The Vendetta

by Thomas Laird

  Maybe his old lady was taking better care of him, both the Balboas figured. They’d seen Carmen around him, and she had pretty much come off as a queen bitch. The wife hadn’t been around lately, even when Chris and Charlie picked him up at the house in Cicero.

  Whatever, they thought. At least he wasn’t trying to take chunks out of anyone’s ass yet today.

  “You got a new job,” Rossi said, sitting at his desk in his inner sanctum office.

  “You want us to do Carlo Bonadura,” Chris said before his brother could open his mouth.

  Charlie looked at his brother, and Charlie’s face reddened.

  “You a fuckin’ psychic or some shit?” Benny Bats laughed.

  “No,” Chris replied. “I just figure he’s next on the list.”

  “You think I got a list?”

  “No disrespect, Boss,” Chris added.

  “None taken.”

  “He’s right,” Charlie said. “We knew it was Bonadura. You gotta clean house before you get to the big asshole in Lake Forest. He’s the last piece in like the puzzle.”

  “That’s the most words I’ve ever heard either of you say,” Ben laughed again.

  “We can talk,” Charlie replied.

  They were both deadpan, staring at Rossi.

  “It’s Bonadura, yeah. He’s lived too long, too. You take Carlo out, and then we deal with the old man. But we remove his remaining pistolero before we move on Lake Forest. Then all his hired help is finished.”

  They remained silent, watching him.

  “I suppose you two see yourselves running a crew of your own, someday soon.”

  “Yeah. I guess,” Chris answered.

  “How old are you two?” Benny grinned.

  “How old you gotta be?” Charlie asked.

  “Most guys are in their thirties, forties, before they run a gang.”

  “We don’t figure on waiting that long,” Chris told his capo.

  “You twins got ambition, which is a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that it shows you ain’t satisfied with your lot in life. That’s something of value because it’ll like propel you into bigger and better shit.

  “But the downside is that you don’t have enough experience to run your own outfit. See, I’m going to be the Boss when we do that old cocksucker in the castle by the lake. You do understand all that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I guess,” Chris replied.

  “Don’t guess,” Ben told both of them.

  “He didn’t mean nothin’,” Charlie apologized.

  “You know how many years I survived? How many punks who tried to move on me? Got any idea?”

  They didn’t speak, but they kept both sets of eyes on Benny Bats.

  “Your day will come, but it’ll come when I give you the opportunity and not until then. You do follow what I just told you?”

  “Yeah. We’re just trying to get somewhere, Ben,” Charlie told Rossi.

  “You’ll get there. But you better slap down those hardons for a while yet. It ain’t healthy if you can’t be patient.”

  The twins sat watching Rossi. It seemed like a pair of wolves had planted a glare on him, Ben thought.

  “You got any clue on what to do about Carlo Bonadura?” he asked the Balboas.

  “He’s already dead,” Charlie responded.

  And then they rose as one, together.

  *

  Carlo Bonadura was a big Sox fan. And it was notable because the Chicago White Sox were basically a minor league club trying to survive in the major leagues. They had no pitching, no offense, and a putrid defense.

  But Carlo stuck with them in spite of their cellar dwelling position in the American League. His father, Giorgio (George, he was called), was a lifelong fan of the club, and he’d had a little involvement in the Black Sox scandal of 1919. That fuck Judge Landis had screwed everything up, and the Sox lost their greatest player in history, Shoeless Joe Jackson.

  It was May and it was still cool outside, and by the time the night game got started against Baltimore, it’d dip down into the 40s. But Carlo had three box seats behind home plate. Two of the tickets were for his bodyguards, Julio Carmelli and Franco Donatelli. They went wherever Bonadura went, these days, truce or no truce. They were well-heeled with .45 automatics slung in shoulder holsters.

