Hush Money

1

One of the two men approaching the golf tee was being studied in the crosshairs of an assassin’s sniperscope. The two men were riding in a red and mostly white golf cart that was putt-putting across the brown grass toward the first tee of the back nine. One of them would soon fold in half as a .460 Magnum blew his intestines and much of his spine and a good deal of blood out of the back of him. But that would not happen immediately. The man in the assassin’s crosshairs had almost five minutes to live.

The driver was a tall man, well over six feet and in obvious good shape, a man with smooth, seemingly unused and handsome features that gave him the look of a twenty-five-year-old when he was in fact forty. His hair was brown and wavy, no gray, his chin deep-dimpled, cheeks too, eyes the color of Paul Newman’s. The passenger was of medium height and build, with a sagging middle that helped to make him look every one of his fifty-four years. His face was spade-shaped, deeply lined, and his brown hair was thinning on top, getting white at the temples. Wire frame glasses nestled on the bridge of a slightly bulbous nose and magnified his colorless gray eyes.

Their cart ascended the slope of the mound from which they’d begin their second nine. They got out of the cart.

They were men as strikingly different in appearance as in background. The smaller man, the one in the more conservative attire — gray golf sweater, light blue Banlon shirt, gray slacks — was Carl H. Reed, former minority leader of the Iowa state legislature, recently retired from that position, recently appointed state highway commissioner. The big man, in the bright red sweater with dyed leather trim, deep blue Banlon shirt and white slacks, the tanned blue-eyed man who had the bearing of a professional athlete, was Joseph P. DiPreta, youngest of the three DiPreta brothers and perhaps foremost amateur golfer in the state, one of the best amateur golfers in the nation.

Excluding the sniper, who lay some distance away in the rough, the two men had the course to themselves on this cool and overcast autumn afternoon. It was late enough in the month — October — for even the most diehard of golf addicts to have hung up their shoes and stowed away their clubs for the season; but Joey DiPreta was more dedicated to the game than most and often played well into November, weather permitting. Today, however, Joey had other reasons for going out on the course: business reasons. Getting in a round or two of golf was a decidedly secondary concern; far more important to get Carl Reed out here on the course this afternoon, alone.

Carl Reed was delighted, almost honored, to have been invited to share an afternoon of golf with Des Moines’ most colorful and celebrated amateur athlete. Carl was a sports nut who took an interest in everything from the World Series and the Super Bowl to log-rolling contests and pro wrestling. He admired and came close to envying guys who pursued athletics as a way of life, and he could especially identify with a Joey DiPreta, since golf, of all sports, meant most to Carl. Golf was the game that let him come down out of the bleachers and onto the playing field, a game that got his mind off the pressures of politics and business. Not that golf was merely a pastime for Carl, an escape valve he could turn when psychological steam built up inside him. No. He was, in his way, as dedicated to the game as was Joey DiPreta.

Carl was aware, of course, of the DiPreta family’s less than wholesome reputation. Their present-day interests, which included a construction company and a Midwestern chain of discount stores, among many others, were not so much in question as were the origins of the DiPreta wealth, which, according to rumor, dated back to the days of bootlegging and worse. As a kid he’d heard stories of the DiPretas and protection rackets and loan-sharking. During the war the name DiPreta always seemed to come up when the black market was being discussed. Some said they had never totally severed their ties with organized crime, and just last year there had been accusations of stock swindle leveled at Vincent DiPreta, Joey’s eldest brother. Nevertheless, Carl had lived in the Des Moines area all his life, holding for over twenty years positions of financial and political responsibility and, yes, power; and in all that time he’d seen no hard evidence to substantiate allegations relative to the DiPretas being a Mafia-style crime family. Nothing at all to turn ugly rumor into ugly fact.

Still, Carl was sensitive to its being a somewhat risky proposition for him to have contact with even a possible mob associate. He’d fought long and hard to build and then maintain a good name in a field that had become more and more tainted in recent years. It was with considerable sadness that he’d come to hear his own college-age children using the word “politician” as if it were spelled with four letters.

Joey could sense the other man’s uneasiness, had sensed it immediately on meeting Carl at the clubhouse. For that reason he’d cooled it on the first nine, not even hinting at the real purpose of the afternoon, just breaking the ice with the guy, whose nervousness, Joey soon decided, must have come from rubbing shoulders with a local super-star. Joey took advantage of Carl’s admiration, using it as an excuse to get overly chummy, to try to become an instant close friend of Carl’s. It seemed to be working.

Funny thing is, Joey thought, watching the skinny but potbellied Carl select a wood, that awkward looking son of a bitch shoots a pretty fair game. The afternoon had been damn near an even match, and Joey was maybe going to get beaten. And he surely wasn’t doing that on purpose. He wanted to win the clown over, but he wasn’t about to throw the match for it — some things were just against Joey’s principles.

Carl shoved a wooden tee into the hard ground, and Joey said, “Whoa! Hey, hold on a second. How about we catch our breath a minute, Carl? Got some beer in a little cooler in back of the cart. What do you say?”

Carl hadn’t wanted to admit being winded, but he sure was, and a beer sounded good. He’s been playing hard, and though he knew he was outclassed, he’d somehow been managing to hold his own; he hoped Joey hadn’t been just going easy on him. He told Joey a beer was fine with him and Joey went and got the beer and they sat in the cart for a while and drank and talked. Joey complimented Carl on holing out on the last green, said that was really some show of putting, and Carl said thanks, his luck was running good today.

“Luck, my ass,” Joey said. “That was a hell of a round you just shot, my friend.”

“I guess you must’ve inspired me,” Carl said with a grin.

Joey, who was grinning too, his teeth as white as fresh white paint. “Don’t you politicians ever let up laying on the bullshit?”

“No, I mean it, Joey. This is really a pleasure, playing with someone of your standing. I can’t tell you how I appreciate your inviting me to join you this afternoon.”

“You think it’s easy finding somebody else crazy enough to want to come out in the dead of winter and knock a little white ball around the ground?”

