Sinner Man

by Lawrence Block

  “You go to Philly, right on schedule. You pick up your fingerman in the airport and take a ride with him.”

  “And shoot Fell?”

  He frowned. “Don’t be silly. You couldn’t do that even if you wanted to. Fell knows what’s happening now. No—you go on a ride with your fingerman. Then you kill him. Just put a bullet in him and leave him somewhere. Baron gave you a nice clean gun and you use it.”

  “What happens when Baron hears about it?”

  “He never hears a thing. He’s not expecting you to make the hit until sometime in the morning or afternoon. You make it right away, get the first plane back. He’s off balance. We move very fast. We get together and the wheels start to roll. We’ve got surprise on our side and Baron’s up the nearest creek. You follow me?”

  “I follow you.”

  He finished his beer. Mine was still half full. I let it sit on the table in front of me and turn flat. I took out my pack of cigarettes and offered him one. He took one and I took one for myself. We smoked.

  “If you pick my team,” he said, “and if we win, you could have it made.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “The local organization would go along. It’s like South America. The whole system stays the same. The only change is who’s on top.”

  “A palace revolution.”

  “You got it. The organization stays in line. Baron goes, Scarpino goes, that pair of hoods he’s got working for him goes. That Johnny and that Leon. You know them?”

  He meant Johnny and Mustache. I told him we’d met.

  “They go, one or two more go. Then things change and at the same time they stay the way they are. You get out of the Stennett and buy yourself a big house. You trade that Lincoln for a Caddy or a Rolls.”

  “I like the Lincoln.”

  “So keep the Lincoln. Don’t play word games, Nat. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “I know.”

  “You side with me and we win, you’re right up there on top next to me. That’s a hell of a lot of bread and a hell of a lot of power. It’s the town by the short hairs. You could do worse.”

  “Probably.”

  “Or you could bet on Baron. And wind up tending bar at a higher salary, getting a bonus here and there. Or he could lose and you could get killed.”

  “I take that chance either way.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I could lose and you could get killed. Getting killed is something that could happen either way. It’s a risk. You can’t look at the risks in this business. They’re always around. You got to look at the rewards. You want to tend bar forever?”

  “It’s a good job.”

  “But not a very big one. There are bigger.”

  I put out my cigarette. The smoke was scorching my lungs and my throat. “I could have gone straight to Philly,” I said. “I could have shot Fell dead as a lox and flown back and the hell with it. No sides to take, no wars to start.”

  “You could have.”

  “But that’s over now. Now I have to pick a side. Now there are two sides and I have to pick one of them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” I said. I stood up and stepped away from the booth. “Take it easy, Tony. I’ll see you.”

  11

  The flight left Buffalo at two-eighteen A.M. The rain had eased up by then and what was left of it didn’t bother the pilot at all. I had a seat over the right wing. I was wearing a black tie and I had a gun in my jacket pocket.

  The stewardess offered me magazines but I wasn’t interested. Instead I let her keep bringing me cups of good black coffee. Not that I was in any danger of falling asleep. But the coffee speeded things up, made the connections in my brain take shape a little faster, a little easier.

  It wasn’t real yet. It was a dream, say, or a high school play, or one of those gangster pictures I used to watch, or some other illusion that had nothing to do with reality. The plane was a movie set standing still, the gun in my pocket a prop loaded with blanks.

  So I pushed the gun and the whole routine out of my mind and sat there concentrating on the stewardess. She was a green-eyed redhead with a figure that looked good despite the tailored blue uniform she wore. Her pretty pink skin looked just as good in that uniform as Brenda’s did in hers. But there was a point at which I could no longer concentrate on the stewardess, so somewhere in the sky between Buffalo and Philadelphia I went to the john to get rid of some of the coffee. I checked the gun there, too. It was a big gun, a heavy gun, a Browning Parabellum with a thirteen-cartridge magazine. It must have weighed two pounds. I took the magazine out and practiced with the empty gun, sighting at imaginary targets and squeezing the trigger. I hadn’t fooled around with this sort of weapon since basic training, a long time ago. I liked this gun, the weight of it, the feel of it. It was a shame I was going to have to leave it in Philly.

