The Moonlight (25 page)

So, in a sense, the murder of Uncle Leo had been like a shot at redemption.

He had never liked Uncle Leo, who had retired when Sonny became the Don—as a gesture of contempt, Sonny had always suspected—but the murder of a kinsman demanded an answer.  The afternoon following the funeral he sat down with his underboss, Jimmy DeLucia, to plot vengeance.

“Listen, Sonny, I don’t know what you’re getting so hot about.  It was a traffic accident.  They’ll find some kid and give him a year, and then, if you think it’s necessary, we’ll top him.”

Jimmy DeLucia had been one of the Don’s more successful inspirations.  He had started out as a street hood and, at age eighteen, had run afoul of the Galatina family by trying to organize a Shylocking operation among the blacks in West Stamford.  This territorial infringement could not be tolerated, but Sonny, who was still his father’s underboss but knew he would succeed him within a year or two, rather admired the kid’s audacity so, instead of having his lights put out, he offered him a job.  DeLucia accepted with gratitude, knowing he was lucky to be alive, and had served Sonny Galatina faithfully ever since.

Jimmy DeLucia had made his bones at sixteen and had been an enforcer before Sonny moved him up to underboss.  Yet for him violence was simply the business tactic of last resort—it was dangerous and it was expensive, and every time some chiseler was found shot in the head or an independent operator was blown up by a car bomb it stretched public tolerance a little thinner.  IBM and AT&T didn’t shoot people in the head.  Donald Trump didn’t use car bombs.  Jimmy DeLucia admired his boss precisely because he was almost indistinguishable from any corporate CEO.  Jimmy DeLucia wanted the Galatina Family run like a Fortune 500 company, not like a street gang.  To the degree that he was aware of Sonny’s romantic longings, he disapproved of them.

“It was not a traffic accident.  It was a hit.”  Sonny’s face darkened as he sat behind the huge mahogany desk in his office, fiddling with a cigar he could not quite bring himself to light—after all, he was still in his best dark suit and Uncle Leo hadn’t been in the ground more than an hour.

“Come off it, boss.  There’s no problem with the other Families and, besides, who’d want to top Leo?”

“I have it on the best authority that the police are treating the case was Murder One.”

“Tom Spolino tell you that?”

Sonny nodded, a little annoyed that his underboss had figured him out so fast.  Of course, he would have been even more annoyed if he hadn’t.

“Tom Spolino is no dummy,” he said, and then, a little maliciously, “If he weren’t such a straight arrow son-of-a-bitch, he’d be sitting where you are now.”

“Then, if it was Murder One, it must have been some sort of private beef.”  DeLucia shrugged—he was impervious to Sonny’s sarcasms.  “Wait for Tom Spolino to catch the guy, and as soon as he’s in the jug I’ll arrange something.  Whether it was an accident or a jealous lover isn’t important.  We’ll deal with it the same way.”

That seemed to settle it, but the morning after the Grazzi killing Jimmy DeLucia found the Don floating in his swimming pool, his ass stuck in an inner tube the size of a truck tire, ready to burn down the whole world.

“Maybe you think
this
was a traffic accident,” Sonny bellowed, uncharacteristically ignoring the presence of his wife, who was lying face down on the grass, cultivating her tan.  “I’m telling you, Jimmy, some fuck has declared
war
on us.”

That was enough for Traci.  Smart girl, she didn’t even want to hear the Don’s secrets, so she got up and walked back into the house.  To avoid a tan line, she had undone her bikini top in back and now, instead of troubling to retie it, she simply carried it in her hand.  Jimmy DeLucia was very careful to avert his eyes.

The two men exchanged an angry look which was really something more like embarrassment at Sonny’s indiscretion.

“I’ve known Sal forever,” the Don said more quietly.  “Don Enrico was his Godfather.  I was best man at his wedding.  And now he gets blown to pieces in some cathouse.  They won’t even to able to have an open casket—what kind of a sicko shoots a guy’s nuts off, for Christ’s sake?”

DeLucia sat down on one of the aluminum deck chairs that were scattered at random around the pool.

