The Road To Ruin Read online

  Today, entering the office, Hall saw Blanchard and Gillette already present, which made sense, because Hall was deliberately ten minutes late. Both were studying the iron banks on the little rail around the room, Blanchard leaning close over the one of a fisherman on a boat. Place a coin on the flat plate at the end of the fishing line and the weight causes the machinery inside to move the fisherman’s arm, and the fishing line, until the coin falls into the open mouth of the creel at the stern of the boat, and thus into the bank.

  Looking around when Hall made his entrance, Blanchard said, “Morning, sir.”

  “Morning.”

  “Oh, yeah, morning. Sir,” Gillette the driver said.

  “Morning,” Hall repeated. He was so pleased to have these people.

  Blanchard dabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the fisherman. “How do I get my quarter back?”

  “Ha ha.” Got another one. With a big broad grin, Hall said, “You don’t, Fred. Sorry about that. Ho ho. Now come on, you two, let’s work out our day.”

  They obediently moved over toward the genuine nineteenth-century partners desk, built at a time when lawyers trusted one another. As Hall took a seat there, the other two remaining standing, Blanchard frowned back at that fisherman as though wanting to remember exactly where to find him, some other time, but then he joined Hall and Gillette and didn’t seem troubled at all.

  37

  FLIP MORRISCONE WAS NOWHERE to be found, all day Wednesday. He didn’t make his three o’clock appointment with Monroe Hall or, so far as they could tell, any other of his appointments. To be certain the man had neither overslept nor died in his sleep, the union team of the conspiracy trooped through the Morriscone house one last time, then came back out to report to capital, “Not there.”

  Now that they’d finally made their decision, and had finally accepted the need and utility of cooperation between the two groups, it was frustrating that their very first decision couldn’t be acted upon. Before parting for the day, all five gathered in their usual places in Buddy’s Taurus, where Buddy said, “We’re still not getting anywhere.”

  “One day,” Mark pointed out. “Maybe he had food poisoning, went to the hospital. Maybe his uncle came to town, he took the day off, they went to the races.”

  Buddy, looking confused, said, “Races. Oh, the track, you mean.”

  Mac said, “There’s no point giving up after just one day.”

  “Exactly,” Mark said.

  Ace said, “How much longer you wanna go spinning your wheels?”

  “We’ll give it the rest of this week,” Mac said. “Two working days, and Saturday. If we don’t find him before, and if he isn’t home Saturday, we’ll try to think of something else.”

  Os said, “I know some people in the Army Reserves.”

  They looked at him. Even Mark seemed a little nervous, when he said, “Os? And?”

  “If it goes into next week,” Os said, “I borrow a tank.”

  •

  Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. They did find him, late Thursday morning. Following what they knew of his schedule, they drove along, packed together into the Taurus—Mark and Os were truly sacrificing for this job—and there he was at last, Flip Morriscone, coming out of the well-appointed home of one of his clients. His green Subaru was parked at the curb of the public street, as they pulled to a stop farther along.

  Here he came, long canvas bag bouncing on his shoulder, the satisfied look of the successful torturer in his eye. Mark and Mac, as representatives of the combined team, approached him as he reached for the rear door of the Subaru to toss the bag in, Mark saying, “Mr. Morriscone. If we could have a moment?”

  It had been decided that an Ivy League accent would be more reassuring than a union accent for the initial approach, and that Mark was just naturally less scary than Os. In the Sancho Panza role, Mac was deemed by all to be the most acceptable.

  Morriscone continued his movement of tossing the bag into the back of the wagon, then slammed the door and turned to them, seeming not at all worried to be accosted by strangers. “Yes?”

  “There’s a certain someone that you and we know,” Mark began, smooth and calm, “that we have a dislike for.”

  Morriscone looked baffled. “There’s somebody I know that you don’t like?”

  “Exactly. Now, we want to do something to this fellow—”

  “Hey,” Morriscone said, taking a step backward. “Keep me out of this.”

  “Not to kill him or anything like that,” Mark assured him, “but to, let us say, cost him something.”

