Authors: John McEvoy
High Stakes (7 page)
Six hours away in Ireland, as Jack and Moe were waving good-bye to the effusively grateful Al Fresca on North Clark Street in Chicago, Niall Hanratty walked out of the Kinsale headquarters of his Shamrock Off-Course Wagering firm and took a deep breath of the early evening air. Sleeves still rolled up, suit jacket carried over his shoulder, a bounce in his step even after the twelve-hour stint he'd just put in. It had been a huge winning day, one of the best in the fifteen-year history of Shamrock and its forty-four-year-old founder and owner. Hanratty had suspected as much. His hopes were confirmed by Tony Rourke's final tally of the day. Business had boomed at nearly every one of the Shamrock shops scattered about Ireland, making prospects look bright for the establishment of two new ones in England. As usual, the famous race meeting at Royal Ascot across the Irish Sea stimulated bettors' plans and hopes and, today with a flourish, Shamrock's bottom line.
Even now, going on nine, the streets and sidewalks of this small, picturesque town were crowded. Hanratty paused at the entrance to his parking lot to inhale the familiar smell of the nearby harbor. He speed-dialed his home. “Sheila, we've had a brilliant day,” he told his wife. “Tell the boys to wash up and get ready. We'll go out for dinner tonight, right?”
“Grand idea, Niall. I'll have them ready. Dermot is due back just now from hurling practice. Pat and Liam are out in the pool. We'll be quick. I'm eager to hear about your day. Will you be along soon, now?”
“Ten minutes, tops. Then I'll shower quick, change clothes, and we'll be off. Do you mind going back into town to Moran's? If not, call ahead, ask for our regular table on the patio.” Hanratty smiled as he heard her enthusiastic reply.
Four and a half miles up the coast road, as he listened to his new CD of The Chieftains, the descending sun was layering light on the blue-green waves of the sea. Niall shaded his eyes and lowered the driver's seat visor as he made the turn leading to his home two miles away. He slowed the BMW at the spot where the road narrowed next to a cliff overlooking the churning waters.
The Chieftains' music suddenly blared, then just as suddenly stopped, as the BMW seemed to hit a snag and veer violently. Niall fought the pulling steering wheel. He heard a thumping sound as first the right rear tire blew apart, then the right front. The vehicle violently veered toward the cliff edge.
Niall pumped the brake. Wrenched the steering wheel to the left as he neared the drop-off. The knuckles of his large hands on the steering wheel were bone white. “Aw, Jaysus,” he muttered as he exerted every ounce of his panicked strength.
Two seconds later, the BMW came to a tottering halt on the cliff's edge. Hanratty sat still. Breathing heavily, he was careful to keep himself centered in his seat. The BMW's right front tilted precariously. He carefully detached his seat belt and opened his door. He leaned out and placed his left hand on the graveled roadside. He slowly shifted his body toward the door and began to ease out.
Niall was nearly free when his right foot caught on the slowly receding lower edge of the driver's side door. He felt himself being pulled back with the now moving auto. Both hands gripping at the roadway gravel, he kicked as hard as he could. His foot came free. He fell facedown before turning up and onto his side in time to see his BMW tilt and began its end-over-end descent to the boulder-strewn border of the beach three hundred meters down.
He got to his feet and looked down at the debris of his auto. “Thank God there was no one on that strand when that happened,” he said to himself. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with a slightly trembling right hand. Wiped the smear of blood off his forehead which he'd scraped on the roadway. “And thank you, Lord, that I wasn't down there for that landing.”
After retrieving the cell phone that had fallen from his shirt pocket, he began walking up the side road to the highway. He took several deep breaths before Sheila picked up and he told her he'd “be a bit late. I'll tell you why when I get there.” He cut off the connection before she could launch a question.
Walking down the gravel-bordered coast road toward home, Hanratty thought,
This
was no feckin' accident
.
Not with two blown tires
.” Striding more quickly now, his jaw set, he called the cell phone of an old friend, Kinsale Garda Captain Dion Fryer. Filled him in on what Niall said were “recent happenings out here, my friend. When you dig my auto out of the rocks and sand, you'll see what caused that mess. Call me when you know anything.”
Only a few yards after Niall had turned onto the main road leading to his home, his neighbor Emma Morrissey pulled up beside him in her station wagon. “A lift, then, Niall?” she said, leaning across the passenger seat toward the door she'd opened. Emma took a long look at Hanratty's scraped face and dusty clothes. He said, “Had an accident, Emma. Thanks for stopping.”
