The Hardest Men
By J.J. Sinisi
The first time I saw Stewart Hardwell, the man who so intimidated my father, his swollen red knuckles bubbled in anger around a blue man’s throat. Though I had never seen the blue man before either, I was quite certain oxygen would assist in the correction of his skin’s tint. Stewart’s rage, or more accurately his savagery, eclipsed all of creation just then. I thought he might squeeze the man’s throat into a tiny unrecognizable thing, like a lump of coal after all of those years of compression.
It didn’t take long before a cadre of similarly suited doormen attempted to peel Stewart away from his victim. I became convinced his strained and bulbous biceps would rebel against the imprisonment of his suit, rising through ruptures, flesh colored submarines breaking the icy surface of his anger.
“Let him alone,” I said, knocking cigarette ashes off the butt of my smoke.
Stewart’s struggling ceased. Many years had passed since his neck served its true purpose. When he turned, draped men clinging to his body like unwanted rain drops, his shoulders and torso turned too, presenting me the fullness of his presence.
“Who’s that, thinking they can speak for me.”
I blinked. Surely, the reason for my balk had partly to do with his focus, his glare singling me out among all other threats, of which there were many. But really, I paused because of his voice. The slow and rich velveteen caress of his low bass left me confounded.
“Richie Carson’s the name.”
“Richie Carson. Ted’s kid?”
I nodded, the smoke reinserted between my lips.
He shrugged his shoulders and the men attempting to hold him blustered away. Stewart started towards me and they retreated, complacent in the knowledge they had earned their pay. For a scant moment I saw Stewart’s victim as well, now safe in his idling car. Pale red had seeped back into the blue of his face but our eyes didn’t mate for long. His foot pounced on the accelerator. The small car shimmied to a start, bucking down the road as he missed shifting every gear.
“What’s Ted Carson’s boy doing back here?”
The club’s façade blinked letters at him, sad greens and yellows trying in vain to wrap his body in their embrace. The deep creases of his face joined in a jagged map of handsomeness and though his shoulder width alone would terrify most tailors, his suit had a fine cut.
“Looking for a man such as you.”
“How is your pops?” His enthralling voice made me wonder if he had ever done any radio work.
“He’s out in San Francisco. Says the fog helps him sleep at night.”
“That’s sounds like something that dumb bastard would say.”
I finished my smoke, flicking it into one of the many puddles about our feet. A chill wind rippled the stagnant water, Chicago in the spring.
“And your mother?”
I pulled another Lucky but didn’t light up. “Gone now six years.”
“That’s a crime. Your mother was a fine woman.”
His inclination was twofold and I was used to the intonation of both. You don’t grow up in the Hollywood Hills the son of a film starlet and expect sincerity from strangers.
“I’m heading back to LA tonight and was wondering if you’d accompany me.” I lit up now, sucking a deep lungful.
“Ha,” he said but didn’t laugh.
“Smoke?”
He waved it away. “Messes with my voice.”
I shrugged. “Unique.”
“I’m a rare bread.” He patted his stomach, strong and hidden beneath the buttons of his under vest.
“That’s why I’d like you to come with me.”
“You said your father was in ‘Frisco. Why would I go to LA?”
“Because my father is retired and isn’t in the motion picture business anymore. But I’m not retired, and I make my bones all across that wonderful paradise you Easterners call California.”
His smile began like a fissure in the earth, crooked and aimless. But soon it edged off the cliff of his face leaving only the left side of his lips upturned, the right side falling down and down until I couldn’t tell if he was smirking or just angry.
“Don’t ever call Chicago east. You know what I do for a living, young Richie?”
The boys attempting to subdue Stewart only seconds ago had fled, and the target of his initial rampage, the unfortunate fellow in his Austin 7, was by now blocks away sitting quietly in its embrace, using his hands and toes to count his blessings. I was desperately alone with this man.
“Yea, Stewart, I got an idea.”
“Then you’d know better than to ask me what you just asked me. You’d know better than to ask me to ever leave this city.”
“Here’s the thing,” I took one long toke and the cherry burned to a flare in the damp air, lighting my face in a deep red hue. “I know you’ve already left, on a number of occasions. And besides which, I ain’t asking. I’m telling.”
His anger made him blink but my badge made him pause. I let the bright letters F-B-I shine proudly from my hip, revealing it with a slow move of my jacket, just below the pistol strapped beneath my shoulder.
“You ain’t serious.” The harp chords on his words no longer sounded pitch perfect. He seemed suddenly smaller.
