On this particular Saturday off, he’d broken a date with a soap-opera vixen in order to meet a man with whom Mr. Wassermann sometimes did business. Angelo DeRiga—“Little Angie,” Midge had heard him called, although he was not especially small, and was in fact an inch or two taller than Mr. Wassermann—dyed his hair black, even his eyebrows, and wore suits that were as well made as Midge’s new ones, from material of the same good quality, but were cut too young for him. The flaring lapels and cinched waists only called attention to the fact that he was nearing sixty, just as the black hair brought out the deep lines in the artificial tan of his face. The effect was pinched and painful and increased the bodyguard’s appreciation for his employer’s dignified herringbones and barbered white fringe.
Little Angie shook Midge’s hand at the door to his suite at the King William, complimented him upon his suit—“Flash, the genuine article,” he said—and invited him to sample the gourmet spread the hotel’s waiters were busy transferring from a wheeled cart to the glass-topped mahogany table in the sitting room.
Midge, who knew as well as Little Angie that the electric-blue suit was inappropriate, did not thank him, and politely refused the offer of food. He wasn’t hungry, and anyway chewing interfered with his concentration. Too many blows to the head had damaged his hearing. High-and low-pitched voices were the worst, and certain labials missed him entirely. By focusing his attention on the speaker, and with the help of some amateur lip-reading, he’d managed to disguise his rather serious disability for a watchdog to have from even so observant a man as Mr. Wassermann; but then Mr. Wassermann spoke slowly, and always around the middle range. Little Angie was shrill and carried on every conversation as if he were on a fast elevator and had to finish before the car reached his floor.
When the waiters left, the two were alone with Francis, Little Angie’s bodyguard. He was a former professional wrestler who shaved his head and had rehearsed his glower before a mirror until it was as nearly permanent as a tattoo. As a rule, Midge got on with other people’s security, but he and Francis had disliked each other from the start. He suspected that on Francis’s part this was jealousy; Mr. Wassermann’s generosity to employees was well known, while Little Angie was a pinchpenny who abused his subordinates, sometimes in public. On Midge’s side, he had a career prejudice against wrestlers, whom he dismissed as trained apes, and thought Francis disagreeably ugly into the bargain. When they were in the same room they spent most of the time scowling at each other. They had never exchanged so much as a word.
“I know Jake the Junkman’s been white to you,” Little Angie seemed to be saying; as always, Midge had to strain to make him out. “Too good, maybe. Some types need to be put on an allowance. A lot of smart guys can’t handle dough.”
Midge didn’t like what he’d heard. Everyone knew Mr. Wassermann had made his first fortune from scrap metal, but most respected him too much to allude to his past in this offensive way. He wondered if it was his place to report the conversation to his employer. So far he didn’t know why he’d been invited here.
Little Angie reached into a pocket and took out a handful of notepaper on which Midge recognized his own scrawl. “You ain’t hard to track. Everywhere you go, you leave markers: Benny Royal’s floating craps game on the South Side, the roulette wheel at the Kit-Kat, Gyp Handy’s book up in Arbordale. There’s others here. You owe twelve thousand, and you can’t go to Jake for a loan. He’s got a blind spot where gambling’s concerned. He don’t forbid his people from making a bet now and then, but he don’t bail them out either. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Midge shook his head. Mr. Wassermann had explained all this his first day. Midge hadn’t known then that the new class of woman he’d be dating liked pretty much the same entertainments as the old.
“See, that’s a problem. I spent more’n face value buying these up. I’m a reasonable man, though. I’ll eat the difference. You got twelve grand, Midge?”
“You know I don’t.”
Little Angie smacked Midge’s face with the markers.
Midge took a step forward; so did Francis. Little Angie held up a finger, stopping them both. “Let’s not be uncivil. There’s a way you can work it off. You won’t even have to pop a sweat.”
Midge heard enough of the rest to understand. Mr. Wassermann, who had the ear of a number of important people, had promised to spoil an investment Little Angie wanted to make. The important people, Little Angie hinted, would be in a position to listen to reason if Mr. Wassermann was not available to counsel them otherwise. All Midge had to do to settle his debts was stand at his usual station outside the door to Mr. Wassermann’s office the following morning and not leave it, no matter what he heard going on inside.
