Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (9 page)

I forced myself to devote all my energy to my breath, like Captain Kirk telling Sulu to divert all power to the shields.
 
In.
 
Om mani padme hum
.
 
Out.
 
Om mani padme hum
.
 
In.
 
O pinupdi podbe dorhal—

The man monster reached the bar, cleared a section of debris such as drinks, coasters, ashtrays and bowls of snack food with his forearms, and leaned forward to rest his weight on them.
 
The groaning of the bartop coincided with a squeal from the footrail below.
 
Our faces were now two or three feet apart.

In spite of myself, kicking myself for it, I dropped my eyes from his.
 
Only then did I take in how he had dressed to come to South Florida.
 
Dark doublebreasted suit.
 
White shirt with buttondown collar.
 
Wide necktie.
 
Stingy-brim fedora.
 
I already knew he wasn’t local—no way he could live on an island the size of Key West for as long as a week without every Conch hearing about him.
 
In my years as a barkeep, I’ve become pretty good at guessing where the tourists are from, but this guy was almost too easy: he fit one of the oldest templates I have on file.
 
The way I phrased it to myself was,
from the neighborhood: half a wise guy.
 
I glanced quickly over at Fast Eddie and saw that he had spotted it too; he rolled his eyes at me.

So I was less surprised than I might have been when the monster made a perfunctory left-right sketch of looking around the place, and said, in a voice like a garbage disposal working on a wristwatch, words anyone else would have realized were a ridiculous cliché:

“This a real nice joint ya got here, chief.
 
Be a fuckin shame if somep’m bad was ta happena the place, ah?”

Down at the end of the bar, Maureen emitted a gasp that was almost a shriek, and then clapped a hand over her mouth.

*
 
*
 
*

I didn’t blame her.
 
He was an evolutionary throwback.
 
Go to any museum with a diorama of Early Man, shave the Missing Link down to a ten o’clock shadow like an extremely coarse grade of sandpaper, and you’ll have something very like his face.
 
Failing that, there are a couple of Frank Frazetta cover paintings that depict him trying to rip Tarzan’s throat out.

Okay, Mr. Sulu—divert a little power to the voice.

To my great relief, it did not quaver when I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage, “I’ve always thought so.”
 
I forced myself to meet his eyes.
 
“Not for nothing, but you’re a long way from home, ain’t you, pal?” I asked.

He squinted at me and pursed his lips.
 
He was thinking about frowning at me, and if he did, I was going to have to drop my eyes again.
 
“You born inna Bronx, chief?”

I nodded.
 
“Moved out to the Island when I was six.”

He aborted the frown.
 
“Oh.
 
For a minute there, I t’ought you was squeezin’ my shoes, talkin at way.”
 
Without warning he smiled, and I needed full impulse power to keep the blood from draining from my head.
 
“Okay.
 
So you unnastan the way things work.
 
Terrific.”
 
The smile went away, like a furnace door slamming shut.
 
“Half a the mutts down here, I gotta drawer em a pitcher, an then come back inna couple days when they heal up enough to talk again.
 
Waste a fuckin time, nome sane?”

“Yeah, I know what you’re saying,” I said.
 
“We don’t get many guys like you in Key West.
 
You’re the first I’ve seen, and I’ve been down here ten years.”

He shrugged.
 
“All good things come to a end, chief.
 
You own iss dump?”

“On paper,” I agreed.
 
“I’m Jake Stonebender.
 
What’s your name?”

He smirked.
 
“Fuck difference it make, really?
 
Like you just said, there’s only the one of me.”

“I have to call you something.”

Very slowly, his massive head went left… right…stopped.
 
“No, ya don’t. “

“I don’t?”
 

“You ain’t gonna be talkin about me.
 
Unna stanwhum sane?”

I sighed.
 
“Aright.
 
You wanna bottom-line this for me or what?”
 
Amazing how easily New Yorkese came back to me, after all those years.
 
Some things you never forget, I guess: like stealing a bicycle.

He took a step back and turned in a slow circle.
 
People seemed to wither slightly under his gaze, in a wave, like wind passing through a wheatfield.
 
Even Harry the Parrot was silent.
 
The only one who didn’t flinch was Fast Eddie, who grew up in darkest Brooklyn back when there were Dodgers there.
 
Willard and Maureen actually ducked their heads and averted their faces.
 

The man monster took in the entire compound: the bar area with its big freestanding stone fireplace, the nearby pool, the scatter of tables and chairs, the five cottages, the shell and coral gravel parking area to the south that rarely held anything but bikes and mopeds, the flaming canopy of poinciana overhead, the handful of obligatory palm trees here and there, and the tall thick hedge that enclosed and shielded the property on all sides.
 
With no apparent pause for computation, he named a sum.
 
“That’s what I figure ya take in, here, an average week.”

I shook my head.
 
“You’re high.
 
Way high.”

He shook his.
 
“Not when I’m workin.
 
Now, I can prackly guarantee ya no trouble here for only a quarter a that.”

“Twenty-five percent is pretty stiff,” I said evenly.
 
My hands were starting to ache from wishing they held a shotgun.

“Not when ya add it up,” he said.
 
“No fires…no explosions…no armed robberies…no random drive-bys…no customers mugged or raped onna way in or out…no wakin up onna bottom a the pool strapped to a safe…ya add it all up, chief, it’s a fuckin’ bargain.”

When in doubt, stall.
 
“I have a partner I have to consult first.”

“Notify, ya mean.
 
Where’s he at?”

I shrugged as eloquently as I could.
 
It wasn’t quite a lie: as long as I didn’t look at my watch, I couldn’t be certain whether Zoey was still rehearsing, or setting up for the gig.
 
I poured a shot of Chivas and slid it across the bar to him.
 
