I brandished my M-1 again, unsafetied it, held it at the ready as I went to the door. Slipping through, I found myself in a broad hall, shadowed by the absence of electricity but still revealed by the moonlight dripping through the windows.
I moved through the darkness. It felt warm to me. Sweat was coursing down my face, stinging my eyes. I hoped it was the sickness and not just nerves. I’d taken on the Third Reich; my heart should be able to handle an old man and his goons before it gave out.
Up ahead, past several closed doors, the hallway turned. Light poured past the corner and I thought I caught a movement of shadow on the lit wall. I crept up on the turn, holding my M-1 down at my feet. I had to lean against the wall before I could slide over enough to look.
Around the corner, the hallway opened up into a lobby. A ceiling globe showed too much of it for anyone to stub their toes. Wall-to-wall rug, carved chairs, and a table with a telephone on it. And two guys, one sitting in one of those nice woodworked chairs, the other pacing.
Maybe I should’ve stepped out, popped them both. I doubt many people came to a mob boss’s house at night because they were collecting for the Missionaries of Charity. But my legs felt weak then. Real weak.
I couldn’t do anything but let them out from under me—sliding down the wall to the floor, sweat pumping from my hands. I was worried about the M-1 slipping away. I wrapped it in my arms, hoping the sleeves of my coat were dry enough to hold it.
“Enough!” The man’s voice was coarse. If you heard it on a record, you’d wonder if the disc was scratched. “Parente thinks he can keep me waiting? He’s not that big anymore and I’m sure as hell not that small!”
“You should feel lucky he’s keeping you waiting,” a second man drawled. “Maybe he hasn’t decided to kill you yet. Knocking off two of his pushers… you get new sleeping accommodations for crap like that, and not anywhere dry.”
“Screw you! I took them because I could and I’ll take more if I have to! Tell Parente he’s not living large anymore. And if he wants to keep living at all, he’ll meet with me. And when I say, not after he’s done arranging his flowers!”
“Don’t do anything rash, Sal. You might be able to talk your way out of a couple dead pushers, but if you keep pressing, it’s going to be war.”
“It’s already war and your boy’s lost. If he wants to have it out, we’ll have it out, but we can do this nice and clean instead. Civilized. He can even keep living here. Not that I wouldn’t love to move in, but I’d hate to have to fill in all the bullet holes, see?”
“Parente won’t never hand over the business without a fight. And if you start busting heads and he starts busting heads back, it’ll only be a matter of time before the Feds look in on us.”
“You think I don’t have the Feds handled?”
“Sal, be reasonable! Parente’s an old man—”
“And I’m young and I’m hungry and I’m not letting this business go under to feed his ego! Either he steps aside or I show him where he can step!”
“Okay, enough of that. Calm down. Let’s have a drink, from the boss’s own cellar, and then we can talk. Nice and cool. You can appreciate that, can’t you?”
“If he’s getting in one last bit of chest-thumping before he leaves, fine. But if he’s keeping me waiting just to tell me no, I swear to God, Lenny, I swear…”
I heard their footsteps squeezing noise out of the floorboards until a door slammed and their voices were gone. I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.
Parente was on the way out? That complicated things. Whoever this Sal was, I didn’t want to do his dirty work for him. On the other hand, taking out the heir apparent might just give Parente another twenty years on the throne. I could’ve iced both of them, only just then I didn’t feel up to shooing a fly.
Maybe there was a way to play this to my advantage, to turn them against each other and get the Feds interested like Lenny had said. But nothing was occurring to me. I thought of taking a slug of Scotch, then either coming up with a plan or catching up to Sal and the consigliere, killing them and Parente and leaving no one to take over the racket. Or maybe I could just enjoy some good whiskey and leave Parente the fun of explaining what a dead cop was doing in his lounge. Hell, I’d settle for playing with matches just then.
So I managed to pick myself up and get my carcass back to the lounge, dragging the M-1 behind me… the last thing I needed was to lose a rifle at a gangster’s house and see it used by one of his black sheep. Once I got to the lounge, I checked in on the lush. I expected she was down for the night, and if she wasn’t, I could feed her a real drink and be done with her.
She was there, alright. Underneath a nice, cozy quilt.
No sooner had I laid eyes on her than someone laid eyes on me. I heard a soft “oh.” The voice was as pleasant as rain drizzling on window glass.
I looked at her. The girl was white, or almost. She had almond eyes and an oval face and a certain sheen to her hair that reminded me of buddies who’d gone home from the war with a wife that was Chinese, Japanese, Filipina. Some of their kids looked real Oriental and others were like this girl, almost all their Irish or Italian or English daddy except for the eyes and the cast of their skin.
“Hello there,” she said, real polite, like her dad must’ve taught her to be when talking to grown-ups. Not that she was a kid. She was out of her teens, at least. The way she carried herself, she knew how beautiful she was and she knew how to use it.
“Hi.” I set the rifle against the wall. Maybe it would assuage her. Mostly I just didn’t want to drop the damn thing.
“Are you a friend of my mother’s?”
“Your mother?” I yelped. I’d have called them sisters before I thought the older woman was a mom.
“Stepmother,” she said. “Penelope de la Cruz. Father married her. I’m sure you can see why.” And she cast a judgmental look at the stepmother that Penelope was in no position to respond to.
“Chloe?” Penelope murmured in her sleep. She still slurred, even in dreamland. “What d’you want… Chloe…”
I crossed the rug while I still could and eased myself down into another chair. “No, I don’t know your… stepmother. I was just taking a shortcut when my car broke down. I made my way here to use the phone. Penelope said I could, but the line’s busy.”
“Then you’re stuck here,” she said, with a sparkle in her eye I couldn’t pinpoint. Maybe she was just glad for someone to see her erstwhile mom embarrassed.
“Looks like.”
“You can have a drink if you want. I’m sure ‘Mother’ won’t mind.” She snorted. “Even if she could.”
“That’s okay.” I didn’t feel like I could swallow anything. It all seemed like a bad idea now. At least in the hospital I could’ve died with a little dignity. Or maybe in my apartment, in my own bed, listening to one of the records I liked.
“Let me get you some,” she said. “I know a lot about spirits. And some about men. You’re a whiskey man, aren’t you?”
“Depends on the whiskey.”
“And if it’s the kind of whiskey I like?” She got two cups from the stack on the drink cart and turned them rightside-up for pouring. Suddenly we were coconspirators. For the first time, I felt not just sick, but old. There was just no fixing being too old to sneak a drink with a pretty girl.