The Cutie (20 page)

Which meant I’d already talked to him before he ever got around to calling me. So scratch Alan Petry. And scratch Paul Devon.

And throw a great big spotlight on Ernest Tesselman.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” I said.

“That helps?” she asked me.

“That helps,” I told her. I grinned at her. “Come on over here, genius,” I said, “and let me drive one-handed for a while.”

She came on over and I drove one-handed, and I put the Mercedes away for the night. The Puerto Rican kid didn’t say anything to me about the job, probably because he wasn’t sure the girl I was with could be trusted. I winked at him to let him know I hadn’t forgotten him, and he grinned at me.

It seemed as though the phone was always ringing when I walked into that apartment lately. Or the cops were waiting for me, one or the other. This time it was the phone, and when I picked up the receiver, Archie Freihofer oozed into my ear and snuggled. “I’ve been trying to reach you, baby,” he cooed.

“I just got home. What’s the good word?”

“None, baby. I’m sorry. Johnny Ricardo’s the only steady customer on this list you gave me, and he wasn’t with any of my girls at either time you’re interested in. The others are all strangers.”

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“Sorry, sweetie.”

“Sure, Archie. Thanks for trying.”

“Any time.”

I hung up, took a step toward the beer in the refrigerator, and the phone rang again. Ella smiled at me from across the room. “You’re a popular man,” she said.

“I wanted a beer.”

“I’ll get it. You talk to your public.”

This time it was Junky Stein. “I found out where Paul Devon was at four o’clock yesterday afternoon,” he said.

“Good boy. Where?”

“In class, acting class. With twelve students.”

“He didn’t duck out for a few minutes?”

“He was directing two of the kids in a scene, the way I hear it. There every minute.”

“Well, so there you are. Thanks, Junky.”

“I haven’t heard from Billy-Billy at all,” he said.

“I have,” I told him. “I’m sorry, Junky. He’s dead.”

“Billy-Billy? Clay, you promised me—”

“It wasn’t us, Junky. I’m looking for the guy. It’s the same one killed the two women.”

“Level, Clay?”

“Level, Junky.”

“I hope you find him, Clay. Billy-Billy never hurt anybody.”

After that call, I dragged out my notebook again, and looked at the names I hadn’t crossed out yet. Three of them. Johnny Ricardo. Ernest Tesselman. The husband. Ricardo was a dark horse, as far as I was concerned. If he turned out to be the guy I was after, I would be damn surprised.

That left Tesselman and the husband. Tesselman was a phony, faking affection for a girl who’d been nothing more to him than steady tail. That didn’t necessarily make him a killer, but it did make him a bit more likely a suspect than if he’d played it straight. I’d have to go talk to him again tomorrow, and I’d have to find some way to check his movements at the time of the murders. And the husband. I liked him for the job, more and more. He and Tesselman, as far as I was concerned, were neck and neck in the Cutie Sweepstakes. It didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense for him to wait five years to kill Mavis, but maybe it would when I found out just who he was. He was my favorite, with Tesselman, principally because I knew so little about him.

“Your beer, Clay,” said Ella.

I looked up, and she was standing in front of me, holding out the glass. “I didn’t hear you come back,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You want to think for a while, don’t you?”

“I’m down to three people,” I told her. “That’s two too many.”

“I won’t disturb you.”

But she did. She had to. She sat very quietly over on the other side of the room, sipping a beer, and just being there she distracted me. I had to come to a decision about her, and until I did, I was going to have trouble thinking about anything else, particularly in the same room with her.

We sat in silence for a while, and then I said, “Ella, what do you think about me? What do you think about the business I’m in?”

She looked over at me, surprised. “Why, Clay?”

“I want to know, that’s all. What you think of me, and what you think of the business.”

“I like you,” she said. “I don’t like your business. You made it plain this afternoon that you’re in the business to stay, no matter what.” She shrugged.

“Do you understand why?” I asked her.

“No, not really,” she said. “I understand you feel loyalty to Ed Ganolese, you feel you owe him something—”

“My freedom,” I said. “I’d be in jail now if it weren’t for him.”

