Parker16 Butcher's Moon (19 page)

Because Buenadella's entire operation was legal, other money from less legal sections of Lozini's overall structure could be siphoned through Buenadella and thus brought back into legitimate trade. Buenadella had an agreed right to a skim on that money, and all in all was doing very well. But he wanted more.

He thought of himself, in his more solemn moments, as representing the wave of the future. In the old days the rackets had been disorganized, competitive, bloodthirsty. Then, mostly because of the pressures of Prohibition, the boys began to get together, to organize themselves and become more efficient for more profit. After Prohibition, there was a gradual movement out of the traditional rackets and into more and more legitimate enterprises; first as a cover for the real operation, later as a way to explain income to Internal Revenue, and more recently as a simple, sensible business way to deal with the profits through reinvestment.

And the next move, it seemed to Buenadella, was to make the legitimate parts of the operation dominant, with the rackets simply in support, to provide capital when needed and strong- arm when needed and political clout when needed, but not ever to be the main concern. And if the legitimate operations were to take over as the primary function, then the best leader at any level was a man whose own piece of the pie was completely legit. A man like himself.

Al Lozini was on the way out, he was going anyway, getting old, overstaying his welcome. Buenadella was interested in hurrying him a little, but that was all, and the only reason to do that was to be sure nobody else got the idea to take Lozini's place for himself. Somebody like Ernie Dulare, for instance, or, maybe later on, Ted Shevelly.

And being the new breed, the businessman rather than the racketeer, he had chosen a good traditional business method for replacing the man ahead of him: co-opt his assistants, drain his economic strength, make private arrangements with his associates. He had spent nearly three years on the operation, moving very slowly, like a fox testing the ice across $ frozen river; never pushing, never forcing the issue, never succumbing to impatience and old-line strong-arm tactics. The final stage was to be the replacement on Tuesday of Lozini's mayor by Buenadella's mayor, to be followed by a meeting with Lozini in which he would be shown that the war was already over, that there was nothing for him to do but retire. Away from Tyler, far away. Florida, maybe. Or maybe he'd like to see Europe; Buenadella could recommend a trip like that. Cultural, healthful, a first-rate Investment all the way around.

How smooth it had been, and how simple. And how stupidly It had fallen apart, with one little push from an unexpected quarter.

That goddam money from the amusement park. Seventy- three thousand, and less than half of it had wound up in the Farrell campaign. The rest had greased the ways here and there, minor payoffs, a nice piece to Harold Calesian, smaller pieces to u couple of other cops, a little hush-money piece to a Lozini soldier named Tony Chaka, a handling portion for Buenadella himself. And the fact is, it hadn't even been needed. The goddam money was just a happy surprise, it hadn't been anticipated, they could have gotten along just as well without it.

A happy surprise. With another surprise in its wake, in the two guys named Parker and Green.

Now, all of a sudden, everything was up in the air. That asshole Calesian was out shooting cops, Lozini was getting nervous and suspicious, Farrell was risking his Mr. Clean image, and it had become necessary for Buenadella himself to give up business methods and go back to the blunter systems of simpler days, to put out a hit order.

He still wouldn't do it on local people, on Lozini or Frank Faran or Ernie Dulare. But these strangers, a couple of shirttail heist artists without connections, they were dangerous alive and nobody would miss them if they were dead. But when the hell would Abadandi get around to finishing them off?

Maybe not until after they'd come here, to this actual house, sent by that yellow bastard Farrell. So Buenadella had some phone calls to make, a reception to organize.

He was still holding the receiver in his left hand. He counted to five after finishing the conversation with Farrell, then lifted his right hand from the cradle and poised his finger at the dial, waiting for the hum.

It didn't happen. Silence on the line. Buenadella frowned, clicked the receiver twice, and had a sudden flashing image of Parker and Green cutting the phone line, isolating him in here.

Then a voice said, "Hello?"

"What?" Buenadella felt himself getting red in the face; this last annoyance was the one too many, the straw that broke the camel's back. "What the fuck is going on?" he yelled.

The voice said, "Dutch? Is that you?"

"Who is this? Farrell?" Though it didn't sound like him.

"No. You know who this is."

Then he did finally recognize the voice: Calesian. "For Christ's sake," he said. "Now what?"

"Get to a clean phone," Calesian said. "I have to talk to you."

"There are no clean phones," Buenadella said angrily, "and I don't have time. I got problems of my own."

"I'll have to come over. This is important."

"You
do that. Now hang
up,
I've got calls to make."

"I'll be there in ten minutes."

"Hang-up!"

Calesian hung up, and Buenadella depressed the cradle again, once more breaking the connection. As he did so, a voice from the French doors behind him said, "Now you hang up."

"Cocksucker," Buenadella said, and threw the phone at the nearest painting of Montmartre.

Twenty-six

As he stepped through the open French doors behind Parker, Grofield thought,
Good God, it's a stage set. And not a very good one.

The room was a disaster, a combination of so many misunderstandings and misconceptions that it practically became a work of art all in itself, like the Watts Towers. It was a den, or studio, or office-away-from-office; called by the family "Daddy's room," no doubt.

