Kiss Her Goodbye Page 20

  "But you're not a turtle. You're a different animal altogether."

  Half a smile dug a groove in a smooth if gently lined cheek. "I'm aware that Assistant District Attorney Marshall also has her shrewd eye on Anthony Tretriano. And I hear interesting whispers that the D.E.A. and the I.R.S. are about to look into his activities as well. No, Mr. Hammer, I felt I could afford taking you out of the game to enhance my standing. But, as I say ... I failed." He glanced at his watch again. "Can we agree to move on?"

  I grunted a laugh. "It's just business, right? Even when your own kid dies, you do all the calculations and decide whether or not to go after the guy responsible. Christ, Alberto—I killed your son. That's the reason to take me out. Not fucking business."

  He shrugged. "That's why you are a small businessman, Mike ... and I am, shall we say, a captain of industry. More coffee?"

  "No thanks. You up for answering a couple more questions, Alberto?"

  "Ask and we'll see."

  "What do you know about gems being used for payoff purposes?"

  He frowned. Blinked. "Why, nothing."

  Was he that good an actor?

  "Did you have anything to do with the murder of a seaman named Joseph Fidello?"

  He shook his head. "Never heard of him."

  "Fidello had his throat cut. A kill with a knife, the same goddamn day that your boy Cerone comes calling on me with a blade."

  Leaning on an elbow, he cupped his chin and got a thoughtful look. Something gently mocking danced in his voice. "I wonder how many knifings there are in New York on any given date?"

  "Yeah, okay. But what about Ginnie Mathes?"

  "What about who?"

  I shifted in the chair. "You really aren't part of this, Alberto? There have been four murders—Doolan, the Mathes girl, a hooker named Dulcie Thorpe, and now Joseph Fidello. And none of them are names that mean anything to you?"

  His shrug was elaborate. "Only Doolan. The others, no. If you want to know where I stand in this—or rather where I sit—it's on the sidelines, watching Anthony Tretriano's world crumble. His father was a minor player, not a nobody, but a very small somebody. Big Tony owed his loyalty to me. Which means his son owed me the same." His eyes flashed, an edge came to his voice. "But instead, Little Tony became a big shot, went to great lengths to rehabilitate his reputation while behind the scenes he sought to usurp what is rightfully mine."

  The lion behind the lamb was revealing itself.

  "So," I said, "when Little Tony and his Club 52 scheme go down, you rise back up."

  The eyes said shark, too—hard and dark and cold. "Why? Did you really think I was a harmless retiree, Mr. Hammer, ready to move to Florida and clip coupons? You can move back to Florida, if you like. You have my word I won't send anyone to kill you, ever again, as long as you stay out of New York."

  "What's the plan, Alberto?"

  "Would I just... tell you, Mike?"

  "You've told me a lot already. Why not?"

  He shrugged. Chuckled. "Why not indeed? Some of us who are written off as over the hill are still very much able to play the game. Don Giraldi. Pierluigi. When Anthony crashes in a cloud of coke dust, we will rise up. Our distribution system is already in place."

  "What, Sonata Imports?"

  That got his attention, the shark eyes flaring. Then he eased back into his soft-spoken host's role. He glanced at his watch again. "You are remarkably well informed for an outsider, Mike."

  "Am I keeping you, Alberto? Got another appointment?"

  "No. Not at all. I find your company interesting. Even illuminating."

  I studied him. The back of my neck was tingling. "I have an idea, Alberto."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah. I have an idea that before I got off that elevator, you sent down word to rally the troops. You probably had some of the older fellas sent safely away, and everybody else you advised to arm themselves and get ready. Maybe you even had phone calls made, while you were stalling me up here, to bring in more troops. What kind of army will I be facing when I leave your condo, Alberto? Will they kill me here, or will they put a bag on my head, toss me in a car trunk, and drive me somewhere to make an example out of me?"

  Alberto Bonetti couldn't hold back the smile. He couldn't stop that upper lip from pulling back over white teeth, which were no less sharklike for being store-bought.

  "Why don't you ask them?" he said and began to laugh, softly.

