“Pretty soon Summit Pictures and Oceania products were getting the edge in the marketplace, and Zitkind was making dough and Brewster was making dough, and Summit was making dough. Now and then some theater owner in Omaha would get roughed up, or a lumber wholesaler in Olympia, Washington, would have his warehouse burned, but that’s business, and everything seemed jake to everybody-except maybe the lumber wholesaler or the movie theater guy in Omaha-until Candy Sloan comes along.”
On the silent TV screen Frederics had stopped speaking. The camera zoomed back and held for a long shot of the whole newsroom, then the screen went gray. I got up and turned it off.
Samuelson kept on talking. “Some of this I picked up here and there-we been looking into this for a while ourselves. We picked Hammond up this afternoon-some of this I got from the two crooners downstairs. She talks to Felton, and Felton gets nervous and tells Hammond, and Hammond bucks it along to Brewster, and so forth, and eventually Franco Montenegro gets sent out to slap Sloan around a little and scare her off. They don’t want to burn a reporter if they can help it.”
“I still don’t know why Franco burned Felton.”
“Patience,” Samuelson said. “I’m getting to that. What me and you don’t know is that Felton has been the conduit for profits from Summit to Zifkind. And what nobody knows, including Brewster and Hammond and Zifkind, is that Felton is skimming. But Franco knew.”
If I’d been a cartoon character, a light bulb would have appeared in a balloon above my head. “And Franco cut himself a piece,” I said.
“Smart,” Samuelson said. “Smart eastern dude. You go to Haavahd?”
“I have a friend who’s taking a course there,” I said.
“Must rub off,” Samuelson said. Through the clear glass door of his office I could see a wall clock in the squad room. It said eleven thirty-eight. “So Felton and Franco are nibbling some vigorish of their own off the Mob’s vig. And nobody knows this.”
“And when we got so close to Felton that he was sure to take the fall, Franco had to kill him,” I said. “‘Cause if the Mob found out what they were doing, it-”
Samuelson nodded. “Yes,” he said, “slow, painful and certain. The part I like is that Felton puts in a call to Franco to come bail him out and of course invited in his own killer.”
“Franco was right,” I said. “Felton didn’t have the stuff. He’d have told everything he knew to everybody who asked him about thirty seconds after you got him in here.”
“The thing is that what Sloan’s boyfriend-what’s his name?”
“Rafferty,” I said, “Mickey Rafferty. But he wasn’t her boyfriend.”
“What Rafferty saw when Felton gave Franco some dough wasn’t what they and you and me thought it was. It was just Franco’s private little gig with Felton. But it got the whole thing rolling, and it got Hammond scared and Brewster and, I suppose, eventually Ray Zifkind, but we’ll never get close to him.”
“And Brewster,” I said. I felt as if I would never leave the chair I was in. As if I were slowly fossilizing, the living part of me dwindling deeper and deeper inside. All my energy was focused on listening to Samuelson. “Franco try to shake him down?”
“Yep. Needed the dough, I suppose, to get out of here and away from Zifkind and us.”
“And Brewster figured Candy was getting too close?” I said.
“Yeah. He didn’t believe she was as taken with him as she acted.”
“So he got Simms, and maybe somebody else-anybody else?”
“Yeah, soldier named Little Joe Turcotte. We’re looking around for him now.”
“So he got Simnxs and Little Joe to go out early and wait for Franco, and when Franco showed up, they gunned him. One of them used an automatic.”
“Turcotte,” Samuelson said.
“And they killed both of them while I was wandering around in the oil field.”
“Don’t make you happy, I guess,” Samuelson said.
“Nope. I haven’t been right since I got here.”
“Can’t see how you could have done much better,” Samuelson said.
I didn’t say anything.
“She was going to keep at it,” Samuelson said. “No way you could have kept her from it.”
“The thing is,” I said. My voice didn’t seem to be very closely connected to me. I paused and tried to think what I wanted to say. “The thing is,” I said, “that she did what she did because she didn’t want to be just another pretty face in the newsroom, you know. Just a broad that they used to dress up the broadcast. She wanted to prove something about herself and about being a woman, I guess, and what got her killed-when you come down to it- was, she thought she could use being female on Brewster. When it came down to it, she depended on-” I stopped again. I couldn’t think of the right phrase.
“Feminine wiles,” Samuelson said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Feminine wiles. And it got her killed.”
Chapter 30
THE PHONE RANG on Samuelson’s desk. The clock in the squad room said twelve twenty-five. I sat almost insentient while Samuelson listened to the phone. He said “Mmm” two, maybe three times, then listened some more. Then hung up without saying anything else.
