Zombie Pulp (19 page)

What intrigued me I found in the back.

It read:

H. HILL 2:00 A.M.

H. Hill?

I jotted that down in my little notebook. It must’ve been a meeting with someone, somewhere. It was a vague clue, but something told me there was relevance simply because funeral directors, to my knowledge, didn’t conduct their business at that hour of the morning—

“What the hell you think you’re doing?”

I looked up and there was some guy standing in the doorway leaning on a broom. His mouth was hanging open wider than a hooker’s at a convention. He was as ugly as a platter of fried dogshit. Looked like someone had heated up his face and pressed it into a Mr. Ugly mold. Thing was, it cooled all wrong. Another thing was, I knew him.

“You,”
he said when he saw my mug. “Steel. What the hell are you doing here? I better call the cops in.”

“Slow down, Junior,” I told him.

His name was Junior Styles and he was a wrong number from the soles of his flat feet to the top of his pointy head. He’d had a pretty good racket going at one time. He had a couple girls working for him, young stuff mostly he’d bullied into it. They’d pick up johns at bars and bus stops, you name it, and bring ‘em back for a quick roll. Thing was, Junior’d be waiting there with a rod and he’d rob ‘em blind. Threaten to tell their wives or families if they squealed to the cops. I hadn’t seen him in about five years; he’d been upstate doing a nickel. I knew. I helped to put him there. And I could see he remembered it, too.

He screwed up his mug and said, “I’ve been thinking about you a long time, Steel, you dirty sonofabitch. Breaking and entering. Ha! I like that.”

“Zip it, pimp,” I told him. “If anyone’s gonna call the bulls in it’ll be me.”

He paled some at that. He knew I’d been a cop and he knew a lot of my friends were cops. And he was a petty criminal and an ex-con. We both knew who they’d believe.

“Never figured you for a broom jockey, Junior. Good to see you found your place in society.”

“Fuck you, Steel. This is just something I’m doing for awhile.”

“Yeah? What’s your grift? How’d you get tangled up in this mess?” I said.

“What mess?”

I shook my head like I knew what I was talking about. “They’ll put you away for keeps this time.”

But like a skinflint, he wasn’t buying it. He swung the broom handle at me and it whistled past my cheek. I stepped in hammered him two quick shots to the chops. He took ‘em, spit blood, and cracked me in the ear with the broom handle. I saw stars and clipped him under the jaw. Before he could answer that one, I took hold of his shirt and sank my knee into his stomach. I repeated that maybe three times until he was curled up harmless as a kitten in a box.

He gagged and spat and called my mother a few unsavory names. But all that got him was a couple more kisses from my left.

“Dirty…sonofabitch,” he growled.

“I’ll do the talking, Junior. I’ll ask the questions and you’ll do the answering. Savvy?”

He glared at me with eyes like runny egg yolks. “Go…screw…yourself.”

I laughed and pulled a switch out of my inner coat pocket. It was a special pocket I’d had sewn in the back, at the bottom, right where the seam was. Even if somebody took my gun, I was still armed. I thumbed the button and six inches of double-edge Sheffield steel was at my disposal. I took my pal by the shirt and hoisted his dead weight up. I slammed him up against the desk and pressed the blade against his crotch.

His eyes were wide, his face trembling. “What the hell you doing? Jesus, Steel.”

“What am I doing? I’m about to slice off Uncle Johnson and the twins unless you start singing a tune I wanna hear.”

“For chrissake! What do you wanna know?”

I sketched it in for him, real slow and simple-like. Didn’t want to tax that dishrag he called a brain.

Junior nodded, started humming a few bars. “All I know is that I was told those people would be coming for a body…that they knew what they were doing and I was to stay out of their way. That’s what the man said.”

“And who’s the man?”

“The man? Barre…Franklin Barre. He owns the place. Christ, you gotta believe me.”

And I did. I let him go and he slid to the floor like lard down a hot pan. He just sat there, covering his friends with his big mitts, and hating, just hating me.

