Maybe he was getting used to the idea of having a quarter-million-dollar price tag on his head. Or as used to it as anybody could get. After all, it had been a matter of years now, since the Family put out that open contract on him, with its promise of a 250 G payoff to anybody who could make the hit.
A quarter of a million was some kind of record, he supposed. Valachi had only rated a 100 thou. But then all Valachi had done was talk: the Family complaint against Nolan represented a complex blend of personal rage and monetary loss. And Nolan wasn’t sitting in prison, his damage done—he was at large, his head packed with inside knowledge—not to mention he was looting key operations as only an insider could loot them.
Nolan’s smile was almost non-existent as he reached for the phone on the nightstand. Before coming to Dallas for a short breather, Nolan had hit the Family’s Cleveland branch for thirty-five thousand. Now he had to get the money safely banked in the Dallas account of “Earl Webb.” He dialed the number of his local contact, a lawyer named M. J. Lange who for ten percent would gladly handle the cash for his client.
“Let me go back over it, Mr. Webb,” Lange’s voice said. “Tomorrow in the mail I’ll get a key. The key will open locker 33 at the Greyhound Bus terminal, and in the locker will be a blue athletic bag. In the bag’s the capital.”
“That’s about it,” Nolan said. “Set?”
“Yes, Mr. Webb. One thing more . . .”
Nolan juggled the receiver on his shoulder as he lit up a cigarette. “What’s that?”
“Sid Tisor’s been after me to get in touch with you. He’s phoned me long distance every night for a week and a half, and he sounds desperate. Wants you to call him. Says it’s life or death.”
“M. J., you know I don’t want to screw around with anybody directly hooked to the Family.”
“Well, I thought it best I pass it on to you. From what I hear, Tisor’s made a clean break. Retired four or five months ago.
“Don’t give me that crap. Nobody breaks clean from the Family. Sid is Charlie’s damn brother-in-law. How do you retire from that?”
“As I said, I’m just passing it on to you. He told me he did you a favor once.”
Nolan ground out the freshly lit cigarette in disgust. “Did he leave a number? Goddamn him.”
The lawyer fed Nolan the number.
“Didn’t he leave an area code?”
“Oh yes,” Lange said, “here it is. 309.”
“Okay, M. J. Take care of that little blue bag, now.”
“Of course, Mr. Webb.”
Nolan slammed down the receiver.
Great, he thought. 309 was an Illinois area code. Close to the heat. That was all he needed.
Nolan glanced down at the bed and considered diving in. He hadn’t slept well on the trip—he could never sleep well on a bus—and he needed the rest.
Then he dialed 1, area code 309, and Tisor’s number.
Soon he heard, “Hello, Sid Tisor speaking.”
“Hi, Sid.”
“Nolan? Is that Nolan?”
“Yeah.”
“How, uh, how about a favor for an old friend?”
“Maybe.”
“I hear you been chipping away at the Family.”
“Any complaints?”
“None. Didn’t you hear I retired? As a matter of fact, the favor I want to ask of you could net you maybe forty thousand of the Family’s money.”
“What the hell are you thinking, Sid? When the Family lets a man retire, they trust him to keep his nose out of their business.”
“Don’t worry about them. They got faith in me.”
“They got faith in nothing and nobody. How do you know they don’t have your phone tapped?”
“They don’t . . . why would they?”
“Life or death. Whose, Sid, mine?”
“Nolan, I got good reason to risk this.”
“You had better.”
“You remember Irene?”
Nolan said he did. Irene was Sid’s daughter. Sid’s wife Rosie had died in childbirth with Irene, and Sid had raised the child by himself. When Nolan had last seen Irene she’d been fourteen. Since then Tisor had sent her off to college somewhere. She’d be around twenty now.
“She’s dead, Nolan.”
“Oh.”
“I think maybe she was murdered.”
“That the reason you got ahold of me?”
“That’s the reason.”
“Where you living now?”
“Peoria—the boonies.”
“The Family ever send anybody around to check on you?”
“Not once.”
“It’s a big risk for me, setting foot in Illinois.”
