Murder on K Street - Margaret Truman [90]
“On the button.”
Rotondi carried the envelope containing the damaging material about Lyle Simmons and the Marshalk Group with him to the Pump Room. He sat at the bar and enjoyed a beer and sandwich. The doorman hailed him a cab, and he arrived at Kala’s apartment building in the Old Town Triangle section of the city, adjacent to Lincoln Park. It had been settled in the mid-1850s by German immigrants and remained a German American enclave until an influx of other nationalities created a melting pot of Germans, Hungarians, and Russian Jews. Gentrification followed, and real estate prices soared, forcing out many of its original residents. Kala bought her condo there because she enjoyed the ghosts of what had been, including saloon-keeper aldermen like Mathias “Paddy” Bauler, who was fond of telling reporters, “I’ll talk about anything with you, as long as the statute of limitations has run out.” Kala was right for the neighborhood, and the neighborhood was right for her.
Kala and her two rescued stray cats welcomed Rotondi to the apartment. “Drink?” she asked.
“Please.”
“Still drinking Scotch?”
He nodded and followed her into the kitchen.
“I hope you know how much I appreciate this, Kala.”
“You’d better appreciate it, Philip. My neck’s way out on this one.”
“I know.”
“When you called and told me what you had, I was ready to kill the little weasel, only somebody beat me to it.”
“Who is this weasel?”
She handed him his Scotch over two cubes and led him back into the living room.
“Show me the stuff you ended up with,” she said, lighting a cigarette.
He opened the folder and laid out its materials. She rifled through it for thirty seconds, shoved the papers back, said, “Yeah, the same stuff.”
“Gathered by a weasel?”
“A no-good, rotten little double-dealing weasel. I’d use some other words to describe him, only I wouldn’t want to offend you.”
“Thanks. So, tell me.”
She took a long, sustained drink of club soda, sat back, fired up another cigarette, and said, “Where do I begin? Okay. We flipped a guy who was inside one of our fair city’s leading crime families. Despite all the Russian and Jamaican and Haitian mobs, we still have the Eye-talian variety, not as powerful as they used to be but still with plenty of fingers into everything, mostly construction and trash hauling, with side ventures in prostitution and drugs. This guy we flipped, Joey Silva, started bringing us the sort of material you have in the folder, links between his crime family and a certain U.S. senator who happens to be an old friend of one of my favorite prosecutors, now happily retired. At first, the info was sketchy, and it was tough to connect the dots. The route the money took to the senator was convoluted, no straight lines, which you would expect from somebody as smart as your college buddy. But the more Silva gave us, the more the picture started to take shape. The family used front companies that moved the money from their hands to a middleman, namely a lobbying firm in D.C. headed by a gentleman named Marshalk.”
“A familiar name,” Rotondi said.
“Another familiar name is president of Marshalk, Simmons’s kid. But of course, you already know this.”
“Everything but the weasel. Go on.”
“The weasel, Mr. Joey Silva, lowlife that he is, kept hitting us up for more money. Every time he did, he said he had more and better information, so we went along. The little bastard was getting rich off us, but he was delivering the goods.” She tapped the file folder on the coffee table. “Juicy stuff, huh, Philip?”
“Not for the senator and Marshalk.”
“Who cares about them? Oh, you do, of course.”
“Not Marshalk. Simmons? Yeah, I care about him.”
“Are you trying to protect him?”
Rotondi shook his head and sipped his Scotch. “I’m not out to protect anybody, Kala. I just need to know the truth. Simmons’s murdered wife, Jeannette, and I were close.”
“Oooh,” she said with a deep, provocative laugh. “Tell me all about it.”
“Another time, Kala. Get back to the story. Who sent this material to Simmons’s wife? This weasel, Silva?