The Shadow Box (47 page)

He wanted to ask Jake if that man in Palm Beach, that
Walter, was the one who murdered him. But he didn't.
That would have been crossing the line into crazy. If Jake
was to say yes, Moon knew it would just be his own heart
again telling him to stop feeling bad about that choke hold.

But if it
was
Walter, he liked to think that Jake was
standing there waiting for him when Walter went to his
judgment. Jake would have worked out a deal with God.
“
Tell you what,''
he would have said. 
“
Give me ten min
utes alone with this son of a bitch and I'll do an extra
year in purgatory.''

If God's any kind of a mensch, he'd have gone for it.

Might not care for the cussin', though.

Moon's watch said half past twelve. He knew he was
stalling because he was not looking forward to facing
Doyle. Going over to see Julie wasn't much better. You
got one who says, “Let's wait,” and one who says, “Let's
go blow their fucking heads off.”

What he'd do, he decided, was sort of take the middle
road. He'd go find Johnny G.

Today's Thursday? Johnny would be down the docks.
On the way, he'd find a drugstore, see about getting his prescriptions refilled.

Chapter 29

“Rasmussen” turned
out to be the magic word.

Whatever it meant, whoever was who, it had worked
for Parker just as well as it had worked for Doyle. It made
the old man tell his Germans to get out. Made him shut
up and listen for a change. Best of all, thought Parker, he
had bought himself some time. Until he and the Baron
had that little talk, he couldn't really afford to blow this
burg anyway. But now, one way or another, give him three
or four days and he just might be rich enough to do it.

By most standards, he was rich already. What Parker
had, if he added it all up, came to about four million. Not
bad for an ex-cop. Time was, he'd have been in pig heaven
to have even a tenth of that put away. But economics
aren't what they used to be.

Out of the four, about a million is in real estate which
the Baron and Hobbs know nothing about. There's the
house in Seattle, a restored Victorian, great view, looks
out on Puget Sound. There's also a condo in Italy, up by
Lake Como, and the place in Guatemala that is on a nice beach but the neighborhood otherwise sucks because ev
eryone down there is either a retired drug dealer, or under indictment somewhere else, or some old-fart Nazi left over
from Hitler.

He
got all new paper to go with each address. Like,
in Seattle he'll be Granville “Granny” Futterman, origi
nally from Pittsburgh where he owned a couple of Auto-
Lubes. He picked that name himself. No one ever wonders
if a name like that is an alias and there are only so many
questions they can ask about the Auto-Lube game. He
might even get new teeth.

There's another half million or so divided between those
three houses. All under the floorboards except in Guate
mala where it's in gold instead of cash because the rats
there tend to make nests out of currency. Guatemala is his
last choice anyway. He's seen enough spies and Germans
for a lifetime.

The point is, these are not what you'd call liquid assets.
Italy and Guatemala have to stay intact in case, for exam
ple, he runs into someone he knows in some Seattle gin
mill and he can't be Granny Futterman anymore. Plus, the
Seattle real estate market is still in the shithouse. It could
take him two years to get his money back out of that
house.

A third million, give or take, is what Parker Security
Services, Inc., would bring if he could sell it. But that's
a total write-off if he splits. The revenues dry up the day
he goes and it's not like Bu
rns
or Pinkerton will be lining
up to bid on what's left. There's also maybe a half-million
bucks worth of chemicals back at his office, sitting in drums and on pallets, which he wished he'd lined up a
buyer for but now he didn't think he'd have time.

There's a small stash here in the city but that's traveling
money. All the rest, like a jerk, he took in AdChem stock,
which, along with most of the industry, will be even
deeper in the toilet than West Coast real estate. He could
sell it but he'd have to do that, like, in five-thousand-share lots and over a year's time so the sale wouldn't raise any eyebrows or get back to the Baron. He didn't have a year.
The way things were going, he'd be lucky to have two
weeks.

