The syndicate, p.8
The Syndicate, page 8
“No. Not exactly.”
Conroy stared at him. “You’re not willing to go on record. You say you knew Siegel but you don’t want to go into how, and now you’re telling me you have no information on his murder. I hate to put you on the spot, but why are we talking?”
He could see her disappointment. Like he was one of those people calling up claiming to know who murdered the Black Dahlia. She went to stand and Craine said, “Actually I was hoping you might be able to answer a few questions of my own. In exchange, I might be able to help you too.”
“Are you a private investigator?” she asked. “Because I don’t work alongside Pinkertons.”
“I’m not a Pinkerton. I promise. And I’m hoping this can be a mutual exchange, if you’ll answer a few questions for me first.”
She sat back down but made a show of checking the clock on the wall. “Questions about what?”
“First, why are the F.B.I. involved in a local murder?”
She shrugged. “Congress has given the F.B.I. new federal laws to fight racketeering and gambling. Their involvement isn’t surprising.”
This was news to Craine. The F.B.I. had never involved themselves directly in homicide cases when he was at the L.A.P.D.
He went on. “George Raft saw Siegel earlier in the day. None of the other papers mentioned it. You did. I’m assuming studio publicity teams—”
She nodded as he spoke. “They did the rounds. Tried to get my editor to remove any mention of George Raft. Didn’t want one of their top actors associated with a mob killing.”
“Do the police have any leads?”
“It’s notoriously difficult to find suspects in mob-related murders,” she said diplomatically.
“Are they sure it’s a mob-related killing?”
“Have you spoken to the homicide unit about this?” she asked, making another show of checking the wall clock.
“I haven’t.”
She smiled weakly. “Then perhaps you should speak to the police press department. Or I can give you the name of the primary detective in charge.”
“Have they done a formal press briefing?”
Conroy exhaled. “They released a statement to the press on Saturday afternoon. But we’re having a full briefing tomorrow.”
“Your article—it impressed me. Are you privy to information the other papers aren’t?”
“I should hope so.”
“You were on the scene?”
“Yes.”
“And you saw Allen Smiley and Charlie Hill?”
“Well, I saw Allen Smiley. Hill was leaving when I got there. Why do you ask?”
Craine answered with another question. “You got a quote from Smiley. You’ve spoken to him?”
“I spoke to him at the time, briefly. Haven’t been able to contact him since.”
“Do the police suspect either Smiley or Hill?”
“Charlie Hill I don’t know, but Smiley and Siegel were close friends and when I saw him the night of the murder, he looked pretty shaken up. The F.B.I. took them off our hands but both were released without charge. Which indicates neither man is a suspect.”
Craine went to ask another question before Conroy stopped him. “Wait. My turn. This isn’t a mutual exchange of information. What is it you can tell me that I don’t already know?”
I know almost nothing, Craine thought. “What if I told you it wasn’t a mob killing?”
“I wouldn’t believe you, for a start. And I’d ask you how you came to believe that.”
Craine hesitated. What did he really have? “I have sources close to the deceased.” He tried to sound convincing. “Privileged access.”
“What kind of access?” she asked with an air of suspicion.
He nodded through the glass partition toward Abe, who was idling by the pneumatic mail system. He looked fascinated by the technology.
“Through him. He has connections.” As if on cue, Abe leaned forward, staring at the row of metal vacuum tubes like a cat watching butterflies. He jumped as a mail canister popped out.
“Oh, congratulations,” the reporter said drily.
He tried to appease her. “If you help me now, I promise to pass on information when I get it.”
“What’s your angle here?”
“Let’s say I’m an interested party.”
Conroy weighed up Craine’s response before quickly listing off her demands: “I want to know more about his Vegas venture. I want to know who the real owners are, and how Siegel was connected to the New York crime rings. If possible I want interviews with Siegel’s investors and associates. On the record.”
Craine hesitated. Press attention was exactly what Lansky wanted to avoid. “That’s not something . . . that’s a little difficult.”
“I see. Difficult.”
“Is there something else I can—”
“No, Mr. Concerned Citizen. I’m afraid you’ve got no stock to trade. So I think this conversation is over.” Conroy pushed herself off the desk and held out her hand officiously.
Craine was frustrated. She was bargaining and he’d come up short.
“Pleasure to meet you, Mr . . .” She paused and glanced at her empty pad. She couldn’t remember. “Graham?”
“Craine. Jonathan Craine.”
His name seemed to catch her off guard. He wondered if it still meant something, even after all these years away.
“Have we met before?” he asked.
“No,” she said firmly, holding the door open. “We’ve never met before.”
Chapter 10
Dragna wasn’t lying. When they pulled into Siegel’s street in Beverly Hills a little after 8 P.M., the two uniformed officers whose job it was to guard the murder scene simply got in their black-and-white patrol car and drove off.
Craine was more than familiar with the machinations of bribery in the L.A.P.D. But his experience had always been in the higher echelons. The City Mayor calling the Chief of Police for a favor; the studio asking the D.A. for leniency. He’d never really appreciated that bribery also worked from the ground up, too.
