Butcher's Road

by Lee Thomas

  “I love you, Roger, but I don’t like you very much right now.”

  “Duly noted.”

  He ushered his wife out the door ahead of him and placed the final bag in the trunk with its companion pieces. He kissed his daughters goodbye, pecked Edie on the cheek, gave the driver money and then stood in the slush in front of their home, waving at the taxicab as it rolled down the block. When it disappeared around the corner, Roger raced up the stoop and into the house. From the jar in the pantry, he took money—to replace the cash that had been in the wallet Brand and Hayes had stolen—and then he gathered up his keys, strapped on his holster, and wrapped himself in an overcoat before leaving the house.

  At the station he poured coffee into a mug and carried it to his desk. He sent a formal request to the evidence room for the items retrieved from Musante’s home and then looked at the low pile of files sitting on his desk. The coroner’s report, along with two disturbing photos of Musante’s naked corpse; medical reports; memos from Brooklyn, NY; bank statements; everything he could think to dredge up on Lonnie Musante sat before him.

  He started with the photos, which showed Musante on a metal table. The first picture was a close up of Musante’s face. His eyes were closed and his upper lip had retreated in death, revealing the stub of a single tooth. The second photograph showed Musante from the waist up. His ribs were visible through the tight skin of a spooned chest. The two bullet holes appeared neat, small, and black in the center of his sternum. A misshapen lump, about the size of a lime had risen to the left of Musante’s navel; it looked like a mouse had curled up beneath the lowlife’s skin. Lennon leaned closer to the picture, wondering what the hell had taken up residence in Musante’s gut. But he could draw no obvious conclusions from the picture.

  Next he read through the memos from New York. He knew that Musante, like a lot of Capone’s crew, had come from back east. Last night, after his encounter with Hayes and Brand, he’d gone home to make sure his family was safe, and then he’d called precincts all over New York City to find out anything he could about Lonnie Musante. When he mentioned the name to a detective in Brooklyn, the man had laughed heartily.

  “I never thought I’d hear that piss weasel’s name again.”

  Lennon informed the sergeant that a dispatcher would be contacting him for details, and if he could assign someone to read Musante’s files to the woman, he would be most grateful. The sergeant was more than happy to help.

  What he found in the folder were two typed sheets with the details of Musante’s criminal past.

  (Detective Lennon, Sergeant Lipman was very helpful, though his language was highly objectionable. I have taken down his statements as spoken. I apologize for the harsh verbiage. That noted, he worked in the victim’s neighborhood during the years in question, so he was quite familiar with him.)

  Sergeant Lipman comments: Musante was in trouble most of his life. Petty theft. Numbers. Attempted assault. He was a typical Brooklyn rat, except he wasn’t, because the little prick just wasn’t any good at the crime business. In fact, he was lousy at it. I’m surprised he lived long enough to have any kind of record at all. Let me see what I’ve got here on him.

  1885: Perpetrator, age 13, arrested with four other youths for setting fire to a fruit cart.

  1885: Perpetrator, age 13, escapes from Ronson Juvenile Facility with Marco Impelliteri and Jupiter Leone. Apprehended two days later.

  1887: Perpetrator, age 15, implicated in the murder of Jupiter Leone. Never charged.

  1888: Perpetrator, age 16, apprehended during the burglary of the home of Anthony Scaramellino (perpetrator’s uncle). No charges filed.

  Sergeant Lipman comments: The family protected their own, even the rotten little piss weasel. Don’t know how he fell so far from that tree. The Musantes were good folks generally speaking. You know, for immigrants. One interesting thing, Musante was with his uncle in the fall of 1890, when the old man got gunned down by persons unknown. The family insisted on treating old Anthony themselves. They must have one hell of a doctor in that family or I saw things wrong, because I could have sworn old Anthony took one to the lung and a week later, I see him strolling down Coffey Street as fit as you please. The old guy just passed away a couple weeks back, according to the papers. He lived a good long life. Must have been near ninety years old.

  1889: Perpetrator, age 17, admitted to hospital with severe contusions.

