“All right,” he said. He licked his lips, and put his left hand on top of his head to shield it from the sun. “I’ll level with you,” he said. Then, still thinking hard, he stopped and licked his lips again.
“Go ahead,” Lozini said. The gun was still pointing at him, not wavering; the bastard might be old, but he wasn’t used up, not yet.
”It’s, uh—” Calesian felt the hot breath of wrath on him, hotter than the midsummer heat. No matter what he said now, no matter what he did, wrath would come at him from some direction. “It’s Ernie,” he said. “Ernie Dulare.”
Lozini sagged a little. The gun barrel dipped, Lozini’s eyes seemed to lose the hard edge of their focus, the skin of his face got grayer, less healthy in the sunshine.
“It was bound to happen, Al,” Calesian said. “And I had to go along with it, you can see that.”
Lozini had nothing to say.
“In fact,” Calesian said, “you know where I just was, I took a plane trip, I went to see a guy from Chicago. Ernie’s clearing things with the big people ahead of time, letting them know there isn’t going to be any trouble, no bloodshed, a simple quiet changeover.”
Lozini, his voice and face duller than before, said, “What guy? What guy from Chicago?”
“Culligan.”
Lozini nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “And he’s got no objection?”
“Why should he?”
“Sure,” Lozini said. Then he frowned. “Prove it’s Ernie,” he said.
Calesian tensed again. “What?”
“Call him. Come on, we’ll go inside and you’ll call him and I’ll hear what he’s got to say.”
“Oh,” Calesian said. “Sure, why not? You think maybe it’s really Dutch, after all, and I’m covering, putting you off on Ernie? I’ll call, you’ll hear it for yourself.” He started to take the attache case off his lap, then stopped and said, “Wait a minute, I’ll do better than that. I’ve got a letter in here to Culligan from Ernie, you can read it yourself.” He put the attache case on his lap again, clicked open the snaps, lifted the lid.
Lozini was frowning at him. “A letter—” Then he straightened up suddenly from the railing, pushing the gun out ahead of himself toward Calesian. “Get your hand out of—”
There wasn’t any time to fit the silencer on, but up here that shouldn’t matter. Calesian fired through the lid of the attache case, then had to lunge forward and grab a handful of Lozini’s jacket to keep the old man from toppling over the railing after all. He lowered Lozini to the slate floor, plucked the gun from his dead fingers, tossed it over onto the chaise longue. His own gun and the attache case were on the floor where they’d fallen when he’d made his lunge forward, but for the moment he let them stay there.
He went into the apartment, hurrying through the living room and into the hall to the bedroom. The linen closet was next to the bathroom door, and inside it the plastic tablecloth for use on the terrace was right where it was supposed to be, on the top shelf. He carried it back to the terrace, spread it on the floor, rolled Lozini in it. The old man was shot in the chest, left side, heart—half good aiming and half good luck. There wasn’t much blood, because he was dead and the heart wasn’t pumping any out of the wound.
Calesian dragged the plastic-wrapped body into the living room, shut the terrace doors, and turned the thermostat down to fifty-five, the lowest possible setting. Then he went into the bathroom to rub some A&D ointment on his scalp to guard against sunburn, and while he was in there he got a sudden case of the shakes. He sat down on the toilet and gripped his knees and stared at the rose-colored wall, and trembled all over.
Lozini. Not some two-bit hood, not a dime-store cop, but Lozini himself. I was always afraid of that bastard, Calesian thought.
After a few minutes he calmed down and took two Alka-Seltzer and left the apartment to find a phone booth—because he couldn’t be sure if his own phone was tapped or not, by state or federal people—and call Dutch Buenadella. But the first three times he dialed, the line was busy.
Twenty-five
Buenadella was on the phone with George Farrell, who had just called him, taking him away from lunch with his family. Buenadella was saying, “What the fuck did you give him my name for?”
“I didn’t know what else to do. He was— He was making it very tough for me. He really wanted to know, do you follow me?”
The phone was a tough way to communicate. They had to tell each other things that they weren’t telling the inevitable eavesdroppers. Farrell had begun the conversation by saying, “Do you know who this is?” and Buenadella had said, “Yes, you dipshit, and so does anybody else who’s listened to all those fucking radio commercials you did.” He’d talked that way because he’d been shocked into rage by the stupidity of Farrell making direct contact with him, two days before the election. They had managed to keep Farrell’s skirts clean all the way through up till now, and he just couldn’t believe the guy was stupid enough to blow it all at this late date, for any reason.
But since then the conversation had gone on, roundabout and vague but gradually getting the point across, and now Buenadella was shocked in a different way. Because that son of a bitch Parker had gone right through Farrell’s security, separated him from his people like a sheepdog cutting out one lamb from the flock, scared the shit out of him somehow, and had gotten from him Buenadella’s name as the guy behind the takeover. And that shouldn’t have happened. Just as Farrell had kept himself clean and above suspicion on the mayoral side, Buenadella had held himself absolutely out of it when it came to unhorsing Al Lozini. And now this bastard from out of town, this Parker, had come in and opened everything up like an appendicitis case.
And Parker wasn’t even supposed to be alive any more. What the hell had happened to Abadandi? Surely he’d had a chance at Parker and the other one by now, so what was holding him back? Once he took Parker out, life would get a lot easier, but if Abadandi waited much longer, Parker would already have opened too many doors, spoiled too many setups, and it wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of difference any more if he was alive or dead.
It crossed Buenadella’s mind that Abadandi might have made his play and lost; but he didn’t believe it. Abadandi was too good, too secure. The answer had to be that Parker and the other one were covering themselves too well and Abadandi hadn’t had a good shot yet to take them out.
Well, it better happen soon. And in the meantime, there was this sudden mess to take care of. Buenadella said, “How long ago did you have your conversation?”
Farrell bumbled around, still too shook up to be brisk. “Uh—twenty-five—almost half an hour.”
“Half an hour! What the fuck a you been doing?”
“Dutch, I had to, I had to calm everybody here. We had policemen being held at gunpoint here, Dutch, it wasn’t something I could just brush off without an explanation. I said they represented some Middle Eastern sect, it was some sort of international political thing, and that I talked them out of holding me.”
“You got people to buy that?”
“Reporters, policemen, everybody.” A bit of pride touched Farrell’s voice, and with it he grew calmer and more confident. “I am good at my profession, Dutch,” he said. “I can talk to people.”
Which was true. When Buenadella stopped to think about it, the fact that Farrell had made the people around him buy any kind of phony story at all was pretty damn good, and that he’d managed to get away to a telephone by himself within half an hour was even better. Grudgingly he said, “All right. You did what you could.”