by Various
The Murder Tree. No, the Deadman’s Tree.
The tree was a legacy case, and like Sammy’d said—some of his very last words—it’d been a long time since it’d been a well-used spot, but Ed Galante thought it’d be a good thing to revive. Ed liked symbols. So here was a bloody tree in a bloody ward, a leftover from when the Irish and Italians’d had it out decades ago.
For a long time, it was just an ancient poplar where kids told stories, scaring one another out of nickels and sleep. And now the gnarled branches and massive trunk were back in service, this looming giant with bark half-bare from fall’s incoming wind.
That tree, it was better than the classifieds, Moe Shapiro once said. Gives people time to get their affairs together. Gives them a last chance to make things right if they can, or if they want to. Not that anyone ever does.
If he’d had a pen, Raul would’ve scratched out Sammy’s name. He didn’t. He left it there, barely legible on the thick paper that’d been nailed in place. It was too dark to see anything but the shape of the letters scrawled against the bone-white sheet, and when he looked closer, he saw something else beneath it.
A new name. He stepped closer, squinting against what must be midnight, by now.
“Harriet O’Dwyer.” So it was still up to the Italians and Irish after all. “The more things change,” he muttered.
But why Harriet?
He played out the possibilities as he walked away from the tree, wandering toward the nearest El stop. She was a piece of work, and she worked half the men in the syndicate. Did somebody tell her something she shouldn’t have heard? Unfortunate, if so. But not unfair. She knew who she was getting into bed with, and recently that’d been a guy named Jake Corallo, if Raul recalled the rumor correctly. Jake’s name hadn’t gone up on the Murder Tree because he’d been shut down last month, before Ed had started up that old tradition again.
Yeah, it probably had something to do with Jake.
He didn’t think about it too hard. It was easier not to. He turned on his heel and went back the way he came, but he didn’t get far before he heard someone call his name. His instinct said this was a bad thing—that he didn’t want to be called out on the street; but his second thoughts told him to lighten up, because it was something that happened to normal people. Something normal people didn’t freak out about, because normal people don’t kill for money. Normal people don’t have mushrooms growing out of their skin.
He froze in his steps and then looked around. His eyes snagged on a guy named Benny Lerch, on the other sidewalk. He crossed the street in a handful of long strides for a man with legs so short. “Haven’t seen you since you left for Philly last year.”
“Has it been that long?”
“And then some, maybe.” He grabbed Raul’s hand to give it a hearty shake. “I heard you went off to New York.”
“Naw, that never happened,” Raul told him.
“Hey, let me buy you a drink.”
“I don’t need a … you know what? All right. I could use a drink.”
Raul should’ve told him no, but he didn’t, so he got a drink with Benny Lerch at the Waystation. His mushrooms weren’t growing back too hard yet, and maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe they’d stay gone a few hours.
His clothes were a little dirty with fungal streaks, but it was dark and Benny either didn’t notice or didn’t say anything.
Benny was disposable, and he knew it. That was his strong suit, if he had one.
He’d weaseled into the Syndicate by starting cars when he was a boy; he grew up around big men with big wallets, and he wanted to be just like ’em. Just as well for him it’d never happened. It was probably why he was still alive. That, and the way car bombs had fallen out of fashion before he reached puberty.
Benny was a fat guy, and if he were any shorter you would’ve said he was a fat little guy, but he wasn’t, so you didn’t. He dressed well, if cheaply, and with an excessive fondness for brown. A shaggy comb-over wasn’t doing him any favors, except that it reminded almost everyone that he was harmless. It reminded Raul that none of them were kids anymore.
Benny knew better than to ask any questions about why the button man needed a drink, and he should’ve known better than to gossip, but he didn’t. Over mediocre gin, he said quietly, “It’s weird, ain’t it? How the score’s gone up. Not just since the Deadman’s Tree went back into play—but before that, too. The last couple of months, I mean. Seems like every other night, someone’s out of the game. Bunch of people I wouldn’t expect to see go. People who didn’t seem to be no threat. Not even players, some of them. But I don’t know. Nobody tells me shit, Raul. Nobody tells me shit.”
