Frenzy (32 page)

"Yep."

He handed him a note with a phone number on it. "Mrs. Russo wan' you to call her," he thought the man said.

"Mrs. Russo? Rosemarie Russo?"

"MISS Russo. Angelina. You call her?" Eichord nodded. "Soon as you can, please. T'anks."

He went to the nearest phone and dialed.

A woman answered it on the second ring. "Yeah."

"Hello, this is Jack Eichord calling for Angelina Russo, please."

"Yeah, I know. I'm her. I'm Angelina. C'n you come over here to d' house?"

"Sure can. Right now?"

"Yeah, awright. Soon as you can, okay?"

She told him where she lived, not realizing he'd been there first thing when he hit St. Louis and couldn't get an audience with the Russos, and he thanked her and headed across town.

He didn't have any trouble finding his way to the Russo house again. He parked and went up to the door and knocked. He rang the doorbell. Knocked again. Inside a baleful, huge bodyguard was saying to his charge, "Miss Russo, you makin' a mistake, please don't talk to no coppers."

"Let him in, Johnny."

"If Jimmie were here, he —"

She cut him off with a look. "Right. If Jimmie were here you wouldn't question what I asked you to do. Now let him in, please."

He turned and opened the door. Johnny had been with the family nearly as long as she'd been on earth. He was like family himself, but he still called her Miss Russo out of respect. She knew what was going through his mind for him to talk to her in that tone. She didn't care. Nothing mattered anymore. Just stop the killing.

"Jack Eichord, Miss Russo." He handed her one of the Special Homicide Division cards. "I got your note." The huge bodyguard eyed him like he'd like to string him up but he backed out of the large room and shut the door quietly behind him.

"Sit down please. And I appreciate you comin' here."

"I've been here before but I never got to speak with you."

"I had to talk to someone. The police."

"All right."

"I —" She took a very deep breath and her body sagged visibly, as if she was going to collapse. For a second he almost thought he should go over there across the room where she was sitting, be next to her if she fainted, and then she straightened up with another breath and said without preamble of any kind,

"I'm afraid for my mother." 

"Oh?"

"And myself. Why not say the truth, right? I'm afraid whoever is doing this will want us, too. My brother and I were very close. I heard things." She looked at him with reddened eyes. "He thought it was somebody outside the family." Eichord didn't say anything, waiting. She coughed. "Somebody tryin' to make it look like there was a power struggle . . . inside the family. You understand what I'm saying?"

He nodded. "Did your brother have any idea who was behind the killings?"

"No. He didn't. Look — I'm even talkin' to you like this — I'm sayin' things I could be put under for. I would
never
rat out anybody in da family for any reason. You can do nothing with what I give you. If you say I told you this I'll deny it. If you try to use it I'll go down. You're gonna' be sentencing me if you tell someone else. You understand?"

He inclined his head and kept silent.

"I won't ask for your word because I don't know you. I don't know if you are a man who takes his word seriously. But if you tell
anybody
you put me under. They'll clip me for sure. Am I getting through to you?"

He nodded again. Angelina Russo had a voice that was used to issuing orders. "Go ahead," he encouraged her.

"There is a council, board, call it what you want, there is this council that meets in New York with the big families. These men govern the society. Their word is the absolute law. Not your law.
The
law. What we live by. You understand when we meet — as
amico nostro?
To be with us, with the thing of ours, is to imply honor that you can trust to the death. But it is a joke. The society, the friends of ours, this has no more meaning than a society of you coppers. Like you police, we are all the same. There is only a handful you can trust.

"So these men they must protect the family. Whenever there is power and money there are always others who want it all for themselves, and our family, like yours, exists because of greed. It is these men who have a few trusted workers within the most secret part of the society. Nobody knows who these men are who work for the
capos
of the families. Not even the lieutenants who run the top crews. They work in secret.

"Phillie knew that the killing was coming from outside. He was sure of it."

