«Rough,» Reed agreed.
«Terrible and frightening,» Felton continued. «And to think that whoever pushed this person… if he was pushed… may be living in this very building now.»
Felton looked into the eyes of the two detectives. «I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you a great favor. I've already told Bill and he's agreed.»
«Bill?» Grover asked.
«Yes. Mayor Dalton. Bill Dalton.»
«Oh, yes,» Grover said. «Sure.»
«That man who was in the street. The dead one.»
«He's not dead,» Grover said.
«Oh.»
«He will be in a little while, but he ain't yet. Pretty bad though, you know, sir.»
«Oh, how terrible. But this may help us. I want you to find out who he is, where he is from, as soon as possible. Before midnight if possible. We have extremely good references and background on all the people living here. If there is some connection, we might be able to find it.»
The detectives nodded. «We already started a routine check,» Grover said.
«Make it more than routine and I'll see you will be well rewarded.»
Grover pushed out his fat, thick hands as though shoving away a second helping of strawberry shortcake. «Oh, no. We don't want nothing like that. We're just happy to…»
Grover didn't get a chance to finish his refusal. Felton had smoothly taken two envelopes from the pages of the volume of poetry. «My card is in here, gentlemen,» he said. «Please call as soon as you learn something.»
When the butler returned after ushering out the two policemen, he said: «You could have bluffed your way through. You didn't have to buy them off.»
«I didn't buy them off, stupid,» Felton said, flipping the poetry on the desk. He rose from the chair and rubbed his hands.
The butler shrugged. «What'd I say, boss? What'd I say?»
«Nothing, Jimmy. I'm kind of griped.»
«What's to worry?»
Felton shot a cold glance at Jimmy. Then he turned his back on him and walked toward the curtains shielding the balcony. «Where'd he come from?»
«What?»
«Nothing, Jimmy. Fix me a drink.»
«Right, boss. And one for me.»
«Yeah, sure. One for you.»
Felton parted the curtains and walked out into the twilight air, twelve stories over East Hudson, on the building he had created.
He brushed some spilled earth from a toppled potted palm with his white velvet slipper. It made a scratching noise against the white tiles of the balcony. He walked to the edge, rested his hands on the aluminum railing and inhaled the fresh air blowing off the Hudson.
The air was clean up there. And he had paid for every brick to get him that high into the cool refreshing breezes. It was free of soot, not like the streets across the river on the lower East Side with pushing crowds, vendors, factories and mothers screaming at kids-when mothers were home. Felton's had rarely been.
Of course, there had been the nights. He would feel a tap on his shoulder, look up, and see his mother and smell the stench of alcohol. There was always a man behind, outlined by the light of the hallway. There was no place else for him to stand. It was a small apartment. One room. One bed. He was in it.
She'd nudge and he'd go out in the hallway. «Hey, leave the pillow,» she would yell. And he'd leave it and go outside into the hallway and curl up near the door. During the winter he would bring his coat.
He lived on the top floor then, too. But on Delancey Street on the lower East Side, the top floor was the bottom of the social ladder, even without a whore for a mother. There were no elevators on the lower East Side. The top meant walking.
Sometimes she would lock the door. And then he couldn't sneak into the apartment in the morning to get a jacket or brush his teeth or comb his hair. He would go to school with the hairy dust of the hallway floor still on his back. But none of the students would laugh.
One had tried it once. Norman Felton had settled it in an alley with a broken bottle. The boy had been bigger, by a full half foot, but size never bothered Norman. Everyone had weak points and on the big ones, it was bigger. All the more space for a stick, a rock, a broken bottle.
By the time he was fourteen, Norman Felton had done two stretches in the reformatory. He was headed for his third when one of his mother's sleeping partners left a wallet in his pants. Norman, heading for the sink, picked up the wallet and left the room. It wasn't the first time he had lifted a wallet near his mother's bed, but it was the first time it had been so full. Two hundred dollars.
