Hush Money (11 page)

Cummins came in at seven-thirty. Fifteen minutes late. He was a tall man with a skinny man’s frame and a fat man’s belly. He was dark-haired, dark-complexioned, wore a rumpled brown suit and looked like a cop, which is what he was. As he joined Frank in the back booth, a waitress put Cummins’s usual breakfast down in front of him. The Friday morning meeting between Cummins and Frank was a ritual, and the necessity of placing an order had long since passed. Cummins mumbled an apology about his tardiness, then dug into the double order of waffles and ham.

“You’re late,” Frank said. With people in the booth behind him, Frank naturally kept his voice down. But his words were anything but soft-spoken.

“I’m sorry, Frank.”

“You’re sorry.”

“Look, I almost didn’t come.”

“You
what
?”

“I sort of forgot.”

“You forgot Friday, Cummins? I never knew you to forget Friday before.”

“I just didn’t think you’d be here, because of—I thought you’d be making funeral arrangements and things.”

“I made those last night. Tomorrow is the funeral. Today is business as usual.”

Cummins looked up from his waffles and ham. “Well, that’s fine. I think that’s the way it should be. You got to order your priorities, you know?”

“I know,” Frank said. He handed the envelope under the table to Cummins who took it and stuffed it casually inside his suitcoat.

“You going to want anything special on this thing, Frank?”

“Not really. Keep me informed. You’re on the case?”

“Yeah.”

“So there should be no problem, right?”

“Right.”

“Only thing special I want from you is I want this guy personally.”

“You want him how?”

“I want him. When you find him, I want him.”

“Frank, uh, if you mean what I think you mean . . .”

The booth was large enough, and the racket in the room loud enough, for Frank to say anything he wanted without fear of being overheard. But just the same he leaned across the table and whispered harshly, “You know what I mean, Cummins. These last few years not much has been asked of you. We’re goddamn businessmen now, thanks to Vince, and maybe he’s got the right idea. But this time we’re doing it the old way. This one time you’re going to earn your goddamn money.”

And Cummins said, in a whisper that was little more than a moving of the lips, “You’re going to kill him.”

“I’m not going to fuck him. Fuck him up, yes. Hell, you may not ever find the son of a bitch’s body. I might lay some goddamn state highway over him and let the trucks and cars make their tire tracks on his goddamn grave.”

“What . . . what am I supposed to do, Frank?”

“Give him to me. Find him and give him to me. And then cover for me. Shut up for me. That’s what you’re paid for, mostly. Shutting up.” He leaned back.

“Whatever you say, Frank,” Cummins said and returned to his waffles and ham.

“Now,” Frank said. “What do you have to tell me?”

“Just what I said on the phone last night. Empty shell casing in the high weeds, the rough. Four-sixty Mag.”

“That’s old. Nothing new? Anybody see the guy?”

“No. Nobody at the country club saw a thing. ’Course there wasn’t anybody else on the golf course, being so late in the season and all. Back of the rough is a blacktop road with a farmhouse across the way, but the damn farmhouse is set back from the road maybe two hundred yards and nobody there saw a thing, didn’t even notice if a car was parked out front or anything, which it probably wasn’t. He probably parked it up around the turn, where there’s no houses around.”

“How do you read it?”

“Except for the size of the gun, which is weird, I’m telling you, I’d say it was a pro did it. I mean it was very smooth, very professional. No hitches at all. Only I can’t see why some hit man would use a big-game rifle. That’s—I don’t know—silly, or strange, or some damn thing.”

“Somebody’s trying to scare us,” Frank said, meaning the DiPreta family itself. “Somebody’s trying to scare shit out of us.”

“Who’s got a reason?”

“I don’t know. Nobody. Lots of people. Vince has been bitching with Chicago over some things. Talking about cutting some of our ties with ’em, which is part of his wanting to go even more legit than we are already.”

“Would that be smart?”

“Going legit? Well, we could cut some of the dead weight off our payroll, that’s for sure.”

“Frank, that’s not fair.”

“Take it easy, Cummins, I’m just kidding. Me, I don’t mind taking a few chances, if that’s where the money’s at. My brother Vince, he’s older, more conservative, that’s all. But this, this is just a business thing. I can’t see Chicago shooting anybody over it. That’s just not done any more. At least not on our kind of level. The DiPretas are a family, just like Chicago is a family. Nowhere near the same level, sure, I’ll admit we’re not, but we’re a family just the same, which is something that carries respect;
that
at least is left over from the old days. When
that
is gone we’ll know the businessmen and politicians have took over. No, not Chicago, not likely. That four-sixty Mag, though, you know what that sounds like to me? That sounds like revenge.”

“I talked to Vince about the playing-card thing.”

“See? That fits in. Revenge. Some personal thing, somebody trying to scare us sort of thing.”

“Yeah, well, I was talking to Brown, you know, my partner?”

“The nigger?”

“Look, Frank, I happen to like Brown, I don’t see any reason calling him a nigger.”

“He’s a nigger, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, he is, but you don’t have to call him that. Anyway, he was in Vietnam.”

“Who was in Vietnam?”

