“How do I know unless you tell me what you’ve got in mind?”
“I hope to hell you can help,” he muttered. “I got nobody else.”
“You’ve got yourself.”
“Yeah,” he said, off-key. “I been having myself for years.”
I didn’t say anything. He tried to glare at me but he couldn’t hold my eyes. He lifted his shoulders and let them drop; juices seemed to run out of him and he said in a weary voice, “Let me tell it my own way. I got to start way back at the beginning or you won’t understand it. I been rehearsing this for two hours this morning. How much you need to know.”
When I made no answer he gave me a spasmodic shrug. “Look, I was a sax man, a pretty good sax man, and I used to be clean. I had this four-man combo and we booked around town, little toy wages but I had talent and I figured I’d make it. More talent than a lot of Charley the Stars ever had, but they eat. I didn’t know that then.
“I figured if you could blow good and hit all the notes that move, all you had to do was wait for some A-and-R scout from Columbia to sign you up.
“Things were going okay. We moved into the better clubs and cut a few sides and the money got good. I was young. I married Joanne about then—everything felt groovy. Jesus God how innocent we were! Did you know she was a virgin when I married her? She was nineteen years old.
“But then I lost two good men, the bass player got drafted and the piano man went to the Coast, and I had to break in a couple idiots that didn’t know their brass from their oboes. So okay, so we keep working, but all the time I keep seeing forty-year-old horn men dying from malnutrition and TB and alcoholism. Good bands are a dime a dozen. All of a sudden I could see I don’t want to spend twenty years playing crumb joints and have nothing to show for it except a mountain of debts and creases in my neck and maybe a habit for booze or hard dope. I had to do better than that for Joanne. You get what I mean? Or am I trying to describe a color to a blind man?”
He had warmed up; he was enjoying the sound of his own voice, but I had to let him go on at his own pace. I nodded at him and said, “I understand.”
“Okay. So I got sick and tired of the life we were leading, that’s all. Jesus, I was in love with Jo. But the way we lived, Sweet God. I figured she deserved better.”
His voice ran down and he sat scowling. I didn’t prompt him. After a while he said sourly, “You know, you really ought to pay extra for the story of my life.”
He looked up with a twisted smile and resumed:
“Then they went ape for rock. They brought in all these stupid long-haired kids where the drummer plays the melody in the band and all they know how to do is jiggle a lot and make enough noise to make you stone deaf. Now I’m too old to get in that bag, see? I’m a musician for Christ’s sake. It’s the last goddamn straw.
“Right then we were working the Moulin Rouge, which was the only room left on the Strip that wasn’t using rock. I could see it wouldn’t last—I learned about squeeze plays the first time I got jumped in an alley by five kids bigger than me. Man, I figured here I was making only a hundred a week but next month I could be starving to death.” He uttered a B-flat grunt of sour laughter and threw up his arms, gesturing. His arms fell to his sides and he said gloomily, “So one night Sal Aiello, he owns the Moulin Rouge, he comes to my door selling Mafia cookies.”
He looked at me to see what effect that had. “I’m not dense,” he said defiantly. “Look, Aiello offered me a chance to write my own ticket, and if I turned it down where was I supposed to go? I wasn’t about to go back to the bottom—I been there, it’s too crowded. So I gave my boys their closing notice. That’s one thing you learn in that business—how to get off.”
I said, “So then Aiello gave you a job. Doing what?”
“Bagman,” he said without hesitation. “I was clean, no criminal record. I was ideal—the cops wouldn’t shake down a guy like me at embarrassing times like when I’m carrying a satchel full of payoff money for the monthly sheet of potbelly politicians.”
“Who’d the money go to?”
He looked at me from under his thin eyebrows. “I don’t think that’s included in the price of your ticket.”
“All right,” I said, saving it for later. “Go ahead.”
“Okay, I’m on the payroll and then something happens that gets me sore at Aiello.” He squinted at me as if to divine how much I knew about that.
I decided it would help to tell him. “I know about Aiello and Joanne.”
“Christ. Everybody alive and his idiot half-brother seems to know about that. Hell, I guess I should have kept it to myself, but she was my wife. The bastard didn’t think I’d lift a finger. He thought I was too scared. He was right. Christ, that crazy Jo goes and shacks up with him just for kicks I guess because she didn’t know any better, and what do I do about it? Nothing. Oh, I belted Jo a few good ones, but I didn’t go near Aiello. If I had, I’d have ended up part of the pavement on a road-construction job. Like he did. But the trouble with me is, I didn’t know enough to keep my mouth shut. I got pissed off—hell, who wouldn’t?—and I loaded up with too much to drink one night and I started beefing in a bar about that bastard Aiello. I didn’t spell anything out, just called him some names, but Pete DeAngelo hears the tail end of it. That’s my luck. So Pete hears me beefing and he walks me outside and taps me around a little. Maybe I had that coming. It taught me my lesson. But right after that I find a couple cops waiting at my house with a warrant and a half a kilo of uncut heroin they claim they found taped inside my toilet tank. It was a railroad—you never saw anything that raw. I was clean, man, I never in my life messed with narcotics.”
“Who planted it? The cops?”
“No. Aiello or DeAngelo, one of them had it done. Then they phoned in an anonymous tip to the cops. They made sure Joanne was out of town that week so it wouldn’t get pinned on her—they wanted her around here handy where they could keep pins stuck in her.”
He turned palms up and looked at me. “And you ask me why I think they’re after me. I can’t pretend I didn’t have a beef against Aiello—it gives me a nice neat motive to go after him the minute I get out of jail, right? Good old Aiello. When I got arrested he was as nice and fatherly as you could ask. Comes to the visiting room and tells me it’s all for my own good, the organization likes to keep the hired help in line and once in a while it calls for teaching a little lesson. I’m the student. He gets me an organization mouthpiece and the guy pleads me guilty, which I was in no position to argue. I walk into Superior Court and the judge hands me seven to ten years, and then Aiello tells me the boys don’t hold any hard feelings, it’s just this is the way things get handled when you step out of line. He promises me there’ll be a good job waiting for me when I get out, and he gives me his word on his mother’s grave nobody’s going to touch Joanne while I’m away. Of course that’s to keep me from getting so unhappy I might decide to sing to the cops. Joanne’s their hostage to make sure I don’t talk right? But I figured Aiello meant what he said about treating me square when I got out—which is why I went up there last night.”
Maybe he thought he detected ironic disbelief in my face; he said angrily, “Hell, what else could I do?”
“You tell me.”
“If I’d turned state’s evidence they might have gone for Joanne or they might have gone for me—they can find a way to slip a hit man into a prison cell if they want to. Either one of us could’ve ended up with our heads in a basket. Okay, so I built up a reputation for keeping my mouth shut, but what choice did I have? It didn’t mean I was happy, I admit—if I was happy I wouldn’t be here talking to you like this. But goddamn it, I’ve seen them put the fix on when they wanted to. Tony Senna got arrested a few years ago and he’s got a record as long as your arm, but they bribed the Records Division to supply the court with a clean record sheet for the trial, and he got off with a suspended sentence as a first offender. First offender my ass. Then there was a bookie they caught chiseling on the receipts a few years back, so two torpedoes beat his head in with tire irons. Some cop caught them both red-handed, but the fix goes in and when the cop gets on the stand he testifies he saw the bookie fall on his head. They could have bought me the same kind of fix, but hell, they framed me in the first place, why should they?”