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I inaugurated the New Year with another 10,000 worder for my two crime markets, probably writing it on January 2 and 3 of 1958. (I have always taken New Year’s Day as a holiday, on the grounds that I’ve been up too late to do a proper day’s work the next morning, and these longer stories for Scottie generally took no more than two days apiece, twenty manuscript pages a day. On some particularly hyper days I would do the whole 40-page job in two sittings, one before lunch, one after. My ledger, at any rate, shows “Mobster on the Make” as my first story of 1958.)
It’s what we used to call in my literary days at Columbia a bildungsroman—the tale of a young man making his way upward in the adult world—except the adult world that my kid is striving to make his way in is the way of organized crime, and one of the things he will learn in the course of his ascent through the ranks is the danger of excessive ambition. It hit the newsstands in the August, 1958 issue of Trapped under the “Ray McKensie” byline.
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MOBSTER ON THE MAKE
Johnny knew how to push ahead fast with tough people.
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Life began for Johnny Price one stinking hot afternoon at Grogan’s Poolroom late in August. He was nineteen then, a big, tough kid who had been out of high school for a couple of months and who had a job running orders for a grocery in town.
He didn’t like running orders. He didn’t like the $50 a week he made, either. He didn’t like the nickel and dime tips he got handed after sweating and breaking his back to deliver somebody’s carton of cookies and apple juice. High school hadn’t taught him anything worth a damn. He was shrewd and sly when he went in, shrewd and sly when he came out, but he hadn’t bothered to pick up any info on quadratic equations or the French Revolution. He didn’t want to clutter up his mind with things like that. Johnny Price had big plans for Johnny Price.
And everything started that day in Grogan’s Poolroom. Old Man Thompson of the grocery had given Johnny the afternoon off, because it was so hot. Nobody was coming to the store in this kind of weather, and there was nothing at all to do. In a sleepy little town like Reesport N.Y. you couldn’t expect the grocery store to bother with anything like air-conditioning.
Uh-uh. Air-conditioning was a city trick. Mr. Thompson just didn’t believe in it.
Grogan did, though. Not real air-conditioning, but a big fan that kept the poolhall pretty clean and fresh during the summer. Johnny made tracks for Grogan’s that afternoon. He had ten bucks in his pocket, and that would see him through a couple of hours’ pool and maybe even some fun in the evening. When he got there, he saw a couple of cars pulled up outside—shiny new ones with the big sweeping tail-fins in back that looked so flashy. Johnny knew whose cars those were, and he was twice as glad he had decided to come to Grogan’s this afternoon. The cars belonged to Mike Lurton and Ed Kloss, two of the local bigshots. They were racketeers tied up with some big New York City crime syndicate. Everyone knew that. That was why they drove the flashiest cars in Reesport.
Ed Kloss and Mike Lurton were a couple of Johnny Price’s heroes. He wanted to be like them. He wanted to work for the Syndicate and drive a car with fins a mile long. He was glad to see they had come to Grogan’s this afternoon.
He went inside. Grogan was sitting at the little booth in front, where he could see who came in. He was sweating more than usual today. Pellets of perspiration trickled down his bald dome of a head. For some reason he looked scared, Johnny thought. Maybe he didn’t like the idea of having two bigshot mobsters playing pool on his tables.
“Afternoon, Mr. Grogan.”
“Afternoon, Johnny.” Grogan’s voice was hoarse and thin-sounding.
“How’s business? I see Lurton and Kloss are here already.”
“Yeah.” Grogan jerked his head toward the door. “Be a good kid and get the hell out of here.”
“Huh?”
“Go on,” Grogan whispered. “There’s gonna be trouble around here. Don’t get yourself mixed up in it. Get out of here before someone puts a hole in you.”
Johnny blinked. He stared at the poolhall proprietor and said, “You tell me what kind of trouble, Mr. Grogan. I ain’t running away so fast.”
Grogan was sweating hard. “Lurton and Kloss. They’re waitin’ for someone in there. When he shows up there’s going to be fireworks.”
Johnny’s eyes widened. “Who they waiting for?”
Grogan said in a hushed whisper, “Guy named Phil McCarran. You know him?”
“Uh uh.”
“Big pinball operator out of Hudson. He’s coming down here to get a payoff from Lurton and Kloss and they don’t intend to hand it over. Go on and git, now. I said too much already.”
A nerve twitched somewhere in Johnny’s cheek. He didn’t know Phil McCarran, but he’d heard of him—a real big operator from upstate. If there was going to be some gunplay, Johnny wanted in. Maybe this was his chance to break into the big time himself.
–
He said to Grogan, “Thanks for the information. Mind if I go inside now?”
“You crazy? Go on and git home.”
Johnny was obstinate. “I wanta get in there Mr. Grogan.”
He started to walk past into the poolroom, itself. Grogan reached out a hand to stop him, slithering down from his high three-legged stool and running around front to stand in Johnny’s way. Johnny grinned. Grogan was an old man and he was half Johnny’s size. Johnny grabbed him by the scruff of his collar and sat him back up on his high stool. Then he opened the inner door and walked through into the poolroom.
The fan was humming quietly. He saw the five baize-covered tables and the single naked light-bulb dangling from the gray dingy ceiling. But he didn’t hear the familiar click of cue against ball.
