The phone did not ring again.
F
at August Pellino was hard-hit by the suicide of George Carrington. The news was hardly in the papers before he received a series of guarded long-distance calls, followed by an equal number of visitors to his old-fashioned brick residence.
Always before, when there was need for a conference, Augie had called it. Otherwise, his business associates had left him strictly alone. This time, however, they had simply announced they were coming, advising him to hold himself in readiness. And in their action, Pellino saw the faint outlines of the handwriting on the wall.
He was no longer in the saddle—at least, he was not seated in it firmly. He was teetering, and the slightest jostle, the smallest move of the wrong kind, would find him dumped in the dust.
Mrs. Pellino prepared an elaborate old-country feast for the group. There was much bowing and scraping and exchanging of compliments; much embracing and fluid laughter. Pellino took part in it, but uncomfortably, with barely concealed impatience. He had never gone for this stuff. He had never liked these people, whom he thought of as wops. He was Sicilian himself, on his father’s side, but he was essentially his mother’s son. Essentially, he was Prussian rather than Latin.
At last, the formal feasting and gabbing was over. Mrs. Pellino vanished into the upper reaches of the house, and Augie and his guests retired to the basement. Bottles were opened, cigars passed. Augie found himself seated alone on one of the long leather lounges, and somehow a light had been focused on him. His associates, on the other hand, sat half in the shadows, ringing him in a seemingly casual semi-circle.
There was silence. It grew deeper and deeper. Pellino wanted to rip out a curse, to get up and start swinging at those blandly impassive faces. And he knew it would be the end of him if he did. For this silence—the treatment—was intended to provoke just some such outburst; to bring out any signs of weakness—or guilt—that might be in a man. And if such were revealed, the man was not allowed to slip from the saddle. He was knocked from it.
Pellino wondered who his successor would be, and he saw, or rather sensed, that the man had already been elected. He was from New Jersey, and his name was Salvatore Onate; one of the oldest of the group and undoubtedly the most prosperous. Obviously, there had been some kind of meeting prior to this one, and Sal had been named spokesman and leader in waiting.
The silence went on and on. August waited, as calmly quiet outwardly as his guests. There was a sudden, tinkling crash, and he jumped. Involuntarily, he half-rose from the lounge.
A ripple of soft laughter ran through the room. Salvatore Onate smiled apologetically.
“How clumsy of me, August. I’m afraid I broke one of your glasses.”
Pellino was furious, but he managed a half-polite gesture of dismissal. The glass was a cheap thing, really, and Sal should leave it where it had fallen.
“Perhaps that would be best,” Onate nodded gravely. “After all, who can put together a broken glass?”
“Who indeed?” said Pellino.
He was prepared to outwait and outtalk this old bastard as long as it was necessary.
Dropping that glass, damn him; deliberately taking him for a rise!
But the younger men had little patience for this kind of game, and Onate noted their growing restlessness.
“Now, we should get down to business, Gus,” he said, his voice growing curt. “We got a lot of dough parked with you. It don’t look to us like you’re taking very good care of it.”
“So how ain’t I?” Pellino shrugged. “Maybe you ain’t looking at it right.”
“He’s looking at it right!” snapped Carlos Moroni, the Chicago man. “Two so-called suicides in less than a month! Two big-shots from the same company, and not a very big company at that! This is smart? You think you can crap all over the landscape without raising a stink?”
Pellino glowered at him. He snarled that he had neither directly nor indirectly caused the deaths of Carrington and McBride, and the police were quite content to accept them as suicides.
“How the hell you know they are?” sneered the Los Angeles representative. “Did they write you a letter? How you know the roof ain’t about to fall in on us right now?”
“Because there’s no goddamned reason for it to!”
“Conceding,” said Sal Onate, “that the suicides were legitimate…and we are not at all sure that you are without guilt in the Carrington matter…”
“What”—Pellino swallowed—“what do you mean by that?”
“Don’t play dumb,” said Moroni. “What the hell would we mean? You ask me, we ought to’ve been keeping tabs on you a lot sooner.”
There were nods of agreement to this. A strangling tightness came into Pellino’s throat. The situation was far worse than he had thought. Apparently, he had been under surveillance for months.