“We’ll finish this talk another time,” I promised him.

I picked up my lid off the floor, brushed off the brim and put it on my skull. Then I got the hell out of there.

4

Next morning I was sitting in my office pouring hot tar down my throat when the blower rang. I’d been sitting there thinking about H. Hill and what it might mean as I answered it.

“Yeah?” I said, setting my coffee down.

“Vince?” Tommy Albert said and I could hear it in his voice again, that sense of disgust like he’d just found out his mother had the clap. “Well. My friend, this ain’t getting any better. In fact, it’s getting a hell of a lot worse.”

“Lay it on me.”

I could hear him striking a match and I could almost smell that turd he was smoking. “You recall a guy named Buscotti? Tony Buscotti?”

I did. Tony “The Iceman” Buscotti, a.k.a. “Frankenstein”, a.k.a “The Headhunter”. Big Tony, as he was also known, was an enforcer and a torpedo for the Italians. He was one of the main cogs in their protection rackets. He was the guy who collected late payments from bookies, loanshark customers, and a variety of other businesses the wops decided needed “protecting”. He was also the guy the mob gave contracts to. A stone killer, Buscotti very often used a knife on his victims. His specialty was a few slugs in the knees to cripple his prey and then some fancy knifework to finish the job. He was a big fierce man, part human and part grizzly bear. Rumor had it he ate raw meat. And when you were nearly seven feet tall and weighed around four hundred pounds, you could do any goddamn thing you wanted to. He made the toughest cops on the force want to wring out their shorts.

Or had, that was.

A year ago he’d been convicted of some seven homicides and sent to the big house for the hot squat. Two weeks ago, he sat down in that chair and put the funny hat on and they fed him the juice. Worm meat now, but the memory persisted like a bean fart in a closet.

“He’s dead,” I said. “Nobody showed at the funeral. Hard to understand, he was such a sweet kid…when he wasn’t using a baseball bat on someone’s jewels.”

But Tommy wasn’t in the mood for that. “His body’s missing.”

I almost spilled coffee all over my lap. “Missing?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “I’m out here at the cemetery. You better get out here. I think we’re developing a pattern.”

I was already pulling my coat on. “Which boneyard are you at?”

And then he said it and I knew: “Harvest Hill,” he said.

5

By the time I got there they were pretty much finished with the grave.

They had opened it and found Buscotti’s casket empty as my wallet and now everyone was standing around looking grim as graverobbers. The day was the color of dirty laundry: dingy and gray. Last night’s rain had turned the boneyard into a mud sea. It was everywhere, clotted on the bull’s shoes like they’d just tiptoed through Mother O’Leary’s cow pasture.

Tommy Albert said, “They had this special coffin made for this ape.” He flicked his cigar butt down into the black, yawning grave. “Had to be twice as wide as usual and longer than your standard box. Like the service and the plot, it was paid for anonymously. You know what I’m saying, Vince?”

I did.

It was all paid for by the Outfit. They couldn’t come right out and put their names to it because that wasn’t how they did things, but everyone knew who sprang for it all the same.

Tommy and I turned away and walked through the sloppy earth, weaving our way amongst headstones, stands of leafless trees, cracked slabs. In the bleak shadow of an ornate burial vault we found more diggers at work. We got there just as they struck wood.

Tommy looked at me. “Eddie Wisk,” he said. “Numbers runner. He was gunned down three weeks ago.”

The workers brushed dirt from the lid of the casket and opened it. They didn’t have to bust open the catches because somebody beat them to it. Wisk was gone, too. You could see the grayed impression on the silken pillow where his head had been. A beetle ran across it. But that was all.

Tommy’s boys jumped down there and started dusting for prints.

“Gone,” Tommy said. He shook his head. “This is connected, ain’t it, Vince?”

“Has to be.”

“Still clinging to the ‘cult’ theory?”

