"Do
"They have no case, they're …"
"No? Then how do they know the job's coming off on March fifteenth? Where'd they get
"We've leveled with you, Dominick," Willis said, "and believe me, we wouldn't have brought any of this out in the open if we didn't have plenty to go on. Now you can either help us or we can book you and take you down for arraignment and you'll have an arrest record following you for the rest of your life. What do you want to do?"
"That's coercion!" Baum shouted.
"It may be coercion, but it's also fact," Willis said.
"I'll tell you everything I know," Di Fillippi said.
He knew a lot, and he told it all.
He told them that the holdup was set for eight o'clock on Friday night, and that the victim was to be the owner of a tailor shop on Culver Avenue. The reason the hit had been scheduled for that particular night and time was that the tailor, a man namd John Mario Vicenzo, usually packed up his week's earnings then and took them home with him in a small metal box, which box his wife Laura carried to the Fiduciary Trust early Saturday morning. The Fiduciary Trust, as it happened, was the only bank in the neighborhood that was open till noon on Saturday, bank employees being among those who did not like to work on weekends.
John Mario Vicenzo (or John the Tailor as he was known to the people along Culver Avenue) was a man in his early seventies, an easy mark. The take would be enormous, Di Fillippi explained, with more than enough for everyone concerned even if split three ways. The plan was to go into the shop at ten minutes to eight, just before John the Tailor drew the blinds on the plate glass window fronting the street. La Bresca was to perform that task instead, and then he was to lock the front door while Calucci forced John the Tailor at gun point into the back room, where he would tie him and leave him bound and helpless on the floor near the pressing machine. They would then empty the cash register of the money that had been piling up there all week long, and take off. John the Tailor would be left dead or alive depending on how co-operative he was.
Di Fillippi explained that he'd overheard all this one night in the pizzeria on South Third, La Bresca and Calucci sitting in a booth behind him and not realizing they were whispering a little too loud. At first he'd been annoyed by the idea of two Italians knocking over a place owned by another Italian, but then he figured What the hell, it was none of his business; the one thing he'd never done in his life was rat on anybody. But that was before the fight, and the bet that had left him broke. Desperate for a little cash, he remembered what he'd heard them discussing and figured he'd try to cut himself in. He didn't think there'd be too much static from them because the take, after all, was a huge one, and he figured they'd be willing to share it.
"Just how much money is involved here?" Willis asked.
"Oh, man," Di Fillippi said, rolling his eyes, "there's at least four hundred bucks involved here, maybe even more."
A lot of things happened on Wednesday.
It was discovered on Wednesday, for example, that somebody had stolen the following items from the squad room:
A typewriter.
Six ballpoint pens.
An electric fan.
A thermos jug.
A can of pipe tobacco, and
Four bars of soap.
Nobody could figure out who had done it.
Not even Steve Carella, who had been released from the hospital and who was very delicately walking around with his ribs taped, could figure out who had done it. Some of the squadroom wits suggested that Carella, being an invalid and all, should be assigned to the Great Squadroom Mystery, but Lieutenant Byrnes decided it would be better to assign him to the tailor shop stakeout instead, together with Hal Willis. At twelve noon that Wednesday, the pair headed crosstown to John the Tailor's shop.
But before then a lot of other things happened, it was certainly a busy Wednesday.
At 8:00 A.M., for example, a patrolman walking his beat called in to report that he had found a stiff in a doorway and that it looked to him as if the guy had been burned to death. Which meant that the two fire bugs had struck again sometime during the night, and that something was going to have to be done about them pretty soon before they doused every bum in the city with gasoline. Kling, who took the call, advised the patrolman to stay with the body until he could get a meat wagon over, and the patrolman complained that the doorway and the entire street stank to high heaven and Kling told him that was tough, he should take the complaint to Captain Frick.
