The Million-Dollar Wound (30 page)

I saw my father. He was sitting at the kitchen table with my gun in his hand. He lifted it to his head and I said, “Stop!”

Then Barney’s hand was over my mouth; he was shaking, wildeyed. His .45 was in his other hand. We were still under the shelter half, in the shell hole. D’Angelo was awake, .45 in hand; the Army boys had .45s in hand too.

“You passed out,” Barney whispered. “Be quiet. Japs.”

Twigs snapping, brush rustling.

Barney took his hand off my mouth; I got the .45 off my hip.

And Monawk woke, in pain, and screamed.

And I shot him. I shot him!
Be quiet, you’re gonna get us killed,
but he didn’t die, he just looked down at the holes my .45 punched in his chest and his face contorted and he reached for the .45 on his hip and he started firing at me and I sat up in bed, in a cold sweat.

Not screaming, like Monawk. I’d done that a few times, sure. But usually it was like now: jerk awake, dripping with sweat.

I glanced at my watch. A few minutes after 2:00 A.M. I flipped the sheets and blankets off and, wooden floor cold on my feet, padded over to my desk. The nine millimeter in my shoulder holster lay on top of it. The rum bottle was still in the bottom drawer, but almost empty. I sat and, slowly, finished it off, drinking from the bottle, looking out the window at the El. Sitting in the orangeish glow of the neon. Quietly shaking.

Well, this was a new twist. I’d been back in the shell hole many, many times in my dreams. But this time it had been different.

Usually I was just generally back there, mortars landing, machine guns zinging, and the people, why the people weren’t necessarily D’Angelo and Monawk and Barney and the Army boys and Watkins and Whitey and me. No, it could be Eliot and Bill and Lou and Frankie and the guy behind the counter in the deli downstairs. Or anybody I knew, or ever knew.

This time, though, it had followed the script. This time it mirrored what had really happened, right up to the moment I fired the .45 at Monawk…

Had I done that? Had I really done that? Fired at Monawk, to shut him up? To stop the screaming that was telling the Japs right where to find us?

My dream seemed to be saying so, but awake, I couldn’t remember doing it. If the door to the answer had cracked open during my sleep, it had slammed shut again, upon waking.

I couldn’t allow that. I forced myself back there, back to the dream and the event it was trying to tell me about, and then I remembered: in the dream Monawk screamed and I fired at him. In life Barney had clasped his hand over Monawk’s mouth, but it had been too late, a machine gun opened up and D’Angelo dove for Monawk, as if to strangle him, only Barney stopped him.

“Bastard’s gonna get us killed,” D’Angelo had said.

Mortar shells, then, bullets zinging.

Beyond that point, I couldn’t seem to go.

But I knew one thing.

“I didn’t kill him,” I said aloud. I put the empty rum bottle in the wastebasket. I didn’t know why, exactly, but I’d come away from the dream with the very real feeling, even the certain knowledge, that I had not killed Monawk.

Maybe now I could sleep. I padded back over to the Murphy bed, crawled under the covers and was sliding into sleep when I heard the sound from next door.

Your classic bump in the night.

Funny. The El can go rumbling by and I don’t even notice it. The slightest other half-imagined sound and I think the Japs invaded. What the hell. I rolled over and forgot about it and then it bumped again.

I sat up in bed. No cold sweat, this time. Silently as I could, I eased out and went over to the desk and slipped my nine millimeter out of the holster. I listened at the wall, heard muffled sounds, no voices. I put my pants on, and went quietly out into the hall, barefoot, bare-chested, gun in hand.

A light was on in my office. Outer office. Gladys’s goose-neck desk lamp, from the look of it. It enabled me to see, through the pebbled glass, the shadow moving around in there.

Frankie Fortunato’s voice whispered in my ear:
it worked before,
and I slammed the side of the gun barrel against the pebbled glass and it shattered and I stuck my gun in hand through the opening and there was the beautiful Olivia Borgia, in slacks and sweater and a sporty little beret and a .38 in one hand, the outer office turned topsy-turvy, file drawers emptied, desk drawers stacked, and now cushions of the couch about to be explored. Her lip curled into a sneer and she took a shot at me; the sound of it cracked open the night and I felt it whiz past and shatter the abortionist’s glass and I squeezed the trigger and sent one back at her. It knocked her back, onto the couch, with a yelp; caught her in the shoulder.

