Philip Carlo - The Ice Man

“Rich, you stay with him, don’t let him out of your sight. He says people owe him money, that he’ll definitely have the money real soon.”

“All right. What do you want me to do with what he gave me?”

“You hold on to that! Don’t let him out of your sight, understand?”

“Yeah,” Richard said, hanging up.

“See, I told ya,” said De Peti. “It’s all okay.”

“It’ll be all okay when you give me the rest of the money,” Richard said.

With that they left the airport, and De Peti took Richard from bar to bar, looking for different people he could never seem to find. After ten hours of this, in and out of different bars, Richard was thinking this guy was trying to give him the slip, buying time De Peti could not afford. They ended up in a crowded place on the South Side called the Say Hi Inn. It was filled with a rough clientele. They ordered drinks. De Peti went to use the phone; Richard kept an eagle eye on him, and saw him talking to a big burly guy whose face was so pockmarked it looked like gravel. Richard clearly saw something he did not like in the big man’s eyes. In his right hand in his pocket Richard held the white-handled, chrome-plated .38 derringer. There were two hollow-nosed rounds in the gun—better known as dumdums—which spread out on contact, making horrific wounds. De Peti came back to the bar, drank some of his drink. “He’ll be here soon,” he told Richard.

“The guy with the money?” Richard asked.

“Yeah, guaranteed.”

Soon, though, Gravel Face made his way over to the bar. Purposely, he shouldered Richard, looking, Richard instinctively knew, to start a fistfight with him so De Peti could slip away. Richard slowly turned to him.

“You like your balls?” Richard asked.

“What? What da fuck?” the guy said.

“If you want to keep your nuts, get the fuck outta here,” Richard said, now showing him the mean little derringer pointed directly at his crotch. “Or I’ll blow them both the fuck off here and now.”

Gravel Face turned and left. Richard turned to De Peti. “So you’re looking to play games.”

“No games—what’re you talking about?”

“If I start playing games you are going to end up very hurt. I’m losing my patience. You think I’m a fool?” Richard asked.

“He’ll be here with the dough,” De Peti said.

But nobody showed up. The bar was closing. Finally, De Peti said they should rent a room in a nearby hotel, that he’d definitely have the money “in the morning.”

“In the morning?” Richard repeated.

“I swear.”

Reluctantly, Richard called Genovese, who said it was okay to wait. They checked into a nearby hotel. Richard washed up and, tired, lay down on one of the two beds there, as did De Peti. But Richard was wary and sleep did not come easily. He didn’t know how long he’d been lying there, but he sensed, in this half-asleep state, movement nearby. He opened his eyes. As they adjusted to the dark he could just discern De Peti skulking through the room, moving toward him, past him, and to the window. De Peti slid it open and began to creep, snakelike, out onto the fire escape. In two swift movements Richard was up, grabbed him, and yanked him back into the room, where he pummeled him. Richard moved shockingly fast for such a big man, which caught many people off guard. Richard turned on the light.

“You slimy motherfucker, you been playing me all along.” Richard kicked him so hard he moved across the floor. Oh how Richard wanted to kill him, shoot him in the head, and throw him out the window, but those luxuries were not his, he knew. This guy owed Carmine a lot of money, and Richard couldn’t just go killing him. Instead, Richard called Carmine in Hoboken.

“The fuckin’ asshole tried to fly,” he said. “I caught him sneaking out on the fire escape.”

“Son of a bitch; put him on’a da phone!”

Blood running from his mouth, De Peti told Carmine that he was only looking to get some fresh air, not escape… certainly not trying to get away. “I swear, I swear on my mother,” he cried, histrionically holding his heart for maximum effect.

“Where’s the money?” Carmine demanded.

“Tomorrow, tomorrow, I swear!” De Peti pleaded.

Richard got back on the phone. Carmine said, “Give ’im until tomorrow. He don’t come up with the money, throw him out a window with no fuckin’ fire escape, okay?”

“Okay,” Richard said. “Gladly.”

The next day, it was the same story, running around to different bars and lounges, looking for different people who had the money. It was like, Richard was thinking, De Peti was playing a shell game, a three-card monte shuffle. Again, De Peti went to use a phone. There was a door near the phone, and Richard could see De Peti eyeing it. He hung up, came back, said they had to go to a pizza place. They waited there an hour, then went to two more bars.

Richard was tired of De Peti’s bull. “He’ll be here, he’ll be here,” he kept telling Richard, and no one showed up.

Pissed, Richard took De Peti back to the hotel and, without another word, hung him by his feet out of the window. Begging, De Peti now said he’d get him “all the money,” that it was in a place he owned over on the South Side—

“You lying to me, I’ll kill you on the spot!” Richard promised.

“I ain’t lying! I ain’t lying!” he pleaded, cars and trucks and buses moving on the wide avenue ten stories below.

Richard pulled him inside. “Let’s go.”

It was a kind of go-go place. Half-naked girls who had seen better days danced around, wiggling their breasts and shaking ample asses in Day-Glo red lights. De Peti took Richard straight to a rear office, opened a safe hidden in a closet wall, grabbed a pile of currency, and gave him the thirty-five g’s.

“My God, if you had the money all the time, why didn’t you just give it to me?” Richard asked, really annoyed now, anger rising in him.

“Because I didn’t want to pay,” De Peti sheepishly admitted.

That made Richard see red; his balls, as he says, were all twisted already, and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“Really,” he said, smiling slightly, making the soft clicking sound out of the side of his mouth.

“Let me get one of the girls in here to clean your pipes out,” De Peti offered.

“Naw, that’s okay,” Richard said.

After counting the money, Richard suddenly pressed the little .38 derringer hard to De Peti’s chest and pulled the trigger. Boom. The report of the gun was muffled by De Peti’s chest and drowned out by the music coming from the club.

With a horrific hole in his chest, De Peti hit the ground hard, and was soon as dead as a doorknob.

Calmly, Richard left the club, hailed a cab a block away, went to the airport, and caught a flight back to Newark. As soon as he hit the ground, he went to see Carmine Genovese.

“And what happened?” Carmine asked as he opened the door.

“I got two things to tell you.”

“Yeah?”

“First, I got the money—all of it. Second, I killed him. All he did was play me,” Richard said, not sure if Carmine would get mad. After all, he had killed a customer of Carmine’s after getting all that was due.

“Good, bravo,” Carmine said. “We can’t be letting these fuckin’ assholes play us for fools. That gets around on the street, we’re out of business. You did the right thing,” Carmine said, patting Richard on his enormous back. “You’re a good man, Richie. Mama mia I wish you were Italian. I’d sponsor you in a fuckin’ minute, in a fuckin’ minute,” he said, and paid Richard well.

Carmine, a very rich man, tended to be—like most Mafia men—cheap and greedy. For them, nothing was ever enough.