House of the Rising Sun

CHAPTER FOUR

A young legbreaker led Ray into Vinnie’s fourth-floor office. The kid wasn’t wearing a suit, which was a sign of the times. When Ray had been in Vice, he never saw a wiseguy who wasn’t wearing a suit. These days it was different. The new generation of wiseguys didn’t have the same respect for the old ways, for tradition, as the previous generation. The kid who let him in had more of a casual mobster look, dressing down, wearing khaki pants and a pullover golf shirt. He was big, offensive tackle size, and after opening the door to the office, he stepped aside to let Ray go in first.

The office was a deep rectangle, with Vinnie’s oversize desk and chair at the far end, facing toward the door. The room was laid out like a great hall with Vinnie Messina as a feudal prince seated on his throne, eyeing his supplicants. Floor-to-ceiling windows on the long exterior wall looked out over the French Quarter.

The young legbreaker put a hand on Ray’s back and guided him toward a leather sofa set at an angle in front of the big desk. Tony Z. sat in a leather wingback next to the sofa. Tony looked fresh, decked out in another Italian suit, his hair oiled and combed, not a strand out of place. Ray wondered if he ever slept.

There were two other guys in the office. One was another young arm-twister, dressed casual like his partner in khakis and a knit shirt. He sat in a hard-backed chair in the far corner, between the desk and the windows. The second guy was Charlie Liuzza, the man everyone called Charlie the Rabbit. Charlie was in his early sixties, but looked trim, like he kept in shape. He sat at the end of the sofa, dressed in a suit and tie, but not the expensive Italian kind Tony wore, more like one you would find hanging on the rack in a decent department store.

Charlie had nothing to do with the House, so why was he here? Ray wondered.

As Ray dropped onto the end of the sofa, opposite Charlie Liuzza, he wondered why he was here. This office made him nervous. On the floor he saw several large rugs, rugs big enough to roll up a body in. The offensive linemen-looking ape who had guided Ray into the room took a seat in the near corner. He and his twin looked like a pair of goombah bookends with Vincent Messina in the middle.

“We’ve been waiting for you, Ray,” Vinnie said in his high-pitched nasally voice. He was fiftysomething and fat, with a bald head he tried to hide under an absurd comb-over.

Ray didn’t know if he was being reprimanded for not getting here quickly enough, or if Vinnie was just making polite conversation. Right after Tony’s call, Ray had showered, dressed, gulped down another glass of Jameson to settle his nerves, then slipped into a sport coat and left. Fifteen minutes and two cigarettes later, he pulled his eight-year-old Mustang into the parking lot on Decatur, two blocks from the House.

“I got here as soon as I could,” Ray said.

Vinnie stared at him, his eyes dark and cold and set deep in his jowly face. The look made Ray wonder if he was going to get out of here alive. He glanced again at the two young goons, but neither of them looked like they were getting ready to make any kind of move against him. Squeezed into the chairs like they were, if they did make a play for him, he would have at least a few seconds to react.

Ray relaxed a bit as Vinnie pointed to Charlie Liuzza. “You know Charlie, don’t you? He works for my brother. Charlie is here, at my brother’s invitation, to make sure we don’t screw this up.”

Ray didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded his head at Charlie, acknowledging the man’s presence.

“But I’m going to handle this my own way,” Vinnie said, giving Charlie a sideways look, “and with my own people.”

An anxious silence enveloped the room. Ray tried to break it. “Handle what?”

Vinnie waved a dismissive hand in the air. “I want you to know that in no way do I hold you responsible for what happened this morning.” He glanced at Tony. “No matter what some people might say.”

“Thank you, Mr. Messina,” Ray said. “I want to tell you personally how sorry I am about-”

“But I want you to find them,” Vinnie said.

Silence.

Finally, Ray said, “Find who?”

“The people who shot my son.”

Ray looked around the room. There had to be a way out of here. Everyone was staring at him. “Mr. Messina… I can’t do that.”

Tony clapped his hands together. He was looking at Vinnie. “I told you.”

Ray chimed in. “It’s not that I don’t want to. I’d do anything to help you. Pete was like a kid brother to me. But I just can’t do this. I don’t have… the ability.”

Vinnie shot him a hard stare. “What do you mean you don’t have the ability? You were a goddamn detective. You sure as shit know how to find people who don’t want to be found.” He leaned forward, keeping his eyes fixed on Ray. “I’m asking you to find the motherfuckers who murdered my boy.” Vinnie choked on the last word and had to cover it with a cough. He was a Mafia big shot, but still a man who had just lost his only son.

