Sleep with the Fishes (5 page)

Endelpo Thuarte,
attorney-at-law, had just returned to New Jersey from a late-season ski trip to Vail. And no sooner had he loaded up his gear and strapped his skis on the ol’ BMW than he was tooling across the Pulaski Skyway toward his Hoboken brownstone, popping vitamins and hitting the speed-dial on his cellular to canvass for a late-night sup with a lady friend.

After leaving several messages, the phone rang back at him. But there was nobody on the other end. Endelpo thought nothing of it. He continued his search for a date.

Mr. Thuarte was a man who lived by a golden rule: work hard, play hard, keep your nose clean. Translated, this meant carry the heaviest caseload, get laid as often as possible, don’t double-cross anybody. His forte was defending small-time mobsters, and for all intents and purposes he was on the Camuchi syndicate’s payroll, the very same outfit that had cut Sid Bifulco the sweet deal. All in all Endelpo was a pretty dandy fellow, unless of course you happened to get pregnant. Even then he was quick to offer to pay for an abortion.

The tan BMW growled down the gaslit and sycamore-lined lane and turned into his driveway; he poked at the automatic garage door opener but nothing happened. Repeated jabs at the button yielded no better results. He unclipped the gizmo from the visor. His white Italian loafers took his ski-jacketed form right up to the garage door, where Endelpo fired the zapper point blank. The door capitulated. It began to rise.

But the light didn’t snap on.

“Jesus! It’s always somet’ing, this door.” Endelpo returned to his car.

The garage was empty except for an old Jacuzzi resting on its side. He pulled the car right up to the whirlpool and switched off the headlights and engine.

The garage door closed automatically, shutting out what little light the streetlamps had cast. By the glow of the BMW’s dome light, Endelpo made his way to the wall switch. He flipped it up. He flipped it down. He waggled it. Then he squinted in the direction of the bulb. It was broken, smashed.

Endelpo went rigid. The house key in his hand burned. Could he get it in the lock, quickly?

Turning toward the door, he saw a large human shape emerge from behind the Jacuzzi. Endelpo’s ears rang, his gut went soggy. The ominous shape moved toward him. The keys that had been in Endelpo’s fingers hit the garage floor. Large hands cut into the wedge of glow from the dome light. Endelpo couldn’t take his eyes off the hands, especially when the digits laced and the knuckles popped.

“Where’s Bifulco?” a chilly, empty voice asked.

Mr. Phillips was at home in his cozy New York brownstone on Grove Street, the kind embellished with an elaborate wrought-iron fence, rails, and window guards. Surrounded by his collection of historically significant shell casings neatly arrayed in lighted wall displays, he was considering a prized .30 caliber brass casing fired on a sunny November day in 1963. A former Texas politician had given it to Mr. Phillips for his services during a reelection campaign.

Those were the days. But now he was older, wiser, so he thought, and content to work small-time and relatively safe jobs for the Camuchi family. Officially, he was retired.

Omer Phillips was no hit man, and he certainly didn’t look like one. He was a slight, dark man with somewhat pointy ears and high cheekbones. A chess prodigy as a boy, young Omer’s aptitude was incongruous with his Turkish family’s Coney Island homestead. But when any of his eight older brothers got pinched by the cops, they came to their little brother Omer for a way out. And he usually found one, or got beat up. By his teens, Omer had dropped formal chess competitions for speed matches on the boardwalk and the quick buck. And when he sought a trade in the sideshows, he shunned his family’s sword stunts for an apprenticeship with Dr. Renaldo, the hypnotist and noted gangland spy. It was said Omer had once put the chief of police in a trance from an adjoining toilet stall.

Omer’s talents took him far from Coney Island’s sideshows. In his adult heyday, of course, Omer worked for politicians, anything from covering up a boozy nocturnal tryst-cum-car-crash to banishing the ex-girlfriends of presidential hopefuls. However, his tours de force were “arrangements” whereby a third party got trigger-happy and someone notable died. This had the benefit of adding to his immense collection of infamous shell casings. But the whole scene got too frantic after Watergate. He still got calls from the Washington crowd but did fewer and fewer well-paying “favors” like the one for Ollie. Bill’s mess was ample evidence of the void left by Omer. Omer was not an assassin. Obstructer of justice? Definitely. Tamperer of evidence? Most assuredly. Briber, extortionist, conspirator, and manipulator? All of the above.

