Butcher's Moon p-16

by Richard Stark

  Parker said, “One of them at the meeting?”

  “No.” Lozini opened the fist and pressed his palm on the table top, splaying the fingers out. Squinting through his sunglasses at the pool, thinking about his people, he said, “Some of them are in it, probably, but not running it. They don’t have the strength you need.”

  “Shevelly? He’s your second-in-command, isn’t he?”

  “Ted’s years from being ready to take over. If he ever could at all, and I don’t think so. Nobody’d follow Ted, that’s the point. It’s got to be somebody that the others would follow.”

  “You know your people,” Parker said. “Who’s got the strength?”

  Lozini had already been thinking about that, despite himself. “There’s only three men,” he said, “that could organize it, could get enough people to go into it, and could get acceptance from people like your friend Karns.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Ernie Dulare. Dutch Buenadella. Frank—”

  Green broke in, saying, “Oh. Is that how you pronounce it? Dew-lah-ree. I thought it was Dew-lair.”

  Lozini frowned at him. “You met Ernie?”

  “No, I just read about him in the paper.” To Parker, he said, “Dulare operates the local horserooms. And Louis ‘Dutch’ Buenadella is our pornography king. The movie houses, the bookstores, and at least one mail-order business.”

  Startled out of his funk, Lozini said, “You know my operation pretty good.”

  With a modest smile, Green said, “I’m the research girl.”

  Parker said, “Who’s this Frank? Not Frank Faran.”

  Lozini nodded to Green. “You know that part, too?”

  ”I suppose that’s Frank Schroder,” Green said. “The narcotics man.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Lozini said softly. “You want to tell me which one it is?”

  “Well, I’ve never met them,” Green said, “but I doubt it’s Schroder.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a little old to take over, to begin with.”

  “He’s five years younger than me.”

  Green spread his hands, and offered an apologetic smile. “Not old to be running things,” he said, “but maybe too old to start running things. I don’t see him getting enough support. Besides, there’s a rumor he’s been eating his own candy.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “Of course it’s true. Even I’ve heard it.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “Oh.” Green made an erasing gesture with the palm of his hand. “I don’t care if the rumor itself is true or not,” he said. “My point is, it’s true that there is such a rumor, and a rumor like that will keep support away from a man.”

  Lozini nodded, accepting it. “All right,” he said. “Frank’s the least likely.”

  Parker said, “Leaving the other two. Dulare and Buenadella.”

  “Right.” Lozini looked at Green. “Any ideas?”

  “Sorry. They’re both the right age, they’re both strong, they’ve both got good power bases inside your structure already, they’ve both got the right sort of connections outside town. You know them; which of them is the most greedy?”

  “Both of them,” Lozini said.

  Parker said, “Give us their addresses.”

  “You’re going to go fight my battle for me?”

  “No. Whether you make it or not is up to you. But two years ago, whoever O’Hara talked to about the money in the amusement park was somebody already plugged in with this revolution you’ve got going on.”

  “It was set up that long ago?” Bewildered, Lozini tried to remember indications that far back, hints that he should have picked up but had somehow missed.

  ”They’ve been waiting for this election,” Parker said. “That’s what’s going to finish you off.”

  “It is, too,” Lozini said.

  Green said, “Everybody else in this country has their elections in November. What’s with you people, that you have to be different?”

  “We made that change on purpose, years ago,” Lozini said. “People do things by habit. Run the election in an off-year, or in an off-time, you get a lower turnout, you can control the result easier. Only this time it’s working against me.”

  “And my money,” Parker said, “went to either Dulare or Buenadella, whichever one is doing this, to help finance the rebellion. So that’s where we go to get it back.”

  Lozini looked at him with something like awe. “Good Christ but you’re single-minded,” he said.

  “I came here for my money,” Parker said. “Not a gang war.”

  “So you’ll go to both Ernie and Dutch? How do you figure out which one it is?”