There were only two men in the poolroom and neither one of them was playing. They were sitting on opposite sides of the door and they looked like they expected an atom bomb to go off in the front office any second. One of them was Mike Lurton and the other was Ed Kloss.
As Johnny entered they said at the same time, “What the hell are you doing here?”
Johnny smiled pleasantly. “Grogan let me in. He figured I could help you.”
They stared at him. Lurton was a big man, Johnny’s size—six-two or so, two hundred pounds. But he was about twelve years older than Johnny, and where the boy had firm muscle Lurton had mostly sagging fat. As for Kloss, he was small and ratty-looking, with a little thin mustache and beady clever eyes. Johnny admired both of them. Lurton was supposed to be able to bend a beer can between his thumb and middle finger. Kloss was the best poker-player in five counties, they said.
In a deep rumbling voice Lurton said, “Grogan must be nuts. Get the hell out of here fast, sonny.”
Johnny shook his head.
“Listen to me. Grogan gave me the pitch—about McCarran coming here to collect. I want to help out. Anything at all.”
“We ain’t interested in a Junior Varsity,” Kloss said in a cold voice.
“Suppose McCarran knows the score and comes prepared? I’ll be your lookout. Let me help you. I’m big and I can take care of myself.”
Lurton looked at his watch. He said, “McCarran’s gonna be here in fifteen minutes. Get out now or I’ll throw you out.”
“You wouldn’t want to do that,” Johnny said. His heart was pounding hard. “You might regret it if I got on the wrong side in this thing.”
Kloss said, “What the hell do you mean by that? Kid, you threatening us?” He scowled.
“I’m trying to help out! Look—when McCarran gets here I’ll be playing pool. All by myself, just practicing my shots. You can hide in the washroom over there. I’ll shoot the breeze with him and get his attention distracted and you two can nail him easy.”
He saw that Lurton was thinking it over. The big man was smiling. “Maybe the kid’s got something there after all,” he said.
Uneasily Kloss said, “I don’t like it. Maybe the kid is part of something McCarran rigged up.”
Lurton let go of a big chuckle that boomed up from deep in his belly. “Him? He’s one of the local kids, Ed. Johnny something-or-other.”
“John Price,” Johnny said.
“Yeah. Price. Okay, Price. Get out the chalk and start making with the billiards. And be ready to duck when the time comes to duck.”
–
Johnny felt an inward surge of glee but didn’t allow even a smile to break the surface of his face. Lurton and Kloss vanished into the washroom. He heard the clicking of safeties on two guns. He picked up a cue and took a couple of random shots, just cannonading the balls around without trying to play anything. The place was deadly silent, only the humming of the fan breaking the quiet. Each carom sounded fantastically loud. Sweat rolled down his face. Even with the fan going it was eighty-five or ninety degrees inside, and maybe five or six degrees more than that outdoors.
The door of the poolroom opened about ten minutes later. Johnny tensed and tightened his jaws, but stuck to his practicing without looking up.
Finally a voice said, “Hey, you. Fella.”
He glanced up. “Yeah?”
He saw a big red-haired man of forty or so standing in the entrance. He wore an open red sports shirt and slick blue pants, and his face was a pasty white color. He was Phil McCarran.
“You all alone in here, kid?”
“Yeah, dammit,” Johnny said. “You wanta try a game or two? My name’s Price.”
“I’m looking for a couple of friends of mine,” the other said. “They were supposed to meet me here. How long you been here?”
Johnny shrugged. He said, “About half-hour or so. Ain’t been nobody here.”
On wobbly legs he walked around to the other end of his table so he’d be out of the line of fire whenever the two mobsters in the washroom decided to shoot. He wondered what the hell they were waiting for.
Then he saw. McCarran had been chicken; he had brought some friends along. Two cold-faced toughs stood just outside, in the hall, ready to jump in if there was any trouble.
Johnny said, “Those guys outside—they come with you? Bring ’em in and let’s have a match, huh? I’m sick and tired of playing solitaire.”
McCarran looked annoyed, but he turned and said, “Okay. Come on in, boys.”
They came in and closed the door behind them. Johnny didn’t lose a stroke. He waited.
Suddenly the washroom door flew open and Lurton and Kloss appeared, firing as they came. The first shots dropped the two toughs before they knew what was happening. McCarran was quick, though; he spun and started to run, figuring he’d make a getaway under cover of all the confusion.
Johnny grinned and took three quick steps forward. He stuck out his cue stick and rammed it between McCarran’s legs. The big gambler stalled like a bike with a pipe stuck between its spokes. McCarran cursed and went sprawling forward. Johnny jumped back and a second later a bullet from Lurton’s gun took off the top of McCarran’s red-haired skull.
It was messy.
For a long moment there was silence in the room, only the humming of the fan. Three bodies lay on the floor. Smoke rose toward the ceiling.
Finally Kloss said, “What was your name again, kid?”
“Price. John Price.”
“You live in this town?”
“Yessir.”
“With parents?”
“My aunt,” Johnny said.
“That’s good. How old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” he lied.
“Congratulations. You’re now an accessory before the fact in this murder. Help us drag these bodies into the washroom and then let’s get the hell out of here. Maybe we can find some use for you after all. You’re pretty quick with your brains for a guy your size.”
