by James Dargan
“That’s okay, Mr Tressle.”
The Tressles walked on.
Randall finished the bottle and went upstairs to sleep it off.
THE FUNERAL
Paulie Dimissio didn’t get an open casket at the chapel of rest – Parrino and Todaro had worked on him real good, beating his brains to a pulp, dislocating his lower jaw while smashing most of his teeth in. They had made him suffer before he died, that much was true. And that was why, as the gangster sat in St Patrick’s Church in Bensonhurst, Frank Dimissio knew who had done it. He had no proof, but he knew.
Dimissio had to go back to Arizona the following day. Quatrocchi had something important he wanted him to do in Flagstaff. Silvestri and Danello were in attendance at the funeral, the only representatives of the Quatrocchi Family. Quatrocchi Junior, the underboss, cancelled at the last minute, citing business in Baltimore as his excuse.
“I know the cocksucker who did it,” Dimissio said at the wake to Danello at the Our Lady of Loretto Social Club on New Utrecht Avenue.
“Who?” Danello asked, sitting opposite his boss at the round table, an espresso and a sizeable chocolate brownie on a plate in front of him.
“Who the fuck do you think?”
Danello wasn’t the smartest wise guy within a bunch of wise guys who didn’t have a high school diploma between them.
“I dunno, boss,” Danello said as he sipped on his coffee.
Dimissio didn’t want to name names – that could be dangerous: mobsters were a paranoid species of men, anything said could have dire consequences for the person in the future.
“You dunno?”
Rose Carnevale, a high school friend, came over.
“How you doing, Frankie?” she said to Dimissio.
Once, Dimissio had had the biggest crush on Rose Carnevale, but now the unmarried middle-aged woman was a hundred pounds on the wrong side of perfect and her skin was blotchy from smoking too many cigarettes.
“Thanks for coming, Rosie,” Dimissio said as she embraced him.
“It was an amazing service.”
“Thanks... You know Carmine, I gather?”
“Yeah. Hi, Carmy,” Rose said with a half-smile to Danello.
Dimissio’s mother, Francine Dimissio, was devastated. Her daughter, Maria, had already taken her home after a brief appearance at the gathering. She had collapsed at the cemetery as they lowered her son to the ground.
The three talked for a few moments until Silvestri came to the table.
“What is it?” Dimissio asked with a stone face.
“Can I talk to you in private, boss?”
“Yeah,” Dimissio snapped as he took out his pack of smokes.
Outside on New Utrecht Avenue the cars were buzzing past like grease lightning. On the sidewalk, too – mothers with children, grumpy Italian old-timers in flat caps and chinos and the omnipresent stinking bums, liquored-up and abusive, were a busy-body entity of humanity.
Silvestri looked at him pensively before saying:
“I might have a lead on your brother’s death?”
“What?”
“Some guy in Greenpoint said he saw your brother in a bar there in an argument with some cocksucker.”
“What bar?”
“The White Eagle Cafe – some Polack joint out on Manhattan Avenue.”
It sort of made sense to him – Paulie Dimissio had many Polish friends and business associates, and maybe one of them had a grudge on a bad property deal which had fallen through.
“And this Polack, what’s his name?”
“Jack Kasperski.”
“Where is he?”
“Listen, I gotta tipoff from Demetrio Alberti, you know him?”
“Papa Alberti’s nephew?”
Papa Alberti had the honour of being the greatest numbers runner in Bensonhurst’s history. Now, the sixty-nine-year-old was a much sought-after singer who did the circuit of all the Italian weddings in Brooklyn.
“Yeah, he was in the place at the time.”
Dimissio knew Demetrio Albertini, not well, but he knew him. This didn’t make sense: Albertini was a family man – much like his dead brother had been – and wasn’t the kind of man to be seen in a bar, let alone one full of Polacks and Micks.
“I need to talk to the prick.”
“I’ll find him.”
“Make sure you do.”
Dimissio rejoined the wake.
INTERROGATION
The last time Jack Kasperski had been strapped to a chair was in junior high when his friends had done it to him for a joke on his thirteenth birthday.
