“Yeah?”
“At his hotel.”
“Who did it?”
“Where were you between two and five today?”
“At the wedding, Corrado Prizzi’s granddaughter’s wedding.”
“What did I tell you?” Gallagher said to the other cop. “They are all going to turn out to be at the wedding.”
Chapter Two
One of Ed Prizzi’s lawyers got Charley away from the cops at ten o’clock that night. They had questioned him for over three hours but he had nothing to tell them and anyway his mind was deep into how to find Irene. Maerose had told him by the way she acted that she knew Irene well, but suppose she didn’t? If she didn’t then she was going to have to remember who introduced her to Irene, and no matter how far backward he had to go, he was going to come up with a way to find Irene again. When he left police headquarters he went to a phone booth in a drugstore and called Paulie at his hotel.
“I was just leaving for the airport,” Paulie marveled. “It’s a real freak thing. I am walking past the phone to go out to the airport and it rings.” Paulie was a hysteric so he was in the movie business. He always made everything out as if God had designed it to happen only to him.
“Listen, Paulie,” Charley said, “you remember the pictures I wanted of that girl and you gave me your card to hand to the guy?” Charley came over a telephone line like a talking brewery horse.
“Yeah?”
“The thing is how can I get it and put it on a cassette?”
“You want it, we’ll do it.”
“Great. Thanks, Paulie.”
“Is the girl an actress? You think we’d be interested in looking at her?”
“You looked at her already. The girl in the church with the green-and-yellow dress.”
“Oh, that one. Well, anyway. The thing is, you gotta look at the footage yourself, Charlie. Who else knows what you want?”
“When can I look at it?”
“Day after tomorrow. But at the studio. That’s the only way.”
“You got it. I’ll fly out there the day after tomorrow. And I want to tell you something else, Paulie. I am glad you and me don’t like the same kind of broads, because I don’t like what you like, either.”
“Charley!” Paulie said. “What did I say? I didn’t say anything!” Charley hung up.
***
When he got back to the beach it was almost midnight. There was a message on the machine from Maerose. He called her. She sounded a little smashed so maybe she had gone to bed with pills.
“Charley, what is it with you?” she asked wearily. “You are something else, you know? I am pooped.”
“Look, Mae, this is important or I wouldn’t bother you. I got to know how I can get in touch with the girl, you know, Irene Walker.”
“Charley, I only know her like an hour longer than you know her.”
“Who introduced you?”
“Some people.”
“Then, okay. Will you call those people who introduced you and run down where she lives?”
“I don’t know, Charley.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
She sighed. “It’s like cutting my own throat. It’s pushing you further away.”
“Who pushed who further away? Me? No, you. That’s finished. That was almost ten years ago.”
“Okay, okay. Ah shit. I had my shot but somebody bumped my arm.”
“I’ll appreciate it.”
“I can’t do it tonight, Charley.”
“Okay. Tomorrow.”
“I’ll try.”
“I can call you like noon tomorrow?”
“I’ll call you. I don’t know how I’m going to do on this.”
After she had hung up she fell back on her bed, then turned over to stare at the wall. She had once had it made with Charley and her whole life, then they had that fight—some fight, she had made it a fight—and she went out of the joint with that guy and they wound up in Mexico City, drunk. She didn’t know what to do so she stayed with the guy and they stayed drunk. Then one morning two of her father’s people came in the door and beat the shit out of the guy while the fucking assistant manager just stood there. They made her get dressed and they never talked to her. They never said anything to her. They took her out of the hotel like a couple of cops and flew her back to New York. She sat in a room with her father and he stared at her until she wanted to yell at him. He looked at her like she was garbage. “You put shame on your family,” he said. “You showed what you care about Prizzi honor. You were going to marry the son of your grandfather’s oldest friend but you became a
passeggiatrice
instead. Thank God, your mother can never know what you did. She is safe from you with the angels. Listen to me! I am never going to talk to you again after this. Angelo Partanna says he forgives you, but Charley doesn’t forgive you, you took his manhood from him. You can make believe you are a member of this family, make believe you are still my daughter, because that’s the way your grandfather
wants it, or you can get out—you are not in this family, you are not my daughter, and I am going to see to it that you stay an old maid for the rest of your life.”
