No Lesser Plea (3 page)

“That’s good,” said Louis. “Now go and stand in the corner and be still.”

The proprietor walked down the aisle behind his counter and stood with his back to his high-priced cognac display. He watched the gunman open a leather attaché case and put the money bag inside. He seemed to be in no hurry.

“This your only store, hey?”

“No,” said Marchione. “We got another one over on the West Side, Eighty-seventh and Broadway. My brother runs it, we’re partners. That’s where we get the name, A and A. I’m Angelo, he’s Alfredo, we call him Al.”

“You know anything about franchises?”

“What? What franchises?”

“I mean like franchising, somebody figure out a good way to sell liquor, do the overhead, buy the stock, then get a bunch of guys to run the stores for him. Like McDonald’s and all.”

Marchione stared at the other man, at the engaged, interested expression on his face and at the black circle of the shotgun barrel’s mouth. (This is crazy, I’m having a business conversation with a robber. Only in New York.)

“Well, there’s not much of that in the liquor business, not in New York. I hear they’re starting it out of town.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. I guess if you got a franchise operation everything has to be the same, so you can get your discount from the supplier. I mean you got to move a lot of the same product, and you got to have a limited inventory. In the city, it’s all fashion, like clothes. One weeks it’s Galliano, next it’s Pernod, whatever. On the stuff that sells steady, well, it’s hard to beat the department stores. A franchise operation would have to beat them on cost on the low end and beat the neighborhood stores on selection on the high end. Then you got the good will …” His voice tapered off. What was going on here? The thought entered his mind that this guy could be a real wacko instead of a regular out-and-out robber.

“I get it,” said Louis. “It don’t really apply to the operation I got in mind, though.”

He closed and snapped his attaché case. “Well, time I was goin’,” he said briskly, and shot Marchione in the face from a range of about five feet. The blast exploded Marchione’s head and a dozen bottles of fine cognac and hurled his dead body back against the shelves. Louis placed his shotgun on the counter and approached the body, being careful of the broken glass. He patted down the man’s pockets and was rewarded with a thick roll of bills. The dead man had done a substantial cash business and routinely kept a good part of it outside his bank and out of view of the Internal Revenue Service. Louis smiled. He was something of an expert on the cash-diversion practices of dead storekeepers and never missed an opportunity to check in places other than the obvious cash register.

He walked out from behind the counter and placed the shotgun and the additional cash inside the attaché case. As he snapped it shut he was feeling good. The old man had about a grand in the roll, plus the $500 from the till—probably not as much as they would’ve got from the supermarket but sure as shit better than nothing, which it would have been on account of goddamn Walker being late. That boy is not cut out for this business.

Louis’s hearing had been slightly impaired by the blast of his gun, so that he failed to hear the footsteps coming up the stairs from the cellar or the door opening behind him.

“Oh God! Dad … what, Oh, no!” Louis spun around and saw a good-sized kid of about seventeen in a tan shop apron and a college sweatshirt. The kid saw him at about the same time and for a heartbeat they just stared at one another. The stink of death and cognac was strong in the air.

Then Louis slammed his case down on the counter and began fumbling frantically at the snaps. The youth picked up a bottle of Scotch by the neck and with a bellow of rage came around the end of the counter, the bottle raised high over his head. Louis lifted the case to block the blow, but not quickly enough. The bottom of the bottle caught him a glancing blow above the ear. He dropped the case and went down on one knee, with hot stars exploding behind his eyes. The kid was on him then, trying to grab at his clothes to hold him steady so he could get a good blow in with the bottle, Louis squirming and trying to kick away across the rough wooden floor.

Louis was not much of a street fighter and the kid was big enough and mad enough to be very dangerous. Now he was trying to press Louis down with his knee, his hand wrapped tightly in the cloth of the other man’s jacket. Enough of this shit, thought Louis, cocking his right leg to bring his ankle holster within reach. He heaved the middle of his body up and as the kid went over to one side Louis brought the Airweight out, stuck the muzzle in the kid’s belly and fired three times.