For a while Eichord thought she was going to say more but whatever she had been about to say she had changed her mind. He read it first in the eyes, which went absolutely blank, and next in the body language, and he felt it in the atmosphere as she metamorphosed in that heartbeat, changing back into the Mafia girl in front of him. Within that second she'd completely shut him out of it, come to the edge and almost
almost
opened the door for him and then, no, the years of habit and influence restored the adversarial climate in which such a woman existed. And he knew he was unwanted here and that any more conversation would be a waste of his time as well as hers, and he got up and left, letting himself out, hearing the solid door slam behind him, shut out of it by tough guinea anthropophagy.

As Eichord got in the car and left, a pair of eyes watched him from across the street through expensive surveillance equipment. They were sometimes greenish-blue in light, sometimes slate-gray, and cold as gunmetal. The eyes of a madman, a professional watcher, glad the girl was still inside.

These mad eyes did not see the girl as a grief-stricken sister and daughter. He, the silent watcher, was more interested in her living brother, Joe Russo. He was watching her because she was the sister of one Joseph Russo, eldest son of Jimmie the Hook, currently serving a fifteen-year sentence for second-degree murder. He was watching Angelina because she was his ticket to Joey Russo, a convicted murderer doing hard time in the same prison as the old man — Salvatore Dagatina.

But above, to the left, and behind him, there was another pair of eyes. Someone was watching the watcher. And when Frank Spain left the premises. Bud Leech of St. Louis Intelligence was tailing him.

Back inside the cop shop the word was that the mob had hit the streets in force. They were tearing up the city but in a way none of the coppers had seen before. Not faction infighting but a cooperative effort. As if all the brotherhoods had banded together and put out a contract on somebody. People who'd been feueding since the days of Tony Gee were suddenly spotted on the streets together. The mob was looking for somebody and the cops were asking each other, "What the fuck is going on?"

Which is precisely the question Eichord wanted to ask Bud Leech when he showed up with a shit-eating look on his face and the bad news that'd he'd LOST his surveillance target. Jack looked up at the huge man and said, "Tell me you're shitting me."

"Yeah, well, I wish I was. I'm sorry, man." Leech was so contrite Eichord would have laughed if he hadn't been so fucking pissed.

"How did it happen?"

"These fucking imbeciles . . . . " He gestured out toward the traffic. "Ah, why make excuses? I just fucked the duck. I was playing it by the book. Changing lanes. Staying back real good 'n' that. This fucking semi comes barreling out of nowhere, I'm in the middle lane, old mom and pop on the left in the passing lane and the fuckin' truck was gonna hit the goddamn car if I didn't get over, I hadda tap the brakes. The motherfucker cuts in,- by the time I can get around the dude on the right he's fuckin' gone."

"What'd he look like?" Eichord said quietly.

"Shit, Jack" — he shook his head —"I never got any kind of look at his face. Ordinary build. Our age, maybe a little younger. Dressed real plain."

"And of course you checked on the tags and it was on the hot sheet, right?"

Leech nodded. "I'm sorry, babe. What can I say?"

"It happens. Fuck it."

"Want me to put the van out there on the house?"

"No," Eichord said. Another decision he'd regret.

BeBop Rutledge was about to get into his wonderful phoneman swindle and he figured it had to be not a penny less than four hundred dollars. He could get
DOWN
with four bills you can take that shit to the bank. BeBop snapped his fingers, jiving, gettin' it on with his bad self, diddy-bopping down the street, scattin' along and feelin' fine. BeBop Rutledge was not a black jazz musician. He was a very white, Anglo-Saxophonic person of your WASP-persuasion-type race. He was twenty-three, and he liked to smoke a little dope now and then, just some hash or whatever, and maybe snort some blow once in a while but nothing serious.

