Hush Money

by Collins, Max Allan

  “Well, then you know the atmosphere, at least.”

  “You mean the halls seem so cold and clammy.”

  “That’s it. And there’s an antiseptic odor, like a public restroom that’s just been cleaned. I can’t explain it, but that atmosphere got to me, somehow, and I found myself hesitating when that detective, Cummins, began asking questions.”

  “Are you going to tell them?”

  “I don’t know. There was something about that fella Cummins that . . . I don’t know.”

  “What was it about the detective that made you lie to him, Carl?”

  “Dear, I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell the truth.”

  “Now you do sound like a politician.”

  “Please. That’s hitting below the belt. If you want to talk about that kind of politician, talk about my predecessor, Grayson—one of your Republicans, incidentally—who was on the DiPreta payroll and raked in God knows how much money.”

  “You must’ve had a reason, Carl, for holding back when that detective questioned you.”

  “Well, I did have a reason. Or not a reason, really . . . a feeling. Instinct. Something about that man Cummins. I just didn’t feel comfortable with him. Didn’t trust him is what it boils down to, I guess.”

  “Didn’t trust him?”

  “I guess not, or I would have told him what I knew. It was just that his voice stayed so flat, so controlled, while his eyes . . . shifting around all the time, narrowing, nervous . . . God, Maggie, the damn eagerness in those eyes. Lord.”

  “Could he be on the DiPreta payroll himself, Carl?”

  “That thought occurred to me. Of course. And why not? If the DiPretas can buy a state highway commissioner, they can buy a lowly damn detective on the Des Moines police force. Sure.”

  “Then I think you did the right thing. Holding back, I mean. But where do you go now?”

  “I don’t know. I have to admit the whole thing’s got me a little bit scared, Maggie. Maybe more than a little bit. Suppose I had talked freely to Cummins. When word of my refusing Joey DiPreta’s offer got back to the surviving DiPretas, that and my telling of that offer to the police, well, I might not have made it home tonight. I might have had a mysterious accident of some sort, got run off the road by a drunken driver, something of that sort.”

  “My God, Carl, now you’re starting to get me scared, too.”

  “You should be. Because the DiPretas are going to make their offer again. I don’t know when or how, but they will. My business meeting with Joey DiPreta was interrupted, but as soon as the smoke clears, the rest of the family will be there to take up where Joey left off. Since I said nothing to the police, the DiPretas will assume Joey either didn’t get a chance to make his offer or that he did and I accepted. Either way, they’ll be wanting to see me.”

  “What can you do? Couldn’t you go to the newspapers?”

  “Telling the press isn’t a bad idea, Maggie, but I have no evidence. Just my word about what a dead man told me. I’ve been thinking it over. Carefully. I’ve been examining what I’ve seen today, and heard. I’ve been thinking about what options are open to me. And I’ve decided to amass evidence on my own. DiPreta said that as soon as I begin to delve into the highway commission records it’ll become apparent enough what was going on during Grayson’s administration. So I’ll begin that examination, tomorrow. Today. As a full-time project. And I’ll keep the lid on, too. Minimum of secretarial help, and then only in a way that could not make clear what I was up to. It’ll be a tough, time-consuming job, but it shouldn’t take me long, if I get at it, and when I have the evidence amassed, then I will talk to the press. I’ll hold a press conference and tell the damn world. But not ’til then.”

  “Finish your drink and come to bed.”

  “You think it’s a good idea?”

  “Yes. Know what else I think?”

  “No.”

  “I think my husband is a great man. Even if he is a damn liberal. Now come to bed.”

  “I’ll be in in a few minutes. I think I’ll go out on the back stoop and finish my drink and get some air first.”

  “Carl . . . ”

  “Just for a couple of minutes. Then I’ll be in.”

  “Okay. I’ll read ’til you join me.”

  “You don’t have to do that . . . unless you want to.”

  “I want to. That is, I want to if there’s a chance of this dowdy old housewife in curlers and robe seducing her brilliant and handsome husband.”