“So you’ve seen the Murder Tree.” Raul didn’t meet his eyes.
“Saw it, yeah. I saw it.”
“Tonight?”
Benny hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. They put Harriet up there, huh?”
“Apparently.”
“You ever actually see anybody post the messages?” Benny asked.
“No. I don’t watch the tree. Probably better for my health that I don’t.”
“I’ll drink to that.” He did, raising a glass covered in fingerprints and clinking it against Raul’s. “You uh … you think you’ll get the call? On Harriet, I mean?”
“I might.” He almost certainly would, a fact he hadn’t admitted to himself until just then. Must’ve been the gin making him honest.
“You going to be okay with that?”
He shrugged. “Nothing much happened, and what did happen, happened years ago.”
“Yeah, but it happened. So if you do get the gig,” he pressed, “can you do it?”
Raul put his glass down on a wet cardboard coaster. “More easily than I can avoid it.” And that was the truest thing the gin had said yet. “Listen Benny, it’s been good to see you, but I need to call it a night. In case the phone rings in the morning, you know. Our old pal Moe, he’s an early riser.”
“All right man, that’s all right. Good to see you, Raul. Always good to see you.”
* * *
On the way home, sitting on the El and watching the city lights streak past, Raul thought about calling Moe tonight and getting it over with. He couldn’t ask too many questions or make too many demands—no, not even him—but he and Moe were tight enough that he could risk a query or two. Of course, Moe might not know the particulars. Galante sometimes played it close to the chest—closer than the old boys, who’d known Moe better and knew how far they could trust him.
So he didn’t call. Besides, like he’d told Benny: Moe was an early riser. Early risers tend to be cranky when their phones ring at 2:00 a.m.
And later that morning, Raul awoke to a ring that summoned him to Moe Shapiro’s office.
Moe’s office was in a nice building on a nice side of the city. Not too flashy—that wasn’t his style. Tasteful and full of books, like a lawyer or a head-shrinker, except Moe’d actually read them all. Once over drinks, he’d told Raul that when he was a kid, his fellow upstart gangsters made fun of him for having a library card. He laughed it off, and kept on reading, and now he sat on top of a big pile of money—the last man left of the old guard. He’d been in the racket since the twenties, when he was one of the new guys who’d taken the game away from the big guys with narrow visions.
Behind his back, people called him “Shorty” or “Specs,” and he didn’t care. He was short and he wore glasses. He knew it as well as anybody. You could rib him if you liked, so long as you kept it friendly and left out anything about him being a Jew. He knew that too, obviously. But he’d be damned if he’d let anybody use it against him.
“What can I do for you, Moe?”
A brunette secretary hustled out of the way and left the two men alone together. The door closed behind her with a click. The button man took off his hat. Moe Shapiro gestured at a stuffed leather chair. “Thanks for coming, Raul. Can I get you a drink?”
“No thanks.”
Moe poured out a d
ollop for himself, something much nicer than what Sammy’d last sipped, decanting it from a big crystal jug into a matching glass. While he worked, Raul pulled out a cigarette and lit it off a pack of matches he’d picked up at a hotel in Phoenix. “I heard the news about Ricca,” Moe said as he slid a brown ashtray toward his companion’s elbow. It wasn’t as nice as the glass because Moe didn’t smoke.
“Shame about that.”
“Always is. I heard they picked him up in an alley.”
“That’s right,” the button man said. And before Moe could ask, he added, “He had a wife and kids. Life insurance, you know how it is.”
Moe nodded, but it was sometimes hard to read him. “You think Elaine knew what he was up to?”
“No. That’s why Sammy didn’t take a bath.” He concentrated on the cigarette. He waited for Moe to decide how he felt about the small shift in plans.
Finally he said, “It’s a good thing I know you’re not a soft touch.”
All right. Then he wasn’t mad, and Raul was reassured. “So is this the part where you tell me I’m responsible for Legs O’Dwyer? I saw her name on the Deadman’s Tree. A soft touch might say no to that one.”
