Gunnelli nodded. “You are not dense, Mr. Nebraska, anyone can see that. You are, however, a trifle naïve. Is not adding fuel to the fire, as you say, any help to putting out the fire? After the building has burned, will you expect a medal because you can say, no, you did not help extinguish the flames but at least you did not make them any hotter?”
“And turning the pictures over to you will somehow help.”
“You may well be surprised.”
I laughed. “I certainly would be. How, exactly, does it help to have you instead of Manzetti blackmailing Mallory? I mean, I can see how it’d help you, but beyond that I’m afraid the picture gets a little unfocused.”
Gunnelli turned silent. He stayed that way for quite a while. The woman, too, kept her thoughts secreted. Breakfast came: croissants. Fresh honey. Toast. Spinach omelette. More hot, strong coffee. Jimmy arranged our plates and, silently as smoke, went away again. I waited until Helen Tosco made herself the first to reach for a croissant, then I helped myself. It was weightless on my tongue, like eating flavored air. I half-finished my second cup of coffee before Gunnelli spoke again.
“Mr. Nebraska, here is a simplistic response to your question: You have met Manzetti and you have met me. Given that we are two evils, which do you think the lesser?” Helen Tosco began to speak—to silence him, I think—but it was he who silenced her, with a look I wish I could muster. He resumed, hardly missing a beat. “I have been in charge of this territory for over twenty-five years. Quietly. Invisibly. Civilly, I daresay. You may not like the fact that I and my people are here—in fact, I am certain you do not like it, and I cannot hold that against you. But it is a fact that we are here, just as it is a fact that we are going nowhere. We will be here, whether I am in charge—or Manzetti.”
I swallowed a forkful of eggs. “That’s how serious it is—you or him?”
He said, “Miss Tosco wishes I were less candid, but I see little point in coyness. Yes, I think that is exactly what it comes down to: me or Manzetti.”
Helen Tosco’s eyes were on me. I looked into her face. It was like trying to read Sanskrit: impossible, at least for me. I turned back to my plate, finished my food, emptied my cup and filled it again from the thermal pot. “And exactly how do you thwart your nemesis?” I asked Gunnelli.
He wiped imaginary crumbs from his chin. “That should be obvious. I beat him to the punch.” Helen breathed heavily but made no verbal objection to her employer’s openness.
“And why will Manzetti wait for you to do this? Why, for that matter, has he waited for you to do this? He has all he needs now, he’s had it for going onto two weeks. Why does he need a complete set?”
The lawyer said, “Mr. Gunnelli—”
He traipsed across her words. “To avoid embarrassment,” he rumbled. “He may take his photographs to the bosses in Chicago, but the burden of proof will still be on him. In order to overthrow me, he must prove that he has accomplished something that I am unfit to do, or something that I let slip through my fingers because I am old and senile.” He smiled the skeletal smile. “If I have similar photographs, he has lost. I need not even take them to Chicago first. I need only wait until Chicago asks me about Manzetti’s charges, then I produce them and say I have had them in hand for months, waiting for the elections to draw near, waiting for the elections to be over—whatever I choose to say. Waiting, in other words, for the time to be right, for the proper moment to use them. Manzetti is defeated. Worse, he is destroyed. A coup that fails is death to its mastermind. Manzetti knows this. That is why he waits, why he wants all the photographs and negatives. He is—what is the expression—sweating bullets, because he knows that waiting not long enough can undo him as effectively as waiting too long.”
I plucked the napkin from my lap, wiped my mouth, crumpled and dropped the cloth into my plate. “Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.”
“Then you agree to the offer?” Helen Tosco asked in a voice that was equal parts excitement and disbelief.
