Death Wish (3 page)

The love-crazed banker had threatened Collucci with a foamy mouth and had to be put to sleep. The apricot beauty joined him six months later. She killed herself when Collucci's inferno yen consumed itself. He smiled. At least the coroner had recorded her death as a suicide.

He always got what he wanted, did whatever he wanted with any of them. Mayme was no different. Except that he was going to put her brother to sleep.

Now he gazed at Olivia's face, still holding so much of the soft beauty of her girlhood. He remembered that first time he saw her thirty-five years before on a star-infested summer night in the late nineteen-thirties. He had been twenty. She fifteen.

•  •  •

He was standing by the merry-go-round. The sight of her trembled his legs with desire and awe. She moved like a ballet prima
donna across the carnival sawdust and through the rubbernecking crowd. Her thighs were sculpted against the clingy organza gauze of her snowy dress. The lilting music of the merry-go-round synched with her sensual walk, shook him like a percussion of drums.

At a distance her face had a striking resemblance to Loretta Young's. But as he followed her, close up, he saw she was taller and prettier with long, shapely legs and her waist-length hair was a-shimmer beneath the lights.

She stopped and vainly pitched pennies at a saucer floating in a tub of water that reflected a rack of smirking Kewpie dolls. He was standing behind her and watched her shake her head in refusal of a Kewpie doll gift from the bowing and scraping concessionaire.

She turned abruptly, and he was stricken by the great blue eyes, electric in the fawn face. She said, “Why do you follow me and look at me so strangely?”

Her voice and presence blanked out the raucous carnival noises and moil of people. He was alone with her in the moon-tinted night. He tenderly imprisoned her white hands in the cups of his huge palms. He felt them flutter and twitch and cuddle like doves in love, in heat. They stood there speechless, swaying drunkenly for a long moment.

He whispered in dulcet Sicilian, “I follow you and look at you in this wild way because I fear to lose sight of you. I need you. I will not live without you. I have been alone searching for you, dreaming about you since my mother and sister went to heaven when I was six years old. I love you, angel . . . saint of my dreams. I want you to be my wife.”

She tore her eyes away to the sawdust and escaped her hands. The snake-pit world of people and reality crashed through the shattered spell.

Her bottom lip quivered uncontrollably as she laughed and said
flippantly, “Marry you? I don't even know your name.” She paused with her eyes dancing mischievously. “Is it Jack the Ripper?”

He frowned annoyance. “I'm Giacomo Collucci, but people call me Jimmy. You?”

She moved away a bit and glanced over her shoulder toward the street. “Olivia Tonelli, and it's been pleasant meeting you, Jimmy.”

Some familiar reference to her last name snagged on his memory. He moved close to her and saw the large vein at the pit of her white throat balloon.

“Beautiful, what I told you . . . I was serious as hell.”

She glanced over her shoulder again. “It's Olivia. Remember? Don't be serious, Jimmy.”

“Why?” he asked.

The tip of her valentine tongue stumbled nervously across her confection lips. “For several good reasons,” she said with an unconvincing quaver in her voice.

He lifted his eyes from a slow deliberate scanning of her upturned face. He looked past her and saw a heavyset guy step from a new black Lincoln sedan across the street. “Heavyset” lumbered up a cobblestone walkway to the front door of a brownstone house.

“Like for instance?” Collucci's strangely lupine eyes narrowed as he watched the heavyset guy cross the street and stride into the carnival lot.

She said, “Like for instance, I'm too young to be anybody's wife. Or should I say slave?”

He frowned and said in Sicilian, “Look at my jewelry, my clothes. Do I look like a penniless ‘mustache Pete' fresh off the boat? See! The corners of your mouth quiver at this moment for my kisses.”

She bit her bottom lip and shook her head. “You're crazy. You . . . It's impossible. I can't marry you.”

He made a sound deep in his throat and continued in caressful Sicilian. “So, you heavenly cock teaser, you will date me a coupla times. Then I guarantee the secret fire in your heart and between
your thighs will burn only for Jimmy Collucci. Test me. You'll marry me.”

She blushed and said with a little-girl whine of helpless confusion, “Please! Don't say things like that. Respect me . . . Let me . . .”

