by Joe Gores
One of her oldest friends was Eddie Ucelli. His company supplied her steaks, but he himself usually only came around when she called him, because she was his contact for the nowadays rare hits he was asked to perform. But sometimes he would come out for a sirloin with his wife, and Mae would sit down at their table to chat about the old days. And Eddie would get all steamed up.
So on nights such as this, Eddie would see his wife home, leave her in front of Jay Leno, and loop back for a little stroll down memory lane. Mae’s memory lane.
Because even though Eddie was fifty-seven years old, a little too squat, a little too wide, and naked a little too hairy, ah, good Christ, Mae could remember him when. Eddie had popped her cherry for her on a rooftop with a view of Manhattan across the East River when she was just entering her teens and he just leaving his. Even now, Mae could coax him alive as no other woman could-and most nights he needed a lot of coaxing even from her.
The phone call caught him on his back under Mae, who wore only her push-up bra pushed up so one of her enormous breasts was in his mouth seemingly by accident-Mae was inventive in ways like that. When she leaned back to take the call, Eddie slid a thumb into her luxurious bush and began rolling her clitoris because it took him a long time to get one of his partial hard-ons and he hated to lose his rhythm. Stifling a moan of pleasure, Mae leaned down to wedge the phone between his shoulder and chin.
“Ucelli,” he said into it.
He listened. His thumb stopped moving inside her. Mae didn’t mind; she could always get herself off if Eddie couldn’t do it for her. She sat placidly astride him; this was not the first of the many such phone calls that Eddie had taken himself here at Mae’s Place. He always came around to celebrate with her after he had completed his contract, but by then his sexual fervor inevitably had ebbed.
Now, before he hung up he said, “I understand. The Feebs got a fuckin’ tap on my line, I gotta duck ’em but it’s no problem.” He added in a guttural voice, “When the time’s right, I’ll do it right.”
At that same moment Mae felt something thick and heavy pressing up against her belly as it hadn’t in years.
“My God, Eddie!” she exclaimed in amazement. “You’re as hard as an iron bar!”
She quickly impaled herself on it, and then, ever so slowly and lasciviously, slid down the pole and started rolling those ample hips as if they were on oiled ball bearings. As she started to breathe very quickly, Mae knew they were both in for the fuck of a lifetime before she would let him die the little death.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Salvador Madrid was muy borracho. Shitface, in fact.
Spic was drunk because this night he’d had to put out a hit on Manuel Monteluego, one of his wife’s many nephews, and it made him sad and nostalgic at the same time. The hit was to be disguised as a drunken Saturday night stabbing outside a rural dance pavilion in Coates, a tiny crossroads place a score of miles south of the Twin Cities on Minnesota 62. Spic had rented the barnlike wood frame building for a baile following a wedding that afternoon only so that he could logically send Manuel down to Coates to pay for everything. And there be made to die.
“Can’ let her know,” he explained in drunken seesaw English to his bodyguard Alejo. He took another hit of tequila. They were alone in the shabby little bungalow on Robie Street that he used as an office. “She keel me dead she fin’ out.”
“Es verdad y jefe,” agreed Alejo obediently; he knew Spic was referring to his wife, Maria. Alejo was another nephew, but that was all right, he was from Spic’s side of the family in Guadalupe, Nuevo Leon; the soon-to-be-dead nephew was a hijo de puta from Sonora and there was little love lost between them.
Normally none of Spic’s people would be caught dead (pardon the pun) at Coates. But few of these would have green cards, so they would all melt away at the discovery of the body soon to be lying on the frozen ground between the dance hall and the gas station. Anyone estupido enough to be picked up by the county sheriff would no tengo, no entiendo, and would soon walk-or be deported as an illegal alien. Either way, no loss.
“Tol’ ’em to do eet while I am here at th’ offeece,” Spic explained. When he was borracho, his English became the slurred wetback English of his youth. “Tha’ way Maria, she gonna know I deent have notheeng to do weeth eet.”
