Chicago Confidential

15

We took a morning flight — six hours from Chicago to Mexico City on Mexicana Airlines — and rented a Jeep for the drive to Acapulco. My companion — a certain model and aspiring actress named Vera — was a cooing delight, her enthusiasm for the trip and bubbly personality going a long way toward rescuing me from the funk I’d been in for the last several days.

Arrangements for the trip had been simple; no passports were needed — just tourist cards, furnished through my travel agent — and I had press credentials, supplied by Drew Pearson, who had paved the way for me with the Associated Press office in Mexico City. As for Senator Kefauver, he made calls to the embassy in Mexico City, to arrange for a Narcotics Bureau agent stationed there to transfer temporarily to the consulate office at Acapulco. It seemed bureau director Harry W. Anslinger — unlike J. Edgar — was backing up the Crime Committee, all the way.

What I had in mind — and in due time I’ll let you in on it — would benefit both Senator Kefauver and my perennial journalistic employer Pearson, meaning I could hit them both up for paychecks and expense accounts.

Even in a funk, I looked after business.

But I had been depressed, no question, sick with sadness and shame. I had not managed to rescue Jackie Payne, though perhaps she was past rescuing: a girl who could go back to the likes of Rocco Fischetti, for drugs and show biz, might well have been past salvation. In time I would see that, but in the days — and, at times, during the weeks and months and even years ahead — I would suffer a gut-wrenching guilt thinking about abandoning that overdosed beauty queen in the grass at Riverview.

The worst of it would come late at night, when I convinced myself she may not really have been dead, and I had left her there, to die in the cold, fleeing to cover my own ass...

Other than remorse, however, repercussions for the carnage at the park never came. I never knew exactly how it was done — although I could easily guess who accomplished it — but the deaths of Jackie and those two Calumet City cops were covered up in a fashion both imaginative and thorough.

Jackie’s body was found in Lincoln Park, and the papers reported the tragic demise of a Miss Chicago turned showgirl turned drug addict. Hal Davis at the News uncovered her connection to Rocco, but no one came forward with the information that she and he were married. She was merely a “former flame” of the notorious Northside gambling boss. Her holy-roller parents saw to it she got a “Christian” burial back in Kankakee, and for about three days she achieved one of her goals: Jackie Payne was in the limelight, a star of sorts, albeit the tabloid variety.

The two cops were found in a ditch along the roadside in that stark industrial stretch north of Calumet City, in the shadow of a grain elevator. The chief of police pledged an around-the-clock search for the prime suspects, a stolen-car ring the brave detective duo had been closing in on; their records as cops were immaculate and they were buried as heroes with full honors. Their deaths were a further indication, said the press, of the peril faced by honest cops like these late Calumet City heroes and Chicago’s own William Drury.

Only a few spoilsports in the press — Lee Mortimer for one — pointed out that Calumet City was an Outfit stronghold of wide-open gambling, prostitution, and narcotics, a state of affairs only possible with police cooperation. “Putting their names in the same sentence as Bill Drury,” Mortimer wrote, “is a kind of blasphemy.”

I couldn’t help but admire the ability of Captain Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert to stage-manage these deaths, when he had to deal with whatever officers happened to catch the call out to Riverview. Impressive. Of course, as chief investigator of the State’s Attorney’s office for these many years, he had developed remarkable clout on all levels of state and local law enforcement.

Somebody needed to do something about the son of a bitch, but as Drury’s friend and “partner” (not really an accurate designation, but that’s how the press termed our business relationship) I would have been a prime suspect should a public-minded citizen put a bullet in Tubbo’s beer-keg head.

Anyway, I had other fish to catch.

Vera and I, enjoying the warm wind stirred up by the open-air vehicle, tooled across a mere dozen or so mountain ridges along the superhighway thoughtfully provided by President Alemán, who’d been pumping Acapulco as a tourist spot. I was in sunglasses, a straw porkpie, a blue-and-tan Hawaiian aloha shirt, chino shorts, and sandals; I’d given my reddish brown hair a blond rinse. Vera was in a pale yellow shirt with flaring collar and cuffs, knotted at her midriff above canary yellow shorts; she too was in sandals and wore sunglasses. She had her hair ponytailed back and it was streaming behind her.

“I’ve been in Mexico lots of times,” Vera the Texas girl said, eyes as wide as Orphan Annie’s, “but this is something else.”

