Gotcha, Call Me Nicky.
Caught you in a lie.
Incendiary origin.
Motive.
Now opportunity.
Now if I can just buy a little more time.
68
Jack’s waiting in the parking lot of Cal Fire and Life.
Waiting for Bill Reynolds, the executive from Underwriting who okayed a million bucks in coverage for the Vales’ personal property, to leave for the day.
Jack’s waiting in the parking lot because he doesn’t want to go to Bill’s office and embarrass the guy or get the gossip going. Jack doesn’t want to hurt Bill Reynolds, he just wants the time to finish his investigation.
Reynolds comes out of the building. Tall guy, has to go six-six, and heavy—in fact, overweight. Wearing an underwriter’s gray suit and carrying a briefcase. Guys from Underwriting take work home.
Jack steps up.
“Bill? I’m Jack Wade from Claims.”
“Bill Reynolds.”
Reynolds has a What the hell is this look on his face as he peers through his glasses down at Jack.
“Bill, you okayed some personal property coverage for Roger Hazlitt on the Vale risk?”
“I’d have to look in the file.”
Jack lays the Vale policy on the hood of Reynolds’s blue Lexus.
“Come see me in my office,” Reynolds says. “I’m not standing out here in the parking lot … It’s 103 degrees …”
“You don’t want to do this in your office.”
“There are channels—”
“You don’t want me to go through channels,” Jack says.
You’re taking bribes from agents, “channels” is not the way you want to go.
Reynolds looks down at him, both literally and figuratively.
“What are you, an M-3?” he asks, citing pay rankings.
“M-4.”
“M-4,” Reynolds says. “I’m an M-6. You don’t have the weight to throw around.”
Jack nods. “Roger says he slipped you a thousand bucks to okay this coverage.”
Which might add to the weight quotient a little bit.
“Get away from my vehicle.”
“Is it true?”
“I said get away from my vehicle.”
“Look, typically you’d lay some of that risk off, wouldn’t you?” Jack asks. “Work with the customer to get one or two other carriers to pick up some of the coverage? Isn’t that the way you’d normally do it if the risk was too high but you wanted to keep the customer?”
“Those are Underwriting decisions.”
“Which is why I’m asking you.”
“You don’t understand the business.”
“Educate me.”
Reynolds takes off his glasses. Looks down at Jack for a long time before he says, “I don’t have the time to explain to you things that you don’t have the education to understand. So leave it alone.”
“Can’t.”
“What’s your name again?”
“Jack Wade. Large Claims.”
“That’s Billy Hayes’s unit?”
“You know it is,” Jack says. “You had your boss on the phone banging at him first thing this morning.”
“Well, Jack Wade from Large Claims,” Reynolds says. “I’m going to tell you once: drop this. Understand?”
“I don’t have the education,” Jack says. “And that’s twice you’ve told me.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell you again.”
“Good, because I was getting bored.”
“You won’t be bored tomorrow morning, I can tell you that.”
“You gonna make some more calls, Bill?”
“Get away from my vehicle.”
“You gonna bring the heat down?”
Reynolds squeezes himself into the driver’s seat and starts the engine. Jack takes the papers off the hood.
The car window rolls down with a soft electric hum.
“Pay the claim,” Reynolds says.
“No.”
“Pay the claim.”
“Everyone’s telling me that.”
“Everyone’s right.”
“Let me tell you about some basic laws of physics,” Jack says. “Before heat can go down, it goes up. Heat rises. So don’t drop any more heat on Billy Hayes, because I’ll send some up your way, from M-4 to M-6.”
The window rolls up.
Reynolds disappears behind blue tinted glass.
Smoked glass, Jack thinks.
69
The parking lot’s a rough place today.
Jack’s walking into the building when he sees Sandra Hansen heading toward him.
“Sandra,” Jack says.
“Jack.”
Jack knows this conversation can only be trouble, because Sandra Hansen is the So-Cal head of Cal Fire and Life’s SIU. SIU stands for Special Investigative Unit, which means it’s the fraud unit. Every big insurance carrier has one, a unit that specializes in handling potentially fraudulent claims. Cal Fire’s SIU functions as more of an intelligence organization—it doesn’t bother with the small shit; its major job is to track fraud rings, the specialized rip-off operations that suck millions of bucks a year in phony claims.
As a former cop, Jack would have been a perfect candidate for SIU, except Jack doesn’t want to be a cop of any kind anymore, even a pseudo-cop.
Another reason he’s not interested is because SIU also functions as the company’s internal affairs unit. You got a Claims guy taking kickbacks for recommending a contractor, or an auto adjuster splitting overcharges with a body shop, or, say, an underwriter taking money from an agent to write bad book, that’s SIU’s turf.
And Jack would rather be a dog than a rat.
“Were you staking me out, Sandra?” Jack asks her.
“As a matter of fact I was,” Hansen says. “Jack, you have a file we’re interested in.”
“Olivia Hathaway?” Jack asks.
