Death on the Mississippi Read online

  He squinted and flicked the fork under Lyon’s chin. “You’re Wentworth.” The fork tines were millimeters from Lyon’s breast bone.

  Pan’s description of the voice had been excellent, it had a definite guttural quality. “I called about a certain obligation of Mr. Turman’s.”

  The fork waved toward the rear of the house. “In the cellar.” Without waiting for a reply, Carillo turned and left Lyon to follow. They passed through the living room where a picture of another flamingo was mounted over the fireplace in a mirrored frame. Identically upholstered furniture was carefully arranged throughout the immaculate room and protected by clear plastic coverings. They went through the kitchen, with its highly waxed floor, and down cellar steps into a family room.

  “Mr. Carillo, there’s something I should tell you about Dalton Turman,” Lyon said.

  Carillo, who had crossed to a small kitchen area in the rear of the room turned and waved his utensils at Lyon. “The money. Put the money on the table and we forget about Turman.”

  “I don’t have the money,” Lyon said.

  Carillo advanced on Lyon with the fork held before him like a lance. Again the tines flicked at Lyon’s shirtfront. “You didn’t bring money because you don’t got no money. I know who you are, just like I know Turman is running.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “Not yet. I must do the sausages and peppers.” He busied himself at a frying pan on the small stove. “My daughter does not like peppers and sausage to cook in her kitchen. Smells, she says. Of course they smell. They should smell. My daughter is a very good housekeeper. Very neat. Very worried about odors.”

  “Can we talk privately here? I’m not wired,” Lyon said.

  Carillo glared at him, waved his spatula in the air and rolled his eyes. “Wired? If you had an electronic transmitter on your person my antisurveillance devices would have sounded an alarm. Why would a provider of venture capital like myself worry about such things?”

  “You obviously don’t since you phoned him from here,” Lyon said.

  “Checking up on my money, nothing much illegal. You got to understand they do not watch me like they did. I am what you call semiretired. A little bank for the books, a little loan here and there, a little extortion to keep my hand in. The Feds, all they think about today is drug busts.”

  “I’m going, Poobah,” an adolescent girl with a cream complexion and jet-black hair said from midway down the stairs.

  Carillo turned to face her with a broad smile. “Ah, Maria, you are beautiful tonight, but you wear pants on a date?”

  “These are designer jeans, Poobah, everyone wears them.”

  “Everyone, yes. Who are you going with?”

  “Jimmie Regan is taking me to the drive-in. We won’t be late.”

  “Be home at eleven.”

  “Everyone else stays out until midnight.”

  “Eleven-thirty,” Carillo said with a smile. He looked over at Lyon. “See how my granddaughter twists her Poobah around her little finger.”

  “Bye.” The girl scooted up the stairs and a moment later they heard the front door slam.

  Carillo handed the spatula to Lyon. “Watch the sausage.” Without waiting for a response he dialed the phone. “Regan, Angie Carillo. Your son Jimmie is taking my beloved granddaughter to the movies tonight. I would consider it a favor if he was respectful to her. She has great meaning to me. Thank you.” He hung up and resumed his cooking chores. “Regan knows me. I am sure his son will be nice to Maria.” He served two plates of sausage and peppers. “It is a great burden to me now that Maria’s father is gone. It is very hard to watch after children in these times.”

  “Divorce is always difficult on kids.”

  “Eat while we talk. Not divorce. It was a question of firepower. Handguns are useless against automatic weapons and I am afraid that the Colombians have adopted modern technology far quicker than us. Sausages are good, yes? It is important that they have natural casings.”

  “You seem to know something about me,” Lyon said. The food was highly spiced and he reached for the red wine Carillo had set on the table.

  “It is important that good sausage be cooked in olive oil that is virgin first press. When you called, I called friends in Hartford who accommodate me. Tell your wife the governor is trying to compromise her.”

  “Does your knowledge extend to where Dalton is?”

  “Let us say we are interested in his journey. We have arranged our own, shall we say, investigators. It would seem that Mr. Turman has decided to take an ocean voyage with large sums of money, some of which, unfortunately, seems to be ours.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be on the ocean. In fact, he doesn’t seem to be anywhere.”

  “He is a very bright man. Once he was able to follow me to a regional meeting with some of my pisanos. It was a quiet house in the country until Turman arranged secret loud speakers and tapes of gunfire.” Carillo made an expansive gesture with his knife and nearly knocked over the wine. “Voices called out ‘G Men’ and that sort of thing. My pisanos were not amused. It was the first time since Tony Anastasia that four contracts were issued simultaneously on the same man. It required much persuasion on my part to get him off with a broken arm.”

  “Perhaps someone went ahead on his own,” Lyon said.

  “The families do not kill prominent people anymore, Mr. Wentworth. Only the new immigrants, like the Colombians, do things like that. If we are displeased with someone, we manage to make their lives unpleasant. Drugs are mysteriously found in unlikely places. Wives are seduced by attractive young men, husbands are compromised in many ways, businesses have unexpected difficulties. Who would do business with us if on default they were taken for a walk on Narragansett Bay? Those days are over.”

