Traffic ran light and we made good progress. Nolan passed the time by pestering me about the man we were going to see, wanting to know if he knew Strathmore, and if he did, how well. And what he would be able to tell us. I rolled my eyes and dodged her questions until we were about halfway there. Finally I said, “Enough already. Let me do the talking, okay? The Diceman is probably going to know something because he was connected, in a big way. If Strathmore is dirty, he’ll know. It was his business to keep track of people like that.”
“Connected?” she said.
“Yeah. As in mobbed up. You know, a bunch of guys wearing shiny suits, with names like Fat Tony and Earless Mario. Catch my drift?”
“Oh.” She paused for a moment and looked out the window as we passed another shopping center with a Strathmore Realty sign on it. “So what do you mean he keeps track of people like that?”
I turned up the AC. “The mob gets a bad rap these days; people tend to underestimate them. They’ve got an intelligence-gathering apparatus that rivals the CIA. Especially with anybody who’s wealthy, they maintain files on them, what they do, where they live, family, friends, vices, their life story, really. Always looking for the weaknesses. Anything that was exploitable.”
Nolan nodded. “Antisocial.”
“No. Actually, they’re pretty fun to hang around with.” I slowed as the traffic thickened. “Great parties. I remember one time, the Harrah’s in New Orleans had just opened—”
“That’s not what I meant.” She sighed theatrically. “Antisocial as in a personality type. A lack of regard for moral or legal standards of society.”
“Oh. That antisocial. Yeah, that describes most of them perfectly.”
“They don’t get along with others, or rules. The pain they cause is rationalized away, or not even addressed emotionally.” Nolan adjusted her seat belt and then spoke again in a quieter tone. “Sometimes they’re called psychopaths.”
“Save it for somebody who cares, okay?”
She obliged, the faint smile on her face irritating me more than the psychobabble.
We hit the freeway, and I turned on the cruise control. We had another half hour to travel before we could maybe start to find some answers. If anybody could tell me whether Fagen Strathmore was dirty, the Diceman could.
Victor “the Diceman” Lemieux started life as a seven-and-a-half-pound fuck trophy, in a third-floor walk-up brothel off Canal Street in New Orleans. The product of a forced union between a seventeen-year-old prostitute and an aging vice cop, Victor was busting heads for a local shylock about the age most kids were learning to drive. When he retired forty years later, courtesy of a .38 slug to the abdomen from a cranked-up Jamaican coke dealer, he was in charge of real estate investments for a certain union’s pension fund controlled by the Marcello crime family.
We were friends, the Diceman and I, after a nasty street brawl one sultry summer evening in an alley off Conti Street in the French Quarter. For reasons that are best left unsaid, I ended up saving his life that evening. Victor had two blades stuck in him, thigh and ribs. I had a fractured wrist and a two-inch gash in my temple, but still managed to pull him down a narrow alley, just as the police arrived. He directed me
to a friendly doctor who patched us up. Despite the fact that he had about as much Sicilian blood in him as did Jerry Falwell, Victor was old school, omertà and honor and all that other Godfather crap. He maintained that he owed his life to me and never forgot it. After the thing with the Jamaican, the Diceman retired and moved to the Dallas area to be near his only daughter.
He lived in a suburb near the airport now, part of the vast Texas prairie converted haphazardly into a sliver of the American dream, in a three-bedroom slap-up job the developer quaintly called the “Jubilee Floor Plan.”
I drove down the main north-south thoroughfare, trying to remember the correct turn. The streets all had western-tinged names like Ponderosa Place and Meandering Canyon. They possessed a dreary sameness, block after block of treeless yards and poorly built brick edifices with miniature turrets and ridiculous-looking two-story arched entryways. I wondered how an old wiseguy called the Diceman fared in this land of minivans, Pottery Barn furniture, and five-digit credit card debt.
His house was in the middle of the block, a dead ringer for all the others except for the LSU pennant hanging over a bay window. We were halfway up the sidewalk when he opened the door, leaning heavily on a cane, his bulk resting against the edge of the entranceway.
“Hot damn. If ’n it ain’t Mr. Oswald. Done come all the way out here.” Victor loved to play up the Cajun accent.
“What’s happening, Victor?” I stepped into the foyer and embraced him.
He slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Little of this, little of that. And who might this purty gal be?”
