The Gelas were cousins of the Galatinas. As a child, Tom Spolino had played with two of the Gela brothers.
And in every instance Charlie Brush was brought in for questioning and denied all knowledge of the crimes. No witnesses could identify him—not even Rickie the Nose’s lady friend, who was discovered cringing under her bedcovers, apparently in shock, not fifteen feet from the victim—and no charges were ever filed.
Jesus, no wonder if somebody decided the bastard needed killing.
There were three more murders, all committed with shotguns at very close range and all in the first four months of 1940. All three victims had Italian names.
Charlie Brush, it seemed, had been at war with the Galatina Family. Did the little creep imagine he could win?
It was a mistake that had been made before in the history of organized crime, but people like Dutch Schultz and the late lamented Legs Diamond had had their own gangs to offer them a little protection. Charlie Brush seemed to have worked entirely alone. What must it have been like, one wondered, to have had such faith in one’s ability to survive.
Because, just maybe, Charlie Brush was still fighting.
Detective Lieutenant Spolino hit a button on his phone and picked up the receiver. “I need a car outside in two minutes. I’m going to Stamford.”
. . . . .
Spolino had called ahead and was meeting Jerry Reilly at the county hospital, where their chief witness was under sedation and twenty-four guard. Nobody was taking any chances.
“The two girls were hopped up on something and couldn’t tell our perpetrator from Bugs Bunny,” Jerry had warned him. “The madam makes a clearer impression, but she might have been drinking from the same cup—she’s said a few things that don’t make a lot of sense.”
“Like what?”
“Like the guy was bleeding from his ear, but the blood was already dried. Like the guy was turning into a corpse right in front of her. It’s a little flaky for my tastes, a little too scary movie. If I were the D.A., I wouldn’t be too happy about putting her in the witness box.”
“You’re right. It is a little flaky.”
But Spolino refrained from telling him just how flaky.
Stamford had experienced something of a boom in recent years. There were new office buildings everywhere, so that from the freeway the city looked like a scale model of Manhattan. Spolino took Exit 5 and found his way to the hospital, which, he was disappointed to discover, was probably about forty years old and built in the usual Institutional Gothic style.
Reilly was waiting for him up in the lobby on the fourth floor.
“I want to see her alone, Jerry.”
“Well, that’s fine with me.” He smiled his fatman’s smile and then reached inside his loud plaid jacket to scratch his ribcage. Both men were of approximately the same vintage, but Jerry Reilly hadn’t worn quite as well. “We’ve been with her all morning, so needn’t worry about fouling up anybody’s tracks.”
He handed Spolino a file folder and took out his pocket handkerchief to wipe his face, but that was just a little piece of policeman’s stage business. The air conditioning was turned up high enough to give you goose bumps.
“Now I’ve been a good boy, Tom,” Reilly went on, looking almost hurt. “You said you wanted in if there was anything nasty relating to the Family, and then three days later Sal Grazzi gets his dick shot off. So now you’ve got the dossier. When do I get to hear what’s going down?”
“You don’t. Believe me, Jerry—you don’t even want to hear.”
Reilly considered this for a moment and then shrugged his heavy shoulders. They knew each other well enough to leave it right there.
“Okay, pal, if that’s the way you want it I guess you’ve got your reasons. She’s down in Room 723.”
When he saw Spolino coming, the patrolman on guard stood up from his chair. He started to open the door for him, but Spolino beat him to the knob and let himself in very quietly.
It was a double room, but the left-hand bed was unoccupied. The woman held the bedsheet up under her chin with both hands and appeared to be asleep. The hands were swollen and bandaged. Without making a sound, Spolino sat down on the chair in front of the night table. He was prepared to wait.
It wasn’t necessary. She began to stir almost at once.
“Ms. Devere?”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. He would have put her age at about thirty-five—pretty, but a bit hard for his taste. Her skin was waxen, which was probably from the sedatives. All in all, she wasn’t in too bad shape for a woman who was not even eighteen hours from the worst experience of her life.
