“I just want to know my options. Is there anything open in Jacksonville or Tucson?”
“This time of year? You kidding?”
“What about like . . . Kalamazoo or Duluth?”
“Sammy, you know what it costs to relocate someone?”
“A lot, you told me. But still, if I get killed . . .”
“Why should you get killed? You’re off the hook. They were going after someone else. Unless, of course, you want to tell me that the bomb at Vons really was meant for you.”
It was a no-win situation. He was fucked if he did, and fucked if he didn’t. The odor of the pastrami was turning his stomach. There was no way he was going to get what he wanted from this man. Now, or ever.
“Well, if I get hit, it’s going to be on your conscience,” he said, limply.
“I’ll live with it.”
“I gotta go,” Sammy said, getting up abruptly and sliding out of the booth.
“Sammy?”
“What?”
The marshal handed him the check and went back to his breakfast.
Sammy took the Porsche from the valet, under-tipping the guy with two singles. One of the problems with driving a sixty-thousand-dollar car was that you were expected to tip big. He put it in first, let out the clutch, and burned rubber, enveloping the valet in a cloud of noise and exhaust. In the rearview he saw the guy give him the finger. Fuck him! He was parking cars for a living.
The way Sammy saw it, he was down to two options. They both involved hitting someone. The question was who. If he did Diddly Shit, then presumably Acme wouldn’t bother going after him, since they couldn’t collect the final money for the African’s contract on him. But he’d still be on the hook to them for his own money, whether or not they actually did the job. There had to be something in the boilerplate of the patio contract that stipulated that they got paid if the job got done, one way or another. And if he were alive, they’d go after him.
Or he could whack Walt and Biff. Use the money to hire another contract killer to do them. This option had the advantage of getting rid of the people trying to kill him, but it left the African alive. Which would defeat the purpose of his having taken out the contract in the first place.
Anyway, there was no point thinking about who to hit if he didn’t know who was going to hit the one he’d decided to hit. Back in the day, there were button men Finoccio used when he needed someone done. Salvatore Didziocomo had never been high enough in the family to know the names of these guys, but there were men who did. Nick the Tip ought to be one of them. Tuccieri had been one of Finoccio’s inner circle. He had been invited on the Vegas trips and down to Miami Beach in the winter for deep-sea fishing and hookers. If anyone knew if there was a West Coast guy, it would be The Tip.
It was the week before Thanksgiving when he’d run into his old colleague in the CVS parking lot and dropped the condoms. Sammy would have to tell him that the marlin weren’t biting in Jacksonville and that he was back in the Springs. On business.
He’d make up a story. Some guy had stiffed him out of serious money. He could give Nick a grand off the top as a referral fee. Whad’ya say, Nick? For old times?
Sammy managed to dig up the card that his old colleague had given him. VICKY AND NICKY, with a Palm Desert address and a phone number.
A woman answered the phone.
“Hi. Wonder if I could speak to Nick?” Sammy used his cheerful voice, one he rarely used.
“Who’s calling?”
“Tell him it’s his old friend, Sal.”
“Sal?”
“Yeah. From the Island. He’ll remember.”
After a moment, The Tip got on. “Sal? How’re the marlin biting?”
“They’re not, Nick. Couldn’t catch a fucking minnow. I’m back in the Springs.”
“No kidding? What are you up to?”
“A couple of things. Listen, I thought I’d take you up on your invitation. You know, drive over, say hello . . .”
“Great. Why don’t you come by for dinner? We’ll throw a couple of steaks on the barbecue, mix up some Mai Tais. Like old times.”
“Okay. Sure. How about . . . tonight?”
“Tonight? Let me check with the boss.”
Tuccieri shouted to his wife, who apparently okayed the deal. “You’re on. Six o’clock for drinks. Bring one of your girlfriends. We’ll play a little pinochle after dinner.”
“Well, I’m kind of between women at the moment, Nick.”