“Oh no,” I said off-handedly. “The pictures are still not for sale. See, as long as Manzetti thinks I might turn them over to you people, he can’t act—at least, that’s what you say. So I can stick to my original plan—keeping the photographs in a cool, dry and very safe place—and be secure in the knowledge that I will not only be not helping Manzetti, I will actually be thwarting him. Isn’t that so?” Neither spoke. I shoved back my chair and stood. “Besides, the way I see it, I now have a double-coverage insurance policy. Neither you nor Manzetti is stupid enough to act against me so long as you don’t know where the negatives are and in whose lap they might end up if anything out of the ordinary happens to me.” There was a drop of coffee left in my cup. The scene seemed to demand I finish it with a flourish, even if my bladder was on the verge of bursting.
“You seem to enjoy the dangerous life, Mr. Nebraska,” said Gunnelli in an expressionless basso. “And it seems, for the moment, at least, that I have no choice but to honor your decision.”
“It does, doesn’t it.”
He leaned forward and shakily shoved the $1000 note at me. “Take this.”
“Thanks, but I don’t take money I don’t earn.”
“I said it was a gift, but you have earned it. If you keep the photographs out of Manzetti’s hands, I consider that a service rendered me.”
I didn’t like that. It made me feel somehow soiled, compromised, uncomfortable. “I’m not doing it or anything for you,” I insisted.
“Nevertheless, I appreciate it. This is merely a token of that appreciation. Take it. I insist.”
I wavered, decided I could just as easily gamble it away along with Manzetti’s money, picked it up, pocketed it. And felt every bit as slimy handling the fresh, crisp bill as I had handling Manzetti’s crumpled, crushed notes. Dirty money is dirty money. Judas proved that.
“Thanks for the breakfast,” I said sullenly. “Let’s do it again real soon. Don’t bother to get up,” I said to Helen Tosco, who wasn’t. “I’ll find my way out.”
It was a swell exit, spoiled only by the gate at the end of the long curve of the driveway. I had to stop the car, get out, hunt around until I found the brown wood box containing the electric switch, back the car up enough to let the gate swing open, get out again, trigger the switch, run back to the car and drive through fast before the gate closed again automatically.
I hoped no one from the house was watching.
CHAPTER TEN
I parked in the shade across from Marcie Bell’s duplex. No inspiration hit, no little muses giving me sage pointers on how to break to her the news that her brother had shuffled off—been pushed off—this mortal coil. Probably there’s no good way of doing it, so the muses keep their mouths shut. Who can blame them?
So I got out of the car and trudged across the street, up the walk, through the door, up the stairs. I felt rather than heard her trot lightly to the apartment door. Then she was in my arms, or I in hers, her mouth a cool and soft sensation pressed hard against mine.
I had almost forgotten about the night before, her bedroom, her. It came back quickly, however, very quickly. She broke the kiss slowly, lingeringly, then looked at me in a sly, self-satisfied, half-lidded way. “Good morning,” I said lamely. I am not good with morning-after scenes—not that I’ve had many of them, which is maybe why I’m no good at them. I think most men are uncomfortable with them, and I’m not sure why. Probably tied in somehow with the old macho training, in which we’re instructed to be miserly with emotional displays, especially sissy emotions like affection. Tied in also is the idea that “real men” don’t reveal themselves, not totally—the strong, silent myth—and the exposure of self that accompanies any expression of love, from holding hands to necking to deeper intimacies, runs contrary to the indoctrination. It’s all fine when hidden in the soft dark night, but no good in the clear white light of day.
Or someth
ing like that.
“You look bushed—My God, what happened to your face?”
I told her I’d bumped into a door, and that if I looked tired I blamed it on her. It seemed to be expected. She smiled and squeezed my hand and invited me in.
In we went, she first, I following. She wore a halter and very brief terry shorts. From behind, as she danced into the apartment, she appeared to be wearing only the shorts, and not much of them at that. Her backside swiveled with the regularity of a metronome. What was that Groucho Marx line? “That reminds me, I’ve been meaning to get my watch fixed.” Words to that effect. I concentrated on her words.
“I was hoping you’d come by. I’m missing my gold necklace, the one that came loose last night.” She tossed her dark hair and gave me a twinkling over-the-shoulder look.