“Call me Agnes,” she said, in a thick voice. “Don’t you guys ever give up?”
“Not until Charlie is in a box somewhere.”
Simply as part of the drill, he held up his badge for her to see. She didn’t seem very interested.
“You gonna read me my rights? Nobody’s read me my rights yet. I feel slighted.”
“You’re a victim. You don’t have any rights.”
She managed a sly, exhausted smile and sat up a little, revealing a hospital nightgown just a shade darker than the bedsheet.
“You’re not one of the local boys, are you,” she said. “They don’t have any sense of humor.”
“I’m here on a tourist visa.”
“Hand me my purse, will you? That a boy. God, I haven’t had a cigarette since . . .”
Still holding on to her purse, she closed her eyes and hugged herself. It was a long pause.
“Jesus,” she said at last, “I think the valium must be wearing off.”
Finally she was able to light a cigarette, and that seemed to make her feel better. Then she glanced at the bandages on her hands and emitted a little pop of mirthless laughter.
“The bastard did a number on my hands.” She flexed the fingers, as if to be reassured that they still worked. “When I get out of here, I think I’ll become a nun.”
“No you won’t,” Spolino replied quietly. “When you get out of here, there’ll probably be a car waiting for you. The Galatinas will provide you with a new identity and you’ll set up shop again in some other city, probably under the protection of one of the allied families.”
The Devere woman’s eyes narrowed, and the cigarette in her fingers began to tremble slightly.
“Are you from them? I thought you were a cop.”
“I am a cop. I’m just familiar with the quaint tribal customs. You feel like telling me what happened?”
So she told him, step by step, the whole story, and Reilly was right because it did sound pretty flaky.
Except, of course, if you had happened to spend part of that morning in old Mrs. Pickart’s basement.
“And you say he changed?” Spolino asked her.
“Yeah. It was like he became someone else, like one face just pressed its way through the other. And the second face could have belonged to a corpse.” She took a ragged little breath and smiled wanly. “I know you don’t believe me . . .”
“And he mentioned Eduardo Grazzi by name?”
“Yeah—he seemed to know Sal’s whole family. Why? Is that important?”
Who could say? Eduardo Grazzi had been a friend of Lucio Spolino, who had introduced him into the Galatina organization, and now Eduardo’s grandson was dead and Lucio’s was trying to find out why. Tommy the baker’s boy, watch your ass. Somehow it wasn’t a very comforting coincidence.
“Tell me about Charlie—you said his name was Charlie?”
The Devere woman’s cigarette had burned down almost to the filter and she was looking a little bewildered trying to find somewhere to get rid of it. Spolino took it from between her fingers and went into the bathroom to flush it down the toilet. When he came back she had already lit another.
“Charlie. That was it. Good Time Charlie.” She laughed feebly at her own joke and then covered her eyes for a moment with her bandaged hand. “I should have known better. I shouldn’t ha
ve let him in.”
“If you hadn’t, he would have waited down in the parking lot and blown Sal away in his car.”
“Then why didn’t he?”
“Maybe he didn’t feel like waiting. Maybe he wanted a witness.”
“Is that the way these things are usually done?”
“No.”
She looked up at the ceiling, and Spolino gave her a moment to regain her composure.
“Why should you have known better?”
She shrugged, her shoulders looking pitifully narrow under the hospital nightgown.
“Some Johns you just don’t let in the door,” he said after a moment. “You develop a sense about it—or, you’re supposed to. Most of them are docile as little lambs, probably frightened you might get mad and tell their mothers. But every so often you hit a scary one, a guy who likes to hurt women. I let this one in because he looked nice. I made a mistake.”
“No you didn’t—it wasn’t you or your girls he was interested it. He just wanted Sal.”
She thought about that for a moment and then nodded.
“Well, he sure got scary fast enough once he was inside.”
