“Disconnek. Am be in touch on you, doan worry.”
“But you’ve said that your niece calls you. How does she accomplish that?”
“Call Webster’s Whirlwind, call Millie and Jake’s, call Bobo’s Dugout, call Mary’s Piano Bar, call—”
Willow broke in on her. “No matter, I’ll be on this late tomorrow morning.”
Sister Rosetta bristled. “How come late? How come not early? Early bird catch worm!”
“Yes, but the big possums walk late. Want another drink?”
She mopped her mouth with the back of a gloved hand. “Hey, one more drink and am take you home, show you where bear burped in brickyard.”
Willow didn’t know exactly what she meant by that, but he’d taken enough chances for one day. He said, “I’ll take a raincheck.”
She rose unsteadily to teeter above him. She patted him on the head, one of those good-old-Rover pats, and she lurched toward the door, pursuing a perilously circuitous route, her heavy purse banging like a wrecking ball against walls and barstools. Willow watched her go out, an aging, hopeless lush who’d probably gotten hooked on sacramental wine during her novitiate days. She was a pain in the ass, but she came out swinging and Willow liked that.
3
Thursday
He headed for the bar, thinking about a girl he’d known, a blonde crackerjack, out of his life now but rarely out of his thoughts. She’d been a model with an eye toward becoming an actress. He straddled a barstool with an effortless ease born of long practice. The television set was off and the jukebox was purring “Uno per Tutte” by Robertino. Helluva voice. Willow remembered Robertino from his boy-wonder days. From the corner of his eye he saw Florence Gambrello, her elbows on her table, her chin cupped in the palms of her hands, boredom personified, but watching his every move. Willow grinned at Raponi, rolled his eyes, and said, “Whe-e-ew!”
Raponi said, “Ain’t it the truth?”
“She isn’t driving, is she?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! She’s dangerous enough on foot! Real ding-a-ling, old Rosie.”
“You know her?”
“Sure, who doesn’t? Rosie drops in now and then—never saw her sober, probably never will. Lives up on Austin someplace—always got money—bought for the house a couple times.”
“Is she really a nun?”
“Probably not. She won’t talk about it. If she’s a nun, she’s AWOL—she’s been coming in since spring.”
“Ever meet her niece?”
“Yeah, once. She came around looking for Rosie one night, back in June or July. Blonde chickie.” Raponi whistled, long, low, and bluesy. “Jesus Christ, I’d sure like to ball that one!”
“Nice?”
Raponi made several remarks in Italian. Willow didn’t understand remarks made in Italian, but he took these as being affirmative because Raponi had grabbed himself by the testicles and he was jiggling them.
Willow said, “Sister Rosetta wasn’t in here that evening?”
“She came in a couple hours later, bombed—I think she’d got hung up at that Dixieland joint south of here—Webster’s Whirlwind. Rosie makes every firetrap on Austin Boulevard and I guess the kid tries to look out for her.”
“That’s a thing of the past—she told me that her niece has lammed.”
“Can’t blame her. Say, that niece just got to be some kind of swinging dish!”
“How’s that?”
“Well, she got a little rose tattoo on the back of her hand.” Raponi lowered his voice to a confidential level. He said, “You show me a tattooed woman what don’t swing and I’ll show you the seven-legged dinosaur I got locked in the stockroom!”
Willow shrugged. “That doesn’t always hold true. I knew a girl with a skull and crossbones tattooed on her right tit, and she was a virgin.”
“You believed that?”
“I shouldn’t have?”
“Fuck you, Tut.”
Willow ordered another Kennessy’s Light Lager, and Raponi mentioned that Dom Palumbo would probably come around when he got in from Detroit.
Willow said, “Before or after the hit?”
“I didn’t ask him—probably after, wouldn’t you think?”
“Sure, after, when the pressure’s off.”
Raponi snorted. “Pressure? Dom Palumbo don’t feel no fucking pressure! Dom got a real short fuse but when he’s on a contract he don’t got a nerve in his whole damn body. Cooler than a penguin’s balls.”
“Do penguins got balls?”
“Hell, yes, penguins got balls! How you think they—?”
“Okay, okay, don’t get all excited, I just wondered.” He gulped the remainder of his beer and slid from his barstool. “See you, Nick.”
