Savage Lover [= Sinner Man]

13

I called Lou Baron from a diner. The phone was on the wall in the rear and I leaned against the wall while I dialed his number. It rang for a while. Then Baron answered it.

“Nat, Lou.”

“You in town?”

“I just got in.”

“Something go wrong?” Baron asked.

I made myself hesitate. “It’s hard to say,” I said finally. “A long story. Can I come over?”

“Now?”

“If it’s okay.”

“Sure,” he said. “Come on over, Nat. I’ll be waiting for you.”

The last line bothered me a little. I put the receiver on the hook and got a new cigarette going. My lungs were smoke-stale and my eyes weren’t focusing just right. I went back to the counter to swallow more coffee. Then Tony dropped me off at the Stennett and I picked up my car.

I left the top up on the Lincoln. I drove slowly, my hands easy on the wheel, the gun tucked comfortably under the waistband of my trousers. I was the angel of death with chrome wings and no halo. I was hell in a short-brimmed hat.

Sunlight kept getting in my eyes. I found Baron’s house and parked my car in front of it. I looked at my watch but I didn’t even notice the time. Just looking at the watch was enough. A present, To Nat from Lou Baron.

Ah, the hell with it. Baron wasn’t my brother. We didn’t go to school together. Two months ago I didn’t even know he was alive. The watch was payment for a competent job of professional beating, not a token of love and friendship. He was a hood and I was a hood and you can’t make high drama out of one hood blowing the head off of another hood. Shakespeare managed it but that was another story. And Brutus wasn’t exactly a hood anyway. More a misguided nut.

So the hell with it.

Porky answered the door. “Crowley,” I said. “I think he’s expecting me.”

Porky didn’t say anything. He never did — maybe he didn’t know how to talk. I looked at him more closely than usual and noticed the way his jacket bulged a little in front on the left side. Tony was right. Porky still packed a gun.

We made the usual promenade together — through the hallway to the living room. Baron was sitting in his chair. He was wearing a bathrobe this time around, a rich maroon affair. He had deerskin slippers on his feet and a cup of coffee in one hand.

Porky crossed the room and disappeared. I didn’t sit down. I looked at Baron — he must have been sleeping when I called and he was still in the process of waking up. “Trouble, Nat?”

“Not exactly. I made the flight, met the finger. A tub of lard named Jack Garstein.”

“I don’t know him.”

The power was still there. The eyes were calm, the hands steady. He was waiting to hear what I had to say. But first I had to get Porky into the room. I asked Baron if I could get myself a cup of coffee.

“Stay here,” he said. “Porky’ll get it.” He yelled for Porky, told him to bring me a cup of coffee. While we waited I killed time playing with a cigarette. I shook out the match and found an ashtray to put it into. Then Porky came back.

Porky had a saucer in one hand with a china cup balanced on it. Steam came up from the brim of the cup. In his other hand he had a silver tray holding a creamer and a sugar bowl. There was a gun under his jacket but he never had a chance to move near it.

My gun was tucked under my belt. I took it out, aimed, squeezed the trigger. I shot Porky in the chest, maybe an inch or two north of the heart. He took two steps and died. The coffee went all over the rug. So did the cream and sugar. But by then the gun was pointed at Baron.

“Why, Nat?”

I didn’t have an answer handy. I stood there, the gun pointed at him, and he sat where he was, his eyes on me, not the gun. He didn’t move at all. He may have been nervous but none of it showed. His question was a real one. He wanted to know why.

“Because you’re through,” I said.

“Who’s behind it?”

“Tony Quince.”

Baron nodded thoughtfully. “All right,” he said. “It figures. He’s well connected, he’s hungry. I suppose I should have been ready for it — and from him. But not this soon. You didn’t go to Philly, Nat, did you?”

“I went. I shot the finger and came home.”

“And now you shoot me.”

“That’s right,” I said.

He thought it over for a few seconds. He still wasn’t nervous. He was a fast hard man looking for an opening.

“Don’t kill me, Nat.”

He didn’t whimper it. He said it calmly, sensibly. He made me want to put the gun away, sit down, have a drink. I told him I had no choice.

“Don’t shoot me,” Baron said again. “Do a turn, change sides. We’ll clean up Tony and a few boys in no time and you’ll be on the right team.”

Everybody was telling me which side to play. “Your team’s gone,” I said. “Dead.”

“How many?”

“Scarpino and Spiro and Carr. And Porky here.”

“Four,” he said. “Four I never needed in the first place. Let me live, Nat.”

