Stan Devers said, “While they send him a finger a day. That’s sweet.”
Hurley said, “So what do you want, Parker?”
“I want Grofield back,” Parker said, “and I want my money. And I want those people dead.”
Hurley gestured, wanting more. He said, “So?”
“So I set you people up with scores, you go do them, you’ve got good money you wouldn’t have had. You’ll all be finished, back here, by when? Three, four in the morning?”
Most of them shrugged in agreement. Hurley bobbed his head, saying, “Probably. Then what?”
“Then you come with me,” Parker said. “The twelve of us hit Buenadella’s house and get Grofield out of there. And if they moved him somewhere, we find out where and go hit that place.” He checked off names on his fingers, saying, “And we make them dead. Buenadella. Calesian. Dulare.”
His intensity had startled them a little. Nobody said anything until Handy McKay, speaking very quietly, said, “That’s not like you.”
What kind of shit was this? Parker had expected a back-up from Handy, not questions. He said, “What’s not like me?”
“A couple things,” Handy said. “For one, to go to all this trouble for somebody else. Grofield, me, anybody. We all of us here know we got to take care of ourselves, we’re not the Travelers Aid Society. You, too. And the same with Grofield. What happens to him is up to him.”
“Not when they send him to me piece by piece,” Parker said. “If they kill him, that’s one thing. If they turn him over to the law, get him sent up, that’s his lookout. But these bastards rang me in on it.”
Handy spread his hands, letting that point go. “The other thing,” he said, “is revenge. I’ve never seen you do anything but play the hand you were dealt. Now all of a sudden you want a bunch of people dead.”
Parker got to his feet. He’d been patient a long time, he’d explained things over and over, and now he was getting itchy. Enough was enough. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s like me or not. These people nailed my foot to the floor, I’m going around in circles, I’m not getting anywhere. When was it like me to take lumps and just walk away? I’d like to burn this city to the ground, I’d like to empty it right down to the basements. And I don’t want to talk about it any more, I want to do it. You’re in, Handy, or you’re out. I told you the setup, I told you what I want, I told you what you’ll get for it. Give me a yes or a no.”
Tom Hurley said, “What’s the goddam rush? We got over an hour before we can hit any of these things.”
Stan Devers, getting to his feet, said, “Just time enough for a nap. I’m in, Parker.” He turned to Wycza, beside him. “Dan?”
Wycza wasn’t quite ready to be pushed. He frowned up at Devers, frowned across the room at Parker, seemed on the verge of telling everybody to go drop dead, and then abruptly-shrugged and said, “Sure, what the hell. I like a little boom-boom sometimes.”
Handy said, “Parker, I was never anything but in, you know that.”
Ed Mackey said, “Shit, we’re all in. I know Grofield, he’s a pleasant guy, we don’t want anybody out there dismantling him.”
Mike Carlow, the driver who hadn’t had anything at all to say up till now, said, “I don’t know this guy Grofield from a dune buggy. In fact, I don’t even know any of you people. But I know Parker, and I’m in.”
They were all in. Parker, looking from face to face, saw that none of them was even thinking of bowing out. Some of the tension eased out of Parker’s shoulders and back. “All right,” he said. “All right.”
Forty-two
In the den, Calesian paced the floor, prowling back and forth while Buenadella sat at the desk with furrowed forehead and watched him as though he were a one-man tennis match. The French doors were closed against the night’s mugginess but the curtains were drawn back, and through the glass panes the floodlit lawn could be seen, the grass and shrubbery and trees all an artificial unhealthy shade of green in the glaring light.
Calesian was sure he was on top of things. He’d nailed down the relationship between himself and Buenadella, he’d had a good productive meeting this afternoon with George Farrell, he’d been present and listened to during the first exploratory meeting this afternoon between Dutch and Ernie Dulare, and he had Parker on the run. And still he was keyed up, tensed and poised and ready as though a starting pistol were about to be fired somewhere and he had to be ready to leap.