–
So that was the beginning for Johnny Price. He was a mobster on the make, a big boy with big plans. He was climbing up in the world of crime.
He went to live with Lurton and Kloss. They had a ten-room place about five miles out of town that they had bought from some old millionaire a few years back. Lurton had half of it and Kloss the other half, and they gave Johnny a room upstairs near the attic. He stopped off at his aunt’s place to tell her that he had a job in another town and wasn’t going to be staying with her any more. She didn’t care. She never cared what he did, so long as he didn’t ask her for money and forked over his share of the food bill every week.
Living with Kloss and Lurton was a picnic. Officially he was their chauffeur, and they gave him ninety bucks a week plus room and board. Unofficially he became their Man Friday, their junior partner in crime.
Lurton and Kloss had their fingers in every pie. They were affiliated with a big crime syndicate operating out of New York City, and every week supplies of reefers and dope arrived, to be routed on to individual peddlers in Troy and Schenectady and the other upstate cities. Small towns didn’t go much for strong stuff like that, but the middle-sized cities did.
It wasn’t long before Johnny found out that Lurton and Kloss were giving the New York syndicate a royal screwing on the rake-offs, as well as putting the squeeze on the small distributors. As middle-men, they were growing plenty fat. Johnny filed his discovery away in the back of his head for possible future use.
They took care of plenty of other things too. The illegal pinball business, which they handled on a local scale with commissions going to the outfit formerly headed by the late McCarran. Nobody ever found out what happened to McCarran. In towns like Reesport, the police aren’t too interested in what happens when a gangster gets killed in a private squabble.
There was a thriving call-girl operation too, and a ring of cardsharps, and half a dozen other things. In their small-town way, Lurton and Kloss were masterminds of crime. But the longer Johnny stayed with them, the more he realized they were just small-fry. He could use them to climb over on his way up the ladder, but that was about all. He didn’t intend to spend the rest of his life in Reesport.
They gave him some little jobs of his own to do. One of them was making collections from the pinball-machine operators in the area.
These were usually local store-owners who kept the machines in back rooms for the benefit of small-time gamblers who liked to pick up an extra nickel or two. Pinball for prizes or money is strictly illegal in New York State. You can’t even offer a pack of cigarettes for a high score, according to the law. But that doesn’t stop people from running pinball machines.
Johnny’s first pinball collection was in the neighboring town of Marboro, four miles south of Reesport—a two-horse town where the pinball concession was run by a joe named Mack Blossom in the back of his soda-and-magazine shop.
Johnny stopped around to visit him about a month after he started working for Lurton and Kloss.
Blossom was a plump, middle-aged man who probably saw a way of making a quick buck by operating the pinball setup. There were a couple of kids sipping soda in his store the day Johnny came in. Johnny had grown a mustache to look older, and didn’t think of himself as a kid any more. Not after having helped murder Phil McCarran.
Johnny walked in and said to the man behind the counter, “You Blossom?”
“Yep. Do something for you?”
“Maybe. How’s the pinball business?”
Blossom looked uneasy. He had a little thin mustache and he nibbled it. He said cautiously, “What you meaning by a question like that?”
Johnny shrugged. “First of September’s collection day, ain’t it?”
“Who sent you?”
Johnny smiled. “Lurton and Kloss.”
“How am I supposed to believe that? Suppose this is just a shakedown?”
‘“Suppose it is?” Johnny snapped. “Does that matter to you? One way or another you hand over the dough, so don’t chatter.”
Blossom said nothing. He looked mean and miserable. Johnny pulled out Kloss’ note and handed it to him. It instructed Blossom to make the payment for the month to John Price, as official representative
“Come with me,” Blossom said shakily.
He led Johnny through a curtain into a back room where the pinball machine was. There was a kid playing it, a skinny kid with blue jeans and long sideburns down his cheeks, and he was bending over the pinball machine like it was a lover, crooning to it and caressing its sides as the ball ricocheted from bumper to bumper, sending up cascades of light with each hit.
He was counting: “Ten thousand! Twenty! Thirty! Forty!”
Johnny peeked over his shoulder at the placard fixed to the corner of the machine. If you scored a hundred thousand, you got a free game. After that it was one free game for each ten thousand points, plus fancy bonuses. If you wanted to, you could cash in the free games for dough at a nickel a game. A good operator could run up twenty or thirty free games in an hour, sometimes as many as fifty. That was two and a half bucks in cash for an initial investment of a nickel. Not bad, either. But the proprietor always came out ahead, because there were always plenty of over-eager jerks who tilted out without winning anything.
–
Blossom was sitting behind a counter figuring out how much he owed Johnny.
Johnny became interested in the game. The punky-looking kid had run up to 90,000 with one ball left. He stood to rake in five or six free games if he played it cagy.
It was pretty foolproof. If the cops came around, all Blossom had to say was that he was giving away free games no prizes, no dough. You couldn’t prove otherwise. But the cops never came around.
“Let’s go, now,” the kid crooned. He pushed in the plunger and sent the gleaming silvery ball up the track. He clung to the sides of the machine, ready to manipulate the flippers that kept the ball hovering up in the pay-zone.
He hit the first bumper and picked up a thousand. Johnny watched the numbers mount, a thousand at a time, once two thousand. 90,000, 91,000, 93,000, 94,000. All the way up to 99,000. One more hit and a free game. One more.
