The Black Door

by Collin Wilcox

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “They wouldn’t’ve liked that.”

  “The Outfit, you mean?”

  She nodded.

  “But Dominic was the head man down South,” I prodded. “He was the one that made the rules.”

  She looked at me briefly before saying, “Dom used to say that the higher you got, the closer they watch you. And it’s true. There were a dozen guys out for his job. Everything he did wrong, it got back East.”

  “Did they know about his romance with Mrs. Hanson, back East?”

  “Sure they did.”

  “And they didn’t mind?”

  “Not as long as he used his head and didn’t get out of line.”

  “And did he use his head?”

  She didn’t reply. As she’d been talking, her gathering tension was more and more evident. Still, I needed information.

  “How did the actual murder occur?” I asked. “Tell me everything you know about it—especially anything that might not’ve got into the papers.”

  For a moment I thought she hadn’t heard me, or didn’t intend to reply. She simply sat staring off across the room, her lips pressed into a tight, painful line.

  “How did it actually happen, Mrs. Vennezio? If I’m going to help you, I’ve got to know. Tell it to me from the beginning.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then, haltingly, she began to speak. “He’d gone to the beachhouse. It used to be our beachhouse. They—they spent weekends there. And that’s when it—it happened. On Sunday night.”

  “Was Faith Hanson with him when he got killed?”

  “She got there just afterward. She found him.”

  “Was she questioned by the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Just that she walked in and found him lying in the living room, dead. Shot.”

  “Did the police think that Dominic knew his murderer?”

  She nodded. “They think he let him in.”

  “How did the police learn about the murder?”

  “A phone call.”

  “Anonymous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “A man, the papers said.”

  “Did your husband usually have a bodyguard with him?”

  “Usually. But not—not on weekends.”

  “Who did the police question?”

  “Everyone. They put on a good show.”

  “What do you mean by that, Mrs. Vennezio?”

  She hesitated before saying, “We live in La Palada. Do you know anything about La Palada, Mr. Drake?”

  I did, but I wanted to hear what she’d say. So I shook my head and waited for her to continue.

  “There’s only three thousand people in La Palada,” she said. “It’s right outside Los Angeles, but it’s a separate town. It’s incorporated, and everything. It’s where most of the big shots live, and it’s got the lowest crime rate in the whole state.”

  “The big shots from the Outfit, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “And they own the town, including the police.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the police turn up a suspect, as part of the show they put on?”

  “No. They just questioned a lot of people, and made a big noise for the papers. Then, after a couple of weeks, it all died down. No one really expected anything different. It’s like when Bugsy Siegel got killed. No one ever expected the murderer would get caught. And he never was.”

  “Yet you still insist your husband wasn’t killed by someone in organized crime?” I asked incredulously.

  “I’m not saying that, Mr. Drake. There were probably fifty men who would’ve liked to see Dominic dead, for different reasons. Anyone makes enemies, no matter what business he’s in, and Dom made his share. Maybe more than his share. What I’m telling you, though, is that his murder wasn’t ordered. Siegel’s murder was ordered, but not Dominic’s. The Outfit didn’t—”

  “Everyone I’ve ever talked to about the murder thought it was a professional job,” I interrupted. “And that includes several policemen.”

  She moved her clasped hands fretfully before her.

  “Talk to Russo, Mr. Drake. That’s all I’m asking you to do. Go down to La Palada and talk to him.”

  “Will he talk to me, do you think?”

  She nodded.

  “How can you be so sure, Mrs. Vennezio?”

  “I made a bargain with him.”

  “What kind of a bargain?”

  “The letters—the four letters I wrote. Two days ago, I told Russo about the letters. I said I’d give them to him, if he’d talk to you. And he said he would.”

  “And you gave them to him?”

  She nodded, silent and resigned.

  “But—but what’s to prevent him killing you?”

  “He promised,” she said simply.

  “And you believed him?”