This was too much to split with mom, so Norman Felton walked down the stairs of the tenement house for the last time. He was on his own.
His success was not immediate. He ran through the two hundred dollars in two weeks. No firms would hire a fourteen-year-old boy, not even when he said he was seventeen. He tried to work his way in with a bookie, but even they wouldn't touch kids as runners.
He had spent his last nickel on a hot dog and was nibbling around it, saving it, caressing it, as he strolled down Fifth Avenue, scared for the first time he could remember, when a large man leaving a mansion bumped into him and knocked Norman's last food to the pavement.
Without thinking, he flailed into the grownup. Before he got off his second punch, two giants were upon him, beating him.
When he recovered consciousness, he was in a large kitchen with servants buzzing around. A middle-aged woman, attractive and heavily-jeweled, was wiping his forehead.
«You certainly know who to take on, kid,» she said.
Norman blinked.
«That was quite a show out in front of my house.» He looked around. There were more pretty women than he had ever seen in his life.
«What do you think, girls?» the middle-aged woman asked. «Does he know who to take on?» The girls laughed.
The woman said «Kid, you're not going to tell anyone about this, right?»
«Got no one to tell,» Norman said.
The woman shook her head, smiling with mistrust. «No one?»
«Got no one,» Felton repeated.
«Where do you live?»
«Around.»
«Around where?»
«Where I can find a place to live.»
«I don't believe you, kid,» the woman said and wiped his forehead again.
And thus, Norman Felton began his career in the most fashionable house in New York. He made a good errand boy for the Missus and the girls like him. He kept his mouth shut and he was smart.
Later, he found out who had bumped his hot dog, out in the street. It was Alphonso Degenerato, head of the Bronx rackets.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
«They all want you, Mr. Morroco,» Norman would say. This always insured a five the next time. Morroco would laugh. «You know it too, kid.»
Then Norman would lead Morroco up to either Norma or Carol's room. He would return downstairs knowing what the girls would be doing.
The first thing was to get Morroco aroused. That could take twenty or thirty minutes. His potency was all in his mind. Then, with great effort, the girl could end it. Her groaning would be real. Only it wasn't excitement, it was exertion.
Then came the lavish praise, telling Morroco what a wonderful man he was. This, the Missus explained, was what he paid for. And that's how they made fifty dollars a night from Vito Morroco.
He was in the rackets, the girls said. But he wasn't a torpedo. No money in it. All he did was deliver money from one place to another and keep his mouth shut. He was a bag man. And he never lost a penny and he never said a word about his business.
He worked for Alphonso Degenerato who had the Bronx rackets. Sometimes he would carry, so the girls said, one hundred thousand dollars.
Norman would run the errands for the house and keep his eyes open. He watched people. He watched Morroco. He saw the admiral from Washington who paid a girl to dance around him nude and sprinkle powder over him.
He saw the minister who asked
to be whipped. He saw the men who needed two women and those who couldn't perform with a dozen. He saw the lonely and the frightened.
And he ran his errands. Pick up a case of hooch here, a woman there; deliver both. Make sure Daisy had her powder. Never call Mr. Johnson by name. Mr. Feldstein appreciated a little bow upon greeting.
The Missus took a liking to him. «Men are run by their balls, their bellies and their fears,» she would tell Norman. «First, they're afraid. Then, they're hungry. When both those feelings are gone, they go for what I give them.»
Norman listened. But she was wrong. He learned that quickly.
Men are run by their egos; stronger than life, than food, than sex, is pride. A man is without this pride only when it is beaten from him. Left alone, human beings are servants of their pride before their bodies. All else flowed from pride.
He saw it in Johnson, in Feldstein and in Morroco. He saw it in the shiny buttons of the admiral. Men were weak and they were prideful and they lied to themselves. And that was their weakness. It was the Missus' weakness, too. He proved it.
Norman Felton was seventeen and had been at the Missus' for three years when she asked: «Have you had any women?»
«Yeah.»
«Which one of the girls?»