TILT!
In a kindly voice Blossom said, “I’ve told you a dozen times, son. If you shake the machine she’s gonna tilt on you, and there ain’t no denying it.”
The boy whirled. “You fat old bastard,” he said. “This machine’s fixed! I was up at 99,000 when she tilted out! You fixed it!”
Blossom laughed. “Just because you can’t control yourself and keep tilting it, Jimmy, that ain’t no reason to say it’s phony. Go on, now, before you make me sore.”
“You lousy phony,” the boy murmured. Johnny stared. Obviously this kid was about to work off a lot of resentments right here, using the tilted pinball machine as an excuse for shooting off steam.
The kid moved toward Blossom, who ignored him and continued to go over the books. Suddenly the kid’s hand moved to his waist and came out with a knife. Not a switchblade, those were hard to find. No, it was the new kind that Lurton was pushing through the neighborhoods, the gravity knives that were still legal until they got around to outlawing them the way they had outlawed the switch. The gravity knife was simple. You held it and you flicked it through the air; and the blade came shooting out and fixed itself in position.
The boy whipped the knife into sticking shape and took three steps across the dirty floor toward the cowering Blossom.
Johnny sized the situation up carefully. The kid was about seventeen, a six-footer but still a couple of inches shorter than he was, and a whole lot lighter. He was a mean-looking kid, and there was fire in his eyes now. He’d been storing up a whole lot that he wanted to take out on the chubby store proprietor now.
Blossom was shielding his face with his arm and mouthing, “Get away from me, Jimmy. You crazy or something? Get away!”
“I’m gonna slice you up, Blossom. Been throwing nickels into that machine all weekend, you got it rigged. Don’t like rigged machines. Don’t like you, you fat old slimy leech.”
He took a few more shuffling steps forward. Johnny stood to one side, watching Blossom sweat, wondering if the fat man was going to have a heart attack. The curtain was drawn and nobody in the front room was able to see what was going on. Blossom’s face was greenish-white, the way Phil McCarran’s face had been the day he had come down to Reesport to collect from Lurton and Kloss.
The kid was very close now. Johnny figured he had let it go on long enough.
He stepped out of the corner and clubbed down with the side of his hand against the kid’s arm-muscle. He brought his hand down with enough force to break a dog’s neck. He came close to breaking the kid’s arm.
The knife dropped and the kid let out a howl. Johnny kicked the knife into the far corner. Then he turned the kid around and slammed him across the face with the back of his hand. Lips and teeth met and blood started to drool out of the kid’s mouth.
All the fight abruptly went out of him, but Johnny didn’t let up. He rapped the kid in the stomach, slapped him twice more, belted him in the shoulder hard enough to spin him around. Now it was the kid’s turn to cower with his hands up, trying to protect himself from Johnny’s ferocious assault.
Johnny finished up with a short chop to the jaw that made him fold up, dizzy.
“No more,” he whimpered. “Please...no more...”
“You learn to keep that damn knife in your pocket next time,” Johnny snapped.
He picked the quivering kid up and carried him through the curtain into the front room, past the soda fountain, out the front door. He booted him in the rear and sent him on his way. Then he turned and went back inside to the back room. Blossom was slumped over panting hard. He had found a bottle and was pouring something for himself.
“I’ll take a little of that,” Johnny said.
Blossom poured it. It was some kind of bourbon, probably two bucks a quart. Johnny rolled it around in his mouth and spit it out on the floor. “Mouth wash,” he said calmly.
Blossom said, “I—l don’t know how to thank you. That kid was out of his head. He woulda carved me up if you didn’t beat him around.”
“Yeah. Would have been too bad, too. Having one of our operators getting carved up with a blade we sold. How much is the account, Mr. Blossom?”
Shakily Blossom looked at the records. “Thirty-eight bucks.” He started to count it out. “I’m sure glad you stopped around today. I’m really grateful. You saved my life, you know. Next time that kid comes, I’m gonna be ready for him.”
“Add five bucks to the bill,” Johnny said. Blossom looked up. “What for? I keep fair books. I wouldn’t want to cheat Lurton and Kloss. Thirty-eight smackers is all I owe them.”
“l believe you. The five bucks is for special services rendered.”
“You mean—?”
“Sure,” Johnny said, “Risking life and limb to throw that punk out. You don’t think I’m gonna act as your bouncer for free, do you?”
“Five dollars,” Blossom mumbled.
“Yeah. You object?”
“N-no, sir. No. Here you are.”
Johnny pocketed the five, as well as the thirty-eight dollar take from the machine. He felt good about things. He was learning the business fast.
–
In the next couple of months, Johnny made himself more and more valuable to Lurton and Kloss, and he noticed a change in their attitude toward him.
They didn’t regard him as just a greenhorn kid any more. They looked on him almost as an equal now. They let him in on confidential things, and they raised his take from ninety to a hundred twenty bucks a week and then to a hundred fifty.
It was nice dough for a big kid not yet old enough to vote. Johnny bought himself a sharp car, new model with fins in the back the size of a whale’s, flukes, and kept it in the garage next to Lurton’s big Cadillac and Kloss’s glossy Lincoln. He hit it up big with the girls, dating three or four from the surrounding towns and giving them a big time.
