Act of Fear

Chapter 19

In the taxi I opened the window to get the air on my face.

‘You sent Pete a note too, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘When I first showed at the motel you thought that Pete had told me you were in Spanish Beach.’

Jo-Jo nodded. ‘Yeh, I sent him a note. Him and Anna.’

‘But you didn’t mention cars or your job,’ I said, ‘and you probably didn’t mail it right in Spanish Beach.’

‘I just said the weather was fine. I figured he’d know I meant I was okay,’ Jo-Jo explained. ‘I guess I mailed it the night I went over to the bike races in Flamingo.’

‘That was lucky,’ I said.

‘Lucky?’ Jo-Jo said.

‘Someone told Roth you were in, or near, Spanish Beach,’ I said. ‘He looked in Flamingo first, and then he looked around the town for a while because he figured you’d never go near the speedway. He was too damned clever for his own good.’

Jo-Jo blinked at me. ‘But Pete hired you.’

‘Yeh,’ I said. ‘He hired me’

At the hospital they did not want to let us see Pete at first. I told them that it was police business and important. The police still had a man at the door of Pete’s room. The officer knew me and my connection to the case and let us go in.

Pete lay in bed. He was still weak, but the bandages were off his face. He struggled to sit up as we came in. I saw him bite his lip in pain. His face was scarred with raw wounds, and his arms were still splinted and bandaged; but he grinned to Jo-Jo.

‘Hello, buddy,’ Pete said. And said to me, ‘Thanks, Mr Fortune.’

‘I came to report to my client,’ I said.

‘So report,’ Pete said, and winked at Jo-Jo.

I told the story. Pete listened closely. The white room was bright with the morning sun. Jo-Jo stood away from the bed. When I told Pete about the final part with the two hoodlums and Jake Roth, Pete’s face seemed to darken under the scars and bruises.

‘I hope they burn!’ Pete said. ‘Roth got away though, huh?’

‘They’ll get him,’ I said. ‘But probably not alive.’

Pete agreed. ‘He won’t get took alive.’

‘I was lucky to get to Jo-Jo first,’ I said.

‘Lucky as hell for Jo-Jo,’ Pete said. ‘Right, buddy?’

Jo-Jo nodded from across the room. ‘Real lucky, Pete.’

‘Mr Fortune, he knows his job,’ Pete said. ‘I hired the right man, all right.’

There was a silence in the room. Pete grinned at both of us. Jo-Jo had picked up a metal water jug and was examining it. I had a good view out the window from where I stood at the bed. I could not look at the view forever.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about the note Jo-Jo wrote to you, Pete?’ I said. ‘I guess the nurse read it to you, right?’

Pete nodded. ‘Yeh, I remembered soon as you left, you know? Stupid. It was when you told me about old Schmidt and talked about movin’ that car. I just forgot the note, damn.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you didn’t forget.’

Pete’s eyes were like two shallow puddles with a dark film of ice on them. The bruises and scars on his face seemed to stand out. The muscles of his jaw twitched.

‘Roth knew that Jo-Jo was around Spanish Beach, Pete,’ I said. ‘He knew before I did. Wild horses wouldn’t have dragged it out of Anna, and if she had told Roth, she wouldn’t then have told me.’

Pete said nothing. He looked at Jo-Jo.

‘There’s only one way Roth could have known about Spanish Beach, Pete,’ I said.

Pete nodded. His dark eyes flickered away from Jo-Jo and from me. He looked at the wall. Then he looked back at Jo-Jo. He looked straight at Jo-Jo as if he had gathered courage.

‘He came here, Roth did,’ Pete said. ‘He was gonna beat me again. I couldn’t take any more. I’m sorry, buddy.’

‘No,’ I said.

Now Pete looked at me. For the first time I saw something move under the flat surface of his eyes.

‘What?’ Pete said. ‘What?’

‘He didn’t beat it out of you, Pete. He didn’t even try to. How could he do that here? And how would he have known Jo-Jo had written to you? No, you called him, Petey. You told him on your own. Why?’

‘I don’t know how he found out about the note, but he did! Okay, maybe I got too scared too easy, but if you got beat as bad… hell, I hired you, Mr Fortune.’

‘Yeh,’ I said, ‘you hired me. But not to find Jo-Jo, Pete. Not to find him. It was a little strange all along. I mean, that you would come to me. You knew Jo-Jo was in trouble.’

Jo-Jo spoke. He still held the water jug. ‘I told you I had trouble.’

‘Sure,’ Pete said, ‘but you never said you was gonna run! You never said what trouble!’

‘You knew I had trouble,’ Jo-Jo said. ‘You knew I was on the run.’