“This is Nolan O’Connor. She’s helping me on this thing.”
Nolan said hello as he shook her hand. He refused to let go, instead leaning on her as if she were another cane. “Let’s go to da den. You can tell me what so important it brings you out thisaway.”
Together the three of us made our way into the cavernous family room overlooking the minuscule backyard. Victor still wouldn’t let go of Nolan, insisting that she sit next to him on the leather sectional sofa running along one wall. He propped a leg up on the coffee table and turned to me. “Lee Henry, we need us some beer. There’s a pile of Dixie in the icebox. Grab some, wouldya?”
I got three cold bottles and passed them around. The Diceman smiled and patted Nolan’s knee. “Ask what you need to ask, Lee Henry.”
“You know a man named Fagen Strathmore? A real estate guy?”
Victor removed his hand from Nolan’s leg and scratched his head. “Whatchoo mixed up with him for? He trying to sell you some swampland?”
“It’s a case,” Nolan said. “Guy goes to meet Strathmore and is never seen again.”
Victor took a long pull of his drink. “That wouldn’t be the first person to disappear.”
“So you know him?” I said.
“Yeah, we was friends once.” He rubbed his eyes, and leaned back. “Lemme tink a minute. Been a long time since I recollected about ole Fagen Strathmore.”
After a few moments he told us the story of the boy who would eventually be a multimillionaire, the person they would call the Big Man, about how he grew up poor, in a trailer park in Port Arthur, Texas, where the sulfur stink of the coastal refineries permeated the humid air like smoke in a barroom. Dad died young, a blowout on an oil rig. Mom took care of the tiny family as best she could, slinging hash in a grease trap in Bridge City, and living mostly on Schlitz, Lucky Strikes, and broken dreams. Sometimes she liked to bring home shrimpers, hard, sun-leathered men who smelled of the sea, sweat, and whiskey. Fagen was big for his age, and a challenge to more than one of his mother’s boyfriends. For his thirteenth birthday, a doctor at the free clinic downtown set
and plastered his broken right arm, and then taped his ribs and nose, the fractures courtesy of a Portuguese fisherman who held no truck with mouthy young men objecting when Mama got slapped around a little.
When he was fourteen he got a paper route, delivering for one of the Houston dailies. At fifteen he was named Paperboy of the Year, and presented with a plaque and a genuine Davy Crockett coonskin cap. At seventeen, he quit high school and bought his first rental house.
The next year proved to be seminal in the life of the young entrepreneur. On his eighteenth birthday, he evicted his first delinquent tenant, skipping the legal niceties and using a baseball bat instead. The next day he bought his fifth lease property, and tracked down the Portuguese man who had put him in the hospital five years before.
The fisherman was never seen again.
At twenty he sold all fifteen of his rental houses, gave half the money to his mother, and took a job with a real estate development company out of Atlanta that wasn’t particular about things like a lack of formal training. They bounced him up and down the eastern seaboard, Connecticut, Philly, New York, even a year in Boston. When he had learned all he could, he quit and came home to Texas, settling in Dallas, the concrete mesa on the banks of the Trinity, where it was said a hungry young man could make a name for himself. Strathmore’s first project had been an office and shopping center, in what at the time had been little more than a cow pasture. The local banks balked at loaning so much money, unsure of this brash young man. The owner of a strip bar on Commerce, a dingy place called the Carousel Club, put him in touch with a fellow in Shreveport who had sent him to see some dark men in the back room of a social club in New Orleans.
One of the people in that back room had been a much younger Victor Lemieux. The person who put them together, the owner of the bar, was named Jack Ruby.
“Fagen always paid back promptly, every time, never gave us the chance to get our hooks in him for real,” Victor said, draining his second beer.
“He kept borrowing mob money?” I said.
“Yeah. It helped us too, sometimes.” Victor shrugged. “Clean funds, you know.”
Nolan stood up and stretched. “So he was doing you guys favors?”
“Uh-huh.” Victor nodded. “Hell, one time he gave us some money so that we could loan it to a certain person for him. Guy’s name was Peabody somethingerother. Went through a savings and loan we had at the time, in Tyler. Peabody was small time, trying to buy property and build some offices. Unfortunately, he had stuff that Fagen wanted. Guy owned the last teeny chunk in a strip of dirt that Strathmore already owned. Bad thing to be Peabody.”
