“Sure,” Petey Vitanza said, “we got girls, you know? Only no steady. Jo-Jo and me got motors, you know? I mean, Jo-Jo is studyin’ hard by Automotive Institute. He’s good. We’re gonna go over ’n work for Ferrari someday. Maybe England, the Limeys sure knows cars.”
And it wasn’t Jo-Jo’s parents who were looking for him.
“They said he went on a trip,” Petey said. “His old man told me to stop botherin’ him, and his old lady got mad. She said I should mind my own business and go dig dirt with the other hogs.”
I didn’t know the Olsens, and I was glad. From that crack about hogs, they sounded like those people who think hard work is for suckers. We have a lot like that in Chelsea. They live around the rackets and the fast buck, and honest sandhogs get their contempt. The story sounded like that. It also sounded like a cover up.
“Is Jo-Jo in trouble, Petey?” I asked.
“Hell no!” Petey said, but he looked scared.
“It’s got the sound,” I said.
Petey was scared. “That cop, the one got beat up bad? The fuzz got it the day before Jo-Jo took off. The bull got beat right down the block from Schmidt’s Garage.”
“And you and Jo-Jo were working on the bike in Schmidt’s?”
Petey nodded. “Jo-Jo works by Schmidt’s. Only we been there near every day for months, the both of us! We was working on his new bike, fixin’ the motor for racin’. It’s a sweetheart, a Yamaha. I mean, we was together all the time!”
“A Yamaha costs real bread,” I said.
“Jo-Jo he stashed his loot. He’s a good mechanic, Mr. Kelly, and Schmidt pays him good.”
I had a funny feeling in my arm, the left arm that isn’t there. I get that when things don’t sound right. This didn’t sound right.
“He had a good job,” I said, “he was studying hard at school, and he had a new cycle you were readying for racing. But a cop’s been beaten right on the block where he works, and he’s run.”
Petey nodded. Nobody is with somebody else all the time. Like I said, my advice on rabbits is go to the cops. They have the tools. Most rabbits are repeaters. Once a man runs, unless the pressures change which they usually don’t, he will run again. It’s the rabbit’s answer to run. Some men drink, some mainline, some watch TV, some beat their wives, some let everyone beat them to see how much they can take, and rabbits run.
But this sounded different. Jo-Jo Olsen had no reason to run, and a cop had been attacked on his block. Jo-Jo sounded like a straight kid, but in Chelsea if a man wants quick money his mind turns only one way, and it isn’t to a bank loan. Besides, if Petey went to the police they would check with the parents and go home.
“Okay, Petey,” I said. “You go home, I’ll check it out.”
I meant it, but you know how it is. It was summer and so hot the chewing gum on the streets turned liquid, and I was having my troubles with Marty again, and it all made me thirsty and tired.
Marty is my woman. Martine Adair, that’s her name on the off-Broadway theater programs and the signs outside the tourist nightclubs on Third Street. Her real name doesn’t matter. She changed her name, and I don’t tell how I really lost my arm. She’s fifteen years younger than me, and she gives me trouble. That’s my own private business. I wouldn’t mention Marty except that she was the reason I was almost too late, and she knew about Pappas.
Anyway, I did get around to checking with precinct on Jo-Jo. They had no record on the Olsen boy, but Lieutenant Marx was interested. Maybe it should have interested me, the fact that Jo-Jo had reached the age of nineteen in our neighborhood without picking up any record at all, and yet his name seemed to ring some kind of bell with Lieutenant Marx. But it didn’t register at the time, and Marx didn’t offer any comment. Most cops don’t.
I put out a few other feelers asking for any information on Jo-Jo, and went back to my own problems. It could have stopped right there, too, but the spark had been set off. Marty got friendly again, and I got mauled a little, and they picked Petey Vitanza out of a gutter beaten blind, and Captain Gazzo down at Homicide told me about the other robbery — and about the killing.
The guy who mauled me was big but slow. I’m not big, and I’m not slow. When you’ve got only the average number and size of muscles, and you picked up a handicap like one arm along the way, you need good legs and fast thinking. It’s called compensation, or adaptation, or just learning to use what you have in a world you can’t do much about.
It was a night about a week after I’d talked with Petey Vitanza. Hotter than the engine room on some old coal-burners I’ve sailed on, and I was heading for Paddy’s Pub. I passed one of our convenient dark alleys, and he came down on me like a whole hod of bricks.
He hit me once on the right shoulder. He’d lunged off-balance, and he only got the shoulder. He was no trained fighter, but he had muscles, and his fist felt like a small bowling ball. I bounced off a wall. His second blow was slow, and I had time to roll with it. That was lucky because it was aimed at my chin and was more accurate. I think his trouble was that he had something on his mind, and his brain was too slow to think of two things at once.
“Lay off Jo-Jo!”
He grunted that message just as he swung the second punch at my jaw, and so he was slow, and I rolled with it. I threw one punch just to make him slow down, kicked his shin hard, and rolled two garbage cans into his path. He ducked the punch, howled when I got his shin, and sprawled over the cans as he lunged again. By the time he had picked himself up I was nothing but heels going away fast. I think I was leaning on Packy Wilson’s bar, and half way through my first drink, before he was sure I had gone.
“A big guy,” I described to Joe. “Blond, I think, or going grey. Kind of a square face, flabby. Dressed good in a suit from the little I got to see.”
Joe shook his head. “He don’t drink much, I don’t know him.”
“He drinks,” Packy Wilson said, “only not in bars you work, Joe. He drinks in the good joints, the Clubs over in the Village and down Little Italy.”
“The racket-owned places?” I said.
“If he’s who I think, and it sounds like him,” Packy said.
“Who?” I said. “Or are we guessing?”
“Olsen,” Packy said. “Lars Olsen. They call him Swede only he’s Norwegian, I think.”
“Jo-Jo’s old man?” I said. There is a big difference between not looking for a missing son, and trying to stop someone else from looking. Good or bad, Jo-Jo had some kind of trouble.
“Yeah,” Packy said. “It was Jo-Jo told me they was really Norwegian. The kid come in here for a beer sometimes. He was real hipped on the Vikings and all, that’s how he come to tell me they was Norwegians not Swedes.”
“Vikings?” I said. “Jo-Jo knew history?”
“The kid knew the Vikings,” Packy said. “Read all them old Sagas he said. He used to say they was tough, and brave, and always won because they was daring and could outsail anyone. He said they never took no handouts from no one.”
I listened to Packy, but I was thinking of something else. In my mind Jo-Jo Olsen was moving down two streets. It didn’t make sense. Everything that had happened, the events, put Jo-Jo more-and-more into trouble, some kind of trouble. But everything I heard about Jo-Jo made it more-and-more clear that he did not sound like a kid who would get into trouble.
“Those old kings sure had names,” Packy said, remembering. “Harald the Stern, Sweyn Blue-Tooth, Halfdan The Black, Gorm The Old. The kid used to rattle them off like they tasted good just to say. He said that today was nothing, his old man even let guys call him Swede and didn’t give a damn.”