“No.”

I should have shot him then and saved time. For some reason I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why. I held the gun and kept it on him. He stayed where he was and looked at me.

He said, “I made a mistake. I guessed wrong. I thought you were just looking for a couple of yards a week, an inside track, a soft touch. I didn’t know how much you wanted.”

“I don’t want much.”

“I would’ve given you more, Nat. I just wanted to put you where you wanted to be, that’s all. Quince put me wise about you, told me you were around. I heard a little from other people but he gave me a name and a little background. He said I could do worse than find a slot for you. Were you in his pocket all along?”

That was a hard one to answer. I wasn’t too sure myself.

“He brought you in,” he said. “He brought you in all on his own, set you up with me. That it?”

‘“No.”

“You were running from something. You — ah, the hell with it. I don’t know about you and I don’t care about you. I played it straight with you, Crowley. I gave you more than I had to give you.”

“Let’s say we used each other.”

“So? Who gets more than that out of anybody?”

I let that one go.

“I got time for a cigar?” Baron asked.

“No.”

“Then end it, Crowley.”

The gun was cocked and ready. A Smith and Wesson thirty-eight primed and ready to go. The gun worked beautifully. It had one notch coming already. Porky was lying in his own blood at our feet and we were both ignoring him.

I said, “There’s something I want to say.”

“Then say it. You got the gun.”

“You had me wrong all the way, Lou.”

“That’s something new?”

“Wrong all the way and more than you know. My name’s not Crowley.”

“Who cares?”

“My name’s Donald Barshter,” I said. “I had a gun in my hand in Korea, never before and never since. Until I hit Buffalo I lived in Connecticut and I sold insurance. I was married and lived in a little house with trees in front of it.”

“Huh?”

“I was a square. Then I killed my wife by mistake and ran. I decided to play mobster. And here I am. I faked everybody out, Lou. I’m a phony all through.”

“You’re full of crap.”

“You think so?”

He stared thoughtfully at me. “Maybe not,” he said. “God damn. You put on a good act, Crowley. But I don’t get it. Why tell me all this?”

I wasn’t too sure myself.

I steadied the gun. “It won’t do you any good,” I said. “You’re not going to run around shouting about it. And I had to tell somebody.”

We could have talked about it for another five days the way we were going. But it wouldn’t have made much sense. I shot Baron once in the face, wiped off the gun and tossed it in his lap. Then I got the hell out of there and drove the Lincoln back to the Stennett.

I called Tony.

“It’s over,” I said.

“It worked?”

“I’m talking to you. If it hadn’t worked...”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

“So tell people,” I said. “Do whatever you want to do. I’m going to bed, I’m beat.”

And I went to bed.

From there on it was Tony Quince’s ball and he ran with it. The routine was what he called it, a palace revolution with the organization staying intact and just the very top turning around. He had spent the last three months laying the groundwork and it couldn’t have run more smoothly. There were no more killings. A few men who had been fairly close to Baron left town in a hurry. Nobody went chasing after them. They weren’t that important.

A few others found themselves with a little less responsibility and a little less money. A bookie had his area cut down. Another man had one of his three after-hours’ joints taken from him and handed to somebody else. You didn’t need a bloodbath for this. Just quiet conversation, backed up with power — power held carefully in reserve.

Somebody found Johnny and Mustache and their community-property female in the rooming house that afternoon, and that one made the papers. The story was about as colorful as you could get — a trio, so nude and so dead, after an obviously hectic evening of fun and games. A ménage à trois if there ever was one. The newspapers called it a sex killing and the cops were too tired to argue. There was never a kick on that one.

Scarpino never got found. The gravediggers covered him up and put grass in place over him and that was it for Scarpino. There were conflicting rumors, the way there always are — some people said he left town on the run, others that he was weighted down in the middle of Lake Erie. Nobody much missed him, except maybe his father. And his father wasn’t talking.

Baron was something else.

The cops picked us up Tuesday night and hauled us in — Tony Quince and Angie Moscato and me. The cops were the same pair of bulls who had pulled me in the first time around, a Fred Zeigler and a Howard Kardaman. This time I didn’t get slapped at all. There was no booking, no hard wordplay. They were being very cagy — if we were going to run things in Buffalo, they didn’t want to rub us the wrong way. As far as evidence went, they knew better than to look for any. They knew we had alibis and that we wouldn’t leave calling cards on dead bodies. They put Baron and Porky on adjoining slabs at the morgue and didn’t worry about them.