«None of them. I get mine outside.»
«Why?»
«Your girls are dirty. Like swimming in a sewer.»
The Missus laughed. She rolled back her head and shrieked a harsh laugh that sent her weakly leaning against one of the lamps in the kitchen where they were talking.
But when she saw, Norman was not embarrassed or cowed, she stopped laughing and began to yell. «Get the hell out of here. Get out of here, you rat scum. I picked you up out of the gutter, you rat scum. Get out of here.»
The cook backed away toward her stove. One of the girls ran into the kitchen and stopped in horror. The Missus, for the first time anyone could remember, was crying.
And chuckling softly before her was Norman, the errand boy.
So he had won, but he had no job, no education and little money. What had he won?
Norman Felton walked out into the rain-chilled afternoon with forty-five dollars in his pocket and a plan. A man had to survive. If he could not, he would die. One life lost. His life was as valuable as the next. More so. It was his.
So Vito Morroco, who had never lost a delivery in his life, a good man with a gun and with the muscle, that night coming out of the Missus' place, met the former errand boy.
He met him in a passageway leading from the side exit to the street. Nobody could see who entered or left.
Norman Felton stood in the passageway. «Gee, Mr. Morroco,» he said. «I'm glad I seen you. I'm desperate.»
«I heard you been canned, kid,» Morroco said. The word «desperate» put him on the balls of his feet. Norman suddenly realized how big Vito was. The hand never left the pocket. The cold brown eyes seemed to cut through Norman's will. The scar-creased lip moved into a sneer.
«What do you want, kid? A fin?»
The air in the chill passageway seemed choking stale. Norman felt the metal strip in his own pocket. It was so damned small. He noticed Vito's eyes move toward his pocket. It was now or never.
«No, Mr. Morroco. I need more.»
«Oh,» Morroco said. There was a bulge in his pocket, too.
«Yeah. I got a plan how we can both make a fortune.»
«We, kid? We? Why you?»
«It's like this. I seen a lot of guys come into the Missus' place. But never none like you, Mr. Morroco. I mean, I know maybe a hundred broads who want it real bad but there ain't a guy, a real guy who can give it to 'em. And I heard the broads in the Missus' say they'd be willing to pay you if you didn't pay them.»
Vito suddenly smiled. His cold brown eyes warmed. His hand started to ease from his pocket.
«Yeah, Mr. Morroco,» Norman said. «The Missus only lets the girls who have been doing good work have you. That's why I used to have to take you to special ones each time. The ones who deserve you.»
«Yeah?» Vito seemed unable to believe it.
«Yeah, and I was figuring, if I could like set you up with women and get maybe twenty per cent.»
Vito was chuckling. The scar made a comical crisscross across his lip. The gold-capped teeth shone under the pale light of the corridor. His hand was out of bis pocket, near his forehead, tipping back his hat.
«No crap,» Vito said. «You're a smart kid and I like you but I got other…» Vito Morroco, thirty-seven, chief bagman for the syndicate, never finished the sentence. He couldn't. A sharp metal blade was in his throat.
The blood flowed and Vito gagged, rolling over the corridor floor, smearing red splotches on the gray concrete. Norman feverishly tried to get to the wallet, look for a money belt, rifle the pockets. Vito rolled and kicked. Dying, he was almost too much for young Norman Felton.
With a jump, Norman landed both feet on Vito's reddened chest as it rolled topside again. A spurting gush of air and blood came out of Morroco's mouth and he was helpless.
Norman had gotten three thousand dollars for that first killing.
That had been the last time he took his money from the victim. More times than he could count, he had been paid by someone else.
And with the money, he bought the clothes and the house and the manners of respectability. He married a respectable woman, with good breeding, and after five years of marriage that produced a daughter, he found that breeding was only clothes deep. When Mrs. Felton was nude, she was just like any other slut going to bed with another man.
And Felton killed without payment. Without a cent. And that had been the first time.
