The Moonlight (26 page)

At first George was so upset he just about puked, but then he got this idea about buying the Moonlight and he settled down again.  By the time he signed the lease he’d almost forgotten the bitch’s name.

If he ever took up with another woman I sure as hell never heard about it, and I don’t think he saw that son of his more than the one time a year he’d disappear for an afternoon to deliver the kid’s birthday present.  I think he just lost interest.

“Charlie,” he would say, “business is great.”  And it was.

We were still partners in a loose sort of way, although I didn’t buy into the Moonlight and George wasn’t much interested in the cocaine trade.  But one kind of folded into the other, because Enrico Galatina was my supplier and George found a backer for his roadhouse in Enrico’s little brother Leo.

It’s a lot of horseshit that Leo provided the money for the buy, because George had plenty of money.  What he needed was a liquor license and the protection of the Galatina Family, and Leo brought these to him in exchange for a share in the business.  I don’t care what the paperwork says—that’s the way it went.

But I was still the backbone for George’s gambling operation.  I took care of any good customer who wanted to get laid or felt the need of a snort, and I took care of the chiselers.  The Moonlight hadn’t reopened its doors two months when I did a guy named Aaron Spieler who took a bad bath at roulette and then welched on his IOU.  The little fuck was a bookie, so you would have thought he’d know better; but he didn’t, so I ventilated his face.  After that  nobody dropped an IOU at the Moonlight he couldn’t cover.

Still, as far as I was concerned the gambling was just a sideline.  I put my heart and soul into the coke business because I knew from the beginning that this was going to earn me some serious money—it’s astonishing how when some people get going on that shit they just can’t leave it alone.

I couldn’t believe how easy it was.  My customers from George’s poker games all had friends, and pretty soon the friends were coming around.  Within a year I had ten or twelve dealers of my own, and things just kept multiplying.  Pretty soon all I had to do was collect the money and keep everybody in line.

Then the Dagos started to get restless.

You see, the original deal was that the Galatina mob were just the messenger boys.  Frank Marcello sold the stuff to them and they sold it to me.  I was paying a few points more than I might have dealing direct, but that was okay because my customers had deep pockets and Marcello couldn’t ignore the claims of the Galatinas.  It was understood by all parties that the western part of Fairfield County was mine, from the state line all the way to Norwalk.

Then I started seeing a guy named Mistretta around town—Rickie the Nose, if you can believe it, although his was just there in the middle of his face like everybody else’s.  And the little fuck was dealing.

So one night in early summer I come in out of the rain to have a beer at Dink’s and I see this creep passing something around like it was chewing gum, and I decide I can’t let this pass.  I wait until he disappears into the men’s room, and then I follow him.

So there he is, propped up against the urinal, a regular guinea dandy in his light gray suit, very busy hosing down the porcelain.  I lock the door behind me and kick his legs out from under him.

So while he’d lying there on the tiles, still clutching his dick, I search him. And, sure enough, he’s got a whole bunch of little envelopes in his pocket, and the stuff doesn’t taste at all like tooth powder.

“You are out of line,” I tell him.  “I did not sell you this shit and, if I did not sell it to you, what you doing with it?”

And then, just to emphasize my displeasure, I take the gun he’s got stuck in his belt—a great big heavy Army .45 automatic, if you please—and I break his cheekbone with it.

“If I see you in my territory again, I take your face off.”

But I guess Mistretta thought I was kidding, because pretty soon he was back.

You can’t make idle threats, so Rickie the Nose had to go.

It seemed that Rickie had a girlfriend, whom he visited twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday.  She had a couple of other friends like Rickie and she seemed to like her privacy, so she had her own apartment over a drugstore in old Greenley.  One Saturday evening I walked her home.

“Now it happens like this,” I told her.  “The Nose is going to be invited to leave town and I’m taking over everything that was his, you included.”

