Wonderful, class. A for effort. Now: what happened to trigger Bell’s untimely (at least, that was probably his opinion) demise? Two possibilities here: Manzetti double-crossed Bell or Bell double-crossed Manzetti. Or—make that three possibilities, class—both.
Let’s say that at least Bell was double-dealing. He withheld some of the photos he was supposed to be selling to Manzetti. What makes me think this, class? Because Copel turns up two weeks after Bell’s death with a crotchful of photos of Adrian? Absolutely. Maybe Manzetti realized Bell had double-crossed him, so he killed him. Maybe he was planning to kill Bell all along, and never knew until later he didn’t have all the pics. In any event, a couple weeks went by before Manzetti and Copel somehow cross paths. How this happened, boys and girls, remains a mystery. Perhaps Bell and Copel were partners all along, unknown to Manzetti. Perhaps Copel, in Marcie Bell’s employ, was looking for the missing Eddie Bell and, as happened to me, got unlucky. Perhaps Copel, in investigating the case, came across the photos of Adrian, recognized her, and decided he could make a killing.
Bad pun, class, and thoroughly unprofessional.
In any event, Copel and Manzetti came together in this place, no more than twenty-four hours ago. Copel was painstakingly worked over, in order to extract from him information, the remaining photos of Adrian or—if Manzetti’s reputation was accurate—just for fun. His torturers didn’t find the negatives Copel had hid down his pants; he had been around a little. And somehow he managed to break away and drag himself to my place before cashing it in.
Excellent reconstruction, class. Whether it bears any resemblance to actuality, of course, is another matter entirely, but it hangs together well as a strictly speculative equation. Good work. Now, one final question: How does our brave hero extricate himself from the bad guys’ clutches and save the day?
Class? Class?
Doomed by the bell.
I snapped open my eyes as if rising from a fevered dream. Maybe I was. I’d gone fifteen hours on five hours’ sleep, following a nineteen-hour day—which maybe explained the crazy scenario my mind had just run through. Crazy, yes; outlandish, no. It gave me at least the bare bones of a story line to follow. If I lived, perhaps I could upholster them a little.
If I lived. That was problematical. But it was worth pursuing, if I do say so myself. Having had something of a breakthrough concerning the probable course of events in this case, my conceit was now such that I believed I and my razor wit could extricate myself from a situation that two men in the past couple weeks hadn’t survived.
On second thought, maybe that wasn’t strictly conceit. Maybe it was the only straw I had to glom on to.
Giddy with adrenaline, though still wobbly, I managed to get to my feet—a feat I’d’ve never managed without a wall to brace against. Cigar had wandered off somewhere, and there was still no sign of Mustache. I started climbing the narrow steel-rod ladder at the head of the pit.
Instantly both giants were at the edge of the hole. “What the heck do you think you’re doing?” Cigar demanded from behind the rope burning in his mouth.
I was head and shoulders above floor level when I paused and looked each man squarely in the face. “It’s damp down there,” I said seriously, trying not to wince at the icy slivers of pain my abused face shot into my brain. “I’ll wait for the boss up here, with you.” I took another rung on the ladder.
The giants looked at each other. “Wiseass,” Mustache decided. He turned back to me and planted a huge wing-tipped shoe on my left shoulder.
I had hoped for this. Clasping the ladder with my left hand, I brought my right up behind Mustache’s left knee. I smacked it hard and the knee buckled and collapsed like a folding-chair leg. Mustache cried out in surprise as his considerable weight went to his right foot, the one on my shoulder. I swiveled to the right on the ladder and Mustache toppled over me and into the pit, headfirst.
He made an unpleasant sound when he hit. I hoisted myself out of the hole as fast as I could manage and put some distance between me and Cigar, who stared stupidly into the pit. There was no activity there.
“Sebby?” Cigar wondered speculatively into the pit. Then, louder: “Hey, Seb—you okay?”
Nothing from the lower depths. I hoped I hadn’t helped Sebby break his neck, but I didn’t hope it too hard.