“Too bad. You don’t want to let those condoms go to waste, Sal,” he chuckled, then gave him directions and hung up.
When he got to Vicky and Nicky’s split-level on the edge of the desert, there was a woman waiting for him. Of course. He should have seen it coming. As a straight single male who drove at night and presumably made a living, he was low-hanging fruit. She was a refugee from Jersey named Connie wearing skin-tight toreador pants and a gold lamé top that accentuated a recent tit job.
The woman put down three Mai Tais and got flirty over the steaks. She was the widow of some made guy on the Island who had left her with enough krugerrands to relocate to Palm Springs and fish for her next husband. Sammy was clearly a candidate for the job.
When Sammy said after dinner that he had some business to discuss with Nick, the women repaired to the kitchen. The good thing about family wives was that you didn’t have to explain this kind of shit to them.
“I thought you were retired, Sal,” Nick said, lighting one of his Tiparillos.
“I wish I was. Unfortunately, I can’t afford it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. You got nailed on that fucking audit, huh?”
“Big time. Lennie The Kike told me I was going up for three to five, on the inside. Which is why I . . . you know?” Sammy couldn’t bring himself to actually say that he blew the whistle, even though Nick knew he had.
“Of course,” Tuccieri said sympathetically. “It’s water under the bridge, Sal. I would’ve done the same thing in your shoes.”
“Well, I don’t feel good about it, but it’s done. Time to move on.”
“You bet.”
“Anyway, Nick, I got some action going on out here. Nothing big. A little laundry business. I’m making a living. Or at least I was until a couple of weeks ago. I got a problem I need taken care of.”
“Uh-huh,” Nick said, taking a long inhale from the cigar. “Serious problem?”
“Yeah. Maybe I can get away with just scaring the guy, but I may have to set an example. You understand?”
Nick nodded gravely. There was no need to define the problem any more clearly. They had spoken the same language all those years and were still fluent in the subtext.
“Preferably someone on this coast.”
“Right. You can’t get on a fucking plane with a piece anymore.”
“Wasn’t there a guy that Phil used when he had a job to do out here? Someone in LA?”
“Tino from Tarzana.”
“Right. Tino. The guy was pretty good, if I remember correctly.”
“The best. The guy wired ignitions like a fucking brain surgeon. But we’re talking like ten, twelve years ago. Who knows if he’s still in business?”
“You know how to find him?”
Nick shook his head. “I don’t even know where the fuck Tarzana is. Can you believe they name a place after some fucking guy who swings from trees?”
“You know anybody who might know?”
“The only guy who could tell you is Phil himself. He kept the number in his head. He never even met the guy. He called, gave him the info, wired him the money, half up front, half when he did the job. When we had a West Coast job, Phil would say, ‘I’m calling Tino in Tarzana.’ And that was it. A done deal.”
Sammy escaped after two rounds of pinochle with Connie’s phone number. On the back of her card she wrote, I’m always home. He drove through the clear, cold desert night, taking the Porsche up to eighty-five on the straight-aways. There was one person who mi
ght be able to track down Tino from Tarzana. Though he wasn’t happy about owing this guy two favors, he didn’t see any other way.
The message was specific. Sammy didn’t have time to fuck around. On the answering machine in Uruguay, he said, “I’m trying to locate a button man named Tino who lives in Tarzana, California. Call me any time.”
The response came back a few hours later. Sammy had no idea what time it was in South America, but in Palm Springs, California, it was around 3:00 a.m. and Sammy was fast asleep with the phone ringer on silent mode.
Typical of Kermit Fenster, the message consisted simply of a phone number. Nothing more. Sammy stood in his pajamas, drinking a mug of espresso and waiting for the caffeine to kick in. Then he made the call.
The voice was thin and spidery, with a thick Mexican accent. “Sí?”
“Tino, this is Gus Malvolio, a friend of Phil’s.”
“Phil who?”
“Phil Finoccio.”
“He’s in the joint.”
