Butcher's Moon

Twenty-four

Harold Calesian stepped from the plane at Tyler National Airport just before one o’clock. The sun beat down from a cloudless sky, and not a breath of wind moved anywhere in the flat expanse of land all around the airport. Calesian walked through the heat to his dark green Buick Le Sabre, unlocked the door, and put his attache case on the back seat. The interior of the car was an oven, from sitting here in this shadeless spot since before eight o’clock this morning, but the air-conditioning cooled the air by the time the car reached the highway.

Calesian was separated but not divorced, his wife and three daughters remaining in the family home in the suburb of Northglen while Calesian had a four-and-a-half-room apartment in an urban renewal section near downtown. The whole downtown section was between the airport and his home, so it was faster to take the Belt Highway around and wind up coming to the apartment from the opposite direction.

The building had tenant parking in the basement. Calesian drove in, took the attache case from the back seat, locked up the car, and rode the elevator up to his top-floor apartment nine stories up. His terrace had a view toward downtown—dull by day, but interesting with neon by night. He unlocked his front door and entered an apartment that was a lot warmer and stuffier than it should have been. Frowning, he closed the door behind himself, and still carrying the attache case, went from the foyer into the living room. Was something wrong with the air-conditioning?

No. The double doors to the terrace were standing open, letting in more heat than the air-conditioning could handle. Walking across the large room to close the doors again, he tried to remember the last time he’d gone out there. Not this morning, certainly; he’d left the apartment first thing this morning, in order to catch that eight a.m. plane. Hadn’t the doors been closed then? But maybe they hadn’t been latched properly, and a breeze had opened them.

What breeze?

Calesian paused midway across the room, and looked around. A professional decorator from Aldenberg’s Department Store had done the apartment for him, the living room in blues and grays with chrome accents, low but heavy pieces, modern yet masculine. Nothing looked different, nothing out of place. That feeling of tension in the air was surely no more than the unexpected heat from outside; he was used to this room maintaining a cool dry atmosphere.

There might have been a morning breeze that opened the doors. There was no reason for anything to be wrong, so it followed that there was nothing wrong. Nevertheless, Calesian gripped the attache case more firmly as he moved the rest of the way across the room and started to close one of the terrace doors.

Al Lozini was outside there, leaning on the rail facing the doorway, eyes squinting slightly in the sunlight. “Hello, Harold,” he said.

Startled, Calesian didn’t say or do anything for just a second. Lozini’s behavior was as strange as the fact of his presence here; he wasn’t being tough or hurried or showing any of his normal feistiness. Instead he was just sitting there, one leg swinging slightly while the other supported him on the wrought-iron railing. His manner was calm, emotionless. The harsh sunlight showed his age clearly in his face, but picked out no emotion there.

Lozini said, “Come on out in the sun. Good for you.”

Calesian stepped through the doorway, cautious and uncertain. He still held the attache case. He said, “You surprised me, Al.”

“I was a burglar when I was a boy,” Lozini said. “That lock of yours is butter. I could back up a truck and strip every television set out of this building in forty-five minutes.”

Calesian had a receding forehead, his black hair thinning badly on top, so that he felt the sun at once. He frowned as much because of that as because of the strangeness of Lozini. “I guess some things we never forget,” he said. “Like getting through locks.”

“Some things you do forget,” Lozini told him. “Like not trusting anybody.”

“I don’t follow,” Calesian said, while thinking. He’s on to us.

“Sit down, Harold,” Lozini said, and nodded at the chaise longue to Calesian’s left.

Calesian hesitated. It entered his mind that with one fast step forward, one shove with both hands, he could topple Lozini over the railing. Nine stories straight down to cement sidewalk.

But there’d be no way to answer the questions that would follow such a death, to protect himself against the investigation. And there would definitely be an investigation; not even Calesian swung enough weight in the Police Department to stifle an inquiry into a death like that. Particularly not with the body right in front of his own building.

