“You have Clarissa and I have Marvin, who has less viciousness in his whole body than that bitch secretary has in one of her unsheathed tits.”
Don’t mention Clarissa in the same breath with him,” said Bressio, and saw Dawson step back. He did not realize how much anger was in him or that he had started to rise until he saw Dawson’s face pale.
“Okay,” Dawson said in a hushed voice, his face pallid. “Okay.”
“I didn’t mean to threaten you, Murray.”
“It’s okay, Al. I know how you feel about Clarissa.”
“It’s not okay. I’m sorry … it’s, well, I don’t feel that way about Clarissa. She’s a good kid. Period.”
“Sure, Al.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I said it was okay.”
“Yeah,” said Bressio, feeling hauntingly vulnerable because it was basic to his soul that people who did not practice violence should never be threatened with it, not even in the tone of voice. He did not like to see it in others and he abhorred it in himself.
“You know, Al, if it weren’t Marvin in this thing, I wouldn’t have offered such a high price,” Dawson said with tenderness.
“I know,” said Bressio
“And think about the hardship this Mary Beth Cutler had to endure living with Marvin. If you think his friendship places demands on me, can you imagine the life of someone living with that nut?”
“I can.”
“And it’s seven thousand dollars, maybe fifty-five hundred of it is what I call Fleish-hazard money.”
“I know.”
“And you’d be doing me a real favor, Al. I haven’t had a fight with the U.S. government for months. I’m getting withdrawal pains.”
Bressio smiled and picked up the envelope for what he at first thought was to reweigh the situation, but by the time his hands gripped the money, Dawson leaped from the couch in joy. It was all over.
“You want to hold the cash for a while or do you want me to deliver it directly to your bookie?” Dawson said, leaning down to fill the glasses while his feet danced around the table.
“I’ll deliver it,” said Bressio curtly. “Whose money is this?”
“Mary Beth’s. Oh, boy, is she a piece of work. You think Marvin is bad? He’s a deep-water Baptist by comparison. When you meet her, you’ll know you’ve been underpaid. What a piece of work.”
Dawson’s joy was contagious, and despite himself, Bressio grinned.
“I knew I had you when you felt bad about frightening me,” said Dawson, dancing the bottle to the middle of the room. He whirled to Bressio. “I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do; Tell you what I’m gonna do. Because I’m feeling a little guilty about shooting fish in a barrel, and because I know how you feel about smack, and because I feel the same way myself … if you find that Marvin ever dealt smack, I’ll drop the case.”
“If this is the woman’s money, then she’s the client,” said Bressio.
“And I’ll tell ya what I’m gonna do, also. I’ll say all right. If you can unravel this situation without helping Marvin, go to it. You filter out from a paranoid’s vision what’s real and what isn’t, and you’ve earned your money. Work done—I forgot to tell you she’s paranoid—completed. You can walk away from this thing free and clear and rich—until you reach your bookie, of course.”
Dawson hummed a waltz and escorted the bottle around the office in a four-step which became a bugaloo. Bressio shook his head like a parent who cannot get his heart into disapproval.
“Just where can I reach Mary Beth Cutler?”
“You can almost never reach her,” said Dawson, dissolving in laughter. “She’ll reach you.”
That evening, Bressio cleared his gambling tabs. Moochie said Bressio needn’t have felt rushed. His credit was good.
“Yeah, I know,” said Bressio and put another hundred on Chicago over the Mets and a hundred on Oakland over the Yankees.
“Anything new around town?” asked Moochie.
“No,” said Bressio. “Make that five hundred on Chicago. The Mets can’t pitch Seaver two days in a row.”
He was asked the same question at the Cedar Tavern on University Place and Eleventh Street by a bartender.
“Nothing new. Real quiet,” said Bressio.
“Jimmy the Bug?”
“Nothing, from what I hear. He was complicating things and he was asked a few times not to and he wouldn’t listen so I hear. He’s being buried tomorrow from Fermio’s.”