  Sergeant Lipman comments: Had his ass beat good and proper by the owner of a candy store for trying to extort money. The candy store owner broke Musante’s jaw and freed a good number of the fucker’s teeth. Hope the weasel didn’t like beefsteak. Lipman laughs.

  No charges filed.

  1893: Perpetrator, age 20, throws in with Giovanni “John” Torrio.

  Sergeant Lipman comments: And ain’t that something? The dumbest, worst-lucked little shit Brooklyn had ever produced, manages to work his way in tight with the shrewdest gangster in the Five Boroughs. Guess his luck changed. He brought Impelliteri into the gang and while Impelliteri continued to put notches on his record—including time for an assault rap—Musante was never again implicated in criminal activity. But you know the piss weasel didn’t go straight. No way. Maybe some of Torrio’s smarts rubbed off on him. He was seen frequently at Torrio’s billiards parlor in Coney Island. He grew old in the place as the real players, Capone, DeStefano, and Glaister, grew up in it. In 1920, Musante followed Impelliteri and Capone to Chicago with a good chunk of Torrio’s crew. So thanks for taking those shit stains off my hands. Lipman laughs.

  (The rest of Sergeant Lipman’s comments were general and were focused on the qualities of my voice and how they might relate to the physical attributes he admired rather than relevant to the victim’s history.)

  Lennon read over the statement twice more, underlining passages that interested him. Then he put the pages aside and opened the report from Musante’s doctor. He’d meant to read through it methodically, but his eyes were drawn down to the center of the page where words in all capital stood out:

  cancer of the stomach. terminal. patient’s life expectancy: 3-4 months.

  Resistant to X-radiation treatments.

  Surgery not recommended due to proliferation of the disease.

  Son of a bitch, Lennon thought. Musante was dying. Lennon returned to the photograph of Musante’s torso and focused on the lime-sized lump growing beside his navel—a tumor, a death sentence.

  He read the rest of the report, none of which was surprising or even interesting—occasional dyspepsia, sore joints, bad back—typical complaints for a man of advancing years. But the all-capital letters drew Lennon’s eyes time and again. He didn’t know whether he should consider Musante’s murder a blessing or not.

  Lennon’s mother had died of lung cancer, or might as well have done. Her last months had been spent wheezing shrieks of pain into a pillow. The morphine the doctors had prescribed hadn’t alleviated the old woman’s suffering much, except when it had knocked her out cold. In the end, she’d shot herself up with half a bottle of the dope and brought her heart to a stop.

  It was an ugly and humiliating way to go, Lennon thought. A couple of bullets might have been a blessing.

  Conrad appeared at the station an hour after his shift had begun. Before saying a word to Lennon, Conrad took a seat and started devouring a ham and egg sandwich that dripped butter like sweat onto the desktop.

  “I got the information on Musante,” Lennon said.

  “So-oo whah?” Conrad said around a mouthful of half-masticated bread and meat. “Fuh-ers stih de-ahd.”

  “Yeah, he is and it’s our job to figure out why.”

  “It’s not our job. It’s not our case. And if it was, our only job would be to find Cardinal and make him fry for it.”

  “If Cardinal was the shooter.”

  Conrad eyed Lennon angrily. He snatched a dirty handkerchief from his breast pocket and scrubbed the butter and egg from his lips. “We saw the fucker do it.
What the hell else do you need?”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Lennon said.

  “Right. You were napping.”

  The insult stirred his belly, but he didn’t respond to it. Conrad wasn’t worth additional aggravation. The man was the epitome of self-serving and he’d have no part of logic unless it happened to corroborate what he already believed. Lennon figured he should have sent the two freaks with their knives and their pain device in Conrad’s direction. He’d like to see the fat son of a bitch squirm inside his lies.

  “It’s not our case,” Conrad concluded. He lifted the sandwich and ripped off another mouthful. “Sow-sies pro’lem.”

  Yes, it was the Southside’s problem, their case. Even if Musante had been gunned down in a northern precinct, the Captain would never have let Lennon investigate a case in which he was considered a secondary victim. That didn’t mean he was just going to drop it. Desk duty bored him to tears, and something about the Musante case just didn’t add up. The more he knew about the man, the more chance he’d find the answer to why Musante was murdered.