“Quite.” The smoke rose, flowing around my fedora and encircling me in a hazy halo.
I missed California just then, but not the weather or the palm trees, or the quick drive across 66 or the languid rides through Laguna Canyon. I wasn’t thinking of the salty view of the Pacific from the Long Beach bluffs and not even the back roads of Riverside where the orange groves ran for miles and the air was so sweet it stung your eyes. The unwavering mountain before me, and the notion that nothing hindered him from reaching for the rod I could see under his coat, even amidst all the bulk that was he, made me forlorn thinking of the great west coast. I missed my California crooks. Always knew where I stood with those fellas.
“Ted Carson’s little boy became a Pinkerton.” He shook his head, the thrum of his voice returning along with straightened posture.
“I’m not based out of Chicago. And besides, the Pinkertons are long dead. This is Federal my friend, and there’s no avoiding us.”
“I ain’t your friend.” Anger now; vitriol complimented by an unintentional but fortuitous wad of spittle from his lip that smattered in little specs across my black framed glasses.
I pulled them from my face, removed my handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my aggrieved spectacles. The diminutive stature of Stewart Hardwell in American crime betrayed his high opinion of himself. If he decided to take my offer and come with, I knew I could protect him. All he’d have to do is give me a taste, a couple of names, and I would work with him. Who knew, maybe once I got him back west he could call my father and the old man could hook him up with one of his radio buddies and everything would work out fine. Yea, wouldn’t that be nice.
“You’re coming in. That’s happening. How it happens is still up to you. If you turn states for us, we can talk. I’ve got connections with—“
“Little Richie,” he said shaking his head. “Your pops went quietly into the night. Got himself a nice gig talking to movie stars and feeling important. Those aren’t the kind of connections I need.”
“Out of respect for my father, I’m giving you a shot here Hardwell. One shot, but it won’t be on the table long. Matter of fact I’m pulling it back now unless you give me something, anything to think this isn’t going to go exactly the way I think it’s headed.”
A great breath escaped his lungs and he craned his neck towards the sky. But the alleyway was so dark I was certain he couldn’t see much of anything past its grimy walls. He couldn’t see the night stars or the skyline of this city on the lake, just damp, slimy brick.
“You know, your mother was some sorta dame.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that.”
“Prick.”
“Murder, Stewart. Murder is only one of the crimes.”
“Yea? Line up Richie. You and the DA and that idiot Commissioner Percy all want a piece of me but no one’s got the balls enough to do anything about it.”
“Come with me,” I finished my smoke and threw it away to join his drowned brother, “quiet and nice. Give me something to go on. Let me know you care. Or you can resist. Keep your mouth shut. Then I can call the local dogs here, and, yea sure, half of them are under your boss’s thumb but the other half? The other half want to do everything possible to cuddle up next to my boss. You know who my boss is, don’t you? You may have caught him talking about crime on the radio once or twice. You know why?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “Because change is coming. And the reason my pops got out of the valley is the same reason I didn’t follow in his footsteps. America’s lawless days are over.”
He laughed and the noise crashed around me in a steady, thunderous roll. “Is that all you got kid? The pillars of this city are ancient. Hard as brick and steel. And they’re stronger than any federal twit who thinks he can flash a badge and soften up the foundation.” He slapped the adjacent wall with an open palm. “Made of the hardest stuff in the world this city.”
“Diamond, Stewart.”
“What?”
“Diamonds are the hardest stuff in the world.”
“I guess you’d know. You’re mom sure had her share.” He spun on a heel and walked away from me. “I got a club to entertain and I ain’t wasting anymore breath on a spec like you.”
I watched the width of his back almost touch both sides of the alleyway when it occurred to me I didn’t even know why he was choking the man in the car. Had Hardwell been singing? Singing in this little club, the one with the green and yellow neon lights? A regular microphone would look silly in those mitts. I bet they lower one down from the rafters for him, a gift from heaven for that silken voice. He must pace the small stage, thick legs walking him to the corners of his performance, timing the peaks of his vibrato with every step. In there, under the glare and with all the dames smiling at him and the suits applauding him, his voice must rise strong and happy. But a guy like Stewart doesn’t live in the heavens. So when a young man has too much scotch and starts heckling him, I also imagine Stewart stopping, mid-note, bounding towards his hapless victim like a runaway boulder. The soft man hops to and runs for his little car, sprinting to stay ahead of the rolling death at his heals before it tumbles all over him.