“What if I just owe you like I did the others?” Midge asked.
“They was getting impatient. If I didn’t step in, you’d be wearing plaster instead of that flashy suit, peeing through a tube. And I got to tell you, patience ain’t what my what-you-call forte. Francis?”
The ugly bald wrestler produced a loop of stiff nylon fishline from a pocket. Midge knew he could prevent Francis from making use of it, but there were others in Little Angie’s employ who knew what a garrote was for. He couldn’t fight them all. Sooner or later he’d run into a Sonny Rodriguez.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Little Angie said. “There’s always a place in my organization for a fellow knows the score. You won’t be out of a job.”
Midge hadn’t been thinking about that at all. “Can I have time to think it over?”
“If I had time I’d wait for Jake to die of old age.”
Midge agreed to the terms. Little Angie leered and tore up the markers. Francis looked disappointed as well as ugly.
The next morning outside Mr. Wassermann’s office was as long a time as Midge had ever spent anywhere, including seven and a half rounds with Lincoln Flagg. Mr. Wassermann had some telephone calls to make and told him he’d be working through lunch, which meant Midge staying on duty, but that he’d make it up to him that night with the full twelve courses from the Bon Maison, Midge’s favorite restaurant back when he was contending. He had an armchair for his personal use in the hallway, but today he couldn’t stay seated in it more than three minutes at a stretch. He stood with his hands folded in front of him, then behind him, picked lint off the sleeve of his gray gabardine, found imaginary lint on the crease of the trousers and picked at that too. He was perspiring heavily under his sixty-dollar shirt, despite what Little Angie had said; he, Midge, who used to work out with the heavy bag for an hour without breaking a sweat. This selling out was hard work.
Too hard, he decided, after twenty minutes. He would take his chances with Little Angie’s threats. He rapped on the door, waited the customary length of time while he assumed Mr. Wassermann was calling for him to come in, then opened the door. The garrote didn’t frighten him half as much as the look of sadness he anticipated on Mr. Wassermann’s face when he told him about his part in Little Angie’s plan.
Mr. Wassermann was not behind his desk.
But he was.
When Midge leaned his big broken-knuckled hands on it and peered over the far edge, the first thing he saw was the tan soles of his employer’s hand-lasted wingtips. Mr. Wassermann was still seated in his padded leather swivel, but the chair lay on its back. Mr. Wassermann’s face was the same oxblood tint as his shoes and his tongue stuck out. Midge couldn’t see the wire, but he’d heard that it sank itself so deep in a man’s neck it couldn’t be removed without getting blood on oneself, so most killers didn’t bother to try.
A torchiere lamp behind the desk had toppled over in the struggle and lay on the carpet, its bulb shattered. Both it and Mr. Wassermann must have made more than a little noise. The door that was usually concealed in the paneling to the left stood open. It was used by Mr. Wassermann’s congressmen and the occasional other business associates who preferred not to be seen going in or coming out. It was one of the worst-kept secrets around
town.
Midge felt sad. He walked around the desk, stepping carefully to avoid grinding bits of glass into the Brussels carpet, and looked down into his employer’s bloodshot eyes.
“The thing is, Mr. Wassermann, I didn’t really go into the tank.”
Mr. Wassermann didn’t say anything. But then Midge probably wouldn’t have heard him if he had.
Evil Grows
This one’s about as erotic as my stuff gets. I was asked to participate in an anthology called Flesh & Blood: Erotic Tales of Crime and Passion, and almost begged off because I prefer subtlety to graphic sex, but when it was explained the editors were looking for something along the lines of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity—two excellent novellas that emphasize suspense over the tiresome bedtime details—I decided to accept the challenge. Also it gave me a chance to plug a terrific pop song that never got its due.
