Bino's Blues

by A. W. Gray

  “Yeah?” Bino said. “What?”

  “Rusty’s wife, Rhonda Benson, now deceased. She’s been in bed with Goldman.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Bino said. “She had more class than that.”

  “Tune in, Bino. I didn’t mean she was screwing the guy. She was so hot at Rusty when they split the blankets, she went straight to the feds. Apparently Rusty put the word out that he wanted to know what safe spot Goldman was keeping her in. All of Rusty’s clients were supposed to be keeping their ears to the ground.”

  “So all that stuff he told me at the golf course,” Bino said, “about how he thought she was visiting her sister … ”

  “Was a lot of bullshit,” Half said. “He had no idea where Rhonda was, at least as of last week. Last week Fat Murphy talked to Rusty, and he was still looking for her.”

  “I should have figured this out. Would have, eventually. All of which puts Rhonda’s killing in a different light.” He slapped his forehead. “Jesus, a hit. I need to come to the party. That’s why Rusty wanted witnesses as to his whereabouts. He spent five hours on the golf course with Barney and me, then met me and that Kinder guy out at Arthur’s. He wanted to know where Goldman was keeping her so he could notify his contract man.

  “And Rusty and Goldman,” Bino said, “have been bullshitting each other. Man, would I like to’ve seen that, Goldman telling Rusty about the deal he was rigging for Terry Nolby, and Rusty acting like he was lapping it up, all the time wanting to know where Goldman was keeping Rhonda. And now that he doesn’t have Rhonda any more, old Marv’s just made a deal with Rusty.” He reached out and picked up the computer printout. “How ’bout these federal cases, Half?”

  “I ain’t had time to do anything about them,” Half said. “Want me to start?”

  Bino stood and snatched up both piles of paper. “Let me think on that. I’ll go over this printout. It might be there’s enough here that I won’t need you to do anything else.”

  Half reached in his drawer and pulled out his betting slips. “I hope not. My business is suffering, you know?”

  Bino stopped in the reception area long enough to say to Dodie, “You find Tommy Clinger?”

  She stood before the file cabinet with one drawer open. She reached in and pulled out a file. “Did do.”

  “You tell him to come in tomorrow morning?”

  She slid the drawer closed. “Didn’t do.”

  He cocked his head. “Huh?”

  “Where I located him was in the shower. His wife says he’s going to call me back.” She carried the file around behind her desk and sat down.

  Bino looked at his watch. “That’s good. I need him earlier. Tell him, six-thirty. I want him to meet me at Joe Miller’s Bar.”

  She rolled her eyes. “How original.”

  He ignored the crack. “It’ll give me time, I’ve got to go check on a contract killer.”

  Now she looked interested. “One of your clients? Or just another drinking buddy?”

  “Neither. I know somebody that can probably tell me where to find one.”

  “You’re not that mad at Mr. Goldman, are you?” Dodie said.

  “Almost,” Bino said. “But, naw. I’m trying to find out who might have done a contract on somebody.”

  Dodie blinked. “Well, if you find out, let me know. I might have a job for him.”

  19

  BINO THOUGHT THAT THE LINC MIGHT BE TRYING TO TELL HIM something. As he exited Highway 114 to turn south on O’Connor Road, just a mile or so west of Texas Stadium, the engine hesitated and nearly stalled. The white Lincoln Town Car wasn’t behaving, and it was the first indication of any trouble in a hundred and nine thousand miles. He’d been a maintenance freak with the car—oil changes every three thousand miles, annual checkups—and he’d made up his mind that the Linc was his until the fenders fell off. But suddenly, just as he was about to cruise into Las Colinas subdivision, the Linc acted as if it was going to quit on him. As he drifted powerless to one side of the road, however, the engine smoothed out and the car picked up speed, and by the time he’d made the sweeping turn onto O’Connor the motor was hitting on all cylinders. He wondered briefly if the Linc knew where he was headed, and if the hesitation had been some kind of protest. Can’t be, he thought, it’s only a car.