“I’ve got a man in the Greenley Police Department,” he said.  “Spolino’s been busy.  He’s dug up all the records on some ’30s hood named Charlie Brush.  He’s also interested in some local guy who’s living in the old Moonlight, but I don’t make much of that.”

This made Sonny very happy.

“Spolino asked me about Charlie Brush,” he said harshly, as if in rebuke.  “Charlie Brush would be a million years old if he was still alive, and he isn’t.  Tell me about the local guy.”

So Jimmy DeLucia gave the Don the story on Philip Owings, heir to the Moonlight Roadhouse, who seemed to be strictly civilian and a bit of a dork in the bargain.  He told him about the car with the dented fender.  He even told him a few things that Detective Lieutenant Thomas Spolino of the Greenley Police didn’t know, such as the fact that Owings had been talking to a contractor about having his driveway repaved—which was a big outlay for a man with less than eight grand in his bank account.  It also sounded like he planned to stay on at the Moonlight, which was even harder to figure.

“A lot of things point to him, but not enough.  He’s not the type, for one thing, and he’s got no motive to kill either Uncle Leo or Sal Grazzi.  It doesn’t add up.”

“Maybe Spolino will come up with another suspect,” Sonny answered.  He freed himself from his inner tube and floundered over to the stairs, ready to come out of the water.

“Spolino doesn’t seem to be looking for another suspect, and we don’t have enough to do anything about this Owings guy now.  We can’t afford to be wrong on something like this.  We can’t afford to look like we don’t know what we’re doing.”

As Sonny climbed out of the pool, DeLucia offered him a towel the approximate size of a bedsheet.

“The madam at the whorehouse where Sal got it is coming out of the hospital in a day or two,” he went on.  “We can’t talk to her until then because the cops are all over her, but she’s reliable.  I’ll show her a picture of Owings and see what she says.”

“I’m going to have to pay my respects to Sal’s wife this afternoon,” Sonny murmured, as if he hadn’t been listening.  Wrapped in his huge towel and seated on one of the deck chairs, he looked old and disillusioned.  “I’ll tell her that Sal was in that place strictly on business, but she knows what kind of a prick she was married to.  Jesus, what a way to die—even for Sal.”

Jimmy DeLucia, who understood that the Don was sometimes given to these sentimental asides, handed him a glass of lemonade from the tray on the table beside him and sat back to wait until Sonny had wound down.

“We have to be sure,” Sonny said, setting the lemonade down on the table without even tasting it.  “But when we are sure, we give the guy the full treatment—we make sure his death is a warning that you don’t fuck with the Galatina Family.  I think maybe I’ll just do this one myself.”

DeLucia felt a thrill of something like horror—the idea was not only dangerous, it was almost indecent.

“Boss, we have people for that kind of work,” he said.  “Specialists. . .”

“This is Family, Jimmy,” the Don interrupted, holding up a finger in warning.  “This is my Uncle Leo and a man my grandfather held in his arms at the baptismal font.  It’s a matter of honor.”

Feeling suddenly as if something he ate hadn’t agreed with him, Jimmy DeLucia stared vacantly at the windows at the rear of the Don’s house, all of which seemed to be full length.  In one of them, he noticed, Traci was standing perfectly nude, almost touching the glass with her body, framed like a picture in some dirty old man’s private gallery.  Did Sonny know she did stuff like this behind his back?

When she was sure he had seen her, she put her hand down between her legs, right up against her little tow colored snatch.

“It’s a matter of honor, Jimmy.”

. . . . .

Sonny drove back in his limousine from comforting the grief-stricken family of Sal Grazzi.  Sal’s wife Bea, a black haired, hard featured woman, had kissed his hand and listened to him with both respect and that dry eyed, hating stoicism which showed her to be a true Sicilian, whom three generations of American-born progenitors had left absolutely unaltered.

“He was there on Family business, Bea.  That was part of his job, to collect the rents.”

“So how was it he died with his pants off,
Patrono
?”

“It was something this man, his murderer, made him do.  It is something which will be avenged.  This I promise.”

