Deadly Diamonds (25 page)

He looked over at his dynamic duo. He gave a curt whistle to get their attention out of the roll basket. A head jerk served as a command to follow us into the adjoining room.

With that order given, he followed George. The implication was clear that “alone” was not in his plans. I brought up the rear. When we reached the door, he stopped to look back at what he assumed was his accompanying fortress. It wasn't there. A flash of shock gripped his face when he saw his security force still glued to their seats at their table.

An instant later, he caught sight of the gun in the hand of my new traveling companion, Seamus Burke. It was barely visible under the fine white linen, but its purpose was perfectly clear to the two apes who remained table bound.

Packy was stuck on dead center in the doorway, until I opened my suit jacket to show the absence of a weapon and the presence of a sheet of paper. I whispered in his waiting ear. “Life or death rides on this paper, Packy. Yours. I can at least promise you'll leave this room alive. If we talk. Let's get on with it.”

He must have seen the truth in my face. He moved into the room and took a seat at the table George had prepared for us, needless to say with his back to the wall.

There was a bottle of wine opened on the table with two glasses. It was an excellent Chianti. George poured a glass for each of us, withdrew, and closed the door.

I was as comfortable as if I were locked in a cage with King Kong, but I could see in his shifty eyes that he was equally out of his element without the armed retinue. We both sat and took the wine. There was no toast.

“So, what ya got? I ain't got all day. You got the stones?”

I took another sip of the liquid courage and looked him dead-on.

“I'll answer that in a minute. I told you I have something else.”

I took the paper I had dictated to Julie out of my suit coat pocket, opened it, and placed it in front of him on the table. He looked at it as if it were a coiled snake. In a way it was.

“Read it. I take it you can read.”

“Listen, smart-ass—”

“Just read it, Packy. If you still feel like playing a scene from
The Godfather
, you'll have plenty of time. I'll wait.”

I took another sip of wine and picked up the bottle to read the label. I wanted to give him a semblance of privacy to focus on every word.

I'd kept it to three short paragraphs, but they had all the punch I could pack into them. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of my writing was in his reaction. It proved out perfectly in the flush of pink that deepened to red and then to deep scarlet from his size twenty neck to the three strands of hair on his flat pate.

He was on his feet. His beady eyes were burning down on me across the table. “What the hell is this crap you're pullin' here, you little shyster?”

“Got your attention, right, Packy?”

“You ain't gonna live to leave this joint, ya bum.”

“Sit down, Packy. It's your life that's in question. Sit down. And for one damn minute stop playing a caveman. Sit down and I'll tell you what you just read.”

To my surprise, the blustering stopped. He slowly sat. His eyes never left mine.

“What you just read is a criminal complaint. It charges you with the felonies of kidnapping, attempted murder, assault, subornation of perjury, conspiracy. There's a collection of others, but those are the headlines. I'm sure you remember that despicable business you pulled with Finn Casey about Monsignor Ryan. Then there was the matter of the kidnapping, beating, and torturing of a man worth twenty times you on your best day, if you ever have one. That would be Lex Devlin. You understand, Packy? That paper's just a summation. The official charges are ready for filing in both state and federal courts.”

That was oversimplified. There'd be the formalities of a grand jury hearing, indictments, and such. But I wasn't giving him a course in law.

His answer was just a silent, burning glare. But that was enough.

“There are witnesses who will be happy to nail your despicable carcass to the courthouse door. They're beyond your reach. You are going to be the poster child for full-scale criminal retribution. You'll also be a career maker for two blood-hungry prosecuting attorneys. You'll be arrested the instant these charges are filed. Maybe you noticed the tall gentleman outside keeping your two goons entertained.”

I let the reference to Seamus Burke go at that to give his imagination some room to play. He was stone silent, but I fired one more salvo. “Take a look out that window, Packy. Look at that sunshine. The next time you'll see the sun outside of prison bars will be in approximately a hundred and twenty years. Except that probably won't happen. You know why, Packy?”

The silence hung on. The only change of expression was that his mouth was slightly ajar and a stream was trickling down at the corner. “I'll paint you a picture. How many mortal enemies you figure you
have in the state prison in Walpole? How many in Danbury Federal Prison?”

I leaned over the table for unnecessary privacy. “And think of this. How many people have you ordered killed in prison, Packy? It's easy, isn't it. They're sitting ducks, right?”

He was just staring. He was stripped of the only kind of defenses he understood—a frontline of hoods with guns. His face had now gone the gamut from burning crimson to pasty white.

I refilled each of our glasses with wine and took a healthy swallow of mine. It was an unabashed dramatic pause. I needed the reality I'd hit him with to settle into the deepest pocket of his consciousness.

My next move was the springing of the trapdoor that I was counting on for leverage. I moved in slow motion to be sure it had full effect.

I reached across the table and picked up the paper that was sitting like a smoking gun in front of him. His eyes followed my hands as I made a grand flourish of tearing the paper into small pieces.

His mouth was now at half-mast. The whipsawing of the previous two minutes left his expression totally blank. He truly did not seem to know if he was afoot or on horseback. But again, the proof would come in the next two minutes.

I leaned in close. “Listen carefully, Packy. The copies of those complaints are in the hands of people who can file them with the court in a heartbeat. Your well-padded ass is well and truly an inch from the meat slicer.”

