Death Wish

  • • •

  Angelo sat idly at his apartment window behind the mansion while his ailing spouse catnapped. He saw the cab go by the driveway carrying Olivia and Petey, and a stack of luggage riding in the front seat. He was surprised not to see Bellini in the cab, since Bellini’s cab had left empty.

  Angelo’s moon face wrinkled concern. He remembered Collucci had Bellini under suspicion as a foe.

  Bellini locked the door. He searched the mansion to be sure he was alone. Then he settled into an easy chair in a shadowy corner of the living room to wait for Collucci, even if it took a month.

  At the fall of darkness, Angelo darted into the basement beneath the mansion. He listened to the stealthy sound of Bellini’s feet as he pussyfooted about the kitchen floor preparing himself a hero sandwich to stop the growling in his belly.

  26

  Two hours after Collucci received Angelo’s call in his hotel suite, he was airborne for Chicago. After his arrival at O’Hare Field, he took a cab to a Loop hotel room where he waited for middle-of-day brightness before he called Angelo and warned him to stay undercover while he covered the back of the mansion.

  At two-thirty, Collucci’s cab pulled up in front of the mansion. Bellini flopped loose-jointed on the living-room sofa and watched Collucci come through the front door. Collucci’s right hand was jammed into his overcoat pocket, and his eyes were wary.

  Bellini let Collucci spot him before he smiled and rose to his feet. “Ah, Giacomo, your trip gave your face such a soft, rested look.”

  Collucci froze and dropped the suitcase he was carrying. He drew a Magnum pistol from his overcoat pocket. Bellini came toward him with a bland face. Collucci leveled the gun and stood as if hypnotized as Bellini narrowed the space between them.

  Collucci suddenly said, “You keep coming, old man, I’ll blow you away. You poisoned Olivia against me, haven’t you? Where have you sent my family?”

  Bellini said, “Poisoned? Sent away? . . . Olivia has installed me as your houseguest until she and Petey return from a little trip.”

  Bellini smilingly held his hands out toward Collucci, palms exposed. “See, Giacomo, a guest does not arm himself,” he said as he oozed forward.

  His arms were up and aimed like hammer-headed battering rams. He should be a foot closer, he thought, before he could hurl up his double fists into Collucci’s throat to crush it or stun him for strangling. Bellini decided to sweet-talk himself into striking range.

  He crooned as he almost imperceptibly shuffled four inches closer to the target. “Angelita loved and trusted you, Giacomo.” Bellini smiled sadly. “Your name was last on her dying lips. For respect of Angelita, put the gun away.”

  Collucci’s brain sent the message to his trigger finger at the instant he saw Bellini spring the hammerheads airborne for his throat. But Collucci’s finger was numb against the trigger. Paralyzed! He stood there transfixed and actually stared into Bellini’s mad eyes for a mini-instant before his finger jerked the trigger.

  He sidestepped. As Bellini’s dead body charged past, his stomach churned at the ragged exposure of bone and brain through Bellini’s blown-away face. He went to Bellini’s crumpled form.

  Angelo came through the front door. They stood looking down at Bellini’s corpse. Angelo crossed himself and started to say a rosary in an almost inaudible voice.

  Collucci glared at Angelo and cut him off. “Stop it! Pull yourself together, Angelo . . . He’s not the fucking Pope.”

  Then Collucci gazed at the pitiful head and said, “I had a big warm feeling once upon a time for that senile old fool . . . You know, like he was my real old man. I promised to bury him beside his Angelita . . . I’ll have to break that promise. Have one of the Rizzos get Labretti the undertaker’s most elegant box . . . for him . . . with no paperwork tracing to the box.”

  Angelo said, “What a shame the old man had to go . . . Anything else, Jimmy?”

  The big vein in Collucci’s neck puffed with emotion. “Don’t look at me that way! What a goddamn shame it is that he tried to strangle me! I am not guilty of his death. He is . . . I didn’t kill him . . . He trapped me with his senility. He killed himself!

  “A thousand times you’ve heard me say it, Angelo. It’s always the dead, the stupid dead who bear all the responsibility and guilt for their dying. I never felt one fucking thing for any of the others . . . except for Bobo Librizzi.”