Johnny had never had it so good as far as girls were concerned. Besides the locals, there were always two or three syndicate girls in the big house, girls stopping off overnight on the way to do a job in Buffalo or Rochester or someplace like that further upstate.
Lurton didn’t seem to have too much interest in the girls, though he took one to his room every once in a while. Kloss, though, had one almost every night. Johnny always had to let Kloss have first crack at any syndicate girl who stayed overnight, but Johnny didn’t mind that too much. His day was coming. Someday Johnny Price would have his pick of every woman in New York.
It was a damned good life.
He made the rounds of the pinball joints and picked up the dough, and occasionally he went on trips upstate to deliver some goods or to make a pick-up. He bought fancy clothes and he lived high. Any time he ran out of cash, he borrowed some from Lurton against his next week’s pay, or he squeezed it out of the country jerks who rented their pinball machines from Lurton and Kloss.
The one thing he took good care never to do was to try to cheat on his bosses. He had a good thing with Lurton and Kloss and he didn’t intend to lose out by swindling them.
Not yet, anyway.
There were some pretty good parties in the big house on the hill. One night about four months after Johnny had gone into the outfit, Kloss called him aside and said, “We’re getting some very special company tonight. Thought I’d warn you now.”
“Who?”
“Joe Angelucci and Pete Rizzo and some girlfriends of theirs. They’re on their way to Syracuse to see a football game and they’re stopping over for some fun tonight. Go down to the town and get some liquor. Here’s fifty bucks. Angelucci likes gin. Beefeater gin. You get any other brand and I’ll gut you.”
Johnny grinned. “Beefeater it is, Ed.”
He drove downtown and ordered a case of gin. He felt apprehensive. He knew who Angelucci and Rizzo were.
They were Syndicate bigwigs—not top men, but pretty far up the ladder. They ran things from New York, and regarded Kloss and Lurton as local stringers. He wondered if Angelucci and Rizzo knew just how much dough Lurton and Kloss had fleeced them of.
Johnny knew. It was in the neighborhood of ten thousand a year. Kloss stayed up half the nights sometimes juggling things so they could drain off more dough than they were entitled to. Once a week he sent a report down to Rizzo by special delivery, along with a check. All very business-like. Crime was organized that way, like a well-run business.
Except that every year a business has an accountant come in to check over the books. In the crime business it didn’t happen every year. It happened whenever the top man decided he didn’t trust his middlemen any more, and if the checkup showed any discrepancies those middlemen were very much in hot water.
The way Lurton and Kloss would be if the Syndicate ever found out what was going on. Johnny smiled to himself. One of these days he was going to let the Syndicate know. Not now; he was still too green for that. But one of these days he would, and when they rubbed out Lurton and Kloss, Johnny Price would be the local kingpin.
Soon. Soon.
He drove back to the big mansion with the liquor and stowed it away in the bar. The time was half past five.
“They’ll be here about six,” Lurton said.
Lurton and Kloss were pacing around the recreation room nervously. They were worried. They were wondering, Johnny thought, whether the Syndicate had found out about them.
“What’s the matter with you guys?” Johnny asked. “You look so damn jumpy.”
Lurton said sourly, “These guys expect a big show. They get annoyed if we don’t shell out for them.”
“Yeah,” Kloss said. “They can be mean.”
Johnny wondered whether Lurton and Kloss were aware of how much he knew. You could never tell, with those guys. You could never tell.
At ten after six the outside door chimed and Lurton said, “Go get it.”
Johnny hopped out and opened up. Two men and two women stood outside, bundled up in expensive-looking clothing. A European car half a block long was parked near the garage.
The four of them stepped in, and Kloss and Lurton appeared. Johnny helped the newcomers off with their coats.
Lurton, said, “Joe, Pete, meet Johnny Price. He’s our protégé, so to speak. Heh-heh.”
A short thick-lipped man stuck out his hand. “Pete Rizzo. Hello, Price.”
“I’m Angelucci,” said the other. He was very tall but thin, almost corpse-like, with hollow cheeks and slicked-back black hair.
The girls introduced themselves as Marie and Agnes. They were quite something. Both of them wore clinging low-cut wraps liberally trimmed with rhinestones. Agnes was a blonde, long-legged, long-haired, with dark inviting eyes and a high, full bosom. Marie was a slinky dark creature with lovely white arms and firm pale breasts. Johnny had seen plenty of women around the place, but these were special. The New York type. The type that high-echelon men like Angelucci and Rizzo rated.
–
The party consisted of watching Rizzo and Angelucci consume a lot of gin. The phonograph played, and with Johnny serving as bartender a lot of liquor flowed. Most of it flowed into the four guests. Lurton and Kloss didn’t drink much. They were too scared, even though it seemed a pretty good bet that the two Syndicate men had come here on a strictly social call.
Johnny didn’t drink much either, just a sip or two to keep in the spirit of things. He found he would manage better if he stayed sober and listened to everything that was said.
Most of it was chatter about the business—about members who had been carted off to jail, or who had met untimely deaths, and so forth. Angelucci complimented Johnny a couple of times. They seemed to like him. Rizzo said, “It’s good to see some new blood in the organization. He looks very capable.”
“He is,” Lurton said.
After a while Rizzo decided he’d had enough, and announced he was going to bed. He was pretty well filled up with gin, though he wasn’t altogether drunk.
