“Chief,” said Gino, bending, “what are you trying to do to me?”
“I’ll tell you,” Beddell said. “I’m trying to head you off from making some serious mistakes. I’ve a rough idea what you’re up to, but there are some blank spots. Shall I tell you what I know so far?”
“Run it,” said Gino, but he’d relaxed considerably.
“All right, I will. First, I know Charlie Rice is trying to move in on a fellow named Caster who owns a bar down on Parker Street. That was fairly obvious from the beginning. Charlie’s not particularly subtle. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt. However, something happened last night that throws an entirely different light on his little operation. A young guy named Marco Carradino got himself badly beaten up—very badly beaten up.”
“That’s too bad,” said Gino.
“So badly,” the Chief went on, “that about midnight last night Carradino died at Parker Hospital.” The policeman was watching Gino’s face. He got no reaction, but he waited for Gino to say something.
“That’s too bad, too.’
“It’s more than too bad,” Beddell said. “It’s murder, or at the very least manslaughter. But the really interesting thing is that Marco Carradino was working in the same bar that Charlie Rice wants to take over. That’s quite a coincidence.”
“Seems to be,” agreed Gino.
“And then, a couple of hours after the Carradino boy died, your friends are found sitting in a car across the street from Caster’s house. At two o’clock in the morning. And Bonino is carrying a gun. They couldn’t seem to come up with a convincing reason for being there, and Bonino was very embarrassed about the gun. I wasn’t around, and neither was Vern, so Dennison did the only thing he could. He booked them.”
“I know,” said Gino. “Dennison is very keen.”
“Yes, he is. But then he’s new, you know.”
“But you’re not, Chief,” Gino said, leaning forward in his chair. “You go back a long way in Parker’s Landing. Back to days when you were a young cop struggling to raise a family on a hundred bucks a month, and we were the new wops in town.”
“You don’t have to remind me of the old days, Gino. I know them too well to forget. And I haven’t forgotten what your father did for me. You should know that. And you should know, too, that my debt is to him, not to you. I don’t owe you a damned thing, but we both owe the same man a hell of a lot. That’s why I’m talking with you this morning. That’s why I called your father this morning.”
Gino tensed. “You called my old man? You lousy—”
“Cut it! You’re not talking to one of your punks. Damned right I called your old man. Just as I did a few years ago when you put that ‘borrowed’ car through the front window of Egmont’s Dairy. And kept you from going to reform school instead of that prep school upstate; have you forgotten that?”
Gino didn’t answer, but Beddell could see that he remembered. “Gino,” he continued, “you don’t owe me a damned thing. But you’re causing that old man a lot of worry, and it looks like you’re set to cause him a lot more. If you’ve thrown in with Charlie Rice, you’re buying yourself a lot of trouble. And your father will pick up the bill.”
“What did he say—the old man?”‘
“He wants to see you. He still thinks he can talk you into going back to college.”
“That’s funny,” Gino said.
“No it’s not, it’s sad. And it’s going to get sadder unless you use your head.” His voice became harder, more official. “Now, get out of here, Gino, and keep clean. Don’t think we won’t be watching you. Obligation only stretches so far.”
“What about my boys?”
Beddell sighed. “If I was a true friend to your father, I’d put you in with them and throw away the key. But I can’t. Take them away; I don’t want them stinking up my jail.”
“Good,” said Gino, standing up and turning toward the door.
“There’s a price, Gino.”
“Yeah?” Gino turned back.
“You’re in luck there, too. Judge Ortiz wasn’t hung over this morning so he allowed them bail. Five hundred for the gun-packing baby and two-fifty for the midget. He thought they were bargain prices; I think you’re getting robbed.”
Gino gave the Chief a bleak look and walked out of his office. He wondered whether to slam the door or leave it open. Instead, he shut it gently and went to retrieve Ruby and Injun.
22
Alec Hoerner woke up late. The first thing he saw on opening his eyes was Joy’s back. She was doing something at the sink, still wearing that sleazy robe.
