Little Black Dress (Peter Macklin Novels) Read online

  “Texas wants to extradite, for Davis and Edison. He thinks it’s just a feint, to make him second-guess his strategy. But he wants to confer.”

  “Not California?”

  “No evidence. Anyway, they were trying to indict Maggiore. I saved L.A. County a million in prosecutors’ fees alone.”

  “We did. I drove the car, remember?”

  “No, and neither do you.”

  “If I find out you’re protecting me at your own risk, I’ll come forward and confess.”

  “It won’t come to that.” He put on the blinker. “I think Dorfman just wants to reassure himself I won’t panic and take a deal.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Because I’d hang myself waiting for the trial date.”

  “Oh.” She changed the subject. “He could reassure himself over the phone. He charges seven hundred an hour for consultation.”

  “I don’t discuss business over the phone.”

  “You’re sure that’s all it is, a feint?”

  “I’ll find out tomorrow.”

  They exited the freeway. Laurie snapped on the map light and read aloud the directions they’d been given by the hotel. When after a few blocks they determined the information was right, she switched off the light. “When were you planning to tell me about going to see Dorfman?”

  “When I did. I didn’t say anything before because I didn’t want to spoil your time with your mother. I knew you’d worry. And I was right.”

  “I thought we might see the real-estate agent tomorrow.”

  “It’s been on the market for months. It’ll still be there day after tomorrow. We don’t want to seem eager.”

  “You’re sure you want to live in the country?”

  “I’ve had it with city living. If you keep your curtains open, all the neighbors know your business, and if you keep them closed, they get too curious wondering what your business is.”

  “It’s the same in the country. The rumor mill never closes. Anyway, we don’t have any business. I may go back to work someday, but you’re retired. It bothers me that I keep having to remind you of that.”

  “I didn’t mean business business. I meant the daily routine. Wherever you live, I want to live with you.”

  She was overcome with sudden emotion. She reached over and squeezed his thigh, and if he weren’t so serious about his driving, she’d have crept her hand up farther.

  In the hotel room they made love with the passion of their honeymoon. It left them soaked and panting. Later, listening to his even breathing in the dark, she was sorry she’d thought of their honeymoon. That was when she’d killed a man.

  It was self-defense, and it wasn’t as if she’d planned it, but it wasn’t the kind of wedding-week memory she’d hoped to carry into old age. Sleepless nights had followed, small eternities of self-loathing and regret, and when she did sleep, the dreams were always waiting. In her daylight exhaustion she had considered therapy, and in the next moment abandoned the idea. Analysts took an oath of confidence, but analysts were human, and she’d lost her faith in the race. Then would come the law to separate her and Peter forever. Peter had seen her torment, but he couldn’t help her with something he’d never experienced, or if he ever had, it had happened so long ago it had lost its sting. She’d faced it alone.

  Time was proving itself the remedy. Time, and her increasing awareness that Peter intended to keep his promise never to return to his old life or to maintain secrets, had brought her this far, but there was still a long way to go, and if she ever reached a point where what she’d done no longer haunted her, what did that say about her worth as a person? As a wife, and as the mother she hoped someday to be? If she taught values to her children and was not repelled by her own hypocrisy, what kind of monster did that make her?

  And it had not been just one man. If you counted complicity, she had killed two. The second time she had driven the car. She’d been the getaway, the wheel, and if she consoled herself that she had stayed in the car and had had no direct part in the act, she was left with the knowledge that that time it had been cold-blooded murder, an execution planned from start to finish. It had been in defense of Peter, because the man would certainly have tried to kill him another time, as he had before, by proxy, without pulling a trigger or even touching a weapon. But if she had exonerated herself on those grounds, she would have begun the short straight slide toward becoming a habitual offender. Because it had been easier the second time.

  She knew then why she’d suggested buying her grandfather’s old farm. By returning to a childhood place, she would erase the crimes of adulthood. But there was another explanation, more sinister. She would remove herself physically from the company of people. From her potential victims.

  “Peter.” She shook him.

  He shuddered and was awake. She saw his eyes gleaming in the moonlight reflecting off Maumee Bay, around the edges of the blinds that covered the window.

