“Is that right.”
The zombie eyes slitted. “I heard stories about you, Heller.”
“Have you.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you went out and did something about this.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“From one old soldier to another, it’s not worth it. I liked Sandy fine. I am gonna miss her sweet ass and salty talk. But she knew what she was getting into. All these people do. It’s like my son.”
“You have a son?”
“I did have. He was wild. I tried to put him on the straight and narrow, but that’s hard when you don’t set a good example. He made it out of Korea alive. Came back and, here’s a funny coincidence, drove cab a while. Then he got involved with some East St. Louis lowlifes, and the next thing you know, Bobby... that was his name, Bobby...”
Another unintentional irony.
“...turns up dead in the trunk of his car. Stab wounds, gunshot wounds, tortured first. People said some assholes figured his old man hid the Greenlease money and maybe he knew where. He was twenty-four. People would come up to me all sorry and sympathetic, tell me how terrible it was. I told them, he was dead to me long before that. After that, I could’ve cut ties with every crooked son of a bitch on both sides of the river, but I didn’t. My boy made his bed. Like Sandy. Not telling you what to do or not to do, Mr. Heller. Just one old soldier to another.”
I said nothing.
Going out, he paused to say, “They’re going to be crawling all over this place again, the cops and the feds. I’ve already found a new home for those three girls who lived with Sandy. But, uh, you need to be out of here tomorrow morning.”
He gave me a little salute and was gone, door shutting gently behind him, as if trying not to stir any ghosts.
I shut off the lights and sat on the foot of the bed in the dark and tried not to cry. Worked hard at it. I would be goddamned if I’d blubber like Shoulders and Dolan and everybody else on this fucking job. Carr was right: Sandy knew what she was getting herself into. The scent of that Greenlease money had made her crazy. What did I care if she lived or died? She was just another whore. I barely knew the bitch. Then the fucking tears came.
A two-rap knock came to the door. My palms took away the wetness and I wiped them on my trousers. I glanced around as the double knock repeated. Carr had forgotten Sandy’s pack of smokes on the coffee table. Not hitting the light switch, I cracked the door to make sure it was Carr, but it wasn’t, and a big guy who was mostly silhouette shouldered his way in. Behind him was another male shape. He came barreling in, too, as I backpedaled, going for the Browning under my arm, but my arm got batted away and somebody snatched out the gun and gave it a toss that made a thud somewhere on the carpet. A hand on either side gripped my biceps from behind as the guy in front of me lifted a hand with white cloth in it, and he poured liquid from a can that infused the cloth with the antiseptically sweet-smelling liquid that was chloroform, and clamped the damp cloth over my nose and mouth.
It took longer to take effect than you might think, and I fought it, flailing, kicking, for what must have been two or three minutes anyway. Which is a long fucking time. And it took two good-size strong men to hold me down, the cold and oily feel of the damp cloth the last sensation I experienced before I learned that the lights could go out in a room where the lights were already off.
The chirring rumble, and occasional jostle, of wheels on pavement told me I was in a car before my eyes came open and confirmed it. My arms were handcuffed behind me and my ankles were bound with heavy twine, the cuffs making me wonder if the fedora-sporting, gorilla-shouldered pair in the front seat were cops. My mouth tasted oddly sweet. My face around my nose and mouth burned a little.
I was lucky to be alive. If you called living being cuffed and ankle-bound in a back seat driven somewhere by a couple of possible cops, probable goons, not that those are mutually exclusive categories. But my head hurt, worse than if they’d sapped me, and the nausea had what was left of the Musial’s meal churning, wanting out.
Like me.
The driver, a forty-ish hood, said, “Jesus, I thought he was supposed to be tough. Is he still under?”
A pale oval with a double chin and tiny eyes looked back at me. My slitted eyes would, I hoped, look closed as I sat there slumped.
“Still under. What do you expect, Mel? He’s over fifty.”
“Hell, so are you, Dutch.”
Wortman second-in-command: Elroy “Dutch” Downey.
“Fuck you very much, Mel. Anyway, I wasn’t the one who got dosed. If this bastard dies on us, Buster’s gonna be pissed. He already ain’t in the best of moods.”
“It was your idea. You said this Heller was tough! And you’re right about the boss — he’s half in the bag. That’s when he gets mean.”
“Not good news for our line-load back there.”
Line-load: taxi jargon for passenger. Was every St. Louis mobster a former cabbie?
I knew where we were now. Not far from East St. Louis — Collinsville, Illinois. We were cutting through another sin strip, the neons of taverns and night clubs like welcoming fires in the night, the Oasis, the Mounds Club, the Horseshoe Lounge, Diamondhead, Red Rooster. A scummy little Las Vegas that stayed open all night in this extension of East St. Louis.
Soon the bright lights turned into rural Collinsville and then we were turning onto a graveled drive.
“You awake back there?” Mel asked the rear view mirror.
“...Yeah.”
“Just behave yourself and this won’t be a one-way ride.”
“What’s the occasion?”
Dutch said, “That would spoil it.”
Up ahead, spotlighted like a premiere, loomed a pair of intersecting square brick buildings with flat roofs, the main two-story adjoining an add-on single story, a Streamline Moderne castle. Between this place and the Coral Court, all that was missing was a rocket ship. As we drew closer, I could make out the wide moat that surrounded the island on which the castle perched, the two-thirds of a moon making an ivory shimmer out of the water. Something silver and scaly broke the surface on the jump.
I said, “That thing has fish in it?”
Dutch said, not unfriendly, “Best-stocked private lake in Illinois.”
And the only one with a gangster living on an island in the middle of it.
For all the modern majesty of the castle and its well-manicured grounds, the bridge that crossed the moat was a wooden, rickety thing. It led to a macadam driveway that curved around right to a three-car garage, which is what the one-story add-on structure turned out to be. My buddy Dutch used a remote control gizmo to open the triple door, which slid overhead to admit their car, an Oldsmobile, into the garage next to a silver Cadillac. Yes, another Cadillac, and if you’re keeping up with your irony scorecard, every Cadillac in this part of the world emanated from a Greenlease-supplied dealership.
The door closed behind us at the push of a button on the brick wall shared with the house. My ankles were cut loose but my hands remained cuffed as we entered a big white hospital of a kitchen that only made the lingering sweetness of chloroform seem more distinct in my mouth. Through there I was nudged in the back with a gun into a hallway merging into a cavernous foyer whose marble floor was as pure white as the money that paid for it was not. A limestone central fountain with a September Morn nude wading in it was overseen by wall-hugging potted plants on pedestals with leaves like green swords.
The foyer fed not the promised pretentious interior decoration but various doorless rooms furnished out of a Sears-and-Roebuck catalogue — an office with modern fixtures, a dining room, a living room, and a large well-stocked library indicating Buster might be the best-read gangster around (maybe the best-read Buster around, period).