“Now who’s laying on the bullshit?” Carl swigged his beer. “Look, I saw you on TV last year, when the guy at KRNT interviewed you. He asked you why you played so late in the season, after most of us’ve given up the ghost, and you said—”

“And I said I liked having the course to myself, because I could concentrate better. Well, that’s true, I guess, but a guy’s got to have some friends, right? Can’t be a goddamn hermit all the time. Tell you the truth, though, Carl, I did have sort of an ulterior motive for getting together with you.”

“Oh?”

Joey noticed the crow’s-feet pulling in tight around Carl’s eyes. Careful, Joey thought, don’t blow it now. “Yeah, well, I mean I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time. Admired you, you know? You got quite a reputation yourself.”

“Come on now, Joey.”

“No, really. I’m a Democrat too, you know. That’s pretty rare around these parts.” Joey forced a laugh, and Carl laughed a little, too. But just a little. Joey had a sinking feeling. He’d appraised Carl Reed as a pushover, a mark, judging from the hero-worshipping attitude the man had displayed earlier; but now Joey had his doubts about being able to pull this thing off, and he just had to. It wasn’t that often his brothers entrusted him with something this important; it wasn’t that often he helped out with business at all. Damn.

“Joey, if you have something on your mind...”

“Hey, remember that junket to Vegas last year? We had some kind of good time on that one, huh?”

Carl nodded. He’d first met Joey DiPreta on that trip, had spoken to him casually on the plane, talked about golf, sports in general.

“That wasn’t your first Vegas hop, was it, Carl?”

“No, it wasn’t. I went a couple other times. What’s your point, Joey?”

The junket was a weekend trip to Las Vegas that Carl and many others in his social circle — doctors, lawyers, executives — had gone on every year now three years running; it was a husband and wife affair, $1500 for the whole trip for both, including hotel room and plane fare and five hundred dollars in casino chips.

“I don’t think you were aware of it at the time, Carl, but my family owns the travel agency that sponsored that junket — in fact all the junkets you’ve been on. Just one of a number of gambling trips we sponsor. To Vegas, the Caribbean, England.”

Carl shrugged, sipped his beer, wondered where this conversation was going and said, “Joey, you’re right... I wasn’t aware your family owned that travel agency. But I’m not particularly surprised, either. I’m aware the DiPreta interests extend to many areas.”

“That’s for sure, Carl. We got lots of interests. We own a sand and gravel company, for instance. And a construction firm. And some other businesses that you might run into now and then, Carl, in your position as state highway commissioner.”

Carl Reed leaned forward and looked at Joey DiPreta straight on. The eyes behind the wire frame glasses were as hard and cold as any Joey had seen. Carl spoke through his teeth: “Wait just one moment, Mr. DiPreta, while I make something clear to you...”

“Hold on, hold on, hold on. I know what you’re thinking.”

“Do you? Then I see no reason to continue this discussion.”

“I know what you’re thinking and I’m not going to suggest anything of the kind. We know you. We know all about you, what sort of man you are. I said I knew your reputation, remember? You’re a man of character, with a name like goddamn sterling silver. So we aren’t about to suggest anything, uh, out of line to you. No. No under-the-table stuff. No kickbacks. Nothing. We’ll bid for jobs, sure, but if our bid isn’t lowest and best, to hell with us.”

“Then what’s this about?”

Joey lifted his hands palms out in a you-know-how-it-is gesture. “Some people aren’t as incorruptible as you, Carl. Your predecessor, for example.”

“My predecessor?”

“We had dealings with him. A lot of dealings. I guess you could call them extra-legal dealings. You see, it was a family thing. Mr. Grayson, your predecessor, was married to a cousin of ours and, well, a thing worked out where he sent some business our way and we kicked back some money to him.”

“Why in God’s name are you telling me this?”

“Because you’re going to find out anyway. You’re going to know. When you get settled down in Grayson’s chair and start examining his records, and then in about a year when those roads we laid down start cracking up like plaster of Paris, you’re going to know what was going on all right.”

“And I’m going to have the makings of a large-scale political scandal. Not to mention possible indictments against members of the DiPreta family.”

“Not to mention that.”

“Well. Thank you for the nine holes, Joey.” Carl rose. “And thank you for the information.”

“Sit down, Carl,” Joey said, pulling him back down to the cart seat with some force, though his voice stayed friendly and pleasant. “I’ll get you another beer.”

“I haven’t finished this one and I’m not about to. Let go of my arm.”

“Listen to me. All we want of you is silence. We will have no dealings with you whatsoever during your term of office, other than this one instance. My family is legitimate these days. This stuff with Grayson all took place back four, five years ago when Papa was still alive. My brothers and me are moving the DiPreta concerns into aboveboard areas completely.”

Carl said nothing.

“Look. The publicity alone could kill us. And like you said, it’s possible indictments could come out of it, and if indictments’re possible, so are prison terms, for Christ’s sake, and more investigations. So all we’re asking of you is this: Just look the other way. You’d be surprised how much it can pay, doing nothing. That’s what they call a deal like this: something for nothing.”

“It’s also called a payoff. It’s called paying hush money, Joey, cover-up money.”

“You can call it whatever you want.”

“How much, Joey? How much are the DiPretas willing to pay to hush me up?”

“You’re a wealthy man, Carl. You’re a banker. Your wife has money — her family does, I mean. Land holdings. It would take a lot to impress you.”

“Yes, it would.”

“I want you to keep in mind that an investigation would bring out your own contacts with the DiPreta family. We’ve been seen together this afternoon, for one thing, you and me. And those yearly Las Vegas junkets, on the last of which you and me were seen together...”

“You’re really reaching, Joey. Tell me, how much to cover it up? What’s the offer I can’t refuse?”

Joey leaned close and whispered with great melodramatic effect: “Fifty. Thousand. Dollars.”

Carl was silent for a moment. “That’s a lot of money. Could have been more, but it’s a lot of money.”

