by Brad Latham
“Who is it?” a male voice shouted.
Agitino’s wife looked back over her shoulder. “A man. Says he wants to see you.”
“All right. Keep him there.”
The two stood and waited, silent, worry in the wife’s eyes as she stared at The Hook. Finally, Agitino padded up. “Yeah?” he asked.
“You’re Red Agitino?”
“That’s right. Who’re you?”
“My name’s Lockwood. I’m with the police.” Again he flashed the wallet. His shield looked much like the ones used by the New York police department.
“What do you want with me?”
“It’s private. Can just the two of us talk?”
His wife’s eyes filled with care, but Agitino seemed unruffled. “If you like. I can come out there.”
“Be careful, Red,” she cried, hand out as if to stop him.
“It’s okay, Reenie,” he told her. “This guy’s all right. I can see that.” He opened the screen door, and waved his arm toward the street. “After you.”
They reached the sidewalk, and Agitino turned to the right and walked a few paces. “Okay,” he said, as easy as anyone could be under the circumstances, “what’s it all about?”
“Maria Nuzzo.”
Agitino broke his stride, then recovered and continued to walk. “Yes?”
“You know who she is.”
“I read about her in the Daily News. Shot dead, wasn’t she?”
“You know she was.”
“Hey, wait a minute—” Agitino spun toward The Hook.
“I’m not accusing you of anything, Red,” Lockwood told him. “I just assume you’ve read every word you could find on her death.”
Agitino’s face went blank. “I don’t get you.”
“I know you were her lover.”
Agitino seemed stung, then swiveled his face to the right, out of Lockwood’s vision. “You’re crazy.”
“Maria talked.”
Agitino wheeled back and looked him over. “Let me see that police card again.”
“You don’t have to worry about me, Red.”
“The card.”
Lockwood brought it out, and this time Agitino grabbed it to study. You’re a liar!” he said angrily. “You’re no cop. You’re with an insurance company!”
“Yes. An investigator for them.”
“You lied to me.”
“I find I get a quicker response if people think I’m with the police. In the end, the results are the same.”
“You’re a phony, and your story is phony.”
“You’re telling me you weren’t Maria Nuzzo’s lover.”
“I’m telling you I didn’t even know Maria Nuzzo.”
“I’m trying to find her killer, Red. That’s all I want.”
Agitino glared at him, and said nothing.
“I have reason to believe her husband killed her. Frankie Nuzzo. And one of the reasons he did it was because he found out she was cheating on him. With you.”
“I’m going home.” Agitino turned, and started walking back to the house.
“Nuzzo is a gangster, Red—a killer! He should be off the streets. You know that. You’ve got to know all about him.”
“Buzz off.”
“He belongs in the chair, Red. If you don’t help me, Maria’s blood will be on your hands as well.”
Agitino’s face went crimson with anger, and he lashed out with a short right that caught The Hook by surprise, and threw him back a few feet. “Leave me alone!” Agitino cried. “I’m going home, and I don’t want to see you again. I’ve got a shotgun in the house, and if you ever try to bother me anymore, I’ll blast your head off and tell the cops you were a prowler!” With that he turned and walked back to the house.
The Hook stood there a moment, then wearily headed back to his car. It had been a long day.
CHAPTER
TEN
Hook Lockwood allowed himself a good long sleep. He’d be damned if he’d make Mr. Gray happy, and at this point, what with the hours he’d been working, and the company he’d been keeping—Nuzzo’s boys and the like—Transatlantic was getting him cheap. Much too cheap.
It was nearly eleven when he strode to the breakfast table room service had wheeled in, the morning’s papers lying alongside the silver tray. He was about to read the Herald Tribune when he saw the headline and photo on the front page of the Daily Mirror.
“BROOKLYN WIDOW TORTURED, KILLED”
He turned to the story on the inside pages.
“Early this morning, Brooklyn police found the mutilated body of Teresa Stoneman, 2122 Alderney Road. Her tongue had been cut out and her throat slashed.”
He read the rest, but there were no other important details. The police suspected it was the work of a maniac. The Hook knew better. They’d cut out her tongue. A warning to informers.