When Niall walked in his door, Sheila looked up and frowned. “What happened to you? Was that Emma dropping you off?”
Niall took off his jacket with its newly torn sleeves, put his cell phone on one of the front hall tables. “Tell you what. I'll give you the whole story after I use the shower and change. Tell Moran's we'll be a bit late. We'll have to take your SUV.” He gave her quick kiss and trotted up the stairs.
Garda Captain Fryer called Hanratty just as he and his family were finishing their desserts at Moran's. Neil excused himself and walked out onto the patio. “What is it, Dion?”
“Niall, both your right tires were punctured. Not so that you'd feel it when you first started driving, but soon enough. Must have been done right before you got in the car. Actually, I'm surprised you drove as far as you did before those tires fully gave way. Obviously, the cuts were not from the tumble down the cliff, Niall. This was some mischief purposely done, and malicious mischief at that. You're lucky you got out of the car in time.”
Hanratty's jaw tightened as he heard Fryer ask, “Any idea, now, Niall, who'd be doing something like this to you?”
“No, Dion. There were a couple of other little incidents before this that I didn't take too seriously. I see now that was a mistake. Some
gombeen
has surely got it in for me. I've got to find out who.”
Anyone bothering to watch as they took their slow-paced morning laps around the Lexford Federal Prison exercise yard would have considered them to be an unlikely pairing. The older, shorter, heavyset man was continually voluble, hands active as he slashed the air, emphasizing his talking points. Next to him, the somewhat younger, much taller, much slimmer man was mainly silent, bent forward to listen to his companion. He occasionally stopped to adjust the new hearing aid he'd received two days before.
It was an overcast, unusually cool summer day in northwestern Wisconsin. Other prisoners perambulating inside the double-fenced perimeters wore windbreakers and caps. The Odd Couple strolled along unconcerned by matters farenheit, wearing their government-issued garb of khaki shirts tucked into khaki trousers, brown work boots. Harvey Rexroth was a large shirt, forty-inch waist, size nine footwear. Aldo Caveretta was medium shirt, thirty-three-inch waist, an eleven D.
Rexroth had been born into wealth and raised and pampered from childhood. Caveretta was a middle-class product of a small Kansas City suburb populated by third-generation Italian-Americans, most of them upright and law-abiding citizens. He had been recruited by the minority as a bright teenager, his college and law school educations surreptitiously financed by it. On their prison yard strolls, the stocky, completely bald Rexroth, referred to as Daddy Warbucks by some of the inmates, had to look up at his lanky, composed companion.
The Lexford Prison wardrobe was a continual irritant to Rexroth, a man previously accustomed to five thousand-dollar suits, imported handmade shirts, and custom-made ties, the cost of any one of which would feed an extended family in a Red Lobster Restaurant on any given night. Besides the expensive clothes, he missed the absence of servants, the expensive and nubile young women he retained for various entertainment purposes, the cadre of fawning order-takers that had surrounded him in each of his four luxurious U.S. residences and at his Bahamian estate, during his glorious dominating period when he headed his inherited media conglomerate. Though it had wound up putting him in Lexford, Rexroth even somewhat missed the less-than-successful thoroughbred racehorse operation he'd launched. That was it. He had no immediate family. His closest business cohort was tucked away in a different federal prison. But far outweighing all of this was Rexroth's molten hatred for the man who helped the FBI put him in Lexford on charges of insurance fraud and racketeering.
Caveretta was in residence as a result of a multi-charge racketeering conviction. It stemmed from his longtime role as legal advisor to Marco Scaravilli, Jr., veteran head of the Kansas City Outfit. Neither the attorney nor the media mogul ever mentioned the chain of events that had landed them in Lexford, though each man was well aware of the other's background.
The regular morning exercise the chunky media baron and the lanky lawyer engaged in was mandatory at Lexford, one of the so-called country club prisons in the federal penal chain. It featured minimum-security, healthy and not unappetizing menus, psychological counseling, tennis and
bocce
courts (in deference to high-ranking Outfit members, primarily from Chicago and Cleveland), horseshoe pits, convenient phone access, and a softball diamond that was seldom used since most of the potential players were middle-aged or older, well past even sixteen-inch slow pitch days.