  “Good God!” Morriscone was getting more and more agitated. “What are you, gangsters?”

  “Not at all,” Mark said, “we are perfectly respectable people, as I’m sure you can see for yourself. All we ask is a little assistance from you, for which you will be well reimbursed as soon as—”

  “Bribery!” Morriscone was actually shouting by now. “Get away from me!” he shouted. “I’ve got trouble enough, I can’t be—Do you want me to call the police?”

  Mac could see that Mark’s oil was not smoothing the waters the way they’d hoped. They’d agreed beforehand not to mention the target’s name until they had Morriscone convinced to help them, just in case he’d feel the need to go warn Monroe Hall, but maybe all in all that strategy hadn’t been such a good one. Taking a deep breath, speaking forcefully into Morriscone’s agitated reddening face, Mac announced, “Monroe Hall!”

  “Mon—” Morriscone’s jaw dropped. He stared at them both like long-lost brothers. “You want to get even with that son of a bitch, too?” A broad grin creased his features. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  38

  WHAT STAN MURCH HAD been looking forward to driving was, maybe, a 1958 Studebaker Golden Hawk two-door roadster, or another two-door, the 1932 Packard model 900, or a 1955 Mercedes Gullwing Custom, in which the doors swing out and upward, or a four-door 1937 twelve-cylinder Pierce-Arrow limousine, all of which he happened to know were in Monroe Hall’s antique car collection, because he’d researched this job with loving care. He’d gotten lists of Hall’s holdings from newspaper reports and then discussed them with Chester who, after all, was also a driver, though privately Stan thought probably not of the very highest rank.

  What he hadn’t expected was to be making supermarket runs at the wheel of a black Suzuki Vitara, a kind of pocket SUV that drove like a jeep; the original jeep, that is, from World War Two, and probably under fire. Nor was that the worst of it, because he really hadn’t expected to be steering a no-pedigree wire-cage shopping cart up and down supermarket aisles in the wake of a harridan named Mrs. Parsons.

  Mrs. Parsons was some piece of work. She was to the manner born, and she wanted you to know it. When, at the post-breakfast meeting in Monroe Hall’s office at the main house, Hall had said, “Here’s your cap, Gillette, and I hope you have a tie and a dark jacket to wear on duty. Good. Get them, and then you’ll drive the cook to the supermarket,” Stan had thought he understood all the words in that last sentence, including “cook,” but apparently he’d been wrong.

  This was Stan’s first experience as a member of the servant class, and already he could see why it had been necessary to invent electricity, so you wouldn’t need so many servants as before, and that way you might be able to hold them off when they turned on you. Hall himself was enough of a pain in the ass, calling him “Gillette” all the time. He’d never been addressed in quite that last-name style before, and the fact that it wasn’t actually his own last name only took the sting out a little.

  And there was also the other fact that the chauffeur’s cap he was supposed to wear dropped down to block his eyes unless he padded the inner rim with newspaper, so that what he looked mostly like, with this black-beaked oversize hat on his head, was a ventriloquist’s dummy. And not one of the smart ones.

  But then, there’s Mrs. Parsons! Apparently, the way it worked, not all servants were born equal, and definitely chauffeurs weren�
�t born equal to cooks. Or at least this chauffeur, this Gillette here, wasn’t born equal to Mrs. Parsons, who even got an honorific in front of her name.

  And who, when Stan stopped the bucking Vitara at the side door per Hall’s instructions, came out from the house there, marched over to the vehicle, and stopped next to the left rear door. Stan waited for her to get in, but she didn’t; she simply stood there, a stout old woman with a face like a bald eagle with a headache, wearing a black cloth coat, black beret-type hat on iron-gray curls, and black lace-up boots. In her left claw she clutched the black leather handle of a black leather handbag.

  When she didn’t move, and didn’t move, he finally got the idea, and stepped out to open her door for her, with an ironic bow she either didn’t see or didn’t choose to see. “Thank you, Gillette,” she said. “I am Mrs. Parsons.”

