Kill Me Tomorrow

by Richard S. Prather

  “All the Civanos,” I went on, “lived for several years in Gardena, California. For some of those same years—in the same block, even—so did Gilberto Reyes. He knew Joe. He knew Joe’s little sister Maria, too. Pretty well, if I may hazard a guess. Gil hadn’t seen Maria Civano in sixteen years, but I doubt he had a lot of difficulty recognizing her Tuesday morning.” I paused. “I’ll give you that, Mrs. Blessing. Men would remember you. Hell, once in a while I may think of you myself … while you’re away.”

  She sat primly, as primly as she could sit, the wide red lips pressed more tightly together than when we’d chatted before, arms folded beneath what I had at first sight thought of as astonishingly protuberant jugs, the huge dark eyes with their long, long lashes glaring at me from under the black brows—she was quite a girl—and remained silent as I continued.

  “Anyhow, Gil naturally walked up to your door, and, probably not yet at all sure if the lovely lady was indeed Maria, spoke, first to you, then to the guy you were with. Now, that was a remarkable moment, worth examining closely. Coloring everything else, motivating virtually all which followed that moment is the money, the grants all set to start pouring in from AGING, and—you know about that. Add the Cosa Nostra, black hand itching for great gobs of those great gobs of federal loot and this brief moment becomes one which, should its full implications become widely known, almost surely would prove disastrous—primarily to the mafiosi, that is—even catastrophic, everything wrecked, blooey. Are you following me, Maria?”

  “I stayed with you up to wrecked, blooey,” she said.

  She was taking this surprisingly well so far, I thought. “Fine,” I said, “because now it gets fascinating. Here is Gil Reyes standing there asking you if you’re Maria Civano. That’s bad. Can’t have him going around blabbing that sort of thing. The possibility others might learn Maria Civano—Crazy Joe’s sister, member of a Mafia-connected family, granddaughter of Pete “The Letch” Lecci—was very early in the A.M. meeting with David Stephens—the AGING Commission chairman’s brother, personal representative and official right-hand man to the dispenser of the goodies—therein lay not merely the seed but the entire flower of catastrophe.”

  I asked her if she minded if I smoked. She told me she didn’t care if I burned. It wasn’t an original comment, but at least she was still talking to me—and, though it had been light so far, I had a hunch she soon would not be speaking to me at all. I found an ashtray, lit a smoke.

  “Naturally, you told Gil he was mistaken, insisted as convincingly as possible you were not Maria Civano, all this undoubtedly with some help from Stephens. You put some doubt into Gil’s mind, some but not enough. So when he left he was still wondering if you were really Maria, and if so why you’d denied it. He knew the Civanos were a crime-connected, actually Cosa Nostra-connected, family—even in Gardena he’d known Crazy Joe was a crook. And still very fresh in his mind was the horribly impressive hit of Joe he’d witnessed only two mornings before. Maybe he even wondered about the increasingly visible mess here at the Villas. Certainly he was concerned, worried, confused, so what did he do? Why, just what many good, religious, confused or worried people do, he decided to talk to his spiritual advisor, the Reverend, to partake of his wisdom, seek his aid and comfort and advice, and he did, and he died.”

  Mrs. Blessing’s eyes, which at times could look like little copies of those vats they pour the hot stuff from in steel factories, were cooling.

  “Tony Brizante’s good friend Gil just plain disappeared,” I went on. “And what confused Tony most of all was thinking Gil had said that he thought he’d seen Joe Civano. But Gil never said any such thing—because he never thought any such thing. Gil told Tony he thought he’d seen ‘Civano,’ but maybe he was wrong—to quote him exactly, ‘That looks like Civano’—and that was all he said. Tony dropped Gil off at work and never saw him again. There was nothing at any time—not from Gil Reyes—about believing he’d seen Joe Civano. The Joe, Maria, was supplied by Reverend Archie.”

  You wouldn’t think such hot eyes could reach a cold close to freezing in minutes, much less seconds, but that’s what they had done. “Let’s separate fact from fiction—the Reverend Stanley Archibald’s fiction,” I said. “What really happened is, Tuesday evening Gil Reyes called on the Reverend to talk about Maria—not Joe—Civano, and right then he was dead. Very close to death, anyhow. Gil Reyes didn’t go anywhere after that, not of his own free will. He didn’t see you at the church, or Henry Yarrow at the church, he didn’t see anybody except Archie and his other executioners. But before he was dead you knew he’d told Tony Brizante he thought he’d seen ‘Civano,’ and that was all he’d told Tony.” I paused. “Incidentally, sometimes when I say ‘you’ I refer not merely to Maria Civano but Letch and Holyjoe and all the brothers in blood clear up to the Commissione.”

