The syndicate, p.34
The Syndicate, page 34
Craine studied him, knowing that Kastel’s reaction would give more away than his answers.
“You didn’t know each other in New York but you were pals from Chicago. You both worked for Paul Ricca. Then you joined up together. Served together in the Pacific.”
“We both served. So what? Most men did. Only fucking cowards like you escaped the draft.”
Craine placed the photograph of Harvey Sterling’s platoon on the table. In the very center was a man with two vertical bars on his helmet. Kastel.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone you were in the same company as Harvey Sterling? Not even the same company. The same platoon,” he said, to no response. “Given Siegel was shot with a long-range carbine, why wouldn’t you mention that Harvey Sterling was a sniper? You didn’t think it was relevant?”
Lansky looked at Kastel and the color left his face.
“Mr. Lansky, I’m not taking this from him.”
Lansky narrowed his eyes. “Let Craine speak.”
Craine had never been much of an investigator. Never had much of an instinct for these things. But what he did have was a surety that Kastel was responsible for Siegel’s murder. Not because of the weight of the evidence. But because of Kastel’s reaction to it.
For a long time he seemed unable to speak, but then Kastel drew breath.
“Sir, this man is deluded. He’s not even a real detective. He’s a sham.”
“That’s what you were hoping. That I wouldn’t be able to handle the investigation, or at most that I’d discover Harvey. But no further than that. I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you.”
“He’s twisting things. He’s got no proof.”
“This is the proof,” Craine said, ignoring the interruption. “Your ultimatum on Wednesday. Delivered on behalf of Mr. Lansky. That I should shoot myself and give up the investigation or my son would be killed.”
Meyer Lansky frowned. “I never gave that order.”
When Kastel’s expression didn’t change, Craine said: “It was a risky move, but you were worried. I suspect Harvey had called and told you we were getting closer. That we hadn’t believed Charlie Hill was responsible and had tracked down Joyce Mills, a woman the F.B.I. used to set Siegel up. So you were hoping I’d take the easy option and kill myself. And then I suspect you were going to shoot Abe too, in case he ever said anything. Wouldn’t be hard. It would look like we killed each other.”
Kastel began to rub his arm.
“Sir, I had to. They were drawing too much attention to—”
“People think homicide detectives care about motive in a murder case. That’s not true. There’s who, there’s what and there’s how. Who cares why?” Craine continued, delivering Kastel’s confession for him. “Maybe you did it because Ricca paid you. Maybe it was part of your deal with the F.B.I. when Ricca went to jail and you didn’t. I couldn’t care less. But I suspect if Mr. Lansky looks into your finances he’ll find the money trail.”
Kastel didn’t say anything.
“And I’m not sure if you paid Harvey Sterling or if you threatened him. Maybe it’s both. He’s got two young children and you know he’s vulnerable. In fact, you know how his mind works—you were his platoon commander. So when the deal is done with the F.B.I. and Chicago, you need a triggerman who can’t be traced back to you. So you call your old army pal Harvey. You explain to him that Siegel needs to be killed. Maybe you make up a reason but you make sure no one else knows. And when he wavers, you remind him you’re his senior. In the army and in the syndicate. And when he wavers again, you threaten his family.”
“You’re making this up. Harvey Sterling murdered them.”
Abe spoke up. “When we confronted Harvey, he told us, ‘He said he’d kill Lucy and the kids.’ ”
“Chicago,” Kastel said. “Paul Ricca.”
“No, not Chicago. Someone else. Someone capable of murdering Harvey’s family before he got home.”
Kastel’s eyes unconsciously moved to Lansky. The older man was glaring at him.
“And that’s what you did, Kastel. You went to his house and murdered them.”
Kastel was scratching the back of his wrist. He shrugged in his suit, like it was ridden with bed bugs. Withdrawal symptoms.
“How did it feel to kill his children?” Craine asked. “Or were you so pumped up on bennies you didn’t care?”
Lansky looked back at Craine. He knew he was right.
