Black Mountain Read online

  The realtor’s plan was straightforward—feigning blissful ignorance, he’d call a meeting to go over particulars regarding the scam. I’d be on the scene in his stead. After I beat some sense into the angry husband, Mr. Realtor would enter from the wings and break the news that he’d recorded their “business” conversations. Essentially, forgive the affair and nobody would go to jail on a Federal money-laundering beef.

  Aside from abetting infidelity and extortion, I calculated it would be a cut-and-dried job. Maybe a 3 or 4 on the risk scale if cuckolded hubby packed a gun. Silly me.

  * * *

  —

  WERE THIS A NICE, SIMPLE HIT, I would’ve jumped out of a broom closet with a shotgun blazing. Boom, boom, account closed. Sadly, I’d sworn off hitting. For the most part. The straight and narrow is a rocky row to hoe.

  Assessing a foe, I imagine a triangle over his knees and groin. I visualize a line that divides his face from the bridge of the nose to the chin. Strike under the jaw with sufficient force, you’ll shatter the mandible and possibly dislocate vertebrae in the neck. Perhaps he’ll sever his tongue and strangle on blood. Strike the nose hard, temporary blindness results. Clap an ear, he’ll go deaf. Clap both ears simultaneously and the subsequent rupture might cause death. Punch the throat or sternum, you take away his air. Possibly more. One can never tell. The human body is a paradox—nearly indestructible, yet infinitely fragile.

  I made a last-ditch, albeit disingenuous, attempt to reason with my visitors.

  “Be advised, I’m here to parlay. This doesn’t need to get ugly.” Yes, yes it did.

  Mr. Skinhead sneered.

  “‘Parlay’? Only thing I want is to see you bleed.” It signified nothing more than the bark of a dog; he hoped to distract me by the meagerest fraction and give his comrade an opportunity to get in some work.

  Dream on. I watched Beardo make his play before it ever began.

  Any given fight has a multitude of variables, but is usually governed by the principle of the path of least resistance. Most bullyboys simply aren’t creative. Ninety percent of the time, a lug cradling a baseball bat is going to unleash if he thinks he has room.

  Beardo swung at my head like he intended to belt a homer over the Green Monster. I stepped forward as he rotated his shoulders and caught the barrel of the bat with my left hand and his left wrist with my right. The contact, although partially arrested, jolted my brain. He was strong. Under no circumstance the manner of brute you’d want to pit your manliness against in an honorable contest. I dragged my heel down his shin and stomped his instep. He would’ve screamed—because imagine the edge of a dull ax scraping bark from a tree trunk—except as the shock of pain rolled over him, I cranked the bat as if wrenching the wheel of an out of control car. His left shoulder separated and he lost his grip and I yanked him toward me, off-balance, then shoved in a whipsaw action. Beardo ate aluminum. He keeled backward and went down.

  The entire struggle lasted under three and a half seconds.

  Mr. Skinhead reacted adroitly once his partner dropped. He pitched the anchor underhand at my head and missed by a gnat’s hair. A window tinkled behind me. I could guess what came next and slid sideways as he heaved on the chain and the anchor recoiled. Metal grazed my arm, ripping suit fabric and gashing me deep. The blaze of pain cost me a second and I was late setting my feet to receive the inevitable rush.

  He released the chain, lowered his head, and bulldozed into me. My ribs bent inward as far as they could, and a smidgeon farther.

  Heavy, muscular, and frenzied with rage and fear, Mr. Skinhead’s tackle was no joke. He clamped my shoulders and carried me to the floor. Falling, I tucked my knees into my chest and straightened them the instant we landed. It’s a judo technique called Tomoe nage. My dad taught me a half-assed version of the traditional throw in grade school. He called it the monkey flip. The way it’s supposed to work is you drive your heels into your opponent’s midsection, jackknifing, and he’s lifted and flung away in a sort of forward somersault like a drunken Superman. I’m no martial artist, and, remember, cramped quarters. My head bounced off the floor, and that screwed my timing as well. Instead of a graceful somersault, Mr. Skinhead crashed through the ceiling, hung there for a moment in a tangle of trailer innards, then fell on his hands onto the carpet, right leg caught in the hole so that he dangled vertically. I rolled, stood, and after a few seconds of gloating at his predicament, front-kicked him in the belly. Less than full power. Forceful enough that he ripped free, rebounded from a wall, and face-planted on a coffee table. The table collapsed beneath him in a bed of shattered glass.