As he neared the doorway Florence Gambrello threw a leg across his path. It was like being blocked by a fallen redwood. Florence said, “Not so fast with the exit! What am I, some old scarpa?”
“Aw, you know better than that, Flo!” There was respect in Willow’s voice, the real stuff. Two weeks earlier Florence Gambrello had decked a rambunctious Irishman, and it’d been all of ten minutes before he’d known his ass from a ripple in Galway Bay.
Florence was saying, “What was it with you and Grandma Moses back in the dark corner?”
“You mean Sister Rosetta?”
“Sister Rosetta, my Sicilian ass! If that ubriacone is a nun, Florence Gambrello is cherry!”
“I don’t care what she is. At two hundred a day I’ll work for Lucretia Borgia.”
Florence’s dark eyes narrowed perceptibly. “Two hundred a day—Holy Christ, that comes to seventy grand a year!” Being a waitress, Florence Gambrello was good with numbers.
“It comes to more like twelve when you work five days a month.” Being a private detective, Tuthill Willow wasn’t bad, either. Florence said, “Who’s Lucretia Borgia?”
Willow didn’t want to get into that. He said, “She got a delicatessen out on South Damen Avenue.”
“Borgia—sounds like northern Italian—you can’t trust them northern Italians.”
“I know it. She’s shortchanged me three times.”
Florence stood, moved close to him, and pinched his cheek. She was a big one but she smelled nice—like cloves, Willow thought. She said, “So don’t forget tomorrow night with Florence!”
Willow said, “I’ll probably never forget tomorrow night with Florence.”
“Gotta be at your apartment. My sister’s staying with me for a few days. We wouldn’t be able to let ourselves go. Florence likes to let herself go.”
“I just may have noticed that. What about your sister—she’s a Jehovah’s Witness?”
“No, but she got her kids with her. The kitchen closes at ten-thirty, so Florence’ll be there elevenish.”
“Well, all right, but we’ll have to be careful. Martha Strotman runs a tight ship.”
“Don’t sweat your landlady—we’re gonna do this so nobody gets the slightest suspicion.”
“That’s what Khrushchev told Castro in sixty-two.”
Willow went out, trudging glumly to his car through a light rain. There was one glaring flaw in that any-old-port-in-a-storm theory. There was serious risk of getting your bowsprit busted.
4
Thursday
On his return run to River Grove, Willow pulled in at Oscar’s All-Night Diner on River Road for a cheeseburger and a vanilla milkshake with two eggs beaten into it. The food at Raponi’s was excellent and he’d have stayed for spaghetti, but Florence Gambrello would have been all over him like a blizzard, fetching extra minestrone and extra salad, buttering his bread, checking his coffee, emptying his ashtray, hovering at his shoulder like a mother condor over her only chick. There was nothing subtle about Florence Gambrello, she didn’t stalk a man, she just hauled off and ran over him.
The pimply-faced kid at the counter was named Ronnie, and when he served Willow’s milkshake Ronnie said, “Say, do them eggs really help, if you know what I’m dr
iving at?”
Willow said, “I know what you’re driving at and I kind of doubt it.”
Ronnie said, “Fish does it real good for me, only I’m afraid to eat ’em on account of I just might rape somebody.”
Willow nodded and munched morosely on his cheeseburger. He was in a ton of trouble, no doubt about it—Florence Gambrello was in the market for a roommate, and when a twenty-seven-year-old woman capable of jazzing the peaches off a wildebeest starts rhapsodizing about the sexual prowess of a forty-nine-year-old man the fat is in the fire. Florence was a nice kid, unpolished in most respects, but reasonably intelligent and frighteningly sincere. Despite her bulk, she wasn’t hard on the eyes—coal black hair, dark brown eyes, flared nostrils, soft red lips. Her dusky skin was without blemish head to heel, and her enormous dark-nippled breasts jutted taut and true, reminding Willow of a dead heat in a Goodyear blimp race. She stood five-eleven, she weighed in the near vicinity of one eighty-five, she was stronger than a full-grown brontosaurus, quicker than a tiger cub, and she could punch like Rocky Marciano. Her father, Sudden Sam Gambrello, had been a light-heavy, not a contender by any stretch of the imagination, but a durable trial-horse who’d rung up eighteen knockouts, and he’d taught his daughter the basics—counterpunching, bobbing, weaving, feinting with a left to wing a lethal overhand right. These tools had readied the Gambrello girl for the realities of life in the North Avenue and Halsted Street area, and Florence had reached maturity unraped, no small achievement anywhere in the city of Chicago and probably unparalleled at North and Halsted—ask almost anybody.