“Do you call your life freedom?” she asked me.

“Of course. I’m damn near my own boss. I work my own hours, I make a good living, most of the time things are calm and quiet and peaceful. Every once in a while the law gets upset, but it blows over and things are peaceful again.”

“You don’t have any feelings about the morality of what you’re doing?”

“As a cop told me tonight,” I said, “I work within the system. Guys like Ed Ganolese, and the organizations they control, exist only because the average citizen
wants
them to exist. The average citizen
wants
an organization that can supply a nice, reliable whore when he’s in the mood. The average citizen
wants
an organization that runs after-hours drinking places for the nights when Average Citizen doesn’t feel like going home at closing time. The average citizen likes a union that’s a little crooked, because he knows some of the gravy’s going to seep down to him. The average citizen even likes to know there’s some place where he can pick up some marijuana if he feels like being wild and Bohemian for a while. And with the number of drug addicts in this country numbering over a hundred thousand, I’m talking about the average citizen. The average citizen also likes to gamble, to buy his imported whiskey cheap, and to read in the papers about desperate gangsters. The average citizen votes for crooked politicians and
knows
they’re crooked politicians when he votes for them. But maybe he’ll get something off his property assessment, or he’ll be able to pick up a little graft. At the very least, he’ll get his kicks by knowing somebody else is picking up some graft.”

“That’s all rationalization, Clay, and you know it,” she said.

“It isn’t rationalization, it’s the truth. It’s the way the system works and the reason for the system’s existence, and I work within the system.” I got to my feet and paced back and forth, warming to my subject. It was a subject I’d thought about often during the last nine years. “Simple economics shows it’s the way the system works,” I said. “Look, no business can survive if it doesn’t get support from the consumer, right?”

“Clay, this isn’t a
business
.”

“But it is. We don’t rob banks, for God’s sake. We run a business. We have items for sale or for rent, and the goddam general public buys. Girls or drugs or higher wages or whatever it is, we give something for the money we get. We’re a business, and we wouldn’t last a minute if we weren’t supported by our goddam buying public.”

“There are legal businesses, Clay.”

“Sure there are. And they operate the same way we do. They fight and claw for the customer’s dollar. They do their damnedest to get rid of the competition. They try to produce something the consumer is going to buy. Within their organization, if somebody isn’t producing, they fire him. And you know when they do most of their firing? At Christmastime, if you want to talk about morality. They fire at Christmastime, because January is a bad month for business. When we fire somebody, we do it permanently, that’s the only difference. We do it permanently because we can’t afford to have people outside the organization who know too much about organization matters. And don’t tell me the big corporations don’t wish they could fire permanently, too, rather than see their ex-employees going over to the competition to spread the word on what Amalgamated Incorporated is planning to do next year.”

“Clay, haven’t you repaid your debt to Ed Ganolese?”

“Crap,” I said. “I’m not in this business purely and simply out of a sense of duty. There’s more to it than that.”

“The thing is,” she said, “you like the business. And you like the feeling of power the business gives you. You like being a big-shot syndicate man.”

“Of course I do. Who ever said I didn’t?”

“You’ve been talking around it ever since I met you, Clay.”

“All right,” I said. I sat down beside her again. “I like the job, all right? That’s me, the big bad nasty man who works for the big bad crooks and likes it.”

“You don’t have to talk to me about it if you don’t want to,” she said.

“Ella, why did you move in with me? I met you, I took you out a couple of times, I said move in with me, and you said all right. Why?”

“Because I liked you. Why else?”

“You didn’t know me as well then as you do now.”

“I knew what business you were in.”

“The hell you did. It was all mysterious and secretive, and you didn’t know a thing about it. And you didn’t want to know a thing about it. Every time busi-ness came up, you faded out of sight, so you wouldn’t have to know about it.”

“I thought you wanted me to do that.”

“I did. Now, I don’t. Now, I want you to know as much about me as you can.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know if you still like me.”

“I’m sitting here, aren’t I?”

“For how long?”