  “Think of that,” Stan said, as she climbed in. Already he hated her, though not quite enough to slam the door on her ankle.

  Later, he would be sorry he’d missed that chance. The entire drive to the supermarket, between her barked directions to the place, she told him in great detail and with much repetition just how dreadful a marriage her poor “Miss Alicia” had made with “that man.” Not having a name at all, Stan supposed, was even worse than being Gillette all the time.

  At the supermarket, he’d assumed he would sit at the wheel with a newspaper while she did her thing. First, of course, as he already knew, he would have to get out and open the door for her. But then, having done so, he was not pleased to hear her say, “Well, come along, Gillette.”

  He went along. It turned out to be his job to push the shopping cart along behind her and fetch the items from the grocery list she’d dragged out of her purse. Up and down the aisles they went, him with his funny-ha-ha hat, her with her imperious manner and her list.

  At the end, he was to follow her—she definitely was to go first—out of the store and across the parking lot. He considered speeding up, as though it were an accident, but how much damage can you do with a shopping cart?

  Later, Stan promised himself: Before we’re done around here.

  39

  FLIP MET HIS NEW co-conspirators at his office-gym, a deep narrow storefront in a suburban mall between nowhere and nothing. Almost all of his contacts with his clients were in their own residences or, occasionally, offices, but every once in a while it was necessary to provide a place for the sessions, as when a client’s marriage had ended with more than the usual fallout and flak, and it would be some time before he would have his own exercise mat again. Also, Flip needed his own gym, to keep himself in peak condition. Therefore, Flip’s Hustle House, which consisted of an ordinary office in front, a gym almost as extensive as Monroe Hall’s behind it, and a smallish changing room and shower behind that, all at the rear of this Meandering Bypaths Mall, tucked away where only the most determined could find it.

  Which included this new group of five. Although, as Flip had noticed from the very beginning, they weren’t a group of five after all, were they? They were a group of two, a pair of snotty silver-spoon-in-the-mouth sorts, supplemented by a group of three, baggy out-of-shape heart-attack-to-come working stiffs. It was amazing, Flip reflected, as he watched his new team troop into the office, how Monroe Hall could bring disparate people together.

  The snot called Mark seemed to be the spokesman. Once they were all seated, either comfortably on one of the three chairs or uncomfortably on the floor, Mark said, “Let me put our cards on the table,” which, in Flip’s experience, meant wool was now headed toward one’s eyes. “We have reasons,” Mark went on, “to feel that Monroe Hall owes us something.”

  “So do we!” announced the sack of guts introduced as Ace.

  Mark nodded at him patiently, as though he’d learned a long time ago to make the nodding patiently at Ace an automatic reaction to the sound of the man’s voice. “I was including you in us,” he said.

  Mac, the brains of the sagging team, said, “Ace, we’re all in this together.”

  At the moment, Flip thought, and watched and listened.

  Mark, the interruption over, went back to laying his cards on the table. “We’ve studied Monroe Hall’s estate,” he said, “all of us,” with a glance at Ace, “for some time. His defenses unfortunately are excellent.”

  Flip nodded. “All that money can buy,” he said.

  Os, the usually quiet one, growled. It was an actual growl, the sort of thing that usually emanates from something on a leash. While Flip looked at him in some surprise, Mark patted Os’s knee—Os was chaired, Mark floored near him—and said, “Yes, Os, we know, some of that money is ours.”

  “And some,” the jack-in-the-box, Ace, also on the floor, put in, “belongs to the ACWFFA.”

  “Agreed,” Mark told him, leaving Flip in the dark, and turned back to say, “We had all noticed that the only person in this wide world with unquestioned access to that compound, apart from Hall’s wife, is yourself.”

  “He needs a personal trainer,” Flip explained. “Stuck in that place, he gets no exercise at all.”

  “We studied you,” Mark said. “I admit it. We even broke in and entered your house.”

  Flip stared in astonishment. This was cards on the table. Trying to think what might be in his house of an embarrassing nature that they might have stumbled across, he said, “You did?”