  “Did you mean what you said before about Benjamin?”

  “I could be wrong.” His voice was clear, as if sex and sleep had not interrupted a conversation hours old.

  “How can you find out?”

  SIX

  In terms of the colorful, relatively young history of mob activity in the city of Toledo, Joe Vulpo was one of the founding fathers.

  He was born Giuseppe Garibaldi Vulpone in 1915, aboard the S.S. Mauritania, bellowing his protests just inside United States territorial waters; which had proven crucially significant sixty years later, when the U.S. Department of Justice attempted to deport him to Sicily on charges stemming from labor racketeering and organized crime in interstate commerce. Declared a citizen by three minutes and two hundred yards, Vulpo was instead sentenced to a year in the federal correctional institution in Marion, Illinois, and released after ten months for good behavior.

  His first experience with organized crime in interstate commerce had taken place at age eighteen, when he’d accompanied a caravan led by Pete Licavoli from Detroit to challenge the Purple Gang’s monopoly of the trade in bootleg liquor and assassination-for-hire in Toledo. Like Cicero, Al Capone’s lair away from home outside Chicago, the Ohio port city had been governed and policed by big-city gangsters for years, in this case Jews, but Licavoli thought it was time for new management. Vulpo had rattle-banged across the state line in the back of a beer truck with a dozen other young men armed with blackjacks, pistols, and lethal garlic breath. He never returned to Michigan.

  Buried in the yellowing files of the Toledo Blade and the Cleveland Plain Dealer were the shrill headlines and accompanying grainy photos of bombed-out storefronts, bullet-riddled sedans, and splayed corpses that had marked the Sicilians’ victory and subsequent assumption of all contraband traffic south of Monroe and along the lake shoreline as far east as Buffalo.

  Vulpo, of course, had played no larger part in the campaign than that of common street soldier. Apart from the occasional arrest and one conviction for aggravated assault (for which he served ninety days in the Wood County Jail), he’d escaped official notice until 1957, when he was one of the men detained for questioning following the police raid on the legendary crime conference in Apalachin, New York. By 1960, his FBI file filled two drawers, including stenotyped interviews with confidential informants and transcripts of conversations recorded from wiretaps. In addition to having partnerships in casinos in Las Vegas and Havana, he was suspected of investing money from a union pension fund in a narcotics operation based in British Honduras, and alleged to be one of the nine men who sat on the commission that ran the American Mafia.

  The Department of Justice attempted to indict him several times during the twelve years that followed his stretch in Marion. Three grand juries failed to hold him over for trial, and the first time he was tried, the judge called for acquital when the government’s star witness admitted that he’d agreed to testify against Vulpo in return for a nol-pros on an old perjury charge. It was at this time the newspapers christened Vulpo the Ir
on Boss, declaring him impregnable to law enforcement.

  Then came the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and the Iron Boss began to show signs of corrosion. In effect, RICO repealed the Bill of Rights without going to the states, enabling investigators to bug priests’ confessionals and attorneys’ offices and tap the telephones of everyone associated with the suspect. Responding to the evidence thus gathered, a jury found Vulpo guilty on eight counts of violating RICO. When his appeals ran out in 1990, however, Vulpo was in custody in the Ottawa County Jail for indecent exposure. He’d been observed walking along the Ohio Turnpike wearing nothing but a pair of hand-loomed cashmere socks, and arrested by sheriff’s deputies.

  Thus began a series of bizarre incidents during which the seventy-five-year-old racketeer’s mental state came into question. Released into the custody of his son Thomas, he stuck his tongue into a light socket in an upstairs bedroom of Thomas’s home in Northwood and was taken to the St. Vincent Medical Center for treatment. Ten days later, back in Northwood, city officers found him lying in the parking lot of a roadhouse, unconscious with three cracked ribs and bleeding from an open head wound. Upon investigating they learned that he had attracted unwelcome attention from members of the Buckeye Bastards Motorcycle Club when he urinated on the club president’s chinos in the crowded men’s room. Witnesses reported that finding all the urinals taken, the victim had stood back and taken aim between the president’s legs, missing his target by several inches. When the officers called his son’s house from St. Vincent, Thomas expressed surprise that his father was not upstairs in bed. On still another occasion, the Iron Boss was detained by private security at a Toledo Wal-Mart for masturbating in the aisle in Home Fashions.

