“We’ve looked into
other areas,” said Buckley.
Foley said, “One we’ve
been studying is off-site gambling. The attraction is obvious. At
some point, the number of people who can fly here and bring serious
money to the tables will reach a peak. Other companies have already
figured out that they can start casinos near big population centers –
first in New Jersey, then on riverboats in the Midwest, then Indian
reservations. Each casino somewhere else clogs one healthy artery and
turns the flow from there into a trickle. So we looked into growing
some new arteries.”
“You’re thinking of
building more casinos? When?”
Foley shrugged. “This has
been in the works for several years. After some study, we decided
that the most promising idea was Indian reservations. We put fifteen
reservations under scrutiny, and came up with one we want.”
“Where is it?”
“Upstate New York. Draw a
triangle from Rochester to Buffalo to Niagara Falls, and it’s
in the middle. It’s less than two hundred miles from Cleveland
and Toronto, less than four hundred from New York and Philadelphia,
less than five hundred from Baltimore, Detroit, Hartford,
Indianapolis. It sits just off the New York State Thruway. If you go
by car from one of those cities to the other, you may very well have
to go past it.”
Seaver looked at the three men,
keeping his expression empty. He had no way of knowing whether it was
a good idea or madness.
Buckley seemed to read his mind.
“You’re thinking that we’re not exactly
diversifying. But we are. Think of a full-service world-class resort.
Casinos and hotels, of course. That’s our strength. Only this
time they would be exclusive, on land only we had access to. But best
of all, we could offer things that nobody else can do, anywhere.”
“You could?”
“An Indian reservation is
a peculiar place, in the law. They can already sell tax-free gas and
cigarettes. Why not foreign cars? High-ticket jewelry? Designer
clothes? Appliances? Besides the tariffs, the sales tax in New York
is eight and a half percent.”
“Are you saying that’s
legal?”
“It hasn’t been
tried yet. We think we could use the precedent of those companies
that sell tickets to police benefits. As long as they give a cent to
the police, they can keep ninety-nine for overhead and profit. We
give a cent to the Indians and they still make millions a year. This
could all be in the open. But what would not be in the open is even
more intriguing. Indians have exclusive hunting and fishing rights on
their land, with no external regulation. We could have live hunts
with game we release: bag a rhino in Upstate New York. We could build
a private port a few miles north, on Lake Ontario, connect it to the
resort by rail, and offer cruises: package tours for Mom and the
kids. For Dad, maybe a members-only junket with high-stakes games and
even some exotic companionship. We could rotate girls in and out
maybe once a week. The port would also give us access to the St.
Lawrence Seaway into the Atlantic. We could take anything out, bring
anything in.” He looked sad. “It was all intriguing. Very
intriguing.”
Seaver shook his head. “I
never heard a word about any of this. I’m amazed.”
The three smiled. “The
world is a complicated place,” said Foley. “No one head
can carry all of the pieces.”
“What about Hatcher’s?
Is this what he knew?”
Salateri muttered something to
himself that could have been a curse. “Hatcher knew nothing
about this, because none of it has happened yet.”
“There have been delays,”
said Foley. “The Indians have to accept the idea, and we
haven’t really approached them yet, just left our card, you
might say. First we needed to do feasibility studies, find out what
wasn’t possible, then make it possible. The big delay has to do
with the Indian Gaming Act. The federal law says that gambling is
okay under conditions established by the state where the reservation
is. Before we go handing money to a bunch of Indians we needed to be
sure that we could get the state legislature’s approval. And we
had to make friends in Albany and Washington.”
“How do you do that?”
Buckley smiled. “We’ll
have to learn about the Indians – keep them in the dark while
we study them. Politicians, on the other hand, are a tribe whose
customs we know.”
“Hatcher handled the
payouts,” Salateri blurted.
Seaver frowned. “I thought
he didn’t know anything.”
Salateri scowled defensively.
