Gunfire gave me my answer, four fast blasts that barely rose above the El’s rumble, flaming my way from the doorway of my inner office, and, still out in the hall, I hit the deck, glass raining over me.
I stood, meaning to fire again, but he’d ducked back in my office.
His wife hadn’t got that far, though. Bleeding shattered shoulder or not, she had gone for the.38 on the floor; her bloody hand was on the gun when I put a bullet in her brain.
Then I dove through the yawning glass-toothed hole where the window used to be, landed on the couch, some pieces of stray glass crunching beneath me, El in my ears, and he was in the doorway, big automatic in hand, 45 maybe, a big man in heavy sweater and trousers, and he did look like Sonny Goldstone, only it wasn’t Sonny, it was her husband, John Borgia, whose pockmarked fleshy face fell when he saw his pretty wife on the floor, her head cracked like a bloody egg.
“You killed her!” he said, outraged, white showing all the way round his eyes, and he turned to fire at me, but I was off the couch and doing the one thing he hadn’t counted on, moving right toward him, and I was on him before he could even react and my gun was shoved in his gut, firing, firing, and I said, “Who the fuck do you people think you’re dealing with,” and fired again, “who the fuck do you people think you’re dealing with,” and fired again.
He fell back, on the floor, landed hard, flopping, thudding, five scorched puckered holes in his gut and chest with five slow red leaks, eyes still open and looking up at nothing. The wastebasket, which he’d knocked over as he fell, spilled next to him, the wadded-up paper saying, GUADNAL.
I stood over him and looked down and said, “Who the fuck did you people think you were dealing with?”
But he didn’t answer. Neither did she.
I walked out of there, stepping over what used to be Olivia Borgia, a greedy one-time 26 girl who was so much like Estelle Carey it killed them both, walking carefully around the glass shards, as I’d already cut my bare feet in several places, and went back in my office.
I felt strangely calm. The El was as silent as the Borgias, now. I sat there at my desk, soaking my bleeding feet with a cool damp cloth, sorting out my options, wondering if calling Drury was the thing to do. Two dead people in my office. Dead by me. Including a woman. I’d killed a woman. I didn’t care.
I just thought of Estelle’s burned, tortured body and didn’t fucking care.
Why hadn’t they found the diary themselves, that awful afternoon? They’d tossed the place, after all. But they’d missed the baseboard hideaway Donahoe had later found, he was a detective, our trusty basset-hound Donahoe, and, besides, Estelle hadn’t mentioned the book till right before she died, meaning after one of them had splashed whiskey over her and smashed the bottle on the floor nearby to frighten her and lit a match and held it over her to frighten her some more, and maybe then she said it, maybe then she said, it’s in my diary-I’ll get it for you, because Donahoe had after all found a gun in that baseboard hideaway as well, only somebody fumbled the match and the housecoat caught fire, and she was aflame, and she was screaming and there was no more talk of diaries as the fire spread from her to the whiskey to the walls, and the place was starting to burn, smoke was starting to fill the place, and they had no choice but to make a run for it, Borgia grabbing a couple of furs to make it look like a robbery.
That was then. What of now? Had anyone heard the shots over the El’s rumble? The building was empty, but for me and those I’d killed. It was the middle of the night. Ten minutes had passed, easily, and no one had come to see what was the matter. No one rushing in. No sirens cutting the night. No nothing.
I dialed a number.
After many rings, a gravelly male voice said, “Yeah?”
“This is Heller. Tell Campagna to call me, right away.”
Pause. Then: “It’s real late.”
“It’s later than you think. Tell him.”
“I’ll ask him.”
“Tell him.”
Three minutes later the phone rang.
“Heller?”
“Hiya, Louie.”
“Are you crazy, Heller?”
“Sure. If I wasn’t, I’d still be in the service, shooting people. But I’m finding it easy enough to keep in practice here at home.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about John and Olivia Borgia.”
Silence.
“They’re dead in my office, Louie. I killed ’em.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“They were rifling the place, looking for Estelle Carey’s diary. They didn’t believe me when I said I burned it.”
“You what?”
“I burned it, Louie. Spread the word. The diary is ashes. To ashes. If the secret to her buried treasure was in those pages, it’s going to be a well-kept one. Should I call the cops on this? It’s not going to do much for business, my killing people in the office. You want a chance to clean up after yourself?”
Silence.
“Borgia was Outfit, Louie. You want to clean up after yourself?”
Silence.
“The Borgias killed Estelle Carey, Louie, but then you know that, right? It was an Outfit hit from word go, just like everybody’s been telling me. But I got some outdated notion that Nitti don’t work like that. Well, times change, and people change. Take for instance, this is the very first time I killed a woman in my office.”
“I want you to go someplace.”
“Where, Louie?”
“What’s the closest hotel?”
“Morrison, I guess. They don’t have any rooms.”
“They’ll have one for you by the time you walk over there. Don’t come back to your office before seven.”
The phone clicked in my ear; Louie didn’t want to talk to me anymore.
When I got to the office at nine, a fiftyish guy in coveralls was measuring to put in new glass. All the broken glass had been swept up and removed. Bullets had been dug out of woodwork and puttied and touched up with paint.
“I didn’t send for you,” I said to the guy in coveralls.
“It’s all taken care of,” he said. He pointed with a thumb over to the doctor’s office across the way, where the waiting room and receptionist could be viewed through where opaque glass used to be. “That’s being taken care of, too.”
The office had been tidied up. File cabinets in order; drawers in desks. No dead bodies on the floor. No bloodstains. Lou Sapperstein was standing in the inner office, looking around, puzzled.
“What happened here, last night?” he said. “The glass is broken, everything’s just a little out of place…and it smells like disinfectant, and something else…what? Paint? Did you have somebody in to clean the place up?”
“Elves,” I said. “Tiny Sicilian elves. Lou, I want you to get your things together at the end of the day. I’ll be moving back into my office. And I made arrangements over at the Morrison for a room there, till I can find an apartment. You can have the whole big office next door to yourself, till we find somebody to take Frankie’s place.”