  I put the magazine back, tucked the gun away in a pocket and went back to my seat. At three-thirty-seven the pilot put the plane down on the runway at Philadelphia International Airport. It was a lousy landing, bumpy and jarring. For a minute I thought the gun would go off in my pocket. It didn’t.

  It was cold in Philly but there was no rain. I got off the plane and headed across to the terminal. My fingerman was waiting for me. He looked me over, noted the black tie and decided I was his man. He came over to me.

  “You Crowley?”

  I nodded. Fingermen are supposed to be small and shriveled, with ferret faces and shifty eyes. He was six-four and he was fat. He was wearing a plaid lumber jacket and heavy cordovan shoes. He looked stupid.

  “My name is Garstein,” he said. “You’re supposed to come with me.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Wait here a minute.”

  He waited there while I found my airline desk and looked for a plane back to Buffalo. There was one that left at four-fifteen, a non-stop flight. That gave me a little less than three-quarters of an hour, which was fine. I made reservations on it. I used the name Albert Miller again, the same name I’d had coming in from Buffalo. A pretty blond took the reservation and thanked me. I told her it was a pleasure.

  I went back where I had left Garstein and he was waiting dutifully. “You’re supposed to come with me,” he said again.

  “I know.”

  “I show you this Dante Fell bum. He’s a punk. A wise punk.”

  “You talk too much,” I said.

  He looked at me and turned his mouth off. I was the trigger and he was the finger so he was supposed to be respectful. He kept his mouth shut and led me from the terminal to a parking lot where his car was parked. It was a Plymouth with a crimped fender. He got behind the wheel and I sat next to him on the front seat. He started the engine, pulled the car out of the lot and drove off down a highway.

  “How far to the city?”

  “Not far. A mile, two miles. Used to be that the airport was way out in the country. The city spread.”

  The road we were on was a wide one, a busy one. There was traffic even at three-thirty in the morning. It wouldn’t do.

  ‘This Dante Fell—”

  I told him to shut up again. He did for a minute but then asked if he should get some music on the radio. I told him I didn’t like music. He gave a sad shrug and went on driving.

  There was a crossroad up ahead. “The next right turn,” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “Take it.”

  “It’s out of our way,” he said. “This is the best route.”

  I put my hand in my pocket and found the gun. I cocked it and put a bullet in the chamber under the hammer. “Take the turn,” I said.

  “Somebody following us?” He looked doubtfully in the rear mirror. Then he turned to look at me.

  I took the gun out and let him see it. His eyes became very wide and his face pale. I said, “Garstein, you talk too much, you ask too many questions. Take the turn or I shoot you.”

  He wondered about it for a minute. The car slowed down and we turned a
t the intersection. It was a quiet road, not any traffic in either direction.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “Drive,” I said.

  He drove about the length of three city blocks. Then I told him to pull the car off the road. He didn’t want to but when I shoved the nose of the Browning into his fat neck he did what I told him to.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “I just don’t get it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Baron sent you. Lou Baron, from Buffalo. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “To do a job,” he said desperately. “On Fell, Dante Fell. Not me. I’m nothing, I’m nobody, I’m Jack Garstein and I don’t count for a thing. You got your signals crossed, Crowley.”

  “You still talk too much. It’s a lousy habit.”

  “God damn!”

  “Get out of the car, Garstein.”

  He did not want to get out of the car. He tried talking some more but I poked him with the gun. He got out on his side and I crawled across the seat and followed him onto the road. Then we walked around the car and stood in some farmer’s field.

  “You’re gonna shoot me,” he said. “You’re gonna kill me.”

  That didn’t deserve an answer.