  I saw the two men reflected in the glass of the microwave door—the big guy who'd come up with me on the elevator and another of the club-room attendants, both with revolvers in hand. "Reinforcements have arrived, huh?"

  Alberto raised a hand as if in benediction, but actually to pause the pair of gunmen behind me. They had entered through a door into the living room, the soft carpeting cushioning their steps. They weren't right behind me—maybe ten feet....

  "Outgunned and outnumbered, Mr. Hammer," Alberto said, and his eyes were hard and his smile was a sneer. All business or not, the old don truly hated me. I could see that now. Maybe vengeance was part of his agenda after all, which at least made him more human.

  "Lousy odds," I said.

  "Terrible."

  "Better than yours."

  The .45 came into my hand of its own volition and I blew his brains out all over the reflection of his boys. Fast as it had been, he'd had time to be surprised, and now stared in shock at the ceiling as blood and brains spilled from his shattered skull like awful jelly onto his otherwise spotless kitchen floor.

  This I noticed only in a peripheral way as I was busy tipping that table over on its edge and giving myself cover, an action accomplished in the startled second shared by the pair that shooting their boss had bought. From behind the wooden wheel, I ripped off two shots so fast neither man had the chance to react before my .45 slugs took root in their heads and blossomed red. They made as little sound falling to that soft carpet as they had creeping up on me.

  I grabbed the dead don by his shirt collar and dragged him down the hall, leaving a sluglike trail of scarlet slime on the tile floor. I had to keep looking fore and aft, fore and aft, because I didn't know whether more guns would come spilling in through the living-room entry, or maybe beat me to the elevator.

  And I was almost to the elevator—no key was needed on the boss's end—when I heard the rush of footsteps and the grunt of breath from guys not used to running. Two more of the armed and dangerous club-room waiters came barreling at me from the living room, shooting, but wildly. I dropped their dead boss to the floor and stood sideways, making as narrow a target as possible, and picked them off one at a time. The first one was another head shot and he went back in a tangle of legs leaving a blood-mist cloud, but the other one slipped in his boss's blood trail and was already careening back when the shot meant for his head caught him under the chin, dropping him in a pathetic pile as he clutched his red-spurting throat and bubbled blood. It was an even bet he'd drown on the stuff before the wound killed him.

  I grabbed dead Alberto by the shirt collar and held him up like a meat shield as I hit the elevator button. If somebody below, hearing the shit hit the fan, had summoned the elevator, then sent it back up, there could be guns poised in that car to blast me to ribbons.

  But the car was empty, and Alberto and I stepped on. Which button should I push? They would expect the ground floor. I hit the second. Firepower would be waiting but not as heavy as downstairs. Holding the late Alberto in front of me, my left fist clutching his collar right behind his shattered head, I was getting blood and other ooze on me, but it couldn't be helped. The elevator wasn't big enough to hide to either side, so I stayed more or less dead center, and when the door slid open, a guy in a green leisure suit with a big mustache and a head of curly hair let rip with a grease gun, a vintage M3, and the bullets bup bup bupped right across and through the dead don and thudded against me, slowed down by the cadaver and just tapping the bulletproof vest.

  I shot Leisure Suit in the left eye, which go
t a surprised expression out of the right one, and before the big guy tumbled to the floor of the little receiving area, I dumped the don on the threshold of the elevator, to keep the door from closing, stranding the car, and bent down to grab the grease gun from limp fingers. I had it in my left hand and the .45 in my right as I moved into the club room.

  It appeared empty. Abandoned. I checked behind the long bar and a bartender and waiter were crouched there. The waiter thrust a .38 snout my way, and I shot him between the eyes, not that tough at close range. The bartender, unarmed, had his hands up—he was about fifty and balding and was crying, looking away Apparently just a bartender. He'd pissed himself, you could see it and smell it.

  Keeping his eyes off me, so as not to see his own death or maybe to tell me he wouldn't be able to I.D. my ass, he was begging for his life and I told him to shut the fuck up.

  "I know there are ways out of here," I said. "Any from this room?"

