The Kingmaker

17 - Rumors

 "Is this Nate's friend?"

"Who is this?"

Eden examined a scratch in one of her plates with great interest, balancing the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she held the object up to the dim light of the ceiling bulb with both hands. She was in the middle of putting away her dishes, but who said she couldn't multitask? A phone call with one of the medium-risk power players of Alexandria City wasn't all that challenging to handle, after all.

"I'm Nate's partner. Is this Mr. DiAngelo? He was clear about it, I'm not to talk to anyone but him."

"I'm the one asking the questions. How'd you get this number."

"I told you, I'm Nate's partner. Or was, since he's been killed now."

"He fell off a building, drunk off his ass. No one killed him."

Eden rolled her eyes. Apparently, there were downsides to the coroners in this city being so incompetent at their jobs. She hadn't thought she would need to convince anyone that Nate's death had been anything but accidental. Talk about a plan backfiring. But that was alright, she could work her way around it. Next time, though, she would have to leave herself with a more flexible margin of error.

"Considering I was there, I can tell you with no uncertainty that it was not an accident, Mr. DiAngelo."

"Get to the point, or this conversation is over."

Well, if Eden had been harboring any doubts as to the cooled relationship between Nathan and Cristian DiAngelo, here was her answer. The man sounded like he hadn't so much as blinked at the revelation, but then again, she could understand that. There wasn't much about Nate to have liked, much less miss. She set the plate quietly into its place in her open cupboard.

"He told me to reach out to you in case it happened, which it did. The blow's gone. Someone took out a hit on him, made it look like an accident, and then took the stash."

"Someone like you?"

If only he knew how true that was. Ironic how he was only accusing her of it in order to demonstrate that he didn't trust her, when she really had been the one to off Nate.

"I might have eventually, but there was money in the partnership. It shouldn't have happened so soon."

There was a bark of laughter on the other end, maybe surprised, definitely amused. Eden smiled; she was an old hand at dealing with people who possessed a macabre sense of humor. That was her specialty in fact, and Cristian DiAngelo was nothing if not macabre. Well, a little crazy too, but that was to be expected from someone like him who had spent his entire childhood getting torn up by other street criminals.

Not that she was supposed to know any of that. She would have to play dumb this go-around.

"Nate and I haven't worked together in a long time, lady."

Ah, there it was. A little give. She smiled and positioned herself to widen the hole and weaken him further.

"I know. He told me not since the night you saved him. Said it was almost a decade ago, but he hasn't forgotten it." Eden heard the man snort in derision, but she also noticed that he didn't hang up or deny the allegation. Good signs. "I won't pry for details, but he seemed to take it pretty seriously. Said he would have wanted to stay in business with you a lot longer if he could have."

"Guy had no vision. Not my problem."

"Either way, you're the only person he trusted enough to tell me to approach if the worst happened."

"So what you want me to do about it? He's already dead. Go home."

"Hm, if only. Except my place got shot up by the same people who came after me next after they were done with him. I guess they didn't need my death to look like an accident." She scoffed into the phone and turned so that she could pull herself up to sit on the counter. "But I'm not asking you to do anything. Nate had a few requests, but they're a waste of time and I don't see you expending that much effort on a guy that was of no use to you even when he was alive."

Another laugh. Yes, a very good sign. And the best part of this was that aside from the lying, she was staying fairly true to her own character. She appreciated a man could enjoy the best parts of her, even someone as f****d up as Cristian. Maybe she ought to take him out for a drink before she killed him later on.

"So what do you want, lady."

"Just letting you know that someone working under Goodwin had a lot to do with it. I don't know if she was responsible or if they were taking their orders from someone else, but I find it odd that in the few hours between Nate going splat on the pavement and his apartment being investigated, someone had already stripped his stash in the middle of the night."

"Happens all the time," DiAngelo snorted. "You sound new to the playground. Once he's dead, everything he owned automatically became property of whoever he owed money or favors to. That's the way it works. Doesn't take long to find out a man's dead, either. Faster than the cops, that's for damn sure."

"Oh, I know that, Mr. DiAngelo. My question is why someone on Goodwin's team has been taking Nate's blow and poaching your dealers with it."

Silence. And then:

"You got proof?"

"Check out the people who leave the beach at hours they shouldn't have been out there in the first place. Maybe have some of your boys follow them home. I couldn't get close enough to see which ones, but you'll find them. You might want to do it fast since by now they've probably shilled out almost all of it, but I saw maybe a dozen bricks of it being passed between hands there. You know about Goodwin setting her boys up on those boats, right? After her cook site got compromised. Bombed, I heard, actually."

Oooh, yes. That was a good one. She would have to work on spreading the rumor that something more insidious and malicious had gone down in Goodwin's lab - people would be ready to believe it, too. People were ready to believe just about anything if the breadcrumbs were laid out just so.

