The Informant

29

IT WAS TUESDAY, before first light on the West Coast. The mockingbirds had been singing sleepily for some time, perched unseen in the canopies of the tall sycamores, not showing themselves or flying just yet because the last of the owls were still out, gliding silently above the trees and searching for one last catch before sunrise. There were specific boundaries in time that they all had to fear. If an owl was still in flight when the sun rose, he risked having a gang of crows attack him. When they did, it was five or six of them at once, wave after wave, hurling themselves into him, trying to corner him, blinking and defenseless.

He was on foot on Marengo Avenue in Pasadena, walking along in a gray hooded sweatshirt and jeans. There were tall, old trees along the parkway and flanking the big houses that were set far up and back on their lawns. The street curved so as he walked, he saw new views, but the curves gave him a bit of invisibility too. The Lazarettis in New York had ordered the leaders of their western incursions in the 1920s to buy houses in places like this, where the quiet, the wealthy, and the respectable lived. And when the eastern bosses came for their visits, they wanted places to stay that were quiet and elegant.

He had chosen the Lazarettis. They seemed to him to be a convenient group to use to cause trouble. In the 1940s the other four New York families had given them a monopoly on the drug trade in Los Angeles, with the others as silent partners. The L.A. branch supplied all five New York families with a reliable stream of cash that required no effort from them, and the others would be very concerned if that flow were interrupted. There had always been jealousies and resentments from the eastern families that didn't share in the drug business. The division had made a certain rough sense in the 1940s and 50s. The five families were each big and powerful, and together they would have been an irresistible force. Since they wanted the drug business, they got it without much discussion. But now that those families had been weakened by decades of prosecutions and the loss of most of their percentages on businesses like construction, linen supply, and garbage disposal even in New York itself, it seemed to some of the other families that the division of spoils was archaic.

The five families were no more capable of controlling the drug trade in Los Angeles than they were of controlling the weather or the tides. The drug business had become absurdly larger than they were. If they tried to control drugs now, one part of the job would be to control the hundred thousand members of the Los Angeles street gangs, who were all more or less involved in drugs, and more or less independent. Another part of the job would be to track the physical movement of drugs and money that comprised most of the economic production of six or seven countries. The Lazarettis were just one purveyor among hundreds, a brand name in a big marketplace.

As Schaeffer walked, he looked at the big houses and spacious grounds. This was what had happened to the Mafia. It wasn't defeat, it was victory. They had gotten what they wanted and they were choking on it. He had just begun to look ahead for the first Lazaretti house, the big one that belonged to Tony Lazaretti, when something whizzed past his cheek.

The first shot should have killed him. It was silenced, and the velocity was slower than the speed of sound, so there was no crack as it passed by the hood of his sweatshirt and pounded into the trunk of the tree beside him. Bark exploded off the tree, but the hood protected his ear and eye from being spattered. He dropped low, touched the ground with his palms, and spun to get behind the tree.

What the single shot had told him was not good news. The rifle had been silenced, and judging from the effectiveness of the silencer, he would guess it was factory made. Those were manufactured in small numbers for military snipers. A silencer also acted as a flash suppressor, so he hadn't seen the muzzle flash: he didn't know where the sniper was. The shot had also told him that the shooter was probably not some Lazaretti underling who spent most of his days persuading the maids on cruise ships to smuggle heroin in cases of soap or shampoo. This was somebody who had enough experience to know where to expect him and to have some idea when he would choose to arrive. The shooter had silently placed a bullet within inches of his head in the dark, had not been heard or seen, and was still out there waiting for a second opportunity now that he had the range and angle figured out.

Schaeffer considered his options. He could stay behind this tree and let the shooter try to improve his angle to get a better shot. Either the shooter would succeed or he would fail, and he might make a mistake that let Schaeffer know where he was. It was only a half hour or so before dawn. At that point the shooter would have to leave or risk being seen and caught in a police blockade that closed off all the streets. Schaeffer could try to get to better cover than this tree trunk. There were several spots not far away—a stone house was behind him and to his left, but it was set far back from the street. And there were other trees he might use as way stations for a move up the block to the next corner.