  “Yes, Mr. Drake. I believed him. I made promises, and so did Russo. If we both keep our words, there won’t be any trouble. That’s the way it’s always been, Mr. Drake—for hundreds of years.” She reached over for her purse and got to her feet, heavily. She pointed to the small pile of bills on the table between us.

  “Take the money, Mr. Drake. Go see Russo. He’ll be expecting you. He’s in the phone book, and he’s expecting you. If you keep your word with him, he’s not a bad man. He’s like Dominic was. They’re just the same.”

  She turned and walked to the door. Hastily crossing the room, I opened the door for her. I wanted to say something, to comfort her. But she was already outside. I watched her get into a car parked at the curb. As the car pulled away, I saw two men in the front seat.

  I closed the door, locked it and walked back into my living room. I picked up the small stack of bills—a thousand dollars, in hundred-dollar bills.

  Automatically I took out my wallet and slipped the money inside. As I did, I was conscious of a sudden, chilling sense of forboding. I’d felt it first as I’d watched the car pulling away, with the two figures in the front seat and the single figure in the rear. Remembering the slow progress of the car, it seemed as if the figures inside were part of some strange procession, traveling to some dim and distant place.

  2

  I AWOKE SATURDAY MORNING to a feeling of apprehension. Over coffee, glumly, my thoughts kept returning to the legend of Faust, irrevocably selling his soul to the devil.

  By the second cup of coffee I’d decided to write out a check to Mrs. Vennezio for a thousand dollars, mail it and forget it.

  An hour later I’d packed, got an airline reservation for later that afternoon and notified my long-suffering city editor that I’d be out of town for a few days.

  It was ultimately a reporter’s overwhelming curiosity, I realized, that had compelled the decision. Although I’d been lucky enough, over the past few years, to solve a few well-publicized murders by the painful process of groping among the dark and confusing images of my subconscious, yet I was nevertheless primarily a professional crime reporter. Even though my employer’s publicity department took great pains to ballyhoo the mysterious methods of their “clairvoyant sleuth of the mind,” it was actually conventional news-gathering techniques that provided me with the disembodied lines and shapes from which, with luck, the final subconscious images unaccountably emerged.

  And so, as a newspaperman, I had no choice but to go down to Los Angeles and talk with Frankie Russo. Beyond doubt, I would never be able to write directly about the conversation. Yet, also beyond doubt, I would never be able to forgive myself if I surrendered the opportunity to interview one of the kingpins of organized crime in America.

  In the meantime, I had three spare hours. After some deliberation, I decided to try and reach Captain George Larsen, chief of the Detective Bureau’s homicide division. A long, laconic Dane with a quick wit and a wry sense of humor, Larsen had been the first police department official to treat m
e as anything more than a witch doctor disguised in a Harris tweed suit. Later, as we’d come to know each other better, we’d become friends.

  Larsen was off duty, and at first I was reluctant to call him at home. Friendship is one thing, Saturday afternoons something else. Yet I was also reluctant to depart for Los Angeles without at least touching base with the law, and an interview with Larsen at home was much more appealing than one at headquarters.

  Luckily, Larsen was working on his boat in the garage, and his wife was delivering an angel food cake to her church bazaar. I would therefore be welcome, if I didn’t mind inhaling resin fumes and helping with the fiber glass.

  And so, shortly after noon, I found myself holding a roll of glass fiber and watching Larsen as he smoothed out a section of freshly applied resin.

  “You should open that window,” I said, moving my head toward the back of the garage. “You need some cross-ventilation.”

  “It won’t open. Besides, this is the last I’m going to do. I have to take Carrie downtown as soon as she gets home.” He dropped a length of the glass fiber into the resin. “Hand me that squeegee, will you?”

  I handed it over, then glanced at my watch. I’d been holding glass fiber and handing over tools for more than a half hour, while waiting my chance to bring up the subject of Dominic Vennezio. But Larsen, muttering constantly about a bad batch of resin that was setting too quickly, had been preoccupied.