  I gave the man kudos for sheer belligerence. Mr. Skinhead struggled to his hands and knees. Jags of glass stuck out of his face. You can picture the bloody mess. He went for a gun in his waistband. I slapped it away as he pulled the trigger and the bullet holed one of those funky tapestries.

  My expression must have spoken volumes.

  “Aw, shit,” he said.

  I looped the anchor chain around his neck and dragged him through the front door, down two cinder-block steps, and onto the gravel lawn. Bump, bumpety-bump. His head bounced satisfyingly. He choked and groaned until I kicked him in the gut again.

  Waiting for him to recover, I sat on a cinder block and examined my injuries. Yet another suit ruined and a chunk of flesh sacrificed to the death gods. Blood streamed from my cuff and over my knuckles. More blood trickled from a knot on the back of my head. My left hand already swelled where the bat had jammed my fingers. Sharp jolts of pain in sync with my pulse indicated I’d broken, or rebroken, a bone. Similar deal with my rib cage where it had absorbed the brunt of Mr. Skinhead’s battering-ram tackle. It hurt to breathe, which meant bruised or cracked ribs. Goody. I thought about kicking him again. Too much effort.

  Mr. Skinhead curled tight. He dry-heaved and finally regained the strength to open his eyes.

  “Does it hurt more getting whupped by a darkie?” I said. “Is it a Nazi demerit? Will you have to make up a story to tell your pals?”

  He asked if his buddy was dead or alive and I said alive.

  “Hope you got your fee in advance,” he said.

  Indeed, I had collected a modest retainer, balance due after the job depending upon what exigencies arose.

  “Say again?”

  He wheezed laughter.

  “Dude—why’d you hire on with a scumbag? He’s a crook, which you know. He’s bangin’ my wife, which you must also know. Why’d you take his side in this?”

  “You can hardly blame the lady—I wouldn’t fuck an Aryan scuzzball either.” I dialed my client and went directly to voice mail.

  Mr. Skinhead sighed dramatically.

  “Had a feeling that slimeball was in the wind. I didn’t come here to retrieve my woman. I come here to retrieve a shitpot of money. Too late now. Those two are in Mexico for sure.”

  I asked him what was so funny. Turns out, absolutely nothing.

  * * *

  —

  YES, MR. REALTOR had already skipped town. I admit my surprise; the guy had sunk roots in Ulster County. What I didn’t know until my chat with Mr. Skinhead was that he and Mr. Realtor were in cahoots to perpetrate a land development swindle.

  My client had played me hard. While I dealt with the angry husband/business partner, Mr. Realtor and the skinhead’s wife disappeared to parts unknown carrying matching luggage jammed with cash.

  Whoops, as the kids say.

  Luckily for me, and unluckily for him, Mr. Skinhead’s entrepreneurial wheelings and dealings weren’t sanctioned by the gang. Worse—for him anyway—he’d “borrowed” a stomach-churning quantity of capital from the Iron Knife treasury—i.e., the dough Mr. Realtor had carried away.

  After an earnest heart-to-heart, Mr. Skinhead and I agreed to let bygones be bygones and never ever speak of the incident.

  I packed him
and Beardo into my truck and ferried them to the ER at Kingston General. A security guard surveyed the mess and asked what happened. I said the first guy ran into a door and the second guy tried to help him. Then I casually split for home.

  Forget supper—I gulped a shot or three of sour mash and fell unconscious in my chair, blood still dripping down my arm and onto the floor in a puddle.

  That marked the close of my second summer in exile.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The headless corpse of a small-time criminal named Harold Lee surfaced on the Ashokan Reservoir. Page 2 of the local paper featured a black-and-white photo of a body bag near tall reeds. The water looked cold. Mystified cops compared notes in the background. Setting aside the luridness of the composition, it seemed nothing more than another sad example of “Live by the sword, get your head lopped by the sword.”

  I’d met Lee (inevitable, since we traveled in the same crooked circles) at one bar or another. Average height and build. Handsome in a distinguished dad fashion, with blue eyes and a square jaw; black hair going silver, although he usually covered it with a hat. Dapper fellow—his wardrobe might have been best described as on-a-budget sharp. He favored Rat Pack knockoff suits. Lee bought me a round, or maybe I treated him. We weren’t friends. We weren’t anything, really.