  Agents of the Justice Department were unmoved, insisting that Vulpo was trying to avoid incarceration on a mercy plea of diminished capacity. Greater gangdom disagreed. Vulpo, who had a reputation for conducting himself with dignity and a nearly obsolete sense of honor, was now known in the bars and restaurants where the cognoscenti hung out as Joey Loops. Those with bachelor’s degrees called him Don Compos Mentis.

  In the natural order of things, the old man’s infirmities would elevate either his lieutenant or his son to his position as head of the Toledo crime family. However, his longtime sub capo, Paul Scalpini, was three years into his own fifteen-year sentence for RICO violations, and his son Thomas was regarded among the veterans who served his father as dangerously unstable. The rumor persisted that Tommy Vulpo had attended his graduation ceremonies at OSU wearing high-heeled pumps under his robes, and he had been questioned by the police on several occasions when transvestite prostitutes complained that they’d been picked up, brutally beaten, sodomized, and dumped into gutters from a car whose description matched Tommy Vulpo’s custom-built Bentley. There weren’t many Bentleys wandering the streets of Toledo, and fewer still with redwood bars built into the backseats. Although none of the victims got a good look at their assailant, most recalled the squat neck and shaved head of the man in the driver’s seat. Yet they failed to pick Take, the younger Vulpo’s Romanian bodyguard and chauffeur, out of lineups, and in time all the complaints were withdrawn.

  As a result, Thomas Anthony Vulpo had a clean sheet with the law. This was not the case with his father’s loyal followers, whose faith in modern police methods was higher than that of the average solid citizen. Crazy Joe’s eccentricities were considered harmless, but Terrible Tommy’s reflected seriously antisocial behavior of the sort that interfered with the smooth operation of a family concern with a tradition as old as AT&T’s. In addition, Tommy was given to unpredictable rages, and had been known to strike the faithful Take in the presence of witnesses. They refused to meet with the son unless the father was present, and whenever Tommy issued an instruction, their eyes went to Joe to see if he nodded. The old man always seemed alert during meetings, even if he did sometimes attend them wearing a Porky Pig baseball cap and a T-shirt reading ’69 OLYMPIC MUFF-DIVING TEAM.

  By the time Ben Grinnell was summoned to meet with Tommy Vulpo following the violent outcome of the latest video-store robbery, Joe was eighty-seven, in failing health, and his presence during meetings was erratic. Many of the old guard were gone—dead, ill, or imprisoned—and the younger lieutenants, some of whom barely remembered a time when the Iron Boss was in full command of his faculties, didn’t insist upon the old man’s presence, tacitly accepting Tommy’s authority. A rift had opened between the generations, with the able-bodied seniors running their franchises more or less independently of Northwood—albeit continuing to make their contributions to the executive fund—while the younger men carried out instructions from Tommy. This feudal situation had weakened the organization’s structure, giving federal and local officers an opportunity to insert a wedge between the factions, isolate the more vulnerable elements, and prosecute them for legions of petty crimes that would ordinarily have been defended vigorously by attorneys on retainer to the Vulpo family. The implication was clear: Support Tommy Vulpo or battle the barracuda on your own.

  The loss of manpower to various penal institutions, and of the revenue it had supplied, forced Northwood to follow the lead of legitimate corporations in a bad economy and downsize. Heavyweight work once conducted by “made” men in good standing with the family was farmed out to independents—non—Sicilians mostly, including Puerto Ricans and blacks—expense accounts were slashed, and single-area specialists obliged to assume responsibilities not covered in their original job descriptions.

