The Cutie (21 page)

The professional triggermen do enjoy killing, though most of them won’t admit it. But why else get into that line of work? That’s why triggermen don’t last very long. They’re emotional, and whenever you mix business with emotion, you’re in for trouble.

I remember talking to one of them one time, a trig-german who
would
admit he enjoyed his job. “Sure I like killing,” he told me. “Who doesn’t? Nobody’s ever come back from a war claiming they didn’t like it when they killed. The only thing that mars the pleasure of killing in a war is the fact that the other guys are shooting back. That doesn’t happen with me, so I can enjoy a killing without worrying about it happening to me.”

We spent one long afternoon together, that guy and I, drinking beer in a joint on Eighth Avenue, and he kept hitting the same theme over and over again. “I enjoy killing,” he said, “exactly the same way that everybody else enjoys killing. Look, here I am, let’s say, I’m holding a gun, and there’s this guy in front of me, standing there, someone I never met in my life before but somebody wants him dead and I got the job. Okay? Okay. I squeeze the trigger, see, and the gun in my hand jumps like a live thing, roaring, and the guy standing in front of me crumples like old tissue paper. I enjoy that, I enjoy the feeling of the gun in my hand, I enjoy the sight of some guy crumpling up and falling to the ground.”

I asked him why he could enjoy a thing like that, and he told me. “Because it isn’t happening to me,” he said. “Death is always interesting, Clay, it’s always a kick. Ask the crowd standing around an automobile accident, or the crowd waiting on the sidewalk for the guy on the ledge to fall or jump, or the crowd at a public execution. They’re enjoying themselves, Clay, those people, the same way I enjoy myself when I pull the trigger and the guy falls down dead. They’re enjoying themselves because death is near and it isn’t their own death. That’s the exact same way I enjoy doing a killing. Most people are afraid to do a killing themselves, afraid of the law or afraid of reprisals or something like that. But I’m not afraid. I let the enjoyment come through, the relief and the kick that I’m still alive, I’m still breathing.
He’s
dead, but I’m still alive.”

It’s an easy thing to take your own private sickness and claim everybody else has it too, so it really isn’t a sickness after all. And who could tell this guy, if he were still alive—the cops got him, finally, when he was enjoying himself so much after one job he couldn’t bring himself to leave the body—that he’s wrong, that the sickness is real, and almost exclusively his own?

A guy who’s never killed can’t say whether killing is enjoyable or not. I’ve killed, so I can refute that madman.

I’ve never killed a man I hated. I’ve never killed a man who was doing any good for society in being alive. I’ve never killed a man for personal reasons of any kind.

I’ve killed. Only a few times, but I have killed, and I’ve never enjoyed it. It’s been strictly business, strictly a job I’m supposed to do. And I know if I let any emotion come out at all, it wouldn’t be enjoyment, it would be pity. And then I wouldn’t be able to do it.

What I
do
enjoy is the reputation I’ve got. Ed knows all he has to do is point a finger and say, “Clay, that guy has to stop breathing, don’t farm it out,” and he knows the guy will stop breathing, and I won’t farm it out to one of the professional triggermen, and I won’t do a sloppy job of it. The law has never come near us for any killing I’ve done personally.

That’s part of the reputation. Dependability, no matter what. I enjoy knowing I’ve got that reputation, and I enjoy knowing I deserve it. The other part is that the people in the organization who know me, or know of me, know I’m the best damn watchdog Ed Ganolese has ever had. They know I can’t be bought, they know I can’t be scared, they know I can’t be outfoxed. They know I can turn emotion off, and they know no man has ever been trapped except through his emotions.

A guy like that triggerman, the one who’d admit that he got a kick out of killing somebody, he worries me and he makes me uneasy. A guy like that isn’t reliable, isn’t trustworthy. Ed could never put a guy who thought like that in my job. He needs somebody like me, who can kill when he has to, but who doesn’t get to like the taste of blood.

I thought about that, and I wondered if it would ever be possible to explain it all to Ella. How to explain to her that I kill
only
in cold blood, but that that doesn’t make me cold-blooded? That I am emotionless only when emotion is dangerous, and that I am as emotional as the next man under normal circumstances.

