Strongarm (Prologue Crime)

by Dan J. Marlowe

  There was Lynn, though. Anyone tracing me would come inevitably to her. On the record, at least one set of tracers had no scruples at all. How could I leave her to that? I had to hide her out someplace, and then with her safely tucked away, I could take off. I’d find her a place in the morning, and go. I couldn’t afford to wait any longer. I hoped I could afford to wait that long.

  I went back out behind the bar. For the next hour I worked in a pure funk. I made half a dozen mistakes on orders. Every minute I had to fight the impulse to bolt. There’s Lynn, I kept telling myself; how will you be able to face yourself if you blow town and they take her out of the trunk of a car?

  I wasn’t conscious of the ringing of the wall phone until Palladino shuffled in flat-footedly from the dining room to answer it. “Yeah?” he rasped. “Yeah, Maxie, it’s me.” He was facing me at the bar. “Who? Whaddya care who — I give it to you, didn’t I?” He scowled at the phone in his big hand. “Listen, what’s all the stink, Maxie? I ask you a little favor — ” he listened again, unwillingly. “On the level? They just jumped you? But why? Huh? You mean right now?” He had pivoted slowly until his broad back was toward me. “Listen, I don’t like it, man. I don’t — yeah, yeah, he’s here. Awright, awright, I said he’s here!” He banged up the phone angrily and walked back into the other room without turning around.

  I felt as though someone had touched a raw nerve end with a hundred-volt current. There was only one explanation for the telephone call and Palladino’s reaction; the fingerprints were of someone important, and the police were on their way over to find out how they had been obtained. Like a sleepwalker I walked to the far end of the bar where Lynn was standing. She gave me her quiet, self-promising, all-girl smile, the smile reserved for our private moments. It disappeared when she got a look at my face. I had to try twice before I could get anything out of my throat. “Pretend to go to the ladies’ room,” I said in a whisper. “Meet me out in the parking lot.”

  Thank God for an intelligent woman. She never said a word. She turned on her heel and walked away. I ducked back out to the storeroom, took off my apron and threw it in a corner, used my wax-impression-copied key, slid the bolt, and stepped out the back door. Lynn was standing by the car, an anxious look on her pretty face.

  “No time to talk,” I said in a rush. “I’m leaving town, right now, but first I’ll find you a place to stay. You can’t go back to the apartment.”

  She took a step closer to me. “Why don’t you give yourself up, Pete?” I was speechless. Give myself up? Sure. She thought I was into Palladino’s till. “Why don’t you?” she repeated. “I’ve felt for a week you were in trouble. I’ll help if you — ”

  “I can’t, Lynn! I can’t!”

  “Then I’m going with you.”

  I was having trouble with my breathing. “You can’t go with me! It could be a whole hell of a lot worse with me. I can’t get you mix — ”

  “I’m going,” she said. She took three steps and opened the car door on the passenger’s side and got in. She looked out at me, all anxiety gone from her face, steady as a cornerstone, beautifully cool.

  I thought of fifty things to say.

  I didn’t have time to say any of them.

  I ran around the car and slid behind the wheel.

  Six minutes after Palladino had hung up the telephone, we were on the road.

  chapter III

  I’d done six months of a ten-to-fifteen year sentence for second degree murder before I realized my own lawyer had sent me over. Or rather, Charley Risko’s lawyer. I spent the next two years making plans for when I got out, and I was out sooner than a lot of people expected.

  At the trial I hadn’t taken the stand in my own defense. It wasn’t necessary, the lawyer, Joe Foley, assured me. “The only reason you’re on trial,” he said, “is because you tried to get Barrett to lay off his newspaper campaign on Charley, and everyone knows you’re Charley’s boy. Everyone knows I’m defending you because I’m Charley’s lawyer. The tinhorns can’t get at Charley, so they’re harassing you. They haven’t got a thing on you. They’ve got to let you go.”

  It took me awhile to see why they didn’t.