Florence had taken up residence with two former patrons of Raponi’s Old Naples Spaghetti House, but only one at a time because Florence had morals. Willow had known Harry Monahan and Joe Ficelli quite well, and they’d spoken highly of Florence—never an uncomplimentary word from either—but both relationships had folded in short order. Harry had taken to lapsing into strange prolonged periods of silence and Joe had twitched a great deal. Both had lost considerable poundage and both had vanished. It was said that Harry Monahan was living with a seventy-year-old aborigine woman in the outback region of Australia. It was also said that Joe Ficelli was working as a night janitor in a Tibetan lamasery, but these were rumors without substance.
Tuthill Willow was no fuzzy-cheeked neophyte—he knew the way to the bakery. He’d survived a hurricane and an accompanying thirty-four-degree troopship list, he’d lasted through a four-hour North Korean mortar barrage, he’d been charged by a runaway circus elephant, and he’d stood on the west rim of Grand Canyon at sunup, but never in his forty-nine freewheeling years had he encountered anything so awe-inspiring as a sexually aroused Florence Gambrello. She became as some untamed creature from an unknown galaxy—her eyes blazed, her lips peeled back from her teeth, she disrobed by tearing her clothing to shreds and casting the scraps to the winds. On one occasion she’d mangled her dress so badly that Willow had sent her home wrapped in his bedspread, and he’d had to get her out of jail when the bedspread had blown away—an eighty-five-dollar setback because the bedspread had cost him ten dollars at a garage sale on Kimball Avenue. Another time, while in the process of kicking off her footwear, Florence had launched her right shoe through the south window of Willow’s bedroom, and her left through the east, both windows being closed at the time, a fact alluded to by Martha Strotman when she raised Willow’s rent by forty dollars a month.
Contrary to popular opinion, Florence Gambrello had not been born in heat, it was just that she’d wasted precious little time in getting there. Florence could be revved to full throttle by a glance, a smile, or the lightest touch, however innocently intended. She could be brought to a rolling boil by a scent, a taste, or a sound. Colors drove her wild—red, yellow, and blue in particular. She could be whipped to sexual frenzy by the sight of a jet airliner taking off. Or landing, for that matter.
Every dog has his day and Florence Gambrello was fully entitled to hers, but so is a 155mm howitzer, and within the cramped confines of his bedroom, Willow would have been hard-pressed to identify the lesser of the two, Florence making not quite so much noise but wreaking infinitely more havoc.
Since Florence had been visiting Willow’s apartment, he’d been threatened with eviction from the premises on several occasions. Financial persuasion had served to alter the picture, but this was why Willow was forking over seven hundred dollars per month for occupancy of a River Grove one-bedroom apartment worth three-fifty tops. Martha Strotman was a nonsmoking, nondrinking, non-just-about-every-God-damned-thing, fifty-five-year-old, never-married virgin who took an interestedly horrified view of the proceedings in the second-floor bedroom immediately above her own. Florence Gambrello made love in robust, sometimes violent, always vociferous fashion, and she was given to bellowing instructions to Willow, her shouts drifting down to Martha Strotman cowering in her bed under a steady shower of plaster dust, covers pulled over her graying head, eyes closed tightly, hands clamped protectively between her legs—“That’s it, give it to me, give it to me goo-o-o-d, show no mercy, oh God, do it, make me suffer, destroy me, you barbarian!” These clawed at the pristine portals of Martha Strotman’s mind, and she would drift into technicolor dreams in which she was closely pursued by great hordes of shaggy, chartreuse-eyed demons brandishing bloody penises larger than battering rams.
