Эд Макбейн: ’Til Death

He did not have his brush with the law until almost two years later in March of 1958. He’d been working, at the time, as a salesman for a paint company in San Francisco. He’d come East for a sales convention and had begun drinking with a stranger in a midtown bar. At some point during the evening, the conversation had swung around to the Korean War. The stranger had admitted that he’d been 4-F and rather glad of it. Because of his disability, a slight heart murmur, he’d been able to make fantastic advances in his company while men of his own age were away fighting.

Sokolin had at first reacted to the man’s confession with slightly drunken solemnity bordering on the maudlin. One of his best friends, he informed the stranger, had been killed in Korea because another soldier had failed to do his duty. The stranger sympathized, but his sympathy must have sounded hollow and insincere to Sokolin. Before the stranger fully realized what was happening, Sokolin was hurling curses at him for being a deserter and a shirker and another son of a bitch who didn’t do his duty when he saw it. The stranger tried to get away, but Sokolin’s ire mounted irrationally until finally he smashed a beer mug on the edge of the bar and came at the stranger with the broken shard clutched in his fist.

He did not kill the surprised 4-Fer, but he did manage to cut him badly. And perhaps the attack would have been considered second-degree assault had not Sokolin accompanied it with eight words spoken clearly and distinctly in the presence of the halfdozen witnesses lining the bar.

Those words were: “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!”

And so the assault had leaped into the rarefied atmosphere bounded by the words “with an intent to kill a human being,” and the indictment read first-degree, and the maximum penalty for violation of Section 240 of the Penal Law was ten years in prison as opposed to the maximum five years for the second-degree crime.

Sokolin had come off pretty well. He was a war veteran, and this was a first offense. It was, nonetheless, first-degree assault and the judge could not let him off with a fine and a fatherly pat on the head. He was found guilty and sentenced to two years in Castleview Prison upstate. He’d been an ideal prisoner. He’d applied for a parole after serving a year of his term, and the parole had been granted as soon as a firm job offer was presented to the board. He had been released from Castleview two months ago — on April 3.

Meyer Meyer pulled the phone to him and dialed Carella’s home number. Carella answered the phone on the third ring.

“I’ve got that stuff you wanted on Sokolin,” Meyer said. “Did that patrolman show up for the note yet?”

“About a half-hour ago,” Carella said.

“Well, he’s not back here yet. You’re leaving about noon, huh?”

“About one o’clock, actually.”

“Where can I reach you if the lab comes up with something?”

“The wedding’s at three at the Church of the Sacred Heart at the intersection of Gage and Ash in Riverhead. The reception starts at five at my mother’s house. It’s gonna be an outdoor thing.”

“What’s the address there?”

“831 Charles Avenue.”

“Okay. You want this stuff on Sokolin?”

“Give it to me.”

Meyer gave it to him.

When he’d finished talking, Carella said, “So he’s on parole now, huh? Went back to California with a firm job offer.”

“No, Steve. I didn’t say that.”

“Then where is he?”

“Right here. The job offer came from this city.”

By one-thirty that bright Sunday afternoon, Antonio Carella was ready to shoot his wife, strangle his son, disown his daughter, and call off the whole damn wedding.

To begin with, Tony was paying for the wedding. This was the first time — and the last time, thank God — a daughter of his was getting married. When Steve married Teddy, it was her parents who had paid for the festivities. Not so this time. This time, Tony was shelling out, and he was discovering that the wedding would cost, at a conservative estimate, just about half what he earned in an entire year at his bakery.

The biggest of the thieves, and he had half a mind to ask Steve to arrest the crooks, were the men who called themselves Weddings-Fetes, Incorporated. They had arrived at the Charles Avenue address at 9:00 A.M. that morning (after Tony had stayed up all night in the bakery getting his Sunday morning breads baked) and proceeded to turn the Carella backyard into a shambles. The Carella house in Riverhead was a small one, but the land on which it rested was possibly the largest plot on the street, stretching back from the house in a long rectangle that almost reached the next block. Tony was very proud of his land. His back yard boasted a grape arbor that rivaled any to be found in his home town of Marsala. He had planted fig trees, too, nourished them with loving care, pruned them in the summer, wrapped them with protective tarpaulin in the winter. And now these crooks, these brigandi, were trampling over his lawn with their tables and their ridiculous flags and flower canopies and...

“Louisa!” he had screamed to his wife. “Why inna hell we can’t hire a hall? Why inna hell we have to have a outdoor wedding! A hall was good enough for me, an’ good enough for you, an’ good enough for my son, but Angela has to have a outdoor wedding! So those crooks can tear up my lawn an’ ruin my grapes an’ my figs! Pazzo! E proprio pazzo!”

“Shut up,” Louisa Carella said kindly. “You’ll wake up the whole house.”

“The whole house is wake up already!” Tony said. “Besides, there’s nobody in the whole house but me, you, an’ Angela, an’ she’s getting married today an’ she’s not sleeping, anyway!”

“The caterers will hear you,” Louisa said.

“For what I’m paying them, they’re entitled to hear,” Tony replied, and grumblingly he had got out of bed and gone down to the back yard to supervise the setting of the tables and the construction of the bridal arbors and bandstand and dance floor. The caterers, he discovered, were very fancy people. Not only were they turning his back yard into a Hollywood set for Father of the Bride (starring me, Antonio Carella, he thought sourly) but they were also building a twelve-foot mermaid, the length of the young fish-woman’s body to be sculpted from ice, a similarly sculpted ice tub to rest beneath her and contain bottles of champagne for any thirsty guests. Tony prayed to God the sun would not get too strong. He visualized the fish-woman melting into the tub, the champagne beginning to taste like lukewarm ginger ale.

At one o’clock, his son and daughter-in-law arrived. Now Steve was a boy Tony could usually count on. Before Steve had gone into the Army, he used to work nights at the bakery, even though he was going to college during the day. Steve was a boy who could be trusted. He was a boy a father could count on. So today — San Giacinto di California! — even Steve had turned on him. Today, of all days, with those thieving Weddings-Fetes, Incorporated, tearing up the lawn, with Angela running around like a chicken senza capo, with the world of Antonio Carella slowly collapsing around him, his own true son Steve had arrived at the house with three additional guests! Not that Tony minded the extra expense. No, that didn’t matter to him at all. So he would work an additional four months in the bakery to make up the money. But it was having to explain to these Incorporateds that there would be three more people and that they would have to arrange them at different tables. Steve was insistent on that. No, he did not want to sit with his friends. He wanted one here, and one here, and himself over there! Pazzo! His own son, as crazy as all the others.