And even while he was thinking those things, it seemed to him he saw the thoughts echoed in Lozini’s eyes; as though Lozini had known it would occur to him he might push, and had further known he would realize it was too dangerous to push.

“Go ahead, Harold. Sit down.”

Calesian sat sideways on the chaise longue, keeping both feet on the floor. He put the attache case on his lap, rested his forearms on the case. He tried to be as casual and unemotional as Lozini. “I guess you want to talk to me about something,” he said.

Lozini was silent. He considered Calesian as though trying to decide whether or not to buy him. Calesian waited, keeping a blanket over his tension, and finally Lozini nodded slowly and turned his head to look out toward downtown. “None of those buildings were there when I first moved here,” he said. “The tall ones.”

“There’ve been a lot of changes,” Calesian agreed.

Lozini nodded some more, still looking out away from the terrace. Then he turned his head to gaze at Calesian again. “This building right here wasn’t here,” he said.

“Three years old,” Calesian said. He knew because he was one of the original tenants.

“Sitting here,” Lozini said, “waiting for you, I spent a lot of time thinking about the past. The way things used to be. The way I used to be.”

“Well, everything changes, I guess.” Calesian was listening hard, trying to think ahead of the conversation, waiting for Lozini to touch ground, get to the point.

“I’m about finished,” Lozini said. “Hard to think about it that way, you know? I look in the mirror, I see an old man, I get surprised. Somebody tells me I forgot a thing I always knew, I can’t figure out how it happened. Be like forgetting to put your pants on.”

“You’re still all right, Al,” Calesian said. But he was thinking hard, trying to work it out, and he was wondering if Lozini was maybe saying that he was quitting. Was that it? He’d come here to turn in his resignation, to ask to be allowed to retire with no trouble. Believing that, beginning to feel less tense, Calesian said, “You’re still fine, Al, you’ve got years in you.”

“I’m past the bullshit, Harold,” Lozini said. “I’m almost ready to quit, walk away from it.” His lips curling, he added, “Go play shuffleboard.”

Calesian watched him, intent on every word. “Almost?” he said.

“That’s right, Harold.” Lozini reached inside his jacket so slowly, moving so unemotionally, that Calesian couldn’t believe he was actually reaching for a gun until the thing was out and aimed at Calesian’s eyes.

Calesian’s hands splayed out atop the attache case. He made no head or shoulder movements. He said, “Take it easy, Al.”

“I’ll go out,” Lozini said, still calm, still casual, “but I’ll go out my own way. I won’t get shoved. I won’t get conned and robbed like an old man.”

“Al, I don’t know what—”

“It’s either Ernie or Dutch,” Lozini said. “Can’t be anybody else.”

Calesian blinked, stunned at the names. But with the gun pointing at him, there was nothing to do but go on playing innocent. “Al, you’re miles ahead of me,” he said. “I just don’t—”

“That’s right, you son of a bitch,” Lozini said, with even the insult said in a calm and measured way, “I am miles ahead of you, though you don’t know it. And all I want from you is the name. It’s either Ernie Dulare or Dutch Buenadella, and you’re going to tell me which one it is.”

“Al, if I had the first idea what—”

“I’ll shoot your fucking kneecap off,” Lozini said, his voice finally beginning to harden, to match the words he was saying. “And you can gimp your way to the discotheque with your teenage twats from now on.”

“Al—”

“Don’t deny it again,” Lozini said. “You know me well enough, Harold. I can shoot pieces off you till sundown and you won’t even get to pass out. One more lie and I start chopping.”

Calesian’s mouth was dry. His scalp was burning in the sunlight, all of his muscles were tense and jumping, and he felt he needed time to go away and relax and work out what was best to do here. But there wasn’t any time, he had to do something now.

