To Free a Spy (5 page)

He’d seen that, too, and only wished it were true. But that was not the issue here.

Sitting upright now, he said, “This is insane! You’ve gone off the deep end, Karly.” Fury reflected in his face.

Karly regained her voice. “I don’t think so,” she shot back. She was sitting up too. “I know
you
, and you don’t want every voter in America to know the kind of slime pit you are, sleeping with your whore for years while you’re making high-sounding promises to your dumb-ass voters. A little three-month affair, that’s one thing, and even sleeping with the same woman for years while you’re married may or may not matter to many these days. But taking money from whoever believes in you and then laughing at their stupidity when you’re with me, buying me clothes and diamonds with the money they give you? That’ll get some attention. I can tell ’em lots of stuff about you, Jag. You’re nothing but a whore yourself. At least I admit it. I may not be as smart as you but I see through you like a piece of glass. And that big-deal father-in-law of yours? I bet he’d like to know what kind of man his daughter’s husband really is.”

Jag jumped out of the bed and grabbed his undershorts, but then on impulse leaned over the bed close to her face. He was trembling from adrenaline. In dramatic whisper, he said, “You know, Karly, you’re rotten right down to the core. I’ve been good to you, never jerked you around. And now you decide you can blackmail me with all that shit you think you know about me.” He had given up trying to pull his shorts on. “Open your eyes. People are used to it. They don’t
care. Nobody
cares. And who would believe a casino hooker anyway?” He was shouting now.

“Well, let’s just find out if anybody cares!” The flash from Karly’s eyes said she had something in mind that would trump everything.

She pressed the redial button on the bedside phone while she was yelling, and the live voice on the speakerphone startled Jag:
“Washington Post. May I help you?”
Momentarily confused, Jag glared at the phone and stiffened against the torrent of blood that surged through his veins as his hopes for his future flashed through his mind.
This belly-crawling two-faced morally bankrupt societal parasite has decided she can take what she wants from
me.
Blind now with rage he lunged across the bed for the phone, but his feet caught in the covers and he fell against the lamp table, knocking everything to the floor. He felt a sharp pain in his right hand, which had landed on the cheese knife and was bleeding badly. He flew to his feet grasping the knife.

“May I direct your call? Hello? You’ve reached the Washington Post!”

Those were the last words Karly Amarson heard. The knife wasn’t large, but Jag, enraged now, plunged it into her chest. Her eyes widened in stark fear. Jag watched for a moment as blood slowly covered the discreet starburst tattoo on her belly and strangely thought of the parlor in New York where she got it on their last visit there as the reality of what he’d just done sank in.

* * *

Frank Gallardi had donned his tux and was about to leave the office when one of his private lines rang—the one for Trophy Club members. He was running late but picked it up.

“Frank! Oh thank God you’re there!” Gallardi didn’t recognize the hoarse voice for a moment. Its owner was shouting. “You alone?”

Gallardi moved the receiver away to protect his ear. “Yeah, leaving to go downstairs. What’s the matter?”

“Don’t say my name for Chrissake. S’body’ll hear you. Just listen—”

“What the hell is it?”

“I don’t know, it’s…uh…I’ve…I mean Karly, she’s…uh…I—”

“Get hold of yourself. Make some sense.”

“Karly…she’s dead, Frank, I think she’s dead.”

“
Is this some kind of joke? What the hell—
”

“No, it’s not a joke! I need your help. Listen to me: No police. None of your security. I mean nobody,” he demanded, still shouting.

“Are you drunk, man? Calm down! Calm down! What’s this about?”

“Listen to me, Frank!” He instructed Gallardi to send someone he trusted from outside the hotel up to Karly’s apartment to remove her body and anything that pointed to violence, like the bloody carpet and sheets. It should look like Karly just moved out—nothing so unusual about that. Frank must know someone he could trust to do it and keep it quiet. Things
just
happen
in hotels.

Gallardi, in a daze, was through listening. “That’s enough! Stop running off at the mouth. This is a respectable place,
it’s my place,
and you’re screwing with my reputation. What the hell have you done, anyway?”

“Frank, look. Karly was going to blackmail me. There was an argument. It ended up bad, and I swear, if anything goes wrong—ever—I’ll cover you. I’ll say I forced you to help me. This gets out I’m dead anyway.”