Cigar looked at me. It was a strange look, and didn’t seem to belong to that face. The face was used to looking hard and tough and unsympathetic. A trace of jowliness and a slight pouch under the lantern jaw was starting to soften it as its owner gravitated into middle age, but even so it was a tough face. Which is why the wide-eyed look it now gave me—the sort of vacant, wrenching look a kid gets when his first pet makes that unexplainable journey into death—was so out of place.
“Jesus, I think you killed him,” Cigar said softly.
I said nothing.
Cigar looked back into the pit. He looked at me, and the wondering expression in his face had evaporated. “Maybe not, though,” he said with a verbal shrug. “Okay, look, shamus, we got to get some things straightened out, fast.” He started around the edge of the pit, toward me. I had been edging away from him—toward the door, maybe, but mostly away from him. Now I bolted. The workbench was closer than the door. I grabbed from it the tire iron I had used to pry open Bell’s crude crypt. It would be about as valuable as dinosaur repellent if Cigar decided to put a bullet through me, but holding it made me feel better.
“Talk from there,” I said. I growled it like a B-picture gangster. The idea was to mask the quaver in my voice.
Cigar spread his big hands innocuously. “Fine, it’s the same to me. I don’t have the time to waste. You neither.” He plucked the stogie from his face and tossed it into the other pit, the one with water in the bottom. The hot cigar hissed when it struck.
The hiss was well-timed, for in walked the villain.
Manzetti. Had to be. I was expecting a Robert De Niro type in white suit, Cuban heels, broad-brimmed hat. Maybe a coat laid thoughtlessly over his shoulders. A pencil mustache to complete the picture.
What I got was Rod Steiger in a gray two-piece suit. But it had to be Manzetti.
He was a short man, but built as solid as a fire plug. He was balding. Rather than disguise it, he wore his remaining dark hair close-cropped. His eyes were shiny and dark, like mockingbirds’, and heavy-lidded. His mouth was soft, slightly pouting. The entire image was calm, deliberating. An accountant, not a mobster. Crazy Al fit his nickname about as well as a dog fits into a church service.
Following close behind Manzetti was a kid, a tall, reedy kid. You knew the type in school: long and thin, all legs, ears at a ninety-degree angle to the head, Adam’s apple that made them look like they had swallowed a billiard ball. This kid—he couldn’t’ve been twenty-two—didn’t seem like muscle, but those wiry guys can be deceptive.
There was nothing deceptive about the cannon he pulled from under the front panel of his baseball jacket and leveled at me. “Drop the crowbar,” he ordered in what he probably thought was a snarl. “And reach for the ceiling.”
I looked at him. “ ‘Reach for the ceiling?’ Bug off, sonnyboy, I don’t take orders from snotnosed wimps who steal their lines from Quick Draw McGraw. ‘Reach for the ceiling,’ ” I added sarcastically, and the kid looked like he’d been slapped with a fresh mackerel. Brave Nebraska. Fearless Nebraska. Macho Nebraska. Ninety percent USDA choice bull, partly to fool the opposition, partly to fool myself. “Besides,” I added carefully, completing the portrait I was painting of the solid P.I. with ice water for blood, “I don’t think the boss here wants too many people getting shot up before he knows what those people might know—and who else might know, too.” I looked into Manzetti’s languid, almost sleepy face. “We don’t want a repeat of last night, do we? Very sloppy work.”
Manzetti gave no show of emotion, not a flicker. He considered my b
ravado for a beat, then drawled smoothly, “Put away the gun, Charlie.”
Charlie reacted violently again, as if struck—and, in fact, he had been dealt two unexpected blows in quick succession. “But, boss—”
“Goddammit, do as I say!” A quick burst of temper, hot, white and fast, like flash paper, and I gained some insight into the origins of Manzetti’s nickname. The kid’s cannon disappeared. So did Manzetti’s ire, which was as unsettling as its sudden appearance. Now he studied me casually with that same amused, detached look. “You’re a brave man,” he said quietly. “Or a stupid one.”
He turned to Cigar. “So, then, Tom, you had a little trouble?”
“Only a little. He got the jump on Sebby, sent him flying into the pit there. I don’t think he’s dead, though, ’cause I just heard him moan a little.”
Manzetti nodded. “You searched him? He’s our man?”
“He’s Nebraska, all right, like I told you on the phone. A private license, too, which is something the newspaper didn’t say. And he’s clean.”
