“It’s turning into morphine,” said the tall man.
“Don’t worry,” said the stocky man. “It’s been stored in a cool dark place.”
The tall man smiled. “Did you know prior to 1920 they sold this stuff alongside aspirin?”
The stocky man laughed. “It’ll give Detroit niggers a painless death.”
“They’re customers,” said the tall man. “Even Luciano gives them that much.”
The stocky man closed the brown suitcase, fastened the clasp, took the key off the table, pocketed it, and put on his gloves. “Are we done? I got appointments.”
The tall man closed and fastened the black suitcase and put on his gloves. “I hit a raw nerve?”
“Yeah, a raw nerve. The Lucianos ain’t nothin’ compared to the Cavallo family. You purple gang guys should know.”
The tall man continued smiling as he picked up the black suitcase, opened the shack’s flimsy door, and tossed out his lit cigarette. “We don’t use that purple gang name.”
“Ancient history, huh?”
“Yeah, the same history says Mussolini chased your family from Sicily.”
The stocky man paused, shifted the suitcase from right hand to left hand, and turned. The tall man held a revolver and smiled.
“Take it easy, Sal. I hear Little Sal’s carrying a stiletto. You and him need temper control. Your family was out of Sicily before Mussolini’s purge. It’s real easy stepping on your toes. That how you got your name? We got wars coming. Get along and we’ll cash in. So what say—?”
“All right,” interrupted the stocky man. “I get your point. Let’s scram before some yard dick gets nosy. Next time I’m sending a runner. He’ll have bigger shoes than me.”
“No more dirty work?”
“No more dirty work. My family name’s sacred.”
The tall man nodded, put his revolver away, and motioned the stocky man through the door. Both looked side to side before leaving the shack, then went in opposite directions, stepping across railroad tracks and snow mounds. A steam locomotive’s whistle wailed from low to high pitch as it emerged from a tunnel.
Salvatore Cavallo walked behind a row of snowed-in boxcars to the Packard where Lonzo waited with the engine running. Cavallo imagined steam from the Packard’s exhaust piped into the shack with the Jew from Detroit locked inside. But enough with the Jew. Cavallo soaked up the All Weather Town Car’s heat. The heater worked better than most in the January cold, the car had a big name, and even sounded big. Once the car was moving away from the yards, Cavallo had to shout to Lonzo in the front seat.
“This thing’s like an opera house!”
Lonzo’s voice was naturally loud like Lon Chaney Junior. “Yeah, boss. I like it.”
Cavallo removed coveralls and boots, put his jacket back on over his shirt and tie. He laced his dress shoes, combed his hair, straightened his hat brim, and put it on. Lonzo drove to three Lower East Side warehouses where Cavallo spread the cash in three separate safes. With the cash put to bed, Lonzo dropped Cavallo at home and took the Packard next door to the apartment house. Cavallo paused to listen to the Packard’s engine as it backed in. Lonzo lived on the ground floor, close to the Packard in the attached garage. The other apartments were used for family business, the room above the garage for private meetings.
Inside his own house, Cavallo expected the usual greeting from Francesca. She’d have dinner ready, Little Sal home from his midtown school, and they’d open a bottle of Corvo. Cavallo had tossed his cigar butt and by now he should have smelled garlic, sausage, and pasta. Where the hell was everybody? And why wasn’t it hot in here the way Francesca liked?
Cavallo put his hat on the wall hook, walked past the empty kitchen to the living room, expecting Francesca working on an afternoon nap, Little Sal in his room messing with his stiletto rather than homework. Instead, Cavallo’s Uncle Rosario greeted him. A bottle of Corvo from the kitchen was on the low rosewood table next to Cavallo’s humidor. Uncle Rosario sat in the chair on one side of the table and motioned Cavallo to sit in the chair on the other side.
Even though Salvatore Cavallo ran Brooklyn operations, his uncle, Rosario Vincenzo Cavallo, remained boss in the eyes of other east coast families. Death was the only retirement. Uncle Rosario had come close up against the Lucianos, but was still around after 70 plus years, and still maintained a workable relationship with other families. With Francesca and Little Sal out, Cavallo knew today would be one of his uncle’s special visits with some kind of judgment.