She didn’t run into Charley for five months. He said, hello, how are you, just like nothing had happened. He wasn’t even cold to her. She had lost him. She loved him and she had lost him and he never came near her again.
Chapter Three
Charley and his father had to spend most of the day with the chemist testing out batches of a shipment of
cinnari
that had just come in from Asia via Colombia. It was Grade A, Number 4 heroin and they stayed with the chemist while he cut it into wholesale lots and into dealer lots. In the midafternoon, while they were riding back through Long Island City, Charley remembered to tell his father he had been picked up for the Netturbino hit.
“Yeah. Ed told me,” his father said. “But you couldn’t be cleaner, right?”
“Who made the hit, Pop?”
“We did.”
“
We
did? How come we did? I didn’t know nothing about it.”
“Well, that’s the best way, ain’t it?”
“Who hit him?”
“Outta town talent. It was a specialist kind of job.”
“How come?”
“Vincent told me to set it up so we couldn’t have nothing to do with it. There’s going to be a rumble in the commission about it, but that has nothing to do with us. We was all at the wedding having our pictures taken, right? Don’t get hot. It was good thinking.”
“Jesus, it was great thinking,” Charlie said.
He got back to the beach at 9:10 that night and
called Maerose as he sat out on the terrace. It was a louse of a night. Rain was pounding down and he had to stay in the far corner between the awning and the wall but he had always figured that anybody who had a terrace with such a view had to use it or let him go back and live in a tenement in west Brooklyn.
Maerose had Irene’s number. “Let me tell you it was some job to get that, Charley,” she said. “It would have been easier to get the number of the telephone booth on top of Mount Everest.”
“I want to send you something really nice for this, Mae. What do you need? Tell me. Whatever.”
She gave him the sad laugh. “Send me a Valentine,” she said, “that’s what I need.”
It was 9:25. So it was 6:25 in California, a good time. Irene picked up on the third ring.
“This is Charley Partanna,” he said. He held his breath.
“Charley Par
tan
na?”
“Yeah.”
“This is ter
rif
ic! How did you get my number?”
“I asked somebody for it. You’re not sore?”
“Sore? I am tickled. Where are you?”
“I’m in Brooklyn.”
“Oh.”
“But I have to be in LA tomorrow, but that won’t take long. I thought—maybe we could have dinner tomorrow night.”
There was a seven-beat pause. “All right,” she said. “I think I can do that.”
“Sensational. Okay. Then I’ll pick you up. What’s a good time for you?”
“Seven?”
“Great.”
“But not here. Make it—well—how about the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire?”
“Sure. Okay. That’s great. Sleep warm.”
He pushed the disconnect button but he sat there
for a long time staring at the telephone. All his life he had just taken telephones for granted, like they were part of the furniture, for Christ’s sake. What about when you needed a lawyer or a doctor? What about the thing it had just done for him, like it was nothing, like it was giving you the Gag of the Day or your horoscope, for Christ’s sake? This telephone had changed his entire outlook on life. This telephone had delivered
Irene
to him. If he heard of any rotten kids ripping out a telephone booth like they did sometimes in the neighborhood, he was going to beat the shit out of them.
***
Just sitting in that hotel lobby under a shiny green balibuntal hat, which by itself could return millinery to a leading place in the arts, she had slowed down the lobby traffic, as Charley could see from across the lobby, to minus nine miles an hour. He studied everyone who was within sight of her in the room, pitying poor Paulie, and he imagined that he could see old men’s eyes getting misty, room clerks and bystanders developing erections, and every woman who saw her realizing that she was doomed to hostile dreams that night. She had turned Charley’s legs to water just by sitting there when he came into the lobby. He was holding on to the back of a chair as he stared at her; she looked up, lifted two fingers and fluttered them at him. He crossed the lobby and loomed over her saying, “I was scared I wasn’t going to see you again.”