Ray felt a lump in his own throat. He glanced out the nearest window. Pete had been a good kid, simpleminded but sweet. An innocent kid. Ray swallowed the lump. There was a lot at stake here. This was no time to get sentimental over a dead half-wit, he told himself. He looked back at Vinnie Messina. “I used to be a detective. Now I’m just an ex-con.”

“That’s even better,” Vinnie said. “Don’t you see that? You know both sides of the street. Plus, now you’re not constrained by all that legal bullshit. I’m not asking you to kill these guys. I’m asking you to use your street smarts and your contacts at the police department to find them. We’ll take care of the rest.”

Ray cleared his throat. “I don’t have any contacts left. I was in prison for almost five years. I’d be as welcome at Tulane and Broad as clap in a convent.”

“What did I tell you?” Tony said. “He’s a fucking coward.”

Ray ignored him. He kept his eyes on Vinnie. “To work it like a cop, you need access to information-lab reports, ballistics, criminal histories, driver’s license information-stuff I can’t get.”

Tony jabbed a finger at Ray. “We lost that money because of you, Shane. You’re either going to find the guys who did this, and get back our three hundred G’s or-”

“Three hundred!” Ray said, turning toward Tony.

“You heard me.”

“We never have that much cash in-”

Vinnie pounded his fat fist on his desk. “I don’t give a shit about the money. I want the motherfuckers who shot my son.”

This was getting dangerous, Ray thought. Very dangerous. Looking back at Vinnie, he said, “I understand what you want done, but I’m on parole. One screwup and my P.O. will put me back inside.”

“Are you saying you won’t help me?” Vinnie said. His voice was low and had lost a lot of its nasal sound. Now it sounded menacing.

“You got guys at the Eighth District who can get you any kind of background information you’d need,” Ray said.

Tony snorted. “Cops are always the last ones to know what’s going on. The scumbags who did this, you don’t find them inside a fucking computer, you got to find them on the street. The street always knows. All you got to do is know how to ask it.”

Vinnie rubbed a hand across his face, but his eyes never left Ray. “I don’t want the police getting their hands on these bastards.”

“We might own half the Eighth District, but those cops are only going to go so far,” Tony said. “They got pensions to protect.”

“That’s why we’ve got to do it ourselves,” Vinnie said.

Ray glanced at Charlie Rabbit, an old-timer with a reputation as a cold-blooded killer, and at the two beefed-up bone-breakers sitting like stone statues of sumo wrestlers. He felt his heart thumping in his chest and a cold knot of fear growing in his belly. “I still think they can do you more good than I can. The Eighth District cops, I mean. But if you bring me into the picture, they may not be willing to work with you.”

Tony jabbed his finger at Ray again. “It’s his mess. He needs to clean it up. If he wasn’t such a chickenshit and had done his job in the first place, none of this-”

“Vinnie’s right,” Charlie Liuzza said. “Money is not important. Blame is not important. Not now.” He pointed to Vinnie. “This man lost a son. Carlos lost a nephew. Blood demands blood. Later, Carlos will deal with the other matters.”

Vinnie’s face flushed. He leaned over his desk, the edge cutting a crease in his bloated belly. “You tell my brother I run the Rising Sun, and I make the decisions here.”

Charlie raised his hands toward Vinnie, palms out, gesturing for peace. “He wants these men found and punished for what they did to your son. Nothing else. We can always make more money.”

Looking somewhat mollified, Vinnie sat back in his chair. “Pass my thanks on to my brother.”

As Charlie nodded, Tony jerked his thumb toward Ray. “What about him?”

“What about him?” Charlie said. “Vinnie asked for his help.”

Charlie took in a deep breath. “I’ve heard some good things about Ray. Let’s give him time to think about it. I’m sure he’ll come up with something that can help us.”

“Think about it,” Tony snapped. “We let our people think about whether or not-”

Vinnie pounded his desk again. “Tony!”

Tony’s eyes narrowed, but he closed his mouth. The two goons shifted in their seats. For the first time they looked uncomfortable.

“Everyone’s upset,” Charlie said. “Everybody’s tired. Let’s put off any further discussion until tomorrow. By then I’m sure Ray will have come up with something, at least a general direction for us, based on his years of investigative experience.”

Tony slid forward in his seat and rested his elbows on his knees. He fixed his eyes on Charlie. His face was hard, his tone challenging. “What’s your involvement in this?”

The older man was cool, not letting Tony get to him. His answer was like his style, slow and steady. “A tragedy happened here that involves every one of us. We’ve come together to do what’s best for the family, just like always.”

Vinnie looked at Ray. “Then I guess you have until tomorrow.” He made it sound like a temporary stay of execution.

Ray nodded.

“You played it smart in there,” Charlie said.