Kasperski was in darkness, afraid. He didn’t remember much, as he had been hit over the head from behind with a blunt object while coming back from his job as a clerk at Brooklyn Borough Hall.
And then there was light as Silvestri pulled the money bag used as a mask off his prisoner’s head.
A gasp followed by deep breaths as the Pole realized he was in the mire.
“Welcome,” Silvestri said to Kasperski.
“Where-am-I-and-what-have-you-done-to-me?”
Silvestri’s reinforcements walked into the room: his boss, Dimissio, as well as Mazzia and a Mazzia apprentice, Luke Spezzi, 19, an impressionable street-smart teenager whose greatest wish was to one day end up on the payroll of La Cosa Nostra.
“What can you tell me, cocksucker?” Dimissio said once he had stepped forward and Silvestri moved back. The Polack argued his case, confused, in tears and shaking, while Dimissio and his men looked on, mocking the poor man who had already soiled himself.
“Nothing, nothing, really, I tell you... I wanna go home... I wanna... go... home and-”
“Shut the fuck up motherfucker and tell him what you told me!” Silvestri said. He slapped Kasperski around the cheek. “Go on, tell him!”
The mild physical and psychological torture had been going on for hours. For a seasoned soldier, say an Allied airman captured by Japanese forces during the Second World War ‘conditioned’ to be tough, the effects would have been minimal. But the pen-pusher Pole was no war hero. Kasperski had spent the last seven years as a do-it-all do-gooder for his boss, Samuel Rawson, director of the New York City Department of Sanitation in Brooklyn as his personal secretary, and he had already broken down.
“I haven’t done anything, I swear.”
“So, you’re saying you weren’t in the White Eagle when my dead fucking brother was in there?” Dimissio went on.
“No!”
And it was all a ruse – Parrino was a favourite of Quatrocchi Junior, who was set to become boss when his old man met his maker. Quatrocchi Junior wanted Parrino as his underboss. Parrino, ever the Machiavellian, had promised Silvestri to make him a capo. Silvestri had agreed. He had told Parrino that Dimissio suspected he had whacked his brother. The two men had come up with a plan. To set Dimissio up, using the innocent Polack as the bait. Kasperski had been at home on the night Paulie Dimissio had been murdered, and even if he had been in the White Eagle Café, it was miles away in Manhattan from where Parrino and Todaro had abducted and murdered him anyway.
“Listen, you piece of shit,” Dimissio said after he had punched the Pole in the face a few times, breaking his nose, “I aiyn’t fucking playing around – who did you see with my brother?”
Thirty minutes later, and under such duress, Kasperski gave a physical description of a man he had never seen in a place he had not frequented in ten years:
Dark complexion. Italian. 175cm tall with a stocky build.
“Whatcha want me to do with him?” Silvestri said, holding his nose as the stench coming from the Polack’s ass had made the confined space they were in unbearable.
“Let the schmuck go.”
*****
“What now, boss?” Silvestri said as they were driving back to Bensonhurst.
Silvestri had given his opinion on Kasperski’s confession: that his boss had enemies in Manhattan and maybe one of them had recognized his brother and decided t
o act out in revenge: Vincent Ciullo, for one, a capo in the Cammaratta Crime Family - who he had beaten to near death when he had insulted his mother during a card game back in ’53. But he doubted it – how the hell did Ciullo know who his brother was when he had never even seen him before? It could have been one of the hundreds or more made men from one of the other three families: Cannizzaro, Galletti, Cuffaro. He just didn’t know.
“I dunno.”
“You want me to sweep the streets, see what I can come up with?”
“Yeah.”
Dimissio dropped Silvestri off outside his home. Once Dimissio had driven off, Silvestri got into his car and went to Parrino’s place at the Palermo Café.
Silvestri reported what had gone down to Parrino. His new de facto capo was disappointed: it hadn’t gone as he had planned.
“So, you aiyn’t so sure he fell for it?” Parrino asked.
