Bad Guys Page 14

  Lando, Blaney, and Novick. Pagano. Bingo. Varga did have a bodyguard nicknamed the Hun, whose real name is Pagano, and it appears that Mr. Pagano did do dirty deeds on Varga’s orders. Like Lando, Blaney, and Novick. Gibbons had gotten what he came for.

  “Look, my friend,” Gibbons said, pointing his finger in Giovinazzo’s face, “you’ve been warned. Another attack on Varga and you’ll be charged with it. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Stick it up your ass!” the mob boss yelled as Gibbons stormed out the door.

  Outside the cop greeted him with raised eyebrows. Apparently Giovinazzo’s other visitors didn’t get him quite so riled.

  “You coming back?” the cop asked.

  “Is she?” Gibbons asked pointedly.

  He made sure the Irish kid saw him looking at his badge number before he turned and left. Heading for the elevator, Gibbons smiled maliciously to himself, knowing that the kid would sweat it out waiting for the reprimand that would never come.

  Of course, maybe the dummy would do his fucking job now and, if he was smart, get the blonde’s number for himself.

  SIXTEEN

  It was just past ten when Tozzi arrived at Leo’s Tavern, and he knew the minute he walked through the door that he’d found the torch. The little man had a voice like a two-stroke engine on a cheap motorcycle, and his nonstop yammering made the room feel more crowded than it already was. Tozzi ordered a beer and sat down at the bar. He watched Paulie Tortorella in the reflection of the mirror behind the rows of liquor bottles.

  Tortorella was sitting at a round table with a girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen and a guy in his late fifties. The man looked like he was made out of slabs of granite, all right angles, squat and rock hard. The girl was beautiful the way poor Mediterranean peasant girls are in the movies. Dark hair pulled back off her face, tight olive skin, big innocent liquid eyes, round but modest breasts under a white camp shirt. The only flaw Tozzi detected was under the table. Her ankles. She didn’t have any. Her calves were solid piping right to her feet. Strong peasant legs came with the package.

  Granite man and the girl sat elbow to elbow at one end of the small table, keeping enough personal space between them and the little loudmouth. They were sharing a bottle of wine while the dwarf was drinking something clear on the rocks.

  Tortorella was a real sketch, a hood fashion plate in miniature. Burgundy silk shirt, heavy gold chain over the exposed chest, black double-knits, pointy gray loafers with Cuban heels, and those sheer, faggy-looking nylon socks that wiseguys seem to like for some reason. Tozzi noticed that the toes of Tortorella’s shoes just barely touched the floor. He had that kind of arrogant wiseass face that begs to be punched out. High cheekbones, slit eyes, permanent sneer, pug nose with piggy nostrils. Despite Tortorella’s slick veneer, Tozzi couldn’t help thinking of Knucklehead Smith.

  “I’m telling you, Leo, this is a sure shot.” He’d said that several times since Tozzi had walked in. “Can’t miss.”

  Tozzi watched Leo the granite man—the Leo, he guessed—shake his big square gray head. “How can you be so sure?” he said, his accent as thick as his voice was deep. “Stocks are very risky business. No sure shots.”

  Tortorella shook his little apple head, a condescending smile scoring his face. “You ever hear of insider trading, Leo? What I’ve got is very similar, but better. My source is onto some very confidential information. I’m telling you as a friend. You invest in Futura Systems, and you won’t have to worry about sending Carmen here to college.” He eyed the girl as if he stood a chance with her. The little guy had more balls than brains, though. Portuguese fathers were known to maim for less, and Leo looked like a real bone crusher.

  Leo refilled his glass with red wine and tipped a little more into his daughter’s glass. There was a big plate of mussels in front of her, which she was eating slowly but steadily. Her liquid eyes rolled from Tortorella to her father to the plate of mussels in a slow, regular pattern. She ate slowly, placing the mussels on her tongue as if she were receiving Holy Communion. Tozzi noticed that she had a slight space between her teeth. She was sexy as hell. In another year or two she’d be worth tangling with Leo over, thick ankles or not.

  “How do you know this stock will split?” Leo gave him the you-lie-you-die eyeball.

  “Futura Systems is a subsidiary of Maks Enterprises. Forum International is a major stockholder in Maks and my source tells me that Forum is getting ready to mount a hostile takeover of Maks. Maks is going to fight it—”

  “Buy up their own stock, you mean.” Leo was no dummy and he wanted Tortorella to know that.

