101 Mystery Stories

22 Top Man Jonathan Craig

I hadn’t believed it the first time I heard it, and I still didn’t believe it. But the boys kept saying it — that is, the boys up in the States kept saying it, and the boys down here in Rio kept repeating it — and I was beginning to wonder if there just might be something to it after all. A lot of wild things were happening in the States these days, and some of the old-timers were saying that it reminded them of the way it was back in Chicago when Big Al was going so good.

Capone was long before my time, of course; I’d come into the outfit after the machine-gun days and the one-way rides. In fact, I’d come in as a bookkeeper in a numbers shop. I’d had almost two years at Hanley Miller High School — which is why they call me the Scholar — and if I’d kept my nose a little cleaner I’d still be up there where the action is, instead of down here with the rest of the expatriates, as they say.

There are a lot of us here in Rio, you know, and very few of us by choice. Not that we don’t like Brazil; it’s just that of all the good things about it the best is that it’s a long way from the cops and the courts in the good old United States. A thing like that can be very important to certain people. You might even say it can make the difference between life and death.

But about this business I started to talk about, these rumors and hints we’d been getting from the States. It didn’t seem possible, but what the boys up there were saying was that Benny the Booze was now the Top Man.

And that didn’t make any sense at all, because Benny the Booze was too hard in the muscle and too soft in the head, and he didn’t have any more moxie and boss-man ability than a high-class ape. But still, that’s what they were saying, in the phone calls between here and there. And what’s more, they were saying it like Benny’s becoming Top Man was the funniest thing that had happened in the outfit since Arson Eddie burned himself up instead of the warehouse he was supposed to put the torch to for Fader Jake. That’s all we had to go on — the phone calls. Nobody in the outfit writes letters, of course, because the Feds have a way of reading them first.

So there were all those rumors and hints on the phone, with the boys in the States pretty much amused by it, but nobody down here knew any of the details and it was driving us all right out of our skulls. We all get together once a week you see, in a private dining room at this hotel on Copacabana Beach, which we’ve pretty much made into an exile’s club, as they say, and we maybe lift a few and cut up old times and try to keep up on what the boys in the States are doing these days.

But this thing about Benny the Booze now being Top Man of the outfit really had us going. The last any of us had heard, Tony Rock was Top Man, just like he’d been for the last dozen or so years. They didn’t come any tougher or smarter than Tony, and how a wet-brain like Benny the Booze could have taken over from Tony Rock was more than any of us could figure.

And then there were, like they say, the lieutenants, the guy next in line after Tony. Rough boys like Fat Felix and Angie Aces and Kay-Cee Matcher and Little Vincent. To be Top Man. Benny the Booze would have had to knock off not only Tony Rock but Fat Felix and the three others as well. But the boys in the States said it, and kept saying it: Benny the Booze was the Top Man.

So when we heard that Country Boy was going to be in Rio that Friday night, and that he was going to join us at our little weekly get-together at the hotel, we all made the scene, and we made it early. Country Boy was the first one to come in from the States since the rumors had started, and if anybody would know the real straight dope, he was the one. Like I say, we were all there: Johnny the Knock and Fig Lip and Millie from Milwaukee and Charley One and Charley Two and Preacher and Seldom Seen and the Indian and all the rest.

Country Boy was a little late getting there, and when he finally did show he looked like he might have stopped off at a few places along the way to see whether his elbow action was still in good working order. That meant he was taking a vacation, because when he’s working, Country Boy doesn’t drink at all. He’s a real pro, one of the best hit men in the business — some say the best. He’d been a top torpedo before I was born, and a legend in his time, as they say. He wasn’t really in the outfit, though; he was a free-lance, and always had been; but since he was such a good man, and a big favorite with Tony Rock, he worked mostly for the outfit.

He looked just like he had the first time I’d ever seen him, and I was pretty sure he was still wearing the same suit he’d been wearing then, and maybe even the same tie. He always wore old-fashioned double-breasted suits with wide stripes and wide lapels and flowery neckties about as wide as your hand with big splashy flowers on them. He had a long skinny face, and when he laughed he opened his mouth about as wide as it would go, without making a sound, so that every time he laughed half of his face disappeared.