And he knew Lozini, he knew that cold look in the bastard’s eyes, he knew that Lozini actually would start shooting very soon now. Not to kill, just to hurt and maim. He’d seen the remnants two or three times over the years of men who’d been treated that way; the shot-off parts had come to the morgue in a separate plastic bag. There’d been jokes about it, the spare parts in the plastic bag, but Calesian couldn’t remember any of the jokes now. All he could remember was the plastic bag, with the bloody bites of flesh inside it.

“All right,” he said. He licked his lips, and put his left hand on top of his head to shield it from the sun. “I’ll level with you,” he said. Then, still thinking hard, he stopped and licked his lips again.

“Go ahead,” Lozini said. The gun was still pointing at him, not wavering; the bastard might be old, but he wasn’t used up, not yet.

”It’s, uh—” Calesian felt the hot breath of wrath on him, hotter than the midsummer heat. No matter what he said now, no matter what he did, wrath would come at him from some direction. “It’s Ernie,” he said. “Ernie Dulare.”

Lozini sagged a little. The gun barrel dipped, Lozini’s eyes seemed to lose the hard edge of their focus, the skin of his face got grayer, less healthy in the sunshine.

“It was bound to happen, Al,” Calesian said. “And I had to go along with it, you can see that.”

Lozini had nothing to say.

“In fact,” Calesian said, “you know where I just was, I took a plane trip, I went to see a guy from Chicago. Ernie’s clearing things with the big people ahead of time, letting them know there isn’t going to be any trouble, no bloodshed, a simple quiet changeover.”

Lozini, his voice and face duller than before, said, “What guy? What guy from Chicago?”

“Culligan.”

Lozini nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “And he’s got no objection?”

“Why should he?”

“Sure,” Lozini said. Then he frowned. “Prove it’s Ernie,” he said.

Calesian tensed again. “What?”

“Call him. Come on, we’ll go inside and you’ll call him and I’ll hear what he’s got to say.”

“Oh,” Calesian said. “Sure, why not? You think maybe it’s really Dutch, after all, and I’m covering, putting you off on Ernie? I’ll call, you’ll hear it for yourself.” He started to take the attache case off his lap, then stopped and said, “Wait a minute, I’ll do better than that. I’ve got a letter in here to Culligan from Ernie, you can read it yourself.” He put the attache case on his lap again, clicked open the snaps, lifted the lid.

Lozini was frowning at him. “A letter—” Then he straightened up suddenly from the railing, pushing the gun out ahead of himself toward Calesian. “Get your hand out of—”

There wasn’t any time to fit the silencer on, but up here that shouldn’t matter. Calesian fired through the lid of the attache case, then had to lunge forward and grab a handful of Lozini’s jacket to keep the old man from toppling over the railing after all. He lowered Lozini to the slate floor, plucked the gun from his dead fingers, tossed it over onto the chaise longue. His own gun and the attache case were on the floor where they’d fallen when he’d made his lunge forward, but for the moment he let them stay there.

He went into the apartment, hurrying through the living room and into the hall to the bedroom. The linen closet was next to the bathroom door, and inside it the plastic tablecloth for use on the terrace was right where it was supposed to be, on the top shelf. He carried it back to the terrace, spread it on the floor, rolled Lozini in it. The old man was shot in the chest, left side, heart—half good aiming and half good luck. There wasn’t much blood, because he was dead and the heart wasn’t pumping any out of the wound.

Calesian dragged the plastic-wrapped body into the living room, shut the terrace doors, and turned the thermostat down to fifty-five, the lowest possible setting. Then he went into the bathroom to rub some A&D ointment on his scalp to guard against sunburn, and while he was in there he got a sudden case of the shakes. He sat down on the toilet and gripped his knees and stared at the rose-colored wall, and trembled all over.

Lozini. Not some two-bit hood, not a dime-store cop, but Lozini himself. I was always afraid of that bastard, Calesian thought.

After a few minutes he calmed down and took two Alka-Seltzer and left the apartment to find a phone booth—because he couldn’t be sure if his own phone was tapped or not, by state or federal people—and call Dutch Buenadella. But the first three times he dialed, the line was busy.