Hush Money (5 page)

“Then the casket will be shut, Frank. It’ll be all right.”

“All right? All right shit. Vince, do you know the size of the slug it was Joey caught?”

“Four-sixty Magnum. You told me on the phone.”

“Hell, he didn’t even
catch
it, it went straight fucking through him. Jesus. You could kill a fucking rhino with that. What kind of sick son of a bitch would do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know, Frank. It’s all very confusing to me.”

“Well, I don’t see what’s confusing about it. Some son of a bitch killed our brother. Okay. Now we find out who and kill the fucker.”

“But why was Joey killed? That’s the question I can’t get out of my mind. Why?”

Frank, realizing he’d slipped into emotional high gear, eased back behind his wall, shrugged and said, “We’re in the kind of business that makes you unpopular sometimes, Vince.”

“Even if I agreed with that, I don’t see it applying to Joey. He was the least involved in family business of all of us.”

“Maybe he was messing with something married. You know Joey and his women, Vince. You know what a crazy lad Joey was.”

“He was a man. He was forty years old.”

“He was a kid. He’ll always be a kid.”

And Frank touched the bridge of his nose with two fingers and swallowed hard.

His wall wasn’t holding up very well at all.

“Frank, could it have anything to do with that politician Joey was talking to today?”

“Who, Carl Reed? No. I don’t think Joe had even made the pitch to the guy yet, about paying him off to keep quiet about Grayson’s kickbacks and all, remember? At least I know Reed hasn’t said anything to the cops about anything. I talked to Cummins, and he interrogated Reed himself, Cummins and that nigger partner of his. Cummins says Reed didn’t have much to say, outside of how horrified about the shooting he was, bullshit like that. Listen, Vince, what about Chicago?”

“No. Not yet. Only as a last resort, Frank. We can handle this ourselves.”

“Maybe they know of some hit man who goes in for big guns or something. You could just ask them.”

“No, I don’t even want to call them and tell them about it.”

“Hell, Vince, they’ll find out soon enough, probably know already, thanks to the Family retirement village we got going in this town. At least one of those old Family guys has heard it on the news and called Chicago by now, you know that.”

“I’m not going to call them. I’m not going to encourage them. I don’t want them sending in one of those damn head-hunters of theirs.”

Frank thought for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right. This is family, not Family. We’ll handle it ourselves.”

“The last time they sent anyone around, you know what happened.”

“The McCracken fuck-up.” Frank shook his head. “Seemed like we were tripping over dead bodies for a week.”

“They got no finesse. Their example makes me glad we’re getting to be mostly legitimate nowadays.”

“Well and good, Vince, but if Papa was alive . . .”

“He isn’t.”

“If he was, he’d say this is a matter of blood, and we got to forget our goddamn business ethics and civic image and that bullshit. We got Joey’s death to even up for, Vince, and we’re going to even up, goddamnit. Not slop-ass, like the Chicago wise guys’d handle it. No way. We just find the guy and whack him out, clean and simple, and it’s not even going to be
remotely
connected up to us.”

Vincent studied his brother. Inside Frank’s cool shell was a hothead wanting to get out. Frank was prone to violence anyway, as for example, his carrying a gun all the time, even though that part of the business had faded into the past long ago. This situation, Vincent thought, could prove to be a bad one for Frank, as bad or worse than when his wife died. This situation could open the door on all the bad things in the secret closets of Frank’s mind; it could tear down Frank’s wall once and for all.

Vince touched his brother’s arm. “Let’s sleep on this, let our emotions settle. We’ll take care of whoever killed Joey. Well choose a course of action on that tomorrow. But first we got a brother to bury.”

Frank nodded and fell silent for a moment. Then something occurred to him, and he reached inside his sports coat to get at the inner pocket and withdrew an envelope. “Tell me what you make of this, Vince.” He handed the envelope to Vincent

Vincent looked at the outer envelope. It was typewritten, addressed to Joseph DiPreta, no return address. Judging from the postmark, it had been delivered yesterday, mailed locally. Inside the envelope was a playing card. An ace of spades.