• • •
No, I’m not prejudiced. Well, not any more than the majority of the population. I’m an organic creature, subject to conditioning and environment, and as such I’m entitled to my own personal set of preconceptions. No, I’m not disappointed; relieved is the word. If you’d shown up with cauliflower ears or swastikas tattooed on your biceps, the interview would have been over right then. So let’s sit down and jabber. What do you drink? Excuse me? Jack and Coke? Don’t get defensive; you’re young, you’ll grow out of it. You grew out of your formula. Miss, my friend will have a Jack and Coke, and you can pour me another Chivas over rocks and don’t let it sit too long on the bar this time. Scotch-flavored Kool-Aid is not my drink.
What’s that? No, I’m not afraid she’ll spit in my glass. She’s got miles on her, no wedding ring, she needs this job. People will put up with what they have to, up to a point.
Which is the point where my job begins. Or began. See, I’m not sure I’m still employed. It isn’t like I go to the office every day and can see if my name’s still on the door. I’m talking too much; that’s my third Scotch the barmaid’s spitting in. You don’t mind that I’m a motormouth? I forgot, you’re one of the new breed. You want to know why. I’m down with that. Thank you, miss. Just keep the tab going.
Let’s see. You ever watch the news, read a paper? Don’t bother, that question’s out of date. You can’t avoid the news. The wise man on the mountain in Tibet picks up CNN in his fillings. But that’s network; it’s the local reports I’m talking about, the police beat. I know what you’re thinking. Crime’s the last thing I should be interested in when I get home. Truth is, I can’t relate to wars in eastern Europe, not since I got too old for the draft, but give me a carjacking two streets over from where I live and you can’t pry me away from the screen. Past forty you get selective about what you take in. I’m not just talking about your stomach.
Anyway, have you noticed, once or twice a month there’s a story about some schnook getting busted trying to hire a hit man? Some woman meets a guy in a bar and offers him like a thousand bucks to knock off her husband or boyfriend or her husband’s girlfriend or the mother of the girl who’s beating out her daughter for captain of the cheerleading squad? Okay, it’s not always a woman, but let’s face it, they’re still the designated child-bearers, it’s unnatural for them to take life. So they engage a surrogate. The reason they get caught is the surrogate turns out to be an undercover cop. I mean, it happens so often you wonder if there aren’t more cops out there posing as hit men than there are hit men. Which may be true, I don’t know. Assassins don’t answer the census.
That’s how it seems, and the department’s just as happy to let people think that. Actually there’s very little happenstance involved. The woman’s so pissed she tells her plans to everyone she knows and a few she doesn’t, gets a couple of margaritas in her and tells the bartender. Working up her courage, see, or maybe just talking about it makes her feel better, as if she went ahead and did it. So in a week or so twenty people are in on the secret. Odds are pretty good one of them’s a cop. I don’t know a bookie who’d bet against at least one of them telling a cop. So the next Saturday night she’s sitting in a booth getting blasted and a character in a Harley jacket with Pennzoil in his hair slides in, buys her a zombie and a beer for himself, and says I understand you’re looking for someone to take care of a little problem. Hey, nothing’s subtle in a bar. People want their mechanics to be German and their decorators gay, and when they decide to have someone iced they aren’t going to hire someone who looks like Hugh Grant.
You’ll be happy to hear, if you’re concerned about where civilization is headed, that many of these women, once they realize what’s going on, are horrified. Or better yet, they laugh in the guy’s face. These are the ones that are just acting out. The only blood they intend to draw will be in the courtroom, if it ever gets that far; a lot of couples who considered murder go on to celebrate their golden anniversaries. A good cop, or I should say a good person who is a cop, will draw away when he realizes it’s a dry hole. It’s entrapment if he pushes it, and anyway what’s the point of removing someone from society who wasn’t a threat to begin with? It just takes time away from investigations that might do some good. Plus he knows the next woman he invites himself to will probably take him up on it.
Hell yes, he’s wearing a wire, and I’m here to tell you Sir Laurence Olivier’s got nothing on an undercover stiff who manages to appear natural knowing he can’t squirm around or even lift his glass at the wrong time because the rustle of his clothing might drown out the one response he needs to make his case. I was kidding about the Harley jacket; leather creaks like a bitch, on tape it sounds like a stand of giant sequoias making love, and you don’t want to hear about corduroy or too much starch in a cotton shirt. Even when you wear what’s right and take care, you need to find a way to ask the same question two or three times and get the same answer, just for insurance. Try and pull that off without tipping your mitt. I mean, everyone’s seen NYPD Blue. So you begin to see, as often as these arrests make news, the opportunity comes up oftener yet. You can blame Hollywood if you like, or maybe violent video games. I’m old enough to remember when it was comic books. My old man had a minister when he was ten who preached that Satan spoke through Gang Busters on the radio. My opinion? We’ve been killers since the grave.