  Naturally, there had been protests, most vocally from among those factions that had all but seceded from Northwood. But they’d ceased after the disappearance of James “Jimmy Teats” D’Onofrio during his journey home from his niece’s wedding in Louisville, Kentucky, and the discovery six weeks later of the badly decomposed remains of Vincent Manila in the spacious trunk of his beloved Oldsmobile 98, recovered from the bottom of a flooded quarry in rural Pennsylvania. Both men had been associated with Joe Vulpo since the early days of the World War II black market, and they had joined in demanding the resignation—peacefully, if necessary—of Tommy after the effects of the budget crunch hit home. Not since the last great gang war in 1972 had anyone of such high rank made the final sacrifice; two seemed just short of excessive. Even the federal drones who spent their days hunched over tape recorders eavesdropping on the dreary Vulpo domestic routine were impressed.

  A sea change occurred on September 11, 2001. Gangsters seemed warm and fuzzy compared to foreign terrorists at the controls of passenger jets. Law enforcement directed its attention away from the American underworld and toward national security. Quietly, the dysfunctional Ohio crime family hailed this gift from the Middle East. Arrests fell off, and peace reigned. Joe Vulpo celebrated by climbing down a trellis and skinny-dipping in Swan Creek Park.

  Grinnell swung his Lexus into the composition doughnut driveway and parked in front of Tommy Vulpo’s house, a crazy-quilt collage of architectural styles from English Tudor to Walter Gropius, and testament to its owner’s tendency toward multiple personalities. Take was waiting for him on the top steps when he got out of the car, not a good sign. Grinnell had underestimated the homebound traffic into the suburbs and was fifteen minutes late for his appointment. Depending upon the state of Tommy’s chemistry that day, the lapse would either pass unmentioned or trigger a tantrum, complete with flying spittle and possibly a heavy desk accessory. You never knew with him, that was the unsettling thing. He was calmer when his father was present, but in recent months the old man had been absent frequently, with only the sound of his heavy footfalls patrolling the floor above to indicate he was at home. Rumor said he was expecting Mussolini to invade by way of Lake Erie.

  Take was a Romanian national. He had no hair on his head, not even in his nose, and the flattened skull characteristic of his race, falling in a plane to the back of his collar. He wore a brown leather windbreaker indoors and out, concealing an underarm holster, fawn-colored corduroys, and b
are feet, the same uniform he wore when he drove Tommy in the Bentley. The extent of his understanding of English was unknown. Tommy had recruited him from a line waiting to register as aliens. He was thought to have been among the refugees who fled eastern Europe after the USSR fell, and that the shoes he’d worn in Lubyanka Prison had ruined his feet for shoes of any kind. The story on the pavement was he’d smuggled himself past Immigration to avoid prosecution for crimes against humanity as a member of Nikolai Ceausescu’s secret police. Grinnell was almost certain the story had been circulated by Tommy Vulpo to intimidate potential attackers. The bodyguard inspected Grinnell for weapons and escorted him to Tommy’s study on the ground floor.

  The house was three stories high, with each floor converted to a self-contained apartment complete with kitchen, bedrooms, and entertainment facilities, and each with its own entrance and separate staircase to the connecting floors. The ground floor was Tommy’s, the second his estranged wife Sylvia’s, and the top belonged to Joe after his move from the original family home in Toledo. Tommy had had the stove in his father’s apartment disconnected and ornamental but functional bars installed in the windows to prevent accidents and escapes. It was just about the most dismal household arrangement Grinnell had ever heard of.

  Bright carpeting, as green as a golf course, covered the floor of the study, which was decorated in Danish Modern. The bookshelves, desk, and occasional tables were bleached a light blonde against the six-month Scandinavian night and similarly bleak Ohio winter. Tommy Vulpo took his attention from the pornographic Web site on the computer monitor on his desk to greet Grinnell and offer refreshment. The visitor declined. Take was dismissed. The site, Grinnell observed, was devoted to photographs of obvious males in lace lingerie and spike heels.

  Tommy was a youthful-looking forty-five. His face had been lifted, his hair highlighted and curled into Grecian ringlets, and in the white terry-cloth robe he always wore as a dressing gown he bore a strong resemblance to the Roman emperor with an unfortunate speech impediment in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. He had fine features, which for once were arranged in a smile. He invited Grinnell to sit.