Bone tenderly slapped her bony behind and said, “Li’l Dee, stop playing that jive on Love Bone Larry Flambert. Girl, I’m hard and cold as a bandit squad roller at Eleventh Street Station.”
She grinned wanly and started through the door.
Bone held her arm for a moment, and his glazed eyes looked down seriously at her. “Li’l Dee, Uncle Bone gonna help you kick that thing you got. You gotta get back to your schoolbooks.”
She nodded. The Tuinals wobbled Bone’s legs as he turned away and followed Angelo to the sidewalk. Angelo felt it unnecessary to play the disarming game of “you follow me in your El D.” He steered Bone directly to the yawning maw of the opened rear door of the black sedan.
Bone stooped and swiveled his head inside the car for an instant and recoiled back against Angelo. “Man, who—?”
Angelo cut in smoothly. “Mr. Collucci is gonna have a Christmas dinner, fun-and-games kinda thing, around noon at the roadhouse for some friends and their kids. The guy in the back is a chef, and the guy up front is his helper and waiter.”
Bone mumbled and flung himself onto the backseat beside beaming Stilotti. Angelo slammed the door shut and went to the driver’s seat. He started the Caddie’s engine and pushed a button on the door armrest. Bone didn’t hear the faint click inside the door next to him as the sedan pulled away. Bone was sealed inside a two-inch-thick bulletproof glass-and-steel-plated rolling prison.
Bone leaned across the seat and stared filmy eyes at Stilotti. He sniggled a spray of spit full into the round, kindly, stunned face and babbled, “Chump, you ain’t no cook. You got no whiskers and red vine, but I’d know your lard ass anywhere. Shiiiiiit! You Mr. Santa Claus. I got a last-minute list to lay on you. I wanta . . .”
Bone’s head dropped back against the cushion in open-mouthed, growly sleep. Phil guffawed. Angelo grunted and gripped the steering wheel. “The Surgeon” giggled tears down his fat, pink cheeks.
2
Angelo sped the black sedan and its prisoner toward Collucci’s roadhouse in suburban Skokie.
Nude Collucci thrust anxiously on silk sheets in his mansion in posh suburban River Forest. He felt himself go limp against the vulva’s pink lips pouting through the silky brambles. He had failed miserably once again between the alabaster thighs of Olivia Tonelli Collucci.
He rolled away to his side and watched her violently undulate her round dimpled butt in the fading glow of a fat yellow moon. Then she impaled herself on his long index finger and hissed hotly as she rode and humped the wet stump. She jackknifed her thighs as he suckled at her breasts. Finally, she galloped madly for the finish line. He vised her nipples together under his big hand. He chewed, bit, sucked, gnawed, and stabbed her into orgasm.
In a raging storm of guttural joy, she flip-flopped in great voluptuous spasms of starved release. Then immediately she was hurt, furious that again he could not stay hard for her. At this moment she hated his mechanical finger-fucking that had, after all, done nothing for her that she couldn’t have done for herself. She scooted off the punching dildo and sank her nails into his crotch and drew herself into a fetal ball, panting and glaring blue fire at him.
Collucci reached for her. “Angel, doll, I’m . . .”
She uncoiled and knifed her teeth into the tender web between his thumb and index finger. He gasped in pain and sucked at the wound. She taunted him with a wicked grin.
He said harshly, “You treacherous witch, I’ll beat the pee out of you.”
She laughed mirthlessly and needled in her throaty voice, “You do, Rubber Dick, and I’ll scream the whole neighborhood and Papa into this house.”
She moved away and turned her back as she barbed over her shoulder in Sicilian, “You horny Westside scum, why don’t you beat the pee out of your new black whore you must be screwing? They have been why you can’t get hard for a decent white woman anymore.”
He was enraged to be reminded of his slum beginnings. And he was always infuriated when she mentioned his wild hang-up on coal-black sexpots.
He choked back the angry words, the truth to shake her clean, serene little world of teas and kid-glove hustling for worthy causes, the truth that Joe Tonelli, her precious father, had swum a river of blood to his present wealth and image of the respectable retired businessman.
After a long silence Olivia said softly in a breaking voice, “Please forgive me . . . You know I don’t really mean to say those awful things. I just feel sorry for you, I really do. You’re going to lose me, lose Petey . . . everything.”
