“What... what kind of shape are they in?”
“Serious but stable, I’d say.” I shifted in my chair. “Joey, here’s the thing. Don’t go hiring ex-wrestlers. Get guys who are wrestling now, and haven’t gone to fat yet.”
The redheaded waitress came over to see if we needed anything. I asked for another Four Roses and ginger, and Pepitone another bourbon.
“So, anyway, Leif Borensen,” I said, sitting back.
He was lighting up a cigarette, hands steadier but not entirely recovered. “Yeah, he was ours, for a long time. What about it?”
“Had Leif broken loose from you boys, to pursue his Broadway producer ambition? Was he going straight, I mean?”
The little mobster shook his head, sighing smoke. “No, that was strictly an ego deal. But he was staying in the movie business, maybe expanding if he got a Broadway hit he could get a film out of. Come on, Hammer, you know we don’t let people out till they hit retirement age.”
Retirement age tended to be however old you were when you wound up in the trunk of a stolen car with your throat slashed and your nuts in your mouth. Gold watch not included.
I said, “So Borensen was still your guy?”
“Still our guy.”
“Which is why he came to you, a few months ago, to get put in touch with a professional who could remove a problem he had. A problem called Martin Foster. His prospective father-in-law, no less.”
Pepitone took smoke in and let it out. Quietly he said, “When you’re in business with somebody, you do them favors. We had nothing against Foster and had nothing to do with his removal, either. Sometimes these business associates ask for a... referral. You know, like a doctor.”
“And Borensen wanted a specialist.”
He nodded, once. “He wanted a specialist.”
“This is somebody you’ve used.”
“I don’t see that that’s pertinent to your line of inquiry.”
“Maybe not.”
The redhead brought our drinks. I sipped mine. Pepitone sipped his.
I asked, “If Borensen had access to a ‘specialist,’ why did he pull that hit-and-run kill himself?”
He laughed and smoke came out of his nose, like a dragon. “For a stupid reason. A very stupid damn reason.”
“Which was?”
He sighed. No smoke this time. “The specialist I refer to is very expensive. You don’t go to a specialist for just any operation, right? When it’s something really serious, you go to the best. And the best is who I sent Borensen to. And that was pricey.”
“Twenty-five grand.”
That I knew this surprised him, and his nostrils flared, like a horse rearing. “You do get around, Hammer. You’ve always had a goddamn nose. Yes. You have the figure exactly right.”
I sat forward. “Are you saying Borensen ran down Dick Blazen himself because he was too cheap to have it done?”
He gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “Draw your own conclusions. Certainly he could have afforded another twenty-five. But some of the richest people on the planet are the tightest damn wads around. After the fact, I told him so. Said when you’re dealing in matters like this, you can’t treat it like one of your goddamn B-movies where you pinch every goddamn penny.” He shrugged. “Of course, our friend learned his lesson, when he came to the rather obvious conclusion that running some prick down can leave witnesses.”
“You mean, when he decided to have me killed, he gave up do-it-yourself, and went back to the specialist, and paid the freight.”
He gave me a slow-motion shrug. “I wouldn’t know, Hammer. I wasn’t part of it. I just made the original referral.”
I grinned at him. “You must be wishing you hadn’t, about now. Because your specialist is getting way out of hand, Joey. He killed Borensen and — what you may not know since it was withheld from the papers — he staged it as a suicide that exactly mirrored the Foster one, right down to the specific type of rod.”
“What? Why the hell would he do that?”
“Because your specialist has a screw loose. He wanted to tell me and the cops to go screw ourselves. He wanted to have a big old belly laugh on us.”
He reached for the glass of bourbon and finished it.
Then he said: “To be honest with you, Hammer... we decided to drop our... specialist... when we saw that he was going after you, in such a reckless, foolhardy manner. Sending second-raters to take you on, instead of tending to business himself. No, we’re done with him.”
“Would you like to know why he did that?”
“Why, do you?”
“Oh yeah.”
I told the Bonetti capo about the late-night phone call, and the killer’s desire to challenge me, to take me on. To see which of us was the real killer among killers.
“He’s gone off the deep end,” Pepitone said, shaking his head. “Son of a bitch is screwier than an outhouse rat.”
“Doesn’t that worry you, Joey? This loose cannon knows where the bodies are buried, because he buried them... for you.”
Pepitone waved that off with a gold-ring-laden hand. “Oh, he won’t talk. That’s not a problem. Anyway, he’ll be out of the picture soon.”
“Because you’re removing his ass from Planet Earth?”
His smile was sly. “No. Something’s doing it for us.”
Not somebody — something.
I lighted up a smoke and smiled around it, as I got it going. “You wouldn’t be referring to Phasger’s Syndrome, would you?”
He grunted a laugh. “Damnit, Hammer. You have a nose. You do have a nose. Where... how... did you...? Hell with it. I don’t care. As I get it, the specialist’s maybe two weeks away from that disease kicking in and blotting him out, nice and slow. He thinks he’s a killer? That shit has it all over him.”
“He wants to shoot it out with me first.”
“Some advice, Hammer? Don’t do it. Don’t go looking for him. If you kill him, you’ll be doing him a favor. Wouldn’t you rather have the bastard suffer? I would.”
“So if I asked you for his name, or his address, you wouldn’t give it?”
“You’d have to haul me off and beat it out of me. And you could do that. We both know you could. But then you’d have a real problem, bigger than this asshole. You’d have to take on the Bonetti family, all their soldiers, all their guns. Is it worth it, just to have the pleasure of shooting this killer in the guts? You need to weigh the thing in your mind, Hammer. A sadistic prick like you should want to let that foul disease have him.”
He had a point.
“Or maybe he’ll track you down,” he said with a shrug. “If so, maybe you’ll kill his ass.”
“Or he’ll kill mine.”
He sneer-grinned, blew out smoke. “Either way, it’s a winner from where I’m sitting... Stay as long as you like, Hammer. Run a tab on the house. Take that pretty girl out on the dance floor. I’ll have those long-haired dipshits play a slow tune, so an old warrior like you can keep up.”
Chapter Fourteen
Indian summer had been replaced by a damp chill under a sky gone as gray as wet newspaper. A squad car was parked in the cobblestone street, half on the sidewalk, but still leaving barely enough room for the cab to pass after it dropped me. I saw Pat’s unmarked car just down the block. Took a real detective to find a parking space on this street before nine a.m.
His call had come in just after eight. I was already up and showered and shaved, sitting in the kitchenette in my underwear, eating the eggs and bacon I’d cooked up, drinking the coffee I’d brewed, as I read the News. Slow news day — neither the killer nor myself had killed anybody.