“It was all indirect. We didn’t want to see a videotape
with a time and date in the corner and a shot of Hatcher counting out
hundred-dollar bills to some New York politician in a hotel room. We
set up a fund.”
“What kind of fund –
cash?”
Buckley said, “It was a
corporation that received some of its money in cash. We had a lot of
land – here, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles – which we
sold to the corporation for an imaginary sum before we brought Pete
in. We converted various plots to parking lots – put asphalt
over them. Pete was in charge of taking the money we said came in,
and paying it to people we said were investors or creditors. He paid
it to other corporations, middlemen, girlfriends, relatives, some to
bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.”
“And Hatcher didn’t
know what he was doing?”
“Never,” said Foley.
Salateri said, “He might
have suspected that the money that started the corporation came fresh
from the casino tables. There were a couple of times when he told us
the numbers on the official slips were lower than the count that
night. Max told him that it was because we needed a lot of cash in
the vault in case somebody hit the million-dollar jackpot on the big
slot. That way we could take publicity pictures of the guy up to his
ass in hundreds. The money only gets reported when it’s taken
out of play.”
“He bought that?”
“Maybe for a while, maybe
never. He stopped asking. The worst he would have thought was that we
were still skimming cash and mixing it in with the take on the
parking lots.” Salateri shook his head. “Can you imagine
that, after all we did for him? He turned his back on us because we
were taking money out of our own casino – our own money! I
still can’t believe it.”
Buckley shrugged. “We
should make it clear that the corporation with the parking lots and
so on wasn’t the problem. There was nothing wrong with it but
where the money came from, and there’s no way he could have
traced it. I think he resented the fact that he was the one who
signed the slips with a short count on them.” He gave a puzzled
little smile. “You see, that was enough to cost him his
virginity.”
Seaver stared at the floor for a
moment, then looked up at the row of three faces. “So the
problem is that he can say he’s pretty sure that at one time,
money was being diverted from the games and put into his own
corporation. Then he paid it to a lot of people he didn’t know?
I’d say let him.”
“Let him?” Foley
looked troubled.
Seaver said, “When I was a
cop, we needed evidence of a crime.”
Peter Buckley looked at him
kindly, sympathetically. “I’m afraid you’re missing
the problem. Pete Hatcher doesn’t know anything. If he somehow
strained his capacities and figured out the names of the people in
New York State who ultimately received the money, he never heard of
them. They’re state legislators and bureaucrats and party
functionaries in a distant place. People in their own state wouldn’t
know who they are. But the F.B.I, would. And if they heard the little
that Pete Hatcher could be assumed to remember – say, four or
five names, dates, and amounts – they could trace the money
backward to the accounts Hatcher controlled, and then forward to find
out where the rest went.”
“But even if they did, the
most they would be able to prove was that Pete gave money to
politicians. Maybe that it came from here, but not who took it. If he
signed for it, then he took it. And half the equation is missing. You
have no interests in their state, and they aren’t doing
anything in return for the money.” When he saw that the three
men were looking at him without changing their expressions, he said,
“You abandoned the project, right?”
“No,” said Max
Foley. “Unfortunately, it isn’t right.”
“Why not?”
Salateri’s impatience made
him look as though he were swelling up. “There are people in
New York State who are already in the gambling business. They are
big, scary people. In the twenties, if they didn’t like you,
they mixed a tub of cement and put your feet in it. Now, if they want
cement, they make a phone call and five hundred cement trucks arrive,
with fifty government building inspectors to certify they did it
right.”
“What have they got to do
with this?”
Salateri’s eyes narrowed.
“You think we can go into their front yard and set up a
business they’ve been in for a hundred years and expect them
not to notice? They needed to be consulted, mollified.”
Seaver was beginning to sense
the gravity of the partners’ predicament. “Did Hatcher
pay them too?”
“He doesn’t know
that either,” said Foley. “The Justice Department would
take about thirty seconds to figure it out. And what Hatcher paid
them wasn’t to buy them out. It was to buy them in. Without
their help we wouldn’t have known which politicians could be
paid off, how to approach them, where to put the money.”
