When Margaret came on the line her voice seemed calm enough. “Hi, Charlie, thanks for calling.”
“What’s happened?”
“Eddie’s hurt.”
“How bad?”
She cleared her throat. “He was on the critical list earlier but they’ve taken him off. Demoted him to ‘serious.’” Her abrupt laugh was off-key. I suspected they might have doped her with something to calm her down. She said, “He was beaten. Deliberately. Nearly beaten to death.”
* * *
EDDIE ISN’T as fat as I am, nor as old — by six years — but he’s a big man with chins and a belly; his hair, unlike mine, is still cordovan but then unlike me he’s going bald on top. The last time I’d seen him — a quick airport drink four years earlier, between planes — the capillaries in his nose had given evidence of his increasing devotion to Kentucky bourbon. His predeliction was for booze while mine was for cuisine.
This time his nose and part of his skull were concealed under neat white bandages and both his legs were cast in plaster. He was breathing in short bursts because they’d taped him tight to protect the cracked ribs. They were still running tests to find out if any of his internal organs had been injured.
He looked a sorry sight on the hospital bed and did not attempt to smile. Margaret, plump and worried, hovered by him. He seemed more angry than pained — his eyes flashed bitterly. His voice was stuffed up as if he had a terrible head cold; that was the result of the broken nose.
He said, “Been a long time since I asked you for anything.”
“Ask away.”
“I want you to get the son of a bitch.”
“What’s wrong with the cops?”
“They can’t touch him.”
The hospital room had a nice view of the Santa Catalina mountains and the desert foothills. There was only one chair; Margaret seemed disinclined to use it so I sat down. “Who did it?”
“This? Three guys. Border toughs. The cops have them — they were stupid enough to let me see their car when they cornered me and I had the presence of mind to get the license number. They don’t matter — they’ve been arraigned and I’ll testify. They’re just buttons.”
“Hired?”
“Ten-cent toughs. You can rent them by the hour. Somebody briefed them on my habits — they knew I’d stop at Paco’s bar on my way home. They were waiting for me in the parking lot.”
Margaret said, “They’re in custody but of course they claim they don’t know who hired them.”
“They probably don’t,” Eddie said. “A voice on the phone, a few hundred dollars in cash in an unmarked envelope. That’s the way it’s usually done. It makes certain the cops can’t trace back to the guy who hired them.”
I said, “The Mob.”
“Sure.”
“You know who hired them.”
“Sure. I know.” Then his lids drooped.
Margaret said, “You’re a sort of a cop, Charlie. We thought you might tell us how to handle it.”
“I’m not a cop.” Around the fourth floor in Langley call us loose stringers, meaning we’re nomadic trouble-shooters — no fixed territorial station — but I’m by no means any kind of cop. Margaret and Eddie didn’t know my actual occupation: they knew I worked for the government and they assumed I was with the CIA but for all they knew I was a message clerk. I found their faith touching but misplaced.
Eddie said, “If you were a cop you couldn’t do me any good. I don’t want somebody to read the bastard his rights — I want somebody to nail him.”
“I’m not a hit man, Eddie. I don’t kill people.”
“I don’t want him killed. He didn’t kill me, did he?” His eyes glittered. “I just want him to hurt.”
“Who is he?”
“Calls himself Clay Foran. I doubt it’s the name he was born with. What he does, he lends money to people who can’t get it from the bank.”
“Loan shark.”
“Yeah.”
“Eddie, Eddie.” I shook my head at him. “You haven’t grown up at all.”
“Okay, I can’t move, I’m a captive audience if you want to deliver yourself of a lecture.”
“No lecture. What happened?”
“An apartment house construction deal. I ran into cost overrides — rising prices on building materials. I had to come up with another fifty thousand or forfeit to the bank that holds the construction mortgage. I figured to clear a four hundred K profit if I could complete the job and sell it for the capital gain, and of course there’s a whopping tax-shelter deduction in that kind of construction. So I figured I could afford to borrow the fifty thousand even if the interest rate was exorbitant.”
“Vigorish.”
“Yeah. Usury. Whatever. Trouble is, I was already stretched past my limit with the banks and the building-and-loans. Hell, I was kiting checks over the weekend as it was, but I was in too deep to quit. I had to get the building completed so I could sell it. Otherwise the bank was set to foreclose. So I asked around. Sooner or later somebody steered me to Clay Foran.”
“And?”
“Very respectable businessman, Foran. Calls himself an investment broker. Of course he’s connected with the Mob. Arizona’s crawling with them nowadays, they all moved out here. For their health,” he added drily.
“How big is he?”
“Compared to what?”
“Nickle and dime, or million-dollar loans?”
“In the middle. It didn’t pinch his coffers to come up with my fifty K but he did it after I offered him a little extra vigorish on the side. Mostly I imagine he spreads it around, five thousand here, ten thousand there — you know, minimize the risks. But hell, those guys get five percent a week; he’s rich enough.”
“Two hundred and sixty percent annual interest?”
“You got it. I know, I know. But I was in a bind, Charlie, I had nowhere else to turn. And I figured to sell the project inside of a month. I figured I could handle it — ten grand interest.”
“But?”
“You see what they did to me. Obviously I came up short. It wasn’t my fault. The building next door caught fire. My building didn’t burn but the heat set off the automatic sprinkler system and it ruined the place. Seventy thousand damage — carpets, paint, doors, the works. The insurance barely covered half of it, and the damage set me back more than two months behind schedule. I had to bail out, Charlie. What choice did I have? My construction company went into Chapter Eleven. It’s not my first bankruptcy and maybe it won’t be my last — you know me — but I’d have paid them back. I tried to keep up the payments. I was a few days late a couple of times and we got threatening phone calls, so forth — you know how it goes. Then it wasn’t a week any more, it was three weeks, and you see what happened. They took out their vigorish in blood. I guess they wrote me off as a bad debt but they figure to leave me crippled as an example to other borrowers who think about welshing. Nothing personal, you understand.” His lip curled.
Margaret took his hand between hers. Margaret was always there to cushion Eddie’s falls: good-humored, fun-loving, careless of her appearance. She had endured all his failures; she loved the real Eddie, not the man he ought to have been. If I ever find a woman like Margaret I’ll have won the grand prize.
Eddie said, “I know the ropes, I had my eyes open, I’m not naive. But they’ve crippled me for life, Charlie. Both kneecaps. They’ll be replaced with plastic prosthetics but I’ll spend the rest of my life walking like a marionette. Two canes. I figure they hit me too hard, you know. I almost died. Maybe I still will. We don’t know what’s bleeding inside me.”
“You knew those guys played rough, Eddie. You knew it going in.”
It sounded lame and self-righteous even as I said it. Eddie’s eyes only smiled at me. He knew I’d pick up the baton.
* * *