She didn’t answer for a long minute. She looked away from me and sipped at her drink and lit a cigarette, and I waited for her to say something. Finally, she said, “If you’re working up to a proposal, you’re taking the strangest method I ever heard of.”

“Clancy Marshall’s married,” I said. “His wife makes believe Clancy’s a lawyer like any other lawyer. He doesn’t talk about his work at home, he has to keep up a pretty little fiction with his wife’s friends, he has to make believe he’s somebody else every minute he’s with her. Ed Ganolese is married, too. He’s got a daughter at some exclusive girls’ college up in New England. He has to play a part at home, too. I don’t want a marriage like that. I want a woman to marry
me,
not some figment of her imagination that I’m supposed to conform to.”

“You want a woman who would marry a syndicate gangster,” she said.

“Crap. I want a woman who will marry
me
.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“I don’t know, maybe it is.”

“Would you have any respect for a woman who would marry a syndicate gangster?”

“Who the hell is talking about respect?”

“I am,” she said. “Clay, when I moved in here, you played that pretty little fiction you were talking about. You didn’t object when I avoided any mention of your work. But now, for the last couple of days, you’ve been showing me more and more of what your life is like. And I keep wondering, what can he think of a woman who will stay with him even after he shows her what he does for a living? How can he think I’m anything but a common whore?”

“Would I propose to a common whore, you clown? Don’t be silly.”

“Don’t syndicate gangsters always marry common whores?”

“No. That’s out of stories.”

“I don’t know, Clay,” she said. “Let me think about it. I don’t want to give you an answer yet.”

“Do you want to stay here while you think about it?”

“Yes,” she said. “But—I think we should just go right to sleep tonight.”

“Oh.”

She reached out and took my hand. “Don’t read an answer into that, Clay,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve got this to think about, and I don’t feel like—like anything else.”

“All right,” I said.

She got to her feet. “I’m going to bed now,” she said. “I’m exhausted. Are you coming?”

“Not yet. I’ll be along after a while.”

“Clay—” She stopped and shrugged her shoulders. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Sure,” I said.

She kissed me, a brief emotionless kiss, and then she stepped away from me again. “You look like a worried little boy,” she said.

“I am a worried little boy.”

“Playing cops and robbers.”

“Sure.”

I watched her go, and I spent a while thinking about her. I didn’t know whether she’d stay or not, and I wasn’t even sure whether I
wanted
her to stay or not. All I knew was that she was the first girl in nine years who had made me wonder about things like this. She was the first girl in nine years who made me want to justify myself.

Face it, Clay. She was the first girl in nine years to make me think of quitting Ed Ganolese.

When I woke up, a little after noon, Ella wasn’t in the apartment. She’d left a note, on the kitchen table. Just three words: “I’ll be back.”

So she hadn’t made her decision yet, and she didn’t want to talk to me until she’d made it. In the meantime, I could just sweat it out, and try to make my own decision. I had to decide if it would be possible to be married to Ella and still work for Ed Ganolese. If that wasn’t possible, I had to choose between them.

Last night, we’d come close to the heart of the thing. Ella was right, I
did
like working for Ed Ganolese. I liked everything about it. I liked the feeling of being Ed Ganolese’s strong right arm. I was high enough in the organization so that no one in the world but Ed Ganolese could give me orders. At the same time, I wasn’t in a position of final authority, where the power-hungry boys would like to rush me to the graveyard so they could take over. It was a safe and strong position, one of the safest and strongest in the world, and I liked having it.

And I liked the work. I liked being the guy who carries the orders to the team, who whips the kiddies back in line when they do wrong, who kisses them goodbye when they have to be taken off the payroll.

I don’t mean I enjoy killing, don’t get me wrong. I’m called on for something like that very rarely—most of the time, my job is simply to assign the few killings we do have to make to professional triggermen affiliated with the organization—and when I have to do it myself, I turn emotion off completely until it’s over with. Killing is an occasional business necessity with the organization, and I believe in keeping it on a business level. I neither hate nor pity. My attitude is the same as any personnel manager who has to fire an unneeded or annoying employee.