My busty companion was right. The drive to Acapulco displayed itself in green breeze-stirred grass on rolling land that occasionally jutted rock and even grew terrifying precipices above tan beaches flecked with foamy white; sleepy little communities of houses and huts of pastel stucco and tile roofs; snarls of coral vine and fields of bougainvillea, mango clumps and banana trees and tropical flowers; boats with sails of white and pea green on a sapphire sea glimpsed beyond piers and wharves with silver nets drying in the sun. I could identify with the latter — I was fishing, too, remember?

But for the fringes of beach and a flat grassy patch just big enough for a landing field, Acapulco itself was an up and down affair — a land-locked harbor of cliffs and promontories and white-gold beaches, a tropical paradise of orchids and coconut palms and parrots. Radiating out of the unpretentious plaza, with its nondescript church, were humble residential streets, while on the heights above perched the seasonal villas of the well-to-do, like pastel stairsteps climbing the hills. Between the two worlds of everyday locals and wealthy foreigners — spread out on their different levels — pockets of shantytown, like fungus, infested hillsides.

La Mirador was the first of the luxury hotels built in Acapulco, back in the early thirties, followed by maybe a dozen more; some of the shiny highrise hotels had mob investors — Moe Dalitz, from Cleveland, for one — who’d got in on the ground floor, back when Repeal was around the corner. Like Havana and Vegas, Acapulco was the kind of resort area mobsters loved — for business and pleasure.

Built on Quebrada Cliffs, La Mirador was no highrise, rather a rambling affair, rich with patios and terraces, and very open, starting with a lobby that had no walls. The beach — though it was late afternoon when we arrived — was scattered with sunbathers, taking in the declining sun, and swimmers, splashing in the foam; Vera and I saw this from a terrace above, the yellow and red and blue of beach umbrellas like polka dots on the creamy sand. Our room, however, opened onto the swimming pool area, which overlooked a magnificent waterview, white waves emerging from the vivid blue Pacific to crash on enormous ragged rocks.

We’d arrived after the daily siesta, just in time for cocktail hour. We didn’t even change our clothes — the atmosphere was almost pretentiously casual; resorts like this, after all, were where the international set came to lounge in open-neck shirts and shorts and sandals. There wasn’t a coat or tie to be seen in the entire Mirador bar.

Which, as bars went, was an unusual one, hewed in the side of a cliff. We sat in our booth, as if in an opera box in a theater, watching the stage the lack of a wall presented, providing a full view of the setting sun using its entire paintbox to color the sky as waves dashed against the rocks a hundred and fifty feet below.

Vera had a coco loco (coconut milk, gin, and ice) and I sipped rum out of hollowed-out pineapple, a treat called a pie-eye. We also both popped quinine capsules, as a precaution against malaria... a real must in my case, since I still had recurrences from Guadalcanal.

Vera’s face had a wide-eyed, youthful innocence, as she drank in not only the gin but the magnificent sunset, and I dared to hope the almost Miss California’s ambition to make it in show business wouldn’t destroy her, as it had the late Miss Chicago.

Throughout, I’d been wearing my sunglasses, but soon my doing so would seem affected and might attract attention — the opposite of my intention. The blond hair, the dark glasses, the typically touristy clothing, and the context of La Mirador and Acapulco itself would keep me — I hoped — from being made by Charley and Rocco Fischetti, who were also staying in this hotel.

In fact, they too were in the Mirador bar, at this very moment, sharing a booth with two Latin dolls who I figured to be showgirls in the hotel’s nightclub, La Perla. In short-sleeve linen sportshirts, slacks, and the tans they’d developed, the two brothers were ignoring the dying sunset and the twinkling harbor lights coming alive. Charley, smoking a cigarette in a holder (like his adversary Lee Mortimer!), seemed to be enjoying himself, chatting up his date; Rocco sat sullenly, a cigar going, the smoke bothering the girl beside him, not that he gave a shit.

The way the booths angled around, I had a good view of them from across the room — and my dark glasses allowed me to gawk without seeming to. Neither Charley nor Rocco (nor their showgirls, for that matter) seemed ever to glance at us, which meant they’d been distracted when we came in, because every other normal man in the bar had noticed bosomy Vera.

Which was another reason to slip out of there.