“Impossible,” Kastel said, sinking now. “I wasn’t even there.”
What time did your plane leave for Chicago?”
“I don’t have to answer—”
Lansky’s voice cut him short. “What time, Kastel?”
“You saw me leave. Midnight.”
“And yet there are no night flights to Chicago,” Craine said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“You’re bullshitting,” Kastel said, coming out of his chair.
“No, I’m not. I even checked with your pilot at the airfield when we arrived. I wanted to be sure and he confirmed it.”
Craine looked to Abe. “It’s true,” the big man said.
Lansky sat paralyzed in his place, staring at Kastel. Like he was waiting for some kind of explanation. There was none forthcoming.
Kastel dropped back in his chair, managing to say, “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means everything. Because you knew you weren’t leaving until the morning. So you waited until you were certain we were on to something, then you killed Harvey’s children and his wife. The F.B.I. have been protecting you, Kastel, but I won’t.”
There was a shriek from outside, then a cheer. Someone celebrating. Beating the house. Craine realized the music had stopped.
Kastel didn’t say anything, staring at Craine in mute protest. His mouth was open and he was trying to shout but his lips moved soundlessly.
Lansky stood to face the man who’d so carefully maneuvered his best friend’s murder, then looked away in disgust. He turned to his bodyguard and nodded before leaving the room.
Chapter 48
When Lansky exited stage left, his bodyguard took out his pistol and aimed it at Kastel.
There were words muttered but Craine couldn’t remember them. He was watching Kastel intently, who stared back at him with a hatred so intense Craine wondered how he could stand it.
Lansky hadn’t told them what he was going to do next, but it was obvious that whatever deal he had set up wasn’t going through. Craine half-expected to hear shouting and gunfire, but he didn’t know what the etiquette was with this new generation of entrepreneurs.
Abe seemed familiar with the protocol and perhaps Kastel did, too, because with the bodyguard leading the way, they left through the suite’s second door and took a hidden elevator down to the basement parking lot.
There were fifty cars in neat rows down there but no one else. They idled under the fluorescent lights in silence and Craine realized that this exercise had been about removing Kastel from sight as much as anything else.
Kastel kept touching his face, then running his fingers over each other. He was frantic. Craine had been in his position only two nights earlier, except without the edge of drug withdrawal that Kastel was experiencing right now.
Craine was wondering how long they would have to wait and what for when several men in dinner jackets exited another elevator across the parking lot. The years didn’t make a difference. He recognized them immediately: Paul Ricca and several members of the Chicago Outfit.
Ricca stared in their direction. He noticed Kastel, confused at first and then incensed, his arms dropping to his sides as if his presence alluded to something else. He was escorted quickly into a waiting limousine and the car drove up the exit ramp at speed before the doors had even been shut.
Craine understood now. Lansky was smart enough not to accuse Ricca and his Chicago Outfit directly. A brutal battle in the Flamingo Hotel and Casino wasn’t what any of them would have wanted. Instead, in their own strange custom, he’d have shaken hands and made apologies that now wasn’t the right time to complete their business deal. He’d have bid them farewell and safe travels and then promptly made himself scarce.
And now they’d take separate planes to separate cities to begin a proxy war from the comfort of their penthouses. What had just occurred was Lansky’s way of showing Ricca that he knew. It was presenting a doomed man on the scaffold as a presage of what was to come.
When the limousine left, Lansky’s bodyguard took Kastel to one side and they exchanged a few words. Craine wasn’t sure what they were saying and neither did he care. Kastel was out of his life and they didn’t need a final face-off to trade barbs.
A feeling of otherness had overtaken Craine. Abe turned to him but he seemed both near and very far away. He was speaking to Craine, holding out the bag of money. “Take it.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Lansky will be offended.”
“Keep it, or bury it out in the desert,” Craine said with a glance at Kastel that said he knew where they were taking him.
Abe nodded and pointed toward a line of cars.
“Pick any one you want. Keys are in the ignition. We can share the driving.”
