Not me, Frank thought.
He started to go with Mike to the clubs where the guys spent their days, andthis hadn’t changed. This had stayed the same, like it was in a time warp. It was comforting, familiar. Familial, I guess, Frank thinks now.
It was all the same guys-Bap, Chris Panno, and Mike, of course. Jimmy Forliano had a trucking business out in East County, and he’d come around sometimes, but that was really about it.
They were a small, tight little group in what was, back then, still a small town. That was the thing about San Diego in those days, Frank thinks now. We weren’t really even a “mob,” or an obvious family like they had in the big East Coast cities.
And there wasn’t a hell of a lot going on.
The normally free and easy San Diego had a new federal prosecutor who was busting everyone’s balls. He’d worked up a twenty-eight-count indictment against Jimmy and Bap for some bullshit about the truckers’ union and was generally making life difficult for whatever organized crime there was in the city.
Bap also had a silent piece of a local taxi company, and he set Frank up with a job driving cabs.
Washing machines on wheels is what they really were, the guys laundered so much money through those taxis. Gambling money, loan shark money, prostitution money-it all went on cab rides.
And political money.
To city councilmen, congressmen, judges, cops, you name it. The chief of police got a new car every year, courtesy of the cab company.
Then there was Richard Nixon.
He was running for president and needed a war chest, and it just wouldn’t have looked good-mobbed-up guys in San Diego writing checks to the Nixon campaign. So the money went through the cab company in chunks “donated” by the owners and the drivers. Frank never would have found out about it except that he saw one of the checks on the office desk one night.
“I’m giving money to Nixon?” he asked Mike.
“We all are.”
“I’m a Democrat,” Frank said.
“Notthis year, you ain’t,” Mike said. “What, you want Bobby fucking Kennedy in the White House? Guy’s got a hard-on for us you could cut glass with. Besides, it ain’t really your money, is it? So relax.”
Frank was sitting in the office of the cab company with Mike, drinking coffee and talking shit, when the call came.
“Are you boys ready to take a step up?” Bap asked.
He was calling from a phone booth.
Bap never called from home, because Bap wasn’t stupid. What he’d do is, he’d put rolls of quarters in his pocket and he’d walk four blocks to this phone booth on Mission Boulevard at night and conduct his business from there, like it was his office.
Usually, they’d meet Bap on the boardwalk in Pacific Beach, just a few blocks from the boss’s house.
You wouldn’t have figured a guy like Bap to have loved the ocean so much.
Something he and Frank had in common, although, of course, Bap never got out on a board, or even went for a swim, as far as Frank ever knew. No, Bap just liked looking at the ocean; he and Marie used to go for sunset walks together on the boardwalk or stroll on Crystal Pier. Their condo had a nice oceanfront view, too, and Bap used to stand at the window and do watercolors.
Bad watercolors.
He had dozens of them, scores of them, probably, and he used to give them out as presents all the time; otherwise, Marie would bitch about him clogging up their whole place with the paintings.
Bap would give them for Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, Groundhog Day, anything. All the guys had them-what were you going to say, no? Frank had one on the wall of his little apartment on India Street-it was a sailboat heading out into the sunset, because Bap knew that Frank liked boats.
Which was true, Frank did like boats, which made this watercolor all the more painful, because no vessel should have to suffer what Bap did to this boat. But Frank kept it on his wall, because you never knew when Bap might drop by, and Frank didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
This worked because he wasn’t married yet. The married guys’ wives usually made them put Bap’s paintings in a closet or something, because the married guys were usually made men and protocol, even in casual San Diego, dictated that even a boss didn’t just drop by without a phone call. But there had been some frantic replacements of paintings on walls when the phone call came, with guys scrambling to get one of Bap’s hideous watercolors up in the living room before the doorbell rang.
So if it was just normal business, they met at the beach. This day, however, Bap told them to meet him at the zoo, outside the reptile house.
The subject was a guy named Jeffrey Roth.
“Who?” Mike asked.
“You heard of Tony Star?” Bap asked, his face pressed up against the glass, staring at a spitting cobra.
“Sure,” Mike said.
They all had heard of Tony Star. He was a rat from Detroit, whose testimony had put half that city’s family away. Rocco Zerilli, Jackie Tominello, Angie Vena, they were all doing time because of Tony Star. The papers had a field day with the irresistible headline TONY STAR WITNESS.
“He’s ‘Jeffrey Roth’ now, in the Witness Protection Program,” Bap said. He started tapping on the glass, trying to provoke the cobra into attacking. “You think you could get one of these guys to spit at you?”
“I don’t think they want you doing that,” Frank said. He felt bad for the snake, which was just minding its own business.
Bap looked at him like he was nuts, and Frank got it. “They” probably didn’t want Bap killing people, hijacking trucks, shylocking money, and running gambling operations, either, so he probably wasn’t going to stop tapping on the glass at the zoo. Indeed, Bap tapped on the glass some more, then asked, “Guess where Star is living now? Mission Beach.”
“No shit!” Mike said.
It was a personal affront, a rat living right in their own backyard.
Frank and Mike had had many discussions on the subjects of rats. It was the worst-possible thing in the world to be, the lowest of the low.
“You gotta be a stand-up guy,” Mike had said. “We’re all grown men; we know the risks. If you get popped, you keep your mouth shut and do your time.”
Frank had agreed, absolutely.
“I’d die before I’d go into the program,” he’d said.
Now they had a guy who had put half the Detroit family in the joint, and here he was, hanging out and enjoying himself on Mission Beach.
“How’d they find him?” Mike asked.
The spitting cobra had curled itself into a ball and looked like it was asleep. Bap gave up and moved on to the puff adder in the next cage. It was wrapped around a tree limb, coiled and looking dangerous.
“Some secretary in the Justice Department that Tony Jack’s got on the arm,” Bap said, tapping on the adder’s cage. He took a slip of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Frank. The note had an address in Mission Beach written on it. “Detroit wanted to send their own guys, but I said no, it’s a matter of honor.”
“Fuckin’ right it is,” Mike said. “Our turf, our responsibility.”
“And it’s worth twenty grand,” Bap said.
The puff adder struck at the glass and Bap jumped back about five feet, losing his glasses in the process. Frank suppressed a laugh as he picked them up, wiped them off on his sleeve, and handed them to Bap.
“Sneaky fuckers,” Bap said, taking the glasses.
“They’re camouflaged,” Mike said.
Frank and Mike went out and bought some geeky clothes that made them look like tourists and checked into a motel on Kennebec Court on Mission Beach. They spent most of their time looking out through venetian blinds at Tony Star’s condo across Mission Boulevard.
“We’re kind of like cops,” Mike said the first night in.
“How do you figure?”
“I mean, this is what they do, right?” Mike asked. “Stakeouts?”
“I guess,” Frank said. First time he ever felt sorry for cops, because being on a stakeout was boring. It gave whole new meaning to the wordtedium. Sitting there drinking bad coffee, taking turns going to Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, or a local taco joint, eating off your lap on sheets of greasy paper. What this garbage was doing to his insides, Frank could only guess. Heknew what it was doing to Mike’s insides, because it was a small room, and when Mike opened the door as he came out of the bathroom…Anyway, Frank started feeling bad for cops.