  If you haven’t committed a murder, it’s funny how hard it is to take seriously the fact that you’ve been charged with committing one. I hadn’t been within fifty miles of the Palomar Motel the night Jack Barrett was found dead there; I couldn’t prove it, but I knew the prosecution couldn’t prove I had been, either. So I couldn’t believe it when late in the trial they sprang a motel registration card on us with my name on it. I looked at Joe Foley standing there gargling. He asked for a recess, and afterward came to see me in my cell.

  “I’ve been defending you in good faith, Pete,” he said to me coldly. My name wasn’t Pete then so that wasn’t what he called me, but it will do. “Now I hear via the grapevine the D.A.’s got two witnesses who’ll put you within a hundred yards of the place that night. Why didn’t you admit to me you’d been there?”

  “Because I damn well wasn’t!” I blazed back at him.

  He just shook his head. “You’re asking me to believe someone went to all this trouble to frame you? Why? Who? Go ahead, tell me. Charley’s sore about this, Pete. He knows you knew he hated Barrett, and you may have thought you were doing the right thing, but you didn’t help the organization by gunning him.”

  “Are you crazy, man? I didn’t gun him. Demand a handwriting test. That’ll prove it wasn’t me at the motel.”

  “What about the witnesses?” Foley reminded me. “And do you realize it’s your neck you’re asking me to play around with? We can’t rest our case on a single shaky point like a question of handwriting. It’s too risky. You can get three opinions either way from the first six so-called experts you stop on the street. If I try it, and it goes against you, your ass has had the course.”

  “But you can’t let it stand, either,” I protested.

  “Charley’s got it all figured out,” Foley said. “I’ll go to the D.A. and tell him we’ll take a second degree verdict. Since they never have produced the weapon, I think he’ll go for it. Then with your neck out from under the axe, in a few months we’ll ask for a new trial on the basis of fresh evidence.” His left eyelid fluttered at me. “By that time we’ll have manufactured some.”

  “Now wait a minute! How can you be sure — ”

  “Charley says you’re to keep — ”

  “I said wait a minute!” I had to consciously lower my voice. “Will you for God’s sake listen to me, Foley? I’m no angel — ” I could hear my voice rising again “ — but I didn’t kill him!”

  “What’s hurting us most is we let them establish you went to see Barrett and tried to get him to lay off Charley,” Foley went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I’d never have permitted it if I thought they could put you near the motel. You should have told me.”

  I stared at him. “Listen, the hell with you, Foley. I want to see Charley. Get him in here.”

  “When will you get it through you thick head I’m talking for Charley? Use your brains, man. You can’t expect Charley Risko to walk in the door here like — like, well, anyone else, now, can you? What are you bitching about, anyway? I told you how we’re going to do it. It’s up to you to ride it out.”

  He left me, and still without really believing it, I found myself riding it out. Six months after I was processed in I had it pretty much figured out, but it took Tony Falcaro to dot the i’s and cross the t’s for me. Falcaro had been in a year when I got there. Seeing him every day kind of crystallized my thinking, because I knew all about Falcaro. For years he and Charley Risko had split the state down the middle between them. Unlike Charley, there’d been no politics for Falcaro; he’d been strictly strongarm. And then he got in Charley’s way. I had to wonder if when he and I looked at each other in the prison we weren’t really looking in a mirror.

  Falcaro had no doubts. At the prison movies one night he sat down beside me. He didn’t turn his h
ead, but his rasp reached my ear. “Welcome to the club, slob,” he said. It wouldn’t have reached a man on the other side of me. It’s a thing you learn in the jug. Occupational therapy. “You got around yet to askin’ yourself who’d ‘ve stood trial for Barrett if they hadn’t had you to feed to the machinery?” he asked me. Lately I had, but I didn’t say anything. “So if you’re not a complete jerk, ask yourself what they’re doin’ for you, man.”

  That was all he said. We watched the picture in silence.

  I’d asked myself, all right. And I’d asked Foley. The climate wasn’t right for a new trial, he kept telling me. I’d just have to hold tight. Charley was getting things lined up. When would Charley get things lined up? Soon. And if that wasn’t enough of a brushoff, I was having trouble getting to see Foley. Sometimes a couple of weeks went by after I sent word out.