  I dragged on my cigarette, dropped ash into the tray. “Well, it was fortunate Tony didn’t know any more than he did, but as Gil’s friend you knew he’d be poking around, could cause trouble, maybe big trouble. You could have killed him to make sure he didn’t say the wrong things to the wrong people or ask embarrassing questions, but that was out if it could possibly be avoided. In part because he was the father of Lucrezia Brizante, but also because too many guys dropping dead or disappearing could be real trouble, could even lead to an investigation that might uncover what was going on here at Sunrise Villas, and above everything else you had to avoid any heat in that area—the big heat, as Letch himself referred to it early Saturday morning. But if Tony could be misdirected and misled—conned—you could cool it, the problem could be solved simply and cleanly. So that’s what happened. Tony Brizante was conned, and expertly.”

  I looked silently at Maria Blessing for a while. No change in her. Expression and posture the same, eyes fixed coldly upon me, quite blank. It was like talking to a very shapely iceberg.

  “So we get to the fiction,” I said. “And in a way I’ve got to hand it to you, I really do, because the problem was complex. You couldn’t let Tony even suspect that Gil had walked over to talk with the woman that morning, because your true identity had to be concealed and even a hint of the truth could lead Tony to the truth to Maria Civano. So you had to shift attention from the woman to the man—but you couldn’t shift attention to David Stephens either, because his presence and identity also had to be concealed. The horns of a double dilemma right there. To make it hornier, the story had to be tailored to fit certain other unavoidable requirements: making it explain that dangerous name, Civano—plus having Gil’s trail lead away from the Reverend, especially the Reverend, and also away from you, Maria. But, by golly, you managed to pull it off—almost.”

  I smiled at her. “That’s such a sad word sometimes, isn’t it? Almost?” Still no comment from Maria. “At any rate, it was ready for Brizante, by the time he went to the Universalist Communion Church, hoping to learn what had happened to Gil. There the Reverend Archie told him, ‘Yes, Mr. Brizante, poor old Gil was here, and he really did think he’d seen Joe Civano, he seemed to be convinced of his error when he left but was still quite distraught.…’ or some such blah. The key words there, in case you weren’t listening closely, Maria, were ‘the Reverend Archie told him.’

  “And Archie told Brizante that the man Gil really saw was not Joe Civano but a gentleman named Henry Yarrow, who with good and sufficient reason had been calling upon that nice Widow Blessing, and the Reverend himself had arranged for them to come to his church to meet poor deranged Gil, who in consequence realized he’d made a terrible mistake.… None of which actually happened, of course, none of which was the truth, since every bit of it was from Reverend Archie, Holyjoe fiction carefully constructed to con Brizante.”

  I beamed at Maria. “There. Did I make it clear for you? Well … if I missed a vital point, you could at least yawn or something. Come, Maria. Look, I’ll sum it up very simply for you: Tuesday morning Gil saw Maria Civano talking to David Stephens, went to church that night an
d got killed, then when Tony came along Holyjoe told him Gil had been there and thought he’d seen Joe Civano with Mrs. Blessing and such, and for corroboration brought in not David Stephens but Henry Yarrow, who merely parroted to Tony the tale Holyjoe—or, more likely, you—had told him to tell. And Tony went away, and later told me, ‘Yes, Shell, turns out Gil really did think he’d seen Joe Civano.…’

  “You’re sure a lousy conversationalist,” I said after a long pause. But even that didn’t get a rise out of her. “Maria,” I went on, “surely you’ve guessed by now that I am not a man who gives up easily. I intend to find something that’ll tickle you if it takes all day. Ah—Henry Yarrow. Substituting him for David Stephens must have been your idea, right? Maybe with some help from Stephens? I imagine that was the toughest part, getting Yarrow to cooperate, even though he didn’t really have much to do. Just going to the church once—because he did not go there to see Gil Reyes, remember, but only to talk to Brizante, lie to him, say he’d been the man with you Tuesday morning. Maybe this will tickle you: once I realized the story was set up primarily to con Brizante, I finally understood that Henry Yarrow was chosen, not because he resembled Joe Civano, but because he looked a lot like David Stephens.”

