The Triple Shot Box (Goodey's Last Stand, Not Sleeping Just Dead & Fighting Back): Three Gritty Crime Novels

by Charles Alverson

  “I don’t,” said Hoerner. “I never knew him.”

  “He was a good kid,” Harry said, “but that’s not the point. What I’m saying is that Marco is lying in the hospital stiff room with his head half-torn off. And all because I decided not to knuckle under to Rizzo. His mother and sister are wondering why he’s dead. He was alive yesterday.”

  “They’re not the only ones,” Hoerner said. “There will be some grieving going on at Rizzo’s place tonight, too. After you called me this evening, I decided it was time to put a little heavy pressure on our friend Carlo. His little brother Steve had an accident tonight.”

  “Accident?” said Harry. “What do you mean?”

  “If you have to know the details,” Hoerner said, “a big, white Cadillac ran up over the curb on Sullivan Street tonight and knocked him over a stoop railing. Last time I saw him, he wasn’t looking too healthy.”

  “Jesus!” said Harry.

  “It had to be done, Harry,” said Hoerner. “You saw yourself tonight that Rizzo means business. He apparently didn’t learn anything from last night’s experience, so he’ll have to learn the hard way.”

  Harry looked at Hoerner with unbelieving eyes.

  “You don’t seem to understand, Harry,” Hoerner said, “but we’re fighting a war, you and I. In wars, people get hurt, people get killed. If we don’t hit them, they’ll hit us. It’s as simple as that. They hit Marco Carradino, and he died. It’s a damn shame. And so we had to hit back. Rizzo’s pulled back into his shell; he’s hard to get at. But his kid brother wasn’t. So he was the target.”

  “Just like that,” said Harry. “Like you’d swat a fly that buzzed around your head. What kind of person are you, Hoerner? I don’t understand you at all.”

  “I guess you could say I’m sort of a soldier,” Hoerner said mildly. “I’m hired to do a job, and I do it the best I can. It’s not always pleasant, but then most of the jobs you get hired to do are the dirty jobs people don’t want to do themselves. It was the same in Vietnam. I—” Hoerner abruptly changed the subject. “Look,” he said, “there’s no way of telling how Rizzo is going to react to what happened to his brother tonight. I’m moving up here until we see which way he’s going to jump.” He gave Harry a telephone number. “More likely, I’ll be getting in touch with you.”

  “But what are you going to do next?”

  “Right now,” Hoerner said, checking his watch, “I’m going to get some sleep. I’ll come by your place tomorrow morning just to see how things are going.”

  “But what about Rizzo? What if he gets back in touch with me?” asked Harry. “What the hell do I say to him? Apologize for having his brother run down? Blame him for killing Marco?”

  “Do nothing like that,” said Hoerner. “You don’t know anything about that. Be reasonable but firm. Give him a chance to back down. You’re going to have to play him, Harry, because you’re his only point of contact. If he’s willing to do the smart thing, you’re going to have to help him save face. If you don’t, this thing is liable to blow wide open. And even killing Rizzo might not stop it because he’s not alone anymore.”

  “Not alone? What do you mean?”

  “You may as well know, Harry. Gino Speranza, old man Speranza’s youngest boy, has thrown in with Rizzo. Gino hasn’t much of an organization, but he’s a dangerous man all by himself.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Harry.

  “Yes, isn’t it,” Hoerner said. “But there’s nothing to worry about yet, Harry. Rizzo is still under control. He’s sore as hell about his kid brother, but he also knows that we’re serious, that we’ll do what we say. That’s important. He’s got to fear us a little.”

  “And he fears us a little, does he?” Harry asked wearily.

  “Yes, I think he does. At least, he’d better. I’m going now. If you have to, you can reach me at that number.” Harry followed Hoerner to the back door.

  As Hoerner reached for the door, he turned back to Harry. “By the way, there’s a couple of bozos in a black Chevy sitting across the street keeping an eye on this place. I passed them on the way in. One of them looks like he’s sleeping, and the other one is listening to the radio. They look like a couple of kids. I could have zapped them both.”

  Harry blurted before he could stop himself: “But you didn’t?”

