such anger as Peterson might feel had no target other than himself- for acquiescing to Gaudia's flippant request to keep the U.S. Marshals out of his hair.

  The U.S. Attorney breathed slowly as he looked out over the city. But would Crimmins really have been present at the hit? Why? Maybe they had been meeting. Maybe Crimmins was trying to cut a deal with Gaudia and the talks had turned sour.

  Peterson patted his thighs. He was on a diet. (One of the things that irked him was that he looked like Peter Crimmins, only Crimmins had more hair.) His head turned slowly but powerfully as if it were geared at a very low ratio. "What about the witness? What's his name? Pellam?"

  'The cops aren't sharing anything with us."

&
nbsp; "Pricks," Peterson spat out. He slapped his leg, feeling the fat reverberate. "One of theirs gets shot and the mayor and commissioner sit on the witness. You know why they do that. For the Post-Dispatch. That's why they do it. Who's on him?"

  "Monroe and Bracken. Rousted him good. But he's not talking."

  "You're sure he got a peek?"

  "Yep. No way he could've missed him. Impossible."

  "I think it's a pay-off."

  "I think so, too," Nelson said, though he in fact did not. What he believed was that Crimmins had said simply, "If you talk, I'll kill you."

  And Pellam had been struck dumb.

  Peterson said, "Move on it big. Find out everything you can about him."

  "Who, Crimmins?" Which Nelson realized to his dread was an immensely stupid question. He said quickly, "Oh, you mean Pellam."

  "Uhm."

  "Then tell them, Monroe and Bracken…" Peterson mused, absently gazing at a Avind-up toy on his desk. "Have them beat him up."

  "What?" Nelson whispered.

  Peterson's eyes flickered and landed on his assistant's troubled face. "Figuratively," he added casually. "Keep on him, I mean. You knew I meant that, didn't you?"

  "Figuratively," Nelson said. "Sure, I knew."

  EIGHT

  Pellam realized suddenly that he had known Nina Sassower for twenty-four hours and had no idea what she did for a living.

  "I'm unemployed actually," she said in response to his question. She was blushing and suddenly appeared very embarrassed. Pellam told her that he'd been in films more than ten years and the majority of that time he'd been unemployed.

  They were walking through what was left of downtown Maddox. They had finished lunch and were moving, at Pellam's tacit guidance, away from the park where Tony Sloan was choreographing the murders of two Pinkerton men who stumble on Ross's hideout; Nina's narrow eyes darted uncomfortably at the sound of the gunshots. They were make-believe but still troubling. Pellam touched her arm to direct her toward the river.

  Today she wore a bulky orange V-neck sweater. The matching orange skirt was billowy and a brisk wind snapped it like a ship's sail. Her shoes were tan and she carried a raincoat that was the same shade. An improbable outfit on Santa Monica Boulevard, but in Maddox, Missouri, it was quite becoming.

  When they had put some distance between them and the gunfight, she relaxed. "Before I got laid off, I was a school counselor, grade school."

  Pellam had taken those tests. His teachers, in the Catskill town where he grew up, were encouraging, but the tests revealed he had relatively little aptitude for any of the listed careers. (Because Pellam liked to read, the counselor suggested, "Book salesman." Because he liked to go to movies, the man offered, "Usher, then with hard work, theater manager.")

  "Not a guidance counselor-more of a therapist."

  "A psychiatrist?"

  "Psychologist. But budget cutbacks… Illinois, too. All over the country, I guess."

  "Surprised they even have schools left in Maddox."

  "Well, I really live in Cranston, which isn't as bad off as here. Closer to St. Louis. But we still aren't doing well. Anyway,

  I guess if you're the one laid off, it doesn't matter if unemployment is one percent or twenty."

  "Guess not."

  They looked straight down this broad street and saw the gray slab of river a quarter mile away. Despite a heavy network of overhead power and telephone cables, the street seemed very nineteenth-century- like a deserted frontier town's. It would look perfectly natural for the road to be filled with muddy mule teams and drovers and ponies and river workers slogging through the muck toward the docks. Pellam noticed a couple of scabby, atmospheric buildings, right out "of 1880. "Let me take some snaps. Hold up a second."

  A battered Polaroid camera unfolded and he took four pictures. He stuffed the undeveloped, moist squares into his shirt, then continued on, Nina beside him.

  "Are those for your movie?"

  "Not the one they're shooting now. I have a catalog of buildings and places that directors might want. Keeps me from reinventing the wheel every time I get a call."

  "You work for the studio? Or do you have your own business?"

  "Freelancer. Like most everybody here. Nowadays the studios just finance and distribute. Everybody else is hired as an independent contractor. Used to be different. In the thirties and forties the studios owned your soul-if you had a soul, that is."

  She didn't laugh but seemed to be memorizing this lesson in Hollywood enterprise, and so he decided not to make a casting couch joke. Not yet. He turned back to the old buildings and Nina watched him take more pictures.

