"I"m trying to find April Kyle, and I"m trying to find out what happened to Ginger Buckey, and how come someone killed her?"
Whitfield made a short dismissive shake of his head. "I"m not concerned," he said, "with how you waste your time. When it"s yours. I want to know what game you"re playing with me."
"You knew Ginger Buckey," I said. "You took her to the Crown Prince resort in St. Thomas and she dumped you and went off with a reed man named Robert Rambeaux. He"s dead too."
"If you make any such allegation before a witness," Whitfield said, "I will certainly sue you."
"Sure," I said. "But what I"d rather is that you tell me about Ginger, and maybe about April."
Whitfield slapped his open hand down on the desk. "Are you crazy?" he said. "Who the h.e.l.l do you think you"re talking to. You"re looking for a couple of adolescent chippies and you come into my office and ask me? Do you have any idea what you"re doing?"
"I didn"t say they were chippies," I said.
Whitfield leaned forward over the desk, letting the swivel chair come forward with him. "Don"t play cute games with me, pal," he said.
"Warren," I said, "if you keep scaring me to death this is going to take all day. You think you"re a powerful guy. You think it"s because of something in you that you"re powerful, so you figure to unleash a little of that power on me and watch me get limp and shriveled."
Whitfield"s eyes were narrowed a little and both hands were flat on the top of the desk as he looked at me.
"But you"re not a powerful guy," I said, "and what power you have isn"t in you, it"s in the job, in the fact that you control a lot of money and a lot of jobs and people want both, so they suck around. I don"t want either. I want to know what you know about Ginger Buckey, and I"m going to find out."
Whitfield raised his hand. With the index mnger extended he jabbed toward me with it. I kept right on talking.
"And until I find out," I said, "I"m going to be so annoying that it will make your eyes water."
"I don"t know what you"re talking about," Whitfield said. "I"ve been to the Crown Prince Club locally once or twice for lunch. I occasionally vacation in St. Thomas. But I don"t know any Ginger Whatsis, or any April."
"Yeah you do," I said, "and you know Perry Lehman who runs the place and you know some other stuff that Mr. Milo doesn"t want me to mnd out, and I want to know what that is too."
The name Mr. Milo rocked him. He sat back and some of the edge went off his voice. "Mr. Milo?" he said.
"Un huh."
"Who"s Mr. Milo?" he said.
I shook my head. "Come off it, Warren. We both know you know who Mr. Milo is. Even if you were clean, you"d know who Mr. Milo was."
He was back to looking at me again. But the look was fuzzier now.
"And I know that something is going down here between you and Mr. Milo because Mr. Milo has already tried to hit me after I started looking for you. The too-bad part for you, Warren, is that I"m probably going to knock the whole thing over, whereas if someone had told me about April Kyle back at the start, I wouldn"t care much what you and Mr. Milo were doing."
"I..." Whitfield started to talk and stopped. On the right wall past the a.s.sistant"s desk a door opened and Jacky Wax walked through. He walked over to Whitfield"s desk and punched one of the b.u.t.tons on the phone.
"Jesus Christ," Whitfield said. "You can"t show yourself here."
"Shut up," Jacky said without heat. He wasn"t looking at Whitfield. He was looking at me.
"How"s things, Jacky," I said.
"I don"t think they"re too good, right now," Jacky said, "especially for you."
He was a tall wiry guy with high shoulders. He was wearing an eight-hundred-dollar suit of pale gray, with a pink shirt and a pink-and-lavender striped tie. His pocket handkerchief was lavender-and-pink dots. His shoes were shiny black and long and pointy and probably cost nearly what the suit cost. He was wearing the kind of sungla.s.ses that lighten inside and darken outside. His dark hair was cut long on top and short on the sides and combed back with a big wave in front and a part on the left side.
"Dammit, Jacky," Whitfield said, "I warned you to stay out of sight. Now he knows."
"He knows anyway," Jacky said. "He don"t know any more than he did. And it"s nothing he can prove."
I nodded. "He"s right," I said to Whitfield. "I know you"re conected to Mr. Milo. I know you went to St. Thomas with Ginger Buckey. And so far there"s nothing I can prove. But there will be."
"No," Jacky said, "there won"t. No need to be fancy about this. We"re going to kill you." Jacky had no emotion in his voice. He might have been talking about real estate.
I was watching Whitfield. The talk was scaring him badly.
"Like I said, all I want is a kid named April Kyle, you clucks have been in a G.o.dd.a.m.ned lather to keep me away from Whitfield when all I want is April Kyle, now you"ve got it escalated to where you"ve got to kill me."
"Don"t make any difference," Jacky said, "how it got here, it"s where we are. I"d have done it a long time ago, but I"m not in charge."
"How "bout Warren?" I said. "He"s looking a little peckish."
"He does what he"s told," Jacky said. "And he likes it."
"You may have to do him too," I said. "I think the strain"s getting to him."
"Don"t matter none to me," Jacky said. "Won"t matter much to you either, you being dead and all."
"G.o.d d.a.m.n it, Jacky, I don"t want this kind of thing talked about in here. It implicates me. Take this talk out into the streets where it belongs."
