The Shadow Cabinet (56 page)

“Do you think you could get Chuck Larabee to meet us at Fred Merkle's office? Eight o'clock?” he asked Klempner after he hung up. “If you could, we could wrap this up tonight. I've got to go out to St. Elizabeths to check on something.”

8.

The exercise rooms of the men's health club on the sixth floor of the K Street office building were deserted that snowy Friday evening except for the weight and body-bag room. Chuck Larabee had been working out alone when Klempner surprised him.

“Dog food,” Klempner said, pumping the leather medicine bag so violently against Larabee's midsection that he went down again, his flushed face drenched with sweat, his lip cut, his gray sweatshirt soaked. “You don't wanna go talk to Merkle, we'll try dog food for a change. What do you figure people spend a year—ten, fifteen million? Come on, Larabee, tell me about dog chow. How much?”

He lifted Larabee by a limp arm, eased him back against the padded wall, and bent to retrieve one of the leather gloves that had fallen from Larabee's dangling hand. “Come on, Chuck babe, try again. We go three rounds this time, you do the talking. I'll only use my left, O.K.?”

Larabee, seeing his opportunity as Klempner pulled on the body-bag glove, swung groggily with his right hand but missed. Klempner, in coat and tie, did a small shuffle as he moved in. “Left hand up, right. That's it, except higher. Now you're getting it. Coming at you now, Chuck. Ready? That's it, keep the left up there.” He dropped his own left and feinted with his right. Larabee took the feint, moved his hands, and Klempner smashed him sideways along the padded wall. Larabee reeled drunkenly along the wall, stumbled, and collapsed to his knees.

“What are you trying to tell me—you don't know dog chow, is that it? What about something you know about? Something easy—like Morris. You don't wanna talk to Merkle about Morris? Shit, you're a tough customer, Chuck. You're really making it tough on me. How about kid prostitutes—that your category? What about runaway kid prostitutes in the U.S.—a hundred, two hundred thou? Come on, Chuckie.…”

“Keep away from me,” Larabee muttered, drooling blood from his cut lip as he leaned exhausted against the padded wall.

“What do you say—a hundred thou?” Klempner continued softly. “Don't be wrong, Chuck, I wanna keep you in one piece for Merkle. What do you think—got any ideas?” He picked Larabee up and draped him across the leather vaulting horse, walked around to the other side, and lifted Larabee's chin with his ungloved hand. “Got an answer yet, Chuck? No? It's the old gong show for you.” He knocked him off the vaulting horse. “Six hundred thousand kid prostitutes in the U.S.—runaways. Read about it in the barbershop magazine. Doesn't that turn your stomach, Chuck? I mean, even a shit like you's gotta have feelings. How about video games? You like Atari, Chuck. You play a little Atari over in that Crystal City pad of yours? Come on, man, there's gotta be something you know about. You don't know about Morris and that scam of his, we'll play video games, right?”

“Leave me alone, you crazy …”

“Crazy what? Get it out, Chuck. Crazy what?” He dragged Larabee across the room and lifted him up against the body bag. “Hold on right there, just stand up, Chuck, like someone was taking your picture. That's it. So how much are these video games gonna gross this year—two million, three million?” Larabee held to the swaying bag. “Come on, Chuck, give it some heavy thought. How much?” Larabee didn't answer. Klempner hit the bag softly once, then a second time, then battered it away from Larabee's embrace. Larabee stood there, exposed, and Klempner slammed him in the stomach.

“Hey, Chuck,” he said softly, bending over him again, “you were standing in the nitro zone, pal. Six billion, Chuck, that's the gross—bigger than the movies. Was that what you were thinking? You gotta get it out, man, like what happened that night Morris disappeared. No use keeping it all in. Six billion, Chuck. That's a whole lotta money for electric Ping-Pong, isn't it? A whole lotta money for a bunch of cheesy functional illiterates the schools are turning out just so they can hang around the fucking arcades all day. They won't turn out any better than me and you did, Chuck—me a sadist, you a goddamn pimp. What do you figure for a country that lets half a million kid prostitutes walk the streets up in New York and then spends a couple of billion dollars a year on dog chow and electric Ping-Pong? How does a shithead like you figure it, a fucking meatball in a classy gym like this that when a guy comes at him can't think whether to hold up his dukes or his pants. You're in a bad way, Chuck. So tell me about that Caltronics scam. Who was it warned Morris off that night? I've got a reputation to protect, asshole. Some of those guys down there at Justice think maybe I got a piece of that money.…”

