You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) by Beinhart Larry

Author:Beinhart, Larry [Beinhart, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453259283
Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller
Published: 2012-06-11T22:00:00+00:00

25.

Men of the Cloth

IT WAS HIS FOOTBALL.

I hoped my mother would talk sense. But she supported him. So I took Guido on, reserving the option to get rid of him at the first opportunity. He was the type, with his pleasant, innocent manner and his clerical ways, that invited disasters to happen to other people. I put my foot down about one thing. No black suits and white collars. Guido got that helpless look on his face. I gave him a C-note and told him to buy himself some clothes.

Even then, the sly bastard didn’t tell me where we were going. Only that we would go somewhere from Miami.

I was supposed to pick him up to take him to the airport, but at the last minute Jerry Wirtman called. I tried to get Joey to cover it. But he’d been on surveillance late the night before, and he was tired. “What I need is a vacation,” Joey said. “I got to take some time. Like maybe a month.”

“A month?”

“What’s been wrong with me, it’s some kind of low-grade virus, is what the doctor said. Rest and sunshine. That’s what I need. And no work. So I got to get away, like for a month.”

“When?”

“What I was gonna ask you, you take care of Mario for me. Also the car. I’ll leave the car for you. Well, I should do it soon. You know. Couple of weeks. Soon’s you come back, maybe.”

So I told Guido to meet me at La Guardia, and that he could borrow cab fare from my mother if he didn’t have it, and I went to see my landlord.

“I’ve been very pleased with the work you’ve done for me,” Jerry Wirtman said. “That Bergman thing, I have to admit, I doubted you when it took so long. And when you went to Paris, I was certain—I’m sorry, I’m a suspicious person, the world we live in”: he sighed in Yiddish—“that a vacation you were taking on my money. Such terrible thoughts. I know now that you are an honest person. Even if there is no such thing as a detectives’ union, is there?”

“In a more perfect world,” I said.

“The FBI came to speak to me,” he said, “about the Bergman case. They said that the French police were interested.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They said they were going to try for extradition.”

“For a goy, you have a Yiddisher kop,” he said. It’s a great compliment for one of them to say a Gentile has a Jewish mind, since they’re convinced we’re all as intellectually dull as Midwesterners. “So from one Yiddisher kop to another, I’ll tell you something. This gonif shyster … Madigliani?”

“Magliocci.”

“ … who was stealing my money under the pretense of being a Bergman. Him. He was not the only person they were interested in, these FBIs. I think they were interested in you. A lot of questions they asked that had nothing to do with Magliocci. With you.”

I thanked him again, this time genuinely.

“Such bad thoughts that I had about you before.

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