The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1)

by William J. Reynolds

  “The point is,” he continued oratorically, growing expansive as his blood pressure declined, “when I buy something I expect to get it. I don’t like it being batted all over town like a Ping Pong ball.” Circuitously he’d come to within a couple paces of me. “But I tell you what, private eye: I kind of like you. You’re short on brains, but you got a lot of balls, and sometimes that’s even better.”

  “You’re too kind.”

  He let it pass. “So here’s what I’m going to do: If—if—you have what belongs to me, I’m going to ask you to hang on to it for me, just to keep it from getting batted around anymore, understand?”

  “We both do, don’t we? You don’t have any choice in the matter.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” he said flatly. “You must’ve seen Bell, in the other room?”

  I nodded. The recollection turned my stomach.

  “Good; keep it in mind. And keep my property good and safe, okay?” He smiled nauseatingly and reached into his pants pocket. “Here.” He pulled out a wad of crumpled currency. “Let’s say three hundred as a fee for keeping my property safe.” I didn’t touch the money he proferred. The fifties were old and creased, damp and, in my imagination, unclean. He stuffed them in my shirt pocket. “Everyone deserves to be paid for a job,” Manzetti said. Somehow he made it sound like a threat. I let the bills stay where they were. My luck had gone about as far as I wanted to press it—further, in fact, than I could have hoped—so I choked down the inclination to ram the three hundred back down his throat. But I refused to mix his filthy money with my own, as if it would taint that. So it stayed in my shirt pocket. Later, I told myself, I’d go and blow the money on a horse, an idea I think I swiped from a Ross Macdonald novel.

  Manzetti pivoted on his tassel loafers, taking in both of his men in the pirouette. It was for them the show was being produced. Manzetti’s face wore a sappy smile, the kind a school kid puts on when he’s in trouble but doesn’t want his pals to think he’s scared. Turn it into a joke. But only Manzetti seemed amused. “Besides,” he told his guys, “if he hasn’t got it, what the hell do we care about him?”

  He laughed—alone—until I said, “That’s what I like about you, Al, you’re such a graceful loser.”

  Then I did something I hadn’t thought I’d ever do again.

  I went out the steel door, climbed into my ’73 Impala and drove home.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When I pulled into the stall behind my building and killed the engine, the nerves started.

  I sat in the dark, sweating cold perspiration, my hands trembling too violently for me to manipulate the lock button and get out of the car, my innards quivering. I waited it out and after a few minutes, creakingly, left the car and climbed the steel stairs to the second floor.

  Three courses of action competed for my attention. In order: leave town and change my name; contact Adrian; contact Marcie.

  The telling order in which these options came to mind didn’t escape me. Marcie was my client, the one footing the bills, the one for whom I was supposed to be putting forth my efforts. However, I’d gone long past the point where I could keep telling myself I wasn’t really more concerned about Adrian’s interests. As cynical as I’d like to think I am, there it was. And I couldn’t even really tell you why. Because I liked her. Because I felt sorry for her. Because I admired her father, an old friend and political idol. Write your own.

  In any event, the first choice was out. I didn’t have enough bread to leave town, and I’ve grown attached to my name, even if it does sound like that of a wild-west hero. When my great-great-grandfather, California bound, had come over from the old country, he rode the rails as far west as his life’s savings took him, then called himself after the place fate had carried him to. His descendants were eternally grateful he hadn’t decided to homestead in Saskatchewan.

  As for the second and third choices—well, it was getting on to four in the blessed a.m., and I just wasn’t going to run around town ringing people’s doorbells at that uncivilized hour. Marcie, I decided, could surely wait a few more hours before hearing more bad news—the last bad news ever—about her brother. The thought that Adrian could be in some danger traipsed across my sluggish synapses, but I quickly put it aside. If Manzetti had had kidnapping in mind, he could’ve done it any time, and wouldn’t have had to screw around with the pictures. Obviously, abduction wasn’t his aim. What he wanted—needed—was those photos. In any event, Adrian would be just as safe or unsafe now as she had been all along.

