You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  “Yes,” he said. “Are you sure it’s them? My eyesight isn’t that good.”

  “Yeah, it’s them.” We weren’t the only ones who’d noticed. The black guy I thought I’d seen at La Guardia was in motion too. “Now do what I said and no more.”

  Gambling in America is like being in a machine. Ignore the advertising. You are not king of the castle. Beneath the thinnest layer of glitz money can buy, it’s Chaplin’s Modern Times, a spinning wheel factory, the patrons lined up like cows, the machines at their teats, milking the money out as efficiently as possible.

  The Caribbean casino is less obsessive. The air and the psychic noise are less tobacco-stained. Maybe because you can’t get there by car or bus.

  Frank and Freddy looked real relaxed. Frank’s silvery hair was freshly blow-dried and set. He wore a turquoise Ban-Lon shirt, yellow golfing slacks, and white patent-leather shoes with a webbed top. Except for the gold bracelet with half-inch links, the gold chain thick as a finger, and the diamond-studded watch, he looked just like a golfing WASP. Freddy wore madras Bermuda shorts in extra wide. And a sport jacket to cover his gun. Frank and Freddy sat down at the alcoved high rollers’ blackjack table. There was a third guy with them, that I didn’t know. Not only did the black staff wait on their every whim; even white people came out to service them. VIPs indeed.

  The casino manager, in his white Bogie dinner jacket, dropped by to chat. I looked to the doors, wondering where Guido was. When I looked back, the manager was beckoning one of the employees over, a croupier I had talked to when I was looking for the two mobsters. The manager, it seemed to me, was instructing the croupier to tell Frankie something.

  Right.

  Time to fade. I slithered toward the doors, heading out the way I came in. I saw the third man rise from the table. He was going in the same direction. I held back and let him get ahead of me, then I followed him out.

  On the patio, a reggae-for-whites band was doing the island version of a White Rapper song.

  Sunday suburb gone to seed,

  Tuesday’s child growing weed,

  On Wednesday Reagan did decreed

  that old morality must succeed.

  The third man walked past the bandstand. Heading toward the dock. Guido was chatting amiably with one of the dock boys. A deckhand stood at the bow of their boat. He held a rifle.

  Thursday’s child is overseas.

  Back on Friday with the keys,

  Oh. Crack-crack.

  Moral disease,

  Oh. Crack-crack.

  Mommas cryin’

  babies please

  don’ wear

  dose dungarees

  first step to degeneracies.

  The third man walked up to Guido and began speaking to him. About two sentences were exchanged. He put the arm on Guido. I started moving forward, but by the time I reacted, Guido had been hustled aboard.

  I knew it. From the moment I saw his collar, he was bad news. Now I had to go after him. Whether I wanted to or not.

  When something happens to a man’s partner, he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him; he was your partner, and you’re supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business, when something happens to one of your organization; it’s bad business to let someone get away with it. It’s bad all around—bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere.

  My gun was in our suite. Which would be the next place they’d be looking for me. To beat them there—and avoid the elevators—I took the stairs. All four flights. No one had gotten there yet. I went to the gun first. A clip was in. I chambered a round, put the safety on, put it in my belt. Then I grabbed a small travel bag. I shoved all my cash in the bottom. The phone started to ring.

  I didn’t answer. It continued to shrill while I stuffed some clothes on top of the money. The phone stopped. Passports. I put the passports in the bag. Someone started knocking at the door. “Housekeeping,” a voice called through the door. But the voice was male, white, and New York.

  It was time to leave.

  I went out on the balcony. Two-thirty, right on schedule, the cloud cover was darkening the beach. The first drops of rain fell.

  I was, quite frankly, a little hesitant about the stuntwork involved in an exterior departure from the fifth floor. I heard the door opening inside the suite. To convince myself that I had to do what I had to do, I tossed my bag onto the balcony below. There was four grand in it. Even John Straightman wouldn’t accept an expense item: $4,000—cash misplaced. I had to follow it down.