Hansen doesn’t think it’s funny. She gives Jack her professional SIU hard look and says, “The Vale file.”
Surprise, surprise, Jack thinks.
“What about it?”
“We want you to back off it.”
“Who’s we?”
“SIU.”
Like I’m supposed to get all watery in the knees, Jack thinks. Fucking SIU thinks it’s the CIA and the FBI except it doesn’t have to answer to anybody.
Well, fuck that.
“Why?” Jack asks. “Why does SIU want me to back off the file?”
“Does it matter?”
“To me.”
Hansen’s pissed. Generally speaking, she says lay off a file, the adjuster lays off it.
“You’re walking into something,” Hansen says. “You don’t know where you’re walking.”
This is true, Jack thinks.
This is really interesting.
“Tell me,” Jack says. “Your guys have something here, for God’s sake tell me, Sandra. I could use the help.”
“You’re going to trip over—”
“So shine me a light,” Jack says. “Seriously, show me the way.”
“—shit that’s too big for you to handle.”
Jack says, “Maybe I should decide what’s too big for me to handle.”
Sandra pulls out the big gun. “Don’t make me take this file away from you.”
Fucking SIU, they can do that. They can walk in and take the handling of a file.
So why hasn’t she already done it? Jack thinks. If she wants the Vale file so badly, why doesn’t she just take it? Nice big juicy arson file. Lotsa glory for SIU …
“I’m trying to do this nicely, Jack,” Sandra says. “I’m telling you: back off.”
“You’re saying pay the claim?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You’re working Vale already, aren’t you?” Jack says.
“Shut up, Jack.”
“You must have a blind file and Vale’s name has—”
“Don’t say another word.”
“—come up in there somewhere and you’re afraid I’m going to trip over it and blow your investigation.”
“SIU has no such file.”
“Come on.”
“I never said that,” Hansen says. “And this conversation never happened.”
Official-pronouncement-type voice.
“And you’re going to pay the claim,” Sandra says.
“I’m tired of everyone and his fucking dog telling me to pay this claim,” Jack says. “Agency, Underwriting, now SIU? What’s going on? Who is this Vale guy, the king?”
“Just pay his claim.”
“A woman was murdered.”
“This is bigger than that.”
Jack stands there and stares at her.
“You’re crazy,” he says.
“If you force us—”
“Totally whacked.”
“If you force us to take over this file,” Hansen says, “I promise you a world of trouble. The rest of your short career will be nothing but one long shit shower.”
She can do it, too, Jack thinks. All she has to do is get one contractor to say he gave me money and I’m out on my ass. She can do it and she would do it because Sandra Hansen is a tough cookie. Standing there in her white business suit with blond hair like a helmet. Attractive, sexy, a killer. Thirty-five or so and already the head of So-Cal SIU. Her career a bullet and I’m standing in the way.
“Think about it, Jack,” she says.
“Stay out of my file, Sandra.”
Hansen decides to give it one more try.
“Get on the team, Jack.”
“What team?”
“You want to be a claims dog the rest of your life?” Sandra asks. “With your background, you could be SIU. Mayhew’s retiring at the end of the year. There’ll be a slot open …”
“You offering me a deal, Sandra?”
“Whatever.”
“I don’t do deals.”
This pisses Hansen off.
“You’re either with us,” she says, “or you’re against us.”
Jack takes Sandra by the shoulders. Gets right in her face.
“If you want to pay this claim,” he says, “I’m against you.”
He lets her go and walks away.
“That’s not where you want to be!” she yells after him. “That is not where you want to be.”
Jack keeps walking as he flips her off over his shoulder.
Leaving Sandra Hansen thinking what a big, brainless, dumb stud Jack Wade is. She’s thinking that Jack’s surfboard has landed on his head once—make that twice—too often.
And that she’s going to have to take him down.
Three years.
She has three years and God only knows how much of her budget sunk into a long-term investigation of Russian organized crime and she’s not going to let one stubborn M-4 of an adjuster flush it down the toilet.
Dead woman or no dead woman.
She feels bad about that.
It makes her sick that Vale gets away with murdering his wife, but that’s the way it is.
70
Pamela.
Nicky’s biggest break from Mother Russia.
A break with the old code, but Nicky’s inaugurated the new code and the brothers are marrying now.
But not California girls—Russian women.
Women of the same culture and language, usually with family ties in the mob. These are wives who understand the way things work, who help bind their husbands to the mob and the code, whose families back home in Russia can be used as hostages if hubby suddenly develops a desire to transgress against the mob.
Not American wives, not California girls.
Who don’t know the code, who ask questions, who make demands, who can’t keep their mouths shut, who get unhappy and when they get unhappy get divorces.
Marry a Russian girl, Dani tells him when he sees Pamela on his arm two, three, four dates in a row.
“I want children,” Nicky argues.
“Have Russian children,” Dani advises. He whips open a catalog of Russian would-be brides eager to immigrate. “Pick one out. Any one and she’s yours. There are some real beauties here.”