  "No! No. Please... please don't...."

  "Where then?"

  A finger pointed at the ceiling. "The end suite upstairs—parking lot side. The fake fireplace swings open, there's stairs down to the cellar."

  "How do you get out of the cellar?"

  "I don't know!"

  Shit.

  I could hear a lot of hustling and hollering above me. I had no desire to go back upstairs. Maybe I could go out the front way just as easy. Back out in the reception area, I checked the late Leisure Suit—he had a pair of thirty-round magazines for the M3 in a jacket pocket. I collected these and shoved a fresh one in. I would have rather had a Thompson than an M3, but at least the thing was light. Even with ammo in, it was only ten pounds.

  When I went down the stairs, two punks in muscle shirts with handguns and dumb expressions were coming up. I panned the grease gun across and wiped the stupidity off their faces and the guns tumbled from dead fingers and they served no further purpose now other than giving me obstacles to step around. Halfway down, the room presented itself, and there was more of the young crowd down there, a confused, excited swarm with guns in hand—I counted twelve, and mixed in were half a dozen older Bonetti hitters, who were jockeying for position, so many bodies down there that they were in danger of shooting each other. Bullets were flying around me, chewing up the wooden stairs and the banisters, and a couple thunked into the bulletproof vest, hurting like hell, like Marciano was working over my midsection, but I passed the grease gun across the sea of faces and turned them scarlet and screaming then moved the spitting, smoking snout in a half circle, chewing up not just flesh but the green felt of the pool tables and shattering the jukebox glass and punching holes in the pop machines and tearing the wooden booths apart, pausing only briefly to toss the empty clip and jam the second one in and give them more, even more, and I was in the jungle again, sweating in the steam with my Thompson chopping up exotic plants and hacking limbs off trees and snipers as screaming Japanese tried to swim through the sky only to belly flop on the ground, and somebody was laughing, and it was me.

  The grease gun was empty.

  And I had no more clips. I got out the .45 but down below was nothing but silence and the smell of cordite and bodies flung haphazardly in various awkward postures of death with the pools and smears and streaks of blood glimmering under fluorescent lighting that had taken not a single hit.

  Nobody was alive down there, or if they were, they were faking it well enough to deserve a pass. Still, something told me not to go out that front door. That was where reinforcements had entered, and more would be waiting.

  So I went back up the stairs, slamming a fresh clip into the .45, and nobody was waiting in the second-floor reception area, nobody alive anyway. I took the fire stairs up and came into an empty hallway. I moved slowly down the carpeted pathway, waiting for somebody to pop out of the doors to the suites on either side, like a real-life Hogan's Alley.

  But nobody did.

  The door to the suite at the far end was locked. I shot the knob off and shouldered in, sweeping the .45 around a living room decorated tacky bachelor pad—style. The fake fireplace was already ajar. Somebody had used it as an exit.

  I went down the narrow, unlighted stairs with the .45 ready. When I found myself in the cellar, where a lot of empty boxes were piled up, I heard somebody whimpering. A small, pale figure was huddled in a corner, hugging its legs, trying to turn into a mouse. It was a girl in panties and no bra, maybe twenty, with a lot of makeup that had run with tears, and lots of permed blonde hair.

  "Please don't kill me," she said, her raccoon eyes pleading. Basement dirt smudged her slender little shape like bruises.

  Somebody's mistress or hooker of the day or whatever. Poor kid. Like Ginnie Mathes or Dulcie Thorpe, she was just another victim of thoughtless, selfish assholes. I didn't want to be one of them.

  "Shush, baby," I said, putting my coat around her shoulders. "It's all right. Nobody's gonna hurt you. I'm a cop."

  Not a complete lie.

  I helped her to her feet and she hugged me.

  "Do you know the way out of here?" I asked.

  She swallowed and nodded and pointed. Beyond some stacked boxes, an arched doorway opened onto a brick tunnel, an escape route for the Bonettis in case something bad went down. Hadn't been much help today. It was just big enough for the kid and me to go holding hands as we moved down. My other hand held the .45, though.

