Brian Garfield: Villiers Touch

Startled, she took a step and then stopped. He strode across the room, grasped her under the arms, and pulled her against him. His kiss was harsh and urgent.

Her mouth twisted while she let him strip her clothes off like rags. He thrust her toward the bed; and with sudden anger she stood her ground. “Why in hell did you have to come to me?”

“Shut up, Naomi.”

“All you want is a Goddamned ego massage. You stand there with your dingle sticking out and you want to prove something to yourself by using me as a box to make a deposit in.”

He slapped her across the face and laid both hands against her breasts and shoved her back onto the bed. He put one knee on the bed between her legs. In a strange sort of rage she closed her hand on his throbbing penis, hard. She squeezed.

His face changed, and she heard him utter an odd sound, somewhere between whine and groan. Driven by some sudden and extraordinary urgency, he fell across her, clutched her body, clung to her bitterly. Suddenly she understood. Her smile was hard; she saw him fight the flames leaping in him, and she squeezed his phallus with a fast, pulsing grip. Instantly she felt him shudder and gasp, and the warm issue of him ran wet along her hand.

Hard-breathing and pale, he rolled violently away. He refused to look at her.

She gave him a lidded glare. “You’re no good to anybody any more, Mace-not even yourself.”

“Shut up,” he whispered.

Russ Hastings sat in his little office with a hand wrapped around a beaded cold can of soda. Bill Burgess was staring at the Post headline-“JUDD SUCCUMBS”-as if he hadn’t already read the entire story twice. Hastings said, “I am going to miss him.”

“He must’ve been quite a guy.”

“He was a good man.”

“Not much you can add to that,” Burgess said, and glanced at the ticker. His shoulders stirred; he changed his tone: “Dow Jones down more than fourteen points today, Russ-Exchange Index down sixty-two cents. Amazing how much impact one man’s dying can have. I wish I’d met him. What’s that you’re reading? You look like you’re trying to memorize it off the page.”

“The Act of Nineteen-thirty-four. Ever read it?”

“On my list of favorite reading, it’s second only to God’s Little Acre,” Burgess said. “I confess I have not read it. You find something fascinating?”

“Rule Ten B-Five.”

“Oh, sure. Yes. Absolutely. Now I comprehend everything.” Burgess rolled his eyes upward and threw up his hands.

“It says here,” Hastings drawled, “all investors have an equal right to material information that might affect stock values. In other words, anybody who’s privy to inside information can’t act on it before it becomes public knowledge-otherwise he’s guilty of fraud.”

Burgess sat up. “Ah-hah!”

“Villiers had information about Elliot Judd’s health before it became public knowledge, and he acted on it, and we can prove it.”

“How much could we hit him with?”

“On that charge? Maybe a three-year sentence.”

Burgess slid back down in the chair. “Or maybe we get a bleeding-heart judge who slaps his wrist and turns him loose on a suspended sentence. It’s not good enough, Russ.”

“Better than nothing, isn’t it?”

“Christ, I wish we could act on the evidence we got out of Wyatt. Villiers gave the orders to burgle Claiborne’s files.”

“But all we’ve got is Wyatt’s word against Villiers’. You know what happens to Wyatt’s credibility in front of a jury when some crack lawyer gets done tearing him to shreds. He could swear the sun came up this morning and you wouldn’t get twelve men to believe him.”

“Well, hell, Russ, we’ve got Wyatt tying him into stock fraud and we’ve got Manny Berkowitz in Chicago tying him into the Mafia, and-”

“If Wyatt makes a poor witness,” Hastings cut in sourly, “what would you call Berkowitz? We can’t go into court without witnesses more reputable than those two-we’d get laughed right out of the building. We’ve got to find an unimpeachable witness, or concrete evidence. Diane doesn’t know enough. The only things we’ve got on paper so far are documents that implicate Wyatt. That’s no help at all.”

“Then what do we do? Sit on our hands?”

“We’ve got to wait for Villiers to make a mistake. We’ve got a four-man surveillance team tailing him. We’ve got a tap on his phone in the hotel, and by tomorrow we’ll have bugs in his suite and George Hackman’s office. I don’t like it any more than you do, but I don’t-Wait a minute.” He turned in his chair, picked up Wyatt’s signed statement, switched on the desk lamp, and hunched over the deposition, thumbing pages back rapidly. “I’ve got an idea.”

“I know,” Burgess said. “I saw the light go on.”

Hastings found his place. “Here. Wyatt says Isher kept warning Villiers he wasn’t going to be able to raise enough money to finance the operation, and Villiers kept saying he had a source of capital if he needed it.”

“So?”

Hastings closed the deposition and turned off the lamp. “So what’s the source?”

“I don’t get you.”

“What’s his source of money, Bill? We’ve closed his Montreal operation. He certainly can’t go to the usual sources-banks, brokers, factors, insurance companies, investment trusts, professional moneylenders. After this morning they’d slam the door in his face; they wouldn’t risk lending a dime to a man in his position, let alone the hundreds of millions he needs. He didn’t have the money on tap already, and yet he’s confident he can get it whenever he wants it. Now, even if he had a legitimate source for that much money, they wouldn’t produce it fast enough to do his scheme any good. They’d have to investigate the whole thing down to the last line of fine print. They’d have to spend weeks drawing up legal documentation. Narrow it down, it’s obvious-knowing his background. He’s got to go to the mob for the money.”

Burgess blinked and stared. “Sure. Christ, it’s got to be.”

“All right, then. Who does he go to? Which mobster? That’s in your department, not mine; I don’t know who’s who in the hierarchy. But there can’t be very many Mafiosi he could approach who could come up with a nine-figure sum overnight.”

“Civetta,” Burgess said promptly. “Sal Senna is Villiers’ man in Montreal-and Senna traces back to Civetta’s organization. Civetta’s the money man in New York, he controls the loan sharks and the numbers. It’s got to be Civetta, nobody else fits.”

“Villiers has to get in touch with him soon, then. Can your people plant bugs in Civetta’s hangouts?”

Burgess made a face. “We’ve had him bugged for months. Either he knows it or he’s careful by nature. He rarely talks on the phone at all, only to his wife. When he wants a business conference he picks a nightclub with a loud orchestra or he drives his pals out into the woods somewhere and they talk half a mile from the nearest building. We’ve even bugged his car, but they don’t talk in the car. They get out and talk too far away for the mikes to pick them up.”

“Then we’ll have to bug Villiers.”

“I guess it’s worth a try,” Burgess said without great enthusiasm. “I’ll have a man bump into him in his hotel lobby and plant a miniature mike in his pocket. But those James Bond gimmicks rarely live up to their publicity. The transmitters are short-range, you’ve got to have your receiver within a few hundred yards of them, and Villiers moves fast-it’d be a miracle if we could keep up. All it takes is a flickering neon light or a radio station nearby or one of those handy-dandy executive jammers in a briefcase, and all you’re going to pick up is a noise like bacon sizzling in a hot frying pan. And even if you get past all those obstacles, you’ve got to have good acoustics and an absolute minimum of background noise before you can expect to get a signal clear enough to record on tape so that the voices can be recognized.”