“Give me forty-eight hours.”

He thought it over.
 
So far I had not said or done anything disrespectful, even for form’s sake.
 
“Okay.”
 
He gulped the shot, turned on his heel and lumbered away, dropping the shotglass onto the cement beside the pool as he passed it.
 
It broke, a musical period to his overture.

It was quite a while after he was gone before anyone moved or spoke.

*
 
*
 
*

“Holy this,” Brad said finally.
 
“How
saw
that guy, Jake?”

‘Yeah,” Walter agreed.
 
“And what want he did exactly here?”

“Well, I didn’t get his name,” I said, “but I bet I can guess the name of the organization he represents.”

“You’re wrong, Jake,” Maureen Hooker said.

Something in her voice made me look down the bar to her.
 
Nearly all of us Callahan’s Place alumni tend to tan so poorly that we’re always being mistaken by tourists for other tourists.
 
But now Maureen was
pale
, the kind of fishbelly white you usually only see on a nightshift worker from Vladivostok.
 
So, I suddenly realized, was her husband Willard.
 
Since I happened to know them both, from conclusive personal experience, to be about as timid and panicky as your average Navy SEAL, this caught my attention.
 
“You’re telling me that guy is
not
mobbed up?”

Willard answered.
 
“You know the way some respectable Italian-American citizens resent the Mafia, for making all Italians look bad?”

“Sure,” Fifty-Fifty said, and I nodded Irish agreement.

“Well, that’s the way Mafiosi feel about him.
 
They figure a guy like him makes regular Italian murderers and thieves look bad.”

“Which is just backwards,” Maureen added.
 
“He makes Capone and Mad Dog Coll look good.”

Doc Webster cleared his throat loudly.
 
“All right, God damn it, if nobody else will ask, I will: who
was
that massed man?”
 
He paused a moment for people to resume breathing.
 
“And where do you two know him from?”

Maybe Maureen’s wince was due to the Doc’s pun.
 
(Mine was.)
 
And maybe it wasn’t.
 
“I’ve never seen him before in my life, Doc.
 
But there’s only one person he could possibly be.”
 

Her husband nodded glumly.
 
“And until five minutes ago I’d have told you, with some confidence, that he couldn’t possibly exist.”

Maureen half turned in her chair to face him.
 
“But there isn’t any doubt, is there, sweet?”

Willard was frowning so ferociously he looked like a migraine victim.
 
“Not in my mind,” he said, and opened his arms.
 

They hugged each other hard.

The Doc cleared his throat again, perhaps half an octave higher, and said in his very softest, gentlest voice, “The first one who tells me who that guy is might very well be allowed to live.”

Willard sighed.
 
“That guy,” he told us all, stroking his wife’s hair, “pretty much
 
has to be the son of Tony Donuts.”

*
 
*
 
*

“I believe you,” I said.
 
“That’s so weird it almost has to be true.
 
But it doesn’t
tell
me anything, yet.
 
Who exactly is Tony Donuts?”

“A memory, now.”
 
He shuddered, and I don’t think it was theatrical.
 
“Not a good one.”

“Well…mixed,” Maureen said.
 

“He was a mixed cursing,” her husband agreed.
 
“I can’t deny that.”

“Willard and I knew each other for years,” Maureen said, “and at various times we were partners, lovers, friends.
 
For awhile we weren’t anything at all.
 
Then Tony Donuts came into our lives and brought us back together…and when the dust settled, we were married.”

“Whoa,” Long-Drink exclaimed.
 
“And that’s not enough to make him a good memory?
 
What was he like?”

Willard looked thoughtful.
 
“Picture the monster that just left here.”

Long-Drink frowned.
 
“Okay.”

“Two inches taller, fifty pounds heavier, ten years older.”

With each successive clause, Long-Drink’s frown deepened.
 
“
O
-kay.”

“With a permanently abcessed tooth.”

Long-Drink’s eyes completely disappeared from view beneath his eyebrows.
 
“Ah,” he said.

“That was Tony Donuts on a good day.”

There was a brief silence, as we all tried to picture such a creature.
 
“I see,” Long-Drink said, though it’s hard to imagine how he could have; by now even the bags under his eyes were obscured.

Fifty-Fifty spoke up.
 
“How’d he get that name?
 
Was he a cop, once?”

Willard briefly sketched a smile.
 
“No, Marty.
 
He was born Antonio Donnazio, that’s part of it.”

“And the rest?”

Willard grimaced.
 
“With children present, I hesitate t—”

“One time he was raping a woman named Mary O’Rourke,” Erin said, “and her husband kept trying to stop him.”
 
She saw Willard’s surprise.
 
“Lady Sally told me the story once.
 
So Tony decided to secure Mr. O’Rourke out of the way, and the tools at hand happened to be a mallet and a pair of large spikes.
 
Afterward one of the crime-scene cops voiced the opinion that Mr. O’Rourke’s scrotum now looked like a pair of donuts, and the name stuck.”

“So did O’Rourke, it sounds l-
oooch
,” Long-Drink said, the last syllable occasioned by the heavy shoe of Doc Webster.

“So how did you two get mixed up with him?” I asked Willard, to change the subject.

He sighed, looked down, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.
 
“Well…this was back in the days when some people called me The Professor.”

Yipes.
 
I had a sudden flashback of several decades, and made a clumsy attempt to interrupt him.
 
“Uh, look, we don’t really need to go into this level of detail—”

Maureen was shaking her head.
 
“Thanks, Jake, that’s sweet—but it’s okay: there isn’t a single want or warrant outstanding for anyone of that name, in this or any jurisdiction,” she said.
 
“There never was.”
 
You could hear the pride in her voice.
 
Not many worldclass confidence men can make that claim.