Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

To Elizabeth he said, “My attorney, Harry Orloff, decides that he needs time to get the papers in order. He tells himself the only way is to get to the senator who’s causing the problem. That was Senator Claremont of Colorado.”

Elizabeth was listening to something she had waited ten years to hear. It was what had brought her into the case. At first everyone had thought the senator had committed suicide, but then the lab people had discovered that the poison had been in the glass he’d used to soak his false teeth.

But Carlo Balacontano was still talking. “I didn’t know what Orloff was doing to take care of things until it was too late. I’m sitting in a restaurant in New York one night, a nice family place owned by the son of a friend of mine, and I get the word. This United States senator didn’t die in his sleep in Colorado. Or he did, but the reason he happened to do that was that Harry Orloff had managed to hire a specialist to come in and do him. I’m shocked. I’m knocked on my ass. I’m furious. On the one hand, the hearings are held off, and Arthur Fieldston is hiding so he can’t be dragged in to answer questions. On the other, my little tax problem with Arthur Fieldston is nothing compared to assassinating a fucking senator. I figure my only hope is that the rest of the world is going to look at the list of corporations getting subpoenas and figure that one of the oil companies or the car companies had decided that they might save a couple billion dollars by not answering too many questions. The problem is that when a big public figure dies, everybody in the country with a badge, gun or law degree, or even a typewriter, comes out to beat the bushes.

“And that’s where I made my second mistake. I’m sitting there at the table in the restaurant, and there’s a candle burning on the table. My man tells me that Harry Orloff needs two hundred thousand dollars to pay off the specialist, because he’s done his job and he’s just shown up in Las Vegas to collect. I’m already so pissed off I can barely see. I’m looking at my guy, and it’s like his face is at the end of a red tunnel. My head is pounding, and I notice I’m breathing so hard that the candle flame is flapping like a flag. When I hear the part about the two hundred thousand and the specialist showing up and registering at Caesars, I go absolutely berserk. I tell the people at the table with me that I want out of this. I want it to be like it never happened. And that was it.”

“What do you mean?” asked Elizabeth. “That was what?”

Balacontano shrugged. “That’s what put me in here. What I’m guilty of is understating my income to the IRS. I figure two years is enough time on that, so I ought to be out six years ago.”

Elizabeth’s face showed no expression. “Except they tell me you weren’t convicted of tax evasion.”

Balacontano waved his hand in frustration. “You’ve got to understand what we’re talking about here. I don’t know how to make you see it. There’s a lot of talk about hit men and all that, so it sounds like going to an exterminator or something. What people don’t think about is that getting somebody killed isn’t all that hard. I saw a couple of days ago in the paper that some woman in Phoenix hired two teenagers to strangle her husband for a hundred bucks apiece. With competition like that, how does anybody make a living? I’ll tell you how. There are only maybe five or six genuine specialists that I know about, so there can’t be more than two dozen, tops. And they’re an odd bunch. You hear about movie stars and famous heart surgeons and these morons with the guitars, and somebody says they’re prima donnas. They don’t know what the hell a prima donna is.

“These specialists I’m talking about are very hard to deal with. A movie star does it for the money, sure, but he likes the applause too—the glamour, the admiration. Not these people. They honestly and sincerely don’t give a shit what you think, whether you like them or hate them; if people flock around them or avoid them, it’s all the same. A friend of mine once told me it was because their egos were so big that they didn’t think anybody else was even real. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s not out of the question. If you hear about some piece of ass who decides she’s a great actress and throws tantrums at the director, people say she’s impossible. You want to see impossible? Try sitting across a table from a guy who wouldn’t notice it if he had to tear your heart out of your chest on the way out, because he’s done it a hundred times before and he’s so good at it he can do it without having to wash his hands. Well, that was the kind of man Harry Orloff hired to delay the Senate hearings: one of the fifteen or twenty serious specialists. After that, when I said I wanted everything to be as though the whole Fieldston fiasco never happened, I was talking in general terms, and I was misunderstood.”

“What did they do?”

Balacontano sighed. “They arranged a meeting to pay him, but it was really a setup to lure him out on the Las Vegas Strip and blow his head off.”

“I take it this was without your knowledge.”

“Damned right. They only had it half figured out. They knew he could be terrible trouble and had to be out of the picture as soon as possible. They also knew that nobody strolls up to a professional killer and says, ‘Sorry, pal. It was all a mistake. The man who hired you had no right, so we’re not going to pay you.’ But what didn’t occur to them is that there’s a reason why these characters keep going into dark places with people where you know only one of them is going to come out, and it’s always the same one. I’m not saying my people should have known what the reason was, because I sure don’t. I’m saying they should have known that there was a reason, and accepted it, and given the son of a bitch his lousy two hundred thousand and prayed to God they never saw him again. It’s like watching the same dog go down a hundred rabbit holes and always come out with a belly full of rabbit. When you come to the hundred-and-first hole, do you bet on the rabbit?”

Elizabeth could see the frustration and anger growing in the old man as the story began to move closer to his own defeat. What he didn’t know was that it was hers too, seen from the other side as though through one-way glass. “What happened?”

Carl Bala smiled a sad little half-smile, and snorted as he thought about it. “You probably wonder why I can tell you all this, don’t you?”

“The question did occur to me,” Elizabeth conceded.

“Because they’re dead. Harry Orloff, all of the people I’m talking about. He killed six or eight people that night. I think he didn’t get Orloff until the next morning.” Carlo felt a little twinge at the mention of Orloff because he had ordered his death personally, but it was the same thing. He wouldn’t have had to if it hadn’t been for the Butcher’s Boy, by that time running amok: a man who had shown that he could and would do anything, who had no allegiance to anybody, no discernible fear and nothing to protect. Balacontano had simply reasoned that if Orloff were gone, the hired killer might not be able to figure out who he had been working for. That had turned out to be his third mistake. “But he didn’t stop there. He went across town to Castiglione’s house.”

“I thought the Castigliones were a Chicago family?”

Balacontano looked at her, distracted, then seemed to collect himself. He spoke patiently. “This is old Paolo I’m talking about. He was retired. Don’t get me wrong, though; Castiglione was still a very important man. In the old days he used to run Chicago. I don’t know how old he was ten years ago, but he had to be in his late eighties. He lived in a big brick house at the edge of Las Vegas because it was supposed to be good for his emphysema. Vegas was under a truce. All the families had business there, and anybody could go there. Castiglione was one of the old ones—strong, didn’t know what pity was. When he retired, he had generations of enemies. You should have seen the place he had there. From the street all you could see was a big wall. When you got through the gate it looked like the Maginot line. There were floodlights and windows like slits in a pillbox. I wouldn’t be able to swear he didn’t have the place booby-trapped too. Somebody new bought it a few years ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someday they flipped a switch in the den and half the lawn blew up.