It was waiting for the election, that’s all. Nine o’clock tomorrow morning the polls would open, eight o’clock tomorrow night they’d close again, and then it would all be over. Everything would be in place, all the relationships assured, the reins securely in the right hands, and no more possibility of anything lousing up, or of anybody making trouble.
Parker, for instance. If he came back after tomorrow, if he really was stupid enough to come back to this town, it wouldn’t matter how much noise and fuss and trouble he made. The entire local organization could shut down for a day or two and go find the bastard like a thousand cats looking for one rat in a barn, and that would be the end of him. If he ever came back. Which wasn’t in any case going to happen.
There was a tap at the door. Calesian glanced over at Dutch, and saw him sitting there with his eyebrows lifted, waiting to find out whether he should let the person in or not. His own den in his own house, and he was letting Calesian tell him whether or not to say Come in; that was how far Calesian had come into control, and he resisted the impulse to smile as he nodded: Yes, you can let the person enter.
“Come in,” called Buenadella, and Dr. Beiny walked in, looking disgruntled and sleepy. But that was the way he always looked—except for those moments when he’d got himself in deep water again, when he would look wide awake and terrified.
Calesian said, “How is he?”
“Breathing,” the doctor said. “That’s about all.”
“What about the finger?”
Dr. Beiny looked puzzled. “What finger?”
“You’re supposed to take one off.”
The doctor looked to Buenadella, and Buenadella said, “I told him not to, Hal.”
Mutiny? Calesian said, “What the hell for?”
“He said it was too dangerous, the guy could die of shock maybe. And we don’t know where Parker is, how to even send the thing to him.”
The pleading note in Buenadella’s voice reassured Calesian; not quite a mutiny. And it was true they didn’t know where Parker was, or how to get in touch with him. Messages had been left at Al Lozini’s house, and with Jack Walters and Nate Simms, but so far the guy hadn’t popped to the surface anywhere. Maybe he wouldn’t, maybe he’d had enough and just ran away. Calesian tried to suit that action to his memory of Parker, and as time went on, it seemed to him more and more likely that a run-out was just what Parker had done. So, magnanimously, he told Dutch and the doctor both, “That’s okay, then. We’ll leave the guy alone for now. But, Doctor, if we hear from Parker I want you on tap. I want you to get over here with your little saw double fast.”
“Whatever you say.”
Buenadella said, “But what if it kills him?”
”After tomorrow,” Calesian said, “we don’t need him alive anyway.”
“I don’t want to hear that,” Dr. Beiny said. He was suddenly in a nervous hurry. “I’m going home,” he said. “If you need me. call me and I’ll come right back.”
Calesian gave him a mocking smile. “Good of you to make house calls, Doctor,” he said.
Beiny bowed himself out, closing the door behind him, and Dutch said, “You figure to kill him, don’t you?”
Thinking the doctor was meant. Calesian frowned at Dutch and said, “What? What for?”
“You keep saying we don’t need him alive after tomorrow.”
“Oh, Green. Well, what the hell, he’s dead already, isn’t he? If it wasn’t for our doctor, he’d be dead a long time ago.”
“He’s alive, Hal.”
“A lot of people are dying,” Buenadella said gloomily. “And where the hell is Frankie Faran?”
“Under a rock,” Calesian said. “He’s deep in hiding, a bottle and some broad. Don’t you worry about Frank Faran, that’s one guy that runs when he sees the whites of their eyes.”
“He should have said something.” Buenadella fidgeted with papers and pencils on his desk. “He shouldn’t just run away like that.”
“Relax,” Calesian told him. “We’re on top of it. Tomorrow’s the election, and then it’s all over.”
“I wish it was Wednesday,” Buenadella said.
Calesian laughed. He wished the same thing, but he couldn’t admit that to Dutch. So he laughed, and condescendingly said, “Poor old Dutch,” and walked over to gaze in easy unconcern out the French doors at the floodlit lawn. He looked up toward the sky, but the bright lights kept him from seeing anything but blackness. He kept looking up anyway, his stance deliberately carefree as he gazed upward as though watching a milk-white full moon ride across the sky.