  “There’s more than a chance. I’ll guarantee it. And you’re not dowdy, Mag. You’re beautiful.”

  “I know, but it sounds better when you say it.” She smooched his cheek. “Go out and get your air and finish your drink. I’ll give you five minutes and then I’m starting without you.”

  He laughed and patted her fanny as he followed her out of the study. She turned off toward the bedroom and he went on out the back way and sat on the cement stoop and sipped the Scotch and thought some more. There was a nice breeze, but it wasn’t cold. The night was dark, moonless, but there were stars. Very pleasant out, really, and he felt good . . . about the pleasant night . . . about the decisions he’d made . . . about his wife, his beautiful wife of almost three decades waiting in the bedroom for him.

  Someone touched his shoulder.

  “Maggie?” Carl said and started to turn.

  He felt something cold touch his neck. He knew almost immediately, though he didn’t know how, that the something cold was the tip of the barrel of a gun.

  “Who is it?” Carl whispered.

  “That’s right,” a voice whispered back. “Speak softly. We don’t want to attract the attention of anyone in your house. Your wife or your daughter, for instance.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m a friend. I know you may find that hard to believe, but it’s the truth.”

  “I have a lot of friends, my friend,” Carl said, hoping his fear would not be apparent, hoping he could put a tough edge in his voice. “None of them holds a gun to my neck when they want to talk to me.”

  The coldness of the gun barrel went away.

  “Maybe that was unnecessary,” the voice said, “but my situation’s kind of precarious. I hope you can understand that. I hope you’ll excuse me.”

  The voice was deep but young-sounding, and there was a tone of—what? Respect? Carl wasn’t sure exactly. But whatever it was, he wasn’t afraid any more, or at least not as much as perhaps he should have been in the presence of an intruder with a gun.

  “Is it all right if I turn around?” Carl asked.

  “Please don’t. I’ll be sitting here right behind you, next to you on the stoop, while we talk a moment. But it’d be better for us both if you didn’t see me.”

  “Then I shouldn’t ask who you are.”

  “You won’t have to. I’ve already told you I’m a friend. Do you always stay up so late, Mr. Reed?”

  “Do I what?” The question caught Carl off guard, and he almost laughed, despite the gun and overall strangeness of the situation.

  “Do you always stay up so late? I’ve been waiting for you to go to bed for several hours now. My intention, frankly, was to enter your house after you were asleep so I could look through your papers in your study.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “To see if my judgment of you today was correct.”

  “Your judgment? When did you see me today?”

  “On the golf course.”

  “On the . . . oh. Oh my Lord. You . . . ?”

  “That’s right. I shot Joseph DiPreta this afternoon.”

  “My Lord. My God.”

  “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m afraid I was listening outside your study while you were speaking with your wife. I found what you said encouraging. I’m glad you’re taking a stand against the DiPretas and what they represent. We have that in common.” The man paused, breathed in some of the fresh night air. “The
breeze feels nice, doesn’t it? There was a breeze like this this afternoon, remember? I was watching you through the telescopic sight of a rifle. You were arguing with DiPreta. I’m not a lip reader, but it was clear you were having some sort of disagreement. And then at the end of your argument the wind carried DiPreta’s voice to the high grass where I was watching. If I heard correct, DiPreta threatened you because you would not accept money to keep quiet. But I couldn’t be sure. I had to come here tonight to try to see if I could find out where you really stood. And I think I’ve found an ally.”

  Carl’s mind stuttered. The boy seemed lucid enough, not at all the madman he must be, but then madmen often seem lucid; their illogic is often most seductive.

  “You may be wondering why, if I learned what I needed to know by eavesdropping earlier, I would risk coming out in the open now to contact you. Because you obviously won’t approve of my methods, even if our goals are similar. But I have something important to tell you. I have this certain body of data you will be interested in.”

  Carl found the ability to speak again, somehow, asking, “Data? What sort of data?”

