He sipped at a jelly glass of anisette. He nodded to Cyril Bluestone.
“Yeah,” Bluestone said, “Marxie Heller. He used to be with the old Detroit outfit, all slobs. They ate opium like it was the breakfast of champions. He was good with figures. He got TB but, because he was steady, the boys set him with Abe in Phoenix and he moved there, but the lungs didn’t get better so they laid him off. He must have met Marowitz and filled him with fairy tales about how he knew Capone and all lies like that, anyway Marowitz insisted on paying for Heller’s cure. And when Heller came out of the sanatorium, Marowitz made a job for him in the finance companies. That was ten years ago. Four years ago, Marowitz sent me a strong recommendation to put Heller on at Vegas. He was a genius with figures, Marowitz said, and he hated to let him go but that Heller’s wife couldn’t stand Phoenix. We hired him. You know the rest.”
“Where is the wife now?” Charley asked.
“In LA,” Bluestone said. “I’ll give you Heller’s file with the wife’s address and all the background.”
“I think I should start with the wife,” Charley said.
“After Marowitz,” Vincent told him. “Tomorrow morning you fly out to Phoenix to see Marowitz. My father wants the money back and he wants you to lay it on Marowitz to take you to Heller.”
“You think Marowitz was in on the scam?”
“How do I know, Charley? Louis couldn’t have thought of it so who knows?”
Chapter Seven
Charley got to Phoenix at two P.M. It was hot. He rented a car, checked in at a downtown motel, and showered before he called Virgil Marowitz.
“Charley Partanna,” Marowitz sang into the telephone. “What an honor! Are you in town? When can I see you?”
Charley hadn’t been able to figure out any way to believe what Vincent had said about this man looking at people in the environment as celebrities, but it was all in Marowitz’s voice so, against his own will, he tried to remember what Bogart did when he wanted to show that he was dangerous. He felt like four kinds of an idiot but he said, “We gotta have a little talk, Marowitz. I’m gonna pick you up in front of your office in twenty minutes. Be there.” He hung up.
He put on a black short-sleeved sports shirt and black slacks and a pair of heavy shades. He got out the map of Phoenix the car rental company had given him and traced out the streets to the address of the Happy Finances office. He got into the car and drove there. There were four separate people in front of the building so Charley gave it a short blast with the horn and a short, roly-poly, grinning man came half-running, half-walking to the car. “Mr. Partanna?” he asked eagerly, with a voice that was pitched higher than an Abercrombie & Fitch dog whistle.
Charley nodded.
“I’m Virgil Marowitz.” He opened the door and got into the car. “What a privilege and a pleasure, Mr. Partanna. May I call you Charley?” He clutched the sides of his head with both hands and keened. “I cannot get it through my head that I am riding through the streets of Phoenix with Charley ‘the Enforcer’ Partanna. My God!”
How does anybody talk to a freak like this? Charley thought. This was business! The Prizzis had been clouted for a gang of money! Bogart never did it in any of his picture shows the way Charley did it to Marowitz. “Listen to me, friend,” he said. “I come here a couple of thousand miles to tell you that your man, Marxie Heller, stole $722,085 from my people.”
“Marxie? I always thought his gang name was Moxie.”
“Shaddap! You are going to make out a check for the seven-twenty-two then we are going to your bank to have it certified. All right? All right. I am going to ask you only once—where is Marxie Heller?”
“Mr. Partanna! I haven’t seen or spoken to the man in more than four years. Where are we driving?”
“We drive till it gets dark,” Charley said. “Then you get out and dig a hole with that shovel on the back seat, then I do the job on you and drop you in the hole and cover it up.”
Marowitz turned around and looked at the back seat. There was a new shovel on it.
“Do I have any choice, Charley? God, this is exciting! I have dreamed about going along on an execution but I never ever imagined that I would be the gangland victim.”
“Gangland?” Charley said.
“Do I have a real choice?”
“Two. Give me the money and Heller, and you can sleep in your own bed tonight.”
“Well, then,” Marowitz said, “no need to drive any further. We can go straight to my bank and I’ll make you out a counter check which they will certify.”
“Okay,” Charley said. “Where is Marxie Heller?”
“I purely don’t know, Charley, so I cannot answer that question. But I could make a highly educated guess. But before I make that guess, I’ve got to tell you something. I just don’t believe you’d kill me because of the complicated way the cable TV company is set up. The Prizzis own sixty-five percent of a forty-million-dollar investment in the cable only so long as I am well and strong enough to protect the revolving credit fund which pours in the operating money. I made the deal with the Prizzis because I thought I was beginning to need protection. If anything happens to me, that credit would just collapse. I designed it that way. Ed Prizzi knows that. Icing me, to put it in the vivid way you fellows say it, would be a hundred times more expensive for the Prizzis, in terms of their honor and their money, than the winkly little amount you say that Heller stole.”
“Jesus, you are something else, Virgil,” Charley said, exasperated, but admiring.