  “No,” said Hoerner, “it’s been a hard night. It’s obvious that they’re only keeping an eye on you or they’d have moved before this.”

  Hoerner opened the door, but Harry asked: “What are we going to do about them?”

  “Let ‘em sit,” said Hoerner. “It will do them good. It’s up to you, Harry. There are some things you’re going to have to handle yourself. I’m tired.” He slipped out of the half-opened door.

  Left alone in the screen porch, Harry stood in the dark and thought for a moment. The idea of Rizzo’s men keeping watch on the house all night gave him the creeps. He took Hoerner’s revolver out of his pocket and looked down at it. Then he put it away again.

  He walked into the front hallway and took up the Hudson County telephone book. Harry dialed a number and listened to the ringing of a telephone.

  The voice that answered was bright and unnaturally cheerful. “Police. Sergeant Dennison speaking.”

  “Hello, police?” Harry said, not having to try to sound nervous. “There are some burglars outside my house. Come quick.”

  “What’s your name, sir? And your address?

  “Never mind that,” said Harry. “There’s a couple of very suspicious looking men sitting in a black Chevrolet in the middle of the 200 block of Elgin Street, and I think they may be armed. You’d better get over here quick.”

  Harry put down the telephone and turned to climb the stairs. In a few minutes, from the little window at the end of Lizzie’s room, he watched a green-and-white prowl car come sliding around the corner and advance down Elgin Street swinging its spotlight from side to side. Then it stopped, and the car’s white doors flew open like wings, releasing two patrolmen with drawn pistols.

  He watched with satisfaction as one cop opened the driver’s door and plucked Injun out like a winkle from its shell. Ruby came out more slowly, sleepily. At the sight of the cops, his big hands went up and up until he could have grabbed a handful of acacia leaves.

  Ruby and Injun were ordered to lean with outstretched arms against their car while the smaller cop made sharp expeditions into their pockets and came out with interesting objects. One of these was Ruby’s outsized pistol, which in the policeman’s small hands looked like a cannon. Soon, still protesting, Ruby and Injun were prodded into the wire-caged back of the squad car. With a last twirl of the spotlight, the police car quickly covered the rest of the block and turned the corner.

  Harry thought he’d never be able to sleep, but a minute after his ruined clothes hit the floor he was in a deep, dream-streaked sleep.

  At one point, he was in bed with Sandra; her slim back was to him. Harry tried to turn her around, but the harder he pulled the more immovable she became and the higher his desire rose. With all his strength, Harry pulled at a shoulder like pliant marble, and slowly Sandra began to turn around. He pulled her close to his body and pushed his face to Sandra’s.

  But then the face was Marco’s—bloody, battered, lifeless. Henry closed his eyes in terror, but he couldn’t stop seeing Marco’s face, and he couldn’t pull away. The body against his was hard and stiff. Paralyzed, unable to recoil, Harry desperately tried to look away, and finally Marco’s face began to fade—to change—until he was Hildy. Smiling her hard, edgy, sardonic smile.

  “Hello, Harry,” Hildy said. “This is some movie, isn’t it?”

  Then, inches from his eyes, Hildy’s face began to swim in meaningless shapes bearing all the faces he’d ever known. One face began to form from the confusion. Sandra’s face. She was Sandra now— real, warm, alive. Timidly, Harry waited for further change, mistrusting his senses.

  But it was Sandra, all right. Ev
ery inch of him could feel her body. She was as solid as she’d been a few hours before.

  “You’re real,” Harry told her.

  “Of course. I’m real,” Sandra said, holding him in that strong-soft embrace he remembered. He felt every point of contact with vivid intensity, and he waited for the hunger to well up again within him.

  But it didn’t come. Nothing. It was as if he were the dead one, not Marco. It was more than impotence. Finally, Harry gave up and let his arms relax from around her.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  But Harry didn’t answer. He was looking at his own reflection in her eyes and watching heavy, glycerin tears pour down his expressionless face. Then they were both gone.

  20

  Hoerner was standing at the split and peeling door of a cottage near the Hudson River. It stood in a short row of similar buildings, more than shacks, not quite houses and all in an advanced stage of surrender to time and gravity.

