Death Wish by Iceberg Slim
17
On an early evening a week after Taylor had selected the squad to help him in the extermination of Collucci, the Collucci mansion rang with music and merriment. The occasion was a gala ball given to honor the husbands of the League of Women for a Greater River Forest. Club President Olivia Collucci was proud. And she felt rekindled affection as she noticed her husband’s urbane and charming social intercourse with their elegant guests.
Finally the last guest had departed. Collucci removed his tuxedo for a change into street clothes. He glanced into the closet door mirror and found Olivia’s eyes gazing raptly at him. He smiled oddly at her through the mirror.
She came and pressed herself against his back and embraced his hips. He moved free and shivered a little. She nibbled at the patch of goose bumps on his back. He reached a hand back under her panties. She spread her legs as he gently massaged his knuckles against her vulva. She squeezed his organ, bloated with blood. He turned his head and alternately sucked her tongue and lips, then aimed his head at an erected nipple which he sucked and licked. Her legs trembled as she pulled away and said breathlessly, with great eyes shining, “Can your business wait?”
He stared into her pleading eyes in the mirror and shook his head. He said, “No, beautiful, it will be sweeter for us unhurried.”
She pouted her bottom lip and bashfully pointed at his crotch like a vulgar child. “You will save him for me and bring him back soon?”
He grinned and crooned in Sicilian, “Where else could this bum find a goddess waiting for him?”
He walked into the closet where he flipped on the light then stood looking thoughtfully at suits and coats of cashmere, vicuna, and other lush materials. The garments were shades of charcoal, fawn, and indigo blue, his favorites. Black garments were also in abundance. He wore these to church and on those solemn occasions when he dignified himself to magistrate or perform executions.
He lifted a blue suit from the rack, but his eyes were snared by a slate-hued suit. He had known, looking into the mirror at the tailor’s first fitting, that he would never wear it. He’d remembered blowing a bloody hole into Bobo Librizzi’s slate-hued jacket. He winced, remembering Cocio’s lies and the pressures that had tricked him into his first execution.
Olivia stared at his face, so strangely disturbed with hatred and pain. “Jimmy!” she exclaimed. “Are you alright?”
He grinned, free of the trance, and lied wide-eyed. “Sure, I’m fine now, Sugar Tit. Just a bitch-kitty charley horse in the foot.”
She pulled him to the bed. He sat smiling on the side of the bed. She squatted before him, massaging the foot he lowered into her lap.
Collucci got dressed. Olivia followed him to the front door. They heard Angelo gun the Caddie in the driveway. He opened the door, and she clung to him.
She said, “Am I acting silly?”
He said, “No . . . Why?”
She disengaged. “I feel silly . . . You know, like I could love you hard again.”
Then tremulously, eyes shining up, “Is it safe?”
Her transient helplessness reminded him of her little-girl charm and sweet vulnerability in the dizzying beginning. He felt a rare tenderness for her as he kissed the tip of her nose. “You’re in no trouble. It’s just the bubbly jazzing you around,” he said as he ducked away from her delicate fist flailing at him.
He smiled back at her and went to drop onto the Caddie’s rear seat. Angelo drove toward Collucci’s meeting with his secret ally, Westside Captain Cono Spino.
Collucci remembered that Phil and his cousin Lollo had been dead and buried for ten days in the mob’s secret cemetery. Angelo had only mentioned them once. Collucci was curious. Why not? He made a note to find out. Collucci mulled the subject matter to be considered by Spino and himself.
Angelo said, “Excuse me butting in my big mouth, Mr. . . . Jimmy. I keep remembering this guy Spino was nothing but a stick-man in a craps joint when Mr. Tonelli, with Mr. Cocio pushing it, picked him up. In ten years he’s a big shot. A capiregime, like you, leading his own borgata . . . Maybe he ain’t solid . . . Maybe he owes Mr. Cocio too much.”
Collucci laughed. “Angelo, you got it all screwed up. Spino gets to keep twenty percent of all net of gambling with cards, craps, bookmaking, and the numbers on the Westside.” He paused and shrugged. “Spino is very displeased with twenty percent and very anxious to be my underboss. His bright future depends on the boss’s removal . . . Spino can be trusted.”