  I flipped to the funnies, wincing at the tenderness in my hand—I’d recently removed the homemade splint. The whack to my dome gifted me with headaches now and again. I didn’t heal so quickly anymore and feared the time of reading glasses and arthritis pills loomed nigh.

  A wiseguy named Marion Curtis rang and told me to meet him around 7 p.m. for drinks at the Green Goddess, a hole-in-the-wall in Rosendale. He hung up before I could say I was busy washing my hair.

  I kept it casual—leather jacket, white T-shirt, jeans, and my favorite steel-toed Doc Martens. Oxblood, laced tight. I holstered a .38 snub against the flat of my back and climbed into the pickup.

  The Rondout Valley is country mouse to the hilt if you’re accustomed to NYC or even Albany. Dregs of an alkaline-orange sunset filtered through a tunnel of dying leaves. Rolling past secluded cemeteries, a boondocks VFW hall, and clapboard houses shuttered tight against the onrushing dark, I pondered the tête-à-tête with Curtis. What does an ex-hitter such as myself say to a mob captain who refuses to accept you’ve gone semi-straight? The drive afforded me a few minutes to rehearse polite demurrals.

  One wouldn’t find the Green Goddess by thumbing through the phone book. Essentially, a modern-day speakeasy, its clientele made the list by invitation or referral. Instead of illicit hooch and dancing girls, Green Goddess dealt in illicit information and dancing girls. The waterhole of choice among the discerning effete and criminals.

  The club occupied the basement of a former church that had undergone several conversions since its Gothic Revival heyday. Fronted by an antique store, the alley side was modeled upon a grotesque architectural phase of offbeat nightclubs, circa 1920s France. Ivy screened crumbling brick walls. Windows were blacked out. A six-step descent brought patrons to the arched threshold of a heavy door, also slathered in black paint. Three gargoyles leered from atop the lintel.

  Legend had it, the gargoyles originally warded an English cathedral. Some ne’er-do-well pried Huey, Dewey, and Louie free and smuggled the trio to America on a steam freighter. Lore further claimed bootleggers had used a tunnel beneath the Green Goddess to access hidey-holes among the caverns of Widow Jane Mine in nearby Joppenbergh Mountain. Wind didn’t moan through the shafts—those were the cries of the restless dead.

  My kind of gin mill.

  A bouncer slid aside the security grate at my knock.

  “Let me in by the hair on your chinny chin chin,” I said.

  He wasn’t impressed. I grudgingly recited the password of the evening (We make this world our hell) and he threw the bolt. Hinges squealed like the front door to a haunted mansion in a Universal monster flick. The bouncer even bore a passing resemblance to a young Vincent Price.

  “Welcome to the Goddess.” His disdainful glance implied that I’d undershot “casual dress” by a mile or so.

  “Much obliged, Vince.” I stepped past him into the belly of the whale.

  * * *

  —

  THE SHADOWY DEN smelled of anise and cigarettes. Low, ribbed-beam ceiling and velvet upholstery. Electric candelabras. Tough to nail what the designers were going for—hipster decadent? At any rate, Oscar Wilde would’ve detested the cedar paneling.

  Card tables were occupied by the well-heeled set. Not too many bohemians among the dinner jackets and party dresses. However, I spotted two plainclothes cops of my (unfortunate) acquaintance, a mob fixer, and a gigolo gone stag for the evening. A man in Roaring Twenties’ gangster attire serenaded the audience from a dais under the lonely blue icicle of a spotlight.

  “Absinthe?” I slid in across from Curtis at his corner booth. “I’m told it maketh the heart grow fonder.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Coleridge.” He stirred his drink. Two empties indicated he’d gotten a running start. “Try one on for size. Lady might agree with you.” The bags under his eyes weren’t convincing.

  “Didn’t that hooch kill Poe?”

  “Didn’t help. Poe died of rabies anyway.”

  I ordered a double whiskey neat from the server who’d made a beeline at my host’s nod.

