Chapter 103
CARMINE NOCCIA had asked me what I wanted. It was like a genie granting one of those fairy-tale wishes—you just have to be careful not to wish for a sausage on the end of your nose.
“I’ve shown good faith,” I said. “I cleaned up a mess you didn’t know you had. I want your father to know what we did. Here’s my point in all of this. You’re not going anywhere and neither are we. Let’s accept the reality of that.”
“You want détente. Peace between our operations. Stay out of one another’s way.”
“Pretty much. And I want to know who put out a hit on Shelby Cushman.”
Noccia smiled. It was a small smile, but it seemed real. “No better friend. No worse enemy,” he said.
I’d been expecting him to say anything, anything but that. The words Noccia had just spoken were what the Marines say about themselves.
No better friend. No worse enemy.
Like Del Rio and me, Carmine Noccia had been in the Corps.
“Can I get you boys something to drink?” he said. “Or maybe you’ll be my guests for dinner? We can talk while we eat.”
“Thanks very much for the offer, but it’s late. And I’m flying.”
Noccia nodded, got up from his chair, and asked me and Del Rio to follow him into the billiards room. He said to the men around the table, “Go outside, guys. Take a break.”
The room emptied quickly. There was a score counter over the billiards table, but Noccia walked past it to the chalkboard that hung on the wall. It appeared to be the long-running tally of winning games.
Noccia picked up an eraser from the tray below the board and wiped out some phone numbers that had been written in the corner.
His back was to me as he spoke. “We have a partner in a number of construction projects: a hotel in Nevada, a couple of malls in LA and San Diego. This partner came to us with a request,” said Noccia. “We had no choice except to honor it.”
I was mesmerized as he began to write his partner’s name with a square of blue pool chalk. At first I didn’t get it. I thought maybe he was going to draw a diagram from the partner to the man who had hired the hit.
But that’s not what happened.
Carmine Noccia scratched letters onto the slate and said, “This is who contracted the hit on your friend Shelby Cushman.”
When he was sure that I had seen what he’d written, he spat on the eraser and rubbed the name out.
He put the eraser down and walked me and Del Rio to the door, where he said good night.
And he shook my hand.