light brown hair, the heritage of a Piedmontese grandmother on his father’s side. His hair seemed even paler in the close-cropped crew cut he’d favored for the last thirty years, ever since his Army days in the Second World War, and was mainly responsible for his nickname.
Buenadella was born and raised in Baltimore, and after the Army he went back there for a few years, soldiering in a different way, working for the people who ran the local rackets. He had some lucky breaks, was made a part of the action a few times, and saved his money. He knew he’d never be anything but a dependable minor hood in Baltimore, so in 1953 he’d moved to Tyler, armed with an introduction to Adolf Lozini and helped by the money he’d been saving up. Television had been hurting the movie business badly at that time, so he’d been able to buy up three local theaters on the cheap. He’d brought in sexploitation movies, was the first exhibitor in the Tyler area to switch over to that kind of film, and his three theaters had gone immediately and permanently into the black. He ingratiated himself with Lozini and the other local people who could be important to him, he became a part of their action, and when in 1960 it was decided to get into the paperback sex-novel boom Buenadella was the natural choice to organize the operation; first as a wholesaler, AM Distributors, Inc., distributing books from publishers in New York and Los Angeles, and later as a publisher, Good Knight Books, buying manuscripts for five hundred dollars, doing a print order of twenty thousand, selling fifteen thousand per title in the Tyler area and the rest in towns in a four-hundred-mile radius. AM Distributors handled Good Knight Books, and Buenadella’s three sex-movie theaters sold paperbacks in the lobby.
Because Buenadella’s entire operation was legal, other money from less legal sections of Lozini’s overall structure could be siphoned through Buenadella and thus brought back into legitimate trade. Buenadella had an agreed right to a skim on that money, and all in all was doing very well. But he wanted more.
He thought of himself, in his more solemn moments, as representing the wave of the future. In the old days the rackets had been disorganized, competitive, bloodthirsty. Then, mostly because of the pressures of Prohibition, the boys began to get together, to organize themselves and become more efficient for more profit. After Prohibition, there was a gradual movement out of the traditional rackets and into more and more legitimate enterprises; first as a cover for the real operation, later as a way to explain income to Internal Revenue, and more recently as a simple, sensible business way to deal with the profits through reinvestment.
And the next move, it seemed to Buenadella, was to make the legitimate parts of the operation dominant, with the rackets simply in support, to provide capital when needed and strong-arm when needed and political clout when needed, but not ever to be the main concern. And if the legitimate operations were to take over as the primary function, then the best leader at any level was a man whose own piece of the pie was completely legit. A man like himself.
Al Lozini was on the way out, he was going anyway, getting old, overstaying his welcome. Buenadella was interested in hurrying him a little, but that was all, and the only reason to do that was to be sure nobody else got the idea to take Lozini’s place for himself. Somebody like Ernie Dulare, for instance, or, maybe later on, Ted Shevelly.
And being the new breed, the businessman rather than the racketeer, he had chosen a good traditional business method for replacing the man ahead of him: co-opt his assistants, drain his economic strength, make private arrangements with his associates. He had spent nearly three years on the operation, moving very slowly, like a fox testing the ice across a frozen river; never pushing, never forcing the issue, never succumbing to impatience and old-line strongarm tactics. The final stage was to be the replacement on Tuesday of Lozini’s mayor by Buenadella’s mayor, to be followed by a meeting with Lozini in which he would be shown that the war was already over, that there was nothing for him to do but retire. Away from Tyler, far away. Florida, maybe. Or maybe he’d like to see Europe; Buenadella could recommend a trip like that. Cultural, healthful, a first-rate investment all the way around.
How smooth it had been, and how simple. And how stupidly it had fallen apart, with one little push from an unexpected quarter.
That goddam money from the amusement park. Seventy-three thousand, and less than half of it had wound up in the Farrell campaign. The rest had greased the ways here and there, minor payoffs, a nice piece to Harold Calesian, smaller pieces to a couple of other cops, a little hush-money piece to a Lozini soldier named Tony Chaka, a handling portion for Buenadella himself. And the fact is, it hadn’t even been needed. The goddam money was just a happy surprise, it hadn’t been anticipated, they could have gotten along just as well without it. A happy surprise. With another surprise in its wake, in the two guys named Parker and Green.
Now, all of a sudden, everything was up in the air. That asshole Calesian was out shooting cops, Lozini was getting nervous and suspicious, Farrell was risking his Mr. Clean image, and it had become necessary for Buenadella himself to give up business methods and go back to the blunter systems of simpler days, to put out a hit order.
He still wouldn’t do it on local people, on Lozini or Frank Faran or Ernie Dulare. But these strangers, a couple of shirttail heist artists without connections, they were dangerous alive and nobody would miss them if they were dead. But when the hell would Abadandi get around to finishing them off?
Maybe not until after they’d come here, to this actual house, sent by that yellow bastard Farrell. So Buenadella had some phone calls to make, a reception to organize.
He was still holding the receiver in his left hand. He counted to five after finishing the conversation with Farrell, then lifted his right hand from the cradle and poised his finger at the dial, waiting for the hum.
It didn’t happen. Silence on the line. Buenadella frowned, clicked the receiver twice, and had a sudden flashing image of Parker and Green cutting the phone line, isolating him in here.
Then a voice said, “Hello?”
“What?” Buenadella felt himself getting red in the face; this last annoyance was the one too many, the straw that broke the camel’s back. “What the fuck is going on?” he yelled.
The voice said, “Dutch? Is that you?”
“Who is this? Farrell?” Though it didn’t sound like him.
“No. You know who this is.”
Then he did finally recognize the voice: Calesian. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Now what?”
“Get to a clean phone,” Calesian said. “I have to talk to you.”
“There are no clean phones,” Buenadella said angrily, “and I don’t have time. I got problems of my own.”
“I’ll have to come over. This is important.”
“You do that. Now hang up, I’ve got calls to make.”