She liked this idea, partly because when Rickie had a bad day he sometimes consoled himself by putting a few bruises on her, but mainly because she had two hundred dollars of my money stuffed into her brassiere.

We waited in her bedroom.  We had about two hours to kill before Rickie showed up for his regular pop, so she decided to convince me that I’d made a good investment.  I was still shoving my shirttail back into my pants when I looked through the window and saw a ten-year-old Ford parking across the street.  The man had no class at all.

“I’ll wait in the bathroom.  We don’t want any bulletholes in your wallpaper, so I won’t put in an appearance until he’s out of his clothes.  You think you can get him to take off his clothes, honey?”

She had beautiful jugs, that girl, and like a lot of girls with a nice pair she thought she could get any man to do anything.  That’s why she wasn’t afraid.

I went into the bathroom, and I took my briefcase with me. God knows what she thought I had in that briefcase—maybe a collapsible baseball bat, maybe a farewell bouquet for Rickie.  Women who think they can handle any guy who’s had his joint in her probably aren’t used to thinking about much else.

Rickie had his own key, and I heard when he let himself in.  By then I had my twelve gauge put together.  I’d come to be very fond of shotguns—with a shotgun, it’s over.  Nobody comes back to get a round off before dying.  Besides, people seem to be more afraid of getting torn to pieces than they are of being dead.

“I’m in here, Sugarplum,” she shouted.

Sugarplum, if you please.  I mean, Jesus.

Rickie liked to tell a girl what a good time she was in for—you should have heard the line of patter he handed out while he was climbing out of his socks.  I loved it.  It was hysterical.  I could have listened for hours, but life is short.

“That’s enough, Sugarplum.”

I stepped out of the bathroom and got him just as he was turning around.  Rickie the Nose Mistretta just disappeared from about the eyes down—there was blood on the wall eight feet behind him.

For a long time the girl couldn’t stop screaming.  I mean, she made more noise than the shotgun—what did she think I was going to do, kiss him on the cheek?

Finally I put my hand around her throat and gave it a friendly squeeze, just enough to convince her that if she didn’t shut up on her own I’d do it for her.

“Now listen, honey.  I’m gonna yield to my sentimental nature and let you live.  But before you hear what you tell the cops, you come see what a load of birdshot did for the Nose.”

I dragged her over to the edge of the bed and held her head so she couldn’t look away.  When I pulled her back she had trembling so bad her teeth were chattering.

“It isn’t a very nice way to die, is it.  You wouldn’t like it to happen to you, would you.”

The story she gave to cops was that Rickie didn’t remember to close the front door, that all she saw was the blast of the shotgun, not the man behind it.  She told them that over and over.  Could be she came to believe it herself.

After that things settled down a bit.  I got a message from Enrico Galatina that it had all been a terrible misunderstanding, that Mistretta had been strictly freelance and they didn’t have the faintest idea where he got his stuff, that they were perfectly happy with their cut and that of course no one would dream of muscling in on my territory.

Fine.  I accepted his apology.  Everything was just fine, and life was beautiful.  I wasn’t even mad at the Galatina brothers—I wasn’t mad at anybody.  It was over three years before I had any more trouble with the dagos.

I had moved into the house on Stanhope Street by then, and I had come to a comfortable understanding with my landlady.  Lenore was a widow with no property except a big, empty house, and she was maybe a year older than me and, I gather, had had plenty of company.  She had two other boarders when I arrived, but I kicked their asses out and took over the whole place.

Lenore was still nice looking and, more important, an easy woman to get along with.  I liked the way she fucked, I liked the way she cooked, I liked the way she didn’t ask questions and didn’t get all bent if I stayed away all night.  She was perfect for me.  I stayed in that house for four years.

Sometimes we’d go up to the Moonlight to have a couple of drinks and dance to whatever miserable band George had hired for the weekend.  We’d sit at a table and drink champagne and I’d think, “In a few hours I’m gonna take this nice lady home.  Then I’m gonna lift up her party dress and fuck her eyes out.”  I think that’s why people go to places like the Moonlight, just to prolong the agony.