  “How about late-night phone calls and a long-range rifle shot at people sitting on a houseboat?”

  Carillo shrugged and consumed a whole sausage in one bite. “That is normal business. And the shot did miss everyone, did it not?”

  “You practically perform a civic duty,” Lyon said.

  “The older families are becoming conservative. We have discovered where the real power is. We know that the well-laundered CD is more powerful than an Uzi, that a line of credit is worth ten soldiers in the street. Real estate, a nice business with cash flow, that is for the older men. Leave the machine guns to the Colombians. We have money now, and it is good money for Maria, and it will be old money for Maria’s children, as good as any old New England money that got its start in the slave trade.”

  “It would seem to me that Dalton Turman has a chunk of that laundered money with him.”

  “If we find him, he will return it. If you or the police find him, he will also return it. We cannot lose.”

  “Poobah, I hate you!”

  Maria was halfway down the stairs clutching the rail with both hands as tears streamed down her cheeks. Angie Carillo’s face darkened as he folded his napkin and stood. “The boy will pay for this.”

  “Pay for what!” she screamed at her grandfather. “He never touched me. We were at the drive-in and he had his arm around me and we were getting ready to … when his father drove in and practically hit us. Mr. Regan pulled Jimmie out of the car and whispered to him. When Jimmie came back he sat against the door. Then he said he felt sick and drove me home at about ninety miles an hour. I could die! You do this all the time, Poobah. How am I ever going to make out?” She ran back up the stairs.

  Carillo began to slowly gather the empty plates. “It is the young. There is no satisfying them.”

  7

  When Lyon left 112 Hutchinson Street in Cranston, Rhode Island, he immediately knew that crime was rampant in the country, and that lawlessness ruled the land like the riders of the Apocalypse.

  His car had been stolen. The parking space directly in front of the home of one of the most senior mafia leaders in New England had provided no protection.

  A tan Ford with an accordion-shaped r
ight fender, eased from the driveway of a vacant house across the street. It slowed to a stop and Rocco reached across the seat and flipped open the door on the passenger’s side. “In,” he commanded.

  Lyon did as instructed. “You had my car driven home?”

  “Yep.” Rocco threw the car in gear and accelerated as he cornered a curve dangerously. “I told you no Rhode Island.”

  “He doesn’t seem like a vicious man, and he’s very concerned about his granddaughter’s chastity.”

  “And of course he fed you?”

  “Some excellent sausage and peppers. I’ve got to remember the way he prepared them.”

  “For Christ sake, Lyon, didn’t you ever hear of the banality of evil?”

  “Most street cops I know aren’t aware of Hannah Arendt.”

  “You don’t know any street cops except me.”

  “What help could you have been to me sitting in a car across the street?”

  “He wouldn’t have burned you in his own house, and I wasn’t about to let them take you on any trips in car trunks. Did you find out anything?”

  “His people are the ones who took the shot at the houseboat, but I don’t think they did anything to Dalton except try to frighten him. As long as they thought the construction job was doing well, they expected to get their money back. They would have nothing to gain by taking Dalton and the boat.”

  Rocco increased the speed of the car as a response to his mood. “God, you’re naive. They had a million-plus reasons to do something to Dalton, and the money was probably hidden somewhere on that damn boat.”

  There was a tone of resignation in Bea’s voice as she stood in the doorway of the cellar recreation room. “When the maps go on the Ping-Pong table and he breaks out the magnifying glass, I know we’re in trouble.”

  “Because of the overlaps on some of our flights, the map is actually larger than you requested,” Gary Dorset said as he kicked the Ping-Pong net further under the table.

  “It’s just fine, Gary,” Lyon said as he finished securing the last of the aerial-photograph strips in place. He stepped back from the table to look at the complete composite that included the banks of the Connecticut River from mid-Massachusetts to the Atlantic Ocean. It also included the Connecticut shoreline from Bridgeport to the Rhode Island border and the islands in that area.

  Bea peered over the table. “It’s a little late to mention it, but we could have bought a map of the same area for fifty cents at the Mobil station.”

  “Wouldn’t be the same,” Lyon said as he realigned one of the strips. “Is Pan around?”

  “She went back to the resort to get more of her things. I think she’s moved in permanently.”

  “Do you get along with her?” Lyon asked.

  Bea thought a moment before replying. “That depends. It’s like living with a combination of Doris Day and Lucrezia Borgia. When you ask her something, you’re either going to get a burst of ‘Que Serra Serra’ or the poisoned ring. You can never tell.”

  “I found that duality too,” Lyon said as he bent over the table with his magnifying glass to minutely examine a portion of the shoreline.

  “Well, I’m off,” Bea said without receiving any response. “I’ll be late for dinner, as I’m having an affair with the Governor.”

  “Don’t hurry,” Lyon said as he inched further over the map with his eyes inches from the photographs.

  “We’ll probably make love in the well of the Senate,” Bea said.

  “Drive carefully,” Lyon said.

  He’d have to stop. After several hours of painstaking searching, his senses had dulled and become unresponsive. He hadn’t found what he was looking for.