“You realize what you’re asking me to do? We’ll both end up in prison.”

“This can’t get out. I’ll be ruined. Listen, I’ll put it all out on the table here. It’s terrible and I wish it hadn’t happened. I’d change it if I could. But Karly, Frank, face it, she was a prostitute. Prostitutes disappear. They vanish sometimes. Nobody expects them at home for dinner or at some PTA meeting. They’re
always
unaccounted for. Nobody’s going to start looking around for Karly and causing trouble. If anything ever comes up, I’ll pull some strings. I’ll handle it! But right now you gotta help me!”

Gallardi thought about the trap
he
was in. If he did nothing and waited for someone to find her body, there would be police all over the hotel and casino, non-stop TV coverage, stories in all the papers. He’d have to risk telling the police he knew nothing about it, or tell the truth and destroy this man he considered a friend, a course contrary to his personal code. “I’ll think about what I’m going to do,” he said.

He slammed the phone onto its cradle and paced around his office for a moment before staring out at the few souls on the Boardwalk below, for whom life went on as if nothing had happened. Frank Gallardi was faithful to a framework of his own principles when making decisions, but now the principles that involved integrity and those having to do with loyalty sat staring at him from opposite corners. This was a problem that had no solution. Even all his wealth couldn’t make it disappear. Whatever his decision now, it would affect the rest of his life. He sat at his desk, hypnotized by the raindrops trailing down the window, reflecting the light from the flashing sign on the Precious Metal Casino next door. He felt sick in his stomach. Maybe he would sit this one out and let the chips fall where they fall, he thought. But the questions wouldn’t go away.
When do you pull up stakes on a friend? Fingers get dirty? So what.

It wasn’t like violence was alien to Gallardi. He had straddled the fence between his friends in the mafia and the law for years. Both sides used him for a sounding board, so he always knew what was going on in town. The mob had never pressured him. He wasn’t sure why. Respect, he wanted to think. He had made it this far on his own and didn’t like the idea of calling on them now. If he did, he knew the rule: Ask for help and you get it, and when asked you give back,
whatever
it is. It’s that simple.

Gallardi swung around to his credenza, looked up a number and dialed.

“Yeah.” The voice was coarse, almost threatening.

“This Matty Figueriano?”

After a moment, “Who wants ta know?”

“It’s Frank Gallardi.”

Matty’s tone changed immediately. “Aw, Frankieee! Long time, my man. How you been doin’? I was in the casino last week. Didn’t see ya ’round.”

Any other time those words would have struck fear in Gallardi. An underworld character in a casino brought on more scrutiny from the regulators, but there was no time to worry about that now. “Look, I need a favor.”

“All you gotta do is name it, Frankie. You know that.”

“How soon can you be here?”

“For you, Frankie, immediately. Seven minutes flat.”

“Use the back elevator.”

Gallardi hung up and took a moment to wonder about his own sanity, then dialed his frantic friend.

“That…that you, Frank?”

“It’s taken care of.”

“Frank. How can I—”

Gallardi answered quietly. “Now you get this: You let this ever touch me, I’ll kill you.”

* * *

Gallardi told Matty Figueriano to
clean up
the designated room. More specificity was not necessary, as a man of Matty’s ilk understood its full meaning. Gallardi then hurried back through his office toward the executive elevator. He was certainly in no mood for the party downstairs but he was the emcee. And if this mess ever came up it might look suspicious that he hadn’t been there. As he rounded the corner outside his office, the voice of Lenny Magliacci chilled him.

“Night, Frank.”

Gallardi stopped dead in his tracks in front of Lenny’s office, which was within earshot of Frank’s. He’d never liked his sister’s son before, but now he had contempt for him. “What the hell you doing here this late, Lenny?”

“Couple important matters to wrap up.”

Gallardi thought:
Important matters?
No one in the office ever gave Lenny anything important to work on. Gallardi considered the situation for a second and decided not to pursue it. Lenny was too dumb and lazy to have caught any of what happened, and Matty Fig had come in and departed through the back entrance to Frank’s office, where Lenny wouldn’t have seen him from his own space. As Gallardi hurried on, he cursed himself for ever letting his sister Molly wheedle him into hiring Lenny. He had done it more to stop her whining than out of any feeling of family obligation. As far as Gallardi was concerned, her worthless son had his chance and blew it long ago. As the elevator opened, he wondered how many times like tonight he’d regretted hiring the loser. He made a mental note to have Lenny’s office moved to another floor. Close to Maintenance, in the basement.

