The Vendetta

by Thomas Laird

  *

  Parisi’s contacts were diminishing as were the number of clan members from his father’s side of the family. A lot of them were either dead or in prison, and it was getting more and more difficult to develop new snitches. It was tough to survive being a street informant against the Outfit. They wound up in the Chicago River or in Lake Michigan or in one of the numerous ponds and sloughs in the park district, out past the ‘burbs.

  Charlie Mandolini was Parisi’s distant second cousin, but he didn’t mind a few extra bucks from the Chicago Homicide detective once in a while. Charlie knew his cousin never ratted on his informants, never threatened to squeal on them.

  Dani and Parisi met him in a pool hall in Berwyn at 4:20 P.M. Parisi’s hair was still wet from the shower. Dani used the hair dryer, so she looked the way she did at the beginning of their days’ shift. Immaculate. Pressed. Perfect.

  The pool hall was called Salerno’s, and it stood next to a pizza restaurant that was noted for the real deal deep dish stuff. But it was early and the pool joint was empty and Jimmy and Dani walked into a vacated establishment. Charlie Mandolini walked toward them from the back end, where the johns were.

  There was a bar, and the three of them took a stool. The bartender-owner walked out from the kitchen behind the wall of liquor bottles.

  “We’ll take Cokes,” Parisi told the skinny barman. He had a full mop of long, steel-gray hair that reached his shoulders.

  Mandolini was a shade over five-four, a runt of a punk. He had a deep five o’clock shadow that wasn’t quite a beard, and his hair on top was the same coal black color as the stubble. He might’ve been thirty or forty. It was impossible to tell. Jimmy bought him a boilermaker, a Jim Beam and an Old Style.

  “How long?” Charlie asked.

  “Two Christmases ago. This is my partner, Dani Hawke.”

  She nodded at him and refused his extended hand.

  “Oh. I get it. Hostility.”

  “Cut the crap, Charlie. This isn’t a social call.”

  The bar keeper brought the drinks but didn’t set them on coasters. Jimmy saw all the rings from the previous drinks he’d laid out.

  “So?” Mandolini sneered.

  “Don’t get snotty or I’ll ask someone else,” Parisi laughed.

  Dani took a sip of her Coke and looked at the mirror behind all those booze bottles.

  “So?” Charlie asked again.

  “Rossi. Where’d they come from, the two guys from the island who tried to pop him?”

  “Where else? Sicily.”

  “I’ll ask you one more time, dummy.”

  Dani looked over at Charlie now, but her look was blank and Mandolini couldn’t get a fix on this female cop. He couldn’t figure out if she were bored or if she were about to pull the gun under her jacket and shoot him here at close range. This brown bitch was kind of scary, Charlie figured.

  “How much?” he asked Parisi.

  “I can do a hundred.”

  “That won’t even bury me.”

  “Two hundred. Or we walk out of here right now, and this bartender rats you out for being a snitch.”

  “I’ll shoot the prick before he gets to the phone.”

  “It’s nice to be confident, Charlie. Well?”

  Charlie looked around the bar and pool room. They were still the only occupants. The barman was back in the kitchen again.

  “They will kill me, Jimmy.”

  “It won’t come from me. You know that,” Parisi said.

  “The bartender’s my brother-in-law.”

  “Then he won’t want to make his sister a widow, will he. Split the money with him. Easiest c-note you ever made, Charlie. Ten-seconds work. Just give me the name of the guy and we’re out of here.”

  Dani looked back at the mirror.

  “My bet is it was Joe Bertelli.”

  “Why Bertelli?” Dani finally spoke up.

  “Yeah, why Bertelli?” Jimmy smiled over at his partner.

  “Bad blood. Bertelli knows, and so do the other capos, that Benny Bats wants to replace the Boss. He wants Calabrese out of the way. Looks like the old bastard refuses to die, and nobody’s dared to take him out. And that’s all I’m saying.”

  Parisi took out two one hundred dollar bills from his wallet. There wasn’t much left in the wallet after he handed over the two c-notes.