As he considered, a delivery truck appeared up the block to his left and came toward him. He looked to his right to spot any obstacles. As the truck approached, he tried to see as much as he could of the area where the shooter must be. He still couldn't see anything conclusive, but there was a thick hedge that ran along the side of the big house across the street.

He judged the speed of the delivery truck, pushed off his tree, and ran beside it. He could see the side of it now, and the logo said it was from a bakery. The truck was going about twenty miles an hour when it passed him so he couldn't quite keep up with it. But a few seconds later the brake light beside him glowed and the truck began to slow for the stop sign at the next corner. He was with it now, fully hidden by it. He had not heard the sound of a bullet hitting anything yet, but he was sure the shooter must know that he'd left his tree.

The truck reached the end of the short block and stopped for the stop sign, but he kept running, sprinting across the intersection. The truck caught up with him and he ran with it for a few yards. But the long block gave the truck driver a chance to increase his speed, and the truck accelerated away from Schaeffer, revealing an alarming sight. A man had been running with him on the other side of the truck, and he was clearly the sniper. The man held a short rifle with a silencer, and he was just slowing down, turning his head to see whether he had outrun his prey.

Schaeffer was slightly behind him, and before the man could turn and bring the rifle around, Schaeffer shot him twice in the back and once in the head. Schaeffer's shots were loud, and there was a flurry of wings as a flock of frightened birds flew off above him. He turned to the right and ran. He had left his car three blocks away in a lot beside a closed restaurant on Fair Oaks, and now he ran as though he were an early morning jogger. He kept up a steady pace with his head up and his strides long, and he was there in under two minutes. He got in and drove north toward the freeway entrance. He noticed a small piece of paper, like a business card, under his windshield wiper. At the first red light he opened the door, snatched the card, and tossed it on the seat beside him, then drove. He got on the freeway, checked his mirrors frequently for a few minutes, and then began to think about what had just happened.

The man he had just killed was a professional shooter. One of the families—probably the Lazarettis—had gotten smart and realized that they probably shouldn't sit around waiting for him. They had also apparently admitted to themselves that the middle-aged, overweight former legbreakers they had been depending on weren't going to be able to protect the bosses from a determined attacker. All the families must have learned he had killed the Castigliones by now, and they had gone into protective mode. One of the families had hired a pro.

Schaeffer hoped the man had been a solitary operator, as he had once been. He didn't want to have to begin worrying about ambushes, booby traps, and assault weapons, but for the moment, at least, he would have to. His guess was that the Lazaretti family had done this. They were the family that had the longest and deepest relationships with violent locals. Operating drug distribution rings wasn't the same as passing money to movie and music companies. The people you met were a bit more feral.

The man had been waiting in an area that was ambiguous. It was near the house of Tony Lazaretti, the one who ran the Lazaretti interests, but it was also about a block down the street from the Castiglione caretaker, Mike Bruno. The Balacontano faction's ambassador to the film industry was Jimmy Montagno, and his house was only a block to the east. The man had not been waiting at one of the houses; he had simply set himself up in the neighborhood to see if anybody came to look around. That was smart.

He couldn't let down his guard now. There were still police, and there was no guarantee that the shooter he'd killed had been alone. That was disconcerting and made him look again in all of the mirrors to be sure a second shooter wasn't in a car following him. His eye caught the little white card that had been stuck under the windshield wiper of the car. He picked it up from the seat.

He was expecting an ad of some kind, but one side was blank, and the other had small, neat handwriting in black ink. CALL ME. URGENT. The phone number was the one Elizabeth Waring had given him in the Chicago church: 202 555-8990.

She had found his car in this city thousands of miles from the place she'd last seen him. How? Was there a global positioning system the Justice Department had activated? LoJack? The car had an antitheft system. Maybe she had triggered it. Maybe in Chicago the FBI had taken pictures of the license numbers of all the cars parked around Vince Pugliese's building that night, and she had somehow narrowed down the list. He had driven to Los Angeles quickly, trying to get to the next target before everybody reacted to the deaths of the Castiglione brothers. He'd stolen some California plates this morning off a pickup truck that was up on blocks and covered by a tarp, but hadn't put them on his car yet. The Illinois plates were still on the car, and that would have made it easier to spot. But if she'd known this was his car, why hadn't there been a contingent of FBI agents waiting with body armor and automatic weapons?

