Porky crossed the room and disappeared. I didn’t sit down. I looked at Baron — he must have been sleeping when I called and he was still in the process of waking up. “Trouble, Nat?”
“Not exactly. I made the flight, met the finger. A tub of lard named Jack Garstein.”
“I don’t know him.”
The power was still there. The eyes were calm, the hands steady. He was waiting to hear what I had to say. But first I had to get Porky into the room. I asked Baron if I could get myself a cup of coffee.
“Stay here,” he said. “Porky’ll get it.” He yelled for Porky, told him to bring me a cup of coffee. While we waited I killed time playing with a cigarette. I shook out the match and found an ashtray to put it into. Then Porky came back.
Porky had a saucer in one hand with a china cup balanced on it. Steam came up from the brim of the cup. In his other hand he had a silver tray holding a creamer and a sugar bowl. There was a gun under his jacket but he never had a chance to move near it.
My gun was tucked under my belt. I took it out, aimed, squeezed the trigger. I shot Porky in the chest, maybe an inch or two north of the heart. He took two steps and died. The coffee went all over the rug. So did the cream and sugar. But by then the gun was pointed at Baron.
“Why, Nat?”
I didn’t have an answer handy. I stood there, the gun pointed at him, and he sat where he was, his eyes on me, not the gun. He didn’t move at all. He may have been nervous but none of it showed. His question was a real one. He wanted to know why.
“Because you’re through,” I said.
“Who’s behind it?”
“Tony Quince.”
Baron nodded thoughtfully. “All right,” he said. “It figures. He’s well connected, he’s hungry. I suppose I should have been ready for it — and from him. But not this soon. You didn’t go to Philly, Nat, did you?”
“I went. I shot the finger and came home.”
“And now you shoot me.”
“That’s right,” I said.
He thought it over for a few seconds. He still wasn’t nervous. He was a fast hard man looking for an opening.
“Don’t kill me, Nat.”
He didn’t whimper it. He said it calmly, sensibly. He made me want to put the gun away, sit down, have a drink. I told him I had no choice.
“Don’t shoot me,” Baron said again. “Do a turn, change sides. We’ll clean up Tony and a few boys in no time and you’ll be on the right team.”
Everybody was telling me which side to play. “Your team’s gone,” I said. “Dead.”
“How many?”
“Scarpino and Spiro and Carr. And Porky here.”
“Four,” he said. “Four I never needed in the first place. Let me live, Nat.”
“No.”
I should have shot him then and saved time. For some reason I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why. I held the gun and kept it on him. He stayed where he was and looked at me.
He said, “I made a mistake. I guessed wrong. I thought you were just looking for a couple of yards a week, an inside track, a soft touch. I didn’t know how much you wanted.”
“I don’t want much.”
“I would’ve given you more, Nat. I just wanted to put you where you wanted to be, that’s all. Quince put me wise about you, told me you were around. I heard a little from other people but he gave me a name and a little background. He said I could do worse than find a slot for you. Were you in his pocket all along?”
That was a hard one to answer. I wasn’t too sure myself.
“He brought you in,” he said. “He brought you in all on his own, set you up with me. That it?”
‘“No.”
“You were running from something. You — ah, the hell with it. I don’t know about you and I don’t care about you. I played it straight with you, Crowley. I gave you more than I had to give you.”
“Let’s say we used each other.”
“So? Who gets more than that out of anybody?”
I let that one go.
“I got time for a cigar?” Baron asked.
“No.”
“Then end it, Crowley.”
The gun was cocked and ready. A Smith and Wesson thirty-eight primed and ready to go. The gun worked beautifully. It had one notch coming already. Porky was lying in his own blood at our feet and we were both ignoring him.
I said, “There’s something I want to say.”
“Then say it. You got the gun.”
“You had me wrong all the way, Lou.”
“That’s something new?”
“Wrong all the way and more than you know. My name’s not Crowley.”
“Who cares?”
“My name’s Donald Barshter,” I said. “I had a gun in my hand in Korea, never before and never since. Until I hit Buffalo I lived in Connecticut and I sold insurance. I was married and lived in a little house with trees in front of it.”
“Huh?”
“I was a square. Then I killed my wife by mistake and ran. I decided to play mobster. And here I am. I faked everybody out, Lou. I’m a phony all through.”
“You’re full of crap.”
“You think so?”
He stared thoughtfully at me. “Maybe not,” he said. “God damn. You put on a good act, Crowley. But I don’t get it. Why tell me all this?”
I wasn’t too sure myself.
I steadied the gun. “It won’t do you any good,” I said. “You’re not going to run around shouting about it. And I had to tell somebody.”
We could have talked about it for another five days the way we were going. But it wouldn’t have made much sense. I shot Baron once in the face, wiped off the gun and tossed it in his lap. Then I got the hell out of there and drove the Lincoln back to the Stennett.
I called Tony.
“It’s over,” I said.
“It worked?”
“I’m talking to you. If it hadn’t worked...”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
“So tell people,” I said. “Do whatever you want to do. I’m going to bed, I’m beat.”
And I went to bed.
From there on it was Tony Quince’s ball and he ran with it. The routine was what he called it, a palace revolution with the organization staying intact and just the very top turning around. He had spent the last three months laying the groundwork and it couldn’t have run more smoothly. There were no more killings. A few men who had been fairly close to Baron left town in a hurry. Nobody went chasing after them. They weren’t that important.
A few others found themselves with a little less responsibility and a little less money. A bookie had his area cut down. Another man had one of his three after-hours’ joints taken from him and handed to somebody else. You didn’t need a bloodbath for this. Just quiet conversation, backed up with power — power held carefully in reserve.
Somebody found Johnny and Mustache and their community-property female in the rooming house that afternoon, and that one made the papers. The story was about as colorful as you could get — a trio, so nude and so dead, after an obviously hectic evening of fun and games. A ménage à trois if there ever was one. The newspapers called it a sex killing and the cops were too tired to argue. There was never a kick on that one.
Scarpino never got found. The gravediggers covered him up and put grass in place over him and that was it for Scarpino. There were conflicting rumors, the way there always are — some people said he left town on the run, others that he was weighted down in the middle of Lake Erie. Nobody much missed him, except maybe his father. And his father wasn’t talking.
Baron was something else.
The cops picked us up Tuesday night and hauled us in — Tony Quince and Angie Moscato and me. The cops were the same pair of bulls who had pulled me in the first time around, a Fred Zeigler and a Howard Kardaman. This time I didn’t get slapped at all. There was no booking, no hard wordplay. They were being very cagy — if we were going to run things in Buffalo, they didn’t want to rub us the wrong way. As far as evidence went, they knew better than to look for any. They knew we had alibis and that we wouldn’t leave calling cards on dead bodies. They put Baron and Porky on adjoining slabs at the morgue and didn’t worry about them.