Collucci scooped his yellow silk pajamas off the Persian rug. Then he slipped into them with a wry smile. He pillow-propped himself against the headboard and glanced at the Patek Philippe’s diamond face winking four A.M. on the nightstand.
He lit a cigarette and sucked deeply, exhaled, and watched a poltergeist of smoke float across the bedroom and suicide against the frosted floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the frozen grotto-garden. The garden sparkled like a crystal Shangri-La in the blaze of security spotlights ringing the mansion.
He glanced over at Olivia’s silky mane firing golden skyrockets on her pillow and idly thought that the Golden Fleece with the dragon bodyguard he had read about somewhere must have had the pulse-leaping magic of his Olivia’s hair. He tried to remember the names of the two heisters with the balls to rip it off. He bit his long bottom lip rummaging his memory.
Yes, he’d get back to his reading of the classics on a regular basis. He had to keep his respectable, upper middle-class role-playing free of telltale flaws. That and other self-improvement things he would do as soon as he managed to put Tit For Tat Taylor and his Warriors to sleep in Rosedale Cemetery, or wherever.
He whipped the satin quilt over Olivia’s splendor and thought what a beautiful no-suck, one-way, hung-up Catholic lousy lay she was. And for the thousandth time he wondered what the ungodly sexy Mayme Flambert would be like to lay.
He remembered when sex with Olivia had become a bore. It had happened when he started handling a big buck. He had showcased his impeccably groomed six-six frame in the posh watering and feeding establishments on the near Northside. Then a succession of foxy high-fashion nymphs and three-way society whores freaked his tongue and nose wide open for licking and rooting into pungent valleys.
He had gotten hopelessly jaded over the years while Olivia remained the invincible one-way lady who could not be even a two-way bitch in the bedroom.
He gazed at her realizing that the sexual and spiritual love he had felt for Olivia in the beginning, thirty-five years before, had not been really lost, but rather it had transformed itself. Now he felt for Olivia only proprietary lust, perhaps the infatuation, that trapped orgasm-of-the-eye kind of cold passion that an art fanatic lavishes upon the most fabulous piece of his collection.
He puffed his cigarette and got a whiff of Olivia’s vaginal fragrance on that finger. But oddly he thought not of Olivia, but again of the haughty and mysterious Haitian temptress and wondered what her scent would be. He sure as hell was going to find out. Like all the others, she was going to spin and dance her crotch on his stiff organ like an ecstatic yo-yo. Willingly or by violent force. His. Soon!
He had always gotten the choicest of the coloreds. He visualized the last one he had played with. She had been a strikingly unique beauty, as all the other black ones had been. She had been haughty and aloof at first, like Mayme. Previously, she had belonged to a trigger-happy black numbers banker. She had had an absolutely fantastically curvaceous body. But the awesome oddity that Collucci could not resist was that her skin, eyes, and hair were one color. Rich, ripe, radiant apricot.
The love-crazed banker had threatened Collucci with a foamy mouth and had to be put to sleep. The apricot beauty joined him six months later. She killed herself when Collucci’s inferno yen consumed itself. He smiled. At least the coroner had recorded her death as a suicide.
He always got what he wanted, did whatever he wanted with any of them. Mayme was no different. Except
that he was going to put her brother to sleep.
Now he gazed at Olivia’s face, still holding so much of the soft beauty of her girlhood. He remembered that first time he saw her thirty-five years before on a star-infested summer night in the late nineteen-thirties. He had been twenty. She fifteen.
• • •
He was standing by the merry-go-round. The sight of her trembled his legs with desire and awe. She moved like a ballet prima donna across the carnival sawdust and through the rubbernecking crowd. Her thighs were sculpted against the clingy organza gauze of her snowy dress. The lilting music of the merry-go-round synched with her sensual walk, shook him like a percussion of drums.
At a distance her face had a striking resemblance to Loretta Young’s. But as he followed her, close up, he saw she was taller and prettier with long, shapely legs and her waist-length hair was a-shimmer beneath the lights.