He forgot about the hotcakes and coffee awaiting him, and tore through the pages of the Brooklyn directory. Agitino. What the hell was his square first name? Dammit, it made no difference. There was no Agitino in the book, not at the right address.
He threw the book down, checked the .38 and grabbed his hat and coat. An easy one, Gray had said. Easy.
He made the forty-minute drive in slightly more than twenty. Obviously someone had followed him to Teresa’s place, and if they’d tracked him there, they’d have continued along to Agitino’s. He hoped he’d be in time. He already had Teresa’s blood on his hands. He didn’t want more.
He reached the house, pulled up, jumped out of the car, and ran up to the door.
Before he had a chance to ring the bell, the door opened, and his heart sank. He found himself face to face with Fish Lomenzo.
“Come in,” Lomenzo said, staring at him with the dead eyes peculiar to the professional killer.
Lockwood saw the big .45 pointed at his gut, and shrugged. He had to get into the house, and although he could think of far better ways … he pulled open the door and stepped inside.
“I’m Albert Lomenzo,” the man told him in a manner that was almost courtly. “I want to thank you.”
The Hook eyed him coldly, but said nothing. He felt someone come up from behind and frisk him. They took the .38.
“Maria Nuzzo was my sister,” Lomenzo said, after it was obvious Lockwood was not about to say anything. “My family. My blood. And somebody killed her. Some loathesome, stinking thing killed her!” Lockwood was covered by two other thugs in the room, and Lomenzo turned his back to him and continued to address his harangue to someone else in the room. “I had to find him, have to find him!”
Lockwood shifted to one side, and saw who Lomenzo was addressing. Red Agitino was sitting in a straightback chair, arms and legs bound, his shirt ripped off, and big red welts standing out on his chest. Agitino’s wife was seated a few feet away, unbound, her eyes wide with mute horror.
Lomenzo turned back to the detective. “And then Frankie told me about you. About your working on the case. So I had you followed. Not in time to help Frankie’s boys, which to tell the truth, I’m not so sorry about. But once you left your hotel last night, my men were with you every step of the way.”
“They’re the ones who killed Teresa Stoneman.”
“You mean the lady who talked too much? You already know about that?”
“It’s in the papers, Lomenzo.”
“In the papers? Good, good. They say why she died?”
“No. The cops thought it was a maniac. I agree.”
Lomenzo ignored him. “The cops. Who cares about the cops. The right people, they’ll know. They’ll understand, and it’ll help them a little bit to keep their mouths shut when they got to be shut.” Lomenzo nodded, content with the thought, and then indicated The Hook. “Sit him down and keep him quiet. I want to talk some more to this one.” He wheeled, and moved toward Red Agitino.
One of the gunmen nodded toward a chair near Agitino’s wife, and Lockwood walked over and sat down. The woman looked at him wildly, unseei
ngly, anaesthetized with terror.
“Okay, pallie, you’ve had a little holiday. Now let’s resume our conversation,” Lomenzo said. He turned to one of his men. “Light up another butt,” he told him.
“No. Please. I don’t know anything.” Agitino was shaking, his eyes echoing the horror in his wife’s.
“You and my sister. Tell me about you and my sister.”
“Nothing. I didn’t know your sister.”
“Gimme the cigarette,” Lomenzo held out his hand, and the slim white tube was given to him, the end of it glowing red. “You know,” Lomenzo said, hand nearing Agitino’s chest, “I’m startin’ you off easy. This kind of stuff don’t work on you, I can come up with plenty rougher.” And he pressed the cigarette into Agitino’s flesh.
“No, please.”
“Talk.”
“I have nothing to say. I didn’t do anything with your sister. I swear on the grave of my mother!”
“Pig!” Lomenzo spat at him. “So yellow, you hide behind your mother’s skirts, you lying adulterer!” He turned to a slight, sallow-faced man near him. “Vinnie—the knife.”
The three of them, Agitino, Agitino’s wife, and Lockwood watched, helplessly, as Vinnie approached Agitino, a stiletto gleaming in his hand.