  When the top of the fourth rolled around, Carlo’s bladder acted up. It was becoming a situation for him, and the old lady was on him about going to the doctor. But he never listened to her. He figured a lot of pissing was the mark of an active mind, and since he had no trouble getting it up to fulfill his husbandly obligations to Violet, the old lady, and to his romantic commitments to his three amours, Betty, Terri, and Alice, he didn’t see the need to let some doctor prod his prostate. If you used it, he’d heard, you wouldn’t lose it.

  He told Julio and Franco it was time to hit the head, and they followed him up the aisle and out onto the concourse. The park was virtually empty. Maybe a thousand fans had braved the elements to see the southsiders get their lame asses handed to them again. The joke was that the Sox were already mathematically out of the pennant race.

  Carlo walked into the pisser and his two gunmen were still behind him.

  “Give me some fucking room,” he barked at them.

  They smiled. Julio and Franco were both about five-nine and both might’ve weighed in at 155 pounds, minus the .45s. They stood by the sink while their chief entered a stall and shut the door behind himself. Carlo didn’t require a bombing run, but he had that nervous bladder, so he didn’t want his two goons watching him wait until his innards let loose with a stream. It really wasn’t necessary because there were just the three of them in the restroom, Bonadura and his two hoods.

  He heard the two pops, and Carlo wondered what the hell was happening, but his urine had finally flowed and he didn’t want to stop the emptying until the sweet misery had departed.

  The stall door blew open, and a man wearing a hood with an extended hand with a .38 police special appeared. The barrel was pointed directly at Bonadura’s noggin. Carlo closed his eyes, but there was no boom, no shot.

  He felt the blow on his face and he was propelled backwards on top of the toilet. Then a hand grabbed him and spun him about and before he could fight back, lash out, his head was smashed against the wall behind the commode. He was beginning to go black when he felt the cold of the water. Someone had him by the hair and was plunging his face into the shitter.

  Carlo was half awake and half unconscious, and a voice screamed for him to fight back.

  But the hand on his neck was fierce and strong and he could gain no purchase with his feet on the slick stone floor of the can. He tried to rise, to withdraw his face from the water, but he was losing consciousness with the effort of the struggle.

  Then there was no pressure on the back of his neck, suddenly, and Carlo was floating somewhere else. And then the floating feeling ceased, and there was no feeling left at all, and the darkness gathered and finally everything went black, black like a starless, moonless night.

  *

  Jimmy and Doc were called on this one because everyone at Homicide knew that Gibron and Parisi would be on the receiving end of the shit flow. They were in the midst of this so-called mob war, and all the other detectives were perfectly happy to let Jimmy and Doc check out another new Outfit corpse in the latrine at Comiskey Park. The location of the triple homicides somehow seemed eerily fitting.

  They saw the two soldiers sprawled on the floor of the bathroom first. The game had been suspended in the fourth, and every one of the sparse crowd was sent on their ways without explanation. Some of them knew that the can behind home plate was strangely out of operation and that several security guys were prohibiting entrance.

  They checked ID on the two gunshot victims. Parisi recognized their names.

  “We’ll find Carlo Bonadura in the crapper over there,” he told Doc.

  “Who else? How many little Indians are left, now?”
>
  “A lot fewer than ten, Doctor.”

  Parisi opened the stall. He and Gibron were both wearing latex gloves although neither detective thought there’d be any prints to work with. This was a public can, and thousands relieved themselves in here during the course of the games.

  Carlo was still face down in the commode.

  “An illustrious demise,” Jimmy proffered. “Worthy of a Caesar.”

  Doc didn’t laugh. Death was death.

  “I think the ME will call it death by drowning. They ought to be here directly.”

  The Medical Examiner took that very moment to make his not-so-grand entrance. He was an Indian with a non-Indian name—Thomas Joseph, M.D.

  He had a slight accent. Jimmy heard he had come to America from Bombay. The word was he hated heat and over-population, and he’d wound up in a city of over three million.

  “Detective Parisi,” Joseph said in greeting. “Detective Gibron.”