He looked at Marie and said, “Suppose you come along with me.”
Marie grinned at him. “Soon, Pete. I want a coupla more drinks first.”
“Okay. Be expecting you.”
Lurton said, “Johnny, show Mr. Rizzo to his room.”
“Sure.”
He escorted Rizzo upstairs to one of the guest bedrooms that had been laid out for the visitors. Rizzo was weaving unsteadily around. As they entered the room he looked at Johnny and said, “Price, you’re a pretty good kid. I like you.”
“Thanks, Mr. Rizzo.” He knew when to be polite and to whom.
“I like you a whole lot. If you’re ever in New York, Price, stop by and see me.
“Maybe I can help you out a little. Always willing to encourage promising new talent when I see it.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir.”
“And—and here’s something to show how I feel about you, Price.”
Drunkenly Rizzo fished in his pocket and came out with a thick stuffed billfold. He pulled out a bill and handed it to Johnny, who took it and put it away without looking at it.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Welcome. Good night. And tell Marie to get the hell up here.”
“Of course, Mr. Rizzo.”
–
He watched the crime magnate stumble into the room, and turned away. He looked at the bill. It was a hundred, new and crisp. Grinning cheerfully, he pocketed it. He went downstairs.
Lurton was the only one in the living-room when he got there. Johnny looked around and said, “Where’d everybody go?”
“Angelucci and his dame went off to bed. Kloss is conducting them to their room.”
“How about Rizzo’s chick? Marie.”
Lurton shrugged. “She had a little too much to drink. Said she wanted some fresh air. She’s out on the front porch.”
“Rizzo wants her upstairs. I better go find her before she passes out under a rosebush.”
He started to the door. Lurton caught up with him in a few steps and whispered in his ear, “You were upstairs with Rizzo a long time, Johnny. Five minutes or so. What the hell took so long?”
Johnny frowned. “He was drunk. He wanted to talk. To tell me what a nice promising kid I am.”
“That all?”
“He gave me a hundred bucks, you angling for a cut of it Mike?”
“Nah. Whatever he gave you is yours. I just wanted to know—”
Whether I squealed? Johnny thought. Out loud he said, “I didn’t give any trade secrets to him. I better go look for Marie, Mike. Rizzo wants her and he’s likely to get sore if I don’t send her up.”
Johnny stepped out into the cool night air. It was early December, but still not too cold. The air was clear and the stars speckled the sky. A big moon brightened things up. He looked around for the girl.
After a few moments he found her. She was sitting on the swinging bench in the garden rocking back and forth. He walked toward her.
“You trying to get pneumonia?” he asked “Girls with dresses like that shouldn’t go outdoors in December.”
“I wanted some fresh air before I went to bed. Come here Johnny.”
He crossed over to her.
“Sit down next to me.”
Her voice was low and throaty. He sat down. He said, “I just put Rizzo to bed. He’s anxious for company. Your company.”
“He can wait a few minutes,” Marie said. She wrapped herself around him and took his hand. She said, “I like you, Johnny. I like big men. Not fat little ones like Rizzo. Let me have you before I go up to him.”
“Okay. Go ahead.” He didn’t need much encouragement. He pulled her to him hungrily, and she responded with the same hunger.
It was all over too soon. He stood up.
“Come on,” he said. “We better get back inside before there’s trouble.”
She grinned at him and said, “I like you even more, now, Johnny. Maybe I can get to see more of you someday. Rizzo can’t last forever. Ever think of coming to New York?”
“Soon,” he told her. “I’m not ready for the big leagues yet. But I will be, pretty soon.”
Together they walked back toward the house. Johnny felt on top of the world. Before long he could make the jump from small-time crap to the real thing, downstate in the big city.
He had it all figured out. By informing on Lurton and Kloss, he could win himself a position in Rizzo’s outfit. But even Rizzo was only a middle-sized fish. Someday perhaps he could pull the same thing with him and jump up even higher in the organization.
–
About seven weeks after that, Johnny decided the time had come to make his big move. He had been with Lurton and Kloss long enough to know almost every aspect of their business and how he could handle it without them. He knew who owed them money, who was likely to fudge on payments if he didn’t get prodded, and everything else. He’d become an expert in the crime business after only a six-month apprenticeship, and now it was time to get rid of his two small-town bosses and start heading for the big time, and Marie.
He had opened up an account with a big New York City bank, and made his deposits by mail. Already he, had salted two thousand bucks away, and he was putting more in the account every week. When he went down there he wanted to have a backlog of dough.
Early in February he said to Lurton, “Mike; I want a couple of days off.”
Lurton grinned. “What the hell for?”
“There’s a girl in Marboro,” Johnny explained. “I’ve been breaking down her resistance for the past couple of months and I just about got her made now. I want to take her down to New York for the weekend.”
“New York, huh?”
Johnny nodded. “What’s a good hotel to take her to, Mike?”
“Try the Waldorf,” he said. “You can’t miss there.”
Johnny left the next day, driving his flashy new car. Neither Lurton or Kloss seemed very suspicious, at least not on the surface. He waved goodbye to them and drove off in the direction of Marboro, but after he was two miles from Reesport he changed roads abruptly and picked up the highway that led to New York. There hadn’t been any girl in Marboro. He was on his way to New York to see Rizzo and show him a couple of the documents he had in his suitcase.