She stopped and vainly pitched pennies at a saucer floating in a tub of water that reflected a rack of smirking Kewpie dolls. He was standing behind her and watched her shake her head in refusal of a Kewpie doll gift from the bowing and scraping concessionaire.
She turned abruptly, and he was stricken by the great blue eyes, electric in the fawn face. She said, “Why do you follow me and look at me so strangely?”
Her voice and presence blanked out the raucous carnival noises and moil of people. He was alone with her in the moon-tinted night. He tenderly imprisoned her white hands in the cups of his huge palms. He felt them flutter and twitch and cuddle like doves in love, in heat. They stood there speechless, swaying drunkenly for a long moment.
He whispered in dulcet Sicilian, “I follow you and look at you in this wild way because I fear to lose sight of you. I need you. I will not live without you. I have been alone searching for you, dreaming about you since my mother and sister went to heaven when I was six years old. I love you, angel . . . saint of my dreams. I want you to be my wife.”
She tore her eyes away to the sawdust and escaped her hands. The snake-pit world of people and reality crashed through the shattered spell.
Her bottom lip quivered uncontrollably as she laughed and said flippantly, “Marry you? I don’t even know your name.” She paused with her eyes dancing mischievously. “Is it Jack the Ripper?”
He frowned annoyance. “I’m Giacomo Collucci, but people call me Jimmy. You?”
She moved away a bit and glanced over her shoulder toward the street. “Olivia Tonelli, and it’s been pleasant meeting you, Jimmy.”
Some familiar reference to her last name snagged on his memory. He moved close to her and saw the large vein at the pit of her white throat balloon.
“Beautiful, what I told you . . . I was serious as hell.”
She glanced over her shoulder again. “It’s Olivia. Remember? Don’t be serious, Jimmy.”
“Why?” he asked.
The tip of her valentine tongue stumbled nervously across her confection lips. “For several good reasons,” she said with an unconvincing quaver in her voice.
He lifted his eyes from a slow deliberate scanning of her upturned face. He looked past her and saw a heavyset guy step from a new black Lincoln sedan across the street. “Heavyset” lumbered up a cobblestone walkway to the front door of a brownstone house.
“Like for instance?” Collucci’s strangely lupine eyes narrowed as he watched the heavyset guy cross the street and stride into the carnival lot.
She said, “Like for instance, I’m too young to be anybody’s wife. Or should I say slave?”
He frowned and said in Sicilian, “Look at my jewelry, my clothes. Do I look like a penniless ‘mustache Pete’ fresh off the boat? See! The corners of your mouth quiver at this moment for my kisses.”
She bit her bottom lip and shook her head. “You’re crazy. You . . . It’s impossible. I can’t marry you.”
He made a sound deep in his throat and continued in caressful Sicilian. “So, you heavenly cock teaser, you will date me a coupla times. Then I guarantee the secret fire in your heart and between your thighs will burn only for Jimmy Collucci. Test me. You’ll marry me.”
She blushed and said with a little-girl whine of helpless confusion, “Please! Don’t say things like that. Respect me . . . Let me . . .”
She glanced back at the heavyset guy coming through the crowd, aiming his seamed face at her.
Collucci said in English, “Your old man?”
She shook her head. “No, his chauffeur.” She touched her fingertips lightly against Collucci’s hands and said softly, “My father thinks I’m . . . well, at least two years away from dates with boys. Besides, I won’t be available. He’s sending me to a fancy girls’ school out East with a twenty-foot wall just to keep hot fast talkers like you out.”
She lowered her eyes and said, “I’m sorry, nice Jimmy Collucci.” She turned and walked quickly away.
He bellowed his despair and loss at her back, “Olivia! I’m here with the carnival for a week. Come back soon, Angel Doll. I gotta see you again. Okay?”
She stopped for a pounding instant and smiled over her shoulder. Her blue eyes gazed at him dreamily as her lips mutely said, “Maybe.”
He didn’t take his eyes off her until the heavyset guy disappeared her away in the Lincoln. And for the next three nights he haunted the carnival where he had never worked, hoping she’d come. Then hollow-eyed, he dragged to bed, tossing sleeplessly until daybreak, raging and cursing her for letting him know she existed.