“Get comfy right there,” I told her. I stayed out in the hall, pointing my gun at her through the gaping, spiky hole in the window.

She’d dropped the .38, on the impact of my round; the revolver was on the floor, just out of her reach. She sat clutching her shoulder, blood dripping through the cracks of her fingers.

When she spoke, it was almost a snarl.

“Where’s the diary?” she said.

“Why do you want it?”

Sneering smile. “Why should I tell you?”

“Because your gun is on the floor and mine is pointed at your sweet head.”

Arching eyebrow. “You want a piece, then?”

“Sure. I want a piece.”

Blood oozing. “She had a million dollars hidden away. More than a million.”

“And the diary has the answer to where she stowed it?”

Curt nod. “The diary has the answer, yes.”

“I read it, lady. I didn’t see any answer.”

Wide eyes. “It’s there! It’s in the diary.”

“I don’t think so.”

Narrowed eyes. “If not words, then a key, perhaps—taped inside.
Something!
”

“Why are you so sure?”

Flaring nostrils. “She told us it was.”

“When?”

Sneering smile. “Before she died.”

The El went clattering by. I had to shout to be heard over it; but I’d have shouted anyway: “You killed her! Goddamn. You little bitch. You and your husband killed her! Where
is
the bastard?”

Gunfire gave me my answer, four fast blasts that barely rose above the El’s rumble, flaming my way from the doorway of my inner office, and, still out in the hall, I hit the deck, glass raining over me.

I stood, meaning to fire again, but he’d ducked back in my office.

His wife hadn’t got that far, though. Bleeding shattered shoulder or not, she had gone for the .38 on the floor; her bloody hand was on the gun when I put a bullet in her brain.

Then I dove through the yawning glass-toothed hole where the window used to be, landed on the couch, some pieces of stray glass crunching beneath me, El in my ears, and he was in the doorway, big automatic in hand, .45 maybe, a big man in heavy sweater and trousers, and he did look like Sonny Goldstone, only it wasn’t Sonny, it was her husband, John Borgia, whose pockmarked fleshy face fell when he saw his pretty wife on the floor, her head cracked like a bloody egg.

“You killed her!” he said, outraged, white showing all the way round his eyes, and he turned to fire at me, but I was off the couch and doing the one thing he hadn’t counted on, moving right toward him, and I was on him before he could even react and my gun was shoved in his gut, firing, firing, and I said, “Who the fuck do you people think you’re dealing with,” and fired again, “who the fuck do you people think you’re dealing with,” and fired again.

He fell back, on the floor, landed hard, flopping, thudding, five scorched puckered holes in his gut and chest with five slow red leaks, eyes still open and looking up at nothing. The wastebasket, which he’d knocked over as he fell, spilled next to him, the wadded-up paper saying,
GUADNAL.

I stood over him and looked down and said, “Who the fuck did you people think you were dealing with?”

But he didn’t answer. Neither did she.

I walked out of there, stepping over what used to be Olivia Borgia, a greedy one-time 26 girl who was so much like Estelle Carey it killed them both, walking carefully around the glass shards, as I’d already cut my bare feet in several places, and went back in my office.

I felt strangely calm. The El was as silent as the Borgias, now. I sat there at my desk, soaking my bleeding feet with a cool damp cloth, sorting out my options, wondering if calling Drury was the thing to do. Two dead people in my office. Dead by me. Including a woman. I’d killed a woman. I didn’t care.

I just thought of Estelle’s burned, tortured body and didn’t fucking care.

Why hadn’t they found the diary themselves, that awful afternoon? They’d tossed the place, after all. But they’d missed the baseboard hideaway Donahoe had later found, he was a detective, our trusty basset-hound Donahoe, and, besides, Estelle hadn’t mentioned the book till
right before she died,
meaning after one of them had splashed whiskey over her and smashed the bottle on the floor nearby to frighten her and lit a match and held it over her to frighten her some more, and maybe then she said it, maybe then she said,
it’s in my diary—I’ll get it for you,
because Donahoe had after all found a gun in that baseboard hideaway as well, only somebody fumbled the match and the housecoat caught fire, and she was aflame, and she was screaming and there was no more talk of diaries as the fire spread from her to the whiskey to the walls, and the place was starting to burn, smoke was starting to fill the place, and they had no choice but to make a run for it, Borgia grabbing a couple of furs to make it look like a robbery.

