“That’s right near Binghamton,” I said. “Appalachin is. I was eighteen then. Some of us rode out in a guy’s car to look at Barbara’s house. Where the meeting took place.”
That made him laugh again. “You see what I mean? Sightseers, for Christ’s sake. People don’t believe it any more. There was a time, in the thirties say, when all the people around a place like that would have stayed miles away, you never know when the shooting’s going to start. Now, things’ve been so nice and quiet for so long, a bunch of kids go out in a car and look at the house.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe it. Why, there was a time, if word got around that somebody like the Genna boys, say, were in town, all the innocent citizens would have gone inside and locked the doors and crawled under the beds. The same as when Anastasia got it in ’57. Nobody believed it. There he was on the floor in the barber shop with five bullets in him, and pictures in the Daily News, and if you say the word mobster, everybody thinks of the thirties.”
“Not me,” I said. “One of them shot my fa—my father.”
“Just a hired gun. You’ll never find him.”
“Wrong. I found him today. He was the guy in the Chrysler.”
“The one you hit, or the driver?”
“The one I hit.”
He grinned and nodded. “Good boy. You’ve got a lot of Eddie Kapp in you, I swear to God.”
“Yeah. We were up to ’57.”
“Wait.” He ordered another round, took a first sip, and said, “The last few years, some of the older guys have been coming back. Back from overseas, with the heat off at last, or out of jail, or one thing and another. And these smooth new types say, ‘Yeah, Pop, but we don’t use shotguns any more. We use inter-office memos. Why don’t you go write your memoirs for the comic books?’ And what can they do? Here’s organizations they set up themselves, and now they get the cold shoulder. They try something, and the lawyers and the tame cops come around. Nobody throws a bomb in the living room any more, they just nag and niggle and slip around. Typical businessmen, see what I mean? Every once in a while, there’s an Albert Anastasia, he just won’t get reconstructed, and the guns come out. Or like with you. But not so much any more. A good press, isn’t that the phrase? Good public relations. Everything nice and quiet.”
“We still haven’t got to me.”
“You’re the ace in the hole, boy. Family, didn’t I tell you? We’ve got all these old boys, hanging around now, waiting to move in again. But they can’t move. There’s nobody to set himself up for boss, that’s all it takes. They’ve met, they’ve written to each other, they’ve talked it over. And they’ve decided on somebody they’ll all accept to run things. Me.”
He gulped down all of the drink. “I’m getting the taste back.” His grin was lopsided. “I wasn’t going to do it. I was going to Florida with Dot. Or without her, the hell with her. Because of you. The symbol. In 1940, I was ready to make my move. Not just New York City. Half the Atlantic Seaboard. Everything from Boston to Baltimore, the whole thing. It should have been mine years before, but I’d moved too slow. Only now I had it. I had the support. Hell, I was part of the new look myself! And then these goddamn Federal people came along with this goddamn income tax thing. And I said to some of the boys, ‘When I come out, this pie is mine.’ And they said, ‘Eddie, you’ll be sixty-four years of age. Twenty-five years is a long time.’ And I said, ‘They’ll remember Eddie Kapp. You people will remember Eddie Kapp.’ They said, ‘Sure, but you’re going to be an old man, Eddie. Who’s going to follow you?’ And I told them, ‘Edith Kelly has a kid of mine. When I come out, he’ll be grown. And he’ll be with me.’ That’s what I told them.” He nodded loosely, eying his empty glass. I motioned the waiter. He came and took the glass away.
Kapp watched him go. Softly, he said, “Don’t you think that meant something to them? Family. A goddamned symbol, boy, that’s what you are. A symbol. Eddie Kapp is bringing new blood. Eddie Kapp and his boy. That’s why they want me. They got a symbol to come around, something to tie them all together.”
“When my father came into New York to pick me up,” I said, “somebody must have recognized him.”
