Max Collins: Mourn The Living

Only his face didn’t jibe with the rest of his youthful image, and of that he was well aware.

His face hadn’t looked so bad to him three days before, when the Nolan threat had as yet to rise up. But now, now he looked at it and found things he hadn’t noticed before. Like deathly pale skin, puckered with dry wrinkles, scattered with an occasional liver spot. And his hair, which only a few days before had seemed to him a distinguished premature gray, now looked a stark white, setting off the new oldness of his face.

Ridiculous!

In three days?

He wouldn’t even think about it.

But Rich rubbed his hand over his chin (the stubble of his beard wasn’t starting to grow in gray, now, was it?) and he knew that Nolan posed the kind of threat that could age a man, as they said, overnight.

Rich stepped into the shower stall, turned the faucet on both hot and cold, mixing the spray to an even lukewarm, and thought about the years he’d spent working his way up the ladder in the Boys’ organization to get into this nice home in Cleveland, Ohio. Six and a half years he’d spent in Chicago, directly under the tight rein of the brothers Franco. Charlie and Sam Franco, along with Lou Goldstein, were the Boys, the three men who controlled the Chicago syndicate.

Rich soaped himself, adjusted the water just a bit warmer, and reflected on those six and a half years with the Boys, most of it spent working in various small casinos, and, toward the end, supervising the bookmakers. Then five more years he spent as Vito’s second-in-command in Pittsburgh. Finally, for the past three years, he’d had his own set-up here in Cleveland, though still tied to the Boys. His operation wasn’t a big one, but it was big enough to suit him: the apex of a career of hard, dedicated work in the none too safe business world of narcotics, gambling, prostitution, unionizing, and, well, other consumer services.

And now an obstacle: Nolan.

That damn renegade hood. Rich had hardly believed his ears when he’d heard that the Boys had set a price tag of a quarter mil on that punk’s head.

Of course, Rich only knew of Nolan, had never met him. When Nolan had started working for the Boys in the Chicago operation, managing clubs for them, Rich was already with Vito in Pittsburgh. But Rich knew Nolan about as well as one man can know another second-hand.

He knew that Nolan was an ex-employee of the Boys, and had submitted his resignation in bullets, taking care of Sam Franco and two bodyguards when he did. Knew that for the past few years Nolan had been traveling around looting and generally tearing hell out of the organization’s key operations.

Rich turned off the shower, slipped into a terry cloth robe to sop up the moisture.

He couldn’t, wouldn’t let the Nolan thing shake him. Nolan was only one man and, by reputation at least, a man who worked alone. He would hit some of Rich’s sources of revenue, maybe, but he wouldn’t think to hit Rich at home. Would he?

Three days before, when the rumor had filtered through his grapevine to him that Nolan was in Cleveland, Rich had moved what capital that was on hand and not in banks to his own wall-safe at home. For various reasons, reasons primarily concerned with matters of federal and state income tax, this money was not banked but kept on hand by the local operation till the Boys sent in a bagman from Chicago to pick it up once a month.

Now, forty thousand of this cash was downstairs in Rich’s wall-safe, and Reese or someone like him had been serving guard duty on it ever since its arrival.

Rich got back into his pajamas. He hadn’t thrown the case of nerves yet, but he felt a little better; he just didn’t like thinking about what the Boys would do to him if he let Nolan lay hands on their money. He was half-way down the hall to his bedroom when he heard the noise.

It wasn’t a very loud noise, just loud enough: a solid substantial thump.

Rich scrambled into the bedroom and got his .32 out from a dresser drawer near his pillow. He didn’t bother Nancy; she was rolled over the other way, asleep.

He crept down the stairs and stood silently at the bottom for a while, facing the stately ivory-white double doors leading to the library, where waited the wall-safe and the forty thousand dollars.

“Reese?”

No answer.

“Reese?”

Rich opened the doors quickly, quietly, and entered holding the .32 in close to him, like an extra appendage. Trembling, he darted his eyes around the room.

There was no one in the library except Reese, who was stomach-down spread-eagled in the middle of the floor, like an X marking the spot. Rich went over to him, bent down. Reese wasn’t dead, but from the looks of the back of his head — freshly red and a shade caved in — he wouldn’t be waking up for a while.

Rich glanced over toward the wall where the picture of his fat wife Lily hung over the wall-safe. No sign of disturbance, outwardly at least.

Shaking badly now, Rich struggled out to the hall again and opened the front door. He wondered why his watchdog, a large German Shepherd, hadn’t let out the usual howl he bestowed on visitors, friendly or otherwise. Then he noticed, looking out across the forty yards of lawn between him and the gate, the outline of the dog in the moonlight. The dog was lying still, but not dead, he was breathing too hard for that. Drugged apparently, Rich decided, and at any rate, out as cold as Reese.

He made his way back into the house, into the library. He shut the double doors behind him, looked around the empty room and felt a wave of calm wash over him.

Nolan had been and gone!

Obviously!

Rich smiled and reconstructed it. Nolan had come and tried to make Reese open the safe, and Reese, of course, hadn’t known the combination. Then Nolan had heard the footsteps upstairs coming down, and, knowing that someone would be on the way with a gun, Nolan had made a hasty retreat! Rich breathed easily, allowed himself a smile.

Relaxed now, Rich headed for his wife’s portrait, pushed it aside and opened the safe.

All the money was there.

All forty thousand.

So, Rich thought, he’d been right: the bigtime punk named Nolan had failed.

And Rich laughed.

“Something funny?”

Rich whirled, swinging the .32-filled hand around to meet the sudden threat imposed by the strange cold voice from behind him. But a massive rock of a fist smashed into his face and Rich felt himself going down like a sack of grain, and as consciousness began to leave him, he felt his hand go fish-limp around the .32. The little revolver dropped harmlessly to the floor, and so did Rich.

The tall, mustached, large-boned intruder reached into the opened safe and in one sweeping motion emptied its contents into the open mouth of a satchel. He closed the satchel, stepped over Rich and walked out of the library.

In the hall Rich’s mistress was standing at the foot of the stairs, her pretty mouth wearing a wry lemon twist for a smile.

“Well?” she asked.

He opened the satchel, counted out five crisp thousand dollar notes and handed them to her. She took them and folded them into a neat, small square.

He leaned over to her, kissed her lightly.

“Thanks, Nance.”

“Any time, Nolan.”

The manager of the Motor-Inn looked across his desk at Nolan and said, “I hope your stay in our city is a pleasant one, Mr. Webb.”

Nolan nodded and waited for his room key.

The manager smiled, and the smile was like a twitch in the middle of his florid face. “Will you be staying in Dallas long, Mr. Webb?”

Nolan didn’t like questions any better than he liked smiles that looked like twitches. He dug into his pocket and came up with a twenty, traded it for his room key and shut the manager off like a TV. Then he lifted his suitcase, hefted the two clothes-bags over his arm and walked out of the motel office.