“Hmmm,” Vincent said.

“What the hell is that, anyway? Who sends a goddamn playing card in the mail, and for what?”

Vincent shrugged. “For one thing, the ace of spades signifies death.”

“That thought ran through my mind, don’t think it didn’t. So what the hell’s it mean? Is it a warning that was sent to Joey? Or maybe a promise.”

Vincent withdrew a similar envelope from his own inside pocket. “Maybe it’s a declaration of war,” he said. He opened the envelope and revealed the playing card inside—also an ace of spades—to his brother.

“I received this at the office, Frank, in the mail. This morning.”

Two: Thursday Night

5

NOLAN DIDN’T KNOW
what to think. The situation was ideal, really, but he wasn’t sure how the Family would react to his wanting out.

It wasn’t as if he were someone important in the Family; in fact, it wasn’t as if he were someone in the Family at all. He was a minor employee who was probably more bother to them then he was worth, and he certainly wasn’t involved in anything important enough to make it matter whether or not he stayed.

Years ago it had been different. Years ago he’d left the Family and all hell had broken loose. He had been in a position then not so very different from the one he was in now. He’d been managing a nightclub on Rush Street for mob backers; today he was doing the same thing, essentially, with a motel and supper-club arrangement out in the Illinois countryside, sixty or seventy miles out of Chicago. But today, at least, they were leaving him alone, not trying to involve him in any of their bloodletting and bone-breaking bullshit. Fifteen, sixteen years ago they had asked him to leave his club on Rush Street and move into head-crushing, a field that didn’t particularly appeal to him.

He supposed his reputation for being a hard-nose, which had developed from his doing his own bouncing in that Rush Street joint, had convinced the Family high-ups that he’d make a good enforcer and that because of his administrative background in managing clubs he’d therefore have the potential to move up in the organization, a young exec who could start at the bottom and work up.

Except up was one place Nolan had no desire to go. Not in the Family, anyway. There were few things in life Nolan wouldn’t do for money, but killing people was one of them. Later on, when he’d become involved in full-scale, big-time heists, an occasional innocent bystander might get in the way of a bullet, sure. A cop, a nightwatchman could go down; that was part of his job and theirs. A fellow heister with ideas of double-cross on his mind might get blown away—fine. That was a hazard of war; he could live with that. Going up to some poor guy in a parking lot and putting a .45 behind his ear and blasting—that was something else again. That was psycho stuff, that was for the ice-water-in-the-veins boys, the animals, and he wanted no fucking part of it.

But the Family had decided that that was the way they wanted him to go, and to start him off, to make him a “made man,” they asked him to knock off a friend of his who worked with him at the club. This friend had evidently been messing around with some Family guy’s prize pussy and had earned himself a place on the shittiest shit list in town. Nolan said no on general principles, and besides, he couldn’t see knocking off a piece was worth knocking off a guy over and told them so. Told them he was going to tell his friend all about it if the hit wasn’t called off. And he was assured it would be. The next day his friend was found swimming in the river. And a couple of gallons of the river was found swimming in his friend.

So Nolan resigned from the Family. This is how Nolan resigned: he went to the office of the guy who’d ordered the hit—the same stupid goddamn guy who’d been trying so hard to get Nolan to kill people for money—and Nolan shot him through the head. For free. Or almost for free. Afterward Nolan and twenty thou from the Family till disappeared.

An open contract went out.

The open contract stayed open for a long time. Something like sixteen years, during which time Nolan moved into heisting. He’d shown a natural ability for organization, running that club for the Family (getting Rush Street’s perennial loser into the black in his first three months), and that same ability worked even more profitably for him as a professional thief. Nolan organized and led institutional robberies (banks, jewelry stores, armored cars, mail trucks) and had a flawless record: a minimum of violence, a maximum of dollars. A Nolan heist was as precise and perfect as a well-performed ballet, as regimented and timed to the split-second as a military operation, with every option covered, every possibility of human error considered. It was the old Dillinger/Karpis school of professional robbery, with refinements, and it still worked good as ever. Perhaps better. No member of a Nolan heist had ever spent an hour behind bars—at least not in conjunction with anything Nolan had engineered.