Moe shook his head, not denying anything. “A soft touch or an old flame, but if we crossed all those names off a list she’d live to see a hundred. All the same, I wish she wasn’t posted. I tried to give her room after Jake bit it; I told Galante to leave her alone, let her cry it out. I gave her a talking to, a chance to pull herself together.”
“Then you played fair.”
“I still don’t like doing it, and I’m not sure why Ed’s insisting. Something about her keeping books for Jake’s operation, and how she doesn’t get to walk away just because she’s sad. But I didn’t know she had anything to do with the books.”
“Me either, but I guess it’s none of my business,” the button man said, and not for the first time.
Moe parked himself behind the desk with a sigh. He left his drink by the decanter, all but forgotten. For half a minute he stared into space, just past Raul’s right ear. For that same half a minute, Raul let his cigarette ash creep toward his fingers without taking a drag.
Moe shook his head again. “And there’s something else I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Fire away.”
“It’s about mushrooms.”
The button man nearly gagged on smoke he hadn’t yet drawn. He forced his eyes to flatten, his mouth to set in a neutral line. “Good on pizza. Better with pasta. Best on meat. Otherwise, what about them?”
“Coincidence, is all. Your last two gigs. The cleaners are talking.”
“About mushrooms? At my gigs?”
“You’re not leaving calling cards, are you?”
“You accusing me of junior-league shit?”
“I’m asking, is all.”
“Then no. I don’t leave calling cards. Mushrooms, or any other kind.”
“No need to snap about it.”
Raul said, “Sorry,” but he said it curtly. Better to sound offended than terrified. Better to act touchy than sick.
“No, no.” Moe waved his concerns away with the smoke that crept in his direction. “I didn’t mean to yank your chain. But you know I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask.”
“Hey Moe?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll take care of O’Dwyer.” He changed the subject by force. He stubbed out the barely smoked cigarette and stood. “You think Frank knows where she’s holed up?”
“It’s no secret. She can’t keep quiet long enough to hide, so you never know—she might be glad to see you. Try the boarding house out on Eighth—the one Anne Civella used to run. Call Frank and see if he can get you a room number.” Half to himself, he asked, “What’s that place’s name…? Can’t think of it, off the top of my head.”
“Three Sisters,” Raul supplied. “I know the place.”
“Tonight, if you can swing it. Word down low says she’s got a date with some jackass from the DA’s office in the morning. I’d like for that not to happen.”
Raul put his hat back on and headed home to wait for night.
A stack of newspapers on his dining room table kept him company. He’d collected them over the last few weeks, and clipped articles here and there from rags he found in other cities—knowing what it’d look like if he ever had visitors.
He picked up a recent scrap and read it for the hundredth time.
NO ROOM FOR JOKERS, the headline said, and then went on to editorialize about how the whole breed ought to be rounded up and stuck on an island, like they were all a bunch of fucking lepers. MURDER ON FIFTH STREET, read another lead, and it told the story of two joker kids who’d picked the wrong ice cream shop in which to be a freak. NEW JOKER ORDINANCE, said the next sheet, and it was all about how several city blocks were being deemed “Joker-Free Zones” like they weren’t even people, and never had been.
His wrist twitched. He crumpled the story and let it drop to the floor.
And then there was the expose on Andy Sifakis, the Greek who’d set up shop on the west side. GANGLAND HIT TAKES DOWN JOKER BOSS. That was an exaggeration. Andy hadn’t been a boss, he’d only been new. And a joker. Nothing real bad, not like some of them. Andy’d had antlers, was all—that, and his hands were more like hooves. He kept everything trimmed and filed up real sharp, Raul remembered that from the one time they’d met.
Funny thing was, it wasn’t the Four Families who’d taken Andy to pieces: It’d been the lower goons, guys like the button man and guys even further down the totem pole. But nobody’d stopped them. Word around town said Ed Galante might even be paying for it, and looking the other way. That’s why there weren’t any jokers in the syndicate—at least no jokers anyone knew about. Maybe it was only a matter of time, and maybe times were changing after all. But they hadn’t changed yet.
