Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery Read online

  Sloan lifted impatient eyebrows at Pellam and told the agents, “He’d be happy to.”

  Chapter 7

  PELLAM PRECEDED THE two agents out of the house, past a row of location vans, dollies, and generator trucks, then down the street. They kept motioning him along the sidewalk, away from the curious eyes of the cast and crew and the crowd of locals, who stared with fascination at the equipment and occasionally waved—some timidly, some like relatives—at the cast.

  One middle-aged man pointed at Pellam and whispered something to the woman by his side. Their faces seemed to darken and they stared, unsmiling, as he walked out of sight behind a row of shaggy hedges. When he turned, as directed, into an alley between two empty houses he could glimpse the couple again. They still stared with apparent hostility, and several others had joined them.

  Halfway through the alley, which Pellam thought led to the agents’ car, the two men stopped, one on either side of him.

  “We can talk here.”

  “Here?” Pellam stepped back to put some distance between him and the agents. He brushed against the brick wall of one of the houses. He turned and found himself hemmed in.

  Pellam turned back to Bracken. “Couldn’t we—”

  “Shut up,” barked the unscruffy Monroe.

  Bracken pointed a stubby finger at Pellam’s chest and pushed him hard against the wall. “We know he got to you. We know he’s pulling your dick.” Though they both shaved, Bracken had done the sloppier job of it. He smelled of sweat. No after-shave for these boys.

  Grim-faced, Pellam waved his arm in the air and started toward the mouth of the alley. “You can go to hell.”

  Two huge fists suddenly grabbed his shoulders and slammed him back into the wall. His head bounced against the window, which cracked under the impact.

  “We’re not getting through to you,” Monroe said.

  An unlicensed pistol in his waistband, Pellam did not want to be frisked. He lifted his arms unthreateningly, palms outward. “Why don’t you just tell me what this is all about.”

  “A witness to a federal crime who refuses to testify or who fabricates testimony known to be false can be guilty of contempt, obstruction of justice and perjury.” Bracken wore a thick gold bracelet on his hairy wrist, which seemed unbecoming on an agent of the federal government.

  “As well as conspiracy if a link can be shown between him and the primary perpetrator.”

  Bracken lowered his face into Pellam’s. “I’m talking about if you haven’t got the balls to tell us what you saw that night we’re looking at you as an accessory.”

  “Are you arresting me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then this is harassment. I think it’s time I called my lawyer.”

  Braken took him by the lapels again and shoved him back against the wall. Pellam remembered to keep his head tilted forward so he wouldn’t break any more windows. “We know you saw Crimmins in the Lincoln and we want you to identify him.”

  “I don’t even know who you’re talking about.”

  “The man who’s paying you off? You don’t remember him?”

  A surveillance photograph appeared from Monroe’s pocket. It had been lifted from a videotape and the time and date were visible in the right-hand corner. The picture showed a heavyset man with a broad, Slavic face and receding hairline. His mouth was open and he was turning his head to speak to an unseen person walking behind him.

  “I’ve never seen him.”

  “Look again, Pellam. That’s Peter Crimmins.”

  “I do not—”

  “Look again, Pellam,” Monroe said. “He’s the man who was in the Lincoln. He’s the man responsible for the death of Vincent Gaudia and for the shooting of a Maddox policeman. He’s the man you saw. All we need is your confirmation.”

  “I can’t confirm what I didn’t see.”

  “You’re not going to cooperate?” Bracken barked.

  “This is cooperation—listening to you two. In fact, it’s beyond cooperation. I’m leaving.”

  IT HAD BEEN a long, long hour.

  Peter Crimmins was sweating. His Sea Island cotton shirt was wet in the small of his back and under the arms. The sweat would bead on his chest hair, and when he moved, would press, cold, against the skin. Sweat was gathering too in the deep folds of fat where his waist met his chest. It trickled down his back.

  Crimmins knew that at any time he could have asked the agents to leave and then they would either have to let him go or arrest him. But if they arrested him—which they might easily have done—that meant he would have to have his friend and counselor present.

  That was something Crimmins didn’t want. So he had consented to the questioning. He waved the men into seats in his office, sandwiched between the parking lot and the room of dark desks, and rested his fingertip on the mole above his eye. The barrage of questions lasted for an hour. They were handsome black men and looked more like recent business school graduates than federal agents. They seemed like many of Crimmins’s clients (both the legitimate ones and the less so)—clever, polite, reserved.

  But underneath: the personalities of a Midwest dawn in January.

  One asked the questions. The other alternated between staring calmly at Crimmins and taking notes.

  “Could I ask you where you were last Friday night, sir.”

  He hated the sir. The way it fell like a fleck of spit off the end of the sentence showed their contempt for him. But what could he do? That was an old rule in negotiations—never say anything that can be quoted against you later. If he later claimed harassment, the agent would say, I never called him anything but “sir” . . . Look at the transcript.

  “I was at my office most of the night.”

  “Until when?”

  “About ten. Quarter to, maybe.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yes. My secretary leaves at five-fifteen every night. I stay late a lot of times.”

  “Is there a guard?”

  “We got guards, sure. But I didn’t see any of them that night when I left.”

  “Is there any way of confirming your whereabouts?”

  “You really think I killed Vince Gaudia?” Crimmins asked, exasperated.

  “Is there any way of confirming it, sir?” the agent repeated.

  “No.”

  “Do you own a Lincoln?”

  “Yes. And a Mercedes wagon. A diesel.”

  “What color is the Lincoln?”

  Crimmins rubbed the bump of his third eye. Why did they hate him so? “Dark blue. But you know that already, don’t you?”

  “What’s the license number?”

  He gave it to them

  “Where was that car on the night we’ve been talking about?”

  Crimmins was hungry. He had bouts of low blood sugar. If he didn’t eat regularly—sometimes five meals a day—he would have attacks. He thought with some pleasure that Vince Gaudia never got to eat his last meal the night he died. “I drove it into the city.”

  “And parked it where, sir?”

  “The place I always park it. The garage near the Ritz.”

  “And that’s a Lincoln Continental?”

  “I told you that already.”

  “Actually, no. We don’t know what model. Is it a Continental?”

  “It’s a Town Car.”

  “Now tell me again where you were on that night.”

  Crimmins asked, “Where I was sitting, you mean?”

  “You were in your office, you claim.”

  “I’m not claiming. I was there. I told you that. Didn’t he write it down? I saw him write it down.”

  “So, an associate of yours . . . or an employee could have taken your Lincoln for a drive.”

  Cummings sighed.

  “Why wasn’t your secretary there?”

  “She leaves about five-fifteen every day. I told you that too.”

  The interview went on and on and on and the agents picked over every word that Crimmins said. />
  Finally the men stood. They flipped their notebooks closed and gathered their raincoats. Suddenly they were gone, having thanked him for his time.

  He now sat at his desk, staring at the familiar nicks along the side, running his finger over them, feeling the bulge of his gut against his belt.

  The phone rang.

  His lawyer was on the line. Crimmins 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 downstairs 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 Peterson’s 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 that 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. Attorney’s 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 Peterson’s 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 temper 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. And more realistically I’d bet he set the hit up months ago—and told the muscle to just go ahead and do it on his own if he got indicted.”

  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 th
e 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.”

  “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 wind-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.”

  Chapter 8

  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.