  “We’ll find out before we go. We’ll ask one of the people that went over to him.”

  “Abadandi?”

  “He can’t talk right now,” Parker said. “Give me Calesian’s address.”

  “Calesian? Why him?”

  “Nobody’s going to make a move against you,” Parker said, “without having your top cop in their pocket. Calesian’s smart enough to know you’re on your way out.”

  “That son of a bitch.”

  Parker said, “What about Farrell?”

  Lozini and Green both looked at him in surprise. Lozini said, “Who?”

  “Your mayor,” Parker said. “You sure he’s on the way out? Maybe he went over, too.”

  “Farrell isn’t my mayor,” Lozini said.

  Green said, “Wain is the mayor. Farrell’s the reform candidate running against him.”

  Parker frowned at them both, and said to Lozini, “You always kept saying ‘my man.’ I figured that was Farrell.” To Green, he said, “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  ”Tell you what?” Green was obviously as bewildered as Lozini.

  Lozini said, “What difference does it make? Alfred Wain is my man, and he’s on the way out. George Farrell is the reform man, and he’s on the way in.”

  Parker said, “Farrell is the one with the big banner across London Avenue. Posters all over the place.”

  “That’s right,” Lozini said. “We haven’t been spending that way. Money’s been tighter for us the last couple of years, I already told you that. Receipts are down everywhere, you heard that from Nate Simms last night. Besides, we never had to spend that much. Farrell’s working in a different league.”

  “I should have made sure,” Parker said. He seemed to be talking mostly to himself. Frowning toward the pool, he said, “It’s my mistake, I shouldn’t have taken it for granted.”

  Lozini said, “I still don’t get you.”

  “Your receipts aren’t down,” Parker told him. “They’re skimming off the top. Farrell is their man.”

  Green said, in a small voice, “Oh.”

  The whole thing opened all at once for Lozini like a sunflower. “Those dirty bastards. They’ve been financing Farrell with my money.”

  “And mine,” Parker said. To Green, he said, “So we by-pass Calesian, we go to Farrell.”

  “Right.”

  Parker got to his feet. “Retire, Lozini,” he said. “Go to Florida and play shuffleboard.”

  Lozini watched the two of them walk through the sunlight and into the darkness of the house. Shuffleboard. Calesian. Abadandi. Ernie Dulare or Dutch Buenadella. Farrell. With his money.

  Lozini got to his feet. Aloud he said, “I haven’t fired a gun in twenty-seven years.” His voice was absorbed into the water of the pool: flat, no echo. He walked around the pool and on into the house.

  Twenty-two

  Paul Dunstan got up at nine, a little earlier than usual for a Sunday. A couple of the guys from the shop were coming around to pick him up at ten to spend the day out at the beach. He got up early enough to have time to spare, padded around his three-room apartment taking care of minor clean-up details, and generally coasted the hour away. It was a relaxed and pleasant interval, spoiled only briefly when he glanced at the table by the front doo
r and saw the retirement check there, still in its envelope. It had come yesterday, and he’d cash it tomorrow.

  He hated those checks; they were his only reminder of his years on the police force in Tyler, three hundred miles from here. He’d thrown one away once, but that was even worse; a barrage of letters from the office of the Tyler City Clerk, wanting to know if he’d received the check, what had he done with it, when would he cash it. One reminder a month was bad enough, so now he cashed the check each month when it came in, pocketed the seven dollars and tried to think no more about it.

  Dunstan was twenty-nine years old, and seven dollars a month was the pension his four years on the Tyler police force had entitled him to, an entitlement he’d rather have done without. He had a new job now, a new life in a new city, and all he wanted was for the past to stay quietly and permanently in the past.

  At one time he had thought he would spend his entire lifetime in police work, even though he’d mostly just drifted into it. The Army had made him an MP during his three-year enlistment, after first training him as a refrigeration engineer, the field of his choice. After the Army he’d had a number of unsatisfying jobs before going with the Tyler force, and had found police work congenial and easy. Most of the time. And profitable, too, in a smallish way.