Felton stepped back from the railing and inhaled the fresh Hudson air again. Today, he had killed once more without profit, this time to stay alive.
Where the hell were these men coming from? In the last year, he had been forced to dispose of one snooper in the regular way upon contract, but today the man had gotten so close, so damned effectively close, that only with a lucky break were Felton and two henchmen able to fling him over the railing down to the street right smack into a police investigation.
Felton's breathing came hard. He no longer noticed the purity of the air. Blue veins bulged in his forehead and he clenched his fists.
Someone was after him and it was no amateur. They had claimed one of his best men.
«No amateur,» he mumbled and then his thoughts were interrupted when Jimmy, the butler-bodyguard, came out on the terrace with a scotch and water.
«Tony Bonelli's inside.»
«By himself, Jimmy?»
«Yeah, boss, by himself. I think he's scared.»
Felton glanced down at the light amber liquid in his glass. «Viaselli send him?»
«Right. Mr. Big himself.»
«Are you thinking what I'm thinking, boss?»
«I don't know,» Felton said. «I don't know.» He turned and walked into the den, carrying half a glass of his drink.
A thin, greasy-haired man with hollow cheeks sat on the edge of a chair near the desk. He wore a blue pinstriped suit, a yellowish tie. He twisted a handkerchief in his hands. He perspired profusely despite the air conditioning.
Felton walked to the chair and stood over Tony, who was almost writhing in his seat.
«What's up, what's up?» Tony said quickly. «Mr. Big sent me over here. He said you wanted to talk about something.»
«Not to you, Tony. To him,» Felton said and slowly poured the rest of his drink over Tony's black shiny hair.
As Tony tried to mop his head with the handkerchief, Felton slapped him hard, once, across the face.
«Now, let's talk,» Felton said, and motioned Jimmy to place a chair beneath him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The receptionist at East Hudson Hospital unconsciously straightened, pushing forward her chest, when she saw that beautiful specimen come toward her desk.
He walked like no man she had ever seen, with the grace of a da
ncer yet the sure, strong movements of an athlete. Every motion seemed to flourish in a calm masculine discipline she just knew could create miracles on a mattress.
He wore a well-cut gray, three-button suit, with a white shirt and a brown tie that matched the deep fascination of his eyes. She didn't know if she was smiling too widely as he allowed his strong hands to settle on her desk.
«Hello. I'm Donald McCann,» he said.
«Is there anything I can do for you?» she asked. His tailor was magnificent.
«Yes, there is. I'm an insurance adjuster and frankly I'm in a bind.»
He seemed to know she would do anything for him; those beautiful eyes just knew it.
«Oh,» she said. The supervisor wouldn't be around until 6:30 a.m. She had a half-hour. What was happening to her? What did this man have?
«Yes,» he said leaning forward. «I'm responsible for the insurance on a building. And I hear someone fell from it.»
She nodded. «Oh yes, Jackson. He's in Room 411, emergency.»
«Could I get to see him?»
«I'm afraid not. You'll have to wait until visiting hours and then get permission from the guard. He tried to commit suicide. They don't want him to do it.»
The man seemed disappointed. «Well, I guess I'll just have to wait until visiting hours.» He waited as though expecting something. Maybe he would leave. She didn't want him to leave.
«Is it very important?» she asked.
He was a kiss away from her lips now. «Yes.»
«Maybe I can get the guard down here and you could go in for a minute.» To hell with the supervisor.
He was smiling so beautifully. «Would that be all right?» she asked.
«Beautiful,» he said.
«I'll phone him. You get in one of those elevators and hold the door open so he'll have to use the other one to come down. The night nurse takes her break now. I'll keep the guard here until I go off… about twenty minutes. Then I'll phone to the floor and you hold an elevator there. When the other one comes up, come back down here to me. I'm getting off then. But don't tell a soul. Promise?»
«I promise.» He had such beautiful eyes. It wasn't until he had disappeared into the elevator that the receptionist realized her husband would still be in bed when she got home. She'd work out something later.
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