“I know he was your second cousin or something, but I never liked him.”
“Neither did I,” said Bressio. “Relatives are like people you meet in the elevator. You don’t have much choice.”
“There was a funny-looking woman asking for you here about a half-hour ago. Said she knew you. Asked where you were. I turned my head for a second and she was gone.”
“Did she say what her name was?”
The bartender shook his head.
“What do you think of Oakland for tomorrow?” asked Bressio.
“I think you should join Gamblers Anonymous is what I think of Oakland.”
“Will you join with me?”
“I like Oakland very much,” said the bartender.
Bressio reached his apartment building in the West Village five minutes before the eleven o’clock news. It was one of those pleasant New York City high rises that visitors always expressed a desire to live in until they heard the monthly rental. Bressio paid $650 a month for three rooms, plus $145 a week to the maid, plus $50 a month to the doorman to “keep his eye on things,” plus $25 a month to the super “so that I don’t have to go looking for you when I need you.”
When he got off the elevator at the fifth floor, he noticed a figure disappear down a stairwell. Assuming it was a burglar’s chickee, he double-locked his apartment door behind him.
The apartment was a semi-organized collection of old chairs and couches from his office and a table that almost matched the chairs and rustic lamps that matched nothing but gave good light. Clarissa had often tried to remodel it, even going so far as to give the furniture to the Salvation Army and ordering stylish replacements.
Bressio bought back his old furniture and gave the new tables, chairs, couches and lamps to Clarissa in lieu of a Christmas bonus.
Bressio opened a bottle of Jack Daniels and stuffed a frozen Weight Watchers dinner into the electric oven that was supposed to clean itself.
He turned on Channel 4 because sometimes the night news had either Dick Schaap or Jimmy Breslin, the only television newsmen he respected. To Bressio, the rest were actors.
When the actor announced Schaap would be on with a story, Bressio poured himself a tad more sipping whiskey and opened a package of dry roasted cashews. It was one of his cherished pleasures to watch a good professional work at anything. Long before, he had formulated a dictum that 85 percent of all the people in any given field did not know what they were doing. With Law, the figure touched 90 percent.
Schaap’s opening cynical line brought an understanding grin to Bressio’s face. He forgot all about his upcoming week of L. Marvin Fleish. Then the phone rang. It was the answering service. A Dawson client had been phoning every half-hour all day. Would Bressio take it?
“Yeah,” said Bressio. “In ten minutes. Not before.”
As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again.
“You’re being followed,” came a woman’s voice.
“Is this Mary Beth Cutler?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Al Bressio. This is my telephone number.”
“Good. This is Mary Beth Cutler. Dawson spoke to you about me.”
“A bit.”
“What did he say?”
“I can’t go through it all on the phone.”
“Right. Good. The line may be tapped. Good thinking. Marve says you’re a good man. He knows you. He says Dawson says you’re a good man, too. I need someone I can trust.”
“What’s this following
business?” asked Bressio.
“A real mean-looking guy came down your hallway about four minutes ago. About five feet ten, two hundred and thirty pounds. Well-dressed. Light summer suit, sort of crumpled. A real gangster type. I think he may be the one who’s got a contract on my life.”
“Was it a whitish double-breasted suit with white shirt and black tie?”
“That’s the one. God, he was a monster.”
“That’s me, Miss Cutler.”
“Oh, good. You’re on our side.”
“When did Mr. Dawson tell you I was hired for this?”
“This morning. He said he was going to see you later, that you didn’t like Marvin, but he could get you to take the case. Marvin disagreed with him. Marvin says you like him very much, you just don’t know how to show it.”
Bressio was about to say something when Mary Beth Cutler unleashed a swarm of information. “Wait until you hear this,” she said. “It’s the most sinister trap ever devised and I’m in the middle of it. I saw the man with the scar again today, and it came right after the cars with the blinking lights. The police are in on it, too. I knew that for sure. The police are in on it. You’ve really walked into something this time.”
