don’t think you can pay at least the vig every week when it’s due, please don’t take the fuckin money, it wouldn’t be worth it to you.’ If the guy hesitates at all, ‘Well, I’m pretty sure I can—’ says anything like that, I tell him, ‘No, I’m advising you now, don’t take the fuckin money.’ The guy will beg for it, take an oath on his kids he’ll pay you on time. You know he’s desperate or he wouldn’t be borrowing shylock money in the first place. So you tell him, ‘Okay, but you miss even one payment you’re gonna be sorry you ever came here.’You never tell the guy what could happen to him. Let him use his imagination, he’ll think of something worse. In other words, don’t talk when you don’t have to. What’s the point?”
It was the same thing getting his coat back. What was there to say?
So now it was up to Ray Bones. If getting his nose busted and his teeth pushed in pissed him off he’d have to do something about it. Some things you couldn’t prevent. Tommy Carlo told him to get lost for a while, go fishing in the Keys. But how was he going to do that with Debbie an invalid, afraid to take a leak she might see blood?
He imagined different ways Ray Bones might try for him. Eating at Vesuvio’s, look up, there’s Bones pointing a gun. Or coming out of the barbershop on Arthur Godfrey Road where they had their office in back. Or, no—sitting on one of the chairs while he’s shooting the shit with Fred and Ed, which he did sometimes when there weren’t customers in the place. That would appeal to Ray Bones, with his limited mentality: the barbershop was here and it was the way guys had gotten hit before, like Albert Anastasia, that Ray Bones would know about. Chili said shit, went over to S.W. Eighth Street and bought a snub-nosed .38 off a Cuban. “The famous Smit and Wayson model
It happened when Chili was in the backroom office making entries in the collection book. Through the wallboard he heard Fred say, “Paris? Yeah, I been there plenty of times. It’s right offa Seventy-nine.” Ed saying, “Hell it is, it’s on Sixty-eight. It’s only seventeen miles from Lexington.”
Fred saying, “What’re you talking about, Paris, Kentucky, or Paris, Tennessee?” Then a silence, no answer to the question.
Chili looked up from the collection book, listened a moment to nothing, opened the desk drawer and got out the .38. He aimed it at the open doorway. Now he saw Ray Bones appear in the back hall, Bones in the doorway to the office, his face showing surprise to see a gun aimed at him. He began firing the big Colt auto in his hand maybe before he was ready, the gun making an awful racket, when Chili pulled the trigger and shot him in the head. The .38 slug creased Ray Bones, as it turned out, from hairline to crown, put a groove in his scalp they closed up at Mt. Sinai with more than thirty stitches—Chili hearing about it later. He pried two slugs out of the wall and found another one in the file cabinet he showed Tommy Carlo.
Tommy called Momo and Momo got in touch with Jimmy Cap, taking the situation to the table, so to speak, discuss whether Ray Bones had been shown disrespect by an associate from another crew, or was it his own fault he got shot. Otherwise it could get out of hand if they let it go, didn’t make a judgment. The two bosses decided this coat thing and what came out of it was bullshit, forget it. Jimmy Cap would tell Ray Bones he was lucky he wasn’t dead, the guy’s wife had given him the coat for Christmas for Christ sake. That was the end of the incident, twelve years ago, except for one unexpected event that came out of it right away, and something else that would happen now, in the present.
The unexpected event was Debbie walking out on Chili, going home to Bay Ridge to live with her mother over a clothing store.