And there are, Nicky agrees. Stunning Russian women, but that’s the point. He doesn’t want a Russian woman. He wants an American woman. He doesn’t want to strengthen the bond, he wants to break it.
And they don’t get it.
Mother does.
She sees exactly what’s happening.
“It is a slap in the face,” she says.
“No, it isn’t.”
“You are a Russian.”
“I’m an American.”
Nicky Vale.
The turnaround in one generation, but to make that a reality he needs to regenerate. To have children.
American children.
Besides which, he has to have her. She’s driving him insane. He knows she dresses to provoke him. Shows him the tops of her white breasts, her long thighs. Wears perfumes that make him hard the second she walks into the room. Kisses him with full warm lips and swipes her tongue across his in a way that makes him feel that tongue on his cock, and then she breaks away and smiles at him to let him know that she knows exactly what he’s thinking, and laughs at him.
Or she’ll press against him. Press her breasts into his arm or his back, or worse—no, better; no, worse—press her pussy against the front of his pants and say, “Oh, baby, I wish we could.”
“We can,” he’ll say.
“No,” she’ll say, frowning. Then a little whimper, her lips in a frustrated pout. “It’s against my beliefs.”
Then she rolls against him, sighs, pouts and steps away.
Sometimes even touches herself over her dress and looks at him with sad eyes and he knows what she’s doing. Knows that she is a cockteaser extraordinaire, knows this, but can’t help himself.
Maybe because she represents to him everything that is so close but just out of reach.
America.
California.
A new life.
A turnaround inside one generation.
And he can see her as the mother of his American children. She is beautiful, free, happy in that careless California way that just doesn’t carry the long tragic burden that Russians bear. And if his children come from her, in his mind they come somehow cleansed of all that history.
And besides, he has to have her.
“Then have her as a mistress,” Mother says. “If you absolutely must have the little tease, then set her up in an apartment, give her money, give her presents, screw yourself silly until you’re tired of her, then give her more money and say goodbye, but don’t marry her.”
If you marry her, Mother says, she will take your heart, your money and your children because this is America and in America the father has no rights. She will ruin you. She’s a gold digger.
“Marry this piece of trash,” she says, “and she will leave you in the rubbish in her place.”
Which, of course, cuts it.
Nicky gives Pam a ring that night.
They marry two months later.
On their honeymoon, on the lawn of the private villa on Maui, she sheds her flowered dress for him. Invites him inside her.
Where she is hot sweet honey.
Liquid gold.
Nicky remembers her neck, the smell of vanilla in the nape of her neck as he stood behind her and put his lips and his tongue against the sweet-smelling white skin below her ear, below her black hair. How she moved against him so he ran his hand down the scooped neck of her dress and felt her breast. Felt the flimsy bra give way and then he rolled her nipple between his thumb and finger and she didn’t object so he slid the dress down over her breasts then held them in his hands and slid his thumbs back and forth across the nipples and how she brought her hand around—to stop him, he thought at first, but she just held her palm to the back of his head—so he took one hand and ran it
down her stomach, and down, and she was wet.
He remembers the sound she made—mmm-hmmm, a sound of unashamed pleasure—and he rubbed her with a finger and she sank back into him.
It’s funny what you remember, he thinks again, because what he remembers most is the smell of her neck and the flowered dress. What it looked like as he pushed it over her breasts, and down around her hips, and how it looked lying rumpled at her feet as she stepped out of it, and laid down on top of it, and held her arms up to invite him to come into her.
Strange, he thinks, but that moment was America to him, was California to him, that open-armed, open-legged invitation to unabashed pleasure. The sound of California to him is and always will be: mmm-hmmm.
And he remembers her wide purple eyes when later she wrapped her legs around him and pushed him deeper in and held him there as she climaxed, and then he did, and then he laid his face into her neck.
And how she said, “Kiss my neck and I can’t stop you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this much, much earlier?”
“Because then I couldn’t have stopped you.”
Then she scratched his back with the diamond of the engagement ring he’d given her.
Mmm-hmmm.
71
For quite a while they’re happy in their California life.
The money rolls in as they ride the top of the real estate boom. She becomes a south coast housewife. Mornings in the gym, lunch with the ladies, afternoons harassing the interior decorators who come to make the house a showpiece. Or getting her hair, her face, her nails done at this salon or that, usually with the same ladies with whom she’d lunched.
Parties in the evening. Lovely friends, beautiful people.
She becomes pregnant quickly, as he sensed she would, her body a lush field of spring wildflowers. Natalie is born with Daddy in the delivery room doing that American thing, coaching his wife’s breathing. But little coaching is needed. Pamela was serenely pregnant—cheerful, relaxed, happy. The birth is as easy as births can be.
“I am a Russian peasant woman,” she jokes. “The next baby I’ll just drop in a wheat field.”
“You are hardly a peasant,” Nicky says.
She reminds him that she grew up on a farm.
“Knock me up again,” she tells him.
He’s delighted to.