The Cutie (23 page)

“I called him and asked him to come over,” Clancy told me. “Ed should know what’s been happening this week. Fred here can fill him in.”

“That can happen second,” I said.

Starkweather bobbed his balding accountant’s head. “Certainly,” he said. “First things first.”

“Sure.” I went over and looked out the window. Far below me was the canyon of the street, cabs swimming back and forth down there like the tropical fish Ernest Tesselman kept. I looked around the office and I saw the framed photograph of Clancy’s wife, standing on the desk. Clancy was married. Ed Ganolese was married. Even fussy little Starkweather over there was married. Why shouldn’t I get married?

While I was struggling to keep from thinking about that, Ed came in, followed by Tony and Joe Pistol. Everybody sat down, and Ed said, “Okay, Clay. Let’s hear it.”

I told him first about the phone call from East St. Louis, and what the relationship between Michael Cantell and Billy-Billy Cantell had to mean. And what the relationship between Michael Cantell and Mavis St. Paul had to mean. And then I said, “Betty Benson had the key all along. She told it to me, but I didn’t notice. The thing was, what caused the killing in the first place was the fact that Mavis St. Paul went to see a lawyer about a divorce. For a while, I figured the fact that Mavis wanted a divorce had somehow or other forced the killing. But then I remembered what it was Betty Benson had told me. Mavis had married somebody from the air base out near her home town. She’d been working at the air base, and that’s where she met him. And she’d been working in the legal office.”

I grinned at them all. “See it? She married a lawyer. And when she decided to get herself a divorce, what lawyer did she go to see? Out of all the lawyers in New York, she picked her own husband. Of course, he’d changed his name in the meantime, so she didn’t realize who he was until she walked into his office. But when she saw the kind of office he had, when she saw the obvious signs that Mike Cantell was now making lots of money, all of a sudden she didn’t want a divorce at all. And then she found out he’d gone and gotten himself married again. For a girl like Mavis, that meant only one thing. She could get bigger alimony for not divorcing him than she could if she went ahead and got the divorce as planned. In less polite circles, that kind of alimony is called blackmail.”

In the silence, I looked over at Clancy. “Where’d she get your name, Mike?” I asked him. “From Ernest Tesselman? Did he mention you once or twice, in connection with Ed Ganolese? Or did she just pull the old coincidence bit?”

Clancy’s smile looked like something made of melting wax. “I don’t get you, Clay,” he said, but his voice broke twice while he was saying it.

“You don’t get me, Mike,” I told him. “But I get you. I get you cold.”

Ed was glaring at Clancy. “Is this on the level?” he demanded.

Clancy said, “Of course not, Ed. It’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of.” The way he said it, the greenest girl scout in the country could have seen he was lying.

“Clancy Marshall,” I said. “You couldn’t get away from that amateur stunt of keeping your initials, could you? All you did was reverse them. Michael Cantell. Clancy Marshall.”

“Your brother,” said Ed in disgust. “Your own goddam brother.”

“Billy-Billy used to tap him for loans when he was in a bind,” I said. “Junky Stein told me how Billy-Billy would go off some place and get money, when he needed it bad enough. But he could only come to the office here. He went at night one time, to Clancy’s home, and he didn’t get any money.” I turned back to Clancy. “That shook you, that night he came to see you, didn’t it, Mike? That wife of yours, you couldn’t let her know you had a brother like Billy-Billy Cantell. He was a threat, just like Mavis St. Paul. Not as big a threat, but still a threat. He was a hophead. You can’t rely on hopheads, they hit the needle and they talk. When the time came to find a fall guy to replace you in the St. Paul killing, Billy-Billy was the natural choice. Wasn’t he, Mike?”

“Listen—” said Clancy. But then he stopped. We were listening, all of us, but he didn’t say any more. He stared at us, wide-eyed, looking from one to the other of us, and the block-party smile was gone from his face for good.

“It’s true,” said Joe Pistol quietly. He looked at me and nodded. “It’s true.”

Starkweather coughed and got to his feet. “I’d better be leaving,” he said. “We can talk about the money situation some other time.”

“Call me tomorrow,” Ed told him, without looking away from Clancy.

“I will.”