I drove her over to La Riviera Hotel, a newer hotel with a nice layout, all roof garden and terrace; the food was a fancied-up but tasty version of Mexican, and — despite the business nature of our trip — we found ourselves flirting and acting like honeymooners. Vera could do that to you.

When we got back, I checked the bar and the Fischettis were not present — which was no surprise. They would almost certainly be in the nightclub, which provided a great view of the Mirador’s main attraction: the famed local boys who took heroic dives into the shallow inlet from the hotel’s high rocky cliff, risking their lives — nightly... four shows.

Vera and I caught the ten-fifteen show from a little spot of our own on the rocky hillside, below the balustrade that was down several sets of steps from the parking lot. We sat on the grass, hand in hand, watching as the boy — bearing a torch, and guided by newspapers set afire and adrift below — hurled himself forty feet into a breaker. Then he climbed the opposite, higher cliff, diving a good hundred feet into a narrow ravine lined with jagged rocks.

This went on for a while, and later the boys came around up on the balustrade, where tourists were watching, to collect coins and sometimes even paper money. Vera urged me to go up there and give them something, which I did — a buck — and Vera squealed at my generosity and gave me a big kiss.

She had her hand in my hair, looking at me like I was as beautiful a man as she was a woman — deluded girl — and she said, “I think I like you blond.”

“Thanks. Maybe you oughta try it.”

“Like Jean Harlow?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Maybe I will.”

We necked there on the hillside for quite a while; it was overwhelmingly romantic — I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, not the glimmering ocean in the moonlight, the crashing waves against the jagged rocks, or that incredible blow job.

That night we had room service bring us several coco locos and pie-eyes, and in our simply but nicely appointed room, the drapes to the pool area shut tight thank you, we drank and played pretend honeymoon and when we woke up the next morning, it was approaching eleven. Both of us felt remarkably good, considering how much we’d had to drink last night. We showered — one at time, which I feel showed remarkable restraint — and I got dressed in another aloha shirt, shorts, and my sandals, getting the Speed Graphic out of my suitcase.

“How do I look?” Vera asked, spreading her arms.

She was in a bikini, a couple of blue scraps that together might have comprised a decent handkerchief.

“Even my tongue is stiff,” I said.

That made her ooze delight, and she came over and hugged me and kissed me and put her Pepsodenty tongue in my mouth.

“Not now,” I said, incredibly enough. “We have work to do.”

I was registered under the name Joe Samuels. The hotel management had been alerted to the fact that I was a pinup photographer, and (we’d been told ahead of time) they had no objection to my taking photographs of my model, around the pool, down on the beach, anywhere around the hotel, in fact.

“You really think my picture will be in the papers?” she asked, batting her lashes over those big hazel orbs.

“Oh yeah. This will make Miss California look like a footnote in your portfolio.”

“You know, I can splash around in the pool, and lose my top. I can make it seem real natural.”

I savored the image for a moment or two, then said, “That I can’t get in the papers, sugar. You understand, this man... these men... they can be vicious.”

“But they do like girls.”

“I wouldn’t say they like them exactly. They like fucking them — and, later, they like batting them around.”

She was nodding. For all her cartoony sexiness, this was not a dumb girl.

“Nate, I understand — they’re dangerous. But you’re right there with me. My protector.”

That gave me a twinge. I hadn’t been much of a protector for somebody else, where the Fischettis had been concerned...

I peeked around the closed curtain, onto the pool area. Bright, sunny, beautiful — just another day in paradise. Beyond the little fence at the far end of the pool, enormous waves threw themselves on massive rocks, followed by massive waves throwing themselves on enormous rocks. Just for variety.

And out on that patio area around the pool — two of several dozen hotel guests either sitting around the water or down splashing in it — were Charley and Rocco Fischetti, in deck chairs.

I released the curtain, backed away, saying to Vera, “We just got lucky.”

“Really?”

“They’re out there — right now.”

“It’s showtime?”

“It’s showtime.”

We exited through the sliding glass doors of our room out onto the patio around the pool. The Fischettis were down to the left, sitting under a yellow umbrella. The showgirls were not with them; a pair of burly bodyguards, however, were. The bodyguards — an interchangeable pair of flat-nosed, cauliflower-eared, dead-eyed dagos — sat on either side of the brothers, but back a few feet.

Rocco wore a white sportshirt and gray slacks and canvas shoes; he was smoking a cigar and leafing through Ring magazine. He seemed bored, glum. The umbrella shaft was stuck down through a small round table, which had drinks and ashtrays on it and separated him from his brother.