“Vinnie, here is a carver,” Lomenzo told Agitino. “He likes to carve. Nice things in wood. Sometimes in ivory. Nice. You’d like it.” He jerked his head at Vinnie. “But most of all, Vinnie likes to carve in flesh.”
Agitino said nothing, his eyes wild with fear.
“This guy’s a snake, Vinnie. Why don’t you give him a brother? Carve a nice snake on his chest?” Lomenzo said, his tone deadly.
Vinnie’s eyes lit up, and he approached Agitino. Slowly, carefully, he traced a line along Agitino’s chest with the stiletto, scraping the surface of the skin just enough to leave a mark, a mark that eventually took the shape of a cobra.
“You gonna talk?” Lomenzo asked again.
Agitino shook his head no, his eyes streaming with tears. “I’ve got nothing to tell. I swear.”
“Go ahead.”
Vinnie took his time, sinking the knife in, and following the outline he’d traced. Agitino started to scream, but one of the thugs stuffed a pillow against his face.
“Not too hard. We don’t wanna smother him,” Lomenzo said, his expression impassive. He waited until Vinnie was done. Agitino’s body was convulsing with pain. “Okay, let him talk.” The pillow was pulled away.
Agitino had fainted. “The salts. Give him the salts,” Lomenzo instructed, and someone broke a capsule and held it under the red-headed man’s nose.
Agitino came to, and started to scream, and the pillow was clapped over his mouth again. Blood was streaming down his chest. “Quiet. Be quiet,” Lomenzo told him. “Be quiet or we do more. Understand?”
Agitino nodded, and the pillow was pulled away again.
“Now talk.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t know anything.”
“Liar!” Lomenzo slapped him across the face, splitting Agitino’s lip. “Okay, Vinnie. Again.”
“I won’t talk. I didn’t do it.”
“Stop,” Lomenzo told Vinnie. “Put away the knife.” A disappointed look came over the carver’s face, and reluctantly he returned the weapon to his pocket, after carefully wiping it off.
Lomenzo considered Agitino for a moment, then, “Okay. I tell you what I got for you. Someone once told me about this thing the Arabs do. The Arabs, they been around a lot longer than any of us—they’re ahead of us by hundreds of years. Thousands.”
Lomenzo turned, and walked toward a corner of the room where a covered box stood. “The things we do to make people talk, the Arabs would laugh at us. Nance stuff, they’d call it.”
Lockwood looked wildly around. He had to do something, but as soon as he moved, three guns were trained on him, all at point-blank range. He subsided.
Lomenzo smiled a little, shrugged, and continued. “The Arabs, they got all sorts of ways. Ways that are guaranteed. You gotta hand it to the Arabs, for heathens they got minds we all should be envious of.”
Lomenzo fiddled a bit with the cloth covering the box. It looked as if there were a handle on the top of the box, as if it were some kind of carrying case.
“But one idea the Arabs had, I think it’s the best of all. I know it is,” Lomenzo said, in a tone of voice that might have been heard at a board of directors’ meeting. “The Arabs, what they do, see, is they take a cooking pot, and they heat it up. Make it red hot, you understand? Remember, when we first got here, I told my man to put a pot on the stove? Remember?” He turned to one of the men. “Is it hot? Red-hot?”
“Yes, Mr. Lomenzo. Red-hot. Glowing.”
“Good.” Lomenzo turned back to Agitino. “And do you know what the Arabs do with that pot? No? Well, what they do is they take the clothes off someone they want to get an answer out of, at least strip them off far enough so that his belly is bare. That’s good enough, especially,” his eyes flicked toward Agitino’s wife, “when a lady’s present.”
Lomenzo again toyed with the cloth on the box. “And then they take the pot that’s so hot it’s red and glowing, and they put it on the belly of the guy they want to have a conversation with. A burning hot cooking pot on his belly, see?”
Lomenzo paused, and rubbed his face. He looked portly, prosperous, a good citizen. Only his eyes gave him away.
“That don’t sound like much fun, does it, a red-hot pot on your belly?” he asked Agitino, who said nothing, dumb with fear.
