“Zach was the guy I had to talk to,” Cogan said. “Nice guy. He helped me set my thing up. Say hello to Zach for me, you happen to see him.”
“I will,” the driver said. “Now, what do I tell him?”
“Well,” Cogan said, “the games’re shut down, right?”
“Most of them,” the driver said. “Somebody called Testa and he said he’d like to see somebody try to come into his operation. So I guess he’s still working. The rest of them’re pretty much closed.”
“Same thing that happened the last time,” Cogan said.
“It’s temporary,” the driver said. “He told me that. He said as soon as I talked to you, to let the fellows know what you want. Or Dillon, rather. Originally it was to’ve been Dillon.”
“I talked to Dillon,” Cogan said.
“What does he think?” the driver said.
“Well, the first thing that anybody’d think about in a thing like this,” Cogan said.
“This is the second time,” the driver said. “That’s what he said.”
“It happened before,” Cogan said. “Four years ago, and now it happened again.”
“The last time, I gather,” the driver said, “the man who did it actually was Trattman himself.”
“With a couple Indians,” Cogan said. “He put on a big show and all, but it was Trattman. Dillon said he even used to brag about it some times.”
“And nobody found out about it,” the driver said.
“Not till after,” Cogan said.
“Well,” the driver said, “this time they worked him over a little.”
“Once,” Cogan said. “They hit him one rap. One. I think, if I was Trattman and I was doing it again, I’d probably get at least one rap myself.”
“Well,” the driver said, “where do we go from here? What do you think?”
“I don’t know enough yet, do much thinking,” Cogan said. “Because, see, I don’t necessarily think this, but it still might’ve really been two kids this time. Or else it might’ve been Trattman. But it could’ve been some guys that knew he did it before. So it’s one of two things here. Mark’s been spending it a little more lately. He could’ve decided, do it again, nobody’d ever think he’d do it twice. But, you ever been up that place?”
“No,” the driver said.
“You know something?” Cogan said. “Nobody’s ever been up that place. Nobody but Trattman. It’s, it’s just not the kind of place that guys go. Except, I was checking around, Dillon mentioned this guy he knew, he used to know, guy was in Walpole and when he come out, they taught him landscaping, and when he come out that’s what he did, and Dillon said he thought maybe that guy did some work up there. So I called him. There’s eighty-six rooms in that place. It’s way the hell off in the woods, and there’s eighty-six rooms in it, and except for Markie’s game there’s not one single thing going on in that place. In the middle of the week the guys that’re using those rooms’re guys that’re selling things, and they work all night. That’s all they do. I talked to Gordon and he said he, when the place first opened up, he put a couple his girls in there. ‘They went nuts,’ he told me. ‘All they did all night was sit in the bar all by themselves and drink. The only guy they ever saw was the bartender. They’re getting fat and I’m losing dough hand over fist, it was awful.’ The place moves a little on the weekends, but then it’s guys that come in with girls. ‘Or fuckin’ amateurs,’ Gordon said. ‘Between the fuckin’ amateurs and the fuckin’ niggers you can’t do squat anyway these days.’ But during the week? Forget it. Nothing. There isn’t even a regular guy taking action in there, ’s how bad it is.
“Now you think about that,” Cogan said, “and keep in mind, I got absolutely no reason, think the guy’s dancing me around. You think about that for a minute. When’d that game go over? Right around midnight, am I right?”
“Around eleven-thirty, I guess,” the driver said.
“Right,” Cogan said. “They go up there and all, most of the lights’re on. ‘The place does a good business,’ Gordon tells me, ‘it’s full almost all the time. It just don’t do no other business.’ So these kids, if that’s what they are, they go there on the right night and they go to the exact room where it is and they go right in, the door’s open, and they take everybody’s money. How about that, huh?”
“Trattman admitted that,” the driver said. “He said he’d started to get careless. Instead of opening the windows or something they’d taken to leaving the door open a little bit, let the smoke out. He said that.”
“Good,” Cogan said. “But the guy that’s running the games isn’t supposed to get careless, you know? He’s supposed to think about things like that.”
“He was in the toilet when they came in,” the driver said.
“I don’t care where he was,” Cogan said. “He wasn’t doing what he was supposed to’ve been doing, and one way or the other, those two guys knew he wasn’t. And they knew he wasn’t gonna be, and they knew where to find him.”
“Right,” the driver said.
“So,” Cogan said, “for now it don’t matter, Trattman did it or somebody did it to Trattman.”
“It doesn’t?” the driver said.
“Not to Trattman,” Cogan said. “That’s where we got to start. We start with Trattman, and we start real good, too.”
“Now wait a minute,” the driver said.
“I’ll wait a week if you want,” Cogan said.
“I’ll have to talk to him before you go ahead and do, whatever it is you’re planning to do,” the driver said.
“Talk to him,” Cogan said. “I got plenty of things to do. Tell him I said we hadda talk to Trattman and see what he says.”
“He wouldn’t object to that,” the driver said.
“Really talk to him,” Cogan said. “You can’t do anything else, that I can see.”
“I can tell you right now,” the driver said, “he’s not going to okay anything major just on your suspicions. He’s very concerned about starting something that’ll make things worse than they already are.”
“I know that,” Cogan said.
“The last time we had somebody handled it was against both our better judgment,” the driver said, “and as soon as he got better he went straight to the FBI and started telling lies like you wouldn’t believe. It’s just a good thing for him that the fellow got cold feet when they brought him in to the grand jury. And it cost us a lot of money to make his feet cold, too, I can assure you. So he’s not going to want anybody going overboard on this. Who’s going to do it, you?”
“Do what?” Cogan said.
“Talk, have this little talk with Trattman,” the driver said.
“Well,” Cogan said, “I could. But, I talked to Dillon about this and we think, I better not. Might be better if Markie wasn’t too interested in me right now.”
“He’s going to want to know,” the driver said.
“Sure,” Cogan said. “Tell him, I talked to Dillon and we think, Steve Caprio and his brother.”
“Dillon knows who they are?” the driver said. “He’s used them before?”
“Dillon knows who they are,” Cogan said. “I know who they are. Barry was on the Wasp with me. He’s really kind of an asshole, but he was also, the guy that was the champ had to beat Barry, the light-heavy champ, he hadda beat Barry to get there. Steve’s all right. They’ll do what you tell them.”