The Cutie (6 page)

“Okay, Clay.”

“Work fast, will you? This is important.”

“In three hours,” he said, “I’ll know where she has moles.”

“Had,” I corrected him. “She’s dead. So be discreet.”

“The essence,” he said.

“Good boy.” I hung up and pushed myself to my feet. I was getting more and more tired by the minute. I like my eight hours’ sleep a night, and I was now one full night behind schedule.

I walked through the apartment to the bedroom, and I was surprised to see Ella awake, sitting up in bed and reading a book. “Why aren’t you sleeping?” I asked her.

She closed the book and dropped it on the floor beside the bed. “I tried to,” she said. “But I couldn’t. So I tried to read, instead. But I couldn’t do that either.”

“What’s wrong, Ella?” I asked her. But I knew already.

“I’ve been thinking, Clay,” she said. And the expression on her face and the tone of her voice told me what she’d been thinking about. The “accident” business again.

“Wait till I get out of the coat and tie,” I said, wanting to stall as long as I could. I hung my suit coat away in the closet, put the tie back in the rack on the closet door, pulled my shirt off and threw it into a corner, kicked my shoes under the dresser, and sat down on the edge of the bed. “It’s hot outside,” I said.

“Your forehead’s all damp. Lie down here.”

I lay back, my head in her lap, and she took a corner of the top sheet and rubbed it gently across my forehead, smoothing the perspiration away. “You look tired, Clay,” she said.

“I am tired. But I can’t go to sleep yet. I’ve got to be at that meeting at nine.”

“How’s this?” she asked me, and her fingers massaged my head, soft and gentle and soothing.

“That’s fine,” I said. I started to close my eyes, but I felt sleep coming on, so I pushed them open again.

We were both silent for a couple of minutes, as Ella massaged away the exhaustion and the tension, and then she said, “I want to talk to you, Clay. Seriously.”

“All right,” I said. I’d been trying to dodge it, but that was stupid. I knew we were going to have to go through this sooner or later, get it over and done with and behind us, once and for all. It might as well be now. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about it any more.

“It’s your job,” she said.

“I know.”

“Clay, don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I’m shocked or anything, about you being a big bad crook or something stupid like that. It’s just that—it’s just the coldness you show sometimes, you—you’re, I don’t know, you’re two different people sometimes.”

“Don’t be—”

“Clay. Don’t tell me to don’t be silly. I know, I know, you’re fine with me, you’re a nice guy and we have a good time together, but—then you can turn around and be so cold-blooded, talk about giving somebody an
accident
when what you really mean is you’re going to go out and commit cold-blooded murder, and it’s just as though it doesn’t really mean a thing to you at all. There just isn’t any feeling there, any emotion. And that scares me, Clay. With me, you show feeling. One of those two faces has to be false. I’m just scared it’s the face you show me.”

“You can’t feel pity for a guy you’re supposed to kill, Ella,” I said. “Or you couldn’t do it.”

“Do you want to feel pity?”

“I can’t. That’s all there is to it, I can’t. I don’t dare to.”

“You don’t have to kill, Clay.”

“I do what I’m told,” I said. “I’m Ed’s boy, he’s my boss, he says do, I do.”

“Why? Clay, you’re smart, you don’t have to be Ed’s boy. You could be anybody’s boy. You could even be your own boy, if you worked at it.”

“I don’t want to be my own boy.”

“What’s Ed to you, Clay?” she asked me.

I lay there through a long silence, my head in her lap, her fingers soothing on my temples. What was Ed to me? “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you a story.”

“A true story?”

“A true story. I went to college for three years, you know that, a jerkwater college in a jerkwater town upstate. Another guy and I, we were at this beer party, somebody bet us we couldn’t steal a car. Crazy bet, ten dollars or something. We said we could. This other guy, he was a science major or something, he rebuilt his own cars from junkyards, stuff like that. We went out, we found this car, with an MD plate. That was the one for us. Cops don’t stop an MD, no matter what he does. He might be on his way to an emergency. This guy crossed the wires, and we took off. We were both kind of high.”

She interrupted me then. “What were you majoring in?” she asked me.

