Mallory was silent, but his eyes gave a whole series of lectures, with slides, that said nothing good about me.
“Sal Gunnelli was our anonymous benefactor, Dan, wasn’t he?” I said softly, wishing to hell Oberon was there to hear this. “When you knew you were losing for want of cash you went to him and you cut a deal with him. He’d provide the cash, you’d provide the senate seat. Shit, for all I know he rigged the damn election. Here I’ve been running around the past couple days thinking the Mob was out to buy itself a senator, never dreaming they’ve had one for the last twenty years.”
Mallory’s face tried to match the color of the bath water, and nearly succeeded. “You son of a bitch,” he snarled from a face suddenly gone ugly. “You bastard, you’ll never be able to prove these baseless innuendoes.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t have to. I know, and that’s enough. I know you’re bought and paid for, have been all along. No wonder you threw Eddie Bell out without a second thought; you knew that one call to Gunnelli and Bell would end up on the bottom of a river someplace, explaining to the fishies how he got there. And so it would’ve gone, too, except neither you nor Gunnelli could know that Manzetti would see this as his chance to discredit the boss and rake in all the chips. And he knew how to do it: He’d get the pictures from Bell—the entire collection, else the whole thing could blow up in his face later if any stray photos surfaced—and take them to Chicago to illustrate that Gunnelli was too old, had lost control, that even a second-rate loser like Bell could touch one of their most valuable pieces of property—that’s you, Dan—and would’ve, too, if he, Manzetti, hadn’t stepped in and saved the day by skillfully taking the photographs and the photographer out of the picture. So to speak.
“It’s lucky for you and Gunnelli that Manzetti wasn’t so terribly skillful at being skillful. Else it would’ve been all over before now. Incidentally, it is all over now.”
“You’re ranting,” Mallory sneered.
That I was, but it didn’t make me wrong. In fact, I knew I wasn’t. I finally had all the variables, or all the significant ones, had values assigned to them, had them arranged in the proper order, and had used them to reach a quotient. It was the only possible sum, the only way everything made sense—why Manzetti and Gunnelli were each so hot for the pictures but willing to settle for a dim assurance that I wouldn’t turn them over to the other; why Gunnelli had bought off the cops to halt the Copel investigation before it could uncover the photographs, the Mob connection and the fact that Mallory already belonged to the Mob; why Mallory hadn’t the slightest fear in the face of the very real threat to his career that Bell posed.
I found myself looking at the senator. A better man than I would’ve felt some sympathy, some compassion for him. I felt little more than hatred and loathing. No sadness—surprising, not to feel even a small twinge when one of your golden idols turns out to be made of dross. Maybe the sadness would come later. Now there was only the cold blue flame of hatred.
Mallory’s attention had wandered from me and back to Adrian—not, I think, the Adrian who lay disfigured and dead in our midst, but the little girl he had known in life. He said, to no one, “She was so beautiful. I don’t understand why this happened …”
“Yes you do,” I said cruelly. “And that’s the problem. You understand too well, because you killed her and you know it.” It was the second time that night I’d used the line, but it was equally true both times—and it certainly grabbed people’s attention. Mallory’s head snapped around and trained on me like a guided missile. He said nothing. I said, “It took you eighteen years—from the day you made your devil’s pact with Gunnelli—but, by God, you got it done, Dan.” I nodded toward the corpse. “And a bang-up job you did, too.”
Mallory knotted and reknotted his fists, squeezing the blood from them until they were the color of bone. “How can you say that, you bastard,” he growled. “I did everything for her, and when I couldn’t I at least saw to it that it got done. You should know that better than anybody—why do you think I asked you to look out for her back then? Because I couldn’t do it myself, you stupid—You filthy son of a bitch,” he sobbed raggedly, pounding his chest in his fury, “I did everything, everything for her, everything I could, everything anyone could’ve done in my position—”
“Yeah, your position, Senator. God, you still don’t get it, do you? You sacrificed everything—mainly Adrian—to Gunnelli, to your own thirst for—for—I don’t know. Power—money—position.” My heart pounded alarmingly inside me and I felt lightheaded, wavery, suddenly removed from the scene. Tremulously, I sucked a breath. It tasted of blood and death and something gone putrid. “You killed her, all right,” I mumbled thickly through numb lips. “Killed her all those years ago. Took her this long to die is all.”
He looked as if he was about to jump up and break me with his bare hands like a broomstick. I half hoped he’d try, because I figured I could take him and I’d’ve loved the excuse. I forced my mouth to work. “Well, look at the bright side: at least she doesn’t have to be around to see her old man revealed as the hypocrite he’s always been.” He didn’t rise to the bait. Too bad; I had no more stomach for trying to goad him into motion. I turned to leave.
And I found myself looking into the wrong end of a shiny automatic I’d’ve never guessed Frank Schell carried.
“Son of a bitch,” I breathed.