Willow finished his cheeseburger, washed it down with the dregs of his egg-laced vanilla milkshake, and drove slowly homeward in the rain. He let himself into his apartment, bolted the door, found a can of Kennessy’s Light Lager in the refrigerator, and flopped disconsolately on his couch to sit with the lights out, smoking, nipping at the Kennessy’s, mulling things over, adding his pluses, deducting his minuses, and arriving at a total several degrees south of zero. This accomplished, he squelched his cigarette, departed the couch, took a long hot shower, and tumbled gloomily into bed. He turned on his nightstand radio and caught a piece of the ten o’clock news. Inflation was running wild, interest rates were on the upswing, a new and deadly strain of flu virus was expected to move into the Chicago area by mid-November, another United States embassy had been blown to smithereens, Geraldine Ferraro had announced that she would sue everybody but she’d been vague as to why, a crazed gunman had shot two people on the South Side and a third through the shoulder. Willow clicked the radio off and cruised into sleep, listening to the rain on the roof. It was a fucked-up world.
5
Friday
He wasn’t a nature lover—birds, bees, sycamore trees didn’t do much for Willow. He’d never seen a babbling brook, he hadn’t crossed the Cook County Line in years, and he had no compelling desire to do either. The neighborhoods were his countryside—Jefferson Park, Logan Square, Edison Park; the Loop was the big city and that was where he balked. Willow detested the Loop, he disliked having to come within artillery range of the abominable place, but there were times when circumstances dictated that he visit it, and this was one of them. The rain had passed, the sun was out, and Willow parked his Buick in a grubby lot on West Adams Street, making his way into the gorge of the sick, gray monster like a missionary into the jungle—on foot, unarmed, and at a pronounced disadvantage. It was as he’d seen it last, smoky, sticky, crowded, roasted-nut houses belching fumes, the stenches of frying onions and greasy meat cascading into clogged thoroughfares, babies wailing, traffic whistles shrilling, horns honking, cab drivers cursing. A few doors short of State Street a wild-eyed, westbound fat woman in a pink dress struck the eastbound Willow forcibly in the groin area with a shopping bag of canned goods, doubling him over and sending him reeling into Berghoff’s, where he downed three schooners of dark beer while attempting to regroup.
The Chicago Yellow Pages had offered agents by the hundreds—real estate, theatrical, insurance, literary—but under “Modeling” Willow had found only one name that approximated “Brimstone”: a Samuel Brumshaw Modeling Agency on South Michigan Avenue, not “Ramdolph” and not “Momroe,” as indicated by the well-lu
bricated Sister Rosetta.
He found the address, the Walton Building, a dingy redbrick three-story structure on the west side of Michigan Avenue just south of Adams Street, a building in a poor state of repair, with a secondhand camera store occupying the left side of its ground floor and a novelty shop the right, a filthy place, its display window jammed with whoopee cushions, dribble glasses, buzzers, yellowing sleight-of-hand paperbacks, trick card decks, rubber snakes, plastic tarantulas, and the like, all generously garnished with dead green flies. The Walton Building’s ten-by-ten foyer hadn’t been swept in a month and it hadn’t been painted since the Great Depression. Its eight-slot wall register was half-filled and Willow noted that the Samuel Brumshaw Modeling Agency was located in 2-D.
Number 2-D was at the far end of a short, poorly illuminated hallway, next to an open washroom that appeared to have been last used by an Apache scalping party. Willow opened the door of 2-D and eased cautiously into a stuffy room with white paint peeling from its ceiling, gray paint peeling from its walls, and blue linoleum peeling from its floor. Cheaply-framed glossy eight-by-tens of hard-faced young women in various stages of undress hung crookedly here and there. Willow saw a brace of badly battered green filing cabinets, a straight-backed wooden chair, and a spavined desk to which had been tacked a white life preserver lettered BON VOYAGE TITANIC. At the desk a man sat in a spoke-backed swivel chair, a balding, grossly overweight fellow wearing wire-framed glasses and a pink-and-orange Hawaiian shirt. He glanced at Willow and cocked a pistol-style forefinger at him. He said, “Just the man I want to see! Look, Abe, scrounge up an old slouch hat and I can work you into a twenty-second Bronco Batteries commercial out at R&K next Tuesday—you’ll be a holdup getaway driver and your goddamn car won’t start on account of you don’t got no Bronco Battery—no lines, Abe, all you got to do is look all frantic and pissed off.”
Death Wore Gloves Page 2