The Moonlight (33 page)

“New?”

“Brand new.”  Owings smiled with the faint pride of ownership.  “I’ve only had it a few days.  You want to see the receipt?”

Spolino shook his head—what was the point?  Sal Grazzi’s killer had left the murder weapon behind.  That was why Owings had been so pleased to show him this one.

He would have been willing to bet that Owings had that receipt in his pocket, and that it was dated last Saturday.

Spolino screwed the barrel back into place and handed the shotgun to its owner.

“A nice gun,” he said, smiling himself, but without the slightest human warmth.  “You won’t have much use of it close to home, though.  Ducks and Geese are protected year round in this state.”

“I’ll find something.”

Spolino went over to his car and opened the door.  He stood there for a moment as if trying to decide something.

“You might find a lot of things in an old house like this,” he said at last.  “God knows what George Patchmore might have had tucked away.”

“Well, if I find anything I think you should know about, I’ll be sure to tell you.”

“That might be wise.”  He let Owings feel the weight of his cold, appraising gaze.  “Say, if you happened to find a lot of twenty-dollar bills, all dated from the early Fifties.  You might mention that to someone, just so the tax people wouldn’t get the wrong idea.”

Good.  Owings wasn’t smiling now.  Spolino knew he had scored a direct hit.

“By the way,” he said, as if it had just popped into his mind, “I wonder if you’ve ever met a fellow by the name of Charlie Brush.  Sound familiar?”

Owings shook his head—you had the impression that for those first few seconds maybe he didn’t trust himself to speak.

“Never heard of him.”

“No.  Yeah, well, he was quite a boy around here once.  He liked shotguns too.”

Spolino climbed into his car and closed the door.  He turned on the ignition, then he rolled down the window and leaned out.  He even smiled.

“Anyway, next time you see him, tell him I got his message.”

July 5, 1990

The funeral of Sal Grazzi took place at one o’clock in the afternoon at Saint Anselm’s in Stamford, his parish church where he and Beatrice Alioto had been married and where they had witnessed their children’s confirmations.  Otherwise, Sal had hardly been inside the doors since grammar school.

Everyone who knew him assumed that Sal Grazzi, found naked and shot to pieces in a downtown brothel, had probably not died in a state of grace, but this was not what gave his funeral its added solemnity.  Sal’s had been the first mob hit in Fairfield County in many years, so all the Families in Western Connecticut, and even those from Westchester County and New York City itself, sent high-ranking representatives to pay their respects and to assure the Galatina people that they knew nothing whatever about this shocking breach of their long and profitable peace.  The street in front of Saint Anselm’s was almost solid with black stretch limousines.

Sonny Galatina arrived early and took the seat which had been reserved for him, six rows back and next but one from the aisle on the right-hand side.  There, in the interval before the priest arrived, he received one after the other the condolences of old men who remembered the long and bitter wars through which the Galatina Family had established itself and who wanted no repetition.  One of these was Carlo Riesi,
consigliere
of the Calabria Family of New Haven.

Carlo had grown so feeble in recent years that one of his bodyguards had to help him lower himself into the pew seat.  This done, he took Sonny’s hand and squeezed it.

“A terrible thing,” Carlo mourned in a gravelly whisper, shaking his head.  “If there’s anything we can do. . .”

But Sonny waved the offer aside with an impatient gesture.  It wouldn’t do to let people imagine the Galatinas couldn’t manage their own affairs.

“We’re on it,” Sonny answered.  “The police seem to think we did it ourselves.  Can you imagine anything so dumb?”

“Cops. . .”  Carlo shook his head again.

“Yeah, well, what we got here is a nut case—just some clown who’s been watchin’ too many movies.  We’ll find him, and we’ll put his lights out.”

“Any leads?”

“We got a name already.  We just got to make sure.”

“Good.”  Carlo patted him on the arm and motioned to his bodyguard to help him up.  “We knew you’d be on top of this, Sonny.”