He reached Manhattan late in the afternoon, parked his car in a garage, and checked in at a hotel—not the Waldorf, because he valued his dough too much for that kind of splash, but a smaller and cheaper hotel near Times Square. He had dinner at a pizzeria. Then he went to a phone-booth and dialed Rizzo’s number.
As he expected, a lieutenant answered, a surly suspicious sounding fellow who wanted to know who Johnny was and what business he had with Rizzo. Johnny spoke a code word that was helpful; then he said, “I’m from Reesport. I work for Lurton and Kloss.”
“Who in hell are they?”
“Big men up there. Look, friend, tell Rizzo I’ve got some dope that he’ll find very interesting. If he doesn’t remember who I am, tell him he once gave me a hundred-buck tip for helping him upstairs.”
Rizzo remembered. A few minutes later the underling came to the phone again and said, “The boss says it’s okay for you to come over. He’ll expect you at eight.”
–
Rizzo lived in a swanky apartment house on West End Avenue, in a sixteenth-floor penthouse. Johnny was met at the elevator by the fellow with the ugly voice, who turned out to be as nasty looking as he sounded. He conducted Johnny inside.
It was quite a place. Johnny had never dreamed a place could be so fancy. There were real paintings on the wall, and carved statuary all over, and luxurious couches and sofas and divans. One of the sofas was occupied by Marie. She wore a revealing wrap and a ring big enough to choke an elephant.
“Hello,” Johnny said.
“Well Mr. Price, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “How have you been?”
“Can’t complain,” she said.
“I miss the country air though. That stroll in the garden—”
They both grinned. A voice behind Johnny said, “Hello, Price.”
He turned. Rizzo stood there, a squat little figure in a green velvet dressing-gown. He said, “Lurton and Kloss send you?”
Johnny shook his head. “I came on my own. Is there any place we can talk confidentially?”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Got some stuff to show you.”
Rizzo scowled unhappily a moment, then said, “Okay. Come into my den.”
The den housed a fantastic gun collection. There must have been five hundred weapons of all makes and ages, in display cases around the walls. Some of them seemed to be hundreds of years old.
Rizzo said, “What did you bring me?”
“Information,” Johnny said. He opened his briefcase and pushed some papers across the desk to Rizzo. They were records of the exact amounts Lurton and Kloss had shaved off their Syndicate payments in the past three months. Rizzo read through them with an ever-deepening frown, and finally looked up. His bulldog face was grim.
“This is serious stuff.”
“I know. That’s why I thought I should bring it to your attention.”
“Has it been going on since you joined them?”
Johnny nodded.
Rizzo drummed with his fingertips on the shiny desktop. “If it’s true,” he said, “Lurton and Kloss are finished. Heaven help you if you’re faking it, though.”
“I swear—”
“Never mind that,” Rizzo said. “We’ll check into it pretty fully. We can’t let crap like this go on. First thing you know every local stringer’ll start taking off whatever he thinks he can get away with.”
Johnny was silent. Rizzo went on, “How come you brought this to me, though?”
“I thought you ought to know.”
“Very loyal of you. Loyal to me, that is. But not to Lurton and Kloss. If it’s true, you’ve cooked them.”
Johnny shrugged. “I’m loyal to the organization, not to those two punks. I know what’s good for the organization, Mr. Rizzo.”
“Mmm. Yes. You also know what’s good for you, Price.”
“Maybe so.”
Rizzo said, “Okay. We’ll look into it. You’ll be amply rewarded if what you say is true.”
On the way out he winked at Marie and she winked at him. Lurton and Kloss were finished, Johnny thought coolly. And maybe before long he’d be pushing Rizzo aside too. It wasn’t fair for a fat slob like that to be shacking up with an item like Marie.
–
He spent the next day in New York, saw some shows and ate at some fancy places, and drove back to Reesport at night. The trip had cost him almost two hundred bucks, but that didn’t bother him. He knew he had set himself up good in Rizzo’s eyes. Before long money would mean as little to him as it did to Rizzo.
He garaged the car and entered the house. Lurton was there. He looked up and said, “Well? How was the date in New York? Your girl come across for you?”
“Sure thing.” He grinned cheerfully. He was thinking, Pretty soon you’re going to be dead, Lurton. You and Kloss. You can’t get away with swindling the organization forever.
He went upstairs and went to bed, feeling pretty good about things. He dreamed about Marie.
About ten days later, the front doorbell chimed and Johnny answered. Rizzo stood outside, looking deadly. Behind him stood Angelucci, and three other toughs Johnny did not know.
Johnny invited them in. In a cold voice, Rizzo ordered him to get Lurton and Kloss. The day for evening the score had come, Johnny thought.
“Hey!” he yelled upstairs. “We got company! Come on down!”
They came down. Lurton’s jaw dropped when he saw who had arrived, but he covered up with a phony smile and said, “Pete! Joe! Why didn’t you tell us you were coming this way?”
“So you coulda baked a cake?” Rizzo snapped. “We happened to be passing by, so we stopped in.”
“It’s great to see you boys again,” Kloss said in an oily tone. “I see you didn’t bring the girls again this time.”
“No,” Angelucci said in a tombstone voice. “We brought the fellas this time.”
