Butcher's Moon p-16

by Richard Stark

  He was also a realist. He knew that the workings of Tyler, of any city, required accommodations with men you would never invite into your own home. Men like Adolf Lozini, for instance; a crook, no better than a mobster, with his hand in every unsavory operation in town. But necessary, because crime and vice would go on existing no matter what, and it was important that some sort of control be laid over the cesspool. Lozini, half murderer and half businessman, was that control.

  Or had been. But Lozini was getting old, he was losing his competence, and a better man would be taking his place. Better in many ways; not only better at controlling the criminal element, but also better in his attitudes toward the city and toward his fellow-men. Lozini’s replacement was a man Farrell could get along with, could understand and even sympathize with—could almost invite to the house.

  The removal of Lozini would mean, naturally, the removal of Alfred Wain, who was Lozini’s puppet in the mayor’s chair. The job had been offered to Farrell, and he knew at once that he would be no puppet, that he could work within the system and still be a much more effective mayor than Wain had ever been. In one sense, his public posture as a reform candidate was a mockery, since he was supported by criminal funds just as much as Wain had ever been. Yet in another way, Farrell told himself that he truly was a reformer, in comparison with Wain; under himself, Tyler would be a much better, a much cleaner, a much less corrupt city.

  The limo was coming to a stop, at the main entrance of the Carlton-Shepard, Tyler’s only first-class hotel. The maroon-uniformed doorman opened the car doors and they all got out, to no reception at all. The few people in the vicinity were all hotel guests, out-of-towners who wouldn’t recognize Farrell or care about who he was, well-off people who wouldn’t be distracted from their own concerns by the appearance of a chauffeured limousine.

  The Carlton-Shepard lobby was cool and spacious. The giant cabbage roses in the carpet design were spaced so that Farrell’s stride matched them exactly; he amused himself by stepping from the center of one rose to the center of the next, all the way across the lobby to the elevator that was being held for him. His campaign headquarters was the entire seventh floor, a lavish expenditure in local terms, but necessary as a public display of his big-league aspirations. It had been important at first to demonstrate that he wasn’t merely another one of those well-meaning amateurs, those ministers and teachers and other bumblers that the opposition had routinely been mounting against Wain over the years.

  Five of them entered the elevator now, with the maroon-uniformed operator: Farrell, Eleanor, Jack, and the two plainclothesmen. They started up, everybody remaining silent in the slightly uncomfortable proximity, and when the elevator stopped, the indicator light over the door read 5.

  The operator himself seemed confused. He moved his control bar back and forth twice, then frowned up at that lit number 5. One of the plainclothesmen said, “What are you stopping for?”

  “I didn’t,” the operator said, and at the same time somebody knocked on the door. The operator looked around at the plainclothesmen and said, “Should I open it?”

  They didn’t seem to know. Farrell found himself suddenly frightened—an assassination? That happened to national figures, not local ones. Who would assassinate him?

  Lozini. What if Lozini had found out somehow, if he’d decided to fight back by eliminating Wain’s competition before weeding his own garden?

  One of the plainclothesmen said, “Yeah, open it.” Neither of them had a gun in sight, but they both had their hands back on their rumps, their jackets pushed back out of the way.

  There was a gate to open, and then a gold-painted door, and the fifth-floor hall was revealed, with two men standing in it. One of them nodded to the plainclothesmen, saying, “That’s okay, Toomey, Calesian sent us.”

  The plainclothesmen relaxed, and so did Farrell. So they were police. When he’d first seen them, with their general aura of toughness, he’d thought they were Lozini’s men for sure.

  One of the plainclothesmen said, “What’s up?”

  “Trouble on seven,” one of the new men said. “A threat against Mr. Farrell’s life. We’re supposed to take him up a different way. The rest of you people proceed. There’s no threat against anybody else. Mr. Farrell?”

  The man wanted him to leave the elevator. Farrell hesitated, unsure what to do. The plainclothesman beside him said to the new men, “We’ll come with you.”