  “Exactly,” Tortorella said. “Futura is a very attractive company, one of the main reasons Forum wants Maks. That’s why Futura stock is gonna jump as soon as it gets out that Forum is out to get Maks.”

  “Have you bought any?” Leo asked.

  “Damn straight I have,” the little man announced. “Twelve grand worth.” He wanted everyone in the tavern to hear the figure.

  Leo threw his head back and held his gut. A second later he opened his mouth and let the bellowing laughter escape. “You? Twelve grand? You’re so full of shit, Paulie, you make me laugh.”

  Knucklehead Smith’s face turned very ugly then. “Hey, I’m no five-and-dime jerkoff, pal. Those days are over. I got cash to burn now, my friend. As a matter of fact, I could buy this goddamn hole of yours with pocket change. I’m making real money now.”

  Leo couldn’t stop laughing. “Yeah, yeah. Your big-deal boss Varga. You tell me all the time.”

  “Go ahead, yuk it up. Mr. Varga likes to hear about people who think he’s a joke.” Tortorella’s heavy irony was meant as a threat. Leo just waved him away with his enormous paw, but his daughter stopped eating when she heard the little man’s statement.

  The girl tilted her head toward her father and said something softly to him in Portuguese.

  “No, no,” he answered gruffly, then finished his reply in Portuguese.

  “Tell me this.” Leo turned back to Tortorella, frowning at him. “If your Varga friend is such a big mafioso, why haven’t I ever heard of him, huh? I think maybe you make him up.”

  “So how the hell do you think I got the new Eldorado parked outside? I paid for that in cash. Varga money,” he said in a stage whisper.

  “Oh, yeah? Anybody can get a car loan, Paulie. You bullshitting me again, I think.” A hard grin passed over the older man’s thick lips.

  Tortorella leaned into Leo’s face to emphasize his point. “Mr. Varga is everywhere and he’s getting into everything, Leo. But guys like Mr. Varga don’t take out ads in the paper for your benefit, Leo. Just take my word for it, the man is into a lot of things.”

  Leo remained skeptical, but his daughter seemed to be spooked by Tortorella’s ghost story. Her eyes were wide and she wasn’t blinking. She clutched her glass of wine with both hands. Maybe she’d seen a movie where the nice old man who owns the corner candy store gets roughed up by the mob punks because he won’t pay protection. Maybe she was afraid for her father. Maybe she was just grossed out by the little creep. It was hard to tell.

  The argument continued with Leo putting questions to Tortorella about Varga that sounded vaguely philosophical. It was almost as if he were asking the little man to prove the existence of God. Tortorella’s answers were vague and ambiguous. He didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know all that much about his boss.

  Tozzi paid for his beer and headed for the door. This shit was going to go on for a while, and he’d heard enough. He’d wait for Tortorella outside. As he opened the door, he glanced back once more at Leo’s daughter. She caught him looking at her and she pouted at him. Incredible, he thought. But the rush of appreciation he felt for the girl was immediately flattened by the wall of dead, humid air he walked into as he stepped out into the night.

  It was five after midnight when Tortorella finally left Leo’s. He unlocked the new black Caddy parked at the curb and hopped in, literal
ly. His method of getting into a car was something like a high jumper making a backward vault. Tortorella’s ego wouldn’t allow him to step up on the rocker panels to get in. That would be the pussy way to do it.

  Slunk down behind the wheel of the old Buick, Tozzi watched as the Caddy’s red taillights came on, then the white backup lights. His hand on the ignition, he waited for Tortorella to pull out into the street before he started up the Buick. The tired old V-8 coughed before it roared. The idle was set too high, and the front end needed a lot of work. The car drove like it had high blood pressure. Fast but unsteady. Every time he got into that car, Tozzi wondered if it would be the last time she’d turn over for him. He tapped the accelerator to calm down the engine, then put it in gear and followed Tortorella.

  Tozzi tailed the Eldorado down Ferry Street, thinking about Tortorella’s boast about paying for the car in cash. That had to be at least a twenty-five-thousand-dollar car. Banks usually don’t make loans to arsonists, even successful ones, which meant Tortorella probably did pay cash. Twenty-five grand plus twelve more to buy stocks. Tortorella was doing all right, much better than your average torch.