  There were three uniforms in the head with them.

  “Two on the floor and one in there,” Jimmy offered.

  “Yes. I see the first two. You call it lead poisoning, yes?” the doctor smiled.

  “Looks like,” Doc answered.

  The swarthy-skinned, handsome young physician bent over and looked each of the first two bodies over.

  “You gentlemen can finish up while I make my initial findings,” Joseph informed them.

  Jimmy was finished with his notes. The crime scene specialists showed up and took their photos. He informed the uniforms to stay put until the paramedics hauled the bodies out of the washroom. They took one last tour of the scene, and then the paramedics showed up about twenty minutes later.

  Comiskey had been cleared. Even the workers had gone home, and the players and concession people as well. The only remaining souls were the cops, the ME, the paramedics, and three stiffs who were on their way to the morgue.

  *

  It was midnight before they were able to take their dinner break. Just for a change, they went to the International House of Pancakes near O’Hare Airport. It was a bit of a drive, but Jimmy was in no particular hurry to go home. Eleanor was staying overnight watching Mike and Mary, and Doc was never in a rush to head back to his one-bedroom apartment on Clark Street.

  They went in all the way with breakfast. These people served it twenty-four hours a day, and they never closed, not even on Christmas. Parisi gloried on all the starch and sugar, and the grease from the pork sausages, too. And he washed it all down with a large Coke. It was all the pancakes and sausages you could eat for $3.99.

  “Many more trips here and that Indian will be performing our autopsies.”

  “He’s a good man. He came here for the waters, but he was misinformed,” Jimmy smiled, his belly next to bursting with what he thought of as comfort food.

  “I know that movie,” Gibron smiled.

  “So.”

  Parisi sat back and tried to digest.

  The waitress came up to them and asked if they wanted anything else.

  “Oxygen,” Jimmy told her.

  She was middle-aged, just a little chubby, and had an auburn bouffant. She looked like a throwback to the forties, Parisi thought.

  She smiled and toddled away after she gave Gibron a somewhat hostile glance.

  “What’d I do?” Doc smiled.

  “Bad ju-ju. Who the hell knows.”

  “How long you figure it’ll be before the poop starts getting flung our way? The captain will definitely not be happy with your Italian friends. They were told to behave themselves, Jimmy, and now this.”

  “They were never very big on playing well with each other.”

  Jimmy sat up and took a last sip out of his depleted Coke. The ice had all melted, now.

  “It was Rossi,” he told his partner. “It was Benny Bats all along.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The storm followed him east. But it was no longer snow. The freezing rain started about three hours after he hit the highway. They were salting ahead of him, but the frozen stuff covered the salt over, and traffic was down to a crawl.

  Johansen slid off the road four hours into his journey. They were closing the highway, it seemed, because there were red and blue lights twirling up ahead. He had no clue when someone could come tow him out of the ditch he’d careened sideways into. And he had a lot of company. There were at least a dozen other vehicles stuck alongside the highway. The ditch wasn’t deep, but his tires could make no purchase to haul him back onto the roadway. He gave up trying after a half hour of futility.

  About three hours later when the rain finally halted, the salt trucks appeared again, and when they had laid down a new batch, the state cops followed them and tried to help out the stranded cars and vans and trucks.

  A trooper stopped at the side of the road and yelled over to Johansen that a tow truck would be along within the hour. In fact, he said a fleet of them would appear as soon as possible to haul everyone out of the ditch along the highway.

  Later, true to his word, a truck pulled up alongside Mark Johansen’s Voyager, and the attendant slid down the embankment with the chain and hitched it up to his ass end. Then he made his way back to the tow truck and started the chain. Mark put it in neutral, and the tower got him hauled back up to the roadway in fifteen minutes.

  The highway was freed of the ice and was black and wet, and the temperature had risen, the radio said, to 36. Johansen was able to navigate his way east at about 55 mph, but he was wary of the condition of the road. The radio also said that it was becoming impassable just fifty miles to the east. So the storm was still ahead of him and wasn’t scheduled to get any better for twelve to eighteen hours.