“Just don’t move,” Schell said nervously. I just didn’t move. There’s nothing worse than a nervous man behind a gun; all the crime novels tell you that. “I don’t want to have to use this thing, but I will if you make me,” said the fat man. “I can’t let you destroy this man and his career, all the fine things he’s done for his state and his country. The best interests of his constituents, that’s always been foremost in his mind. His record shows that.” The fat man’s voice turned earnest now, and there was a pleading, persuasive look in his sweaty, pudgy face. “The work, that’s the important thing. Sure, we’ve had to make some compromises along the way in order to get things done. That’s politics. But we never compromised the work, never, and that’s what’s important. The work that we’ve started—just started—can’t be thrown out, not like this. You must understand that, Nebraska, you were there at the beginning.”
I said I understood it. I also said I didn’t see what Schell thought he could do about it. “You can kill me,” I said, though I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to remind him, “but that won’t change anything. It just means that everything will start to unravel for a different reason. Everything else will come out, though, sooner or later. In any event, Frank, it’s all over.”
“No. It isn’t. Not yet. It’s a long damn ways from being over.” He turned to Mallory, who had sat silently, motionlessly, through the testimonial. I might have been able to get the gun from my hip pocket before Schell could react. He probably wasn’t that expert with firearms. But neither was I. I played it cool, and cursed Ben Oberon for sitting at home nursing his hurt feelings and a bottle while I did his work for him.
“Senator, grab his arms,” Schell was saying. “Use the belt from your coat and tie his arms behind his back.”
Mallory started, as if awakened from a dream or a trance. “What—what are you doing?”
“Trying to save both our necks,” Schell said reasonably, as if talking to a child. “If we do this carefully, it can look like double suicide. Nebraska’s prints will be on the blade. We can say he and Adrian used to be lovers, but Adrian had ended the affair—” He stopped suddenly. He was helped to stop by the unmistakable, unyielding pressure of a gun barrel on his back, dead center between the kidneys.
“Save the speeches for the voters, Baby Huey,” a deep voice cooed in his ear. Schell’s face went slack and ashen, his piggy eyes bulging in the sacks of blubber that surrounded them. He dropped his gun without it being suggested to him.
“You certainly made me sweat it out
, you sadistic bastard,” I said hotly.
“This is gratitude?” Ben Oberon complained.
EPILOGUE
Adrian Mallory’s suicide gave Senator Mallory’s campaign a shot in the arm: the sympathy vote. Straw polls that showed him at best neck and neck with his opponent now put him eighteen, twenty points ahead. Mallory carried on with tragic courage for about a week after Adrian was buried; then it was abruptly announced that he was quitting the race and retiring from public life. No one knew why. Almost no one. Mallory knew, and Schell; I knew, and Oberon. And Gunnelli knew. Mallory’s retirement was the price I exacted from him in exchange for the pictures I had—now had for real—of Adrian. The party scrambled for a good replacement, but it was too late; the opposition walked away with it in November.
Before the election rolled around, Alfredo Manzetti was found in George’s Car Barn with his head half sawed off by a garrote. OPD took Tom Carra in for questioning, but nothing could be made to stick. It was written off as an intramural vendetta, and we all forgot about it inside of a month.
Gunnelli retained control of his territory, thanks to the pictures I gave him to counter Manzetti’s takeover attempt. It was, as Gunnelli himself had said, the lesser of two evils, and the course that Ben Oberon and I decided on that night in Adrian Mallory’s apartment. That and the end of Mallory’s political career. Gunnelli agreed to it. He lost his senator but he kept his kingdom and his power. Six weeks later he was dead. A blood clot broke off in one of his “old pegs” one night and went straight to his heart. They found him in bed the next morning, cold as a snowman.
A week or so after Adrian died I drove by Marcie Bell’s house. A vacancy sign was in the yard. I went up and inquired about the place, as if interested in renting the apartment. In the course of things I asked about the previous tenant. The landlady—who occupied the lower half of the house—said she thought the young woman had moved to Arizona or New Mexico or someplace like that. For her health, she thought.
I finished The Book early that fall and after a little work found a daring publisher. It appeared the following spring to some kind reviews, made a little money, made a little more money in paperback, was optioned by a producer you’ve never heard of for a film that never got made, and sank gracefully from view.
Jenny showed up on the doorstep Christmas Eve with a bottle of Krug and two suitcases. She stayed through New Year’s. Later I got a card from her in St. Thomas.
I couldn’t talk Ben Oberon out of his decision to leave OPD; neither could the commission, though they gave him a medal in the attempt. He became the chief of police in a little Minneapolis suburb, where he sails a lot and from which he sends a card every Christmas.
And I made good on my promise to blow the dirty money pressed on me by Manzetti and Gunnelli. Thirteen hundred big ones. I found a bookie and put the whole bundle on an equestrian nose, a million-to-one long shot, a fleabag whose next stop was the glue factory. The bookie thought I was a loon, but what did he care. He went along with it.
And wouldn’t you know it—the damn nag won.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William J. Reynolds, a native of Omaha, has been a magazine editor, an advertising and marketing executive, a college instructor, and a communications director, as well as the author of a number of books, short stories, magazine articles, and poison-pen letters. His début detective novel, The Nebraska Quotient, was nominated for a Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America. His novels have been published in five countries and in three languages. Reynolds and his wife live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
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