No Lesser Plea Read online

  So the day passed. Walker’s noon-to-eight shift came to an end and he walked out into the evening toward his car. The air was cool, at least, and after what he had been breathing, almost pure. He made himself take deep breaths, hoping to calm his pounding heart and calm the tremor in his limbs. But his anxiety was deeper than he could reach with his own resources.

  It took him half an hour to change the license plates; he kept dropping the bolts and skinning his knuckles. Afterward, he collapsed on the front seat of the car. He had intended to be straight for the drive, but he thought, “Gonna go off the goddam road if I keep shaking like this,” and reached for the envelope taped to the roof of his glove compartment.

  Ten minutes later, through the miracle of dope, Walker had to strain to remember what he was so worried about. It would be a piece of cake tonight—no different from driving the wife and kids to church, except he would be $500 richer. He thought about the money. Maybe he would give half to the mortgage company, keep them off his ass for a while, and see Paradise with the rest. Then he could get a little ahead, maybe taper off without too much trouble, be cool, clean up his act, and get a better job. Yeah, things were starting to look a lot better; it was amazing how every problem kind of fell into place when you got your head straightened out.

  Thinking these and similar thoughts, Walker nodded off. He came to with a bolt of adrenaline shooting like a hot stake through his innards. He yanked his wristwatch out of his pocket, where he stashed it before starting work. It was 10:15.

  Shaking and sick with fear, he cranked the car, almost flooded, started up, stalled, released the hand brake, started again, and peeled rubber out of the company lot. He whipped onto Queens Boulevard going fifty, heading west, sweating again, chanting, “Oh Jesus, clear the way, oh, Jesus muthafucka move your ass, you asshole move, oh no don’ stop in the lane for no fare muthafuckin’ cabbie oh Jesus don’ make me be late, that man kill my ass for sure …”

  Driving better than he ever imagined he could drive and with improbable luck, Walker reached 50th and Lex at 10:45. Stack and another man he didn’t know were waiting by the subway entrance. They walked quickly over to the car; Stack got in the front seat and the other man got in the back.

  Walker said, “Hey man, I got hung up. There was a wreck on Queens Boulevard.”

  Stack reached over and grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pulled him over so that their faces were inches apart. Walker noticed that his eyes were light-colored with yellow flecks, and burning.

  “Shut the fuck up! I told you, mutha, I told you. You in trouble now, boy, I mean it. Now move this piece of shit, and don’t make no more mistakes.” He gestured to the backseat. “This here Willy Lee. He gonna make sure you don’t.”

  Walker did as he was instructed, easing the car down the avenue. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Stack open his attaché case and take out a sawed-off shotgun. He put it on the seat next to him. “This here Thirty-ninth. Turn and pull up at the end of the block,” he said.

  As the car slowed to the curb, Louis stuck the shotgun down between his belt and his body on the left side. It was a 16 gauge Remington Standard Model 870 pump gun, which Louis had bought in a pawn shop in Passaic the week before and cut down himself from its normal length of forty-eight inches to slightly over sixteen inches. It had five double-aught shells in the magazine.

  Louis also had a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber Bodyguard Airweight in an ankle holster on his right leg. He had never used this particular gun, since pawnshop shotguns had proved sufficiently deadly for all the killing he had ever done. Still, Louis didn’t believe in taking unnecessary chances. There was always the possibility of pursuit after a job and the pistol was insurance.

  “Wait,” he said, as he picked up his case and swung out of the car and around the corner. Three minutes later he was back. He opened the door and got in. Walker said, “What happened. You do it?”

  “What happened? You shit! What happened? I tell you what happened. Bullshit happened, that’s what. They gone, boy, long gone. You made me late, and goddam Snowball, I call myself ready to tear your fuckin’ junkie head right off.”

  “Shit, Stack, I said I couldn’t help it,” Walker whined.

  “Ah, shut your mouth, just drive. Get goin’.”

  “Where to now?”

