The Fugitives Read online

  Argenziano, whose hand had made several false moves toward the bread, grabbed a piece, dipped it in the pooled olive oil on the dish before him, and took a bite. He nodded at Kat while chewing. He swallowed and took a sip of mineral water.

  “Resort management is free to make any business decision that it feels is in its best interests.” This came out sounding like “innarests.” “We expect them, of course, to fully honor existing obligations. But we can work with all sorts of different contractors and vendors. They’re usually pretty quick to see the advantages of working with us. It means more business for them, sometimes considerably more. Of course, in such cases we take a commission on that end as well. It’s very similar to going to an out-of-network health care provider. You pay for the privilege.”

  Kat said, “You told me that you were a ‘liaison.’ What exactly do you liaise?”

  “Well, I’m the face South Richmond presents to the Northwest Michigan Band of Chippewa Indians, and vice versa.” Here he paused to smile, demonstrating the face in action. “Mostly I keep lines of communication open. In the very rare instance when one party has a complaint, I convey it to the other. I mediate in those rare instances. This is very rare, though. I must stress the rarity. Most misunderstandings can be cleared up without my ever having to pick up the phone and call back east. That’s one advantage to my being based on-site. I am the face they deal with. It’s a relationship. And for the most part, the job is the very pleasurable matter of overseeing things going very smoothly. It’s very similar to the work, speaking of journalism”—he gestured at her notebook—“of a managing editor. I coordinate the contributions many different individuals bring to a very complex series of operations.”

  “And what did Jackie Saltino do?”

  “Jackie reported to me. He was our transfer pricing manager.”

  “What’s ‘transfer pricing’?”

  “It’s pretty complicated to explain. But it has to do with maximizing profit.”

  “And this is what Jackie Saltino did.”

  “Yeah, until he left us.”

  Kat had memorized the details, but it was the authority of the notebook to which she deferred. It was easier, sometimes, kept unpleasant confrontations to a minimum, to rattle off known facts transcribed in her own hand as if they were questionable pieces of information she herself couldn’t quite accept. She flipped a few pages back. “I have Jackie Saltino dropping out of high school in the tenth grade. Two years at Spofford Juvenile Center for auto theft and aggravated assault, remanded to Elmira Correctional Facility when he turned eighteen after pleading guilty to a reduced charge of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the death of a fellow detainee at Spofford. Paroled at twenty-one, worked for Archer Courier as a foot messenger for eight months, until he was rearrested on charges of having beaten a Henry I. Baumann, the recipient of a package who he, Jackie, thought had withheld a tip. This time he went to Auburn.” She looked up. “It kind of just goes on.”

  “And you disagree with the idea of giving a person who’s paid for their mistakes a chance to wipe the slate?”

  “No. I’m all for it. I was just saying that, looking at this history, it doesn’t really suggest the preparation or temperament necessary for a complicated management job.”

  Argenziano gave her that tight smile again and sipped his mineral water. “Jackie worked hard to get where he was.”

  “But then he left.”

  “People do leave us.”

  “Mr. Argenziano,” Kat said, “there’s a reason why you agreed to talk to me about Mr. Saltino, but I’m not sure what it is.”

  “You called and said you were interested in him.”

  “I called Manitou Sands and they put me in touch with Gary Houkema.”

  “Gary. Director of public relations. Terrific guy.”

  “But when I reached Gary Houkema he told me that you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Jackie was my employee. He was directly under me.”

  “I mean like he wouldn’t say a word to me, this Gary Houkema. And I thought, that’s funny. Usually it works the other way around. You call a person directly involved in a story and they refer you to PR.”

  Sean returned with the salad and steak. He set the food before them quickly and moved off. Kat turned around in her seat to glance behind her. The restaurant had begun to fill, she could see a few people clustered near the entrance waiting for tables, but their section remained empty except for them.

  “We do a lot of things differently around here,” said Argenziano.

  Kat stared at her notebook. She picked up her fork and pierced a string bean. She looked at Argenziano, who had begun diligently sawing at his steak. He cut it in half, then started cutting one of the halves into bite-sized pieces. She noticed that the steak had been branded with an H.

  “Have you ever heard from Saltino?”

  “No, not a word. It’s not uncommon.” He shrugged, still cutting.

  “Never been asked to provide a reference, or verify employment?”

  “Nope. But again, people float in and out of this business.”

  “Even transfer pricing managers.”

  “Even managers.”

  “Do you know where Saltino is?” she asked.

  “No. Do you?”

  “What if you were to hear some news about him?”

  Argenziano put one of the bite-sized pieces of meat in his mouth. He chewed. He sipped water. “I’d be interested in catching up with him,” he said, finally.

  Kat looked at the notebook, then closed it. She pushed her hair out of her face and bit down on her thumbnail.