Collucci noticed concern still creasing Angelo’s face as the Caddie picked its way through neon thickets on the far Westside. He thought aloud. “Spino’s soldati and my own combined are four hundred, four fifty to sixty . . . only seventy soldati loyal to the bosses. So, cheer up, old friend of mine.”
Angelo grinned. “Yeah, I guess you got the edge on the bosses.”
Collucci said, “And another secret edge Spino and myself have imported from Sicily.”
Angelo’s mouth started to open, but Collucci frowned and said, “Angelo, we need our eyes instead of our mouths. I think we passed Spino’s setup back there a coupla hundred yards.”
Angelo U-turned and retraced. He turned into a wide driveway and the headlamps illuminated a sign: Holy Mother Home for the Elderly atop a ten-foot gate of grilled steel.
A guard wearing double forty-fives around his sweatered waist put aside a magazine inside his cubicle. A revolving TV monitor scrutinized the Caddie and its occupants as he spoke briefly on a phone. He pressed a button that swung the gate open.
Angelo drove into the twenty acres, walled in by twenty feet of concrete for what seemed like an hour to him through a long black tunnel of wind-flogged trees, swaying and groaning in the howling loneliness.
Then suddenly the Caddie entered a circular acre of light, seemingly bright as noon. In the center of it sprawled a two-story building of casket-gray stone. Angelo drove down a graveled driveway and pulled the Caddie to a stop before several stone steps.
As they went up the steps, the front door opened. The runt Spino, impeccable in double-breasted blue mohair, greeted them with warm Sicilian words of welcome and embraces.
Angelo removed his overcoat and dropped down into an overstuffed chair in the foyer. He riffled an old copy of Playboy to the centerfold.
Spino led Collucci down a glossy hallway leading to the office, then stopped and gestured toward a door. Collucci peered through a rectangle of glass at a score of illegal aliens from Sicily. Some lounged on sofas watching TV shoot-’em-ups, while others sat and stood kibitzing around players at pool, card, and domino tables.
Collucci said as he moved away, “They all clean?”
Spino nodded. “Like the ones before them. No criminal beefs whatever. And like the others before, they have special skills, useful in the Family’s bakeries, restaurants, meat markets. One of those you saw is a whiz at counterfeiting money, passports, and stock certificates to dump as collateral for big loans.”
Spino turned into a walnut-paneled office. He flipped a wall switch. A three-tiered chandelier burst a crystal firebomb. Spino was dwarfed as he seated himself behind the massive desk.
Collucci exhaled smoke and said, “They are in good spirits now . . . but I wonder after they slave awhile for coolie pay . . . ?”
Spino jiggled his doll head. His wide mouth shaped his deceptively sweet Howdy Doody smile. “They know a phone call to immigration will dump them back into their shit holes in Sicily. And they understand that the Honored Society can shrink the whole fucking world to the size of a coffin for informers.”
Collucci said, “They came Mexico way?”
“No,” Spino said. “These came in from Windsor by motorboat to Detroit.”
Spino picked up a stiletto letter opener from the desktop. “But many others will be coming both ways soon. They will be needed to replace the soldati who sour when we retire those two old bastards.”
Collucci said, “Tonelli’s head has rotted between his broad’s thighs. Now h
They laughed.
Then Spino’s eyes glittered with excitement as Collucci said, “Cono, I am sure that while you have not been doubtful, you have been concerned about my promise over a year ago to get a foolproof source of pure drugs.” He paused for an instant. “I intend to be completely open with you in all matters as I am certain you will be with me. I have arranged a meeting in Rome in the near future with a powerful government clique to secure the control and licensing of a pharmacological firm which will manufacture tons of merchandise for the drug end of our partnership. At this moment I invite you to share in it equally.
“Our emigrant coolies will also be the mules to lug the kilos. So you see, partner, what a perfect setup we’re putting together?”
Spino did a pleased jack-in-the-box from his chair and came around the desk to pump Collucci’s hand, exclaiming, “Exquisita! Exquisita!”
Spino tiptoed and slid away, from the mantel top, a superb copy of The Last Supper. Collucci gazed through a two-way mirror at a half-dozen nude couples, drinking and laughing in the amber glow.