  Louis turned to Elvis. “Hear him, now. Think he a fuckin’ cabbie. ‘Where to?’ my ass. Just go to the next robbery, Donald, you miss the first one. What the fuck I care, just move it.”

  Louis was blazing, not just because he had missed the robbery, but because he had built himself up as perfect to the kid in the back. For some reason he didn’t quite understand, he wanted to impress Pres Elvis. He needed an acolyte to admire the perfection of his technique, to learn from him, and maybe set up in business on his own, using the same style. Louis also had in the back of his mind the idea of maybe starting a franchise. He’d show some likely youngsters how it was done, and then sit back and take a piece off the top each time they pulled a job. Let the younger dudes take the risks now. Louis was an avid reader of the business press and considered himself in the entrepreneurial mainstream of America.

  Now it was turning to shit before his eyes. Louis, like most people in his line of work, had an extremely low tolerance for frustration. Since he spent most of his working life armed to the teeth, he did not need a high one.

  The car had turned north on Madison. Walker was hoping Stack and Willy would get out and leave him alone, and he planned to loop back to Lex at 50th and maybe drop them off at the station again.

  But at 48th Street he heard Stack say, “Right, turn right, dammit!” He turned the corner. “Park here now, I wanna check out that liquor store.” Louis had spotted a lighted window with a figure standing behind the counter. He never pulled an impromptu job, but he was driven to bring something off tonight, to show Elvis he was a pro. To show himself, too.

  Angelo Marchione, the proprietor of A&A Liquors, was spending the last few minutes of the night placing bottles of Chivas on the high-class Scotch shelf behind the register counter. His son, Randy, was working in the basement storeroom. The door ringer sounded and Marchione looked up to see a well-groomed coffee-colored man dressed in a black pinstriped three-piece suit, and wearing gold-rimmed glasses, walking toward him.

  “Can I help you?” said Marchione.

  Louis favored the classic approach. He pulled his shotgun out, stuck it in the other man’s face and said, “OK, muthafucka, this is a stick-up. Let’s have the cash drawer, NOW!”

  Marchione did as ordered. He’d been robbed before and knew the routine. He pulled the cash drawer out and slid it across the counter.

  “Now take out all the bills and put them in a bag,” said Louis. “No, not no paper bag—use the cash bag from the bank.”

  Again Marchione complied, stuffing about $500 in bills from the drawer into the plastic zipper bag supplied by Bankers’ Trust. (What was with this guy—did he want a deposit slip too?) The shotgun never wavered from his face.

  “That’s good,” said Louis. “Now go and stand in the corner and be still.”

  The proprietor walked down the aisle behind his counter and stood with his back to his high-priced cognac display. He watched the gunman open a leather attaché case and put the money bag inside. He seemed to be in no hurry.

  “This your only store, hey?”

  “No,” said Marchione. “We got another one over on the West Side, Eighty-seventh and Broadway. My brother runs it, we’re partners. That’s where we get the name, A and A. I’m Angelo, he’s Alfredo, we call him Al.”

  “You know anything about franchises?”

  “What? What franchises?”

  “I mean like franchising, somebody figure out a good way to sell liquor, do the overhead, buy the stock, then get a bunch of guys to run the stores for him. Like McDonald’s and all.”

  Marchione stared at the other man, at the engaged, interested expression on his face and at the black circle of t
he shotgun barrel’s mouth. (This is crazy, I’m having a business conversation with a robber. Only in New York.)

  “Well, there’s not much of that in the liquor business, not in New York. I hear they’re starting it out of town.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. I guess if you got a franchise operation everything has to be the same, so you can get your discount from the supplier. I mean you got to move a lot of the same product, and you got to have a limited inventory. In the city, it’s all fashion, like clothes. One weeks it’s Galliano, next it’s Pernod, whatever. On the stuff that sells steady, well, it’s hard to beat the department stores. A franchise operation would have to beat them on cost on the low end and beat the neighborhood stores on selection on the high end. Then you got the good will …” His voice tapered off. What was going on here? The thought entered his mind that this guy could be a real wacko instead of a regular out-and-out robber.