Charley — his hair was blond, like mine, also a dye job — wore gray shorts and a white blue-checked shirt which hung open revealing a tanned hairy chest and small paunch; he was stretched out in a lounge chair, smoking his cigarette-in-holder, watching pretty girls in swimsuits, of which there was no shortage.

But pretty girls in swimsuits was one thing, and Vera Jayne Mansfield in a bikini, that was a whole other thing.

In my sunglasses and tourist attire, the camera blocking my face, I shot picture after picture of Vera, in and out of the pool, preening, posing, sticking out her chest, pushing out her bottom, peeling those lush lips back across the white teeth. I was whispering photographer type things at her, complimenting her, directing her; but she didn’t need any direction. She knew just how to handle herself in front of a camera.

Every man around that pool — and this included young men, old men, married men, single, even guys on their honeymoons — watched the brunette babe in the bikini like they’d just heard about sex for the first time, and were really, really impressed...

And in many of those shots, I caught Charley and Rocco Fischetti on film. Neither one of them — nor their bodyguards — thought a thing about it.

The problem was, the brothers were under that umbrella, sitting in shade, and I didn’t have what I needed, not yet. We had talked about this, Vera and I, and as she climbed from the pool and I helped her into a hooded terrycloth robe that ended midthigh, I whispered, “We haven’t got it yet.”

“He’s leaving,” she said, looking past me.

“What?” I said, but Vera was on the move.

I turned to see Charley and Rocco getting up, their two thugs falling in line — it was almost noon, so this was simply lunch, most likely. We could have waited for another time, but she was going right up to him...

...and I moved in — clicking.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, in that Betty Boopish voice, “I hope you don’t mind my saying how elegant you look.” She was standing in front of him, the robe open onto all that bikini-bound, water-pearled flesh of hers, and Charley smiled, tightly.

Her smile radiant, she said, “I mean, that cigarette holder — you just look so... continental.”

This gibberish was holding Charley hostage. Rocco was gazing at her suspiciously, but neither he nor his brother — or their idiot retinue — seemed to have noticed me, moving in ever closer, snapping photos.

“Thank you, my dear,” Charley said. “You’re a lovely girl. Are you in show business?”

“I want to be.”

And now Rocco stepped up to the plate, his suspicions gone. “We have business associates in that field,” he said. “Ever hear of the Chez Paree?”

“Oh yes!”

“We own a piece.”

I faded back — I had all the photos I needed, but she was still talking to them. Finally, she beamed at them and said something — I was out of ear range, now — and bounced over to me.

“I think I made a good impression,” she said.

“They’re making impressions in their pants right now,” I said, taking her gently by the arm and walking her over to our room. I unlocked the sliding doors and we stepped in.

She jumped up and down, jiggling in all the interesting places. “They liked me! They said they’d give me an audition.”

“Vera. Sit down.”

She sat on the side of the bed and I told her about Jackie Payne. I gave her a fairly detailed version, starting with the religious parents in Kankakee and ending with death by overdose. When I was finished, Vera wasn’t crying or anything, but her expression was sober and her eyes melancholy.

“You didn’t have to tell that story,” she said. “I know they’re gangsters. I don’t want anything to do with them.”

“I know. But you’re just starting out — and I saw today the effect you have on men.”

“It’s just my body.”

“No, lots of girls have big tits, kiddo. You have confidence, and stage presence. You’ll go somewhere. Just try not to do it by getting in bed... literally or figuratively... with the likes of Charley and Rocco Fischetti.”

She grinned up at me. “Hey — I wouldn’t care if that was Darryl Zanuck out there... I’m here with Nate Heller.”

“Actually, you’re here with Joe Samuels... who has work to do.”

I dropped the Kodak rolls in a packet off at the front desk; arrangements had been made for my film to be taken by courier to Mexico City and delivered directly to the Associated Press office, where it would be developed and the best shots of the Fischettis wired to Washington... where both Drew Pearson and representatives of Senator Kefauver would receive them.

From our poolside room I made two calls: room service, to bring us lunch; and the American consulate, where a lanky, well-tanned Narcotics Bureau agent named Dennison was waiting to hear from me.

“The photos are on their way,” I said.

“Good,” the agent said. “First thing tomorrow morning, I should have the proper warrants. I won’t pull in the local policía till the last moment.”

