Kill Me Tomorrow

by Richard S. Prather

  Walt grinned, but kept shaking his head.

  “That’s it,” I told him. “Except, well, he made me feel—creepy. Like he had a kind of B.O. reserved for hoods or psychos, or for evil. Evil’s the word, the insides of Dorian Gray, corrupt, conscienceless, lecherous, murderous. He looked like something like that might crawl up out of a swamp and puke moss and little bugs. If I ever saw—”

  Walt jerked his head up and suddenly snapped his fingers. “Got him. I think.” He moved to a filing cabinet, yanked open a drawer, ran his thumb over the top of a row of manila folders, selected one and pulled it out. He studied its contents, then tossed the folder on my lap and handed some photographs to me. “Four mugs of him,” he said. “A nice kid, growing up. First one, he’s nineteen years old. Then thirty-six, fifty, and sixty-eight. The last one was taken twenty-two years ago.”

  The first shot was of a tall, skinny, good-looking kid. Really good-looking, almost handsome. At thirty-six, heavy-jowled, harder, a chill in the eyes. Then with the nose bulbous, eyelids drooping, mouth bent down at the corners. Maybe in each of the first three pictures there were traces of the man I’d seen today, but I would have missed them if it hadn’t been for the last shot.

  That one was my man.

  A hell of a lot younger, but even so there was the ancient look I’d noted, the appearance of rottenness or decay, the bulbous nose pitted and flesh of cheeks and jowls sagging, even the start of that crepey wattle under the neck.

  “It’s him,” I said.

  “Pete Lecci. Sonofabitch. I thought the old monster was dead.”

  “Pete …” Yeah, no wonder those ancient bells had rung.

  “Funny,” Walt continued. “That little finger, the scar and all helped. But when you said ‘lecherous,’ it was like you’d stuck his picture in front of me. Lecci—they called him ‘The Letch.’ But he goes way back. Maybe you don’t remember. He dropped—or was pushed—out of circulation about the time you were born, maybe a few years later.”

  “I remember. I mean I remember reading and hearing about him. Never actually had the pleasure of his company.”

  “A lot of suddenly dead guys did. Shell, you sure stir up the memories—I spent most of a year on Letch right after I made detective, but I couldn’t pin anything on him. Nobody could. That first picture of him was taken a few months before he did his first—and only—bit. Reformatory bit at that. Arrested maybe twenty times in the next forty years but never spent another day in the slammer. But if ever anybody should have been put away for good it was Pete Lecci. In thirty years there were three, four men who stand out for me. Guys so miserable, so sly and rotten and—inhuman maybe, you almost got to admire them for being such complete sonsofbitches. Lecci was one of them. Yeah, Lecci. You better believe it.”

  Walt guzzled some beer and went on, his voice soft, as if he were talking more to himself than to me, roaming among those thirty years of memories.

  “Pete Lecci was a Cosa Nostra Don, sure. Big one, right at the top, member of the Commissione. But more than that. He was as close as anyone, even Maranzano and Luciano and Genovese, ever got to being the real number one, the Capo di tutti Capi—Don of Dons, boss of all bosses. Couldn’t prove it, but they say in his best years he owned, and I mean owned right down to their shorts, two Cabinet members, half a dozen federal judges, Congressmen and Christ knows how many cops. Heroin, prostitution, labor unions, loan-sharking, gambling—racetracks, dog tracks, numbers, slots, stock market—if there was a buck in it he was in it. And murder, naturally. Can’t play all those games if you’re sensitive.”

  Walt stopped talking, seemed to come back from somewhere else. Then he looked at me alertly and said, “What in hell is Pete Lecci doing at Sunrise Villas?”

  “Maybe you’ve guessed. That’s what I’ve been wondering.”

  While Walt finished his beer in silence I went through the papers in the folder. I remembered that Lecci had dropped out of sight more than twenty years ago, retired either voluntarily or involuntarily. More often than not, a Mafia bigshot is “retired” after being treated to a sumptuous dinner complete with booze and friendly talk by his dearest pals, who then shoot him several times in the head. But that hadn’t happened to Lecci. He’d been seen around or there’d been word about him for a few years after he’d come down off the mountain. Then there were rumors: he was sick; he’d died; he’d moved to Italy or Brazil or Sardinia; his ex-buddies, fearing he was getting soft in the head but still knew too much and thus could spill too much, had gagged him with cement; lots of rumors. Never, however, one that said Pete Lecci had moved to Arizona.