  Now, finally, he dropped the squeegee into a nearby bucket of solvent.

  “Let’s go inside and get some coffee,” he said, leading the way. “These fumes are something.”

  I poured the coffee from a pot on the stove while Larsen set out sugar and cream on the small kitchen table

  “Well, what can I do for you?” he asked, sipping the coffee and for the first time giving me his full attention.

  I paused a moment, conscious of savoring the sensation I was about to produce.

  “Dominic Vennezio’s widow wants me to find out who killed her husband.”

  He sipped a small swallow of coffee, set down his cup and examined me appraisingly with his pale blue Nordic eyes.

  “You’re kidding,” he said.

  I shook my head. “She came to my place last night and laid it all out. She stayed for more than an hour.”

  He sighed, perhaps with a certain weariness, perhaps more with a wry regret. Larsen was both an honest and a realistic cop. He realized that corruption existed in municipal politics, and therefore in lawmaking, and therefore in law enforcement. He knew that organized crime was the principal reason. Protection money is the one fixed item of overhead in the budget of every illegal venture. Larsen knew all this—and more. Yet, like most honest cops, he preferred not to think about it, just as a shoe salesman would rather not think of the frequency with which his customers’ feet are washed.

  “What all did she say?” he asked, his voice noncommittal.

  As concisely as I could, I told him.

  “And you’re going to do it?” he said incredulously.

  “This morning, I wasn’t. Now I am.”

  “What changed your mind? The money?” His voice was chilled with irony.

  “No, it wasn’t just the money. It’s the chance to interview Frankie Russo. You know as well as I do that organized crime is the biggest single business in the country. And it’s the biggest, most sensational news story in the country, too—in the world, for that matter.”

  “It’s the biggest untold story in the country. Anything you’ll ever need for material, you’ve already got. You don’t have to talk to Russo, and you know it.” He shifted in his chair, suppressing an impatient pique. “You could spend a week writing news stories that’d never get past your own city desk—or maybe your own wastebasket, once you thought about it.”

  “I could say the same to you. San Francisco’s a clean town as far as organized crime is concerned. It’s the only clean big city in the country, outside of maybe Portland and Seattle. But you could still spend that same week arresting a lot of people that you know are guilty as hell.”

  “Knowing is one thing,” he said sharply. “Proving it’s something else.”

  For a long moment we sat staring at each other. I was regretting my last remark; possibly Larsen was regretting his.

  Finally he took a deep breath and stirred his coffee, frowning.

  “Send the money back, Steve. You’ve taken your lumps over this clairvoyance thing. I gave you a few myself, a couple of years ago. But this is different. You could find yourself in deep, permanent trouble.”

  “With the law, you mean?”

  “With the law or with the Outfit. Just because Mrs. Vennezio doesn’t think her husband was murdered in the, ah, line of duty doesn’t make it so.”

  “But she’s got Russo talked into seeing me. That must mean something.”

  “It probably does. It probably means that Russo wants those letters.”

  “But …”

  “I’m telling you, Steve: you can’t possibly win. If the murder turns out to be a professional job, done on contract, and you find out who did it, you could be murdered yourself. If it wasn’t a professional job, then it’s possible Russo might let you go ahead. He doesn’t want unauthorized murders in his organization. It’s bad business. Sloppy management. However, if you do help him, then you’ll be on his side. He’ll take your information and use it to enforce ‘discipline,’ as they call it. You could be an accessory. At the very least, you’ll be on his payroll, just the same as if you were one of his lawyers, for instance. So then, if you go to the police, you’ll be in trouble with Russo. If you don’t go to the police, though, you’ll be violating the law. So you can’t win, no matter which way you jump. It’s happened to plenty of people, Steve, believe me. Just last year a vending machine operator walked into a police station and asked for protection, if he’d talk. He said he was scared—that he’d been a legitimate businessman for years, but got into financial difficulty. He couldn’t get a loan through regular channels, and finally—rather than lose his business—he took a loan from the Outfit. He didn’t know it was the Outfit, but he knew something wasn’t quite right, either. That’s how it all started—that’s how it always starts, with money. Easy money. A year later the Outfit was running his business, using him for a front. So he finally decided to get out. But he made the mistake of telling his story to the wrong cop—a hack lieutenant who decided to talk it over with the D.A.’s office before putting the guy in protective custody. The lieutenant told the guy to come back in the morning. So the guy walked out of the police station, and that’s the last anyone saw of him—until his body washed up, a week later.”