“I know it is, Nolan.”
“I haven’t been in Illinois since the shit hit the fan.”
“I know.”
Neither one of them said anything for a while. Then Tisor said, “Will you come?”
“Yeah.”
Nolan slipped the phone onto the hook and said, “Goddamn you, Sid.”
It might be an okay score, but Sid always tended to exaggerate, and that forty G’s he had promised might turn out closer to four C’s. And Illinois wasn’t the safest place in the world for you when every greaseball out of Chicago knew your face and knew it was worth a quarter million.
Nolan said, “Shit,” and lit up another cigarette.
He didn’t really give a fuck about Sid or his dead kid, but Nolan owed Sid, from the old days.
And Nolan paid his debts.
2
IT TOOK four buses to get to Peoria.
Nolan took rear seats on each of them and always tried to avoid attracting attention, and he was successful, but only with the men: from women he drew stares like flies around something dead.
There was nothing particularly striking about his clothing, just a blue banlon shirt and lightweight tan pants suited to the Texas weather, and a blue plaid woolen parka he was carrying to meet the already cooling Illinois climate. But when he stood, he stood six feet that seemed taller, a lean, hard man with muscular bronzed arms that a young woman who sat by him on the third bus had brushed against a few more times than the law of probability could allow. His thick desert-dry brown hair had begun to gray, and his angular, mustached face was deeply lined, making him look every one of his forty years. Behind black-framed, black-lensed sunglasses were gray eyes that kept a cold, close watch on everything.
On the final bus a lady of about sixty sat next to him and tried to small-talk him, but Nolan didn’t small-talk easily. She seemed relieved when they at last reached Hannibal, which was her stop. She looked exhausted from an hour of making conversation with herself.
As she rose from her seat, she gave him the matronly smile of a professional grandmother and said, “Hannibal’s a fascinating place, you know. Mark Twain was born here.”
Nolan made an attempt at being pleasant, since she was getting off. “He wrote books, didn’t he?”
She shook her head and waddled off the bus, boarding almost immediately a touring bus bound for Tom Sawyer Cave.
Nolan fell asleep for a while and woke up as the bus was passing a sign which should have read “Hello! Welcome to Illinois!” but somebody had removed the O in hello.
He closed his eyes and leaned back and rolled his past around in his mind for a few minutes.
Nolan had begun as a bouncer in a night club on Rush Street in Chicago. In a few years he climbed to manager. He was, of course, working for the Family; and the Family was grooming Nolan for bigger and better things.
At the head of the Family were “the Boys”: Charlie Franco, Sam Franco and Lou Goldstein. Charlie and Sam were president and vice, while Lou held down the treasurer post. Their “outfit” was a multi-million dollar enterprise dealing in gambling, prostitution, unionizing and narcotics, among other consumer services, tied in with but largely independent of the New York mob families.
Nolan reached behind him and got his cigarettes out of the pock
et of his parka. He lit one up and glanced out the bus window. He saw some crows picking at a scarecrow in a field and he thought of Sam Franco.
Sam Franco had been largely responsible for Nolan’s promising future in the organization. Nolan hated the man on sight, which was natural since even Sam’s brother Charlie referred to Sam as “the skinny little bastard” more often than not. But Sam was one of the Boys, so Nolan didn’t advertise his feelings. And Sam, who tended to like young men more than young women, kept his admiration for Nolan platonic, because Nolan wasn’t the type of man you made passes at, even if you were one of the Boys.
So for the next year and a half things ran smoothly. Nolan moved up in the organization, thanks to Sam, and Nolan kept on hating Sam’s guts in silence, and everybody got along fine until Nolan met the girl.
The Illinois cornfields, already patched with snow, flashed in the bus window by Nolan’s seat. He stared out the window and tried not to think about her. He didn’t like thinking about her.
She was a nice girl, a very nice girl in spite of the fact that Nolan convinced her to spend the night with him during the first week of their acquaintance. She spent the night with him for two months. She had reddish blond hair, the high-cheekboned beauty of a model, an excellent body and was extremely quiet. All in all, she was everything Nolan wanted in a woman.