“Sure. For twenty-two years, who cared? Before I went in, I told Will to get out of New York and stay out, not to ever come back as long as he lived. He knew I meant it, and he did it. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t have to know why.”
“He didn’t know I was yours?”
Kapp shook his head, grinning. “He knew you weren’t his. That’s all he knew.”
I emptied my glass. All I could see was Dad looking at me, that last second before he vomited blood. “He didn’t know why they were killing him. Jesus, that’s sad. Oh, good Christ, that’s sad.” When I waved at the waiter, my arm was stiff. I said to Kapp, “He never once let me know. I was his son. Mom was dead, he brought me up by himself. Bill and me, we were the same, exactly the same.”
I couldn’t talk. I waited, and when the waiter brought the glass I emptied it and told him I wanted another.
Kapp said, “They knew I was getting out soon. They saw Will Kelly in town. They got panicky. They had to get rid of Kelly, and they had to get rid of his sons. They couldn’t take the chance on the symbol still meaning something.” He nodded. “And it still means something,” he said.
I lit a cigarette, gave it to him, lit another for myself. The waiter came with more drinks. Kapp had the cigarette in his right hand. He picked up the glass with his left hand, then grunted and dropped it, and it fell over on the table. His face looked suddenly thinner, bonier. He said, “Good God, I forgot my hand.”
“Let’s see it.”
It was gray. A swollen oval on the back was black. I said, “The hell with this. We’ve got to find you a doctor.”
“I didn’t feel a thing,” he said. “Not until I picked that glass up.”
The waiter was there, looking irritated, mopping up with a red-and-white-checked cloth. I paid him, and we left, and got the name of a doctor from the desk clerk. And directions, just down the street.
We went there, and the doctor looked him over. He cut the hand, for drainage, and bandaged it up, and said it would be a couple weeks before Kapp could really use it. In the meantime, keep changing the bandage every day. And stop back in three or four days. Then he checked the left knee, because Kapp was still limping. He said that was nothing to worry about, just bruised. Kapp told him he’d walked into a chair. We both had liquor on our breath, so the doctor didn’t question us.
Then we went back to the hotel and up to the room. Bill was lying on his bed. His forehead was bloody around a small hole, and he had the Luger in his right hand.
Eighteen
There were three cops I talked to. One was a local plainclothesman, a comic relief clown who chewed cut plug. One was from the county District Attorney’s office, a ferret with delusions of grandeur. And the third was State CID, an ice-gray man with no tear ducts.
I told them all about Bill’s having lost his wife two months ago in an automobile accident, and his father being killed only a month before that, and how he’d been very depressed ever since, and he’d had the Luger for years but I hadn’t known he’d brought it along on this trip with him. And we were just traveling around the state, basically to try to forget our recent losses. But Bill had just got steadily more and more depressed, and now he’d killed himself.
The local cop swallowed it whole, with tobacco juice. The DA’s man would have liked a hotter story, but he didn’t want the work of digging for it. And the CID man didn’t believe a word of it, but he didn’t care. He was just there to memorize my face.
So it was called suicide. To me, it looked like a lousy job of staging. Aside from the fact that Bill wouldn’t have killed himself for anything. It wouldn’t have occurred to him.
The local cop had called a local undertaker, who might have been his brother-in-law. He looked at me and rubbed his hands together. We both knew that he was going to cheat me down to the skin,
and we both knew there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
Thursday night, I went out and got drunk. I barhopped out toward the air base. When I started a fight with a Staff Sergeant, the CID man came from out of the smoke and took me away. He drove a gray Ford, and he put me in it and took me back to the hotel. Before I got out, he said, “Don’t do what your brother did.”
I looked at him. “What did my brother do, smart man?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Whatever it was, you take warning.”
I said, “Go to hell.” I fumbled the door open and lurched into the hotel. I never saw him again. What -ever had bugged him, he’d either been satisfied or had given up.