“You’re coming with me?”
“There are men at your farm. I’ll need to speak with them. They had his support,” he said, cocking his head toward Kastel. “But I’m not expecting any difficulties.”
Craine swallowed hard and said, “Thank you.”
The two men looked at each other. They didn’t shake hands but there was an acknowledgment of what they’d gone through.
Craine began moving to the driver’s side of a Chevrolet when he noticed Kastel step very deliberately away from the bodyguard.
“I’ll be seeing you in Bridgeport,” Kastel said.
“Shut your mouth and get in the car,” Abe said, but Kastel was ignoring him.
Craine thought he’d misheard him. “What did you say?”
He wasn’t sure what he meant. Something in his tone or manner had thrown him. It wasn’t said bitterly. It was said in triumph.
“I said, I’ll see you in Bridgeport.”
Craine couldn’t see Kastel’s expression in this light but he thought he was grinning. Or at least, unafraid.
Abe seemed no more edified. For a moment, nothing else happened. It wasn’t until he saw the bodyguard nod to Kastel that Craine realized with sudden dread that he was in on it too.
“Abe—” His name caught in Craine’s throat like phlegm.
As though reading his mind, the big man stepped in front of Craine so that he was between them. He took his revolver out from his jacket but his telegraphed movements were too slow.
The bodyguard lifted his gun and squeezed the trigger; under a low ceiling the shot was momentarily deafening and then Abe dropped his gun and grabbed his stomach. He stepped back until a car propped him up, his blood smearing across the car window as he tried to stay upright.
After that, everything happened very quickly.
Craine watched Kastel run across the parking lot. He moved swiftly out of his field of vision, running through cars, his body protected by the coachwork.
Abe’s revolver had skittered across the floor. Craine scrambled to pick it up but as he reached for it the bodyguard began firing at him, his .45 pistol hammering thumb-sized holes into the car door beside him.
Craine fell to the ground and crawled sideways, using the back wheels as a bulwark. More pistol shots followed, deafening, the sparks closer each time. Craine heard the squeal of tires as Kastel drove out of the parking lot but by now the volume and noise of fire was almost unthinkable, rounds pinging off the metal and crisscrossing in different directions. Something plucked at his pants and then his thigh stung. A bullet had ricocheted and caught the top of his leg.
Craine didn’t scream but his body jolted like he’d had an electric shock. Lansky’s betrayer fired two more shots in his direction until the pistol clicked empty.
The man swore. He came around the car and reloaded without taking his eyes off Craine. It was all strangely awkward, like an executioner fixing his hood before swinging his axe.
Craine’s leg was numb. He couldn’t stand up. He pushed himself up onto his elbows and began to shuffle backward but it was no use. He saw the bodyguard slide a new clip into the butt of his pistol.
Craine waited for the bullet. He didn’t close his eyes but he was half looking away when he caught the man pirouetting in the air, only then realizing that it was Abe who had lunged at him and now had a hand around the man’s throat.
Craine watched as Abe threw him sideways onto the hood of a car. In a fraction of a second, the wounded man was grabbing the bodyguard by the hair and forcing his head back into the windshield several times until he dropped the pistol. The glass starred behind him.
With his other hand, Abe got the length of his forearm underneath the man’s chin so it was pressing against his windpipe, strangling him.
Craine saw the man’s feet come off the ground but then he had his hand clutching at the small of his back; he brought his fist back round and there was a knife in it. Craine shouted at Abe but it was too late; the man swung the blade round Abe’s barrel chest and into his side like Ahab spearing the whale.
The bodyguard’s hand writhed, bringing the knife in and out again frantically. Abe howled in pain, ragged, uncontrolled gasps that only stopped when he gritted his teeth and butted the man so hard with his forehead that his entire body went limp.
Abe loosened his grip and stepped back before falling sideways to the ground.
Craine scrabbled for the bodyguard’s pistol and aimed it at the man but by now he was immobile on the car hood, choking, barely able to breathe.