  I dropped down and hung by my hands. A Bahamian gardener looked up, regarded me with amusement, and carefully stepped away. Just in case I missed. I swung in, released, and landed beside my money. Without mishap.

  In the movie-of-the-week version there is a beautiful actress—hair by Jonathan, wardrobe by DeMille, breasts by Silicone—waiting in that room. Ready, after one look at my honest brown eyes and hunky shoulders, to aid and abet me. Whilst satisfying my every lust.

  I got an empty room. I’m not complaining.

  The glass balcony door was locked. I tapped a hand-size hole with the butt of the SIG, unlocked the doors, stepped in, walked on out the front, and went down the stairs. I found my way, by smell, toward the service entrance and exited beside the garbage. Outside, it was coming down. Thick and steady, like a locker room shower.

  I made for the dock.

  The storm was growing. We were in for more than the fifteen-minute-as-advertised tropical special. More rain, more wind, more waves. That was going to help. Everyone had headed for shelter. Including the guard in the bow. I could get to the boat without being seen.

  If there were no more than two of the opposition on board, I might be able to get Guido out. I had a gun. And no desire to actually fire it. It’s not that I don’t enjoy killing people. Anyone who has ever watched TV knows that once it’s been clearly established that the victims are bad guys—dope pushers, toxic-waste dumpers, crooked lawyers, IRS agents—slaughter is a lot of fun. But if the Bahamian police had not been watching the same shows, I would be stuck with attorney’s fees, a time-consuming and probably embarrassing trial (those false passports), and incarceration for fifteen years to life.

  The difficulty was getting on board without alerting anyone.

  There was a gangplank. If I crawled up, spreading my weight, it would cause a less abrupt shift. For Guido? Did I owe it to Mom? I thought back to those nights, a child sick and feverish, my mother staying up, soothing my fevered brow, spoon-feeding me that awful soup she used to make from a can. Yes, Mom, I got down on my knees and crawled up the gangplank in the drenching rain for you. We’re even now. At least for the soup.

  It brought me up near the rear of the cabin, the bow to my left, the stern and the entrance to my right. I dumped the luggage bag there, then slithered across the deck, keeping my silhouette low. I reached the cabin in just four slithers. Rising slowly, I tried to get a look inside. Then I heard a noise to my right. I slumped down to a prone position, gun out in front of me, and began crawling toward the stern.

  At the end of the cabin wall, I gathered my feet under me but stayed as low as I could.

  The rifle appeared first, before the man.

  That was my moment. I could reach him before he saw me. I rose, leaving my gun on the deck, and made a grab for the rifle barrel; got both hands on it and rolled back, ripping it away from him. I’d meant to do a neat judo-class rollover, but my feet slid out from under me. I reached out with my right hand to grab something, but there was nothing, and I went down hard. He yelled. I grunted. My elbow hit the deck just after my back. My left hand went numb, and the rifle flew away over my head, sliding on the wet deck. I tried to get up, but it took a beat before my lungs could get enough air to let me do it. Up on my hands and knees, I went scrambling for the SIG. Not knowing where he was.

  I got the pistol, then went skiddi
ng around the corner. He was disappearing into the cabin. I went after him. Without thinking. Which is the only way to do something like that.

  Inside the cabin I saw Guido on one side. It looked like he’d been hanged. But I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention, because the other guy was going for another weapon. It was one of those squat, ugly things—an Uzi, or a MAC-10, or one of their cousins—that burp out six hundred rounds a minute. So much firepower that even a dead man can kill with it.

  I charged. Hoping, I guess, that the clip was out, that the safety was on, that something was wrong enough that I would get to him before he could fire.

  He was slow. A few beats later, after I’d hit him, my brain realized what my eyes had seen. He was operating with one hand. My weight slammed him into the cabin wall. The breath blew out of him. Then his lunch, which had been largely liquid. Regurgitated rum and Coke cascaded down over my head and back.