  I liked this line of reasoning. It meant I could go in and go to bed.

  Ordinarily I’d’ve found my way in the dark, but I closed my eyes, put on the lights, and opened them again to survey the damage. Not bad. The place had been searched, but not obviously so. If you weren’t looking for it, you might’ve gone hours before noticing, say, that this closet door that had been closed was now slightly ajar, that that plant was turned the wrong direction, that this lamp shade was out of skew. Nothing dramatic, nothing flung across the room, nothing broken.

  I was relieved. Which doesn’t mean I liked it at all. But what can you do?

  I switched off the lights again, stripped and stepped into a hot shower. Just the thing for a muggy night. The towel was still damp from that morning—yesterday morning, I reminded myself—so, dripping, I went blind into the hall, took another towel from the closet and dried myself while walking the short corridor to the bedroom. I flung the towel in the direction of a chair in the corner, rummaged by touch through a dresser drawer, peeled the spread and top sheet from my bed and stretched out, still without putting a strain on any light bulb.

  After my stress-reducing technique I felt almost human again. Ready to sleep, even after everything. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been troubled by insomnia; for me, sleep is an escape. Once I can distract my mind from its overworking, I’m gone.

  Of course, sometimes the mind is more cooperative than others. As soon as I closed my eyes, uninvited guests paraded across my inner eyelids. Adrian. Marcie. Jennifer. Ah, Jen, come to deliver the guilt? I kicked myself mentally. No cause to blame Jennifer just because my conscience was having second thoughts about my dalliance with Marcie Bell. Of the two of us, Jen was the one who had been totally, consistently honest. It was my idea to clamber aboard the integrity wagon and pat myself on the back for remaining so faithful, so noble, so martyred. And it was I who chose to jump off the wagon—then curse Jen for “making” me feel guilty. Integrity. Right.

  I apologize for burdening you with the ethical problems of a sensitive man in the late twentieth century, but they are onerous. Indeed, I must have tossed and turned for all of twenty seconds agonizing over them.

  Soon, predictably, my thoughts found other routes to follow, other questions to consider, equations to write. Equations with no quotients at the end. The deeper I delved into things, the deeper and blacker things got. It was like that silly cube toy: every time I turned it in a different direction, I loused up the whole pattern. The only advantage to the cube was that I could put it away when I got sufficiently frustrated.

  I began to list everything I didn’t know:

  How Eddie Bell met Adrian.

  How he persuaded her to pose for him; what hold he had over her.

  How Marcie could know nothing of her brother’s activities, which the police had known of for years.

  How Copel knew Bell’s game; whether Copel and Bell had been partners.

  Where Eddie had his various photographs processed, or where he kept the equipment to do it himself.

  How Bell and Manzetti came together.

  Why Manzetti was interested in Bell’s pictures. (I felt it safe to assume here that the Mob was interested in blackmailing a U.S. senator—though not for mere money—but unless and until I could say for sure, it went on the list.)

  Why Bell ended up dead; wheth
er he tried to double-cross Manzetti; whether Manzetti double-crossed him. Or both.

  How Copel and Manzetti connected, and all of the same questions surrounding Copel’s death.

  And so on. The last thing I recall thinking was whether Adrian, if I told her of Bell’s demise, would be more open with me, would provide me with answers to some of these questions, or at least new roads to wander. And if, should she still be reluctant, it was time to talk to her father.

  Sounded like I was going to tell on her …

  I slept.

  For about ninety minutes. At 5:34, by the digital clock at bedside, I woke. Suddenly and completely, afraid to move, even to breathe. That used to happen to me once or twice a year when I was a kid. It meant I’d been dreaming about werewolves. But that ended when I was about fourteen. Things had gotten a whole lot scarier since then. I lay a full minute in the diffused purple darkness, waiting. Nothing. I heard, and had heard, no sound. And yet I knew with sickening certainty, the left side of my head throbbing in time with my racing pulse, that someone was in the apartment.

