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  “You want the truth?”

  With the smile still in place, she said, “Do you think I have time to sit here and listen to you tell lies?”

  “He’s too handsome for his own good. That kind of handsome stifles personal growth.”

  She leaned forward as though I were too far away for her to hear, and her eyebrows came up an inquiring quarter of an inch. “Personal …”

  “Growth.”

  Trey Annunziato looked over at Hacker. The smile was down to a muscle memory, just a meaningless tilt of the lips. “What do you think about that, Lyle?”

  Hacker sighted over the edge of his glass. “We talking about Tony?”

  “We are, and please try to keep up.”

  “Tony’s an asshole.”

  “He is indeed,” Trey said. “Do you know who Tony is, Mr. Bender?”

  “No.”

  “He’s my husband.” She turned her face slightly to the left and regarded me from the corners of her eyes, the angle you sometimes see in self-portraits where the painter is looking at himself in a mirror. There was nothing spontaneous in the gesture; it looked like someone had told her it was a good angle, and she’d been practicing. “As you should have surmised from looking at the painting.”

  “We all make mistakes,” I said. “He was probably one of yours.”

  Her perfect eyebrows came together a fraction of an inch, an attractive way to suggest perplexity. I was beginning to think that Trey Annunziato was one of those people who see their lives as a series of close-ups.

  “Mmmmm,” she said. “How candid.” She rested her chin in her hand the way Charlie Rose sometimes does when he knows he’s on camera. “Do you know anything at all about me?”

  “As little as possible,” I said. “As an intentionally disorganized criminal, I try not to get anywhere near the organized variety. I know you went to Stanford, took some sort of graduate degree-”

  A nod. “Business administration.”

  “And I know you’ve been running the show since your father, ah …”

  “Had his accident.” She sipped her wine, the brown eyes cool on mine, as though she were daring me to have a reaction. “What did you expect me to be like?”

  “I didn’t. I never thought much about you until I was on the way over here.”

  “Did you, for example,” she said, crossing her legs, “expect me to be a woman?”

  My eyes were drawn to the fire from the diamond circlet around her ankle. “I’d heard a rumor, but Frederick G. Annunziato the Third isn’t a conspicuously feminine name.”

  “Good old dad,” she said unfondly. “He would have preserved the name if his only child had been a donkey. My older brother died when he was three, and I was the last baby my mother could have, so he just unpacked the name again and gave it to me. Nicest thing he did was not calling me Fred when he talked to me. He always called me Trey.”

  “That’s mildly interesting,” I said.

  “And you’re wondering why in the world I’m telling you about it.” She lifted the glass to her lips and then did a good job of pretending to notice I hadn’t tasted mine. “Please,” she said. “Try it. I’d like to know what you think. It’s the second growth from our new vineyard.”

  I tasted it, and then I tasted it again. “I’m not a wine connoisseur,” I said, “but it’s good enough to swallow repeatedly for a long period of time.”

  She threw her head back, shook her hair out, and laughed. The laugh might have worked if she hadn’t thrown her head back. When she was through simulating affectionate mirth, she turned to Hacker and said, “You didn’t tell me he was cute.”

  “I guess I missed it,” Hacker said.

  “Well,” she said, leaning forward to demonstrate that she was going all frank on me. “Here I am. I’m a girl who should have been a boy, who got a boy’s name, and was handed a life sentence at birth: Run the business. The enterprise, as my father always called it, was created by my great-grandfather, broadened and deepened by my grandfather, taken international and expanded exponentially by my father, and handed to me. With the expectation that I’d pass it on even bigger and more profitable than it was when I got it.”

  “I’m sure you’ll do fine,” I said, since she seemed to be waiting for someone to say something.

  “I’m sure I would, too,” she said. “If I weren’t in the process of shutting the whole thing down.”

  7

  Junior Agonistes

  The sun, most of the way down to the treetops, made a farewell appearance through the window, and projected itself into the bottom of Trey’s wine glass to create a fiery little point of light there. It was so bright I had to look away from it, which at least had the advantage of giving me something to do.

  “When you say closing it down,” I said, “do you mean, um, closing it down?”

  She said, “You could at least try to paraphrase me.”

  “You caught me off-balance,” I said, “which is what you wanted to do.”

  This time she didn’t throw back her head. She just laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh, maybe a two-stop chuckle, but it was about eighty percent real. “This is a quiz,” she said, holding her glass up a couple of inches, which doused the miniature sun. “Where does the wine come from?”

  “Your vineyards. Second growth.” I sipped it again. “It’s a little heavy on the tannin.”

  Hacker pulled his nose out of his glass long enough to hiss, “Bender,” but Trey waved him off. She sipped and said, “Does a vineyard sound like a criminal operation?”

  “Not if the wine’s any good.”

  “At the moment,” she said, “I own a vineyard, four dry cleaning shops, six Seven-Eleven franchises, a real estate holding company that controls nine office buildings on Ventura, including the one that Mr. Wattles occupies, and I just bought a chain of two-hour optometrists.” She sat back. “They’re called ‘Dr. Simon’s’ now, but I want to change it. What do you think of ‘Look Fast’?”