“A very lot, Carl. Especially when the IRS doesn’t have to know about it.”

“Let me ask you something, Joey.”

“Sure, Carl. Anything.”

“Where do we stand on our golf scores?”

“What? What are you...”

“Humor me. How many strokes down am I right now?”

“Well, uh, one stroke, Carl. I’m leading you by one, you know that.”

“Good. That way you’re going to be able to quit while you’re ahead, Joey. Because this game is over.”

Carl got up and out of the cart and began walking away.

“Carl!”

Without toning, Carl said, “Thank you for an interesting afternoon, Mr. DiPreta.”

“Carl, today you were offered money. Tomorrow it could be... something else. Something unpleasant.”

Carl kept walking.

Joey hopped out of the cart and said, almost shouting, “You know that term you used, Carl — hush money? That’s a good term, hush money. I like that. There’s two different kinds of hush money, you know — the kind you pay to a guy so he’ll keep quiet and the kind you pay to have a guy made quiet. Permanently quiet.”

Carl felt the heat rising to his face. Unable to contain his anger any longer, he whirled around, ready to deliver one final verbal burst, pointing his finger at Joey DiPreta like a gun.

And Joey DiPreta doubled over, as if shot, as if somehow a metaphysical bullet had been fired from the finger Carl was pointing; or at least that was Carl’s immediate impression.

Within a split second the sound of the high-power rifle fire caught up with the .460 Magnum missile that had passed through Joey DiPreta like a cheap Mexican dinner, tossing him in the air and knocking him off the mound and out of sight before Carl really understood what he’d just witnessed; before he really understood that he’d just seen a high-power bullet bore through a man and cut him literally in two and lift him up and send him tumbling lifelessly off the hillock.

Carl drew back the pointing finger and hit the deck, finally, rolled off the hill himself, to get out of the line of any further fire.

But there was none.

The assassin had hit his mark and fled, satisfied with his score for the afternoon, and why not? As one of Des Moines’ finest would later caustically point out, it isn’t every day somebody shoots a hole in one.

2

His name was Steven Bruce McCracken, but nobody called him any of those names. His friends called him Mac. His sister called him Stevie. His mother, when she was alive, called him Steve. His father, when he was alive, called him Butch. His crew had called him Sarge. The VC had called him a lot of things.

His reputation, it was said, was considerable among the Vietcong. That was what he’d heard from ARVN personnel, who themselves seemed a little in awe of him. To his own way of thinking, he’d never done anything so out of the ordinary; he was just one of many gunners, just another crew chief doing his job. As crew chief one of his responsibilities was to provide cover fire as men (usually wounded, since the bulk of his missions were Medivacs) were hustled aboard the helicopter. He would stand in the doorway, or outside of it, firing his contraband Thompson submachine gun (which he’d latched onto early in the game, picking it off a Cong corpse) and shouting obscenities in three languages at the usually unseen enemy, unflinching as return fire was sent his way, as if daring those gooks to hit him. Personally, he didn’t see how any of that could build him any special reputation among the enemy or anyone else. He always suspected those damn ARVN were putting him on about it — he had trouble understanding them half the time anyway, his Vietnamese lingo consisting mostly of bar talk and their English being no better — but later G-2 had confirmed that he did indeed have a name in Charlie’s camp. He supposed his appearance must’ve had something to do with whatever reputation he may have had. He stood out among the Americans, who, to the gooks, all looked alike, and he made a bigger target than most, which must’ve been frustrating as hell to the little bastards, missing a target so big. He was six-two and powerfully built — his body strung with holstered handguns and belts of ammunition and hand grenades — his white-blond hair and white-blond mustache (a slight, military-trim mustache that still managed a gunfighter’s droop on either side), showing up vividly against his deeply tanned skin.

His appearance today, a month out of service, was little different, even if he wasn’t wearing guns and ammo and grenades. True, the hair was already longer than the Marines would have liked, but other than that he looked much the same. His physical condition was outstanding; even his limp had lessened, seemed almost to have disappeared. A chunk of flesh along the inside of his right thigh had been blown away in the helicopter crash, just some fat and some not particularly valuable meat, leaving a hole six inches long by three inches wide, a purplish canyon that at its greatest depth was two inches. There was still some shrapnel in that hole, and pieces worked their way out now and then; he could feel them moving. Nothing to be worried about, really. He’d never look good in a bathing suit again, but what the hell? He was lucky. A few inches higher and he could’ve spent the rest of his life pissing through a tube and trying to remember what sex was like.

He’d been sole survivor of the crash. They’d been coming down into a clearing for a Medivac, and some fucking brush-hugging gook shot the hydraulic system out of the plane (they never called it a helicopter, always a plane) and made their landing premature and murderous. Coming down, they caught another shell, a big one, and at hover level the plane blew up and killed most of the men they’d been coming to save. He himself had been the only one on the scene who got off with relatively light injuries. The pilot lasted an hour, died just minutes before another plane came in to pick up survivors, which was him and two badly wounded ARVNs, one of them a lieutenant who died on the way back.

He had learned at the beginning not to form too close a friendship with any of his fellow crew members, because he’d had a whole goddamn crew shot from under him the first goddamn month. The damn mortality rate was just too fucking high for friendship.

But sometimes you can’t avoid it.

The pilot had been a friend. A friend he’d talked with and laughed with. A friend he’d gone on R and R with in Bangkok. A friend he’d shared smokes and booze and women with. A friend he’d held in his arms while a sucking chest wound took care of the future.

His own wound, the wound in his thigh, was nothing. Nothing compared to the wound left by the loss of his friend. Trauma, it’s called. At the hospital the powers that be decided he needed some visits with the staff psychiatrist, and by the time he was patched up again, mentally and physically, he was told that because of the trauma of losing the pilot and rest of the crew, because of that and his shot up leg, he was being sent home.