“I called you,” she said. “Maerose gave me your number. But you weren’t in. I was going to call you again on Sunday morning.” She was lying, but it was a nice kind of lie.
“No kidding?” That proved something to Charley, it proved that this wasn’t going to be the one-sided thing he had been afraid it could be. “Let’s go someplace,” he said.
She stood up. She was just right, three inches
shorter than he was, but he hadn’t remembered her this tall. “You got higher heels on?” he asked.
“Higher than what?”
“Higher than at the wedding.”
“Oh! Yes. Yes, I do.”
“I’ve got a studio car with a driver in the alley.”
“Let’s take my car. You drive.”
He had never heard such a voice. Before he went home he was going to get Paulie to run some Garbo movies for him because Irene Walker had to sound like Garbo. He had read somewhere that some guy had paid fifteen hundred dollars for a dead rose that Garbo had kissed maybe twenty years before and he had thought that guy was a scimunito. But he understood now. He would pay fifteen hundred dollars for any rose that had even been in the same room with Irene Walker. Now he was in the same room with her and she liked him and soon she would kiss him and someday maybe they would auction him off and only God knew how much he would bring.
They walked out slowly past the elevators and the display cases and the restaurants to the wide, covered driveway. She said something to a car jockey and an amethyst-colored foreign car, a two-seater with the top down, was backed into place in front of them. Charley handed Irene into the car, gave the jockey some money and told him to send the studio car back, then he went around to the driver’s side and got in.
“What kind of a car is this?”
“A Gozzy.”
“A Gozzy?”
“It’s a replica of a 1929 Mercedes. The Japanese make them in England for the Arab market. It’s a great California car.”
“It’s a great anyplace car,” Charley said as they drifted out of the courtyard. “Man, it must cost.”
“Well,” Irene said, “it wasn’t free but, my God,
think what it will cost two years from now. What kind of food do you like?”
“Food?”
“You know, what kind of restaurant?”
“Outside? Outside is like a novelty to me.”
“Aiee, do I have an outside restaurant for you.”
They drove to the ocean, then up the Pacific Coast Highway, and Charley felt taller, better, greater, kinder, and smarter than he had ever felt in his life. He felt so good that he told her about the time in Lansing, Michigan, because that was the one thing he had experienced besides Irene Walker that always made him feel good.
“I am there on business and there is a blizzard. There was so much snow that almost all the people who worked in the motel couldn’t get there. There was the assistant manager and the night auditor, that’s all. The guests had to make their own beds and cook and keep the lobby clean and some of them were pretty lousy about it. I saw what a bind everybody was in and, anyway, I like housework and cooking. I live alone and you can’t live like a peasant so I tell the manager I want to help out with the general situation. That guy gave me a smile I can still see, a really beautiful smile. I worked the switchboard, I worked in the kitchen, I tended bar—anyplace I could help out. Most of the guests were pretty good about the blizzard, like they lent each other newspapers and so on, but the other people, the beefers, just hung around the lobby and stared out at the snow going up higher and higher, and made trouble. On the third day, a freelance snowplow guy comes up to the door and he offers to clear out the whole parking lot and the road out to the main road and he wants four hundred dollars for this. The assistant manager naturally says he isn’t authorized to spend that kind of money and anyway they have a contract snowplow guy. The people who live in the lobby make a big yell because he won’t
make the deal. Two guys start to push him around so I have to drag them into the lounge and bounce them around a little. That quiets everybody down but they sulk, and the other people, the good people, catch it from them and they won’t work anymore, they just sit around the lobby and beef. I made all the beds. Then I got behind the counter in the coffee shop and they all ate. At four o’clock when it’s already dark, the contract snowplow comes to the front door and tells us he has the snow cleared away and that we can get out on the highway. The motel empties in like ten minutes but only three of those bastards—pardon me—offer to pay, which the assistant manager then tells them there won’t be any bills anyway. When everybody was gone, the assistant manager, his name is Francis M. Winikus, makes a speech to me about how I did the right thing. I know I did the right thing but the speech still made me feel very good. I call him up every Christmas. It gives me a good feeling.”