A couple of years ago Nolan had heard that his Family troubles had cooled off. His source seemed reliable, and after all, it was into the second decade since all that happened, so why
shouldn’t
things cool off? He loosened up some of his precautions (the major one being to stay out of the Chicago area altogether) and had been doing preliminary work in Cicero on a bank job when some Family muscle spotted him and guns started going off. It took over a month to recover from that, and when he came out of hiding, recuperated, but weak and tired of getting shot at, he arranged a sitdown with the Family to negotiate an end to the goddamn war.

The sitdown hadn’t worked. There’d been more gunfire and more months of recuperating from Family-induced bullet wounds. But then something had happened. A change in regime in Chicago, a relatively bloodless Family coup, turned everything around. One day Nolan woke up and his Family enemies were gone and in their place was the new regime, who viewed Nolan, enemy of the former ruling class, as a comrade in arms.

As a reward of sorts, Nolan had been set up at the Tropical, a motel with four buildings (sixteen units each), two heated swimming pools (one outdoor, one in) and another central building that housed the supper club whose pseudo-Caribbean decor gave the place its name. Actually, the Tropical was a trial-run center where potential managers for similar but bigger Family operations were given a try. Nolan had been in the midst of just such a trial run when nearly half a million bucks of his (with which he was set to buy into one of those bigger Family operations) was stolen and eventually went up in smoke. Since his agreement with the Family had been to buy in and since he no longer could, Nolan was asked by Felix—the Family lawyer through whom Nolan had been doing all of his Family dealings of late—to stay on at the Tropical and supervise other trial runs, sort of manage the managers.

It was a terrific deal as far as work load compared to salary went. Pretty good money for sitting around bored, only Nolan didn’t like sitting around bored. In his opinion sitting around bored was boring as hell, and his ass got sweaty besides. He guessed maybe he’d been part of the active side too long to chuck it completely, even if he did find the prospect of no longer having to duck Family bullets a nice one.

Earlier this month Nolan had struck out in response to the boredom of the Tropical. The nephew of an old business partner of his had been tagging along with Nolan lately, and he and this kid, Jon, had pulled a heist in Detroit just last week that had run into some snags but eventually came out okay, resulting in a good chunk of change ($200,000—in marked bills, unfortunately, but easily fenced at seventy cents on the dollar), and now Nolan was again in a position to buy in.

Only not with the Family. Because a condition of Nolan’s present employment with the Family was that he was not to engage in heists anymore. The Family had gone to great lengths to build a new identity for him, an identity that had everything from credit cards to college education, and they did not like their employees (those involved in the legitimate side of their operations, anyway) risking everything by doing something stupid.

Like pulling a heist.

So Nolan was frustrated. He had money again, but no place to spend it. He had a job again, managing a supper club and motel, which was ideal, but the job was numbing and thankless and paid okay but not really enough to suit him. He had his freedom again, with no one in particular trying to kill him, but it was an empty freedom. He was on a desert island with Raquel Welch and he couldn’t get it up.

He was sitting in the basement of Wagner’s house. The basement was remodeled. There was a bar at the end opposite the couch Nolan was sitting on. Between the bar and the couch most of the space was taken up by a big, regulation-size pool table. The lighting was dim, but there was a Tiffany-shade hanging lamp over the pool table you could turn on if need be. There was a dart-board, a poker table, a central circular metallic fireplace, all of which was to Nolan’s right. It was obviously a bachelor’s retreat, in this case an aging bachelor. Wagner had been married once but just for a short time, and that was a lot of years ago. There were framed prints of naked sexy women on the dark blue stucco walls: Vargas, Petty, Earl Moran. Good paintings, but very dated: Betty Grable-style women, Dorothy Lamour-style women. The fantasy of a generation that grew up without
Playboy
let alone
Penthouse
; the fantasy of a generation that masturbated to pictures of girls in bathing suits. The fantasy of Wagner’s generation, an old man’s generation.