Since Maria would eventually learn there had been friction between husband and nephew over missing receipts, Spic had arranged that she would hear of Manuel’s death almost as quickly as he would. She would call him here to wail over the phone; and later, learning of the estrangement, she would remember her husband had been nowhere near Coates when Manuel had died.
This was necessary because the only person on earth Spic Madrid feared was his wife. Not Maria as Maria, short, wide, mother of his five children. Rather, he feared her spiritual powers, renewed daily at mass. Family was muy importante to Maria; if she knew he’d had her nephew killed, she would put God’s curse upon him, and Spic would surely wither and die.
Por Dio, where was the call? In his mind he could hear the Mexican band (originally from Chihuahua) he’d hired for the wedding. Horns, guitar, bass, accordion, fine-tuned Peavey cranked to the max, bowing out the dance hall walls with “Las Mariposas.” He was nodding his head in time to the unheard music. Stamping feet, whirling bodies… flashing knife…
The phone rang, an unknown voice said, “Es muerto.”
Spic hung up. So. It was done. Now Maria’s call.
She would be at their rambling frame house on Marshall Ave in St. Paul, far from the west side where he did his business. When they had married twenty-two years ago, she’d been tiny and skinny; during their wedding dance, he in his rented black suit, she in her rented white wedding gown, she had clung to him as if she were an appendage of his body. He had been the strength she had needed, the realization of her dream of El Norte.
In turn Jose, their two-year-old son, had clung to her white skirt with both his little brown hands as they had danced. At the time of his conception and birth, they had been afraid to get married lest they be caught in the system and deported.
Three years before that, at seventeen, Spic had been a mojado muling kilos of raw heroin taped to his ribs across the Tortilla Curtain at El Paso, until one night some maricon pusher tried to pay him off with a switchblade. He left the man dead under a mesquite bush, minus his head, which Spic left in the middle of the road with the tongue sticking roguishly out.
He fled north all the way to St. Paul where what he now termed “a shit job the gringos wouldn’t take” was arranged for him by a man named Cisco Monteluego. For his new life he took the name Madrid because Madrid was in Spain, not Mexico, thus had no echoes of his pachuco past.
During his two years washing dishes in the restaurant where Cisco cooked, he had met Cisco’s niece, Maria, and their son had been born. After he and Maria had married, he started calling Cisco “Tio,” and together they started selling tacos at county fairs during the summers. The next year, they opened a taco stand on Concord Street in St. Paul’s mostly Latino west side, and during the next few years prospered in a modest way.
Awaiting Maria’s call, Spic shut his eyes and remembered…
It was three-thirty in the morning, and the tiny four-stool place was deserted with the door open to let out the hot grease smell of deep-frying taco shells. The sign over the door said TIO’S TEXAS TACOS. Tio Cisco was sweeping the floor and Spic was in the minuscule storeroom opening a hundred-pound sack of corn flour. A man dressed in black, with black gloves, and wearing a Porky Pig Halloween mask, came in and took a stool.
“We are closed, sir,” said Uncle Cisco in his invariably courteous way. “If you come back tomorrow…”
But Porky Pig took from his pocket a gun with a silencer screwed onto its muzzle. His voice was distorted by the mask.
“You want to be closed forever, or you want to pay us a hundred dollars a week so nobody comes around bothering you?”
“Senor,” began Uncle Cis
co in a terrified voice, staring at the gun, “a hundred dollars a week will take all of our profits.”
“That’s one,” said Porky Pig.
Spic was drawn to the storeroom door by the voices. Porky Pig turned his stool to give the short skinny Mexican a measuring look, swinging the lethal silenced gun Spic’s way as he did, then turned back to Uncle Cisco as the main man in the equation.
“That’s two,” he said.
“We will pay, we will pay,” said Uncle Cisco very quickly.
“No, no pagamos,” muttered Spic sullenly.,
But Porky Pig must have understood Spanish. He said, “That’s three,” and the silenced gun said pfft pfft pfft, like that. But not at Spic.
Instead, Uncle Cisco seemed to leap backward, his feet coming up off the floor, the broom flying from his hand. He caromed off the end of the counter to sprawl facedown on the faded linoleum, his limbs jerking and twitching, then still.
