The judge banged his gavel; Castleberry led Celeste and Stefan outside. The boy turned around and waved; Mal flashed him the V for victory sign, tried to smile and couldn’t. His son was gone in a breath; Kellerman said, “I heard Castleberry heard about your promotion and went batshit. I heard he leaked the hospital pictures to one of Hardesty’s clerks, who told the judge. Mal, I’m sorry and I’m angry. I’m going to tell Ellis what Castleberry did and make sure that punk gets reamed for it.”
Mal stared at the spot where his son waved goodbye. “Ream her. Pull out all the stops. If Stefan has to hear, he has to hear. Just fucking take her down.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Looking around Ellis Loew’s living room, Buzz set odds:
Twenty to one the grand jury handed down beaucoup UAES indictments; twenty to one the studios booted them on the treason clause prior to the official word, with the Teamsters signing to take their place inside twenty-four hours. If he convinced Mickey to make book on the proceedings, he could lay a bundle down and get well on top of Howard’s bonus. Because the action in Loew’s little command post said the Pinkos were buying one-way tickets for the Big Fungoo.
Except for tables and chairs set aside for clerks, all the furniture had been removed and dumped in the back yard. Filing cabinets filled with friendly witness depositions covered the fireplace; a corkboard was nailed to the front window, space for reports from the team’s four investigators: M. Considine, D. Smith, T. Meeks and D. Upshaw. Captain Mal’s stack of interrogation forms–questions tailored to individual lefties, delivered and notarized by City Marshals–was thick; Dudley’s field summaries stacked out at five times their width–he had now turned fourteen hostiles into groveling snitch friendlies, picking up dirt on over a hundred snitchees in the process. His own reports comprised six pages: Sammy Benavides porking his sister, Claire De Haven skin-popping H and Reynolds Loftis as a homo bar hopper, the rest padding, all of it snoozeville compared to Mal’s and Dudley’s contributions. Danny Upshaw’s stuff ran two pages–eavesdrop speculation and necking with Pinko Claire–him and the kid were not exactly burning down barns in their effort to destroy the Communist Conspiracy. There were tables with “In” and “Out” baskets for the exchange of information, tables for the photographic evidence Crazy Ed Satterlee was accumulating, a huge cardboard box filled with cross-referenced names, dates, political organizations and documented admissions: Commies, pinkers and fellow travelers embracing Mother Russia and calling for the end of the U.S.A. by means fair and foul. And–across the broadest stretch of bare wall–Ed Satterlee’s conspiracy graph, his grand jury thumbscrew.
In one horizontal column, the UAES brain trust; in another, the names of the Communist front organizations they belonged to; in a vertical column atop the graph the names of friendly witnesses and their “accusation power” rated by stars, with lines running down to intersect with the brainers and the fronts. Each star was Satterlee’s assessment of the number of days’ testimony a friendly was worth, based on the sheer power of time, place and. hearsay: which Pinko attended where, said what, and which recanted Red was there to listen–a brain-frying, mind-boggling, super-stupendous and absolutely amazing glut of information impossible to disprove.
And he kept seeing Danny Upshaw smack in the middle of it, treading shit, even though the kid was on the side of the angels.
Buzz walked out to the back porch. He’d been brainstorming escape routes under the guise of writing reports for hours; three phone calls had fixed Audrey’s skimming spree. One was to Mickey, handing him a convoluted epic on how a bettor skimmed an unnamed runner who was screwing the bettor’s sister and couldn’t turn him in, but finally made him cough up the six grand he’d welched–the exact amount Audrey had grifted off the Mick. The second was to Petey Skouras, a tight-lipped runner who agreed to play the lovesick fool who finally made good to his boss for a cool grand–knowing Johnny Stompanato would come snouting around for the name Buzz wouldn’t give on, find him acting hinky and pound a confession out of him–the returned cash his assurance that that was his only punishment. The third was to an indy shylock: seven thousand dollars at 20 percent, $8,400 due April 10–his woman out of trouble, his gift for her grief: Gene Niles with his face blown off on her bed. Seven come eleven, thank God for the Commie gravy train. If they didn’t succumb to the hots for each other, he and his lioness would probably survive.