The walnut-veneer paneling, very dark, made the already small square room even smaller and squarer, darkening it to the point where even a white ceiling and a white rug would have had a hard time getting some light into the room. Instead of which, the ceiling was crisscrossed with Styrofoam artificial wooden beams, k la restaurants trying for an English-country- inn effect, and the two-foot-by-four-foot rectangles between the beams had been painted in a kind of peach or coral color; Consumptive's Upchuck was the color description that came to Grofield's mind. While the floor was covered with an oriental rug featuring dark red figures on a black background, with a dark red fringe buzzing away all the way around.

Would there be a kerosene lamp with green glass shade, converted to electricity? Yes, there would, on the mahogany table to the right, along with the clock built into the side of a wooden cannon; above these on the wall were the full-color photographs of The Guns That Won the West lying on beds of red or green velvet.

The man in the middle of the room, hurling his telephone at the opposite wall, went with the room so totally that Grofield was almost ready to believe he and Parker had come to the wrong house. This was a businessman, a Kiwanian, a blunt Tuscan pillar of the community, a property holder and a taxpayer, a man with proctological problems. If Grofield hadn't heard Buenadella's conversation on the phone, and if he wasn't watching the man throw the telephone with such force that the wire ripped from the wall and the cradle smashed that sloppy watercolor of Avenue Junot, he'd think they must have made a mistake, this couldn't be a hood named Buenadella, the one wresting control from Lozini.

But then Buenadella turned around to face them, and Grofield revised his opinion. There was a heaviness in the jaw, a coldness in the eyes, a hulking in the shoulders, none of them attributes a legitimate businessman would have permitted himself. This was a man who was used to getting his own way, not through argument or money, but through intimidation. He reminded Grofield of a mobster named Danamato he'd met once In Puerto Rico. There'd been trouble when Danamato had convinced himself that Grofield had killed Mrs. Danamato, and talking sense to him had been like explaining algebra to a brick.

Grofield wondered if Buenadella would be equally thick. He was starting off dumb enough; pointing a thick finger at them, he yelled, "All right, you bastards, you've fucked things up enough around here! You get out of town in the next forty-five minutes and you just may get to live a little longer."

Neither Parker nor Grofield was showing any guns, but they froth had them available if necessary. Once inside the room, Parker moved to the left while Grofield pulled the French doors closed and then moved to the right. Parker said, "Sit down, Buenadella. It's time for us to talk."

"I don't talk to punks! Get out of here and keep going!"

Casually, Grofield took from his pocket Abadandi's wallet and tossed it on the desk. "You'll probably want to send that to Abadandi's next of kin," he said.

Buenadella frowned, massively, his whole face shifting downward. "What?"

"With a nice letter," Grofield added. "Proud of your boy, first-class soldier, died saving his platoon, great loss, will be missed. They can frame it, hang it over the mantelpiece."

Buenadella stepped closer to the desk, picked up the wallet, opened it, and looked at a couple of the documents within. Parker and Grofield waited him out, till at last he lifted his head and glared at Grofield. "Where'd you get this?"

"Off a dead man."

"I don't believe it."

Grofield shrugged.

Buenadella studied him, thinking it over, and then tossed the wallet contemptuously back onto the desk. "There's more men where he came from," he said.

Grofield smiled. "Are they just as good?"

"We'll try them ten at a time," Buenadella said.

Parker took a step closer to him. "You won't try them at all," he said. "We're here with you, all by yourself. We can finish it right now."

Buenadella moved his heavy look from Grofield to Parker. "I don't have anything to finish with you."

"Seventy-three thousand dollars."

"Stolen goods," Buenadella said. "You don't have any claim on the money, and there's no proof I ever saw or touched or spent a dollar of it. You want to take me to court?"

"You're in court right now," Parker said.

Grofield, sincerely trying to be helpful, said, "Mr. Buenadella, a little piece of advice. My friend is a very impatient man. I don't know anybody who handles frustration worse than he does. He's been very calm up till now, he hasn't made any trouble, but I think—"

"No trouble!" Buenadella seemed honestly astounded, surprised right out of his tough-guy role. "Do you realize what you—" He sputtered slightly, moving his hands, finding it impossible to put together the words to express what had been done to him.

"Believe me," Grofield said. "We've been here five days, all we've ever wanted is our money, and all we get is the runaround. There's an election going on, there's a mob war shaping up, there's all this nonsense. We don't care about any of this, all we care about is our seventy-three thousand dol—"

"And you're fucking up everything in sight!" Buenadella shouted. He acted like a man with a true grievance, self-righteous and enraged. "You're doing robberies, you're killing people, you're pulling a gun on the mayoral candidate, you're screwing up a personal business arrangement that I worked
three years
to— You call it a mob war? What mob war? Everything was quiet until you people got here!"

"If we'd been given our money on Thursday," Grofield said, "even on Friday, there wouldn't have been any trouble at all."

"I'm sick of this town," Parker said. "I want my money and I want to get out of here."

"Seventy-three thousand," Grofield said. "That's really not a lot of money. A business expense, that's all."

Buenadella had been about to make another angry statement, but he abruptly closed his mouth on it and gave a speculative frown instead. The term "business expense" had taken root in his head; Grofield could see it growing in there, becoming a lovely green tree.