That was then. What of now? Had anyone heard the shots over the El’s rumble? The building was empty, but for me and those I’d killed. It was the middle of the night. Ten minutes had passed, easily, and no one had come to see what was the matter. No one rushing in. No sirens cutting the night. No nothing.

I dialed a number.

After many rings, a gravelly male voice said, “Yeah?”

“This is Heller. Tell Campagna to call me, right away.”

Pause. Then: “It’s real late.”

“It’s later than you think. Tell him.”

“I’ll ask him.”

“Tell him.”

Three minutes later the phone rang.

“Heller?”

“Hiya, Louie.”

“Are you crazy, Heller?”

“Sure. If I wasn’t, I’d still be in the service, shooting people. But I’m finding it easy enough to keep in practice here at home.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about John and Olivia Borgia.”

Silence.

“They’re dead in my office, Louie. I killed ’em.”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“They were rifling the place, looking for Estelle Carey’s diary. They didn’t believe me when I said I burned it.”

“You what?”

“I burned it, Louie. Spread the word. The diary is ashes. To ashes. If the secret to her buried treasure was in those pages, it’s going to be a well-kept one. Should I call the cops on this? It’s not going to do much for business, my killing people in the office. You want a chance to clean up after yourself?”

Silence.

“Borgia was Outfit, Louie. You want to clean up after yourself?”

Silence.

“The Borgias killed Estelle Carey, Louie, but then you know that, right? It was an Outfit hit from word go, just like everybody’s been telling me. But I got some outdated notion that Nitti don’t work like that. Well, times change, and people change. Take for instance, this is the very first time I killed a woman in my office.”

“I want you to go someplace.”

“Where, Louie?”

“What’s the closest hotel?”

“Morrison, I guess. They don’t have any rooms.”

“They’ll have one for you by the time you walk over there. Don’t come back to your office before seven.”

The phone clicked in my ear; Louie didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

When I got to the office at nine, a fiftyish guy in coveralls was measuring to put in new glass. All the broken glass had been swept up and removed. Bullets had been dug out of woodwork and puttied and touched up with paint.

“I didn’t send for you,” I said to the guy in coveralls.

“It’s all taken care of,” he said. He pointed with a thumb over to the doctor’s office across the way, where the waiting room and receptionist could be viewed through where opaque glass used to be. “That’s being taken care of, too.”

The office had been tidied up. File cabinets in order; drawers in desks. No dead bodies on the floor. No bloodstains. Lou Sapperstein was standing in the inner office, looking around, puzzled.

“What happened here, last night?” he said. “The glass is broken, everything’s just a little out of place…and it smells like disinfectant, and something else…what? Paint? Did you have somebody in to clean the place up?”

“Elves,” I said. “Tiny Sicilian elves. Lou, I want you to get your things together at the end of the day. I’ll be moving back into my office. And I made arrangements over at the Morrison for a room there, till I can find an apartment. You can have the whole big office next door to yourself, till we find somebody to take Frankie’s place.”

Lou seemed confused, but he said, “Sure. You’re the boss.”

I went next door and sat at my desk. I’d slept pretty good at the Morrison. Restless, but no dreams about shell holes. Or office shoot-outs, either.

Midmorning, the phone rang.

“A-1 Detective Agency.”

“Heller?”

“Louie.”

“No problems, I trust?”

“No. Thanks for the new glass.”

“You’re welcome. Frank said to tell you he appreciated the opportunity to clean up that mess.”

“Well, it was Frank’s mess, after all.”

“No. It wasn’t. They were Outfit, but Frank didn’t send ’em to that apartment on Addison Street. And he didn’t send ’em to your place, neither.”

“Sure.”

“You don’t have to believe it.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Frank says he owes you one.”

“Frank owes me nothing!”

“He says he owes you one. And he’s going to pay it right now. Your boxer pal, Ross?”