361 - Donald E. Westlake [55]
It would be nice to believe that. But the writers were blandly lying. They weren’t using up their lead character, because they needed him in the next book in the series.
So I went out and bought a bottle of Old Mr. Boston, and on Friday I went to the newspaper library and wasted the day reading about Ed Ganolese. Every once in a while, it seemed, he was served a subpoena and he answered questions before an investigating body of some sort or another. The investigators were always after someone else and usually they asked Ganolese about his relationship with that someone else as of twenty years before. His answers were never informative, but he always managed to be just barely cooperative enough to avoid the legal wrath of the investigators.
Once, there was a photograph. It showed a man somewhat older than fifty, well fed but still strong-looking. He had a kind of brutal handsomeness, softened by time and weight, and the waist-up dignity of the nouveau riche. He sat before a microphone shaped like a hooded snake, and he brooded at his inquisitors.
Another time, a reporter explained that the name was pronounced “Jan-o-lease,” and was originally spelled Gianolliese, but the family had shortened and somewhat Anglicized it.
No one had ever done a profile on him.
Friday night, I saw two science-fiction horror movies on 42nd Street. The weekend inched by. Sunday morning, I awoke with a bitter headache at eight o’clock, with less than four hours sleep. But I couldn’t drop off again, and it took me an hour to understand why. Then, feeling like a fool, I got up and dressed and found a Catholic Church, and prayed for Bill, who wasn’t here. It wasn’t that I attended Mass. Bill’s stand-in came to Mass, and he was me. When Mass was over, I left with no more interest in the place, my duty done. I went back to the hotel, and to bed, and to sleep.
Starting Monday, I read the papers, all of them. It was five days since the meeting at Lake George. The coup d’etat should begin soon.
It began on Wednesday night. Reading Thursday morning’s papers, I nearly missed it. I took a cab back to the hotel from the Daily News building on East 42nd Street, where I had bought the Brooklyn and Queens and Bronx editions of that paper. I bought the other morning papers in the hotel lobby and went upstairs and worked my way through them. I sat cross-legged on the bed, turning pages with my left hand, holding the Old Mr. Boston bottle in my right.
I went all the way through, and something was bothering me. Something in the News. I took the Queens edition and went through it again, and this time when I came to the candy store explosion I stopped.
It was a small candy store in a bad section of Queens. At ten-thirty last night, a gas heater in the back of the store exploded, killing the proprietor. It was the proprietor’s brother, a man named Gus Porophorus, who told the firemen about the gas heater.
There was a photograph of the burned and jumbled back part of the store. The photograph showed a blackboard along one wall.
I got up from the bed and lit a cigarette and walked around the room, laughing. I’d seen posters in subway stations, advertising the Daily News. The poster would have a big blowup of an unusual photograph, and the caption, “No one says it like the News.”
A blackboard in the back room of a candy store! No one says it like the News. The horseplayers wouldn’t have anywhere to place their bets in that neighborhood for a few days.
I’d been expecting something like the movies. Banner headlines screaming, gangland slaying. I’d forgotten what Kapp had said to Irving Baumheiler: “Quiet hits. Hits, but quiet hits.”
I went through all the papers again, and this time I knew what to look for. A stationery store fire in the Bronx, owner killed in the blaze. And a man named Anthony Manizetsky,