Butcher's Moon p-16

by Richard Stark

  There were spaces between the orange drapes covering the French doors on the inside; Calesian had stooped to peer through, and when he’d seen Parker he’d immediately backed away from the house, taking shelter amid the hedges so he could think things over.

  So; Parker too had figured things out, but unlike Lozini, he had chosen to go directly to the top. Was he here because he wanted to find out if Buenadella was the man organizing the takeover, or was it because he already knew? Whichever it was, they were obviously just talking in there. Parker wanted his money, not a lot of corpses, so he wouldn’t shoot Buenadella. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be good for Calesian to jump him inside Buenadella’s house. Better to wait for him to come out.

  Which was what he’d done. Except that it hadn’t been Parker all by himself in there; the other one, Green, had also been present, though Calesian hadn’t been able to see him in looking through the space between the drapes. And that was why Calesian had made his mistake.

  If he’d known Parker and Green were both in there, he would have stayed out of sight until both men had emerged completely from the house into the outer daylight. He was fast and he was accurate, well-trained on the pistol range in the basement at headquarters, and he had no doubt he could step out from concealment and drop any two men on earth before they could reach for their own weapons. Even fast-draw artists from rodeos or movies; anybody.

  But he hadn’t known about Green. So the French doors had opened, a man had come out, and Calesian had stepped out from behind the hedge to kill him, to finish him off once and for all. And it was as he was coming out, raising his arm in the formal shooter’s posture, elbow locked, entire arm and hand and gun pointing at that man’s heart, that he saw the second one coming out behind the first and realized his mistake.

  And by God, they were fast. Both men were moving when he squeezed off that first shot. There wasn’t a chance in hell for the first man to get away, but the second one was still inside the house, and he moved fast, and the second shot missed.

  So Calesian ran forward, crouching, weaving, and burst through the French doors to see the interior door slamming on the other side of the den. And Dutch Buenadella was on his feet behind his desk, yelling something Calesian didn’t hear and didn’t pay attention to.

  Goddammit. In the house, actually inside the house, with Buenadella’s family present. The situation couldn’t be worse, but the guy couldn’t be allowed to get out of here alive. Calesian crossed the room on the dead run, yanked open the door, and something grabbed his arm, spun him backward around off balance, and shoved him away toward the side wall.

  Buenadella. Calesian, flinging his arms out to get his balance back, saw Buenadella slamming the door again, and he couldn’t believe it. “Dutch!” he yelled, and surged once more at the door. “He’s getting away!”

  Buenadella stiff-armed him. “God damn you son of a bitch bastard asshole, stop where you are or I swear to God I’ll rip your head off your shoulders and kick it into the street!”

  The tone of voice got to Calesian more than the words. He stopped, panting, adrenalin pumping, and finally saw that Buenadella’s face was purple with rage, and that the rage was directed at him, at Calesian. “Jesus Christ, Dutch,” he said, still panting, “I could have had them both.”

  “I just made a deal with them!”

  Calesian blinked. He lowered the pistol in his right hand and looked dazedly around the room. “You did what?”

  “A deal. You know what a deal is, you half-assed Armenian hot shot? You know what anything is except shoot people?”

  “How a deal? What kind of a deal?”

  “I give them their money back.”

  Calesian stared at him. “I don’t believe it,” he said.

  “For peace and quiet?” Buenadella was leaning forward, not exactly shouting but nevertheless pushing the words very hard into Calesian’s face. “To get my man safely into the mayor’s office? To take over from Lozini with no problems, no questions, nobody gunning for me? When I can write the whole fucking thing off to begin with, and pay out of skim money in the second place, and wind up with the Feds and Al Lozini paying the whole thing between them?”

  “Goddammit, Dutch,” Calesian said, reasonably, apologetically, “how was I supposed to know that? This morning you had a contract out on them.”

  “Never mind this morning. They came here, we talked sense, we made a deal.” Buenadella’s hand swept toward the body lying on the grass just outside the French doors. “And now look.”