When Frank Gallardi reached the Quinn ballroom the din of chatter rose a notch as his guests noticed him. A few clapped. Gallardi was not a natural gladhander but made the rounds with a word or two or a body hug for these people who knew and loved him.

* * *

Three hours later, Lenny Magliacci blended himself into the casino crowd near the entrance to the Austin Quinn ballroom. The dense carpet covering the casino floor absorbed only a fraction of the noise from the slots, tables and revelers.

Seldom had he seen as much security. He was asked for I.D. by two men in black suits. President McNabb was surrounded by his Secret Service entourage. Magliacci wondered whether the mystery caller his uncle had threatened from the phone in his office earlier in the evening was here in the ballroom.

Six Years Later

Anyone watching would have
thought Frank Gallardi was daydreaming as he sat in his office and gazed out at the crowd on the Boardwalk and the ocean beyond, but far from that, he was thinking over the call he’d received minutes earlier from Sean O’Malley, an Atlantic City police detective who had once worked weekend security for a couple of years in the Trophy Club. When O’Malley was promoted to city detective he gave up the part-time job at the casino, but Frank saw O’Malley as a pipeline to the police and invited him to drop in on him once in a while. They talked about the M.O.’s of the latest rip-off artists to hit the casinos and of other cases O’Malley had inside information on, but it was unusual for the detective to call for an appointment. “Something interesting,” he had said.

O’Malley sat across from Gallardi and pulled a plastic evidence bag out of his pocket. “Still advertising with this kind of pen?” he asked. As Gallardi examined the pen, O’Malley told him a local house builder putting in a foundation out on the west side of town had dug up what at first appeared to be trash, but called the police when a rolled-up rug was stained with blood. Rolled up in the rug was a writing pen bearing the Golden Touch Casino & Hotel logo, and some cocktail glasses that had remained intact. Finally, there was a bloody framed photo.

“Recognize this woman, Frank?”

It was a picture of Karly sitting at a table with Gallardi in what he recognized as the small secluded bar in the Trophy Club.

“Of course, I know as well as you do! Karly Amarson.”

“Yeah, and we found a man’s gold bracelet there with the name of an underworld character we keep an eye on engraved on it.”

“What’s the name?” Gallardi asked.

“Figueriano. Matty Figueriano. Know him?”

Gallardi leaned forward in his chair. “Everybody knows Matty,” he uttered. “So where are you going with this?”

“Haven’t found a body yet! Just all the stuff I told you about. But we believe there is one. You seen Karly lately, Frank?” It was a rhetorical question.

“Yeah, yeah, she’s been gone from here a long time. Just disappeared. You think it’s her?”

“One of the blood samples matches Karly’s DNA. The amount of blood makes the M.E. sure she’s dead.”

Gallardi looked stressed but said nothing.

O’Malley continued. “Matty Fig, or whoever buried that stuff, may have been told what to do, and may not know what had happened to the body, or he may have disposed of it elsewhere to separate it from other evidence. There is a body, though. You can bet on that.”

O’Malley left and Gallardi closed his office door behind him. He was in an uncomfortable quandary.
What the hell would Figueriano have done with the body?
It was an unexpected, and unacceptable, loose end.

He picked up the phone and dialed a number in Washington, one that would bypass all bureaucrats, secretaries and assistants. “Yes,” a man’s voice answered.

“We need to talk.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“In person.”

“Wish I had the time, Frank. Phone’ll have to do.”

“Uh-uh.”

The man in Washington chuckled. “Hell, this is the most secure line in the world. What’s it about, anyway?”

“Not on the phone,” Gallardi asserted. “When can you meet me?”

* * *

Frank Gallardi stood at the corner window of a D.C. hotel suite taking in the White House and further away the Capitol, both gleaming in the darkness. Their symbolism was never lost on him but he didn’t need to live in Washington to appreciate them. When the door rattled, he opened it and saw his expected guest standing between two men wearing dark suits and no smiles. One of them started to enter the room, but the visitor nodded for him to wait.