I didn’t think I could explain it at all, not to her and not to anybody else. I doubted I could explain anything about my relationship with the organization, and how it is possible for me to do all the things required of me by the organization, and still remain myself.

Possible? No, that wasn’t the word. Necessary was the word. I couldn’t explain to her how or why it was necessary for me to do everything required of me by the organization, and still remain myself. I couldn’t explain to her that any man with a vocation absolutely needs to be needed in that vocation, and that my vocation was to be Ed Ganolese’s good right hand.

Which brought me right back to the original question. Could I be married to Ella and still be working for Ed Ganolese at the same time?

I had an unhappy feeling the answer to that question was no. Which in turn raised the second question. Which did I want more, my current life and job, or Ella?

That one I couldn’t answer at all.

While I brooded about it, I made myself some breakfast and then wandered around the apartment for a while, at loose ends. Finally, I pushed the problem into the back of my mind, picked up my notebook, settled myself in the living room, and went back to the other problem, namely, who killed Mavis St. Paul et al., and why?

It occurred to me that it was just barely possible that the killer wasn’t on my list at all. But who else was there? I’d asked around, I’d poked and pried, but no more names had cropped up. He
had
to be here, he had to be one of the three names left.

And if the list kept getting smaller, until it reached zero?

I’d worry about that when it happened.

Of my two favorites, Ernest Tesselman and the husband, Tesselman was the only one I could do anything about at the moment. I had to wait on the husband until I heard from East St. Louis.

It seemed like time to have another little chat with Ernest Tesselman. I called Ed, told him what I wanted to do, and got Tesselman’s home phone number from him. Then I called Tesselman, told him who I was, and said I wanted to have another little chat with him.

“Are the police still bothering you?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “They’ve eased off. I appreciate that, Mr. Tesselman.”

“Then what do you want to talk about?”

“I’d rather tell you in person, sir.”

“Not here,” he said. “I’ll be at my office at four o’clock.” He gave me the address, on Fifth Avenue just south of Central Park, and I told him I’d be there at four.

That left me with three hours, and nothing to do. So I did nothing. I brooded about Ella, and I brooded about the cutie, and around two-thirty the phone rang.

I hurried to answer it, hoping it was the call from East St. Louis, but it was only Clancy Marshall, spouting doom and gloom again. “Clay,” he said. “Can’t you talk some sense into Ed?”

“What’s wrong now?”

“What do you think is wrong? This cops-and-robbers game you’re playing. Clay, I don’t know whether Ed has told you this or not, but the organization is going to hell while you two play around in matters that don’t concern us at all. I was just talking to Starkweather, our accountant, and this thing is costing us money, more money than we can afford.”

“What do you expect me to do?”

“Talk to Ed. He won’t listen to me.”

“He won’t listen to me either, Clancy. He wants the guy who started this mess.”

“And then what? Clay, look at it realistically. The police have Billy-Billy Cantell, so the case is closed. We can’t turn this guy over to the law.”

“I don’t think Ed plans to turn him over to the law.”

“What else? Kill him?”

“I think that’s what he has in mind, yes.”

“Fine. Then we’ve got the law upset all over again. This isn’t like killing some little punk in the organization, Clay. You’re going to be killing somebody who’s a solid citizen as far as the law is concerned. So we’ll have another investigation on our hands.”

“Maybe not. We can probably cover it.”

“Maybe. Probably. We don’t stay in business with maybes and probablys, Clay.”

“Clancy, tell me something. Is Ed sore at you for harping on this?”

“He won’t even listen to me any more. I call his place and that Neanderthal bodyguard of his just hangs up on me.”

“So you want me to talk to him. Clancy, if I talked to him it wouldn’t do any good. He’d just be sore at me, too. If he won’t take advice from his lawyer, he won’t take it from me.”

“We can’t keep fooling around this way, Clay.”

“Maybe it won’t last much longer.”

“You’re getting close to him?”

“I think so.”

“Well, that’s some consolation. I say we should forget the whole thing, but I’ll be just as happy to see it finished with once and for all.”

“Don’t take your job so seriously, Clancy.”

