We pondered the mystery of it all until Shorty came back. “This way,” he said. The baldheaded man took two steps backward so that I could enter. He waved a hand in the direction of the dining room. They didn’t seem to want me behind them.
Ramsey Lynch looked as if he hadn’t been getting enough sleep. His eyes were bloodshot and had dark smears under them. He wore an ice cream suit that made him look fatter than he was. He didn’t smile when I came in, but I hadn’t expected him to. Three of them sat at the far end of a table. Lynch wasn’t in the center; he was on the left side. The man on the right side wore glasses and had an open attaché case before him. The man in the center stared at me and I thought that he had the oily eyes of an unhappy lizard.
“Sit down, Dye,” Lynch said, so I sat at the opposite end of the table, near the sliding doors. Neither Shorty nor the baldheaded man had followed me into the room.
“So you’re what we paid twenty-five thou for,” the man in the center said, and from his tone I could tell that he didn’t think I was much of a bargain.
“Twenty-five thousand so far,” I said. “The final bill is for sixty.”
“You know me — who I am?” he said.
I knew, but he didn’t wait for my answer.
“I’m Luccarella.”
“From New Orleans,” I said.
“You’ve heard of me, huh?” He didn’t seem to care one way or another.
“Giuseppe Luccarella,” I said, “or Joe Lucky.”
“That Joe Lucky’s newspaper stuff,” he said. “Nobody calls me Joe Lucky, but if they did, I wouldn’t mind. I don’t care about things like that anymore. You wanta call me Joe Lucky, go ahead.”
“I’ll call you Mr. Luccarella,” I said.
He shrugged. “This is my lawyer, Mr. Samuels.”
I nodded at the lawyer and he nodded back and said, “Mr. Dye.”
Luccarella leaned over the table, resting his elbows on it. He had a narrow, crimped face that looked as if it had been squeezed so hard that his lizard eyes and gray teeth threatened to pop out of his skull. His skin had an unhealthy yellowish tinge to it, as if he had just suffered a bad bout with jaundice. The deep lines in his face, especially his forehead said that he was somewhere past fifty, but his hair was still thick and black and glossy and he wore it long. He looked like a man who worried a lot.
“Lynch works for me,” he said. He had that New Orleans Rampart Street accent that borders on Brooklynese and makes works come out close to woiks and for sound like fah. “You work for Lynch, so that means you work for me, right?”
“I don’t work for anybody,” I said. “Particularly Lynch.”
“He pays you, don’t he?”
“He pays me a fee in exchange for information. I don’t work for him. We’d better get that straight at the start.”
“Possibly Mr. Dye would prefer the word retained,” the lawyer said in that smooth, conciliatory tone that the expensive ones seem to be born with.
Luccarella gestured impatiently. “Works, retained, who the hell cares? All I know is that since Lynch’s been paying you this town’s gone to hell.”
“Well, it’s not quite that bad,” Lynch said.
“I say it’s gone to hell and when receipts are down sixty-five percent I don’t know what it’s done if it hasn’t gone to hell.”
“Sixty-eight percent, Mr. Luccarella,” the lawyer said.
“It’ll be even worse next week,” I said.
Luccarella frowned. “What do you mean worse?”
“Necessary busted Henderson down to the Missing Persons’ Bureau.”
“There isn’t any Missing Persons’ Bureau,” Lynch said.
I smiled. “There is now.”
“What was Henderson?” Luccarella said.
“Vice squad.”
Luccarella threw up his hands and flopped back into his chair. “That’s the fucking end!” he yelled. He turned on Lynch and the fat man seemed to cower in his chair as if afraid of being struck. “You can’t even keep a line on a goddamned vice-squad cop! What are you doing to me, Lynch? I hand you the sweetest setup in ten states and you just sit around and piss it away. What are you doing it to me for?”
Before Lynch could answer, I said, “You might have some competition, too, but I suppose Lynch has already told you about that.”
Luccarella pulled himself together with a visible effort. “I shouldn’t do that,” he said in an apologetic tone. “I shouldn’t fly off the handle like that. My analyst tells me that it’s inner-directed rage that should be channeled into something constructive. So that’s what I’m gonna do. No, Mr. Dye, Lynch hasn’t told me about any competition. Lynch doesn’t seem to know what’s going on anymore. He seems to have let things sort of slide. Ever since that tame police chief of his shot hisself, Lynch seems to be sort of out of it, you know what I mean?”
“I’ve tried to keep him informed,” I said.
Lynch glared at me, but said nothing. “Sure you have,” Luccarella said. “I bet you’ve kept him right up to date, but maybe you can sort of bring me up to date, if you don’t mind too much?” He was trying to be very polite and constructive and perhaps the tight grip that he had on his end of the table helped.
“By competition I mean that Swankerton’s got some visitors. Chief Necessary says that they’re making a market survey and he seems to think that they might move in. Or try to.”
Luccarella squeezed his eyes shut. “Who?” he said. Then he said it again without opening his eyes.
“I think I remember most of them,” I said. “Jimmy Twoshoes of Chicago is one. The Onealo brothers, Roscoe and Ralph out of Kansas City. Nick the Nigger from Miami. Tex Turango, Dallas, A guy named Puranelli from Cleveland.”
“Sweet Eddie,” Luccarella said, his eyes still tightly closed.
“You didn’t tell me none of this,” Lynch said.
“I just found out.”
Luccarella opened his eyes and looked at me. “I want things back the way they were, Mr. Dye. I want things nice and calm and peaceful. I want to know how much that will cost me.” He gripped his end of the table so hard that his knuckles turned white. “You notice I’m being constructive.”
“Your analyst would like it,” I said.
“He’s an interesting guy. I had a lot of the worries and that’s why I went to him. I still have the worries, but I don’t mind them so much now. He said that most people have got the worries, but when they find out that they got them, then they can live with them. He said worrying about having the worries is what really gets you down. So you see why I don’t want to have any of the worries over here in Swankerton.”
“I understand,” I said.
“That’s good. That’s real good. So how much is it gonna cost me?”
I leaned back in my chair and smiled at Luccarella. I hoped it was a friendly one, the kind that wouldn’t worry him. “Chief Necessary said he would be willing to meet Friday to discuss things.”
Luccarella shook his head. “I have to be at my analyst Friday. What about today?”
“No chance today. Tomorrow’s a possibility.”
“Set it up with Lynch.”
I shook my head. “As you said earlier, Lynch has sort of lost touch.”
Luccarella smiled for the first time, a big, buck-toothed smile. He even chuckled. Then he looked at Lynch and chuckled some more. It was turning into his kind of a meeting after all.
“You agree with him, Lynch?” he said. “You agree that you’ve sort of lost touch?”
Lynch looked at me and moved his head slowly from side to side as if he could see seven chess moves ahead to the end of a game that he couldn’t possibly win. The lawyer looked a little embarrassed and busied himself with some papers. Luccarella chuckled some more. I smiled at Lynch. Everyone knew what was coming, but only Luccarella seemed to have any relish for it. Perhaps I did too, but I’m still not sure.