But she was something else, too, something Nolan didn’t want: she was a cop.
Sam Franco called Nolan in for a special meeting the day after it became known that the girl was jane law. Sam informed Nolan that the girl would have to be removed. Nolan informed Sam that he had already told her to pack her things. What he did not tell Sam was that he too was packing his things, and would take off with her as soon as this blew over.
Sam said, “You’re going to have to ice her.”
“I can’t do that, Mr. Franco.”
“I’ll tell you what you can and can’t do! Now, this is your fucking mess, clean it up!”
“No.”
“Ice the bitch, Nolan. That’s my final word.”
But Nolan’s final word had been no, and he meant no. He didn’t kill the girl.
Someone else did.
Nolan found her the next day, in his apartment, floating face up in his tub. The tub was overflowing with water turned pink from blood.
She’d been beaten first, to near-death, then drowned. Little of her beauty in life had been retained in death.
The emotional outlet Nolan knew best was violence, and he spent the next twenty minutes demolishing the apartment. He reduced all the furniture to rubble and smashed his fists through its plasterboard walls. When he had calmed down enough to think, he went down to the lobby of the apartment building to use the pay phone, since he had torn his own phone from the wall.
“This is Nolan, Mr. Franco.”
“Yes, Nolan.” Franco’s voice exuded fatherly patience.
“Mr. Franco,” he said, his voice even, his hand white around the receiver, “you were right about the girl. I want to thank you for . . . letting me avoid the dirty work.”
“That’s quite all right, Nolan,” said Sam. “Come on over and we’ll talk business.”
Nolan went to Sam’s penthouse office on Lake Shore Drive where he found Sam at his desk, enjoying the view of Lake Michigan out the picture window.
“Nice view,” Nolan said.
Sam turned in his swivel chair, said, “Oh hello, Nolan. Yes, it is a nice view, particularly in May, when . . .” Sam had begun to get up.
“Don’t get up, Mr. Franco,” Nolan said, and Mr. Franco sat back down, two bullets from Nolan’s .38 in his chest.
The first man through the door caught a bullet in the stomach, the next one through got his in the head. The odds were good that Nolan had gotten the girl’s killer because the two men he had shot were Sam’s personal bodyguards and had taken care of most of Sam’s unpleasant chores.
Nolan waited for everyone to die, watching the doorway to see if anyone else wanted to join the party. When no one did, Nolan turned to the wall-safe opposite Sam’s desk. His mouth etched a faint line of a smile as he twisted the dial to the proper combination: a few weeks before he’d been in the office for a conference and had watched carefully as Sam opened the safe. As Nolan had been storing away the combination for possible future use, Sam had boasted its being too complicated for anyone but a Franco to master.
Nolan emptied the safe’s contents into a briefcase and walked out into the outer office, where Sam’s secretary was crouching in the corner, waiting for death. Hauling her up by the arm, Nolan used her as a shield to get safely out of the building and into a cab, the .38 in her back making her a willing if not eager accomplice.
The police noted that the incident marked Chicago’s fourth, fifth and sixth gangland slayings of the month, and promptly added them onto the city’s impressive list. The Boys kept Nolan’s name out of it (the secretary Nolan had used as an escort ended up describing him as short, fat, balding and Puerto Rican) because of the pains Nolan could cause them if he ever chose to reveal his knowledge of their organization’s inner workings to the authorities. The Boys’ benevolence, however, ended there.
Charlie and Lou, shocked to see bloodshed come so close to their personal lives, placed the quarter million on Nolan’s head before Sam’s body had even cooled.
Nolan had taken his twenty-thousand dollar bankroll, compliments of Sam’s wall-safe, and headed for a friend’s place, where he holed up two weeks, waiting for the heat to lift off Chicago. The friend who hid him out was named Sid Tisor.
Nolan looked out the bus window and watched the sun go down. He closed his eyes and waited for Peoria.
