A Bomb Built in Hell (14 page)

“Who are you?” the woman demanded.

“I'm from your father, Mrs. Benton.”

“He knows better than this. I don't have anything to say to him.”

“I only need five minutes of your time, Mrs. Benton. It's just some papers he wants you to sign.”

“I thought I already did that years ago. How come he …?”

“It will only take a moment,” Wesley said, as he gently pushed the door open and stepped past her and into the apartment.

The place was quiet except for the raucous meow of a Persian cat reclining on the velvet sofa. Wesley walked toward the wall-length sofa as though he intended to sit down. The woman followed close behind him at a quicker pace, nervously patting her piled-up hair into place.

“Now, look! I told my father and I'll tell you, I—”

Wesley wheeled suddenly and slammed his right fist deep into the woman's stomach. She grunted and fell to the rug, retching. He slipped the brass knuckles off his hand and knelt beside the woman. She was struggling
to breathe, her face a mottled mask of red and white. Wesley reached into his pocket and brought out a pair of anesthetic nose plugs. He inserted them into the woman's nostrils, put a handkerchief over her mouth, and watched closely until her breathing became slow and measured.

Satisfied she would stay unconscious for as long as the anesthetic lasted, he put on the surgeon's gloves, then carefully removed all his clothing, folding it neatly into the opened attaché case.

A thin stream of blood ran out of the corner of the woman's mouth—she must have bitten her lip.

Still didn't wake her up
, ran through Wesley's mind as he laid the Beretta on the rug beside the woman, fitted the tube silencer, and doubled-locked the front door. The cat had vanished.

Pet had told him that the husband was a gourmet cook, so he knew what to look for.

He found the set of knives—hollow-ground Swedish steel with rosewood handles—and the portable butcher block on the stove island. He picked up the whole set and carried it back into the living room.

Wesley gently laid the woman's head on a couch pillow and placed the butcher block under her neck. When he pulled the pillow out from under her head and tugged back on her hair, the skin of her throat stretched taut, the veins in her neck leaping out against the pale skin.

He held the heavy butcher knife poised eighteen inches from her throat, mentally focused on a spot three inches beyond, and took a deep breath. The butcher knife flashed down. Blood spurted from her neck arteries.
It took three more full-strength blows before the head came off completely.

Wesley grabbed the headless body by the ankles and dragged it toward the bedroom, leaving a thick trail of blood and paler fluids. He dumped the body on the bed and left the bedspread to absorb the mess while he went back for the head.

Wesley turned the body over on its back. He spread the woman's legs as far as they would go, quickly lashing her ankles to the legs of the matching teak bedposts with piano wire so they wouldn't close during rigor mortis. Then he took the head and pressed it down on the bed, moving it forward and backward in its own trail of fluid until it was slammed squarely between the woman's legs. Wesley used a tiny drop of Permabond to keep gravity from closing the eyes, leaving them staring straight ahead.

Next, he dug his right hand into the gaping neck and worked his fingers around until they were completely smeared with blood. He walked to the off-white wall behind the woman's body and used a finger to write:

He went looking for the cat and found it under the rolltop desk in the den. Wesley pulled it out, careful at first so as not to be scratched, until he saw its claws
had been removed, probably to protect the furniture. He stroked the animal to calm it down. And then pushed it into the den, closing the door behind him.

Wesley entered the Japanese-style bathroom and used a small screwdriver to remove the drain. Then he took a shower: first blazing hot, then icy cold. When he was completely clean and all the blood had vanished, he dried himself with a towel from his attaché case, leaving the water running.

Then he dressed, first putting the surgeon's gloves into a plastic bag and returning them to his case.

Before he left, he used the black silk handkerchief to wipe every surface. The library had told him that twelve points were necessary for a “true-positive” fingerprint ID, but five or more were “legally sufficient.” His precaution was autopilot—Wesley knew if there was
any
identification at all, his case would never reach a courtroom.