“What do you mean?” Ray asked, wondering why Charlie Rabbit had wanted to talk, wondering if Charlie was buying him a farewell drink before killing him, like giving a condemned man a last cigarette as he stood before the firing squad.

After the meeting in Vinnie’s office broke up, Charlie had bumped Ray’s elbow and jerked his head in a “follow me” motion. They went downstairs and out the front door of the Rising Sun without saying a word. Now they were across the street, sitting at the bar in the Hog’s Breath Saloon.

“I’m talking about that prick Tony,” Charlie said. “You didn’t let him get to you. That was good.”

Ray took a drag of his Lucky Strike, then sipped at his whiskey, wishing he knew why he was here.

“Where did you do your time?” Charlie asked.

“Terre Haute.”

“How was it?”

“Long,” Ray said, swirling his glass and watching the ice spin.

“You did about four years, didn’t you?”

Ray looked up. “Four years, three months.”

Charlie lit a cigarette. “I know what you mean about it being long. I’ve been down twice.”

“Where?” Ray asked. He was warming to the old man’s soft-spoken, easy style. Warming to it as long as it didn’t end with a bullet behind his ear.

“First stretch was state time at Angola. You talk about a miserable shit-hole. That was the worst place I’ve ever been. Got lucky, though. I drew a double sawbuck, but I beat the case on appeal and got out after three years. Later, I did nine years’ fed time in Atlanta.”

Ray stubbed out his cigarette butt in the ashtray. “I don’t think I could have done nine years.”

“I said the same thing after I did my three at Angola, but everything is relative.” Charlie took a sip of his drink. “You know the best way to do a long stretch?”

“How?” Ray asked, flicking his Zippo three times to get a flame. Then he lit another Lucky Strike.

“Just like you do the short ones…” Charlie held his glass up.

Ray smiled. He raised his glass and clinked it against Charlie’s. “Day by motherfucking day,” he said at the same time Charlie did. Then they downed the rest of their drinks.

The bartender brought a fresh round. Charlie slid a twenty across the bar. After the bartender moved away, Charlie asked Ray, “You know what’s wrong with us today?”

“Who do you mean?”

“Our thing,” he said. “ La Familia.”

Ray shook his head.

“Everything’s too easy,” Charlie said. “You take a guy like Tony. Young pretty boy, all that gel in his hair. He looks like an actor playing a wiseguy on TV, instead of the real thing. You look at him, you know right away he’s never done time. Probably the only trip he’s ever made to lockup was to bond somebody out.”

“He’d end up somebody’s bitch inside a week.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Charlie said. “You did the right thing, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not smacking him.”

“You talking about today, in Vinnie’s-Mr. Messina’s office?”

“He’s not the fucking pope,” Charlie said. “You can call him Vinnie, but I’m talking about yesterday, last night, this morning, whatever time it was that Tony and his boy Rocco roughed you up behind the bar.”

“You heard about that, huh?”

“I keep an eye on the place for the Old Man.”

“From what I hear that’s not all you do.”

“I eliminate problems,” Charlie said.

“Am I a problem?” Ray asked, working hard to keep the nervous tremor out of his voice.

Charlie smiled. “Not yet.” Then he took a sip of his drink. “I’m serious. You did the right thing by handling that situation the way you did.”

Ray nodded at the compliment. “He punches like a girl.”

Charlie laughed. “He’s a made man, though. I ain’t saying he ever should have been made or that he would have been made back when I was coming up. But he got his button, so you handled it the best way you could.”

“Why does he have such a hard-on for me? I get paid to stop drunks from pawing the girls and to keep strangers from going upstairs. Protecting the cage was Bobby’s job.”

“Because Tony is a fucking turd. He’s covering his own ass and Bobby’s. Bobby is on his crew, same as those other two muscle heads. Tony put Bobby in the cage, so if Bobby catches any blame, that puts blame on Tony, and he’s not going to let that happen.”

Ray took a sip of his drink. Then he said, “Tony blames me, but Vinnie trusts me to help him. Am I missing something?”

“What you said in Vinnie’s office was right. We got the captain of the Eighth District in our pocket. We’re practically sending his kids to college.”

“Then why does Vinnie need my help?”

“Because our friend the captain can’t do us any good.”

“He’s the district commander. He can do anything he wants.”

Charlie shook his head. “The Public Integrity Bureau is crawling up his ass. He’s scared.”

“I can understand that,” Ray said. “PIB crawled up my ass and sent me away for four years.”

“So the captain told Tony to pound sand.”

“I bet Tony loved hearing that.”

Charlie shrugged. “What’s he gonna do? The man’s a police captain.”

“And I’m the next best thing?”

