“Figure of speech,” said Argenziano, fixing her with the pair of eyes that she knew was the last thing James Patrick Sheehan had seen before an epidural hematoma had plunged him into the coma from which he’d never awoken.
“Of course,” she said. “But then, you wouldn’t know, would you?”
“Like I said, I haven’t heard anything about him since he left here.”
“How long had you known him?”
“Met him at P.S. 102, in Brooklyn. He was a couple of grades ahead of me. That was a million years ago.” Argenziano leaned back and looked into the middle distance, rather theatrically contemplating the past.
“So you’re childhood friends.”
“Yes.”
“And you hired him.”
“I did.”
“But then he leaves and you never hear from him again. It’s odd.”
“It happens.”
“Did you have a falling-out?” asked Kat.
He laughed. “No, nothing like that.”
“And he left right after this theft is alleged to have taken place.”
“Looks like we’re back where we started,” said Argenziano. He glanced at his watch.
Kat flipped through her notebook and stopped at a page with car rental information on it. “My source claims to be in possession of proof of the theft.” She looked up.
“What ‘proof’?”
“Don’t know,” shrugged Kat. “I only have the claim.”
Argenziano impatiently waved off someone behind Kat. She turned around and saw a black-clad hostess retreating. The queue of people waiting for tables had grown longer. Their section remained empty. He leaned forward.
“OK,” he said. “I’m going off the record now. Got it? Let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s possible that South Richmond might have advised the Chippewas that it could be mutually advantageous to regularly set aside a rough percentage of cash receipts prior to their being entered on the top line.”
“OK,” said Kat. She felt a growing excitement.
“If something like this were to happen, it would be, ah, customary for this to be cash that South Richmond would take physical possession of. It would be good business.”
“How so?”
“It just would be.” Argenziano paused slightly between each word, for emphasis.
“Is it legal?”
“Is it legal,” said Argenziano, with a laugh. “Kat, this is a legitimate business. This is what I’ve been saying all along. There are official documents on file with official government agencies that prove this. My point here is that in the hypothetical situation we’re discussing, a single individual would have to actually carry the money from point A to point B. Physically, like, in a briefcase.”
“And that individual is Saltino.”
“Oh, it has to be Saltino, if you are dead set on writing a story about someone strolling out of my casino with a brown paper bag full of U.S. currency. This is not going to be depicted as part of a pattern of activity that could be construed as consistent with that of a corrupt organization. OK? One big weekend, one man’s temptation boiling over. That’s the frame this story has to fit inside of, if you want any help from me at all.”
“What makes you think I need your help?”
“Here you are. Who’s your source?”
“That’s confidential.”
“I’m going to bet that it’s not someone who can speak, how do I put it, authoritatively on these matters.” He removed the napkin from his lap and tossed it over the steak. It immediately absorbed some of the bloody fluid pooling on the plate. He stood. “You’ll need some cooperation on this end.” She reached into her purse and pulled out one of her cards and handed it to him.
“Call me if you want to cooperate,” she said.
He stuck the card in his breast pocket without looking at it. “Enjoy the rest of your lunch.”
7
I WOULD know this dude Salteau was bullshit even if I didn’t remember him from Manitou Sands. He was not like any damn Indian I ever heard of. He didn’t talk right look right or walk right. He messed up these stories I’ve heard a thousand times. I don’t mean he changed them around I mean he wasn’t thinking in the right direction. And he didn’t know anybody at all. Who ever heard of an Indian not knowing anybody? There’s always some cousin around or something.”
From the e-mail Becky Chasse had sent her on Tuesday. A name from so far out of the past that the idea of the woman living, continuing on outside of Kat’s fixed concept of her, thrilled and unsettled her. She’d brought it to Nables to ask if she could take a look.
“Who’s this Becky Chasse? Why’s she writing to you?”
“She probably knows that none of those little local papers can handle a story like that. They probably wouldn’t touch it if they could.”
“No but why’s she writing you?”
She’d told Nables that she and Becky had gone to the U of M together. He hadn’t seemed to realize that nobody who went to Ann Arbor would go back to a place like Nebising, or go to work in the cage at Manitou Sands for that matter. Michiganders mostly got out of Michigan, if they got the chance. Nables had very limited ideas about what constituted a dead end, though. He’d been made a columnist after he’d brought a Pulitzer home to the long-suffering Mirror for a three-part series on extortionate lending practices on the South Side generally and in Grand Crossing particularly, but despite having been given carte blanche it turned out that there was nothing in the entire world (nominally, his beat) quite as corrupt or done quite so badly as it was in the ghetto at home. His ledes, usually drawing a contrast between some showy boondoggle that benefited the few and the hidden and unrelieved suffering of the many, became notorious for their vitriolic hyperbole, and he’d been kicked upstairs and named midwest editor when his columns, as reflexively indignant as they were, began to irritate even the constituencies he was defending, who had grown tired of being called credulous fools for playing the lottery or enthusing over some costly civic initiative.
Nables had gazed at the e-mail for a long time. He’d manufactured an office for himself by barricading his desk behind tall lateral filing cabinets. Everyone else sat in the bullpen. This cheerless, metal-lined space contained no clue to his character, his personal life, or his vanities. Kat thought of him as an unexceptionally intelligent man with a certain kind of inflexible integrity that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and she didn’t know how she felt about it. She wanted her incorruptible heroes to be genius rogues, and that wasn’t what she had here with Nables.
“Do Native Americans gamble at these casinos?” he’d asked, finally.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Because if I’m going to send you to Michigan I want to know who this is ripping off and why I ought to care.”
“I think up there it might be mostly white people.” She’d pushed her hair out of her face, and shrugged. “A lot of people from Chicago have houses on the lakeshore.” She’d shrugged again. “Local interest.”
“Local interest,” said Nables. “Like we couldn’t find ourselves some god damn white man banging a tom-tom and calling himself Geronimo right here in the city of Chicago. If you’re telling me that this is where a lot of rich folks go to spend discretionary income, maybe you ought to think and tell me again.”
Kat hadn’t been sure what her trump was. Story about the hijacking of racial identity?
“You are aware that Michigan is the state that gave us Eminem? I am interested, Kat, in injustice. Not in exasperation. There are no African Americans, and I presume that there are no Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, or Asian Americans for that matter, who are not exasperated by, who are unaware of, the ways in which we are belittled and stereotyped, mimicked and plagiarized. We are all aware and we have made it our project to make other people, white people, aware. And what have white people done? This is what white people have done. They’ve learned to express regret, to watch what they say in public, to exalt carefully selected public figures, to scrupulously integrate their advertising, and to visibly celebrate a diversity that exists only in that advertising. Meanwhile, the master program continues uninterrupted. Underpay us, siphon money out of our neighborhoods, cheat us out of an education, keep us high, put us in jail. How does pointing out one more time the ways in which insult is added to injury help? See, I don’t think you can answer that except to say that it doesn’t.”