  “All I knew was, you wanted them dead.” Calesian self-consciously put his pistol away, trying not to draw attention to it in the course of the movement.

  “You think everybody’s supposed to be dead,” Buenadella said in disgust. “That cop O’Hara, that was a bright stunt. And now this guy. Who else you been killing, hot shot?”

  Calesian became horribly embarrassed; in fact, he felt himself blushing. “Look, Dutch,” he said, and then couldn’t go on.

  Buenadella peered at him in wonder. “By God,” he said, “there is somebody else. Who?”

  “Al Lozini came to see me,” Calesian said unhappily. “At my home. He—”

  “You killed Al?”

  “He had a gun on me, Dutch, I couldn’t—”

  “You killed Al Lozini? Do you realize how many friends Al has around the country? Do you realize how many—” Buenadella stopped, spread his arms out wide, appealed to heaven. “Give me strength.”

  “There wasn’t any choice, Dutch. I didn’t want to, for Christ’s—”

  “Didn’t want to? You’ve killed us all, you blood-drinking bastard! Karns, Culligan, a dozen of them. They’d let us retire Al, everybody gets old, everybody has to move over, we were making that play out, everything fine. But kill him? I know three guys off the top of my head that know Al Lozini thirty years; they’ll send an army in here when they find out Al’s dead.”

  “They won’t,” Calesian said. “Nobody goes that far for a dead man, there’s no point.”

  “They won’t deal with me,” Buenadella said. “Never again. I’m through, I’m finished. Nobody will deal with me. Even if I give them your head on a plate, say it was your idea and I punished you, they won’t believe me and they won’t deal with me.”

  That much was right, and Calesian knew it. Casting around, feeling helpless, feeling as though he was being unfairly blamed for a series of bad happenings for which he shouldn’t really have to carry the weight, he looked around the room again and his eye lit on the body outside on the grass. “Then,” he said, “we palm it off on them.”

  Buenadella frowned. “What?”

  “Those two guys. Your deal with them is blown anyway. So we claim they killed Lozini while trying to get their money.” “Why would they kill Al?”

  ”To deal with you. They weren’t getting anywhere with Lozini, and they knew you were next in line, so they killed him and came to you. To threaten they’d do the same to you and deal with the next man down the line.” Leaning forward, speaking softly and earnestly, Calesian said, “It’ll play, Dutch. It’ll read just like the truth.”

  “Christ,” Buenadella said, looking around, thinking it over. “What a goddam mess.”

  “It’ll play, Dutch.”

  Buenadella said, “But Parker’s supposed to know Walter Karns. What if it comes down to our word against his?”

  “We have to kill him,” Calesian said. Hastily, seeing the expression on Buenadella’s face, he added, “I’m not being trigger-happy, Dutch, it’s the simple truth. If they’re both dead, there’s no more problem.”

  Buenadella looked over at the one out on the lawn. “Is he dead?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Take a look.”

  Calesian shrugged and went over to the body and rolled it over onto its back. Blood gouted from the chest, high on the left side. Too much blood, and too high on the chest. Frowning, Calesian touched the guy on the side of the neck, and damn if there wasn’t a faint
pulse there. The pulse was keeping the blood flowing out of the wound.

  It was seeing the second one in the doorway that had distracted Calesian, thrown his aim slightly off. Two inches from where he’d wanted the bullet to hit.

  Buenadella was standing next to Calesian, looking down with distaste. “He really is dead, huh?”

  Reluctantly, not looking up, Calesian said, “No.”

  Fear in Buenadella found release in anger. “Goddammit! You can’t even do that right! Killing’s all you know how to do, and you don’t even know how to do that.”

  A dull anger moved in Calesian, but he didn’t have the will to follow through. He could defend himself, he could yell back, he could get up and punch Buenadella in the face. All he did was stay on one knee next to the dying man and watch the blood pulse out, while Buenadella’s words ranted above him.