  He and Joe O’Hara had been radio-car partners for over two years when the mess happened at the Fun Island Amusement Park. Before then, Dunstan had been in on the take in a minor way, not called upon to actually do anything other than close his eyes from time to time, but the mess at the amusement park had changed all that. He’d been in on attempted murder, he’d seen people killed, he’d wound up with the robber holding him captive at gunpoint, and when it was all over, he’d had it. Not because O’Hara had been so enraged at him, full of yelled charges of cowardice; that had been nothing but O’Hara blustering away his own fear and incompetence. And not because of the cold contempt he had seen in that old man Lozini’s eyes; what did he care about the contempt of a creature like Lozini? It was his own attitude toward himself that had made the change. He had suddenly known he couldn’t live that way any more, a living contradiction, straddling the fence of the law, a hypocrite in every breath he took.

  So he’d quit the force, and moved away from the city of Tyler completely, and had found a job here with a firm that maintained central air-conditioning units in office buildings, the kind of work the Army had originally trained him for. He had a good job, good friends, a good life, a few girl friends in the last couple of years. If it weren’t for the absurdity of the seven-dollar-a-month pension check, he wouldn’t ever have to think about Tyler again.

  What could he do about the checks? Nothing. Move, leaving no forwarding address? Almost impossible in this organized world, not without disrupting his life entirely. It was easier, finally, just to cash the check each month, spend the seven dollars, try not to think about it.

  At nine-forty he went and got dressed. He wrapped his bathing suit in a towel, and was just putting the rolled towel on the table by the front door, next to the pension check, when the apartment doorbell rang. He frowned at his watch: ten to ten. Harry was never early. He pulled open the door, and it wasn’t Harry at all. It was a smiling self-assured guy holding a paper bag in front of himself, holding it by the bottom with just one hand. “Paul Dunstan?” he said.

  It was a vaguely familiar face. Was he really somebody from Tyler, or was it just that Dunstan had been looking at the pension check that made him think this guy had something to do with that city? He said, “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry about this,” the guy said, smiling, sounding truly sorry about it, “but I don’t know how much O’Hara told you.” And he reached into the paper bag.

  Dunstan’s reactions were slower than when he’d been on the force. He didn’t move until the gun with the silencer screwed on the end of it started coming out of the paper bag, and by then it was too late.

  Twenty-three

  “First-rate sermon. Reverend,” George Farrell said.

  The minister’s noncommittal face suggested he knew he was being used. “I’m glad you liked it, Mr. Farrell,” he said.

  Farrell kept pumping the man’s hand, holding it in both of his so the minister couldn’t make a premature withdrawal. Out of the corner of his eye, Farrell watched Jack, standing unobtrusively to one side; Jack would give him the high sign when the photographers and cameramen were finished, and then he would let go of the minister’s hand.

  Farrell made a lovely all-American picture there in the sunlight, and he knew it. Tall, heavy-set, with a banker’s stockiness and an actor’s profile and a doctor’s professional intimacy, he belonged on that church step, shaking hands with that black-garbed white-haired man of God. Four news photographers and the camera crews of two local television stations were fixing the scene indelibly, to be shown to the voters between now and Tuesday. Compare this image, voters, with any photograph you choose of Alfred Wain, with his overly large nose and the deep bags under his eyes and his general hangdog air of being the owner of a warehouse full of dubious cargo.

  Over to the side, Jack lifted a hand to his medium-long hair, brushing it back. Farrell, smiling a manly smile, said, “Keep up the good work, Reverend,” and released the minister’s hand.

  “You too, Mr. Farrell,” the minister said, with no expression at all in face or voice.

  And to hell with you, Mac, Farrell thought. Smiling, he turned away, automatically reaching to take Eleanor’s elbow. She was there, of course, right where she should be, the perfect complement: tall, ash-blond, competent-looking, attractive without seeming oversexed, with just the slightest touch of apple-pie plumpness about her. Where would a public man be without this wife?