  “Tapes. Of conversations in motel rooms, both private and meeting rooms. Of phone calls. Also photographs, other documentary material. Pertaining to the DiPretas and their family businesses and their connections to organized crime, specifically to Chicago. A lot of the material, in fact, pertains directly to Chicago. I hesitate to call this body of data evidence because I’m no lawyer. I don’t know what a court would do with this stuff. But if nothing else, it can serve as a sort of blueprint to the DiPretas and everything they have done, are doing, and are likely to do.”

  Carl spoke with all the urgency he could muster. “If you do have such a collection of data—and, damn it, I believe you do, Lord knows why—you must turn it over to me. You were listening to my wife and me, you know that I’ll be mounting a personal, intensive investigation of the DiPretas and their activities, and it’s my intention to expose them and the people they deal with for what they are. To tell anyone who’s interested that the Mafia is alive and well and living in Des Moines.”

  “I may do that. Eventually.”

  “Eventually? And until then?”

  “I’ll use the . . . blueprint ... to serve my own methods of dealing with the DiPretas.”

  “You mean . . . killing them.”

  “Yes.”

  “My Lord, man. That makes you no better than they are.”

  “Mr. Reed, war is amoral. There is no morality in war, just winners and losers.”

  “War? Is that what you imagine yourself to be doing? Waging war? Launching a one-man campaign, one-man war against the DiPretas? How old are you? You’re just a boy, aren’t you. Twenty-five? Thirty? Were you in Vietnam? Is that it?”

  “I was in Vietnam, yes, but that’s not ‘it.’ Please don’t use that as an easy answer, Mr. Reed.”

  “Turn your information, your data—turn it over to me at once. This course of action you’re charting is not only dangerous, it’s—forgive me—but it’s psychopathic. Good intentions or not, you’re charting the course of a madman.”

  “Mr. Reed, I thank you for your concern.”

  “Listen to me, I beg you. . . . You can’t go on trying to . . . wage this crazy war or whatever it is you picture yourself doing.”

  “I don’t expect your approval, sir.”

  “What do you expect of me then?”

  “Your silence.”

  “What makes you think I won’t go to the police and tell them about this conversation tomorrow? Or call them right now, for that matter?”

  “Because of your suspicions about Detective Cummins. Which are correct. He is on the DiPreta payroll. To the tune of five hundred dollars a month.”

  A sick feeling was crawling into Carl’s stomach.

  “I’ll make arrangements so that if anything should happen to me . . . if I am a casualty in my own war . . . then the body of data I mentioned will be turned over to you. Good night, Mr. Reed.”

  “Please! What can I say to change your mind!”

  “Nothing.”

  When Carl entered the bedroom, his wife was asleep. He went out to the liquor cabinet, refilled his glass of Scotch, and went back to the study.

  9

  FRANK DIPRETA BUTTERED his hot Danish roll. Even before Frank had begun stroking the butter on, the pastry was dripping calories, sugary frosting melting down into cherry-filled crevices. But Frank had been born thin and would die the same; nothing in the world put weight on him. He bit into the sweet circular slab and chewed, in a bored, fuel-consuming way that could make a fat man weep.

  He was sitting in the back booth of the Traveler’s Inn coffee shop. Alone. Elsewhere in the shop, strangers were sharing booths and relatively cheerfully, too, but not Frank. His was in a rounded, corner booth that could have seated six, and this was the busiest time of morning—it was seven-thirty now, the peak of the seven-to-nine rush—but Frank seemed blissfully unaware that the rest of the rectangular shop was a sardine can crammed with people as hungry for room to breathe as food. The regulars knew better than to say anything, however, and most of the non-regulars were too busy just trying to get some food and get it down to bother complaining. Complaints, of course, came on occasion, and to take care of that a sign was placed in front of the back booth: this section closed, sorry. This was all part of a routine that dated back to the day the motel and its coffee shop first opened, eleven or so years ago.