“I believe it, Miss Cutler. What is bothering you specifically at this moment?”
“The whole thing.”
“Well, look. Tomorrow morning bring the whole thing to my office. Do you know where it is?”
“The Woolworth Building.”
“Right. Twenty-fifth floor.”
“Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“I think it’s him again. Shh. No, he’s walking past. Going around the block. I’m downstairs from your apartment in a telephone booth. Should I go back to my apartment or go upstairs to yours?”
“Look, do you have any money?” asked Bressio on the outside chance she really was being followed.
“Yes. I can give you money.”
“No. You’ve given enough to Dawson for me. Do you have any money on you?”
“Yes. Should I tell you how much over the telephone?”
“Do what I tell you, Miss Cutler. Go into the subway. Any line. Go to Forty-second Street. They all go there. Take the shuttle back and forth until you’re sure you’re not being followed or until midnight, whichever comes first. Don’t go on riding the subways after midnight. Get out. Hail a cab. Go to a major hotel. Check in. Lock the door. Don’t open it for anyone. I’ll see you at eleven A.M. in my office.”
“Which hotel?”
“You decide when you get in the cab,” said Bressio.
“The Biltmore?”
“Sure. Fine.”
“What if this line is tapped?”
“I told you to decide when you get in the cab.”
“Good. Good thinking. This is going to be great. See you tomorrow, darling.”
Bressio hung up and sadly realized he had missed Schaap. He turned off the television. The phone rang again. It was Mary Beth Cutler.
“Was that eleven A.M. at your office?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll be at the Biltmore.”
Bressio hung up again and went to his window facing the street. He looked down at the phone booth on the corner. A thinnish woman in light tan raincoat and red babushka whisked from the booth down the street looking right and left. Mid-block she turned and rushed the other way. Bressio checked the street. He saw no tail.
He got his answering service on the phone and delivered some very special instructions. There would be something extra for the operator if the service were performed properly. He gave her Dawson’s private home phone number.
“This is what I want you to do: Phone that number at four-thirty A.M. Get Dawson. Not his wife. Not his maid, but Dawson. Only Dawson will do. Tell him that Al Bressio has met the girl friend of L. Marvin Fleish. Got that? Repeat it … good. Perfect. Now, I will receive no phone calls from anyone until nine A.M. tomorrow morning. None. Under any circumstances.”
“The standing Dawson call-through is out then?” asked the service operator.
“Especially the Dawson call-through.”
At 4:45 A.M., Bressio was awakened by his answering service, which apologized but said his wife was dying at St. Vincent’s Hospital and he was the only one who knew her blood type, which could save her life. Could the answering service let the call through from the hospital?
“No,” said Bressio sleepily. “If she hasn’t taken the precaution to wear a blood-type badge, death will teach her a lesson.”
The answering-service woman gasped. Bressio hung up. Murray Blay Dawson had just let him know he had gotten the message.
IV
Bressio woke up scheming how to avoid L. Marvin in the ensuing week. Perhaps L. Marvin would contract sudden cancer of the brain and die before noon. Bressio had been lucky before.
He put on a fresh gray silk suit, a white shirt and a dark tie. He switched off the television on the way out of his apartment as he headed downtown toward Little Italy and Fermio’s Funeral Home on Mulberry Street, from whence his second cousin James “the Bug” Bugellerio would be buried.
He took a cab and then walked the last two blocks, remembering the early-morning summer smells of his childhood and how the ice would melt over the lettuce under canvas in the dark cool interiors of the vegetable stores. There were refrigerators and coolers now in these stores, but many of the good smells remained. He remembered dunking bread and butter into heavily creamed coffee, and running out to play before the sun rose high and made breathing a chore and life an oven.