Nowadays, Omer’s work was simple, just the way he liked it. Some Johnny Dangerous has a pissed-off girlfriend threatening to talk to Mrs. Dangerous, the press, the cops—anybody to get back at Johnny? Enter Mr. Phillips. Perhaps said girlfriend would have some kind of outstanding warrant for prostitution in Atlantic City. Or maybe delinquent tax returns. Even an old beau with a vicious bent. Possibly all three. All it usually took was a little fatherly advice and a dab of homespun extortion. Often a smattering of hypnotic suggestion was helpful.

When the call came in at ten p.m., Omer leisurely answered on the seventh ring.

“I’m very sorry, Monseigneur, I got thuh wrong numba.” The caller hung up.

Omer buttoned his plaid vest, straightened his bow tie in the mirror, plopped his gray woolen crusher atop his silver hair, and slipped an umbrella out of the stand on the way out the door.

Once in his blue Karmann Ghia and out of the garage, he motored down Broadway and stopped at a Worth Street pay phone. He dialed a number.

A murky, mortuary voice answered.

“O.K., Mr. Phillips, you got a job.”

“Always here to help. It must be serious, at this hour.” Omer twirled his umbrella.

“I’d say so, Mr. Phillips, I’d say so. Johnny Fest is escaped from thuh Newark overnight lockup infirmary for stomach pains. Was due in court. Killed a guard. Pushed his eyes into his brain. Stole some clothes from hospital staff, a candy-stripers’ shirt. On thuh loose. We want to make sure thuh cops find him. Quick, like before he whacks anybody, friends, lawyers…You know what I’m talkin’ about?”

“Yes, I’ve got you covered. I’ll let you know tomorrow. Good-bye.” Omer hung up and stared at the phone, rapidly tapping the steel tip of his umbrella on the sidewalk.

He popped a quarter, called information, and got the nice operator to give him Endelpo Thuarte’s address.

Endelpo still wore his ski jacket. He lay facedown but at the same time faceup on the kitchen floor. To be precise, Fest’s handiwork had left the victim’s chest flat on the floor, but the startled, sneering face staring at the ceiling. Endelpo’s head had been twisted completely backward. Both arms were clearly broken and folded at odd angles over his back. Johnny, it seemed, hadn’t gotten as far as breaking the legs before Endelpo had either talked or died or both.

Omer swung his umbrella, paced, and thought. Then he hooked his umbrella on one arm and snapped on surgeon’s gloves. He looked at the dates stamped on the lift tickets clipped to Endelpo’s jacket and pulled an American Airlines ticket folder from the inside pocket. Then he checked the garage—empty, but still fragrant with exhaust. Well, it was obvious that Mr. Thuarte had just returned from a trip and that his luggage as well as his skis and car were nowhere about. This meant Johnny Fest was on his way, soon to switch cars probably, but on his way.

Omer went to Endelpo’s study, which was littered with strewn files. Among shards of a broken lamp on the desk lay an address and appointment book, which was open to Sid Bifulco’s new address. Taking out a small pad of his own, Omer took a few notes.

The next step was to call the police, anonymously identifying the killer and mentioning that he was probably driving a BMW with skis on the roof. It was a long shot.

After that, Omer was bound for Hellbender Eddy.

Saturday morning
dawned over the Ballard Cabin porch, where Sid was splayed across a PVC chaise lounge like Robinson Crusoe tossed on the beach.

Soaked to the skin and damned near a broken man, he’d returned from his battle with the river and collapsed onto the plastic recliner. Sid’s mind dived headfirst into exhausted sleep. Somewhere around two a.m. and in a fit of shivers, he had drawn the dusty spiral-weave rug from the porch floor over his sorry carcass.

Sid wasn’t dreaming. He never had, not so he could remember. But as he stirred from soggy sleep in the predawn light, he felt positive the nuzzling in his ear was the tail end of some wicked slumber fantasy. There was a certain wuffling to the nuzzle, which he found disconcerting, and for some reason it made his nostril ache.

Rolling his head to the side, Sid found black squirrel pupils considering him with syncopated whisker spasms. Before the rodent could initiate a nasal probe, Sid slid his hand from beneath the rug and rotated it into a cup. The young squirrel found this of interest, climbed aboard Sid’s hand, and began systematically inspecting each finger.

