Hush Money

by Collins, Max Allan

  “I’d like that, Di.”

  “Besides, I want to talk to you.”

  “About school, I suppose.”

  “About school, yes, and some other things. I’m your sister and interested in what you’re doing. Is that so terrible?”

  “Well, not a lot has changed since you saw me yesterday, Di.”

  “I give you free meals, you give me a hard time. Is that what you call a fair exchange?”

  “Hey, I appreciate it, Sis. I even love you part of the time.”

  “When I put the plate of food down in front of you, especially.”

  “Yeah, especially then.”

  “Look, I got to get back to my desk. See you at six?”

  “That’ll be fine. What’s for dinner? Casserole, you said.”

  “Oh, you’re really going to love me tonight, little brother. Made one of your favorites.”

  “Oh yeah? What?”

  “Lasagna.”

  Appropriate, he thought to himself, smiling a little.

  “Stevie? Are you still there?”

  “I’m still here, Di. See you at six.”

  3

  EVERY DAY, both going to and coming from work, Diane would turn her head away as she drove by the little white clapboard house where her mother had been murdered. Across the way was a junk dealer’s lot, a graveyard for smashed-up and broken-down automobiles, which she would shift her attention to to avoid looking at the house. The junk yard was hardly a pleasant landscape to gaze upon and even had its metaphorical suggestion of the very thing she wanted not to think about: death, destruction, mortality. But she would look at it every day, twice a day, rather than look at the house.

  She would have avoided the whole road if that were possible, but there seemed to be no way to avoid this particular stretch of concrete. East 14th Street seemed to run through her life like her own personal interstate, complete with all the rest stops and exits of her life, significant and insignificant alike, everything from the insurance company where she worked to shopping centers, restaurants, movie theaters. Her mother’s house, of course, was on East 14th; so was the Travelers Inn Motor Lodge, where her father had been manager and where, in his private suite of rooms, he had died. Her brother lived in an apartment on Walnut, just off East 14th, while she herself lived in an apartment house on the outskirts of Des Moines, where East 14th turns into Highway 65, the highway along which the DiPretas, her father’s employers for so many years, lived each in their individual homes, enjoying the expanse of Iowa farm country between Des Moines and its smalltown neighbor, Indianola.

  It was a street that rolled up and down and over hills that seemed surprised to have a city on them. On her drive home, once past certain landmarks—the skyscraper outline of the Des Moines downtown, the awesome Capitol building, the bridge spanning the railroad yard—East 14th turned into an odd mélange of small businesses and middle-class homes, with random pockets of forest-type trees as a reminder of what had to be carved away to put a city here. It was an interesting drive, an interesting street, and she liked having access to all her needs on one easy route. But today, as every day, she averted her eyes as she drove by that little white clapboard house where her mother had been shot to death.

  Diane didn’t look at the house, just as she didn’t look at the loss of her parents. She ignored both, because recognizing either would emotionally overwhelm her. She hid the pain away in some attic of her mind and went on with her life as though none of it had happened. She’d cried only twice during the course of the whole affair: first, on receiving the news of her mother’s murder, and second, on hearing of her father’s suicide. Both times she had cried until she hurt; until her chest hurt, her eyes hurt, until nothing hurt; until emptiness set in and she could feel nothing at all. After that, after crying those two times, she didn’t cry any more. Not a tear. Even at the funeral she hadn’t wept. People congratulated her on her strength, found it remarkable she’d been able to face the tragedy head on as she had. But they were wrong; she hadn’t faced a thing, head on or otherwise. Facing it would have ripped her apart, left her emotions frayed and her mental state a shambles. So she faced nothing; she blocked off everything.

  And she knew it. She knew that repressing emotion, letting the pressure build up behind some closed door in her head, was probably an unhealthy attitude. Sometimes she wished she could cry again, wished she would cry again. Sometimes she wished she could get it out, all of it. She’d lie in bed, consciously forcing the thoughts from her mind, feeling emotion churning in her stomach like something she couldn’t digest. Wishing that were the case, wishing it were that simple, wishing she could stick a finger down her throat and make herself heave all of that bile out of her system.

