"Should I go over to your office?"
"I'm sending you copies of the transcripts by e-mail, but I wanted you to be aware that they're coming. The first batch is from a tap we've had on the phone of a Castiglione soldier named Ronald Bonardo. He runs a crew that's been doing real-estate scams in Florida. They'd buy and sell the same house four or five times among themselves to jack up the price, take out a giant mortgage, and then walk away. That worked in boom times when houses were going up. Now they're taking money to prevent foreclosures. The victim signs his house over to them."
"What does he say on tape?"
"Bonardo called Vincent Pugliese in Chicago to ask what was going on. Pugliese says on Friday night that the two older Castiglione brothers were dead and he was taking over the family. He said the one who had done the killing was the Butcher's Boy. That's the nickname of the guy you've been watching for, isn't it?"
"Yes. Is there anything on the tapes that will tell us where the Butcher's Boy is going next?"
"Not on the pages I've seen. The other transcript is a phone tap on a Lazaretti soldier in California named Joe Buffone. He's talking to an associate, a Lazaretti soldier in New York named Nano Scuzzi, this morning. Scuzzi asks whether they've got things set up. He says, 'I did what I was told by Tony. I delivered the first two hundred thousand to their company. That gets them on the job. When they deliver proof that he's dead, we give them the other three hundred.' Scuzzi says, 'Tony's smart. We don't want to see our best earners following that bastard into some dark alley, like the Castigliones did. It's stupid to even try. Let the guys like him handle him. If the pros bag him, we won't have to.' What do you think?"
Elizabeth felt her morning changing rapidly. "They've hired a hit man to kill the hit man. Or a team of them. I suppose it should have been obvious that this was going to happen, but I didn't see it coming. It makes perfect sense. The Lazaretti soldiers are skilled as drug smugglers and distributors. It doesn't make them effective against a professional killer. That's why they hired people like the Butcher's Boy a generation ago."
"How do you think we should handle this?" Holman asked.
"The first thing is probably to find out what we can about this murder-for-hire team. The ones who work that way usually have some kind of cover-an office, a company that takes in money and issues paychecks. Maybe there's something earlier on the tapes that will tell you where Buffone went to make his payoff, or if he spoke with the go-between on the tapped phone, or some detail we can use."
"I'll let you know if we find anything," he said.
"Thank you, John. I really appreciate your keeping me up on this. The taps were on two unrelated cases, and they would have been missed if you hadn't noticed. I'll talk to you soon." She hung up, and she felt a headache begin around her eyes and expand and intensify. She had been in Chicago all weekend, away from her children and putting herself in danger, which she had no right to do. She had just told herself that she wasn't going to try to go off alone and ad lib a plan after she was in the street between an angry professional killer and a bunch of armed gangsters. But the Butcher's Boy might be the most promising informant in forty years. And he wasn't worth anything dead.
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.