The Case

by Leopold Borstinski

  “Do you realize that unless you report me to the police right now you’ll be guilty of conspiring with me to kill Axel?”

  “Well put. Does he have to die? Can he not be hurt until he agrees to a divorce?”

  “No, I want him punished. He must suffer as he has made me suffer.”

  “And you think I’m the best man for this job?”

  “I don’t know, to be honest, but you come recommended by a friend of a friend which makes you the best chance I have to be rid of that man.”

  I thought for a minute because I’d never been paid to murder before. Sure I’d killed in Korea, but that was different. I was mighty tempted by the dough and the cash could be useful seed capital to head east at some point.

  The clincher? The pitiful, distraught face sat on the other side of my desk. At that moment, I’d have done anything to bring relief to that pained expression, that anguished howl of a woman.

  “We will not meet here again, understand? And you will not be a client of mine during the process either.”

  “I got it.”

  “After it is over, we will never see or communicate with each other again.”

  “Sure.”

  “Most important is that we don’t write anything down. You will tear up any piece of paper you have with my name or number on it. I will take no notes. I am saying this because there must be absolutely no trail of evidence that connects us. Nothing.

  “What we are embarking on is a very dangerous state of affairs and each needs to be protected from the other in case the police investigation uncovers you or I as being involved. Understood?”

  “Why yes, Jake.”

  “Good. I am going to take most of the money now so we won’t have any problems later with the financial side of the business.”

  “Okay, but...”

  “Don’t worry, Axel will be dead within a week. I don’t welch on a deal and there’s no way I’m gonna want this matter to hang around me any longer than it needs to. The more time I spend on it, the greater my chances of getting caught.”

  Alice then gave me loads of details of where Axel worked, what he did and didn’t like and as much as she knew of his paramours. After an hour we were through and I detailed an arrangement for the two of us to contact each other. She cried some more and we shook hands. Not quite a blood pact, but sufficient for our needs. Now we both knew a deal was a deal; we were committed.

  THE WAY I figured: Axel was a slimeball and probably deserved to die. The memories of the horrors I’d seen in Korea were still relatively fresh and my respect for human life had yet to be fully rebuilt.

  With Axel’s office as my starting point, all I had to do the next day was to follow him from home for a while and get used to his movements. My plan was to find a slot when he was alone and then do the deed without any witnesses.

  The majority of the day was spent in his office, which meant most of my time was spent in my car, scrunched into the driver’s seat with my knees embedded in the steering wheel. There was nothing I could do: I needed to be ready, with only a few seconds warning, in case he flew the nest. But he didn’t. Nor on Tuesday, nor the Wednesday. I was wondering if Alice had been making the whole thing up when I got a break on Thursday. Until then, Axel had worked late, driven home and spent the rest of the evening with Alice. Then repeat.

  Thursday, he left the office around four and took a left, rather than his usual right, out of the car lot. As soon as I saw that, I knew this would be an interesting afternoon’s drive round town. Ten, maybe fifteen, minutes later and he stopped in the middle of a residential street: we’d been driving through the burbs for at least five minutes by then.

  He parked outside a rundown house with a tired picket fence with long grass for a front lawn. Straight to the front door and a confident rat-a-tat-tat with his knuckles to announce his arrival. No doorbell for Mr. Lechuga.

  A half a minute later, the door opened a woman’s head popped round to see who was there. A smile, a grab of Axel’s head and he was dragged straight into the house, swallowed up by that briefly open door. I glanced at my watch to get a sense of quite how long he was inside, but after best part of an hour, truth was that I got bored.

  The private eye manual told me to stay put and wait for Axel’s return, because there was nothing I could do with what he was doing inside that fair maiden’s home. But I went for a look-see, anyway. Like I said, I was bored.

  I scouted round to the back of the property and squatted by a tree so I could get a crafty look into the kitchen. Nothing. More scurrying and a hedge gave me cover to crouch and stare into the living room.

  To my surprise, I saw the two of them on a sofa; I thought they’d have gone straight upstairs to bed, but yet again, my knowledge of human nature failed me. To be more precise, I saw Axel’s ass cheeks moving in and out, while his pants and shorts dangled round his ankles. Meanwhile, the owner of the house had her legs akimbo with her panties hanging like a thread off one ankle while her hands gripped tightly to Axel’s ass. I caught sight of one wobbling tit but most of the time, Axel’s body got in the way for me to see anything more. She had long dark brown or black hair, which engulfed Axel’s head from time to time.

  They carried on like this for several minutes until Axel arched his back and halted immediately afterwards. He fell off her and turned to land on the sofa, legs outstretched, spent. The woman let her legs fall to the ground and also just sat there, stretched out.

  A MINUTE OR two went by with nothing but two naked people resting after an exhausting fuck. Then I noticed that Axel’s hand wondered towards the woman’s crotch and he started to finger her without moving the rest of his body. She edged her body towards him - only an inch or two, mind - to make things easier for him and then she raised her hand and used her fingers to manipulate his dick. You didn’t need to be a sex counselor to understand they were about to embark on round two.