  Twenty-nine

  Parker couldn’t stay in one place. Rage drove him, and frustration. He waited in Lozini’s house for twenty minutes, then had the houseman call Shevelly and Faran and the fat lawyer Walters and the swinging accountant Simms, but nobody knew where Lozini had gone. Parker couldn’t wait any longer. He was prowling the living room, pacing back and forth, aware of Lozini’s family huddled away upstairs, and after the last useless call he grabbed the phone book and looked up Harold Calesian.

  He was listed, with an address on something called Elm Way. Parker tossed the phone book at a chair and told the houseman, “When your boss comes back, tell him to stay here. I’ll keep in touch.”

  “Yes, sir.” The houseman had the pale face and out-thrust cheekbones of someone who’s terrified without knowing what to be afraid of. He hurried ahead of Parker to hold the front door open, then seemed reluctant to close it again after Parker had gone on through, as though afraid Parker might think it an insult.

  Parker drove to the nearest gas station and got directions to Elm Way. It was on the other side of the city, past downtown, so the attendant recommended he go the other way to the Belt Highway and take it around.

  Elm Way sounded suburban, ranch-style houses on green plots penetrated by slowly winding blacktop streets, but when Parker reached it the street was straight, concrete, and flanked by big-shouldered apartment buildings, upper middle income, urban renewal, less than ten years old.

  Calesian’s building was the biggest of them, taking up a full block width on the right side of the street. The shrubbery at the base of the building looked too green, as though it were artificial, as though in winter it would still be there, arsenic-green, thrusting out of the snow.

  There was tenant parking in the basement. Parker drove down the ramp from sunlight to fluorescent light, and found most of the spaces empty; it was Sunday, and the Sunday drivers were out. He backed the Impala into a space near the exit, and took the elevator up to the first floor, where the mailboxes told him Calesian’s apartment was 9-C, at the top of the building. He rode up there, rang the bell twice, and popped the lock with a credit card.

  The apartment was cold, the air chilly and flat. Parker moved silently across the foyer, looked across the living room at the view of Tyler through the closed terrace doors on the far side, saw the thing wrapped in plastic on the floor near those doors, and went on to check out the rest of the apartment.

  It was empty. None of the drawers or closets contained anything that he wanted to know or study; but Calesian wasn’t the type to leave evidence against himself lying around.

  Finally he went back to the living room. He thought he knew what that thing was, wrapped in plastic in there on the floor. Kneeling, he folded the translucent plastic back.

  Yes. Lozini.

  Thirty

  Driving across town, Ted Shevelly felt very nervous. He didn’t like going to Dutch Buenadella’s house in the first place, and he doubly didn’t like it that Harold Calesian was the one who’d summoned him. And to make matters worse, he couldn’t find Al Lozini, couldn’t talk the situation over with him to find out what the hell was going on.

  Turning in at the curving blacktop driveway to Dutch’s house, he noticed the TV repair truck across the street, knew it meant either the Feds or the state CID were taking movies of his arrival, and didn’t much care. The cops already knew who he was, it hardly mattered whether he visited Dutch Buenadella or not. Besides, his main trouble wasn’t cops. At least, not the cops outside. His main trouble was Buenadella and his tame cop on the inside, Calesian.

  It was one of Buenadella’s rougher-looking goons who led him through to the den, where Buenadella was sitting at his desk, looking uncomfortable and unhappy and even a little sick, while Calesian paced back and forth, a slow and measured tread, frowning at the floor, obviously thinking very hard. He looked up when Shevelly entered, and stopped in the middle of the room to say, “Hello, Ted.”

  Shevelly felt it important to maintain the hierarchy. He didn’t know why he had that feeling, but he followed it. “Hello, Dutch,” he said to Buenadella, then turned to nod at Calesian. “Harold.”

  But it was too late to maintain a chain of command. Calesian had taken over here, and Shevelly saw that right away. While Buenadella sat at his desk looking worried, his eyes never leaving Calesian, it was Calesian who did the talking, his voice hard and authoritative as again he paced back and forth. “We’ve got a problem, Ted,” he said. “It seems Parker and Green killed Al Lozini.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, Ted.” Calesian paused to touch Shevelly’s arm, then moved on. “I know you liked Al, I hate to have you hear it this way.”