“How do I know?” I said, angry at her. “Business administration. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Let me tell the story, will you?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“We took the car,” I said. “It was wintertime, this is up in the Adirondacks, a lot of winter resorts, ski places and like that. This girl came running out. She wasn’t a little kid, you know, she was twenty-something, a waitress at some lodge, she was running across the road because she was late for work. I was driving, I got all fouled up with the clutch and the brake and the accelerator. I plowed right into her, then I found the brakes. I clamped down on them, rigid, scared to death, and the car went sliding. It was a Buick, one of these big heavy jobs. It went off the road and hit a tree. The guy with me went through the windshield, got killed. The door on my side popped open and I went out. Nobody saw it happen. It was wintertime, you know, pretty late at night, cold as hell out. This car was coming the other way, and they saw what happened, but they were the only ones. They stopped and came over and one of them asked me what was wrong, how did I feel? All I could say was, ‘We stole the car, we stole the car, we stole the car.’ I could see my whole life shot, right there. I should have known better, I was twenty-three years old, two years in the Army, three years in college. I should have known better.”

“Was this Ed Ganolese?” she asked me. “The one who saw the accident?”

“If you mean, did he decide to hold it over me, no, you’re wrong. These guys, three or four of them from the car, they got my wallet, and I guess they saw my student activity card. One of them said, ‘A college kid.’ One of them leaned over me and said, ‘Kid, you’ve screwed up.’ I don’t know, I was shook up and scared and groggy and still half-drunk. I saw one of them wiping the steering wheel with a cloth, and the door handles and the dashboard, and they helped me up and into their car and drove me back to the college. By then, I was pretty much sober, and not so groggy any more. The guy in the back seat with me said, ‘Kid, you were lucky we came along. Go to bed and deny everything in the morning. They don’t have a case on you.’ž”

“That was Ed Ganolese?”

“I didn’t know it then,” I said. “All I knew right then was that he’d saved me from a hell of a rough jam. He was on his way back to New York from wherever he’d been. I tried to thank him, but he wouldn’t let me. ‘I con the cops for fun, kid,’ he told me. ‘Besides, you don’t need a rap like that. Go on in and go to bed.’ So I did, and the next day, in the afternoon, a state trooper came for me, and they questioned me down at City Hall. A CID man. I told him I hadn’t gone along with the bet, I was too drunk, I’d gone home and I didn’t know what happened after that. They didn’t believe me—they knew the other kid hadn’t been driving, he went through the right-hand windshield—but they had to let me go, they didn’t have any proof I was at the scene. I was scared, but I wouldn’t change my story.”

“So you got away with it,” she said.

“Sure. The law couldn’t touch me. But everybody knew I was there, or at least everybody thought they knew it, and that’s the same thing. The people in school, I mean, the other students and the teachers. The students would cut me dead, and the teachers would give lectures on accepting responsibility, every class I was in. They wouldn’t look at me in particular, but everybody knew what the lectures were all about.”

“They were trying to help you, Clay,” she said.

“Crap. Ed Ganolese helped me. He was the only one in the world who helped me. Look, in the first place I was one of the crazy vets going to school on the GI Bill. This was a couple years after the Second World War vets all graduated, and a couple years before the Korean vets began to show up. A vet was an oddball when I was in school, there weren’t that many of us. And we didn’t have the money the teenagers had, going through on their parents’ dough. They were ready to believe anything about a vet. They were down on him because he was older, poorer, and supposed to be wilder. So even though the law couldn’t touch me on the hit-run, everybody on campus had me already tried and convicted.”

“So you ran away?” she said.

“I tried to go back to school,” I told her. “I tried to forget the whole thing, I’d had a close scrape and come up lucky. But nobody’d let it die. So I cut classes and packed up. I threw everything away I couldn’t fit into one suitcase, a ratty old black thing with straps, you know the kind. Then I headed into town, for the bus depot. I didn’t know where I was going, I was just going. I didn’t want to go home. My father’d found out about it, and he didn’t believe me either. I passed the hotel, and there was the same car, the guys who’d helped me that night. The car was right out front, with nobody in it. So I hung around for an hour, and then they finally came out and across the sidewalk to the car. I knew which one was the boss, it was easy to pick him out. I went up to him, dragging this damn suitcase, and said, ‘Mister, I’m your boy.’ He looked at me and grinned and said, ‘What can you do?’ I said, ‘Anything you tell me to do.’ž”

She waited for me to go on, but I was finished. That was the story, and it was the first time I’d told it to anybody in over five years, and it made me nervous just to talk about it.