  I read with care one of the typed sheets of bond paper, on which was detailed Lecci’s family history. Not the Cosa Nostra “Family,” but his own blood relations.

  Mother and father, uncles and aunts—mafiosi families are uniquely loyal, close-knit; they stick together, present a united front against all that is not Mafia or non-mafiosi. There’s a lot of intermarriage among members of the various Mafia groups or Families as well, binding the Brotherhood together, appropriately, with ties of blood.

  It was difficult to picture that wrinkled and wasted old man I’d seen today as young and vigorous, his flesh pressed against the flesh of a woman, his lips on her lips, their limbs entwined. Yet Pietro “The Letch” Lecci had not only married but had fathered two children, a son, Antonio, and a daughter, Angelica.

  The son had been killed in an alley one week after his twenty-fifth birthday, shot by a rookie patrolman who emptied his service revolver into young Lecci after taking two slugs from the hood’s gun in his own chest. The patrolman died in that alley. But so did Antonio Lecci.

  Angelica married, and soon gladdened Dad’s heart by giving birth to his grandson, Giuseppe, and two years later to the first of his three granddaughters, Andrea; three years and a bit later, Felicca came along; and then Maria, two years after Felicca. The man whom Angelica Lecci married was a minor hoodlum named Massero Civano, little more—at the time of the nuptials—than an errand boy in one of the minor Cosa Nostra Families, but within ten years a man to be reckoned with, as “underboss” or subcapo, second-in-command to a capo, a man with the power of life and death—or, more accurately, the power of death.

  I dropped the papers into my lap.

  I leaned back, relaxed. There it was. I checked the dates again. Giuseppe, now, would be forty-six years old. Giuseppe—Joe. Joe Civano.

  So the guy blown all over the landscape last Sunday morning in Tucson, Crazy Joe Civano, was—had been—Pete “The Letch” Lecci’s grandson.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I rolled to a stop near 2430 East Claridge Street at nine P.M. Lights were on inside the house. I’d made good time—but I had nonetheless reentered the city with as much care as if I’d been a Greek clambering from the Trojan Horse into Troy.

  Peaceful Sunrise Villas, huh? Where the Golden Days of the Golden Years Begin? Lucky Ryan alone would have been enough. But add Pete Lecci and his so-recently-dead grandson … Well, I wasn’t even going to call on old gray-headed Widow Blessing without my Colt .38 fully loaded and inches from my hand, and every sense on the alert, and a mind steeled against slyness, chicanery, double-talk and deception.

  Charged up with those thoughts I climbed out of the car and, after looking all around, strode to the front door and rang the widow’s bell. A gal—obviously not the Widow Blessing—opened the door. Whoever she was, it looked as if her bell was still ringing.

  She stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, but she wasn’t just standing there, she was moving. It would be even more pointedly descriptive to say she was moving. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it before. And I’ve seen lots of things.

  She gazed at me with a small smile on her face, and her right shoulder resting against the door jamb, and her bare arms folded beneath astonishingly protuberant jugs, and all of that was quiescent; but her hips and even in small measure her thighs and knees were engaged in tracing strange and wonderful patterns in
the air—and if I hadn’t known this sort of thing didn’t happen, even to me, at least not on such short acquaintance, I would have presumed she was doing provocative grinds, and friendly little bumps, and assorted ingenious combinations of the two.

  “How do you do?” I said finally. “I’m looking for the Widow Blessing.”

  “I’m Mrs. Blessing,” she said.

  “No, I mean the old gray-haired babe … You’re Mrs. Blessing? Mrs.—”

  “Mrs. Mary Blessing. Who are you?”

  “I’m Shell Scott. But let that go for a minute. You’re—”

  “I don’t think I know you, do I?”

  “No … The reason I’m here, I’d like to talk to you about Mr. Gilberto Reyes.”

  “Oh. That Reyes thing.” She paused. She paused all over. I hadn’t realized it would disappoint me. “Would you like to come inside, Mr.—was it Scott?”

