He let the Keenans and Greene and Berns in the back, up the fire escape, and they all changed clothes in his little closet of a room. Harry Keenan, a big guy who looked like a melancholy bear, said he had silencers for the guns.
"No silencers," Ange said, placing a. 45 automatic and a. 38 revolver, both Colts, in a steel-gray tool kit that contained nothing else except two boxes of ammunition and some towels stuffed in to keep the guns from rattling around. "I want the world to hear this."
"This place could be crawling with cops," Greene said. Both he and his partner Berns were burly, with lumpy anonymous faces. Sam Keenan rarely said a word; he was a skinny pale killer with a pointy chin and nose, and seemed always to follow his brother's lead.
"There's gonna be cops," Ange admitted, "but it won't be crawlin' with 'em. They can't afford to, it'd give 'em away."
"Killing cops ain't a brilliant idea," Berns said. "Remember the shit storm after the Kansas City massacre?"
Ange waved that off. "That was feds, and besides, we're just gonna kill a nigger. We won't kill any cops unless they get in the way. Shoot 'em in the kneecaps, why don't you? If you're squeamish."
Harry Keenan planted himself in the middle of the small cement room and spread his hands like an umpire. With five men in there, it was as crowded as the stateroom scene in that Marx Brothers movie. And Ange didn't like being crowded.
"We need big dough for this," Keenan said. "We never bargained for going head-on with cops. You want us to risk puttin' our faces in every post office in the country with state, feds, and locals aiming to put our asses in the hot squat, you'd better up the fuckin' ante, Ange."
"You want me to up the fuckin' ante? I'll up your fuckin' ante." Angelo felt the red rising into his face. "You can fucking retire when this is over. A hundred grand apiece. Is that the fuck enough for you bozos?"
The men glanced at each other with eyes wide with dollar signs and, slowly, began to nod. One hundred thousand depression dollars would buy these men a new life. And these aging remnants of the once-proud Purple Gang could use an opportunity like that, to hell with the risks.
"Agreed," Harry said, for all of them.
The Outhwaite housing project was bordered on the north by Quincy and the south by Woodland. The five men were in a battered brown '34 Reo panel truck, Harry and Angelo in the front, the rest riding in back. All wore work clothes- coveralls and caps.
"Anybody asks," Ange had told them all, "we're plumbers. But let me do the talkin'."
A second car, a four-door Plymouth, was parked on a side street off Quincy, a few blocks away, so on the getaway they could dump the panel truck with the work clothes inside. Right now, just after four o'clock, they pulled into the access road that took them between two large red-and-orange brick buildings and into the large grassy courtyard of the projects. Outhwaite was like a fortress, a rectangle of land between 40th and 55th with rows of modern brick apartment buildings on each side; in the center was the nearly finished X-shaped building where Washington was sequestered.
The afternoon was cool and overcast, but not cold; colored kids of grade-school age with light jackets or no jackets were running around the big grassy area, playing kick the can, screaming gleefully. Several trucks of various sizes, apparently belonging to the handful of white workmen who were milling about, were parked on the grass near the X-shaped building. Up on the roof were more white laborers, working with tar; the smell of it was in the air.
Angelo and his four cohorts got out of the panel truck slowly, casually, talking amongst themselves-the topic of conversation being whether that Iowa kid Bob Feller could pitch the Indians into the next World Series.
A young-looking fair-haired workman loading a ladder into the back of a truck said, "Hiya,'' and then, "Little late in the day to be comin' to work, ain't it, fellas?"
"You know how it is in the plumbing business," Ange said, shrugging, fist tightening around the handle of the tin tool box he was lugging. "Trouble with those new fixtures already."
"No rest for the wicked," the workman said with a grin, and went back about his own business.
The double doors to the main lobby were in the middle of the X on the Woodland Avenue side. The lobby was unfinished cement, ceiling and floor, and empty. Angelo tried the elevator, but it wasn't working yet. They found a stairwell and walked up, flight after flight, without a word.
At the landing of the fifth floor, Angelo paused and peeked out the hallway door.
Not a soul in sight.
Like the lobby, the walls were concrete and so was the floor, no carpet or tile laid yet. The light fixtures had not been put in, though bulbs and wiring were in place. The place smelled new: The scents of fresh cement, of glue, of metal, mingled. There were, however, numbers on the varnished wood doors.
Angelo posted Greene on the stairwell door. He sent Berns to the other end of the hall, cautioning both men not to create a crossfire if any gunplay broke out. Then Ange led the Keenans down the hallway to room 514. Harry, like Ange, was hauling a tin tool kit. Carefully, quietly, both men set their tool kits on the floor, snapped them open, and withdrew guns. Harry took out two nine-millimeter Brownings, kept one, and gave one to his skeletal brother Sam; Ange held his Colts, the. 45 and the. 38, in either hand, a regular two-gun plumber. With nods, he positioned Harry and Sam on either side of the door, their backs to the cement wall.
Whispering, just mouthing the words really, he told them, "Follow me."
Then Ange raised his foot and kicked the door in with one try, knocking the fucker off its hinges.
He bulled through, into a barely furnished living room, and, seeing a figure in a chair by a window with its back turned, he began shooting with both hands. Harry and Sam Keenan burst into the room and followed Ange's lead, bullets chewing up the sparse second-hand furnishings and punching holes in newly plastered walls and shattering the glass of windows that overlooked the grassy courtyard. The sound bounced off the hard plastered walls, flattening but not muting it; the din was deafening. The air filled with cordite and smoke and powdered plaster from the walls.
It was all over in a matter of seconds.
The three men stood flat-footed for a moment, watching the store-window dummy in the English suit tumble out of the chair, shot to shit.
From an adjoining room at left, possibly the kitchen, Eliot Ness emerged, with his own. 38 in hand; from a room at the right, possibly a bedroom, Toussaint Johnson came out with a shiny silver revolver in either hand. Angelo was not the only two-gun cowboy in this corral.
"Just drop them," Ness said.
"I know you," Johnson said, his eyes narrowing, his nostrils flaring, pointing accusingly first at Sam and then at Harry Keenan with each of the silver weapons.
At once Angelo and the two Keenans knew exactly who Johnson was and what he meant: That this was the Negro detective who had been at the scene of the murder of Rufus Murphy; the man who had in fact pursued Sam Keenan through Murphy's backyard on that violent night in 1933. In a flash all three men knew that they were facing the black cop whose friend they had killed.
So nobody dropped their gun.
Instead the Keenans stepped forward to fire at Johnson, faces taut with desperation, but Johnson beat them to it; he was screaming with rage as he fixed both those silver revolvers simultaneously, aiming one at Harry and one at Sam, who were on either side of the stunned Angelo, punching a hole through the chest of Sam and another through the forehead of Harry, whose head came apart like a melon. Out of the comer of Ange's left eye he saw most of the inside of Harry's head go splat against the wall, like a mudball flung by a kid, a bloody gray mess sliding down the plaster wall.