In the room, I lay in bed, and for a long while I didn’t know what was wrong. Then I figured it out. I couldn’t hear the sound of Bill’s breathing in the next bed. I listened. He wasn’t breathing anywhere in the world. Poor sweet honest Bill.
I once read a book of stories by a man named Fredric Brown. In one of them he quotes the tale of the peasant walking through the haunted wood, saying to himself, I am a good man and have done no wrong. If devils can harm me, then there isn’t any justice, and a voice behind him says, There isn’t.
The author didn’t say so, but I know. The peasant’s name was Bill.
I wished I could go talk to Kapp, but we’d decided it would be best for us to keep away from each other until all the cops went home. It would only complicate things to bring Kapp into it. Just as I said I was alone when I found Bill.
I got up and turned on the light. I went downstairs, but all the bars in Plattsburg were closed. I went back up to the room and turned off the light and sat up in bed smoking. Every time I took a drag the room glowed red and the covers moved on the other bed. After a while I switched the light on and went to sleep.
Friday afternoon, Uncle Henry showed up from Binghamton, and we had a fight. He wanted Bill’s body shipped to Binghamton, and I wanted it stuck in the ground here and now. It wasn’t Bill, it was just some meat. There wasn’t any Bill any more.
I won, because I was willing to pay. Then there was trouble with a priest named Warren because Bill committed suicide, so he couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. I said, “There are stupid policemen in your town, Father. Bill didn’t kill himself.”
He said, “I’m sorry, but the official view—”
I interrupted him, saying, “Didn’t you hear about the Constitution? They separated church and state.”
I said more than that, and got him mad at me. Uncle Henry was shocked, and told me so when we left: “The Church has its laws about suicide, and that’s—”
“If you say that word suicide once more, I’ll shove a crucifix down your throat.”
“If your father were alive—” And so on.
So Saturday six hired pallbearers carried the coffin from the funeral home. There was no stop at a church for the suicide; he went straight out of town to a clipped green hill with a view of Lake Champlain, and into a hole which no priest had blessed with holy water. He would have to make do with God’s rain.
Uncle Henry and I were the only ones beside the grave who had known Bill in life. The undertaker came over and wanted to know if we wanted him to say a few words. I had never known till then what a man would look like who had a complete and absolute lack of taste or sensibility. I looked at this wretch and said, “No. Not ever.”
After the funeral, I arranged for storage of Bill’s car. It was mine now, but I couldn’t drive it till the registration had been changed, which would take too long. No one can drive a car registered to a dead man.
Uncle Henry came back to the hotel room with me. He said, “Are you coming back home with me?”
“To Binghamton? I don’t have any home there.”
“You do with us, if you want. Your Aunt Agatha would be happy to have you stay with us.”
“I’ll be right back.” I went into the bathroom and sat on the floor and cried like a little kid. I wanted to be a little kid. The floor was all small hexagonal tiles. I counted them, and after a while I got up and washed my face and went back outside. Uncle Henry was standing by the window, smoking a cigar. I said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been in a bad mood. You were a good guy to come up here.”
“It hasn’t been easy for you,” he said.
“I don’t think I want to go back to Binghamton. Not yet.”
“It’s your life, Ray. But you’re always welcome, you know that.”
“Thank you.”
We were silent a minute. He wanted to say something, and he didn’t know how. I couldn’t help him; I didn’t know what it was he wanted to say. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “About Betsy.”
“Betsy?”
“Bill’s girl. We’ve been caring for her.”
“Oh. I forgot about her.”
“We’d like to keep her. I’d like to adopt her.” He waited, but there wasn’t anything for me to say. “Would that be all right with you?”
“Oh. Well, sure. Why ask me?”
“You’re her uncle. You’re her next of kin.”
“I don’t even know her, I’ve never seen her. I don’t have any kind of home or anything.”
“I’ll start the papers then. There may be something you’ll have to sign, I don’t know. Where can I get in touch with you?”
“I’ll write you when I get an address.”
“All right.”