  “Calesian wants the rest of you to stay in a body,” the new man said. “To cover us when we take Mr. Farrell up the other way.”

  “We’re supposed to stay with him,” the plainclothesman said.

  “You’ve got the candidate’s wife there.” The other new man said, “Let’s not hang around here and be targets.”

  The plainclothesman said, “I don’t think I recognize you.”

  “Come on, Toomey.” The new man took a worn leather wallet from his pocket, flipped it open, held it open with both hands for the plainclothesman to see. “You’ve seen me around,” he said.

  The plainclothesman—Toomey—nodded doubtfully, but still seemed reluctant. “Our orders are to stay with Mr. Farrell,” he said.

  “Fuck,” the new man said, sounding disgusted, and took a gun out from under his jacket. Everybody in the elevator tensed, moving involuntarily backward, and the man said, “Hands on heads. Fast.”

  The plainclothesmen had relaxed sufficiently before this to no longer have their hands anywhere near their own guns. Farrell, who immediately placed his own hands atop his head, saw the plainclothesmen hesitate, saw the second man out there also draw a gun, and saw the plainclothesmen angrily realize there was nothing they could do but obey.

  ”You too,” the new man said to the elevator operator, who had been merely staring open-mouthed at everything that was happening. The operator at once put his hands straight up in the air.

  The first man gestured with his gun at Farrell. “Come out here,” he said.

  “D-don’t kill me,” Farrell said. He was terrified, but he tried to speak calmly, rationally, tried not to blubber. “There’s no reason to, I’m not—”

  “Shut up, you horse’s ass. If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead now. I want to talk to you.” To his friend, he said, “Hold them. I’ll make it fast.”

  “Too bad we couldn’t do it the other way.”

  “It’ll work out.” He glared at Farrell; he was very angry that his scheme hadn’t worked. “Get the hell out here, I said.”

  Farrell moved jerkily forward. It was true, they weren’t going to kill him. Unless something went wrong. But what did they want?

  “Put your arms down. Walk easy. Down to the right there.”

  Farrell obeyed, leaving the elevator behind, walking along the empty hallway, sensing the man coming along behind him. They reached a stairwell door, with its red light glowing above it, and the man said, “In there.”

  Farrell opened the door, stepped through into the gray-metal stairwell. He stood on the landing, not knowing whether he was supposed to go up or down the stairs, and the man came through the doorway behind him, shut the door, touched his arm to turn him around, and punched him very hard in the stomach, just below the belt.

  Farrell bent over, falling backward against the wall, his forearms folding over the sudden flowering pain in his stomach. The pain seemed to rush out like rips in a stocking—lancing up through his chest into his throat, down into his genitals, down his legs to make a tingling weakness in the back of his knees. The breath had whooshed out of him when he was hit, and he opened his mouth wide, trying to replace the lost air, but his throat seemed to be closed, air scraped in slowly and painfully.

  The man stood waiting for him, his expression cold and grim, clinical, detached. Farrell struggled to breathe, swallowed down a feeling of nausea, waited out the pain. Gradually his lungs filled with air again, the turmoil in his stomach settled, the pain eased, he could straighten himself. Blinking, mouth open, he stared at the man, wond
ering what he would do next, why this was happening.

  The man said, “I wanted you to know I’m serious. Do you know it now?”

  “Yes.” Farrell’s throat was raspy, it hurt a bit when he talked.

  “Good. Who’s financing you?”

  Farrell couldn’t begin to understand the question. “I don’t—” He coughed, which also hurt, and pressed a hand to his throat. “What?”

  “One of Adolf Lozini’s sidemen is financing you,” the man said. “Which one is it?”

  Scandal: that was the first thought that came to Farrell’s mind; this was some sort of insane reporter or scandalmonger, out to verify a rumor he’d heard somewhere. The unlikelihood of a reporter holding people up with a gun or asking his questions with his fists didn’t occur to him until later. It was thinking in terms of a reporter, in terms of scandal, that he answered, saying, “No, you’re wrong about that.”

