Butcher's Moon

Twenty-five

Buenadella was on the phone with George Farrell, who had just called him, taking him away from lunch with his family. Buenadella was saying, “What the fuck did you give him my name for?”

“I didn’t know what else to do. He was— He was making it very tough for me. He really wanted to know, do you follow me?”

The phone was a tough way to communicate. They had to tell each other things that they weren’t telling the inevitable eavesdroppers. Farrell had begun the conversation by saying, “Do you know who this is?” and Buenadella had said, “Yes, you dipshit, and so does anybody else who’s listened to all those fucking radio commercials you did.” He’d talked that way because he’d been shocked into rage by the stupidity of Farrell making direct contact with him, two days before the election. They had managed to keep Farrell’s skirts clean all the way through up till now, and he just couldn’t believe the guy was stupid enough to blow it all at this late date, for any reason.

But since then the conversation had gone on, roundabout and vague but gradually getting the point across, and now Buenadella was shocked in a different way. Because that son of a bitch Parker had gone right through Farrell’s security, separated him from his people like a sheepdog cutting out one lamb from the flock, scared the shit out of him somehow, and had gotten from him Buenadella’s name as the guy behind the takeover. And that shouldn’t have happened. Just as Farrell had kept himself clean and above suspicion on the mayoral side, Buenadella had held himself absolutely out of it when it came to unhorsing Al Lozini. And now this bastard from out of town, this Parker, had come in and opened everything up like an appendicitis case.

And Parker wasn’t even supposed to be alive any more. What the hell had happened to Abadandi? Surely he’d had a chance at Parker and the other one by now, so what was holding him back? Once he took Parker out, life would get a lot easier, but if Abadandi waited much longer, Parker would already have opened too many doors, spoiled too many setups, and it wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of difference any more if he was alive or dead.

It crossed Buenadella’s mind that Abadandi might have made his play and lost; but he didn’t believe it. Abadandi was too good, too secure. The answer had to be that Parker and the other one were covering themselves too well and Abadandi hadn’t had a good shot yet to take them out.

Well, it better happen soon. And in the meantime, there was this sudden mess to take care of. Buenadella said, “How long ago did you have your conversation?”

Farrell bumbled around, still too shook up to be brisk. “Uh—twenty-five—almost half an hour.”

“Half an hour! What the fuck a you been doing?”

“Dutch, I had to, I had to calm everybody here. We had policemen being held at gunpoint here, Dutch, it wasn’t something I could just brush off without an explanation. I said they represented some Middle Eastern sect, it was some sort of international political thing, and that I talked them out of holding me.”

“You got people to buy that?”

“Reporters, policemen, everybody.” A bit of pride touched Farrell’s voice, and with it he grew calmer and more confident. “I am good at my profession, Dutch,” he said. “I can talk to people.”

Which was true. When Buenadella stopped to think about it, the fact that Farrell had made the people around him buy any kind of phony story at all was pretty damn good, and that he’d managed to get away to a telephone by himself within half an hour was even better. Grudgingly he said, “All right. You did what you could.”

“Thanks, Dutch. And I wanted you to know as soon as possible.”

“Too bad you couldn’t have pulled your bullshit number on our friend instead.”

“Dutch, you weren’t there. Believe me, I didn’t have—”

Any choice, he was going to say. Buenadella cut him off, saying, “All right, it’s done. And he’s got half-an-hour lead to get to me, so get off the phone and let me set things up.”

“Right, Dutch. And I’m sorry, I just—”

Couldn’t do anything else, he would have said that time. “I know,” Buenadella said. “I know. Hang up.” And he broke the connection.

Standing there holding the receiver in his left hand and depressing the cradle with his right, counting slowly to five to give the phone company a chance to break the connection so he could make another call, Buenadella frowned thoughtfully at the paintings on the opposite wall of his den. They were French, pastels, crooked streets in Montmartre, in Paris. Not prints, regular originals, he’d bought them in Paris seven years ago when he and Teresa had swung through there on their way back from the trip to Italy. It was funny how everybody in Italy had thought he was German and everybody in France had thought he was Italian, and here he was an American all the time.

Louis Buenadella was fifty-seven years old, a big-boned man who did a lot of eating and who spread two hundred seventy pounds over his six-foot-four-inch frame. His stomach and behind and thighs were pretty thickly padded out with fat, but the rest of him was big and hard, all muscle and sinew. He had fair skin and nearly blond light brown hair, the heritage of a Piedmontese grandmother on his father’s side. His hair seemed even paler in the close-cropped crew cut he’d favored for the last thirty years, ever since his Army days in the Second World War, and was mainly responsible for his nickname.

Buenadella was born and raised in Baltimore, and after the Army he went back there for a few years, soldiering in a different way, working for the people who ran the local rackets. He had some lucky breaks, was made a part of the action a few times, and saved his money. He knew he’d never be anything but a dependable minor hood in Baltimore, so in 1953 he’d moved to Tyler, armed with an introduction to Adolf Lozini and helped by the money he’d been saving up. Television had been hurting the movie business badly at that time, so he’d been able to buy up three local theaters on the cheap. He’d brought in sexploitation movies, was the first exhibitor in the Tyler area to switch over to that kind of film, and his three theaters had gone immediately and permanently into the black. He ingratiated himself with Lozini and the other local people who could be important to him, he became a part of their action, and when in 1960 it was decided to get into the paperback sex-novel boom Buenadella was the natural choice to organize the operation; first as a wholesaler, AM Distributors, Inc., distributing books from publishers in New York and Los Angeles, and later as a publisher, Good Knight Books, buying manuscripts for five hundred dollars, doing a print order of twenty thousand, selling fifteen thousand per title in the Tyler area and the rest in towns in a four-hundred-mile radius. AM Distributors handled Good Knight Books, and Buenadella’s three sex-movie theaters sold paperbacks in the lobby.