After kissing stubbled cheeks, Cavallo sat and stared across the rosewood table. His uncle’s eyes were sunken, jaw crooked, wisps of gray hair lit from behind by winter sky visible through the window. What would happen when Uncle Rosario died? Would he establish a similar relationship with other families? Or would war break out like the European war brewing?
Uncle Rosario had already opened the Corvo and, trembling, filled their glasses halfway. They toasted and drank. Cavallo drank most of his; Uncle Rosario took only a sip before wiping his mouth with his sleeve. Several months earlier the doctor said Rosario suffered a minor stroke. Since then he tended to drool. Cavallo and his uncle spoke Italian.
“I cannot drink like before, Salvatore. It’s a sign my time is near.”
“That sign will have flashing lights, like on Broadway.”
A crooked smile. “Better than gunpowder flashes.”
“I made the final exchange with the Jew, only he doesn’t know it.”
“Good. That’s the end of it. We’ve kept the family name unblemished. Because your cousin sits in prison, you and I are the only ones who count.”
“You’ve come here to speak of family legacy?”
Uncle Rosario coughed, took a deep breath, and tapped the rosewood table. “I’m here to speak of legacy in the name of your son.”
Cavallo pictured Little Sal sneaking eight-pagers with grainy photographs of naked women into the bathroom and locking the door; Little Sal listening to swing music on the radio; Little Sal learning how to drive with Lonzo, running over the drunk on the sidewalk, and helping Lonzo toss the body into the river. What would Uncle Rosario think if he knew Little Sal had already killed his first man?
“Should we stop calling him Little Sal? asked Cavallo.”
“It’s not as simple as a name. His first appearance in newspapers cannot be for his arrest. His path must be outside the traditional.” Uncle Rosario took another sip of Corvo, followed by a swipe of his sleeve. “You may not agree with Roosevelt, but he has the right idea. Why do you shake your head?”
“What does idiot Roosevelt have to do with my son?” asked Cavallo.
“Idiot Roosevelt is superior to idiot Mussolini in one critical way. He knows how to convince. You knew this was coming. We can’t keep doing things the old way. Your namesake, Salvatore Cavallo, will become the family’s man of honor, appearing in newspapers and magazines as the Sicilian of reform. Our family funds will push him up the ladder!”
Uncle Rosario stood. Cavallo stood, went to his uncle’s chair and they hugged. The order would be carried out. Cavallo only hoped Little Sal would stay in line until his uncle’s final stroke. It was January. Uncle Rosario had a hard time with last summer’s heat. Although it was several months away, Cavallo thought maybe this summer would finally do his uncle in.
As he escorted his uncle out of the apartment to the car and driver he knew waited in the alley, Cavallo tried to imagine Little Sal, his son, climbing a political ladder. Not a bad idea, as long as Little Sal didn’t fall. Yeah, not a bad idea he and his Uncle Rosario came up with.
Over 2,000 miles west, in the dusty town of Green River, Wyoming, a young man named Cletus Minch left the hardware store where he worked. He carried a new fishing rod he’d just purchased and was anxious to try it out. Three girls from his high school class walked along the street. Cletus coul
dn’t help staring at Rose Buckles, the center of attention. Last month a rancher got clipped by a delivery van because both the rancher and the driver were busy staring at Rose.
The setting sun was behind the girls. While the others wore slips beneath their dresses, Rose obviously wore no slip. The sight of Rose’s legs tightened Cletus’ throat as the girls approached. When they all smiled and said hi, Cletus made what he figured was a grunt.
After passing the girls he dare not turn around. Instead he walked faster, crossing the Green River bridge on his way home. To help forget about his grunt at the sight of Rose Buckles, he flipped his new rod in the air, making it sing and thinking of next morning at the river. Before going inside, he glanced back at Castle Rock standing over town like a statue, and recalled the time he and his buddies climbed it and the kid named Tom almost fell. Cletus’ mom sung out his name as the door swung closed.