  Again.

  It must have been eighty degrees in that place but I went cold and shivery.

  Silently, I slid from the mattress and trod lightly the short hall to the black living room, thinking how similar this was to last night’s fun and games. This time, however, instead of a steam iron I carried a revolver taken from the dresser and tucked under my pillow before I said my prayers. Part of my new get-tough policy with unannounced, predawn drop-in guests.

  I’d just passed the bathroom door when a pair of iron arms shot out of the blackness and grabbed me. One went round my lower face to keep me from yelling, the other tried to knock the gun from my hand. The first was more successful than the second. We wrestled around a bit while I tried to get the gun in a shooting position and he tried to stop me. At times like this I wish I was one of those huge, solid chunks of meat like Travis McGee or Spenser—six-ten or something, two hundred and fifty pounds, all muscle and bone. Either of those fictional detectives would’ve had his assailant stacked like kindling by now. Me, I come in an inch or so under six feet, and the only exercise I get is grappling with childproof caps. Being in just my skivvies, I couldn’t even give him a good swift kick in the shins. Finally, however, I managed to waltz him backward, off balance, into the bathroom doorjamb, which he hit with a satisfying crack.

  In that instant his grip loosened just a notch, but enough for me to duck low, cock my free arm and drive it back elbow-first into his crotch.

  Immediately I was released as, with a grunt and a sharp intake of air, my attacker doubled over to tend to his injured privates. I snapped on the light over the mirror and was sort of surprised—sort of not—to find Manzetti’s giant gun, the one he called Tom, hunched over on my bathroom floor, half gasping, half retching.

  Shaking with exertion, anger and nerves, I patted him down and removed from him a clip-on holster. I tucked his gun under my armpit and shoved my own weapon into his face. “You stupid son of a bitch, I should blow your face off right now. This is my house; the cops wouldn’t even look at me funny.”

  It might as well have been a licorice stick I held to his head for all the attention Tom paid it. He writhed on the floor, clutching his balls, moaning. “I—wasn’t going to hurt—you,” he croaked with some effort.

  “Forgive my paranoia,” I growled. “I must be getting jumpy in my old age.” I grabbed a fistful of sport coat and yanked a couple of times for emphasis. “Lucky for you I didn’t want to have to scrape your brains off my walls in the morning,” I yelled. “And that I want you to go back to Manzetti and tell him this is no way to ensure his ‘property’ doesn’t end up where he wouldn’t like to see it.”

  Tom shook his head. His face was an alarming shade of gray and his eyes were tearing but he’d reclaimed some of his wind. “Not—Manzetti—” he rasped hoarsely.

  “What?”

  He looked up at me. A wince of pain creased his face, but he quit looking like he was going to barf his guts up all over the floor. “Not Manzetti,” he repeated. “He didn’t send me. If he knew I was here he’d like to shoot me in the balls instead of just elbow me.”

  “Not a bad idea; I’ll have to keep it in mind. All right. If Manzetti didn’t send you, what are you doing here?” I mussed up his clothes a little more to show him I meant business. I was getting awfully tired of questions with no answers, of avenues of speculation that ended in cul-de-sacs. I aimed to call a screeching halt to it there and then.

  “I—can’t say.”

  I jabbed my gun up below his left shoulder blade. “Try,” I growled in my best tough-guy voice.

  “I can’t. He’d kill me if I said.”

  “And I’ll kill you if you don’t.” That came from a James Bond movie. “Now or later, Tommy, your decision.”

  He agonized over it. I prodded him again with the business end of the gun, in case he’d forgotten it was there. “All right, all right,” he finally bleated. “Maybe I can smooth it over with him.”

  “Just turn up that old Neapolitan charm, chum, and I’m sure you’ll have him munching out of your mitts in no time. Whoever ‘he’ is … ?”