I leaned back to give him room to breathe, but close enough to hear my every syllable. “Here's the deal. I want information. This time, no halfway. I want a complete answer to every question. And know this, Packy. I know enough of the truth to tell if you slip one half inch. One quarter inch off the mark, and I give the signal. If I do, those papers will be filed in both courts. If they are, nothing can call them back. Your life is gone.
Capisce
?”

He was still in shock. I handed him his glass. He took a mechanical sip. Then he finished the glass. I poured him another. He downed
that one too. I set the bottle aside. I wanted him to have enough wine to recover from the numbing shock, but not enough to give him any liquid feeling of false confidence.

When he looked back up at me, I sensed that I had hit the balance. His eyes were clear, with just enough fear left inside to prime the pump.

I was primed too. I'd waited for this moment, it seemed, since the nightmare began. I finished the wine in my glass, hit the start button of the recorder in my pocket, and began the interrogation of my young life.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

So there we sat, Packy Salviti, a gangster practically from the time he left his mother's womb with a conscience as calloused as a longshoreman's fist, and a lawyer who, but for the grace of God, could have followed a parallel path with an equally thuggish gang in the Puerto Rican barrio on the other side of the city. And to crown the anomaly, we sat conversing in the very room in which Charles Dickens presented the Parker House Saturday Club with his first American reading of his immortal
A Christmas Carol
. God bless the twists of fate that keep life surprising.

We each took one more draught of George's excellent choice of Chianti. I was confident that the ground had been prepared for a fertile harvest, but there was still an urgency to seizing a moment that could pass in a blink of an eye.

“Let's start easy, Packy. While he was alive, you worked for Barone, right?”

There was a hesitation. “Maybe. Listen, I don't like usin' names. Ya know?”

“You listen, Packy. It's your ass that's in the meat grinder at the moment. Not Barone's or anyone else's. Let's not lose sight of the obvious. One more time. Did you work under Barone in the Mafia,
La Cosa Nostra
, whatever you people call yourselves?”

He mumbled something, and I wanted a clear recording.

“Speak up, Packy. You've never been shy before.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I was number three in line.”

“Good. Pesta's the godfather, to misuse an old word. Barone was next in line, and then you. Right?”

“Yeah.”

He said it with what sounded like a spark of pride, and I loved it.

“Barone was killed. So now that makes you the second in line to Pesta. Right?”

“Yeah. You could say that.”

“All right. We've got the cast straight. So, somehow Barone got involved with those damn diamonds that seem to be getting people killed. How did that happen?”

He stretched himself back in the chair. To get to the heart of this thing, I had to get out of the tooth-pulling mode. A sudden notion struck me. It was a serious gamble, but I took the recorder out of my pocket. I made a flourish of pretending to turn it on. It had actually been running for some time.

I watched him stare at that thing in the center of the table. It could have gone either way. It could have clammed him up, God forbid. Or it could have just the effect I wanted. I'd seen it happen with witnesses in a trial.

It went my way. He was suddenly on stage. This pitiable ape, who had never had anyone's attention that he didn't get without breaking a leg or having a henchman do it, was suddenly important enough to have someone recording his every word. His voice came up. He was no longer slumping.

“Them diamonds. Yeah. Sally Barone. He got into that. He was always talkin' about takin' over in them days. Takin' Pesta's place. That ain't so easy. Pesta was don of the family. The rule is you can't kill a don without the permission of the dons of the other families. The best way to get permission is to show the dons you can bring in more money. A lot more money. That's why he wanted to get into this diamond business. Not the legit ones. The ones they smuggle outta places like Sierra Leone. “

“Makes sense. But how? You need contacts in that business.”

He took a breath and leaned back. Crazy as this sounds, he was beginning to enjoy his fifteen minutes of fame. He was an “expert” with something to say. And both the recorder and I were tuned in.

“He knew them Irish bums in Southie were into the business. They had the contacts. You might say he struck a deal with the devil.”

“Why were the Irish willing to deal with the Italians? They've been shooting each other over border wars for years.”

He rubbed his fingers and thumb together—the universal sign for money. “That bum, O'Byrne, tipped him off to a contact in Ireland. He heard of some guy from Africa who had some stones for sale. I think O'Byrne wanted to broaden his network, maybe open up some other kinds of deals with our organization. My guess, Sally offered to share his drug sources with O'Byrne in exchange for giving him the diamond contact. O'Byrne could up his profits in the drug end and they both make out. Why the hell not? The Irish work their parts of the city and stay out of ours.

“Anyway, Sally went for the deal. He flew over there and made a deal. He left a hundred grand in the bank over there and brought a bag of stones back. Twenty-two of 'em. He owed the guy from Africa another nine hundred grand. The deal was he'd sell 'em to O'Byrne for a hell of a lot more'n he paid for 'em. He'd pay off the African guy and still have enough to impress the other dons. Maybe get permission to knock off Pesta and take over. I don't know. Maybe share the take with the other dons. That was the plan.”

“So what went wrong?”

He leaned back and looked at the ceiling. It was either to gather his thoughts or to stretch the enjoyment of his new professorial role. In a few seconds, he snapped forward. I was delighted that he was talking to the machine instead of me. Whatever worked.

“It's like this. Sally Barone had this ‘soldier' we call him. He didn't like it when Sally was a traitor to Tony Pesta. He went to Pesta and spilled it.”

“Who was the soldier?”

“Tommy Franzone. A good kid.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Yeah. Why not? Anyway, Pesta exploded. He gave the contract to this kid, Franzone.”

“Contract?”

He looked at me for the first time in minutes. “Yeah. To kill Sally Barone. What're you, born yesterday?”