Where There's Smoke полностью

I listened to Jeffrey’s theory with only polite interest. In the code of men who accept markers from losing gam­blers, the debt must be paid in one way or another. But these men are in business, and they realize just as cer­tainly as any other businessmen that if they kill the per­son who owes them money, the money will never be collected. Better to break his arm a little, or rearrange his nose. Homicide is the last resort of creditors; the money owed will never be retrieved. At the same time, it is an extremely convincing reminder to future I.O.U. writers. When murder does become necessary, however, it’s usu­ally done more dramatically, so that there’ll be no mis­take about who ordered the execution or why. An automobile accident? This hardly seemed the style of men trying to teach an object lesson. If you want to warn other gamblers that they can’t welsh with impunity, you don’t commit a murder that might be misconstrued as an accident. And even if someone had tampered with Gibson’s automobile, or forced him off the road, or otherwise arranged for his collision, his son’s fears seemed unrea­sonable. Rarely will underworld creditors knock off a debtor and then go after his family as well. That’s merely wasted motion, and Players like to conserve their energy.

I asked Jeffrey where I might find his mother, and he gave me the address of her place of business uptown. This bothered me immediately. Granted Mrs. Gibson owned a business, granted she needed to put all her time and energy into running it, especially since her late spouse had done his utmost to squander her earnings as well as his own, it nonetheless seemed passing strange that she would go to work on the day after her husband had been killed in an automobile accident. In my years as a cop, I’d run across a great many self-possessed women, but never had I met a grieving widow who’d carted her dead husband’s body to a funeral home, left instructions on how to dress and package it, and then gone off to busi­ness as usual. Rhoda Gibson’s sang-froid seemed a bit unusual, to say the least.

I had no wish to carry around with me a pistol that might have been a stolen one, so I returned the Smith & Wesson to Jeffrey, with the suggestion that he try not to shoot himself in the foot with it. It was twenty-five min­utes to eleven. I went back to where I’d parked the Mer­cedes, and drove east toward the television-repair shop of Henry Garavelli.

Henry was wearing blue coveralls with yellow stitching over the right-hand flap pocket, GTV for Garavelli Tele­vision. I shook his hand with a curious feeling of paternal pride. I’d known him for more than five years now, hav­ing first made his acquaintance when he was eighteen and a member of a street gang euphemistically named The Cardinals, S.A.C., the “S.A.C.” standing for “Social and Athletic Club.” Most of the gang’s socializing had been done on tenement rooftops with willing teenage “debs,” and most of the athletics required breaking heads with tire chains, slashing faces with ripped-off car aerials, and stabbing with switchblades or shooting with Saturday-night specials the members of “spic clubs,” this being a time when the emergence of Puerto Ricans as something more than second-class citizens was causing all sorts of nationalistic fervor to rise in the breasts of fourth-generation Italians eager to protect their turf. I thought I’d seen the last of the street gangs in the late forties and early fifties, but in 1969, when I met Henry for the first time, the resurgence was beginning. By the time I quit the force, it had again become a full-blown plague upon the city.

Henry was now twenty-three years old, and he had served three and a half years in prison because I sent him there after I caught him holding up a grocery store. Henry was nineteen at the time, having graduated from his bopping street gang to shooting heroin into his arms, thirty dollars’ worth a day, which came to two hundred and ten dollars a week—a long habit to support unless you are burglarizing, mugging, and otherwise supplementing your nonexistent income by holding up markets, tailor shops, liquor stores, and the like. Henry never admitted to anything but the grocery-store stickup, but that was enough to gross him a ten-year sentence for a first of­fense, reduced to three and a half by the Parole Board after he proved to be an ideal prisoner.