  “Musante was dying,” Lennon said, not that he expected his partner to give a shake.

  “Looks to me like he did a good job of it,” Conrad replied. He again scrubbed his lips with the foul handkerchief. “Now how about you drop this shit? It’s fucking up my digestion.”

  Lennon pushed the photographs and papers back into his file and closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see Conrad sloppily eating his breakfast. He refused to believe this was just a run-of-the-mill mob murder. Hayes and Brand, the strange men who had asked so many questions, weren’t connected to the outfits, at least no outfits Lennon had encountered in Chicago’s streets. A dying man was murdered and his killer stole something of considerable value from him. That’s what Hayes and Brand had wanted. They’d made their disinterest in Musante clear, even though they’d referred to the man as family. It was what he’d been holding that interested them. Maybe it was this same item that interested Marco Impelliteri, Angus Powell, and every other thug now chasing Butch Cardinal.

  But what was it? he wondered. What the hell could be so important?

  Chapter 14

  Delusions in a Strange Bed

  …And for a moment he was home: a sturdy house on good land in a valley beneath endless sky. He had his porch and his comfortable chair and a glass of cold beer. In the house someone fiddled with the stove, making him wait. He was impatient to see his companion, whoever it might be. He needed an explanation for the weight in his chest and the pain in his head. But like all of the other dreams sweltering in his mind, home was a transient place, nothing more than a wispy mist, easily burned away to reveal a fresh, hidden place and a new, fleeting sentiment.

  He found himself crouched on the floor of his sister’s house in Burlington, holding her head in his lap as blood ran a line from her lip to her chin. Clara cried. Two minutes later, she was on her feet, shrieking at him, pointing her finger. So much hate.

  Butch woke and gasped for air because he felt as if he’d been held under water, at turns ice cold and scalding hot, too long, but the gasp agitated his chest and throat and did nothing to alleviate the suffocating sensation. He sat up in bed. He coughed violently, so violently that it felt like his sternum and spine were meeting in the center of his chest, displacing his heart and sodden lungs. The cough continued, bringing a cramp to his sides and spikes of misery to his temples. He crashed back on the pillows and took in the details of a room made filmy by the scrim of moisture covering his eyes.

  Sunlight cut through a crack in scarlet drapes to his left. Columns of a similar red alternated with gold creating the design of expensive wallpaper. The paper ran from crown molding to a deeply etched chair rail. To his right, an armoire with an intricately carved cornice stood against the wall. Ahead, the varnish on a matching secretary’s table glimmered in the rod of sunlight running over its surface. Butch craned his neck to find a small lamp and a ceramic bowl occupying another table only a few inches from his head.

  Where the hell is this? What am I doing here?

  His chest convulsed and another flurry of coughs dislodged the questions; they fell into darkness. And his thoughts turned hazy again, and his vision lost focus and the bar of light cutting the far wall expanded and blossomed before turning black.

  He woke some time later, brought from the hot swamp of dreams to find a figure standing at the end of his bed. Though not wholly certain, Butch told himself this person, a young man with a sour face, was real and not another scrap of delusion.

  The kid was short and stocky with pale skin, accentuated by a sheer white shirt that hugged his shoulders and chest.

  “Who are you?” Butch asked.

  “This is my house,” the kid said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Hollis brought you home. You’ve been stinking up our guest room for two days and making Hollis act like a complete ass.”

  “I’m sorry,” Butch replied. A whisper of self-consciousness blew through the miserable aches and pains. But at least he knew where he was and who he was with.

  “Yeah, well, sorry and a nickel…” The kid crossed his arms over his chest and sneered. “At least you’re easy on the eyes.”

  Butch tried to make sense of the comment, but his feverish and fatigued thoughts melted together like candle wax. He shut his eyes for a moment, just a second to rest them, and then he was asleep, drifting through fragmented images.