  Collucci moved in close to Angelo with fanatical eyes. “Angelo, I swear to you that old fool . . . Papa, lying there, means goddamn nothing to me now. He’s just like all the other cocksuckers that deserved to be put to sleep.”

  He leaned his wild face into Angelo’s. His voice lurched and shrilled. “Believe it, Angelo! He’s just another dead cocksucker to me now. You believe me, Angelo? Say something! Say you believe me! Say it!”

  Angelo recoiled and said, “Sure, Mr. . . . Sure, Jimmy, I believe you! I ain’t never doubted nothing you told me about your own personal feelings on important private stuff . . . have I, Jimmy, . . . ?”

  27

  Spring had come to Chicago. The grand lady sprawled a-shimmer in her ball gown of neon. Collucci gazed out at her from beneath the penthouse terrace bubble. He sat in a high-backed chair covered in royal blue velvet that rested on a raised platform. He was impatient for the stalled plan to assassinate the Commission to move again.

  He spent most of his nights in his chair. There were many nights when alone, he ached for Olivia and Petey. He had spent, and was still spending, five thousand a week in his worldwide search for a trace of Olivia and Petey. So far, it was as if they had vanished off the earth.

  And he thought a lot about Bellini asleep in his five-grand box, buried on the rise behind his Sweet Dream Roadhouse.

  The Rizzos and Angelo played rummy at a table before him. The phone rang on the table beside Angelo. He picked up the receiver and frowned as he said, “Mack Rivers,” and passed the phone to Collucci.

  Collucci said, “Hello,” and listened for a minute or less.

  Angelo’s ears flapped to hear Collucci say, “Mack, I’ve changed my mind about having them and their wives here. The best psychology is me over there to hype them up to full confidence that they got reliable protection for all-out operation of their businesses. What the hell, Mack, they will be doing business on the Southside, not here. I’ll be there tonight after regular closing.”

  Collucci hung up the receiver.

  Angelo said, “Mr. Collucci, excuse my big mouth butting in. I know the Warriors are fading . . . But Taylor is still alive and nuts. Please let the numbers bankers and big drug dealers come here like you first laid it out.”

  Collucci threw his head back and laughed. “Even Taylor wouldn’t try for me on a skateboard. Besides, the jigaboo numbers bankers and dope dealers will go on crapping in their pants unless I prove, by showing over there, that Taylor’s balls shriveled away when he lost his legs. I have to prove the Warriors and Taylor have become pussycats.”

  Collucci lit a cigarette. He gazed out on his kingdom. He thought about the irony of how Tonelli’s trusted penthouse soldati, except for a couple, had assisted and welcomed his takeover of the penthouse.

  Yes, he thought, he had a secret overpowering reason why he must go to the Southside. He had to prove to himself he was not afraid of Taylor.

  Two teams of assassins sent by the National Commission to kill Collucci had been trapped and disposed of by Collucci’s aides.

  A third team sat around the clock at a window in a skyscraper hotel two hundred yards away with an overview of the penthouse terrace. One of the assassins sat, ironically, zeroing in on Collucci’s forehead with a starlight-scoped Magnum rifle. He and his partner had waited for two weeks for a day or even a moment balmy enough to encourage the retraction of the three-inch-thick plastic bubble under which Collucci spent most of his time.

  On the far Southside, the dope-jackers bandit gang led for Kong by his cousin, Buncha Grief, had finally put the chips dow
n on the Double Head policy bank safe, loaded with cash and cocaine.

  It was the end of the dope jackers. They were bloody and lost with the death of Buncha Grief and almost the entire gang. The dead lay strewn about, all but chopped to pieces by Double Head’s machine gun.

  They had held the bank’s employees at bay and cleaned out the safe. They were going down a narrow hallway to the street when above their heads, near the high ceiling, Double Head pushed up a hinged ventilator cover and sprayed the gang with his machine gun.

  One member of the gang, leaking blood, managed to reach the getaway car driven by Charming Mills. As the getaway car shot away past the policy bank, Double Head let go a burst through the blasted-away hallway door.

  A round of gunfire tore through Charming Mills’s back and pierced arteries inside his chest. His wounded companion leaped from the car several blocks away. Mills was near death. He blacked out and crashed the getaway car into a sentry vehicle at a Zone entrance point.