  “I’m not that sure that I need to know where he is,” said Kat. “Journalistically, I mean. Why am I interested in this guy, exactly?”

  “Why, indeed.”

  “Middle manager quits his job, falls out of touch with his old associates. This is America, right? Happens every day.”

  “People just pick up and move.”

  “Pull up stakes and head for greener pastures.”

  “Make a fresh start.”

  “Burn bridges.”

  “Exactly,” said Argenziano. “It’s not news.”

  “Except when it is,” said Kat. “The question is, is it a story?”

  “That’s the question exactly.”

  “If it were a story there’d be a reason for me to try to find out where he is.”

  “So you’re wondering how you can determine if this is the case.”

  “It’s funny. That’s really the dividing line in reporting. Interesting things happen all the time that never come anywhere near the papers or the six o’clock report. You know? Sometimes it’s an accident of context. Something kind of big happens the same day something really big happens. But more often it’s a question of whether it’s a story. What we’ve been talking about, I don’t know if it’s a story.”

  “But you called me. Here we are.” Argenziano seemed amused. He leaned back in his chair and laid his interlaced fingers over his belly, a fat man’s gesture that didn’t quite work for him. The uncut half of his steak remained on the plate. A garland of parsley lay sodden in a puddle of burgundy-colored blood streaked with translucent fat. He had a look on his face that said Your Move.

  “See, I have this unconfirmed thing,” said Kat. “I have a source who worked here for a while who told me that Jackie Saltino stopped showing up for work at around the same time that four hundred fifty thousand dollars went missing. This was right after March Madness last year.”

  “That’s a busy weekend,” observed Argenziano.

  “Kind of a big coincidence, I thought.”

  “What would make you think that Jackie Saltino had anything to do with something like that, if it even happened?”

  “Did it not happen?”

  “Let me ask you. When you contacted them, as I’m sure you did, what did the authorities say? Did Manitou Sands report any money having been stolen? Is there an open investigation?”

&
nbsp; Kat gazed at him without answering.

  “But you didn’t just dismiss it from your mind, did you? You didn’t just chalk it up to malicious speculation by some disgruntled ex-employee?”

  “Seems like a disgruntled ex-employee could come up with a nastier story than that, I bet.”

  “I bet. But this would be your sort of typical rumor people that work near the money like to spread. The countinghouse view, is what I call it. It’s a strange thing about money, Kat. Very strange thing. People who don’t have any, they love to tell stories about it: about the ways it gets wasted, about the ways it gets lost, about the ways the people who do have it just throw it around. No skin off their nose, I guess. They dream about having so much they can go around giving away Cadillacs like Elvis. Of course, everybody’s near the money. Work at a McDonald’s on a busy stretch of the interstate and you’re right on top of ten, fifteen million a year. But not everybody sees it laying around in big piles like we do here, though. People who do, they think, hey—easy come, easy go, casino makes money like that!” He snapped his fingers, then began to count off on them: “They don’t think about overhead. They don’t think about the cost of insurance and security. Computer systems, custom-designed systems. Maintenance and repairs. They don’t think about the salaries for the entertainment. The chef. Place like this has an executive chef. The golf pro, the tennis pro. They don’t think about the comps. They don’t think about the cost of training workers in the pit or in the cage—that’s highly skilled work with very high turnover.”

  “This is you saying the story’s made up.”

  “This is me saying that it’s a daydream they stuck a name on, apparently. You sit in that cage all day long surrounded by fucking stacks of cash, pardon my french. Why not? It’s like plucking one grape off the bunch at the greengrocer, right?”

  “So it didn’t happen.”

  “That would be a hell of a lot of money not to report stolen, wouldn’t you agree, Kat?”

  “I thought it was possible that a company transacting a lot of its business in cash might not want to call attention to its accounting practices.”

  “See, now you have that countinghouse view. Stacks of money. Bags of money. Must be something wrong with it.” He laughed warmly and with easy contempt. “It’s a very interesting thought, Kat. But our financials are on file with about eight zillion government and tribal authorities, though. We’re audited by a Big Four firm. Manitou Sands and South Richmond both.”

  Kat gave a little back-to-the-drawing-board shrug. “Guess that answers my question.” She popped a piece of tuna into her mouth and glanced at her watch. He hadn’t come close to disproving her conjecture, but Argenziano was weirdly right about the money. She didn’t know why money that couldn’t be traced or accounted for seemed illicit; why we felt upright and legitimate only when our money could be used to track us. It was as if we found ourselves whole in the record of our spending; could be held to account for our lives only by being held to account for our transactions.

  “Jackie Crackers.” Argenziano shook his head. “A name from the dead.”

  “Is he dead?” asked Kat.

  “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.”