Fifty miles south down the river, across the state line in the town of Manila, Utah, a young man the same age as Cletus named Decken MaCade had just gotten a ride into town for the first time. Although Decken was a new LEM (Local Experience Man) at the Manila CCC camp, he wasn’t local. The Pocatello District transferred him from Salt Lake City earlier in the week because he’d taken a few geology classes and they were blasting a road from Manila through the Uinta Mountains to Vernal. As the camp superintendent put it to Decken that afternoon, “I reckon headquarters thinks we need expertise in the geological area.” The way the superintendent emphasized expertise let Decken know where he stood.
He’d spent the day with the blasting crew from Barracks One, the guys everyone called powder monkeys. No sooner would he get ahead of the blasting to check the age of the rock, someone would be on his behind yelling, “Fire in the hole!” and he’d have to skedaddle.
That evening the powder monkeys invited Decken on a trip to downtown Manila for beer at a few bars and a gay old time at a dance hall. Instead, so-called downtown Manila consisted of rundown houses, post office, gas station, and general store. The powder monkeys bought beer at the general store, drinking it in the back of the truck on the short drive back to camp, and had a good laugh, figuring they’d lured the Mormon into their lair by the promise of Manila’s decadence. Decken turned down the beer, not because he was Mormon, but because after a day of blasting he preferred a quiet evening in the library. He found a Uintas Range geology book and cracked it open. The book seemed almost, but not quite, as old as the rock in canyons and thrust faults surrounding the place.
Chapter 10
May 2011, Sun City, Arizona. Already 100 outside, but cool in the clubhouse. Scrabble club retirees beyond library bookcases unaware of Guzzo. Amongst Scrabble entry challenges they spoke of air conditioning feeling great after a golf cart ride from condos and argued about health care. The women wanted health care for everyone. The men said Medicare benefits would suffer and universal health care would encourage illegals. One man mumbled mobsters were taking advantage of health care until his wife shushed him.
Another man with a phlegmy voice said, “At least Obama bin Laden’s dead.” A woman tersely corrected him, “You mean Osama bin Laden.” Men chuckled. Women, who outnumbered them, did not.
Guzzo grabbed a thick book from the bookcase and thumbed it in case anyone peered around the corner. Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut, plenty of murder photos. Guzzo stared at clips from the Psycho shower scene, thumbed forward to scenes of the detective knifed on the stairs, supposedly by old Mrs. Bates.
Guzzo used a knife at a Michigan job after a barroom brawl involving a second-generation researcher conveniently moved outside. Two drunks, one driving off in his pickup, allowing Guzzo to hit his mark. Afterwards Guzzo caught up to the pickup wandering all over the road, then tossed the knife, along with a worn and bloody pair of cotton work gloves, into the bed of the pickup after the guy stumbled into his house.
In Georgia he’d staged a murder-suicide with a 12 gauge double barrel, conveniently loaded with deer slugs and prominently displayed above a fireplace mantle. A white man in his 90s and his African American wife who looked 20 years younger. The house was rural and, because both yelled, Guzzo didn’t require a listening device. He recalled the wife’s final screech at her husband, whose singing in the shower sounded like a younger man with a deep voice. The guy had just finished a verse of “Stardust.” During a pause the wife moved into the bathroom.
“Jethro, I warned you! Your first set of wives left ‘cause of that goddamned caterwauling! I mean it, Jethro! I’m younger than you and I can take you on!”
Guzzo went in the unlocked back door, took the shotgun from above the mantle, sat the woman on the toilet seat, shoved the barrels into her mouth, and fired. When the shower curtain flung open, he fired the remaining slug into the chest of the old man. Old Jethro went down without hanging onto the shower curtain and ripping it off the rings. Afterward Guzzo set the scene to appear the wife fired the first shot, then sat and fired the second into her own mouth.
On the beach in Ukraine, he’d told the doctor his name was Jethro to put her off guard. The current job, here in Sun City, would be more relaxed. Fontaine, on the other side of the bookcases, was the one who’d complained about universal health care being used by mobsters. Mrs. Fontaine, who’d shushed him, was aware of the suicide weapon. Guzzo had used a long distance microphone on the golf course facing the condo to listen in when Mrs. Fontaine called her daughter-in-law several days earlier.
“Michelle, he keeps it here on the balcony.”
“Does he say what it’s for?”
