The Last Cop Out Read Free Page B

penthouse office, Teddy Shu, second underboss of the Great Lakes sector, made a final call to the red phone on the desk of Papa Menes who was vacationing in his place in Miami, told him that Frank Verdun had arrived in New York, set the wheels in motion and they should be seeing some action within a few days. Papa Menes was pleased, but more than a few days would make him very displeased and Teddy Shu would be the first to feel his displeasure.
    Teddy hung up, wiped the sweat from his upper lip and told the delivery boy he had called for coffee to come on in. When he looked up the delivery boy had an all too familiar face and before Teddy could get the name on his lips he had no mouth at all because the .45 had taken away most of his face.
    Papa Menes was seventy-two years old, a short, chunky man with a ring of gray hair that circled his head like a wreath. Both his oversize hands seemed warped by age and arthritis, but actually they were twisted because they had been broken that way, one in a street fight and the other by Charlie Argropolis who was trying to make him talk. He would have talked, too, but Charlie made a mistake by always carrying that ice pick in a sheath on his belt and before he could finish the torture treatment, Little Menes had snatched it out and drove it up to the hilt in Charlie’s eyeball. Little Menes had been twelve years old then. Now, at seventy-two, he was the presiding dictator of that gigantic clan whose empire of fear extracted taxes from people of every nation of the world.
    On the street he could pass for the friendly neighborhood grocer. Behind a pushcart he’d seem perfectly normal. In his suite overlooking the whole of Miami Beach and the Atlantic Ocean he was out of time and place. But he was comfortable and one of the preogatives of his age and position was to set his own schedule and one of the items on that agenda was that nobody could disturb him before ten o’clock in the morning.
    Outside in the hall George Spacer squirmed in the divan next to the elevator, worried because his partner, Carl Ames, didn’t want to wait another half hour.
    “Will you sit down and relax,” he snapped.
    Carl Ames fiddled with the zipper on his golfing jacket and stabbed his cigarette into the sand-filled ash tray by the wall. “Damn it, George, the old man’s going to eat us out for not letting him know. You know what he did to Morrie last month.”
    “He was only taking a nap then. You know his orders.”
    “Look . . .”
    “Teddy Shu is dead.” He glanced at his watch. “He’ll still be dead in another twenty minutes.”
    “Chicago’s been trying to get the old man since they found out!”
    “Chicago should have its head examined. At least the switchboard’s smarter.”
    “Okay, watch, we’ll be back hustling broads in Jersey.” George Spacer gave his partner a dirty smile. Two weeks before an Air Force private had kicked one of his balls loose from its moorings and Carl had been hurting ever since. “At least you’ll be able to get more ass than you getting here,” he said.
    “Fuck you,” Carl told him.
    At five minutes after ten they followed the waiter into the suite of their boss, allowing him time to be far enough into his breakfast to take the edge off his usual restless night, and stood at attention beside the glass-topped table by the window.
    Papa Menes dunked his toast, popped it into his mouth and said, “So?”
    “Teddy Shu got bumped last night.”
    “I heard,” the boss told him. He turned his paper over and tapped the headline of the article that carried the story. “A real fancy job. Who called you?”
    “Bennie.”
    “Any details?”
    “Just that nobody can figure it.” The old man didn’t seem too upset and Carl’s stomach started to quiet down. “Teddy was alone, but there were a dozen people in the outside offices. Nobody came in or went out that they didn’t know.”
    “Somebody figured it,” Papa Menes said softly. His eyes were like