Yes, he probably did.
Spolino reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope.
“I have some photographs here,” he said. “I want you to tell me if you recognize any of them.”
There was a small table top attached to the bed by a metal arm so that it could be swung out of the way. Spolino brought it up so the Devere woman would have a flat surface on which to sort through his little rogue’s gallery.
He had collected a set of photographs over the years for precisely these kinds of identifications, and about twenty of them were dummies: pictures of convicted felons known to be serving long sentences, pictures of cops who had retired and were working as security guards in Florida, even a picture of his brother-in-law Jack. But one of them was from Philip Owing’s military service file and another was the Rikers Island mugshot of Charlie Brush.
She spread them out in front of her and began sorting through them with the tips of her fingers. After a while she pushed all of them aside except two—Philip Owings and Charlie Brush.
“This is the guy who rang the bell,” she said, pointing to Owings. “But this is the one who pulled the trigger.”
Chapter 20
Sonny Galatina’s third marriage was five years old. Traci was twenty-two years his junior, knew how to keep her mouth shut, and was fantastic in bed, but Sonny was close to hating her. The bitch only wanted to be married to a rich and powerful husband, not to Sonny Galatina—he could have been the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and she would have gone right on making the right noises every time he crawled up on her belly. That was her job. For the rest, they hardly knew each other.
Sonny was very good at managing the Family businesses. Profits had been up every year since he had taken over from his father, and he had refined the whole procurement and distribution system for the drug traffic so that it was probably more reliable than the post office. Yet he could never forget that he was the Don only because Roberto had been his father and Enrico his grandfather. The leadership of the Galatina Family was strictly an inheritance. He had not paid the price in blood that would allow him to claim it as an original possession.
Enrico’s father had been a streetcar conductor, but Enrico had already made his bones at fifteen, by killing the capo of a rival gang, and before Prohibition was over he was head of the most powerful family in Southwestern Connecticut. With his brother Leo and, later, his son Roberto, he had fought the terrible wars of the 1930s and ’40s, until the Galatinas stood unchallenged—they had allies, but they had no rivals. All their rivals were dead.
Could he have done all that, Sonny wondered. Could he even have survived in that world?
The only man Sonny had ever killed was a negro heroin dealer who had developed into his own best customer and couldn’t keep up with his payments. Uncle Leo had stage managed the hit so that all Little Bobby had had to do was to walk in, pop the guy, and walk out. He was twenty-four and already his father’s underboss. It had been humiliating.
So in his late forties Sonny Galatina was a disappointed man. His personal fortune was one of the largest in the United States and he lived in imperial splendor, but he felt like a guest at his own banquet. It depressed him to think that if he were ever imprisoned it would probably be for something like tax evasion. He was a caretaker Don, so remote from the world of his father and grandfather that sometimes he felt like a legitimate businessman. All he could do was to sit around in the evening, watching old gangster movies and dreaming of everything he had missed.
So, in a sense, the murder of Uncle Leo had been like a shot at redemption.
He had never liked Uncle Leo, who had retired when Sonny became the Don—as a gesture of contempt, Sonny had always suspected—but the murder of a kinsman demanded an answer. The afternoon following the funeral he sat down with his underboss, Jimmy DeLucia, to plot vengeance.
“Listen, Sonny, I don’t know what you’re getting so hot about. It was a traffic accident. They’ll find some kid and give him a year, and then, if you think it’s necessary, we’ll top him.”
Jimmy DeLucia had been one of the Don’s more successful inspirations. He had started out as a street hood and, at age eighteen, had run afoul of the Galatina family by trying to organize a Shylocking operation among the blacks in West Stamford. This territorial infringement could not be tolerated, but Sonny, who was still his father’s underboss but knew he would succeed him within a year or two, rather admired the kid’s audacity so, instead of having his lights put out, he offered him a job. DeLucia accepted with gratitude, knowing he was lucky to be alive, and had served Sonny Galatina faithfully ever since.