  Her husband, Jerry, used to try to make her talk about it; talk it out, get rid of it. It wasn’t that Jerry was a particularly sensitive individual, Christ no. She smiled bitterly at the thought. Jerry just wanted in her pants all the time; that was Jerry’s only concern. After her parents died she lost interest in sex, which had of course bruised Jerry’s overinflated ego. She didn’t know why, but she just felt cold toward Jerry as far as sex was concerned. Nothing stirred in her, no matter what he tried.

  And try he did. Before, he’d never been particularly sex-oriented during their marriage; after the first year, it had been a three-times-a-week affair: Friday, Saturday, Wednesday, a passionless, clockwork ritual. She used to feel slightly rejected because of that, since she’d always been told she was sexy and sexy-looking, had always been sought after by guys and liked to think of herself as cute. Sure, maybe her boobs weren’t so big, but how often did a guy meet up with a girl with natural platinum blonde hair and the blue eyes to go with it? She was cute, goddamnit, and knew it, and was proud of it. She’d always liked sex, had fun with it; that had been a lot of what she’d liked about Jerry, though Jerry the Tiger had turned tame after a marriage license made it legal. That was Jerry, all right: back-seat stud, mattress dud. But when he found out about her newly acquired sexual reluctance, Christ, then he was waving a damn erection in her face every time she looked at him. Which was as seldom as she could help it.

  “You’re frigid,” he’d tell her, and she wouldn’t say anything. After all, she didn’t turn him away; she just wasn’t particularly responsive. And how the hell could she help that? How the hell could she help how she felt? You don’t turn love and sex on like tap water, Jerry. “If you didn’t think about your parents all the time, we wouldn’t have this problem,” he would say. I am not thinking about my parents, she’d say. “Oh, but you are. You’re thinking about not thinking about them.” That doesn’t make sense, Jerry. “It makes more sense than you, you frigid goddamn bitch.” And she would say, all right, Jerry, do it to me if you want, Jerry, you will anyway. And he would. And she would feel nothing.

  Nothing except contempt for her husband, which blossomed into the divorce, which as yet was not final, as the law’s ninety-day wait (to allow opportunity for reconciliation) wasn’t quite up. But the marriage was over, no doubt of that. Diane was aware that even before the divorce thing arose Jerry had been seeing other girls; and mutual friends had told her recently that Jerry had already narrowed his field to one girl, who oddly enough was also a platinum blonde (not natural, she’d wager) and who had a more than superficial resemblance to somebody named Diane. Which seemed to her a sick, perverse damn thing for the son of a bitch to do.

  She thought back to what he’d said to her the night their marriage exploded into mutual demands for divorce. He’d said, “You’re cold, Diane. Maybe not frigid, but cold. You got yourself so frozen over inside you don’t feel a goddamn fucking thing for or about anybody.”

  It was a blow that had struck home at the time, a game point Jerry had won but a thought she’d discarded later, after some reflection. She wasn’t cold inside. She could still feel. She could still love. She loved little Joni more than anything in the world. She was filled with the warmth of love every time she held her
daughter in her arms, and she was having trouble, frankly, not spoiling the child because of that.

  And there was Stevie. She loved her “little” brother, damn near as much as her little girl. She worried about him, hoped his life would take on some direction, hoped there wasn’t an emotional time bomb in him, ticking inside him, because he too had shown no outward emotional response to the deaths of their mother and father.

  And why wasn’t Stevie going out with any girls? It wasn’t right, wasn’t like Stevie, who was a notorious pussy-chaser. She hoped he hadn’t contracted some weird jungle strain of VD over there and couldn’t have normal relations because of it. She asked him what was wrong, why wasn’t he dating or anything, and he explained he wanted “no extra baggage right now.” That was unhealthy. A man needed a good sex life.

  True, she was hardly the one to talk, hardly the one to be dispensing advice to the sexually lovelorn. She hadn’t seen any men since breaking with Jerry, hadn’t gone out once. Hadn’t had sex, hadn’t been close to having sex, since Jerry’s last rape attempt almost eight months ago. Hadn’t had any desire for it.