They were dreamy-eyed as they sat on a gold satin couch, and on the mammoth silk cushions strewn on the snowy carpet of the sunken living room. The flashing smiles of the men did not, however, warm their frozen dark eyes nor mask the cruelty and menace etched on their swarthy faces.
Spino answered Collucci’s unspoken question. “They are survivors of the Bomato Family . . . as you know, Sicily’s most skillful contract assassins for two generations. Their talents will be necessary for that last difficult stage of our plan.”
Collucci hesitated before he nodded. “But, I thought those not wiped out by the Carbinieri massacre in Palermo years ago were given sentences to hold them for several lifetimes.”
Spino grinned. “True. But for enough lira to tempt a saint . . .” Spino threw tiny hands into the air and sighed helplessness.
“The ex-warden’s disgrace was perhaps not a bad bargain at the price.”
They chuckled. Collucci pushed The Last Supper back in place to cover the spy mirror.
As they walked down the hallway toward the front door Spino said, “I keep them happy here while they wait for work and payoffs bigger than they got in Sicily. They eat like wardens here, have ritzy suites, the cream of cunts from my cathouses up north, and the best vino from the Old Country . . . and I’ve convinced them the high walls and the guards are only to protect them.”
They laughed heartily at that one.
Collucci’s index finger made a circle near the side of his head. “We must carefully decide about the terrible ones . . . when their last jobs . . . the old cocksuckers of the Commission have been retired.”
Spino jerked his thumb toward the back of the building. “We will use the terrible Bomatos for the jobs on Cocio, Tonelli, and the jigaboo?”
Collucci buttoned his blue cashmere overcoat. “Yes, on Cocio. He will be set up very soon. I will notify you as to time and place. Taylor and Tonelli will be all my pleasure.”
Collucci shook Spino’s hand, then he opened the door to step out and a blast of icy wind teared his eyes.
Spino touched Collucci’s arm. “Guns on Cocio?”
Collucci’s yellowish eyes hardened. “No! A snake must be hacked to pieces and his head crushed to mush . . . Afterward, doll him up in bra and panties like a faggot for the police and newspapers.”
Spino looked deep into Collucci’s eyes and said softly, “Will your old friend Bellini be on our team?”
Collucci stood as a statue for a long moment before he said harshly, “He will, or leave the game.”
As Collucci stepped through the doorway, Spino’s words of caution were almost blotted out by the raucous wind. “Take care, Giacomo! We must not arouse the smallest suspicions of Tonelli and the Commission.”
Collucci smiled bleakly. “Cono, who wants to shrink the fucking world?”
Spino shut the door, and Collucci felt euphoric as he went down the steps to the car and sat up front with Angelo.
18
Angelo moved the Caddie through the section of the Westside that years before had been the turf of Collucci’s Sicilian Knights. Collucci turned on the radio and spun the dial to the recorded voice of Beverly Sills singing Aida’s title role. He looked at one A.M. on his watch, then lazily stretched out his legs and pulled the brim of his gray hat over his eyes to shield against the lances of oncoming headlights.
He was microscoping his meeting with Spino for any overlooked signs of possible impurities of Spino’s heart when he felt the Caddie pull over and stop. He slid his hat back and sat erect as Angelo pointed past him to a wire-fenced junkyard covering almost a city block of what had once been a colony of well-to-do Italian Americans. He looked and wondered why the hell Angelo was fascinated by the graveyard of wrecks.
Then Collucci remembered even as Angelo said, “A lot of that usta be your father-in-law’s estate.”
Angelo pulled the Caddie away.
Collucci said, “How the hell . . . ? Tonelli himself would have passed it.”
Angelo grinned. “Me and Lollo made a helluva score in that old pink house caving in over there one night. The owners were fucking around at the King Crip’s first coronation in the White House.”
They smiled.
Collucci silenced Sills. He pulled his hat brim over his eyes to muzzle Angelo and relaxed to the whispery pianissimo of the tires as Angelo drove masterfully through the night.