  Curtis wore one of his trademark suits—tonight, a Caruso butterfly. Had somebody sworn he presided over Sunday gangsters’ barbecue in formalwear, I would’ve believed them. Slick, graying hair, neatly manicured nails, pancake makeup, a hint of eyeliner, and a pat of Clive Christian’s 1872 in the unlikely case his Rolex required complementing. At a glance, one might write him off as a pretty, slightly soft, middle-aged executive. Big mistake—he served as the red right hand of Eddy Deluca, don of the Albany Syndicate. Curtis knew where heaps of bodies were buried because he’d shoveled the dirt.

  “Thanks for showin’.” He extended me the courtesy of implying I’d much of a choice. Less than a year ago, he’d provided material aid in disposing of my worst enemy, an Outfit button man named Vitale Night. “How’s your girl?”

  “Meg is annoyed I’m boozing with you instead of rubbing her feet after a long day. And yours?”

  “Same. I slipped the pool boy a twenty to massage her bunions.” He plucked a Nat Sherman from an ashtray and dragged. “Wish somebody would rub mine, for once.”

  “This modern era is bedeviled by inequity between the sexes,” I said. “Foot rubs are a one-way street.”

  “Speakin’ of the street, word out there is, you’re a busy man. Got dirty laundry? Call in Isaiah Coleridge. He gets the tough stains out.”

  “Sounds dramatic. I mostly stick to the legit.”

  “Sure, pal. Although ‘mostly’ leaves a wide streak of gray to navigate.”

  “It does indeed.”

  Curtis smiled with all his teeth.

  “Music to my ears. Means you’ll have no problem doin’ me a favor.” He didn’t add that it also wouldn’t be a problem because I owed him big. The tab always comes nigh with the mob and there’s no past-due notice. Except this was worse than I’d reckoned on. “You recently, uh, accepted a job for a realtor in Kingston. Tuned up a couple of guys who were doing business with a shady realtor. Yeah, your expression says you know of whom I speak.” He shook his head to forestall my commentary. “Don’t sweat it. It’s a teeny bit complicated because we have a minor interest in what those fellas were doing. See, one of the guys you thrashed worked for me, undercover-like. He was supposed to let the deal unfold and then do the good ol’ double cross. Now our boy’s listenin’ to his bones knit and the ringleader is in the wind. I ain’t mad. I know your character. You’ll wanna square accounts.”

  Tempting as it was to make with eloquent excuses, I waited for the other shoe. That was easy; I could see him winding up to smack m
e with his size ten.

  “Catch today’s Gazette?” he said.

  My mind’s eye did a smash cut to the story about the dead goon in the Ashokan.

  “I may have skimmed it.” The joke didn’t land. “What’s the noise?”

  “Harold Lee got clipped. Horrible, absolutely horrible. Remember Harry? Tight with the Kingston crowd. Mr. Nothin’ Personal.”

  “Alas, I knew him. Although not well.” My drink arrived and we clinked glasses. “To Harry ‘Nothin’ Personal’ Lee.” Harry always reflexively apologized before he put the hurt on some hapless piker. “Here lies a man who knew how to twist an arm.”

  “Salud. My crew swore by the fella. Real pro, not a yahoo. That end a the racket is crawlin’ with yahoos.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  According to the stat line, the recently departed Lee had done a contract or two in his impetuous youth and decided it wasn’t his cup of tea. He specialized in strong-arm collection; Louisville Slugger or a lead pipe, pick your poison. Mild gambler, moderate drinker, no dope. Leaned on debtors exactly hard enough to do the job. Perfect for loan sharks who wanted a rent-a-thug to handle the light work.

  Curtis said, “They dumped Harry in the reservoir. Washed up day before yesterday. Buddy a mine with the Kingston PD puts the body at close to a week in the drink. Real half-assed disposal effort. Wallet and cash weren’t touched.” He lowered his voice. “Report doesn’t state the cause of death. His body was mutilated, though. Some bastard sawed his head and hands off.”

  “As in . . . ?” I made a slicing motion.

  “As in, decapitated with a serrated knife. A big one—Green River or Bowie.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “Exactly my reaction,” he said. “Animals runnin’ wild.” Curtis operated with cool precision. In his mind, unorganized crime constituted a plague. While the Mafia might be savage, it imposed order upon chaos, much as the Romans brought law and culture to the “barbarian” hordes. He had me pegged as one of the good savages, and I let it ride.