Starkweather scurried out, not wanting to know what was going to happen next, and Ed said to Clancy, “You did this. You caused all this trouble. You got the cops down on us and killed your own brother and put the whole goddam organization in a bind. You did it. My own goddam lawyer.”

Clancy’s mouth moved, but no sound came out of it.

“Okay,” said Ed. He got to his feet. “Okay,” he said again. “Let’s go away from here.”

We went out to the elevator, the five of us, Clancy in the middle. I pushed the button and we waited till the night man brought the elevator up. We boarded, and rode down in silence. I was waiting for Clancy to try something on the way down, but maybe he realized he’d just be killing the old man at the controls if he opened his mouth. Anyway, he kept quiet.

At street level, we followed the night man to the glass doors, and waited while he unlocked one for us. He smiled and nodded and said good night to us, and we all said good night to him, all except Clancy.

We stood on the sidewalk for a few minutes, while Tony Chin went after the car. I stayed close to Clancy, ready for him to make any kind of move at all, either to run or to shout for help, but he stayed nice and quiet all the time.

Ed’s Rolls Royce purred up to the curb, and we all climbed in. Joe Pistol sat up front beside Tony Chin, while Ed and Clancy and I sat in back, Clancy in the middle. The car started up, and we drove crosstown.

Clancy swallowed once, loudly, and said, “Ed, I—” but then he stopped again, and he didn’t say another word the whole trip.

Tony drove straight over to Ninth and down to the Lincoln Tunnel. I rested a warning hand on Clancy’s knee as we came to the toll booths on the Jersey side of the tunnel. I felt him tensing, felt him trying to be brave enough to shout to the guy in the toll booth for help, but we drove on through with no trouble, and I felt his body sag again. Hope, as they say, springs eternal in the coward’s breast. Maybe Clancy didn’t really believe his ticket was one-way.

Tony drove along a few of the Jersey roads, and he obeyed every speed limit there was. We drove on a four-lane divided highway for a while, and then a three-laner, and then a bumpy blacktop two-laner, and then a one-lane dirt road. And then we stopped.

We all got out of the car. It was dark out there, with the trees and the smell of the Jersey swamps all around us, the black Rolls behind us, and the only light coming from a three-quarter moon and a sky full of stars. The glow over to the east of us was New York. It was hot, muggy, but none of us noticed it just then.

Ed stood with his back to the car, Tony on his left and me on his right. Joe Pistol stood near the front of the car, observing but not a part. Clancy stood wilting, facing the three of us.

Ed spoke to Clancy then, for the first time since we’d left the office. “You’re going to die out here, Clancy,” he said. “I want you to know why you’re dying. It isn’t because you killed the St. Paul woman, or the Benson woman, or even your brother. It isn’t for killing anybody, killing isn’t a crime I worry about. You’re going to die for another crime, far more serious. You’re going to die for stupidity. You did a stupid killing, and you followed it up with two more just as stupid. You got emotional, you lost your head, and you acted like an amateur. You gave the organization trouble. You used an organization man for a patsy. You acted like an amateur, and I can’t have an amateur in the organization.”

“Ed,” said Clancy. His voice was as faint as the air.

“The killing was a stupid one because it was complicated,” Ed told him. “And it was a stupid one because it was emotional. Clancy, we take care of our own, you ought to know that. If you’d come to me about this bitch bothering you, we’d have taken care of it for you. But you got stupid. You took the law into your own hands.
My
law.”

“Ed,” whispered Clancy.

Ed took a step forward, and we all stood to one side and waited. Ed isn’t as young as he used to be, and he’s grown accustomed to soft living, but he’s still got a hard core inside him. He reached for Clancy, and his left hand grabbed a bunch of shirt front. His right hand came across and clipped Clancy on the side of the jaw. Clancy turned his head, rolling away from the punch, but he didn’t roll away from the open backhand that made the return trip.

Tony and Joe and I, we stood to one side, watching and waiting, and Ed worked on Clancy, holding him up with one hand, clubbing him in face and body with the other hand. During the whole thing, nobody said a word, not even Clancy.

