The Last Don - Mario Puzo [130]
Cross said, with savage bitterness Vazzi had never seen before, “I should have killed him straight out. I should have taken my chances. I hate being so fucking clever.”
“Ah well,” Vazzi said, “it’s done now.”
He watched Cross drive through the gates. For one of the few times in ten years, he was homesick for Sicily. In Sicily men never became so distraught about a woman’s secret. And in Sicily there would never have been all this fuss. Skannet would have been swimming at the bottom of the ocean a long time ago.
As dawn broke, a closed van pulled up to the Hunting Lodge.
Lia Vazzi collected the forged suicide notes from Leonard Sossa and put him into the car that would take him back to Topanga Canyon. Vazzi cleaned up the bungalow, burned the letters Skannet had written, removing all traces of occupancy. Leonard Sossa had never seen either Skannet or Cross during his stay.
Then Lia Vazzi prepared for the execution of Boz Skannet.
Six men were involved in this operation. They had blindfolded and gagged Skannet and put him in the van. Two of the men got into the van with him. Skannet was completely helpless, shackled hand and foot. Another man drove the van, and another man rode shotgun for the driver. The fifth man drove Skannet’s car. Lia Vazzi and the sixth man drove another car that went in front.
Lia Vazzi watched the sun slowly rise from the shadows of the mountains. The caravan drove nearly sixty miles and then turned into a road deep in the woods.
Finally the caravan halted. Vazzi directed exactly how Skannet’s car should be parked. Then he had Skannet taken out of the van. Skannet made no resistance, he seemed to have accepted his fate. Well, he’s finally figured it all out, Vazzi thought.
Vazzi took the rope out of the car. He measured the length carefully and hung one end to the thick limb of a nearby tree. Two men were holding Skannet up straight so that he could slip the noose around the man’s neck. Vazzi took out the two suicide notes that Leonard Sossa had forged and slipped them into Skannet’s jacket pocket.
It took four of the men to lift Skannet to the roof of the van and then Lia Vazzi threw his fist out in the direction of the driver. The van shot ahead and Skannet flew off the roof and dangled in the air. The sound of his neck cracking resounded through the forest. Vazzi checked the corpse and removed the shackles from the body. The other men removed the blindfold and the gag. There were little scrapes around the mouth, but a couple of days hanging in the forest and they would not be significant. He checked the arms and legs for signs of restraint. Again, there were slight marks, but they would not be conclusive. He was satisfied. He did not know if it would work, but everything Cross ordered had been done.
Two days later, alerted by an anonymous tip, the county sheriff found Skannet’s body. He had to scare off an inquisitive brown bear who was hitting the rope to make the body sway back and forth, and when the coroner and his assistants arrived, they found the body’s rotting skin eaten by insects.
BOOK VI
A Hollywood Death
CHAPTER 10
TEN BARE FEMALE asses rose in harmony to greet the camera’s blinking eye. Despite the picture still being in limbo, Dita Tommey was auditioning actresses on the Messalina soundstage for an ass to double for Athena Aquitane’s.
Athena had refused to do nudes, that is, she would not show full tits and ass, an astonishing modesty in a star but not a fatal one. Dita would simply substitute tits and ass from some of the different actresses she was now auditioning.
Of course she had given the actresses full scenes with dialogue, she wouldn’t demean them by posing them as if they were pornography. But the determining factor would be in the culminating sex scene, when rolling around in bed they would thrust their bare buttocks up to the camera eye. Her sex-scene choreographer was sketching