Death on the Mississippi (9 page)

“You never know,” Rocco said. “He might need a quick joke fix one day.”

“Have you ever heard of a man called Angie Carillo out of Providence?” Lyon asked.

“Boots Carillo, sure. He's Rhode Island mob. All the mob connections in this state are controlled out of Rhode Island. Carillo runs a lay-off bank and things like that.”

“How about loan sharking?”

“He bankrolls, but wouldn't be personally involved unless it was big numbers,” Rocco said.

“Pan found his telephone number in one of Dalton's address books and called him. She's positive that he's the one who called them at night. I thought I'd drive up there and interview him.”

“You're out of your living mind,” Rocco sputtered. “How in the hell do you think he got the name Boots?”

“All those guys seem to have weird nicknames like Fats, Scarface, or Needle Nose,” Lyon said.

“It's street rumor that in his early days, Carillo disposed of his victims by fitting them with cement overshoes. These functioned very poorly when you tried to walk across Narragansett Bay.”

“It's only a short drive.”

“No way,” Rocco said. “No Boots Carillo and no trips to Rhode Island. Got it?”

“No trip to Providence, got it,” Lyon repeated.

It took Lyon an hour and a half to drive to Providence, Rhode Island. It took another twenty minutes to backtrack to suburban Cranston where Carillo lived. It was dusk when he arrived at 112 Hutchinson Street, which was a modest stucco house on a quiet thoroughfare not far from Roger Williams Park. Except for minor variations in their tiny front yards, or the addition of an upper-story window dormer, the houses on the street were nearly identical. Constructed on a narrow lot and separated from its neighbor by a concrete drive that led back to a small garage, number 112 had a ceramic pink flamingo standing in a small concrete pool in its minuscule front lawn.

Lyon walked down the short walk and rang the door chime. The first bars of “Ave Maria” echoed through the house interior. When the music-chimes stopped, he rang for an encore. The door was finally opened on the third rendition by a portly man with an astounding shock of gray hair who appeared to be in his late sixties. He carried a spatula in one hand and a long-handled fork in the other. His clothing was obscured by a gigantic white butcher's apron with the words “Greatest Granddad in the World” stitched in red script.

He squinted and flicked the fork under Lyon's chin. “You're Wentworth.” The fork tines were millimeters from Lyon's breast bone.

Pan's description of the voice had been excellent, it had a definite guttural quality. “I called about a certain obligation of Mr. Turman's.”

The fork waved toward the rear of the house. “In the cellar.” Without waiting for a reply, Carillo turned and left Lyon to follow. They passed through the living room where a picture of another flamingo was mounted over the fireplace in a mirrored frame. Identically upholstered furniture was carefully arranged throughout the immaculate room and protected by clear plastic coverings. They went through the kitchen, with its highly waxed floor, and down cellar steps into a family room.

“Mr. Carillo, there's something I should tell you about Dalton Turman,” Lyon said.

Carillo, who had crossed to a small kitchen area in the rear of the room turned and waved his utensils at Lyon. “The money. Put the money on the table and we forget about Turman.”

“I don't have the money,” Lyon said.

Carillo advanced on Lyon with the fork held before him like a lance. Again the tines flicked at Lyon's shirtfront. “You didn't bring money because you don't got no money. I know who you are, just like I know Turman is running.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Not yet. I must do the sausages and peppers.” He busied himself at a frying pan on the small stove. “My daughter does not like peppers and sausage to cook in her kitchen. Smells, she says. Of course they smell. They should smell. My daughter is a very good housekeeper. Very neat. Very worried about odors.”

“Can we talk privately here? I'm not wired,” Lyon said.

Carillo glared at him, waved his spatula in the air and rolled his eyes. “Wired? If you had an electronic transmitter on your person my antisurveillance devices would have sounded an alarm. Why would a provider of venture capital like myself worry about such things?”

“You obviously don't since you phoned him from here,” Lyon said.