Everything went back into the attaché case.

It was 10:56 when Wesley let himself out of the apartment, the handkerchief still in his hand as he turned the doorknob. The hallway was empty. He took the elevator downstairs, got off, and walked across the deserted lobby to the doorman.

The street was quiet. The sun was already boiling the concrete, but the people from that neighborhood went from their air-conditioned apartments to their air-conditioned cars to their air-conditioned offices. Nobody walked; they even paid people to walk their animals for them.

The doorman smiled at Wesley's approach. Wesley motioned him over.

“I have a package in my car for Mrs. Benton.”

“Just bring it around to the back entrance, sir. The super will—”

“Mrs. Benton said she would like you to deliver this to her
personally
. Would that be all right?”

“Certainly, sir. If you'll just bring it inside here to me, I'll—”

“It's a little too big for that. Could I drive around to the service entrance and hand it to you there?”

“Yes, sir, you could, but I don't like to leave the door unattended.”

“Mrs. Benton understands. She said to give you this for your trouble,” Wesley said smoothly, handing the man a pair of twenty-dollar bills. “She doesn't want the package to leave your hands. Can you bring it right up to her?”

The doorman all but saluted. “I'll just wait here a couple of minutes to give you time to get around back—I don't want to be off my post too long.”

“Appreciate it.”

Wesley walked out the front door and climbed into the Eldorado. He drove off to the corner and turned right; the alley was only about eighty feet away. Wesley deliberately drove past the alley and then backed the big car down to the service entrance. He left the motor purring and quickly assembled the Beretta-and-silencer combo.

The service door opened in less than a minute. The doorman moved quickly toward the open window of Wesley's car, smiling. Wesley shot him twice in the chest. The impact was minimal; the doorman fell to the
ground. Wesley opened his door, leaned out, and put three more slugs into the man's skull. He was out of the alley and driving along the side street in seconds.

Wesley drove crosstown without haste until he spotted a gray Fleetwood, just pulling out of a legal spot on Fifth Avenue as if it had been waiting for him.

He walked three blocks, then hailed a cab, which took him to the corner of Houston and Sullivan. A short hike down Sullivan toward Bleecker took him to Pet's Ford. As the Ford pulled away from the curb, the Fleetwood took its place.

The two men drove back toward the Slip. The kid hailed a cab to go pick up the Eldorado.

T
he headlines screamed

BIZARRE MURDER ON SUTTON PLACE!

The stories hinted at gruesome, unprintable details, but there were no photographs of the murder scene itself, and the basic facts didn't match the reality.

Wesley and Pet stayed in the building, waiting for the later editions. Amp-up time: MURDERED SOCIALITE WAS MAFIA CHIEFTAIN'S DAUGHTER! with the kind of follow-up “color” stories that humans like Salmone had come to hate ever since Colombo got himself vegetablized for courting the press.

Pet was reading between the lines. “Christ, Wes, what'd you do to her?”

“It's better you don't know, right? You got to look surprised
when they tell you about it. And if they polygraph this one, the murder method'll be one of the keys.”

“You don't forget a thing anymore, huh?”

“I'll tell you what I
did
forget. I was going to fuck her when she was unconscious—or at least beat off onto the body. It'd freak them out even worse. I just forgot.”

“Like fucking hell you ‘forgot.' You couldn't do that, Wes—you're a man.”

“I'm a bomb, old man,” Wesley said, flatly. “And they lit my fuse a long time ago.”

W
esley went out that night, leaving Pet behind. He drove the nondescript Ford up and down Allen Street. Whores approached the car at every light. It was quicker to look them directly in the face than to pretend to ignore them—they moved away the second they saw his eyes.

It took hours of prowling before he found what he wanted.

When he returned to the Slip, Pet was gone. The haphazard-appearing scrawls in the dust on the garage floor told Wesley the old man had gone to meet with his employers.

