Tony posting grandkids
pictures on Facebook, was how Nick found him. He’d accepted a DM about a friendly
reunion for old times’ sake.
“I’m old!” he texted. Nick was still going to kill him.
Looking at Tony now, standing
across from him at the end of the deserted Brooklyn dock, the loitering sun
over the East River touching the Manhattan skyline, Nick might have backed off.
The deep-set eyes no longer joked, the freckled pate missing the greasy kid
pompadour, jowly cheeks replacing the sharp jawline of a callow tough, the
once-taut physique now a rounded slump. Lot of water under the bridge since the
last time seeing Tony, the boss’ right-hand guy slash gofer, pushing a dolly
around a Bronx warehouse.
Nick was no spring chicken either,
pot-bellied, re-built knees, titanium hips. Desk-bound hours at a time for all
these years, churning out spy novels, westerns, cozy mysteries, and sci-fi
epics under a dozen names for pulp publishers didn’t help. Didn’t pay much
either, but along with the freelance editing jobs, it was a living. He’d paid
his dues. But this particular debt was long overdue. Anyone else might have
written it off after fifty years. He’d sworn to himself to make good, and now
Nick had Tony right there in front of him, the .45 aimed straight for his heart.
“You think you know the story,”
Tony said, blowing smoke from his Marlboro Light. “but you don’t.”
“Shut up,” Nick said. “I know
everything I have to know. Ever hear of FOIA—Freedom of Information Act? I went
through the FBI files. The newspaper clippings. The whole schmear. Did my
research. All these years later, now I know. You were their guy, Tony. On the
inside.”
“It was 1972. Things were crazy. The
families were at war. Feds had me by the balls. So I gave them a tip or two.
Christ, Larry was running a porn business.”
“He wasn’t hurting anybody.
“He liked you.”
“Larry was my friend. He was
almost like an uncle to me.”
“Larry was my uncle.”
“He was my first editor,
goddammit! First one to take my writing seriously, even though it was just
crap.”
“Always a good place to start,”
Tony said, flicking his cigarette into the river.
“He had bigger plans. So did I. ”
Larry Zee was going legit, he’d
told Nick. CAD Editions, a line of dirty books named after his three kids,
Cathy, Andrew, David, was turning a tidy profit distributing “erotica” written
under pen names by broke, aspiring novelists like Nick, so onward and upward. Larry
Zee (AKA Lorenzo Zacchetti) was running the family’s vice rackets and could do
what he wanted. Nick would drop by the warehouse in the East Bronx, hand over his
latest manuscript, get paid cash money—and talk literature with Larry for hours
instead of those humdrum university classes he was supposed to be attending.
Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald—those names they tossed around. This was a real
education. Larry respected writers. He’d once wanted to be one. Boy, did he
have stories to tell, growing up with a big Italian family! But instead of college
Larry went into business, the family business. It had to be that way. He still
had dreams, though. Like Grove Press, like Olympia, edgy books penned by a
stable of break-through authors like J. P. Donleavy, Terry Southern, and Samuel
fucking Beckett, yeah. Barney Rossett, Maurice Girodias—that’s the kind of
publisher Larry Zee was going to be.
“Larry read what I wrote. He even
gave me notes. Scribbled in red ink in the margins. ‘Good story’ he’d always
say at the end. ‘You always know what makes a good story, Nick.’ He said he was
going for quality lit. So I gave him my manuscript, my first novel. Then headlines
about a Mafia hit. No more Larry. Never got the manuscript back, my only copy.”
“And you—you just kept on being a
hack writer.”
“My first novel published, jeez—life
would’ve turned out different. Maybe yours, too, instead of a mob punk."
“It needed work, Nick.”
“What—you read my manuscript?”
“It was brilliant, Nick. You
always knew what makes a good story. Hey, I read everything you wrote. Who you
think did those notes? That goomba, Larry Zee? Never finished high school. I
had two years in community college—English major. That red pen in the margins
was mine, Nick. All that bullshit about
Fitzgerald, Hemingway—Larry Zee faking it, never cracked a book in his life. C’mon,
Nick, who handled the editorial for CAD Books? You’re looking at him.”
“Why did you kill him?”
“Publishing,” Tony shrugged. “It’s
a dirty business.”
“And the feds couldn’t touch you because you
were their snitch.”
“Something like that. The bosses
liked things as they were, and me in charge is what kept them happy. Dropped
the erotica line, went hard-core. That’s where the money was. Internet’s
finished all that now. Anyway, I was your first editor, Nick. Can’t we be
friends?”
Nick thought about it.
“And I’m sorry we lost your manuscript.”
Nick squeezed the trigger and
watched Tony’s body splash, swept away into the river’s dark swirl.
It would make a good story.
Rex Weiner is an editor, author and journalist. His stories and articles have been published in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, and Capital & Main, and his fiction appears in Switchblade Magazine, Broadswords & Blasters, Pulp Modern, and Econoclash Review. His tales about a detective working in the music business, serialized in the LA Weekly and New York Rocker in 1979-80, became the 20th Century Fox movie The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. Collected in a book for the first time, The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane: The Long Lost Rock n’ Roll Detective Stories was published in 2018 by Rare Bird Books. He was a speaker at the 2018 Bouchercon and is a co-founder of the Todos Santos Writers Workshop. Website: rexweiner.com
This is some prime crime friction, Rex. We're talkin' heavy meta.
ReplyDeleteA masterclass in dialogue.
ReplyDelete