Sid’s only warning was the flash of orange incisors.

Sharp pain and seconds later, Sid found himself sucking on a pinky, looking at a bunch of chattering leaves in the rafters. “Cute lil’ mother,” he mumbled around his pinky. “Painful, but cute.”

In a matter of hours, Sid was refortified with new weapons, revised battle plans, sandwiches, coffee, some nylon rope, auxiliary oars, a new anchor, and a life preserver. He launched his boat again and rowed toward the bay below the rapids. His target: walleye at the near bank, on the outside of the bend, just like in the
Rod & Creel
illustrations.

The previous day’s rain had brought the river up a few inches and left it cloudy. Starting from the tail of the rapids, Sid manned the anchor, drifting downriver and testing the depths. A knowing smile grew when the anchor suddenly found bottom much deeper. Just as he’d suspected—a nice drop-off where toothy walleye might prowl. The sun muscled by the loafing clouds and shone on the angler Bifulco. Anchor aweigh.

Walleye can be caught with jigs, doodads comprised of a hook with an oblong piece of painted lead at the head and a froufrou of feathers or hair at the tail. When bounced just off the bottom of a lake or river, the technique is aptly named jigging.

And so Angler Bifulco jigged. The current was constant, swirling but not fast, and he tossed his lures behind the boat and set the rods against the gunnels. The motion of the boat afforded a natural jigging action.

Puffs of cloud, like smoke from a cigar, filled the sky, and a breeze made the trees creak like the underside of a freight trestle. Before long, a brace of canoes drifted by, nice people waving and calling to him.

“Catch anything?” they all said.

“Sure,” Sid replied over a mouthful of salami and rye. His rods pumped mildly in the rolling current, jigs dancing deep below.

Russ stood with a bucket on the rocky shoal near his landing and watched the intrepid Bifulco with a pair of binoculars.

“Well, I’ll be damned. He’s sitting on my walleye hole,” Russ said aloud, lowering the binoculars. Too bad Sid hadn’t been there earlier, trolling with Rapalas, Russ mused. Or later in the season, maybe using some lampers. If so, Sid might actually have had a chance. Probably turn up a shad though. Russ tucked the binoculars away and glanced upriver. It was nigh on ten a.m., and the weekend flotilla was on schedule.

There were a dozen or more canoe and rafting outfitters on the Upper Delaware, all of which launched several hundred craft encumbered with recreational boaters each spring and summer day. Now for some, a paddle down the scenic beauty of the Delaware has the emotional impact of a Frederic Church landscape. But for others, a paddle down the scenic Delaware is a notch up from beer slides at a frat wingding.

Russ could hear the hooting echo of the recreational boaters already. In honor of their arrival, he began turning over rocks along the shore looking for hellgrammites, black bi-pincered Dobson fly larvae as big as an index finger and doubtless the model for numerous alien sci-fi monsters. Great bait, but their ferocious pincers still made Russ a tad squeamish. He found courage in the fact that they were worth a quarter apiece.

When a flotsam of caterwauling oafs began to swirl around him, Sid merely sneered, noting, “There oughta be, like, some kind of a law against this shit.”

But by eleven a.m., with the river a wall-to-wall yeasty commotion and discarded Bud Light cans, Sid was eager to commit an uncharacteristically messy homicide.

Canoes brimmed with sunburned, beefy Brooklynites. Inner tube swarms were plugged with guffawing jackanapes. Inflato-kayaks were draped with neon-bikinied jabbering flab. Floating coolers flocked about huge circular yellow rafts awash in bingeing servicemen on leave. Radios, boom boxes, banjos, and trumpets. Power squirters, Water Weenies, and Wonder Mud. Paddle splashing, capsizing, fisticuffs, and urinating.

After having his lines fouled, his bow slammed, and his neck popped by Water Weenie cross fire, Sid decided to weigh anchor and give it up. Just as he was leaning over the front of the boat, a buffoon suckling from a beer helmet zipped his runaway kayak down the fast current and fishtailed into the S.S.
Bifulco.

Man overboard. The gang thought it was a scream.

A half hour later at Ballard Cabin, old boots, musty tarp, and oily rope flew out of the cedar closet as Sid searched in vain for a rifle. He had almost reached the point of lashing butter knives to broom handles before he simmered down and realized he might just jeopardize his parole if he speared a few recreational boaters.