  Pounding on the weak door with a clenched hand, Hoerner shouted: “Come on, you scroungy bitch—open up!” When there was no immediate response, he added counter-rhythmic kicks to the bottom of the door. Under the double assault, the door buckled like the cheap plywood it was but didn’t break.

  Hoerner stopped banging, and he smiled when he heard the rusty heave of bedsprings inside and the shuffling pad of naked feet across linoleum. The door opened as far as a green-painted chain would allow, and the opening filled with dull blond hair, a pale, half-made-up face and sallow shoulders stuffed into a thin beach robe.

  “Who is it?” asked the girl, looking up into Hoerner’s face from a distance of two feet.

  “Who is it?” Hoerner said. “Unlock that chain, Joy, or I’ll rip off this door and throw it—and you—into the river.”

  “I can’t, Alec,” Joy said. “My husband is home.”

  “Your husband is the same place he was six months ago and the same place he’ll be this time next year. Doing three to six on Riker’s Island.”

  “He escaped.”

  “I’m going to escape in about a second, Joy, all over you and this shack, and there’s not going to be much left of either of you.”

  “I really can’t, Alec,” she whined. “There’s somebody here with me.”

  “Who?”

  The girl looked up at his face, and her eyes were no longer soft and focusless. They were defiant and as hard as eyes like hers could manage. She jerked her sharp chin up. “My father,” she said. Joy looked down at the burglar chain as if studying its mechanics.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Hoerner said, not loudly but with so much force that the girl’s hand grabbed for the chain and dropped it. She nearly fell as she stumbled back into the room at the same time.

  Hoerner pushed the door, not worrying that he might hit her with it, and saw a dark-haired, under-chinned man sitting in T-shirt and trousers on the big, swaybacked bed, pulling on long, blue socks.

  “It’s all yours, kid,” he said. “I got to get to work.”

  “O’Brien,” Hoerner said, “when you go to work I’ll start going to church. And when you stop humping your stepdaughter, I’m going to run for pope. What do you think Mae is going to do when I tell her you’re at it again?”

  O’Brien looked up at Hoerner with black eyes with a hint of something half-wild and scared in them. He continued to tie the laces of shiny black, perforated-toe shoes that had cost Joy’s mother forty-five dollars. His rounded, slightly twitchy face suggested a sophisticated rabbit. He was thirty-nine but looked a youthful forty-five.

  “You know,” he said, hastily jamming an arm into the wrong sleeve of a pin-striped shirt, “that Joy is like a daughter to me, Alec.” He wrenched the arm out and tried to get it into the other sleeve.

  “Yeah,” said Hoerner, “you just fuck her to protect her reputation.” He stepped back and opened the door which had bounced shut. “Finish dressing outside, shit-heel,” he said, “or I really will tell Mae, and she’ll cut your balls off. If you have any.”

  O’Brien gave up trying to button his shirt and dragged a suit jacket and tie from the bedside chair. “Sure,” he said, “sure. I’ve got to be going.” With his eyes fixed on Hoerner’s face, he walked a long arc to the door and paused for a split-second. “See you, Joy,” he said.

  “Scram!” Hoerner yelled, slamming the door so fast it caught O’Brien on his right heel as he hopped clear of the doorway. Outside he knelt and tried to smooth the bruised leather with a spit-moistened forefinger.

  Putting the chain back up, Hoerner turned back to Joy, who was leaning back against the grease-spattered stove watching him. Her limp robe had fallen open revealing a sagging, bruised breast with a tiny, pubescent nipple and below a scattered patch of sandy pubic hair.

  “You staying long?” she asked.

  “Long enough,” said Hoerner. “If Jack O’Brien is waiting around for me to leave, he’ll have a long wait.” Joy shrugged. “The sheets,” Hoerner said, gesturing to the bed. “Get them off.”

  “But, Alec, I just put them on yesterday morning.”

  “I don’t care if you put them on tonight,” Hoerner said. “I’m not sleeping on sheets used by that miserable little shit.” He snatched the bedding to the floor. “And pillow cases, too.”

  With a shrug, Joy began rummaging in the bottom drawer of a warped bureau. As she sloppily remade the big bed, Hoerner watched her with weary eyes.

