Butcher's Moon

Twenty-six

As he stepped through the open French doors behind Parker, Grofield thought, Good God, it’s a stage set. And not a very good one.

The room was a disaster, a combination of so many misunderstandings and misconceptions that it practically became a work of art all in itself, like the Watts Towers. It was a den, or studio, or office-away-from-office; called by the family “Daddy’s room,” no doubt.

The walnut-veneer paneling, very dark, made the already small square room even smaller and squarer, darkening it to the point where even a white ceiling and a white rug would have had a hard time getting some light into the room. Instead of which, the ceiling was crisscrossed with styrofoam artificial wooden beams, a la restaurants trying for an English-country-inn effect, and the two-foot-by-four-foot rectangles between the beams had been painted in a kind of peach or coral color; Consumptive’s Upchuck was the color description that came to Grofield’s mind. While the floor was covered with an oriental rug featuring dark red figures on a black background, with a dark red fringe buzzing away all the way around.

Would there be a kerosene lamp with green glass shade, converted to electricity? Yes, there would, on the mahogany table to the right, along with the clock built into the side of a wooden cannon; above these on the wall were the full-color photographs of The Guns That Won the West lying on beds of red or green velvet.

The man in the middle of the room, hurling his telephone at the opposite wall, went with the room so totally that Grofield was almost ready to believe he and Parker had come to the wrong house. This was a businessman, a Kiwanian, a blunt Tuscan pillar of the community, a property holder and a taxpayer, a man with proctological problems. If Grofield hadn’t heard Buenadella’s conversation on the phone, and if he wasn’t watching the man throw the telephone with such force that the wire ripped from the wall and the cradle smashed that sloppy watercolor of Avenue Junot, he’d think they must have made a mistake, this couldn’t be a hood named Buenadella, the one wresting control from Lozini.

But then Buenadella turned around to face them, and Grofield revised his opinion. There was a heaviness in the jaw, a coldness in the eyes, a hulking in the shoulders, none of them attributes a legitimate businessman would have permitted himself. This was a man who was used to getting his own way, not through argument or money, but through intimidation. He reminded Grofield of a mobster named Danamato he’d met once in Puerto Rico. There’d been trouble when Danamato had convinced himself that Grofield had killed Mrs. Danamato, and talking sense to him had been like explaining algebra to a brick.

Grofield wondered if Buenadella would be equally thick. He was starting off dumb enough; pointing a thick finger at them, he yelled, “All right, you bastards, you’ve fucked things up enough around here! You get out of town in the next forty-five minutes and you just may get to live a little longer.”

Neither Parker nor Grofield was showing any guns, but they both had them available if necessary. Once inside the room, Parker moved to the left while Grofield pulled the French doors closed and then moved to the right. Parker said, “Sit down, Buenadella. It’s time for us to talk.”

“I don’t talk to punks! Get out of here and keep going!”

Casually, Grofield took from his pocket Abadandi’s wallet and tossed it on the desk. “You’ll probably want to send that to Abadandi’s next of kin,” he said.

Buenadella frowned, massively, his whole face shifting downward. “What?”

“With a nice letter,” Grofield added. “Proud of your boy, first-class soldier, died saving his platoon, great loss, will be missed. They can frame it, hang it over the mantelpiece.”

Buenadella stepped closer to the desk, picked up the wallet, opened it, and looked at a couple of the documents within. Parker and Grofield waited him out, till at last he lifted his head and glared at Grofield. “Where’d you get this?”

“Off a dead man.”

“I don’t believe it.”

Grofield shrugged.

Buenadella studied him, thinking it over, and then tossed the wallet contemptuously back onto the desk. ‘There’s more men where he came from,” he said.

Grofield smiled. “Are they just as good?”

“We’ll try them ten at a time,” Buenadella said.

Parker took a step closer to him. “You won’t try them at all,” he said. “We’re here with you, all by yourself. We can finish it right now.”

Buenadella moved his heavy look from Grofield to Parker. “I don’t have anything to finish with you.”

“Seventy-three thousand dollars.”

“Stolen goods,” Buenadella said. “You don’t have any claim on the money, and there’s no proof I ever saw or touched or spent a dollar of it. You want to take me to court?”

“You’re in court right now,” Parker said.

Grofield, sincerely trying to be helpful, said, “Mr. Buenadella, a little piece of advice. My friend is a very impatient man. I don’t know anybody who handles frustration worse than he does. He’s been very calm up till now, he hasn’t made any trouble, but I think—”

“No trouble!” Buenadella seemed honestly astounded, surprised right out of his tough-guy role. “Do you realize what you—” He sputtered slightly, moving his hands, finding it impossible to put together the words to express what had been done to him.

“Believe me,” Grofield said. “We’ve been here five days, all we’ve ever wanted is our money, and all we get is the runaround. There’s an election going on, there’s a mob war shaping up, there’s all this nonsense. We don’t care about any of this, all we care about is our seventy-three thousand dol—”

“And you’re fucking up everything in sight!” Buenadella shouted. He acted like a man with a true grievance, self-righteous and enraged. “You’re doing robberies, you’re killing people, you’re pulling a gun on the mayoral candidate, you’re screwing up a personal business arrangement that I worked three years to— You call it a mob war? What mob war? Everything was quiet until you people got here!”

“If we’d been given our money on Thursday,” Grofield said, “even on Friday, there wouldn’t have been any trouble at all.”

“I’m sick of this town,” Parker said. “I want my money and I want to get out of here.”

“Seventy-three thousand,” Grofield said. “That’s really not a lot of money. A business expense, that’s all.”

Buenadella had been about to make another angry statement, but he abruptly closed his mouth on it and gave a speculative frown instead. The term “business expense” had taken root in his head; Grofield could see it growing in there, becoming a lovely green tree.