  He went south through new-money Las Colinas, home of the here-today-gone-tomorrow fast-buck crowd, and marveled as he always did over the size of and contrast between the different houses. There were modern architecture monstrosities sitting alongside Spanish-style homes complete with adobe brick fronts and red-tile roofs, and next door to the Spanish home might be an English Gothic with rounded towers at its corners. If Bino was running Las Colinas, he thought, he’d pass a residential building code. Anybody building an ugly house had to pay a fine.

  He passed the residential district and slowed, bending to peer out the right-hand window to search for addresses. He cruised in front of a strip shopping center holding a Toys “R” Us, a Tom Thumb Supermarket, and a Bally’s President Spa, and then made a sharp right-hand turn into the far end of the parking lot. He moseyed in front of the Tom Thumb, braking every fifty feet or so to bounce roughly over a speed bump, and parked nose-on to the curb in front of the Bally’s. Visible through the picture window fronting the building, two men and three women trudged away on stair climbers. Bino turned off the key; the Line’s engine died with a final ominous post-ignition shudder. Bino got out, made a face at the Line as he locked the driver’s-side door, then strolled across the sizzling concrete to enter the health spa.

  He was conscious of sounds, the rubbery clop-clop of feet on stair climbers, the faraway clunk of someone lowering a freeweight onto its stand. On his left was a natural fruit juice dispenser; behind the counter on his right was a petite bottle blond in a thigh-length pink leotard. She wore no makeup and didn’t need it. She smiled at him like someone on a commission, and said brightly, “Welcome to President’s.” The chart on the counter told him that if he’d sign up before August 1 he’d get a discount on the initiation fee. The young lady’s leotard was cut away in front to reveal taut stomach muscle; Bino’s own midsection felt suddenly softer than it had just moments ago.

  “Hi,” Bino said. “I’m looking for someone in here.”

  “Oh?” She frowned and looked down at her sign-in roster. “Who?”

  “Annabelle Pirelli. Or Mrs. Dante, could be either one.”

  She ran a finger down the column. “Mrs. Annabelle, it says. You want to go back? She’s doing pecs, I think.”

  Bino wanted to say, Doing what? But he kept his mouth shut and circled the counter toward the rear of the weight room. The girl bent over to lift a box from a lower shelf, showing buttocks like pumped-up basketballs.

  He went down the aisle between two rows of Nautilus equipment, and passed a guy who was examining his flexed triceps in a full-length mirror. Bino’s own muscles tightened involuntarily.

  Annabelle was on a sixty-degree padded incline bench attached to a Nautilus, her upper arms extended out, elbows bent, hands up in the locked position as she forced the tension bars up beside her ears. The cords in her neck stood out with the effort. Her leotards were lavender, her honey-blond hair tied behind her head, terrycloth bands on both wrists and around her forehead. Her tensed thigh muscles rippled under spandex. Bino thought her figure even better than twenty years earlier, when she’d bounced up and down and led cheers in Moody Coliseum while he was playing basketball.

  He went and stood before her with his hands in his pockets. She was at maximum extension when she spotted him. Her arms relaxed; the tension bars rolled outward. Air escaped her lips in a sigh. There was a fine sheen of perspiration on her cheeks and upper lip. She smiled, showing one slightly crooked front tooth.

  “Did you just happen in?” she said, slightly breathlessly. “They have a membership drive.”

  He
adjusted his tan knit polo around his waist. “I came to see you.”

  “Well, aren’t I the lucky one,” she said. Her biceps were bunched, a crease in the flesh where her upper arm joined her shoulder. “How did you know where I’d be?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  The laugh crinkles around her eyes tightened. “I do?”

  “Those two musclebutts you referred to me last month.”

  “Yes, aren’t they beautiful?” she said. “Keep them out of jail, love. It would be a shame to waste all that on prison punks.”

  “A steroid selling beef isn’t that serious,” Bino said. “I’m working on it. Probation, likely, they’ve got no records.”

  “Hip, hip, hooray,” Annabelle said.

  Bino backed up to straddle a padded bench, and sat down. “Anyway, they delivered your message.”