  "What's that?"

  "Your catalog of locations."

  Pellam stored the binders in a file box under his bed in the camper. He said, "That can be arranged."

  They continued up the street.

  "Let's go in, can we?" Nina nodded at a store. Although Pellam was extremely aware that he owed Sloan a big field, he said sure. They walked into a huge warehouse, filled with scavenged relics from buildings. Nina said she was interested in columns and mantelpieces. They found a couple of scabby wooden columns, stripped down carelessly; you could still see blotches of paint and nicks and the scorch marks from the blowtorch. Nina liked them but thought at four hundredeach, they were too pricey. Pellam agreed. He also did not think they would fit into his California contempo bungalow on Beverly Glen. "And dangerous," he added, "in the camper."

  She smiled at this, then stopped in front of a dark, flaking mirror, framed in ancient oak. She flicked her hair with her ringers.

  Pellam asked, Tell me about yourself."

  She blushed and gazed at a brass coal bucket with a face embossed into it.

  "A cherub," Pellam commented, not pushing the deflected question.

  "I always thought that was a cigar. Like the kind Clint Eastwood smoked in those Italian westerns."

  "Isn't that cheroot?"

  "Could be. I'm always getting things mixed up."

  After a pause she said in a dogged voice, "So, tell you about myself. Well." She had apparently steeled herself for the response. "You'll probably find it pretty boring. I grew up in Maddox. Went to Mizzou-that's the University of Missouri-in St. Louis, studied English lit, which gets you nowhere. I got a job in a library and didn't like where it was going. So I got a master's degree in psychology. Then moved over to Cranston, nice safe distance from Mom and, at the time, Dad. Hobbies?

  Astrology, shiatsu-"

  Massage? He thought quickly. Was it too early in their courtship to make a thigh reference? Probably. He opted for back.

  He said, "I have this problem in my back." Then added, "My lower back."

  She parried with feigned disappointment. "I don't do lower backs."

  "You specialize. I see." He waited what he thought was the proper amount of time. "No boyfriend?"

  "Boyfriend." She considered and he wondered if she was tailoring a lie. "There's this guy I see off and on. A lot off and not much on. You know how it is. When I was younger I dated a lot but, I don't know, something about me-I was kind of a jerk magnet. What rocks those boys crawled out from under…"

  "Ever been married?"

  "No. You?"

  He was a veteran, Pellam admitted.

  "See, I'd rather not get married than be married and have to go through the pain of divorce."

  "Well," Pellam said, "without pain, there's no appreciation." They both considered that while they stared at a ninety-dollar spittoon. He said, "You're thinking that was a stupid thing to say."

  Nina was nodding. "Uhm, yeah, I think it was." She laughed and they paused at bins filled with old albums, selling for fifty cents each. Pellam liked the scratchy sound of LPs. He didn't own a CD player. He sunk a lot of his listening money into records. When he got home he'd record them on cassettes for the tape deck in the Winnebago. He began going through the jazz bin. "You like music?"

  "Oh, yeah, music is the best," she announced, and l
ooked over his shoulder at the album cover he was reading.

  "Who's that?" she asked.

  "Oscar Peterson." Who's that?

  "Sounds familiar."

  "Oscar Peterson," Pellam said again.

  "Uh… I'm land of into soft rock, you know. Light FM. It's relaxing."

  Oh.

  "It's jazz," he said.

  "Like Stevie Wonder?" Nina asked sincerely.

  "Sort of," Pellam said. "They use the same notes."

  Outside, the voodoo of Tony Sloan's paranoia caught up with Pellam. He explained that he had to get back to work. When he leaned forward to kiss her cheek, to say good-bye, she responded with firm pressure on his hands and even leaned into him. A semihug. He glanced down and got a clear vision of the plunging neckline of her sweater. He was staring at her pale skin when they separated and she caught his downward-looking eyes. He said quickly, "I was admiring those earrings.

  They're interesting."

  "A present," she said, perhaps choosing not to believe him.

  He slipped on his sunglasses and smiled. "You interested in searching for a field with me sometime?"

  Nina nodded. "Sure. I'd like that." She touched his arm and looked serious. "But I'd like to say something."

  The boyfriend who wasn't a boyfriend. The girlfriend who was a girlfriend. I don't like men with film companies.

  Lips that touch liquor…

  "Yup?"

  "I want to tell you why I picked you up."

  "How's that?"

  "I mean, not that I don't like you."

  "No."

  "See, I heard that when the film company came to town they were hiring people. I mean, it's not the only reason I started talking to you." '

  "Is there any way I could get a job?"

  Well, he should have known. This was hardly the first time it had happened. She must have seen the flicker in his eyes.

  The Ray-Bans were not all that dark.

  "I'm sorry." Her eyes went straight to the ground. "I shouldn't have asked. It's just-"

  "I don't mind."

  "It's just that I've been out of work for six months. I haven't even been able to find a job waitressing."