I let Hardwell walk off, deciding not to rush after him, not to provoke him any further. The line I fed him about the local CPD sounded better when I rehearsed it a hundred times on the never-ending drive from LA. But the moment it left my mouth I knew he’d call it. I knew this man, a man born on the streets of the West Side, would look at me, look at this California kid, whose mother spent half her life in film and the other half swimming at the bottom of a rum bottle, whose father started running numbers as teenager in Brooklyn and became a lieutenant in the mob before retiring and moving west, as far west as the setting sun goes, to follow his movie star girlfriend, the mob letting him go because back then, back then, if you were trusted not to open your mouth you wouldn’t, a man like Stewart Hardwell looks at a man like me and says: you ain’t hard kid. You ain’t hard at all. So stop acting like it.
But that’s also why I didn’t come alone.
The alleyway door to the club rested ajar on its metal frame. I pried my fingers between the jamb and the door and pulled it open. I pushed aside the silk curtain hanging beyond and wandered into the backstage area of the theater.
A tight row of vanities stood at attention before me, each with a small mirror ringed in globe lights, each scattered with trinkets defining the personality of the girls who call those reflections home six nights a week. Of their personal effects there were many. Little Hawaiian twisty toys, pictures of young men in tight uniforms taped to the glass, pictures of young women hung there too, budding starlets and well-worn silver screen gals, cigarette stems and the occasional syrette of morphine, for there was no shame amongst the true hard working girls of any town.
This much I knew. This much my mother had taught me. Even in my earliest memories she was already famous, but she never strayed far from backstages not unlike this one. I’d sit in a chair watching her somehow get even prettier, and the other girls around her, some half naked and grinning at the delight on my face as I gazed at that which was forbidden, would fawn over her hair and her nails and her makeup and the beauty of my mother. She owned rooms like this. Now her son owned them too, only in a different, and at least in my mind, more respectable way.
I stepped from behind the curtain and out onto the stage, the badge on my hip letting me skip the years of training a performer needed to walk this very tread.
Stewart Hardwell stood at the edge, a microphone on a stand silent before him. The microphone hadn’t come down from the heavens. It was attached to the ground like everything else and it didn’t look small there in front of him. Neither did the distance from me to him, the stage itself, or, most prominently, the empty, yawning club before him, devoid of people and life. Stewart Hardwell’s arms fell slack, their power stripped in the face of my own.
I raised an arm admittedly thinner than his, though I now wielded more power. My hand came down and so too did the might of the FBI.
Hardwell turned to face me, useless hands at his sides. His body shuttered; a tremendous ball of impotent mass, like the moon, unable to break free from the gravity binding him to the world, to this city, no matter how badly he ever wanted to leave it behind.
“So that’s it? You just get to arrest me and I don’t get a word?” His voice jumped through the microphone though he hadn’t intended it to, amplifying the distressed yet still cushioned chords of his final words throughout the hall. Those words flapped into the air, bouncing quickly off the high ceilings and echoing back between us, just as my men, FBI men, descended upon him with their Tommy Guns and their cigarettes and their proud smiles at another fallen pillar.
“You get to say whatever you want. But I’d suggest you remain silent.”
“This won’t stand with the boss. You know that. The son of Ted Carson would know that.”
“My old man knew when to fold up shop. The rest of you degenerates are on borrowed time and you’re still too stupid to know it. We’re here to collect.”
“I ain’t gonna say shit.”
“I know that Hardwell and I expected nothing less.”
Three of my best pointed their automatic weapons at Stewart Hardwell and his shrunken strength. Drop the weapon one yelled. And Stewart, tenderly, with two chubby fingers, plucked out his .45 and threw it to the stage floor. It bounced off the wooden planks, one last closing number.
“Stewart Hardwell, you’re under arrest for the murder of Terry Mahoney in California, laundering money for the Genovese family in Nevada and New Mexico, and the assault and battery of Ethal Murmat here in Chicago. I recommend you don’t say anything anymore.”
Two men snapped cuffs behind Harwell’s back and pushed him up the isle to the front of the club.
I stood and watched them go. The men did a good job of cleaning out the club while I kept him busy in the alleyway. It didn’t have to be done. I could have just as easily taken him down outside. Or, perhaps even more impactful, I could have pinched him on stage, in front of a gawking and bewildered crowd. Either way, I knew he wouldn’t take the deal. But I was happiest this way. Happy he was forced to see so much emptiness in such a large, powerful place.