  Bama, a moment before, had heard on the radio about the massacre of dope jackers at Double Head’s policy bank. When he heard the crash, he jumped from his supper at his girlfriend’s apartment fifty yards away. He reached the wreckage, and Mills was dead. He had Mills’s body taken to the hospital morgue.

  At first Bama didn’t realize that Mills’s death afforded an opportunity to run Kong through a psychodrama test.

  Bama, while searching Mills’s two-room apartment on the first floor of the parsonage, had noticed the carpet felt oddly spongy beneath his feet under a large table he moved. He pried up the section of carpet. Beneath it was a fat cushion of banknotes, which he guesstimated at no less than a hundred thousand dollars. He restored the room as he had found it and went to set up the trap for Kong.

  Taylor was brought to stake out Mills’s apartment. He sat on a mound of bedclothes in a large closet without his wheelchair.

  Kong, waiting in Buncha Grief’s apartment for his return from the Double Head job, heard the news flash Buncha Grief’s death in the shooting. He hurried back to the Zone.

  Bama told him of Mills’s death. Bama watched Kong rush into the morgue for a brief moment. Then he went quickly toward the parsonage.

  Taylor watched Kong key himself into Mills’s apartment. Kong went directly to the table and pulled it away from the corner cache. Taylor let him rip up the carpet before he stuck his head and luger outside the closet. Taylor said harshly, “Smitty, freeze!”

  Kong’s hand rattlesnaked for the thirty-eight special in his waistband as he whirled around. Taylor pumped two holes into Kong’s chest before he could squeeze the trigger.

  The impact punched Kong flat on his back, corners of his mouth and his eyes rolled in agony. Taylor leaned and almost touched Kong’s face with his own.

  Taylor said gently, “Smitty, I’m sorry your evil crookedness caught up on you . . . Why you do it, Smitty? . . . Why you hating? Why you put the hurt to me and the peoples? . . . Why you do it, Smitty?”

  Kong rolled his dying eyes up and stared into Taylor’s face with such luminosity and psychotic hatred that Taylor flinched. He recited it with grotesque care, like a monstrous child repeating a half-remembered obscene limerick. “You hurting? Motherfucker . . . I was a star nigger before you fucked me outta my top spot with my Devastators . . . shit . . . I been hurting and hating ever since. I’m glad the dago fucked up your pins . . . Nigger, I pulled his coat you was on the way . . .”

  Kong heaved a liquid sigh and died, and his face was hideous with sick triumph.

  Taylor was still beside Kong, drained and still staring at Kong’s twisted face when Bama wheeled in Taylor’s chair. He was accompanied by Dew Drop and Ivory Jones, Taylor’s personal orderlies. They silently followed behind Taylor as he drove his motorized chair back to his bunker.

  28

  Collucci and Angelo left the penthouse at two A.M. for the bash of confidence at the Voodoo Palace. When they arrived, the doorman unlocked the door and let them into a scene of wild revelry and celebration.

  Twenty flamboyantly garbed numbers bankers and wholesale drug dealers danced and laughed with their wives and women. They spotted Collucci. The band stopped playing, and the crowd shook the room with cheers and applause. Collucci and Angelo took ringside seats at the reserved table. The band started up the last dance tune before showtime.

  And in her tenement room up the street, Mayme Flambert put her binoculars aside. She went to the phone in the hallway and dialed Taylor to inform him of the changed location of the bash.

  Shortly after, Ivory Jones and Dew Drop were preparing a van to take Taylor to an alley ambush position diagonally across from the front of the Palace.

  Dew Drop said, “Ivory, I don’t like it. What do you think?”

  Ivory said, “There’s nothing to think about, Drop . . . We gave Big T. our promise . . . He don’t have to know we’re gonna back him up. Take it easy, Drop. Everything’s gonna be cool.”

  Dew Drop said, “I guess . . . You seen Bama?”

  Ivory said, “We don’t have to worry about him. He went to bed finally, after three days. He’s dead.”

  Ten minutes later, Taylor sat hidden inside the van with a machine gun on his lap.

  The Rizzos, armed with high-powered rifles and rigged spotlight, installed themselves on the Palace roof, twenty minutes after Taylor was in position beneath a mountain of garbage and trash near the mouth of the alley.

  Only Taylor’s glittering eyes were visible as they locked on the front door of the Palace. He sat there and saw his life cover to cover, over and over again as he waited.