He left the freeway in Silverlake, drove to a quiet hillside street where his car was shielded from the windows of the nearby houses, and removed his Illinois plates. He drove a few more blocks, stopped, and put the California plates on his car.

He coasted downhill and found a convenience store on the first major street and went to the pay phone on the outer wall. He dialed the number of Elizabeth Waring. He waited a long time while the number rang, and he knew she must have gone to sleep after she'd found his car. When her voice came on, she sounded groggy and disoriented. "Hello?"

"What did you want?"

"I found out that the Lazaretti family hired a team of hit men to go after you."

"Why didn't you try to trap me when you found my car?"

"It cost me years to intuit your existence, then to meet you and realize how much you know. I want you to live to tell me about your former friends. Meanwhile, I thought I'd better warn you about the hit men, or you might get killed."

"I had already noticed a change in strategy. Thanks for the tip, though. It tells me a lot. Take care."

"Wait. I'm in Los Angeles right now. I need to talk to you in person. Is there anywhere you're willing to meet me?"

"Where are you staying?"

"The Sheraton Universal."

"I'll be in touch." He hung up, already wondering why he had called her and regretting that he had implied that he would meet her. She was dangerous and distracting at a time when he needed to keep up the pressure on the bosses. He hoped one of them would panic and do something stupid, but no matter what, he had to keep them nervous and off balance.

He knew the flaw in his reasoning was that it committed him to a course that probably wouldn't end well. He might be able to get a couple of families to begin picking each other off, but making them that agitated would first require him to accomplish a slow-motion massacre. He would have to show up in an increasing number of places where people would be waiting for him. And if he managed to get through it, all of the families would be more interested than before in killing him. What he was doing was arranging his own last stand, not his escape.

He knew that Elizabeth Waring was not his ally and that pretending she cared about him was a police interrogation tactic she'd probably been taught in some training class. She wanted an informant, and to recruit him she needed him in trouble and desperate. She had delivered the warning about the hit team to add to the growing pile of evidence that he was not likely to make it through this without help. But that did not negate the fact that she was the only person in this hemisphere who actually preferred that he live rather than die. If he listened to her next pitch, maybe he would hear something he could use. And no matter what, she worked for the most powerful entity in this game.

He got off the freeway at Laurel Canyon Boulevard and drove along Ventura Boulevard to Lankershim, turned left and then right to go up the steep hill to the Universal Studios complex. He stopped his car on the circle at the front entrance to the Sheraton Universal Hotel, hurried inside, picked up a courtesy phone, and asked for her room.

"Hello?" she said.

"Come and meet me in the lobby. I'll be here for five minutes. If I see anything that makes me uncomfortable, I'm gone."

"Can you give me ten minutes to brush my hair?"

"Do it in the elevator." He hung up and went to sit in a velvet chair in an arrangement near the front entrance. The hotel lobby was all white and the floor yellow with black lines in geometric shapes. He scanned, looking at the people.

In the old days he could have picked out any FBI agents in something under two seconds. On jobs like this they would have been all male, and the ones who weren't white would have looked like black members of an all-star football team. Now FBI agents didn't look one particular way. He had to watch every human being within view, and if one of them let his eyes rest on Schaeffer for more than an instant, he became a possible enemy. The surveillance systems in public places like hotels should be good enough so they didn't even have to be here to see everything he did. He saw several sets of parents with kids, a couple dressed like they were on their way to the tennis courts, a group of young women who looked like the survivors of a bachelorette party.

He looked at his watch. Three minutes had passed. He turned his attention to the doors and the corridors extending out of the lobby in various directions. He had to be sure that if one of his ways out got suddenly blocked, the others were open. Then he heard a bell and an elevator door slid open.