It would be a hot day today, but not yet. Several storefronts had their windows painted over with thick green paint. These were the little gambling clubs, the meeting halls, the centers of business. Their occupants, who would arrive in a few hours, did not want strangers looking in. Hence the paint.
When Bressio turned onto Mulberry Street he saw a line of cars filled with men across from Fermio’s. Some had cameras. Bressio judged there were at least six carloads, which surprised him, because at best Jimmy the Bug was worth only two cars of cops. He saw the early-morning sun glint off a large lens and stared into it. The camera suddenly lowered, the plainclothesman looked away briefly, apparently regained the composure lost from seeing Bressio’s face that close up, and began shooting again.
Bressio saw some men point to him and others take notes. He knew what they were doing. He only wished they knew what they were doing.
As soon as he entered the large aluminum doors of Fermio’s, he said to the first Fermio he saw: “Who the hell are those bananas? Six carloads of cops to register the comings and goings of Bugellerio’s mourners.”
“They’re new,” said Patrice Fermio, a chubby but precise-looking man in black suit and black tie.
“No kidding,” said Bressio. “They got a good front and profile of me. What are they doing, registering the world?”
“They’re FBNC, Federal Bureau of Narcotics Control. Whole bureau is new.”
“I know. I know. But this narcotics … Jimmy isn’t narcotics. No one here is narcotics.”
“They’re new.”
“They must have money and men to burn,” said Bressio and headed toward the sounds of the professional mourners. Foolishness like that always unnerved him. Especially with people who carried guns.
At the entrance of the main parlor, Bressio blessed himself with holy water and walked solemnly along the dark carpet down the aisle between folding chairs to a rich bronze casket. He held his hands before himself as though approaching the altar rail for communion, as the sister had taught him more than a quarter of a century before at Our Lady of Pompeii School, down the street. Bressio leaned over the heavily cosmetized face of his second cousin, Jimmy, and kissed the cold, dark lips in formal respect.
The bullet hole in the Bug’s temple was hidden by dark wax and a judicious addition of just the right shade of black thick hair, much like Bressio’s. Fermio’s was considered without peer in flo
wer arrangements and bullet holes. Such was the reputation of Fermio’s that people said you could give Genaro, Patrice’s older brother, a fingernail and a photograph of the departed and he would produce your loved one almost as good as new. Sometimes better.
Alphonse bowed stiffly to the remains and stepped away to a flower-draped pre-dieu before the casket. He knelt there for a formal four seconds, crossed himself perfunctorily and rose to present himself to his mother’s cousin, the grieving Philomena Bugellerio. She sat in the front row, with her other sons standing behind her. They were, as Bressio knew them, Billy, Sally and Joey, all in their late forties, all unmarried and living at home, and all aspiring to button man, hoping that seniority would accomplish for them what talent failed.
Alphonse kissed his mother’s cousin dutifully on both cheeks.
“Blood,” said Philomena, a scrawn of a leather-faced woman wearing severe black in contrast to the whitish powder on her cheeks. “Your cousin’s blood has been spilled.”
“Aunt Philomena,” said Bressio respectfully, “I grieve with you in your loss. It was a hard business Jimmy was in.”
“The spies got him. The spies did it to him, Alphonse. The spies spilled your cousin’s blood.” Her face whitened with anger.
The murmuring in the funeral parlor ceased. The mourners looked at a portly gray-haired man in a dark suit and then at Bressio. This was important. They knew that Philomena, having been rebuffed in her first bid for vengeance, was now seeking to transform a bad business experience into a race war. They also knew that despite many lucrative offers, Alphonse Bressio had always kept himself clear of family business. If he should change now, it would be of utmost importance to the portly gentleman, possibly to all five families of the city. Much more important than Jimmy the Bug’s death.
“A hard business, Aunt Philomena,” said Bressio and bowed courteously. The murmuring in Fermio’s resumed and Bressio went back up the aisle past the official mourners, who not only added a dimension of grief but allowed others to discuss matters of the day, the essential grieving being taken care of.
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