Porky Pig stood up and began unscrewing the silencer from the gun. Death had loosened Uncle Cisco’s sphincter so the smell of shit overrode the hot grease smell in the little room.
“Whew!” he exclaimed in his muffled pig voice, “smells like something crawled up there and died.” He chuckled. “Must be all that hot Mexican food.” Spic hadn’t moved from the doorway of the minuscule storeroom. To him, Porky Pig added, “Remember, beaner, one hundred dollars a week, starting Friday.”
Then he was gone, leaving Uncle Cisco dead on the floor. Before calling the police, Spic took all the money from the cash register and from the body and hid it under the floormat of Uncle Cisco’s dilapidated Chevy. That way the cops would treat it as a simple robbery and would not look very hard for the killer.
Uncle Cisco, dead upon the floor.
Tonight, Uncle Cisco’s son Manuel, dead upon the sere yellow grass and frozen ground beside the Coates Pavilion.
Spic felt tears hot behind his eyelids. Leadership was a stern mistress. He opened his eyes, looked at his nephew Alejo across the scarred and battered wooden tabletop. The tequila bottle was empty, his limes and salt were gone. His drunkenness had passed. He wanted to be alone to mourn the death of Tio Cisco’s son at the hands of unknown assassins.
“Go get me another bottle of tequila, Alejo.”
“I s’posed stay with you, guard you, jefe.”
With a chuckle, Spic made the sign of the cross over him. “I absolve you.” He threw money on the table. “And more limes.”
Spic had paid protection for five weeks, always leaving the cash drawer ajar with a single hundred-dollar bill in it, staying in the storeroom until Porky Pig had come and gone. Then he began closing the store to follow Porky on his rounds, finally to the house where Porky lived under his real name of Alex Jones. One night after the wife had gone to bed, Spic cut off Porky’s head and set it on top of the TV set, tongue protruding, for Mrs. Jones and their two children to find in the morning.
Spic took over the collection route. When the Organization sent a man to kill Spic and thus reclaim the route, Spic killed him and buried him in a patch of woods overlooking the Minnesota River near Fort Snelling. He sent the killer’s head, packed in dry ice, tongue lolling, to the killer’s fag boyfriend.
The local capo realized Spic had no compunctions about killing anyone whatsoever, for any reason, at any time, and that he would be harder to kill than to absorb. So Spic became a made man, always moving up by killing the man above him, always just before that man realized he was in Spic’s way. Now, at forty-two, he controlled illegal drug sales in four northern states.
His wife called. She sobbed and wailed in Spanish about the death of Manuel, her favorite nephew. Spic consoled her, crying too, promising to come home right away to pray with her for the salvation of poor Manuel’s immortal soul.
While they talked, he heard Alejo behind him, returning with the tequila and limes. As he turned, phone in hand, the muzzle of the Jennings J-22 was pressed by the gloved hand against the bridge of his nose, and he just had time to think, Maria knows that I
As Alejo got out of the car with the tequila, shivering in his sports jacket in the freezing drizzle, the bulky man just coming down the front walk from Spic’s business bungalow tossed a new, heavy overcoat around the skinny Mexican’s shoulders. Alejo dropped tequila and topcoat to run up the walk into the house. As he was doing that, the assassin U-turned his rental car to get back onto Minnesota 3 South which would take him to 494 and, eventually, the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Because of the M.O., Dante Stagnaro got word of the Madrid hit off the FBI wire and was on Northwest flight 350 at 6:45 a.m. He was met around noon by Bob Carman, Agent in Charge of the Minneapolis FBI office. Carman was caricature FBI-blue-black hair, blue eyes, blue suit, blue tie, blue sedan.
“Thanks for bringing me in on this,” said Dante.
Carman chuckled as they shook hands, smile lines creasing his lean cheeks, tanned even in a Minnesota winter. Dante wondered if a sunlamp was involved.
“It was actually Rudy Mattaliano, your federal prosecutor buddy in New York, who gave you a good report card, Stagnaro. The car is this way. The incident occurred over in St. Paul.”