Jacky turned toward him slowly. "You really got to understand something, Whitfield. We don"t work for you. You work for us. We supply the bimbos, you do what you"re told."
"For G.o.d"s sake, Jacky," Whitfield said. "I"m president of-"
"You"re s.h.i.t," Jacky said. "You work for us. Don"t you?"
Whitfield stared at him. Jacky leaned slightly toward him.
"Don"t you?"
Whitfield nodded slowly.
Jacky looked back at me. "You got any final words?" he said.
I said, "You know I"ve got all this stashed with someone so if I go down it goes to the cops."
"And if you don"t go down?"
"Maybe it doesn"t have to," I said.
"Nothing you can prove anyway."
"You know better, Jacky. The feds find out you"re connected to this bank and they"ll be all over you like leather on a baseball. They"ll turn something up."
Jacky shrugged. "They"ve turned up stuff before. We"re still in business."
"Sensible att.i.tude," I said, "except you been acting just the other way, like if I got to Whitfield the sky would fall."
"So you got a proposition?" Jacky said.
"I want April Kyle, and I want to know what happened to Ginger Buckey."
"And that"s all?" I nodded.
"Okay," Jacky said, "take a hike. We"ll get back to you."
I made a shooting gesture at Whitfield with my forefinger and thumb, and went on out. Downstairs in the lobby Hawk was leaning against one of the writing islands looking at two guys near the door.
He nodded toward them. "Mr. Milo?" he said.
"Un huh. Jacky was upstairs."
"I bet he mentioned shooting you," Hawk said. We were walking straight at the two guys near the door.
"Sort of. I offered him an alternative."
"He go for it?" Hawk said.
"We"ll see," I said.
The two guys by the door moved aside as we reached them and we went out onto Franklin Street.
34.
In the morning Jacky Wax came to see me. He came into my office wearing a three-piece blue suit and a pink tie and carrying a paper bag with two cups of coffee in it. He gave me a cup, and sat down in my client chair and opened the coffee, peeling the lid off away from himself so if any spilled it wouldn"t get on his suit. I opened my coffee and had a swallow. Jacky had a little of his.
"Okay," Jacky said. "We are running a business, and we try to do what"s best for the business. If it"s best for business to kill somebody, we kill him. If it"s best to buy somebody, we buy him, you unnerstand?"
"Un huh."
"If it"s best to deal, we deal."
"Un huh."
"We want you to unnerstand that. Mr. Milo himself said he wanted that crystal clear, that you ain"t getting away with something you shouldn"t."
I nodded. Variety is the spice of life. "So we like the deal," Jacky said.
"Which is?"
"Which is you get the bimbo back, and you leave everything else alone. Lehman, Whitfield. Everything else."
"Who takes the fall for Ginger Buckey?" I said.
"Who?"
"Ginger Buckey, the hooker got killed in New York. Somebody"s got to go down for that."
"Why?"
"Christ, Jacky," I said, "I don"t know. But somebody does. n.o.body cared about her one day in her life."
"What f.u.c.king difference does it make to her now," Jacky said.
"I don"t know that either, but somebody"s got to pay the price. She"s going to matter."
"You didn"t say anything about this yesterday," Jacky said.
"I didn"t know about this yesterday. Until just now I thought I was looking for April Kyle."
"And now you"re not?"
"Her too, but we"re going to get even for Ginger."
Jacky drank some more coffee. His long legs stretched out in front of him. His white shirt had French cuffs, I noticed. With sapphire cuff links. He swallowed a mouthful of coffee a little at a time and looked at me while he did it. He shook his head.
"You are a piece of f.u.c.king work," he said. "You know who you"re dealing with. You"ve known it for a while. And you keep pushing anyway, and when you get lucky and we offer you a deal, you push more." Jacky shook his head.
"Kid"s father was raping her when she was twelve. Then he sold her to a pimp, and he sold her to a pimp and so on and then somebody killed her."
"So her old man was a creep," Jacky said. "Don"t matter anymore."
"I want somebody," I said. "Otherwise the whole thing goes down."
"You think you know what the whole thing is?" Jacky said.
"I know some, I guess some. I say Whitfield is washing money for you. I say he"s got one of your dummy companies on an exempt list so that the cash transactions over ten grand don"t get reported to the IRS. I say in return you have Perry Lehman supply him girls and a safe place to use them where his Boston Banker reputation doesn"t get p.e.c.k.e.r tracks all over it. Maybe he gets a piece of what he washes, but I bet mostly it"s women."
"And you figure we own Lehman?" Jacky said.
"Of course you do. He"s operating highcla.s.s wh.o.r.ehouses all over the country. He never gets busted. Tony Marcus doesn"t dare touch him. I annoy him and your guys appear."
"Makes sense," Jacky said.
"So I start looking for April Kyle, one day, and this is the part I don"t get, and it trips some alarm someplace. I don"t know why, but everybody starts panicking "cause it"s going to lead me to DePaul Federal. And somebody goes down to New York and starts closing doors."