“All right,” he said, “Carrington was out here to the house. Just a little while before he died. But no one knew about it.”
“We knew about it.”
“But I didn’t have nothing to do with his getting killed! He was by himself when it happened. Sure, I was sore about his coming out here. Sure, I tossed him around a little. So what?”
“Let it go,” said Onate, with seeming idleness. “You had nothing to do with it. You are not probably responsible for McBride’s death. Now, what about this officer, the man Thomas Lord?”
“What about him? He got rooked and he’s sore. So what?”
“Then everything is fine, yes?” Onate nodded, his tone still idle. “Our investment is safe. There is nothing to fear.”
“Well…sure. You can add it up for yourself.”
“But we have had no return on the investment, Gus. Practically none. It has all been plowed back into the business, along with our original capital.”
“So you know the answer to that. Look at the new drilling rigs we bought, and them things cost! Better than two hundred grand a rig! We bought tanks and trucks and—”
“How much would they bring at a forced sale? Assuming, that is, that such a sale was possible.”
“How much?” Pellino frowned. “I don’t get you, Sal.”
But, of course, he did get it, and they knew that he did. The possibility of investigation had at last made them see the danger which he had seen in the beginning. Highlands had been racing against time. The oil had had to be gotten out of the ground very quickly. Thus, the huge and constant investment in new equipment—equipment which, as salvage, would not bring a fraction of its original cost.
“Our holdings,” said Sal Onate, “have a book value of more than five million dollars. We suggest that you sell them.”
“Sell them! But—”
“But you can’t,” Onate nodded. “The title to our principal leases—and, of course, everything attached to them and deriving from them—is clouded. No one but a fool would buy them at even the most modest price.”
Pellino hesitated, trying to protest. Then, feebly, he spread his hands. “All right, Sal; you called the turn. But things have been that way right from the beginning.”
“No. They are not as they were in the beginning. Neither McBride nor Carrington was dead then—both under suspicious circumstances. Nor is Lord the man which you represented him as being. He is not a bumbling, small-town clown, but an intelligent and determined man; a trouble maker of the worst kind. At one time, perhaps, he could have been bought off reasonably. But now…”
He shook his head, leaving the sentence unfinished. Pellino said hopefully that it was still worth a try. But he was far from sure that it was, and uncertainty was in his voice.
As yet, apparently, Lord hadn’t fully appreciated the strength of his position. But any gesture of appeasement was apt to open his eyes, and his reaction was more than apt to be disastrous.
“So all right,” said Pellino, “maybe we don’t make him no offer. Maybe it wouldn’t be smart.”
“And?”
“What do you think? He’s a loner, no heirs or kin. He ain’t around any more, we got no worries.”
It was easily his worst blunder. Onate gave him a look of frowning incredulity. Carlos Moroni snorted, jerking a contemptuous thumb at him.
“Get this Pellino, will you? Like some half-assed mystery writer! He don’t know what the hell to do, so he has everyone drowned in a flood.”
“Very stupid, Gus,” sighed Sal Onate. “Two deaths, two that could have been murder, and now you suggest a third. Killing a man who is not only identified with Highlands, but also associated with the law. If this is an example of your thinking…”
“The stupid son of a bitch don’t think at all!” snapped the Los Angeles man. And then they were all talking at once.
He had done nothing right. Every move he had made, seemingly shrewd at the time, was now cited as a blunder. Mrs. McBride was suspicious. Lord had declared a vendetta. Highlands had a dangerously ugly reputation in the fields. Danger loomed from every side; the danger of exposure and the danger of losing their entire investment. And for the great risks they had taken and were taking, they had received no payment whatsoever. When there had been a sizable pot to split, Pellino had dumped it into an exploratory well. Seventy thousand dollars sunk into the ground, with a string of tools irretrievably jammed on top of it.
“And according to our geological reports,” said Sal Onate severely, “there was no oil there in the first place. It was simply more of our money thrown away.”
Pellino’s temper flickered, then wearily subsided. It was their right to check on him. And checking, they would naturally check on that wildcat well; on anything that might be misfeasance or malfeasance, betrayal or blunder. They were always thorough, men like these. They did not act without ample evidence.