“Police usually so amenable to payoffs?” Craine asked.
Abe looked at him like he was crazy. “People do what they need to do to feed their family,” he said.
Linden Drive was adjacent to Sunset Boulevard, a premier location with mansions on both sides: French chateau, Spanish colonial, English Tudor. Craine used to come to parties here, first with Celia and then with Michael as a child when their social life moved away from movie circles and closer to parents at Michael’s school. The memories of Saturday barbecues or Sunday brunches drifted by like passing cars.
Abe drove past Siegel’s house, then parked fifty or so yards down the street. In rougher parts of L.A., neighbors would be stood in their windows with cups of coffee, content to spend their evenings watching vehicles come and go, nosing in on other people’s business. Not here. Here people locked themselves away, pretending to themselves they were the only Tuscan villa on the street.
Siegel’s front door was unlocked, but both men checked through the windows before entering.
The house was spacious, with an open-plan hallway leading on to a kitchen-diner that took up most of the heart of the house. It reminded Craine of his old place in Beverly Hills. Large rooms leading on to to even bigger rooms. More space than a family could ever fill.
“You been here before?” Craine asked.
“Never.”
“Big place.”
Abe shrugged. “At the end of the game, the pawns and the kings go in the same box.”
It was evening now but Craine didn’t flip the light switch. Even in the half-light they could see the wide hallway was covered in bloodied footprints where crime scene technicians had moved in and out of the house.
They found the living room at the end of the hall, police tape covering the doorway where the crime scene had been duly processed and closed. Craine pulled down the paper tape carefully and turned the door handle with his shirtsleeve.
The living room wasn’t visible from the street, so Craine could turn the light on. He picked his way around broken shards of window glass, taking an inventory of what was there: a piano in the corner; a fireplace that looked like it had never been lit; a record player and an expensive range of long-play records. French windows overlooked a backyard, but the glass in one of them was broken; except for some police tape, the room was open to the elements. Finally he saw the floral sofa in the center of the room he recognized from the newspaper front pages. A giant bloodstain was the last of Siegel.
“What do you think?” Abe asked. Craine noticed him check his watch and log the time.
There was a strong metallic smell from all the gore but other than the bloodstains and broken glass, the rest of the room looked oddly pristine. Nothing out of place. Like a show home that had undergone a brief but acute trauma.
“Looks the same as the photographs in the paper,” Craine said. “I’ll need to take a closer look. You can see the shots came through that broken window. Siegel was on this sofa here.” Craine pointed at one of the sofas and drew a line with his arms. “From the angle of the holes in the wall you can see the direction of fire.”
Craine noticed Abe check his watch again. “Are we in a hurry?” he asked.
“I don’t know what Dragna paid them but you normally get an hour.”
“You’ve been in this situation before?”
“Uh-huh.” Abe didn’t expand. “I’ll check the rest of the house.”
Abe left the room and Craine felt relieved. In the pictures, detectives walked around the room talking to their partners, chewing over facts. But he had always preferred to work a crime scene alone.
Knowing that he would only get one chance to survey the crime scene, Craine’s approach was methodical and unhurried; he moved around the room in an outward spiral, noting salient features, filtering out others.
There were two tumblers on the coffee table in front of the sofa, both still with whiskey in them and one with dried blood spray on the outside. The papers had said that Smiley was sitting with Siegel when he died. So where was Charlie Hill when the shooting started?
Craine went over to the sofa and crouched so he was eye level with where Siegel would have been sitting. Leaning on his haunches, he lifted the sofa cushion between thumb and forefinger. It peeled away where the blood had pooled and congealed. The back of the sofa was sodden and stained with the debris of murder. Siegel must have emptied several pints of blood here. He looked around: blood had painted most of the furniture and wallpaper within a two-yard radius. One round must have severed one or both carotid arteries. There wasn’t even the barest suggestion that he could have survived the shots.
Craine closed one eye as if he was aiming down a barrel and looked at the direction of spatter on the wallpaper behind. There were bullet holes on the back wall but they were tightly clustered. Given the direction of fire was consistent, it didn’t look like there had been more than one shooter.
The accuracy was impressive, even at this limited range. Whoever did the shooting knew what they were doing. Like a soldier. Police ballistics had identified the weapon as an army carbine. Could the F.B.I. compare the projectiles against registered military weapons?
Craine closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene, imagining the moments that preceded the shooting. Siegel sitting on the couch reading a newspaper. He has a glass of whiskey nearby. He’s talking with Allen Smiley, a little drunk. He doesn’t see the lone shooter creeping up through the garden with a rifle raised, drawing a bead on Siegel and pulling the trigger.
Siegel probably never even heard the bullets. Or felt them. A thump in the head and then blackness as two rounds tore through his brain.
Imagining it all made Craine shiver, but already he’d drawn some basic conclusions.
It wasn’t a crime of passion. It was a lone shooter. Possibly military.
Abe came back into the room, bringing Craine to himself. “Doesn’t look like anything’s been taken. You done? Don’t have a lot of time.”
