Max Collins - Murder by numbers

"Something," Garner said, taking one hand off the wheel to point up ahead.

It was a black sedan, its tail sticking out of an alley, revealing a mud-spattered license plate. The doors were open.

"Pull over," Ness said, needlessly, because Garner already was.

Ness jumped out of the car, just as it was stopping, and reached absent-mindedly for his gun. All he touched was the empty shoulder holster: He hadn't taken time to fill it.

No matter. The car, a new Buick parked in the middle of an alley next to a dignified two-story brick undertaking parlor, was empty.

Garner had a look inside the car. "Registered to Roland Rushing."

"That's the Emperor's brother. Go call it in. Will-have him picked up."

Ness walked down the alley a ways, not looking for anything in particular. A cat scurried across his path and made him jump, a little. As the darkness of the alley gathered in on him, he suddenly became aware that he was walking unarmed down a ghetto alley, next to a funeral home. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned quickly, ready to swing.

"Easy, boss," Garner said.

Ness sighed heavily. "Gave me a start."

"Carry a gun. You'll live longer. We got trouble-come on."

Ness followed his old comrade out of the alley, as Garner's words flew out in an uncharacteristic rush: "I was getting ready to put that APB out on Roland Rushing when I heard the call."

They were to their sedan, now.

"What call?"

Garner, on the driver's side, looked gravely across the top of the car at Ness, standing on the rider's side. "The dispatcher said Mrs. John C. Washington called for help-four men broke into her home looking for her husband."

"Damn! Was she hurt?"

"Don't know."

"Get the hell over there right now."

The Hawthorne Avenue area felt even more like a trap tonight, as they turned back east past the fortress-like wall of factories, into the quiet neighborhood where the John C. Washington home had once again been invaded.

Two uniformed patrolmen were inside with the former policy king's queen; one of them stood near Mrs. Washington, who wore a pink satin robe, as she sat on the couch, crying into a handkerchief. The other cop was in the kitchen, applying a damp cloth to the head of a burly fiftyish Negro in sportcoat and no tie, the Washingtons' live-in bodyguard.

The living room had been turned upside-down; not as thorough a job as when the cops had played wrecking crew here a few months before. But thorough enough.

Ness sat next to Mrs. Washington. The slightly plump, very pretty woman looked up with a tear-streaked face, her mouth quivering, her eyes red and frightened and angry.

"We just got this place put back the way it should be," she said, as hurt as a disappointed child, as bitter as a spurned lover.

"Yes, I know," Ness said. "I'm sorry. I wish you would've let us post men here, like I asked."

"Johnny didn't want that. He said that'd tip everybody off that he was talking. We have bodyguards anyway. That oughta been enough."

"Yes, it should. But we'll protect you from here on out."

She was shaking her head emphatically. "I'm tired of this, I'm so tired of this… first you damn white police ruin, my beautiful house, then more white men, criminals this time, come do the same blessed thing. You're all the damn same. Ain't no difference between you. White crooks, white cops, what's the difference?"

"I know it must seem that way to you, Mrs. Washington."

Sometimes it seemed that way to Ness. He'd put as many cops in jail as gangsters, in this town.

He squeezed her shoulder gently. "But it wasn't anybody white who sold you out, tonight."

She blinked, cocked her head. "What do you mean?"

"Those same four men who worked you over were riding around the east side earlier this evening, offering money for the names of witnesses."

Her features tightened. "You're saying, someone of my race took money to give up Johnny C.?"

"Most likely."

She sat and blankly stared.

"What exactly happened here, Mrs. Washington?"

She didn't say anything for a while, but Ness didn't repeat his question. He waited patiently for her to respond. Finally, she did.

"Four men-white men, dago men. Big awful men. One of them must have knocked out Milton."

She meant the bodyguard.

"They come in demanding to talk to Johnny C.," she continued. "I told them Johnny was out of town on business, like we been saying. They looked all over the house, busting stuff up." She began to cry again. He patted her shoulder. "They said… they said… 'we'll be back.' "

Ness looked up at Garner. Garner lifted his eyebrows.

"They probably will," Ness said. "I'm going to move you in with your husband."

"Oh, I'd like that. I'd like that very much."

"We're going to put an end to this," he said.

She was shaking her head again. "I don't know what Johnny C. is going to do when he hears about this."

"I hope," Ness said, "that he says he'll go along with what I have in mind…"

Little Angelo Scalise, not a perfect specimen of mental health even under the best of conditions, was about to go fucking nuts.

He had been living in the small cement hide-out room behind the lanes at Pla-Mor bowling alley for more than two days now. When Black Sal got tipped that indictments were about to hit the fan, Scalise had holed up in the cement-block room that Lombardi and his associates had used since Prohibition days as a cool-off flat. The room was tiny-a cubicle really-with only one window, and that consisted of glass bricks you couldn't see out of, and a cot and a small dresser and a tiny ice-box and a hot plate and a little Bakelite radio. It wasn't a hell of a lot better than a prison cell.

And in a prison cell, you wouldn't have to listen to the constant racket of clattering bowling pins.

The noise was muffled, but not that muffled, and Ange flinched involuntarily with every strike. For a guy who loved to bowl, it was a strange sort of hell. On the few times when he stuck his head out, just to fight the fucking closed-in feeling, he'd see those goddamn pin boys in the narrow walk-way area behind the lanes. They'd be laughing and talking, and he couldn't make out what they were saying because of the sound of pins getting knocked over. But he knew those little fuckers were laughing at him. He'd clipped 'em with pins often enough. He would go back in and flop on his cot and shut the door and muffle the sound of clattering pins and contemplate how much fun it would be to bash in those little fuckers' brains with a bowling pin.

His cousin Sal had gone south-he'd be in Acapulco by now, spread out on the beach like a big dead fucking fish. They had money in a resort hotel down there, so Sal would be living like a king. But not like a man.

For all Sal's talk of how important respect was, the fat slob was nothing but a coward, turning his back on a fucking five-mil-a-year business, just because Eliot fucking Ness lined up some niggers to squeal. Angelo wasn't about to turn his back on such a business, to walk away from his money and his manhood.

"We're rich men," Lombardi had told him, before catching the chartered plane. "We've worked long and hard. Our fathers worked long and hard. We can afford to take a rest, a vacation for a while. Few years pass, this'll all blow over."

"I ain't gonna waste the best years of my life loafin' on some Mexican beach, with some Mexican bitch sucking my dick! What kind of life is that for a man?"

Sal had contemplated that, and said, "Not a bad one at all," and got on the plane.

Goddamn him!

Well, fine. Who the fuck needed him. Angelo would have the whole goddamn business to himself. Sal and Polizzi and the others were acting like this was the end of the damn world, or at least the damn numbers racket. Hell, as long as there were niggers, there'd be numbers! And as long as there was numbers, there'd be big bucks to be made, and as long as there was big bucks to be made, the Mayfield Road gang-with Little Angelo Scalise as top man, from now on-would own the east side.