  “Yes, it was. Sure, I would.”

  She stepped back from the door, and with more light falling on her face and form I could get an even better look at her. The Widow—no, that was no good any more; Mrs. Blessing, or Mary Blessing, or Mary—did not fall into the normal fifty-or-over category of most Sunrise Villas residents. On the other hand, it was highly unlikely that Mary would ever see thirty again. She might even have to look way behind her even to get a peek at it. But it is not true that all good-looking tomatoes are ineligible to vote. This one wasn’t exactly a spring chicken, but more of a summer hen. For whom the roosters would battle, with beak and claw, all over the barnyard.

  As I walked into the room I heard the throb of soft music. Wild music. Strange music. I wasn’t even sure it was music. As a guess, it was a combination of pounded drums, strummed strings, plucked chickens, and clacked clackers, as the rather disturbing background to the voices of Haitian voodooists calling on Agwé, Sogbo, and Badé simultaneously. Finally I realized that Mrs. Blessing had not been laying an egg in the doorway, but merely keeping time to the music. At the moment she was snapping her fingers in a sort of absentminded way. She had lots of rhythm.

  Lots of other things as well.

  So this was the woman Tony Brizante had barely noticed when Gil Reyes was talking to Henry Yarrow. Tony’s eyesight, and perhaps more than his eyesight, was failing if all he’d been able to recall was that she’d been wearing shorts and a white blouse and was barefoot.

  She was tall, a gal formed for negligees and peignoirs, for showers and baths and nudist camps, a lovely climbing—but not over—the hill; in a word, she was built. The face, especially the dark eyes and wide red lips, was sensual, with thick black brows over and long lashes curling from the huge eyes. A mass of waving black was her hair, her skin was dark, and she looked as if she might be Italian—or Mexican, Spanish, Portuguese. If Italian, it was a different Italy from Lucrezia’s, maybe the Rome of Gypsies or the Naples of new Borgias. Or wherever modern temples to bawdy Venuses were built.

  Mrs. Blessing was wearing a gray dress of some thin smooth shimmering fabric, plus nylons and high-heeled gray shoes, and very little else. The cloth slid against her skin as she walked across the room to a wide, soft, upholstered chair and indicated a similar chair for me, directly opposite and about four feet from hers. As I seated myself in it, she sort of slunk downward into hers and crossed her long legs in such a way that the gray cloth fell away from her thigh.

  It fell way away, revealing a vast and hypnotic expanse of smooth curving flesh indented by the black strap of what might have been a garter belt. What must have been a garter belt. What, at least, was not a chastity belt. Sure, there was a little doohickey clutching the top of her nylons—

  “Mr. Reyes?” she said pleasantly.

  “Yes, ma’am, Mr. Reyes. I wanted to talk to you about that—him. I … Mind if I smoke?”

  She shook her head.

  I got the smoke lit, took a puff. “I’m trying to find Mr. Reyes. He—”

  “Have you phoned his home?”

  “Not lately. He—”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, he—he may be someplace where they don’t have any phones. For all I know. He—”

  “Surely he has a phone in his home.”

  “Who says he’s home? He—”

  “Do you know he’s not home?”

  “Well, not positively. Not absolutely. But—”

  “Would you like to use mine?”

  “Your what?”

  “Would you like to use my phone?”

  “Your phone? What would I do with it?”

  “Call Mr. Reyes.”

  “I don’t want to call Mr. Reyes. Look, lady, I think he’s dead. Killed, deceased, a corpse. He—”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say … May I use your phone, Mrs. Blessing?”

  “Of course.”

  I used her phone. I looked up Reyes’ number, dialed, listened to a ring, hung up, and went back to my chair.

  “He’s not home,” I said.

  “Why did you want to see him?”

  “It’s not so much that I want to see him. I want to find him. He’s probably loaded with lupara anyhow—”

  “Lu—what?”

  “Never mind. Make it bullets. Shotgun pellets. Anything. Look, I have reason to believe, at least seriously to suspect, that Mr. Reyes has been killed, that he is dead, d-e-a-d, dead.” I paused. “Probably I should have got around to telling you this before now. I’m an investigator, a private detective.”

  “How fascinating.”