“We need to check the bedrooms,” Craine said.
From the living room they went upstairs, where a landing led to a long corridor with two doors on either side.
The first two rooms hadn’t been touched. No boot prints; no blood; no fingerprint dust.
The third was the master bedroom, the room where Siegel slept. Abe had a flashlight and swept the beam across the room, but there was nothing untoward. Framed photographs on bedside tables. A few watches on top of a dresser that looked to be of high value. The wardrobe was partly open and he could see a row of tailored suits, mostly houndstooth check, and a few chalk-stripe flannel sports coats. The belongings of a very wealthy man. Craine didn’t envy any of it.
The room at the end of the corridor was a guest bedroom, but something stopped Craine in his tracks. This was different: ruffled sheets, a few bed cushions thrown onto the floor. He looked closer at one of the pillows on the bed. There was light powder on it. Was that makeup?
“You found something?”
Ignoring Abe, Craine picked up the pillows one by one, checking them over. He picked one of the cushions off the floor and brought it to close to his face. The faintest smell of perfume.
But it was something else that confirmed his suspicions. On the carpet: a single earring.
Craine was running through a new scenario in his head when there was an engine sound from nearby. Two pairs of headlights swung into the driveway and the room lit up, their silhouettes sliding across the wall.
Craine’s watch read 8:50 P.M. They were back early.
Rising to his full height, Abe stood chest out, suddenly alert. He reached inside his jacket and took out his Savage.
“We have to go,” Craine said.
They backed out into the corridor, trying to avoid their shadows. When they were half-way down the stairs, Craine saw in the glass panels around the front door a set of shadows moving outside. There were voices barely a few yards away.
“The kitchen,” Abe whispered.
Moving quickly now, Abe led Craine into the kitchen, using his pistol to point at the back door.
Without discussion, they went outside and began running across the lawn toward the back fence. A man in middle age, climbing fences in Beverly Hills. This isn’t how I saw myself spending early retirement, thought Craine.
Once at the car, Abe got behind the driver’s wheel. They drove off slowly, both of them staring at the side-mirrors in case they were followed.
After they’d turned off the street, Abe said, “In the bedroom. You saw something.”
“An earring,” Craine said.
“So?”
“So the police and the press have said that there were two people in the house when Siegel was killed.”
“Charlie Hill and Allen Smiley.”
“Exactly. Allen Smiley was downstairs with Siegel. But Charlie Hill was upstairs. You saw the bed. I think he was with a girl.”
“The police said there were only two witnesses.”
Craine nodded. He felt something. The excitement of a lead.
“Why would they lie?”
“That’s what we need to find out.”
Abe didn’t say anything. Craine noticed he was shifting his head to look at his rearview mirror. His shoulders arched.
“What is it?”
Abe waited deliberately before answering. “We’re being followed.”
He was right. In his side-view mirror, Craine could see a set of headlights bearing down on them.
Abe turned off Sunset Boulevard. The wrong direction. “Hotel’s right there.”
“We don’t want them knowing where we are.”
Nothing was said. They passed another two blocks, Craine checking over his shoulder, scanning the road behind. He couldn’t make out anything more than the two beams twenty yards back, never closer, never further away.
“Still there,” he said, facing forward.
The beams flashed twice and Abe tensed his hands against the wheel.
“Police?” Abe asked.
Craine focused on the car in the side-view mirror. It wasn’t a black-and-white. There were two men inside, but their faces weren’t visible.
“I said, is it police?”
He didn’t want Abe to do anything rash. “It’s not marked,” he said as calmly as he could manage.
Craine could see a series of questions forming on his frown.
“F.B.I.?”
“Could be,” he replied, but they both knew his answer was the affirmative. ‘‘Pull over.’’
No reply.
They continued driving with Abe looking at his mirrors and Craine looking at Abe. After several seconds Abe banged his fists against the wheel and pulled up on the side of the road.
The car slowed to a stop behind them. Craine and Abe glanced between the rear- and side-view mirrors but the other car’s headlights blinded them. All they could see were two silhouettes as they exited onto the street on either side.
The two figures kept apart from one another as policemen are trained to do, one with his hand on a pistol belt and the other circling round to the driver’s door with a flashlight.
Abe reached into his inside jacket pocket for his Savage.
Craine grabbed his hand and Abe gave him a feral look in return. “Don’t,” said Craine.
Abe firmed his grip on the pistol and began to pull it out of its holster. Craine could see the figures behind them getting closer.
“Please, Abe. No one needs to get hurt.”
Abe made no sign he agreed.
Through the glass, Craine could see the two men had slowed, their pace faltering. One of them was beaming the side of the car. First their license tags, then the coachwork. The second they saw Abe’s hand on his pistol they’d start shooting.
“Let me handle this. Don’t turn this into a firefight.”
The men were so close now. The beam lit up the interior. When the man with the flashlight was no more than two yards from the door, Abe grunted and put his hands back on the wheel.
“You better know what you’re doing,” he said.