Lurton and Kloss began to look scared for the first time. Standing to one side, Johnny watched their lips go white, and then the rest of their faces.
Rizzo said, “We came up here to check up on your books, boys. A little birdie told us that you might not be handing over all that we were entitled to.”
Quietly, the three thugs stepped around and frisked Lurton and Kloss. They also frisked Johnny. He did not attempt to protest yet. Just in case by some miracle Lurton and Kloss escaped, it was just as well to let them think he was in trouble too, and not the informer who had given them away.
Weaponless now, Lurton said, “Pete, honestly, you don’t think that—”
“Cut the crap,” Rizzo said. “Let’s see the books.”
–
It was all over in ten minutes. With Rizzo’s thugs keeping careful watch, Kloss opened the safe and silently handed the records over. Rizzo leafed through them. A cold smile grew on his face.
“According to these things, my friends, you haven’t been treating us very fairly. We’ll have to fix that, won’t we?”
Lurton was quivering. It was startling to see a man that big turning green with fear.
Kloss was steadier. He said in a tight voice, “Okay, Rizzo. You’ve got us. But how did you find out?”
Rizzo shrugged. “We were tipped off. We never name our informants.”
Johnny smiled suddenly, and Kloss saw it. He said,
“He’s the one! Isn’t he, Rizzo? Price told you, the lousy little stoolie!”
“Those are harsh words, Ed,” Johnny said.
“He admits it!”
“Shut up, Kloss,” Rizzo said. “You’re making too much noise.” He gestured to the three thugs. “Take Lurton and Kloss out back and give them what’s coming to them. This place is so secluded that nobody will hear the shots.”
Kloss said, “See—just us! Not Johnny!”
“Johnny gets a reward,” Rizzo said. “He tipped us off to you two, sure.”
Kloss nearly broke loose from his captor’s arms. He hurled curses at Johnny, who simply smiled at the angry little man.
“You taught me not to cheat the organization,” Johnny said. “But you didn’t practice what you preached. So I had to turn you in. Sorry about that, boys. And thanks for the education.”
“Take them away,” Rizzo commanded.
The thugs hustled Lurton and Kloss out of the house and into the back yard. Inside, Rizzo and Angelucci stood with their ears cocked, listening. Johnny listened too. He felt warm and happy inside. This house would be his, now, and the entire district would belong to him. When he was ready to move up in the scale a bit, he’d find some way of getting rid of Rizzo, and climb up another notch toward his goal at the top.
And he’d have Marie too.
Suddenly the sound of a shot came from outside, and then a scream. Another shot another scream, lower pitched.
That was from Lurton.
“The boys are having fun,” Rizzo said. “Winging them first.”
Two more shots sounded. And then silence.
“They’re finished,” Angelucci said.
The three thugs reappeared and nodded. It was done with. The gangland execution had been carried out in proper style.
Rizzo said, “We owe you thanks for this, Johnny. Those birds were taking us for thousands.”
“You don’t have to thank me, sir. I was just being loyal to the organization.”
“Sure you were, Johnny. That’s why you ratted on the two fellows who took you in and showed you the ropes. You were loyal to the organization, so you turned them in like a stoolie.”
Johnny frowned. He didn’t like the tone of Rizzo’s remarks.
He said, “ I was helping you, Mr. Rizzo. They were stealing from the organization. How could I let that go unpunished?”
“You’re perfectly right, Johnny. You sang like a miserable stoolie because you saw a way of climbing, over their dead bodies, and now that they’re out of the way you’ll be laying for me next. The organization doesn’t need guys like you, Johnny. Take him outside.”
“Huh? But I saved you thousands! I—”
“You’re out for yourself, kid. You did us a good turn, sure. But I ain’t going to risk having you do the organization another good turn some day at the expense of my neck. My girl Marie tells me you have lofty ambitions. We don’t like kids to get too ambitious too fast, Johnny-boy.”
He felt them grab his arms. He tried to struggle, but there were three of them his size, and he didn’t stand a chance. They hustled him outside.
Through his brain rushed confused thoughts. Marie had squealed on him, then! And Rizzo knew Johnny’s plans and didn’t intend to let him live long enough to put them into operation. Someone who had squealed once might always squeal again, if there was something in it for him. Something like Marie, maybe.
Two crumpled bloody bodies lay in the back yard. Lurton and Kloss. Johnny stared at the naked guns that had suddenly appeared in the hands of the thugs.
“Don’t shoot me,” he pleaded. “I’m Johnny Price. I’m gonna be someone big someday, and I’ll take care of you! I’ll see to it that you get everything you want!”
“Listen to him,” one of them said.
He persisted, “Look—go inside and shoot Rizzo and Angelucci! I’ll take care of you! Not me! Don’t shoot me!”
They snorted. “Punk kid would sell anybody out. We better finish him.”
They didn’t waste time. The first bullet caught him in the shoulder and knocked him to his knees. The second went into his lungs. He clung to life, moaning, trying to tell them it was all a mistake, that he was Johnny Price and on his way up in the gang world, that someday he’d be the top man. He heard Rizzo laughing within, savagely, and knew it was no use. He had served his purpose and Rizzo was having him rubbed out. Him, Johnny Price! He coughed bloodily and tears welled to his eyes just before the final bullet crashed into his brain.