  “Crowley, there’s a car coming. You can’t shoot me— they’ll see you. You can’t.”

  “So we wait until they pass.”

  I watched him think. He was trying to get up the nerve to run out into the road and ask them for help. The car came. There were two kids in the front seat, high school kids looking for a place to park. They drove past us and Garstein didn’t move.

  I pointed the gun at him.

  “Please,” he said.

  “Shut up.”

  “Crowley…”

  It still wasn’t real. I was a machine, primed and ready. It wasn’t real.

  “I’m a married man,” he said. “I got a wife. A kid, a little girl—”

  “You got insurance?”

  He looked blank.

  “Everybody should carry insurance,” I said. “Plenty of it. It’s a great comfort in times like this.”

  He didn’t understand.

  “You should have met me before,” I said. “I would have sold you a policy. Straight life, twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth. Then you wouldn’t be worried now.”

  He still didn’t understand. His mouth opened and closed. He took a step back and I squeezed the trigger. I shot him four times in the chest and once in the face. I wiped my prints off the gun and threw it in the bushes. Then I got into his Plymouth and drove back to the airport to catch my plane.

  * * *

  I was back in Buffalo by five-thirty. The sky was gray with dawn and the air was moist and warmish. I used a pay phone at the terminal to call Tony Quince.

  “I’m home,” I said.

  “Get over here fast, Nat.”

  “Right away.”

  I found a cabby, gave him Tony’s address and told him to hurry. I settled back in the cab and tried to relax. It didn’t work. There would be a time to relax again but not for a while. I looked in my pack for a cigarette. The pack was empty. I bummed a cigarette from the cabby and smoked.

  Tony lived in a third-floor apartment in a four-floor building. It was a good building, grounds well kept, inside clean and moderately plush, I rang the bell marked Quince and an answering buzzer let me open the vestibule door. I walked up the stairs and wound up in front of a door with a brass nameplate that had Tony’s name on it. The door opened before I had time to hit the bell.

  “Come on in,” he said. “Sit down. How was Philly?”

  “I didn’t see much. Just the airport and a stretch of road.”

  “How did it go?”

  “It went.”

  “Easy?”

  “I suppose so.”

  I wasn’t sitting down. Neither was he. I stood like a robot while he walked back and forth, in front of the window. I joined him at the window. He had a view of private homes across the street. An unexciting view. There was a bird singing his head off in an elm tree across the street. I wished he would shut up.

  Quince said, “I guess you picked a team.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Mine.”

  “Yours.”

  “It’s the right side, Nat. The winning side, the side that pays off. You used your head.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  He came back from the window. “The finger,” he said. “Where did you leave him? You dumped him, huh?”

  I told him what I had done with Jack Garstein. This pleased Quince.

  “They won’t find him right off,” he said. “They won’t find him for hours—they won’t expect Fell to get hit for hours. By that time so many things are going to happen in Philly that Baron won’t know Jack Garstein from Abraham Lincoln.”

  “There’s a similarity,” I said. “They both got shot.”

  He got a laugh out of that one. He broke the laugh off abruptly and turned serious. “We got to move fast,” he said. “I told you before a few people got to be hit. You remember?”

  I remembered,

  “Baron, Scarpino, Johnny and Leon. You know Scarpino? Forty or forty-five, thin, ugly. One eye doesn’t work too good. You know him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He’s very close to Lou. He’s got to go. Hang on.”

  He strode to the phone and picked it up. He didn’t look fat and dumpy now. He was taking charge, moving in, and it showed in his voice and his bearing and his walk. I wondered why he had ever seemed soft and easygoing. He dialed a number and spoke quickly to someone named Angie, his voice low. He put the receiver down and looked at me.

  “Angie Moscato,” he said. “Remember?”

  “From the poker game.”