  Chapter 15

  Interrogating Humphrey

  The young man’s name was Humphrey Bell. Rabin knew a lot about him now. For instance, he knew Humphrey was twenty-two years old, and not the teenage boy Rabin had thought when observing him on the train. Humphrey’s oddly proportioned features and slight build had given Rabin the mistaken impression that he was still in his growing years. Further, Rabin knew that Humphrey was only visiting Chicago. A long time resident of Red Hook, New York, Humphrey had been sent—by whom he would not say—to the windy city, where he had rented a room in a building across the street from the former residence of Butch Cardinal with the intent of keeping an eye on the property. Another thing Rabin knew was that the kid was bleeding all over the floor of the room; he was sobbing quietly into his gag, a filthy piece of shirt already sodden with tears and spit and snot.

  “This is my job,” Rabin said, leaning against the counter of the kitchenette. “Which is to say, I have nowhere else to be right now. I can stay here for a few more seconds or a few more weeks.”

  From his chair in the center of the room, Humphrey sniffed loudly and closed his eyes.

  Indianapolis had proved frustrating for Rabin. He’d endured the train ride surrounded by pitiful humanity only to watch the Paddy, Rory Sullivan, leave the station and climb into a car. The old Irishman hadn’t so much as paused to adjust the vehicle’s mirrors before speeding away. Rabin had flagged a cab and they’d followed Sullivan for thirty minutes, but it became clear that Butch Cardinal’s friend was doing nothing more than retrieving his vehicle and returning to Chicago. The gym owner had not come south to help the wrestler; he’d already helped Cardinal by loaning the man a means to escape. For all Rabin knew, that act had ended Sullivan’s complicity. He wasn’t ready to write Sullivan off, but the man was not the shortcut Rabin had hoped.

  In the cab, returning to the train station, Rabin had grown more incensed with the situation, and he nearly asked the cabbie to pull to the side of the road, where Rabin had intended to release a bit of his annoyance on the driver, but he’d thought better of it, and the decision turned out to be a good one. Had he indulged himself with the cabbie, he would have missed the train back to Chicago. In and of itself not a significant event, but on the return trip, he’d again seen Humphrey in the club car, appearing as frustrated as Rabin himself.

  Back in Chicago, he’d followed Humphrey to his room, which overlooked the same street as Butch Cardinal’s, and there he’d secured the young man to a chair. Going through the
man’s pockets he’d found identification, which had given him Humphrey’s name and an address in Brooklyn. But why he was in Chicago and following the same man as Rabin was the question. He wasn’t a hitter. No chance of that. Humphrey’s eyes were too clear, filled too full with hope and dreams. So what was he, and why had his path crossed Rabin’s twice in a single evening?

  Still leaning against the counter, Rabin removed the ice pick from his jacket and tapped the tapered spike against his palm. He looked away from Humphrey who seemed to have drifted into unconsciousness again, and sneered at his surroundings. Wallpaper peeled away from seams, had been torn out in great swatches, exposing dirty plaster like wounds. Once the color of wheat and grass, the paper had fouled from age and dirt and nicotine stain and now resembled the colors of infection. The floor was buckled and warped. Long deep scratches bit deeply into the planks. The furniture and linens and window shades were of the lowest quality. Only the radio beside the window was as yet untarnished by time and indifference. How could a man call himself human and install himself in such a sty?

  Leaving the kitchenette, Rabin walked past the dozing man. At the window, he pulled the shade aside and peered into the street. Pedestrians bundled against the bitter, gray air scurried like vermin—rats seeking their sustenance. He’d missed another morning with his wife, and it was because of the kid in the chair. Of course, Rabin was here voluntarily. It was his choice, but it was Humphrey’s fault. He released the shade and turned to the radio.

  A moment later, the raucous and tinny music of a big band clamored into the room. Humphrey shot upright in his chair. He knew what the music meant; it meant questions, and it meant pain.

  At the chair, Rabin leaned close to Humphrey’s ear so that he could be heard through the music. “I’d like to say that I admire your courage, but the truth is I don’t understand it. I cannot fathom the notion of enduring personal discomfort for another man, even less for an ideal. Apparently, you’ve convinced yourself that silence is bravery’s equivalent. But you’re not a friend of Butch Cardinal’s. You don’t even know the man, do you?”