Finally, Ed was finished. He backed away from Clancy, lying sprawled on his face in the Jersey mud, and Tony Chin handed him a towel from the glove compartment of the Rolls. Ed wiped his hands on the towel and gave it back to Tony. He was breathing a little hard, but that was all. And his face was completely expressionless.

Tony put the towel back into the car, and then he walked over to me. He pushed out his hand with something in it, and I took it.

It was a Colt .45, one of the blockbusters. I held it in my hand, and looked at it and hefted it. It was the first time I had seen this particular gun, and it would also be the last. After I had finished with it, Tony would take it back and it would disappear. It would cease to exist. Most of the parts would be saved for other guns, but the barrel would be destroyed. The barrel is what they use in ballistics.

I looked over at Ed, and he nodded to me. Then he and Tony and Joe Pistol all walked around to the other side and stood there, looking up at the night sky. It’s best to have no witnesses to a thing like this, none at all.

I stepped over in front of Clancy and looked down at him. He was sitting in the mud, half-conscious, propping himself up with one hand. The other hand was wiping at the blood on his face, distractedly.

He was going to die. Because he got trapped by his emotions.

He raised his head, and looked up at me, eyes all white in the darkness, finally believing it, and I turned everything off. I was a machine, and my arm was the arm of the machine, and the gun was a part of the machine. And when the machine’s finger contracted, the machine’s gun exploded, and that was what the machine was for.

Clancy flipped over backwards, falling awkward and broken, like a puppet when you cut the strings. The machine stepped forward and looked at the broken puppet, and saw that it had been shot in the head, and it wasn’t breathing.

Tony Chin came over and dismantled the machine, removing the gun from the hand. I turned around and went back to the Rolls and crawled into the back seat. Tony put the gun somewhere under the front seat, and went back to the body. He picked it up and walked off with it, and Ed got in the back seat with me while Joe Pistol sat up front.

Tony came back a couple minutes later and got two broom-like things out from under the driver’s seat. He went around back to attach them to the rear bumper, behind the tires. It was a one-lane dirt road, and when we drove back to the two-lane blacktop, we would sweep the dirt road clear of tire tracks.

Once on the blacktop, Tony stopped the car and removed the brooms. Then we drove back to Manhattan.

They let me off in front of my apartment building, and Joe Pistol looked back at me as I was getting out of the car and said, “You’re efficient, Clay.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You did good work,” Ed told me. “Only now I got to get me a new goddam lawyer.”

I went upstairs to the apartment. I got myself a beer and sat down in the living room to think. It was eleven o’clock at night. In three hours, I was to pick Ella up at the Tambarin Club, just as I’d been doing every night for almost three weeks now.

But tonight was different from the other nights. Tonight, I had killed a man. All my talk about refusing to maintain the pretty fiction—did I mean I would tell Ella about the killing tonight, and that I would demand she either understand or leave me? If I didn’t tell her, I was starting the double life, like Clancy (and look where it got him) and Ed and all the other husbands in this business. If I did tell her, what did I have the right to expect from her?

I could hear the conversation already, three hours before it would happen. She would ask me how I was doing on the case, and I would tell her I’d found the killer. She would ask me who it had turned out to be, and I would tell her, and then she would ask me what had been done about him, and I would say, “Ed beat him up and then I shot him in the head.”

And she would want to know why I shot him in the head. And I would have to say, “Because he was stupid.” And she would want to know how he had been stupid, and I would have to say, “He gave in to his emotions, and that is stupid.”

And I knew what she would say then, too.

Finally, I got to my feet and went out to the bedroom. I got Ella’s suitcase out of the closet and packed all her things into it. I carried it down to the parking garage, picked up the Mercedes, and drove to the Tambarin. I walked into the manager’s office and gave him the suitcase. I told him to give it to Ella when she finished working that night. “And tell her,” I said, “that I said I was sorry.”

I left there without easing his curiosity, and drove back home. The Puerto Rican kid at the garage said, “You got any news on the job, mister?”

“You stay right here, you stupid clown,” I told him. “It isn’t what you think.”

I left him gaping at me and went home, where I called Archie Freihofer. “Archie,” I said, “I want you to send me a girl. Right now. Any girl, I don’t care who. Just so she’s somebody I won’t be sorry to say goodbye to in the morning.”