Butcher's Road (5 page)

Butch explained what had happened at Musante’s in as much detail as he could manage. Reciting it back to Rory, hearing it all out loud, Butch found every moment implausible. Unreal. Rory wasn’t helping much. His face was like a mask, showing no more emotion than he would if he were listening to someone complaining about the fish at a restaurant he had no intention of visiting. Butch ended the story and leaned forward making a bridge of his hands and resting his upper lip against it.

“And you came here?” Rory said, dryly. He leaned against the doorjamb and shook his head. “I can’t have you here.”

“I’m not looking for a hideout, Rory,” Butch said. “I just didn’t know where else to go.”

“Tell me about the cops.”

“What cops? After the shooter killed Musante, I ran. I didn’t stick around until the cops came.”

“You dumb sack of horse meat,” Rory said, “The shooters were the cops.”

Butch looked up stunned. “That isn’t right. Not right at all. How do you figure?”

“Because your name’s all over the radio. The cops said they walked in on the murder, so if you didn’t do it, then they did.” The Irishman lowered the gun and stepped away from the door. “Get your kit together and come on out to the office. I’ll put some coffee on.”

“I should go,” Butch muttered as if speaking to himself. Rory didn’t need this kind of trouble.

“Oh, you’ll go. But it sounds like you’re up to your eyes, and the only thing panic is going to get you is more panic. So let’s take a few minutes to think things through before you go tearing out of here.”

“Sure,” Butch said. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me,” Rory said, “My opinion isn’t going to change your luck. They’re still going to fry your ass if they get their hands on you.”

With that, Rory left the doorway and a stunned Butch, who covered his face with his palms and scrubbed viciously as if his troubles were a film of dirt he could remove with a bit of elbow grease. Except these troubles were in deep, a stain. If Musante was right, Butch should have been dead on the floor alongside the ugly old man. But why?

He pushed himself off of the cot and stretched out his back. A twinge of pain shot up his left knee from where he’d landed in the alley after escaping his apartment. Compared to his ear, which stung like hell, the minor twinge was hardly a concern. He shook it out and walked through the lighted gym. In the office, Rory had already set a percolator on the electric burner he kept on top of his filing cabinet. Photographs, yellowing newspaper clippings, and post bills with Ripper Sullivan’s name printed in big black letters cluttered three of the walls. A half wall, open from waist level to ceiling, squared off the fourth side of the room. Rory kept his desk against the partition so he could collect dues from the men entering the gym and so he could keep an eye on his equipment. Unlike the walls, the desktop was clear—the wood dry and split like Lonnie Musante’s kitchen floor.

“I didn’t mean to bring this mess in here,” Butch said. “I should get going.”

“Sit your rump down,” Rory said.

Butch hesitated. He wrung his hands and then smoothed the hair on the back of his head.

“Sit,” Sullivan repeated. Butch did as he was told. “What did I always say about the first thing you do when you get into a ring?” Rory asked. “And I don’t mean that exhibition nonsense; I mean a real match.”

“Size up your opponent,” Butch said.

“That’s right. Glad you remembered something useful.”

“But how am I supposed to size this up? None of it makes sense. The Irish? The Italians? The cops? I haven’t stepped wrong since I got into town, haven’t skimmed so much as a nickel. I play the game clean.”

“Bodies stacking up in barber shops and on the sidewalks and you think it’s a game?”

“You know what I mean.” He wasn’t in the mood for a semantics lecture.
Any
lecture.

“No, I don’t,” Rory snapped. “I don’t know what you mean. Fill me in. How is this a game, Butch? I offered you work at the gym five minutes after you settled in town. Solid work. Real work. I told you to get away from Powell, but you laughed. What did you tell me? You told me you weren’t really involved.”

“I’m not,” Butch said. “I bounce at his club, and sometimes I collect a few bucks.”

“Every tooth in a shark’s mouth is involved. You think you just go along for the ride and no blood gets on you?”

Butch lowered his head. He felt cornered, and a hot rage boiled up the back of his skull. “Rory, we should talk about something else.”

“You telling me I’m wrong?”

“No,” Butch said. He couldn’t even comfort himself with denial. Like Rory said, he was in the shark’s mouth and he was there of his own choosing, but Jesus if that explained what was happening to him. “The other way around. I know you’re right and it makes me gut sick. But it’s done. Now I’ve got to deal with it. That doesn’t mean I have to go over it a hundred times.”

“Well, you don’t have the luxury of letting this one slide, Butch. You need to size up your opponent and find a hold that’ll take him down.”

“Between the cops and the gangs there are about two thousand opponents, Rory. And if you heard about this on the radio, then that number is just getting bigger while I sit here.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“I don’t know.”

Rory lunged forward and slapped the side of Butch’s head. “You’d better know something, Butch. Now what’s your plan?”

Grateful his friend hadn’t hit his bad ear, but distracted by a ringing the attack had brought to his head, Butch sat back in the chair. How could he have a plan? He’d only just found out the extent of his problems. Rory crossed his arms and sat up straight and glared, wanting an answer. He had to say something.

“I’m going back to my room. I’ve got some money stashed there. When the bank opens, I’m going to get that money out, too, and then take a train east. I’ll catch a boat, go back to Paris. I did a tour there…know some people. I can lay low.”

“Except you can’t,” Rory countered. He stood and poured coffee into two tin cups. He handed one to Butch and said, “The police are involved. They’re already at your place, and anything you think you want,
they’ve
already got it. You walk into that bank, and they’ll walk out
with
you. You walk through the doors of that train station and—”

“Okay,” Butch barked. “I get it.” But the import of what his friend was saying had only just reached him, the cry inciting an avalanche. Everything he had, every
damn
thing, was gone, and if not gone, inaccessible, which was the same thing. Years of work and saving and living like a bum just to have enough money for a house, and peace, and quiet… Meaningless. Wasted.