Waring's head was up and her eyes were scanning as she stepped out. She walked toward him, and he put his arm around her waist and guided her across the lobby to the row of glass doors in front. She knew he was pressing close to her so federal officers couldn't shoot him without the risk of hitting her so she submitted to it.

They stayed together all the way to his car, and he drove off with her. As they coasted down the long hill to Lankershim Boulevard and then over the overpass to Ventura Boulevard, they were silent, each watching for signs that the other's friends or enemies were following. Finally he said, "We can talk. I don't care if you're wearing a wire."

"Thank you. I wasn't looking forward to being groped. I'm not wearing a wire." She paused. "I thought since you came for me so quickly, you might have had some kind of change of heart."

"Not exactly. I thought that you deserved a tidbit for trying to warn me. I was with Sam Lonzio the night that Chickie Salateri died."

"Sam Lonzio the Lazaretti underboss in New York?"

"Yeah. Salateri was sent out to Los Angeles to do some work for the Lazarettis."

"I remember the case. Somebody reported him missing and the Los Angeles police looked for him for over a year."

"When it's somebody like him, the cops have a way of looking where it's easy to look, not where the body's likely to be."

"So you know what happened."

"That night I was in L.A. because I had to do a job somewhere else, and I wanted to be far away from it. So I had checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, rented a car, taken a plane somewhere else, done the job, and come back. I wasn't tired, so I went out for the evening. I went to a restaurant right near where Laurel Canyon ends on Sunset Boulevard and ordered a late dinner. In walks Sam Lonzio. He sees me and comes to my table. He said, 'Can I sit with you?' I said, 'Sam. I'm here in case somebody ever asks me where I was tonight. Do you want me to say I was with you?'

"He said, 'You can't do that here anyway. Tony Lazaretti has a half interest in the place. If you eat here, you'll look like a criminal. But I've got a good alibi, and you can share it.'

"I said, 'What is it?'

"'Tonight I'm on a cruise ship that stops in Ensenada. It left San Pedro already, but there's a guy on it in my cabin using my name. If I need an alibi, I show up in Ensenada anytime before the boat leaves for Cabo, and he goes home. The crew says Mr. Lonzio's been with us for the whole cruise. I've also got a cabin in the name Don Rustin. You can be him.'

"'That's a lot of trouble.' I didn't bother to tell him that good alibis are simple. He had his own theory. But I said, 'What is it you're going to do that's such a big deal?'

"'I've got to take out Chickie Salateri.'

"'Why?'

"'He's been dating one of the Lazaretti daughters. You know, Carmine's granddaughter, Catherine. She lives out here in L.A. She was married at one time to Bobby Molto, but he couldn't ever keep it in his pants, and he didn't understand why you can't cheat on a boss's child, so she got an annulment. That was, like, five, six years ago. So lately she's dating Chickie Salateri. Only she comes home from a shopping trip one afternoon, and there's Salateri with one of those little digital cameras, taking pictures. He's taking shots of the clothes in her closet, has her bank statements out on her desk and takes shots of those. She sees him, but tiptoes back outside and comes back in making a lot of noise. He doesn't know she knows, just hides the camera in his coat. When he goes to the head, she checks the camera. There are shots of her jewelry all laid out in the little velvet drawers from her jewelry case.'

"'Why was he bothering with all that?'

"'At first we all thought he must be working for the IRS. You know—helping them say that if she had five or six million in jewelry and didn't work, where did it come from? They do that, the feds. They put your children in a bind so you can stew about it until you want to kill yourself. But Carmine Lazaretti didn't get to be old by ignoring that light coming along the train tracks toward him. He sent people from New York that Chickie didn't know, and they watched him and asked around. They found out he's been casing the house for a robbery. He's got a crew, and he's got an out-of-state fence for everything in the house. He's even hired a woman who looks a little bit like Catherine to use cloned credit cards and IDs to clean Catherine out.'

"'So you think he's planning to kill Catherine too.'

"'All of this stuff takes a lot of time to pull off. If she's dead, he's got a lot.'

"'So you're killing him tonight?'

"'They said to do it, but if I do it after he gets her, I'm dead too. Now that I see you're in town, it's like a sign from God.'

