“Yeah, God, that’s terrible,” Charlie said. “Hey, listen, want to grab a cup of coffee?”
“Sure, Charlie.”
“How’s one o’clock look for you? In the lobby?”
“Great,” I said. I might have to leave the deposition early, but that was hardly my concern at the moment.
I went down to the fourth floor of my building and opened Suite 410. Lee Tucker was there. We’d expected Charlie would be contacting me soon, and we couldn’t be sure what he’d been doing in terms of surveillance on me, so the plan had been that Tucker would park himself in this office until we heard from him. We knew for certain that nobody was watching me last night, as the feds had been covering every side of my house, and presumably everyone working for Charlie had been busy disposing of Greg Connolly’s body. But today was a different story. Charlie had put someone on me two days ago and for who-knows-how-long before that. He could do it again.
“You look like shit,” Tucker pronounced. “Does it hurt?”
“Only when I breathe.”
Tucker tossed me my cell phone. “Phone’s clean,” he said. Overnight, federal agents had looked over my cell phone to be sure Charlie hadn’t planted a recording device of his own in my phone.
“Charlie called. Coffee at one o’clock,” I said.
Tucker nodded slowly. “How’d he sound?”
“Cautious. ‘Did you hear about Greg,’ that sort of thing.”
“So he’s still worried,” Lee said.
“Worried about you. Not necessarily about me.”
Tucker seemed skeptical. “You willing to bet your life on ‘not necessarily’?”
It was a legitimate question. “Charlie trusts me,” I said.
“You realize, Kolarich—even if he doesn’t think you’re wearing a wire, he could think that Connolly gave us information about you.
Which means we might come to pay you a visit. Which makes you a liability. If Charlie’s as cautious as we think, it would make sense to get rid of you.”
“Of course I know that. That’s why we have to set his mind at ease.”
Tucker tossed me the F-Bird. It felt like a hundred pounds in my hand.
“You understand my limitations,” said Tucker. “I can’t cover you. I can’t wire you up for real-time monitoring, and I can’t follow you wherever you go.”
“I understand,” I said.
Tucker sighed. He started to say something but thought better of it.
“Talk,” I said.
He struggled for a moment.
“Speak,” I said.
He held up a hand. “Look, when they found Greg—the bullet to his brain? It wasn’t the only . . . it wasn’t the only . . . injury. You follow?”
I thought I did. Before the end of his life, before the bullet entered his brain, Greg Connolly endured things he probably considered worse than death.
Tucker leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t accustomed to talking people down from taking risks. He’d spent far more time talking people into them. “I’m just saying, we’ve got Cimino on a lot. We can confront him, flip him—get to the higher-ups that way.”
“You think that would work?” I said it like I was doubtful. Because I was. I couldn’t imagine Charlie agreeing to cooperate with the feds. Nor could I imagine him being successful at it if he tried.
At one o’clock, I went down into the lobby. Charlie was there, on his phone. He gestured to me and started walking toward the exit. He liked a coffee shop down the street. I joined him outside, not braced for a cold, gusty wind. We headed due east, my head down against the wind, when he hit my arm. I looked up and saw his Porsche parked at a meter.
“C’mon,” he said.
“Change of plans?”
He got around to the driver’s side and looked at me. “That’s right. Change of plans. That okay with you?”
Charlie trusts me
.
“Whatever,” I said. I got into his car.
60
I WOULD FOLLOW CHARLIE’S LEAD. HE DIDN’T SPEAK,
so neither did I. It wasn’t hard to figure out where he was taking me. We were going to his club, presumably for another game of racquetball. For another chance to strip-search me without strip-searching me.
It hadn’t been that hard to foresee. Tucker and I had discussed it. We’d gone back and forth in Suite 410 earlier today about the F-Bird. We finally decided against it. As much as we wanted Charlie on tape, confessing to the murder of Greg Connolly, there was too large a risk that Charlie would search me for a listening device. If he had even the tiniest lingering doubt about my loyalties, the day after Greg’s murder would be the time to test me.
Charlie’s expression was tight. Controlled. He had a lot of worries at the moment. He knew the feds had been looking at someone—presumably him included—and he didn’t know what the shakeout of Greg Connolly’s murder would be.
We went through the same routine as previously. An attendant gave me clothes and a racquet, and I left my clothes in an unlocked locker. Once again, I had dodged a bullet with the decision to leave the F-Bird at home.
“What the hell, Charlie?” I said to him when we were on the racquetball court. It was an isolated court, but my voice echoed. It hardly seemed the place for this conversation. And he hadn’t received confirmation yet from whoever it was who was going through my clothes, searching for an F-Bird.
“Let’s just play,” he said. So play we did. Each of us, in different ways, had a lot of steam to vent, and this was the perfect setting. I was sore at first for obvious reasons, but the flow of adrenaline helped, and soon enough I was playing like my life depended on it. I felt sorry for the little blue racquetball and for Charlie, if he had any pride in how he played, because I showed him no mercy whatsoever. The first game was over in less than twenty minutes. The second, less than fifteen.
Charlie was grabbing his knees. His gray shirt was stuck to his body with perspiration. I had to admit, I wouldn’t have minded if he’d keeled over right there, but justice wouldn’t work that way. In the end, I think it was good for him, the workout. “Three out of five,” he suggested.
I was just getting loose. I shut him out in the third game.
He grumbled about it, but he had weightier issues on his mind than a racquetball game. We retired to the same parlor area for juice. He excused himself, presumably to meet with the person who had searched my clothes in the locker, and who would give me a clean bill of health. Probably Leather Jacket was not that person this time, or if he was, he wouldn’t want me to see him.