  Her social life was limited and anything but sexy, but she enjoyed it. She spent her evenings with her daughter, watching television, playing games, sometimes going to movies, when she could find one rated G. If Joni wanted to stay overnight with her friend Sally, downstairs, well, that was fine; Diane could catch another, more adult film with one of the girls from the office. And now with brother Stevie home from service, she could have him over and cook for him and have him join their diminutive family circle and add some needed masculine authority.

  She was just a few blocks from the apartment house now. She glanced at the clock on the Pontiac’s instrument panel and switched on the radio to catch the news. The newscaster was in the middle of a story about a shooting that had taken place earlier that afternoon. She didn’t catch the name of the victim, but she heard enough of the story to tell it was a ghastly affair, a piece of butchery out of a bad dream. Some psychopath sniper was loose, had cut a man down with a high-power rifle in broad daylight, on the golf course of an exclusive local country club. She shivered and switched off the radio. That was just the sort of thing she didn’t need to hear about.

  She pulled into the apartment-housing parking lot. She saw her brother’s car in the lot and smiled. Christ, it was good to have Stevie home.

  4

  VINCENT DIPRETA was known, in his earlier, more colorful days, as Vince the Burner—even though he himself rarely set fire to anything outside of his Havana cigars. The name grew out of Vincent’s pet racket, which was bust-outs. A bust-out is setting up a business specifically with arson in mind, and it works something like this: You set yourself up in an old building or store picked up for peanuts; you build a good credit rating by finding some legitimate citizen looking for a fast buck and willing to front for you; you use that credit to stockpile merchandise, which will be moved out the back door for fencing just prior to the “accidental” fire; you burn the place down, collect the insurance on the building and its contents, and declare bankruptcy. A torch artist out of Omaha did the burning for Vincent; theirs was an association that dated back to the forties and lasted well into the seventies. Vincent was dabbling in bust-outs long after he and the rest of his family had otherwise moved into less combustible and (superficially, at least) more respectable areas of business.

  In fact, during the course of his bust-out career, Vincent was so brazen as to bum two of his own places, right there in Des Moines. Even for Vince the Burner that took gall. “You don’t shit where you eat, Vince,” he was told the first time; but nobody said anything the second go-around, as the sheer fucking balls of the act was goddamn awe inspiring. First he’d burned one of his two plush, high-overhead key clubs. Both had been big money-makers for years, but when liquor by the drink passed in Iowa and made the key-club idea a thing of the past, he decided to convert one of the clubs into a straight bar/nightclub and put the torch to the other. Then, a few years later, he’d burned DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant on East 14th, because he was planning to remodel the place anyway, so what the hell? And besides, most of the money had gone to the Church, who deserved it more than some goddamn insurance company, for Christ’s sake.

  Vincent was a good Catholic, or at least his own version of one. His wife went to Mass every Sunday, and his money did too, though he himself stayed home. In recent years, when his teen-age son, Vince Jr., had contracted leukemia, Vincent had upped his already generous contributions to the Church in response to their priest’s suggestion that the son’s illness was repayment for wrongdoings committed by the DiPreta family over the years. Vince Jr.’s illness was a classic example of the son paying for the sins of the father, the priest suggested, and a monetary show of faith might help even the score. This sounded worth a try to Vince Sr.—maybe a healthy donation to the Church would work as a sort of miracle drug for Vince Jr.—and Vincent promptly got in touch with his torch-artist friend in Omaha for one last fling. DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant burned, got remodeled and was now doing as good as ever—no use busting out a money-maker, after all.

  But it hadn’t done much good for Vince Jr., who died anyway, despite massive injections of cash into the local diocese coffers. And even though their priest had been on a nice DiPreta-paid trip to Rome when Vince Jr. passed away, Vincent bore no bitterness toward the Church. No promises had been made, no miracles guaranteed. Secretly, however, he couldn’t help wishing his and his son’s salvation was in more reliable hands, though he said just the opposite to his wife Anna.