“Coffee,” said Hoerner, and he closed his eyes again. He remembered vaguely the tinny clanging of the alarm clock.
In a couple of minutes, Joy padded over to the bed and placed a cup of coffee on the paint-peeled bedside table. He could smell it. Then Joy perched herself on the very edge of the bed, ready to flee if necessary.
Alec pushed himself up against the pillows into a sitting position and took a sip of the hot, black coffee. Joy waited until he’d drunk nearly half of the cup.
“Alec,” she said at last, “we go back a long time, me and you, don’t we? I mean since I was just a kid on Forty-Seventh Street.”
“Yeah,” Alec said in a neutral tone, not angry or scoffing, “I guess we do.”
Joy was encouraged. “Don’t get mad or anything,” she said cautiously, “but you’ve changed a lot. I mean from what you used to be before you went in the Army. I’ve noticed it a lot since you’ve been back. What is it—three years you’ve been home?”
“Closer to four,” said Hoerner. “What do you mean I’ve changed?”
“Well—” Joy hesitated, and Hoerner smiled ruefully to himself. Having people scared of you was very convenient sometimes. It saved a lot of argument. But it could be overdone. Sometimes it was like living in a cage full of nervous hamsters.
“Go ahead, Joy baby,” he said soothingly. “Say anything you want to. I won’t bite your head off. I’m saving my strength for what could be a very wearing day.”
“You sure?” she asked, looking up at him out of lowered eyes.
“I’m sure.”
“Okay, then,” Joy said, gathering resolution and sticking her weak chin out, “you have changed, Alec, you know you have. On the block, you know, you were always a tough guy. Hardly anybody was tougher, not between Forty-Fifth and Forty-Ninth Street, anyway. But…”
“You mean I’m not tough anymore, Joy,” Hoerner said mockingly. “Is that it? You think I’ve gone soft. You think old Alec, the terror of the West Side, has turned pansy, is that it? I’m very hurt, Joy, I really am.”
“No,” she protested shrilly, “it’s not that, Alec, and you know it.” Joy was relieved to find Hoerner in such a good mood and was almost sorry she’d started questioning him. But she resolved to plow on. “What I mean, Alec, nobody’s saying you’re not still tough. If anything, you’re tougher than ever. But that’s not what I’m saying.”
“So what do you mean?” Hoerner asked, finishing his coffee and setting the cup on the bedside table.
“I mean,” Joy said, looking into his mocking eyes, “inside you’re different, Alec. You’ve gone all hard. It’s as if—as if something in you that used to be sort of tough and springy is all gone hard and brittle. Like you were under some kind of terrific pressure inside.” Joy stopped and looked away from Hoerner in embarrassment.
“Go on, Joy,” Hoerner said, and she could tell from his voice that he meant it, that he wasn’t angry with her. But she couldn’t bring her eyes back to his, so she continued talking while looking away from Hoerner. Her hands picked at the frayed beading on her robe.
“Well, when you came home from Vietnam in uniform with all the medals and ribbons and all,” she continued softly, “it seemed as if you hadn’t changed much. But you had. You were all restless and moody, as if you were hunting for something, something that maybe didn’t exist. Everybody noticed it, and they said so, too.
Behind your back.”
“What did they say, Joy?”
“They said something had happened to you in Vietnam,” Joy said. “Something bad. And Johnny Fahey from over on Eighth Avenue said he’d heard things about you when he was in Vietnam.”
“What sort of things?” asked Hoerner, lighting another cigarette.
“Johnny’d never really say. He just used to whistle, low like, and grin and say he was glad he wasn’t no Vietnamese when you were around. Once, he said that the Army was happier to see you leave Vietnam than the Viet Cong were. I don’t know what he meant by that.”
“I can imagine,” said Hoerner. “Go on, Joy. What else?”
“Well, then when you went for a copper. I couldn’t believe it. Nobody could. There wasn’t anybody in the neighborhood who could imagine the old Alec Hoerner in a cop’s uniform. And me neither.”