I took it up. ‘By all the normal rules, Pete, you should have minded your own business, right? If Jo-Jo had trouble and you guessed it was connected to Stettin like you said, you should have been quiet as a tomb. That is, if you wanted to help Jo-Jo. But you came to me. I figure you’d even guessed about Tani Jones. I figure you even knew it was Roth after Jo-Jo all along. But you came to me even though you knew that when I started looking it would cause Jo-Jo more trouble.’

‘I wanted you to find him, help him! Is that so bad? How would I know it was gonna work out bad? Hell, you did save him, didn’t you? It worked out okay!’

‘Sure, it worked out fine, but not for you,’ I said. ‘You hired me to make trouble, Pete, not to stop it.’

Pete said nothing. The hospital room was very sunny now, and hot. Jo-Jo had put down the metal water jug and was watching Pete. Pete just sat there propped up. I suppose he was still weak. Or maybe just tired. I suppose he had been thinking about all of this ever since he had heard that Jo-Jo was safe and Roth was on the run instead.

‘Jo-Jo,’ I said, ‘where’s your miniature Ferrari good-luck piece?’

‘My Ferrari?’ Jo-Jo said. He took out his key ring. ‘Right here, why?’

I took the good-luck charm and held it up in front of Pete Vitanza. Petey just stared at it, those dark eyes as flat and opaque as mud. The charm, Jo-Jo’s good-luck piece, was dull and battered and scratched as it would have to have been if carried for long in his pocket with his keys. It was exactly like the charm Gazzo had found under Nancy Driscoll’s body.

‘Let’s see your charm again, Pete,’ I said.

Pete did not move.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I remember it. It was new and shiny, Pete, wasn’t it? The miniature you showed me was new. Jo-Jo, when did Petey buy his charm?’ ‘When I did,’ Jo-Jo said.

‘So I bought a new one,’ Petey said. ‘I lost mine, yeh.’ ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘You lost it all right.’

Pete stammered. ‘There’re hundreds of them! Thousands!’

‘Sure there are,’ I said. ‘I remember something that manager, Walsh, said. He talked about Jo-Jo and Nancy, how Nancy said that all they talked about was cars and motors. Plural, Pete, you understand? More than one person talked to Nancy about cars.’

Then Jo-Jo spoke up. He had guessed what I was saying at last. That’s how I had wanted it to happen.

‘We used to go up to her place together sometimes.’ Jo-Jo said. ‘Yeh, I remember. When she came around, he talked to her. Yeh, I remember how he looked at her.’

‘Damn it, everyone knows I knew her!’ Pete said, cried.

‘Sure, but not that way. You had a yen for her, didn’t you, Pete; a big yen,’ I said. ‘The miniature, the grease-stained handkerchief, anything else that fits Jo-Jo fits you, too. You acted like you barely knew her. But you implied all along that she could be involved in it all. You sent me to her, Pete.’

‘You knew I hadn’t even seen her for months,’ Jo-Jo said.

‘You knew she wouldn’t know anything about Jo-Jo,’ I said.

‘You knew I left town before she got killed,’ Jo-Jo said.

‘You knew no one would go to her to look for Jo-Jo,’ I said.

Our voices hammered at him, beat him, slashed him.

‘No! I didn’t know! Those two hoods beat her. Roth got to her! Sure, that was it, Roth got to her. Roth!’

He was like a trapped animal. A small animal caged in that bed and unable to move or run or hide. He thrashed like a fish in a net. I did not like what I was doing, but I had to push him. I had to push him right to the wall.

‘You brought her into it, Pete,’ I said. ‘You sent me to her. You wanted all of them connected to her, because you knew she was dead. You killed her, Pete, and then you remembered that Jo-Jo was on the run.’

‘No!’Pete shouted. ’No!’

‘She had a man with her late Saturday afternoon,’ I said. ‘A drunk kid. That was you. Jo-Jo was gone, you were lonely I guess; you had always wanted her. You went up there. I don’t know what happened. I don’t suppose you meant to kill her, you’re not Jake Roth. I figure you got crazy drunk. You hit her, Pete. You hit her and hit her and hit her and hit her!’

‘No,’ Pete said. ‘No… no…’ But he was backed to the wall, and there was no power left in his voice.

‘You were scared. I’d have been scared. You wiped her face. I guess you tried to revive her. You saw she was dead. That was when you ran. How far did you run, Pete? All the way back to Chelsea? Were you back here and feeling safer when you found that you had dropped that miniature Ferrari? When you saw you’d left the handkerchief, and the bottle? You were not one of her regular men, but you had left that Ferrari, and sooner or later the police would dig you out. You’ve seen them work. They don’t give up easy, no. There was that Ferrari, right? It was the Ferrari miniature that gave you the idea, sure. Jo-Jo had one just like it. Jo-Jo was a real boyfriend. Jo-Jo was on the run. Jo-Jo was already in trouble.’

