A Nasty Piece of Work (8 page)

“I could attach your income for the rest of your life.”

I tossed the globe from my right hand to my left and then back again. I could hear him suck in his breath. “I don’t have an income,” I explained. “I don’t go to an office, I don’t draw a salary. How about it, Russell? All I want are simple answers to simple questions.”

I gave the globe a spin and tried balancing it on the tip of my middle finger. “For Christ’s sake put it down,” he whispered hoarsely. “I’ll tell you what I can.”

I kept the globe in the palm of my hand just in case. “Who hired you to represent Emilio Gava?”

He made his way around his desk and collapsed into a leather chair that appeared to fold itself around him. “Our firm has an ongoing relationship with—” He sucked air in through his nostrils and started over again. “Over the years Fontenrose & Fontenrose has taken on some special clients—we deal with their legal problems, we manage their financial portfolios.” His hagfish mouth clamped shut. He was clearly having a hard time spitting it out. I played catch, left hand to right hand and back again, with his three-hundred-year-old Lorenzo da Silva. He groaned. “This is the first time one of our special clients has been arrested after going into the program. Certainly no one in the program has ever jumped bail—”

“What program are we talking about?”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s witness protection program. That’s as much as you’re going to get out of me, Mr. Gunn. If you require more information, I suggest you go to the horse’s mouth.”

“Would you care to identify the horse’s mouth?”

“Talk to Charles Coffin. He runs the witness protection program for the western states out of the FBI’s Albuquerque office.”

I could actually hear his sigh of relief when I deposited his precious globe back in its cradle.

“Please leave now, Mr. Gunn.”

I looked at my watch. “Twelve minutes. Which means I owe you one-sixth of three hundred dollars, which is fifty bucks.” I pulled two twenties and an Alexander Hamilton from my billfold and dropped them onto his king-sized desk. “That makes us even-steven, pal.”

I plowed through the carpet to the door. Miss Wyman led me down the corridor to Miss Godshall, who led me back through the secret door to the elevators. Heading back toward earth in one of the Cresswell Building’s silver time capsules, I felt like a sap for having paid for Fontenrose’s twelve minutes. As gestures go, it’d been pretty dumb—I was out of pocket fifty bucks, all to feel superior to an eel.

In the words of D.D. back at the Blue Grass, go figure.

Twelve

Ever since the honcho himself, J. Edgar Hoover, fired an agent he spotted in the hallway for wearing tight trousers, every FBI field office that I’ve been to has been an island of haberdashery conformity. The New Mexico field office, on Luecking Park Avenue in downtown Albuquerque, was certainly no exception. The men circulating in the corridor sported dark two-piece suits with button-down shirts and conservative ties. The two female secretaries at the main desk wore jackets that flared at the hips over sober dresses that plunged to midcalf. Maybe it was my imagination working overtime, but even the men on the Ten Most Wanted list posted on the wall next to the elevator seemed comparatively well decked out, which made me wonder if casual apparel like mine could keep you off the Most Wanted list. The way the secretaries sized me up, I wondered if casual apparel could keep you out of the New Mexico field office.

“There’s no agent here by the name of Coffin,” the older of the two secretaries informed me with nasal finality.

“I have it on good authority that the agent in question, one Charles Coffin, runs the FBI’s western witness protection program out of this field office,” I persisted.

“Everything all right here, Miss Pershing?” a two-piece suit passing the reception desk asked.

“Gentleman here seems to think we have a Mr. Coffee working out of this office,” the second secretary said.

“Mr. Coffin,” I corrected her. “Charles Coffin.”

“Sir, who are you?” the two-piece suit demanded.

I reached into my hip pocket for my wallet to come up with some ID.

“Sir, I need you to keep your hands where I can see them,” the two-piece suit said. The pleasant smile never quit his lips.

“Last time someone told me that, we wound up having an altercation,” I said.

“Sir, is an altercation anything like a fight?”

“It starts off with insults. It moves on to pushing and shoving. Where it ends depends on the parties involved.”

A second two-piece suit materialized in a nearby doorway. I wondered if the secretaries had little buttons under the rim of the reception desk that they could push if someone with casual apparel turned up on the premises.