It was only after the old man had left that Sonny realized how deeply he had committed himself.  But what else could he have done?  He couldn’t look like a jerk in front of a man like Carlo Riesi, who had once traded shots with his grandfather.

He just hoped this Philip Owings was the one, because he was almost certainly going to have to kill him now.

Sonny looked up to the altar and, about ten feet in front of the communion rail, the bronze casket—closed, of course, because Sal Grazzi was in no condition to be seen—and suddenly he was conscious of having reached the crisis of his life.  Sal had never amounted to much, but he had been Enrico’s godson, and now he was sealed off forever from the light of day.  An offense had been committed against the honor of the Galatinas, and it demanded to be avenged.  If he could manage this one thing, Sonny thought, then at last he would be the true Don, like his father and grandfather before him.  If he could not, he was nothing more than a businessman who dealt in illegal substances.

The last people to arrive were the grieving family.  There was Bea and her three children, two young girls and a pimply, sullen thirteen-year-old son, and there was the widowed mother.  The mother, Teresa, a fat, white-haired woman in her sixties, never took her face out of the lace handkerchief she held unfolded over her right hand.  Stupid woman.  She should be relieved, Sonny thought.  Now she wouldn’t have to take Sal in anymore on the regular occasions when his wife threw him out of the house.

Bea was tall and angular, an unappealing woman but possessed in mourning of a certain grim dignity.  She glanced over her shoulder and caught Sonny’s eye, and he nodded.  He had made his promise, it seemed, and now it was up to him to keep it.

Sal’s boy kept twisting his head around, like a theater manager checking the house.  He looked uncomfortable in his black suit.  He seemed to resent being here at all.

Terry—that was the kid’s name, Terry, like a goddamned pansy hairdresser—Terry was not a very promising youth, and chances were good that in five or six years “Uncle Sonny” was going to have to invent a job for him.  Probably he would follow in his old man’s footsteps, playing Mafia hard guy to an audience of bored hookers, a wise ass in gold chains and a white Cadillac who kept a big nickel-plated automatic in his glove compartment just so the girls could see it when they went for a kleenex.

That was the trouble with the Families these days.  They were the employers of last resort.  If a kid had any brains he went to college and learned how to be a legitimate thief.  It was only the morons who came into the business, the deadwood for whom you had to “find something” because their fathers and grandfathers had been righteous hoods back in the days when that was still a badge of honor.  The Mafia today was just a kind of hereditary civil service for no talent crooks.

It wasn’t hard to imagine how Sal had died, pleading for mercy and squealing like a pig.  And yet he had to be avenged, because he was a made man in the Galatina Family and that continued to mean something.

And it would go on meaning something until the day Sonny Galatina forgot how to be a man and let such an insult go unanswered.

During the service Sonny assumed an expression of the most impenetrable gravity, as if he were listening not to the priest but to some terrible inner voice that counseled war and destruction and spoke with a distinct Sicilian accent.  This was expected of him.

When the priest was finished, and the organ gurgled somberly, Sonny went to the front of the church, faced Sal Grazzi’s casket and crossed himself, and then went to the grieving family.  He shook young Terry’s hand, touched the young daughters on the heads, patted Sal’s mother on the arm and then took Bea by the shoulders and kissed her once on each cheek.  This too was expected of him.  He spoke to Bea, just a few sentences.  He hardly knew himself what he said, and it did not matter.  Everyone would see him with the widow, and they would believe he was promising her vengeance.

He did not follow the other mourners to the graveside—Sal Grazzi had done nothing in his life to make him worthy of such an honor, and Don Galatina had his dignity to consider.  Instead he rode home alone in his black limousine, brooding like an actor over the details of his performance.