With the back of my hand, I wiped a few stray bits of moisture from my brow. Replacing my hat atop my head, I took a single moment for a hearty breath, sticking out my chest just to see how far it would go. And in fact, it went quite far tonight. Quite far indeed.
END.
It didn’t take long before a cadre of similarly suited doormen attempted to peel Stewart away from his victim. I became convinced his strained and bulbous biceps would rebel against the imprisonment of his suit, rising through ruptures, flesh colored submarines breaking the icy surface of his anger.
“Let him alone,” I said, knocking cigarette ashes off the butt of my smoke.
Stewart’s struggling ceased. Many years had passed since his neck served its true purpose. When he turned, draped men clinging to his body like unwanted rain drops, his shoulders and torso turned too, presenting me the fullness of his presence.
“Who’s that, thinking they can speak for me.”
I blinked. Surely, the reason for my balk had partly to do with his focus, his glare singling me out among all other threats, of which there were many. But really, I paused because of his voice. The slow and rich velveteen caress of his low bass left me confounded.
“Richie Carson’s the name.”
“Richie Carson. Ted’s kid?”
I nodded, the smoke reinserted between my lips.
He shrugged his shoulders and the men attempting to hold him blustered away. Stewart started towards me and they retreated, complacent in the knowledge they had earned their pay. For a scant moment I saw Stewart’s victim as well, now safe in his idling car. Pale red had seeped back into the blue of his face but our eyes didn’t mate for long. His foot pounced on the accelerator. The small car shimmied to a start, bucking down the road as he missed shifting every gear.
“What’s Ted Carson’s boy doing back here?”
The club’s façade blinked letters at him, sad greens and yellows trying in vain to wrap his body in their embrace. The deep creases of his face joined in a jagged map of handsomeness and though his shoulder width alone would terrify most tailors, his suit had a fine cut.
“Looking for a man such as you.”
“How is your pops?” His enthralling voice made me wonder if he had ever done any radio work.
“He’s out in San Francisco. Says the fog helps him sleep at night.”
“That’s sounds like something that dumb bastard would say.”
I finished my smoke, flicking it into one of the many puddles about our feet. A chill wind rippled the stagnant water, Chicago in the spring.
“And your mother?”
I pulled another Lucky but didn’t light up. “Gone now six years.”
“That’s a crime. Your mother was a fine woman.”
His inclination was twofold and I was used to the intonation of both. You don’t grow up in the Hollywood Hills the son of a film starlet and expect sincerity from strangers.
“I’m heading back to LA tonight and was wondering if you’d accompany me.” I lit up now, sucking a deep lungful.
“Ha,” he said but didn’t laugh.
“Smoke?”
He waved it away. “Messes with my voice.”
I shrugged. “Unique.”
“I’m a rare bread.” He patted his stomach, strong and hidden beneath the buttons of his under vest.
“That’s why I’d like you to come with me.”
“You said your father was in ‘Frisco. Why would I go to LA?”
“Because my father is retired and isn’t in the motion picture business anymore. But I’m not retired, and I make my bones all across that wonderful paradise you Easterners call California.”
His smile began like a fissure in the earth, crooked and aimless. But soon it edged off the cliff of his face leaving only the left side of his lips upturned, the right side falling down and down until I couldn’t tell if he was smirking or just angry.
“Don’t ever call Chicago east. You know what I do for a living, young Richie?”
The boys attempting to subdue Stewart only seconds ago had fled, and the target of his initial rampage, the unfortunate fellow in his Austin 7, was by now blocks away sitting quietly in its embrace, using his hands and toes to count his blessings. I was desperately alone with this man.
“Yea, Stewart, I got an idea.”
“Then you’d know better than to ask me what you just asked me. You’d know better than to ask me to ever leave this city.”
“Here’s the thing,” I took one long toke and the cherry burned to a flare in the damp air, lighting my face in a deep red hue. “I know you’ve already left, on a number of occasions. And besides which, I ain’t asking. I’m telling.”
His anger made him blink but my badge made him pause. I let the bright letters F-B-I shine proudly from my hip, revealing it with a slow move of my jacket, just below the pistol strapped beneath my shoulder.
“You ain’t serious.” The harp chords on his words no longer sounded pitch perfect. He seemed suddenly smaller.
“Quite.” The smoke rose, flowing around my fedora and encircling me in a hazy halo.