  I jumped away. He continued to vomit. He couldn’t breathe. And he was trying to nurse the wrist that had snapped when I took his rifle. I thought it was safe to leave him be. I picked up the Uzi, put the SIG in my pants, and took a look at Guido.

  “Hello, Anthony,” he said, with that same calm, placid smile that I hated. He had one rope around his scrawny neck; a second tied his hands behind him; and both were fixed to a cleat near the ceiling. “I don’t want to die.”

  It was a good knot. A bitch of a knot. Eventually I just gave up on it. I found a knife in the galley, then cut Guido down.

  The guy on the floor was getting it together. I caught his movement out of the corner of my eye.

  “Move, you asshole, and I’ll kill you,” I said, informationally.

  “Drop it, you asshole,” Fat Freddy Ventana said from behind me.

  I dropped the Uzi. It fell loud. Then I turned slowly. There were three: Freddy with his .38, Frankie, and the one I didn’t know. He held a Clint Eastwood magnum.

  He went down first. With a very stunned look on his face.

  The next bullet hit Frank Felacco from behind. Frankie screamed. Which was the first sound of violence, the first anyone of us knew that someone was shooting from outside the cabin door. Freddy turned, slowly, the way a semi does. The next bullet hit him, but he kept going. The guy I had beat up grabbed the Uzi off the floor.

  I pulled out the SIG and fired at him. I think, by then, Freddy was shooting. My shot was right on. I got the guard in the head. The far side of his face exploded. But his hands clenched, convulsed in reflex, and the Uzi started emptying its clip. The recoil moved his dead arm in an arc. Glass and metal and wood shattered and split and flew around the room along with the bullets.

  I shoved Guido to the floor and threw my body over his.

  It was from there that I watched the automatic fire from the dead man cut Fat Freddy in half.

  Finally it was over. Silence, silence. Then the sound of rain came through the silence. Reality seeping back in. I stood up and rushed for the door. It was still coming down thick. I thought I saw, through the storm, a man slow from a run to a walk. He was black, and maybe he was the man I’d seen at the airport in New York, who may have been the tourist I spotted earlier in the day. Sent by Santino Scorcese because of Guido’s call. Then again, maybe that was three different people.

  I grabbed my suitcase from where it still lay, beside the gangplank, then I went back in and started checking bodies. Frank Felacco was still alive. Not very alive, but doing that last-breath number.

  When somebody arrived, if somebody arrived before we disappeared, I wanted to be found as a priest. An innocent priest. I fumbled in the bag. Yes, the passports were there. Real and phony. And two black short-sleeved shirts with collars. I tossed one to Guido, while I squeezed into the other. He didn’t react.

  “Put it on, put it on,” I told him, and he began to do so.

  I knelt down in the blood and took a closer look at Frankie. He saw the collar.

  “You really a priest?” he said.

  “Why did you hit Arthur Scorcese?” I said.

  “Father … ”

  “Come on, come on, Frankie tell me about Arthur.”

  “I wanna make confession,” he said. “I’m dying. I know I’m dying. Fuckin’ Freddy, so fuckin’ slow.”

  “I’ll handle this,” Guido said, back in costume.

  “Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Find out about Scorcese.”

  I stood up and watched Guido kneel beside Frank. He took a cross from somewhere and held it up to Felacco.

  “Confession … and the last rites, Father … You gotta.”

  “First you must make confession,” Guido said, leaning close to him.

  It was an eerie scene. The old doubting priest kneeling among the dead. Felacco with the life visibly draining from him. The cross held up. A pond of blood flowing around them. The madness had shattered all but two of the small, low-voltage lamps. The light was dim and soft.

  The senses return one by one. I became aware of odors, and of hot and cold. The man I didn’t know had died pretty clean. But the guard’s brains and much of his face were spread across the floor. Blood drained from his head, urine from his crotch. The blood was hotter than the tropics. All that blood raised the temperature of the cabin. Freddy was worst of all. Most of the fire had hit him in the back, after he turned, and the exit wounds, the big ones, were in front. Body fat, intestines, organs, were all falling out of him. The room reeked like an abattoir.

