Cohen was gripping his glass with sausage fingers clenched blue-white. “What… kind… of… pictures?”
The big wrong question–Mickey might be talking to Sol Gelfman and get the true skinny. Buzz braced himself. “Lucy and a dog.”
Mickey’s hand popped the glass, shards exploding all over the table, tomato juice and vodka spritzing Buzz. Mickey looked at his bloody palm and pressed it flat on the tabletop. When the white linen started to turn red, he said, “The Greek is fucking dead. He is fucking dog food.”
Two waiters had approached; they stood around shuffling their feet. The squarejohns at the next table were making with shocked faces–one old lady with her jaw practically down to her soup. Buzz waved the waiters away, slid next to Cohen and put an arm around his twitching shoulders. “Mickey, you can’t, and you know it. You put out the word that anybody who bucks Jack D. is your friend, and the Greek did that–in spades. Audrey saw me work him over–and she’d know. And the Greek didn’t know how stand-up you are–that your woman’s friends are like kin to you. Mickey, you got to let it go. You got too much to lose. Fix Lucy up with a nice place to stay, someplace where the Greek can’t find her. Make it a mitzvah.”
Cohen took his hand from the table, shook it free of glass slivers and licked lemon goo off his fingers. “Who was in it besides the Greek?”
Buzz showed him his eyes, the loyal henchman who’d never lie; he came up with two gunsels he’d run out of town for crashing Lew the Jew Wershow’s handbook at Paramount. “Bruno Geyer and Steve Katzenbach. Fairies. You gonna find Lucy a place?”
Cohen snapped his fingers; waiters materialized and stripped the table dervish fast. Buzz sensed wheels turning behind the Mick’s blank face–in his direction. He moved over to cut the man some slack; he stayed deadpan when Mickey said, “Mitzvah, huh? You fucking goyishe shitheel. Where’s Audrey and Lucy now?”
“Out by my car.”
“What’s Solly pay you?”
“A grand.”
Mickey dug in his pants pockets and pulled out a roll of hundreds. He peeled off ten, placed them in a row on the table and said, “That’s the only mitzvah you know from, you hump. But you saved me grief, so I’m matching. Buy yourself some clothes.”
Buzz palmed the money and stood up. “Thanks, Mick.”
“Fuck you. What do you call an elephant who moonlights as a prostitute?”
“I don’t know. What?”
Mickey cracked a big grin. “A two-ton pickup that lays for peanuts.”
“That’s a riot, Mick.”
“Then why ain’t you laughing? Send the girls in now.”
Buzz walked over to the bar, catching Johnny Stompanato working on another shot. Turning, he saw Cohen being gladhanded by Tom Breneman and the maitre d’, out of eyeshot. Johnny Stomp swiveled around; Buzz put five Mickey C-notes in his hand. “Sifakis snitched you, but I don’t want him touched. And I didn’t tell Mickey bubkis. You owe me.”
Johnny smiled and pocketed the cash. “Thanks, pal.”
Buzz said, “I ain’t your pal, you wop cocksucker,” and walked outside, stuffing the remaining hundreds in his shirt pocket, spitting on his necktie and using it to daub the tomato juice stains on his best Oviatt’s worsted. Audrey Anders was standing on the sidewalk watching him. She said, “Nice life you’ve got, Meeks.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Part of him knew it was just a dream–that it was 1950, not 1941; that the story would run its course while part of him grasped for new details and part tried to be dead still so as not to disrupt the unraveling.
He was speeding south on 101, wheeling a hot La Salle sedan. Highway Patrol sirens were closing the gap; Kern County scrubland loomed all around him. He saw a series of dirt roads snaking off the highway and hit the one on the far left, figuring the prowl cars would pursue straight ahead or down the middle. The road wound past farmhouses and fruit pickers’ shacks into a box canyon; he heard sirens to his left and right, behind him and in front of him. Knowing any roadway was capture, he downshifted and plowed across furrowed dirt, gaining distance on the wheeirr, wheeirr, wheeirr. He saw stationary lights up ahead and made them for a farmhouse; a fence materialized; he downshifted, swung around in slow second gear and got a perfect view of a brightly lit picture window:
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