Al grinned back. There were times when he quite liked the younger man. Times like this one. He promised himself that when the time came to kill Dave he'd make it quick. A bullet in the back of the head. The guy wouldn't know a thing. It seemed the least that he could do.
Chapter NINETEEN
Jimmy Figaro believed in history. But what was the use of it if you didn't learn from it? You didn't know about it, you were doomed to repeat its mistakes, and one thing Figaro could not afford was a mistake. Not with his client list. With some of these guys you fucked up just once and that was it. Then it was you that was history.
One of history's lessons was to do with being the bearer of bad news. A cop he once knew in Orlando got woken in the middle of the night by another cop on his doorstep telling the guy he had some bad news for him. As it happened the bad news was just that the guy had been ordered to take charge of an accident investigation in which a lot of kids had drowned, and the cop was going to have to look at the kids' bodies. But the guy was so annoyed with the other cop when he found out it wasn't really bad news for him at all, and that none of his own family were dead or anything, that he pulled a gun and shot the cop on the doorstep dead.
There were a lot of permutations on the don't-shoot-the-messenger theme. Nobody liked the guy who brought bad news. And that nobody could turn nasty when he was someone like Tony Nudelli. It was ironic how Figaro's own bad tidings were tied up with the very same thing that had taught him to be extra careful of Nudelli and his quick temper in the first place. Which was Benny Cecchino.
Benny Cecchino had been a made man, a loan shark who had borrowed 8250,000 from Tony, at half a percent per week, to put out on the street at whatever vig he liked. One percent, or a hundred percent, Tony didn't care who got charged or how much just as long as he got his 1,250 a week from Cecchino. Cecchino had lent $4,000 to an individual called Nicky Rosen, who promptly disappeared. Three weeks later Cecchino had been driving up Collins and thought he saw Rosen in another car. By the time Cecchino realized that the guy was someone else he had smashed his Mercedes into the lookalike and put him in hospital. An honest mistake, except that the lookalike turned out to be Tony Nudelli's own brother-in-law. It was just bad luck and Nudelli might have excused this, but for the fact that Cecchino had gone around the Beach talking about it like it was the funniest thing that had ever happened. Like he didn't give a shit whose brother-in-law it was. And the minute Nudelli heard about that he took a gun, drove down to the restaurant where Cecchino was usually to be found, which was a mob-owned place, and took care of the insult himself. And not just any gun either, but an awesome little Derringer-sized twelve-gauge pistol, firing one single capiscum round that was capable of crippling a grizzly bear. It was like having a shotgun in the palm of your hand. A make-sure killer's gun that left most of Cecchino's head in his lap.
After that happened it wasn't just Jimmy Figaro who gave Naked Tony extra respect. It was everyone. David Delano included.
As Figaro parked his BMW on Nudelli's drive, he reflected that it was curious the way history was always rewriting itself. How years after you thought the chapter was closed, new facts came along to alter your perception of something you thought you knew very well already.
It was Figaro's client, Tommy Rizzoli -- Tommy of the ice trucks and the mango trees -- now cleared of all racketeering charges, who had supplied the original crumb of information that caused Figaro to go and check out a few things himself. What he discovered was that on the night Dave Delano saw Naked Tony walk into that restaurant and shoot Benny Cecchino, Dave had been there to make a deal with Cecchino on behalf of Nicky Rosen, the guy who had disappeared with Cecchino's four grand. Rosen, it turned out, had been engaged to be married to Dave's sister, Lisa, and Dave was trying to make sure that the same thing didn't happen to his future brother-in-law as had happened to Naked Tony's. The lookalike guy. Except that the twelve-gauge capiscum had put an end to the negotiations.
No one ever found Benny Cecchino's corpse. But it wasn't long before the word got out that Nudelli was involved and that Dave Delano had been the last man to talk to Cecchino before he got himself killed. The State tried and failed to put together a case against Naked Tony, which was when the Feds, already trying to make a Rico case against Nudelli, subpoenaed Dave to give evidence before a Grand Jury. Just a few weeks after Dave's five-year sentence for contempt, Naked Tony had taken over Benny Cecchino's vig list. Three months later, Nicky Rosen was found dead in a boatyard at Dinner Key. Someone had sawed his head half off with a broken bottle.