The newspaper. I should’ve realized even the bad guys read until their lips get tired. I should have taken some precautions, made some plans, instead of blundering into their mitts as I had. Been out of the game too long as it is, Nebraska, and the game was never this serious before.
“Clean, huh? He’s clean, his place is clean—I suppose that heap out back, too?”
Tom bobbed his head snappily. “Sebby went over it. There was a piece in the glove box, but that’s it. No sign of …”
Again with the nodding. Manzetti latched his hands behind his back and paced the concrete floor to where I stood. He walked thoughtfully, carefully, as if each step had to be painstakingly planned in advance. Perhaps it did. Manzetti was still a distance from having what he wanted, and two men who could have helped him were dead. As I had said, pretty sloppy. I was counting on his reluctance to repeat the error yet again, with me.
Manzetti stopped mere inches from me. I smelled his aftershave. I didn’t care much for it. But he didn’t ask my opinion. Instead, he said, “You realize you’re in very serious trouble here.” Manzetti, the soul of brotherly concern.
I tried to mimic his tone. “You, too, I think.”
He arched an eyebrow in what might have been surprise—mild surprise, mildness seeming to be Crazy Al’s alter ego—but he didn’t comment on it. Instead: “I believe you have something that belongs to me, something I bought and paid for, something I will have. If you do have it, you’ll give it to me. That’s right enough. First let’s talk about what you’re doing here, on private property.”
I considered several replies in the course of the next few seconds, and settled on the truth—the modified truth; that seemed to be the only kind I knew lately. “Like the man said, I’m an eye. I was hired to find out what happened to Eddie Bell. That brought me here. As simple as that.”
“Who hired you?”
“Someone interested in where Bell got to.”
Manzetti made his little half-laugh. “If it’s important, you’ll tell me.” There seemed to be no boast behind this and other statements like it Manzetti made: he simply had never had any reason to doubt the ability of his clout to gain him whatever he wanted. Even now, all the cards seemed to be in his hand, which does tend to give one that air of confidence. “Let’s say you tell me about—the Jew …”
“Copel,” Tom supplied.
“Copel. Tell me about Copel.”
I shrugged. “You tell me. You seem to be the last one who … spoke with him.”
“But you seem to be the guy with all the answers.”
“Detective, remember? Deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning—I could never keep them straight. Bell disappears. The man hired to find him is murdered. Word’s on the street that you’re involved—and there you are. Pretty straightforward stuff, Al.”
His face went white on the proper noun, but he recovered quickly. In different circumstances it would have been funny, like watching a recovered alcoholic agonizing over an available bottle, or a reformed gambler fighting an invitation to a “friendly” card game—you know, funny in a sick, sadistic sort of way. In this case, however, there wasn’t anything funny about it at all.
“Why did Copel come to you last night?” Manzetti demanded, a little less suavely than had been his style earlier.
“It could have been chance,” I said offhandedly. “Probably it wasn’t, though. I knew Copel years ago. When you guys let him get away”—I said the words with what I intended to be subtle contempt—“he must’ve had it in mind to run to the nearest person he knew: me.”
“He had something of mine,” Manzetti rasped. “Something he had no business having. Something I bought and paid for. I want it back. I want it now.”
“You’re repeating yourself, Al. And we can’t have everything we want, can we? Where would that leave us? Besides, there’s a lot of real estate between here and my place. A man can lose things in the dark, especially a dying man.”
Manzetti’s eyebrows knotted over his eyes. “You’re telling me he didn’t have anything on him?”
“Actually, I’m telling you no such thing. Actually, I’m telling you no thing—nothing, Al, get it?” I like to think I was being as courageous, clever and unflappable as Simon Templar. In fact, I was scared silly, babbling on with nothing in mind beyond clouding the issue as much as I could. Fortunately, it’s one of the things I excel at.
If I was looking to spark a reaction, I got it. Manzetti’s face underwent a terrible transformation, the worst since Frederic March played Dr. Jekyll. It grew red. It fairly vibrated with pent-up anger. Then it blew in an animal roar, at the end of which was tacked an oath of heroic dimension.