So what's the bottom line?

He could bag this thing now and have three houses plus
about six hundred thousand in cash. Spend it living half
way decently, and it's gone in five years. He could invest
it, live on the interest, but if interest rates don't shoot up
a lot more than they have, we're talking maybe forty grand
a year. He did better than that as a cop. He'd have almost
that much if he'd stayed on and gotten his pension. Fat
chance, though. He was one step ahead of an indictment.
But at least he stayed long enough to catch old Bart
Hobbs, that pillar of the financial community, bankrolling
a drug buy.

A lot of them did that. Hobbs just got greedier than
most and he got stupid.

The way it usually would happen, word would get
around that so and so, some lawyer, some accountant, can
turn a hundred grand into two hundred grand, tax free,
within five days. It's to make a buy and everyone knows
it but no one ever says that out loud. All you're doing is
lending this guy some money. If he even
mentions
the
word “drugs,” you say, “How dare you suggest such a
thing” and you get up and walk away because you know
he's wearing a wire. To be on the safe side, go back to
your office and call the cops on him.

There's a risk you can lose your hundred but it's no
worse than one chance in fifty that you will because
ninety-eight percent of these deals go through. So, even if a shipment gets seized, you just put up more money on
another deal because the law of averages says you can't
lose. The dealers won't screw you because they're not
about to rob their own bank. The middleman won't be
cause the dealer would cut his balls off.

But Hobbs, would you believe, decides to cut out the
middleman. Two to one isn't good enough. He wants three to one. Half the people he knows are doing cocaine so he
tells one of them he wants to meet a dealer. The guy he asks has a possession rap pending so he flips Hobbs in
return for a free ride and sets him up with an under
cover cop.

Guess who?

All this, mind you, while Hobbs is already making very
big money by driving down the value of a bunch of little
companies so that AdChem can pick them up for a song.
He's also AdChem's bag man for buying secrets from
rival companies and for paying off certain government
insiders, one of whom turned out to be Turkel.

Turkel's basically a shlub. But he ran a print shop in
the basement of the FDA where they circulate confidential
reports on what the big drug companies are developing,
what's about to
get
approved, what isn't, and what drugs
are about to be recalled. He knows who the FDA is in
vestigating on suspicion of fudging test results. No com
pany fakes them entirely but sometimes, for example, their
lab animals die when they shouldn't and no one knows
why. Rather than go back to square one, they'll replace
those dead animals with new live ones. All rats look
alike, right?

Turkel's not supposed to be reading this stuff. He's
supposed to print up, say, fifteen copies and assign a num
ber to each one, then seal each in a special envelope for
distribution to the people on a special list. They are then
individually responsible for the security of their numbered
copies. This is supposed to ensure confidentiality but ev
eryone but the FDA knows that confidentiality went out
with the invention of the Xerox.

He knows that this knowledge is worth money. The big
money would be in tipping the drug companies but Turk
e
l
has no idea how to make the approach. You don't just
call up and ask for the president. What if he's honest?
What if he pretends to go along but sets up a sting?
There's Turkel, in a public crapper, passing copies of doc
uments under the stall and the FBI kicks in the door just
as he's taking the cash. Seen it a hundred times on TV.

Being too nervous to steal, Turkel plays the market in
stead. He knows when a stock is likely to shoot up and
when it's likely to drop like a stone. He knows what new
issues can't lose and which ones will be a disaster. He's
doing okay but he's trading in hundred-share lots because he doesn't have much money. So he takes out a loan and
now he feels like a player. Being a schmuck, he plays in
his own name. Luckily, he's still not playing for serious money, otherwise the SEC would have spotted him in a
minute. But he's scoring just enough, and often enough,
to make his name pop up on the Lehman-Stone computer.
Hobbs tracks him to the FDA basement and knows he has
a live one. He flies down to Washington, finds Turkel
driving a new BMW, and explains the facts of life to him.