She said, “What happened after that?”

“Ed brought me back to New York with him. I drove cigarettes to Canada for a while. I was a New Look union boy for a while. I came up in the world. Ed knew I was his boy.”

“Why, Clay?”

I closed my eyes. “Why? If Ed hadn’t come along that night, where would I be today? In jail on a twenty-to-life for manslaughter and stealing a car and half a dozen other counts.”

“It was a college prank,” she said. “You might have gotten just a suspended sentence.”

“The girl was dead, Ella. That doesn’t come under the heading of college prank. Nobody else lifted a finger for me. Ed was the only one helped me. He saved me, so I was his boy. Besides, I hadn’t known what I wanted to do. Nothing attracted me very much. Nine to five as a clerk or an accountant some place, I didn’t go for that.” I opened my eyes again, and looked at her. “I like this life, Ella,” I said. “You’ve got to get used to that idea. You’ve got to believe it. I like this life.”

“Which face is false, Clay?” she asked me.

“Neither one. Both. How the hell do I know? I’ve got a feeling for you. If I let myself, I’d have a feeling for Billy-Billy Cantell, even if I had to give him an accident. But I can’t let myself have any feelings there.”

“You can turn your feelings off and on?”

“Not on, Ella. Only off.”

This time, I was the one waiting for
her
to say something. Finally, I had to break the silence myself. “Will you stay?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said.

I left the apartment at eight-thirty, dead on my feet, and drove downtown to the building where Clancy Marshall, Ed Ganolese’s lawyer, has his office. Ella still hadn’t given me definite word one way or the other, and I worried about that all the way downtown. I didn’t even think about the fact that neither Fred Maine nor Jack Eberhardt had called me with news about Billy-Billy Cantell. By now, one of them should have. A punk like Billy-Billy couldn’t stay completely out of sight for very long. Either the cops would find him, or we would find him. One of us should have found him by now.

Clancy’s office is on Fifth Avenue, and I knew it would be impossible to find a parking space anywhere in the vicinity. So I drove down Columbus Avenue until after it became Ninth Avenue, and turned left on 46th Street. I left the Mercedes at a parking lot on 46th Street, and took a cab the rest of the way. If I’d been fully awake when I left the apartment, I would have taken a cab right from there and not bothered about the Mercedes at all.

Sitting in the back seat of the cab as we inched our way crosstown, I thought about Ed Ganolese, and about what I’d told Ella of my first contact with Ed. In the garbled goulash of the newspaper trade, Ed Ganolese would undoubtedly be referred to either as a “crime czar” (in the tabloids) or a “syndicate chief” (in the kind you fold), but neither of those pat phrases gets the right idea across. I would call Ed the man with the finger in the pie. Any pie. Show me a pie and I’ll show you Ed’s finger.

You may never have heard of Ed Ganolese, but he is a very important guy in your life. At one time or another, he has probably bought a politician for you to vote for. If you ever came to New York for a convention and did things the little woman shouldn’t know about, Ed probably wound up with some of your cash. If you ever guessed three numbers for money, Ed got a part of your dime. Likewise, if you have given money to horses or to other sports stars, or drunk much beer, or ever heated a spoonful of white powder over a candle while the hypo waited nervously in the wings, you have helped to make Ed Ganolese the wealthy and happy man he is today.

A man with so many varied interests obviously can’t watch all of them at once. So Ed has people working for him, people whose job it is to stand on the edge of each pie plate and make sure nobody runs off with the filling.

But humans are, after all, only people, and Ed occasionally finds things amiss among his many pies. When that happens, he needs somebody to slap the kiddies who were naughty and to put all the filling back where it belongs. That’s where I come in. Once, during one of those racket investigations that louse up the working day so badly, a reporter with a flair for the trite called me a “right-hand man and troubleshooter for crime czar Ed Ganolese.” I’m neither. I’m a governess. My job is to keep the kiddies from annoying Papa and messing up the nursery.