Behind Lexford's double-fenced boundaries there lived in modest, but quite comfortable, cubicle housing some five hundred convicted white collar criminals who had dirtied their pinkies in physically non-violent ways. Among them were two ex-governors of a Midwestern state notable for producing such offenders, two former U.S. Congressmen, a scattering of various states' legislators. The majority of the population was comprised of felonious investment experts and banking executives, thieving businessmen, and corrupted attorneys. Among the latter was Rexroth's companion, Caveretta, on enforced sabbatical from his post as
consigliorie
for the Scaravilli Family.
This was at least the fifth time that the persistent Rexroth had questioned Caveretta about the progress, or lack of it, of their current project, which was arranging for someone to murder Rexroth's nemesis, Jack Doyle. It was Doyle, posing as a veteran horseman and working at Rexroth's huge Kentucky breeding farm, who had come up with the evidence of the cold-blooded killings of heavily insured stallions that eventually led to Rexroth's conviction.
Toward the end of their first year at Lexford, Rexroth and Caveretta found themselves sharing the same psychiatric counselor, Dr. Patricia Hough. Even this practiced practitioner marveled at the two men's shared ignorance of, or outright contempt for, morality. Rexroth enthusiastically regaled the stunned doctor with tales of his lifelong ethical duplicity. Caveretta was far less forthcoming, but the similarities between his life views regarding people who for some reason “owed,” and those of Rexroth, stunned Dr. Hough. She considered it not surprising that these two men bonded while waiting for their appointments in their uneasy counselor's outer office.
So, when Rexroth asked his new friend during one of their spring morning walks if he could arrange to have someone killed, the response was a simple “Who?”
“A sneaky bastard named Jack Doyle. A Chicago guy.”
Caveretta stopped. “Not, I presume, mobbed up in any way.”
Rexroth said, “Of course not. The man is a tool of our repressive federal government.” He took a couple of steps and deep breaths. No time to engage in another right-wing rant. “I don't know any Mafia people.”
Caveretta smiled as he walked forward. “You must think you do
now
. Or you wouldn't be bringing this up, Harvey.”
A tennis ball flew over the nearby court fence toward them, its propellant cursing at its flight. Caveretta reached up a big hand and snatched it out of the air. Tossed it back over the fence.
Caveretta said, “I'm not going to ask you why you want this guy killed. My question, Harvey, is this. How much will you pay? You want it done soon, it'll cost you. I'd put it at fifty grand before I even talk to my people. That would be wired to a bank routing number.
All
in advance.
Capice
?”
Rexroth shrugged. “Piffle.”
Caveretta stopped walking. “Did you say cripple? You want a crippled hit man?”
“I said, âpiffle.' You know, a mere bagatelle.”
Caveretta leaned toward Rexroth, puzzlement evident on his long, sallow face. “A dear rag and bell? What the hell are you talking about?” Irritated, he fiddled with his hearing aide, muttering, “Fuckin' government-issue.”
Rexroth, trying to tamp down the level of his irritation, said, louder, “Never mind. Can you get this done, Aldo? Every day that conniving bastard keeps breathing makes me seethe. I need him gone.” Another right-handed chopping of the air for emphasis.
Caveretta glanced behind him before saying, “Look, Harvey, this kind of project cannot be carried out in days. I have to talk to people. Not just over the phones here with the fed ears stuck to the line. I have to use other methods of communication. It'll take some time.”
They walked to the northwest corner of the fence before turning back. Rexroth was trying to contain his exuberance as they passed under a guard tower, ignoring one of the resident Prairie State ex-governors also walking beneath it who strode past, smiling and waving at them.
“Stupid bastard must think he's running for office,” Rexroth snorted. “To think I shoveled major money to that nitwit's campaign. I thought he was a cleverer crook than he turned out to be.” Rexroth shook his head in disgust. “You just can't count on a lot of those thieving bastards.”
They turned left at the southern barrier, heading back toward the entrance, before Rexroth suddenly stopped and grabbed Aldo's elbow. “My friend, who do you think would carry out this, uh, assignment? I've heard about guys like Slicer Sam, Golf Bag, Stan Hunt, Jimmy Nibbles. Will you get somebody like that for this?” Rexroth said eagerly. He frowned before adding, “Especially for this kind of money?”
“Jimmy What?” Caveretta said. Agitated, he took another try at properly adjusting the beige item in his right ear. “Harvey, those are all bullshit names. People see them in movies, TV, and think that's what our guys are called. Our people have regular names. None of which,” he said, opening the door for Rexroth, “you will ever know.”