  “How about ‘The Frame-Up’?”

  “Something that says speed,” she said.

  “Second Sight?”

  “Too abstruse.”

  “Twenty/twenty in one-twenty?”

  Now she was giving me a genuine grin. “Got any more?”

  “Four Eyes in Two Hours?”

  “Eeeewww.” But the grin widened.

  “This is not why you called me here,” I said. “You could have asked for help naming a business without such an elaborate setup.” I grinned back at her. “And while we’re playing Show Me, you also own a bunch of bookie shops, a protection racket, about a third of the Mexican grass in the Valley, the hookers on the north side of Ventura for a couple of miles, a car theft operation that ships the cars to Eastern Europe, and one of the biggest porno operations in the country.”

  “Actually,” she said briskly, “it’s the biggest. And you left out quite a lot, although you’re wrong about the protection and the hookers. I’ve offloaded both of those operations. They’re no longer under the Annunziato umbrella, so to speak. The other businesses, the ones I named, not the ones you did, are one hundred percent legit. And, of course, pornography is legal, although I’m repurposing that business,”

  “Re what?”

  “Repurposing.”

  “Is that MBA language?”

  “It is.”

  “Good, because it certainly isn’t English.”

  “It means I’ll no longer make the films. I’ll own the things people use to make the films: cameras, lights, microphones, postproduction equipment, even studio space. The printing presses to make the box. The DVD duplication facility, the website for online distribution. You want to make Girl Guides Run Wild Three, you rent everything from me.”

  “If there was ever a film that needed two sequels, Girl Guides Gone Wild is that film.”

  “You have absolutely no idea,” she said, “how much the first two made. So much we didn’t know where to put it. But I won’t be filming the third
one. I’ve sold the franchise and I’ll rent the equipment. Because that’s where I’m going, Mr. Bender. Within eighteen months, the Annunziatos will no longer be part of the shadow economy.”

  “The shadow economy,” I said. “What a romantic way to put it.”

  “I’m in the middle of handing off the marijuana operation right now. Forty-eight hours from now, we’ll be out of the dope business. The others will follow.”

  “Well, with no desire to offend,” I said, “if that’s your plan, why are you talking to a crook?”

  “We’re going to come to that.” She turned her head and said, without raising her voice, “Eduardo.” And there he was, in all his glowering Blackness, standing in the doorway in suspended animation. Kill? Sure. Vacuum? Sure. “Could we have some more wine, please? Another Scotch, Lyle?”

  Hacker said, “You bet.” Eduardo crossed the room and picked up the bottle, which was no more than eighteen inches from Trey Annunziato’s elbow, and poured for her. I waved him off. Then he took Hacker’s glass, dropped in a new ice cube, and filled it almost to the brim. Hacker took it without glancing up or grunting thanks, and from the look in Eduardo’s eyes, what was all right for Trey was very much not all right for Hacker. He turned and left, and the room brightened noticeably.

  “You’re asking yourself why you’re here,” she said to me.

  “Not at all,” I said. “It’s not every day I get to taste a good second growth.”

  “You’re here because I need someone,” she said. “So that’s really two questions, isn’t it? Why do I need someone, and why is it you?”

  “Which one would you like to answer first?”

  She scooched her rear around on the seat a little and extended an arm over the top of the chaise, not so much to get more comfortable as simply to make sure I was completely focused on her. “Let’s start with why it’s you. Do you remember someone named Flaco Francis?”

  Whatever I’d been expecting, this wasn’t it. “Vaguely.”

  Her smile this time was tolerant. “I’m sure it’s more vivid than that. The name alone should guarantee it, Flaco being Spanish slang for skinny, and Francis being, well, Francis. According to my father, Flaco was like those white guys now who want to be black, with the watch caps and the-what do they call that awful jewelry?”

  I didn’t feel like playing. “I don’t know. Awful jewelry?”

  “Bling,” she said. “They call it bling. If he were around now, Flaco would be wearing bling. But this was fifteen years ago, and Flaco wanted to be Mexican.”

  “Let’s back it up a minute. Your father knew Flaco?”

  “My father owned Flaco.”

  Suddenly several things from long ago made sense. “Did he.”

  “Body and soul. And you got a little tangled with Flaco, didn’t you?”

  “If you say so.”

  “No, no, no, Mr. Bender. You got very tangled with Flaco.”

  I had. “He stole something from a friend of mine.”

  “He stole seven Cadillacs, all brand new. Cadillacs that your friend had acquired by unconventional means. This was when Cadillacs still had some cachet. When they were bling, so to speak. And your friend couldn’t very well go to the police, since they take a dim view of crooks who have a bunch of Cadillacs without pink slips. So he called you, and you figured out who took the cars and recovered three of them. And then, just to prevent retaliation, you set Flaco up on a phony burglary, and he was arrested. On Thursday, he had seven new Cadillacs, and on Friday he was sitting in jail in Van Nuys, looking at three to five.”

  “I remember.”

  “Finally. Well, since your memory has kicked in, what happened next?”

  “Somebody from Flaco’s posse came to me and told me Flaco had five kids and a pregnant wife, and promised to tell me where the other four Cadillacs were if I could somehow pop Flaco out of jail. He also suggested that there were lots of people willing to get even with me even it Flaco personally couldn’t.”