Louis sat up. The kid was lying on his back not far from his feet. He was gasping and his hands were pressed into the widening stain of blood forming in the center of his body. Louis stood up and straightened his clothes. He was irritated to see that his suit-jacket lapel had been torn in the struggle. Walking over to the shelves behind the counter he inspected the stock and then selected a quart of J&B Scotch, bagging it neatly from the supply underneath the register. He picked up his attaché case, stuck the bottle under his arm, then walked over to the wounded youth and shot him twice in the forehead at point-blank range. Then he walked out of the store.

The ten minutes Louis was away were the longest ten minutes in Walker’s life. He was itching and shivering. The last hit was hardly enough to keep him calm; after this, he deserved another, but damn, that was his absolutely last stone empty bag of dope. He glanced up and looked at the man in the backseat through the rear-view mirror. Pres was leaning back in his seat, eyes half closed, a faint smile on his lips. Walker studied his face. The dude was cool, no lie. Walker said, “Say, Stack been gone a long while, ain’t he?” The other man’s eyes came open a fraction and he met Walker’s gaze in the rear-view mirror.

“No, it’s just a couple of minutes. Take it easy.”

“Maybe we should drive around the corner, maybe something went wrong.”

“We staying right here. Jus’ be cool.”

There was a muffled bang from around the corner. Walker jumped.

“Uhnnh … ooh, shit, what was that?” he said, although he knew very well what it was. Walker’s legs were twitching uncontrollably by now, like a four year old who needs to go potty. There were three more popping sounds, sharper this time, and then two more.

“What the fuck he doin’ in there, playin’ shootin’ gallery? Oh, come on, les go, les go!” he moaned, banging the heel of his hand against the steering wheel.

In the back Pres thought, “This boy comin’ apart, now. Might have to whap his head a couple times, settle him down.” The idea gave him some small pleasure. He felt in charge, cool, a little tingly. It’s wonderful to find one’s métier while one is still young.

Then the car door was opening and Louis was getting in. He had recovered his composure, and flashed a grin at Elvis. “Alright, my man! Nice score.” He turned to Walker. “Damn, Snowball! You look like death eatin’ a sandwich. Was you worried about your Uncle Stack?”

“No, Stack, it jus’ like … seem like you took a long time an’ all.”

“Yeah, right, now Donald, I want you to start drivin’ uptown on Madison. The speed limit is thirty-five, red mean stop, green mean go. Fiftieth, cut over to Lex an drop us off. Now, move.”

Walker did as he was told, driving like an old lady on the way to church. The night was cool and the traffic fairly light. He made it to the subway station in a little over eight minutes and pulled up to the curb.

The two other men got out. Louis came around to the driver’s side. He said, “Listen here, Snowball. You goin’ to drive to the Olympia Hotel, that’s at Tenth Avenue, ’round 23rd Street. There’s an all-night garage across the street. Put the car in there.
Before
you do that, pull over somewheres and change the plates. You got that? You got a screwdriver, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but Stack, I sick now. I’m fucking crawlin’, don’t you got anything to fix me up?” He snuffled back his running nose.

“Oh, I got some
good
stuff for you, Snowball, but I gotta go back to my place for it. Tell you what—take this here bottle and put yourself to sleep tonight. When you wake up I be there with your money an what you need.”

“You sure, Stack? I be bouncin’ off the walls come mornin’.”

Louis reached in and patted Walker on the cheek. “Yeah, Snowball, I be there, you my man, you part of my gang, ain’t you?”

Like the fly fisherman or the duck hunter, Man Louis had a solid practical understanding of the psychology of his particular prey, which in his case was the dope addict. He knew that junkies owned only two psychic states: fixed and looking for it. At a certain stage of looking, he knew, they were the most suggestible beings on earth, the promise of dope being enough to cancel any normal sense of suspicion or caution. He needed Walker in a certain place, alone, for at least twenty-four hours, and experience had shown him that a scared junkie would hold still that long on the expectation of a freebie hit of
good
dope.

Walker put the car in gear and drove off. Louis watched him go and then turned to Elvis.