He didn’t look like much, but he was the best. And he never carried a gun. He was an icepick man, and an artist in every sense of the word.

He would stand in a crowded elevator, put his icepick just beneath the base of a mark’s skull, and walk out at the next floor, with everybody thinking the guy had dropped dead of a heart attack. And he had a way of following marks into movie houses and taking the seat just behind them. When the action on the screen got interesting enough, he’d sort of lean forward a little, and even the people sitting on each side of the mark never suspected that he has suddenly lost all interest in the movie and everything else, permanently.

Like I say, Country Boy was a real artist, and it was no wonder he’d stood so high with Tony Rock, the Top Man — unless the rumors about Benny the Booze being the new Top Man were true after all.

Well, Country Boy must have been clued in by somebody that we were all pretty hot to know the score, but he just sat there at the guest of honor’s place at the table, squinching up his little eyes behind those gold-rimmed cheaters of his and telling us all how good we looked and how nice it was to see us again. He had a lot of news for us, all right, and he didn’t stop talking for a second. But not one word about Benny the Booze being the new Top Man.

He must have run on that way about half an hour, with everybody getting more irritated and frustrated every second, and some of the looks he was getting, especially from Millie from Milwaukee, would’ve knocked most guys right out of their chair.

Finally Millie from Milwaukee couldn’t stand it any longer. She sort of eased herself about halfway up out of her chair — which wasn’t easy for her, since she hits the Fairbanks at about 340 — and gave Country Boy a hard focus and said, “All right, Country. You’ve got your kicks by now, so give with the news on Benny the Booze. Is he, or isn’t he, the Top Man?”

Country Boy looked at her for a while, and then he took off his cheaters and wiped them on that big flowery tie of his, and put the specs back on and looked at her some more.

“It’s a fact,” he said, slow and solemn. “Benny the Booze is the Top Man.”

Everybody around the table made some kind of noise — grunts and gasps and so on — to show they could hardly believe it. Hell, who could believe it?

“What happened to Tony Rock?” Charley One asked. “How come he isn’t still the Top Man?”

“Good old Tony,” Country Boy said shaking his head sadly. “A wonderful guy. A sweet, wonderful guy. One of the grandest men I ever knew.”

“Yeah, but what about Benny the Booze?” Charley Two said. “Talk it up, Country. What do you want to keep us hung up like this for?”

“It’s a real sad story,” Country Boy said. “There was even some violence connected with it. Quite a bit, in fact.” He paused. “I guess you all know how much Benny the Booze wanted to be Top Man.”

Everybody around the table made sounds to show they knew.

“Well,” Country Boy said, “Benny figured there were five boys between him and the Top Man job — Kay-Cee Matcher. Little Vincent, Angie Aces, Fat Felix, and the Top Man himself, Tony Rock. So he looked around for somebody to help him eliminate them, so he could be Top Man himself.”

“All of them?” Fig Lip asked, amazed.

“Every one,” Country Boy said. “And he was lucky, because he was able to hire the best hit man in the business to help him out.” He smiled modestly. “When I say the best hit man, I know I don’t have to name any names for you to know who I mean. Right?”

We all made sounds to let him know we knew who the best hit man was.

“I understand the price for the entire contract was fifty G’s,” Country Boy said. “Cash in advance. People in a position to know tell me that’s a record. But there were a couple of riders. First, all those boys had to be hit the same night. Second. Benny the Booze had to see for sure they’d been hit: he had to inspect them, one by one, as they arrived.”

Country Boy paused, frowning. “And there was one more thing — something this hit man figured was beneath his dignity. And that thing was that Benny the Booze insisted the hit man dig a grave deep enough for all the boys, and dig it himself. You can imagine how the hit man felt about that.”

He looked around the table for the sympathy and understanding he knew was coming to him, and we all looked back at him the way we were supposed to. What a thing! Asking an artist like Country Boy to dig a hole in the ground!