Forty three
It was the night of the new moon: no moon. Earlier in the evening a pencil-line arc of white had denned the lightless moon’s location in the sky, but by eleven-thirty that line had narrowed to nothing. Stars shimmered in the heat haze, surrounded by black sky.
State Highway 219, angling northwest out of the city, was as dark and unseeable as the pine woods through which it cut. A man walking along the road would have had to guide himself by what was under his feet—the hardness of concrete, the rattle of gravel, the yielding texture of dirt—rather than what was in front of his eyes; except when an automobile would come along, following its own headlights through the dark.
At quarter past eleven a recently stolen Mercury Montego drove by, northbound, driven by Mike Carlow, with Stan Devers beside him and Wycza spread out on the back seat. Ten minutes later Nick Dalesia followed, with Hurley and Mackey both next to him in the front seat of their just-stolen Plymouth Fury. Occasional cars passed them southbound, but they overtook no one else going north.
Seven miles north of the Tyler city line, in a blaze of red and yellow neon that kept the night slightly at bay, was a rambling two-story white clapboard farmhouse now operating under different management. The sign out by the road that said
TONY FLORIO’S
R
I
V
I
E
R
A
Dining — Dancing
Appearing Nitely
Paul Patrick
and
The Heat Exchange
might have been airlifted by helicopter directly from the Strip in Las Vegas. The pine trees visible across the road in the sign’s glow looked unreal, a clumsy stage setting, as though the sign had a greater vitality and truth than they, and had overwhelmed them.
Monday was a good night at Tony Florio’s Riviera; in fact, every night was a good night there. The blacktop parking lot out behind the main building was over half full when, at twenty past eleven, the Plymouth drove in and joined the Mercury already parked there.
Inside, Tony Florio himself was on hand to greet his regular guests and to give a smile and a friendly word to any passing transient who recognized him. A one-time light-heavyweight contender, Florio’s body had grown rounder and bulkier since the days when he’d made his living in the ring, but the pockmarked square-jawed face hadn’t changed much at all, and with the steady secret use of hair dye, the mass of tight curly black hair cascading over his forehead was just the same as it had been in the days when it was the trademark used to identify Tony Florio by all the sports-page cartoonists. Florio’s eyes were clear, his handshake strong, his manner expansive and confident, and so far as most of his customers knew, this was Tony Florio’s own place, set up and paid for out of the money he’d earned during his years as a professional boxer. Very few people knew that Florio, like most professional boxers, had been in his heyday nothing but a commodity, pieces of him owned by individuals and groups from all over, every fight purse being sliced up a hundred different ways, and with the federal government the first in line. Whatever had been left in those days Florio had spent himself, at once, in places very like this Riviera.
But what difference did it make who owned the place, so long as it was fun to go? And for the older male patrons, Tony Florio was still a recognizable name, and to shake his hand was a pleasure of a kind not often available in a backwater like Tyler.
When Dalesia and Hurley and Mackey walked in, Florio looked them over from his casual spot near the headwaiter and did a saloonkeeper’s rapid fix on them: They were strangers, new to this place. They didn’t give the impression of being local citizens, so they were more likely to be traveling men, passing through town and wanting an evening’s entertainment. They would have a few hundred on them, but they would neither make nor break the bank. It was possible that a cabdriver in town had steered them out here for a late dinner in the main dining room—called, obscurely, The Spa—but not likely. They were definitely not the type for The Corral, where younger local couples danced to the rock music of The Heat Exchange. Were they for upstairs? If so, they would have a card with them, from one of the six desk clerks, nine bartenders, and seven cabdrivers in town whose judgment Florio trusted.
And when Florio stepped forward to give them a glad hello, it turned out they did have a card, but the source of it was a surprise. Looking at the familiar name in the familiar handwriting on the familiar business card, Florio said, “Ah hah.” He looked up, reassessing these three, saying, “So you know Frankie Faran, do you?”