I brought up the tire iron. “Watch it,” I snapped. “I’ll crack your head like a melon before Howdy Doody here even has time to think about pulling his bazooka.” There was Tom the cigar-smoking giant to consider, too, but he seemed strangely absented from the drama.
With effort, Manzetti controlled himself. “You think you’re smart, eh?” he spat. “You’re not, shamus, you’re stupid. Eh?—stupid. Else you wouldn’t fuck with me. You know who I am?”
“Sure I do; you’re Crazy Al; I heard of you even before they kicked you out of Chicago.”
Again the face colored, but he worked at it and managed a laugh. Sort of. “That’s right, yeah. And you probably know why they call me that.”
“’Cause you’re a fun date?”
“That’s right, asshole, keep it up. You ever see a man with no kneecaps try to climb a flight of stairs? Ever see a man with busted elbows try to feed himself, or even wipe his own damn nose? Guys who end up like that, they usually start out being funny, you know?” He glared malevolently. It was like putting wet paint on a freshly painted wall—it was a dare.
“Mercy me, yes, I do, Crazy Al. It just shakes me up so. And when I get shooken up I lose things. Like little packages, little keepsakes. No telling where these things end up—downtown, Lincoln, Chicago …”
“You better not be playing games with me, asshole.” He delivered this invective complete with shaking fist, which, I’m sorry, was comical. I laughed.
“Judas priest, Manzetti, I thought they busted you for being crazy, not stupid. I am playing games with you, Manzetti, I’ve been playing games with you since you walked in the door—since Copel dropped dead in my living room, if you want to know the truth of it. And I can keep on playing games with you all night, because you can’t touch me. You don’t know what I know. You can’t kill me—you can’t lay a finger on me—because you don’t know who else might know what I do, or who else might find out if I so much as stub a toe walking out of here. Get it, Al? It’s a game all right, a joke, and the joke’s on you.” I reached out and flicked his left ear, the way we used to when we were kids. He grabbed at his stinging ear and, with a kind of strangled r
oar, turned on his heel and stomped away from me.
Manzetti paced, panting, crazy, like the proverbial crazed tiger. A demon was raging in him, looking to break loose. I wondered if I had pushed it too far, but it was a little late for that now. Finally the man settled on the congregated oil drums not far from us. He attacked them, literally, with fists, feet and elbows. It was an ugly and frightening sight, one that you wanted to run from. It was a little like watching someone else having sex—embarrassing, repulsive and just a little exciting.
When he was finished, his fine suit of clothes was ruined. His hair was a wild mess of spiky strands glued to his sweaty crown. His hands were bruised and bloody. He stood before me, fairly crackling with raw hatred, hunched, disheveled, breathless, burning holes in me with hot eyes. This was one crazy bastard, I decided. He dragged a bleeding hand through the muss of his hair and barked, “Get him out of here.”
He was speaking to no one in particular. Tom started, as I’m sure I did; the kid, too, for all I know.
“Al?” Tom ventured.
The anger flared again, but it no longer crackled; a lot had dissipated during his outburst. “You ignorant bastard, I didn’t mumble. I said get this fuckhead out of here. Get him out of here, get him out of here, get him out of here!” He was on the verge of losing it again. I wondered that something in his head didn’t go blooey.
The giant he called Tom looked at me expressionlessly and shrugged. “You heard the man. Do it, while you have the chance.”
That was good advice. I moved toward the door, trying to keep all three men in sight, maintaining a white-knuckled grip on the tire iron. I was a foot, ten inches, from the door when Manzetti’s half-laugh—it, too, weakened by his display—erupted briefly. “What the hell,” he said after it. “I can afford to be generous. But only once, shamus.” Again he tried valiantly to smooth his hair. “Maybe you know something, maybe you’re just blowing smoke. It doesn’t matter. Because I’ve got your number, baby, and you can’t pass gas in this town I don’t know it. If you have what belongs to me, you can’t take it to anybody but me—because if you do it’s all over for you.” He smoothed his sweaty shirt front with his hands, unaware of the streaks of blood and oil they left, and began to stroll—strut, rather—around the room. Was the brave show for my benefit, the men’s, or Manzetti’s own?
The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1) Page 9