  “There certainly were,” Trey said.

  “I had no way of knowing that. Anyway, since I had essentially put Flaco there, the guy figured I might be able to get him out.”

  Trey nodded encouragingly. “And you did.”

  “Evidence got lost,” I said. “Right at the station.” I kept my eyes off of Hacker, who had sat up. “And don’t ask who lost it for me, because that’s off-limits.”

  “End of the day, your friend had all seven cars back, and Flaco was a free man. And Flaco went to my father and told him the story.”

  I said, “What a guy.”

  “He didn’t have much choice. He had to explain what he’d been doing in jail. My father didn’t like it when his people wound up in jail.”

  “Understandable.”

  “And then there was Antoine Duvall,” she said.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “What is this, This Is Your Life?”

  “Antoine Duvall fell for the Nigerian scam, didn’t he?” She turned to Hacker. “Do you know about the Nigerian scam, Lyle?”

  “Uh-uh,” Hacker said. He was staring at me, trying to figure who I might know at the Van Nuys station.

  “The way I understand it,” Trey said, “the person working the Nigerian scam sends just thousands and thousands of people an e-mail telling them that he’s an investor who got involved in a deal in some African country and ran afoul of the authorities. Some very complicated story. Right so far?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Anyway, the hook is an absurd amount of money-say forty or fifty million-in a bank account in whatever country. Let’s say Nigeria, since that’s where it started. Because the authorities have him on their bad list, he can’t pull the money out. But you could, and if you’ll do it for him, he’ll pay you ten or fifteen percent. A nice chunk of money for essentially doing nothing. All he needs is for you to sign some meaningless forms, which are just there because they look official, and on one of them you list the number of the bank account to which you want these millions of dollars transferred.”

  “An account number?” Hacker said. “Ain’t nobody going to fall for that.”

  “Out of the twenty or thirty thousand e-mails every month, they are going to reach, statistically speaking, three or four bona fide idiots,” Trey said. “Or maybe they’re old people whose judgment isn’t so good. Antoine, who had worked for my grandfather, was seventy-seven, and not quite as sharp as he might have been. He responded with his account numbers and got cleaned out.”

  “Antoine was a sweet old guy,” I said. “He baked cookies for the local fire department every week.”

  “And he was devastated,” Trey said. “One of the problems with living on this side of the law is that there’s no pension plan. No health insurance.”

  “And his wife,” I said. “She was sick or something.”

  “Shirley,” Trey said. “I knew her when I was little. Alzheimer’s. Anyway, you took care of it.”

  “I can’t take the credit. A kid did most of the work. But Antoine had a friend who was a mentor of mine, a burglar named Herbie. Herbie told me about it, and I met Antoine and Shirley, and I got really pissed off. So I got it back for him.”

  “And some extra,” she said.

  I shrugged.

  “Antoine told my father what you did, but he didn’t understand how.”

  “I reverse-engineered it,” I said. “I knew a fifteen year-old kid, a girl, who could make computers leap through rings of fire while they sang arias from Verdi. So we set up a virtual bank, the Bank of US, that was really nothing more than an invisible forwarding link to a real account with a few thousand bucks in it. Then we sent responses to the con man’s e-mail as though it had been sent to us, with the number of the phony account. The second he hit the link we’d set up, which was on our own computer, we followed him, electronically I mean, to the account he was transferring to. The kid hacked the bank the con man was using and found that he’d set up a couple of linking accounts at the same bank
. We cleaned them all out and then we sent him an e-mail from a phantom mailbox saying the next time he tried to pull the scam he’d lose more than just money.”

  “Like what?” Hacker asked.

  “I think the right hand was mentioned.”

  Trey was back in the chin-on-hand pose. “And you gave Antoine how much?”

  “I don’t know,” I said uncomfortably.

  “All of it, I believe,” she said. “About two million. He’d only lost three hundred thousand.”

  “Pain and suffering,” I said. “Antoine was a nice old guy.”

  “So the long and short of it,” Trey said, “is that my father had heard both these stories, and he told me about you. He said you were a smart guy and I should keep track of you in case I ever needed you.”

  I held up both hands. “Hold it. I thought you went to Hacker here, and then Hacker went to Wattles, and-”

  “All true,” she said. “I told you that my father suggested I keep track of you, not that I succeeded in doing it. You’re a hard man to find.”

  “Not hard enough, apparently.”

  “By dumb luck, I went to people who knew where you were. When Lyle told me your name, I thought, well, here’s virtue rewarded. I’m trying to go straight, and I get the very man I need. A man my father called smart. My father didn’t exactly throw compliments around.”

  “If I were smart,” I said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “Here in the Valley,” I said, although it wasn’t true.

  “Cal State Northridge?” A faint wrinkle of distaste briefly shortened her nose by a hundredth of an inch or so. Not enough ivy for a Stanford post-grad. “What did you take?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “But it was a great place to meet girls.”

  The tendons in her neck were suddenly tight. “Mr. Bender, I am asking about your education.”

  “And I’m avoiding answering you.”