  I stuck around for the second show but when the third show started up, I realized this would be a long night, so I returned to my car and drove round until I found a store to buy more cigarettes and a bite to eat.

  Sure enough, Axel’s car was still parked where he’d left it. Presumably, they either reached round seven, or they had something to eat themselves, because he only left a few minutes before midnight. This much sex with his mistress explained why he had no energy to do anything with Alice.

  When Axel left, he drove straight home and stayed until the morning when he got up and headed to work, like normal. Friday was a repeated sex session, but he played the family man at the weekend. Monday, Tuesday: mistress; Thursday through to the Sunday night: Alice.

  As Alice had said, there was no discernible pattern in his movements. Chances were he’d get a call from the mistress and hightail it round to get himself some love action and spend the rest of the week pining for her and recharging his energy.

  The best opportunity I had was to take him out on his way to or from the mistress. The latter sounded a better plan because he never left before eleven at night and there would be few people around then. Also, the guy would be extraordinarily tired and his reactions would be slower. This would give me the advantage of surprise and of speed. My odds were improving all the time.

  Before I carried out my plan, I wanted to find out a bit more about the woman he was banging, other than she had long black hair and a sexy bush. And I am glad I did.

  41

  THE FIRST TRICK when you want to learn about a total stranger is to use the reverse phone directory. This is a book containing people’s names, addresses and phone numbers. Usually, you have a name and look up the number, but the reverse directory operates the other way round and if you have the patience, you can sit down and stare at the damn thing until you spot the address you’ve written on your scrap piece of paper.

  Two days of staring at lists of addresses delivered me my answer: the dame was called Angie Greene. To the ordinary detective, that would be the end of the discussion, but if you live in LA
, you need to know about the local rackets.

  Mickey Cohen had been in jail for almost two years but his reach stretched way beyond his cell door. Mickey controlled almost all the organized crime which took place in the city, although I’m pleased to say I never met the guy.

  Ever since he’d gone inside for tax invasion - like Capone before him - day-to-day matters had been handled by others, but he still pulled the strings. His number two, Frank Bompensiero had taken over the operation and Bomp, as he was known, kept a close eye on all of Cohen’s empire, including the girlfriends of the key members of the Family. If you lived in LA and you mixed in certain circles, as I did, you understood how the wheels of the city continued to turn. And I knew Angie was one of Bomp’s skirts.

  These facts added up to a whole new way to kill Axel and I wouldn’t need to be anywhere near him when he visited Satan. And that’s exactly where he’d be going.

  Axel worked at a company that sold water purifying units. Big whoop. The interesting thing about this dull product was that sewerage plants used them so they were big business. In a city like Los Angeles, water was more valuable than oil, so if you could clean up the equivalent of oil then you ruled the roost.

  Mickey Cohen’s mob had its octopus arms all over the sewerage business and anything that can create clean water would have been on their watch list. And this gave us the connection between Axel and Angie: they will have met through some mobster, who knew Bomp.

  Angie was something special: a real moll’s moll. Rumor had it she grew up in Chicago, had mixed with the gangsters on the wrong side of the tracks and had gone further west to Vegas to hustle her way through the Flamingo and as many johns as her body could muster. And then onto the west coast where she buzzed her way around many a barfly until she settled in LA and met Bomp and his merry band. The rest, as they say, is history and takes us to about five minutes before Axel bumped into Bomp’s gal.

  Later, I heard Axel was invited to a mob party because he was supplying them with a hundred plus machines to clean sewerage plants across the LA area. Like everyone else there, he drank a large quantity of vodka martinis and supped from many a young lady, hired for the night to keep the broadly male attendees physically content. Angie was primarily there for Bomp but obviously she strayed off the script when she met Axel and left the party early with him to squeeze his wallet dry.

  LOVE BLOOMED FROM this chance encounter - or at least lust flourished, which is nearer the truth. They both enjoyed each other’s body and had fun together. Angie had more to lose as she was seeing Axel behind Bomp’s back, but Bomp was only concerned she was there when he wanted her. And that was every other Friday evening when the mobsters took out their girlfriends instead of their wives.

  The rest of the time Angie was free to do what she wanted and Bomp kept her in the lifestyle to which she became accustomed. She was no better able to look after these new expensive nice things than when she was a five dollar hooker. That explained the rundown shack she called home.

  Perhaps the most remarkable aspect to their affair was Axel’s ability to carry on doing business with Bomp, while fucking the guy’s girlfriend behind his back. Part of me always wondered if Angie didn’t so much bump into Axel as much as she was placed there carefully by Bomp to keep an eye on an important asset for the water purification plants. No disrespect to Axel: he was a fine looking guy, but nothing that special to write home about. Just another Latino guy on the cusp of going to seed.

  The other fact worth remembering was that water purification was - and is - much more than an industry utility. In a city like LA, the entire area lives and dies on how much water gets transported into the city. Whoever controls the water, controls the city completely. Mickey Cohen’s stranglehold on LA came directly from his management of the clean water supply, so Axel might have had a slight paunch and be shtupping his girlfriend, but Axel also held the key to millions of extra dollars of revenue. For a man like Bomp that made Axel worth keeping alive. At least while the water kept flowing.