His conversation with Benny collided uncomfortably with the scraps on the table. Some of those guys weren’t even players. Andy sure as shit hadn’t been.
JOKERTOWN RECEIVES CIVIC IMPROVEMENT GRANT.
And then there was New York City, where the jokers had their own quarter. Their own hospitals, restaurants, apartments. Their own gangs. Their own riots and problems, too. There was always the chance he could trade one set of problems for another, if it came to that. Take the geographic cure, so to speak.
It was something to think about.
Later.
By the time he was finished sifting through the most recent daily rags, the sun was setting low enough that he could take his chances back in the old Bloody Ward, where the Three Sisters boarding house waited at the edge of Little Italy.
* * *
The button man took the El and then he took a cab, and then he let himself in through the back door that emptied onto the alley, because no one ever watched it. Some things you could count on. Likewise, he counted on the shifty-eyed maids and working girls who kept their heads down and their lips pursed tightly together, and he turned his face away from them, staying in the shadow of his hat’s brim. He took Frank Ragen’s suggestion and tried the third floor.
Room twenty-one.
The hall was empty and felt abandoned, with its ragged faux-Persian runner and dingy wallpaper that was eighty years old if it was a day. He wrinkled his nose and smelled mostly dust, mostly inefficient cleaning products and the faint, lingering tang of cheap lotion and old tobacco. The room numbers passed in tarnished metal digits, odds on the left and evens on the right. Long before he reached it, Raul knew that twenty-one would be last.
He stopped in front of it, and listened.
Outside, a telephone was ringing in a booth and two cats started up a fight. A drunk complained at a car. Closer, then. Downstairs. Downstairs, the bored teenage boy at the desk was handing out keys and making promises. A vacuum hummed across the floor. Closer still. This hallway, where nothing moved.
This room. And in it, a woman he used to know.
He heard th
e nearby plop of water dripping onto something that was wet already. The buzz of a radio that couldn’t decide between two stations. Nothing else. No footsteps, no shifting springs in a cheap, battered bed. No furtive phone calls or last-minute sobs.
He put his hand on the doorknob and turned. The knob clicked obligingly. Didn’t have to pick it or kick it down. One of his easier gigs, then, except for all the obvious reasons.
He pushed, and the door leaned inward.
He peered around the frame and saw no surprises within. A bed with an ugly blanket. A dresser no woman would choose for herself. A window overlooking the drug store across the street. She might not be in, or Frank might’ve been wrong. But someone’d been here lately, he could see that much by the discarded stockings and mushed-up cotton balls. The bed wasn’t made, and a smudge of beige makeup marred the right-side pillow.
He let himself inside and closed the door, leaning back against it to make sure it was shut. He slid the cheap metal bolt to lock it, knowing it wouldn’t hold more than a moment if anyone insisted hard enough.
To his right was a bathroom, its door open no wider than two fingers throwing a peace sign. The dripping he’d heard … that’s where it came from. A light burned within, casting a slim shadow in reverse. It struck into the lower-lit gloom of the bedroom, a pale yellow line like an arrow.
She was in there. He could feel it in his bones. In his skin, which already crawled with the mushrooms yet to come.
He drew his gun and steadied his breathing. This was old hat. This was the job. She’d known the rules, ignored them, and this was what it cost. He wasn’t the executioner, not her friend, not her lover. Just the messenger. Same as always. No surprises for anyone.
With the back of his free hand, he nudged the bathroom door. It groaned open.
She was in there, all right. And he was surprised.
Harriet O’Dwyer reclined naked in the tub, wrists slashed and body bobbing slowly; that part didn’t bother Raul. He’d had seen plenty of blood and he’d already stepped in hers. He would’ve cursed himself but he didn’t, he only took one step back and wiped his shoe on carpet the color of guacamole. The bathroom was painted with gore, and it looked like more than one woman’s corpse could hold, except that he knew from experience that it wasn’t.