"'You want a minute to think that through again?'

"'You know what I mean. You can do it for me.'

"'Not interested.'

"'Look,' he said. 'I've killed two people in my whole life. One was a son of a bitch in Brooklyn who owned a pawnshop. Somebody's niece noticed it was suddenly full of stuff that had been stolen in our neighborhood. One of the Lazaretti soldiers took people past the front window for a week or so, and they identified what was theirs. So I got sent to handle it. The guy wasn't even armed. He just sat behind his desk and I shot him in the chest. The other one I don't want to talk about. I've got no experience. I'll give you fifteen grand to go with me and act as a consultant. I'll do all the shooting. Then we'll drive down and catch the cruise. Those ships are full of pairs of women who pay good money just to meet somebody like us, dance and drink a little, and get laid. They say a weekend like that is just the thing. It sets them right up and they're good for a month.'

"I said, 'We can skip the cruise, but I'll help you out.' So we left. He drove, and we picked up a big van. Inside it was a plastic container, maybe four feet by two and a half, with a vacuum top that latched. We went by Chickie Salateri's house, then a couple of clubs. At the third we found him. The club was a problem because a lot of people stay very late. So I told Lonzio, go in and buy him a drink, act like his friend, and persuade him to go to another club with us. He went in, and about twenty minutes later they both came out. So there were now three of us in the van, and the big plastic tub. I sat on that, and Chickie seemed to pay no attention to the thing, as though it were a piece of furniture. Sam drove up into Griffith Park. The place is huge. Sam said the route we were taking was a shortcut to get from Los Feliz into the Valley, where a great new club had opened, but it didn't feel like a shortcut. The road was weird and winding, and went up into the hills by the observatory. Then Sam says he's got a tire that seems funny, so he pulls over to check it. This struck Chickie Salateri as more than suspicious. But he thought the one assigned to kill him must be me. He started to pull out a gun to shoot me so I gave him a quick jab to the nose. Sam opened the passenger door beside him and stabbed him. Sam was not good with a knife so he just kept trying to kill him while Chickie fought back. It took four or five minutes before the bleeding got to him and he died. The van was a mess, and so was Sam. His shirt was soaked. He ended up tossing it in the plastic bin with Chickie."

"Where did you bury the box?"

"We didn't. Sam knew about this old cemetery in the middle of the city. It wasn't little bronze plaques set in a lawn. It was full of big gravestones and crypts. Sam drove right to a crypt. It was the kind that looked like a little marble building. He'd had somebody come through and saw the lock off in advance. The box fit right on this shelf in there. We put it in, went out, and Sam put on a brand-new lock."

"Do you remember the name on the crypt?"

"O'Hara. The newest date carved on the wall was 1956."

"That's a pretty respectful burial for the Mafia."

"He was a made guy, and he had family still around. They don't usually mutilate the body unless the guy talked to the cops."

She changed the subject. "So if I find the O'Hara crypt in a cemetery in the middle of Los Angeles, there will be Chickie Salateri in Tupperware."

"I think it was Rubbermaid, actually. The point is, the body is in there with Sam Lonzio's shirt with his blood and Chickie's on it."

"Why are you giving this to me?"

"You're welcome. It's because, for whatever reason, you've been trying to help me stay alive. And because, when the time came to vote in Arizona, all the bosses of the Lazaretti family, including Sam Lonzio, voted to get together and kill me."

"You don't ever forget, do you?"

"It was a memorable evening."

"Maybe the vote in Arizona was a moment of weakness for Lonzio. He was surrounded by his bosses."

"Everybody gets another chance, every day. If he doesn't like what he's been doing, he can do something different—even do the opposite of what he just did."

"I hope you believe that."

"What's your pitch?"

"Things have just changed for you. Now the people after you aren't a lot of old, fat cigar puffers trying to look tough. And they're not waiting for you to turn up when you happen to get down to them on your list. They're hiring real hitters—people just like you—who will make a professional effort to hunt you down."

He shrugged. "I already knew. They have connections with people who do this kind of work, and they've got a lot of money to spend. It's not a surprise."