“Checking up on my money, nothing much illegal. You got to understand they do not watch me like they did. I am what you call semiretired. A little bank for the books, a little loan here and there, a little extortion to keep my hand in. The Feds, all they think about today is drug busts.”

“I'm going, Poobah,” an adolescent girl with a cream complexion and jet-black hair said from midway down the stairs.

Carillo turned to face her with a broad smile. “Ah, Maria, you are beautiful tonight, but you wear pants on a date?”

“These are designer jeans, Poobah, everyone wears them.”

“Everyone, yes. Who are you going with?”

“Jimmie Regan is taking me to the drive-in. We won't be late.”

“Be home at eleven.”

“Everyone else stays out until midnight.”

“Eleven-thirty,” Carillo said with a smile. He looked over at Lyon. “See how my granddaughter twists her Poobah around her little finger.”

“Bye.” The girl scooted up the stairs and a moment later they heard the front door slam.

Carillo handed the spatula to Lyon. “Watch the sausage.” Without waiting for a response he dialed the phone. “Regan, Angie Carillo. Your son Jimmie is taking my beloved granddaughter to the movies tonight. I would consider it a favor if he was respectful to her. She has great meaning to me. Thank you.” He hung up and resumed his cooking chores. “Regan knows me. I am sure his son will be nice to Maria.” He served two plates of sausage and peppers. “It is a great burden to me now that Maria's father is gone. It is very hard to watch after children in these times.”

“Divorce is always difficult on kids.”

“Eat while we talk. Not divorce. It was a question of firepower. Handguns are useless against automatic weapons and I am afraid that the Colombians have adopted modern technology far quicker than us. Sausages are good, yes? It is important that they have natural casings.”

“You seem to know something about me,” Lyon said. The food was highly spiced and he reached for the red wine Carillo had set on the table.

“It is important that good sausage be cooked in olive oil that is virgin first press. When you called, I called friends in Hartford who accommodate me. Tell your wife the governor is trying to compromise her.”

“Does your knowledge extend to where Dalton is?”

“Let us say we are interested in his journey. We have arranged our own, shall we say, investigators. It would seem that Mr. Turman has decided to take an ocean voyage with large sums of money, some of which, unfortunately, seems to be ours.”

“He doesn't seem to be on the ocean. In fact, he doesn't seem to be anywhere.”

“He is a very bright man. Once he was able to follow me to a regional meeting with some of my pisanos. It was a quiet house in the country until Turman arranged secret loud speakers and tapes of gunfire.” Carillo made an expansive gesture with his knife and nearly knocked over the wine. “Voices called out ‘G Men' and that sort of thing. My pisanos were not amused. It was the first time since Tony Anastasia that four contracts were issued simultaneously on the same man. It required much persuasion on my part to get him off with a broken arm.”

“Perhaps someone went ahead on his own,” Lyon said.

“The families do not kill prominent people anymore, Mr. Wentworth. Only the new immigrants, like the Colombians, do things like that. If we are displeased with someone, we manage to make their lives unpleasant. Drugs are mysteriously found in unlikely places. Wives are seduced by attractive young men, husbands are compromised in many ways, businesses have unexpected difficulties. Who would do business with us if on default they were taken for a walk on Narragansett Bay? Those days are over.”

“How about late-night phone calls and a long-range rifle shot at people sitting on a houseboat?”

Carillo shrugged and consumed a whole sausage in one bite. “That is normal business. And the shot did miss everyone, did it not?”

“You practically perform a civic duty,” Lyon said.

“The older families are becoming conservative. We have discovered where the real power is. We know that the well-laundered CD is more powerful than an Uzi, that a line of credit is worth ten soldiers in the street. Real estate, a nice business with cash flow, that is for the older men. Leave the machine guns to the Colombians. We have money now, and it is good money for Maria, and it will be old money for Maria's children, as good as any old New England money that got its start in the slave trade.”

“It would seem to me that Dalton Turman has a chunk of that laundered money with him.”

“If we find him, he will return it. If you or the police find him, he will also return it. We cannot lose.”