  The gun was in the man’s left hand. He lifted it, chopped the barrel down on the top of Farrell’s right shoulder. Farrell screamed at the sudden pain, the sound echoing in the stairwell. The man clapped his free hand over Farrell’s mouth, bouncing his head back against the wall, holding him there till the echoes died, while Farrell clutched at his burning shoulder. He felt his jaw trembling, knew the man could feel it in the hand pressed against his mouth, and felt angry and ashamed of himself for displaying weakness.

  The man released him and stepped back. “I don’t want to waste time,” he said. “I’m in a hurry. I know where you’re getting your financing. I know which of Lozini’s people it could be and which ones it couldn’t. I’ve got it narrowed down to just a few. Now you tell me which one it is or I’ll break you apart in here and go ask somebody else.”

  He knows, Farrell thought. He’s narrowed it, but he doesn’t know which one. Could I lie, give him a false name? Which ones has he narrowed it to? What if I told him it was Frank Faran, from the nightclub?

  “If you lie,” the man said, “I’ll come back and kill you. And I’ll get to you just as easy as I did this time.”

  Farrell trembled all over his body. His mind skittered back and forth, torn by fear and the need to work out too many complexities. How could he dare to tell this man the truth? Of course he could deny it later, but still . . .

  The man’s hand drew back, closing into a fist.

  “Buenadella!” Farrell shouted. “Louis Buenadella!”

  Twenty-four

  Harold Calesian stepped from the plane at Tyler National Airport just before one o’clock. The sun beat down from a cloudless sky, and not a breath of wind moved anywhere in the flat expanse of land all around the airport. Calesian walked through the heat to his dark green Buick Le Sabre, unlocked the door, and put his attache case on the back seat. The interior of the car was an oven, from sitting here in this shadeless spot since before eight o’clock this morning, but the air-conditioning cooled the air by the time the car reached the highway.

  Calesian was separated but not divorced, his wife and three daughters remaining in the family home in the suburb of Northglen while Calesian had a four-and-a-half-room apartment in an urban renewal section near downtown. The whole downtown section was between the airport and his home, so it was faster to take the Belt Highway around and wind up coming to the apartment from the opposite direction.

  The building had tenant parking in the basement. Calesian drove in, took the attache case from the back seat, locked up the car, and rode the elevator up to his top-floor apartment nine stories up. His terrace had a view toward downtown—dull by day, but interesting with neon by night. He unlocked his front door and entered an apartment that was a lot warmer and stuffier than it should have been. Frowning, he closed the door behind himself, and still carrying the attache case, went from the foyer into the living room. Was something wrong with the air-conditioning?

  No. The double doors to the terrace were standing open, letting in more heat than the air-conditioning could handle. Walking across the large room to close the doors again, he tried to remember the last time he’d gone out there. Not this morning, certainly; he’d left the apartment first thing this morning, in order to catch that eight a.m. plane. Hadn’t the doors been closed then? But maybe they hadn’t been latched properly, and a breeze had opened them.

  What breeze?

  Calesian paused midway across the room, and looked around. A professional decorator from Aldenberg’s Department Store had done the apartment for him, the living room in blues and grays with chrome accents, low but heavy pieces, modern yet masculine. Nothing looked different, nothing out of place. That feeling of tension in the air was surely no more than the unexpected heat from outside; he was used to this room maintaining a cool dry atmosphere.

  There might have been a morning breeze that opened the doors. There was no reason for anything to be wrong, so it followed that there was nothing wrong. Nevertheless, Calesian gripped the attache case more firmly as he moved the rest of the way across the room and started to close one of the terrace doors.

  Al Lozini was outside there, leaning on the rail facing the doorway, eyes squinting slightly in the sunlight. “Hello, Harold,” he said.

  Startled, Calesian didn’t say or do anything for just a second. Lozini’s behavior was as strange as the fact of his presence here; he wasn’t being tough or hurried or showing any of his normal feistiness. Instead he was just sitting there, one leg swinging slightly while the other supported him on the wrought-iron railing. His manner was calm, emotionless. The harsh sunlight showed his age clearly in his face, but picked out no emotion there.