  When the Caddy headed under the dark steel support beams of the Pulaski Skyway, Tozzi assumed Tortorella was going to follow the truck route past the Harrison dump toward New York, but when he turned onto the Turnpike entrance, Tozzi suddenly felt something was up. He just had a feeling that this wasn’t Tortorella’s regular route. Tozzi didn’t know where the little man lived or where else he hung out, but south on the Turnpike didn’t seem right. Once you passed Elizabeth and the docks, normal people lived down that way. Victims, not hoods.

  Driving past the airport, Tozzi discovered what an erratic driver Tortorella was. He stayed in the fast lane, but he’d work his way up to seventy-five, then suddenly drop back down to fifty-five. Maybe his feet keep slipping off the pedals, Tozzi thought meanly. But this kind of driving made Tortorella hard to tail, and Tozzi had to let him get far ahead whenever he sped up so as not to be too obvious. He hoped the little bastard was so busy watching for state troopers that he didn’t notice the old brown LeSabre behind him. Fortunately for Tozzi, though, he wouldn’t get out of the left-hand lane, so that whenever Tozzi did pull up close, he could ride in Tortorella’s blind spot.

  Staring at the Eldorado’s taillights, Tozzi kept thinking about the Portuguese girl and how her composure was rattled when she discovered there was a real-live Mafia guy sitting at her table. She was so beautiful, so complete in that innocent tranquillity of hers until Tortorella mentioned the mob. Joanne was beautiful too, but it was a different kind of beauty. Her calm was cool; it came from knowledge, not innocence. She’d seen it all—certainly in terms of bad guys, she had—and the completeness of her experience made her tranquil and beautiful. It was almost fucking zen, Tozzi thought.

  At Exit 11, the Caddy suddenly turned off the highway without signaling and got onto the Garden State Parkway going south.

  “Where the hell is he going?” Tozzi wondered out loud.

  A few minutes later Tortorella got off the Parkway at the first exit he came to, Woodbridge-Perth Amboy, then wound his way around local streets until he hit Route 27, a congested four-lane strip littered with small factories, cheap motels, chain restaurants, and discount outlets. On this road he had to concentrate on keeping two cars between himself and the Caddy, auto surveillance by the book, but he was still thinking about Joanne and the Portuguese girl. Eventually they blended in his mind and became two of the same person, both perfect and perfectly desirable. It had never been easy for Tozzi to think straight about attractive women. He’d often wondered if there was something wrong with his head.

  At a traffic light, Tozzi noticed a WELCOME TO EDISON sign courtesy of the local Jaycees. Tortorella had beaten the light, and Tozzi anxiously watched the Caddy pull away, then turn into a parking lot about a hundred yards beyond the intersection. Tozzi could just make out the big yellow sign on a pole over the lot: $U$$MAN’S AUDIO-VIDEO CENTER.

  After the light turned green, Tozzi cruised past Sussman’s and turned into the next store’s lot, a carpet outlet. He cut his headlights and circled around to the back of the building and parked in the shadows.

  Tozzi sat in the dark and stared at the Caddy parked by the back door of Sussman’s with the trunk open. Tortorella was unloading something, leaving it by the door. He shut the trunk, got back into the idling car, and backed it up to the embankment at the far end of the lot, where a collection of junk trees brushed the Caddy’s roof with their drooping branches.

  In the meantime Tozzi got out of his car and tiptoed to the edge of the shadows behind the carpet outlet. The little man got out of his car and walked across the lot to the back door, about thirty yards from where Tozzi was standing. Tortorella seemed to be looking for something. He bent down and picked up a discarded Styrofoam coffee cup that was on the ground next to the dumpster, then turned it over into his hand. Walking back toward the door, he threw the cup away.

  When the door opened, Tozzi was certain that the key to the back door had been left in that coffee cup for a night visitor. By the dim light spilling out of the doorway, Tozzi could see that what Tortorella had unloaded from the car were plastic gallon jugs. Filled with something flammable, no doubt. He waited for the little man to bring his jugs in and shut the door behind him before he made a move.

  SEVENTEEN

  Paulie Tortorella went behind a counter and took out a headset radio from the display case. He turned up the volume, found his favorite FM rock station, put it on his head, and adjusted the volume back down. He liked working to music.