It happened because during the discussion period Momo called Chili to get his side—as a favor to Tommy Carlo, otherwise he would never have spoken to him directly—and Debbie listened in on the extension. All Momo told Chili was to cut out the schoolyard bullshit, grow up. But that was enough for Debbie to know Chili was still connected. She went so far as to get out of bed to keep after him, wanting to know what he was doing with Momo and “those people,” becoming screechy about it until finally he told her, so he was working for Momo for Christ sake, so what? Thinking it would shut her up and he’d get the silent treatment for about a month, which he could use. But instead of that she became hysterical, telling him, “That’s why I had the miscarriage, I knew it. I
What? Because its dad was operating a quick-loan business? Helping out poor schmucks that couldn’t get it from a bank? How did you talk to a woman who believed an unborn kid would know something like that? He tried. He told her she ought to see a doctor, get her fuckin brain looked at. Debbie’s last words to him, she said, “You think you’re so smart, let’s see you get a divorce, big shot.” In other words she would pass up alimony and live with her mother over a clothing store to prevent his ever remarrying. Debbie, too dumb to realize the world had changed with rock and roll and the pill, believed it would keep him from ever getting laid again.
Chili, from then until now, went with a succession of women, some on a serious basis, some not. There was one named Rose, a bartender, who lived with him a few years. One named Vera, a go-go dancer he fell in love with, but he couldn’t stand other guys watching her and they broke up. He took out women who were waitresses, beauticians, sales clerks at Dadeland Mall, would take them to dinner and a movie, sometimes to bed. There was a singer named Nicole he liked a lot, but her whole life seemed to be rock and roll and he never knew what she was talking about. Chili liked women and was comfortable with them without putting on any kind of act. He was who he was and they seemed to go for him. What some of the women didn’t go for was seeing so many movies, practically every time they went out. They would get the feeling he liked movies more than he did them.
The other thing that came out of the coat incident, now twelve years later, happened right after they got word about Momo, shot dead as he left a restaurant on West 56th in Manhattan, and Tommy Carlo went to attend the funeral. The day after that Chili had a couple of visitors come in the shop looking for him, a big colored guy he had never seen before and Ray Bones.
“They cut straight hair in this place,” Bones asked Chili, “or just fags?”
Times changed. Fred and Ed were gone and a couple of guys named Peter and Tim were doing hair of either sex in an art deco backstage-looking setup, light bulbs around rose-colored mirrors. They were okay. They had Chili combing his hair straight back, no part, like Michael Douglas in
Chili had changed too in the past dozen years, tired of showing respect to people he thought were assholes. Momo had been okay, but guys in his crew would come down to Miami on vacation and act like hard-ons, expecting him and Tommy to show them around, get them broads. Chili would tell the hardons, “Hey, I’m not your pimp,” and they’d give Tommy a bad time because he was Momo’s nephew and had to go along. The result of this situation, Chili was phasing himself out of the shylock business, only handling a few regular customers now who did-n’t give them any trouble. He was also doing midnight car repossessions for small loan companies and some collection work for local merchants and a couple of Las Vegas casinos, making courtesy calls. He had chilled down a few more degrees too.
Still, he couldn’t help saying to Ray Bones, “The way you’re losing your hair, Bones, you oughta let these guys style what you have left, see if they can cover up that scar. Or they can fit you with a rug, either way.”
Fuck him. Chili knew what was coming.
There weren’t any customers in the shop. Ray Bones told Peter and Tim to go get a coffee. They left making faces and the big colored guy backed Chili into a barber chair, telling him, “This man is the man. You understand what I’m saying? He’s Mr. Bones, you speak to him from now on.”
Chili watched Mr. Bones go into the back hall toward the office and said to the colored guy, “You can do better’n him.”
“Not these days,” the colored guy said. “Not less you can talk Spanish.”
Bones came out with the collection book open, looking at all the names of who owed, the amounts and due dates in a green spiral notebook. He said to Chili, “How you work it, you handle the spics and Tommy the white people?”
Chili told himself it was time to keep his mouth shut.
The colored guy said, “The man’s talking to you.”
“He’s outta business but don’t know it,” Bones said, looking up from the book. “There’s nothing around here for you no more.”
“I can see that,” Chili said. He watched Bones put his nose in the book again.
“How much you got working?”
“About three and a half.”
“Shit, ten grand a week. What’d Momo let you have?”
“Twenty percent.”
