“I’m a married man,” he said. “I got a wife. A kid, a little girl—”
“You got insurance?”
He looked blank.
“Everybody should carry insurance,” I said. “Plenty of it. It’s a great comfort in times like this.”
He didn’t understand.
“You should have met me before,” I said. “I would have sold you a policy. Straight life, twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth. Then you wouldn’t be worried now.”
He still didn’t understand. His mouth opened and closed. He took a step back and I squeezed the trigger. I shot him four times in the chest and once in the face. I wiped my prints off the gun and threw it in the bushes. Then I got into his Plymouth and drove back to the airport to catch my plane.
I was back in Buffalo by five-thirty. The sky was gray with dawn and the air was moist and warmish. I used a pay phone at the terminal to call Tony Quince.
“I’m home,” I said.
“Get over here fast, Nat.”
“Right away.”
I found a cabby, gave him Tony’s address and told him to hurry. I settled back in the cab and tried to relax. It didn’t work. There would be a time to relax again but not for a while. I looked in my pack for a cigarette. The pack was empty. I bummed a cigarette from the cabby and smoked.
Tony lived in a third-floor apartment in a four-floor building. It was a good building, grounds well kept, inside clean and moderately plush, I rang the bell marked Quince and an answering buzzer let me open the vestibule door. I walked up the stairs and wound up in front of a door with a brass nameplate that had Tony’s name on it. The door opened before I had time to hit the bell.
“Come on in,” he said. “Sit down. How was Philly?”
“I didn’t see much. Just the airport and a stretch of road.”
“How did it go?”
“It went.”
“Easy?”
“I suppose so.”
I wasn’t sitting down. Neither was he. I stood like a robot while he walked back and forth, in front of the window. I joined him at the window. He had a view of private homes across the street. An unexciting view. There was a bird singing his head off in an elm tree across the street. I wished he would shut up.
Quince said, “I guess you picked a team.”
“I guess so.”
“Mine.”
“Yours.”
“It’s the right side, Nat. The winning side, the side that pays off. You used your head.”
“I hope so,” I said.
He came back from the window. “The finger,” he said. “Where did you leave him? You dumped him, huh?”
I told him what I had done with Jack Garstein. This pleased Quince.
“They won’t find him right off,” he said. “They won’t find him for hours — they won’t expect Fell to get hit for hours. By that time so many things are going to happen in Philly that Baron won’t know Jack Garstein from Abraham Lincoln.”
“There’s a similarity,” I said. “They both got shot.”
He got a laugh out of that one. He broke the laugh off abruptly and turned serious. “We got to move fast,” he said. “I told you before a few people got to be hit. You remember?”
I remembered,
“Baron, Scarpino, Johnny and Leon. You know Scarpino? Forty or forty-five, thin, ugly. One eye doesn’t work too good. You know him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He’s very close to Lou. He’s got to go. Hang on.”
He strode to the phone and picked it up. He didn’t look fat and dumpy now. He was taking charge, moving in, and it showed in his voice and his bearing and his walk. I wondered why he had ever seemed soft and easygoing. He dialed a number and spoke quickly to someone named Angie, his voice low. He put the receiver down and looked at me.
“Angie Moscato,” he said. “Remember?”
“From the poker game.”
“Yeah. He can use a gun and he can drive like hell. He’s on his way over here now. This is how we do it, Nat. First we pick off the flies. We cut the arms off and then we go for the head. Scarpino first. He lives with his old man. The old man sings anarchist songs and makes wine in the basement. He’s old and senile. So we get Scarpino right there.”
I let him talk. He was doing fine.
“Then Johnny Carr and Leon Spiro. Spiro keeps a broad maybe two blocks from Cassino’s. He’ll be there now, at the broad’s. So will Johnny.”
“They’ll both be there?”
“Yeah. They share the broad.” I made a face. “Share and share alike,” Quince said. “They’re a pair of pigs and the broad is a third pig. We ought to hit her just for exercise.
“And then Lou,” he went on. “The big one for last. That’s the tough one. He sleeps with one eye open and a gun next to him and he never eases up. But this is the time for it. We take the others first. Then we figure out a way.”
I found a chair and sat in it. He went into his kitchen and came out with a full coffeepot. He poured out two mugs of ink and gave me one of them. I burned my tongue on it but I drank it anyway.
“I got bennies,” he said. “If you need them.”
“I don’t use them.”
“Neither do I. They let you move fast but they get you too keyed up, too high. Coffee’s plenty.”
We drank the coffee. He stood up again and walked over to a dresser, opened the bottom drawer. I watched him rummage around in a pile of shirts and sweaters. He came up with two revolvers, thirty-eights. He hefted them both and handed one to me. It was a Smith and Wesson, a little lighter than the Browning automatic I’d used before.
“It’s full and it’s safe. Good enough?” he asked.
“Fine.”
He kept looking in the drawer, found a shoulder holster and got into it. He put the gun in place.
“I haven’t got an extra rig,” he said.
“I don’t use them,” I said. I put the gun in my pocket.
He poured a little more coffee. We drank it down. Then he stood by the window waiting for Moscato.
“There he is,” he said finally. “Let’s go, Nat.”
12
The three of us sat in the front seat. We didn’t do much talking. It was getting close to six-thirty, according to the watch on my wrist, the watch that had To Nat from Lou Baron across the back. I didn’t feel much like looking at the watch just then.
The excitement was the main thing. You could see it in Angie Moscato’s hands on the wheel, in Tony’s eyes. Moscato drove swiftly and easily but his hands were curled around the steering wheel like snakes. We were all on a roller coaster, on a train, on a boat to hell. We couldn’t get off. We could only ride to the end.
The sun was coming up now and it looked as though it were going to be a good day — bright, warm and clear.
Scarpino lived with his father in the heart of the very old west side near the waterfront. There was a housing project stretching for a block in one direction and another going up on the other side. But where Scarpino lived was an area still untouched. Dirty frame houses were clustered together. Grass and weeds grew between the blocks of cement and cracked them. Angie parked the car in front of a house that looked a little better than the others.
“Don’t know why he lives here,” he said. “He makes good dough. He could live better.”
“It’s his old man,” Tony said. “He doesn’t want to leave the old neighborhood.”
“This is a good one to leave. He must be a nut.” We got out of the car and left the motor running. Tony led the way up the driveway to the side door. Angie took a gun from his shoulder holster and kept it in his coat pocket. He didn’t take his hand away from it. Tony rang the bell and we waited until a man opened the door.
He was short and scrawny. He had a drooping mustache and watery eyes. He wore dirty denim overalls and a starched white shirt open at the neck. His eyes danced. He knew Tony.