The Sudden Demise of Sharkface Bensky

The guy who cut Sharkface Bensky’s throat in front of Santa Maria Addolorata that Saturday night got away clean. He ran down the alley next to the church so fast nobody going in or coming out of Carnival Night got a good look at him. Only a deaf kid standing on the steps came forward to say he’d seen it happen, and the description he gave to a hand sign reader the next morning at the police station wasn’t much, just that the cutter used a straight razor with what looked like an ivory bone handle and wore a dark brown overcoat. Sharkface crumpled to the sidewalk like a squeeze box out of air and bled to death before anyone thought to call an ambulance. Two teenage girls stepped right around him, the deaf kid told the reader, kept right on talking and went up the steps into the church. A cop said they probably thought Sharkface Bensky was a drunk who’d passed out and was sleeping it off.

Roy and his friends went by on Sunday to see the bloodstains. It was the first week of December and there hadn’t been any snow yet, though the temperature was below freezing.

“It don’t look like blood, does it?” said the Viper. “It’s so black.”

“Maybe they already washed it with somethin’,” said Jimmy Boyle, “to get the red out.”

“Skull Dorfman says the church makes its living off the blood of others,” Roy said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Jimmy.

“Means the fathers wouldn’t be cryin’ over a little spilt blood,” said the Viper. “Not after what it says in the Bible. It’s good advertisin’, you ask me.”

“The priest is probably talkin’ about it right now,” Roy said. “Comparing Bensky’s blood to the blood of Christ.”

“You coulda fooled me,” said Jimmy Boyle. “I didn’t think Sharkface had any blood in his body. He never let anyone slide.”

“Skull said he was a kneebreaker who needed his knees broke,” said the Viper.

“Think he done it?” asked Roy.

The Viper shrugged. “Who’s to say?”

“The bulls ain’t gonna knock theirselves out to solve this case, that’s for sure,” said Jimmy. “I wouldn’t be surprised they was behind it even.”

Sharkface Bensky’s real first name was Moses. The moniker Sharkface came from his having had his nose slit open from bridge to tip with a stiletto by Bobby Battipalo, a soldier for Joe Batters, because he welshed on a bet, and Battipalo’s having inserted in the wound a five dollar bill. He did it in such a way that the fin stood up like a shark’s. Bobby Battipalo paraded Bensky around afterwards so that people could see his handiwork. It took thirty-two stitches to close up the cut and left a scar impossible not to notice. When Battipalo left Bensky, still stunned and bleeding, in front of Meschina’s restaurant on Blackhawk Boulevard, he said to the bunch hanging out on the sidewalk, “Looks like a shark out of water now, don’t he?”

Mass let out and the parishioners began leaving Santa Maria Addolorata and coming down the steps. Roy, the Viper and Jimmy Boyle had all stopped going to church a couple of years before, when they were twelve or thirteen, although Jimmy occasionally still accompanied his crippled grandmother to confession when his mother was unable to, to make sure she didn’t fall.

Jerry Murphy walked over to the boys. Everybody called him Goat because he had been trying to grow a goatee ever since the first few hairs appeared on his face when he was fourteen. Goat was now almost eighteen, and he had hardly any more hair on his chin than he’d had four years before. His idol was the trumpet player and famous hipster Dizzy Gillespie, who wore a goatee, and Murphy often wore a beret and glasses, like Gillespie, even though there was nothing wrong with his eyes.

“Hey, cats,” he said, “you come to scope out the murder scene, huh?”

“Hi, Goat,” said the Viper. “Yeah, you know, we Shakespeare scholars are checkin’ out the damn spot.”

“For extra credit in English,” said Roy.

“I bet I know who’s the perp,” Goat said.

The three boys looked up at him. Goat was six two; of the boys, Jimmy Boyle was the tallest at five eight.

“Remember Bird Man?” said Goat.

“Yeah,” said Roy, “the ex-welterweight from Streator went to see Birdman of Alcatraz twenty times. Used to hang out with the Pugliese brothers at their garage.”

“Right.”

“Bird Man cut Sharkface’s throat?” said Jimmy. “Why?”

Goat fingered the several thin hairs on his chin, then said, “Sharkface was collectin’ for the Puglieses and keepin’ part of the payoffs for himself, tellin’ ’em some cats didn’t pay up when they did. The Puglieses hired Bird Man to take Sharkface out of the count.”

“Who told you?” asked the Viper.

Goat shrugged his shoulders. “Just a guess,” he said. “Gotta split. Stay cool, cats.”

Goat pulled his Dizzy beret out of one of his coat pockets, stretched it over his crewcut scalp and walked away.

As churchgoers continued to file past and around the boys, a squad car drove up and parked in front of Santa Maria Addolorata. Two of Chicago’s Finest got out and hurried up the steps into the church.

“Somethin’s up,” said Jimmy Boyle.

“Yeah,” said the Viper, “let’s wait here.”

Four more squad cars pulled up and blocked off the street in both directions. Eight cops ran up the steps into Santa Maria Addolorata and four more stayed outside and made sure no citizens lingered on the steps or on the sidewalk. One of the cops motioned for the boys to step away from where they were standing. The trio walked ten feet up the street and stopped.

A couple of minutes later, two officers exited the front door of the church clutching a man between them, each holding one of the man’s arms. There was a black hood over their prisoner’s head and his hands were handcuffed in front of him. He was wearing a long brown overcoat. The cops on the steps, the sidewalk and in the street all had their guns drawn and kept looking around. The prisoner was shoved into the back seat of one of the squad cars and wedged between two cops. The rest of them got into the cars and drove off with sirens blaring. Roy saw the head priest from Santa Maria Addolorata, Father Vincenzu, who was from Romania, standing on the top step watching the police cars speed away.

“Bird Man,” said Jimmy Boyle.

“Maybe so,” said the Viper.

“You think Father Vincenzu was hiding him?” Roy asked.

“More likely he talked Bird Man into turning himself in,” said Jimmy.

“But why would Bird Man have been in the church in the first place?” said Roy.

The Viper put up the collar of the army field jacket his brother had given him after he’d come back from Korea. It was several sizes too large for him.

“What beats me,” he said, “is how Goat knew it was Bird Man.”

Suddenly the street was dead quiet. Roy looked up again at the entrance to the church. Father Vincenzu was still standing there. As he turned to go inside, he saw the three boys and waved at them. Roy waved back, and then the Viper and Jimmy Boyle waved, too.