That had been fine with him at the time, but soon the trauma had faded, as far as he was concerned, and the leg felt better, and he demanded to be sent back; he’d re-upped specifically because he liked combat. But barely into his first tour of his reenlistment, he was stuck state-side. He was told he would not be sent back to Vietnam, because no one was being sent back: the gradual withdrawal of troops was under way, with the Marines among the first in line to leave.

He had no regrets about Vietnam, other than not getting his fill of it. He would’ve liked to have had another crack at the gooks; losing another crew had only made him more eager to wade in and fight. But now, finally, he was glad to be out of the Corps. His last two years and some months had been spent at glorious Quantico, Virginia, which was the sort of base that made Vietnam seem like a pleasant memory. State-side duty bored the ass off him; he preferred the war: that was where a soldier was meant to be, goddamn it, and besides, the pay was better. Sometimes he wished he had signed on as a mercenary, with Air America, instead of reenlisting in the Marines. As a mercenary he could’ve picked up a minimum of twelve thousand a year and be more than a damn toy soldier, playing damn war-games in the backwoods of Virginny.

But now that he was a civilian again — on the surface, anyway — he was glad he hadn’t gone the Air America route. He might have been killed as a mercenary, which was a risk he wouldn’t have minded taking before, and still didn’t, but not for money. The money a mercenary could make, which had once looked so attractive to him, seemed meaningless now. Dying wasn’t a disturbing concept to him, really; in fact sometimes it damn near appealed to him. What disturbed him was the thought of dying for no reason, without purpose. If he lost his life in pursuit of his private war, well, okay; at least he’d have died pursuing a worthwhile cause. You could argue the pros and cons of a Vietnam, but not this war, not his war. Anyone who knew the facts would agree — even the damn knee-jerk liberals, he’d wager.

Since parting company with Uncle Sugar, he’d been living alone in an apartment but spending some time with his sister and her small daughter. He didn’t have a job, or, rather, he didn’t have an employer. He told his sister he was planning to go to college starting second semester and actually had filled out applications for Drake, Simpson, and a couple of two-year schools in the area. Hell, he might even attend one of them, when his war was over; he had GI, he had it coming.

Not that he was thinking that far ahead. That was a fairy-tale happy ending, off in the fuzzy and distant future of a month from now, and he wasn’t thinking any further ahead than the days his war would last. Yes, days. With a war as limited as this one, a few days should be enough, considering no further reconnaissance would be necessary, to seek out and destroy the enemy. He’d been over and over the legacy of tapes, documents, committing them to memory, all but word for word, and he now knew the patterns, the lifestyle of the DiPreta family like he knew his own. A few days of ambush, of psychological warfare, and the score would be settled, the war would be won. He might even survive to go to college and become a useful member of society as his sister wanted. Who could say.

It was 4:47 p.m. when he arrived at the two-story white clapboard house, the basement of which was his apartment. The neighborhood was middle to lower-middle class, the house located on East Walnut between East 14th and 15th streets, two main drags cutting through Des Moines, 14th a one-way south, 15th a one-way north. His apartment’s location was a strategically good one. Fourteenth and 15th provided access to any place in the city, with the east/ west freeway, 235, a few blocks north; and he was within walking distance of the core of the DiPreta family’s most blatantly corrupt activities. A short walk west on Walnut (he would have to circle the massive, impressively beautiful Capitol building, its golden dome shining even on a dull, overcast afternoon like this one) and he’d find the so-called East Side, the rundown collection of secondhand stores, seedy bars, garish nightclubs, greasy spoons and porno movie houses that crowded the capitol steps like a protest rally. The occasional wholly reputable business concern seemed out of place in this ever-deteriorating neighborhood, as if put there by accident, or as a practical joke. At one time the East Side had been the hub of Des Moines, the business district, the center of everything; now it was the center of nothing, except of some of the more squalid activities in the capital city.

Location wasn’t the only nice thing about his living quarters; nicer yet was the privacy. He had his own entrance around back, four little cement steps leading down to the doorway. The apartment was one large room that took up all of the basement except for a walled-off laundry room, which he was free to use. He also had his own bathroom with toilet and shower, though he did have to go through the laundry room to get to it. Otherwise his apartment was absolutely private and he had no one bothering him; he saw the Parkers (the family he rented from) hardly at all. He had a refrigerator, a stove, and a formica-top table that took up one corner of the room as a make-do kitchenette. A day bed that in its couch identity was a dark green went well with the light green-painted cement walls. There was also an empty bookcase he hadn’t gotten around to filling yet, though some gun magazines and Penthouses were stacked on the bottom shelf (he’d given up Playboy while in Nam, as he didn’t care for its political slant) and a big double-door pine wardrobe for his clothes and such, which he kept locked.

The wardrobe was where he stowed the Weatherby, which he’d brought into the house carried casually under and over his arm. It was zipped up in a tan-and-black vinyl pouch, with foam padding and fleece lining, and he’d made no pretense about what he was carrying. He’d already explained to the Parkers that shooting was his hobby. Luckily, Mr. Parker was not a hunter or a gun buff, or he might’ve asked embarrassing questions. Someone who knew what he was talking about might have looked at the Weatherby and asked, “What you planning to shoot, lad? Big game?”

And he would’ve had to say, “That’s exactly right”

He laid the Weatherby Mark V in the bottom of the wardrobe, alongside the rest of the small but substantial arsenal he’d assembled for his war: a Browning 9-millimeter automatic with checkered walnut grips, blue finish, fixed sights, and thirteen-shot magazine, in brown leather shoulder holster rig; a Colt Python revolver, blue, 357 Magnum with four-inch barrel, wide hammer spur and adjustable rear sight, in black leather hip holster; a Thompson submachine gun, 45 caliber, black metal, brown wood; boxes of the appropriate ammunition; and half a dozen pineapple-type hand grenades, which he’d made himself, buying empty shell casings, filling them with gunpowder, providing primers.

He closed the wardrobe but left it unlocked.

