Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Who was it hit Lucky Tom?”

“How should I know?”

“Well,” said Beyer, reasonably, “then how should I know who hit Dant and Third-Time and Big Nose?”

There was a long silent moment. “We’ve been friends a long time,” Moscow said. “We have kept things cool, and we have all done very nicely that way — with no guns, and no blasting a bunch of guys out of revenge for something which we never did to Lucky Tom in the first place.”

“If I thought you hit Lucky Tom—”

“The bum,” said Moscow, “was not worth killing.”

“If I thought you did it,” Beyer went on, “I wouldn’t go and shoot up a batch of punks like Dant and Third-Time and Big Nose. You know what I’d do?”

“What?”

“I’d go straight to the top,” said Beyer. “I’d kill you, you bum!”

“That’s no way to talk, Barry.”

“You had no call to kill Lucky Tom. So maybe he was holding out a little in Ward Three, it don’t make no difference.”

“You had no call to kill those three boys.”

“You don’t know what killing is, bum.”

“Yeah?” Moscow challenged.

“Yeah!”

That night, a gentleman named Mr. Roswell “Greasy” Spune turned his key in his ignition and was immediately blown from this world into the next. The little man with the small hands and the white gloves watched from a tavern across the street. Mr. Spune was a bagman for Barry Beyer’s organization. Less than two hours after Mr. Spune’s abrupt demise, six of Barry Beyer’s boys hijacked an ambulance from the hospital garage. Five sat in back, and the sixth, garbed in white, drove the sporty vehicle through town with the pedal on the floor and the siren wide open. “This takes me back,” one of them was heard to say. “This is the way it used to be before the world went soft in the belly. This is what you would call doing things with a little class.”

The ambulance pulled up in front of a West Side tavern where the Moscow gang hung out. The ambulance tailgate burst open, and the five brave men and true emerged with submachine guns and commenced blasting away. Eight of Archie Moscow’s staunchest associates died in the fray, and only one of the boys from the ambulance crew was killed in return.

Moscow retaliated the next day, shooting up two Beyer-operated card games, knocking off two small-time dope peddlers, and gunning down a Beyer lieutenant as he emerged from his bank at two-thirty in the afternoon. The gunman who accomplished this last feat then raced down an alleyway into the waiting arms of a rookie patrolman, who promptly shot him dead. The kid had been on the force only three months and was sure he would be up on departmental charges for forgetting to fire two warning shots into the air. Instead he got an on-the-spot promotion to detective junior grade.

By the second week of the war, the pace began to slow down. Pillars of both mobs were beginning to realize that a state of war demanded wartime security measures. One could not wander about without a second thought as in times of peace. One could not visit a meeting or a nightclub or a gaming house or a girlfriend without posting a guard, or even several guards. In short, one had to be very careful.

Even so, not everyone was careful enough. Muggsy Lopez turned up in the trunk of his car wearing a necktie of piano wire. Look-See Logan was found in his own kidney-shaped swimming pool with his hands and feet tied together and a few quarts of chlorinated water in his lungs. Benny Benedetto looked under the hood of his brand-new car, found a bomb wired to the ignition, removed it gingerly and dismantled it efficiently, and climbed behind the steering wheel clucking his tongue at the perfidy of his fellow man. But he completely missed the bomb wired to the gas pedal. It didn’t miss him; they picked him up with a mop.

The newspapers screamed. The city fathers screamed. The police commissioner screamed. Finney and Mattera worked double-duty and tried to explain to their wives that this was war. Their wives screamed.

It was war for three solid months. It blew hot and cold, and there would be rumors of high-level conferences, of face-to-face meets between Archer Moscow and Barry Beyer, cautious summit meetings held on neutral ground. Then, for a week, the killings would cease, and the word would go out that a truce had been called. Then someone would be gunned down or stabbed or blown to bits, and the war would start all over again.

At the end of the third month there was supposed to be another truce in progress, but by now no one was taking truce talk too seriously. There had not been a known homicide in five days. The count now stood at eighty-three dead, several more wounded, five in jail, and two missing in action. The casualties were almost perfectly balanced between the two mobs. Forty of Beyer’s men were dead, forty-three Moscow men were in their graves, and each gang had one man missing.

That night, as usual, Finney and Mattera prowled the uneasy streets in an unmarked squad car. Only this particular night was different. This night they caught the little man.

Mattera was the one who spotted him. He noticed someone sitting in a car on Pickering Road, with the lights out and the motor running. His first thought was that it was high school kids necking, but there was only one person there, and the person seemed to be doing something, so Mattera slowed to a stop and killed the lights.

The little man straightened up finally. He opened the car door, stepped out, and saw Finney and Mattera standing in front of him with drawn revolvers.

“Oh, my,” said the little man.

Finney moved past him, checked the car. “Cute job,” he said. “He’s got this little gun lashed to the steering column, and there’s a wire hooked around the trigger and connected to the gas pedal. You step on the gas and the gun goes off and gets you right in the chest. I read about a bit like that down in Texas. Very professional.”

Mattera looked at the little man and shook his head. “Professional,” he said. “A little old guy with glasses. Who belongs to the car, friend?”

“Ears Carradine,” said the little man.

“One of Moscow’s boys,” Finney said. “You work for Barry Beyer, friend?”

The little man’s jaw dropped. “Oh, goodness, no,” he said. His voice was high-pitched, reedy. “Oh, certainly not.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Aberdeen Pharmaceutical Supply,” the little man said. “I’m a research chemist.”

“You’re a what ?”

The little man took off his gloves and wrung them sadly in his hands. “Oh, this won’t do at all,” he said unhappily. “I suppose I’ll have to tell you everything now, won’t I?”

Finney allowed that this sounded like a good idea. The little man suggested they sit in the squad car. They did, one on either side of him.

“My name is Edward Fitch,” the little man said. “Of course, there’s no reason on earth why you should have heard of me, but you may recall my son. His name was Richard Fitch. I called him Dick, of course, because Rich Fitch would not have done at all. I’m sure you can appreciate that readily enough.”

“Get to the point,” Mattera said.

“Well,” said Mr. Fitch, “is his name familiar?”

It wasn’t.

“He killed himself in August,” Mr. Fitch said. “Hanged himself, you may recall, with the cord from his electric razor. I gave him that razor, actually. A birthday present, oh, several years ago.”

“Now I remember,” Finney said.

“I didn’t know at the time just why he had killed himself,” Mr. Fitch went on. “It seemed an odd thing to do. And then I learned that he had lost an inordinate amount of money gambling—”

“Inordinate,” Finney said, choked with admiration.