“Believe it or not, Vinnie likes cops. If he wasn’t born a wiseguy, he probably would have been a cop, one of those fat doughnut-eating cops, but still a cop. He’s the one told his brother to bring you on after you got out of the joint. Cops got a better education than your average goombah, anyway, so Vinnie probably figures you got a better shot at catching these punks than any of our guys.”

“But I’m not a cop anymore,” Ray said. “I tried to explain that to him. I’m an ex-con. That means I’m blacklisted for life. I’m like a leper. Where I show up, other cops run so they don’t catch anything from me. All I am now is an unarmed security guard. I can’t go after a crew of armed robbers and murderers without a gun, but if I even get near one, I’m violating my parole.”

“Nobody’s asking you to take them down. Just help us find them.”

Ray steeled his resolve. “What if I say no?”

Charlie’s face got hard. “Then you’ll be a problem.”

They had another round. This time Ray paid.

As they were leaving the bar, Charlie slipped a napkin into Ray’s hand. “My number’s on it. You need help, give me a call. I’ll see what I can do.”

“You think that asshole is going to do it?” Tony asked, leaning against the wall next to one of the big windows in Vinnie Messina’s fourth-floor office.

Vinnie, his ass sunk into the sofa, munched on peanuts from a jar. He nodded as he dropped another handful into his mouth. “He’ll do it.”

Tony eyed the empty chair behind Vinnie’s desk. Pushing away from the wall, he strolled over and sat down, listening with satisfaction as the rich leather creaked under his weight. The casters rolled easily on the hardwood floor as he slid up to the desk and propped his elbows on the lacquered top. “You didn’t see him with that cop downstairs. I don’t think he’s bullshitting when he says he ain’t got no friends on the department anymore.”

Vinnie upended the jar, pouring the last of the peanuts directly into his mouth. When he finished crunching them, he said, “My brother’s gonna think it’s funny if I don’t put Shane on the job.”

Tony knew that Vinnie lived in his older brother’s shadow. He also knew Vinnie didn’t like it, but there was nothing Vinnie could do about it. He wasn’t tough enough to really stand up to his brother. Old Man Carlos put up with a certain amount of posturing from his kid brother, but that was it. Vinnie wasn’t his own man. He certainly would never be able to replace his brother. Someone else would have to do that. “Then why did you let that prick Charlie Rabbit talk you out of it?” Tony said.

Vinnie set the empty peanut jar down on the end table. “He didn’t talk me out of it. I agreed that Shane could think about it until tomorrow.”

“Since when do we let our guys think about whether or not they’re going to do what we tell them?”

“We don’t tell anybody anything,” Vinnie snapped. “I tell them what to do. And they’re not our guys. They’re my guys.”

Now wasn’t the time to argue. Patience, Tony told himself. He had to have patience. “That’s what I meant.”

“I know you got a beef with him over that broad downstairs, but-”

“I don’t give a shit about her,” Tony snapped. “She’s just a piece of tail, like half a dozen others.”

Vinnie stared at him. “When you let things get personal, that’s when you lose control.”

Tony Z. waved a hand at him. “I just don’t like the guy.”

“I like him, and my brother likes him. He did five years for us.”

“It wasn’t five years,” Tony said, tired of hearing about how tough Ray Shane was supposed to be. Everything he had seen of Shane lately just convinced him even more of what a scared little prick he was.

“Close enough to five,” Vinnie said. “But the important thing, at least as far as my brother is concerned, is the guy didn’t rat.”

“He knows what we do to rats.”

Vinnie struggled to his feet. “Point I’m making, Carlos appreciates Shane’s loyalty. And so do I. Shane is an ex-cop. He’s perfect for this job.”

Tony watched Vinnie, wondering if the fat man was going to want his chair back. But Vinnie lurched to the nearest window. Gazing out at the filthy streets of the French Quarter, Vinnie said, “The one thing my brother admires most in people is loyalty.”

Tony swiveled the chair toward the window, looking at Vinnie’s back. “How does doing a few years in the joint make him so loyal? I say it shows how stupid he is for letting the FBI get him on tape.”

Without turning, Vinnie asked, “You know why Charlie Rabbit was here?”

“He said he was here to help, whatever that means.”

“More than that,” Vinnie said. “My brother values Charlie’s opinion over anyone else’s. If he doesn’t like what Charlie tells him about how we handle this situation… Well, a lot of people might end up paying for what happened last night.”

Tony leaned back in the big chair, getting comfortable. “I don’t trust Shane.”

Vinnie turned away from the window, fixing Tony with a stare. Surprisingly, the gaze of the man he considered little more than a fool suddenly made Tony uncomfortable. Vinnie’s eyes had something burning in them that Tony had never before seen in the blubbery fool’s expression. Menace. “Carlos is watching us, so you make sure Shane does what I want him to do.”