“What’s going on here?” the second agent demanded.

“This …
gentleman
 … wants to see an Agent Coffee,” the second secretary said.

“Coffin,” I corrected her, “as in casket. Coffin as in sarcophagus. He’s supposed to be the agent in charge of the FBI’s witness protection program in this neck of the American woods.”

The second agent circled around me. “Are you a police officer?” he asked.

“I’m a private investigator—”

“You possess identification?” the second agent asked.

I pulled back the flap of my threadbare sports jacket and, moving in slow motion, extracted the wallet from my hip pocket. I produced my laminated New Mexico detective license from the wallet and waved it in the air. The first agent snatched it from my fingers. “Goes by the name of Lemuel Gunn,” he told his colleague. “State-certified private investigator working out of Hatch.”

“A real private investigator, in the flesh,” said the second agent. “We haven’t seen one of those fellers around here in a coon’s age.”

“Listen,” I said, “if you don’t have a Charles Coffin working out of this field office, you must have a witness protection program.”

“I’ve read about witness protection programs in detective novels,” the second agent allowed, “but I’ve never actually seen one on FBI premises.”

“Sir, you fixing on joining the witness protection program?” the first agent asked.

“I’m trying to track down someone who I have reason to believe was in your witness protection program. His name is Emilio Gava. He was released on bail after being charged with buying cocaine. I have reason to believe he has no intention of turning up for the trial.”

“Which would make him a bail jumper,” the first agent said.

“Bail jumpers are a police matter, aren’t they?” the second agent asked the first agent. He eyed me. “Have you tried the local police in the jurisdiction where you expect him to jump bail?”

I wedged my wallet back into my hip pocket. “I don’t have much experience with the FBI, but if all their agents are like you jokers, the country is in deep shit,” I said.

“Sir, I need you to watch your language,” the first agent said. “There are ladies present.”

“Language isn’t something you can watch,” I shot back. “To get the full impact, you need to hear it.”

For some reason the second agent repeated my name. “Lemuel Gunn, with two
n
’s.”

“Sir, is there anything else we can do for you?” the first agent inquired.

“As a matter of fact there is. Can one of you Bobbsey Twins direct me to a good tailor in Albuquerque? I’d kill for a two-piece outfit like the ones you’re sporting.”

I got to say this for me, I live and learn. At least this time it didn’t cost me fifty bucks to feel superior.

Thirteen

Lady Godiva riding bareback couldn’t have lured me back to that promoter’s idea of kingdom come, East of Eden Gardens, but Ornella Neppi’s predicament could and did. It wasn’t my style to leave a body unburied or a stone unturned. I decided to chat up Emilio Gava’s poker partners in the hope of eliciting a heretofore overlooked detail, a snatch of conversation, who knows, maybe even a lead to the occasional blonde bombshell who turned up at Gava’s condo, obliging him to turn up the radio. In short, I was scrounging for anything that might help me pick up the cold trail of the presumptive bail jumper.

Frank Uzzel in 4B was the first name on the list I’d gotten from the concierge, Alvin Epley. I pushed the doorbell expecting a buzzer, what I heard were chimes playing the first notes of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” A thin, very young Chicano maid wearing a starched white apron and suffering from terminal acne cracked the door. “You the man what called?”

“I am the man,” I said, flashing the grin I used to disarm civilians.

“If it’s that Allstate fellow, Consuelo, show him in,” a voice called from another room. “I’m expecting him.”

Uzzel turned out to be a square-jawed, crew-cut, gray-haired retiree with ramrod posture, standing or sitting. He wore a short-sleeved polo shirt and had a dog tag tattooed across the biceps of his left arm. (I recognized it because I used to wear two of them around my neck.) He looked to be one of those veterans who had married into the army the way priests marry into the church, he looked like he intended to remain faithful to his dying breath. He received me in a den one wall of which was covered with photographs of him in combat fatigues, another with a gun rack filled with as lethal an arsenal as I’d come across outside of a forward base armory. “I made top sergeant,” he allowed, following my gaze, looking at his photographs as if he were seeing them for the first time. “Thirty-three God-wonderful years in the finest military on Mother Earth. Four of them in Nam.” He motioned me to a chair next to a glassed-in case filled with medals, each one set on a small purple pincushion. “You serve your country, Mr. Gunn?”

