Stanley died two days later. He’d gone into a coma and hadn’t come out of it. Maybe it was for the best, since he didn’t have to learn about his grandson.
Andy had cut himself in on McGill’s racket early when Creek Fortier had come to ask his advice, not daring to bring it up with Stanley. I’d guessed right about that part at least.
Stanley had held the paper on Creek’s land, intending to put it in trust with Andy as trustee. The part I’d guessed wrong about was why Chip McGill had gone after Stanley. It was insurance, plain and simple, in case Andy got cold feet. McGill thought like a thug, which he was. What nobody figured out until afterward was that Andy had already decided he’d throw McGill over the side. If the Disciples thought McGill were a liability, they’d take him out for their own protection. Andy just needed a credible story, one that would sell on the street, and he had it in the case he was preparing, the townies who had bought product from McGill. If word got out they were going to plead down in exchange for giving him up, he was dead meat. His big name in the neighborhoods wouldn’t buy him a pass.
Why had Andy gone bad? Maybe somebody had finally met his price, but that doesn’t really explain it. Kitty Dwyer believed in him right up until she saw him with the pliers in his hand.
And that’s where my own thinking led me. Andy had gotten tired of living up to other people’s expectations. He stepped over the line because the line was there. They say in the trade that the dealer always gives you the first taste for free.
~ * ~
Then there was Max Quinn.
I knew that Kitty had terminated his contract with Ravenant & Dwyer, and by an unhappy coincidence I met him a couple of days later, lugging his files out of the office. I was there to take Kitty to lunch.
Max put the box he was carrying down on the tailgate of a station wagon parked in the loading zone and looked me over with bland venom. “You queered me good, pal,” he said, smiling.
The smile was for show. “Not my intention,” I said.
“Well, the good Lord save us from honest intentions,” Max said. He leaned back and rested his elbows on the carton. “You ever stop to think I had those vermin in the palm of my hand and I was ready to close my fist? I coulda had every one of the bastards, and what do you have to show for it? Chip McGill on a slab and a dead lawyer.” He shrugged. “‘Course, I guess a dead lawyer ain’t the worst thing. You take the bitter with the sweet.” He smiled that crocodile smile again.
“I’m not arguing,” I said. “But our interests weren’t the same. You were looking for it to go your way. My client wanted a different outcome.”
He snorted. “Your client,” he said. “Jesus, you take the prize. Your client is dead, for Christ’s sake. He had one foot in the grave when he hired you. You should of showed me some professional courtesy, for openers. Not to mention that I saved your ass from a whipping. “
“I wasn’t forgetting,” I said.
“Me, either,” Max said.
“You had a personal axe to grind,” I told him, “and you were looking to buy chips so you could get back in the game.”
“Is that what you think?” Max shook his head. “You stupid s.o.b.”
“Don’t push it,” I said.
“I have an axe to grind, yeah,” he said hoarsely. “You want to know what it is? My daughter Olivia died on speed. She took a hot-shot. And those bikers are out there peddling methedrine cut with rat poison. You’d better goddamn know I’ve got an axe to grind.”
“You were on the task force, state police, and DEA,” I said, finally seeing the forest for the trees.
“Now we’re playing catchup ball.”
There was nothing I could say. I tried anyway. “I’m sorry about your daughter,” I said.
“Sorry don’t do the trick, pal,” he said, and turned away.
I remembered what Stanley had said about flying over the Adriatic during bombing runs. It had looked so beautiful, like a blue mirror, but was hard as cement if you hit it going down. It was an appropriate metaphor.
Enemies are like that.
Max could smile his crocodile smile and pretend to carry on a civil conversation with me, like bygones were bygones, but he’d be looking for a chance to drop me in a hole, the deeper the better. It was a brute fact like the bright blue ocean below, unyielding as stone. I’d done Max an injury, and it didn’t matter that it was an honest mistake. He wasn’t going to give me room to make another.
<
~ * ~
JOE GORES
Inscrutable
from The Mysterious Press Anniversary Anthology
Knuckles colucci wasn’t known as Knuckles because they dragged on the ground when he walked. Far from it. Oh, his jaws were blue enough, his nose was Roman, his eyes were mean, his lips had that Capone twist. But he was physically slight, not bulky. So while maturing into a classic Mafia soldier, and then graduating to Armani suits and Ferragamo shoes — which he invariably wore with parrot-bright aloha shirts — Knuckles needed some sort of physical edge. Thus the habit, in his youth, of carrying a set of brass knuckles as an equalizer.
Those days were long past. Now Knuckles was a frightener. He never demanded of some poor fool the vigorish due a local loan shark. He never broke knees or cut off thumbs. He wasn’t an enforcer. He warned people. Once.
If the warning was ignored, he killed them.