I sighed, slapped a nail in my kisser and gave it some heat. “I’m not sure of anything just yet.” Quickly, I filled him in on my visit to the funeral home. “I’m thinking whoever wrote that is the one that was here last night.”

“And you think it’s this Franklin Barre character?”

I blew out smoke. “Just a guess. It was his office I was in.”

“I’ll have him brought in. See what we can sweat out of him,” Tommy said. “What about this Marianne Portis broad?”

“I think you should hold off on her for now. Give me a day or two.”

Tommy looked at me. “You know what kind of shit I could get into if I did that?” He shook his head. “Two days. That’s it. This stinks, Vince. Stinks bad. I got pressure on me now like you wouldn’t believe. I got uniforms out looking for Stokes too.”

Stokes was the night watchman at Harvest Hill. Nobody seemed to know where he was and maybe he wasn’t tied up in this, but neither Tommy or I believed that for a minute.

Conspiracy? You’re damned right. One that involved killing prosecutors and robbing graves and making off with dead bodies in the still of the night. But what was the thread? There was something, but I just couldn’t make the connection.

“See ya, Tommy,” I said walking off.

“Where you going?”

“I gotta see a guy about a grave.”

6

Thirty minutes later I was in Little Italy. Parked just up the street from a warehouse called Frenzetti & Sons. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a warehouse and was: inventory in the form of furniture came in and went out. But if you happened to know the right people, you could get invited down below into the basement where the Italians operated an illegal casino. Blackjack, roulette, craps, slot machines, high and low stakes card games—you name it. The mob ran it and took a lucrative cut of everything that went down. The mob, in this case, being Slick Jimmy Conterro. A guy I grew up with and who happened to be an underworld soldier. I never held that against him and he never held being a cop against me.

I knew that right now, Bernie Stokes, night watchman of Harvest Hill boneyard was down in the casino. And would be for fifteen or twenty minutes more.

I knew I could go down there and get him anytime, but I didn’t. I’ve gambled at Jimmy’s place plenty. Lots of cops do. He gives good odds. Better than you’ll get in Vegas. He runs clean games. But I also knew Jimmy wouldn’t like me barging down there and manhandling a customer. You didn’t make waves in this neighborhood; even the cops were on the payroll here.

So I sat there in the heap chewing a salami on Jewish rye and dipping my bill in a quart of beer. The minutes ticked by. I finished the sandwich, the beer, was halfway through my second butt when Stokes came out.

You should’ve seen him.

Looking over his shoulder, keeping his head low trying to blend into the crowd. But he blended in like a nun in full habit at a stroke parlor. Maybe it was how he acted—so jittery and afraid—but the guy was marked. You could see that.

I called him over and he almost left his skin lying on the walk.

“
Jesus, Bernie,” I said. “What gives? You don’t look so good.”

“
Don’t feel so good,” he said, sliding through the passenger side door.

He was a tight little guy with a beak on him like a doorstop. Good guy as far as that went, but you could trust him like you could trust a rattlesnake in your shorts. He stank of hair oil and cheap rum. His eyes were red as the setting sun and his face hadn’t seen a razor in a week or more.

“
I got my problems, Vince. You know? I got my problems.” He kept his eye on the rearview. In fact, he kept an eye out everywhere. “You can’t be too careful these days.”

“
Give you a ride somewhere?”

“
Sure. Uptown. You know the place.”

I did. Bernie had a place over an Irish saloon. “Somebody after you, Bernie?”

He was trying desperately to light a cigarette, but his fingers were trembling too much. I lit it for him. His face was pale as a whitewashed fence. “Yeah, somebody’s following me. I know it.”

I wasn’t sure what that was about. Jimmy’s goons weren’t known for their subtlety; they wanted you, they kicked right through the front door like the First Marine Division hitting a beach. “Probably cops, Bernie.”

“
You think so?” He was even paler now.

“
I know it.” I explained to him how I was unofficially working with the precinct. “It’s this bit about Tanner. The papers didn’t have the particulars, Bernie, but he was partially eaten. Chewed up like a drumstick.”