Nolan’s generation.

Nolan was fifty years old and pissed off about it. Wagner was his friend, but Wagner irritated him, because Wagner was only a few years older than Nolan and was an old fucking man. Wagner was going on his third heart attack. Wagner’s doctor had told him to quit smoking. Wagner’s doctor had told him to quit drinking. Wagner had done neither, and was on his way to his third heart attack.

Wagner was down at the bar end of the room, building drinks. He was a small, thin, intense man who was trying intensely not to be intense any more. He had the pallor of a man who just got out of prison, though it had been maybe twenty-five years since his one prison term. Wagner was lucky he hadn’t spent more time in stir than that, the way Nolan saw it. Wagner had been a box-man, a professional safecracker, and, what’s more, he’d been the best and, as such, in demand; but instead of picking only the plums, Wagner had taken everything he could, every goddamn job that came his way. That was stupid, Nolan knew. You take only a few jobs a year and only the ones that smell absolutely 100 percent right. Otherwise you find yourself in the middle of a job as sloppy as Fibber McGee’s closet and afterward in a jail cell about as big. Otherwise you find yourself with a bunch of punks who afterward shoot you behind the ear rather than give you your split.

Of course Wagner’s skill contributed to keeping even the most ill-advised scores from being sloppy, and that same skill made him worth having around, so perhaps, Nolan conceded, perhaps Wagner had some assurance of not being crossed, even by punks. But none of that had mattered a damn to Wagner. Wagner had been the intense sort of guy who had to work, had to work all the time, much as possible, and Nolan knew the little man was lucky he was alive and out of stir. Lucky as hell.

Another thing about Wagner, he’d saved his money. Wagner had dreamed of retiring early and getting into something legitimate, more or less. It was a dream Nolan could understand; he had it himself. The difference was Nolan’s fifteen-year savings turned to so much air when a carefully-built cover got blown, making it impossible for him to go near the bank accounts where even now that money was making tens of thousands of dollars interest every year.

Wagner had been lucky. He got out early (age fifty) and with a nest egg so big Godzilla might’ve laid it. He bought the old Elks Club in Iowa City and turned it into a restaurant and nightclub combined. The old Elks building was three floors, counting the remodeled lower level, which Wagner converted into a nightclub below, supper-club above, and banquet room above that. It was Nolan’s dream come true, only Wagner’d made it work where Nolan hadn’t.

But Wagner’d made it work too well. Wagner went after the restaurant business with the same vengeance he had heisting. And at fifty-two he’d had his first heart attack. Slow down, the doctor said, among other things. At fifty-three he’d had his second heart attack. Slow
down
, goddamn it, the doctor said, among other things. And now, at fifty-four, he was on his way to his third and had, on the spur of the moment, invited his old friend Nolan over to ask him if he wanted to buy in and be his partner and take some of the load off and help him avoid that third and no doubt fatal heart attack.

Wagner looked relaxed, anyway. He was wearing a yellow sports shirt with pale gray slacks, like his complexion, only healthier. Nolan was dressed almost identically, though his sports shirt was blue and his pants brown.

Their clothes began and ended the similarity of the two men’s appearances. Wagner was white-haired, cut very short but lying down, like a butch that surrendered. His face was flat: his nose barely stuck out at all. It was a nebbish face, saved only by a giving, sincere smile. Nolan’s face, on the other hand, seemed uncomfortable when it smiled, as if smiling were against its nature. He was a tall man, lean but muscular and with a slight paunch from easy days of Tropical non-work. He had a hawkish look, high cheekbones and narrow eyes; perhaps an American Indian was in his ancestry somewhere. His hair was shaggy and black and widow’s peaked, with graying sideburns. He wore a mustache, a droopy, gunfighter mustache that underlined his naturally sour expression. Nolan did have a sense of humor, but he didn’t want it getting around.