Collucci lounged, slit-eyeing and recognizing the wind-mauled streets, bleak and deserted, except for the phantoms his memory conjured up. His mind started to feast on his early pain and suffering at the hands of Cocio and Tonelli. Collucci remembered his last day in the hospital after the fracas with Tonelli’s soldati.
The afternoon of his release he went directly from the hospital to Cocio’s apartment. He had checked out of the hospital an hour before the Tonelli limousine was expected to take him to his car, garaged on Tonelli’s estate. He walked the half-mile to Cocio’s place in the July heat to collect his thoughts and test his strength.
Cocio opened the door. He was showing out a teenage “hard face” wiggling an adult rear end and rouged to the gills. She rolled hot eyes up at Collucci and brushed her epic chest against him.
She yapped, “Cheapskate, gimme another fin for a real snazzy pair of baby dolls or never call me again.”
Cocio shoved her hard. He showed Collucci his teeth as Collucci stepped into the living room and sat on a sofa beside Cocio. Collucci felt the sofa’s horsehair stuffing prickle through his sweaty linen trousers. Under Cocio’s stare he shifted himself nervously.
Cocio said with a sly smile, “Jimmy Collucci, the whiz. First day in the streets and you’re here to tell me to read in the evening papers how you made your bones, eh? Knife or gun?”
Collucci looked him in the eye. “Mr. Cocio, I’m here so you can name somebody else I can make bones on.”
Cocio threw his head back and laughed. “Mr. Bellini oughta be here to glim his hotshot prize crawfishing on his bones.”
Collucci’s face hardened. “You gonna give me another guy?”
Cocio frowned and the tip of the blue-black widow’s peak undulated on his forehead. “No dice. It’s gotta be Librizzi.”
Collucci shook his head stubbornly.
Cocio stood up and glared down into Collucci’s face. “Are you saying no to Mr. Bellini’s wishes?”
Collucci stood up, towering above the bantam. “I’m saying I’ll get Mr. Bellini’s okay to make bones on some other guy instead.”
Cocio horselaughed and said, “Wake up! You’re just my strawboss for a gang of punk car snatchers. You’re not in. Even if you was, you could get a quicker undienza with F.D.R. than you could bend Mr. Bellini’s ear. Even I can’t bring him a problem except I go through Mr. Tonelli.”
Collu
Cocio said harshly, “I got legit reasons, but I don’t have to give you no fucking reason.” He smiled and lowered his voice. “Maybe Mr. Bellini saw those guys you busted up and overrated your guts. I oughta tell him what you showed him was maybe some freakish miracle, considering your old man had less balls than a broad.”
Collucci reeled as if fist-clouted at the mention of his father’s widely publicized cowardice.
Cocio tensed before Collucci’s wild face. He stepped back to get drawing space for the forty-five automatic holstered beneath his dressing robe.
Finally words leaped from Collucci’s tight throat. “Mr. Cocio, no disrespect, but no bullshit; if you ever mention that crummy cunt to me again, one of us will die. I ain’t nothing like him. I got the guts to take a crack at anybody, any time. I even got the guts to race your piece at this distance. You believe me?”
They stared into each other’s eyes until Cocio shrugged and decided to shoot an angle. He said softly, “Sure, I believe you’d try . . .” He took a pack of cigarettes from his robe pocket and held it out to Collucci. They lit up, and Cocio said, “Forget Librizzi. I’ll have Ya Ya knock off that finking bastard.”
Collucci saw the danger to his pride and image if Ya Ya Frazzio, his archrival, did a job on a fink he had turned down. But most unbearable for him would be the implication of cowardice. And could Ya Ya and Cocio afford to let him live with so great a feeling for the victim?
Collucci moved close to Cocio to study his face as he said, “Who?”
Not one muscle in Cocio’s face was awry as he lied, “He’s gonna gab to a secret Grand Jury poking around for a connection between kid gangs and organized crime . . . The finger came from big brass downtown . . . No doubt about Librizzi at all.”
Collucci said, “I’ve known the guy almost all my life, and nobody can tell me he’s gonna walk in and empty his head just like that.”
Cocio said, “The source said he was caught cold in Stickney wheeling a hot El Dorado two weeks ago. The jury is gonna get the beef and his parole violation squashed after he flaps his mouth.”