“Well, Gus?” said Onate. “Well?”
Pellino stalled, carefully relighting his cigar and carefully blowing out the match.
“Well, how about it?” said Moroni. “You got something to say or not?”
August looked at him coolly, took a long puff from his cigar, and spewed a stream of smoke at him. “I’ve got something to say. You want to listen, or do you want to jump down my throat?”
“Talk!”
Pellino talked. He declared that he had never had any intention of hitting Lord; in suggesting that Lord be got out of the way, he had meant only that. Either to have him lured and kept away peaceably, or to have him framed. With the contact he had in Big Sands one or the other should be a cinch.
“Contact!” Moroni spat. “Now, there’s a fancy name for a whore. Five million bucks, and he’s bettin’ it on a double-crossing whore!”
“Now, Carlos,” said Onate mildly. “Whores can be very useful.…You can manage this quickly, Gus?”
“Why not?”
“Good. It is settled, then.”
The meeting broke up shortly after that. When his guests had departed, Pellino repaired to the kitchen, sat there drinking coffee and staring sourly into nothingness. He was by no means sure that he could get rid of Lord. He had simply been talking off the top of his head, making promises because he had to. Given enough time, he could doubtless dispose of Lord in a way that would be free of kickbacks. But he had virtually no time; he had to rush in without any time for laying a proper groundwork. And such tactics seldom resulted in success.
He brooded. His mind moved over the events of the evening, the insults and the threats, and his fat face purpled with rage. His associates had known the risk they were taking right from the beginning. He had made very sure that they understood it. The lease titles were clouded; they could only be realized upon by being rapidly drilled-up and selling off the oil. All of this had been known by all; yet, now, when the always potential peril seemed about to become actual—and through no fault of his.…
It was a bad shake. He had been damned, and tentatively doomed, even before the meeting tonight. Without his knowledge, a new president of Highlands had been appointed, a man from the accounting department. Also without his knowledge, a new field boss had been hired. Briefly, he, Gus Pellino, no longer had a voice in Highlands’ affairs. He had the full responsibility for the company’s welfare—oh, sure, he had that, all right!—but no authority.
Just wait.
Pellino raged silently.
Just wait until I’m back on top again, and they come sucking around me!
They knew no tricks that he didn’t know. He knew how to dig up dirt which, exhibited to a man’s enemies, could easily prove fatal to him. And just as soon as he was in the clear…!
Slowly, his eyes raised toward the ceiling, and his thoughts moved upward with them—up there to the bedroom, where his wife lay in the moonlit darkness, she of the blankly pleasant smile and the rich and willing body. Their marriage had been one largely of convenience, a means of strengthening ties which were always a little tenuous. (
And a hell of a lot of good it did when the chips were down!
) It had seemed, at the time, that he was mainly the gainer by the deal. But now he was no longer so sure.
Yes or no?
he thought.
Had she or hadn’t she?
He shrugged, arose from the table, and went heavily up the stairs. He had nothing to lose by seeking out the truth. If he took care of Lord satisfactorily, nothing else would matter. If he failed, nothing else would matter. In the larger scheme of things, she was merely another old-country relative, of which there was already a burdensome abundance.
As he entered the room, she awakened and smiled at him, moved slightly over in the bed. He sat down at her side, started to pull down her nightgown, and she hastened to help him. Her breasts seemed to leap into his hands. He began to stroke them, gently at first, then with ominously increasing firmness.
“You have a nice time,
cara?
It was good to see your kinsmen?”
“Sí?”
She didn’t understand him. Apparently, she didn’t. “You say wot, Gossie?”
Pellino grinned at her. His fingers dug in suddenly, her lightly blue-veined flesh squeezing up between them, and she squirmed slowly on the narrow border between agony and ecstasy.
“P-please, Gossie. A leetle it is all right. I like even. But s-so moch—
Gossie!
”
“Can’t understand nothin’, hmmm?” Pellino grunted. “Can’t talk to me, can you? Not to me. But Uncle Sal, now—him and Cousin Carlos—they’re something else again, ain’t they? You can talk plenty to them!”