  In the beginning I’d wondered who had killed Barrett, but it hadn’t bothered me particularly that it was I who stood trial. Charley would have the answer. Charley always had the answer. It was only recently it had begun to filter through to me that this time I was the answer, served up on a platter with an apple in my mouth.

  So I was ready the next time Falcaro knocked up against me. In the pen he was Number One, and when I tell you the warden didn’t have a third as much influence, I’m telling you the literal truth. He picked the exercise yard for our talk. One second I was walking by myself, the next I was surrounded by Falcaro’s boys. He never went anywhere in the prison alone. “Risko knows you’re not gonna stay dummied up forever, kid,” he said to me out of the corner of his mouth. He was probably five years younger than I was, but his squat, powerful body had never known childhood. “Stay away from yard fights or you’re due for a back door parole.”

  I knew what he meant. A phony fight starts in the vicinity of a selected victim, and in the melee half a dozen illicit blades are sunk in the victim’s back. The blades remain in the body, nobody bothering to claim ownership. In prison, blades and the arms to use them aren’t difficult to buy. The back door parole is effected via the undertaker’s pine box. It’s the classic method for the organization “outside” to silence a recalcitrant on the “inside.”

  Falcaro was watching me. “I always liked the job you did for Risko, kid,” he said. “I’m losin’ my secretary to the parole board next month. You want the job?”

  “Sure I want it,” I told him.

  “Now you’re gettin’ smart,” he approved. “I’ll take care of it.”

  He took care of it. A week after Mig Lannucci was paroled, I was Falcaro’s cellmate. It was quite a cell. A typewriter was the least of the nonprison equipment in it. I was taken off my license plate detail in the prison shop and issued plain blue denims. I spent all my time with Falcaro; I smoked his cigars, and I handled his voluminous mail that came and went via prison guards. Half the guards in the place were on Falcaro’s payroll. We didn’t go cabareting nights — it wasn’t that much of a country club — but it was a hell of a long way from being a model prison.

  When I went with Falcaro I had no illusions. He had a spot for me; that’s why he took me on. Eventually the spot could turn out to have a large black X marked on it. I’d worry about that when I came to it. I wanted out, and Charley wasn’t getting me out, and it didn’t look as though he intended to get me out. As long as I was on Falcaro’s team in the pen, he’d give me protection I couldn’t give myself against a snap judgment of Charley Risko’s that he could no longer afford to have me alive.

  Night after night in the dark in the pen I inked in previously penciled figures in Charley Risko’s ledger and mentally added and readded them until daylight.

  I didn’t like the totals.

  I had a good head of steam up before Falcaro tackled me in the cell one night before lights out. So he could watch my face, I imagine. He’d waited nearly a year while he watched me chewing on myself about Charley. “I’m doin’ one hand, kid,” he said to me. In prison parlance one hand was five years; both hands was ten. “Wit’ good time, I’m due on the street in a year. Risko knows you been in my pocket lately. I got word he don’t like it. When I’m gone, your umbrella’s gone. You could have a hard way to go in here.”

  He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know. “So?” I asked him.

  “So the three-to-five I’m doin’ on my head, see? Well, a little curdled, maybe, because of the reason. But now I got word the day I kick it here, Risko’ll have a paper an’ a marshal waitin’ at the gate. For Tony Falcaro it’ll be the same kinda go-round, only with a bigger ticket if I drop the decision. I’m only forty-sixty to beat it, an’ that kind of odds I don’t like.” His flat, black, obsidian-like eyes were full on my face. “I’m not waitin’ around for the paper an’ the marshal. I’m crushin’ out of here.”

  I didn’t hesitate. “I’m with you, Tony,” I said. I had to be with him, of course. If I wasn’t with him, I was against him, and once he got that idea in his bullet head it wouldn’t be Charley Risko from whom I needed protection. “What’s in it for me with you on the outside?”

  He grinned at me. “This you’ll like. First we go an’ collect Risko. Just you an’ me. We’ll take him to a shack I got. The only piece of furniture in the place is a heavy kitchen table bolted to the floor. We’ll strip him, stretch him out on the table and tie him up good, then sprinkle him with gasoline an’ set fire to the shack.” He laughed at the expression on my face. “You think I’m kiddin’?” He laughed again, less jovially. “Sure I’m kiddin’. Was I to tell you what I really got lined up for that character, you’d shoot your cookies for a month.”