  “But …” I moistened my lips. “But I’m working for Mrs. Vennezio, not for Russo. All I have to do is give her the murderer’s name. That’s the agreement. It’s got nothing to do with the Outfit.”

  In exasperation, Larsen sharply shook his head. “That’s being just plain naïve, Steve. If you were a—a society reporter, I could understand it. But you’ve spent five years reporting crime. You should know better.”

  “Well …” Indecisively I hesitated before deciding to say, “There’s the money, too. Ten thousand dollars. I—I was thinking that I could put it in a mutual fund. It could be an annuity.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t the money.”

  “It isn’t. Not entirely. Still, I’d be a fool not to think about it. Newspapers don’t pay that much, George—and the clairvoyance business hasn’t been very brisk lately, either. So when you add it all up—”

  “When you add it all up,” he interrupted, “there’s something that doesn’t sound right. Mrs. Vennezio moves out on her husband. Supposedly she’d’ve divorced him, except that she’s Catholic. She hasn’t lived with him for two years, during which time he’s been keeping another woman. Then Vennezio gets murdered. And now his widow can’t rest until she knows who murdered him.” Larsen shook his head. “It just doesn’t make sense, Steve. There’s somethin
g missing.”

  “You haven’t talked to her, though. She’s a—a peasant type. She’s superstitious, and she’s not really very bright—or at least not very sophisticated. Also, she’s a Sicilian, and apparently she was raised to go by either the code of the church or the code of the Mafia, whichever applied. And, in this case, it’s the Mafia. Vengeance. She’s got to know who—”

  “But that’s exactly where the whole thing smells. The Mafia has its code of vengeance, all right. God knows there were enough blood feuds, even in this country—and not so long ago, either. But don’t forget omerta—the code of silence. No matter what happens, you’re not supposed to talk about it—and especially not to the police. Now, you’re not exactly the police, but you’re not exactly the corner grocer, either. And if Mrs. Vennezio is already in hot water with the Outfit, the last thing she’d do is contact someone on the outside. And you know it, Steve. You’re closing your mind to some very obvious points, here. And it could be dangerous. I’m telling you,” he repeated, “that you could end up dead, or at the very least beaten silly, just to remind you not to talk. And then, if you don’t talk, you could actually be indicted for withholding material evidence in a capital crime.”

  “Who’d indict me?” I asked.

  “What?” His voice was short and irritable. I’d seldom seen Larsen really angry, but now his lips were tightened and his jaw was clenched.

  “I said, who’d indict me? The district attorney of La Palada?”

  For a moment I thought he was actually going to lose his temper, something I’d never seen. But he simply said, “La Palada,” as if it were an obscenity.

  “Well, I mean it, George. Who would indict me?”

  “You talk like you’re on the other side already.”

  Now I felt myself becoming angry.

  “That’s a lot of crap, and you know it. I asked the question for a reason. The murder of Dominic Vennezio is already swept under the rug. There’ll never be an arrest made, and you realize it as well as I do. Now, if that’s the case, why the hell shouldn’t I make a few thousand dollars? For that matter, why shouldn’t I make myself one thousand dollars, just for going to Los Angeles and getting an interview that any crime reporter in the country would give anything to get? That’s all I’m committed to now, you know—just a trip down to Los Angeles. I could be right back here Monday morning.”