“Try under your night table,” I said quietly. “It slid off the table when you put it there.” I closed her front door behind me and again she wrapped herself around me ferociously, which didn’t make what I had to tell her any easier in the telling. She floated out of the room, toward the closed bedroom door. “Make yourself to home. There’s coffee if you want it.”
I didn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact. I used her bathroom, and when I was finished found her in the living room, in direct line of the fan, whose presence in that environment wasn’t so much a luxury as a criterion for the continuance of life. Marcie displayed the gold serpentine chain. “You’re a good detective,” she chirped. “It was right where you said.” She turned her back three-quarters to me. I took the hint and sat beside her to fasten the necklace.
“This clasp’s in bad shape,” I said as I dinked with it. “You’re going to lose the thing for good someday.”
“I know. I have to get it fixed, but I’m always wearing it. Except when it falls off, of course.”
“I think it’d take the jeweler about five minutes to replace.” I finally got it hooked, and she turned to give me another kiss. It brought my blood pressure up to a healthy level, which under other circumstances I wouldn’t’ve minded in the slightest. However, circumstances were as they were. I more or less pried us apart. The look on her face was confused, on the way to hurt.
“What is it?” she whispered. “Is it about Eddie? It is, isn’t it?”
I nodded. Doctors always get to say things like, “He didn’t respond to treatment,” or, “He was too far gone.” I had no such luxury. I had to come across up front.
“He’s dead,” I said.
She looked stupid. “Oh God,” she breathed with terrible reverence, or something like it. “Oh Eddie, oh God.” With a crack the back of her head hit the back of the couch. She seemed to go slack, empty, as if someone had pulled a plug and all the energy in her bones just bled out. There were no tears, just an ancient weariness in her fine voice when she said, “Tell me.”
I slouched back into the couch and crossed my ankles on the table. “It’s pretty much as I told you last night, only more so. The pictures, the Mob—the whole bit. And Eddie got caught between two warring factions: the homicidal maniac I told you about last night and the head of the Omaha relations of the family. The maniac wanted the photos in order to buy some power with the Chicago bosses and oust the present boss. I found Eddie’s body in a garage on the north side after I left here last night. He’s been dead all along, Marcie, ever since he disappeared, or just about. He was selling those nude photographs I was telling you about, but he got caught holding out and they killed him.”
“Holding out?” The voice was miles away.
“He was supposed to be selling Crazy Al everything he had with the woman in it, but he gave them some prints he wasn’t supplying any negatives for.”
“Oh God—so they killed him.”
“I’m afraid so, yes. I’m sorry, Marcie, I really am. If there’s anything I can do …” I looked over at her, slumped on her spine, quiet and motionless, staring off at something I couldn’t see, something I would never be able to see, something from her long ago that was now forever gone. I could have cried, but it required too much effort.
“I can’t believe it,” Marcie Bell said. “Eddie. Gone. Just like that.” She looked at me. “You know,” she said softly, “when I woke up this morning I thought about what you said last night. I still can’t believe that Eddie was involved in anything like this—I can’t help but think there’s some horrible mistake, mistaken identity, something—but somehow I knew this morning that Eddie was … gone. That he’d never be back. Poor Eddie, he never had a chance.”
I asked her what she meant. “Just that: from the beginning, everything seemed against him somehow, you know? I hate to say this about my own brother, but the simple truth is that Eddie was a loser. I don’t mean anything bad by that, just that things never seemed to work out right for him the way they seem to always work out right for some people. Jobs, friends, girls—Eddie just never had much luck, and what he had seemed to be bad.” Again she fell silent. I was reluctant to disturb it. However …
“What makes you think Eddie didn’t have anything to do with the pictures? I mean, the police have known about his, um, activities in that line for quite some time. And I spent much of last night with a witness to the transaction; he wasn’t at all vague on the point.”
Her mouth went tight and the muscles in her neck stiffened. “I don’t care about any of them. I knew my brother better than them, better than anyone. I know he couldn’t be involved in any pornography, certainly not any blackmail. Where would he even meet such an important man’s daughter? Much less photograph her in the nude. No, I know it’s a mistake, a horrible, tragic, ghastly mistake. Period.” She unwound from the couch with energy born of anger. “I know it’s early, but I’m for a drink. You?”