“You know, Brown, the nig, he was in Vietnam and he was telling me about the playing card deal. I mean, I told him about Vince getting that card in the mail, just like his brother Joey did, and Brown said in Vietnam they used to distribute whole damn packs of the ace of spades. Whole fuckin’ damn decks of nothing but aces of spades, and the Americans, after they wasted a bunch of slants, they’d spread ’em around like confetti on the slant corpses, ’cause these slants, they’re superstitious bastards, and the ace of spades, it stands for death, you know, so the Americans would leave ace of spades all over the ground, on and around the dead bodies, to spook the V.C.”

“So what?”

“So maybe somebody’s doing the same thing to you. Trying to spook you with the ace of spades. Like I said, it stands for death.”

“Yeah, I know it stands for death, you dumb- ass, I know that’s what somebody’s trying to do is spook us with the goddamn ace of spades. I mean, it wouldn’t make much sense sending the deuce of hearts, would it, dumb-ass?”

“No, Frank, you don’t follow me. I mean maybe the guy who shot Joey is out of Vietnam. Maybe that’s where he picked up on shooting, too. Sniping. If he was a soldier, I mean. In Vietnam.”

“Wait a minute,” Frank said. Something was starting to click in the back of his head somewhere. Something was starting to click together. “Wait a minute.”

“What, Frank?”

“Nothing yet. Let me think a second.”

Cummins shrugged and returned to his waffles and ham, which were cold now, though that didn’t seem to cool his enthusiasm any.

A few minutes passed, and suddenly somebody rapped on the window right by their booth. Both Frank and Cummins looked up and saw, through the aqua-blue-tinted glass, a figure in jeans and khaki jacket. The most striking thing about the figure was that he was wearing a woolen ski mask. The ski mask was dark blue with red and white trim around the eye holes and was out of place. The morning was a little bit chilly, yes, but a ski mask certainly wasn’t called for.

Then the man in the ski mask held up his right hand to show Frank and Cummins why he’d rapped on the window for their attention.

In the man’s hand was a grenade.

The pin had been pulled, and only the pressure the man was applying to the lever was delaying the triggering of the hand grenade.

Both Frank and Cummins froze for a moment, not yet fully comprehending what was going on. During that moment they watched as the man in the ski mask jogged backward a couple of steps and brought his arm back and then forward, like a major-league pitcher, and the grenade was hurtling toward the window before either man had realized what was happening.

The aqua-blue window shattered, letting in the white light of the sun and the grenade, which bounced once on the booth’s table top and landed on the floor, where Frank and Cummins already had gone to escape the oncoming missile. The two men were on their knees and the grenade was on the floor between them. They looked at each other like two of the Three Stooges doing a take and then scrambled off in opposite directions.

“Jesus Christ, a grenade!” somebody hollered (not Frank, or Cummins, either, both men having their priorities in order, as usual, namely saving their own asses).

People got up from booths, stools, bumped into each other, doing the panic dance. Some of them, the ones close to the door, even managed to get out of the building.

Frank was praying when the grenade exploded; Cummins was crying. The explosion was loud enough to be terrifying, but only momentarily.

There was smoke, but not much, and when it cleared, the grenade was revealed as a lump of metal sitting on the floor of the coffee shop, looking like an oversize walnut with a cracked shell and just about as dangerous.

“A dud,” Cummins said, getting out a handkerchief and hastily drying his eyes. It wouldn’t do, after all, for the detective on the scene to be in tears.

“Not a dud,” Frank said. “Whoever packed it with powder packed it with just enough to make a big bang and scare shit out of everybody.”

The grenade’s shell casing was cracked, but the explosion hadn’t been enough to break it into the destructive splinters that do the damage.

“Like I said before,” Frank said, “somebody’s trying to scare us. Somebody’s playing goddamn games with us.”

“In Vietnam,” Cummins said, “they called it psychological warfare.”

Frank nodded.

Cummins turned to the confused, relieved, but badly shaken group of people, who were standing around the rectangular coffee shop like passengers in a surrealistic subway car, and began to speak in loud, reassuring, authoritarian tones. Pretty good for a guy who a few seconds ago was bawling, Frank thought.

Frank walked back over to the booth, where the broken window gaped; shards of glass filled the seats and littered the table. He went on to the adjacent booth—whoever’d been sitting there before was making no move to reclaim it—and sat down.

On the table was a playing card.

10

FRANCINE DIPRETA
was sitting on her bed, which was shaped like a valentine and soft as custard. The spread was fluffy, ruffly pink. The room around the bed was pink, also: pink wallpaper, pink colonial-style dresser with mirror; even a pink stuffed animal—a poodle—peeked out behind pink pillows resting against the bed’s pink headboard. When Frank, Rosie, and little Francine had moved into the house some ten years before, the little girl had loved the pink room. But Francine was a big girl now and kept in check her intense dislike for the room in all its nauseating pinkness only because it held for her father too many memories of Francine’s childhood and those happy years when Mother was alive. Besides, next year, the year after maybe, she’d be moving out. She was, after all, nineteen years old and a college freshman. Living in this child’s room was a beautiful young woman, with platinum blonde hair and China blue eyes and a trim, shapely figure. As she looked around, she shook her head and thought of the line from that Carly Simon song—”Daddy, I’m no virgin”—but knew that particular sentiment was one she’d never find nerve to express to her own Daddy.