  “I’ve never understood why people say that.”

  I’d have bet a dollar to a nickel that when I’d come back to my seat after making the phone call there was at least two more inches of thigh showing than there’d been before.

  Two, maybe even three, inches.

  A good two and a half, anyhow.

  Well, that was all very well, but I—even though I have a natural, healthy interest in such things—was not going to let it distract me from my duty. No matter what they say about me, when there is a job to be done, I am not a man who lets business … How did it go?

  I concentrated. I gathered my mental forces together, knitted my brows together, jammed my teeth together, and said, “Mrs. Blessing, I merely want you to tell me about your brief conversation with Mr. Reyes Tuesday morning.”

  “What? I can’t understand you when your teeth are pushed together like that.”

  I opened my mouth and wiggled my jaw.

  “It just sounded like a buzz,” she said.

  I felt like telling her to shut up. “Mrs. Blessing,” I said slowly and distinctly, “I merely want you to tell me about your brief conversation with Mr. Reyes Tuesday morning.”

  “Oh, is that all? Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Ma’am, I have already said it twice—”

  “You mean when I was with Mr. Yarrow, and Mr. Reyes thought Mr. Yarrow was somebody named Civano? Joe Civano?”

  “That’s it. Let’s keep it going, now we’ve got it.”

  “There isn’t much I can tell you. I was talking to Mr. Yarrow in front of my house when this car parked, and Mr. Reyes—I didn’t know who he was then, neither of us did—walked up and asked Mr. Yarrow if he was from Gardena, in California. Mr. Yarrow said no, he wasn’t, he’d never lived in California. But Mr. Reyes didn’t seem to believe him. Said something about he’d lived in Gardena, and hadn’t Mr. Yarrow lived there too? Several years ago? Wasn’t he Joe Civano? It was funny. I mean, odd.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Just about. Henry talked to him a little longer—told him what his name was, and his business and all, then the man went to the car he’d been in, and they drove away. Somebody else was driving.”

  “Yeah, I know. You saw Mr. Reyes again Tuesday night, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. That was the really odd thing. That’s when we found out who this Mr. Civano was, that he was a criminal—and he was dead, he’d just been killed.” She shook her head. “How coul
d Mr. Reyes think Henry was a dead man?”

  “That, to put it mildly, is one of the peculiar things about this case. Did Mr. Reyes mention—or have you ever heard of—a Pete Lecci? Or The Letch?”

  She looked at me blankly. “Who are they?”

  “He—they—isn’t they. I mean, it’s one guy. The names don’t mean anything to you?”

  “No. The only funny name was Civano.”

  Yeah, funny name, I thought. Funny man. “Can you tell me a little more about Mr. Yarrow?” I asked her.

  “When George—my husband for twelve wonderful years, rest his soul—was alive he owned a real estate agency, and Henry worked for him as a salesman. George liked him very much, was even thinking of taking him in as a partner when … well, George passed away. Henry knew all about the business—I don’t understand any of it myself—so I asked him if he’d run it for me.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She broke the silence by volunteering, “It was just a coincidence that Henry was here so, ah, early in the morning. He dropped by to … have me sign some papers. Real estate things—it’s all a mystery to me, I just sign the papers and somehow everything works out all right.”

  And that was about it. I thanked her, and she showed me to the door. The door closed, shutting off the soft sound of that crazy music, and I walked to my Cad thinking about Henry Yarrow. It puzzled me even more than it did Mrs. Blessing that Gil Reyes could have mistaken a local businessman for a Tucson mafioso he must have been pretty certain was dead.

  Besides, I’d have given a dollar to a nickel that Henry hadn’t dropped by Mrs. Blessing’s home so, ah, early in the morning to … have her sign some papers.

  I found North Palma Drive about a mile down Claridge, followed it a couple of blocks till I hit the sixteen hundreds, parked near the next-to-last house, number 1694, at the far end of the block, and approached Yarrow’s home with at least as much care as I’d used on my previous stop. And when I rang the bell my right hand was beneath my coat. Just in case.

  Even though I was virtually certain Civano had been dead more than five days, it was a bit of a relief when the door opened and a tall, heavily built man looked out at me. Because he was certainly not Joe Civano.