“How was everything back home?” Virgil asked.
“They gave you a lifetime pass,” Charley said. The waiter brought the drinks.
“Say! This is an
extremely
refreshing drink,” Virgil said. “I’ve
got
to get the recipe.”
“Are you gay, Virgil?” Charley asked.
“Oh, a little.” His face lit up. “Are you?”
“No.”
“Oh, well. Don’t worry about it.”
“Where is Marxie Heller?”
“Such stick-to-it-iveness! Well, if I were one of the top executives of your organization, I would forget all about Phoenix, a four-year-old trail, and go back along the only trail which Marxie Heller ever followed consistently in all the time I knew him.”
“What trail?”
“His wife.”
“In LA?”
“Yoppee. Charley, this is a mag
nif
icent drink. We must have another.” He waved to the bartender. “Marxie said he had to get out of Phoenix because his wife couldn’t stand it here. He said it was too dry for the asthma or something. I protested. Marxie was a very good figureman. He said he would greatly appreciate if I would smooth the way through my many
gangster
friends—pardon the expression—and get him work in Vegas. Naturally, I called Cyril Bluestone for him. He left and I never saw him again.”
“You got any pictures of him, Virgil?”
“I have three or four very good snapshots. I keep a sort of Rogues’ Gallery and I would absolutely
cream
with honor if you would consent to sit for me.”
“My father is against any and all pictures,” Charley said.
“I understand, Charley.”
The bartender brought the new drinks to the table and Virgil asked him for a telephone. When it had been plugged in, he tapped out a number. “Hello, Killer?” he said into the phone. “This is me. Killer dear, I want you to go to Book Six of the gallery and study the index hard, go to the page holding the shots of Marxie Heller and bring them—now, please—to the front desk at The John H. Jackson Gusher Motel. I said, at the desk, dear. Please, Killer, do not make me angry.” He hung up.
“He isn’t really a killer,” Virgil said to Charley, “I just call him that to give him a little side.”
Chapter Eight
Marxie Heller’s wife lived in an elegant fake-Georgian house in Westwood. Charley parked in the street about fifty yards beyond the house then walked back to make his way quietly up the driveway to the side door and let himself in. He closed the door quietly. Night was falling in blotters of darkness. He moved along a hall that led from the kitchen, looking for a room with a light, and there it was as he came around a sharp corner, gleaming out from under a door. Charley opened the door and found himself staring into the hooded, khaki-pouched eyes of Marxie Heller as he sat, dealing solitaire, at a large desk. Heller stared at him and blinked.
Charley didn’t say anything.
“What do you want, my friend?” Heller asked.
“The Prizzis sent me.”
Heller moved his right hand to open the drawer of the desk in front of him and Charley moved across the room and, both as a warning and as a precaution, broke Heller’s wrist by lifting Heller’s forearm with both his hands then crashing the wrist down violently upon the edge of the desk. Heller went under for a few seconds. Charley sat close to him and waited for his eyes to flicker again. He opened the drawer while he waited and took out a long knife. It had beautiful
balance. It would be a great throwing knife. He slid it under his belt at the small of his back. Heller came around.
“Where is the Prizzi money, Marxie?” Charley asked.
“Who are you?”
“Charley Partanna.”
“Oh, shit—Straight-Arrow Charley, the All-American Hood. Well, Charley, I am going to tell you I haven’t got the money and you are going to say you don’t believe me then everything is going to get rough for me, but that’s the facts, I don’t have the money.”
“What’s the difference, Marxie? What you did, things had to get rough for you anyway. Come on.”
“Where?”
“Out to the car. Come on.”
Heller got up. He stared at his ballooning wrist. “Jesus, this hurts,” he said to no one at all.
“You won’t need it,” Charley said. Heller cradled the wrist in his good arm and shuffled out from behind the desk.
Charley said, “Up against the wall, feet apart, hands over the head.” He found the gun in Marxie’s bathrobe pocket. He unloaded the gun, put the bullets in his pocket and dropped the gun in the wastebasket. “Out,” he said.
They went out the back door and Charley moved Heller into the two-car garage. He told Heller to swing the door open, they went inside. “The light, Marxie,” Charley said, pulling down the garage door. Heller hit the switch. The light showed an Oldsmobile Cutlass and an empty space for another car.