  “Make sure you send flowers to my wake, Jimmy.”

  “You ain’t dead, yet. And it won’t come from my end. Look to your brother-in-law, and don’t stiff him on the money, Charlie.”

  Jimmy and Dani got off the stools and headed out the front door of Salerno’s Pool Hall and Bar.

  *

  “So when are you going to bring this girl home?” Eleanor asked him.

  The kids were upstairs doing their homework, and Parisi’s mother was finishing up the dishes while Jimmy did the drying. She made lasagna for the four of them, and Jimmy told her she’d outdone herself again.

  “Never mind the stronzo, Jimmy. When’re you going to bring her round?”

  “How do you know there is someone?”

  “You’re too happy to be alone. I can see it on your face.”

  “Well don’t get all worked up. It isn’t going anywhere.”

  “With the glow on your face? I don’t think so.”

  “You’d need to talk to her about it. She doesn’t want any walks up the aisle. End of story.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I wish you were right, Ma. But she’s set on keeping it temporary. And she’s twelve years younger than I am.”

  “So what’s twelve years?”

  “She just doesn’t want what I’m selling.”

  “Does this young woman know what she’d be getting, with you?”

  Parisi laughed.“You’re highly prejudiced, Ma.”

  Parisi wiped off the counter top and hung the towel inside the cabinet under the sink.

  “She’s pretty determined to hold me off.”

  His mother put the last dish up in the higher cabinet next to the sink.“You shouldn’t be alone. You heard no too many times in one life. It isn’t right. God can’t be that cruel.”

  “Sure he can, Ma. You ought to take a ride with me in the police car during a shift.”

  “It breaks my heart to see you alone. Erin’s gone such a long time…”

  “Don’t start. Please.”

  “I know. I’ll shut my mouth.”

  He placed his hand over hers as it rested on the counter top. She put her other hand over his.

  “When’re you going to get married again?” he posed to her.

  She laughed.“Never. I like it alone. Jake was enough for one lifetime.”

  “You’re nowhere near the end, Ma.”

  “It wouldn’t be so terrible. I had a life. It gets old, after a time.”

  “Now you got us both depressed.”

  She laughed and slapped his hands.

  “You got Mary and Mike and me, and we still got a family. How bad can that be? And this girl…Does she at least like you?”

  “Sure. We have a good time together.”

  “Is she Italian?”

  “She’s an American Indian, Native American, whatever. She’s Cheyenne, she says.”

  “First it was an Irish girl. Then it was the black girl, Celia. And then it was that Hispanic girl, Rita.”

  “And two of them are dead. Rita better look out for the evil eye. And Dani, too.”

  She slapped his hands again, but she was laughing at the same time.

  “There’s no evil eye. People die. People leave. Like your father. It’s no one’s fault. Maybe this Dani’ll be different.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m like the Cubs, Ma. I think Sianis’s goat put the hex on me, too.”

  “The goat didn’t do anything. The Cubs stink all by themselves with no help.”

  “Yeah, that’s why you never miss a game on the television.”

  “There’s nothing but crap o
n TV,” she retorted.

  She looked at her son, deep into his brown eyes.“You love this girl, Jimmy?”

  He looked down at his hands.“I’m pretty dumb about these things. I keep making the same mistakes over and over again.”

  “You’re a very smart man, Jimmy.”

  “Not in these things I’m not.”

  “You loved the right women. It just worked out wrong.”

  He took her face in his hands and kissed his mother on the forehead.

  “You know what? You’re right. I’ve been lucky to know all of them. I just wish it would last a little longer, every time. You know?”

  She turned away from the sink.

  “I think I’m going to bed early, Jimmy. You can take me home now. I’ll be here when the kids get home tomorrow afternoon.”

