Death Wish (27 page)

Bellini tensed and hawkeyed her as she went to her purse and lit a cigarette. She glanced at Petey napping on the floor across the room on a giant pillow. Then she strode back to the sofa and paced silently before Bellini for a long moment before she burst into a torrent of impassioned words. “I am so ashamed that all of my life I let myself, forced myself, not to realize, not to see yours and Jimmy's and Papa's wretched world.”

She paused, and her eyes were on fire when she continued. “I'm liberated from my stupid cocoon of delusion. I'm glad women have declared war on men to force their humanity. I'm thrilled to join that war to save the world's sanity for our children.

“You went to New York to make sure Jimmy joins Papa. All of you should be sent to join Papa . . . You are all enemies of sanity . . . of children.”

Bellini flushed scarlet. He got to his feet and faced her. He said, “I will not let you insult me. You are very upset. I am afraid for you.”

He raised his arms to embrace and comfort her, and then stared with his mouth open as she cringed away.

He was hurt to the quick by the fear in her face and her words. “You won't have to kill me. I'd be too ashamed to admit I'd ever lived with your horror.”

He choked out, “Before I would let myself harm you, dear daughter, I would end my own life.”

She glanced through the window and said, “My cab is here . . .”

He followed her to the front door with a sad face. She opened it and beckoned to the driver.

Bellini said, “Why are you leaving your home in such haste?”

She pursed her lips and said softly, “My conscience wouldn't let me stay in the Church if I stayed here . . . with him.”

The driver came past them, following Olivia's finger to the pile of luggage at the bottom of the staircase.

As Olivia went to wake up Petey, she said, “Petey and I need a cleansing.”

They stood staring down at Petey mumbling in his sleep.

Olivia said, “I will use only my mother's money for Petey and myself . . . their money, Papa's and Jimmy's . . . all of it, I'll return it to the people who need it!”

Petey rode Bellini's back to the door.

Olivia said, “Our cab can take you to a cabstand.”

Bellini scarcely heard her through the roaring birth of an exciting way to steal Collucci's life. He mumbled, “I'll get coffee . . . Lock up before I go . . . alright?”

Olivia nodded and said, “Good-bye and good luck.” She turned away. Petey dismounted and followed her down the walk to the cab.

•  •  •

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.

T
wo 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, . . . ?”

S
pring 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 down 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 . . .”