On this particular Wednesday he had flown first class from Detroit to San Francisco. A boring flight because today would be just a warning. He walked through the jammed, noisy, jostling airline terminal and down two escalators. The first took him past the luggage area, where he had no luggage to pick up. He never brought anything more lethal than sinus breath onto any of the numerous commercial flights that his profession demanded. He’d taken three falls in his thirty-nine years. If he took another he wouldn’t get up again, so he wasn’t about to take it.
The next escalator took him to a long slow-moving walkway. In the underground parking garage a bright-eyed kid in his twenties fell into step with him on the angle-striped pedestrian walk.
“Nice flight?” Knuckles merely grunted. The kid handed him a set of Lexus keys. “The red one,” he said, and turned off to lose himself among the endless rows of cars.
The Lexus was nestled between a hulking, sullen SUV and some sort of canary-yellow Oldsmobile convertible. Knuckles pulled on thin rubber surgeon’s gloves, unlocked the door, got in. There was a black violin case on the passenger seat. He unsnapped it, raised the lid, looked inside, grinned thinly, and closed and resnapped it. He set it upright in the bucket seat and snugged the seat belt about it, then followed the EXIT signs out of the labyrinth. His nose was already tingling from the exhaust fumes trapped in the garage. Too many freaking people. Kill ‘em all.
~ * ~
“I need a frozen Milky Way,” said Larry Ballard.
He was a tall, athletic blond man in his early thirties, with a surfer’s tan, a hawk nose, and cold blue eyes that just saved his face from true male beauty. He was also a repo man for Daniel Kearny Associates at 340 Eleventh Street in San Francisco.
“Nobody needs a frozen Milky Way,” Bart Heslip pointed out.
He too was very well conditioned, early thirties, shorter, thicker, plum black, and with the shaved head currently in favor among African American males. After winning thirty-nine out of forty pro fights, he had quit the ring to become a repo man for DKA.
“I’ve been working out really hard,” explained Ballard. “My blood-sugar level is way down.”
“We can’t have you going hypoglycemic before you win that black belt,” said Heslip. “Ray Chong’s it is — after you take me back to my car in Pacific Heights.”
~ * ~
Above the door of the narrow Eleventh Street storefront sandwiched between a tire repair shop and an auto supply store run by Persians in turbans was the legend Peking grocery store — Chinese delicacies in English letters and Chinese characters.
The owner
, Ray Chong Fat, was anything but. Ray was skinny and stooped, with a thin face, not much chin, a long upper lip, and lank black hair. As always, he wore a highly starched white shirt, the cuffs rolled up two turns over his skinny wrists, the collar two sizes too big for his scrawny neck.
Ray was a widower with seven, count ‘em, seven daughters. And not even one lousy little son. One daughter in grad school, two in college, two in high school, one in elementary school, one just about to enter kindergarten. Seven daughters meant a lot of expenses, which meant a lot of hard work for Ray.
But he was a satisfied man, whistling tunelessly to himself as he stocked the shelves with assorted cans of exotic fruit: rambutan canned with pineapple; soursops; jackfruit in syrup; and of course Chinese lychees.
The rest of the narrow store was jammed with Chinese yams and cabbage; mandarins and mangoes and pawpaws and star fruit; dried and salted squid; frozen ducks and fish, frozen candy bars and ice cream bars, green tea and chow mein noodles and dried rice noodles and sweet rice candies, all redolent with the smell of strange spices. The shelves in the back room bulged with rental videos, all in Chinese and most shot in Hong Kong. Romance and martial arts were the favorites.
The front door jangled its little bell. The familiar salt-and-pepper team from down the street came in.
“Hey, got riddle,” exclaimed Ray in his high-pitched singsong voice. “Why Chinese so smart?”
“I don’t know, Ray,” said Ballard. “Why are they?”
“No blondes.” Ray went off into gales of high hee-hee-hee-hee laughter. Heslip shook his shaved head.
“It’s what I always tell you, Larry. Inscrutable.”
Two jokes and a riddle later, they headed for the door. A slight man was getting a violin case out of a red Lexus when they emerged. Ballard waved the frozen Milky Way after him.
“Not my idea of the third violin at the symphony.”
“Maybe it isn’t a violin in the case,” chuckled Bart.
~ * ~
The bell tinkled. A short, swarthy man with a nose as big as a parrot’s was coming up the aisle toward Ray. The man wore a very expensive suit and carried a violin case. Ray wreathed his lean face in a welcoming smile full of prominent teeth.
“Yessir, yessir, help you, sir?”
“Yeah, you freaking slope, you can help me,” said Knuckles.
Ray Chong Fat’s eyes became flat and stupid.
“No savvy,” he said.
Knuckles set his violin case on the counter.
“Know what I hear? I hear some Chinaman is running an unsanctioned Asian card club for the really high rollers in this town once or twice a month, on the weekends.”
“No savvy,” said Ray Chong Fat.
“I hear this freaking Chink’s got a game planned this weekend. I hear a certain gentleman in the South Bay don’t like that shit, get my drift?”