“What happened?” Nolan pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from her pocket and stuck one in her mouth. She made no move to light it.
Victor looked at her smoke and licked his lips, breathing heavily. Finally he snapped out of it and said, “Huh? Oh yeah, well, Fagen says let me buy it. Peabody says no. Fagen ups his offer. Peabody says no again. See, he’s got plans, needs that building to use as collateral because he wants to borrow some money. So he borrows the money, using this certain savings and loan I done mentioned already. Then guess what happened? Had ’em a little case of Jewish lightning. Damn shame too; his family had an antique store in the place, been there for years.” Victor paused and looked at a spot on the wall. “Peabody’s mother was there that day. She didn’t make it out.”
“Jewish lightning?” Nolan said.
Victor grabbed her pack of cigarettes and stuck it under his nose, inhaling the scent of the tobacco deeply. “Whoowee, that smells damn good. Guddam doctors say no more smokes, no more sausage, no booze ’cept for a Dixie or two a day.” He took another whiff of the demon weed and put the pack down. “Where was we, oh yeah, Jewish
lightning. That’s a fire. Usually you do it to collect the insurance money. Only this time, there weren’t no insurance because the S&L’s supposed to take care of it. But that bank didn’t and Peabody lost his ma and his property. To good ole Fagen Strathmore.”
“Whatever happened to Peabody?” I said.
“Humph.” Victor waved a hand and shrugged. He pulled a cigarette out of Nolan’s pack and stuck it in his mouth, leaving it unlit. “Peabody threatened to sue. Started calling the papers, shit like that. He had a car wreck a little bit after. Died.”
I turned to Nolan. “I hope you’re not going to say Strathmore’s got narcissism whatever.”
She shook her head. “His basic personality type sounds like self-confident with narcissistic disorder overlays. Most definitely a Type A.”
I sighed. “Are you making this stuff up as you go?”
“I have a degree in psychology.”
“That makes her smarter than you and me put together, Hank.” The old man laughed and removed the smoke from his mouth, running it lengthwise under his nose like it was a Monte Cristo No. 1.
“When I was on the job, I specialized in profiling.” Nolan looked at me. “You got a problem with understanding the way the mind works?”
I didn’t reply. She held a Zippo out to the Diceman. He shook his head, and sucked the dry, unlit tobacco.
“I’m trying to quit too.” Nolan slid the lighter back into her jeans. “Sometimes it feels good to just hold one in your mouth.”
“Orally fixated, are we?” A brief smirk crossed my face as Victor chuckled. Nolan rolled her eyes.
I decided to get back on track. “What’s Strathmore been up to lately? Any ideas?”
The Diceman shook his head. “I’m out of the game. No idea. Ain’t talked to that crooked son of a bitch in ten years, I’ll bet.”
We made small talk for another half hour. As we were leaving, my cell phone rang. A muffled voice was on the other end, crying. I waved
good-bye to Victor and we walked outside, listening to Vera Drinkwater’s voice in my ear. “Hank. They’ve found Charlie.” More tears now; her voice became ragged. “He’s dead. They found him dead.”
“Tell me what happened, Vera.” My tone was sharp, trying to snap her out of hysteria. Nolan and I got in the truck. She raised her eyebrows at me. I shrugged and mouthed, Charlie’s sister.
“They said he shot himself.” More crying, then the sounds of deep breathing. She was trying to get control of herself. “They said he committed suicide. They found him in a crack house. With drugs.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When did they find him?”
“I don’t know, they just called me, just now.” She started sobbing again. “He had one of those emergency contact cards in his wallet. He had my name on it. I remember when he filled it out—” She started to cry harder. I let her sob for a few moments. The crying subsided and she spoke again. “He didn’t kill himself, Hank. There’s no way, not after what he’d been through. He was on the upside. People don’t kill themselves when they are on the upside, do they, Hank?”
“I don’t know.” My voice was low and calm.
She quit crying and her tone became cold. “I want you to find whoever did this. I want you to find who murdered my baby brother. Will you do that for me, Hank?”
I sighed and stared at a greasy spot on the floor mats, feeling older than I should have. I grabbed a pencil out of the console. “Tell me where they found him.”
She told me the address and we hung up, after I promised her I’d be in touch later in the day with what I found.