  It was the tropics. The smell grew fast and it grew thick. And the flies had already begun to find us. Even through the rain.

  I stepped outside. I wiped the SIG clean of fingerprints and threw it overboard. They would probably find it. But by then, hopefully, we would be clear. Still the rain came down. Still no one came.

  Back inside, Felacco had lost the strength to talk much more. It was time for us to be gone anyway.

  I bent low and said as much to Guido.

  “Father, the rites, the last rites,” Felacco said, with all of the little life he had, a desperate whisper.

  “No,” Guido said, “not yet.”

  “I made my confession. Forgive me, Father, forgive me in the name of Jesus.”

  “I have to tell you,” Guido said calmly, “that I won’t forgive you. You have been a terrible man. A killer, thief, drug peddler. You have fed on the flesh of others. Frankly, Frankie, if there is a God, and he has any sense—”

  “You ain’t no priest,” Frankie gasped.

  “Yes, Frank Felacco, I am. And I am here to tell you that if God has any sense, he won’t forgive you, either. If there is a hell, you will burn in it forever, in immortal agony. But there may not be. So the least I can do is let you go to your death in a state of fear and terror.”

  27.

  Santino Speaks

  I CALLED PETE AND asked him if he knew someone who might make the run in a small boat. Of course he did. It cost us two thousand dollars. Cash. And we weren’t the only cargo. But it was a fast boat, leaving late and scheduled to arrive in Miami before dawn.

  Things finally caught up with Guido while we were at sea. Exhaustion, shock, his age. He passed out. He got very pale. It scared me. But I covered him with blankets and he came around before we reached the mainland. Pete met us and took us to the airport. I destroyed our false passports, then caught the next flight to New York.

  I took him to my mother’s. He was going to need some rest before we went up to see Santino Scorcese to claim our reward.

  There had been a long talk about computer camp or baseball camp. Wayne had decided on computer camp because it had all the camp stuff—including baseball—plus computers. He was into a real rationalist phase.

  “What if I stayed home this summer?” he asked when I put him to bed. He sounded troubled.

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I want to stay home,” he said in a statement.

  “If you want to stay home,” I told him, “you can. It would save me some money.”

  “Can we af
ford camp?” he asked.

  “Yeah, champ. This year we can afford it. De money’s in. Big bucks, ya know what I’m sayin’. If you go to computer camp, I’ll get you a computer of your own when you get home.”

  “You think if I go to computer camp I’ll be a nerd?”

  “You don’t have to be just because you use your brain. I’m sure there are plenty of brainless nerds.”

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Good,” I said, tucking him in. I turned out the light.

  “Tony,” he said, in the dark, “if I go away … ”

  “Yeah, kid?”

  “If I go away for the summer … when I come back … when I come back, will you be here?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be here.”

  I closed the door behind me, went to the kitchen, and got a beer. What a wonderfully normal thing to do. I shivered. With a kind of relief. So very far from the madness in Freeport. I considered telling Glenda what’d happened down there. But I didn’t want to hear about it myself. A refrigerator. A kitchen. Quiet. Homelike. Good stuff.

  Glenda said, “Why didn’t you tell me about Jerry Wirtman’s offer?”

  I’d left in a rush. But I’d spoken to her several times from Freeport. I could have told her. I said, “How did you hear about it?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Is that something that doesn’t matter to us?”

  “I didn’t get around to it. Besides, it doesn’t matter. Until we get down to cases. I don’t know … maybe I was saving it as a nice surprise.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “you’re still avoiding whatever it is you’re avoiding.”

  Maybe I was. “There I was, in the Bahamas. All these bikinis parading around, micro-mini things, and I was true and it’s been a long time. How about it?” I said.

  “What kind of sluts wear micro-mini bikinis for men to slobber over?”

  “The point was that I didn’t do anything.”