I missed California just then, but not the weather or the palm trees, or the quick drive across 66 or the languid rides through Laguna Canyon. I wasn’t thinking of the salty view of the Pacific from the Long Beach bluffs and not even the back roads of Riverside where the orange groves ran for miles and the air was so sweet it stung your eyes. The unwavering mountain before me, and the notion that nothing hindered him from reaching for the rod I could see under his coat, even amidst all the bulk that was he, made me forlorn thinking of the great west coast. I missed my California crooks. Always knew where I stood with those fellas.
“Ted Carson’s little boy became a Pinkerton.” He shook his head, the thrum of his voice returning along with straightened posture.
“I’m not based out of Chicago. And besides, the Pinkertons are long dead. This is Federal my friend, and there’s no avoiding us.”
“I ain’t your friend.” Anger now; vitriol complimented by an unintentional but fortuitous wad of spittle from his lip that smattered in little specs across my black framed glasses.
I pulled them from my face, removed my handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my aggrieved spectacles. The diminutive stature of Stewart Hardwell in American crime betrayed his high opinion of himself. If he decided to take my offer and come with, I knew I could protect him. All he’d have to do is give me a taste, a couple of names, and I would work with him. Who knew, maybe once I got him back west he could call my father and the old man could hook him up with one of his radio buddies and everything would work out fine. Yea, wouldn’t that be nice.
“You’re coming in. That’s happening. How it happens is still up to you. If you turn states for us, we can talk. I’ve got connections with—“
“Little Richie,” he said shaking his head. “Your pops went quietly into the night. Got himself a nice gig talking to movie stars and feeling important. Those aren’t the kind of connections I need.”
“Out of respect for my father, I’m giving you a shot here Hardwell. One shot, but it won’t be on the table long. Matter of fact I’m pulling it back now unless you give me something, anything to think this isn’t going to go exactly the way I think it’s headed.”
A great breath escaped his lungs and he craned his neck towards the sky. But the alleyway was so dark I was certain he couldn’t see much of anything past its grimy walls. He couldn’t see the night stars or the skyline of this city on the lake, just damp, slimy brick.
“You know, your mother was some sorta dame.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that.”
“Prick.”
“Murder, Stewart. Murder is only one of the crimes.”
“Yea? Line up Richie. You and the DA and that idiot Commissioner Percy all want a piece of me but no one’s got the balls enough to do anything about it.”
“Come with me,” I finished my smoke and threw it away to join his drowned brother, “quiet and nice. Give me something to go on. Let me know you care. Or you can resist. Keep your mouth shut. Then I can call the local dogs here, and, yea sure, half of them are under your boss’s thumb but the other half? The other half want to do everything possible to cuddle up next to my boss. You know who my boss is, don’t you? You may have caught him talking about crime on the radio once or twice. You know why?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “Because change is coming. And the reason my pops got out of the valley is the same reason I didn’t follow in his footsteps. America’s lawless days are over.”
He laughed and the noise crashed around me in a steady, thunderous roll. “Is that all you got kid? The pillars of this city are ancient. Hard as brick and steel. And they’re stronger than any federal twit who thinks he can flash a badge and soften up the foundation.” He slapped the adjacent wall with an open palm. “Made of the hardest stuff in the world this city.”
“Diamond, Stewart.”
“What?”
“Diamonds are the hardest stuff in the world.”
“I guess you’d know. You’re mom sure had her share.” He spun on a heel and walked away from me. “I got a club to entertain and I ain’t wasting anymore breath on a spec like you.”
I watched the width of his back almost touch both sides of the alleyway when it occurred to me I didn’t even know why he was choking the man in the car. Had Hardwell been singing? Singing in this little club, the one with the green and yellow neon lights? A regular microphone would look silly in those mitts. I bet they lower one down from the rafters for him, a gift from heaven for that silken voice. He must pace the small stage, thick legs walking him to the corners of his performance, timing the peaks of his vibrato with every step. In there, under the glare and with all the dames smiling at him and the suits applauding him, his voice must rise strong and happy. But a guy like Stewart doesn’t live in the heavens. So when a young man has too much scotch and starts heckling him, I also imagine Stewart stopping, mid-note, bounding towards his hapless victim like a runaway boulder. The soft man hops to and runs for his little car, sprinting to stay ahead of the rolling death at his heals before it tumbles all over him.