He felt fine. Not jumpy at all. He sniffed under his arms. Nothing, not a scent; this afternoon had been literally no sweat. That was good to know, after some years away from actual combat. Good to know he hadn’t lost his edge. And that the helicopter crash hadn’t left him squeamish: that was good to know, too. Very.

But he took a shower anyway. The hot needles of water melted him; he dialed the faucet tight, so that the water pressure would stay as high as possible. If he told himself there was no tension in him, he’d be lying, he knew. He needed to relax, unwind. He’d stayed cool today, yes, but nobody stays that cool.

The phone rang and he cut his shower short, running bare-ass out to answer it, hopping from throw rug to throw rug to avoid the cold cement of a basement floor that was otherwise as naked as he was.

“Yes?” he said.

“Stevie, where’ve you been? I been trying to get you.”

It was his sister, Diane. She was a year or two older than he, around thirty or so, but she played the older sister act to the hilt. It was even worse now, with their parents dead.

“I was out, Di.”

“I won’t ask where. I’m not going to pry.”

“Good, Di.”

“Well, I just thought you’d maybe like to come over tonight for supper, that’s all. I came home over lunch hour and put a casserole in, and it’ll be too much for just Joni and me.”

Joni was her six-year-old daughter. Diane was divorced, but she hadn’t gotten out of the habit of cooking for a family, and consequently he’d been eating at her place several nights a week this last month. Which was fine, as his specialty was canned soup and TV dinners.

“I’d like that, Di.”

“Besides, I want to talk to you.”

“About school, I suppose.”

“About school, yes, and some other things. I’m your sister and interested in what you’re doing. Is that so terrible?”

“Well, not a lot has changed since you saw me yesterday, Di.”

“I give you free meals, you give me a hard time. Is that what you call a fair exchange?”

“Hey, I appreciate it, Sis. I even love you part of the time.”

“When I put the plate of food down in front of you, especially.”

“Yeah, especially then.”

“Look, I got to get back to my desk. See you at six?”

“That’ll be fine. What’s for dinner? Casserole, you said.”

“Oh, you’re really going to love me tonight, little brother. Made one of your favorites.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“Lasagna.”

Appropriate, he thought to himself, smiling a little.

“Stevie? Are you still there?”

“I’m still here, Di. See you at six.”

3

Every day, both going to and coming from work, Diane would turn her head away as she drove by the little white clapboard house where her mother had been murdered. Across the way was a junk dealer’s lot, a graveyard for smashed-up and broken-down automobiles, which she would shift her attention to to avoid looking at the house. The junk yard was hardly a pleasant landscape to gaze upon and even had its metaphorical suggestion of the very thing she wanted not to think about: death, destruction, mortality. But she would look at it every day, twice a day, rather than look at the house.

She would have avoided the whole road if that were possible, but there seemed to be no way to avoid this particular stretch of concrete. East 14th Street seemed to run through her life like her own personal interstate, complete with all the rest stops and exits of her life, significant and insignificant alike, everything from the insurance company where she worked to shopping centers, restaurants, movie theaters. Her mother’s house, of course, was on East 14th; so was the Travelers Inn Motor Lodge, where her father had been manager and where, in his private suite of rooms, he had died. Her brother lived in an apartment on Walnut, just off East 14th, while she herself lived in an apartment house on the outskirts of Des Moines, where East 14th turns into Highway 65, the highway along which the DiPretas, her father’s employers for so many years, lived each in their individual homes, enjoying the expanse of Iowa farm country between Des Moines and its smalltown neighbor, Indianola.

It was a street that rolled up and down and over hills that seemed surprised to have a city on them. On her drive home, once past certain landmarks — the skyscraper outline of the Des Moines downtown, the awesome Capitol building, the bridge spanning the railroad yard — East 14th turned into an odd mélange of small businesses and middle-class homes, with random pockets of forest-type trees as a reminder of what had to be carved away to put a city here. It was an interesting drive, an interesting street, and she liked having access to all her needs on one easy route. But today, as every day, she averted her eyes as she drove by that little white clapboard house where her mother had been shot to death.

Diane didn’t look at the house, just as she didn’t look at the loss of her parents. She ignored both, because recognizing either would emotionally overwhelm her. She hid the pain away in some attic of her mind and went on with her life as though none of it had happened. She’d cried only twice during the course of the whole affair: first, on receiving the news of her mother’s murder, and second, on hearing of her father’s suicide. Both times she had cried until she hurt; until her chest hurt, her eyes hurt, until nothing hurt; until emptiness set in and she could feel nothing at all. After that, after crying those two times, she didn’t cry any more. Not a tear. Even at the funeral she hadn’t wept. People congratulated her on her strength, found it remarkable she’d been able to face the tragedy head on as she had. But they were wrong; she hadn’t faced a thing, head on or otherwise. Facing it would have ripped her apart, left her emotions frayed and her mental state a shambles. So she faced nothing; she blocked off everything.

And she knew it. She knew that repressing emotion, letting the pressure build up behind some closed door in her head, was probably an unhealthy attitude. Sometimes she wished she could cry again, wished she would cry again. Sometimes she wished she could get it out, all of it. She’d lie in bed, consciously forcing the thoughts from her mind, feeling emotion churning in her stomach like something she couldn’t digest. Wishing that were the case, wishing it were that simple, wishing she could stick a finger down her throat and make herself heave all of that bile out of her system.

Her husband, Jerry, used to try to make her talk about it; talk it out, get rid of it. It wasn’t that Jerry was a particularly sensitive individual, Christ no. She smiled bitterly at the thought. Jerry just wanted in her pants all the time; that was Jerry’s only concern. After her parents died she lost interest in sex, which had of course bruised Jerry’s overinflated ego. She didn’t know why, but she just felt cold toward Jerry as far as sex was concerned. Nothing stirred in her, no matter what he tried.