“But compared to the rest of it, it does sound like fun,” Lomenzo said, voice dry and uninflected. He lifted the covering off the box. From where he sat, Lockwood couldn’t see for sure, but the box seemed to be, not a box after all, but a cage of some sort. Lomenzo picked up the cage and carried it over to Agitino.
“You like the look of these?” he asked Agitino, and now Lockwood saw inside the cage, saw its contents. Rats.
Agitino’s eyes were wide with horror as Lomenzo continued. “You see, my friends the Arabs, for them a red-hot piece of metal on somebody’s stomach don’t mean nothing, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how it cooks the flesh till it stinks. For them, that’s just the beginning. It’s what they put under the pot that counts.”
He leaned closer to Agitino. “This is what they put under the pot.” He pointed to the rats. “You see, once the rats are under the pot, they want to get away from it, because it’s so hot, you know what I mean, they’re afraid they’ll be burned. So there’s only one way they can figure to get away. And that’s to eat their way through the stomach they’re standing on.”
Mrs. Agitino began to scream, and Vinnie came up behind her and clapped a hand over her mouth. There was blood on his hand. Her husband’s blood. She subsided, sobbing.
Lomenzo toyed with the door of the cage, raising it a fraction of an inch. Instantly, the rats raced to it, bodies quivering with excitement, eyes glittering, teeth bared. “Bring in the pot, Vinnie,” Lomenzo commanded.
“No!” Agitino cried. “No! I’ll—I’ll talk.” All of him seemed to sag as he said it.
Lomenzo stared at him for a moment, for two. “Okay,” he said, finally, “talk.”
Agitino’s eyes pleaded. “Not in front of her,” he said, indicating his wife.
Lomenzo was stone. “In front of her.”
Agitino began to cry. “I love her. I don’t want her to know.”
Lomenzo shrugged. “You shoulda thought of that before you started. Now talk. Or,” he fiddled with the cage, “we get to find out how good the Arabs are at what they do.”
Agitino blanched, and turned to his wife. “I’m sorry, honey. I loved you, I really did.” He was talking like a man already dead. “But—” he began to sob again. “I couldn’t help it.”
Lomenzo slapped him, hard. “Talk!”
“All right,” Agitino said, all hope gone from his face. He looked like a shell. “Maria and I—we were
what you say.”
“Pig!” Lomenzo slapped him again. “When? For how long?”
“It began last summer—August, I think. I was working on her car. We got to talking. She made an advance.”
“Liar!” Lomenzo punched him this time, full on the mouth.
“It’s true. And—and she was an attractive woman. I was tempted.” He turned to his wife. “I didn’t want to, not really, but—I don’t know why—I couldn’t say no. I never loved her.”
Lomenzo hit him again. “Who else?”
“What?”
“Who else was she givin’ it to?”
Agitino looked genuinely astonished. “No one. No one I knew.”
“Yeah.” Lomenzo turned away from him. This was his sister. He was being dishonored in front of his men. He wanted to get it over quickly.
“That’s the truth?”
“Yes. As far as I know.”
“When did you stop seein’ her?”
“I—I—” Agitino looked helplessly at his wife. “I didn’t.”
“You were still seein’ her right up to the time she was killed?”
“Yes.”
Agitino wheeled back to him, murderous. “Did you kill her?”
“No.” Agitino saw the look in Lomcnzo’s eyes, and whatever last shred of dignity he had left fell away. “No! I swear to God I didn’t. Please believe me! Please!”
Lomenzo tried to retrieve a little family honor. “You loved her.”
Agitino looked at Lomenzo, then at his wife, then back to Lomenzo. “No. No, I didn’t love her.”
Lomenzo was already done with him, except for a few final questions, questions he obviously expected no satisfactory answer for. “Do you know who killed her?”
“No.”
“Do you think Frankie knew? Her husband.”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Lomenzo spoke, though looking at no one. “I got to find out who killed her. I also got to protect her honor. These three know about it now, all of them.” He adjusted his tie, buttoned his jacket. He was ready to leave. He spat the words over his shoulder, “Vinnie, you and Phil and Loomo, you stay here and finish up. There’s nothing left we can get out of them.”
