Макс Коллинз: Hush Money

Vincent had been sitting alone in the room for an hour now. He had heard the news of his brother’s death on the car radio on his way home from his office at Middle America Builders. But he hadn’t gone home; he couldn’t face Anna and the deluge of tears she’d have to offer him over the loss of Joey. He’d called her on the phone and soothed her, as if Joey had been her damn brother (Anna had always had a special fondness for Joe — but then so had everybody in the family) and he had come here, to the new DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant, for privacy, for a booth to hide in in a moment or two of solitary mourning. The restaurant was closed when he got there (it was six now; they were just opening upstairs), and he’d walked through the darkened dining room, where the manager and hostess mumbled words of condolence — “We’re so very sorry, Mr. DiPreta,” “We’ll miss him, Mr. DiPreta” — and he headed downstairs to one of many small conference rooms. The whole lower floor was, in fact, a maze of such rooms, used by the DiPretas and any visiting mob personae, whenever unofficial official business needed to be discussed.

Many high-level mob meetings had taken place on DiPreta turf these past five or six years or so, even though the DiPretas themselves did little more than host the meets. There were several reasons for Des Moines being the site of meetings of such importance. For one thing, many older members of die Chicago Family, the aging elder statesmen, had chosen Des Moines as a place to retire to, since Chicago was going to hell and the blacks, and the Iowa capital city was possessed of a low crime rate and a metropolitan but nonfrantic atmosphere that reminded them of Chicago in its better days. Whenever the Family needed to consult these retired overlords, which they did both out of respect and to seek the good counsel the old men could provide, a meeting place would be furnished by the DiPretas. And the DiPretas would do the same whenever the Family wanted to confab with other crime families, such as Kansas City and Detroit, for example, because Des Moines made a convenient meeting place, pleasantly free of the federal surveillance afflicting the Chicago home base. Until not long ago, meetings were divided pretty evenly between the restaurant and the Traveler’s Lodge Motel, with the nod going to the latter most often; but then the McCracken problem arose, and both the DiPretas and the Family had quickly gotten out of the habit of utilizing the Traveler’s Lodge facilities: even with Jack McCracken gone, a bad taste lingered.

The door opened. Frank DiPreta joined his brother in the small conference room. Frank was a thin man but a naturally thin one, a dark and coldly handsome man with a pencil-line mustache. At fifty-three he was an older version of the deceased Joey but without Joey’s blue eyes. Frank’s eyes were dark, cloudy and, at the moment, slightly reddened. He wore a black suit, which was not his custom, and a .38 revolver in a shoulder holster, which was. He alone of the DiPreta brothers had continued carrying heat these past ten or twelve years, and he’d been alternately teased and scolded for the practice by Joey and Vince, who’d insisted “those days” were long over. Eventually he would say, “I told you so.” Now was not the time. He joined his brother at the table.

Vincent studied his brother. Frank’s face was set in its typical stoic expression and betrayed no hint of emotional strain. His eyes were a little red, but there was no other indication. Still, there seemed to be waves of tension coming from the normally calm Frank that were just enough to worry Vincent. Six years ago, when Frank’s wife had been killed in an automobile accident, Frank had tried to maintain his standard hard-guy stance; but gradually cracks had formed in Frank’s personal wall, and the emotional strain, the pain, the anger began to show through. And, ultimately, Frank had responded to the situation with an act of violence. Vincent studied his brother’s seemingly emotionless expression, wondering if that would happen again.

“Vince, you shouldn’t drink.”

“Frank, I know. Have you taken care of everything?”

“Yes.”

“The services?”

“Saturday morning.”

“Who will say the Mass?”

“Father DeMarco.”

“Good. He’s a good man.”

“Well I like him better than that son of a bitch you sent to Rome.”

Vincent nodded.

Frank looked at the ceiling awhile, then suddenly he said, “The funeral parlor guy says the casket should stay shut.”

“I see.”

“He says he can’t make Joey look like Joey.”

“I see.”

“You don’t see shit, Vince. You want to see something, go down and see Joey. Go down and see goddamn meat with a twisted-up expression on its goddamn face.”

The wall was cracking already.

“Then the casket will be shut, Frank. It’ll be all right.”

“All right? All right shit. Vince, do you know the size of the slug it was Joey caught?”

“Four-sixty Magnum. You told me on the phone.”

“Hell, he didn’t even catch it, it went straight fucking through him. Jesus. You could kill a fucking rhino with that. What kind of sick son of a bitch would do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know, Frank. It’s all very confusing to me.”

“Well, I don’t see what’s confusing about it. Some son of a bitch killed our brother. Okay. Now we find out who and kill the fucker.”

“But why was Joey killed? That’s the question I can’t get out of my mind. Why?”

Frank, realizing he’d slipped into emotional high gear, eased back behind his wall, shrugged and said, “We’re in the kind of business that makes you unpopular sometimes, Vince.”

“Even if I agreed with that, I don’t see it applying to Joey. He was the least involved in family business of all of us.”

“Maybe he was messing with something married. You know Joey and his women, Vince. You know what a crazy lad Joey was.”

“He was a man. He was forty years old.”

“He was a kid. He’ll always be a kid.”

And Frank touched the bridge of his nose with two fingers and swallowed hard.

His wall wasn’t holding up very well at all.

“Frank, could it have anything to do with that politician Joey was talking to today?”

“Who, Carl Reed? No. I don’t think Joe had even made the pitch to the guy yet, about paying him off to keep quiet about Grayson’s kickbacks and all, remember? At least I know Reed hasn’t said anything to the cops about anything. I talked to Cummins, and he interrogated Reed himself, Cummins and that nigger partner of his. Cummins says Reed didn’t have much to say, outside of how horrified about the shooting he was, bullshit like that. Listen, Vince, what about Chicago?”

“No. Not yet. Only as a last resort, Frank. We can handle this ourselves.”

“Maybe they know of some hit man who goes in for big guns or something. You could just ask them.”

“No, I don’t even want to call them and tell them about it.”

“Hell, Vince, they’ll find out soon enough, probably know already, thanks to the Family retirement village we got going in this town. At least one of those old Family guys has heard it on the news and called Chicago by now, you know that.”

“I’m not going to call them. I’m not going to encourage them. I don’t want them sending in one of those damn head-hunters of theirs.”

Frank thought for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right. This is family, not Family. We’ll handle it ourselves.”

“The last time they sent anyone around, you know what happened.”

“The McCracken fuck-up.” Frank shook his head. “Seemed like we were tripping over dead bodies for a week.”

“They got no finesse. Their example makes me glad we’re getting to be mostly legitimate nowadays.”