I went over to Maxie, and stood just to his left, between several wooden four-drawer filing cabinets and the corner of the wall the desk was up against.
“If this is business,” Maxie said, hands on his knees, his head tilted to one side in a gesture of reasonableness, “why have any guns at all?”
“I like negotiating from a position of strength.”
There was the garbled sound of conversation out in the living room, then the sound of running, the sound of furniture being knocked over. Maxie started to move, started to rise, but I swung into his gut with the nine millimeter, knocking the wind out of him, sitting him back down, sending him in his chair rattling back against the desk.
And the gunshots started.
They were muffled shots, silenced shots, WHUP! WHUP! WHUP! WHUP! but they were gunshots all right. Some of them were happening in the connecting room, and Maxie, still doubled over, glanced at me with round accusing eyes and I ducked down and flattened back against the wall, using the wooden filing cabinets for cover, and saw Maxie drop his hand toward that coat on the floor, fumbling for the gun in that coat pocket, getting it in hand, a.38 Police Special, sitting on the edge of his chair and looking up toward the doorway, at something and somebody I couldn’t see, looking as if he were about to rise his fat ass up out of that chair, only he never did.
He sat back in the chair, leaning back like a man getting a close shave, but this was no close shave: he was getting bullets pumped into him, into his chest, into his neck, into his face, the top of his head erupting and spattering the Old Heidelberg neon, his legs and feet tap-dancing while the silenced bullets softly sang.
Then the gunshots stopped and left him sitting with his head back and emptying out, blood dripping on the carpeted floor like red rain. Cordite stench scorched the air, gun smoke mixing with blood mist.
And I was cowering against the wall, in the corner made by the wall and the wooden filing cabinet. Unseen, I thought. They didn’t know I was here-did they?
“Phil,” a voice called from the other room. It was a whiny voice, high-pitched. Then, closer: “I did mine.”
“Mine’s done, too, Jimmy.” This voice was a baritone with gravel in it.
The nine millimeter was tight in my hand; my breath was sucked in hard, my heart pounding in my ears. I moved my head, my shoulders carefully, oh so slowly, forward, just barely glancing a sliver’s worth around the edge of the filing cabinet.
I could see them, one standing over by, and the other in, the doorway: the one inside the room must have killed Greenberg; he was wearing a brown topcoat and hat, was average in size and build, but his face was distinctive-as flat as a jockey’s ass, no cheekbones at all, eyes tiny, slitted, oriental-looking. The other guy, the one in the doorway, Hassel’s dispatcher, wore a mustard-color tweedy-looking topcoat and was small; his face was round and his nose pug and his eyes round and bright and cheerful.
These were not faces I would forget.
Neither would I forget their guns, though I couldn’t actually see them: they were big automatics, mostly hidden by fuzzy white towels that had been wrapped turbanlike around the barrels and over the muzzles; both towels, around the nose of each gun, were on fire, orange flames flittering on the scorched area around the nose of each automatic. Neither man seemed to notice.
They were talking softly, laughing lightly as they moved into the outer suite.
I waited ten seconds, then carefully stepped past Maxie, who was draped back across the desk, bloody gray matter seeping out his skull onto the ledger book; well, Eliot said the guy had brains.
I moved quickly, quietly, across the room, the nine millimeter in hand. Slowly, I stalked after the torpedoes, but as I was coming out of the office into the adjoining bedroom, I damn near tripped over Hassel, who was on the floor, his face turned to one side, his dead eyes even deader now, his head cracked open like a melon draining its seeds and pulp.
That stopped me a second. And by the time I was out in the living room, they were almost to the door.
“Police!” I called, and shot at them, specifically at their backs. That’s the best place to shoot a man, after all.
But that goddamn living room stretched out forever, and I missed one guy, and only winged the other, the cheerful one, but he wasn’t so cheerful now, yowling like a dog that got its tail stepped on, mustard-color topcoat splotched with ketchup-red, and the other one, the flat-faced fucker, turned and shot at me, no towel on the gun anymore, a big humongous Army Colt, and the room exploded with noise.
I dropped to the floor, and behind me a pigskin golf bag took a slug like a man and clattered on top of me, pinning me, but I squeezed off three more, as they were bolting out the door, my slugs chewing up wood and plaster.
And they were gone.
For perhaps two seconds, I considered pursuing them.
Then I got out from under the golf clubs, stepped past the still-smoldering burnt towels they’d discarded along the way; the makeshift silencers had been effective-the gunshots had obviously attracted no attention outside the suite itself, although these latest, louder ones no doubt would. I had to get the hell out.
In the hall, gun still in hand, I met no one. Later, I learned that Hassel, Greenberg and Waxey Gordon had rented out the entire eighth floor, which explained why no one had reacted to the gunshots yet. As for Louie, Sal and Vinnie, and any other bodyguards, they were either deceased or paid off; maybe that had actually been Vinnie’s voice, in the hall, as he played Judas for an unspecified number of gold coins.
I could have stuck and talked to the local cops. After all, I could describe the gunmen who shot Greenberg and Hassel. But I didn’t give a fuck who shot Greenberg and Hassel-who were, after all, just victims of this goddamn beer war; maybe Lindy’s kid was now another (inadvertent) victim of that war.
And I wasn’t about to become the next victim, either, which is what I would be if I went around identifying and testifying against mob torpedoes. Mrs. Heller’s little boy didn’t get to be a cop because he was stupid.
Yes, they’d seen me, but I was nobody out east, nobody they’d know, or ever recognize.
Eliot was right: it was time to go home.
All of these thoughts took approximately three seconds, as I rushed toward the door to the rear stairs and went up them, two at a time, my gun still in hand; I didn’t slip it into its holster till just before I went through the door to the ninth floor, where I found a wet-eyed, nearly hysterical Evalyn waiting breathlessly.
“I heard gunshots! Nate, are you…?”
“I’m swell,” I said, grabbing her by the arm, walking with studied calmness down a hall where various guests had stepped from their rooms with looks of alarm and confusion. We went inside her suite but I didn’t tell her what happened, not at first. I just lay on her bed and she held me and patted and smoothed my hair while I trembled like a frightened child.
24
On the following Monday, I played chauffeur for Evalyn one last time. Midafternoon, I was tooling the powder-blue Lincoln up rutted Featherbed Lane to the whitewashed stone house where a child, not so long ago, had been stolen. Evalyn rode in front this time, and I wasn’t in the natty gray uniform with the black buttons. She was a little depressed and, frankly, so was I.
“Not a word to Colonel Lindbergh,” I cautioned, “about Hassel and Greenberg. I don’t want to go making any more accomplices-after-the-fact than I already have.”
She nodded. She looked with hooded-eyed interest at the bleak, weedy grounds of an estate that to her must have seemed modest indeed.
“Look at the hillside beyond the house,” she said, distractedly, searching out some beauty in the barrenness. “The white and pink dogwood against the dark cedars…lovely.”
The thought didn’t seem to cheer her up much. She wore a black fox stole and a smartly cut black suit with a white silk blouse and pearls, dark silk stockings, and a soup-dish black hat with no veil; she looked like a wealthy widow, in token mourning.
I pulled around by the garage, where a modest level of police activity continued; the weather today was almost warm, and the doors were up, and the handful of troopers dealing with mail and phone calls seemed to be
