April Evil (8 page)

“A room at the Palm Lodge. It’s a little crummy, but it’s near the center of town.”

“Dang it, I hoped maybe you lived in one of those nice private little cabanas at South Flamingo Beach.”

“I’ve been considering a change.”

They looked at each other. Mooney could feel the pulse in his throat. “I could move today,” he said.

“Get one with a phone, darling.”

He left by the back door and walked around the house. The motor scooter started on the third try. He drove back down the key, squinting against the warm wind. He thought of her, all wet and silky, and his loins felt an urgency that superseded the warm sense of depletion. He found that to be entirely at ease, he had to keep thinking of her. He did not like thinking of the other thing, the old man and his craziness. Nor did he want to think of the money. There were small shrill alarms in the back of his mind that could only be stilled by thinking intently of Lennie Parks.

During his life he had cut corners in many small safe ways.
But this was more than sharpshooting. Once, when he was twenty-five, he had been roughed up by a pair of cops. It had made him sick to his stomach. It was one of the memories he seldom took out and examined. This could be trouble before it was over. Maybe it would be best to forget it. He had finally had the woman. That should be enough. Pull stakes and roll. But it was much woman. Fire and ice. Too much to turn your back on, yet. Stay a while. Until it began to look too shaky, and then take off. The cabana rent would make a hole in the bankroll. With the season rolling to a stop, there wouldn’t be much coming in. But the woman was worth it. Thirty-four years or so of knowledge in a young girl body. It certainly wasn’t attraction or love on her part. She was trading. She was using what she had to make a deal with. It was his language, and he knew he had accepted it at its proper value. They weren’t kidding each other.

He left the agency a little earlier than usual. He took his own car to South Flamingo Beach. The rental agent was still there. Six of the cabanas were empty. He picked one on the end. Cars parked by it could not be seen from either the beach or the road. It was on pilings. Heavy draperies could be drawn across the front windows. He paid a one-month rental, and took possession. He moved his stuff out of the Lodge into the cabana. He laid in a small stock of liquor. He dusted the place, rearranged the few pieces of furniture, fluffed the pillows—and ceased only when he realized that he was acting like a nervous and elderly bride. He was sardonically amused at himself.

Before he went to bed he washed out an overdue stack of socks and underwear. In the night when the wind awoke him he thought of the old man and he was frightened. But it was her price, and he would pay it, and maybe there was no risk. Maybe there was no risk at all.

Ronnie arrived in Flamingo on Wednesday, the thirteenth day of April. He stepped down from the silver car of the Seaboard Airline Railroad onto the open platform. He tipped the porter, picked his pigskin bag out of the lineup and moved off to one side, smelling the warmth of the air, looking at the women in their thin bright clothing.

He spotted coin lockers in the waiting room. He put his bag in one, bundled his tweed topcoat in on top of it and, after a moment of hesitation, put his brown felt hat in also before slamming the door. He bounced the key on his palm, slipped it into his side pocket and turned, whistling thinly, back out into the sunlight.

He was in his late twenties. He was slim and erect and blond and his suit sat well on him, gray gabardine hanging properly from good shoulders. He walked in a springy way and his expression was that of a man just about to smile. He had the nordic look of a ski instructor, the pale blue eyes of snow-country distances. He looked alert, intelligent and friendly.

Ronnie was in the mood of a man on vacation. He walked slowly down Bay Avenue from the station, absorbing the mood and flavor of the town. He had seldom worked in a town this small. And though he was not here to perform his practiced,
specialized task, habit was strong. He mapped streets as he walked, studied traffic density, measured the timing of the traffic lights.

He had walked in just this way in many strange cities. He took infinite pains. Inattention to detail has ruined many small businesses. Ronnie was, in effect, a small business enterprise, solvent, successful. He had been on call for seven years, ever since he completed his first and only prison term at the age of twenty-one. When any syndicate underling became too greedy, or too ambitious or too unmanageable, or whenever a particularly vicious doublecross had been accomplished or was contemplated, there was a choice of specialists who could be contacted. Ronnie was one of them. The most successful one. During the seven years he had killed twelve men and two women.