Klempner rolled him over, flipped his arm behind his back, and locking his knee against Larabee's midsection, brought the arm up. “Come on, Larabee. I'm gonna break your fucking arm, you don't bend—”

But Larabee cried out and Klempner relented. He stood up and crossed the room to unlock the door. He stooped at the water fountain in the hall outside, red-faced. A small Filipino in white ducks, white sneakers, and white shirt padded up the corridor from the locker room with a few towels over his arm. He stopped to look in the door.

“You looking for something?” Klempner asked.

“Mr. Larabee.”

Klempner moved back to the door. “He's been sparring, shadow boxing a couple of rounds.”

“I have to close up.”

“I'll tell him, he's all punched out.”

Klempner went back into the room and shut the door. “Come on, Larabee, let's go. Where's your self-respect, lying there like a goddamn douche bag.” He straddled him and lifted him by his waist, pumping air back into his lungs. “You were an old Navy man—right, Chuck? How about Vietnam? I heard you were in Vietnam. What'd you do—run the Saigon commissary?” Larabee's mouth opened, he stirred crablike on the floor, and Klempner dragged him back against the padded wall. “What about combat stats over there in Vietnam, Chuck? You know anything about that?” He gently slapped his face and Larabee slowly opened his eyes. The knock came at the door. “Think about how many GIs got their wounds in combat, Chuck.”

The Filipino gym attendant stood at the door, wearing an overcoat and holding a gym bag. He said he had to leave.

“Tell you what I'll do,” Klempner proposed, taking out his wallet. He removed five dollars. “It's Chuck's birthday. He says take your kids to the flicks. He'll lock the door after him.”

“Tell him to turn the key twice.”

“Got you—twice. Twice, you hear that, Chuck?” He shut the door.

Larabee had slumped silently to his side, head against the mat as he gazed at the stooping Klempner with glazed, distant eyes.

“You're gonna get a cardiac,” Klempner said even more softly. “You're gonna get a fucking cardiac right here and on Monday morning that's the way they're gonna find you, just slumped over like that. Your lips are turning blue already; that's a bad sign. I mean, a guy boozes too much, smokes too much, grunts around in the sack too much with these hookers, and then comes over here to work it all out, and it just breaks him all up inside. You're feeling that now, aren't you? Feeling it all inside, like the old ticker's about to peel its skin. Your knees are dancing, like your chest. Feel your chest, Chuckie. Go ahead, feel it—what they call a fibrillation. That's tough shit, Chuckie babe, because we've still got five rounds to go.…”

He jerked Larabee to his feet, slung one arm over his shoulder, and carried him across the room to drape him over the leather vaulting bar. Larabee grunted unintelligibly, his eyes rolled back in his skull, and he slid back to the floor mat, where he lay on his back, eyes open, blinking at the wire-caged lights overhead.

“You wanna tell me about it now, Larabee?” Klempner whispered, bending near. “Tell me what you're gonna say when we go down and talk to Fred Merkle. I'm not gonna ask you again.…”

Larabee seemed to respond, holding his chest, his eyes half-open.

“Was it you called Morris that Monday night, told him to lie low?”

He was slow in answering and Klempner grabbed his arm.

His eyes closed again. It was a long time before he answered, as if he were carefully hoarding his breath in lungs that wouldn't survive the night.

“Strykker,” he said weakly. “I didn't know anything, but it had to be Strykker.”

He was still wobbly when Klempner led him into the Justice Department suite where Fred Merkle and Wilson were waiting. His feet shuffled, like an old man's. He didn't seem to know where he was as he collapsed down in a chair, but Klempner said he was ready to make a statement. Fred Merkle took one look at his face and decided not to wait. On the basis of what Haven Wilson had already told him, he'd decided to move immediately, before it was too late.

The short, dark day was over. It was a quiet suburban night in a quiet suburban neighborhood. The snow flurries were still intermittent, barely discernible in the pools of white light atop the rustic lampposts of the Rockville subdivision. A faint frosting of snow lay over the streets and lawns, over the parked cars and the rail fences. Living room windows were lit, soft rectangles of orange and yellow blooming softly out from behind the white-shrouded shrubbery.