  “I get it,” said Louis. “It don’t really apply to the operation I got in mind, though.”

  He closed and snapped his attaché case. “Well, time I was goin’,” he said briskly, and shot Marchione in the face from a range of about five feet. The blast exploded Marchione’s head and a dozen bottles of fine cognac and hurled his dead body back against the shelves. Louis placed his shotgun on the counter and approached the body, being careful of the broken glass. He patted down the man’s pockets and was rewarded with a thick roll of bills. The dead man had done a substantial cash business and routinely kept a good part of it outside his bank and out of view of the Internal Revenue Service. Louis smiled. He was something of an expert on the cash-diversion practices of dead storekeepers and never missed an opportunity to check in places other than the obvious cash register.

  He walked out from behind the counter and placed the shotgun and the additional cash inside the attaché case. As he snapped it shut he was feeling good. The old man had about a grand in the roll, plus the $500 from the till—probably not as much as they would’ve got from the supermarket but sure as shit better than nothing, which it would have been on account of goddamn Walker being late. That boy is not cut out for this business.

  Louis’s hearing had been slightly impaired by the blast of his gun, so that he failed to hear the footsteps coming up the stairs from the cellar or the door opening behind him.

  “Oh God! Dad … what, Oh, no!” Louis spun around and saw a good-sized kid of about seventeen in a tan shop apron and a college sweatshirt. The kid saw him at about the same time and for a heartbeat they just stared at one another. The stink of death and cognac was strong in the air.

  Then Louis slammed his case down on the counter and began fumbling frantically at the snaps. The youth picked up a bottle of Scotch by the neck and with a bellow of rage came around the end of the counter, the bottle raised high over his head. Louis lifted the case to block the blow, but not quickly enough. The bottom of the bottle caught him a glancing blow above the ear. He dropped the case and went down on one knee, with hot stars exploding behind his eyes. The kid was on him then, trying to grab at his clothes to hold him steady so he could get a good blow in with the bottle, Louis squirming and trying to kick away across the rough wooden floor.

  Louis was not much of a street fighter and the kid was big enough and mad enough to be very dangerous. Now he was trying to press Louis down with his knee, his hand wrapped tightly in the cloth of the other man’s jacket. Enough of this shit, thought Louis, cocking his right leg to bring his ankle holster within reach. He heaved the middle of his body up and as the kid went over to one side Louis brought the Airweight out, stuck the muzzle in the kid’s belly and fired three times.

  Louis sat up. The kid was lying on his back not far from his feet. He was gasping and his hands were pressed into the widening stain of blood forming in the center of his body. Louis stood up and straightened his clothes. He was irritated to see that his suit-jacket lapel had been torn in the struggle. Walking over to the shelves behind the counter he inspected the stock and then selected a quart of J&B Scotch, bagging it neatly from the supply underneath the register. He picked up his attaché case, stuck the bottle under his arm, then walked over to the wounded youth and shot him twice in the forehead at point-blank range. Then he walked out of the store.

  The ten minutes Louis was away were the longest ten minutes in Walker’s life. He was itching and shivering. The last hit was hardly enough to keep him calm; after this, he deserved another, but damn, that was his absolutely last stone empty bag of dope. He glanced up and looked at the man in the backseat through the rear-view mirror. Pres was leaning back in his seat, eyes half closed, a faint smile on his lips. Walker studied his face. The dude was cool, no lie. Walker said, “Say, Stack been gone a long while, ain’t he?” The other man’s eyes came open a fraction and he met Walker’s gaze in the rear-view mirror.

  “No, it’s just a couple of minutes. Take it easy.”

  “Maybe we should drive around the corner, maybe something went wrong.”

  “We staying right here. Jus’ be cool.”

  There was a muffled bang from around the corner. Walker jumped.

  “Uhnnh … ooh, shit, what was that?” he said, although he knew very well what it was. Walker’s legs were twitching uncontrollably by now, like a four year old who needs to go potty. There were three more popping sounds, sharper this time, and then two more.