And George would come around in his monkey suit and smile and sit down to drink a glass with us.  It was a dim little place and it was all your life was worth to have dinner there, but George loved owning it.  He loved going down to the basement to count his wine bottles.  He loved going up to the second floor and having the dealer ask him if so-and-so’s marker was good.  He even loved buying the county sheriff a drink once a month and then putting five bills in the slob’s hat when he went to fetch it for him from the cloak room.  He loved being a respectable crook.

Sometimes I would see Leo Galatina there, sitting at one of the bigger tables with maybe six or seven other bad guys, and I might nod if I felt like it—I wasn’t about to go over and shake his hand or nothing.  Leo wasn’t a friend and he wasn’t a fucking king either, and I didn’t need him.

Enrico I never saw there.  Enrico I never saw at all.  Enrico was one of those guys you only hear about.

So life slipped quietly by.  I was making more money than I could think how to spend, and nobody hassled me.  In all that time I only did one guy, and he wasn’t even a wop.

Slappy Beal was a favor for a friend.

Jack Mahoney and I used to rob stores together when we were kids—one of us would distract the owner for a couple of seconds, and then the other one would grab something and run.  It was that kind of thing that landed me in reform school, because I got caught and Jack didn’t.  When I got out I promised myself I’d always work alone and, except for George, I never had another partner.  I should have kept that promise.

Anyway, Jack set up as a fence and did very well.  We stayed friends—why should I hold it against him that he could run faster?—and he knew he owed me one for not selling him to the cops.  He was always good for a couple of bucks when my luck was bad.

So one day he drives up from Greenley and we have dinner together.  He has this brother-in-law.  His wife made him give the slug a job, but he’s always got his hand in the till and he’s good for nothing.  Jack is tired of it.  Can I help?

Let me get this straight, I say, you want him offed?

That’s about right, says Jack.

So fine.  I’ll do the brother-in-law.  Just for old times.

It’s a big conspiracy, see.  There’s this very important envelope that has to be delivered.  Slappy is supposed to go to the movie house, sit in the next to last row, and wait.

Movie houses are great for this sort of thing, because everybody is busy watching the picture or trying to get inside his girlfriend’s blouse—nobody pays attention to anybody else.  And the Greenley Theater is even better because the sound is so bad that everybody sits as close to the screen as they can.  Plus Wednesday nights are the best because the audience is thin.

The movie was
It happened One Night
, a comedy—perfect.  Everybody’s hysterical.  I went to see it two nights before, just so I’d know what scenes got the biggest laughs.

On Wednesday I take my seat in the last row, right behind a fat little man with mole fuzz for hair.  We’re all alone back there.  I wait until Clark Gable and Claudet Colbert are having one of their big fights and the audience is really rocking, and I reach over and put my hand on the guy’s shoulder.

You Slappy Beal? I ask him.

Sure, he says.

So give me the envelope, I say.

Sure, he says, and hands it back.

Thanks a lot, I say.  Now enjoy the movie.

Then I reach forward and pull his head back—people don’t fight a lot when you’ve got your fingers in their eye sockets—and with my free hand I take a straight razor from my pocket and cut his throat.  The blood is all over the next row of seats, but if Slappy makes a sound even I don’t hear it.

For a while there he’s pretty busy twitching, so I hang on to him until he figures out he’s dead.  Then I wipe the razor clean of prints and drop it in his shirt pocket.  Maybe the cops ’ll think he cut himself shaving.

I get up and leave.  I never did like Clark Gable.

In the lobby I discovered that I had gotten blood on my sleeve, which was a great pity because I had to burn the coat.  But there were seven bills in the envelope Slappy had given me and, besides, it made me happy to be able to do a favor for a friend like Jack.  Friendship was always very important to me.