In the first sedan, a federal marshal and a Justice Department investigator sat in the front seat. Wilson sat alone in back. Klempner followed in his own car.

A new Toyota was parked in the drive of the last town house, not used since the snow began to fall. A television set was turned on in the living room. Wilson rang the door chimes and the U.S. marshal moved to one side of the porch, Klempner to the other. A thin, dark-haired woman in jeans opened the inner door.

“I'm from up the street,” Wilson said, taking off his hat. “I wonder if I could talk to your husband.”

“What about?”

“The Optimist Club raffle; I mentioned it to him the other day.”

She stood watching him uncertainly, drying her hands on the towel. “I'll get him.”

He appeared a few minutes later, beard and hair even longer now, sleepy-eyed, in stocking feet, wearing a flannel shirt. Only after he turned on the porch light did he recognize Wilson and then stood looking at him suspiciously. “What the shit do you want?”

“To talk for a few minutes?”

“Nothing to talk about. I told you all I know.”

“It'll just take a minute.”

He hesitated, looked back in the hall, and then pushed open the metal storm door. “Listen, hey—” Then he saw Klempner's huge figure standing to one side. “Fuck you, man.” He slammed the door shut.

“Take the back,” the marshal called, and Klempner bolted from the porch and around the side. The marshal pushed in through the front door, Wilson at his heels. They went down the hall, down the steps, and into the bright kitchen. The sliding door that led to the terrace was open. The dark-haired girl was backed up against the refrigerator. “U.S. marshal. Does he have a weapon?”

“He doesn't even have his shoes on.”

“It's all right,” Wilson told her. “Nothing's going to happen to him. The marshal's got a warrant.”

Footprints led across the terrace and disappeared into the small, dark yard. Klempner stood at the side gate. “Not this way,” he said. The girl turned on the patio lights and followed them out. “Let me talk to him,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“Come on, Gary! Don't be stupid, it's a U.S. marshal.”

They waited, looking out into the darkness. “Is there a way out?” the marshal asked.

“Just the high fence. Come on, Gary, don't be dumb. They want to talk, that's all!”

Again they waited.

“Come on, Morris—use your head!” the marshal called.

“Listen to him, Gary!”

After a moment they heard his voice. “I wanna lawyer.” It was muffled and weak.

“He's in the toolshed,” she said. She brought a flashlight from the kitchen and handed it to the marshal. “Just ask him nice. He's all talk. He wouldn't hurt a fly.”

She watched as they went back toward the portable toolshed built up against the high paling fence. The marshal flashed the light against the closed wooden door. “Come on out, Morris,” the marshal said easily. “We'd like to talk to you.”

Silence. Then, “Get that Klempner hoodlum away from me.”

“He's not going to bother you. I asked him to come along. You're in U.S. custody.”

They waited. A few minutes passed and then the door opened slowly. Morris came out, his hands locked behind his head. He blinked painfully in the powerful beam of the flashlight. The marshal lowered the light and Morris marched back across the snowy yard in his stocking feet, his hands still behind his head, elbows out in some heroic parody of a Hollywood war movie.

“You can drop them now, Morris,” the marshal told him as they reached the terrace steps.

Morris turned to look at Wilson, like an actor who'd just given a cunning performance. “Like the tiger cage at Lang Vei, right, Wilson? Man, I really had you fuckers going, didn't I? You really gobbled that shit up.”

“It was stupid, the whole masquerade.”

“How'd you know?”

“Little things. Your hands, for one. You talk too much, for another. The St. Elizabeths incident never happened.”

“Shit, man, what'd you want me to do? I was home free until you come nosing around. I had to lose you quick.”

“Where's Cronin?”

“He freaked out. The same day he crashed you on the beltway. Wendy and me took him up to that VA hospital in New York.” Klempner came up the steps behind him and Morris said, “Hey, you got a cigarette, Klempner? I'm still your main man, right? Federal witness program?” But Klempner made an abrupt move toward him and Morris bolted through the door. “Hey, listen, no rough stuff. I'm gonna make you guys look real good, what I got on that schlemiel Strykker and his Caltronics scam.…”