  Billy Joel was singing “Uptown Girl.” Paulie sang along softly with him as he fetched a gallon of gasoline and mounted the stairs to the second-floor showroom. On the way up he noticed that the carpeting was that fire-retardant industrial stuff. It didn’t matter. The flames from the first floor would take care of the second floor. He just had to make sure the roof caved in.

  He took a ten-penny common nail out of his pocket and punctured a few holes near the top of the plastic jug; then he went to work, squeezing the jug to douse the drapes, the satin promotional banners on the walls, and the ceiling. He was careful not to spray gas on the walls any lower than three feet from the floor. Investigators always look for excessive burn marks on the lower part of a wall, a sure sign that a flammable liquid was splashed around the room. Paulie prided himself on leaving no clues.

  When he ran out of gas, he tossed the crushed jug downstairs and followed after it. He was thinking about Billy Joel in greasy coveralls making time with Christie Brinkley in the “Uptown Girl” video.

  Paulie grabbed two more jugs and went down to the cellar, which had been left unlocked for him. He switched on a light and traced the water pipes until he found a rag tied around a section of pipe near the shutoff valve. He’d left instructions that a wad of candle wax be jammed into the pipe so that the sprinkler system would be choked off. By the time there was enough heat built up in the basement to melt the wax in the pipe, it would be too late for the sprinklers to do any good. Eventually the melted wax would flow out with the water, leaving no evidence of tampering. The rag marked the spot where the wax block was. Paulie noticed that somebody was even good enough to leave some broken wooden crates under the pipe just as he’d asked. He was very pleased with these arrangements.

  Paulie punctured another one of the jugs and sprayed gas on the crates and stacks of cardboard boxes all around the room, gleefully taking aim at what he thought was the most expensive merchandise.

  The deejay on the radio was giving the weather and complaining about the humidity. “Well, here’s one for the heat,” the deejay said. “‘Dancing in the Street,’ the original by Martha and the Vandellas.” Paulie was surprised and delighted that they weren’t playing the Mick Jagger-David Bowie version. He loved old Motown. Puncturing the next jug, Paulie sang out loud with Martha. He was having a good time now.

  When the jug was empty
, he drop-kicked it behind a stack of Technics turntables. It clattered loudly when it hit the concrete floor. The nice thing about these thin plastic milk jugs was that they were consumed in the fire. No evidence. The not-so-nice thing about them was that you couldn’t leave gas in them for too long. The gas eventually eats through the plastic and the jug leaks, which is not what you want in the trunk of your car. Paulie knew what he was doing, though. He knew how long you could trust these milk jugs once you filled them with gas. He also knew that you had to fill them right to the top with no air space. Air space makes fumes, and it’s the fumes that are deadly. The fumes, not the gas itself, is what ignites and explodes. A good torch is always careful about the fumes.

  Back on the first floor, Paulie picked up the last two jugs and assessed the room. They’d left a lot of boxes and cartons around the showroom the way he wanted. That was good. Electronics merchandise isn’t so flammable that it doesn’t need a little help. Especially when the carpeting is flame-retardant.

  On a shelf near the cash register, there was an old-fashioned radio in a cathedral-shaped wooden cabinet. Paulie had asked that an old radio be here for this job. Standing on a chair, he turned it on with his knuckles, turned down the volume, then peeked around the back to make sure the tubes were starting to glow. Transistors don’t get hot, but tubes do. Someone left this old mama on all night, a tube exploded, the wooden cabinet started to smolder, and that’s how the fire started. At least, that’s how it will appear to have started.

  A fucking genius is what I am, Paulie thought to himself. He admired the old radio. This is real genius. That Stevie, man. You ask him for something, and it’s always right there where you want it, no fail. Good man.

  Paulie didn’t give a shit what they said about him. Stevie Pagano was all right as far as he was concerned. Stevie always had jobs for him, good jobs like this one. When Paulie asked for certain things to be on the job waiting for him—rooms to be set up a certain way, wax in the pipes, whatever—Stevie made sure it got done. And Pagano always paid promptly. By the end of the week the cash just appeared in the safety-deposit box at Paulie’s bank, like magic. Yeah, working for Richie Varga’s family was all right.