I stopped. I waited. Pete had turned his face to the wall of that white room. ‘You decided to give Jo-Jo to the police. You’re a bright kid. You probably even figured that someone was after Jo-Jo, and maybe that someone would get blamed. Or maybe you’d be real lucky and Jo-Jo would never be found, not alive. A dead Jo-Jo would be a great suspect. Maybe you even knew it was Roth after him by then. Maybe, not. But you sure knew about Stettin and maybe even Tani Jones. You wanted someone blamed; you know the cops don’t stop looking unless they have someone to pin a killing on; it doesn’t look good. So you got the bright idea to give them Jo-Jo. You got the idea to stir it all up by hiring me to make waves. You knew I’d go to the police about Jo-Jo’s rabbit act. You knew the police, or maybe me, would connect Jo-Jo to Nancy Driscoll.’

I could not see those flat, dark eyes. His head was turned away. But I saw his shoulders shake. ‘I don’t suppose you wanted him dead, not at first. I don’t suppose you even thought about that. You just wanted a smokescreen. But then you got beaten up, and you knew there were some hard people after Jo-Jo. That was a break for you, that beating. It made you look good, and it gave you more possible killers of Nancy Driscoll. After all, she had been beaten, too. You got too smart, Pete. You sent me after Nancy, you pushed too hard. You got to thinking that it would be a lot better if the police never found Jo-Jo alive. With what they had on him, if they found him dead, they’d probably pin her killing on him and close the books. Or pin it on the same guys who killed him. It didn’t matter which. If they got him alive, it would not be so good. So you called Roth and told him where to find Jo-Jo. And that was your mistake. Because only you could have told Roth. You had the letter from Jo-Jo.’

He was still weak. Maybe he was tired. In that bed he could not run or fight. And he knew what he had done. There is an urge to confess. There is, ask any cop. I’ll leave the why of that to the psychiatrists, but I know it is true, I’ve seen it too often. I’ve seen a hundred men with no proof against them that will stand up in court, with just enough suspicion on them to be hauled in for questioning, and sooner or later they confess. No rubber hoses. Just weariness and perhaps guilt and that something else I can’t explain — that urge to finally tell. Maybe it is only that it becomes too hard to lie when you know the truth. I’m not talking about the professional criminal, the Jake Roth. I’m talking about the ordinary man who never wanted to kill. A man like Pete Vitanza. He had not meant to kill, I was sure of that, and he was filled by guilt, but he was also afraid, and he tried once more.

‘You got nothin’ll stand up,’ Pete said. His face towards the wall. ‘You got no proof.’

‘I’ve got enough to make Gazzo take you downtown, Pete,’ I said. ‘He’ll ask the questions, Pete. I’ve got enough for that. You know how Gazzo’ll ask. You know you’ll tell him.’

When he turned from that wall his battered face was almost calm. His dark eyes were no longer flat. The eyes had depth again; they had colour. He had been afraid, worried, for a long time now, and it was over. His face even seemed younger under the bruises. He looked at both of us from the bed. His arms stuck out like bandaged boards.

‘She turned me down.’ There was a tone of surprise in his voice as if he still could not believe that Nancy Driscoll had turned him down. ‘I was drunk. I mean, Jo-Jo was gone and I got drunk. So I went up to her place. I took a bottle and some beer. I was there a long time. She threw the tease at me. The bitch! I mean, she shook it all in my face. She gave me the full show. Then she said no. I mean, she said no! I hit her. She called me a pig. She called me a punk, a kid. A dirty pig she said. I hit her again. She was on the floor and I hit her some more. I hit her a lot more. I was crazy drunk. I hit her. Then she didn’t move. I remember something like screams, you know? I mean, I didn’t hear her scream, I just sort of remember. She stopped moving. She was on the floor. I wiped her face. She was dead.’

Pete stopped. His arms stuck straight out. His eyes saw the dead face of Nancy Driscoll. He closed his eyes.

‘So you wiped the beer cans and the bottle,’ I said. ‘You’ve seen the movies. They always wipe off the fingerprints. You took the address book. Maybe your name was in it. But you ran too soon. You left too much. Later you remembered what you had left, and you remembered that Jo-Jo was on the run. Everything you’d left fitted Jo-Jo, too. It looked like a good chance for you. Just frame Jo-Jo. With any luck Jo-Jo might not even be alive to deny it — only you had to be sure Jo-Jo was tied to the Driscoll girl. That was where I came in.’

‘I was scared,’ Pete said. His eyes were still closed. He shivered there in the bed. ‘I was so scared… so scared…’

I went to the telephone to call Gazzo.

Jo-Jo walked out of the hospital room without speaking again. Not to Pete, and not to me.