  No reaction yet. But I felt maybe a little reaction was coming. “Yarrow looked enough like Stephens to fool Brizante, who’d been forty or fifty feet away when he saw Stephens. But Henry Yarrow wouldn’t have fooled Gil Reyes, not for a minute.”

  She blinked and said, “Oh.” Not much, but it was enough for me. Apparently she hadn’t thought of that before.

  “Sure,” I said, “good enough for Brizante, even confused the hell out of me for a while. But Reyes knew well what Joe looked like. I won’t bore you with a full catalog, but even after sixteen years Joe’s very dark eyes—dark like yours, Maria—wouldn’t have changed to the very striking light bright blue of Henry Yarrow’s eyes. Forget Joe’s facial scars and all the rest of it. Just those eyes are enough. If the Reverend Archie’s story to Tony was true, it meant Gil stood talking to bright-blue-eyed Henry Yarrow for a couple of minutes, and after that still thought he might have been talking to Joe Civano—whom he knew to be dead, anyway.”

  She said something else. It was a swear word. She didn’t swear like a girl. Probably the only thing she didn’t do like a girl.

  “Obviously,” I went on, “Gil would not have thought, and did not think, he’d been talking to Joe Civano—yet that’s what Reverend Archie told Tony Gil Reyes had said to him. Therefore, Reverend Archie was lying. Why? Well, let’s remember Gil did still feel maybe he’d been talking to a ‘Civano,’ even after that early A.M. conversation. We now understand it could not have been the man he referred to. Who else? Only the woman. Mrs. Blessing. Or, a Civano—named Maria. And, finally, since both you and Yarrow told the same story as the Reverend, and the story could not be true, then all three of you were lying.”

  This time she didn’t even swear. Just sat there, looking as if she’d swallowed a bug.

  “This may amuse you, too,” I said. “A hood named Lucky Ryan made a try for me but it turns out that was his own idea, not a contract, and it was too soon after I got here to have a connection with my investigation anyway. The first real, planned Cosa Nostra hit was tried only a little while after I asked you about Pete Lecci. You expected questions about Joe, sure, but not about his—and your—grandpa, so naturally you had to go blab it to Letch or the Reverend, didn’t you? And who would do that but Maria?”

  She sure didn’t say much. I took a drag on my cigarette, snubbed it out, and wrapped up the last of it. “If I hadn’t come along, or if you’d managed to kill me, the whole shmear would have worked, and it almost did anyway—there’s that ‘almost’ again. Reyes and Jenkins gone. Shell Scott could go. Tony himself could be hit if necessary. Even Lucrezia Brizante—if you could’ve managed to kill me.

  “I know, Maria. Mere bagatelles, once you’ve swallowed, without gagging, the code, omerta, the religion of Cosa Nostra. I will burn if I betray the secret of this Cosa Nostra! Live—and die—by the gun and the knife! We are now one family! Before all, before religion, before country, before blood family, is this Cosa Nostra. I realize all the dead and almost-dead people I’ve mentioned aren’t part of this thing of yours, and therefore don’t really count. So none of it bothers a sweet girl like you. But what about Joe?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  A real question, at last.

  “Sweetie,” I said, smiling, “don’t you know it works both ways? Don’t you know once you join the club you have to take the bad rules with the—can we call it good? The Commissione sent out the word, ‘Hit Crazy Joe.’ I don’t mean sent it out all over, it wasn’t an open contract—”

  “You’re a liar.”

  I kept smiling. “Dear, if creepy old Letch failed to die of old age in another day or two, he’d have been on his way like Joe. Others of the brothers, relatives of the blessed family are—were—moving in, and those who didn’t fit had to go. Your brother was too close, too loyal, to The Letch. Crazy Joe was also too—well, too crazy.”

  “You’re a—”

  “Please, Maria. I know David Stephens, even though he’s not Mafia himself—for one thing, he talks much too readily—came by here Tuesday morning to cool you out about Joe Civano’s murder. Helping, as his brother’s emissary, to assure you the big bosses would find out who’d so foully assassinated your brother, and wreak vengeance—well, you remember. Just another part of the con, sticking in the convincer. Only this time it was for you, Maria. A present from the Family.”