  The tunnel came out in another basement, which had steps up to old-fashioned storm-cellar doors leading onto a gravel parking lot. A padlock had a key waiting in it for quick escapes, and I used it. We were half a block down from the Y and S Club, standing under an overcast sky on a spring afternoon that had turned chilly.

  She gazed up at me, got her first real good look at my face. I assume there were streaks and spatters of blood on it, and even under the best of conditions, that mug wouldn't instill much confidence in any sane human. Her eyes, which were big and blue, saucered, and her mouth made an O, and she ran away from me on bare feet, the sport jacket slipping off her shoulders onto the gravel.

  I picked up the jacket, put it on over the now-holstered .45, and started walking. I was maybe twelve blocks from Cummings's office, where I could hole up. The sky growled at me and I couldn't blame it. A lot of men had died this afternoon, some very young, as young as they'd been stupid. I felt nothing for them. I had given old man Bonetti a chance to make peace and he chose war.

  Bad choice.

  If the family had been crippled by the shoot-out on the pier a year ago, it was decimated now. Over. History.

  I limped off, the two hits I'd taken on the bulletproof vest burning, making each breath I took a clutching, clawing thing. One of the hits had punched very near that hot spot under my ribs, turning bad into worse.

  But I was still alive, and when the rain began to fall, I welcomed it. It would wash off the blood and save me the trouble.

  Chapter 12

  SOMEHOW I GOT UP the stairs to the little landing outside the ancient office, the weathered wood under my shoes wheezing as bad as me. I worked the key in the lock, stepped inside, didn't bother hitting the light switch. I got out of the wet sport jacket and let it drop to the old wood-slat floor like a sodden little corpse.

  With some effort—the painful places from where bullets had pounded the bulletproof vest were prodding me like sadistic children with a helpless pet—I climbed out of the speed rig and flung it somewhere, retaining the .45, which I tossed onto the old leather couch.

  Wracked by a hurt that threatened my consciousness, I wriggled in the dark as rain clawed at the windows and got out of my shirt and the bulletproof vest, kicked out of my shoes, and stepped out of my drenched trousers, just dropping things in damp clumps wherever they chose to fall. Then I stumbled in my T-shirt and shorts, which were moist not wet, to the supply closet where on a high shelf I'd seen an old folded-up blanket. I dragged that behind me like a squaw's papoose over to the leather couch. The .45 I moved to the floor where I could reach it—the
wood-and-pebbled-glass door was to the right of the file cabinets, and I had a decent enough view of it.

  The blinds behind Cummings's desk, a vague blobby shape over to my far right, were shut, but there was no daylight out there to get in. On my walk here, I'd seen the afternoon give way to night, hours early, thanks to the thunderstorm and black clouds that rolled and roiled like a black tidal wave in the sky, shot through with crackling veins of white.

  After reclining in slow motion, I settled on the couch, on my right side, the plump armrest my pillow. Soon I got to like the driving sound of the storm. The thunder had let up, mostly, its roar reduced to an occasional halfhearted murmur. Now there was just downpour, cleansing the gray collection of steel and glass and concrete that New York had become, or giving it a good goddamn try.

  I didn't dare go back to the Commodore, not right now. Too many people knew I was staying there. And too much temptation for me to return to those pill bottles, the magic vials that quelled the hurt and beat my subconscious into submission and mellowed me out when that was the last damn thing I needed.

  But the temptation remained, as the pains in my side and my midsection throbbed and burned and traded spasms like they were in competition for my attention. They had it, all right.

  The saving grace was how tired I was, the energy I'd burned in the jungle of that three-story brownstone, followed by a wind-whipped, rain-lashed twelve-block walk, had left me spent, empty, and it didn't take long for sleep to roll in like fog and fill me up.

  ***

  The sound of the key in the door lock was small and scratchy and subtle, and if the rain hadn't reduced itself to drizzle that merely pattered at the windows, I might not have heard it.

  I came awake at once, but moved not at all. The dream I'd been lost in had been intense and dramatic and was gone now, a tiny vivid life snuffed out by the reality of someone entering the office.