Seaver frowned and considered.
“I know I’m being slow, but let me be sure I understand
where we are – ”
“For Christ’s sake!”
Salateri shouted. “Hatcher doesn’t know he knows
anything! But if the F.B.I. the New York State Police, the Nevada
Gaming Commission, or the fucking dog-catcher hear a word of it,
they’ll know everything!”
“It seems to me that if we
could somehow separate the issues – ”
Salateri was white with rage.
“What did they teach you in the police academy – how to
shake down doughnut shops? We have one deal that connects a Las Vegas
casino, half the politicians in New York, and the Mafia. In one deal!
That blows the politicians, who might have to go get a job. And that
blows seven or eight fat old grandpas, who have to spend their last
few years locked up with friends and relatives. But not us. We’re
not going to jail with them. They’re not going to let us make
it up the courthouse steps to hear the charges.”
Buckley looked at Seaver with
gentle regret. “It seems to us that we can’t pull out of
this and tell them we managed our business badly. We can’t let
them get an inkling that anything is wrong. We’re staying alive
one day at a time by convincing them that we move slowly, cautiously,
prudently.”
“This is something they
respect,” said Salateri. “For five generations they’ve
been nibbling away at the world like termites, until now you can’t
pull a board off a toolshed without finding them behind it. The
problem is, the longer we bullshit them, the harder they’re
going to take it.”
Seaver squinted down at the
carpet.
Peter Buckley said, “You’re
thinking we should tell them the truth and ask them to find Hatcher
for us.”
“Well,” said Seaver,
“I was considering it.”
“Very alert of you,”
said Buckley. “They could certainly do it.”
“Sure,” said
Salateri. “They have people in every city in the country. He
couldn’t run to Europe, because they had that sewn up before
Great-Grandpa got on the boat to come here. In South America,
Southeast Asia, North Africa they have drug suppliers with armies to
protect the crop. I never heard of them having anybody at the South
Pole, but I wouldn’t rule it out. They’d find him. But he
doesn’t know much, and we know a lot. Who’s the biggest
threat? And they don’t have to hunt around and find us to end
it.”
There was a moment of silence to
give Seaver’s mind a chance to catch up, to understand. “What
would you like me to do?”
Foley said, “We’re
thinking of hiring a second team. Maybe a third. Pay all of them.
Whoever succeeds gets a bonus. How does that strike you?”
“It makes me nervous,”
said Seaver. “Earl and Linda are good. Most likely, by now they
know where he is, or at least what region. If they find him and there
are other people nosing around, they’ll notice them. They’ll
have to assume those people can only be bodyguards for Hatcher, or
police of some kind. They’ll kill them. Or try to.”
“So what?” asked
Foley.
“Then it’s not a
clean hit where an anonymous newcomer came quietly and went quietly
and nobody notices. It’s a fight between professionals with
lots of gunfire and unburied bodies and blood.”
“And?”
“And, as Bobby pointed
out, no matter where this happens, it’s in the middle of some
Mafia family’s territory. They’re going to want to know
who these shooters were, who they worked for, who they were after. It
would be hard to imagine them not turning up Hatcher. If he’s
killed or wounded, he’ll be identified. If he gets very lucky
and escapes while our own shooters massacre each other, somebody will
survive, and the local family will hear Hatcher’s name.”
Buckley stared at Seaver with
interest. “Any ideas that would get around those problems?”
“Not offhand. I’ll
think about it.”
“How about if we had
somebody at least as good as Earl and Linda, somebody they know by
sight, whose interest in Pete Hatcher won’t require any
explanation? Somebody they’ll see as an ally?”
Seaver’s collar tightened
and he began to sweat. “I don’t think they’d see it
that way. I don’t know where they are. There’s no way to
call them off, or warn them.”
“But they wouldn’t
shoot you, would they? How could they expect to get paid the three
hundred thousand if they killed their employer?”
“They couldn’t, but
– ”
“Good,” said Foley.