“Poobah, I hate you!”

Maria was halfway down the stairs clutching the rail with both hands as tears streamed down her cheeks. Angie Carillo's face darkened as he folded his napkin and stood. “The boy will pay for this.”

“Pay for what!” she screamed at her grandfather. “He never touched me. We were at the drive-in and he had his arm around me and we were getting ready to … when his father drove in and practically hit us. Mr. Regan pulled Jimmie out of the car and whispered to him. When Jimmie came back he sat against the door. Then he said he felt sick and drove me home at about ninety miles an hour. I could die! You do this all the time, Poobah. How am I ever going to make out?” She ran back up the stairs.

Carillo began to slowly gather the empty plates. “It is the young. There is no satisfying them.”

7

When Lyon left 112 Hutchinson Street in Cranston, Rhode Island, he immediately knew that crime was rampant in the country, and that lawlessness ruled the land like the riders of the Apocalypse.

His car had been stolen. The parking space directly in front of the home of one of the most senior mafia leaders in New England had provided no protection.

A tan Ford with an accordion-shaped right fender, eased from the driveway of a vacant house across the street. It slowed to a stop and Rocco reached across the seat and flipped open the door on the passenger's side. “In,” he commanded.

Lyon did as instructed. “You had my car driven home?”

“Yep.” Rocco threw the car in gear and accelerated as he cornered a curve dangerously. “I told you no Rhode Island.”

“He doesn't seem like a vicious man, and he's very concerned about his granddaughter's chastity.”

“And of course he fed you?”

“Some excellent sausage and peppers. I've got to remember the way he prepared them.”

“For Christ sake, Lyon, didn't you ever hear of the banality of evil?”

“Most street cops I know aren't aware of Hannah Arendt.”

“You don't know any street cops except me.”

“What help could you have been to me sitting in a car across the street?”

“He wouldn't have burned you in his own house, and I wasn't about to let them take you on any trips in car trunks. Did you find out anything?”

“His people are the ones who took the shot at the houseboat, but I don't think they did anything to Dalton except try to frighten him. As long as they thought the construction job was doing well, they expected to get their money back. They would have nothing to gain by taking Dalton and the boat.”

Rocco increased the speed of the car as a response to his mood. “God, you're naive. They had a million-plus reasons to do something to Dalton, and the money was probably hidden somewhere on that damn boat.”

There was a tone of resignation in Bea's voice as she stood in the doorway of the cellar recreation room. “When the maps go on the Ping-Pong table and he breaks out the magnifying glass, I know we're in trouble.”

“Because of the overlaps on some of our flights, the map is actually larger than you requested,” Gary Dorset said as he kicked the Ping-Pong net further under the table.

“It's just fine, Gary,” Lyon said as he finished securing the last of the aerial-photograph strips in place. He stepped back from the table to look at the complete composite that included the banks of the Connecticut River from mid-Massachusetts to the Atlantic Ocean. It also included the Connecticut shoreline from Bridgeport to the Rhode Island border and the islands in that area.

Bea peered over the table. “It's a little late to mention it, but we could have bought a map of the same area for fifty cents at the Mobil station.”

“Wouldn't be the same,” Lyon said as he realigned one of the strips. “Is Pan around?”

“She went back to the resort to get more of her things. I think she's moved in permanently.”

“Do you get along with her?” Lyon asked.

Bea thought a moment before replying. “That depends. It's like living with a combination of Doris Day and Lucrezia Borgia. When you ask her something, you're either going to get a burst of ‘Que Serra Serra' or the poisoned ring. You can never tell.”

“I found that duality too,” Lyon said as he bent over the table with his magnifying glass to minutely examine a portion of the shoreline.

“Well, I'm off,” Bea said without receiving any response. “I'll be late for dinner, as I'm having an affair with the Governor.”

“Don't hurry,” Lyon said as he inched further over the map with his eyes inches from the photographs.

“We'll probably make love in the well of the Senate,” Bea said.

“Drive carefully,” Lyon said.