  He found a motel off the Interstate and decided to wait it out. As he pulled off the exit, a state trooper was right behind him. His lights were twirling and he followed the Voyager into the Super Six’s parking lot.

  There was a .38 snub-nose in the glove compartment, but Johansen most certainly did not want to shoot a State-y, or any other cop, for that matter. This was going to be his last trip to Chicago. He had a family to return to after he met with the capo who had his brother David murdered.

  He didn’t open the glove box. He pulled into a space, and the trooper pulled behind him and blocked him off. Then the cop approached the Voyager. Mark rolled down the window and waited. He knew the drill.

  “Can I see license and registration, sir?”

  The policeman was tall with a wide set of shoulders. There was no excess on his frame, either. Mark figured him for ex-military, and the cop had kept in shape.

  Johansen handed him his phony ID, but Mark didn’t ask what he’d done wrong or what the problem was. It only pissed cops off if you asked that kind of question. It was healthier to answer when you were asked.

  “Would you step out of the car, sir?”

  Mark got out. He was unarmed, but the State policeman had his eyes on Johansen’s hands. If he tried anything, it likely wouldn’t go well with this big man. He had a weapon and a radio, two big advantages. Maybe the road to Rossi was over, he thought.

  The trooper flashed his flashlight into the interior of the van.

  “Your left brake light is out.”

  “It is?”

  “Yessir. I’m going to give you a warning, but you need to attend to it soon.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “It’s a good idea to get off the road. It’s a mess further east. Were you headed that way?”

  “As a matter of fact, I was. Thanks for letting me know.”

  “I’d give it a full twenty-four hours. They say it’s going to get a lot better in a day or so. Hope it doesn’t delay you too badly.”

  “It’ll keep until I get there, I guess,” Johansen smiled.

  “It wouldn’t do to get yourself in a wreck. Nothing can be that pressing, I don’t suppose.”

  “You’re right. It’ll still be there when I arrive. Thanks again for letting me know about the brake light. I�
�ll take care of it before I hit the highway again.”

  The State cop smiled slightly and headed back to his car. Then he took off immediately.

  Johansen got his duffel with his clothes and his weapons and headed into the office for the Super Six. It wasn’t the Hilton, by any means, but it looked clean when he got inside.

  “Can I get a single?” he asked the clerk.

  The clerk was a bit tubby and had a moon-shaped bald spot the covered most of the top of his head. There was a shine up there from the lights above him.

  “One left. You’re lucky.”

  “That’s the first good luck I’ve had since I got on the road. It’s terrible out there.”

  “So I’ve heard. Weirdest May I’ve ever seen. It’s supposed to be spring. But I hear we’re in for a big improvement by late tomorrow.”

  “I hope so,” Mark told him.

  He asked Johansen for his driver’s license and a credit card, and the ex-Green Beret handed him both. The only thing bogus about the credit card was the name on it. But the card worked, and Mark was promptly checked in. You had to have plastic for motels and hotels, lately, so the credit had to be real, even if the name was false. Johansen had three sets of cards with three different names, and the trio worked whenever he needed them. He’d set up the accounts six months ago, and he paid the bills promptly so that he was never refused.

  He took his duffel up to the third floor. There were people traversing the hallway, and he wondered if it would be quiet enough to get sleep tonight. The parking lot was pretty well full when he and the cop pulled in. Apparently, few travelers were chancing a road trip until things improved out there. It was indeed a strange first week of May.

  He called Marilyn from the room. His real name wasn’t connected to this motel, so he figured he’d be safe. She picked up on the third ring.

  He explained to her about the delay, but she sounded very worried anyway. He expected her to be anxious.

  “I’ll still be home soon. The weather’s clearing.”

  “It isn’t the weather I’m worried about.”