“I dunno, Paulie... But I’ll tell you one thing,” Silvestri said as he chucked back the stiff whiskey Parrino had given him, “if he doesn’t come after you, every Italian mobster in NYC is gonna get it until he finds the cocksucker who done it.”
*****
It was dark by the time Silvestri left the Palermo Café, a few drinks in him but not enough to make him drunk. Silvestri lived nine blocks from the club. When he got in the car and turned on the radio, Twilight Time by the Platters was playing. He smiled, it was one of his favourites.
“Don’t fucking move, motherfucker.” Silvestri tried to move but Dimissio’s Smith&Wesson Special was pressed against the back of his head. Silvestri recognised his capo’s voice anywhere. “Hand over your piece.”
“I can explain, Frankie.”
“You better, you cocksucker.”
Silvestri talked, all the while looking out of the window to his house in the middle-class Brooklyn street he had owned with his wife for eight years. As he told Dimissio lies, his beautiful Irish wife, Mary Silvestri, and the thought if Dimissio got too ‘trigger happy’ he would never see her again – were the foremost things on his mind.
“I owed him money.”
“You owed Paul money?”
“Yeah.”
“How much?” Dimissio said as he pressed the muzzle of the gun harder against his soldier’s skull.
“A hundred and twelve large.” That number just came out. “Yeah, one hundred and twelve big ones.”
“You’re a fucking liar.”
Silvestri had never been much of an actor – his drama teacher at St Columbine’s High School, Mr Sumner, had once said he could have had some use as actor John Barrymore’s ass wipe – the comment had flown right over the young delinquent’s head, naturally.
“It’s the goddamn truth, I swear.”
Dimissio knew if he pulled the trigger he was in trouble. There was too much connecting him to what was going on between his crew and Parrino’s and his brother’s death.
“You’re a fucking liar.”
Dimissio pistol whipped him, knocking Silvestri out.
*****
“Where... are... w-we?” Silvestri said, now fully awake with a huge bump on his head and a headache to go with it.
Dimissio was in the driving seat. Silvestri, next to him.
“We’re going sunbathing.”
“Are you gonna whack me?”
“That thought had fucking crossed my mind.”
“You know you can’t – I’m a made guy.”
“Don’t get so confident, ass prick – I’m the one with the gun in my hand.”
“I know, I know.”
Dimissio had driven out in Silvestri’s car to a deserted beach in Rockaway so he wouldn’t have far to Idlewild Airport for his American Airlines flight back to Tucson in a few hours’ time. Sunset was minutes away from rising over Jamaica Bay, but the mobster was in no mood for sentimentality with his underling. He wanted some answers and he wanted them right away.
“So, are you gonna tell me the truth?”
“Goddamn it! I fucking told you all I know.” Silvestri rubbed the back of his head.
“If that hurt, this motherfucker in the brain aiyn’t gonna do you no favours,” Dimissio said.
*****
Dimissio’s mentor when he had been growing up on the streets of Bensonhurst, Tony Armone, once told him that whatever a wiseguy told you, believe the opposite:
“You see, kid,” Armone began, a soldier in capo Vito Bufalino’s crew, as he put his arm around the teenager Dimissio, a few months under the seasoned mobster’s wing, “to be a clever man of the streets - a mafiusu back in the old country – is to act in a certain way... Take them, for instance,” the Sicilian born Armone said, pointing to a group of kids similar in age to his protégé which was hanging outside an ice cream stand on the boardwalk in Coney Island, “they’re what we call make believers, not connected to no person of importance, shitstains to society, in a word – do you see, kid?” Armone wiped his brow of sweat: it was the seventh day when temperatures had climbed above ninety degrees, and New Yorkers were suffering for it.
“Yeah.”
“It’s all about what you want outta life.”
“I know.”
“You fancy a beer?” Armone asked the fifteen-year-old.
“Yeah,” Dimissio answered enthusiastically.
The teenager now realized why his old man was always busting his balls about hanging out with wise guys.
“Come with me.”
If Dimissio had walked into any saloon in any part of Brooklyn on his own or with his pals and tried to order a beer, he would have been thrown out of the door before he uttered the first syllable. But not now, because he was with someone who mattered. A man with connections. A respected and feared individual.