  Rumor around town was that Bomp had expanded Mickey’s empire in two ways. First, he’d leveraged many of Mickey’s Hollywood contacts to increase the volume of cocaine and heroine transported into the city each year. And the dealers were household names: genius.

  Second, Bomp had maneuvered mob guys into key positions in the water utilities and purification plants. In hindsight, this was when the Mafia took a real stranglehold on the most powerful state in the union.

  I reported back to Alice, so she’d get ready for the next, and much more dangerous, phase of the operation: the murder itself. We had agreed that if I needed to speak with her, I’d drop a five dollar bill inside her morning paper once it was lying on her doormat.

  Then Alice would make her way to a coffee shop across town. We’d choose a different place each time we met so there’d be no pattern to follow and the cops would have to ask a lot of waiters before they’d find two who had seen us conspiring together before the job. Simple, elegant but hardly original. Like Alice herself.

  CAFÉ ROSETTA WAS my choice for our first hook up mainly because I’d never been there and I had found it by closing my eyes and slamming my finger down on its entry in the phone directory. Again, the randomness of the venue limited the chances of anyone recognizing us when we were there.

  Sure enough, the coffee was decent, Alice arrived on time and our booth was sufficiently comfortable and private for no-one to pay us no never mind.

  “How’s it going?”

  “All is fine, Alice. Don’t worry.”

  “I thought, when you sent your message, that something was up.”

  “Oh no. Quite the opposite, really.” Beat. “First things first: I have seen Axel with another woman. You were right, he is having an affair.”

  “Sonofabitch.”

  Over the years, I’ve learned to let that information hang in the air a while because, like pigeon feathers, thoughts take a while to settle down after hearing those words. If you want cool heads, create a cool environment. So, I sat quietly for a spell, stirring my coffee to cool it down while hoping the same was happening to Alice’s rekindled rage.

  “Are you still interested in pursuing our... arrangement?”

  “Goddamn right I am. Son of a bitch definitely deserves to meet his maker.”

  “Fine. In that case, I should warn you that soon your wish will be my command. When we leave Rosetta, there will be no turning back. Within twenty-four hours Axel will be no more, so if you are not certain, now genuinely is the right time to mention it. Tomorrow will be too late, okay?”

  “Jake, I completely understand our situation and I thank you for trying to protect me from my own desires, but I want that man dead and I want it to happen as soon as possible.” These last words were barely audible: Alice’s voice had lost all its power and, through gritted teeth, all I could hear was a hoarse whisper.

  “Good. Then you can expect a call very shortly when I collect the second installment of my money.” To save problems later - like Alice deciding she didn’t want to pay me after all - I took three quarters of my service fee up front. But that still left a sum to pick up after the deed was done.

  Last, I gave Alice the random venue for our next rendezvous and as she’d arrived second, I stood up, pecked her gently on the cheek, threw down enough greenbacks to cover the check along with a healthy tip and walked out the Café Rosetta, never to see it again in my life.

  One thing: as I bent down to kiss Alice on the cheek, I inhaled her perfume, which tasted divine. With that, my nostrils flared, and I inhaled her scent deeply and wanted a further taste. But this was not the time and certainly not the place. Quite sensibly, I didn’t look back.

  My plan was simple, which meant there was little to go wrong and, even if it did, I had a perfectly serviceable plan B.

  Plan A was to drop a line to Bomp and tell him what his water cleaning pal, Axel was up to with his moll. I figured this information would have been enough to get Axel clip
ped by Bomp’s gang. Plan B was the original idea: I’d take the guy out myself.

  NOT FOR THE first time in my life, I headed for the Italian quarter to find a guy called Giuseppe. The inevitable consequence of the journey meant I was stood in a small room, while a guy with olive skin and way too much grease in his black hair eyed me up and down with total disdain in his expression. I didn’t mind because I wasn’t going to ask him for a favor, so I was safe.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t. I’m just a fella who wants to share what he knows with people he thinks should hear what he has to say.”

  “And that would be me, would it?”

  “Hope so. I reckon it is, yeah.”

  Steely eyes stared at me as the goon tried to figure out if I was a stand-up guy or a tire kicker.

  “And what do you know you think’s so important?”

  “I know who Angie Greene is fucking and I’m not talking about any Italian man, if you get my drift.”

  The dude sat up straight in his chair, partly because I had referenced the great man Bomp himself and partly because of the incendiary implication of my comment. I offered more details so he believed my claim and I could show I was to be taken seriously.

  “And why do you feel the need to give up this information without even asking for a payment or nothing?”

  “Don’t like the guy she’s with and I’m hoping he might meet with an accident sometime soon.”

  He nodded, understanding my motivation easily, and then we parted company. Job done.

  Two days went by and I carried on my surveillance operation, following Axel from his office back home and on the second day, he scooted round to Angie’s for a quickie. Apart from that, nothing happened. I had hoped the mob would operate at a faster pace than this, but no joy.