She glanced back at the heavyset guy coming through the crowd, aiming his seamed face at her.

Collucci said in English, “Your old man?”

She shook her head. “No, his chauffeur.” She touched her fingertips lightly against Collucci's hands and said softly, “My father thinks I'm . . . well, at least two years away from dates with boys. Besides, I won't be available. He's sending me to a fancy girls' school out East with a twenty-foot wall just to keep hot fast talkers like you out.”

She lowered her eyes and said, “I'm sorry, nice Jimmy Collucci.” She turned and walked quickly away.

He bellowed his despair and loss at her back, “Olivia! I'm here with the carnival for a week. Come back soon, Angel Doll. I gotta see you again. Okay?”

She stopped for a pounding instant and smiled over her shoulder. Her blue eyes gazed at him dreamily as her lips mutely said, “Maybe.”

He didn't take his eyes off her until the heavyset guy disappeared her away in the Lincoln. And for the next three nights he haunted the carnival where he had never worked, hoping she'd come. Then hollow-eyed, he dragged to bed, tossing sleeplessly until daybreak, raging and cursing her for letting him know she existed.

On the fourth evening, the Lincoln came. She got out and went into the brownstone house where, as it turned out, lived a sick relative that she visited. To Collucci it seemed like forever. But within ten minutes she came across the carnival lot to him with her hair like a golden banner flying joy, flying love!

They concealed their affair from Joe Tonelli. And Collucci concealed from Olivia the strong street rumor that her father was underboss to the top boss Louis Bellini. And of course he concealed
from Olivia the grisly proof he witnessed with his own eyes that Joe Tonelli was one of the Mafioso.

Collucci got his confirmation the first night he set foot on the grounds of the Tonelli estate in suburban Oak Park and Olivia Tonelli gifted him with her precious maidenhead.

Since their first meeting two months before in June they had spent countless hours cooing love and banter on the telephone. Many times during this period, Olivia, dropped off by the chauffeur, would meet Collucci in the cool balconies of movie theaters to enjoy deep tongue kissing and to fondle themselves into a state of near nervous collapse.

Finally Olivia would look at the radium dial of her wristwatch and flee to the black Lincoln gleaming outside the theater. Collucci would follow and watch the chauffeur take Olivia away again.

Collucci would reluctantly take his iron hard-on and blow the achey pressure in his balls into one of a dozen young girls waiting eagerly to receive it.

One night, Olivia and Collucci found themselves together in the guest bungalow behind Joe Tonelli's mansion on a night when he was out of town.

The servants were off, and the estate apparently had only the usual two resident guards in the mansion, plus three killer Dobermans guarding the rear of the estate, that Olivia had locked in the basement.

Collucci had slipped through a ten-foot-high steel gate, unlocked by Olivia, to the bungalow. Soon they lay nude, face to face, kissing and fondling. For the first time he put his shaft between her thighs. She squeezed herself around it and rubbed its heady gristle against her stiffening little dingus.

In the midst of their ferocious tonguing and wild bumping and grinding in the slippery creaming frenzy, she groaned, “Jimmy, I lied on the phone, and I feel so whorish and ashamed. I wanted . . . to give you my . . . cherry. Don't hurt me. Don't be rough. But please,
sweet Jimmy Collucci, take it now; it's yours. I might die before I reach eighteen.”

He started to protest, and she muzzled his mouth with her palm.

“Don't speak. Take it!”

He obeyed her wish with exquisite tenderness.

When he left the bungalow hours later, he saw a sliver of light flash from a root cellar door in a far corner of the deserted grounds. Curiosity pressed his eyes against the rotted-out crack in the door. At first he thought the two young guys laughing and joking around in Sicilian were undressing a realistic clothing store mannequin. But it had a weirdly familiar face that seemed splashed or daubed with red paint. It lay hideously realistic on a table covered with sheets of tar paper dripping scarlet.

He almost cried out in shock and betrayed his presence. He realized the thing on the table had been likeable Tarantino, a wholesale grocer!

Then he saw one of them sawing off sections of arms and legs while the other guy rolled the sawed-off parts into neat tar paper packages.