“Oh, I’ll give you the certified check,” Marowitz said. “Ed Prizzi will never let any of your people cash it, but I’ll tell you what; if your uncle Vincent will give me the thrill of forcing me to appear in front of the Grand Council of organized crime, or even just the New York-Chicago families’ Commission—either one of them the final court of American culture—for a ruling on whether or not I should pay the money because I recommended Marxie Heller for a job in Vegas four years ago, then I will gladly pay the fine if the council, in my presence, rules against me.”
“Virgil—”
“Yes Charles?”
“All—shit!” Charley said, throwing a U with the car. “We’ll go back to my motel and get out of this fucking heat while I call New York.”
Vincent Prizzi told him to stay where he was, he would call him right back. He called back in seven minutes. “Somebody screwed up, Charley,” he said. “Buy the man a drink.”
Charley went to the quiet table in the corner of the air-conditioned bar. Virgil greeted him with a sunny smile.
“What a business!” Charley said. He called a waiter and ordered two jugo de piñas con Bacardi.
“How was everything back home?” Virgil asked.
“They gave you a lifetime pass,” Charley said. The waiter brought the drinks.
“Say! This is an extremely refreshing drink,” Virgil said. “I’ve got to get the recipe.”
“Are you gay, Virgil?” Charley asked.
“Oh, a little.” His face lit up. “Are you?”
“No.”
“Oh, well. Don’t worry about it.”
“Where is Marxie Heller?”
“Such stick-to-it-iveness! Well, if I were one of the top executives of your organization, I would forget all about Phoenix, a four-year-old trail, and go back along the only trail which Marxie Heller ever followed consistently in all the time I knew him.”
“What trail?”
“His wife.”
“In LA?”
“Yoppee. Charley, this is a magnificent drink. We must have another.” He waved to the bartender. “Marxie said he had to get out of Phoenix because his wife couldn’t stand it here. He said it was too dry for the asthma or something. I protested. Marxie was a very good figureman. He said he would greatly appreciate if I would smooth the way through my many gangster friends—pardon the expression—and get him work in Vegas. Naturally, I called Cyril Bluestone for him. He left and I never saw him again.”
“You got any pictures of him, Virgil?”
“I have three or four very good snapshots. I keep a sort of Rogues’ Gallery and I would absolutely cream with honor if you would consent to sit for me.”
“My father is against any and all pictures,” Charley said.
“I understand, Charley.”
The bartender brought the new drinks to the table and Virgil asked him for a telephone. When it had been plugged in, he tapped out a number. “Hello, Killer?” he said into the phone. “This is me. Killer dear, I want you to go to Book Six of the gallery and study the index hard, go to the page holding the shots of Marxie Heller and bring them—now, please—to the front desk at The John H. Jackson Gusher Motel. I said, at the desk, dear. Please, Killer, do not make me angry.” He hung up.
“He isn’t really a killer,” Virgil said to Charley, “I just call him that to give him a little side.”
Chapter Eight
Marxie Heller’s wife lived in an elegant fake-Georgian house in Westwood. Charley parked in the street about fifty yards beyond the house then walked back to make his way quietly up the driveway to the side door and let himself in. He closed the door quietly. Night was falling in blotters of darkness. He moved along a hall that led from the kitchen, looking for a room with a light, and there it was as he came around a sharp corner, gleaming out from under a door. Charley opened the door and found himself staring into the hooded, khaki-pouched eyes of Marxie Heller as he sat, dealing solitaire, at a large desk. Heller stared at him and blinked.
Charley didn’t say anything.
“What do you want, my friend?” Heller asked.
“The Prizzis sent me.”
Heller moved his right hand to open the drawer of the desk in front of him and Charley moved across the room and, both as a warning and as a precaution, broke Heller’s wrist by lifting Heller’s forearm with both his hands then crashing the wrist down violently upon the edge of the desk. Heller went under for a few seconds. Charley sat close to him and waited for his eyes to flicker again. He opened the drawer while he waited and took out a long knife. It had beautiful balance. It would be a great throwing knife. He slid it under his belt at the small of his back. Heller came around.
“Where is the Prizzi money, Marxie?” Charley asked.
“Who are you?”
“Charley Partanna.”
“Oh, shit—Straight-Arrow Charley, the All-American Hood. Well, Charley, I am going to tell you I haven’t got the money and you are going to say you don’t believe me then everything is going to get rough for me, but that’s the facts, I don’t have the money.”
“What’s the difference, Marxie? What you did, things had to get rough for you anyway. Come on.”
“Where?”
“Out to the car. Come on.”
Heller got up. He stared at his ballooning wrist. “Jesus, this hurts,” he said to no one at all.
“You won’t need it,” Charley said. Heller cradled the wrist in his good arm and shuffled out from behind the desk.
Charley said, “Up against the wall, feet apart, hands over the head.” He found the gun in Marxie’s bathrobe pocket. He unloaded the gun, put the bullets in his pocket and dropped the gun in the wastebasket. “Out,” he said.