  The two of them went down the church steps together, Farrell waving broadly to the curious crowd; mostly churchgoers, attracted by the television equipment, who had stayed because they recognized their mayoral candidate. Sudden spontaneous applause broke out among them, true spontaneous applause, and for just a second Farrell was so startled he almost broke stride. Then he moved on, feeling a great wave of emotion well up within him. They truly liked him, the people really and truly liked him.

  The limo was at the curb, and Jack was already there to hold the door open and the citizens at bay. Eleanor got in first, and Farrell after her. Jack shut the door, slid in front next to the driver, and they were off, followed by the unmarked police car with its two plainclothes bodyguards.

  “Well,” Eleanor said. “So much for that.”

  Farrell stretched his feet out on the gray carpeting. The limousine had been contributed for the duration of the campaign by a local automobile dealer, and its normal role as a rental vehicle was revealed by the pair of folded bucket seats tucked up against the front-seat back. Farrell opened one of these now and put his feet on it. He felt physically content, and still pleased at that applause. Spending months manipulating emotional reactions, it came as a shock and a delight to be liked without inducement.

  Eleanor had taken out her large notebook and was studying it. “Coffee with the volunteers at headquarters,” she said.

  He nodded; nice kids, the volunteers. Though they bewildered him at times. He’d look at them, see their intense shining eyes staring back at him, and he’d wonder just who in the name of God they thought he was. Well, it didn’t matter, did it? You couldn’t buy for all the money in the world the work they did for free, out of whatever noble misconception it was that drove them.

  Eleanor was closing the notebook, but Farrell said, “What’s after that?”

  She opened it again. Technically, an old pol named Sorenberg was Farrell’s campaign manager, but it was strictly an honorary position, a part of the fence-mending Farrell had had to do early on. Eleanor was his campaign manager, she had the whole structure in her mind and every detail in her notebooks. “Visit the swimming pool at Memorial Park,” she said. “Little League game at Veteran’s Field. Dinner and speech to the teachers’ union. Dinner and sp
eech to the Urban League.”

  “Enough,” Farrell said. “Enough.” He had already had breakfast with the Knights of Columbus and listened to a morning concert of the Methodist Youth Federation glee club. Tuesday couldn’t get here fast enough.

  Eleanor gave him a thin smile—understanding and sympathy, but with some reserve. She had been opposed to his getting involved in all of this in the first place, though she would never be difficult about it. Eleanor was a smart and capable woman, too sure of herself to be difficult. My best investment, Farrell said of her at times; it was supposed to be a joke, but it was also more than that.

  George Farrell was forty-three, president of the Avondale Furniture Company, tables and chairs, a family-owned business that had been started by Farrell’s great-grandfather in 1868; returning Civil War veterans were getting married, furnishing new homes. Farrell had been a part of the family business since he’d graduated from Northwestern University, but he had never taken a great interest in the running of the concern, nor had he ever put himself in a position of real authority or control. He was a figurehead president, the different divisions of the company all being run by competent professionals, and he was content to leave it that way; he had enough to do so he didn’t feel like a useless sponge, but not so much that he felt overburdened.

  When, a few years ago, he’d been asked by some local pols to run for the City Council, Farrell had accepted at once, only later pausing to wonder why he’d wanted the job. Partly, of course, it had been his pleasure at being asked. But also there was a certain boredom that had been coming over him the last few years, a boredom caused by his general remoteness from his livelihood, by the casual irrelevance of his working day. Would the City Council be a cure for that?

  It would. Farrell loved politics, every bit of it. He loved the maneuvering, he loved the deals and the sense of being an insider, the almost frightening feeling of being in a house of cards constructed of winks and nods and handshakes, and he also loved the occasional feeling of accomplishment, the knowledge of a job well done, the people’s trust justified, a valuable task competently completed.