“From good old union days,” Ed Mackey said, and gave Florio a tight hard grin.
Florio recognized that grin, and that kind of man. It was the sort of expression you found sometimes with professional sparring partners, guys whose goal in life was to prove they could take more without flinching than anybody else in the world. Men like that were dangerous because they almost always wanted to test themselves against somebody or other, but once you knew how to handle them, they were babes in the woods. This one would throw away his last dime upstairs, given the opportunity.
So let’s give him the opportunity. “Well, any friend of Frank’s,” Florio said. “Would you boys care for a drink before dinner?” Then, when he saw them glancing off to their left at the entrance to the bar—called The Salon—he gave them a big smile and said, “Not in there. Private.” He turned and gestured to a waiter who wasn’t a waiter, but whose job it was to escort customers who weren’t going to The Salon or The Spa or The Corral, and when the waiter came briskly over, Florio said, “Show these gents to my office, will you, Angy?” And to the three men he said, “I’ll be along in just a minute.”
“That’s very nice of you, Mr. Florio,” Nick Dalesia said, and the other two nodded, with slightly belligerent smiles on their faces.
In the dining room, Mike Carlow and Stan Devers and Dan Wycza were eating a late supper of omelette or steak tartare. Carlow was seated so he could see the main entrance, where the exchange between Florio and the other three had taken place, and now he said, “Well, they’re in.” Neither of the others said anything or looked around from their food, and after the one comment Carlow, too, went back to eating.
* * *
Wiss and Elkins left the Pontiac—their own car—on a side street, and walked down London Avenue past the darkened windows of the closed shops toward the Mature Art Theater, a block and a half away. It was twenty to twelve; London Avenue was deserted. The last show at the Mature Art had let out fifteen minutes ago, a couple of dozen hunch-shouldered men who had wandered off in separate directions, none of them looking as though they’d had much
of a good time. Now the sidewalks were empty of pedestrians, the street empty of traffic. Night lights shone in the interiors of stores, the sodium arc streetlights spread their bright pink glow on silence and inactivity, and the sky was as black as the velvet in a jeweler’s window display.
Wiss carried a small black leather bag with a brass catch, like the bags doctors carried in the days when they made house calls. Elkins strolled with his hands in his pockets, looking constantly left and right, far ahead, back over his shoulder. They moved along like a pair of workers off a night shift somewhere, and when they reached the Mature Art Theater they stopped and looked at the posters.
A double feature was playing currently at the Mature Art: Man Hungry and Passion Doll. The posters featured black-and-white photos of slightly overweight girls in their underwear kneeling on beds or pulling one another’s hair or kissing one another or cowering with arms raised self-protectively in overlit corners of bare rooms.
There were four glass doors leading to the theater lobby, but three of them featured red arrows pointing toward the fourth. Just inside that fourth door a chrome railing led the customer past the cashier’s window, where money was paid but no ticket was given. By eliminating tickets, the management—Dutch Buenadella—found it possible to lie to everyone about the number of paying customers who had seen the show.
There were strong advantages in being able to lie about the size of the audience. Tonight, for instance, a typical Monday night—a slow night generally for dirty movies—one hundred eighteen people had paid five dollars apiece to see the show. Of each five dollars, not quite one dollar was due the city and the state in sales and other taxes, a dollar-sixty was to be turned over to the distributor of the movies for their rental, and another fraction was to be paid the projectionists’ and ushers’ unions for their pension funds; leaving about two-forty out of each five dollars for the owner of the theater, before overhead. But the books for tonight would show that eighty-seven people had paid to see the double feature, meaning that thirty-one people, paying one hundred fifty-five dollars, had not been counted. Which meant that eighty dollars and sixty cents would not be paid the city, the state, the distributor, and the pension funds, and that next March the remaining seventy-seven dollars and fifty cents would not be declared as part of the corporation’s income for tax purposes.
Butcher's Moon p-16 Page 22