“Right. But he’s still doing business.”
“I don’t do New York.”
“This is local, Tino. Palm Springs.”
“I don’t do the desert.”
“It’s an hour and a half away.”
“I don’t drive at night.”
“You can handle it during the day. Leave LA at six, you’ll be home by noon, three the latest.”
Sammy heard the sound of a nose being blown, then: “How much you got to spend?”
“Ten.”
“I’d have to pack a bag.”
“Why? You’re not staying overnight.”
“Colostomy bag.”
Jesus. What was he thinking? Anybody who blew cars for Phil Finoccio was probably pushing eighty.
“I’ll get back to you, Tino,” Sammy said and hung up.
Sammy started back toward the bedroom, meaning to go back to sleep. But the caffeine was tap dancing through his brain. He glanced at his watch. Nine thirty. His eye caught the date. December 24. It was Christmas Eve. Holy shit. The night before Christmas, and all through the house, Sammy Dee was trying to arrange a hit. That wasn’t going to look good if there was a Guy up there, and if The Guy was paying attention.
When you thought of it, getting rid of the African was actually the Christian thing to do. The man was clearly some sort of criminal. If he wasn’t smuggling drugs, he was smuggling guns. God knows what he had been up to in Africa. Some sort of genocide, no doubt.
But, more importantly, if Diddly Shit wound up with Marcy, then Sammy would wind up in the homeless shelter and become a drain on society’s resources, consuming vital public funds that were needed for truly destitute people. Limbless veterans and fallen nuns would be turned away in favor of an able-bodied man who had failed to support himself in his old age.
This equation made sense to Sammy. He would go with it. Or at least make his case when his day in court arrived. He would explain to The Guy that he had done what he did for the greater good.
A half-hour later, his phone rang. It was Marcy Gray, inviting him to midnight mass. He said yes, in the desperate hope that it would cancel out his earlier activities. He’d eat a wafer and explain things to The Guy.
XI
MARCY
When work began on Didier’s patio, Marcy didn’t give it much thought at first. Yes, it was a coincidence, but not that big of a coincidence. A number of residents of Purgatory Gardens had gotten their patios redone. If she had the money, she would have her own redone. Every time she looked out at her forlorn flower boxes on the bare concrete, she thought of Stanley. Your patio should be condemned as a public eyesore.
With the reporters gone, she was once more officially chopped liver. Artie Reman wasn’t calling with updates on the movie deal; photographers weren’t shooting pictures of her going in and out of Sammy Dee’s condo; the possibility of the phone ringing at any given moment was no longer there. For so many years, she had lived with that possibility—to the extent that even now, she still felt a quickening of the pulse whenever her phone rang. This could be the call, the one that turned it all around, the role that put her on the map for good.
After a series of plaintive emails, Janet had relented and called in a prescription for Zoloft, but the effects of the anti-depressant hadn’t kicked in yet. All it had done was blunt her sex drive—not that it had been very acute to begin with. She couldn’t even dish up a nostalgic memory of what it had been like to be in bed with a man, let alone take steps to make it happen.
Which wouldn’t have been very difficult. She still had two men humping her leg and was convinced that either of them would be happy to accommodate her if she so much as dropped a hint. She had actually resolved to do it after her last face-to-face session with Janet, when the therapist had told her she was in the Catbird Seat. But then Sammy’s car was blown up, and everyone was a little too jumpy to think about sex.
They were back to their strange, three-way slow dance, while Marcy waited for the Zoloft to start working and Christmas to be out of the way. She spent her afternoons playing Scrabble with Didier at the pool and her evenings in front of the TV tearing up at the Christmas specials and feeling sorry for herself. It all looked to be dissolving into one big blah.
Until Evelyn Duboff called with an update.
It was late in the afternoon, and Marcy was sitting in the dwindling light of her living room, trying to decide whether to have cottage cheese and frozen pizza or cottage cheese and frozen enchiladas, when her phone rang. She almost didn’t answer it, that’s how depressed she was.