“I think I did, yes,” I said.

“Where’bouts?”

“Afghanistan.”

He pursed his lips respectfully, one soldier acknowledging another. “I hear tell Ghanistan wasn’t a picnic.”

“No one who was there would describe it as a picnic,” I agreed.

“Did I hear you right? You
thought
you’d served your country? Jeez, how can you not be sure?”

I hiked one shoulder. “Military service is complicated,” I said. I glanced at the photos on the wall. “I’m sure you can relate to that. You do what you’re told to do. You do it as well as you can. Sometimes it works out, other times it doesn’t.”

“Nam was sure as heck complicated,” Uzzel said. “I was never sure which of the turkeys in black pajamas was the enemy and which was on our side, so I treated any turkey in pajamas as a potential hostile. Hostiles sometimes wound up dead before they could convince us they weren’t hostile. Heck, in Nam I was never sure what a victory would look like, though I got to admit I sure recognized defeat when I looked it in the eye.”

I nodded. “Afghanistan’s not all that different,” I said. I waved away his offer of a Scotch neat, then accepted when he insisted. He poured one for himself and settled onto an ottoman covered in camouflage tent cloth.

“This is about Emilio, huh? That’s what you said on the phone.”

It turned out that Gava’s arrest had been a hot item of scuttlebutt in the East of Eden rumor mill. I explained about the suspicion that he intended to jump bail. “I heard he sat in on your regular Sunday night poker game, so you must have known him. I thought you might remember something he said—a comment, a quip, anything at all—that could help me find him so that my company doesn’t have to reimburse the bail bondsman who’ll have to fork over $125,000 to the state.”

“Jeez, I don’t know as how I can add much to what you already know. Our poker game’d been running for years when Emilio moved into Eden. Hattie Hillslip over in 9A, she’s the one who went and invited him to join our Sunday night shootout. That’s what we call it. A shootout, though needless to say no guns are allowed at the table.” Uzzel chortled (Kubra’s pet word these days; she claims I don’t laugh, I chortle) at a private joke.

“What?”

“Emilio knew I was a gun collector from when he played here at my place,” Uzzel said. “He knew we had this little no-guns-at-the-table rule. It was one of those little rules you joke about but everyone figures is sensible. So one night, we were playing at Hank and Millie Kugler’s over in 8D, Emilio all of a sudden produced the neatest little two-shot derringer I ever set eyes on, and I’ve set eyes on my share. It was so small you could conceal it in the palm of your hand and nobody would be the wiser.”

“How did your Sunday night regulars react to this breach of etiquette?”

“Heck, we all laughed. What else was there to do?”

“I see what you’re saying,” I said.

“What am I saying?”

“You’re saying you don’t confront a man with a weapon in the palm of his hand.”

“Jeez, you’re putting words I never spoke in my mouth. You’re putting thoughts I never thought in my head.”

I tried to change the subject. “How do you decide who gets to host the game any given week?”

Uzzel let go of the previous subject reluctantly. “We take turns. One dollar is set aside from every pot to pay for the whisky and beer and cold cuts and potato chips and salted peanuts. I got to say, Emilio enjoyed the poker. He was in his element. The way he shuffled cards, the way he dealt them, he could have been a professional dealer in a previous incarnation.”

“What was he in this incarnation?”

“Don’t know as anybody ever asked him. He was Italian, you know, not that there’s anything wrong with being Italian. But those heavy lids that closed over his eyes didn’t encourage personal questions.”

“Generally speaking, did he win or lose?”

“Off the top of my head, I’d say he won more than he lost.”

“Especially when he was dealing,” I ventured.

Uzzel angled his head to squint at me. “What makes you say that, Mr. Gunn?”

“Your description of the way he handled cards. I’ve seen dealers who can shuffle till you say stop and then make four aces come off the top every eighth card.”

“Yeah, well, don’t think the thought didn’t occur to us—”

“But the heavy lids closing over his eye didn’t invite accusations of cheating.”

“If he’d been caught at it, I wouldn’t have backed off, I would have challenged him, derringer or not.”