lunge forward, but for the moment he let them stay there.
He went into the apartment, hurrying through the living room and into the hall to the bedroom. The linen closet was next to the bathroom door, and inside it the plastic tablecloth for use on the terrace was right where it was supposed to be, on the top shelf. He carried it back to the terrace, spread it on the floor, rolled Lozini in it. The old man was shot in the chest, left side, heart—half good aiming and half good luck. There wasn’t much blood, because he was dead and the heart wasn’t pumping any out of the wound.
Calesian dragged the plastic-wrapped body into the living room, shut the terrace doors, and turned the thermostat down to fifty-five, the lowest possible setting. Then he went into the bathroom to rub some A&D ointment on his scalp to guard against sunburn, and while he was in there he got a sudden case of the shakes. He sat down on the toilet and gripped his knees and stared at the rose-colored wall, and trembled all over.
Lozini. Not some two-bit hood, not a dime-store cop, but Lozini himself.
After a few minutes he calmed down and took two Alka-Seltzer and left the apartment to find a phone booth— because he couldn’t be sure if his own phone was tapped or not, by state or federal people—and call Dutch Buenadella. But the first three times he dialed, the line was busy.
Twenty-five
Buenadella was on the phone with George Farrell, who had just called him, taking him away from lunch with his family. Buenadella was saying, “What the fuck did you give him my name for?”
“I didn’t know what else to do. He was— He was making it very tough for me. He really wanted to know, do you follow me?”
The phone was a tough way to communicate. They had to tell each other things that they weren’t telling the inevitable eavesdroppers. Farrell had begun the conversation by saying, “Do you know who this is?” and Buenadella had said, “Yes, you dipshit, and so does anybody else who’s listened to all those fucking radio commercials you did.” He’d talked that way because he’d been shocked into rage by the stupidity of Farrell making direct contact with him, two days before the election. They had managed to keep Farrell’s skirts clean all the way through up till now, and he just couldn’t believe the guy was stupid enough to blow it all at this late date, for any reason.
But since then the conversation had gone on, roundabout and vague but gradually getting the point across, and now Buenadella was shocked in a different way. Because that son of a bitch Parker had gone right through Farrell’s security, separated him from his people like a sheepdog cutting out one lamb from the flock, scared the shit out of him somehow, and had gotten from him Buenadella’s name as the guy behind the takeover. And that shouldn’t have happened. Just as Farrell had kept himself clean and above suspicion on the mayoral side, Buenadella had held himself absolutely out of it when it came to unhorsing Al Lozini. And now this bastard from out of town, this Parker, had come in and opened everything up like an appendicitis case.
And Parker wasn’t even supposed to be alive any more. What the hell had happened to Abadandi? Surely he’d had a chance at Parker and the other one by now, so what was holding him back? Once he took Parker out, life would get a lot easier, but if Abadandi waited much longer, Parker would already have opened too many doors, spoiled too many setups, and it wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of difference any more if he was alive or dead.
It crossed Buenadella’s mind that Abadandi might have made his play and lost; but he didn’t believe it. Abadandi was too good, too secure. The answer had to be that Parker and the other one were covering themselves too well and Abadandi hadn’t had a good shot yet to take them out.
Well, it better happen soon. And in the meantime, there was this sudden mess to take care of. Buenadella said, “How long ago did you have your conversation?”
Farrell bumbled around, still too shook up to be brisk. “Uh—twenty-five—almost half an hour.”
“Half an hour! What the fuck a you been doing?”
“Dutch, I had to, I had to calm everybody here. We had policemen being held at gunpoint here, Dutch, it wasn’t something I could just brush off without an explanation. I said they represented some Middle Eastern sect, it was some sort of international political thing, and that I talked them out of holding me.”
“You got people to buy that?”
“Reporters, policemen, everybody.” A bit of pride touched Farrell’s voice, and with it he grew calmer and more confident. “I am good at my profession, Dutch,” he said. “I can talk to people.”
Which was true. When Buenadella stopped to think about it, the fact that Farrell had made the people around him buy any kind of phony story at all was pretty damn good, and that he’d managed to get away to a telephone by himself within half an hour was even better. Grudgingly he said, “All right. You did what you could.”
“Thanks, Dutch. And I wanted you to know as soon as possible.”
“Too bad you couldn’t have pulled your bullshit number on our friend instead.”
“Dutch, you weren’t there. Believe me, I didn’t have—”
Any choice, he was going to say. Buenadella cut him off, saying, “All right, it’s done. And he’s got half-an-hour lead to get to me, so get off the phone and let me set things up.”
“Right, Dutch. And I’m sorry, I just—”
Couldn’t do anything else, he would have said that time. “I know,” Buenadella said. “I know. Hang up.” And he broke the connection.
Standing there holding the receiver in his left hand and depressing the cradle with his right, counting slowly to five to give the phone company a chance to break the connection so he could make another call, Buenadella frowned thoughtfully at the paintings on the opposite wall of his den. They were French, pastels, crooked streets in Montmartre, in Paris. Not prints, regular originals, he’d bought them in Paris seven years ago when he and Teresa had swung through there on their way back from the trip to Italy. It was funny how everybody in Italy had thought he was German and everybody in France had thought he was Italian, and here he was an American all the time.
Louis Buenadella was fifty-seven years old, a big-boned man who did a lot of eating and who spread two hundred seventy pounds over his six-foot-four-inch frame. His stomach and behind and thighs were pretty thickly padded out with fat, but the rest of him was big and hard, all muscle and sinew. He had fair skin and nearly blond