By Wednesday even the police realized that Tony Quince had the city in his pocket. Patrolmen started nodding respectfully at me when I walked down the street. Zeigler and Kardaman wrote Baron and Porky off as jobs done by person or persons unknown. And the newspapers had fun with it. It was the biggest story since McKinley got his.

They called it a Mafia job, performed by syndicate hoodlums under the direction of the all-powerful Unione Siciliano. They made Baron an ancient henchman of Dutch Schultz, with connections with Touhy, and explained that he’d been assassinated by remnants of the old Capone mob. It was a brilliant job of theorizing and the only thing I could find wrong with it was that it had no basis in fact. But you can’t expect much more from newspapermen. Their sourcebook on crime is a mass of printed matter on the topic, all of it written by other newsmen. They make the myths and wind up believing them.

So I spent a week sitting around the apartment, sometimes with a bottle handy, sometimes without. I took Annie out for dinner twice and wound up in bed with her once — at my place, the Stennett.

It was brutal sex, murderous sex.

Because I was a murderer now. Not just a killer, a man who’d accidentally knocked his wife’s head in, a man who’d once been to war. I’d looked men in the eyes now, men who begged me for their lives, and I’d taken their lives instead. I’d felt my finger tighten on the trigger. I’d sent bullets into their bodies. And I made love now like I was sending bullets into Anne’s.

But Anne, who knew damn well what I’d done even though I hadn’t told her and she hadn’t asked, performed as if she were a killer too — between the stretches where she acted as if she were my victim.

Both roles had rubbed off on her, the killer’s and the victim’s. Because I was murderer and victim both. Anybody who kills is his own victim — each time you kill you destroy something of yourself.

And in the sex with Anne I was destroying some of my own sensitivity — Barshter’s or Crowley’s, it didn’t matter which.

I had never had sex like this before, sex that went on and on until Anne begged me to finish her off, bring her to climax for God’s sake.

But I wouldn’t bring her to climax. I stretched out the act to the point of the sadistic, so that Anne finally had to finish herself off. And I wouldn’t let her alone even after she did that — I kept on going, starting her off again on the ascent toward orgasm. She tried to wrench herself away from me but I wouldn’t have that. I pinioned her and stroked her until she was a twitching mass of sensation — and then I abruptly stopped and she had to finish herself again while I watched. And I did watch, my breath coming hard, well past my limits but not done, as if there was a hole inside me deeper than the hole we put Scarpino in, and I’d been shoveling as hard as I could but it just wouldn’t get filled.

Anne tormented me in retaliation, abruptly stopping when I was finally on the verge and laughing while I tried to bring myself to gratification. In a fury I hit her and she sank her teeth into the soft flesh near my armpit and closed her fist like a vise around my main male armament.

I slapped her face but she wouldn’t let go.

“Cool it,” I said.

“No,” Anne said.

“You’re a bitch,” I said.

“And what kind of name do they call you, Nat? Maybe you have no name at all. Maybe what I’m holding onto is anonymous — it could belong to anybody.” She squeezed mercilessly.

I slapped her again, harder, and this time she let go. I fell on her and she flexed her legs and she screamed and took me inside her.

Both of us rocked and plunged. We slammed at each other as if we were out for blood. We reeked with sweat and started sliding all over each other. It was a savage act, a killer’s act — but neither of us died. Only parts of us died. Parts of our humanity died.

What was left was the inhumanity. I plundered Anne’s breasts until she sobbed. I dug at her until there was blood, real blood, not something I saw in a nightmare. And she again used her teeth on me until I saw red and I chopped at her ruthlessly.

We acted like a couple of stone-age animals. Like a couple of dervishes whirling to sacrifice each other.

We were exhausted, finally, and we fell asleep. When I awoke, Anne was gone, back to her own place, I guessed. It was morning and I went out to breakfast. Without Anne it was a quiet time.

Which was good, because I didn’t feel much like noise. I’d had noise enough for a lifetime, the sort you hear and the sort you feel in every nerve ending. There had been Garstein in Philadelphia, then Johnny and Mustache and Porky and Scarpino and Baron. And the girl, the girl whose name I had never bothered to find out, the hard little blonde who had picked the wrong time to wake up and who had died for it. The girl who had been killed as an afterthought.

Seven of them, if you bothered keeping score. Three of them were mine — Garstein and Baron and Porky. The rest were Angie’s but I had watched them die.

It was more blood than I was used to — outside of a movie screen. And this was the sort that doesn’t vanish when the lights come up.