And try he did. Before, he’d never been particularly sex-oriented during their marriage; after the first year, it had been a three-times-a-week affair: Friday, Saturday, Wednesday, a passionless, clockwork ritual. She used to feel slightly rejected because of that, since she’d always been told she was sexy and sexy-looking, had always been sought after by guys and liked to think of herself as cute. Sure, maybe her boobs weren’t so big, but how often did a guy meet up with a girl with natural platinum blonde hair and the blue eyes to go with it? She was cute, goddamnit, and knew it, and was proud of it. She’d always liked sex, had fun with it; that had been a lot of what she’d liked about Jerry, though Jerry the Tiger had turned tame after a marriage license made it legal. That was Jerry, all right: back-seat stud, mattress dud. But when he found out about her newly acquired sexual reluctance, Christ, then he was waving a damn erection in her face every time she looked at him. Which was as seldom as she could help it.

“You’re frigid,” he’d tell her, and she wouldn’t say anything. After all, she didn’t turn him away; she just wasn’t particularly responsive. And how the hell could she help that? How the hell could she help how she felt? You don’t turn love and sex on like tap water, Jerry. “If you didn’t think about your parents all the time, we wouldn’t have this problem,” he would say. I am not thinking about my parents, she’d say. “Oh, but you are. You’re thinking about not thinking about them.” That doesn’t make sense, Jerry. “It makes more sense than you, you frigid goddamn bitch.” And she would say, all right, Jerry, do it to me if you want, Jerry, you will anyway. And he would. And she would feel nothing.

Nothing except contempt for her husband, which blossomed into the divorce, which as yet was not final, as the law’s ninety-day wait (to allow opportunity for reconciliation) wasn’t quite up. But the marriage was over, no doubt of that. Diane was aware that even before the divorce thing arose Jerry had been seeing other girls; and mutual friends had told her recently that Jerry had already narrowed his field to one girl, who oddly enough was also a platinum blonde (not natural, she’d wager) and who had a more than superficial resemblance to somebody named Diane. Which seemed to her a sick, perverse damn thing for the son of a bitch to do.

She thought back to what he’d said to her the night their marriage exploded into mutual demands for divorce. He’d said, “You’re cold, Diane. Maybe not frigid, but cold. You got yourself so frozen over inside you don’t feel a goddamn fucking thing for or about anybody.”

It was a blow that had struck home at the time, a game point Jerry had won but a thought she’d discarded later, after some reflection. She wasn’t cold inside. She could still feel. She could still love. She loved little Joni more than anything in the world. She was filled with the warmth of love every time she held her daughter in her arms, and she was having trouble, frankly, not spoiling the child because of that.

And there was Stevie. She loved her “little” brother, damn near as much as her little girl. She worried about him, hoped his life would take on some direction, hoped there wasn’t an emotional time bomb in him, ticking inside him, because he too had shown no outward emotional response to the deaths of their mother and father.

And why wasn’t Stevie going out with any girls? It wasn’t right, wasn’t like Stevie, who was a notorious pussy-chaser. She hoped he hadn’t contracted some weird jungle strain of VD over there and couldn’t have normal relations because of it. She asked him what was wrong, why wasn’t he dating or anything, and he explained he wanted “no extra baggage right now.” That was unhealthy. A man needed a good sex life.

True, she was hardly the one to talk, hardly the one to be dispensing advice to the sexually lovelorn. She hadn’t seen any men since breaking with Jerry, hadn’t gone out once. Hadn’t had sex, hadn’t been close to having sex, since Jerry’s last rape attempt almost eight months ago. Hadn’t had any desire for it.

Her social life was limited and anything but sexy, but she enjoyed it. She spent her evenings with her daughter, watching television, playing games, sometimes going to movies, when she could find one rated G. If Joni wanted to stay overnight with her friend Sally, downstairs, well, that was fine; Diane could catch another, more adult film with one of the girls from the office. And now with brother Stevie home from service, she could have him over and cook for him and have him join their diminutive family circle and add some needed masculine authority.

She was just a few blocks from the apartment house now. She glanced at the clock on the Pontiac’s instrument panel and switched on the radio to catch the news. The newscaster was in the middle of a story about a shooting that had taken place earlier that afternoon. She didn’t catch the name of the victim, but she heard enough of the story to tell it was a ghastly affair, a piece of butchery out of a bad dream. Some psychopath sniper was loose, had cut a man down with a high-power rifle in broad daylight, on the golf course of an exclusive local country club. She shivered and switched off the radio. That was just the sort of thing she didn’t need to hear about.

She pulled into the apartment-housing parking lot. She saw her brother’s car in the lot and smiled. Christ, it was good to have Stevie home.

4

Vincent DiPreta was known, in his earlier, more colorful days, as Vince the Burner — even though he himself rarely set fire to anything outside of his Havana cigars. The name grew out of Vincent’s pet racket, which was bust-outs. A bust-out is setting up a business specifically with arson in mind, and it works something like this: You set yourself up in an old building or store picked up for peanuts; you build a good credit rating by finding some legitimate citizen looking for a fast buck and willing to front for you; you use that credit to stockpile merchandise, which will be moved out the back door for fencing just prior to the “accidental” fire; you burn the place down, collect the insurance on the building and its contents, and declare bankruptcy. A torch artist out of Omaha did the burning for Vincent; theirs was an association that dated back to the forties and lasted well into the seventies. Vincent was dabbling in bust-outs long after he and the rest of his family had otherwise moved into less combustible and (superficially, at least) more respectable areas of business.

In fact, during the course of his bust-out career, Vincent was so brazen as to bum two of his own places, right there in Des Moines. Even for Vince the Burner that took gall. “You don’t shit where you eat, Vince,” he was told the first time; but nobody said anything the second go-around, as the sheer fucking balls of the act was goddamn awe inspiring. First he’d burned one of his two plush, high-overhead key clubs. Both had been big money-makers for years, but when liquor by the drink passed in Iowa and made the key-club idea a thing of the past, he decided to convert one of the clubs into a straight bar/nightclub and put the torch to the other. Then, a few years later, he’d burned DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant on East 14th, because he was planning to remodel the place anyway, so what the hell? And besides, most of the money had gone to the Church, who deserved it more than some goddamn insurance company, for Christ’s sake.