“No savvy.” A drop of sweat ran down Ray Chong Fat’s nose.
Knuckles Colucci unsnapped the violin case. He opened it. “Take a look at that,” he said.
Ray Chong Fat looked into the case. He paled.
“Yeah, you savvy that okay, slope,” said Knuckles. He closed the case, resnapped it, waggled a finger under Ray’s nose. “Don’t do it no more,” he said.
~ * ~
“I need a beer,” said Bart Heslip.
It was nine-thirty that same night, and he and Ballard, working in tandem, had scored two repos each.
“Nobody needs a beer,” Larry Ballard pointed out.
“This is thirsty work.”
“Okay. Ray’ll be open for another half-hour at least.”
But Ray Chong Fat’s store had the closed sign out, even though light still glowed from the back room. They rapped on the glass and rattled the door. In this neighborhood, even DKA had alarms on the doors and heavy mesh screens on the ground-floor windows. Ray had neither.
“How many years have we been coming here and he’s never been closed before ten o’clock?” asked Ballard.
Bart said softly, “Maybe it wasn’t a violin.”
Ray’s door was no proof against their lockpicks. They were halfway down the length of the store when the door of the back room opened and Ray came out. Even in the dim light he looked drawn and wasted.
“Go ‘way! We closed.”
“After you tell us what’s wrong.”
Over green tea and delicate almond cakes in the video room, they got the story out of him. The little man with his threats and the violin case with anything but a violin inside.
“It’s easy,” said Bart. “Just cancel the game.”
“Two year ago, number three daughter real sick, ‘member?”
“We remember.” They had gotten up a cash donation at DKA.
“Go to Chinese Benevolent Association, borrow money. Lots of money.” He opened his arms wide. “Big interest.”
“Not so benevolent?” suggested Bart.
Ray nodded morosely, sipped tea. They ate almond cakes.
“Man come, say I gotta run weekend Asian card club to pay off loan. If I won’t, he say they do things to my daughters.”
“They needed a front,” said Larry. “At least the loan —”
“Never get loan paid off. Only pay off interest.”
“You know the guy with the violin case?” asked Bart.
Ray shook his head vigorously.
“Know who sent the guy with the violin case?”
“Somebody in South Bay.” Ray started wringing his hands with the theatricality of true emotion. “What I do?”
“You hold the game and save your daughters,” said Ballard.
“Then man with violin come back and kill me.”
The two repo men looked at each other.
“No,” said Heslip.
~ * ~
“Why is sex like insurance?” asked Rosenkrantz.
“The older you are, the more it costs,” said Guildenstern.
“Their jokes are worse than Ray’s,” said Bart Heslip.
It was six a.m. Thursday. He and Larry were with the two bulky SFPD homicide cops in the upstairs conference room at DKA, where they had total privacy because nobody could get up the stairs without making noise. The cops had insisted on this since they were outside department regs just being there.
Rosenkrantz was bald as Kojak and Guildenstern had hair that looked fake but wasn’t. It was rumored in the department that even their wives called them by their nicknames.
When they did good cop/bad cop, Guildenstern was always the bad cop. He had the eyes for it. He said, “You guys been talking for ten minutes and you ain’t given us anything we’d be ashamed to tell our mothers.”
“Only thing could embarrass your mothers is that they are your mothers,” said Heslip.
Guildenstern looked at Rosenkrantz. “He being profound?”
“Just nifty,” said Rosenkrantz.
“Just careful,” said Ballard. “If you try to take down the game, our guy’s family gets hit.”
“And if he holds the game, he gets hit. We got that part of it.” Rosenkrantz was suddenly angry. “The mayor and the D.A. are always telling us there ain’t any Mafia in San Francisco. Asian gangs fighting for power, maybe. Chicano gangs fighting over turf, perhaps. Black gangs fighting over drug money and rap music, could be. But —”
“But no Mafia action,” said Guildenstern. “These days, local guys who are connected have only bookkeepers on their payroll. They need something done, they make a call and somebody gets on a plane out of Chicago or Detroit or even Cleveland.”
Rosenkrantz took it up. “The threatener picks up his hardware at the airport on the way in, does what he does, leaves his hardware at the airport on the way out. We got a lot of names and reputations, but we can’t get nothing on nobody.”
“You’re saying the guy with the violin case isn’t local?”
“Tell us about him,” suggested Rosenkrantz.
They did. The cops exchanged glances.
; “Knuckles Colucci out of Detroit,” said Guildenstern.
“Mean as a snake,” said Rosenkrantz.
“Call the undertaker for your pal,” said Guildenstern.
“Who hired him?”
The two big cops heaved themselves to their feet. “South Bay? Let us worry about that,” they said almost in unison.
“Who runs the Chinese Benevolent Association?”
The Best American Mystery Stories 3 Page 20