  Tom sighed heavily, like a weight was coming off his chest. Which probably isn’t too far off the mark. “I been part of Manzetti’s territory—north side—since before he ever came to town. Manzetti, that asshole, he thinks he’s running me. Well, he’s supposed to be. But he ain’t.” Tom puffed himself up a little—no easy feat when you’re crouched over on a bathroom floor—and boasted, “I get my orders straight from Gunnelli.”

  Gunnelli. The main man, the big boss, the head of the entire Omaha operation, answerable only to and directly to Chicago, for which Omaha is something like a branch office in its gambling and sharking ventures. Small but profitable, very profitable. And rather important, too, disproportionately to its size. Salvatore Gunnelli. Sal the Gun, as the papers had called him thirty or forty years ago, when the papers were big on making up handles like that.

  Oberon had called it: I was dog-paddling out pretty far from shore.

  I said, “I thought everyone got his orders from Gunnelli.” I realized, of course, that Omaha was divided into territories over which lower-level bosses—lieutenants, as the crime novels have it—held sway, but, like division managers in a corporation, the lieutenants, and everybody in the chain of command, reported to Gunnelli—ultimately, to Chicago.

  “Don’t kid yourself, huh?” said Tom derisively, the color returning to his face, the starch to his backbone. “Everybody works for themself, just some more than others.”

  Then that was it: Manzetti was getting a little independent for Gunnelli, who had enlisted Tom to keep an eye on him and report his activities to Gunnelli. I put the question to Tom and got a sullen look that said volumes.

  “Now that has some interesting story possibilities,” I muttered half aloud.

  “Hey, can I get up here?” Tom asked.

  I looked around the room. I know you can’t tell, because I hide it so well, but I’m a very nervous sort of guy when it comes to the Mafia snooping around my bathroom. “Yeah-h,” I said slowly, “but I want you in the tub.” He looked at me like I had two heads. “In the tub,” I repeated firmly. “Like I said, I’m getting paranoid in my dotage. I want you sitting in the tub—on your hands, too, if you don’t mind terribly—so I know you can’t pull anything fast and cute.”

  He shrugged, more with a look than a gesture. “You’re the boss.”

  “I’m glad one of us thinks so.”

  Tom climbed slowly, painfully, into the tub. It was still wet from my shower, but he didn’t complain. I wouldn’t have either: he looked too ridiculous, two hundred pounds of gangster, fully clothed, in my pale pink bathtub. Oddly, however, it didn’t seem to tickle either of our funny bones.

  “Comfy?” I said testily.


  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Wonderful. Okay, so there’s bad blood between Manzetti and Gunnelli. What’s it have to do with me?”

  “That’s what I started to tell you back in the garage, before Manzetti showed up.” Tom wagged his dark head. “That’s one crazy guinea, you know that. Man’s only playing with about half a set of marbles.”

  “I noticed. Quit stalling.” I waggled the gun a little again. “I want the big picture, Tom, so I know where I fit into it.”

  He looked at me speculatively. The gun didn’t bother him that much. I suppose he’d dealt with tougher customers than even me. “Okay, here’s the deal,” he said after he’d given it some consideration. “I think you and Gunnelli gotta meet.”

  “You running some sort of underworld lonely hearts’ club, or do you have some other intention?”

  “Well, I shouldn’t even be telling you, not without Gunnelli gives his okay first. But, seeing’s how you kind of have the advantage … I can probably smooth it with the boss. So look, all it is is that Gunnelli wanted for me to set up a meeting with him and Bell, then with him and Copel. Neither of them happened, like I’m sure you can figure out. But I figure that when I tell him about tonight, I mean you and Manzetti, well, he’s gonna want me to set up a meet with you and him.”

  “And you’re getting your ducks in a row early.”

  “Nah, I’m just trying to get everything set up first. That means I gotta warn you about Manzetti. They don’t call him Crazy Al for nothing. That’s what I started to tell you back at the garage before he showed up. I was going to tell you to clear out of there before he came—and to stay clear of him after.”