  Lozini said, “Come on out in the sun. Good for you.”

  Calesian stepped through the doorway, cautious and uncertain. He still held the attache case. He said, “You surprised me, Al.”

  “I was a burglar when I was a boy,” Lozini said. “That lock of yours is butter. I could back up a truck and strip every television set out of this building in forty-five minutes.”

  Calesian had a receding forehead, his black hair thinning badly on top, so that he felt the sun at once. He frowned as much because of that as because of the strangeness of Lozini. “I guess some things we never forget,” he said. “Like getting through locks.”

  “Some things you do forget,” Lozini told him. “Like not trusting anybody.”

  “I don’t follow,” Calesian said, while thinking. He’s on to us.

  “Sit down, Harold,” Lozini said, and nodded at the chaise longue to Calesian’s left.

  Calesian hesitated. It entered his mind that with one fast step forward, one shove with both hands, he could topple Lozini over the railing. Nine stories straight down to cement sidewalk.

  But there’d be no way to answer the questions that would follow such a death, to protect himself against the investigation. And there would definitely be an investigation; not even Calesian swung enough weight in the Police Department to stifle an inquiry into a death like that. Particularly not with the body right in front of his own building.

  And even while he was thinking those things, it seemed to him he saw the thoughts echoed in Lozini’s eyes; as though Lozini had known it would occur to him he might push, and had further known he would realize it was too dangerous to push.

  “Go ahead, Harold. Sit down.”

  Calesian sat sideways on the chaise longue, keeping both feet on the floor. He put the attache case on his lap, rested his forearms on the case. He tried to be as casual and unemotional as Lozini. “I guess you want to talk to me about something,” he said.

  Lozini was silent. He considered Calesian as though trying to decide whether or not to buy him. Calesian waited, keeping a blanket over his tension, and finally Lozini nodded slowly and turned his head to look out toward downtown. “None of those buildings were there when I first moved here,” he said. “The tall ones.”

  “There’ve been a lot of changes,” Calesian agreed.

  Lozini nodded some more, still looking out away from the terrace. Then he turned his head to
gaze at Calesian again. “This building right here wasn’t here,” he said.

  “Three years old,” Calesian said. He knew because he was one of the original tenants.

  “Sitting here,” Lozini said, “waiting for you, I spent a lot of time thinking about the past. The way things used to be. The way I used to be.”

  “Well, everything changes, I guess.” Calesian was listening hard, trying to think ahead of the conversation, waiting for Lozini to touch ground, get to the point.

  “I’m about finished,” Lozini said. “Hard to think about it that way, you know? I look in the mirror, I see an old man, I get surprised. Somebody tells me I forgot a thing I always knew, I can’t figure out how it happened. Be like forgetting to put your pants on.”

  “You’re still all right, Al,” Calesian said. But he was thinking hard, trying to work it out, and he was wondering if Lozini was maybe saying that he was quitting. Was that it? He’d come here to turn in his resignation, to ask to be allowed to retire with no trouble. Believing that, beginning to feel less tense, Calesian said, “You’re still fine, Al, you’ve got years in you.”

  “I’m past the bullshit, Harold,” Lozini said. “I’m almost ready to quit, walk away from it.” His lips curling, he added, “Go play shuffleboard.”

  Calesian watched him, intent on every word. “Almost?” he said.

  “That’s right, Harold.” Lozini reached inside his jacket so slowly, moving so unemotionally, that Calesian couldn’t believe he was actually reaching for a gun until the thing was out and aimed at Calesian’s eyes.

  Calesian’s hands splayed out atop the attache case. He made no head or shoulder movements. He said, “Take it easy, Al.”

  “I’ll go out,” Lozini said, still calm, still casual, “but I’ll go out my own way. I won’t get shoved. I won’t get conned and robbed like an old man.”

  “Al, I don’t know what—”