Butcher's Moon

Thirty-four

Calesian was up. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt so alive, so self-confident, so expectant, so in control of things— not with women, not with the job, not anywhere. It wouldn’t have surprised him if little bolts of lightning were to shoot from his fingers and eyes.

Standing in the main front hallway of Dutch Buenadella’s house, watching Dr. Beiny come slowly down the stairs, Calesian smiled to himself as he contemplated his own suddenly expanded future. Dutch was up on the second floor, hustling his family to greater speed in their packing; acting like an old woman, he was sending his family out of town for fear of some nameless horror he felt descending on them all. “We’re going to the mattresses, Hal,” he’d said a little while ago, and it had taken Calesian a minute to figure out what he was talking about. Then it came back to him: a phrase from the movie The Godfather, meaning a gang war. Tyler had never in its history had a gang war.

And it wouldn’t now. Who was going to dispute? Al Lozini was dead. Frank Schroder was too old, and anyway, content with his piece of the action in the narcotics trade. Ernie Dulare was also content with what he had, and in any event was too smart to go to war on a problem that could very easily be worked out through negotiations; Dutch didn’t intend to take anything away from Ernie, so why should Ernie care one way or the other? And who else was there to go to these famous mattresses? Nobody.

Dr. Beiny reached the bottom of the stairs and gave Calesian a sour nod. “I’ll look in again this evening,” he said. A tall stoop-shouldered saturnine man in his late forties, Dr. Beiny had made just about every mistake a respectable middle-class doctor could make. He had performed illegal abortions and had a girl die in his office. He had vacationed in Las Vegas and lost far more than he could pay. He had involved himself with women who were guaranteed to bleed him as much as they could. Although not a drunk, he had been drinking the night he’d been involved in an automobile accident, during which he could have been found guilty of criminal negligence both as a driver and as a doctor, had either case ever gone to court. He had mishandled controlled narcotics, misdiagnosed fatal illnesses, and even managed to get caught out by the Internal Revenue Service for nondeclaration of patients’ fees that he’d received in cash. The Lozini organization maintained him as a kind of house doctor, and he managed just barely not to be more trouble than he was worth. He was apparently willing to do absolutely anything that was asked of him, and to find pleasure in nothing on earth.

Calesian, nodding toward the second floor, said, “Is our patient sleeping comfortably?”

“He’s alive,” Dr. Beiny said. “I don’t say he’ll stay that way for very long.”

“Nobody wants him to live forever,” Calesian said, grinning. “Just long enough to kill his partner.”

“Taking fingers off him won’t help,” the doctor said. “No matter how careful I am, it shocks the heart.”

“Just one a day,” Calesian said cheerfully. “We’ll give him plenty of chance to rest up in between.”

“But what if it kills him?”

Calesian gave him a suggestive smile. “Then we’ll just have to take fingers off somebody else, won’t we?”

The doctor’s sour expression turned even more sour. “I’ll stop back this evening,” he said.

“You do that.”

Calesian watched the doctor leave the house, then glanced up the stairs, thinking about Dutch Buenadella again. He wasn’t in sight up there, so Calesian strolled away through the house to the den and sat down at Dutch’s desk, swiveling the chair so he could see the rear lawn.

With all those bushes and trees out there, it wasn’t possible to see very far, but Calesian knew there wasn’t any chance of Parker’s sneaking up to this doorway as Calesian himself had done earlier today. The second-floor windows were now occupied by armed men, watching every approach to the house. After dark the floodlights would be turned on. Parker could come here any time, but his arrival would be announced.

It was pleasant to sit here by the open French doors, looking out at greenery in the light of the late afternoon sun. Things were organized, things were under control. Two of Dutch’s men were dealing with Al Lozini’s body right now, Parker had been contained, his partner Green was being kept alive long enough to be useful, and Calesian himself was on the threshold of a life for himself that he had never dreamed possible. Dutch Buenadella, a businessman as smart and as cold and as nerveless as they come, had collapsed completely when the guns came out. He had made himself dependent on Calesian now, and he would stay dependent from here on. Dutch Buenadella would be the figurehead running Tyler after the death of Al Lozini, but Harold Calesian would be the power behind the throne. The true power.

Until just today Calesian had been content with the power he already possessed, the power implicit in his job with the police force and the power that came as a side effect of his association with Adolf Lozini. But when this new door had opened, this sudden unexpected chance to leap up to a completely different level of life, he hadn’t hesitated for a second.

The repaired phone rang, on the desk. Calesian swiveled away from the lawn view to look at it, surprised, and almost reached out to answer it. Then it occurred to him that it wouldn’t be for him and that there were other extensions in the house also ringing. Let someone else answer it.

Someone else did, in the middle of the second ring. It was almost as though that, too, was part of Calesian’s new range of power; he had reached out with his thoughts in a command to someone to answer the phone, and it had been answered. Which wasn’t what had happened, of course, but it felt that way, and the feeling of power he was relishing operated at the same level. Smiling to himself, he turned back and gazed out at the lawn again.

Two minutes later Dutch Buenadella came into the den, and Calesian was taken aback by just how bad the man looked. His flesh seemed too big for his skeleton all at once, as though he’d shriveled somehow inside there. Calesian stared at him, not wanting to ask what was wrong, and Buenadella said, “Ted Shevelly was just found shot to death in the street. Over on Baxter Street. Shot dead.”