Max Collins - Ask Not

After my shot, which missed both him and the vehicle, he began to weave, making a target that though big was erratic, and even with my thirteen-shot magazine, I didn’t want to waste any more bullets. I would ram the son of a bitch. There, under a full moon that made spectral figures out of bordering cypress trees in their cloaks of Spanish moss, two vehicles sped down a narrow country road with the Mississippi an unseen but felt presence at our right, and the looming Huey P. Long Bridge up ahead.

I didn’t want him to make it to that bridge. I didn’t want him to make it back to New Orleans. I wanted him here, I wanted him now, in the swampy primeval darkness.

I was going a grinding one-hundred when I bumped his rear bumper and he tried to pick up speed but there wasn’t anything left in the Corvair, and he looked back at me, his handsome bespectacled face turned hideous with hysteria, as if to beg for mercy, and this time when I rammed him, he lost control and I immediately took my foot off the pedal and watched him take off over the left shoulder and crash into the cement pillar of the bridge approach, the right front of the vehicle crumpling like a paper cup in a fist, with a tinkling of headlight glass adding delicate high notes to the discordant low-pitched music of crunching metal.

I pulled over, left it running, got out with the gun in my right hand, and walked slowly over to the Corvair, which had its right wheels off the ground, spinning, the exhaust puffing mightily into the night on the car’s ride to nowhere. Night sounds were kicking back in, frogs, owls, nighthawks, crickets, a melancholy yet disinterested Greek chorus. I approached cautiously, though I could see him slumped behind the wheel, his head back, physics again, the windshield spiderwebbed where his skull had hit it, one lens of his black-framed glasses similarly veined.

He was breathing. Not quite unconscious. His face was smeared with blood and his forehead had a rip in it, showing bone. He looked at me with pain in his eyes. Somebody should do something to help him out.

I went back to the Galaxie and got the length of hose and the bath towel.

When I was rolling his window nearly (but not all) the way up, I noticed he had a package of Chesterfields in the breast pocket of his sport shirt. I relieved him of those. Then I rigged up the fake suicide. He seemed to be awake during the procedure, though he said nothing. I tried not to smile at him, but I just couldn’t help myself.

I went back to the Galaxie and used the dashboard lighter to fire up a Chesterfield. I burned through three waiting for him to die. In the dankness near the river, though the night itself was cool and dry, with the ghostly trees and bushes gathered round, I might have been back on Guadalcanal, waiting for the Japs to make another banzai attack. Certainly I was in some kind of fucking jungle.

I pitched the last of the Chesties down the gravel-and-shell road. It would have been reckless to toss it into the brush. Funny thing, my first thought as I pulled out was to wonder if I had time to get back to the Roosevelt, clean up, and still meet Janet for beignets and café au lait. My wristwatch, easily visible in the moonlight, said it wasn’t even midnight.

What was I going to do with all that time?

Then something came to me.

Heading along US Highway 90 East, I almost missed the turnoff to Churchill Farms. I hadn’t been the driver the one time I’d been there before. But my previous visit to the 6,400-acre swampland domain of Carlos Marcello had been nothing short of memorable, and my only real problem was spotting the turn at night. The moonlight helped.

For all of Marcello’s visionary talk two years ago, about developing this property, nothing had changed. It still surprised me there was no gate, that this was not a private road. The lane remained a narrow strip of dust-generating rutted dirt, with barely enough shoulder on either side to allow cars going in opposite directions to make room for each other — not that I met any.

As I glided by in the Galaxie, the lights were on in the small, rustic-looking shrimp-packing plant with its Negro workers, one of Marcello’s legitimate businesses. Otherwise, the full moon was providing all the illumination, lending an otherworldly beauty to the marshy landscape on my either side, untamed foliage shimmering in a gentle breeze, washed ivory. Dead cypress and living willows seemed to keep a watchful eye, like overseers in slave days.

The clearing came sooner than I remembered, the marshland making way as if Moses had parted it to take room for the barn-turned-farmhouse, its white paint job given a ghostly glow by the moon, several narrow downstairs windows burning yellow, the rest black (including those upstairs). It was almost one in the morning, after all. The red-painted shed off to the right had an abandoned look, no milling chickens and goats this time of night. Two cars were parked on the gravel apron beside the farmhouse — the familiar bronze Caddy and a sporty Dodge, a new model called Lancer, coincidentally also the Secret Service designation for President Kennedy. Had Carlos Marcello learned the meaning of irony after all?

Almost as if he were still perched there from my previous visit, Jack — Marcello’s barber, chauffeur, and bodyguard, all in one tall, burly package — was sitting on the top step of the little cement porch, wearing a light-blue leisure suit, long legs angled in two directions as he smoked a cigarette, adding a little fog to an otherwise cloudless night. Well, anyway, he’d been sitting when I first entered the clearing. By the time I pulled up a few feet from the house, he was on his feet and approaching with a.38 revolver in his hand, calling, “ Guys! Guys! ”

They were out of the house before I was out of the car, two thugs in the kind of hats and sport shirts and slacks you wear on a golf course, if you’re a fan of pastels, that is.

Hands high in the air, I said, loud, in a rush of words, “Jack, it’s Nate Heller! Remember me? I have an emergency I need to talk to Uncle Carlos about.”

The other two had slipped past Jack on their way toward me, also with guns in hand; but he told them, “Hold up!”

Then he moved through them like a cop through a crowd and planted himself, facing me, perhaps four feet away. His revolver in hand, but pointing down, he looked at me skeptically.

He wasn’t exactly threatening as he said, “I remember you, Mr. Heller. But it’s late and Mr. Marcello doesn’t appreciate drop-in guests.”

“It’s an emergency, Jack. And I understand Uncle Carlos doesn’t have a phone out here.”

“That’s right. This is where he gets away from it all. I will tell him you stopped by, and you can probably meet with him tomorrow at the Town and Country.”

“It can’t wait. You check with him.”

“You call at the motel in the morning. I’ll make sure you get an appointment.”

“He’s not going to like it, Jack, if you don’t check with him. I said it was important.”

He thought about that, but seemed about to say no, despite my insistence.

So I insisted some more: “There are some freshly dead business associates of his that he’s going to want to know about. Right now.”

Jack frowned. Then, very slowly, he nodded. “Okay. I’ll wake the boss. You stay put.”

He turned to go back inside, but paused on the way to whisper orders to the pair of fellow bodyguards. Then he glanced over his shoulder at me and gave me an almost smile. “Mr. Heller, this is unusual enough that I’ve instructed my friends to keep you covered. No offense is meant.”

“None taken,” I said.

One flunky, young and skinny in shades of green, including his wide-banded straw porkpie, stood facing me at my left, maybe six feet away; similarly positioned to my right was an older, beefier guy with pockmarks and a mustache and shades of yellow attire, including an Ivy League cap. Today’s male fashions were definitely not doing thugs any favors. On the other hand, the green porkpie’s Colt Python, a.357 Magnum, and his partner’s Smith and Wesson.44, went a long way toward making up for it.