She had looked at him as if he didn’t believe him, as if vengeance were something that could safely be left to her.  She was a scary woman, and it was little wonder if Sal found his comforts elsewhere.

The interview had left Sonny profoundly depressed.  He knew what was expected of him—that he hunt the man down, inflict upon him a slow and painful death, and then present the widow with his severed trigger finger.  He believed he would be able to deliver all this.  What he could not believe was that it would be enough.

He would give Bea a pension.  He would send her flowers on the anniversaries of Sal’s death.  He would put her children through college.  This also would not be enough.

Sal had been fucking whores and God knows who else, and his murderer had caught him at it.  At bottom the source of Bea’s pain and anger was that she had not been the one who pulled the trigger.  She was not interested in justice or a pension or flowers or the college tuition of her three brutish little children.  She wanted her honor back.  She wanted the refund of her virginity and to wear white and return to her father’s house as if Sal Grazzi had never existed.  She wanted to murder the son-of-a-bitch all over again for being such a screw-up as to die like that and expose her shame to the whole world.

And these were things that even Don Galatina,
capo di tutti capi
, could not give her.  So what good was he?

On its way home, the car slid past St. Mary’s cemetery, with its acres of marble tombstones, and Sonny stared glumly out through the smoked glass windows at an old woman with a kerchief over her head who laid a bouquet of flowers of a grave.  He saw her kneel on the grass and cross herself, and he wondered who would put flowers on his grave one day.

The Don had two sons by his first wife, grown men now.  One was an eternal political science major at NYU and the other played indifferent polo down in Florida, and both were slightly embarrassed by their father, if not by the wealth that allowed them to pursue their wasted lives.  He had given them everything and he hardly ever saw them.  A five-year-old daughter by his second wife he would not even have recognized.  Thanks to him, they would all live lives of golden indolence, but none of them would mourn him or pray for his soul.

He was already within the town limits of New Canaan and five minutes from his front gate when the car phone buzzed faintly in its upholstered box.  Only his housekeeper and his top lieutenants had the number, so he opened the box and picked up the receiver without curiosity.

“Yeah.”

“Is that all you can say, you dumb guinea fuck?  You can’t even manage a ‘hello’?”

Sonny felt as if he had been hit with a cattle prod—nobody talked to him like that.  Nobody.

“Who the fuck is this?” he shouted, loud enough to make his driver turn around to see what was the matter.  Sonny waved his attention away with an impatient gesture and slid the glass partition closed between them.

“You know who this is, you limp-dick dago jerk.  How was the new widow—she offer to suck you off yet?”

“Whoever this is, you’re fucking dead!”  Sonny was so angry by now he could feel his shirt collar choking him.  “You hear me, Shithead?  You’re dog meat!”

“So far the score is 2-0 my favor, Sonny Boy, so I wouldn’t be too confident about that.  You should’ve heard the way Sal screamed when I made a mess of his pathetic little wop goodies.  You should’ve heard him—he sang like an opera star.  He was glad when I finally shot his face off.”

“I’ll kill you, you fucking bastard!  Dead! 
Morto
!”

The only answer was a cold, terrible laughter.  It was the laughter of one beyond fear, beyond even death.

And it faded away into silence.

“I have one more visit to make,” the voice said.  “And then it’s your turn, Sonny Galatina.”

“Bastard—fucking bastard!  I’ll fix you so. . .”

But the line had already gone dead.

“I’ll fix him myself,” Sonny murmured, as rage twisted in his bowels like a snake.  “That settles it, I’ll blow the creep’s head off.  Me, personally, I’ll stick his balls down his throat for him.  I’ll . . .”

And then something occurred to him—something that made him feel sick with fear.  How the hell did this guy know his car phone number?

And if he knew that, what else did he know?

George’s little doll-faced wife left him in 1935 and moved back in with her mother.  She said she didn’t want to be married to a gangster.  She said she didn’t want their son visiting his father in Sing Sing.  She said a lot of stupid things, but she was a pretty stupid broad.  Three months after the divorce was final she married a guy who sold bathroom fixtures in Darien.  I think she’d been having it on with him for some time.