DeAngelo shot erect in the chair. “That’s a goddamn lie,” he rasped. It was the first reaction I’d had out of him.
Madonna told him to shut up and said to me, “Where’s the money now?”
I heard the raspy growl in DeAngelo’s throat before I saw him start to move with the corner of my eye. He had a gun under the loose tail of his sport shirt and he was hauling it out. Big Freddie, slow to react, was taking a surprised backward step when I shot my arm out, extracted the gun from Freddie’s shoulder holster, and snapped it downward just as DeAngelo’s gun leveled on Madonna’s belly.
The report of the gun was startling in that enclosed space. Bone fragments and blood sprayed from DeAngelo’s head. His bodily functions instantly lost their control; his sphincter relaxed and there was immediately the stink of human urine and manure.
Chickens will suspend their pecking order whenever one of their number gets sick. They all turn on the weak chicken and peck it to death. Ed Baker and Tony Senna had their guns in their fists before the echo died, but they were pointed at DeAngelo, not at me. DeAngelo’s actions, and the expression of his face, had been all the admission of guilt any of them would ever need to see. Before the body even began to slump in the chair, Senna and Baker had put bullets into it.
Tony Senna and Freddie herded us outside to the pool; the stink inside was offensive. Baker was doing something about the body. Madonna came outside behind us and we all stood ranged around the poolside furniture. Nobody wanted to sit down. Joanne trembled violently and clung to my arm. She said to Madonna, “Nobody double-crosses you, do they?”
“Not more than once,” he said with a grimace. “You have to understand the rules of the game, honey. The winner is the last one left alive.” He said it with a straight face.
I set the briefcase on a round metal umbrella table and opened the hasp with a key. Senna tugged out his gun and trained it on me but I only glanced at him, and upended the open briefcase to dump its contents on the table. Folded documents, photos and two packages of recording tape tumbled across the table in a littered heap.
I said, “That’s a sample, mainly to prove to you that I really do have the stuff. You can do whatever you want with this. Most of it’s worthless now. The blackmail evidence against Doctor Brawley is somewhere in here, and quite a bit of stuff that would have nailed Aiello for tax fraud if he were still alive. Now, of course, it’s useless. The film you had on Joanne has been destroyed. The evidence on Frank Colclough and Stanley Raiford has already been mailed to the FBI, so I doubt those two will get very far with their primary election campaign before they’re indicted.”
Madonna gave me a hooded glare. “That’ll buy you a ticket to the graveyard. You know that.”
“No. The rest of the documents from Aiello’s safe are still under my control. They’ll be turned over to the appropriate federal agencies if my contact doesn’t hear from me regularly. I’ve got you over a barrel. You know as well as I do what’s in that collection. If it’s released, some prominent noses are going to bleed, yours included. It’ll crack the whole state open like an oyster—it’ll blow your whole stinking mess of an organization ten miles in the air.”
“Then why don’t you release it?”
“Because it’s my life insurance. Mine and Mrs. Farrell’s.”
“You’re a pretty smart son of a bitch, aren’t you? What about the cash?”
“It comes to three million, one hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars, in unmarked, untraceable bills.”
“That’s not what I asked and you know it.”
“It’s in a safe place,” I said. “You don’t need it. And I can’t think of anybody it ought to be turned over to. If it went to the law it’d just end up lining some crooked politician’s pocket. So I’ll tell you what’s going to happen to the money. Mrs. Farrell and I plan to honeymoon in Las Vegas a few weeks from now. I plan to win one hell of a lot of money when I’m there. Say a quarter of a million dollars, this trip, and I’ll repeat it every year or so until I’ve won three million, one hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars across the roulette tables. I’ll declare it as income and pay taxes on it. I leave it to you to make the arrangements and see to it that Las Vegas comes across. Any slip-ups and a few pieces of warm information will start to dribble into the FBI’s hands until you straighten out.”
I grinned a tight grin at him. “Any questions?”
He said in a low growl, “What the hell do you need all that money for?”
“I want to buy my kid brother an operation so he can play the trumpet again.”
I took Joanne’s arm and walked her around the pool to the back gate. Madonna said something behind us, and Tony Senna was there with the key by the time we reached the gate. He opened it and let us through. I heard the gate click shut behind us, and the snap of the lock. We walked around the end of the house, across the lawn, and got into the car. Joanne gave me a long slow smile. I started the car and pulled out of the driveway. I looked in the rear-view mirror, but nobody was following us.
By Way of Introduction …
This story was written in the mid-1980s as an original screenplay. The producer to whom it was delivered sent back a note indicating his disappointment with the script. He wrote, “The story is too old-fashioned. It has a beginning, a middle and an end.” I’m not making that up. In that estimable gentleman’s honor, I have divided this narrative version of the story into three acts, labeled—well, you’ve already figured that one out.
The organization that was to have filmed this one tumbled into Ozymandian ruins, like most independent movie companies, and Marksman went to a shelf in my house where, like most unfilmed scripts, it remained unread by anyone except a producer and the author’s agent and the author’s wife.
In its original form the script is 105 pages in length. It would have made for a movie about 95 minutes long; but a screenplay contains a great deal of white space. It is in fact no longer than a novelette, or extended short story. A screenplay is nothing more than a sheet of instructions for filmmakers and actors to keep at hand while they assemble their movie out of such components as they may have gathered. Often it’s true that the tricks attributed by cineaste critics to “marvelous directorial touches” are in fact specified clearly in a writer’s screenplay before a director ever gets near the picture; but generally speaking, a screenplay does not (or at least should not) tell directors how to direct, actors how to act, cinematographers how to photograph, or audiences how to feel. The screenplay simply tells us what happens. It’s up to the actors, the director, the photographers and the sound team, the editors and the audience to interpret these happenings. The writer creates the story, but everyone has to bring something to it—the writer alone does not make a movie unless he also happens to be producer, director, cast and crew.
Screenwriting Rule One: A script is a blueprint for illusion, and its every sentence must meet one of two criteria—it must be dialogue, or it must begin figuratively with the words “we see” or the words “we hear”.
If the camera can’t see it or the microphone can’t hear it, then it cannot be filmed, and therefore it doesn’t belong in the screenplay.
In preparing this story for publication in narrative form, I’ve eliminated the abbreviations and jargon that may make screenplays annoying or confusing. (How many readers can be expected to know that because of an obscure Hungarian director’s pronunciation in the 1930s, “MOS” means “Mit-Out Sound,” which is filmese for “without sound” or “silent”?) I’ve added bits and pieces in order to clarify events—a few lines or words here and there, in the effort to make it readable. But I have not tried to disguise its origins; it remains quite staccato. In movies people rarely talk in long paragraphs—everything’s a one-liner. It’s best to leave those essences alone.