“But as I was saying,” Country Boy went on, “the price was right — it was a record contract for one night’s work. And so this hit man did it. He dug a grave deep enough for all five of ’em. Oh, sure, he hated himself for it, but he did it. And then he made a few arrangements and supplied himself with a few choice icepicks from a collection of such items which he seems to keep, and got out his old battered last year’s Cadillac and went to work. He was a man of his word. He’d made a contract with Benny the Booze to help Benny be Top Man, and that was exactly what he was going to do.”

“All in one night?” the Indian asked, not doing too good a job of keeping the astonishment out of his voice. “All in one night, Country?”

Country Boy laughed that wide open-mouthed laugh that made half of his face disappear.

“Naturally,” he said. “This hit man wasn’t only the best, he was the fastest too. First he went calling on Kay-Cee Matcher. About an hour later there’s old Kay-Cee, with no more problems, face down in the bottom of that fine new grave.”

“And so where was Benny the Booze all this time?” Seldom Seen wanted to know.

“Parked behind some trees about fifty feet away,” Country Boy said. “After this hit man heaved Kay-Cee in the grave, here came Benny on the double and shined a flashlight down in the hole to see for sure it’s Kay-Cee, and then beat it back to his car again. Didn’t say a word.”

“All right for Kay-Cee,” Millie from Milwaukee said. “Who was next?”

“This hit man was sort of working his way up the chain of command,” Country Boy said. “He wasn’t only good and fast but...” He broke off and looked down the table at me and raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“Methodical,” I said.

“Right,” Country Boy said, smiling. “Methodical. Thank you, Scholar.”

I was pleased, of course. It was one of those little things that you can look back on in later life, after you’re past 40.

“The next man up,” Country Boy began, and then laughed. “Or maybe I’d better say the next man down, was Little Vincent. Right in the ground, no trouble at all. And Benny the Booze races back and forth with his flashlight, making sure this hit man isn’t throwing in any ringers on him.”

“And next?” Preacher asked.

“Angie Aces,” Country Boy said. “Angie gave this hit man a little trouble. He was kind of hard to find, and even harder to get into the car; but it all worked out fine, and pretty soon Angie was down in there with the rest of them. And of course Benny the Booze makes his two-way sprint with his flashlight, just to make sure it’s really Angie.”

“That’s three,” Millie from Milwaukee counted.

“Number four was Fat Felix,” Country Boy said. “And they never called that boy Fat Felix for nothing, believe me. Getting old Felix in that hole was more work than all the others put together.”

“And that left only the Top Man himself,” Johnny the Knock said, awed. “Tony Rock.”

Country Boy let out a long sigh. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Tony Rock. One of the sweetest guys that ever lived.”

There was a long silence all the way around the table. You know the kind of silence I mean; it’s the kind that’s loud enough to break your eardrums. I don’t know how the others felt; me, I felt like I’d been hit with a sledge hammer. Tony Rock! The toughest, brainiest boy that had ever taken over the outfit. It left me feeling numb all over.

Country Boy sighed again. “But a contract is a contract, and I’m a man of my word, as is well known. Am I right?”

Some of us nodded, but nobody said anything. He was right. A contract is a contract, and when you make one you keep it.

“Anyhow,” Country Boy said, “as soon as Fat Felix was in the hole, here comes Benny the Booze out of the trees again and shines his flashlight down on Felix’s face and grunts and says, ‘Four down and one to go, and then I’ll be Top Man,’ and then this hit man says, ‘Right,’ and puts his icepick into Benny where he figures it’ll do the most good.”

Nobody said anything; I don’t think anybody could have.

Country Boy looked around the table. “Like I told you,” he said, “this hit man had made a few arrangements before he started out — like calling Tony Rock for an okay on what he was going to do.” He paused, and I could see that crazy silent laugh of his beginning to build itself up again.

“And so that’s how Benny the Booze got to be Top Man,” he said. “The last boy to go in that hole, right on top of all the other boys stacked up in it was Benny. This hit man had told him he’d make him Top Man, and he had — Top Man in the grave.”