On the fourth evening, the Lincoln came. She got out and went into the brownstone house where, as it turned out, lived a sick relative that she visited. To Collucci it seemed like forever. But within ten minutes she came across the carnival lot to him with her hair like a golden banner flying joy, flying love!
They concealed their affair from Joe Tonelli. And Collucci concealed from Olivia the strong street rumor that her father was underboss to the top boss Louis Bellini. And of course he concealed from Olivia the grisly proof he witnessed with his own eyes that Joe Tonelli was one of the Mafioso.
Collucci got his confirmation the first night he set foot on the grounds of the Tonelli estate in suburban Oak Park and Olivia Tonelli gifted him with her precious maidenhead.
Since their first meeting two months before in June they had spent countless hours cooing love and banter on the telephone. Many times during this period, Olivia, dropped off by the chauffeur, would meet Collucci in the cool balconies of movie theaters to enjoy deep tongue kissing and to fondle themselves into a state of near nervous collapse.
Finally Olivia would look at the radium dial of her wristwatch and flee to the black Lincoln gleaming outside the theater. Collucci would follow and watch the chauffeur take Olivia away again.
Collucci would reluctantly take his iron hard-on and blow the achey pressure in his balls into one of a dozen young girls waiting eagerly to receive it.
One night, Olivia and Collucci found themselves together in the guest bungalow behind Joe Tonelli’s mansion on a night when he was out of town.
The servants were off, and the estate apparently had only the usual two resident guards in the mansion, plus three killer Dobermans guarding the rear of the estate, that Olivia had locked in the basement.
Collucci had slipped through a ten-foot-high steel gate, unlocked by Olivia, to the bungalow. Soon they lay nude, face to face, kissing and fondling. For the first time he put his shaft between her thighs. She squeezed herself around it and rubbed its heady gristle against her stiffening little dingus.
In the midst of their ferocious tonguing and wild bumping and grinding in the slippery creaming frenzy, she groaned, “Jimmy, I lied on the phone, and I feel so whorish and ashamed. I wanted . . . to give you my . . . cherry. Don’t hurt me. Don’t be rough. But please, sweet Jimmy Collucci, take it now; it’s yours. I might die before I reach eighteen.”
He started to protest, and she muzzled his mouth with her palm.
“Don’t speak. Take it!”
He obeye
d her wish with exquisite tenderness.
When he left the bungalow hours later, he saw a sliver of light flash from a root cellar door in a far corner of the deserted grounds. Curiosity pressed his eyes against the rotted-out crack in the door. At first he thought the two young guys laughing and joking around in Sicilian were undressing a realistic clothing store mannequin. But it had a weirdly familiar face that seemed splashed or daubed with red paint. It lay hideously realistic on a table covered with sheets of tar paper dripping scarlet.
He almost cried out in shock and betrayed his presence. He realized the thing on the table had been likeable Tarantino, a wholesale grocer!
Then he saw one of them sawing off sections of arms and legs while the other guy rolled the sawed-off parts into neat tar paper packages.
Collucci ear trapped enough of the rapid Sicilian chitchat to learn the guys planned to mail the packages to friends and relatives of their butchered enemy as a grim warning from Tonelli. He puked all the way to his car until his guts dry locked.
Collucci led Olivia to believe he was on the legit as part owner of the carnival where they first met. He concealed from Olivia the fact that he was leader of a hot car ring.
Mafioso Frank Cocio, behind the scenes, controlled Collucci, a nonmember, in the operation of the stolen car ring. And Collucci concealed his affair with Olivia Tonelli from Cocio, who adored even the ground that Olivia walked on.
Olivia told Collucci that she was frightened by the naked lust and desire in Cocio’s eyes for her.
* * *
The grotto-garden lights that reflected on the frosted windows in the Collucci bedroom suddenly snuffed out and moved Jimmy Collucci from his reverie of Olivia.
He wasn’t alarmed as he saw it was five A.M. The spotlights came on at that same instant, and he told himself that it was Henrietta, the live-in maid and cook. She lived in quarters above the five-car row of garages on the other side of the garden. She often accidentally pulled the wrong switch on the service porch off the kitchen, downstairs.
Now he faintly heard her clattering pans and her resonant humming of a Christmas carol as she started breakfast for the Colluccis.