They went out the back door and Charley moved Heller into the two-car garage. He told Heller to swing the door open, they went inside. “The light, Marxie,” Charley said, pulling down the garage door. Heller hit the switch. The light showed an Oldsmobile Cutlass and an empty space for another car.
“You had time to think,” Charley said. “You want to tell me where the Prizzi money is?”
“If I knew, maybe I’d tell you, maybe I wouldn’t, but I don’t know.”
Charley took a revolver, which had a sound suppressor fixed to its barrel, from a shoulder holster and shot Heller three times; once in the face, once in the chest, and once in the throat. He put the weapon away and opened the trunk of the Oldsmobile. He picked Heller up from where he had fallen beside the car and folded him into the trunk. He slammed the trunk lid shut, put out the light, opened the garage door and went back into the main house.
He sat in the darkened dining room just off the side door to the kitchen, which led from the driveway, and waited. He sat for thirty-five minutes before headlights came up the drive, pulling a car behind them. The side door opened and the woman came in, arms filled with shopping. She closed the door, crossed the kitchen and called out, “I’m home, dear.”
Charley got up and moved into the kitchen doorway saying, “Marxie isn’t here, Mrs. Heller.”
She whirled around to face the voice.
She was Irene Walker.
Chapter Nine
She screamed. “Charley!”
He was speechless.
“What are you doing here?” she asked hysterically. “Why didn’t you call? You always call. Ah, shit, Charley, you’ve ruined everything.”
“Where’s the money?”
“Money?”
“Where is it? Heller killed Louis Palo to get it, where is it?”
“Charley, I don’t know what you are talking about. Did you ask Marxie? Where is Marxie?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“All right, Irene. Where’s the Prizzi money your husband stole from Vegas?”
She moved in a daze. “Maybe I know. He had a little bag. I’ll show you.” She left the kitchen and he followed her along a corridor out to a closet in the main front hall. She opened the door and shoved a satchel out with her foot. “It could be in there,” she said. “That’s the only place I know that it could be.”
Charley lifted the satchel up to the top of a table. He snapped open the clasps and opened the bag. It was filled with money.
“I’m going to count this,” he said. “Move over that way. I want you in front of me.”
She moved.
He counted the money. He motioned for her to sit down. She sat down and he went on counting the money. “You’re short,” he said.
“I’m short?”
“I got three hundred sixty dollars here. Half!”
“Half?”
“Mrs. Heller, don’t answer what I say with what I just said. Where’s the rest of the fucking money?”
“Charley—I didn’t even know it was there,” Irene said. “So how could I know it was short? When Marxie came here three nights ago he had a big suitcase and that small bag. He just slung the small bag in that closet and he unpacked the suitcase.”
“Then you knew he came to stay.” Charley’s voice was cold.
“Yes.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He said his lungs were bad again, that he had to go back to Phoenix but that he was so tired that I had to let him rest here for a few days.”
“And you did.”
“Yes.”
“This is the worst night of my life,” Charley said.
“I wanted him to stay, Charley. It was my chance to talk to him and get him to give me a divorce.”
“You know what I remember?”
“What?”
“I remember you came in that kitchen door tonight and you yelled out, ‘I’m home, dear.’ Not just that you were home, or not just Marxie, but dear is how you called him.”
“He was dear to me,” she said slowly. “We had fourteen years together. I was a kid in Chicago and he was my friend. Not one time did he ever yell at me or hit me or take my money. I went to Detroit with him, then after he had to go to Phoenix, I went in and out to see him because he was my friend and he thought he was going to die. I loved him, not the way I love you, but I loved him like my father would never let me love him. Marxie was a funny, funny man. He had a terrific mind and he really cared about me.”
“He ripped off the Prizzis for seven hundred twenty-two dollars!”
“Where is he?”
“I’ll take him with me.”
“For Christ’s sake, Charley! He was my husband! He was good to me!”
“You’re surprised? Seven hundred twenty-two dollars and you’re surprised?” he said bitterly. “You still want to marry me?”
She stared at him sullenly.
“You want a little time to think about it?”
“I want you to have time to think about it,” she said. “I mean what happened to Marxie isn’t news to me. When he told me how he and Louis Palo took the money, I knew he was cooked. I knew they’d have to send you after him. He would be just as dead even if you had grown up to be a shoe salesman. So—what the hell—I’m not surprised, Charley. But you are. You’re the one who is surprised. You sit in a stranger’s house waiting for the stranger to come home and she turns out to be your woman. Your own woman. Shit, that is the real surprise, so, what I am saying is, you are the one who has to think about it.”
“Think” was right. So she was Marxie Heller’s wife. So she knew about the Prizzis, knew Marxie was stealing from them, knew what Charley’s real business was. Had been expecting him to come after Marxie. When he hit that one, Charley decided to stop thinking for a while.
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