Vincent was a good Catholic, or at least his own version of one. His wife went to Mass every Sunday, and his money did too, though he himself stayed home. In recent years, when his teen-age son, Vince Jr., had contracted leukemia, Vincent had upped his already generous contributions to the Church in response to their priest’s suggestion that the son’s illness was repayment for wrongdoings committed by the DiPreta family over the years. Vince Jr.’s illness was a classic example of the son paying for the sins of the father, the priest suggested, and a monetary show of faith might help even the score. This sounded worth a try to Vince Sr. — maybe a healthy donation to the Church would work as a sort of miracle drug for Vince Jr. — and Vincent promptly got in touch with his torch-artist friend in Omaha for one last fling. DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant burned, got remodeled and was now doing as good as ever — no use busting out a money-maker, after all.

But it hadn’t done much good for Vince Jr., who died anyway, despite massive injections of cash into the local diocese coffers. And even though their priest had been on a nice DiPreta-paid trip to Rome when Vince Jr. passed away, Vincent bore no bitterness toward the Church. No promises had been made, no miracles guaranteed. Secretly, however, he couldn’t help wishing his and his son’s salvation was in more reliable hands, though he said just the opposite to his wife Anna.

It was no secret, though, to Anna or anyone else, how hard Vincent took the death of his son, his only son. Vince the Burner had always been a fat man, the stereotype of a.jolly, heavyset patriarchal Italian. But after his son died, Vincent began to lose weight. He immersed himself in his work as never before, pushing harder when age dictated slowing down, but at the same time seeming to care less about his work than ever before. He developed a bleeding ulcer, which required several operations and a restricted diet that made his weight drop like a car going off a cliff. The expression “shadow of his former self” was never more apt The six-foot Vincent dropped from two hundred and fifty-five pounds to one hundred and sixty-three pounds in a year’s time.

Vincent had been a handsome fat man, a round, jovial, eminently likable man. As a skinny man, Vincent was something else again. The flesh hung on him like a droopy suit, loose and stretched from years of carrying all that weight around; the firmly packed jowls of fat Vincent were jolly, while the sacklike jowls of skinny Vincent were repulsive. His face took on a melancholy look, his small dark eyes hidden in a face of layered, pizza-dough flesh. It was as though a large man’s face had been transposed to a smaller man’s smaller skull. The features seemed slack, almost as if they were about to slide off his face like shifting, melting wax.

If, these last seven years since the death of his son, Vincent DiPreta’s countenance seemed a melancholy one, then on this evening that countenance could only be described as one of tragic proportions. He sat in a small meeting room at a table the size of two card tables stuck together and wept silently, pausing now and then to dab his eyes with an increasingly dampening handkerchief. There was a phone on the table, which he glanced at from time to time, and a bottle of Scotch whisky and a glass, which Vincent had been making use of, his restricted diet for the moment set aside. He was smoking a cigar — or at least one resided in the ashtray before him, trails of smoke winding toward air vents in the cubicle-size meeting room — and it seemed a strange reminder of Vincent DiPreta’s former “fat man” image. When he would take it from the ashtray and hold it in his fingers, the cigar seemed almost ready to slip away, as if expecting the pudgy fingers of seven years ago.

Vincent had been sitting alone in the room for an hour now. He had heard the news of his brother’s death on the car radio on his way home from his office at Middle America Builders. But he hadn’t gone home; he couldn’t face Anna and the deluge of tears she’d have to offer him over the loss of Joey. He’d called her on the phone and soothed her, as if Joey had been her damn brother (Anna had always had a special fondness for Joe — but then so had everybody in the family) and he had come here, to the new DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant, for privacy, for a booth to hide in in a moment or two of solitary mourning. The restaurant was closed when he got there (it was six now; they were just opening upstairs), and he’d walked through the darkened dining room, where the manager and hostess mumbled words of condolence — “We’re so very sorry, Mr. DiPreta,” “We’ll miss him, Mr. DiPreta” — and he headed downstairs to one of many small conference rooms. The whole lower floor was, in fact, a maze of such rooms, used by the DiPretas and any visiting mob personae, whenever unofficial official business needed to be discussed.

Many high-level mob meetings had taken place on DiPreta turf these past five or six years or so, even though the DiPretas themselves did little more than host the meets. There were several reasons for Des Moines being the site of meetings of such importance. For one thing, many older members of die Chicago Family, the aging elder statesmen, had chosen Des Moines as a place to retire to, since Chicago was going to hell and the blacks, and the Iowa capital city was possessed of a low crime rate and a metropolitan but nonfrantic atmosphere that reminded them of Chicago in its better days. Whenever the Family needed to consult these retired overlords, which they did both out of respect and to seek the good counsel the old men could provide, a meeting place would be furnished by the DiPretas. And the DiPretas would do the same whenever the Family wanted to confab with other crime families, such as Kansas City and Detroit, for example, because Des Moines made a convenient meeting place, pleasantly free of the federal surveillance afflicting the Chicago home base. Until not long ago, meetings were divided pretty evenly between the restaurant and the Traveler’s Lodge Motel, with the nod going to the latter most often; but then the McCracken problem arose, and both the DiPretas and the Family had quickly gotten out of the habit of utilizing the Traveler’s Lodge facilities: even with Jack McCracken gone, a bad taste lingered.

The door opened. Frank DiPreta joined his brother in the small conference room. Frank was a thin man but a naturally thin one, a dark and coldly handsome man with a pencil-line mustache. At fifty-three he was an older version of the deceased Joey but without Joey’s blue eyes. Frank’s eyes were dark, cloudy and, at the moment, slightly reddened. He wore a black suit, which was not his custom, and a .38 revolver in a shoulder holster, which was. He alone of the DiPreta brothers had continued carrying heat these past ten or twelve years, and he’d been alternately teased and scolded for the practice by Joey and Vince, who’d insisted “those days” were long over. Eventually he would say, “I told you so.” Now was not the time. He joined his brother at the table.