He cleared his throat again. “I should start back. I don’t like to drive at night.”
I went down to the car with him. He said, “Oh, yes, one other thing. Bill’s house—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, not now! Some other time, some other year, let me alone!”
“Yes, all right. You’re right. Be sure to send me your address. I’ll take care of things till then.”
He drove away, and I went to a liquor store and asked for two bottles of Old Mr. Boston before I remembered. I took them both anyway, and went back to the hotel room. I sat cross-legged on the bed and smoked and drank and thought. Very gradually, I unwound. Very gradually, I got so I could pay attention to my thoughts again.
It got slowly dark outside, and I treaded heavily through my thoughts to some conclusion I didn’t yet know. And Kapp knocked on the door at a little after nine.
I got up and let him in. He said, “Your uncle gone home?”
“This afternoon,” I said.
“I’ve been watching. You haven’t had any tail. I guess they’re satisfied with the suicide idea.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Crap. Neither are you. If that job was done by a professional, they’ve got a lot slacker than my day.”
“I know.”
He pointed a stiff finger at his forehead. “The angle was wrong,” he said. “You know what I mean? Dead on that way. I saw that right away. Too high.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“What’s that you’re drinking? I brought some House of Lords.” He had a brown paper bag under one arm. He took the bottle out and showed it to me. “Want some?”
“I’ll stay with this.”
I sat on the bed again, and he sat in the armchair in the corner. He said, “You feel like talking, Ray?”
“I think so.”
“Before we found Bill dead, I was going to ask you a question. You know the question I mean.”
“I suppose so.”
“I want to make the move, Ray. I want to get a base and call a few people and tell them okay, they can count on me. And the first thing they’ll ask me, ‘You got your son with you?’ What am I going to tell them?”
I didn’t say anything. I read the label on the Old Mr. Boston bottle. What I was drinking was seventy proof.
He waited, and then he spoke rapidly, as though he were trying to catch up. “I’ll tell you the way it stands, Ray. This thing’s going to happen, one way or another. People are coming back, people are choosing sides. If you say yes, no, it doesn’t make any difference, you see what I mean? It’
s still going to happen.” He held up a rigid finger, peered over it at me. “There’s only one difference if you say no. Only the one. Eddie Kapp won’t be running things. I don’t know who will be—maybe there’ll be a fight first, I don’t know—but it won’t be Eddie Kapp. I’ll take my sister away from her husband and go down to Florida like I figured.”
“I hear it’s nice down there,” I said.
He frowned. “Is that your answer?”
“I don’t know. Keep talking.”
“All right. I want you with me. I mean besides everything else, you know what I mean? The hell with it, you’re my son. I never thought about it this way, I never knew it’d hit me this way. When I went in, you were just a—you know, just a little thing in a crib. I saw you maybe three four times. You weren’t anybody at all yet, you know what I mean?”
“And now your heart is full.”
“Okay. And my glass is empty.” He refilled it from the bottle of House of Lords. “I don’t expect you to feel anything like that for me,” he said. “What the hell, I’m no kind of a father or anything. But it hits me, I swear to Christ it does. You’re my son, you know what I mean?”
“Yes. I know what you mean. Forget what I said there, I didn’t mean to be a smart-aleck.”
“Sure, what the hell. But there’s two of the reasons why I want you to stick with me, you see? Because you’re my son, and it’s as simple as that. And because if you’re with me I can make my move. There’s a lot of profit in the New York operation, Ray, take it from me. God knows how much these days.”
I held up my hand. “Wait a second. Let me tell you something. That doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mean anything to me at all. I don’t care about the New York mob. If you take it, I’m not your heir.”
“If you feel that way—”
“I feel that way. Have you got any more reasons?”
“It depends what you want to do,” he said.
“In what way?”
“You still want revenge? Because if you do, you should stick with me. We’ll be after the same people.” He drank half a glass. “It depends whether that’s what you want or not,” he said.
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