The freeway took them east and then north toward the tract bungalow on Robie Street where Spic Madrid had been a few hours before becoming an incident on an FBI report form. The skies were gray and cold; pockmarked snow lay on the banks flanking the freeway.
“New York feels this ties in with something you’re working on out in San Francisco,” said Carman in an insinuating voice.
“I wouldn’t see Madrid associated with my case in any way, except that he was in Vegas last week at the same time as some of those who might be involved. So… maybe. And from what I heard of the M.O.-small-caliber weapon, one up the nose…”
“Professional hit all the way,” agreed Carman sternly.
He got them off the freeway on Concord, drove a few blocks north and doglegged over to Robie. There was slush in the gutter; frozen footprints between street and sidewalk made walking precarious; Dante got a wet foot.
The frost-crazed walk was slippery with new ice; the February thaw had ended with drizzle and then a freeze the night before. The house, like most of the others in the block, was probably from the 1920s, white frame, squat and narrow, with a veranda and peeling green shutters. A small jet shrieked by overhead on its takeoff from Holman Field beyond the freeway. Their breaths went up in white puffs. Dante was shivering inside his inadequate San Francisco topcoat.
The two men acknowledged the uniformed cop on duty outside the house in greatcoat and gloves, ducked under the yellow crime scene tape; the seals were not yet fixed to the door, so they entered, switching on lights in the early afternoon. The only room used was the living room, its only furnishings a table that had served as a desk, a swivel and two straight-backed chairs, a broken-down couch. Table lamp, telephone with two lines, TV set. The heat was off, it was cold.
“Classy,” said Dante. His wet foot was freezing.
“Local cops tell me Madrid used it only to coordinate the street sales. Just a few years ago this was mostly Latino, but a lot of Hmongs from the Laos highlands have diluted the mix.”
“Did Madrid deal to them, too?”
“Maybe,” said Carman without too much interest. “But word is they made him nervous, so the only people who ever came here were his direct lieutenants. Not so dumb, at that.”
“Until last night,” said Dante.
The body had been removed and the place dusted for prints and vacuumed for fibers, but otherwise was untouched. White tape outlining a hologram of someone sitting in the swivel chair tipped backward over the desk. There was quite a lot of black-dried blood puddled around the taped outline of the head.
“He was talking with his wife on the phone when he got it. And his bodyguard probably met the hitman coming down the walk.”
Dante looked sharply over at Carman. “Courtesy absence? Warned off by the killer?”
�
��The locals don’t think so. He’s Madrid’s nephew and was devoted to him. Madrid was drunk, sent him out for tequila and limes. Another nephew also was killed last night a few miles south of here in a little town called Coates.”
“Open season?” mused Dante.
“That one looks like a simple knifing after a wedding dance, but you could be right-a straight power play by other locals. Madrid was a vicious bastard, climbed over a lot of widows and orphans on his way to the top of the pyramid.” He stopped with a short, almost bitter laugh. “Allegedly.”
Dante was trying to visualize the hit from the taped outlines on chair and desk. “Anything else odd about this one?”
“The killer left the gun behind-no fingerprints on it.”
“Jennings J-22, maybe? Only one round in it? Sprayed with Armor All? And he gave his overcoat away afterwards, maybe?”
“Yeah, Armor All. And yeah, he gave the overcoat to the nephew.” He added sternly, “Okay, Stagnaro. Give.”
“Popgun Ucelli out of Jersey. Either him or someone who knows his M.O. and is using it. Your Organized Crime people have a running tap on his phone…”
Carman was already turning away toward the phone. Another airplane shrieked by low overhead, rattling the windows in their shrunken frames. A taped X on the edge of the desk marked where the killer had set down the murder gun after using it.
“He’s sitting at the desk, talking on the phone, hears something behind him,” Dante said aloud, more to himself than Carman, “and thinks it’s the bodyguard coming back. He turns, the pistol is pressed against the bridge of his nose, whap! he’s dead meat.” He shivered with the cold, looked over at Carman. “How many shots?”
Carman held up one finger, then opened his hand, palm toward Dante, in a stop motion as he listened to the phone. He grunted a few times, said thank you, and hung up shaking his head.