“But I did wear one, didn’t I, Joy? For nearly two years,” he said. “You saw me in it, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I saw you, Alec,” Joy said, “but not much, because about that time Mom married Jack, and I came up here to live with them. But I heard a lot about how you weren’t kidding, how you really were a cop, and how everybody around was nervous about you.”
“Nervous about me?” asked Hoerner, genuinely a little surprised. “Just because I wore a cop’s uniform? People scare a lot easier than they used to.”
“No,” said Joy, “not afraid of the uniform, Alec. Afraid of you. The uniform really had nothing to do with it. It was just you. What you’d become.”
“What had I become?”
“That’s what I don’t know,” Joy said. “That’s what’s got me puzzled. But you can tell me something—that is if you will.”
“What’s that?”
She looked down again; “What really happened with those two kids under the pier?”
Hoerner looked at the girl, his eyes blank. She was talking about the incident that had made the New York Police Department decide that Hoerner, despite his excellent record and prospects, was just a little too hot to handle. After Hoerner had won three citations in Harlem, they’d put him back on the West Side, and all had gone well. Crime had dropped considerably on his beat. But then at three one morning a cab driver reported a hot gun battle under Pier 86. When a squad car got there they found Hoerner on his feet but in a daze. Lying near a pier column were two local boys, members of a West Side gang, dying of bullet wounds.
One of the kids had a homemade pistol in his pocket, but it had never been fired. Hoerner couldn’t or wouldn’t explain what had happened, so the department relieved him from duty and waited for the storm to hit. The shooting had come too late for the morning papers, and by that afternoon the evening papers were all tied up with an international plane hijacking. The Pier 86 story got lost among the underwear advertisements. A local youth worker and the mother of one of the boys tried to keep the matter alive, but nobody else was much interested. A couple of months later, Hoerner was quietly asked to resign, and it never made a ripple.
Hoerner relived it all in his head in a few seconds, and when he looked at Joy again it was with an expression so mild and unguarded that she hardly recognized him.
“You know,” he said, “that’s a question I’ve been asking myself ever since that night. The department didn’t believe me, but I don’t know what happened. You know who those kids were. They called themselves the Apaches. Well, a bit after two-thirty I busted four or five of them going in through the top of a Cadillac convertible on Forty-Sixth Street. They cut out for the piers, and the last I saw they ran into the darkness, and I went in after them. And then—I think—somebody started shooting at me. Several shots came out of the darkness under the piers. I remember pulling my gun and going in. And that’s all.”
“I never knew that,” said Joy.
“I never told anybody,” Hoerner said, “except the police department shrink, and I don’t think he believed me.”
“I believe you, Alec,” Joy said so sincerely that Hoerner laughed.
“You would, Joy,” he said. “You would.” When Joy stiffened and started to turn away, Hoerner reached out and took her thin wrist. “Come on,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Joy held back stiffly and looked Hoerner searchingly in the face. “Don’t laugh at me, Alec,” she said. “Please, don’t.” Her wrist between his fingers felt like a satin-smooth stick, and she still pulled away.
“I won’t,” said Hoerner, and he relaxed his grip on her arm. But instead of pulling out of his reach, Joy seemed to collapse on the bedcovers over his legs until she was lying nearly full-length with her cheek against Hoerner’s abdomen. He felt her arms go around his waist and clutch tight. “I won’t,” he repeated, touching her badly-dyed hair.
23
Harry Caster was lying in bed staring at the ceiling and trying to get up the energy and courage to rejoin the world when the doorbell rang. Harry lay very still. If he didn’t move, perhaps they’d go away. No murder today, thank you. But the insistent ding-dong that Harry had hated since they’d moved into the house continued relentlessly. Even being shot was a little better than lying listening to that bell. Harry got up and crept to a small window overlooking the front porch.
Sandra Carradino was standing on the doorstep with her finger pressed firmly on the bell. Harry dropped the curtain, ran down the stairs, opened the door and jerked Sandra inside.
