The Last Gig

by Norman Green

  “You gotta bury someone, you better fuckin’ bury them. You remember the shah of Iran? He let the Ayatollah leave the country, let him go to France. He buries the motherfucker instead, it’s a different world.”

  “Isn’t that funny?” Caughlan said. “You know what that tells you? That giving someone absolution is the only unforgivable sin. You let somebody walk, they’ll fuck you every time. But, Jerry, my question to you is this: why are you taking a chance like this? The Jerry Tomasino I know would never come here himself. He’d be at Lincoln Center or some damn place while Martillo was getting whacked. I don’t get it.”

  “I gotta do this,” Tomasino said. “The bitch put too many of my guys on the shelf. I got nobody I dare to send . . .”

  “Got you,” Caughlan said. “It’s down to you and the Brit, here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t dare send O’Hagan.”

  “The son of a bitch already . . .” His voice died away as he realized what he’d said. He pointed his pistol at Caughlan’s guts. “Wallace,” he said to the Englishman. “Turn on the fuckin’ lights.”

  Wallace Parker, over by the door, fumbled for the light switch. Caughlan was momentarily blinded. He squinted at Tomasino, who squinted back. The pistol never wavered. The three of them were in the room over the garage at Caughlan’s house in Old Tappan, New Jersey. “You son of a bitch,” Tomasino said. “You fuckin’ bastard. She ain’t coming, is she?”

  “No,” Caughlan said. “Why’d you do it, Jerry?”

  “Gearoid brought the scam to me,” Tomasino said, sneering. He looked around, but there was no one but the three of them there. “He said you were fat, dumb, and happy. An easy mark. It was too much money and it was too good to pass up. When the Feds finally caught on, they’d take one look at you and throw your ass in the can while we walked away counting the change. We couldn’t lose.”

  “So how come you’re down to this? How come you’re losing?”

  “That fuckin’ bitch! Martillo is what happened, but when I get my hands by God on that—”

  Wallace Parker stuck the Taser against Tomasino’s neck and fired. The gun fell from Tomasino’s boneless hand as he crumpled to the floor. Caughlan retrieved the gun while Parker hit Tomasino with the Taser again. “Got another entry for his list of life lessons,” Parker said, straightening back up. “Never back a lame horse. Was that all right? That’s what you wanted me to do, right?”

  “That’s what I wanted.” The Brit stared at him, and he stared back. The guy doesn’t trust you yet, Caughlan thought. Maybe he never will. He took your money, though. But that’s the way of it with turncoats . . . “Pick him up. I got a hole already dug, out back in the garden.”

  Parker hauled Tomasino semi-erect, got him over one shoulder. Good thing Tomasino’s a little guy, Caughlan thought, and he followed the two of them back down the stairs. He did not want to have to touch the bastard. They walked out of the garage, around back, and through the wet grass of the backyard. “Over here,” Caughlan said, treading carefully in the dark. “The hole is right in front of you. See that big pile of dirt?”

  “Got it,” Parker said. “You want . . .”

  Caughlan found the shovel, swung it high over his head and brought it down on the back of Parker’s skull. Parker and Tomasino both tumbled down into the hole. Caughlan stuck Tomasino’s pistol in a jacket pocket, took the jacket off and laid it aside. He began filling the hole back up. Gave that whole goddamn speech about conservatives, he told himself, but the feckin’ Brit must not have been paying any attention at all.

  She stood up, and he stood up right behind her, pressed himself close to whisper harshly in her ear. “Don’t try anything stupid. I’ll pop you right here in the middle of this restaurant, don’t think I won’t.” She ignored him, moved slowly across the crowded room, paused and turned to face him just as they got to an open space on the other side. He had his pistol in a jacket pocket, pointed more or less in her direction.

  “Why did you do it? Your own brother.”

  “Half-brother,” he said, angry.

  “Did you have to kill him?”

  “He got everything he ever wanted,” Gearoid said. “Seen that guitar up at auction, the old man had to go and buy it for him. It was sickening.”