“Two cold ones, Charlie,” Armone said with a wry smirk to the bartender, Charles Castellini, the proprietor of The Spartan Saloon & Eatery on the Coney Island boardwalk, a place Armone had a ‘vested interest’ in.
Castellini, a native of Taranto, Apulia, hated the Sicilian Armone now because Armone had taken a big stake in his business after Castellini had got into debt. It had all started off so innocently when Armone asked his friend if he could help him out with a small loan. Castellini was happy someone was there for him at a dark time. It was only after he had trouble paying the money back that the Apulian saw the real side of the Sicilian.
“Who’s your friend?” Castellini said to Armone, eyeing Dimissio up and down.
“A friend of mine.”
“Dontcha think he’s a bit young to be drinking liquor?”
“I’m twenty-one, mister,” Dimissio said, breathing his chest out while instantly growing an inch or two as he stood on his toes.
“Just serve the drinks, Charlie,” Armone said to Castellini.
If Castellini had had the chance to do it, nothing would have given him greater pleasure than to spit in Armone’s beer. But he didn’t, unfortunately.
“Let’s sit over there,” Armone said to his young apprentice, catching a spot free by the window. The boardwalk was busy, as was always the case when beach weather descended on New York. “So, what we gonna drink to?” Dimissio didn’t know what to say as he held the glass of Brooklyn’s own Rheingold beer in his hand. “Well... I’m waiting?”
“God, I dunno, Mr Armone.”
“I told you, kid, call me Tony.”
“I dunno, Tony.”
“Just drink the thing and don’t think too much, then,” Armone answered with a smile.
*****
The sun had risen now and Dimissio was no nearer from getting some sort of truth out of Silvestri:
“Listen, I don’t wanna kill you, but the way it’s going it don’t look like I got much choice, does it?”
“You got plenty of choices – you know you aiyn’t gonna do it, ‘cause you can’t...”
Dimissio had to think quick: to kill or not to kill, that was the question.
“Why did you do it?”
“What?” Silvestri said,
shrugging his shoulders in a cold indifference.
“You’re a goddamn sonofabitch for making me do it. Do you even care?”
“Listen, let me go.”
“How much has that cocksucker paid you?”
“I aiyn’t for sale, Frankie, you should know that.”
Dimissio had only one choice and he knew that Silvestri knew it. A made man was made till the day he died and couldn’t be touched other than off the orders of the boss. And anyway, Dimissio didn’t want to kill Silvestri: fuck him up for life, maybe, but not kill him. That thought was held for Parrino, the man who had whacked his brother. What he had to do was fly back to Tucson and get Quatrocchi in his corner.
JUSTIN
He had driven the five-hundred miles to California out of solemn desperation. In some way, it was his absolution and the rekindling of his spiritual side which had died suddenly when his wife passed. In another way, it was his goodbye, on terms acceptable to him and only him. His other daughter, Eve, didn’t want to speak to him under any circumstances, but Melissa had sent the faintest of signals, and he hoped for the best. The times the Randalls had spent in the Coronado National Forest camping when they had first arrived in Arizona were imprinted indelibly on the ex-cop’s mind.
Los Angeles, the city of dreams and Hollywood, the place they were broken, too. Randall had hopes as well: to see his first grandchild. Before all that, though, he wanted to relax a bit, take in the sights and see what all the fuss was about.
“I’d like a room for the night?” Randall said to the unsightly man on reception at the Moonlight Motel on the Sunset Strip.
“You got any pets?”
“No.”
“And how you paying – in cash or by cheque?”
“Cash.”
“Sign in,” the man said as he opened the guest book and thrust it in front of Randall.
“I’ve got a question,” Randall asked, taking the pen off the man.
“Yeah?”
“Do you do a wake-up call service?” The receptionist looked at Randall strangely. “Something wrong?” Randall added.
“Yeah, we can do that if you wanna.” Randall paid for his room and took the key. “Turn left at the door and just walk on down. Room 17’s just around the corner.”