“Smart. Outfit guys have a piece of this town.”

“You haven’t been made?” Dennison asked.

“No. I’ll lay low till tomorrow morning.”

After I hung up, Vera looked at me with what pretended to be innocence and asked, “You’ll lay how?”

She was a handful. Two, actually.

I took her to another hotel to spend the evening — Los Flamingos, a hotel whose modernistic architecture stretched along the edge of an orange-and-slate-blue cliff three hundred and fifty feet above the ocean. The dining room had no outside walls, only a high-beamed roof; but we sat under a roofless section with the moon and stars as our ceiling, while in nearby papaya trees, yellow-and-blue macaws tried to make conversation with us.

Out in the ocean, under the moonlight, on the silver waves, a whale was spouting, and flying fish were leaping from the depths, huge creatures that looked like minnows from our high perch. We both ate charcoal-broiled red snapper, drank wine, and danced to a rumba band well into the night.

When we slipped into our room, back at La Mirador, just after one a.m., we were both a little tipsy and neither of us expected skunk-haired Rocco Fischetti to be sitting on the bed waiting for us, with my nine millimeter Browning in his hand.

“Go in the bathroom, honey,” Rocco said. His eyes were like dark stones close-set in that pockmarked face; the black slashes of eyebrow angled down in a scowl that his mouth was participating in. My suitcase was open on the floor — that’s where he’d found the gun.

Vera was clinging to my arm, shivering with fright. Like me, I had the feeling she was sober, suddenly.

“Honey,” he said, just a little louder, “in the damn bathroom.”

“Do it,” I told her.

She ran in there, glancing back at us, framed in light.

“Shut the door,” Rocco said.

She did.

I stood looking at him. Wearing the same white shirt and gray slacks as this morning, he was seated on the edge of the bed, the gun in his hand draped casually in his lap.

“This is the rod you waved in my face, in the Chez crapper, ain’t it?” he said.

“She’s an innocent, Rock. Let’s go someplace and do whatever we have to do. And leave her out of it.”

“Those shiners you give me — they’re almost gone.” He laughed hollowly. “I looked like a fuckin’ raccoon.”

“Rocky — we were friends once. Let’s settle this another time, in another setting — with this girl out of the picture. She’s an innocent kid.”

Rocco swallowed. Something was weird about him. Was he drunk?

“Jackie was an innocent kid, too,” he said.

“Yeah... yeah, she was.”

“What are you here for?”

“What do you mean, Rock?”

“What the fuck are you here for?” He hefted the nine millimeter. “To kill me? To kill Charley?”

Standing there casually motionless, I was nonetheless looking for the moment to jump him. The weird state of mind he was in might help — might...

“I’m not here to kill you,” I said. “You’d already be dead, if I were.”

“Or you’d be dead. Why are you here, Nate?”

“...you saw me.”

“Playing photographer. Yeah. You snapped me and Charley.”

“Yes. And those photos are on their way to Washington.”

I thought that might get a rise out of him, but he just sat there, zombie-eyed. Finally, he said, “That means, unless Charley and me clear out... tonight... we’ll be in cuffs tomorrow. On our way back home.”

“That’s pretty much it. yeah.”

“He’s fuckin’ ruined me, you know.”

“What? Who? Charley?”

Rocco sighed, nodded. He kept thumping my gun against his thigh, nervously. “He and Tubbo went against the Outfit.”

“Arranging the Drury and Bas hits, you mean?”

“Yeah. They had inside help, y’know.”

“I do know.”

And I told him who I figured it was.

He confirmed my suspicions with a shrug and a nod. “You don’t buck Accardo and Ricca or even old Greasy Thumb. You either die, or if you’re real lucky, you lose damn near everything. Giancana, that crazy bastard, he’ll be sitting where the Fischetti brothers was sitting.”

“Because your brother bucked the Outfit.”

“Yeah. Drury had all sorts of tapes of Charley and Tubbo talkin’—’bout the election and shit.”

“You haven’t told Charley about me, have you?”

“No — no, Nate, I ain’t told him, and Charley ain’t made you. He was too busy today looking at Little Miss Big Titties. I saw you, though. You kinda look like my fuckin’ brother, with that blond hair.”

“If you don’t tell him now, Rock, you’ll be arrested tomorrow, along with him. You know that, don’t you?”

