“Some.”
“I also bet you don’t have a house like this one,” he said. “I also bet you don’t have a Matisse hanging on the wall. I don’t mean a goddam copy. I mean what they call an original. Right?”
I told him he was right. I didn’t bother telling him I wouldn’t live in his house on a bet or that I didn’t like Matisse. This would have annoyed him.
“I got and you don’t, London. You know why?”
“Money, probably.”
“Part right. Money and power. I want a house, I go hire an architect and tell him what I want. I want a good picture, I call a dealer and tell him I want the best. That’s why I got this briefcase.”
He walked over to a heavy mahogany drum table with ugly claw feet. He ground his cigar to a pulp in an ashtray. He came back and pointed at me, this time with his finger.
“You got to get the point of this, London. You had the briefcase and I wanted it. I offered to pay you off. You, you had to be smart. Too smart. You didn’t want to play. Money wasn’t enough, so power came in. I sent a little muscle to show you I wasn’t playing games. The muscle knocked the crap out of you. The muscle told you you could get your head knocked-in playing cute. So now I got the briefcase and you got nothing.”
I looked at him.
“Muscle,” he said reverently. “How long you think you’d have a President without an army? Or a business. You take when they started labor unions. The workers, the slobs, went out on strike. They wouldn’t work. So the boss, he got some muscle going for him. He hired some slobs and told them to break a few heads. All of a sudden there wasn’t a strike any more. Everybody was working.”
I told him the unions were still around. He looked at me scornfully. “You know why? They got smart. They got muscle of their own and they broke heads on their own. You see?”
I nodded. I looked at Billy, the muscle we were batting back and forth. He looked muscle-bound and stupid. I looked at Ralph. He was more of a right arm than a muscle. He looked useful and his gun looked dangerous. More dangerous than my Beretta. I wondered if it was the same gun he killed the blonde with.
“And you’re the smart one,” he was saying. “So I got the briefcase and you got crap. I don’t have to pay you a penny, London. You know what I can do now? I can tell Ralph to shoot a hole in your head. Not in here — why mess up the place, get the rug bloody?”
“You got the girl’s rug bloody.”
He gave me an odd look. “We take you outside,” he went on. “Billy tells you to go outside and you go because he tells you and you don’t want another beating. Then Ralph shoots a hole in you and Billy digs a deep hole and buries you. The gardener plants flowers.”
He laughed, his heavy body shaking. “Better,” he said. “We take you outside and we hand you a shovel and tell you to dig. We tell you you’re digging your own grave and you dig it, anyhow. You think you wouldn’t dig it? You think you can’t make a man do any damn thing in the world?”
He was probably right.
“We tell you to dig and you dig. We tell you to lie down and you lie down. And then we shoot you and cover you up and plant the flowers and you disappear. Nobody ever knows what happened to you; you’re gone. You never were in the first place.”
I nodded slowly. “All because of power.”
“You got it, London.”
“Muscle,” I said. “There’s only one thing wrong with having muscle working for you.”
“What’s that?”
“The kind of person you have to have around.”
“You mean Billy?”
“I mean Billy.” I took a deep breath and wondered if they would really make me dig my own grave, and if I was really weak enough to do it.
“I mean Billy,” I repeated, looking at the gorilla. “You know about him?”
He looked puzzled.
I looked at Billy and remembered the kind of punch he threw. I thought about what Ralph had said before, remembered how Billy had reacted. And wondered if it still worked that way.
“About him and his mother,” I said, loud. “He sleeps with his mother, Bannister. He does things with her. Bad things.”
And that was Billy’s cue.
He came in high and he came in hard and he came in fast. I saw him coming, saw Ralph raise his gun behind him and take aim. Ralph wasn’t going to shoot. He didn’t figure it would be necessary. He was waiting.
So was I.
It happened quickly. Billy was hunting for my head and he threw a big fist at it. I ducked and let the punch go over my shoulder, then came up underneath him and pivoted. That lifted him up and spun him around. His own tremendous forward motion did all the rest of it.
And I threw him at Ralph.
He had come in high and hard and fast and he went out the same way, flying straight for Ralph. The little man — the right arm — went over backwards with the big man on top of him. Maybe Ralph was trying to shoot me. Maybe the gun went off by accident, a pure reflex action.
It didn’t matter. Either way it went off, a loud noise only slightly muffled by Billy’s bulk. Either way Billy’s T-shirt turned red with his blood. Then the two of them hit the floor with an impact as loud as the gun shot. They did not move.
I looked from them to Bannister. He had a gun in his hand. It was a big gun and it was pointed at me.
Twelve
It was so quiet I could hear the country noises outside. Birds singing, crickets chirping, the wind in the trees. A scene of pastoral bliss. I looked at him, then at the gun and then at him again.
“That’s the trouble with muscle,” I said. “It can work both ways. Billy’s muscle just got him killed.”
The gun didn’t waver. The mouth smiled but the eyes were colder than Death.
“Cute,” he said. “Very cute. What was that? Judo?”
“Something like that.”
“Using his own muscle against him,” he said slowly. “Yeah, I get it. I had a Jap working for me once, little guy skinny as a bird. He could get cute like that, toss a guy my size clear across the room and off the wall. You know what you just did?”
I let him tell me.
“Same thing as Billy,” he said. “You used your brains against you. You got so cute that in a minute or so I shoot you and you’re dead. Your brains get blown out. What good are they then?”
I put my hands in my jacket pockets and tried to look casual about it. The Beretta was right where it was supposed to be. I tried not to think what would have happened if Ralph or Billy had taken it away from me. It was better not to think about things like that.
“You’d kill me anyway,” I told him. “What’s the difference?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Sure you would. You’ve got enough killings under your belt. One more wouldn’t hurt you.”
He laughed like a clown. “Dumbhead,” he said. “I haven’t killed anybody all by myself in fourteen years. You’ll be the first. Unless Ralphie wakes up to save me the trouble.”
I looked at Ralph and decided he wouldn’t wake up for a while. “So you don’t pull the trigger yourself,” I said. “You order the hits instead. It’s the same thing.”
He didn’t answer.
“You’re just a killer, Bannister. You killed a batch of jewel thieves to save yourself a hundred grand. You killed a girl when she crossed you. Now I’m next. Congratulations.”
He looked amused. I kept my hands in my pockets. My right hand closed around the Beretta and my index finger looked around for the trigger and found it. I was glad now that it was such a small gun. It made a neat bulge in the pocket, small enough so that he didn’t even notice it.
“You’re a pig,” I said. “With all your money and all your power you’re still fresh from the gutter. And the gutter smell clings to you. It won’t wash off. You’ll go on killing like an animal and living like an animal until somebody blows your brains out. Or until they strap you in the chair and throw the switch.”