  At the end of the block, Ivory and Dew Drop, armed with shotgun, rifle, and handguns, crouched in the van waiting to back Taylor’s attack.

  At four ten A.M., the Palace door opened, and the horde of rowdies burst onto the sidewalk. Taylor was coiled like a steel spring in his chair as he watched for Collucci to appear.

  The sidewalk in front of the Palace was almost clear when Collucci, Angelo, and Rivers stepped out. Taylor struggled from the garbage and mounted the machine gun on a steel apron bolted to the chair arms. He switched the chair into high gear, then he plunged toward Collucci from the alley mouth with fierce face and bared teeth into the middle of Forty-seventh Street.

  The Rizzos illuminated Taylor with the spotlight. Collucci spotted Taylor an instant before he blasted off a burst. Quickly he snatched Angelo into the gutter beneath the limousine.

  Mack Rivers caught a stitching of holes across his forehead and dropped dead on the sidewalk.

  The deafening barrage of the Rizzos popped spurting springs of blood on Taylor’s chest and face. He was a shredded sieve when a blast blew off a chair wheel. The chair crashed to the pavement in front of the Palace.

  Behind him, Ivory and Dew Drop opened up with shotgun and rifle fire. Their guns shattered the spotlight and killed Mario Rizzo, who smashed onto the sidewalk.

  The other Rizzo’s automatic rifle splintered the van windshield and gouged gaping holes in the chests of Ivory and Dew Drop. The van crashed into a shoe store and exploded.

  Taylor, tied into the capsized chair, lay on his side, his head resting on the asphalt. The left half of his face was gone. His nose dangled like a misshapen finger across the gory ruin.

  But still he gripped the machine gun butt, and his remaining eye had an eerie phosphorescence as it swiveled in the lopsided head seeking Collucci. It locked on Collucci and Angelo, at its level, cowering in the gutter beneath the limousine. Taylor bellowed. His hate and passion for vengeance aimed the snout of the machine gun. The bodies of Collucci and Angelo leaped and cavorted under the impact of the flaming blasts that virtually chopped them in half.

  Bama, in fake white whiskers and wig, moved through the gawkers and knelt beside Taylor. Taylor’s eye swung up to Bama’s face. A comet flare of El train light streaked overhead and haloed Bama’s wooly wig an instant.

  Taylor’s Halloween pumpkin mouth burbled through an ooze of blood and entrails. “Will
ie tole me . . . Mama darlin’ tole me . . . Bama tole me, even . . . I shoulda knowed . . . You was up there . . .”

  Then Taylor was dead, and Bama wept.

  The sex-fiend squealing of city death wagons sodomized infant day. Chicago, the gaudy bitch, had banged another carnal night away. Now the fake grand lady lay uglied in her neon ball gown, sleazed in the merciless light. Her bleak drawers hung foul with new and ancient death.

  A preview of

  Airtight Willie & Me

  Back in the days when bad girls humped good bread into my pockets, con man, Air-Tight Willie and pimp . . . me . . . lay in a double bunk cell on a tier in Chicago Cook’s County Jail. I was having one bitch kitty of a time tuning out the interracial sewer mouth shucking and jiving and playing the “dozens” from cell to cell on our tier.

  “Lee, your mama is a freakish bitch that hasta crap in a ditch ’cause she humped a railroad switch.”

  “Hal, your raw ass mammy had bad luck. That drunk bitch got platoon raped in an army truck.”

  Air-Tight Willie leapt off his bunk screeching and made it a “dozens” roundelay. “Dummy up you square ass punks. Both you mutha fuckah’s got mamas so loose and wide they gotta play the zoo to cop elephant woo.”

  I was winding up a stone and a day. I would hit those cold-blooded streets four brights (mornings) hence, Whoreless! I mean I was desperately trying (in the flare of matches they lit across the courtyard) to monitor the shuck and jive of the whores and jaspers (pimpese for lesbians) as they ate each other out and banged their pygmy cocks together.

  I figured by culling the bullshit coming from across the way, I might pick up a dropped name and a line on at least one three-way money tree. Maybe she’d be up a bit. Maybe some joker had blown one. Maybe I could fly one a couple of my magnetized copping kites (high voltage letters) when I hit the bricks, and steal a ’HO!