  One plucked eyebrow arched. “Oh? Did I give them a message?”

  “I guess it was a message,” Bino said. “It was a handwritten itinerary of your workout schedule, on the letterhead of this place.”

  “Maybe I just wanted you to know I was getting back in shape.”

  “You’ve never looked out of shape to me, babe,” he said. “I’ve always said, told everybody, you look like you could still cartwheel from the fifty to the goal line.”

  “Looks are deceiving,” she said. “At least they were. My legs were getting like dough.” She reached down to stroke her inner thigh.

  Bino had to admit that her workouts were … well, working out. She’d always been a fanatic about the way she looked. Which, Bino thought, was part of the problem with her. “I need to ask a favor,” he said.

  “Excuse me? I thought you came as a result of my message.”

  He firmed his expression. “We need to talk, Annabelle.”

  She laid her head back against the inclined bench. “Up front, down the corridor, there’s a juice and salad bar. Give me a few minutes to finish toning.” Her eyes showed a wanton twinkle. “Then I’ll be ready for you, okay?”

  The juice and salad bar was behind a glass cafeteria-style counter, in a long room with full-length mirrors covering three of the walls. Bino felt out of place as he pushed his tray along, dropping a fork and spoon on top of a folded paper napkin, looking over an array of sandwiches on saucer-size paper plates, an olive and a miniature pickle impaled on a toothpick stuck through each individual sandwich. All he saw was wheat bread, which Bino supposed contained no additives and crap. He wondered briefly how far it was to the nearest 7-Eleven, where he could get a loaf of good old Mrs. Baird’s.

  He pointed at one of the sandwiches, and leaned over to say to the girl behind the counter, “It’s chicken, huh?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “It’s soya. Tastes like chicken.”

  I’ll just bet it does, Bino thought. He said hopefully, “How ’bout the beef?”

  “It’s soya, too,” she said. “We don’t have any meat here.”

  “Oh.”

  “You want the beef?” she said.

  “No. No, just checking.” He continued on down the line, finally ordering a drink called a strawberry/banana smoothie. The girl tossed fresh strawberries and banana chunks into a blender, added crushed ice and water, and whipped up something resembling a daiquiri which she served him in a plastic cup. He fished out two singles and approached the register. The girl trotted down behind the counter to punch computer keys, then grinned at him. “That’ll be three-eighteen, sir,” she said. Bino mumbled to himself as he poked the dollar bills back into his pocket and came tip with a five. She gave him his change. He stumped over to a waist-high table and sat on a stool.

  The only other customers were two guys at a nearby table, men in their twenties wearing muscle shirts, their triceps like thick twisted rope. Bino sat up straighter and glanced in the full-length mirror, then took a deep breath and stuck out his chest. One of the two guys smirked at him. His ears reddening, he had a sip of strawberry/banana. It wasn’t bad.

  In about five minutes Annabelle appeared, striding confidently in from the corridor, patting her forehead with a towel draped around her shoulders. She nodded and smiled, and he lifted his cup in a toast. She went through the serving line, then approached with one of the godawful phony chicken sandwiches and a cup of water. She sat on the stool beside him and crossed her legs as the two burly guys threw appreciative glances in her direction. Then the two looked at Bino as if to say, Who’s the out-of-shape asshole sitting with the fox? Involuntarily, Bino squared his shoulders.

  “Do you have a sore back or something?” she said.

  He relaxed. “No, I’m okay. How’ve you been?”

  “Bored.”

  Annabelle spent her life in a state of boredom, which Bino supposed was one of the reasons he’d come home from law school class one day to find her gone. “Sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “Are you planning to excite me?” She took a tiny bite from one corner of her sandwich.

  “ ’Fraid not. I’m just not a very exciting guy.”

  “That’s not what I remember,” she said, chewing, “from the last time we were together.”

  During the time he’d been defending a federal judge, Bino had weakened and taken her to bed for the first time since their divorce eighteen years ago. He swallowed hard. Her current husband was into a lot of different things, one of which was making guys dead. “I need your help with something,” he said.