As the great wrought iron gates opened for him, Sonny lowered the limousine window and asked one of the guards if Jimmy DeLucia had arrived yet.  The man shook his head and said no, not yet.  There was no one in the house except Mrs. Galatina.  He kept his face and his voice empty of expression as he said this, for it was wise not to seem to be implying anything.  The Don merely nodded, as if he already knew everything the guard could tell him, and the limousine window went back up.

In front of the house, his driver opened the door for him and Sonny stepped out onto the driveway.  He felt better now that he was home.  Home was privacy and safety, and right then he needed both.

“I have one more visit to make and then it’s your turn, Sonny Galatina.”
  Just let the little fuck try.

None of the servants lived on the property because Sonny liked to have his house to himself at night, but he was by no means unprotected.  The estate was surrounded by an eight-foot stone wall topped with a tripwire and, inside that, a network of electronic sensors—any attempt to break in would show up on a lighted panel in the gate house, and the guards, who kept in touch by walkie-talkie, would be all over any intruder.  There were always six guards, two at the gate and four on the perimeter, and at night they patrolled with dogs.

The security arrangements had been put in mainly as a matter of prestige and to keep out reporters, but right now, with a psycho running around loose, Sonny was glad to have them.

Just let the little fuck try.

Sonny went up to his dressing room and changed out of the black silk suit he had worn to the funeral.  He put on a pair of tan walking shorts and a yellow polo shirt.  The pool was visible from the window and when he looked out he saw Traci lying face down on a towel, perfectly naked.  The sight of her like that filled him with lustful wrath.

“You’re gettin’ too much sun,” he said to her when he came outside.  “You’re gonna get skin cancer you keep up with this shit.”

“I use sun screen.”  She raised herself on one elbow, probably just so he could see her breasts, and smiled at him with mischief.  “Thirty-seven dollars a bottle.  You think you could do my back for me?  I can’t always reach.”

He knelt down beside her and squeezed a heavy dollop into his hand.  Then, with a slow, circular motion, he began rubbing it in between her shoulder blades.  She had a beautiful back, supple and muscular, and the sun had heated her skin.  It was a sensual pleasure just to touch her.  When the lotion was exhausted, he cupped his hand over the curve of her right buttock.  He had a terrific hard on.

“You want to?” she asked.  She rolled over so that his hand was on her snatch.  She was a real blonde.  “I get a lot of dirty thoughts lyin’ around here in her sun.  I’d probably come in about thirty seconds.”

“The house is full of people.”

But even as he said it he let his hand slip down to her cleft.  He touched her there and a little spasm went through her, like an electric shock.  She was already slippery.

“You do that again, and I’ll come right now.”

And she did, too.  A couple of long, ragged breaths and the pink flush spread all the way down to her breasts.

“Go ahead and fuck me,” she said, her voice thick and urgent.  “Who cares what the servants think?  Just pull your pants down and fuck me.”

He lifted his hand away.  Desire constricted his throat like a bad conscience.

“Jimmy ’ll be here pretty soon.  I don’t want him to see you like this.”

A certain coldness came into her eyes as he spoke, as if she were deciding she had made a mistake, one she would never make again.

“Go into the house and get some clothes on,” he said, feeling strangely humiliated.  “And don’t come out again until after Jimmy’s left.”

When his wife was gone, Sonny sat on one of the deck chairs, staring at the water in his pool, deciding that he had made a mistake to marry for the third time.  He didn’t like Traci, but he desired her, and the conflict of feelings was beginning to get on his nerves.  He should have been content to keep her as a mistress, to set her up in the penthouse of one of the apartment buildings he owned in Stamford and visit her there two or three times a week.  That would have been better.  Nobody said you had to like your mistress—you were probably better off if you didn’t.  And you didn’t have to put up with your mistress trying to seduce you during business hours.

It was inevitable that Traci would go the way of his other two wives.  One day he would just decide that he had had enough, and he would tell her to take a walk.  He would scare the shit out of her first, just to make sure she never gave any trouble, and then he would pension her off so she could spend the rest of her life getting her nails done.