  “What the hell did—” Shevelly couldn’t encompass it. “What for?”

  “I think they got impatient,” Calesian said. “I think that just comes down to it, they got impatient. They looked around, and decided Dutch here would probably be the number-one boy if Al checked out, so they dropped Al and got in touch with Dutch and told him he had twenty-four hours to cough up their seventy-three thousand or they’d kill him and deal with Ernie Dulare.”

  “Holy Christ,” Shevelly said.

  “It all happened this morning,” Calesian said. “Dutch called me, and between us we set up an ambush for them, Dutch told them to come here and collect the money. When they got here we shot one of them, but the other one got away.”

  “Which one?”

  “Parker.”

  “You shot the wrong one,” Shevelly said.

  Calesian shrugged. “They’re both hard cases,” he said. “Parker’s the more obvious, that’s all. The point is, he’s still out there. We need to finish him off before he makes more trouble. We’re in trouble enough with Tuesday’s election as it is.”

  Shevelly rubbed a palm across his forehead. “Every goddam thing at once,” he said. “And Al— I can’t get over it.”

  Buenadella finally spoke up. “I loved Al Lozini,” he said. His voice was trembling as he said it; Shevelly, looking at him, suspected the tremble was caused more by fear than by love, but he didn’t make any comment.

  Calesian said, “The point is, we’ve got to get Parker. We need to bring him in again, and finish him off.”

  Shevelly frowned at him. “Bring him in? How?”

  “I know how to get in touch with him,” Calesian said. “I can make an arrangement with him, a meeting. You go to the meeting, you tell him the story, and he comes in.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Shevelly said. “Why’s he going to meet with me? He’ll think it’s another trap.”

  “He’ll pick the spot,” Calesian said. “It won’t be a trap, so what do we care where you meet? The point is to tell him the story, that brings him in.”

  “What kind of a story,” Shevelly said, “is going to make somebody like Parker come back in again where you can get your hands on him?”

  “A story with evidence,” Calesian said. He strode to Buenadella’s desk and picked up a small white box, the sort of box that inexpensive earrings or cuff links come in, nestling on a bit of cotton gauze. Shevelly noticed Buenadella l
ooking at the box with repugnance, his lips drawing back from his teeth as though he might suddenly throw up.

  Calesian brought the box over to Shevelly. “This evidence,” he said, and opened the box, and inside, on the inevitable bit of cotton gauze, was a finger, severed just below the second knuckle.

  Thirty-one

  When Parker got back to Lozini’s place, the houseman told him, “There was a telephone message for you. Not from Mr. Lozini.”

  No, not from Lozini. Parker said, “Who from?”

  “Detective Calesian. He left a number for you to call him back.”

  Parker looked at the piece of paper: a name, seven digits. “This number mean anything to you?”

  “Yes, sir,” the houseman said. Sometime in the last hour he had either lost his fear or grown used to it; in any case, he was all right now, operating without that buzzing sense of tension. “That’s one of Mr. Buenadella’s home lines,” he said.

  “All right,” Parker said. “Get me Dulare, Shevelly, Faran, Walters, and Simms. I want them to meet me here, all five of them, right now. I’ll use the hall phone here, you use a different one.”

  The houseman looked doubtful. “Is this okay with Mr. Lozini? I don’t have any instructions about you.”

  “You know those five names,” Parker told him. “Your boss wants them here.”

  That made sense to the houseman. “Okay,” he said. “I just wanted to check, you know?”

  Parker turned away to the hall phone, and after a second the houseman left. Parker dialed the number from the piece of paper, and on the first ring it was answered in Buenadella’s voice, sounding wary. “Yeah? Hello?”

  ”This is Parker.”

  “Oh.” Buenadella sounded almost relieved, as though some other caller might have been even worse news. “Listen, Parker,” he said, “that wasn’t my idea. That was a mistake.”

  Calesian’s mistake; Parker had already figured that out. And Calesian was in the room with Buenadella, which was why Buenadella had identified the caller by name.