"And?"

"I don't know which one, but there's someone on one of those boats - maybe more than one - who's been f*****g around for a while, stepping out of his comfort zone and into the blow business. He might be connected to your poacher. It's been going on at least a month now since that's how long I'd been working with Nate, but it has to have been longer than that. Much longer. He just didn't notice because he'd gone soft, and because he was always a little stupid. Didn't believe me when I told him, but I guarantee you if you bang a few heads together the next few nights, you'll find something out. I've been looking for a while now, and the only thing I can find out is that it was someone going around saying they were Nate's man, that they had a better proposition than the one you were giving them."

More silence, and this time Eden had to squint a little and curl her hands around the edge of the countertop to dredge up a little bit of hope inside her. There was a chance DiAngelo would hang up on her right now, that he would dismiss everything she said simply because he didn't care.

But that wasn't the DiAngelo she remembered glimpsing on the streets whenever she sneaked into the Slum Belt, the crazy, stringy, bloody-faced motherfucker who didn't let anyone look at him the wrong way. He'd changed a bit, filled out and become a little more in control of himself, but there had to still be a spark of that spiteful, spitting, rabid animal in him that made him chase down anyone who dared to cross him.

"Sounds to me like Nate's the one who's been doing the poaching, then. And I don't see how these two incidences connect. Sounds random to me, lady."

Well, that was true. Nate's poaching of his ex-friend's dealers was completely irrelevant and purely coincidental, but Eden's job was to convince him otherwise. It shouldn't be too hard - a man in his profession would always be ready to believe the worst of everything. It paid to be paranoid.

"Sure, you can believe that. Just a coincidence. Just like you can believe he'd ever be ambitious enough to arrange any of this on his own. Mr. DiAngelo, have you ever seen him act on his own initiative in the time you've known him? He told me he'd been doing the same bullshit small-time distributing for over ten years now. He had no vision. He was going to do this for the rest of his life, the same ball game he'd been playing since he was eighteen. You can't really tell me in all honesty that he would ever have had the brains or the balls to go after your turf. As much as he admired you, it doesn't even compare to how much he feared you."

Ah, yes. Something Eden was also good at, stroking egos. She briefly wondered if she ought to set up a side business in the future, whispering sweet encouragements to big, overcompensating criminals with terrible pasts.

"Keep talking."

"There's not much I can talk about, Mr. DiAngelo. I've given you about all the information I know - except something about Goodwin's operations that I dug up while I was looking around."

"You think Goodwin is -"

"I'm not thinking anything, I'm just keeping my mind and ears open. I don't know who to trust. Even you. But I have to start somewhere, and at this point I'd rather take my leap of faith into your arms since I know you wouldn't have been interested in dealing with small fish like Nate anyway. I find it hard to believe you would have anything to do with this. Not to mention it's your territory being infringed on, if I'm right. Would be strange to see a man inconvenience himself that way, even for a greater purpose."

Eden's hand slid up to grip the burner phone tight, fingertips digging into the plastic as she waited for DiAngelo's answer. She had everything in place - had followed one of Goodwin's cooks home just before dawn broke, shimmied open the window and planted the cocaine on the high shelf in his closet. Chances were astronomically low he would even think to look there for anything at all, at least not anytime soon, and yet it was sure to be found as soon as someone raided his place to search it.

All that in the time the man had been taking a shower. She had been in and out of his dilapidated apartment within ten minutes. Maybe she ought to pursue a career in this too, hm.

It had been a close call, but she had gotten away almost completely unscathed minus a nasty cut on her leg from a protruding nail. Good thing she was up to date on all her shots. She had yanked out the nail from the wood just in case anyone would see the trace of blood on it, too. She needed to take every precaution possible.

"I guarantee you'll find something if you take the time to look, Mr. DiAngelo," she said calmly. "And I'll admit now that I came to you for another reason, actually, other than the ones I named."

"Oh?"

"You have the manpower. I'm not blind, Mr. DiAngelo. I see that you have the network and the resources to get things done when you want them done, and following home a dozen different people to root out the weak link is well within your power. There's not much else I can say on that topic, you know it better than I do."

Ah, yes. More ego stroking. Scritch-scritch.

"Then I'll take my leave and hope you're interested enough to pursue this."

"Wait. We should meet."

Eden smiled. Hooked, she thought. She'd string him along a little longer.

"To be honest, I'm very much afraid of you. You can't blame me for that, can you? I'll give you another call in, say, two nights. I'd like to get to the bottom of this and find out what's brewing in our side of the city. I'm not ready to believe everything's just an accident, and I want to know how they connect."

"Smart woman."

"Thank you. And then if you find something by the time we speak again, I'll have to ask you for another favor."

"And what's that."

"Mr. DiAngelo, I just might want to come work for you."