“But why is this happening?” he asked. How had he crossed Powell or Impelliteri in the first place?

“What makes you think there is a why?” Rory asked. “Case you haven’t been paying attention, your buddies don’t make up the sanest group of folks this side of the Mississippi. They get ideas—foul, rotten ideas. They get these ideas and they can’t get rid of them until they do something about them.”

Butch nodded his head, but the explanation fell short. The Italians and the Irish gunned each other down the way most people did their laundry, but there was always a reason—even if it wasn’t particularly rational.

“So what do I do?” he asked.

“Right now, this city is your opponent, and it’s too big and too well-trained for you to do anything but forfeit.”

“I told you I was leaving,” Butch said.

“Okay.” Sullivan shrugged. “Where are you thinking of going? With no money and little chance of finding enough work to feed yourself?”

“Does it matter? I can’t stay here. Maybe I’ll head south and see if I can pick up with one of the carny tours. I can’t take the chance with a vaudeville troupe or serious promoter up this way. They’re all tied into the syndicates.”

“What about that sister you used to talk about?”

“First place they’d look, and I haven’t spoken to her in a long time.”

Not since the fight. Not since the night he’d rushed her to the doctor. A sudden flash of memory—split knuckles, his sister screaming, so much blood. After what he’d done, she wouldn’t welcome him at the door, not unless she was holding a rifle to his chest when she did it.

“Any other family?”

“None that could help.”

“Friends?”

“They’re all on the circuits,” Butch said. “No place to hide. Too many eyes.”

“Okay,” Rory said. “Okay. Okay. Let’s circle this thing, eye its backside. What was in the package?”

“Huh?”

“The package,” Rory repeated. “You said Musante handed you the package before he got himself shot, so what was in the package that’s so god damn important?”

“Nothing,” Butch said, “I mean, I don’t know. Just some ugly piece of jewelry. No diamonds or rubies on it. Looks like lead—ugly rusted lead.”

“You got it on you?”

“Yeah, I got it,” he said and reached into his pocket.

Butch withdrew the pendant, and handed it across, laying the chain over Rory’s thick palm. The man sneered and squinted and tested the ornament’s weight in his palm before shrugging again and handing it back to Butch. “You’re right. It doesn’t look like much. Musante say where he got it?”

“I don’t even think he looked inside the package,” Butch said. “I think someone handed it off to him, and he handed it off to me.”

“Sounds like a hell of a puzzle for a few fillings worth of metal.”

“I’m thinking I should send it on to Powell. Might take the heat off.”

“Don’t be feeble,” Sullivan scolded. He huffed out a breath and looked away in frustration like a disappointed parent. “Those two cops expected to walk away with that thing last night, and they didn’t expect to leave anyone who’d touched it breathing. And don’t count on this being Powell’s racket. It could be Impelliteri and the Italians. Either way, the cops and the gangs are the same thing. I don’t trust the cops in this town any further than I can piss, but they follow the money and do what they’re told. You work a deal with whichever side wants that thing, and this Musante business will go away.”

“If I live long enough to make the deal.”

“Finish your coffee,” Rory said. “I think I can get you out of the city, and I have a good idea about where you should go.”

“Where’s that?”

“New Orleans. I’ve got a friend down that way named Rossington. Owes me a favor or two.”

“Name’s familiar.”

“He was a second-tier grappler. Had a lot of flash and style. Not much on the technical side, but he was good with the crowd.”

“Why’d he throw it in?”

“Couldn’t really get used to the life.”

Butch didn’t like the sound of this. Rory was the straightest arrow he’d ever met, but putting his life in the hands of a stranger at this point, after what he’d already endured, was just plain foolish. “You trust him?”

“Like I said, he owes me. I’ll call ahead.”

Butch would keep it in mind. It was a long shot, but maybe his only shot. He needed time to think it through. Another concern was at the top of his mind. “Rory, I hate to ask, but I need you to do something else. It’s important, and if it doesn’t help me, maybe it will help you.”

He leaned over the edge of the desk and whispered to Rory, the way he would if they sat in a crowded room, surrounded by strangers. Butch told his friend about the loose board under the davenport in his apartment, told him about the money.

“Maybe the cops won’t find it. Once things cool down, you could go by my place and pick it up.”

“And you want me to send it along?”

“Unless things go south,” Butch said. “Then you keep it. There isn’t enough money in the world if things go south.”

Detective Roger Lennon sits in an armchair. He wears a cream-colored cotton robe. A white bandage wraps his head like a turban and blends seamlessly with the lace doily draped over the back of the chair. Smoke rises in a twisting column from the cigarette he’s placed in the crystal ashtray on the table beside him. His daughters sit on the floor at his feet. Both wear crisp, golden-yellow dresses tied at the waist with white sashes. Their hair has been parted down the middle and pulled into pigtails. They look up at him, mouths open, bombarding him with questions. Edie leans over him from the back; her arms rest on his chest and her lips are pressed in a kiss against the strip of bandage above his ear. The corners of his mouth are lifted in a shallow smile. His gaze is distant, removed, as if staring at something miles away, like a convict imagining a field of grass, an open road, a room built of anything but concrete and steel bars.

A man in a double-breasted, forest-green suit stands before the door of a crematorium. Flames jump behind the grate. A blanket of coal and coal-coke glows orange at the bottom of the incinerator. The name etched into the clay pad nestled beside the cheap wooden casket reads
Musante
. Fire climbs the coffin’s sides. Smudges of char ring the box in black waves. The observer’s name is Marco Impelliteri. His hair is thick and the salt and pepper strands lie neatly against his head. Agitation is clearer on his face than grief. He clutches a crucifix in his plump palm, which he holds firmly against his hip.