I went back to the Galaxie and used the dashboard lighter to fire up a Chesterfield. I burned through three waiting for him to die. In the dankness near the river, though the night itself was cool and dry, with the ghostly trees and bushes gathered round, I might have been back on Guadalcanal, waiting for the Japs to make another banzai attack. Certainly I was in some kind of fucking jungle.
I pitched the last of the Chesties down the gravel-and-shell road. It would have been reckless to toss it into the brush. Funny thing, my first thought as I pulled out was to wonder if I had time to get back to the Roosevelt, clean up, and still meet Janet for beignets and café au lait. My wristwatch, easily visible in the moonlight, said it wasn’t even midnight.
What was I going to do with all that time?
Then something came to me.
Chapter 18
Heading along US Highway 90 East, I almost missed the turnoff to Churchill Farms. I hadn’t been the driver the one time I’d been there before. But my previous visit to the 6,400-acre swampland domain of Carlos Marcello had been nothing short of memorable, and my only real problem was spotting the turn at night. The moonlight helped.
For all of Marcello’s visionary talk two years ago, about developing this property, nothing had changed. It still surprised me there was no gate, that this was not a private road. The lane remained a narrow strip of dust-generating rutted dirt, with barely enough shoulder on either side to allow cars going in opposite directions to make room for each other — not that I met any.
As I glided by in the Galaxie, the lights were on in the small, rustic-looking shrimp-packing plant with its Negro workers, one of Marcello’s legitimate businesses. Otherwise, the full moon was providing all the illumination, lending an otherworldly beauty to the marshy landscape on my either side, untamed foliage shimmering in a gentle breeze, washed ivory. Dead cypress and living willows seemed to keep a watchful eye, like overseers in slave days.
The clearing came sooner than I remembered, the marshland making way as if Moses had parted it to take room for the barn-turned-farmhouse, its white paint job given a ghostly glow by the moon, several narrow downstairs windows burning yellow, the rest black (including those upstairs). It was almost one in the morning, after all. The red-painted shed off to the right had an abandoned look, no milling chickens and goats this time of night. Two cars were parked on the gravel apron beside the farmhouse — the familiar bronze Caddy and a sporty Dodge, a new model called Lancer, coincidentally also the Secret Service designation for President Kennedy. Had Carlos Marcello learned the meaning of irony after all?
Almost as if he were still perched there from my previous visit, Jack — Marcello’s barber, chauffeur, and bodyguard, all in one tall, burly package — was sitting on the top step of the little cement porch, wearing a light-blue leisure suit, long legs angled in two directions as he smoked a cigarette, adding a little fog to an otherwise cloudless night. Well, anyway, he’d been sitting when I first entered the clearing. By the time I pulled up a few feet from the house, he was on his feet and approaching with a.38 revolver in his hand, calling, “Guys! Guys!”
They were out of the house before I was out of the car, two thugs in the kind of hats and sport shirts and slacks you wear on a golf course, if you’re a fan of pastels, that is.
Hands high in the air, I said, loud, in a rush of words, “Jack, it’s Nate Heller! Remember me? I have an emergency I need to talk to Uncle Carlos about.”
The other two had slipped past Jack on their way toward me, also with guns in hand; but he told them, “Hold up!”
Then he moved through them like a cop through a crowd and planted himself, facing me, perhaps four feet away. His revolver in hand, but pointing down, he looked at me skeptically.
He wasn’t exactly threatening as he said, “I remember you, Mr. Heller. But it’s late and Mr. Marcello doesn’t appreciate drop-in guests.”
“It’s an emergency, Jack. And I understand Uncle Carlos doesn’t have a phone out here.”
“That’s right. This is where he gets away from it all. I will tell him you stopped by, and you can probably meet with him tomorrow at the Town and Country.”
“It can’t wait. You check with him.”
“You call at the motel in the morning. I’ll make sure you get an appointment.”
“He’s not going to like it, Jack, if you don’t check with him. I said it was important.”
He thought about that, but seemed about to say no, despite my insistence.
So I insisted some more: “There are some freshly dead business associates of his that he’s going to want to know about. Right now.”
Jack frowned. Then, very slowly, he nodded. “Okay. I’ll wake the boss. You stay put.”
He turned to go back inside, but paused on the way to whisper orders to the pair of fellow bodyguards. Then he glanced over his shoulder at me and gave me an almost smile. “Mr. Heller, this is unusual enough that I’ve instructed my friends to keep you covered. No offense is meant.”
“None taken,” I said.
One flunky, young and skinny in shades of green, including his wide-banded straw porkpie, stood facing me at my left, maybe six feet away; similarly positioned to my right was an older, beefier guy with pockmarks and a mustache and shades of yellow attire, including an Ivy League cap. Today’s male fashions were definitely not doing thugs any favors. On the other hand, the green porkpie’s Colt Python, a.357 Magnum, and his partner’s Smith and Wesson.44, went a long way toward making up for it.
My nine-millimeter Browning was in its shoulder holster, by the way, a tight fit in a suit not cut for it. I also had a Colt Woodsman .22 stuck in my waistband, though concealed by my suit coat (one button buttoned), and a little Mauser .22 auto in my left-hand suit-coat pocket. These handguns had been retrieved from the late Rodriguez and the Oswald look-alike, when I’d returned to the scene to do a little of my own cleanup.
Not much had been necessary. I just wanted some extra firepower, if I was going midnight-calling on Uncle Carlos. And I did need to spend some time at the scene of Mac Wallace’s tragic suicide, wiping off my fingerprints from a few surfaces — again, not many: the towel and garden hose, for example, were not conducive to prints. The window and its handle, however, were.
“Leo,” the shades-of-green younger one said in a cornpone drawl, “I believe the old gent’s heavy. Don’t the old gent look heavy to you?”
He had noticed the bulge under my left arm.
“Good eye, Freddie boy,” Leo said. “Give the man a frisk. You’re gonna have to stand for a frisk, bud.”
“No,” I said.
They both looked at me like kids who just learned the truth about Santa Claus.
“Those weren’t Jack’s orders,” I said, nothing confrontational in my tone. “Keep your distance and we’ll stay friendly.”
This seemed to offend Leo, though his irritation would have carried more weight if he hadn’t been wearing that dumb cap. He growled, “What makes you think Jack’s the one gives the orders around here?”
“Because I saw him give you orders. Don’t overstep.”
Leo frowned. “Frisk him, Freddie.”
I laughed.
Freddie glared at me. “What’s so funny?”
“It just sounded funny,” I said with a shrug. “‘Frisk him, Freddie.’ Sounds like a British Invasion tune.”
Hurt, Freddie put his Colt away in his own shoulder holster and said, “You gonna stand for a frisk, smart-ass, like Leo says.”
When he stepped toward me, I shoved Freddie into Leo, and they both went down. I kicked Leo in the wrist and his.44 popped out and landed in the gravel a foot or so away.