Collucci ear trapped enough of the rapid Sicilian chitchat to learn the guys planned to mail the packages to friends and relatives of their butchered enemy as a grim warning from Tonelli. He puked all the way to his car until his guts dry locked.

Collucci led Olivia to believe he was on the legit as part owner of the carnival where they first met. He concealed from Olivia the fact that he was leader of a hot car ring.

Mafioso Frank Cocio, behind the scenes, controlled Collucci, a nonmember, in the operation of the stolen car ring. And Collucci concealed his affair with Olivia Tonelli from Cocio, who adored even the ground that Olivia walked on.

Olivia told Collucci that she was frightened by the naked lust and desire in Cocio's eyes for her.

*  *  *

The grotto-garden lights that reflected on the frosted windows in the Collucci bedroom suddenly snuffed out and moved Jimmy Collucci from his reverie of Olivia.

He wasn't alarmed as he saw it was five
A.M
. The spotlights came on at that same instant, and he told himself that it was Henrietta, the live-in maid and cook. She lived in quarters above the five-car row of garages on the other side of the garden. She often accidentally pulled the wrong switch on the service porch off the kitchen, downstairs.

Now he faintly heard her clattering pans and her resonant humming of a Christmas carol as she started breakfast for the Colluccis.

Collucci glanced at Olivia's sleeping form and sprang out of bed. He went to the windows overlooking the garden and noticed that the white stone duplex at the edge of the garden, shared by bachelor Lollo Stilotti and married Angelo Serelli, was completely darkened. He wondered if they would have Bone ready for trial before he went to early Christmas Mass with Olivia and their ten-year-old son Petey.

Collucci and Olivia had not missed this Mass together in thirty years. Olivia and Petey always in devout sincerity, Collucci always as ritual camouflage for his secret atheism, and in that fiercely respectable “role play” of Mafiosi with families.

Naked Collucci jogged his steel spring shadow on the frosted bedroom windows for fifteen minutes. Then he stretched out on the carpet and did fifty pushups. His wide chest was dewy with sweat but heaving smoothly when he finished his daily morning exercise.

He took his pajamas to the hamper in the mirrored bathroom off the bedroom, then he sat on the stool smoking and reading intently a long article in the
Tribune.

The article posed the question: “Are the Mafia Families in large cities across America attempting now in the seventies to eliminate Black, Cuban, and Puerto Rican competition and regain a total narcotics monopoly?”

Collucci smiled grimly as he read on about narcotics history that
he had experienced. And he was determined to make history himself despite Tonelli and Cocio.

He rose and flushed the commode. He stood and watched serpents of blood wiggle down the hole with his stool.
Pressure!
he thought,
I got Taylor and his fucking mob of Warriors stacked on top of the Cocio and Tonelli grief. I've gotta put the cocksuckers to sleep soon.

He showered and stood terry-clothed before a mirror where he razored away a graying cave of blue-black stubble inside the deep cleft in his strong chin.
That cleft,
he mused,
is my Kirk Douglas cunt catcher.

He thought about his upcoming urgent meeting the next day with Tonelli and underboss Cocio at the fifty-story Tonelli penthouse fortress. He was almost certain he was being summoned to be told that the bosses had made a decision to end the Family's involvement in the narcotics business.

A smug little smile flickered across his mouth at the thought that he had anticipated the Family's narcotics pullout a year before.

Fuck the bosses,
he thought. He, with the help of other relatively young Family turks, would bury the bosses and the niggers and build a billion-dollar drug business.

How? Simple, he thought, with carefully established networks of “mules” to bring it into the States. And his “Italian Connection” would refine his bountiful supply of raw opium from his “Iranian Connection.” The refinery would be a licensed pharmaceutical house which he would secretly control in the near future. It would be protected by high government officials who would share in the profits.

He slapped after-shave lotion on his lean jaw and mulled the state of affairs.

Olivia would be Tonelli's only heir to his material wealth. He would fall heir apparent to the Tonelli and Cocio mob power and prestige if he exterminated them in a manner that left him beyond the suspicions of the National Commission of ruling Mafiosi, of which Tonelli was a most respected member.