  “You killed him for that?”

  Gearoid’s eyes glittered. “No. The little bastard was smarter than I thought he was. He knew I hated the old man, and once he found out we were related, he never took his eyes off me. I don’t know how he tumbled to our little import scheme, but he did. He was a better programmer than I thought he was. He was gonna rat me out. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen. Enough, now, go on outside.”

  “My turn next?”

  “You sealed that one when you broke into my apartment and stole that goddamn guitar. How did you know I had it?”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “But I had a feeling, you know what I mean? I figured, if you were the murderer, you’d flip when you saw it. Which you did. And that ain’t even the real one.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That one’s a phony. I wasn’t sure what you’d done with the original, so I had a friend make that one for me.” It felt good, saying that.

  “You played me? You bitch . . .”

  “Worse than you think,” she said.

  Gearoid reached up with his free hand, grabbed Alessandra by the hair, and twisted. He pulled her up onto her toes, it felt like he was about to tear the scalp right off of her head. He had the pistol out in plain sight now. He scanned the crowd, which had suddenly grown silent. “Looks like you blew it again,” he said. “Overconfidence. Isn’t that what nearly got you last time?”

  Philip Giles, the tall thin black man who’d been sitting at the table next to theirs, came out of the bathroom behind them and grabbed the Irishman’s wrist, twisted the gun up toward the ceiling. O’Hagan bellowed, hauling even harder on Al’s hair, began twisting the gun back down inch by inch, closer to Giles’s face. There was a commotion behind them as someone tried to push his way through the crowd. He won’t make it in time, Al thought, and she reached over, got O’Hagan by one ear, snatched it off.

  O’Hagan bellowed again, louder this time, exploded in a kinetic frenzy of blood and furious motion. He dropped Alessandra, ripped his gun hand away from Giles, swung it in her direction, the blood streaming from the side of his head. I still got his ear in my hand, Al thought, and she dropped it, got both hands on O’Hagan’s gun arm. She saw TJ Conrad out of the corner of her eye, heard a swish as he swung the wooden guitar like an ax. It flew past her ear and hit Gearoid in the face. He went down with Giles on top of him, banged his head hard on the wood floor. Giles kicked the gun away, got up wiping blood on his pants. “Jesus,” he said.

  TJ Conrad walked past Alessandra, retrieved the guitar.

  “Little bit heavier than I like ’em,” he said, turning back to her, grinning.

  She looked at him. “Me or that guitar?”

  His grin got wider. “You kidding? Ain’t you got any mirrors at your house?”

  She ignored that. “That’s your funeral suit?”

  “Changed my mind,” he said.

  Salathiel Edwards finally managed to push his way in through the crowd, followed by three uniforms. The uniforms began shoving the crowd back from the prone and bleeding Irishman. Alessandra reached up, took the silver necklace off, handed it to Edwards. “Get what you need?”

  “Clear as a bell,” he said.

  Twenty-four

  Al was back in jeans and a T-shirt. She walked through the front doors of Astoria Studios carrying the laptop under her arm. She had broken into O’Hagan’s apartment in the early hours of the morning, found the real Stevie Ray Vaughn guitar and Willy Caughlan’s laptop. She left the guitar for the police but she’d taken the computer. The cops didn’t need it, after all; they had O’Hagan’s confession on tape.

  Security stopped her at the front desk.
She gave them her name, sat down in a waiting room while they got the necessary clearances. It took about half an hour before someone came for her, walked her down some stairs, and through a dark corridor to a small room on the lower level. It was empty but for a long table and four chairs. Al sat down, opened the laptop, and fired it up.

  Twenty minutes later the door opened and a man in a gray suit stuck his head in. “Are you Ms. Martillo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right,” he said, and then he went away. Five minutes later he was back again; this time he came all the way into the room, followed by God and two very large bodyguards. God, aka Shine, looked pale and drawn. They all came around to Al’s side of the table and looked over her shoulder at the screen, but Al folded it down.

