From across the street from where the maroon coupe was parked, where he’d been sitting in his own parked car, a six-foot figure in a dark gray suit under an open raincoat stepped out and crossed to join the two men on the corner, under a streetlamp, one of the few around here that was working.
They were talking — smiles all around, a friendly confab. All three men were an anomaly in this neighborhood: well-dressed white men, lawyer Bas and the two assassins, neither of whom (at this distance, anyway) looked familiar to me. The man who’d been driving the maroon coupe — small, round-faced, mustached — wore a light gray suit, no topcoat, and a darker gray fedora; his lanky partner, also mustached, wore a dark blue topcoat and a lighter blue fedora.
So that fucking Bas was their boss — he’d set Drury up for these natty assassins. But why was the lawyer meeting them here, where the meeting with the (I now assumed) imaginary witness was to have taken place? He did represent some taverns and clubs in this part of town, but still I was just realizing, with a shudder, the faultiness of my original thinking, and reaching for the door handle, thinking that Bas might be innocent, and in danger, when the taller mustached assassin swung something out from under that dark blue topcoat — a shotgun.
Even from half a block away, I could see Bas’s wide-eyed shock, and he turned to flee down the sidewalk, away from them (and me) when the guy opened up — shotgun all right... no doubt the same one that had nailed Drury — and the night exploded. Bas seemed to pause in midair before he pitched face-forward to the cement, his splattered back a modern art study in charcoal and red, worthy of Charley’s penthouse wall.
I was long since out of the car, and running down the street, hat flying off, cigarette trailing sparks into the night, gun tight in my fist, when the guy in the topcoat got in behind the wheel of the parked, motor-running coupe — he’d traded jobs with his partner, who had trotted down to where Bas had belly-flopped onto the cracked cement. The .45 in the round-faced assassin’s hand blasted down at the supine attorney, once, twice, blossoming orange in the darkness.
The round-faced guy ran back to the coupe, climbed in on the rider’s side, and they took off, heading straight at me, though neither had noticed me yet; the glare of their headlights made me squint, but I’d anticipated it, and I saw them, both of their mustached faces (the tall one had a harelip scar), and they saw me too — their expressions as saucer-eyed as Bas’s — as I pointed the nine millimeter at their oncoming windshield and fired.
The shot rang through Little Hell, echoing, and the bullet spiderwebbed the windshield, but I didn’t think I’d hit either one of them, goddamnit, and I dove and rolled as the driver swerved, first to try to run me down, second to take a right that would take them toward and under the El tracks, toward Ogden Avenue.
I was barely back on my feet, when they were gone, out of my view, and — gun still in hand — I ran down to the fallen Bas, knowing it was hopeless, but checking him out, anyway.
Kneeling down to take a closer look, I figured the shotgun blast in his back had probably killed him; but the coup de grace pair of .45 shots in his head made taking his pulse a worthless procedure. I did it anyway.
Now that the shooting had stopped, people were coming out of their houses and tenements, colored faces filling doorways and windows, eyes wider than Willie Best’s and shouts of “Call the police,” and “Buncha white men shootin’ at each other,” and such like, from either side of the street, surrounding me, an accusatory gospel choir singing skyward in the night.
Before the cops or Jesus responded, I ran back to my car and got out of there, hoping to hell we all looked alike to them.
The same red-uniformed doorman as on my previous visit to the Barry Apartments — paunchy, fiftyish George with the drink-splotched face — was on duty; and he remembered me... and my name.
“Oh yes, Mr. Lincoln,” he said, accepting another of my green business cards. “How can I help you tonight?”
“I just want to go up and see my friend Joey Fischetti.”
George shook his head. “I’m not sure any of the Fish family is in, this evening. I came on at four, and the other guy said they’ve all cleared out.”
“Yeah? Vacation?”
“Not sure. They winter in Florida, y’know, but I never saw ’em go down this early, before. You could ask that girl who lives with Rocco. She’s back.”
The corner of my left eye twitched. “Is she?”
“If you can get past Pete, she is,” he said, with a shrug.
“Pete?”
George nodded toward the lobby. “The elevator operator. He’s sort of the guardian at the gate. I work for the Barry Apartments; but Pete works for the Fischettis.”
“I appreciate the information, George.”
“Any time, Mr. Lincoln.”
I had a clear head and I had that cool, detached limbo state of mind that I’d experienced in combat on the Island — Guadalcanal, that is. A distancing that keeps men under fire from going mad.
I clopped across the marble floor of the narrow, mirrored, fern-flung lobby. Over my arm the London Fog was draped, which hid the nine millimeter in my fist; I wasn’t wearing a hat — it was somewhere in Little Hell, having blown off my head when I was running down the street, trying to help Bas, fucking up yet another bodyguard assignment.
Nice thing about bodyguard work is, the clients who survive will write letters of reference; and the dead ones never complain.
Stepping on the elevator, I said, “Ten, please.”
This was the same blue-uniformed, blue-five-o’clock-shadowed thug as before — with the same bulge under his left arm. He glanced at me — maybe he recognized me, maybe he didn’t — but he just did as I asked him. After all, I wasn’t going up to the penthouse.
When the doors slid shut, I pretended to drop my London Fog, and as I was coming up, I slapped the bastard along the side of his head with the Browning barrel. He stumbled into the side wall of the elevator, his ear bleeding, his eyes doing a slot-machine roll; I reached into his coat, withdrew Pete’s .38 revolver from its holster, and stuck it in my waistband.
He lurched at me, grabbing at me like I was a ladder he was trying to climb, and I slapped his other ear with the Browning; now he went down on his knees, like he was praying, or preparing to blow me — neither image appealed to me, so I pushed him all the way to the floor with my left foot, and — now that he was unconscious, or pretending to be — tied his hands behind him with my necktie.
The door opened on ten and, when nobody got on or off, the doors closed again, and I drove myself up to the seventeenth floor. Pete had come groggily around; he was on his side, looking up at me — he seemed puzzled and like maybe his feelings were a little hurt.
“What did I do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Which is what you’re going to keep doing. You got a passkey?”
“Fuck you!”
That meant he did. I searched him and found it in a shallow slanty pocket of his blue uniform’s jacket.
“Are they here?” I asked. “The three Fish brothers?”
“Fuck you,” he said, with no enthusiasm.
That meant they probably weren’t — that George the doorman had been right... goddamnit. At that moment, fresh from the murders of my two clients, I would have loved to return the favor to Rocky and Charley — slowly... Rocky because he was a sadistic son of a bitch, and Charley because he was the brains, and undoubtedly had ordered these hits.