Wesley picked up the newspaper Pet had left behind for him. Page three had a story about a letter bomb that had exploded in the face of Nancy Jane DiVencenzo of Long Island's tony North Shore. The police had no clue to the sender—the letter had been blown into microscopic particles, along with the young deb's face.

Wesley went to his own place and let himself in. He took the dog up to the top floor and let it run free on
the hardwood for an hour while he focused on the white wall. The dog alternatively loped and turned on vicious bursts of speed; he kept at it until Wesley drew a deep breath and sat up. They went down to the apartment together, the dog taking the point, as always.

The soft, insistent buzzing woke Wesley at 3:25 in the morning, telling him the old man was back. He dressed and went down to the basement garage.

The dog acknowledged his passage with a throaty growl, and Wesley realized that he had never seen the animal sleep.

The old man was smoking one of the black, twisted cigars he liked. He almost never did this inside the garage. The exhaust fan was running like Vaseline flowing through oil, so silent it could only be sensed, not heard.

“You got them, Wes—you got them
all
. I almost threw up behind just
hearing
about it. The woman's husband is in Bellevue. He's never gonna be right. They can't agree on much, but they know some sicko crew's after them all. The Long Island guy got the phone call in the middle of last night—he was already in the city for a meet on the Sutton Place thing. He went fucking crazy. They tied it in, just like we expected.”

“The cops—”

“The honest ones're probably laughing. What the fuck do they care? But they all know the sky's the limit for any real info.”

“Leads?”

“Forget it. The big man himself said it had to be a fucking ghost what done it.”

“It was.”

“I know. I used to light candles for Carmine, Wes. But I finally realized that it was just another club he couldn't join.”

“What'd you tell them?”

“I told them it had to be a freak from the cesspool. I said I'd hit the area and nose around until I came up with something, put a lot of my people on the street, all that bullshit. Then I gave them a whole bunch of crap about the security arrangements they'd need for their families. Like we said, right?”

“Perfect. I found a building. On Chrystie, south of Delancey, on the west side of the block. The whole building's empty—three stories. It's got buildings on either side, both higher, both abandoned.”

“Abandoned, my ass. You got people squatting in every fucking X-flat in this city.”

“That's no problem. They don't see nothing going in. And, going out, there won't be nothing left
to
see. Let's look tomorrow night.”

W
esley went all the way up to the roof and sat, smoking as he looked at the Manhattan Bridge. He and Pet had stockpiled enough explosives to lift the building he'd found on Chrystie into orbit—it wouldn't be difficult to completely mine the place and set it off with a radio control. But there was just no way that Pet could excuse himself and leave the room, much less the building, not with those kinds of humans inside and all mega-tense like they'd be.

Risk against gain. Wesley sat and thought about
some political pamphlet he'd read in prison. Lee had given it to him. Everyone respected Lee for being in the know, but the pamphlet had never made sense to Wesley. How could the writer talk about the lumpen proletariat being the vanguard of the revolution when the fucking lumpen proletariat couldn't even understand the fancy-ass words the man used in a book they'd never read? Or was that a criticism of Marx by some
other
fucking lame who thought the lumpen were terrific? Lee read those tracts like they were comic books—he kept chuckling over them. Nobody ever understood what he was laughing about, and he never explained.

“An ox for the people to ride …” Who wanted to be a fucking ox? Work all your life and then have them eat your flesh when you're too old to work or breed. The prison-reform freaks had it all wrong. Wesley remembered when the cons threatened to riot behind their demand for conjugal visiting, and Lee told them they had conjugal visits in Mississippi, where he'd done time before. Wesley asked him why
Mississippi
, of all places, would treat prisoners so good.

“Because the cons down there, they ain't nothing but motherfucking work animals. You feed them and you keep them serviced, or they turn mean and lazy on you. Prisons is a big business down there, Wes,” Lee told him. “Chopping cotton, same way we did when they first brought us over. Don't cost the taxpayers a dime—the prisons
make
money for the State.”