Craine turned his attention to Abe. He was lying on the asphalt, one hand held out toward the exit as if reaching for the ghost of Kastel’s car.
Craine dragged him away and propped him up against a car wheel, pressing his hands into his sides to stop the bleeding. It was no use: blood was starfishing across the floor.
“Abe, look at me. Abe, please.”
He said his name several times to no response, and then suddenly Abe gripped Craine’s hand. He leaned closer until his ear was inches above Craine’s mouth. But Abe didn’t have any last words. There would be no eulogy. Instead he shook his head. Not like he couldn’t talk. But like he was answering an unsaid question. No, his face said. I’m not going to make it through.
And then his head stopped moving and his chest stopped rising and his face looked very placid, swallowed by life’s maw. Gone.
“Abe,” Craine said, shaking him. But he didn’t say it again. There was no point. He touched the big man’s shoulder with one hand. A strange recognition of what this stranger had done for him. Futile, perhaps. But a gesture nonetheless. It didn’t matter what people said about Abraham Levine. This man had saved his life.
Craine had experienced death in many forms but there was nothing quite so intimate as watching someone die at close quarters. Not for the first time this week he had accompanied someone on that most personal of paths. He wondered if it would be the last.
Craine looked away. There wasn’t time to think about Abe being dead. He groaned as he tried to stand up. He looked at the pistol in his hand and remembered what Kastel said. I’ll see you in Bridgeport. It meant only one thing: Kastel would go to kill his son.
Craine took the filthy tie from his collar and bound it around his thigh to stop the bleeding. The pain was such that he had to prop himself against the car to keep himself upright.
There was a coughing sound; the other man was bent over now, hacking. Craine stood, unsteady on his feet. He held the pistol out so the man could see the glint of it under the fluorescents.
“Get up,” he said heavily. “Get up now.”
Craine pointed in the direction of the Chevrolet. “Open the door. You’re driving.”
Chapter 49
From the back seat Craine instructed the man where to go. “Take a right north and keep going until I say so.”
There was no need to say anything else and besides, Craine didn’t have the strength for it.
He had the bodyguard’s pistol with him but only the rounds that were left in the magazine. He was tempted to take them out and count them, but didn’t want his driver to use the moment to escape or, worse, turn on him. Or maybe he simply didn’t have the energy.
They drove for hours, the dry desert heat replaced with something damper and richer as they got closer to the Sierra Nevada.
Craine sat slumped in the back seat. He hadn’t felt searing pain like this before, and not long after they’d crossed from Nevada to California, he threw up in the footwell. Whether it was the agony of his leg or simply the adrenaline passing, he wasn’t sure. A few times he wondered whether he’d make it home conscious. Or even alive.
They drove throughout the night, stopping briefly for gas without ever leaving the car. Craine had his pistol pushed into the back of the leather seat hard enough that his driver could feel it. He was pretty sure the gas attendant noticed the blood on their shirts, but he took no interest in asking them where they were from or where they were heading. Maybe a part of him already knew.
It was black outside, but the stars hinted at what was around them. Long stretches of dry plains gave way to curling hillside roads and timbered peaks. A wall of mountains welcomed him back to Mono County.
The journey seemed feverish, and Craine felt himself drift off before an image of Michael jolted him awake. He thought of Abe, too, but everything in Vegas was behind him. Now there was only what was in front.
Several times he told his driver to go faster but they never saw Kastel’s car. He’d had only a few minutes’ head start, but a few minutes was enough. Kastel might have gone straight into the house and killed Michael. There was no coming to terms with it, simply an awareness that it might be the case. But it felt extreme, even for someone so clearly unhinged. Besides, it was Craine he wanted. He’d told him where he was going for that very reason.
Craine was imagining Michael’s fingers crawling in the sand like worms when he felt some kind of movement inside his chest. He focused his eyes and saw the driver staring at him in the rearview. The car was slowing down, drifting to the side of the road, and he realized the man was hoping to make a run for it.