Because Buenadella’s entire operation was legal, other money from less legal sections of Lozini’s overall structure could be siphoned through Buenadella and thus brought back into legitimate trade. Buenadella had an agreed right to a skim on that money, and all in all was doing very well. But he wanted more.

He thought of himself, in his more solemn moments, as representing the wave of the future. In the old days the rackets had been disorganized, competitive, bloodthirsty. Then, mostly because of the pressures of Prohibition, the boys began to get together, to organize themselves and become more efficient for more profit. After Prohibition, there was a gradual movement out of the traditional rackets and into more and more legitimate enterprises; first as a cover for the real operation, later as a way to explain income to Internal Revenue, and more recently as a simple, sensible business way to deal with the profits through reinvestment.

And the next move, it seemed to Buenadella, was to make the legitimate parts of the operation dominant, with the rackets simply in support, to provide capital when needed and strong-arm when needed and political clout when needed, but not ever to be the main concern. And if the legitimate operations were to take over as the primary function, then the best leader at any level was a man whose own piece of the pie was completely legit. A man like himself.

Al Lozini was on the way out, he was going anyway, getting old, overstaying his welcome. Buenadella was interested in hurrying him a little, but that was all, and the only reason to do that was to be sure nobody else got the idea to take Lozini’s place for himself. Somebody like Ernie Dulare, for instance, or, maybe later on, Ted Shevelly.

And being the new breed, the businessman rather than the racketeer, he had chosen a good traditional business method for replacing the man ahead of him: co-opt his assistants, drain his economic strength, make private arrangements with his associates. He had spent nearly three years on the operation, moving very slowly, like a fox testing the ice across a frozen river; never pushing, never forcing the issue, never succumbing to impatience and old-line strongarm tactics. The final stage was to be the replacement on Tuesday of Lozini’s mayor by Buenadella’s mayor, to be followed by a meeting with Lozini in which he would be shown that the war was already over, that there was nothing for him to do but retire. Away from Tyler, far away. Florida, maybe. Or maybe he’d like to see Europe; Buenadella could recommend a trip like that. Cultural, healthful, a first-rate investment all the way around.

How smooth it had been, and how simple. And how stupidly it had fallen apart, with one little push from an unexpected quarter.

That goddam money from the amusement park. Seventy-three thousand, and less than half of it had wound up in the Farrell campaign. The rest had greased the ways here and there, minor payoffs, a nice piece to Harold Calesian, smaller pieces to a couple of other cops, a little hush-money piece to a Lozini soldier named Tony Chaka, a handling portion for Buenadella himself. And the fact is, it hadn’t even been needed. The goddam money was just a happy surprise, it hadn’t been anticipated, they could have gotten along just as well without it. A happy surprise. With another surprise in its wake, in the two guys named Parker and Green.

Now, all of a sudden, everything was up in the air. That asshole Calesian was out shooting cops, Lozini was getting nervous and suspicious, Farrell was risking his Mr. Clean image, and it had become necessary for Buenadella himself to give up business methods and go back to the blunter systems of simpler days, to put out a hit order.

He still wouldn’t do it on local people, on Lozini or Frank Faran or Ernie Dulare. But these strangers, a couple of shirttail heist artists without connections, they were dangerous alive and nobody would miss them if they were dead. But when the hell would Abadandi get around to finishing them off?

Maybe not until after they’d come here, to this actual house, sent by that yellow bastard Farrell. So Buenadella had some phone calls to make, a reception to organize.

He was still holding the receiver in his left hand. He counted to five after finishing the conversation with Farrell, then lifted his right hand from the cradle and poised his finger at the dial, waiting for the hum.

It didn’t happen. Silence on the line. Buenadella frowned, clicked the receiver twice, and had a sudden flashing image of Parker and Green cutting the phone line, isolating him in here.

Then a voice said, “Hello?”

“What?” Buenadella felt himself getting red in the face; this last annoyance was the one too many, the straw that broke the camel’s back. “What the fuck is going on?” he yelled.

The voice said, “Dutch? Is that you?”

“Who is this? Farrell?” Though it didn’t sound like him.

“No. You know who this is.”

Then he did finally recognize the voice: Calesian. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Now what?”

“Get to a clean phone,” Calesian said. “I have to talk to you.”

“There are no clean phones,” Buenadella said angrily, “and I don’t have time. I got problems of my own.”

“I’ll have to come over. This is important.”

“You do that. Now hang up, I’ve got calls to make.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

”Hang up!”

Calesian hung up, and Buenadella depressed the cradle again, once more breaking the connection. As he did so, a voice from the French doors behind him said, “Now you hang up.”

“Cocksucker,” Buenadella said, and threw the phone at the nearest painting of Montmartre.