“Good morning to you, too,” Sandra said, smoothing her clothes. “Do you always greet callers this way? I wouldn’t want to be the Avon lady in this neighborhood.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you,” Harry said, leading her into the living room to the tattered leather sofa. “Some very strange things are happening on this street. There were two hoodlums sitting in a car across the street at two this morning keeping a watch on this house. One of them had a gun.”
“How do you know that?”
“I saw the cops take a gun—a very big gun—off one of them. I called the police—anonymously—and told them there were burglars on the street.”
“You’re a very clever man,” Sandra said. “But what’s this business about my getting shot? Do you have a gun?”
“Yes,” Harry admitted, and he told her how Hoerner had given it to him. “But I don’t think I’d ever use it. There’s something about shooting people that’s so final.”
“There is that,” agreed Sandra.
“What I want to know,” Harry said, “is what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be with your mother?”
“I was,” said Sandra, “all night.”
“Was it bad?”
“Yes, pretty bad,” she said. “Have you ever been with someone who was terribly sick and wanted to vomit but just couldn’t do it, just couldn’t get anything up? That’s my mother. Only with her it’s tears that won’t come. Thank God the clan has started arriving.”
“The clan?”
“The clan Carradino,” Sandra said, “every loving one in the tristate area. They don’t just come and say vague things; they make a picnic of it with kids, dogs and vast amounts of food. My goofy cousin Leon even brought his football—he’s thirty-seven, the fat slob—and right now he and his equally slobby kid are probably throwing it around in our garden.”
“What does your mother think of all this?”
“She loves it. Now she’s got somebody to organize, to boss. Besides, eventually my aunts, the dread Ferrara sisters, will make her cry. They’ll work on her until she cracks, and I don’t want to be there to see it.”
“But won’t they miss you?” Harry asked.
“Probably not until the funeral Sunday, and then only because it says in the book that the deceased’s sister sits in such and such a place. But if they miss me, they miss me.”
“And how are you?” Harry asked very seriously.
“I’m okay, Harry,” she said. “I really don’t believe it all yet, but I’m okay.” She put a hand on his. “But right now, I’m very tired.
Have you got a bed someplace in this palace where a person could lie down?”
“Sure,” said Harry. “Alone?”
“Not necessarily,” she said.
24
It was well after noon by the time Hoerner pulled up across the street from Harry Caster’s house. He saw Caster’s rented car in the driveway and knew he ought to go in and check with him, find out if anything new had happened. But instead he sat there in the car. Absentmindedly, he lit a cigarette and thought about that morning at the cottage by the river. You’re getting soft, Hoerner, he told himself. All the same, it wasn’t a bad feeling. Hoerner tipped his hat down over his eyes a little and slid back into reverie.
* * *
“Stupid,” Gino Speranza was saying. “I never heard of anything so stupid in my fucking life.” He’d just bailed out Injun and Ruby and was driving them back to Harry’s street to their car.
“Somebody narked us,” Ruby said from the seat next to him. He hadn’t shaved, and blond stubble lay like golden powder on his cheeks. Injun sat in the back seat immobile and silent. His dark eyes burned into the seat back in front of him.
“Shut up,” Gino snapped. “You’re some operators, you are. I wouldn’t send you out to heist a lollipop. Jesus, is Rizzo going to laugh when he hears about this. I provide him with a couple of men—good men, I tell him—and they can’t even watch a house for one night without getting busted.”
Ruby started to say something but closed his mouth and gritted his teeth. This was wise, because Gino was wound tight to the explosion point. The humiliation of his interview with Chief Beddell was eating away at his self-control like strong acid.
“Okay,” Gino grated as the car turned onto Harry’s block, “where is it?”
“Over there,” said Ruby with a vague gesture of his hand.
“Over where, for Christ’s sake?” Gino screamed, taking his eyes from the street to glare at Ruby. At that moment, the big Thunderbird swerved and hit the back of Hoerner’s parked car with a crunch of collapsing metal. A hubcap popped off the Thunderbird and rolled erratically across the street.
The Triple Shot Box (Goodey's Last Stand, Not Sleeping Just Dead & Fighting Back): Three Gritty Crime Novels Page 54