He’d been napping on his couch, and he’d been seriously tempted to let the telephone ring. Normally a pushover for temptations, serious or otherwise, he’s managed to resist this one and he’d answered the phone. Later, he’d consoled himself with the certain knowledge that there’d have been no way of avoiding the mess—if she’d missed him on Thursday she’d have called on Friday or Saturday, and he’d have responded exactly as he had on Thursday. His finances were under siege and for four hundred dollars he’d have gone over Niagara Falls in a busted orange crate, waving Old Glory and singing “America the Beautiful.”
He tooled the rust-splotched, bald-tired, white Buick Regal out of a flaming orange sunset and into the soft gray shrouds of another Chicago twilight, boring east on Gunnison Avenue to where an enormous cerise and blue neon sign said Raponi’s Old Naples Spaghetti House. It was just one helluva sign, clearly readable for two city blocks. It said Italian Cuisine and Steaks & Chops and Parties Welcome and Italian Jukebox, and it had a tilted champagne glass that spewed little white bubbles and below the champagne glass it said Cocktail Lounge and Nick Raponi claimed that it cost two hundred dollars a month to keep it lit up. The last four letters of Cocktail sputtered fitfully, flickering on and off in the rapidly gathering October darkness. Tuthill Willow noticed things like that. He was a detective.
There were two cars in the tidy yellow-striped parking lot—Nick Raponi’s brand new Chrysler New Yorker and Florence Gambrello’s antiquated bronze Mercury with its rear bumper caved in. Willow left his Buick, pausing momentarily to sniff the scent of distant burning leaves, wondering if they burned leaves in Heaven, and deciding that they did and that it was probably legal.
Willow knew that Raponi’s would be virtually deserted because Thursday evenings at Raponi’s had been financial catastrophes for years, anticipated and accepted like April afternoons in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. Raponi’s was a decent establishment—dim, clean, orderly, and this may have been why Willow had never felt completely at ease there. He’d won his drinking spurs in places where the lights were bright, the jukeboxes loud, the barstools lopsided, the urinals busted, the toilet paper missing—joints where men cussed and spat on the floor and where the women who came in were lost or looking for a proposition, usually the latter. Raponi’s was genteel—its ceiling heavy beamed, spotless white stucco, its walls paneled, its floors carpeted, and there were potted rubber trees in every last nook and cranny. There was a twenty-five-foot black plastic bar with red leatherette barstools, and a fifty-seat dining area with a glass chandelier the size of a Victorian bathtub, skinny-legged wrought-iron tables with red cloths, candles in little red glass chimneys, and black Naugahyde swivel chairs. And barely within the entrance there was Florence Gambrello, Raponi’s steady waitress and occasional bouncer, slouched at a table, yawning, smoking, scratching a muscular thigh, and staring moodily into a red pond of unoccupied dining room tables. Willow paused, cranked up his best preoccupied facial expression, and attempted to brush by her, but Florence Gambrello had the reflexes of a young mongoose and she seized him by the tails of his sports jacket to haul him unceremoniously back to her table. She said, “So where’s the fucking five-alarm fire?”
Willow’s smile was of the hand-in-the-cookie-jar variety. He jerked an urgent thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the ailing neon sign. He said, “Uhh-h-h, I was in a hurry to tell Nick that your tail isn’t working just right.”
Florence Gambrello nodded, staring at him with sultry Sicilian eyes. She ran the pink tip of her highly educated tongue across her full lower lip. She said, “Well, Tutto, any old time Florence’s tail ain’t working just right, you tell Florence, you don’t take it up with Nick Raponi, you got that?”
“The neon sign, Flo—I’m talking about the neon sign out front.”
Florence Gambrello reached behind him to squeeze his buttocks, one at a time. She said, “May God be with you tomorrow night, lover!”
Willow grinned a ghastly grin.
Florence said, “See me before you leave.” It was more command than request.
Willow nodded and ambled to the west end of the bar where Nick Raponi stood, one foot up on the beer cooler, eyes glued to a television commercial—like he was witnessing the second coming of Marilyn Monroe, Willow thought. Raponi was a self-important, rotund, dapper little man with sleek black hair combed straight back, quick, beady dark eyes, an oversize nose, a Bert Reynolds mustache, a fat two-carat diamond ring, and a whole mess of syndicate connections, or so he’d told Willow more than once. On these occasions Willow had nodded appreciation of Raponi’s underworld affiliations, knowing that most Chicago Italians profess to have close Mafia ties and that very few of them would have recognized a genuine Mafioso if he’d been pissing on their shoes. Willow cleared his throat repeatedly until Raponi glanced in his direction. Raponi grimaced and pointed to the rear of the bar area. “Yeah, Tut, she’s back in one of the booths—stumbled in here maybe fifteen minutes ago. Said something about having an appointment with you.”
Willow said, “She sounded half-paralyzed when she called.”
“No change—she’s loaded to the gunnels. Took a vodka collins with her—haven’t laid eyes on her since.”
Willow bought a bottle of Kennessy’s Light Lager and went back there. She was sitting in the shadows, perched sidesaddle on the edge of a booth bench, crossed legs protruding into the aisle, watching his approach with skeptical murky eyes. She said, “Missur Willur?”
Willow nodded and sank onto the booth bench across from her. Over the years Willow had encountered his share of oddball clients, but this was his first contact with a drunken nun.