  “Hold up,” she said. “All you guys, get over there.” The three men stopped, looked at Shine for instructions.

  “G’wan,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”

  Al waited until they were settled in on the other side of the room. Two of them were seated and one of the bodyguards stood at the door. She opened the computer back up. She had one moment of consternation when she thought the file wasn’t going to open, but then the video started. She turned the laptop so that she and God could both see the screen.

  The opening footage was some shaky images of Tudor City, Willy Caughlan’s neighborhood on Manhattan’s east side, Willy grinning into the camera on an overcast winter day. Shine, sitting next to Al behind the table, sucked in her breath, then went silent. There was a woman’s voice, off-camera, indistinct. She asked Willy something, Al could tell by her inflection. Willy shook his head, looking with some annoyance at the camera that occupied the space between himself and the woman. “Man, you really are in love with that thing.” The woman holding the camera laughed, said something that seemed to reassure Willy, and he smiled again. “You wanna come up?”

  Alessandra felt a sudden wave of sorrow as it hit her that she was hearing a voice from the grave. It was a boy’s voice, lacking timbre because he had not fully grown into his body yet, he was still young, long-boned, and skinny. He would have been a big man, Al thought, he had his mother’s height, but his father’s genes showed clearly in the shape of his face and the breadth of his shoulders. And he’s dead, she thought, murdered as he stood in the doorway of his adult life, just before he had any real chance to become something. He was so different in the video, so alive and so human, moving, breathing, talking. When he had only been an image, a sterile, two-dimensional face on a still photograph, he had been almost an abstraction in Al’s mind. Seeing him alive on that winter day somehow brought home the enormity of his death, the magnitude of the loss of all the years he might have had.

  The camera blinked, and suddenly they were inside Willy’s apartment. Shine was a natural redhead, and one pale, freckled breast filled most of the screen as she fiddled with the camera until she had it where she wanted it. Then she backed away, crawled on hands and knees across an expanse of queen-sized bed to join Willy, who was very ready for her.

  “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Shine said, her voice rising rapidly. The two men who were seated on the other side of the room jumped up, but Shine was faster than they were. “You stay where you are!” she shouted, half-rising out of her own seat. The men froze, looked at each other once. “Goddamn you, sit back down!” she yelled, and they subsided slowly back into their seats.

  Alessandra closed the file, and the video quit playing.

  “What do you want?” Shine asked her.

  Al shrugged. “I don’t know. A better job. A guy I can trust. World peace.”

  Shine didn’t look at her. “I mean, what do you want from me?”

  “I don’t know. I was just gonna wreck this, you know what I mean? I was gonna pull out the hard drive and throw it in the river or something. I never met Willy, but I figured I owed him that much. But then, the more I thought about it, the more I thought you ought to have a voice in it.”

  “You could have sold this,” Shine said.

  “I know.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “I’m not old enough to sell it. I’m still all idealistic and shit.”

  Shine stared at her.

  “Couldn’t do it,” Al told her. “Felt too low-rent.”

  God’s pale face looked haggard under the fluorescent lights. She looked at the computer, then at Al. “Can we still . . . Can we take out the hard drive and wreck it or something?”

  “Why not.”

  “Jimmy,” she said, looking at the guy in the gray suit. “Go find a hammer and a screwdriver.” She turned back to Al. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” Al said. “But I’ll get over it.”

  Twenty-five

  Alessandra Martillo had asked TJ Conrad to handle the music at Tio Bobby’s funeral. Her mind blunted by grief, she hadn’t given it another thought, had no idea what he was going to play. She was in the front row next to Anthony, maybe a dozen feet from the coffin. She sat there watching Bobby’s calm face while the preacher’s words bounced off the hard shell of sorrow that surrounded her.