He was coming up on a fucking totally bogus Possession with Intent to Distribute in a few weeks and he had to come up with something. He thought about taking the four hundred dollars he was going to scam the phone operation for and head out West, but then u.S. Magistrate Wilma Smith was such a hard-bark old bitch she would definitely kick a hole in his ass the size of a fucking headlight if he split. All he needed was a federal fugitive warrant on top of that other Possession bullshit. BeBop wasn't going to let it bring him down.

The Possession thing was a total circle jerk. A guy he knew had come by BeBop's house with about two pounds of white powder in a plastic bag, it coulda been Comet or any damn thing in there, granulated Domino sugar — shit, what did he know, right? And the dude goes. Hey, BeBop, say hey, hold this for me an' I'll give you a trey. Shit, why not? What's a friend for? And then first thing you know Rabbit, which is his name. Rabbit's Foot, he boogies and these cops come pounding on the door 'n' shit, and they come in and find his stash, and there's this bag and he didn't know there was fucking two pounds of COCAINE in there. Damn. What a surprise, right? And then he's gotta draw Wilma Smith, her fucking ballbreaking honor the judgeship, and she just loves to step on BeBop's stones anyway, so first she sets a detention hearing and he has to make the fucking national debt in bail, and now she's gonna' try to slam him down for hard time on this absolutely bogus Possession with Intent to Distrib.

But he refused to allow this gloomy horizon to bum him out. He might just take that four hundred and get straight. Do himself a thing, you know. And it all fell together so beautiful for him, see, there he is bopping down the street when he sees this dude put a move on this other dude.

He was just about to phone The Man with a kind of bullshit thing about some fags who were into some B & E that he'd heard about, just a nothing little thing to lay some groundwork for the Possession number until he could come up with something for real, and he sees this shit. BeBop goes, "Oh, WOW!" and "Check it OUT!" when he eyeballs this one dude grab this other dude and kind of like shove him into the EGA theater. The EGA has been closed since the Last Supper, but like he sees them bop right on in there and he figures he'll see what's goin' down. Who ever knows, right?

And he pushes on in there and he can see the dudes have taken a bolt cutter or something to the big, thick chain that holds padlocks on the doors on each side of the EGA box office. And it's darker than the inside of Bessie Mae's pussy but he eases on in real quiet. Where the fuck is everybody? And he hears this mumbling shit coming from inside, and he moves on ahead, just about pissing his britches he's so scared.

The EGA — which was called the REGAL but over a period of time it lost its
R
and its
L,
and so everybody just called it EGA — it was gonna be torn down to put in another fucking condo or whatever, and it had been just this little ma-and-pa theater about a hundred years ago, and it held tops maybe 150 dudes in there go in see a fucking cowboy double feature.
Lash Larue Whips It Out,
one of them pictures, and BeBop eases on around so he can see the naps.

Two dudes down frost in the dark, like they got good seats you know, right in the middle, and he can barely see 'em from a little EXIT light thing over on the side, and the one dude says something and this other guy he goes, "I want you to meet Mary Pat Gardner" — I think the name he said was, or maybe Mary Pat Garner. Something like that.

"Say hello Mary Pat," he tells this other dude. And the other one goes. Yeah, cool, "Hello, Mary Pat AAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHH!" And he screams like he just got a tit in the wringer, you know.

And it's quiet then and the first dude says, "The bitch was real thirsty," or some shit like mat, and he raises something that looked like a knife and sticks the other one again but there's no sound and, man, I just about shit my pants, BeBop tells The Man.

"That's when I phoned you, man. You better get out here right away. And bring a fucking ambulance, man. This ain't no wet dream either, my man. I'm givin' you a fuckin' MURDER ONE here." And he was just starting in about the bogus Possession thing and how Her Honor U.S. Magistrate Wilma Fucking Smith was planning to put his stones in her pliers again and send him away to Springfield or somewhere and he'd come out in a couple of years with an asshole like a cannonball when the ungrateful fuckin' cop hangs up on him.