There were several reasons for his continuing success. There was his capacity for planning carefully. There was his use of a variety of techniques so that no standard pattern could be ascribed to him. He did not look or act the part. On rare occasions when he had been picked up, he made no attempt to deny a criminal record. But in his quiet voice, using excellent diction and grammar, he would point out that he owned a small and profitable tire-recapping business in central Pennsylvania, and he was on a business trip. He had papers to prove it. And he did own the small business, and it was profitable.

It was in the tiny cluttered office of his small business concern that he would receive a phone call. It would come from a pay station in New York or Chicago or Kansas City or New Orleans. It would be a voice he didn’t recognize. Go to Las Vegas and call such and such a number. He would make the trip. The phone call would result in a contact in a dark car or a dimly lighted room.

The instructions were simple. “Frankie Delani in Reno.”

And some time during the next month one Frankie Delani would cease to live—by knife or bullet, by a wire around the throat, or a fall from a high place, or a heavy blow on the head. And Ronnie would return to Pennsylvania. Soon thereafter he
would receive payment. It would come in various ways. It was always in cash, in used bills. There was never any specific clue as to who had sent it. Sometimes he suspected. But he never knew. Sometimes when the amount seemed too small, he was annoyed. Other times it would be larger, more satisfying. But only Ronnie knew that he would have performed the assigned tasks with no pay at all. Once, between assignments, he had gone to a strange city. He had selected a name at random, taking it from a phone book. It had been very simple because, in this case, the man had had no presentiment of danger. But Ronnie had made the stalk as carefully as with the others.

But he resolved he would not do that again. It had been pleasurable, but it had meant a step across a thin line. He was aware that he was not as other men. He had read enough to know that other men, if they could see inside him, would call him psychopathic. So long as he kept his wish to kill within the channel of those cases assigned to him, he could pose as a man of business and the difference would not show on the outside. But he was superstitiously afraid that were he to continue to kill without cause, he would become marked, and other men would begin to read the difference when they looked at his face.

There were, in the country, perhaps twenty men who knew his function and his importance. Few of them knew him by sight. They did not want to know him better. Should he ever fail, they did not want any tie-in provable. Some of the men who knew of him were police officials. Those men, wise and cynical in their trade, felt that he performed a reasonably valid function. Without Ronnie, and a very few other specialists, open warfare could result. A strong syndicate meant more crime—but more of a surface appearance of law and order. Weak links in the administrative chain had to be removed. It pleased Ronnie to think that two of the men who had known of him—had been high enough up in their territories to know of him—had been eliminated through his efforts.

The last time he had come to Florida, he had come on assignment. He had come to Tampa three years ago. The man was named Mendez. Mendez had been involved in a serious disagreement
over control of bolita. Serious for Mendez. It had taken three weeks of planning. Mendez had a bodyguard. But he had a bad habit of walking out of a place ahead of them. Ronnie had blown Mendez’ chest open with a twelve-gauge shotgun on a rainy night as the man left a bar.

This trip was different. This trip was a change in routine. A thick-set man with white hair and a thin high voice had given him the instructions in person. That, in itself, was a departure.

“You know Harry Mullin?”

“I know of him.”

“Know he crashed out?”

“I read about it.”

“He’s got good connections. He’s got something lined up. He wants a box man and a gun. He asked for the Ace for the box. You’re the gun.”

“It’s not my line.”

“It was your line once.”

“It didn’t work out.”

“You’re going into it again, one more time.”

“Okay. Why the pressure?”

“No pressure. What we know about what Mullin has lined up, it sounds sour. Anyway, the word is that it has to go sour, not for Mullin but for the Ace. The Ace got loose too easy. Nobody wondered too much about it. Now we know.”

“He made a little trade?”

“A couple of little trades. We just bought us a new assistant D.A. out there, and he had the word on it. It would be hard to pick off the Ace, as a straight deal. So it goes this way. You go in on it as the gun. Let the Ace do the box work before you take him. Don’t tip Mullin in advance because he’s nervous. You can tell him afterward, if you have to.”