When Charlie returned, it seemed that his load had been lightened slightly. Once again, I had won his trust. I wondered how many more times I would need to do that.
“Christ, this thing,” he said to me, considering a glass of grapefruit juice. “You understand, it wasn’t something I enjoyed doing. I mean, can we get past this? You wanna punch me in the face to make us even or something?”
“What, this thing that happened?” I asked. Never say it outright. A code of the corrupt—say it out loud as little as possible.
“Not something I enjoyed,” Charlie said again. “I wish it hadn’t happened.”
“Hey, Charlie,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. I leaned into him. “First of all, just to reiterate a thought from last night: Fuck you. Second thing: Fuck you again. You do that to me again, you better kill me. Okay, glad that’s settled.” I took a breath. “I don’t give a shit about some snitch. Greg made his bed. I just want to know what he told them. Is someone going to be knocking on my door?”
Charlie didn’t smile—it was hardly the occasion—but I sensed that he liked my remarks. He didn’t want me playing ethical watchdog or getting cold feet. I had reassured him on both counts.
“I think it’s okay.” He said it so quietly that the F-Bird wouldn’t have picked it up even had I been wearing it.
“Put my mind at ease,” I said.
“What Greg could offer the feds would be earlier stuff.” Our heads were almost touching. “Mostly before you showed up. And then that stuff you did with us, early on. Before you and I branched out. Those few contracts with the buses and the prisons, that stuff.”
I pondered that for a moment, then nodded. “The stuff you did with me, you can say I signed off. The lawyer signed off. What about the stuff before I came aboard?”
Charlie paused. “Don’t worry about what happened before you came aboard.”
“I’m worrying,” I said.
“Don’t.”
I didn’t think I was going to get what I wanted, but I took a shot, anyway. “Who else knows about what happened to Greg?”
“Nobody,” he said. “Nobody knows.”
“I need to know, Charlie. I need to know who to worry about.”
“Worry about yourself. We’ll be fine.” He evened a hand over the table. “We lay low for now. Slow down our operation.”
That much made sense. He wasn’t going to give me any more information. I wasn’t in a position to bargain.
“Until we see where this is going,” he added. “You hear anything, you let me know.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s hope you don’t,” he said.
What he didn’t know is that I’d be hearing from the U.S. attorney’s office very soon.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in my office, eating aspirin and doing not much of anything. Joel Lightner called me near five with some news.
“I found your good friend Kiko,” he said.
61
THE NEXT DAY, AFTER WORK, I MET JOEL LIGHTNER
for drinks. Note my use of the plural. It’s never just one with Joel. The stated purpose was that Joel claimed to have some information for me. I’d asked him for two things. One was to find where Federico Hurtado—Kiko—laid his head every night. And the other was to give me the home address and marital status of Delroy Bailey, the owner and operator of Starlight Catering.
But Joel had added one reason for the conversation. He wanted to know what the hell was going on. He wanted to know why I needed this information. He said he wouldn’t give me the information until I did so. I’d kept Joel at a distance out of an abundance of caution, not wanting him to get on the federal government’s radar. And I found his paternalism annoying, however well-intentioned. But I was growing weary of all the deception, and I thought I could use Joel’s perspective. That’s how I explained it to myself, at least. It was also fair to say that I needed someone on whom I could unload all of this information.
He ordered a Maker’s Mark, and I ordered a dirty martini. And I talked. He listened. I went through the whole thing. We went through two rounds of drinks before I had finished.
“So the Cannibals had nothing to do with Wozniak’s murder,” he said. “It was the Latin Lords. It was this guy Kiko who you’re so interested in.”
“Yeah.”
“And I was wrong about Ernesto Ramirez,” Joel said. “You were right. He
did
have some information. He and this friend of his, you called him Scarface? They’d heard from Kiko that Wozniak got whacked to ‘cover up a connection to Delroy.’ And they took that to mean Joey Espinoza.”
“Right,” I agreed.
“Joey Espinoza pulled strings at this state board, and he got his ex-brother-in-law Delroy a beverage contract over Wozniak’s company. Wozniak was making noise. And so Joey needed to cover the thing up by having Wozniak killed. Joey covered up his connection to Delroy.”
“Correct.”
“And you figure, since Joey was already under Chris Moody’s thumb when Wozniak was taken out, he must have had a partner. Someone else talked to Kiko.”
“Right. You disagree?”
“No,” he said. “You’re probably right. Especially because then Ernesto got whacked, too, and it’s hard to believe that was Joey Espinoza, with the feds watching his every move. So, okay, there was someone else. And you like this guy Charlie Cimino?”
“He seems like the best fit,” I said. “But I’m not sold.”
“You’re not sold because of what happened to you the other night. When Charlie’s crew did a little Guantánamo Bay routine on you.”
“Right. The point being, I don’t think they were
Charlie’s
crew. I think someone else was in charge. Someone higher than Charlie.”
“But the other night was all about rooting out snitches,” said Joel. “It wasn’t about Adalbert Wozniak or Ernesto Ramirez. Why do you put those things together?”
I shook my head. “Something tells me they’re all related, Joel. I mean, someone in that group is willing to kill. There can’t be that many people who fit that description. Plus, everything seems to revolve around that state board, the PCB. Charlie Cimino was asking me about my interest in Starlight Catering. The goons who interrogated me asked the same thing. That’s the company the PCB gave the contract to over Wozniak. And Ernesto, the information he had was about Starlight, about its owner Delroy. And Greg Connolly was the chair of that board, even back when Starlight got that contract. No,” I decided, “they’re related. All roads lead to the same place. Whoever killed Greg Connolly killed Ernesto and Wozniak.”