“You had time to think,” Charley said. “You want to tell me where the Prizzi money is?”
“If I knew, maybe I’d tell you, maybe I wouldn’t, but I don’t know.”
Charley took a revolver, which had a sound suppressor fixed to its barrel, from a shoulder holster and
shot Heller three times; once in the face, once in the chest, and once in the throat. He put the weapon away and opened the trunk of the Oldsmobile. He picked Heller up from where he had fallen beside the car and folded him into the trunk. He slammed the trunk lid shut, put out the light, opened the garage door and went back into the main house.
He sat in the darkened dining room just off the side door to the kitchen, which led from the driveway, and waited. He sat for thirty-five minutes before headlights came up the drive, pulling a car behind them. The side door opened and the woman came in, arms filled with shopping. She closed the door, crossed the kitchen and called out, “I’m home, dear.”
Charley got up and moved into the kitchen doorway saying, “Marxie isn’t here, Mrs. Heller.”
She whirled around to face the voice.
She was Irene Walker.
Chapter Nine
She screamed. “Charley!”
He was speechless.
“What are you doing here?” she asked hysterically. “Why didn’t you call? You always call. Ah, shit, Charley, you’ve ruined everything.”
“Where’s the money?”
“Money?”
“Where is it? Heller killed Louis Palo to get it, where is it?”
“Charley, I don’t know what you are talking about. Did you ask Marxie? Where is Marxie?”
“He’s dead.”
“
Dead
?”
“All right, Irene. Where’s the Prizzi money your husband stole from Vegas?”
She moved in a daze. “Maybe I know. He had a little bag. I’ll show you.” She left the kitchen and he followed her along a corridor out to a closet in the main front hall. She opened the door and shoved a satchel out with her foot. “It could be in there,” she said. “That’s the only place I know that it could be.”
Charley lifted the satchel up to the top of a table. He snapped open the clasps and opened the bag. It was filled with money.
“I’m going to count this,” he said. “Move over that way. I want you in front of me.”
She moved.
He counted the money. He motioned for her to sit down. She sat down and he went on counting the money. “You’re short,” he said.
“
I’m
short?”
“I got three hundred sixty dollars here. Half!”
“Half?”
“Mrs. Heller, don’t answer what I say with what I just said. Where’s the rest of the fucking money?”
“Charley—I didn’t even know it was there,” Irene said. “So how could I know it was short? When Marxie came here three nights ago he had a big suitcase and that small bag. He just slung the small bag in that closet and he unpacked the suitcase.”
“Then you knew he came to stay.” Charley’s voice was cold.
“Yes.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He said his lungs were bad again, that he had to go back to Phoenix but that he was so tired that I had to let him rest here for a few days.”
“And you did.”
“Yes.”
“This is the worst night of my life,” Charley said.
“I wanted him to stay, Charley. It was my chance to talk to him and get him to give me a divorce.”
“You know what I remember?”
“What?”
“I remember you came in that kitchen door tonight and you yelled out, ‘I’m home, dear.’ Not just that you were home, or not just Marxie, but dear is how you called him.”
“He
was
dear to me,” she said slowly. “We had fourteen years together. I was a kid in Chicago and he was my friend. Not one time did he ever yell at me or hit me or take my money. I went to Detroit with him,
then after he had to go to Phoenix, I went in and out to see him because he was my friend and he thought he was going to die. I loved him, not the way I love you, but I loved him like my father would never let me love him. Marxie was a funny, funny man. He had a terrific mind and he really cared about me.”
“He ripped off the Prizzis for seven hundred twenty-two dollars!”
“Where is he?”
“I’ll take him with me.”
“For Christ’s sake, Charley! He was my husband! He was good to me!”
“You’re surprised? Seven hundred twenty-two dollars and you’re surprised?” he said bitterly. “You still want to marry me?”
She stared at him sullenly.
“You want a little time to think about it?”