  He didn’t say any more, and I didn’t ask any questions. Not then. He’d had to tell me about the breakout; as his cellmate I’d have to become aware eventually of what was going on. He knew I wanted out as badly as he did. He wasn’t risking much.

  Still, I had to ask myself — why me? He must have had the break-out in mind before approaching me to become his “secretary.” After a few sleepless nights I took him on about it. “How come I rate the red carpet to the street with you?” I asked him.

  “You stupid or somethin’, Kid? You’re the enemy of the enemy, ain’t you? Where can I get better insurance’n that? An’ there’s a kicker to that pair of aces — as long as I had one of my own boys in here wit’ me the screws I can’t buy never enter the corridor here wit’out givin’ me an’ the cell a real careful double O. Now, wit’ one of Risko’s boys in here wit’ me, an’ knowin’ how Risko an’ me feel about each other, they can’t figger it. I got ’em on their heels, kid.”

  I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I could figure it, either. It could be I was intended to be the sacrificial lamb if anything went wrong. I decided it made no difference. Falcaro didn’t want out one damn bit more than I did. The thought of Charley Risko was a festering sore in my mind. To get to the street and Charley Risko, I’d take my chances with Falcaro and his boys.

  It took us nine months to set it up, inside and out. Four of us were going: Falcaro, Skip Cavallieri, Georgia Stutz, and me. In the whole nine months the four of us never once met all together. It was usually in twos, twice in threes. We were going out in a laundry truck, and we’d be met four blocks away. Falcaro spread money around, but as usual he was depending on muscle. He and Cavallieri were the muscle; Stutz was the wheelman. I was included by reason of being Falcaro’s cellmate, but I’d stopped suspecting his motives regarding me. For over a year now I’d been doing a job for him, a job he needed done. And I wasn’t affected by the petty jealousies that periodically afflicted his “boys.” In his own bearlike fashion, I think Falcaro even liked me.

  Because I’d been included in the plot willy-nilly, initially I had none of the confidence of Falcaro, Cavallieri, and Stutz. In the beginning the thought of four of us against the armed might of the guards seemed ridiculous to me. I became aware of the crushing burden of an escape attempt on the nerves; the regular life of the big penitentiary went on around us in its monotonous daily patter
n while we held our little meetings and developed our grand design. I found myself watching everyone, and I felt everyone was watching me.

  As day after day went by and our plans continued to firm up, Falcaro’s grim certainty of success was, if not contagious, at least heartening. The attempt no longer seemed so completely ridiculous to me, and once beyond a certain point in the preparations I discovered I had developed a fatalistic attitude that furnished its own substitute for confidence. I’d felt the same thing in Korea.

  The way Falcaro and Cavallieri outlined the inside part of the break seemed too casual to me, but that’s muscle men for you. They spent so much time planning the outside arrangements it was almost as though they expected to walk out the front gate. The big advantage any prison break attempt has on its way to the walls is that the guards inside the walls are unarmed. Falcaro was counting on that, and also on spreading plenty of money around. I knew he might be able to buy a couple of unlocked doors near the cell, but the tough guards were on the perimeter of the prison. Nobody bought them. Out in the exercise yard every time I looked up at the wall and the gun towers I got a sick feeling.

  I couldn’t eat for twenty-four hours before the smash. Falcaro’s money got us to the laundry building with no trouble, although our blue denim uniforms labeled us out-of-bounds in a restricted area. After that we were on our own. The laundry truck was at the loading dock. Falcaro leaped up on the platform like a big cat and slugged the unsuspecting dock guard, then threw him into the truck. The driver bleated once before Skip blitzed him, yanked him from under the wheel, and let Stutz slide into the driver’s platform seat. As we eased away from the dock and down to the gate Cavallieri was tying up guard and driver. Stutz hit the horn twice. The gate started to open. It can’t be that easy, I thought to myself, down on my knees in the truck body ripping open a bundle of white barber coats so we’d have something to put on over our denims. It can’t be that easy.