Bloody River Blues

On the other hand, Lombro felt responsible for the safety of his four hundred guests.
    Finally, after an agonizing half hour of indecision, Lombro had walked up to Ralph Bales and, as the children were cutting the cake, struck up a conversation. He learned that Ralph Bales had grown up in St. Louis. He was orphaned young—as Lombro had been—and had made a career of various riverfront jobs. They talked careers, real estate, making money, losing money. Ralph Bales mentioned, vaguely, unions and shipping companies and waterfront services and Teamsters. He lived in a house not far from Lambert Field. He enjoyed working in his garden. Lombro did, too, he said, though he hated the sun.
    Ralph Bales said he loved the sun.
    Lombro was satisfied that the man represented no danger and said good-bye. Ralph Bales touched him on the arm in a special way and offered his card. “You say you’re in real estate,” he said with ambiguous significance. “If you ever need any security consulting, let me know.”
    So the card, Ralph Bales, Consultant, was filed away in Lombro’s Rolodex. He thought he might have a need for a consultant at some point.
    A month ago, he had.
    And now, as he put the shoe brush away in his bottom drawer and vacantly watched the papers blowingoutside the windows of his office, he foresaw that the transaction that arose out of that wedding might have been the only serious mistake he had ever made in his life.
    “Okay, kind of a problem,” Ralph Bales now said.
    Philip Lombro listened, his head immobile, eyes moving slowly around the face of his visitor.
    “He snuck up on us, the cop.”
    Lombro said, “There was nothing you could’ve done?”
    Ralph Bales was deferential to clients. He didn’t roll his eyes or sigh. He said, “No, he came up out of the blue.”
    Lombro opened his desk. He pulled out a thin envelope containing $25,000. He handed it to Ralph Bales.
    Ralph Bales said, “Thank you.”
    Lombro nodded.
    Neither man seemed grateful, or pleased, by the exchange.
    “How much of a problem is it?” Lombro sounded reasonable. Men like him tend to stay calm when they have problems.
    Ralph Bales chewed on the thin lip that was cut into his round, padded face. “Well, you don’t want to shoot a cop. Whatever happens, you don’t want to do that.”
    Lombro’s eyes settled on Ralph Bales’s naked upper lip. He realized the mustache was gone.
    “I’m not being, you know, cute,” Ralph Bales continued. “The cops don’t get mad when you kill a DA witness because witnesses are scum. When the cops get mad is when you shoot a cop.”
    “And?”
    “And there’s some things we have to do.”
    “Such as?”
    “Okay, we’ve got to find the guy that saw us.”
    “Who?”
    “The guy walked into me when I got out of the car. The one with the beer.”
    Lombro lifted one ankle to his other knee and touched his heel absently then rubbed it.
    “He saw me,” Ralph Bales said. “And he saw you.”
    “They might not find him, the police.”
    “No, that’s—”
    Lombro continued an argument that seemed to reassure him. “Why would he volunteer? Why would anyone do that?”
    “He might not,” Ralph Bales agreed. “But some people are funny. They do weird things.”
    Lombro said, “The way you’re talking, it sounds like you’ve decided something.”
    “Excuse me, it isn’t really a decision. I mean, we don’t have a choice, okay?”
    Hit Man Shoots Cop in Back. The newspaper sat prominently on Lombro’s desk. Ralph Bales had been wrong. There was no photo of Vince Gaudia’s body. Just the shot policeman’s wedding picture.
    “I don’t like this at all.”
    “With all respect, Mr. Lombro, when you—” he looked for words that weren’t too incriminating “—take on a project like this there are potential downsides. Okay? Like you buy a building and find out it’s got termites or something. It just happens. You can’t run away from it.”
    “The woman, too. You killed the woman.”
    “Stevie tells me that was an accident. Gaudia pushed her in front of him.”
    Lombro was nodding. “I don’t care much about her. She knew the kind of bastard she was getting involved with.”
    Outside the window a blackbird settled on the top of a brick facade. The bird’s nervous, glossy head flicked about. It shot into the sky in a gray streak.
    Ralph Bales said, “We did the job for you and there was a glitch. But the fact of the matter is, I don’t live here and Stevie Flom