I let Hardwell walk off, deciding not to rush after him, not to provoke him any further. The line I fed him about the local CPD sounded better when I rehearsed it a hundred times on the never-ending drive from LA. But the moment it left my mouth I knew he’d call it. I knew this man, a man born on the streets of the West Side, would look at me, look at this California kid, whose mother spent half her life in film and the other half swimming at the bottom of a rum bottle, whose father started running numbers as teenager in Brooklyn and became a lieutenant in the mob before retiring and moving west, as far west as the setting sun goes, to follow his movie star girlfriend, the mob letting him go because back then, back then, if you were trusted not to open your mouth you wouldn’t, a man like Stewart Hardwell looks at a man like me and says: you ain’t hard kid. You ain’t hard at all. So stop acting like it.
But that’s also why I didn’t come alone.
The alleyway door to the club rested ajar on its metal frame. I pried my fingers between the jamb and the door and pulled it open. I pushed aside the silk curtain hanging beyond and wandered into the backstage area of the theater.
A tight row of vanities stood at attention before me, each with a small mirror ringed in globe lights, each scattered with trinkets defining the personality of the girls who call those reflections home six nights a week. Of their personal effects there were many. Little Hawaiian twisty toys, pictures of young men in tight uniforms taped to the glass, pictures of young women hung there too, budding starlets and well-worn silver screen gals, cigarette stems and the occasional syrette of morphine, for there was no shame amongst the true hard working girls of any town.
This much I knew. This much my mother had taught me. Even in my earliest memories she was already famous, but she never strayed far from backstages not unlike this one. I’d sit in a chair watching her somehow get even prettier, and the other girls around her, some half naked and grinning at the delight on my face as I gazed at that which was forbidden, would fawn over her hair and her nails and her makeup and the beauty of my mother. She owned rooms like this. Now her son owned them too, only in a different, and at least in my mind, more respectable way.
I stepped from behind the curtain and out onto the stage, the badge on my hip letting me skip the years of training a performer needed to walk this very tread.
Stewart Hardwell stood at the edge, a microphone on a stand silent before him. The microphone hadn’t come down from the heavens. It was attached to the ground like everything else and it didn’t look small there in front of him. Neither did the distance from me to him, the stage itself, or, most prominently, the empty, yawning club before him, devoid of people and life. Stewart Hardwell’s arms fell slack, their power stripped in the face of my own.
I raised an arm admittedly thinner than his, though I now wielded more power. My hand came down and so too did the might of the FBI.
Hardwell turned to face me, useless hands at his sides. His body shuttered; a tremendous ball of impotent mass, like the moon, unable to break free from the gravity binding him to the world, to this city, no matter how badly he ever wanted to leave it behind.
“So that’s it? You just get to arrest me and I don’t get a word?” His voice jumped through the microphone though he hadn’t intended it to, amplifying the distressed yet still cushioned chords of his final words throughout the hall. Those words flapped into the air, bouncing quickly off the high ceilings and echoing back between us, just as my men, FBI men, descended upon him with their Tommy Guns and their cigarettes and their proud smiles at another fallen pillar.
“You get to say whatever you want. But I’d suggest you remain silent.”
“This won’t stand with the boss. You know that. The son of Ted Carson would know that.”
“My old man knew when to fold up shop. The rest of you degenerates are on borrowed time and you’re still too stupid to know it. We’re here to collect.”
“I ain’t gonna say shit.”
“I know that Hardwell and I expected nothing less.”
Three of my best pointed their automatic weapons at Stewart Hardwell and his shrunken strength. Drop the weapon one yelled. And Stewart, tenderly, with two chubby fingers, plucked out his .45 and threw it to the stage floor. It bounced off the wooden planks, one last closing number.
“Stewart Hardwell, you’re under arrest for the murder of Terry Mahoney in California, laundering money for the Genovese family in Nevada and New Mexico, and the assault and battery of Ethal Murmat here in Chicago. I recommend you don’t say anything anymore.”
Two men snapped cuffs behind Harwell’s back and pushed him up the isle to the front of the club.
I stood and watched them go. The men did a good job of cleaning out the club while I kept him busy in the alleyway. It didn’t have to be done. I could have just as easily taken him down outside. Or, perhaps even more impactful, I could have pinched him on stage, in front of a gawking and bewildered crowd. Either way, I knew he wouldn’t take the deal. But I was happiest this way. Happy he was forced to see so much emptiness in such a large, powerful place.
With the back of my hand, I wiped a few stray bits of moisture from my brow. Replacing my hat atop my head, I took a single moment for a hearty breath, sticking out my chest just to see how far it would go. And in fact, it went quite far tonight. Quite far indeed.
END.
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