Lest you think I draw my munificent paycheck hanging around gin mills hitting on Lizzie Borden, I should tell you life undercover most of the time is about as exciting as watching your car rust. When the lieutenant told me to meet this Rockover woman I’d been six weeks raking leaves in the front yard of a drug lord in Roseville, posing as a gardener. I never saw the man; he’s in his bedroom the whole time, flushing out his kidneys and playing euchre. He’s got maybe a year to live, so assuming I do gather enough for an indictment, he’ll be in hell trumping Tupac’s hand by the time they seat the jury. I don’t complain when I’m pulled off. Friend, I’d work Stationary Traffic, handing out parking tickets, if it meant getting out of those goddamn overalls.
The briefing’s a no-brainer. This Nola Rockover has had it with her boss. He’s a lawyer and a sexual harasser besides, it’s a wonder the Democrats haven’t tapped him for the nomination. It’s her word against his, and he’s a partner in the firm, so you know who’s going to come out on the short end if she reports him. Her career’s involved. Admit it, you’d take a crack at him yourself. That’s how you know it’s worth investigating. The odd thing, one of the odd things about getting a conviction, is the motive has to make sense. Some part of you has to agree with the defendant in order to hang him. It’s a funny system.
Getting ready for a sting you’ve got to fight being your own worst enemy. You can’t ham it up. I’ve seen cops punk their hair and pierce their noses—Christ, their tongues and bellybuttons too—and get themselves tossed by a nervous bouncer before they even make contact, which is okay because nine times out of ten the suspect will take one look at them and run for the exit. I know what I said about bars and subtlety, but they’re
no place for a cartoon either. So what I do is leave my hair shaggy from the gardening job, pile on a little too much mousse, go without shaving one day, put on clean chinos and combat boots and a Dead T-shirt—a little humor there, it puts people at ease—and mostly for my own benefit I clip a teeny gold ring onto my left earlobe. You have to look close to see it doesn’t go all the way through. I’ve spent every day since the academy trying to keep holes out of me and I’m not about to give up for one case. Now I look like an almost-over-the-hill Deadhead who likes to hip it up on weekends; a turtleneck and a sportcoat on Casual Friday is as daring as he gets during the week. Point is not so much to look like a hit man as to not look like someone who isn’t. Approachability’s important.
The tech guy shaves a little path from my belt to my solar plexus, tapes the mike and wire flat, the transmitter to my back just above the butt-crack. The T’s loose and made of soft cotton, washed plenty of times. Only competition I have to worry about is the bar noise. Fortunately, the Rockover woman’s Saturday night hangout is a family-type place: you know, where a kid can drink a Coke and munch chips from a little bag while his parents visit with friends over highballs. Loud drunks are rare, there’s a juke but no band. The finger’s a co-worker in the legal firm. I meet him at the bar, he points her out, I thank him and tell him to blow. First I have to reassure him I’m not going to throw her on the floor and kneel on her back and cuff her like on Cops; he’s more worried she’ll get herself in too deep than about what she might do to the boss. I go along with this bullshit and he leaves. Chances are he’s got his eye on her job, but he hasn’t got the spine not to feel guilty about it.
The place is crowded and getting noisy, the customers are starting to unwind. I order a Scotch and soda, heavy on the fizz, wait for a stool, and watch her for a while in the mirror. She’s sitting at the bar booth facing another woman near the shuffleboard table, smoking a cigarette as long as a Bic pen and nursing a clear drink in a tall glass, vodka and tonic probably. I’m hoping I’ll catch her alone sometime during the evening, maybe when the friend goes to the can, which means I don’t count on getting any evidence on tape until I convince her to ditch the friend. So I wait and watch.
Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places Page 15