  “Finding nothing of use,” Mark said, to Flip’s great relief. “The same with your car.”

  “My car?”

  “That Subaru. We wondered how many people we could hide in it, or one like it. Possibly have one of us disguise himself as you, hide others in the vehicle—”

  “No, no,” Flip said, and had to smile, looking at them. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I really don’t think a one of you could disguise yourself as me, not for a second.”

  “There were these problems,” Mark agreed. “They appeared to be insurmountable. But then, my friends and I—” He paused here, surprisingly, to smile in amiable fashion toward the flab called Mac, and to say, “Particularly my friend Mac.”

  “It was all of us,” Mac assured him.

  “In any event,” Mark said, “it occurred to us that, since Monroe Hall famously alienates everyone who comes within even the slightest contact with him, why wouldn’t he have alienated you?”

  “Why, indeed?” said Flip, furious all over again, thinking grimly of the three hundred forty-seven dollars he’d just this afternoon mailed to the feds. “What he did to me, the no-muscle-tone son of a bitch,” he said, “is turn me in to the IRS.”

  “The IRS?” They were all astonished, but none more so than Os, who said, “Forgive me, but what about you could possibly interest the IRS?”

  “My money,” Flip said simply. “There’s nothing too small for those people to go after, now that we’re at war.”

  “War?” More general astonishment, this time summed up by Buddy: “What war?”

  Now Flip too was astonished. “What?” he said. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

  They didn’t. So involved were they in their own concerns that an entire war had slipped beneath their radar.

  Mark, as though questioning this war’s pedigree and bona fides, said, “What war is this?”

  “They’re calling it,” Flip said, “Project Everlasting Watchfulness and Prosperity Under God.”

  Mac said, “That’s the name of the war?”

  “Apparently,” Flip said, “they worked it out with focus groups and ad agencies and everything, and that was the name that sold best.”

  “That isn’t how they used to name wars,” Mark protested. “They used to name wars with some gravitas to them. The Civil War. The French and Indian War.”

  “The Thirty Years’ War,” suggested Mac.

  “The Napoleonic Wars,” Buddy offered.

  “The War of Jenkins’ Ear,” Os tossed in.

  “Well, all right,” Mark conceded, “they weren’t always mature and d
ignified, but mostly they were.”

  “Say it again,” Ace urged Flip.

  “Project Everlasting Watchfulness and Prosperity Under God.”

  “It sounds,” Buddy mused, “like one of those religious tracts they put in your screen door.”

  “They did the most up-to-date branding,” Flip assured him. “It’s all very modern.”

  Os said, “So’s carpal tunnel syndrome.”

  Mark said, “Never mind this war and these namings.” Gazing intently, openly, honestly at Flip, he said, “We have come to see if your entree to Hall’s property, plus our manpower and motivation, might help us get our hands on the bastard.”

  Flip said, “What do you want to do with him?” He wasn’t sure he was ready to go along with murder, but felt at least he should hear them out.

  It was Os who answered: “We want his money.”

  “Our money,” Buddy said.

  Mark said, “The idea is, we get him off that compound. We get him to a computer, possibly that one there on your desk.”

  “I don’t think so,” Flip said.

  “Somewhere,” Mark agreed. “We force him to access his offshore accounts, and transfer large pieces of his money to us, to our friends here, and now to you. Once the transfer is complete and irreversible, and once we have our alibis in place, just in case he recognizes some of us through the masks we’ll naturally wear, we’ll release him, considerably poorer.”

  “And serve him right,” Buddy said.

  Flip said, “Mmm, I don’t know.”

  “The money transfer?” Mark shrugged. “Trust me, I know how to make those work.”

  “No,” Flip said, “I’m talking about getting him out of there. I don’t know how many of you I could even get into the place, but to then get all of us and a trussed-up Monroe Hall back out again, I just don’t—”

  And then he saw it. His eyes opened wide, and so did his mouth. He gazed at a vision in the middle distance. Flabby Mac said, “You got something, I saw it hit you.”