“I’d like it better if it was both of them.”

“Nobody has anything against Mullin.”

“Has anybody got anything for him, particularly?”

“I see what you mean, kid. But don’t get ape sweat. Mullin is nervous, but they couldn’t jar anything out of him.”

“If I decide to make it both, would there be a big kickback?”

“Not too much. Riverio might yelp, but not loud. Riverio thought the gun ought to come out of another area, and that gives us the chance to use you.”

“Does Mullin know I’m in?”

“And the Ace does too.”

“No squawk?”

“Nothing I heard of. It’s a place called Flamingo, Florida. On the west coast. Get down there by April 12th or 13th. Check the book in the Chamber of Commerce. There’ll be a message there for you.”

“What’s their deal?”

“All I know is Riverio said it sounded sour to him. It could even be a bank. Mullin likes banks.”

“If it’s a bank, I’ll take both of them before it starts.”

“Use your judgment.”

“I don’t want any part of banks.”

“They’ll be strangers in town, and keeping their heads down, so it ought to be easy.”

“Don’t pay me like it was easy.”

“It will be fat pay.”

“Won’t the Ace be jumpy?”

“He’s been loose for two years. He’s stopped worrying by now. You better wait and see how they plan to score. It might be a good thing. You might make out.”

“No banks.”

“Then it would probably have to be both.”

“Mullin is pretty heavy right now.”

“There’s that, too. But he’s smart enough to stay off the streets.”

“I haven’t seen the Ace in five years. We didn’t get along.”

“Doesn’t that make it easier?”

“Maybe.”

Ronnie opened the car door and got out. The car drove away. Ronnie watched the tail-lights through light snow, until the car turned a corner. Then he turned his overcoat collar up and started walking the ten blocks to the Broad Street Station in Philadelphia.

Now he walked down Bay Avenue in Flamingo in holiday mood. This one pleased him. He was glad it had worked out this way. It would be a special treat to be with the Ace and Mullin, knowing he was going to take both of them. He’d known he was going to take the pair of them as soon as it had been explained to him. Maybe they knew it too, the ones who decided policy. Taking both would be the safe way in the long run. Safer than any chance of being seen with Mullin. It would be nice to sit and chat and eat together and drink together and smile and tell stories and know every minute that those were their last few hours on earth. They wouldn’t know it. They’d feel safe with him.

He remembered the first of the two women. It had been just like that. Some drinks together, and some laughs together, with him knowing all the time, every second of every minute. Watching her eyes and the way she moved her hands, and knowing all about it—knowing something she didn’t know. It gave him a funny excited feeling to watch her and touch her and know she was going to end—click—like you turn off a light. He remembered how when the time was right he had put on the yellow knit gloves and hit her sharply and suddenly, and used her boyfriend’s neckties to lash her wrists and ankles and then, changing the plan a little, had waited until she woke up before taking hold of her throat with his hands in the yellow gloves. It hadn’t lasted very long, but it lasted longer than a knife and much longer than a bullet. Then he had left the way he had come in. Out the window to the shed roof and off the roof to the side yard, and out through the back and down the alley to the next street and down the street to the lot where he had parked the car he had rented a hundred miles away.

He walked down Bay Avenue until finally he saw, coming toward him, a girl who was sufficiently pretty. He stopped her and smiled and said, “I beg your pardon. Could you tell me where the Chamber of Commerce is?”

“It’s right down at the foot of this street, just to the left when you get to the causeway.”

He looked into her eyes until she looked away nervously.
“Thank you very much.”

She tried to edge by him. “That’s all right,” she said.

“Can I buy you a drink for being polite to a stranger?”

“No. No thanks. Really. I’ve got to run.”

He let her go. He turned and watched her. She walked quickly and when she was forty feet away she looked back and saw him standing there, still smiling. She ducked her head and hurried along, clutching her parcels. Ronnie chuckled and turned and went on his way.