'Who were these people you did this for? You wouldn't tell me before. But you have to tell me now.'
Leo nodded but then stood up. He went to the sliding door and opened it, then moved out by the pool. He stood at the edge and looked down at the vacuum gliding silently along the bottom. Cassie came up behind him. As he spoke he never took his eyes off the water.
'They're from Vegas by way of Chicago.'
'Chicago. You mean the Outfit, Leo?'
Leo didn't answer but in his silence was the answer.
'How the hell did you get involved with the Outfit, Leo? Tell me.'
Leo started walking along the edge of the pool, his hands deep in the pockets of his robe.
'Look, first of all, I'm smart enough to know not to intentionally get involved with the Outfit, okay? Give me a little fucking credit, okay? I didn't have a choice in the matter.'
'Okay, Leo, I understand. Tell me the story.'
'It started about a year ago. I met these guys. I was at Santa Anita and saw Carl Lennertz over there, you remember him, right?'
Cassie nodded. Lennertz was a scout, always had an eye out for what he called a good book – a score. He sold tips to Leo, usually collecting a flat fee or ten percent of the gross taken out of Leo's end. Cassie had met him once or twice with Leo and Max several years before.
'Well, he was with these two guys and he made the introductions. They were just two guys who hung around the track and were looking to back a move here and there. They said they were venture capitalists.'
'And you just took them at their word.'
A truck with a bad muffler system roared by on the nearby freeway and Leo didn't answer the question until the noise had abated.
'I had no reason to doubt them and they were with Carl and he's good people. Besides, at the time things were drying up and I was scratching bottom. I needed setup money and here were these two guys. So I set up a meeting for later and we got together and I asked them to, you know, back me up on a couple things I had on my desk. They said sure, no problem.'
He stepped to the side of the pool where a surface net at the end of a ten-foot pole was hooked to a fence. He took it down and used it to skim a dead hummingbird out of the pool.
'Poor things, I don't think they can see water or something. They dive right in. This is the third one this week.'
He shook his head.
'Dead hummingbirds are bad luck, you know.'
He flicked the dead bird over the fence into a neighbor's yard. Cassie wondered if maybe the three dead hummingbirds were really just the same one that the neighbor kept throwing back over the fence and into the pool. She didn't say anything. She wanted Leo to get back to the story.
Leo hooked the net back in place on the fence and came back around to Cassie.
'So that's how it started. I took sixty-five bones off them against a hundred when the jobs were paid out. I was thinking six weeks tops. One was diamonds and that's always quick. And the other was a warehouse – Italian furniture. I had somebody lined up in Pennsylvania on that and was probably looking at six weeks tops on the turnaround. My end was going to be about two and I'd owe these guys one. Not bad. Most of the money I needed from them was for the data. The people I was working with had their own equipment.'
He was wandering, telling too many details about the plans and not what happened.
'You can skip all of this, Leo. Just read me the last page.'
'The last page is that both jobs went to shit. The data on the diamonds was bullshit. A rip-off. I paid forty for it and the guy disappeared. And then the furniture turned out to have been made down in Mexicali. It was counterfeit designer stuff and the made-in-Italy tags were as bogus as most of the tits you see in this town. I didn't know it till I got the truck all the way to Philadelphia and my buyer took a look. Shit, what a fucking mess. I just had them abandon the truck on the side of a road in Trenton.'
He paused as if trying to remember some other detail, then waved a hand in a resigned, dismissive gesture.
'And so that was it. I owed these guys a hundred grand and I didn't have it. I explained the situation to them and they were about as sympathetic as a night-court judge to a hooker. But when it was all said and done I thought I had bought some time. Only they just said that and turned right around and sold my fucking paper to another party.'
Cassie nodded. She could finish the story herself now.
'These two new guys come around and say they represent the new holder of the paper now,' Leo said. 'They make it real clear that the new holder is the Outfit without actually having to say it. Know what I mean? They tell me that we have to work out a payment schedule. I ended up paying two grand a week just on the interest. Just to stay afloat. It was killing me. I still owed the hundred but I was never going to get out from under. Never. Until one day they show up with a proposition.'
'What was it?'
'They told me about this job.'
He pointed through the open slider at the briefcase sitting on the desk inside.
'They told me to set it up with their guy in Vegas and that if I did it, then they'd burn my paper and still give me a cut on the caper.'
Leo shook his head. He walked over to the table and chairs near the shallow end and sat down. He reached over to a hand crank on the umbrella pole. He started turning it and the umbrella opened like a flower. Cassie came over and sat down. She cupped her left elbow in her right hand.
'So they obviously knew what was in the case,' she said.
'Maybe.'
'No maybes. They knew. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been so fucking magnanimous with you. When are they coming for it?'
'I don't know. I'm waiting on a call.'
'Did they give you a name?'
'What do you mean?'
'A name, Leo. Whoever bought your paper.'
'Yeah, Turcello. Same name that was on the package at the desk for you. He's supposedly the guy who picked up the pieces after Joey Marks went down.'
Cassie looked away. She didn't know the name Turcello but she knew who Joey Marks had been. He had been the Outfit's brutal point man in Las Vegas – one in a long line of vicious enforcers. His real name was Joseph Marconi but he was universally known as Joey Marks because of the keepsakes he left on those of his victims he allowed to live. Cassie remembered how she and Max had spent a year living in fear of Marks, who wanted a piece of their action. After she was in High Desert she picked up a newspaper one day and read about how Marks had been killed in his limousine during a bizarre shoot-out with the FBI and police in a bank parking lot in Las Vegas. She had celebrated after reading the story – which in prison amounted to sipping a paper cup of applejack she'd bought with a pack of cigarettes.
She didn't know who Marconi's replacement, Turcello, was but she assumed he had to be just as viciously psychopathic as Marks had been in order to be named to the position.
'And now you've got me in the box with you and these people,' Cassie said. 'Thanks, Leo. Thanks for – '
'No, you're wrong. I protected you. They don't even know about you. I took the job and set it up. Like I told you before, nobody knows everybody in the caper. They don't know you and they never will.'
Leo's promise was not reassuring. Cassie could no longer sit down while it seemed her life was passing in front of her. She got up and walked to the pool's edge and looked down into the calm, clear water. Her left arm hung at her side like a dead weight.
'What are we going to do, Leo? If I have this right, the Chicago mob used us to steal a payoff these Cubans from Miami were making to a third party on the buyout of the Cleo. We're sitting in the middle of what's going to be a war. Do you see that? What do we do?'
Leo got up and came to her. He pulled her into a tight hug and spoke calmly.
'Nobody knows about you. I promise you. Nobody knows about you and nobody ever will. You don't have to