  “What the fuck he doin’ in there, playin’ shootin’ gallery? Oh, come on, les go, les go!” he moaned, banging the heel of his hand against the steering wheel.

  In the back Pres thought, “This boy comin’ apart, now. Might have to whap his head a couple times, settle him down.” The idea gave him some small pleasure. He felt in charge, cool, a little tingly. It’s wonderful to find one’s métier while one is still young.

  Then the car door was opening and Louis was getting in. He had recovered his composure, and flashed a grin at Elvis. “Alright, my man! Nice score.” He turned to Walker. “Damn, Snowball! You look like death eatin’ a sandwich. Was you worried about your Uncle Stack?”

  “No, Stack, it jus’ like … seem like you took a long time an’ all.”

  “Yeah, right, now Donald, I want you to start drivin’ uptown on Madison. The speed limit is thirty-five, red mean stop, green mean go. Fiftieth, cut over to Lex an drop us off. Now, move.”

  Walker did as he was told, driving like an old lady on the way to church. The night was cool and the traffic fairly light. He made it to the subway station in a little over eight minutes and pulled up to the curb.

  The two other men got out. Louis came around to the driver’s side. He said, “Listen here, Snowball. You goin’ to drive to the Olympia Hotel, that’s at Tenth Avenue, ’round 23rd Street. There’s an all-night garage across the street. Put the car in there. Before you do that, pull over somewheres and change the plates. You got that? You got a screwdriver, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but Stack, I sick now. I’m fucking crawlin’, don’t you got anything to fix me up?” He snuffled back his running nose.

  “Oh, I got some good stuff for you, Snowball, but I gotta go back to my place for it. Tell you what—take this here bottle and put yourself to sleep tonight. When you wake up I be there with your money an what you need.”

  “You sure, Stack? I be bouncin’ off the walls come mornin’.”

  Louis reached in and patted Walker on the cheek. “Yeah, Snowball, I be there, you my man, you part of my gang, ain’t you?”

  Like the fly fisherman or the duck hunter, Man Louis had a solid practical understanding of the psychology of his particular prey, which in his case was the dope addict. He knew that junkies owned only two psychic states: fixed and looking for it. At a certain stage of looking, he knew, they were the most suggestible beings on earth, the promise of dope being enough to cancel any normal sense of suspicion or caution. He needed Walker in a certain place, alone, for at least twenty-four hours, and experience had shown him that a scared junkie would hold still
that long on the expectation of a freebie hit of good dope.

  Walker put the car in gear and drove off. Louis watched him go and then turned to Elvis.

  “That asshole. Pres, my man, let me tell you. Some people they just tools, oughta have a damn on-off switch top their head. This Snowball, now, I meet him two weeks ago, hangin’ around Stacy’s out in Queens? I know this dude pushes shit round there. Lil Donald’s one of his prime clients. Anyway, I ask around, the man’s in trouble, got a fifty dollar Jones on him, in hock up to his ass. We get to talkin’, me and Donald, an I slip him something from my private stash. He’s flying, man, I his momma and his poppa. I tell you, Pres, you want to own a dude, get you a smackhead. I tell you somethin’ else. When you done, they got that switch on ’em, you jus’ reach up and switch it off. Dig?”

  Elvis dug. “How you gonna do it?”

  Louis looked pained. “I ain gonna do nothin’. He gonna do it. We jus gotta set up the situation, hey. That’s the other part of your job. Now let’s go home.”

  As the two men descended into the steam-smelling passages, united as they were in the camaraderie of the deed, their minds held quite different thoughts. Elvis was elated, but at the same time calm with the sense that his immediate future was safely in someone else’s hands, that the awful necessity for daily choices was in abeyance. In this he was like a monk or a woman who has just become pregnant. To him, the reality of the murder, the horror that was about to descend on Mrs. Marchione and her family, was utterly opaque. He had no imagination, or rather, his imagination was suspended at the level of a child who can say, “Bang, bang, you’re dead,” without being able, in fact, to grasp the nature of death.