  The coffee shop was aqua blue: the booths, the counter and stools, the mosaic tile floor, the wallpaper, the waitresses’ uniforms; even the windows that ran along the side wall by the booths were tinted aqua blue. It was like eating in a fish tank. Nobody seemed to mind; nobody seemed to notice. The food was not particularly reasonably priced, but it was good and attracted an almost exclusively white-collar clientele; and then there were the guests at the motel who mistakenly wandered in for a leisurely breakfast and became a part of this morning madhouse instead. It was this latter group who most often expressed displeasure about the man in the big back booth who was sitting all by himself, eating a buttery Danish roll. And Frank ate three or four of the Danish every morning, and he took his time.

  It would have been hard to guess, looking at this calm, self-absorbed man, that very recently he had suffered a great personal loss; the death of his brother Joey did not show through the mask that was Frank DiPreta’s face. His eyes were not red. His appetite was certainly unhampered; he was now engaged in the consumption of his second Danish and looking forward to his third. He was not wearing black; in fact, the tie he wore with his tailored powder-blue suit was colorful: red and white speckles on a blue background, like an American flag exploding. There was no apparent tension in him either—no tapping foot, no drumming fingers. No, the only way to know the condition of this man, to understand the extent of grief he felt and his desire for revenge and the depth of that desire, would be to look into his mind; and no one could look into the mind of Frank DiPreta. Frank DiPreta was a private man, with private thoughts, needs. Even his late wife, Rosie, had never been really close to him and had known it. His daughter, Francine, thought she was close to him, but she wasn’t really.

  Cummins came in at seven-thirty. Fifteen minutes late. He was a tall man with a skinny man’s frame and a fat man’s belly. He was dark-haired, dark-complexioned, wore a rumpled brown suit and looked like a cop, which is what he was. As he joined Frank in the back booth, a waitress put Cummins’s usual breakfast down in front of him. The Friday morning meeting between Cummins and Frank was a ritual, and the necessity of placing an order had long since passed. Cummins mumbled an apology about his tardiness, then dug into the double order of waffles and ham.

  “You’re late,” Frank said. With people in the booth behind him, Frank naturally kept his voice down. But his words were anything but soft-spoken.

  “I’m sorry, Frank.”

  “You’re sorry.”

  “Look, I almost d
idn’t come.”

  “You what?”

  “I sort of forgot.”

  “You forgot Friday, Cummins? I never knew you to forget Friday before.”

  “I just didn’t think you’d be here, because of—I thought you’d be making funeral arrangements and things.”

  “I made those last night. Tomorrow is the funeral. Today is business as usual.”

  Cummins looked up from his waffles and ham. “Well, that’s fine. I think that’s the way it should be. You got to order your priorities, you know?”

  “I know,” Frank said. He handed the envelope under the table to Cummins who took it and stuffed it casually inside his suitcoat.

  “You going to want anything special on this thing, Frank?”

  “Not really. Keep me informed. You’re on the case?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So there should be no problem, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Only thing special I want from you is I want this guy personally.”

  “You want him how?”

  “I want him. When you find him, I want him.”

  “Frank, uh, if you mean what I think you mean . . .”

  The booth was large enough, and the racket in the room loud enough, for Frank to say anything he wanted without fear of being overheard. But just the same he leaned across the table and whispered harshly, “You know what I mean, Cummins. These last few years not much has been asked of you. We’re goddamn businessmen now, thanks to Vince, and maybe he’s got the right idea. But this time we’re doing it the old way. This one time you’re going to earn your goddamn money.”

  And Cummins said, in a whisper that was little more than a moving of the lips, “You’re going to kill him.”

  “I’m not going to fuck him. Fuck him up, yes. Hell, you may not ever find the son of a bitch’s body. I might lay some goddamn state highway over him and let the trucks and cars make their tire tracks on his goddamn grave.”

  “What . . . what am I supposed to do, Frank?”

  “Give him to me. Find him and give him to me. And then cover for me. Shut up for me. That’s what you’re paid for, mostly. Shutting up.” He leaned back.