  “Translating into, Dante’s help,” she said. “The last time you pumped me for mob information, at least I got a good screwing out of the deal.”

  He picked up his cup and swirled pink liquid around. “I’m coming to you because I know that nobody else can assert the influence on Dante Tirelli that you can. You’re in a real strong position, Annabelle.”

  She smirked. “Does that mean I’m not going to get the screwing?”

  “What I need is,” Bino said quickly, “I’ve got a case where I think somebody’s paid somebody else to do a contract killing.”

  She huddled closer to him and looked around the room. “Shh. Information’s one thing, but being a stool pigeon against my husband won’t make for real spiffy marital relations.”

  “Not him,” Bino said. “He’s got nothing to do with this. But the chances are ninety-nine percent on the Bino Phillips scale that a pro did this job. What we’ve got is a woman looking like a victim of a nut. Later, though, it turns out to be very convenient for certain people, people with a lot of stroke, that she’s dead. Making a killing look like something different than what it was, that’s a signature of only one group of folks.”

  She relaxed. Bino felt a little bit sorry for Annabelle, being in a marriage where she had no way out other than feet first, but Annabelle had known exactly what she was getting into. She’d been a poor little rich girl all her life, and her marriage to Dante Tirelli had the same motive as her earlier marriage to Bino Phillips—something that would be fun for a while, and when things quit being fun she could simply walk away. Only with Dante Tirelli it hadn’t worked out the way she’d planned, and never would.

  “What would be my incentive other than sex?” Annabelle said, taking a bite of her sandwich.

  “This time,” Bino said, “it would be Dante’s incentive. The dead lady had nothing to do with the Outfit, and neither do any of the other players. Mob contracts are all family affairs. The guy that did this, because of the method, he’s either an Outfit guy or had some training from one. That means that somebody’s taking in work on the side, and if that’s true he’s doing it on the sly. His capo di tutti, or whatever they call them these days, isn’t going to like one of his people acting as an independent, and is going to want to know about it. Brighten up, babe, you’ll be doing something that old Dante will like.”

  “Dante doesn’t like dealing with the New York guys. He’s been forced into it lately on
the gambling, he thinks because of you.”

  Bino felt a slight chill. “Why because of me?”

  “The New York people being in on the gambling in Dallas is a trade-off. Something they did for him a while back. I’d be raising my neck and saying, Here, honey, go ahead and cut my throat, if I elaborated on that, but you should be able to add two and two.” Annabelle folded her arms on the table. Her breasts bunched under taut spandex.

  He got her drift. He’d agreed once to represent a lovely person named Buster Longley, who was in the process of trying to make a plea bargain deal in return for tattling on a guy named Winnie Anspacher, who in turn had held information not so favorable to Dante Tirelli. Longley had died in jail under less than pristine circumstances, and though Bino had figured the murder to be mob related, he’d never had any confirmation up to now. “Sure,” Bino said. “Buster Longley.”

  “You said that,” Annabelle said. “I didn’t.”

  “Hey, Annabelle, I didn’t have anything to do with who Longley was or wasn’t going to roll over on. That deal was in the hopper before I ever talked to the guy.” The story was almost the truth, and Bino put on his best Honest Abe expression.

  “You should tell Dante that, not me,” Annabelle said.

  “Whether I’m popular with Dante or not,” Bino said, “it’ll be a feather in his cap to transfer information about somebody in the Outfit doing hits on their own. And it’ll score points for you to be the bearer of the tidings.”

  “I’ve got better ways than that of scoring points,” Annabelle said. She winked.

  “Be that as it may,” Bino said, “here’s what I need. The lady was found in Houston. Three days before that, she was in Dallas taking a golf lesson.”

  Annabelle rolled her eyes. “I hope you weren’t teaching her. God.”

  “Hey, I’ve really improved since we were … you know, married. But no, I wouldn’t have the time to give lessons. The point is, the guy’s likely in either place, Houston or Dallas. There are only a few people that do things like this, and it shouldn’t take much for Dante to figure out who he is. I want his name in return for furnishing the information that it’s going on.”