Vincent studied his brother. Frank’s face was set in its typical stoic expression and betrayed no hint of emotional strain. His eyes were a little red, but there was no other indication. Still, there seemed to be waves of tension coming from the normally calm Frank that were just enough to worry Vincent. Six years ago, when Frank’s wife had been killed in an automobile accident, Frank had tried to maintain his standard hard-guy stance; but gradually cracks had formed in Frank’s personal wall, and the emotional strain, the pain, the anger began to show through. And, ultimately, Frank had responded to the situation with an act of violence. Vincent studied his brother’s seemingly emotionless expression, wondering if that would happen again.

“Vince, you shouldn’t drink.”

“Frank, I know. Have you taken care of everything?”

“Yes.”

“The services?”

“Saturday morning.”

“Who will say the Mass?”

“Father DeMarco.”

“Good. He’s a good man.”

“Well I like him better than that son of a bitch you sent to Rome.”

Vincent nodded.

Frank looked at the ceiling awhile, then suddenly he said, “The funeral parlor guy says the casket should stay shut.”

“I see.”

“He says he can’t make Joey look like Joey.”

“I see.”

“You don’t see shit, Vince. You want to see something, go down and see Joey. Go down and see goddamn meat with a twisted-up expression on its goddamn face.”

The wall was cracking already.

“Then the casket will be shut, Frank. It’ll be all right.”

“All right? All right shit. Vince, do you know the size of the slug it was Joey caught?”

“Four-sixty Magnum. You told me on the phone.”

“Hell, he didn’t even catch it, it went straight fucking through him. Jesus. You could kill a fucking rhino with that. What kind of sick son of a bitch would do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know, Frank. It’s all very confusing to me.”

“Well, I don’t see what’s confusing about it. Some son of a bitch killed our brother. Okay. Now we find out who and kill the fucker.”

“But why was Joey killed? That’s the question I can’t get out of my mind. Why?”

Frank, realizing he’d slipped into emotional high gear, eased back behind his wall, shrugged and said, “We’re in the kind of business that makes you unpopular sometimes, Vince.”

“Even if I agreed with that, I don’t see it applying to Joey. He was the least involved in family business of all of us.”

“Maybe he was messing with something married. You know Joey and his women, Vince. You know what a crazy lad Joey was.”

“He was a man. He was forty years old.”

“He was a kid. He’ll always be a kid.”

And Frank touched the bridge of his nose with two fingers and swallowed hard.

His wall wasn’t holding up very well at all.

“Frank, could it have anything to do with that politician Joey was talking to today?”

“Who, Carl Reed? No. I don’t think Joe had even made the pitch to the guy yet, about paying him off to keep quiet about Grayson’s kickbacks and all, remember? At least I know Reed hasn’t said anything to the cops about anything. I talked to Cummins, and he interrogated Reed himself, Cummins and that nigger partner of his. Cummins says Reed didn’t have much to say, outside of how horrified about the shooting he was, bullshit like that. Listen, Vince, what about Chicago?”

“No. Not yet. Only as a last resort, Frank. We can handle this ourselves.”

“Maybe they know of some hit man who goes in for big guns or something. You could just ask them.”

“No, I don’t even want to call them and tell them about it.”

“Hell, Vince, they’ll find out soon enough, probably know already, thanks to the Family retirement village we got going in this town. At least one of those old Family guys has heard it on the news and called Chicago by now, you know that.”

“I’m not going to call them. I’m not going to encourage them. I don’t want them sending in one of those damn head-hunters of theirs.”

Frank thought for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right. This is family, not Family. We’ll handle it ourselves.”

“The last time they sent anyone around, you know what happened.”

“The McCracken fuck-up.” Frank shook his head. “Seemed like we were tripping over dead bodies for a week.”

“They got no finesse. Their example makes me glad we’re getting to be mostly legitimate nowadays.”

“Well and good, Vince, but if Papa was alive...”

“He isn’t.”

“If he was, he’d say this is a matter of blood, and we got to forget our goddamn business ethics and civic image and that bullshit. We got Joey’s death to even up for, Vince, and we’re going to even up, goddamnit. Not slop-ass, like the Chicago wise guys’d handle it. No way. We just find the guy and whack him out, clean and simple, and it’s not even going to be remotely connected up to us.”

Vincent studied his brother. Inside Frank’s cool shell was a hothead wanting to get out. Frank was prone to violence anyway, as for example, his carrying a gun all the time, even though that part of the business had faded into the past long ago. This situation, Vincent thought, could prove to be a bad one for Frank, as bad or worse than when his wife died. This situation could open the door on all the bad things in the secret closets of Frank’s mind; it could tear down Frank’s wall once and for all.

Vince touched his brother’s arm. “Let’s sleep on this, let our emotions settle. We’ll take care of whoever killed Joey. Well choose a course of action on that tomorrow. But first we got a brother to bury.”

Frank nodded and fell silent for a moment. Then something occurred to him, and he reached inside his sports coat to get at the inner pocket and withdrew an envelope. “Tell me what you make of this, Vince.” He handed the envelope to Vincent

Vincent looked at the outer envelope. It was typewritten, addressed to Joseph DiPreta, no return address. Judging from the postmark, it had been delivered yesterday, mailed locally. Inside the envelope was a playing card. An ace of spades.

“Hmmm,” Vincent said.

“What the hell is that, anyway? Who sends a goddamn playing card in the mail, and for what?”

Vincent shrugged. “For one thing, the ace of spades signifies death.”

“That thought ran through my mind, don’t think it didn’t. So what the hell’s it mean? Is it a warning that was sent to Joey? Or maybe a promise.”

Vincent withdrew a similar envelope from his own inside pocket. “Maybe it’s a declaration of war,” he said. He opened the envelope and revealed the playing card inside — also an ace of spades — to his brother.

“I received this at the office, Frank, in the mail. This morning.”