“I’m paid to take it seriously,” he said.

After that, I brooded about one thing and another for a while longer, and a little after three Ella came home. I started to say something to her, but she interrupted me, saying, “Not yet, Clay. I don’t want to talk about it yet. Have you had any lunch?”

“No,” I said.

So we had some lunch, and we didn’t talk about it. But since that was all either of us was thinking about, we didn’t talk about anything else either. It was a long and silent lunch.

Tesselman’s office suite was on the fourteenth floor, and the frosted glass window showed gold lettering reading “Ernest Tesselman, Attorney-at-Law.” But Ernest Tesselman hadn’t been a practicing attorney, in the normal sense of the phrase, in years.

He was the only one present in the suite, by which I mean there was no secretary. The butler-bouncer was present, dressed in civvies and now converted to bodyguard, but bodyguards don’t count among those present.

The atmosphere was somewhat chillier at this meeting than it had been the first time. The bodyguard, whom I still thought of as Tux even though he was in mufti now, was waiting for me in the outer office, and he insisted on frisking me before letting me in to see his boss. His search was thorough, but I wasn’t wearing any armament of any kind, so he grudgingly held the door open for me, and I walked on into Ernest Tesselman’s sanctum sanctorum.

Tesselman was formally dressed this time, in a somewhat old-fashioned blue-gray suit, complete with vest and watch chain. The desk he sat behind was as huge and as empty as the desk in his study at home. He mo-tioned me into the leather chair opposite him, and Tux stood watchfully in a corner behind his boss.

“I’ll begin,” I said, “by filling you in on events since I last talked to you.”

He nodded, silent, waiting for me to get to the point. His eyes were cold and wary, not trusting me.

“Betty Benson was killed,” I said, “shortly after I talked with you.”

“I know,” he said. “I read about it in the newspaper. The police had some idea you did it.”

“I’d been there, before the murderer. At any rate, Billy-Billy Cantell, the one they wanted for the killing of Miss St. Paul, is also dead, and the police have the body. So the case is closed, as far as they’re concerned.”

“As far as they’re concerned?”

“Ed Ganolese isn’t satisfied. We’ve had a lot of trouble and a lot of expense because of this. Ed wants to even the score.”

“So you’re still looking.”

“That’s right, I am.”

“Why come to me? I told you everything I knew the last time we talked.”

“I’m afraid you were lying to me, Mr. Tesselman.”

He glanced over at Tux, who hadn’t moved, and then looked back at me. “That’s a rude thing to say. Also inaccurate.”

“I said I’d talked to Betty Benson before she was killed. You and she differed on a couple of points.”

“Such as?”

“You told Mavis, and you also told me, that you were planning on helping her get started in musical comedy.”

“That’s right.”

“Miss Benson told me Mavis couldn’t carry a tune, couldn’t sing a note.”

“She was merely untrained. I was paying for singing lessons.”

“You also told Mavis, she says, that you were planning to marry her.”

“I had asked her to marry me, that’s right.”

“Yet you tried to seduce Miss Benson.”

“Did she tell you that? She’s a filthy little liar.”

“Why? Why should she lie about it?”

“Having known the girl only slightly, I couldn’t begin to guess what her motives were.”

“You tried to give me the impression you’d been in love with Mavis St. Paul, that her death affected you deeply.”

“And?”

“I’m afraid it became apparent, after a while, that you cared more for that pregnant fish of yours than you did for Mavis.”

“Your rudeness knows no bounds, I see,” he said. “Nor does your bad taste. Aside from the untruth of your suggestions and statements, I’d like to know what business you have making them. What are you doing here?”

“Hadn’t it occurred to you that you were a logical suspect?”

“Suspect? You think I killed Mavis?”

“No, sir. Nor do I think you didn’t. But I do think there’s a possibility that you killed her. And there are some contradictions in your attitude toward her. I’m here to try to straighten out those contradictions.”

“The last time you visited me,” he said coldly, “I tried to be reasonable. I don’t feel like being reasonable this time. You come here and suggest I murdered that poor girl, suggest that my attitude toward her was hypocritical, that I lied to you before. I see no purpose in being reasonable.”

“As you wish.”