Jimmy DeLucia had made his bones at sixteen and had been an enforcer before Sonny moved him up to underboss. Yet for him violence was simply the business tactic of last resort—it was dangerous and it was expensive, and every time some chiseler was found shot in the head or an independent operator was blown up by a car bomb it stretched public tolerance a little thinner. IBM and AT&T didn’t shoot people in the head. Donald Trump didn’t use car bombs. Jimmy DeLucia admired his boss precisely because he was almost indistinguishable from any corporate CEO. Jimmy DeLucia wanted the Galatina Family run like a Fortune 500 company, not like a street gang. To the degree that he was aware of Sonny’s romantic longings, he disapproved of them.
“It was not a traffic accident. It was a hit.” Sonny’s face darkened as he sat behind the huge mahogany desk in his office, fiddling with a cigar he could not quite bring himself to light—after all, he was still in his best dark suit and Uncle Leo hadn’t been in the ground more than an hour.
“Come off it, boss. There’s no problem with the other Families and, besides, who’d want to top Leo?”
“I have it on the best authority that the police are treating the case was Murder One.”
“Tom Spolino tell you that?”
Sonny nodded, a little annoyed that his underboss had figured him out so fast. Of course, he would have been even more annoyed if he hadn’t.
“Tom Spolino is no dummy,” he said, and then, a little maliciously, “If he weren’t such a straight arrow son-of-a-bitch, he’d be sitting where you are now.”
“Then, if it was Murder One, it must have been some sort of private beef.” DeLucia shrugged—he was impervious to Sonny’s sarcasms. “Wait for Tom Spolino to catch the guy, and as soon as he’s in the jug I’ll arrange something. Whether it was an accident or a jealous lover isn’t important. We’ll deal with it the same way.”
That seemed to settle it, but the morning after the Grazzi killing Jimmy DeLucia found the Don floating in his swimming pool, his ass stuck in an inner tube the size of a truck tire, ready to burn down the whole world.
“Maybe you think this was a traffic accident,” Sonny bellowed, uncharacteristically ignoring the presence of his wife, who was lying face do
wn on the grass, cultivating her tan. “I’m telling you, Jimmy, some fuck has declared war on us.”
That was enough for Traci. Smart girl, she didn’t even want to hear the Don’s secrets, so she got up and walked back into the house. To avoid a tan line, she had undone her bikini top in back and now, instead of troubling to retie it, she simply carried it in her hand. Jimmy DeLucia was very careful to avert his eyes.
The two men exchanged an angry look which was really something more like embarrassment at Sonny’s indiscretion.
“I’ve known Sal forever,” the Don said more quietly. “Don Enrico was his Godfather. I was best man at his wedding. And now he gets blown to pieces in some cathouse. They won’t even to able to have an open casket—what kind of a sicko shoots a guy’s nuts off, for Christ’s sake?”
DeLucia sat down on one of the aluminum deck chairs that were scattered at random around the pool.
“I’ve got a man in the Greenley Police Department,” he said. “Spolino’s been busy. He’s dug up all the records on some ’30s hood named Charlie Brush. He’s also interested in some local guy who’s living in the old Moonlight, but I don’t make much of that.”
This made Sonny very happy.
“Spolino asked me about Charlie Brush,” he said harshly, as if in rebuke. “Charlie Brush would be a million years old if he was still alive, and he isn’t. Tell me about the local guy.”
So Jimmy DeLucia gave the Don the story on Philip Owings, heir to the Moonlight Roadhouse, who seemed to be strictly civilian and a bit of a dork in the bargain. He told him about the car with the dented fender. He even told him a few things that Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino of the Greenley Police didn’t know, such as the fact that Owings had been talking to a contractor about having his driveway repaved—which was a big outlay for a man with less than eight grand in his bank account. It also sounded like he planned to stay on at the Moonlight, which was even harder to figure.
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