  Parisi turned on the tap and washed his hands in the sink. Then he walked into the hall and got his flight jacket and put it on. Eleanor was waiting for him at the front door. It was only a fifteen- minute drive to his father’s and mother’s house. Mike and Mary would be okay alone for a half hour, and they walked outside and Jimmy closed and locked the door behind them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was the pride of his career, this estate in Lake Forest. He stuck out like the legendary sore thumb because he was the new rich gangster among all those old rich pricks who inherited their money from their wealthy forebears. But Calabrese was happy that he’d worked his way up from nothing to where he was today. It was the American Dream that all those middle-classed slobs were striving to achieve and had never accomplished.

  Let them ignore him, even though he knew they didn’t. He was Tony Calabrese, Outfit Boss of Bosses, and they didn’t dare come out with any insults in public. They feared him if they weren’t crazy. He could wipe them out with a flick of a finger. All he had to do was make the call, and they all knew it.

  Their wives were socialites. His wife was the wife of a gangster. But Miriam dressed better than all of those old cunts. He sent her to Paris every spring to buy thousands of dollars’ worth of new dresses and outfits. Her shoes could pay a school teacher’s salary for half a year in Chicago. The car she drove, a brand-new Jag, was as good as any ride in the neighborhood.

  Let them stick their noses up in the wind. Fuck them. He was a mainstay in this town for thirty years, now, and he might live thirty more.

  If he survived this prostate stuff. His count, the doc said, was too high, and they were going to have to do a biopsy. Tony didn’t let anybody know what his deal was with the prostate. That would be like admitting publicly that his dick didn’t work. He’d had the high blood pressure since his twenties, been on the meds since his thirties, and all those pills had finally made his dick soft now that he was seventy.

  He had memories of all that cooze, but that was all he had. He’d tried pills, and he’d considered a few other exotic methods, including surgery, but he didn’t want them fucking around in that territory.

  The first few times he’d had problems getting it up, he was frightened, but the trip to the urologist explained what was happening. The doc told him it was natural for a man his age, after all the medicines he’d ingested, to have the kind of ‘issues’ he was having.

  “You mean I’m a fucking eunuch,” he told the specialist.

  “No, no. You need to lose weight and lower your pressure so I can lower your meds,” the doc replied.

  But Tony C loved his beer and booze and pasta and pizza more than he loved sex, apparently. He told himself that you paid the price for your pleasures eventually, and now the tab was due.

  Lou Marchesi was his number one bodyguard, had been for fifteen years. Lou had been a made man for twenty years. He’d popped his first assignment when he was only eighteen. You could trust him with your old lady, so he was always in Tony’s near vicinity.

  It was another appointment with the pee-pee doctor again. It was Tony C’s name for the urologist. They had to be in the Loop by two, and it was already one.

  November turned dark and cold. The days were shortening and the sun hadn’t appeared in a week. Tony felt depressed. He knew this weather was an evil portent, and he felt like cancelling the appointment, but Dr. Evangelista was already hard enough to see unless you had a meet nailed down. So he told Lou to go get the car, a ’91 Caddy. Black limo. He had to make his neighbors comfortable with his choice of rides.

  Tony emerged from the front door. There were trees on every lot. It was like being in a glade or a forest. He supposed it was the reason this expensive ‘burb had its name. The lots were all indeed wooded. He peered into the cluster of evergreens to the south. They were all fifty, sixty feet high and clustered almost on top of each other.

  Lou brought the Cadillac around the circle to pick Calabrese up by the entrance. He stopped the car abruptly at the end of the sidewalk, and then Lou popped out and opened the back door of the four-door limo for his boss.

  Tony C ducked down quickly into the vehicle, but he didn’t hear the crack of the shot until Marchesi flew backward and until the blood exploded from his forehead. Then Lou was down, and Calabrese flattened himself across the backseat.

  His chest swelled with his quickened breath, but he remembered he had a car phone. He grabbed the receiver and then dialed 911 on the base of the telephone which was placed between the two seats in front.

  Tony waited for the report of the next shot, but it never happened.

  The cops pulled into his driveway about ten minutes later. They had their service weapons out, and Tony waved at the four policemen from inside the back of the Caddy. They told him to come out, and when two more Lake Forest squads arrived, Tony C finally braved it out and got out of the car.

