Макс Коллинз - Hush Money

It was a blow that had struck home at the time, a game point Jerry had won but a thought she’d discarded later, after some reflection. She wasn’t cold inside. She could still feel. She could still love. She loved little Joni more than anything in the world. She was filled with the warmth of love every time she held her daughter in her arms, and she was having trouble, frankly, not spoiling the child because of that.

And there was Stevie. She loved her “little” brother, damn near as much as her little girl. She worried about him, hoped his life would take on some direction, hoped there wasn’t an emotional time bomb in him, ticking inside him, because he too had shown no outward emotional response to the deaths of their mother and father.

And why wasn’t Stevie going out with any girls? It wasn’t right, wasn’t like Stevie, who was a notorious pussy-chaser. She hoped he hadn’t contracted some weird jungle strain of VD over there and couldn’t have normal relations because of it. She asked him what was wrong, why wasn’t he dating or anything, and he explained he wanted “no extra baggage right now.” That was unhealthy. A man needed a good sex life.

True, she was hardly the one to talk, hardly the one to be dispensing advice to the sexually lovelorn. She hadn’t seen any men since breaking with Jerry, hadn’t gone out once. Hadn’t had sex, hadn’t been close to having sex, since Jerry’s last rape attempt almost eight months ago. Hadn’t had any desire for it.

Her social life was limited and anything but sexy, but she enjoyed it. She spent her evenings with her daughter, watching television, playing games, sometimes going to movies, when she could find one rated G. If Joni wanted to stay overnight with her friend Sally, downstairs, well, that was fine; Diane could catch another, more adult film with one of the girls from the office. And now with brother Stevie home from service, she could have him over and cook for him and have him join their diminutive family circle and add some needed masculine authority.

She was just a few blocks from the apartment house now. She glanced at the clock on the Pontiac’s instrument panel and switched on the radio to catch the news. The newscaster was in the middle of a story about a shooting that had taken place earlier that afternoon. She didn’t catch the name of the victim, but she heard enough of the story to tell it was a ghastly affair, a piece of butchery out of a bad dream. Some psychopath sniper was loose, had cut a man down with a high-power rifle in broad daylight, on the golf course of an exclusive local country club. She shivered and switched off the radio. That was just the sort of thing she didn’t need to hear about.

She pulled into the apartment-housing parking lot. She saw her brother’s car in the lot and smiled. Christ, it was good to have Stevie home.

Vincent DiPreta was known, in his earlier, more colorful days, as Vince the Burner — even though he himself rarely set fire to anything outside of his Havana cigars. The name grew out of Vincent’s pet racket, which was bust-outs. A bust-out is setting up a business specifically with arson in mind, and it works something like this: You set yourself up in an old building or store picked up for peanuts; you build a good credit rating by finding some legitimate citizen looking for a fast buck and willing to front for you; you use that credit to stockpile merchandise, which will be moved out the back door for fencing just prior to the “accidental” fire; you burn the place down, collect the insurance on the building and its contents, and declare bankruptcy. A torch artist out of Omaha did the burning for Vincent; theirs was an association that dated back to the forties and lasted well into the seventies. Vincent was dabbling in bust-outs long after he and the rest of his family had otherwise moved into less combustible and (superficially, at least) more respectable areas of business.

In fact, during the course of his bust-out career, Vincent was so brazen as to bum two of his own places, right there in Des Moines. Even for Vince the Burner that took gall. “You don’t shit where you eat, Vince,” he was told the first time; but nobody said anything the second go-around, as the sheer fucking balls of the act was goddamn awe inspiring. First he’d burned one of his two plush, high-overhead key clubs. Both had been big money-makers for years, but when liquor by the drink passed in Iowa and made the key-club idea a thing of the past, he decided to convert one of the clubs into a straight bar/nightclub and put the torch to the other. Then, a few years later, he’d burned DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant on East 14th, because he was planning to remodel the place anyway, so what the hell? And besides, most of the money had gone to the Church, who deserved it more than some goddamn insurance company, for Christ’s sake.

Vincent was a good Catholic, or at least his own version of one. His wife went to Mass every Sunday, and his money did too, though he himself stayed home. In recent years, when his teen-age son, Vince Jr., had contracted leukemia, Vincent had upped his already generous contributions to the Church in response to their priest’s suggestion that the son’s illness was repayment for wrongdoings committed by the DiPreta family over the years. Vince Jr.’s illness was a classic example of the son paying for the sins of the father, the priest suggested, and a monetary show of faith might help even the score. This sounded worth a try to Vince Sr. — maybe a healthy donation to the Church would work as a sort of miracle drug for Vince Jr. — and Vincent promptly got in touch with his torch-artist friend in Omaha for one last fling. DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant burned, got remodeled and was now doing as good as ever — no use busting out a money-maker, after all.

But it hadn’t done much good for Vince Jr., who died anyway, despite massive injections of cash into the local diocese coffers. And even though their priest had been on a nice DiPreta-paid trip to Rome when Vince Jr. passed away, Vincent bore no bitterness toward the Church. No promises had been made, no miracles guaranteed. Secretly, however, he couldn’t help wishing his and his son’s salvation was in more reliable hands, though he said just the opposite to his wife Anna.

It was no secret, though, to Anna or anyone else, how hard Vincent took the death of his son, his only son. Vince the Burner had always been a fat man, the stereotype of a.jolly, heavyset patriarchal Italian. But after his son died, Vincent began to lose weight. He immersed himself in his work as never before, pushing harder when age dictated slowing down, but at the same time seeming to care less about his work than ever before. He developed a bleeding ulcer, which required several operations and a restricted diet that made his weight drop like a car going off a cliff. The expression “shadow of his former self” was never more apt The six-foot Vincent dropped from two hundred and fifty-five pounds to one hundred and sixty-three pounds in a year’s time.

Vincent had been a handsome fat man, a round, jovial, eminently likable man. As a skinny man, Vincent was something else again. The flesh hung on him like a droopy suit, loose and stretched from years of carrying all that weight around; the firmly packed jowls of fat Vincent were jolly, while the sacklike jowls of skinny Vincent were repulsive. His face took on a melancholy look, his small dark eyes hidden in a face of layered, pizza-dough flesh. It was as though a large man’s face had been transposed to a smaller man’s smaller skull. The features seemed slack, almost as if they were about to slide off his face like shifting, melting wax.

If, these last seven years since the death of his son, Vincent DiPreta’s countenance seemed a melancholy one, then on this evening that countenance could only be described as one of tragic proportions. He sat in a small meeting room at a table the size of two card tables stuck together and wept silently, pausing now and then to dab his eyes with an increasingly dampening handkerchief. There was a phone on the table, which he glanced at from time to time, and a bottle of Scotch whisky and a glass, which Vincent had been making use of, his restricted diet for the moment set aside. He was smoking a cigar — or at least one resided in the ashtray before him, trails of smoke winding toward air vents in the cubicle-size meeting room — and it seemed a strange reminder of Vincent DiPreta’s former “fat man” image. When he would take it from the ashtray and hold it in his fingers, the cigar seemed almost ready to slip away, as if expecting the pudgy fingers of seven years ago.