She had to ask twice; I was lost in thought. A drink would just about bag me, but I accepted. Noble Nebraska, buckling to peer pressure. I stared into the revolving fan blades as she went into the kitchenette and poured a couple of respectable measures of Jack Daniel’s over ice. She brought the glasses into the hot living room, handed me one, reclaimed her place on the couch. “Well,” she sighed, “here’s to Eddie.” She downed most of her whiskey.
I sipped at mine. “What do you plan to do, Marcie?”
“What do you mean? There’s nothing to do. I can’t very well call up this Crazy Al Manzetti or whatever his name is and ask him to deliver the body to the Forbush Funeral Home, can I?”
“No,” I said quietly, “you can’t. And you wouldn’t want to. I saw the body and it wasn’t very pretty anymore. Besides, after last night’s thrill-packed adventure, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve already taken steps toward … disposal.”
“So there you go,” she said with finality. “What’s there to do? I’ll go by Eddie’s place and pick up his stuff—Lord knows there’s not much—and, well, I guess that’ll be the end of it.”
That didn’t set too well with me. There’s something in us, drummed into our heads from the beginning of socialization, from the beginning, perhaps, of the species, that doesn’t easily allow us to simply forget our dead. In battle, we risk our necks to retrieve fallen comrades. Rescue workers strive to reclaim victims from hopeless disasters in mines, fires, lakes. And when the dead cannot be reached and loaded into caissons, our sensibilities still demand a tribute for them—a few words spoken over water, a memorial dedicated to the anonymous slain. But no such ceremony for Eddie Bell. I’ll go by Eddie’s place and pick up his stuff, and that’ll be the end of it. Indeed yes. Small impact on the world made by such people. Hundreds—thousands, probably—vanish every year, and they are so marginal, so far below our consciousness, that they are literally never missed. Except, perhaps, for a “Whatever happened to that Eddie—what was his name? Beal? Something like that.” “Guess he just drifted along.” “Guess he must of.”
No, that didn’t rest easy in me, all the more so because it seemed so easy for Marc
ie. My news hadn’t really affected her—surprised her, yes; saddened, perhaps; affected, no. It wasn’t shock; shock I’ve seen before and she wasn’t suffering from it. It simply wasn’t that important to her. Eddie was gone; too bad, that’s it. I was reminded of when we first met, Marcie and I, the day before, when the little sensors flashed in my head. Calculating. That’s what had come to mind. Still fit. In fact, it fit even better now. As much as I liked Marcie—or thought I could if I came to know her—as much as I was strongly attracted to her physically, sexually, I still saw in her a powerful and perhaps even dangerous selfishness. Or self-preservation; who can make the distinction? In bed she was as loving and giving as any partner I’ve ever had; subconsciously, however, you always knew that the giving was only in proportion to what she received. That isn’t love. The real Marcie Bell was imbedded, enshrouded, deep within herself, so deep that no one—maybe not even Marcie—could touch her or affect her. It was a hard thing to tell myself, for without too much effort, I knew, I could fall for her. Perhaps for that very reason, then, it was a good thing to remind myself.
Marcie finished off her drink and headed for the kitchen while asking if I wanted another. I hadn’t even taken a second hit off mine yet. I declined. She cracked an ice-cube tray in the kitchen and I said, “What about the police?”
Liquor gurgled over the cubes. “What about them? You think I should swear out a complaint against the Mafia? No thanks, friend. I try not to go looking for trouble.”
“You just read me a highly impassioned defense of your brother. The evidence is stacked against you, but maybe if we told the police what we know they’d poke into it more aggressively or more accurately than they’ve been. Maybe they’d find out you’re right after all, maybe clear Eddie’s name.” Or maybe Sal the Gun would just bring more pressure to bear on Oberon’s bosses.
The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1) Page 13