“Just a minute,” Buenadella said. The desk chair was just to his left; he pulled it back from the desk, sat down, rested his forearms on the green blotter, and gazed off toward the French doors.

Grofield shot Parker a look, but Parker was watching Buenadella, his own expression unreadable as usual. Grofield wondered if Parker understood that they’d just won, that Buenadella was going to give them the money.

Yes, he was. He was sitting there now working it all out in his head. Seventy-three thousand dollars to get rid of the troublemakers; a high price, but the alternative was even worse trouble than he’d already had, and in effect he’d be paying the troublemakers with their own money, not his.

And more. Inside that heavy head, Buenadella was working out tax dodges, company dodges. The seventy-three thousand would come from this place and that place, would read one thing and another on the company books and ledgers; and what percent of it would the government wind up paying, in the form of tax deductions for business losses? If Buenadella paid out seventy-three thousand in deductible business expenses, declared it all and lowered his tax bill by one-third of that—say, twenty-four thousand—he would only be paying forty-nine thousand out of his own pocket. And since the seventy-three hadn’t been his to begin with, he could look at it that he was making a twenty-four-thousand-dollar profit on the deal.

Buenadella finally broke the silence. He seemed uncertain whether to talk to Parker or Grofield, and looked at Parker first, but then turned to Grofield instead; probably because Grofield seemed friendlier. “I can’t pay you all at once,” he said.

Grofield grinned; he couldn’t help himself. As an actor, and as a summer-theater producer, he had dealings from time to time with the business mentality, and by God, if this wasn’t it in full flower. A hood would either pay up or start shooting, it was impossible to think of a hood in terms of time payments. Buenadella, regardless of the business he was in, was more merchant than crook, and that was why it was going to be possible to deal with him.

But not this way. “Sorry,” Grofield said. “We couldn’t keep coming back for the payments. It has to be all at once.”

“Seventy-three thousand,” Buenadella pointed out, “that’s a big bite.”

“You can do it.”

“You’re going to strap me at a time when I really need the cash.”

Parker said, “Stop it, Buenadella. There’s only one way to pay us, and you know it.”

Grofield saw Buenadella getting his back up again; the very sound of Parker’s voice irritated the man. Now, with negotiations finally having been opened, and moving along pretty smoothly considering the circumstances, there was no point going back to the old hostilities. So, to soothe Buenadella, Grofield said, “I’m sure we can work something out, Mr. Buenadella. We don’t want to be unreasonable.”

“You call yourselves reasonable?” But it was said truculently, not angrily, so no real damage had been done.

“Well,” Grofield said, “of course, we’re pretty well locked into two conditions here. We have to have a lump-sum payment, and we have to have it in cash. You can see the reasons for that.”

Buenadella, the businessman, could see the reasons, but didn’t want to. “We could have a paper between us,” he grumbled. “We could make a legal thing, that you could take me to court if I missed a payment. If I agree to pay you, I’ll pay you.”

“It just wouldn’t work, Mr. Buenadella,” Grofield said, sounding mournful about it. “To have a legal document, you’d have to have my real name, for instance, and I’d rather you didn’t have it. Not to mention an address.”

“Christ.” Buenadella tapped his fingers on the desk blotter; they made small muffled noises, as for a midget’s funeral. “Where’m I going to get that much cash right away? I might as well tell you go fuck yourselves, do your worst.”

“You haven’t seen our worst, Mr. Buenadella,” Grofield said gently.

Buenadella cocked his head and squinted at Grofield, and it seemed to Grofield that for the first time Buenadella was taking the threat seriously. Underplay, Grofield thought, always underplay, that’s the way to get your effects every time.

Buenadella was still working things out. “It’s possible,” he said. “But it’ll take a couple days.”

“Now,” Parker said.

Grofield said to Parker, “Wait a minute, let’s hear him out. He’s got problems too.”

“Only you people,” Buenadella said. He rubbed the line of his jaw with a knuckle, thinking. “I can’t do anything today, right? It’s Sunday, everything’s closed. Tomorrow first thing I start. But you’re talking cash, that’s going to take a couple days.”

Parker said, “One day.”

Buenadella looked back and forth at the two of them, and decided to talk to Grofield again. “You can’t collect cash that fast,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about, it takes time, liquidating things, converting to cash. I’m in a bad cash flow situation anyway, what with the summer, attendance down, this election—”

“Well,” Grofield said, “I sort of think the election is what my partner had in mind. That’s Tuesday, right?”

“Sure, Tuesday.”

“Day after tomorrow.” Grofield shrugged, shaking his head, as though truly sorry to be the bearer of bad news. “See, that election’s important to us. It’s part of the pressure we have on you.”

“You don’t pay up by Tuesday morning,” Parker said, “your man loses. One way or another, he loses.”

“It can’t be done that fast!”

“You can if you really try,” Grofield said. “I tell you what; I’ll give you a call tomorrow morning, say ten-thirty, see how you’re coming along.”

Bitterly Buenadella said, “I wish I’d never heard of that money.”

“That would have been better,” Grofield agreed. “We can find our own way out.” He glanced at Parker, who nodded.

Grofield went first. He opened the French doors, stepped through to the cluttered rear lawn with its overcrowded plantings of bushes and hedges and small trees, and he saw the man with the gun just as the gun sparked white and red at the end of the barrel.

There wasn’t time to do a thing, not even time to think. He never heard the sound of the shot, but he felt the punch high on the left side of his chest; it felt as though he’d been hit by something as big as a fist, a metal fist.

It spun him around. Everything went out of focus as he turned, like a special effect in a movie. He killed me! Grofield thought despairingly, and slid down the invisible glass wall of life.