  “Okay,” he said, “that’s good enough.” Quickly stripping naked and hanging his clothes on a wooden hanger, Hoerner slipped into the far side of the bed facing the wall. The cheap sheets felt cool and clean.

  Without turning around, he said, “Set your alarm clock for ten o’clock and don’t mess up.”

  As he ordered his mind for sleep, Hoerner heard the girl winding the noisy clock and then felt her weight slip into bed behind him. The bedside lamp clicked the room into darkness. He felt her knee at the back of his thigh and a soft breast touching his back.

  “Alec,” she said, “is there anything you want?”

  “Yes,” he said, “some fucking sleep.”

  The girl moved back from Hoerner, not sharply or angrily, but as if she’d expected no better answer. She lay there watching him fall asleep.

  21

  It was nearly noon before Gino Speranza found out what had happened to Ruby and Injun. He was just entering his apartment when the telephone rang.

  “Yeah?”

  “Gino?” a voice said.

  “What’s up, Vern?” he asked.

  “It’s Bonino and Carelli,” the policeman said. “We’ve got them down here.”

  “What do you mean?” Gino asked, his voice rising.

  “They were picked up, Gino,” Vern said evenly, “over on Elgin Street early this morning. A citizen’s complaint. Our men found them sitting in a car at close to two a.m with a loaded, unregistered pistol. They brought them in, and Dennison booked them.”

  “Booked?” Gino asked, genuinely surprised. “How booked, Vern?”

  “You know, Gino, things are changing around here. New men. Dennison’s even made sergeant, and he was on this morning. He booked ‘em.”

  “Is the Chief there? Let me talk to him.”

  “He’s here, Gino, but he says you better come on in and see him. He wants to talk to you.”

  “Talk to me? Vern—”

  “Sorry, Gino,” Hodges said. “I’m doing you a favor by calling.”

  “I’ll be there,” said Gino, dropping the telephone.

  As he drove to the police station, Gino’s mind was clashing, trying to sort out this thing that had happened. All he could figure out was that his men had been fingered by somebody, probably one of the guys who had taken Rizzo for a ride. Maybe the boss, the hard man Rizzo talked about. Gino’s mind conjured up this man as a shadow, dark and commanding. The image brought to Gino memories of his father from the early days of his childhood.

  When he appeared in the nursery, Baptiste Speranza had seeme
d like a superman to his youngest son. A dark, strong-smelling hero with powerful arms and a pocket full of silver coins. No matter how much the older kids clamored and hung on their father, Gino was never left out. Instead he was in the middle, caught up in the strong arms and pressed against a sandpaper cheek which left him with a glowing reminder of his father’s presence long after he’d gone away.

  That’s how he remembered his father when Gino was sent, at the age of eleven, to that military academy in Ohio. Gino pretended not to remember the name of the academy. That was the same time his father had “gone away” for five years. Gino had known almost from the first that Speranza was in a federal prison. He’d been ashamed and proud at the same time, and had nobody in the world to talk about it with.

  His father had been released just in time to see Gino—a short, rebellious, no-stripe cadet with too-long hair and nicotine-stained fingers—graduate with his class. There was a reunion with a gray old man in an expensive but ill-fitting suit who seemed only a weak shadow of his father.

  Roy Beddell was sharpening a new pencil with a bone-handled jackknife, carefully dropping the shavings onto his spotless blotter, when Vern Hodges led Gino, looking very tight and controlled, into his office.

  “Hello, Gino. Have a seat.”

  Gino sat down silently and watched the Chief bring the pencil to a needle point.

  “Vern said you had a little problem,” Beddell said, looking up at Gino.

  “Vern said you wanted to see me.” There was a silence.

  “Yes, I did,” the Chief admitted. “I understand we’ve got some friends of yours here. A couple of young fellows called”—he picked up a sheet of paper from his desk—“Bonino and Carelli. You know them, do you?”

  “I know them,” said Gino, not giving an inch.

  “Okay, Gino,” Beddell said, putting the paper into a manila file, “that’s all I wanted to know. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about? If not…” Beddell left the rest of the sentence hanging.