  When he stood onto the grass, he looked down at the body of his associate and top button man. There was no face to identify or recognize. There was only the shell of a skull.

  “Come on, Mr. Calabrese,” one of the cops told him. “Are you unharmed?”

  He was a tall, beefy copper with a red nose. Tony figured him for a Mick. There were still plenty of Irishmen cops in Cook and Lake Counties.

  They rushed him to the police station in Lake Forest. It was a modern, grey, concrete building that wasn’t ornate in any way. It was strictly utilitarian and functional in appearance.

  They questioned him for an hour. Tony never asked for his attorney.

  “Are you feeling all right?” the red-faced cop asked him again. “You look like you might be going into shock.”

  But Tony waved him off, and when they were finished questioning him, he asked for a ride back to Lake Forest.

  “You certain you want to go back there this soon?” the Irish policeman asked.

  His name-tag read O’Leary, so Tony had guessed right about his ancestry.

  They never asked him about his business. He knew all that would arise in the next interview. O’Leary said it was likely they’d need to bring him in at least one more time.

  “No problem,” Calabrese told the big cop. “You guys are a lot more polite than the Chicago guys.”

  O’Leary smiled, and then he got a patrolman to take the Boss of Bosses home.

  *

  He had them search the grounds. The Lake Forest officers had gone over the place thoroughly, but they’d come up with nothing. The shooter had to be a pro. There was no shell left from his spot. But they’d found branches that had been broken where he’d probably fired the round that tore Lou’s face off. There were no footprints, however. The gunner had swept up after himself. He’d taken only the one shot, which was professional in itself. If he’d missed, as he had, there was no time for a second round. The idea was always to get the hell out immediately.

  He had his capos come to the estate that night. All of them except Rossi. Tony was pretty certain that Benny Bats had arranged the assassination. Everyone knew he wanted Calabrese’s scalp.

  Bonadura thought they ought to go to war with Ben Rossi and his crew immediately.

  Carbone
thought they should hit the outlaw capo now, too.

  “We have to make sure it was him. We can’t afford a war if we’re not certain. Too expensive. Last time we had a battle was fifteen years ago, and it took three years to get back to normal. Blood is very pricey,” Tony told them.

  “So what do you want us to do, Boss?” Carbone asked.

  “What do you fuckin’ think? Find out if they goofy cocksucker made the order on me. Do it now!”

  The meeting was adjourned.

  *

  Jimmy got word of the hit later that same afternoon. He was writing up a report on a drive-by on the west side that had claimed the life of a sixteen-year-old boy who already had a scholarship for basketball lined up at Northwestern. The kid was a player and an all ‘A’ student, as well. His name was Grandy Patterson, and he was already regarded as one of the top ten high school players in the country.

  “What a waste,” he muttered as he finished typing the document.

  “Every day in every way…” Dani said over his shoulder.

  It was then that the phone call came from their brethren in Lake Forest. A sergeant named Miles O’Leary was on the other end of the line with Jimmy.

  “Apparently Calabrese is still very spry because he got into that limo and his bodyguard caught the blast right in the mush. Tore his face right off his head. It was pretty nasty, Detective. We figure it was a high-powered hunting rifle of some sort, but we’ll have more when we hear from ballistics. We’re giving you guys a heads-up because we know Calabrese is all wired up in the city, so this is your courtesy call.”

  Parisi thanked the Lake Forest policeman, and then he hung up.

  *

  Dani and Parisi took a drive up to the expensive suburb by Lake Michigan.

  When Parisi pulled in front of the massive home, Dani stared out at Calabrese’s estate.

  “Jesus Christ. And we’re only how many miles from Clark Street and the hood?”

  “Not that many. Check out the lives of the rich and famous.”

  “I feel like I need another shower. Christ, there’s ivy on his walls.”

  Parisi laughed. They got out of the Crown Vic. Their visit was unannounced, but that was the way Jimmy wanted it.