“I want you to have time to think about it,” she said. “I mean what happened to Marxie isn’t news to me. When he told me how he and Louis Palo took the money, I knew he was cooked. I knew they’d have to send you after him. He would be just as dead even if you had grown up to be a shoe salesman. So—what the hell—I’m not surprised, Charley. But you are. You’re the one who is surprised. You sit in a stranger’s house waiting for the stranger to come home and she turns out to be your woman. Your own woman. Shit, that is the real surprise, so, what I am saying is, you are the one who has to think about it.”
“Think” was right. So she was Marxie Heller’s wife. So she knew about the Prizzis, knew Marxie was stealing from them, knew what Charley’s real business was. Had been
expecting
him to come after Marxie. When he hit that one, Charley decided to stop thinking for a while.
“Yeah. Okay. Marxie is in the Oldsmobile in your garage. I’ll drive the Olds out to the LA airport and leave it in the parking lot. The cops will pick up on it. Is it your car?”
“No. And it has Nevada plates.”
“Fine.”
“Charley—do you believe me what I said about not seeing Marxie for four years?”
“Baby—he was just over the hill in Vegas. He moves in with you here because this is his house—the man had a fucking arsenal on him tonight, that was all—he brings a big suitcase in because he is running and you cook for him and lay down for him and when you come home of your own free will, you sing out to him ‘I’m home, dear.’ No. I don’t believe anything you said.” His voice rasped with bitterness. “Maybe if you were somebody else I would just blow you away. But it doesn’t matter because there is nothing I can do to change how I feel about you even if I wanted that, but I can see your eyes, Irene. I believe them because that’s what I want to see. I got to go back to New York and hand all this in, then Marxie Heller is finished for both of us. My people are going to ask about you and I am going to tell them lies. Then I’m going to come back out here, I think, and ask you again if you want to marry me.”
“I want to marry you, Charley,” she said.
Chapter Ten
He felt like somebody had handed him an armful of dead fish. Jesus, he thought, this has to be the original merry widow. I zip her husband while she’s out tracking down specials in the supermarket, and she wants to marry me. What kind of a nothing woman is she?
What the fuck was he going to do about her? She had absolutely set the husband up because she had to know the Prizzis were coming for their $720. She was the bad guy. It had to be. She had to be the shit. With her mind,
and
with her body, she had to organize Louis Palo, that cunt-simple schmuck, and her own husband, to steal the money then to take the fall for her. There was only one thing he could do, what the Prizzis expected him to do; he was going to have to do the job on her and pack her in the trunk with the husband. But what about the rest of the money, the $360? If he zotzed her there wouldn’t be anybody to tell him where to find the Prizzis’ $360. He had to get whatever look had come on his face off it because she was beginning to look scared shitless.
“Listen, Irene,” he said hoarsely, “I’m gonna tell you what you are gonna do. You are gonna stay awake tonight and think where that other three hundred sixty dollars is, you hear? I gotta lose Marxie and the car and get back to New York. I gotta do something and that’s all I can decide to do right now.”
“Okay, Charley,” she said, “I will turn this whole house inside out until I find out where Marxie hid the money. When will you call me? When am I going to see you?” She felt like she was going to fold right there. She hoped she could stay standing. If she sat down that could look like some kind of guilt to him. His need to kill her was just beginning to fade out of his face.
“I don’t know, Irene,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you’ll see me again?” She had to hold him. She had to anchor him down on her side of the fucking swamp because if she let him drift away she knew he would come back and she would be dead.
“Shaddap!” he shouted. “The Prizzis are out three hundred sixty dollars and nothing happened to you.”
“Marxie is dead,” she said simply. “He was my friend. What is the loss to the Prizzis of some money which their insurance company is going to give back to them compared to what I have lost?”
“What are you, a professional liar?” he cried. “Five minutes ago you said you wanted to marry me, and you know, if you got a big loss on your hands, I am the one who fixed you up with it.”
“Maybe there is something wrong with your emotions,” she said, feeling safer because she had him talking and doubting what he thought he believed. “Marxie was dying. He had maybe a week, maybe ten days. I knew I was going to lose him. That is one legitimate set of emotions, okay? But you came in and gave it to him. When I left him, he was alive. When I walk in here, he is iced. What do you know—what do you care about a woman’s emotions? Either way, he had to go, but nobody was set for your way, Charley.”