  Lyon knew that the Mississippi was basically an unseaworthy vessel. It might be capable of making short hops between Caribbean Islands during fair weather, or it could safely navigate the inland waterway, but the craft’s blunt lines and small draft made lengthy sea voyages not only hazardous, but nearly suicidal. His theory required the houseboat to still be in the vicinity of the Connecticut River. The expensive aerial map he’d prepared had not revealed what it should have revealed.

  There was something he wasn’t seeing. His knowledge of the state and shore had been confirmed by the aerial pictures, but there was still something he had either missed or hadn’t viewed properly.

  Sawhorses were placed on either side of the access road leading to the Pincus Resort. A two-by-four stretched between them carried a ROAD CLOSED sign. Lyon removed the barrier and drove into the complex.

  In the few days since Dalton’s disappearance, decay had already taken root at the unfinished project. Construction equipment had been abandoned in the middle of tasks, and building materials appeared as if they had been haphazardly dropped by departing workmen at a prearranged signal. The area had a general aura of desolation.

  The dusty station wagon with the Pranko Construction Company logo on its sides was parked in front of a small building near what was to have been the recreation center. Lyon parked behind the wagon and entered the building. The reception area was deserted, as were the sales closing rooms and front offices. Empty desks and hanging wires marked where typewriters, copying machines, and other office equipment had once stood.

  Two men were in small offices at the rear of the building. Sam, the construction foreman, was surrounded by dozens of phone books and had a telephone pressed to his ear. “A houseboat that’s nearly eighty feet long called the Mississippi … any houseboats called anything … okay, thanks.” He slammed down the receiver. “So much for New Jersey, now I start on Delaware.”

  “You’re calling all the marinas on the Eastern seaboard?” Lyon asked in amazement.

  “Damn right! He can’t hide that tub forever. He has to stop somewhere for gas and supplies, and when he does, I’ll find him.”

  “The Coast Guard has already tried,” Lyon said.

  “They don’t have a stake in this like I do.” He began to dial another number. “Can’t talk now. Got to keep calling until the phone company finds out what’s going on and cuts off our lines … Hello, Blue Point Marina? I’m calling …”

  Lyon went into the office next door. He recognized the man behind the desk as Dalton’s partner and financial officer, Randolph Dice. Dice sat behind a desk piled high with ledgers and computer printouts. He held a pocket calculator in one hand and stared blankly off into space until he became aware of Lyon’s presence. “If you’ve come to pick up the computer terminals, you’re too late. The bank already grabbed them.”

  “I’m Wentworth. I was on the Mississippi the other day.”

  “If you’re one of Dalton’s friends, I don’t need to guess why you’re here. He borrowed money from you and you want to call in the note.”

  “I’m trying to find him.”

  “You are a member of a large but not very exclusive group.”

  Randolph Dice was a short man bordering on the fat in his early thirties with a squat build. There was a physical softness about him that seemed reflected in the scrubbed pinkness of his complexion, flabby facial features, and a body that must have taken great pains to avoid all physical exertion.

  “Do you have any ideas where he might be?” Lyon asked.

  “If I did, I would gladly hire someone to annihilate him. Let me tell you something, Wentworth. I left an extremely prestigious position with a management consulting firm to join this organization. I had this mistaken idea that I wanted to become a bold, young entrepreneur. Instead, I am rapidly becoming a bankrupt, aging accountant.” He threw a ledger across the room and let it clatter against the wall. “And I got an MBA from Harvard for this?”

  “That’s our record,” Lyon said automatically.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “An unimportant passing thought,” Lyon said. For years he and Bea had kept a tally on how quickly it took a Harvard graduate to announce his or her alma mater. Randolph Dice now held the record. “How much is missing?”

  “About a milli
on-two-plus, as best I can reconstruct it so far, but I’m not finished yet.”

  “I still don’t understand how he got all that cash from a company in financial trouble.”

  “In any multimillion dollar operation there are numerous accounts, escrows, bank floats, compensating balances, and other types of money available to an unscrupulous and clever manipulator. The only difficulty is that most of that money does not belong to us. The bankruptcy court is going to bury us.”

  “And you weren’t aware of any of this?”

  “Of excessive spending and poor cash control, yes. Massive fraud, no. He made false entries, ran the money through different accounts and finally converted it to cash. How the hell can I explain that to the authorities? Sam and I are going to look like fools at best, coconspirators at worst. In addition, we’re going to lose all our personal assets.”

  “You voluntarily put those assets on the line,” Lyon said, “because you thought this project would make money.”

  “It could have.”

  “Then why did Dalton steal from it and run with less than he could have made legitimately?”

  Randolph Dice put both hands to his head and slowly rocked back and forth. “I don’t know. If I understood, I might know a lot of other things.”

  “What happens if he’s found dead without the cash?”

  Dice’s hands dropped away from his face as he looked at Lyon with a new antagonism. “In that instance, I would be a murder suspect.”

  “Who else could have known about the missing cash at the time Dalton disappeared?”

  “Sam, of course. Dalton’s wife, Pandora, could have known. Then there was talk that Dalton and Katrina Loops had a thing going. She might have known. If Katrina knew, and since she’s involved with Bobby Douglas, he might have known.”