  “Yeah. He can use a gun and he can drive like hell. He’s on his way over here now. This is how we do it, Nat. First we pick off the flies. We cut the arms off and then we go for the head. Scarpino first. He lives with his old man. The old man sings anarchist songs and makes wine in the basement. He’s old and senile. So we get Scarpino right there.”

  I let him talk. He was doing fine.

  “Then Johnny Carr and Leon Spiro. Spiro keeps a broad maybe two blocks from Cassino’s. He’ll be there now, at the broad’s. So will Johnny.”

  “They’ll both be there?”

  “Yeah. They share the broad.” I made a face. “Share and share alike,” Quince said. “They’re a pair of pigs and the broad is a third pig. We ought to hit her just for exercise.

  “And then Lou,” he went on. “The big one for last. That’s the tough one. He sleeps with one eye open and a gun next to him and he never eases up. But this is the time for it. We take the others first. Then we figure out a way.”

  I found a chair and sat in it. He went into his kitchen and came out with a full coffeepot. He poured out two mugs of ink and gave me one of them. I burned my tongue on it but I drank it anyway.

  “I got bennies,” he said. “If you need them.”

  “I don’t use them.”

  “Neither do I. They let you move fast but they get you too keyed up, too high. Coffee’s plenty.”

  We drank the coffee. He stood up again and walked over to a dresser, opened the bottom drawer. I watched him rummage around in a pile of shirts and sweaters. He came up with two revolvers, thirty-eights. He hefted them both and handed one to me. It was a Smith and Wesson, a little lighter than the Browning automatic I’d used before.

  “It’s full and it’s safe. Good enough?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  He kept looking in the drawer, found a shoulder holster and got into it. He put the gun in place.

  “I haven’t got an extra rig,” he said.

  “I don’t use them,” I said. I put the gun in my pocket.

  He poured a little more coffee. We drank it down. Then he stood by the window waiting for Moscato.

  “There he is,” he said finally. “Let
’s go, Nat.”

  12

  The three of us sat in the front seat. We didn’t do much talking. It was getting close to six-thirty, according to the watch on my wrist, the watch that had To Nat from Lou Baron across the back. I didn’t feel much like looking at the watch just then.

  The excitement was the main thing. You could see it in Angie Moscato’s hands on the wheel, in Tony’s eyes. Moscato drove swiftly and easily but his hands were curled around the steering wheel like snakes. We were all on a roller coaster, on a train, on a boat to hell. We couldn’t get off. We could only ride to the end.

  The sun was coming up now and it looked as though it were going to be a good day—bright, warm and clear.

  Scarpino lived with his father in the heart of the very old west side near the waterfront. There was a housing project stretching for a block in one direction and another going up on the other side. But where Scarpino lived was an area still untouched. Dirty frame houses were clustered together. Grass and weeds grew between the blocks of cement and cracked them. Angie parked the car in front of a house that looked a little better than the others.

  “Don’t know why he lives here,” he said. “He makes good dough. He could live better.”

  “It’s his old man,” Tony said. “He doesn’t want to leave the old neighborhood.”

  “This is a good one to leave. He must be a nut.” We got out of the car and left the motor running. Tony led the way up the driveway to the side door. Angie took a gun from his shoulder holster and kept it in his coat pocket. He didn’t take his hand away from it. Tony rang the bell and we waited until a man opened the door.

  He was short and scrawny. He had a drooping mustache and watery eyes. He wore dirty denim overalls and a starched white shirt open at the neck. His eyes danced. He knew Tony.

  “Tonio,” he said. “Buon giorno, Tonio.” There was some more in Italian that I couldn’t catch.

  Tony said, “Buon giorno, Mr. Scarpino. Is your son at home?”

  “He sleeps, Tonio. He sleeps all morning.”

  “We have to see him, Mr. Scarpino. You wait right here, Mr. Scarpino, while we go see your son.”

  We left the little old man in his kitchen and went up a squeaking flight of stairs. I said, “Won’t the old guy remember us?”