“In case a wild horse runs across the golf course.”
“Horses on the golf course?”
“Talk about wild horses is from his CCC days. I tell him to shut up about it.”
“Why should he shut up, Mom?”
“Because years ago he said never let him talk about it. But since the stroke, things leak out.”
“Do you know what happened in 1939, Mom?”
“A wild horse had to be put down. There’s more but that’s all I can say about it.”
Guzzo continued flipping through Hitchcock, closer to the front of the book, back in time past Strangers on a Train and Spellbound with its Salvador Dali images of a knife cutting an eyeball, past Saboteur with the fall from the Statue of Liberty, and eventually past all the early films to the beginning of the book, where Guzzo began reading.
Eventually Scrabble boards were put away and the players left the clubhouse. Guzzo closed the book, making a mental note to look it up back home. He went out the back exit, retrieved the walking golf cart and bag he’d left there, put on the golf cap hung on the three wood, and walked behind the condos, slowly because of the god-awful heat.
Paul Fontaine’s memory was shit. At the dining room table, staring at red flowers, couldn’t remember what kind they were. When his wife leaned her cane against his walker and put a plate with a sandwich down, he peeked inside and seconds went by before the words ham and cheese came to him. Names for things were like Scrabble, trying to get a word to fit.
“Maybe we could take the shuttle into Phoenix tomorrow.”
Paul looked up. Lillian’s cane now leaned against the table on the far side beyond the nameless red flowers. “I’d rather drive, use my GPS.”
“You gave Michelle the GPS with the car.”
“I forgot. Anyway, Phoenix is nothing but shopping.”
“We have great grandchildren with birthdays. The bus drops us at the door and they have those carts you like.”
Paul clamped down, tightening his teeth and chewing his sandwich. He purposely spoke with his mouth full; it bugged the hell out of Lillian. “Okay, fine. Phoenix or bust.”
But they never made it to Phoenix. A tall young man in golf outfit came in the door, smiling like hell. Somehow, here was this guy at the side of the table, having come through the door even though Lillian always locked it. A
tattoo on the guy’s upper wrist—STORM. And he had a key. A key! The guy kept smiling and Paul thought maybe he’s supposed to know him.
“I’m here to check on things,” said the young man.
“What things?” asked Lillian.
Still smiling, the man grabbed the knife Lillian had used to cut bread, and before Paul could put his sandwich down, the man grabbed Lillian around the mouth from behind and cut her throat so that blood the color of roses—Lillian’s roses!—spurted across the tablecloth.
It was easy keeping Paul down. Despite his efforts to fight back, the man simply knocked over his chair, sat on him, and grabbed his hands, making him hold the knife. He tried to push the knife at the man, begging back younger years. He felt like a child whining for his mother. Lillian, on the far side of the table, bleeding into the carpet with eyes open, was not his mother. If only someone would help. If only guys from Barracks Three were here. If only he could do something.
The young man opened the balcony door. Paul tried crawling away, was grabbed from behind, thrown atop Lillian, roughed up. Then the rope Paul had tied to the balcony railing as a joke was around Paul’s neck and the man carried him. Paul saw the golf course due west with a couple guys looking the other way over the western horizon, the heads of their irons flashing in sunlight as they turned them round and round, contemplating their shots. He saw sky and sun and finally, nothing.
During the condo “sweep,” Guzzo noticed a printout on a stack of roadmaps in a bookcase. A CCC reunion announcement, October in Colorado. Family members invited to attend for fathers who’d passed. Guzzo recalled seeing the same announcement at another job before Ukraine. The roof job in Detroit’s Greektown surrounded by rundown neighborhoods, the old guy spry for his age, clawing the air during his fall.
Guzzo forgot about the Greek, locked the door, went down to his walking cart in the stairwell, and stepped out into the hot sun. He golfed past the pair that had been on the course when he’d hung the old man, tossed his folding cart and clubs over a section of fence hidden behind atrophied bushes, climbed the fence, put clubs and cart into his rental, switched from the golf cap to the Stetson, and drove onto the highway toward Flagstaff. He never flew out of the city where he did a job if he could help it.
The Girl With 39 Graves Page 6