But Marcy Gray was congenitally incapable of not answering a ringing phone. She picked up and heard Evelyn Duboff’s voice.
“You got a moment, darling?”
“I guess so.” She had lots of moments, but she wasn’t up to hearing more bad news about her suitors.
“You might want to sit down.”
“I’m sitting.”
“Okay, so listen. I’ve done some more digging on your two Lotharios, and came up with some really interesting information . . .”
“Evelyn, I’m not sure I want to hear this right now . . .”
“I think you’d better.”
“What?”
“I have reason to believe that these two clowns are trying to kill each other.”
“Pardon me?”
“They both may have taken contracts out on the other one.”
“What!”
“Wait, it gets better. With the same hit man.”
“Sammy and Didier have hired hit men?”
“Looks that way.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Duh . . .”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Sweetheart, they’re fighting over you.”
“Oh, please . . .”
“It appears to be the only explanation for what’s been going on. There were attempts on both of them, right? First the African with the bad pizza, and then Sammy and the blown car.”
“That was the Taliban.”
“The Taliban could easily have been the cover story. WITSEC does that kind of thing to protect their people, so that they don’t have to relocate them again. And then, we got the patios.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“There’re a couple of contract guys who operate out here in the desert. They charge twenty-five grand for a hit, and their cover is that they’re exterminators and patio deck refinishers. They have a company—Acme Exterminating and Patio Decks—and they make you sign a contract to get your patio redone. That’s in case you stiff them, so they can go after you. And, this is the capper, they actually put the facacta patio deck in to cover their asses.”
“So?”
“So, didn’t you tell me that both of them have had their patios redone recently? Two schnorrers like them are going to spend twenty-five grand just to fix up their property? I don’t think so.”
“How do you know this?”
“I
have a pipeline into the Riverside County prosecutor’s office. Apparently, both federal and state have been trying to nail Acme for a while, but so far they’ve been able to cover their tracks. These guys are good. They’re top of the line, your Chivas Regal of hit men.”
Marcy let the phone slip from her ear as she tried to assimilate the astounding information that Evelyn Duboff had just imparted to her. It was both absurd and made complete sense. It explained a number of things that needed to be explained. But still . . . killers? Sammy and Didier? Men she’d had in her home for Thanksgiving dinner and played Scrabble and almost slept with?
“Darling, you there?”
Marcy put the phone back to her ear. “Yeah . . .”
“Look, I known this is upsetting, but you needed to know it.”
“What should I do?”
“You could talk to someone in the DA’s office, tell them what you know.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Build a case against Acme.”
“Yeah, and in the meantime Sammy and Didier go to jail.”
“Maybe they can cut a plea deal.”
Marcy took a deep, cleansing breath, then another.
“Don’t hyperventilate on me, darling.”
“Evelyn, it’s the holidays. I can’t deal with this shit now.”
“You want my advice? I’d cut them both loose.”
“Thank you.”
And she hung up. In a trance, she walked over to her freezer, took out the frozen enchiladas, unwrapped them, and stuck them in the microwave. Then she took out the cottage cheese and poured herself a large glass of recorked chardonnay. Sitting at her kitchen counter, she ate the cottage cheese right out of the container, washing it down with the souring wine. She stared at the phone and did everything in her power not to call Janet’s emergency number. This is only for when you’re on the ledge.
As far as Marcy was concerned, if she wasn’t already on the ledge, she was eyeing it through the window.
She left a message on Janet’s non-ledge number to call her as soon as possible. I’m not on the ledge, but I’m pretty fucked up. Then she polished off the rest of the wine, washing down the curdling cottage cheese and the overdone enchiladas, slopped herself on the couch in front of a Law and Order rerun, and turned the sound low. She used TV as white noise. Better to have something in the room with her, even if it was stale cop dialogue, than to be completely alone with her thoughts. Which, at the moment, were all over the place.
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