"The ones they hire may not be as good at it as you, but how good do they have to be?"

"I'll have to think of ways to keep them to a high standard."

"Wouldn't it be better to get out of their reach?"

"If they're good enough, and there's enough money at stake, there is no such place."

She turned in her seat and watched him as she spoke. "I'm willing to offer you not a perfect thing, but a good thing. We'll put you up in a place that's secret and that would be extremely difficult for anybody to know about, much less get to. There are classified military installations here and abroad. Nobody can overhear the name of the facility and have the faintest idea where or what it is. A lot of these places are somewhere in the middle of huge bases that are themselves remote and difficult to get into. You and I would meet once a day for a few weeks at a time, to chat. This might go on for a year or two, longer if you want. You would have to make your own deal for immunity with your own lawyer."

"You're not offering blanket immunity?"

"They approve that for people who give us suspects who are much worse than the informants are. I don't think the attorney general's office would approve blanket immunity for you. Everything you've done is a capital crime. I think I can get you some kind of immunity for the crimes you tell us about. Anything else, and you'd be fair game."

"And the court testimony?"

"You would have to testify in the cases where that's the best route to a conviction. If you're the eyewitness, it's unavoidable. But they wouldn't have you testifying against bookies and bagmen and corrupt accountants. The prosecution would look ridiculous bringing in someone like you for that. I'd say you should expect to testify against a few bosses. Just having you in a court saying you know them and have worked for them would be a big strike against them in the minds of a jury."

"There's a lot of showmanship in your business, isn't there?"

"Yes," she said. "Right now, we're talking about big, news-making prosecutions of Mafia bosses. This is how we do them. We find somebody who was on the inside, who knows enough details so there can't be a mistake, and we make a deal with him to testify."

"Is this your whole pitch?" he asked. "Your whole offer?"

"I can't give you money, except in the form of support while you're working with us."

"I don't need money."

"Good."

"And your bosses have agreed to everything else?"

"No," she said. "Right now, nobody knows I'm talking to you. This is an emergency. I have to make my best offer to you now, before you're dead. I can talk to them after you're safe."

"Then what you're offering is theoretical. Your boss isn't behind you on this, or you wouldn't be flying around the country without telling him what you're doing."

She sighed. "I'll be completely open with you. My boss, the deputy assistant attorney general in charge of my section, is a political appointee. He's still green, and has no experience making deals with informants, and feels suspicious about the practice. He'll learn as he goes. If we didn't make arrangements of this sort, we'd still be trying to prove the Mafia exists. His bosses know that, and if I can bring in the offer of your services, they'll explain it to him. But no. At this moment he doesn't know what I'm doing."

"So you haven't actually got any offer."

"What I've described is what I believe I can get approved, even over the objections of my boss. If his bosses feel reluctant to overrule him, I have other allies I've collected over the years who would help persuade them. Some are powerful people. A call from any of them would almost certainly work wonders."

"I'm impressed by your commitment," he said. "You'll use up all your markers and call in all the one-time favors. It will leave you without the power to do much else."

"You'll give it back to me. If I can get convictions of a fair number of the old men, then I'll have more friends than I can use. It will also accomplish what you want most. Putting these people in prison forever, just like you did Carlo Balacontano, is as good as killing them, isn't it?"

He pursed his lips, and there was a pained expression in his eyes. "I appreciate the offer, and I believe it's real. But I can't accept it."

"What's wrong? What is it that's missing? I'm offering to keep you alive for as long as you want federal protection. If you don't get off the streets to a place where they can't reach you, they'll kill you."

"They'll keep trying, certainly."

She watched him as he drove back along Ventura Boulevard to Lankershim and then up the steep hill to her hotel. As he pulled into the circle in front of the entrance, she said, "Maybe this isn't the best I can do. Give me a chance. You haven't said what's missing. Just tell me, and I'll try to get it."

"Freedom," he said.

"I don't know how to give you that," she said. "The things you've done don't leave me a way."

"Exactly."

He stopped in front of the entrance and looked at her expectantly. She got out of the car and then stood for a moment, watching him as he moved the car forward and turned to leave the circular drive.