“That asshole. Pres, my man, let me tell you. Some people they just tools, oughta have a damn on-off switch top their head. This Snowball, now, I meet him two weeks ago, hangin’ around Stacy’s out in Queens? I know this dude pushes shit round there. Lil Donald’s one of his prime clients. Anyway, I ask around, the man’s in trouble, got a fifty dollar Jones on him, in hock up to his ass. We get to talkin’, me and Donald, an I slip him something from my private stash. He’s flying, man, I his momma and his poppa. I tell you, Pres, you want to
own
a dude, get you a smackhead. I tell you somethin’ else. When you done, they got that switch on ’em, you jus’ reach up and switch it off. Dig?”

Elvis dug. “How you gonna do it?”

Louis looked pained. “
I
ain gonna do nothin’.
He
gonna do it. We jus gotta set up the situation, hey. That’s the other part of your job. Now let’s go home.”

As the two men descended into the steam-smelling passages, united as they were in the camaraderie of the deed, their minds held quite different thoughts. Elvis was elated, but at the same time calm with the sense that his immediate future was safely in someone else’s hands, that the awful necessity for daily choices was in abeyance. In this he was like a monk or a woman who has just become pregnant. To him, the reality of the murder, the horror that was about to descend on Mrs. Marchione and her family, was utterly opaque. He had no imagination, or rather, his imagination was suspended at the level of a child who can say, “Bang, bang, you’re dead,” without being able, in fact, to grasp the nature of death.

Louis, on the other hand, had plenty of imagination and his mind was continually writhing with plans and contingencies. Although he affected the style and speech of a bad street thug, he was in fact the product of a comfortable middle-class home, his mother a schoolteacher, his father an undertaker and part-time preacher. Straight had been the gate and narrow the way in the Louis household: Mandeville’s two older brothers and younger sister had grown up strong in the church and, riding the crest of the civil-rights movement, had risen well in the world—dentist, lawyer, high-school principal.

But in one of those quirks of human development that confounds liberal philosophy, Mandeville, at eight, had had an illumination, or rather its opposite. It suddenly occurred to him that the complexities of the moral life—thinking of others, giving rather than receiving, following the commandments—and the plaguing guilt and conscience that enforced them, could be dispensed with. If one was clever enough to avoid detection and capture, one could do anything,
anything.
You could curse God in church and nothing would happen. You could sneak into the church and pee on the altar cloth and the minister’s robes. You could steal a kitchen knife and dismember your sister’s kitten. And if you slipped and got caught (and this was almost the best part), you could wail and beg forgiveness, and promise never to do it again and quote the gospel about the prodigal son and all that bullshit, and
they believed it!

Of course, one does get a reputation. By fifteen, Mandeville was known around his suburban Philadelphia neighborhood as a bad boy, although he was protected from major consequences by the mighty respectability of his family, by the inability of the community to believe that so sterling a house could bring forth such a monster, and by the belief, sadly strained by the passage of years, that he “was young yet,” and would “grow out of it.”

Mandeville by this time had discovered his talent for armed robbery. He was a highwayman in the lanes behind the elementary school, growing rich on the lunch money and allowances of his terrified victims; lacking sword and pistol he made do with an ice pick. So effective was this instrument, when applied gently to the eyelids, at producing instant compliance, that Mandeville was unprepared when an unusually spunky eleven-year-old girl had not only refused him her lunch money, but had called him a dumb asshole and kicked him painfully in the shins.

He felt he had no choice but to chase her down and work her over a little with the ice pick, thus discovering both the limits of his community’s tolerance and the foolishness of leaving witnesses.

The girl had staggered home, bleeding from dozens of wounds, with a piece of Mandeville’s windbreaker clutched in her hand. The police were called, Mandeville was arrested while trying to burn the torn and bloody windbreaker in his backyard, and at the juvenile hearing scores of children and their parents came forward to accuse him. For his part, Mandeville was outraged that his sincere repentance, his neat suit and polished shoes, and the reputation of his family cut no ice with the presiding judge. He was sentenced to a year in the state reformatory.

On the evening of his first day on the inside he was given the obligatory beating by the boss kid of his cottage, a huge and brutal redneck youth who had by no means enjoyed Mandeville’s advantages in life, and knew it, and was looking forward to making the thin, scholarly looking black boy’s life hell on earth.