rough draft story part 1

It was two in the morning when I stumbled home from the bar around the corner. My apartment building was once a mom and pop motel. Now it was a rundown tenement with a fresh coat of badly applied paint. As usual the light above the entrance flickered on and off. I got my keys out of my pocket only to find that someone had already jimmied opened the door. As I climbed up the stairs to my floor the smell of ethnic cooking and wet dryer lint hit me. My hand reached for the door and realized the handle was unlocked. Without any thought my hand reaches into my coat and comes back out with my luger. I swing the door open with my gun aimed high and found two gangster looking mother fuckers, their guns pointing right back at me. I slowly put mine down on the kitchen counter and lit up a cigarette. “What can I do for you boys?”
The one on the right looked like a reject from a Dick Tracy strip, his face rat like and slanted, his hands thin and wiry. The other was short and fat with a reddish face and a bulbous nose. He wore a bowler hat that looked a size to small making his face look all the more fat.
“Mr. Savinelli would like to have a word with you. We have a car waiting. Please follow us.” The fat one wheezed
A brown limo was waiting on the side of the road. The rat man climbed in first and I was instructed to sit in the middle. We drove for a few blocks and stopped a large tower building with gold reflective windows. The elevator ride seemed to go for ever as it climbed to the fiftieth floor. The fancy script letters on the wall of the waiting room read Savinelli Imports. There was no receptionist. I was frisked and led into the corner office. It looked like any respectable businessman’s office, the walls were painted a light gray and on them hung landscape portraits of what I assumed was the Italian countryside. To the right was a bookshelf full of authors I had never heard of. The whole back wall was a window with a view of the Los Angeles skyline that made just about anybody feel important. In the middle of the room was a large mahogany desk with a glass top that was nearly bare short of a few file folders, a family picture or two and a wooden cigarette box. Behind the desk sat a man in his late forties. He was wearing a tan three piece suit and his hair was shellacked to the back of his head. His completion was tan and his eyes were a dark brown. They had a glazed sadness to them, as if they had just witnessed someone kicking a puppy. Two bodyguards stood to his left and to his right. They both eyed me with caution.
“I assume you know who I am” he said softly
“Sure do.”
“I have heard you have a reputation for getting things done and getting them done quietly. I have a situation that requires the upmost delicacy. You see my sixteen year old daughter has run away with a man and I need her returned to me unscathed.”
I took a cigarette out of the box on his desk and lit it slowly. “Why hire me when you could just as easily send out a couple of your goons?”
“The man she has run away with is an employee of a business rival. The relationship between his organization and mine is strained at the moment and I don’t want this to turn into a war.”
I took a long drag off my smoke and blew it up in the air towards the ceiling. “The whole thing sounds pretty sketchy and I’ve got other cases to work on, why should I take the job.”
He looked past me and thought for a moment. “I understand the dangerous nature of the task and for that I am willing to double your normal rates. If you decline my offer, I will have my goons, as you call them, take you out back and beat you until the mere sight of your face would make your mother cry.” He said with a calm and composed tone.
“I’ll save mom the grief; you got a picture of her?”
He pulled out a wallet sized picture from a desk drawer and handed it to me. She was a cute girl with long dark hair and her father’s completion. Her eyes were set wide from her dainty nose and her lips were full and pouty. She had a crafty look on her face that made me think she was a bit too smart for her age. I put the picture in my coat pocket. “Who’s the boyfriend?”
He looked past me again and his upper lip curled a bit. “His name is Jack Hall. He worked for me up until six months ago when he left to go work for the Romano family. It was around this time he started seeing my daughter, unbeknownst to me.
He reached back into his desk and returned with another picture and handed it to me. The picture was of four men, one of them Savinelli, at a restaurant table. “Hall is the second to the left” he whispered.
Hall looked about twenty two and was tall and slender. He had a long nose and small beady eyes. He wore a suit nicer than anything I could afford at his age, or now for that matter. Savinelli took a cigar out of his coat and chopped off the end of it with a cigar cutter. One of his lackeys promptly leaned in to light it for him. “Hall was like a son to me, we had a falling out over business matters that do not pertain to your objective.”
“With all due respect, I like to decide what pertains to my objective.”
“It is not wise or good for your health to argue with me Mr. Bashor. I am a patient man, but my patience only goes so far. Here is Hall’s last known address and a list of places he frequents along with a check to retain your services. I will reimburse any expenses needed. Do a good job for me and you will be well taken care of. Something in the way he said taken care of sent shivers down my spine.

By the time I got home it was around eight pm. I fixed myself a drink and cooked up some steak in a dirty skillet. After the third drink I called it a night and passed out. The next morning I woke up with a case of heartburn and a headache that would follow me the rest of the day. I shaved, showered and put on a clean suit. For breakfast I fried bacon on the same dirty skillet, toasted some bread and chased it all down with a couple cups of black coffee.

My first course of action, mainly because I didn’t know what else to do, was to check out Hall’s place. The apartment was in a downtown high rise not far from Savinelli’s office. The lobby looked like the entrance to the Ritz Carlton and had a fountain slightly smaller than the ones at the Taj Mahal. The night clerk was an old man with a face red from drink. He gave me a kindly nod as I passed him toward the elevators. I rode up to the forty fourth floor and located apartment 4451. The doorbell hummed a two note chime and I waited for an answer. No response. I thought about going home and calling it a night but my sense of duty and a desire to be paid convinced me otherwise. The situation called for a lock pick. It took me about five minutes to pick the damn thing. The whole time I looked over my shoulder expecting some neighbors to stroll by. Nobody did. The inside of the apartment looked like a room out of a seventies movie set complete with shag carpeting and an L shaped couch. Like Savinelli's office the view was breathtaking and made me feel crummy about the alley view window in my place. On the floor was a bear skin rug. The whole place seemed to scream of a want for class, never quite achieving it. The door to the hall bathroom was slightly open and the fan was running. I pulled the door open slightly and the smell attacked my nostrils. There was hall, on the toilet, his pants round his ankles and a bullet between his eyes. The back half of his head lay open and a wet piece of skull was hanging by a thread of skin. He had seen better days. I put a handkerchief to my face and started to dig through his pockets. Nothing but his wallet and pocket lint. The wallet contained all the things you would expect it to, nothing of interest. I left the bathroom and shut the door behind me. I should have left but I had to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. I started with the kitchen, empting out the oatmeal and cereal boxes carefully into bowls, sifting through them and pouring them back into the boxes. Next I checked under the sink and through all the junk drawers. So far nothing. I made a point to search the liquor cabinet and poured myself some good bourbon. I moved on to the bedroom, going through dresser and nightstand. Nothing. I was checking the pockets of his suits when I found a crumpled up piece of paper. Scrawled on it was an address. I put it in my pocket and started for the door.