  The church was full. Half of those in attendance wore heavy black leather jackets and boots, and the other half was more carefully suited in somber pinstripes and dark grays. These poor guys, she thought, the gays are all too well-acquainted with death, and the bikers dance with it, they court it in their own way . . . She was dry-eyed, shut down, as sere and unmoving as a bouquet of dried flowers until shortly after Conrad sat down at the piano. She didn’t recognize any of the music he played, but it sounded medieval to her, slow, sonorous, building up gradually until it filled the entire space, booming and echoing off the stone walls, leaving everyone in the church sitting in an almost stunned silence, but then he segued into something quiet and soft, and a slender, gray-haired woman got up to sing a version of “Ave Maria” that Alessandra had never heard before. The crowd stood then, began filing out. Alessandra lost Anthony in the shuffle, his friends swallowed him up, wrapped him in a cocoon, and swept him away. He turned back once to look for her. She blew him a kiss, waved good-bye.

  She stopped on the church steps, stood there alone as the tide receded, watched long black cars and glittering chrome-and-steel motorcycles as they coughed and stuttered into life. She felt curiously distant, as though she was watching something that was happening in some other place, until she felt his hand on her shoulder. She knew it was him just from the touch, she could feel the calluses on his fingertips, and she turned, lost her grip, wrapped herself around him.

  He took her back to his place in Greenpoint, after. He didn’t ask her if she wanted to go, he just put her in a cab, climbed in after her, gave the driver his address. He surprised her once again, because the place was relatively clean for a guy, decent, if small, sparsely furnished, with exposed brick walls, wooden floors. He hit a button on his phone as they entered. A disembodied voice told him he had sixty-seven messages.

  “What?” she said, turning. “Sixty-seven . . .”

  He turned the phone off. “I’m very popular, these last couple days,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “God gave me a co-writing credit,” he said.

  She was confused. “God . . .”

  “Last week, in the studio. The day you were there, remember, I sat in with a couple guys that morning? Turns out it was God’s track they were working on. As a matter of fact, she was there.”

  “Shine?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t see her, but she was there, she heard what we did, decided I deserved a credit.”

  “How about that. Does that mean you’re rich and famous now?”

  He shrugged. “Very hard to tell what it means when God does something. Can I get you something to drink?”

  “What you got? And how are the guys in BandX taking this?”

  He walked over to his fridge, opened it, and looked inside. “Not good,” he said. “Not good at all, but we already got all the tracks down, so mayb
e it doesn’t matter. I got beer, I got half a bottle of red wine—which I gotta warn you is pretty vile—and I got a bottle of Cutty Sark.”

  He remembered what I drink, she thought, and he stocked up. “Cutty,” she said. She felt a bit unsteady on her high heels, felt awkward in the unfamiliar dress, felt the gulf yawning between the two of them, felt her heart hammering high in her chest. He turned to watch as she kicked off her shoes. He had the scotch in one hand, two glasses in the other.

  “Forget the ice,” she told him.

  He stood, silent, looked at her.

  “You don’t know how bad I wanna run away,” she said.

  He spread his arms wide. “I’m a pussycat,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  He nodded. “I get it.”

  “Can you deal with . . . Can you help me?” she said.

  “Relax,” he told her. He put the glasses down, opened the bottle. “Everything is gonna be fine,” he said. “You’ll see . . .”

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank both Andy Markham and “Killer” Joe Delia, who shared with me the joys of making music and the pains of making it in the music business. Thanks also to Brian DeFiore, who is also well acquainted with the perils of serving a temperamental and occasionally ill-humored muse. Finally, thanks to Christine, for her patience and love, and to the Liberty Street Irregulars, to whom I owe a debt I cannot hope to repay.

  An Excerpt from Sick Like That

  If you liked The Last Gig, keep reading for a sneak peak at the next riveting mystery fearing Alessandra Martillo

  SICK LIKE THAT

  Available this summer wherever e-books are sold!

  One

  Alessandra Martillo did not like Marty Stiles, she thought he was a pig, but if so he was a pig with many useful skills and she had learned a lot from him. In short, she owed him, and she hated that, which was why she sat on the hard plastic seat of a southbound A train that was headed for Coney Island where Stiles slumped motionless in a wheelchair and waited for death.