  It was no secret, though, to Anna or anyone else, how hard Vincent took the death of his son, his only son. Vince the Burner had always been a fat man, the stereotype of a.jolly, heavyset patriarchal Italian. But after his son died, Vincent began to lose weight. He immersed himself in his work as never before, pushing harder when age dictated slowing down, but at the same time seeming to care less about his work than ever before. He developed a bleeding ulcer, which required several operations and a restricted diet that made his weight drop like a car going off a cliff. The expression “shadow of his former self” was never more apt The six-foot Vincent dropped from two hundred and fifty-five pounds to one hundred and sixty-three pounds in a year’s time.

  Vincent had been a handsome fat man, a round, jovial, eminently likable man. As a skinny man, Vincent was something else again. The flesh hung on him like a droopy suit, loose and stretched from years of carrying all that weight around; the firmly packed jowls of fat Vincent were jolly, while the sacklike jowls of skinny Vincent were repulsive. His face took on a melancholy look, his small dark eyes hidden in a face of layered, pizza- dough flesh. It was as though a large man’s face had been transposed to a smaller man’s smaller skull. The features seemed slack, almost as if they were about to slide off his face like shifting, melting wax.

  If, these last seven years since the death of his son, Vincent DiPreta’s countenance seemed a melancholy one, then on this evening that countenance could only be described as one of tragic proportions. He sat in a small meeting room at a table the size of two card tables stuck together and wept silently, pausing now and then to dab his eyes with an increasingly dampening handkerchief. There was a phone on the table, which he glanced at from time to time, and a bottle of Scotch whisky and a glass, which Vincent had been making use of, his restricted diet for the moment set aside. He was smoking a cigar—or at least one resided in the ashtray before him, trails of smoke winding toward air vents in the cubicle-size meeting room—and it seemed a strange reminder of Vincent DiPreta’s former “fat man” image. When he would take it from the ashtray and hold it in his fingers, the cigar seemed almost ready to slip away, as if expecting the pudgy fingers of seven years ago.

  Vincent had been sitting alone in the room for an hour now. He had heard the news of his brother’s death on the car radio on his way home from his office at Middle America Builders. But he hadn’t gone home; he couldn’t face Anna a
nd the deluge of tears she’d have to offer him over the loss of Joey. He’d called her on the phone and soothed her, as if Joey had been her damn brother (Anna had always had a special fondness for Joe—but then so had everybody in the family) and he had come here, to the new DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant, for privacy, for a booth to hide in in a moment or two of solitary mourning. The restaurant was closed when he got there (it was six now; they were just opening upstairs), and he’d walked through the darkened dining room, where the manager and hostess mumbled words of condolence—“We’re so very sorry, Mr. DiPreta,” “We’ll miss him, Mr. DiPreta”—and he headed downstairs to one of many small conference rooms. The whole lower floor was, in fact, a maze of such rooms, used by the DiPretas and any visiting mob personae, whenever unofficial official business needed to be discussed.

  Many high-level mob meetings had taken place on DiPreta turf these past five or six years or so, even though the DiPretas themselves did little more than host the meets. There were several reasons for Des Moines being the site of meetings of such importance. For one thing, many older members of die Chicago Family, the aging elder statesmen, had chosen Des Moines as a place to retire to, since Chicago was going to hell and the blacks, and the Iowa capital city was possessed of a low crime rate and a metropolitan but nonfrantic atmosphere that reminded them of Chicago in its better days. Whenever the Family needed to consult these retired overlords, which they did both out of respect and to seek the good counsel the old men could provide, a meeting place would be furnished by the DiPretas. And the DiPretas would do the same whenever the Family wanted to confab with other crime families, such as Kansas City and Detroit, for example, because Des Moines made a convenient meeting place, pleasantly free of the federal surveillance afflicting the Chicago home base. Until not long ago, meetings were divided pretty evenly between the restaurant and the Traveler’s Lodge Motel, with the nod going to the latter most often; but then the McCracken problem arose, and both the DiPretas and the Family had quickly gotten out of the habit of utilizing the Traveler’s Lodge facilities: even with Jack McCracken gone, a bad taste lingered.