  I waited for her comment.

  And waited. So I used her phone and called what she would have referred to as Uncle Angelo or the fuzz, or possibly even pigs. Which is to say I called my friends, and invited them over.

  As I hung up I gave it one last try. “Maria—Mrs. Blessing—about Henry Yarrow, he had to know he was in on something rotten, but I’ve held the thought that he wasn’t in on this, not all the way—not, at least, like the rest of you. But he cooperated, went along with it, he did everything you wanted him to do. He even kept up the pretense when I dropped in on him Friday night, lied very convincingly to me. I’m personally convinced he didn’t have any idea what a helluva bloody mess he was getting involved in, but, still, how did you get him to go along with it even as much as he did?”

  She told me. I guess finally she figured, correctly, that she didn’t have anything to lose. However, it is not the kind of statement I care to air in mixed company. So I will merely say that her brief and pithy comment ended with, “—the hell out of him.”

  Yes, Maria was quite a girl.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I drove out of Sunrise Villas the same way I’d come in.

  The storm was long over, and it was a blindingly bright day, the air washed clean, a day much more typical of Arizona than the one just ended. I rolled along the same streets I’d driven with Lucrezia Brizante at my side. Past the two brown-and-white buildings of the Town Hall and local-government offices, the building where I’d first seen Tony Brizante and Lecci and the Reverend and Kerwin Stephens—and made my two appearances before the council, for that matter.

  When I stopped to turn right off Palos Verde into Saguaro I glanced at the velvety bowling green. Fewer players there this day. The old gaffer wasn’t there. I sighed. By now he might be gone to that Great Bowling Green in the sky. Or maybe it was merely that this was Sunday, and people were going to, or in, or recovering from, various services in various churches. But not, I felt reasonably sure, the Universalist Communion Church.

  I glanced at my watch. One P.M. it was, on a Sunday afternoon in July. Just two days minus a few ticks since Lucrezia Brizante had nearly blackened my eyes, simply by walking toward me in the Mountain Shadows Cocktail Lounge.

  I drove out of the Villas, but before going on to Mountain Shadows I stopped to take a look back—I don’t suppose you could call it a sentimental look, exactly—at the
huge orange sign, arched like the rim of the rising sun, at the entrance to the town:

  SUNRISE VILLAS

  And beneath it the slogan, or legend: “Where the Golden Days of the Golden Years Begin.”

  Well, could be, I thought. Could be.…

  The drapes were drawn and it was cool and dim in my suite. Even the door had been fixed. But even if it had still been flat on the floor, I would have left it there. I was tired. Barely enough gas left to make it into the shower and then into the clean cool sheets of my just-soft-enough double bed.

  Ordinarily I hang up my clothes, no matter how pooped I may be. But this time I took everything, my shirt and tie and shoes and shorts and socks and suit … my wonderful, brand-new custom-tailored, gorgeously shimmering color-of-a-drunken-dragon’s-eye suit, and dropped it all and kicked it into a corner.

  Then—ah, luxury—into the shower. Some of the strange garbage I washed off me, out of my hair, even from my ears, had been clinging to me for twenty-four hours. More, since my awakening in the desert last night.

  Last night? It was difficult to believe this was only Sunday afternoon. Hell, I still had the rest of Sunday to sleep, and three days left of my week’s vacation. A quantity of that time would of necessity be spent among representatives of the law—with whom, as may possibly be suspected, I had already spent some. But I was free. As to whether I would remain free forever and ever there was some small question.

  At least Dr. Fretsindler, owner of the YAG laser, its trailer, and the automobile to which all that had been attached, was not also going to put me in jail. I had returned the entire shebang—undamaged, astonishingly—to the doctor, and he seemed to bear me no ill-will whatsoever.

  When I explained why I had done what I’d done, of what immense help to me the laser had been, and a few of the other circumstances—only a few, since it would have taken till August to tell of them all—he hadn’t protested. Now that I considered it more closely, he hadn’t said much of anything. Fretsindler had merely looked at me. Just looked and looked. When I was through he sort of edged away and said, “That’s all right. Perfectly all right. No harm done. Splendid, old chap. I’m … sure it won’t happen again.” Then he shut the door, and I’d heard him lock it.