“Can you help me or not, Freddy?”
He gave me a comforting smile that said the fool and his money would all too soon be parted. “There’s a guy in Dallas who’d be happy to take that kind of action. Name’s Akiva Roth. Operates out of Faith Financial on Greenville Ave. Took over the biz from his father five or six years ago.” He lowered his voice. “Word is, he’s mobbed up.” He lowered his voice still further. “Carlos Marcello.”
That was exactly what I was afraid of, because that had also been the word on Eduardo Gutierrez. I thought again of the Lincoln with the Florida plates parked across from Faith Financial.
“I’m not sure I’d want to be seen going into a place like that. I might want to teach again, and at least two members of the schoolboard are already cheesed off at me.”
“You could try Frank Frati, over in Fort Worth. He runs a pawnshop.”
“Uh-uh. It’s just that I knew a Frati once. Who also ran a pawnshop and took bets.”
“Probably they both came from the same savings-and-loan clan in Romania. Anyway, he might fade five Cs — especially a sucker bet like you’re talking about. But you won’t get the odds you deserve. Of course you wouldn’t get em from Roth, either, but you’d get better than you would from Frank Frati.”
“But with Frank I wouldn’t get the Mob connection. Right?”
“I guess not, but who really knows? Bookies, even the part-time ones, ain’t known for their high-class business associations.”
“Probably I should take your advice and hold onto my money.”
Quinlan looked horrified. “No, no,
On July twenty-second, I told Sadie I had to run some errands in Dallas and said I’d ask Deke to check in on her. She said there was no need, that she’d be fine. She was regaining her old self. Little by slowly, yes, but she was regaining it.
She asked no questions about the nature of my errands.
My initial stop was at First Corn, where I opened my safe deposit box and triple-checked Al’s notes to make sure I really remembered what I thought I had. And yes, Tom Case was going to be the upset winner, knocking out Dick Tiger in the fifth. Al must have found the fight on the internet, because he had been gone from Dallas — and the sensational sixties — long before then.
“Can I help you with anything else today, Mr. Amberson?” my banker asked as he escorted me to the door.
“Maybe so. Do you know where I could find a costume shop? I’m supposed to be the magician at my nephew’s birthday party.”
Mr. Link’s secretary, after a quick glance through the Yellow Pages, directed me to an address on Young Street. There I was able to buy what I needed. I stored it at the apartment on West Neely — as long as I was paying rent on the place, it ought to be good for something. I left my revolver, too, putting it on a high shelf in the closet. The bug, which I had removed from the upstairs lamp, went into the glove compartment of my car, along with the cunning little Japanese tape recorder. I would dispose of them somewhere in the scrubland on my return to Jodie. They were of no more use to me. The apartment upstairs hadn’t been re-rented, and the house was spookily silent.
Before I left Neely Street, I walked around the fenced-in side yard, where, just three months before, Marina had taken photographs of Lee holding his rifle. There was nothing to see but beaten earth and a few hardy weeds. Then, as I turned to go, I
My next stop was the sprawling ranch on Simpson Stuart Road where George de Mohrenschildt lived with his wife, Jeanne. As soon as I saw it I rejected it for the meeting I had planned. For one thing, I couldn’t be sure when Jeanne would be in the house and when she’d be away, and this particular conversation had to be strictly Two Guys. For another, it wasn’t quite isolated enough. Paul Quinn College, an all-black school, was close by, and summer classes must have been in. There weren’t droves of kids, but I saw plenty, some walking and some on bikes. Not good for my purposes. It was possible that our discussion might be noisy. It was possible it might not be a discussion — at least in the Merriam-Webster sense — at all.