“What the fuck’s it matter? Maybe I go back and plead the fifth, don’t cause the Outfit no trouble, and the boys see I’m a stand-up fella.”

“You want Charley to get dragged back to the States?”

“Oh, yeah. ’Cause if he does, they’ll either kill him... or his heart will. He’s a sick man, you know.”

“How sick?”

Rocco coughed a laugh. “Sicker than he fuckin’ knows.”

“What do you mean?”

A shrug. “Maybe somebody switched his little pink pills with, whaddyacallit... playsee what’s-it’s.”

Was I hearing this?

“Placebos, Rock? You switched your brother’s pills?”

“You tell him, Nate, and I will kill you.”

I looked at him for a long time — the depression I’d seen lately in my own face was in Rocco’s, only deeper, like a mask that wouldn’t come off.

Then I came over and sat next to him. “You loved her, didn’t you?”

“What, jus’ ’cause I slapped her around, you don’t think I loved the little bitch? She could get under your skin. She was so goddamn sweet, and pretty. You ever hear Jackie sing?”

“Yeah.”

“How could you kill that? How could you kill something sweet like that, when you know your brother loves her?”

“You married her to protect her.”

“Of course. Then Charley found out that wouldn’t do no good, in this Kefauver thing... and he and Tubbo... Fuckers.”

“I tried to save her.”

“How?”

All Rocco knew was Jackie had turned up in Lincoln Park, overdosed. I told him the whole story — about Riverview, and how Tubbo had covered it up so masterfully.

“Somebody’s got to bring that fat bastard down,” Rocco said.

“Somebody will. She was a great girl. I can see how she’d be easy to fall for.” I didn’t say I knew as much because I’d fallen, too.

He was slumped so far over now, it was like he was doubled up with a cramp; he was rocking a little. “She died, all cold and scared... overdosed. It’s my fault... I got her hooked on that fuckin’ junk. I thought I could... handle her better, that way. She wanted a career, I wanted a wife.”

Only in Rocco’s world would you try to accomplish that by putting your fiancée on junk.

But the guy loved her, all right, in his twisted way. He was sitting there, slumped in half, and I reached over and took the gun from his fingers, and slipped my arm around his shoulder. He put his head against my chest and he wept. He wept for a long time.

Then he got up slowly and swallowed thickly, wiping his face with his hands, saying, “Nate... don’t tell anybody.”

“Don’t tell anybody what?”

“That I blubbered like a baby. I will kill your ass, you do.”

“I cried for her, too, Rock. I just got it out of my system, already... and anyway, you loved her longer... and more.”

He sighed, nodded, straightened his shirt. “Nobody can know about Charley, neither.”

“Obviously.”

“But with a little luck, that bastard’ll keel over dead, any day now.” He smiled to himself, savoring his brother’s imminent demise, as he headed for the door. “Any day...”

Around ten the next morning, Charley was sitting by the pool again, with his brother next to him, the thugs playing bookends. Charley was wearing a bathrobe and swim trunks; and Rocco was in a loud sportshirt and quiet slacks.

I had left Vera in our room, but she was watching out the glass doors. She saw me as I pulled up a deck chair and sat next to the broad-shouldered, oval-faced gangster, who was smoking his black-holdered cigarette.

“How you feeling, Charley?” I asked pleasantly. “You look a little peaked to me.”

The cigarette in the holder fell from his mouth, and hot ashes hit his chest; quickly he brushed them off, his eyes wide with surprise and alarm.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Heller?”

“Today, just relaxing. Thanks for asking, Charley. Yesterday I was taking pictures — your pictures. You don’t know it, but you made the papers all over America, this morning. Drew Pearson has quite a story.”

His eyes were huge and filled with rage under the same sort of black slashes of eyebrow Rocco wore. “You dumb son of a bitch! I was your friend — don’t you know what a bad enemy I can make?”

“No, but I bet Jackie Payne does... Charley Fischetti, this is Agent Dennison... Agent Dennison, Charley Fischetti.”

And Agent Dennison, in a tan tropical suit that blended well with the uniforms of the policía backing him up, stepped forward.

Charley began to swear at me, and shake his fist; then he froze, his eyes popped out a bit — reminding me of Pop-Eye at the Riverview freak show — and he clutched his chest, heaving heavy breaths.

Acting quickly, Rocco went to his brother’s aid, helping him with his little pink pills.