3
TISOR WAS WAITING for Nolan at the bus station, asleep behind the wheel of his Pontiac, a blue year-old Tempest. Nolan peeped in at him. Tisor was a small man, completely bald, with unwrinkled pink skin and a kind face. His appearance hardly suited his role of ex-gangster. Nolan opened the car door, tossed his suitcases in the back, hung up his clothes-bags and slid in next to Tisor. He placed his .38 to Tisor’s temple and nudged him awake.
“Nolan . . . what the hell . . .” Though the .38 barrel was cold against Tisor’s skin, he began to sweat.
“Sid, we been friends a long time. Maybe too long. I’m worth a quarter million dead and you’re still on good terms with the Boys. If you’re part of a set-up to get rid of me, tell me now and you got your life and no hard feelings. If I find out later you’re fingering me, I think you know what you’ll get.”
Tisor swallowed hard. He’d never heard Nolan give a speech like that before—he’d never heard more than a clipped sentence or two from Nolan at a time. Never in the ten years he’d known the man.
Tisor said, “I’m with you, Nolan. I don’t have any love for Lou or Charlie or any of the bastards.”
Nolan’s mouth formed a tight thin line, which was as close to smiling as he got. “Okay, Sid,” he said, and put the gun away.
Tisor turned the key in the ignition—it took a couple tries as the weather had turned bitter cold a few days before—and got the Tempest moving. He wasn’t mad at Nolan for the stunt with the .38; he’d almost expected it.
Nolan said, “I haven’t had much sleep, Sid. Take me to a motel, nothing fancy, but I want the sheets clean.”
Tisor said, “You’re welcome at my place. I got two extra beds.”
“No. I’ll stay at a motel.”
Tisor didn’t argue with Nolan. He drove him to the Suncrest Motel. He let Nolan out at the office and waited for three minutes while Nolan got himself set with a room. Nolan came back with key 8, which put him in a little brown cabin close to the end. There were ten cabins, stretched out in a neat row. Nolan walked to his and waved at Tisor to follow him.
Nolan started unpacking his clothes as soon as he got inside the cabin. Tisor said, “You want me to leave now?”
“Wait a minute. We’ll grab some food at the diner across the road. But no talk about your problem
till I’ve had a night’s sleep.”
Tisor again didn’t argue with Nolan. He was used to putting up with the ways of the man. He knew Nolan’s mind was his own and it was no use trying to change him. He would just go along with him and everything would work out all right.
The diner was boxcar style, and the two men took a postage-stamp table by a window. The place was cheap but clean, which was all it took to please Nolan. Tisor ordered coffee, Nolan breakfast.
“You were smart to get scrambled eggs,” Tisor said. “Breakfast’s always the best thing a diner serves.”
“Right.”
Damn you, Nolan, Tisor thought. Why is conversation such a task for you, you goddamn hunk of stone?
“You care if I ask you what you been doing the last six years or so?”
Nolan lit a cigarette. “Go ahead.”
Tisor leaned over the table and whispered. “What’s this I been hearing about you robbing the Boys blind? I hear they can’t wipe their ass without Nolan’s stole the toilet paper.”
Nolan decided he might as well tell Tisor everything, so he’d have it out of the way—Tisor would hound him till he got it all, anyway.
“It started,” Nolan said, “with them chasing me. They sent guns wherever I went. Mexico, Canada, Hawaii. Didn’t matter.”
“You ran.”
“Sure I did. At first.”
“At first?”
“Running gets tiresome, Sid. The first month I ran. After that I took my time. I knew the Boys, knew how they thought. Knew their operations. So when my original bankroll of twenty G’s ran out, I went back for more. Looted any of the Boys’ operations that were handy.”
Their food came and they shut up till the waitress laid the plates down and left.
“How do you work it?”
“Huh?” Nolan said. He was eating.
“When you loot ’em. How do you work it?”
“Quick hit, planned a day or so in advance. Just me. Once in a while outside help, on a full-scale operation. Lots of pros working free-lance these days. Not even the Family controls professional thieves. Not many pros are afraid to help me, not with the money that’s in it.”
Mourn The Living Page 2
