Free Prizzi's Honor by Richard Condon

drinks to the table and Virgil asked him for a telephone. When it had been plugged in, he tapped out a number. “Hello, Killer?” he said into the phone. “This is me. Killer dear, I want you to go to Book Six of the gallery and study the index hard, go to the page holding the shots of Marxie Heller and bring them—now, please—to the front desk at The John H. Jackson Gusher Motel. I said, at the desk, dear. Please, Killer, do not make me angry.” He hung up.
    “He isn’t really a killer,” Virgil said to Charley, “I just call him that to give him a little side.”

Chapter Eight
    Marxie Heller’s wife lived in an elegant fake-Georgian house in Westwood. Charley parked in the street about fifty yards beyond the house then walked back to make his way quietly up the driveway to the side door and let himself in. He closed the door quietly. Night was falling in blotters of darkness. He moved along a hall that led from the kitchen, looking for a room with a light, and there it was as he came around a sharp corner, gleaming out from under a door. Charley opened the door and found himself staring into the hooded, khaki-pouched eyes of Marxie Heller as he sat, dealing solitaire, at a large desk. Heller stared at him and blinked.
    Charley didn’t say anything.
    “What do you want, my friend?” Heller asked.
    “The Prizzis sent me.”
    Heller moved his right hand to open the drawer of the desk in front of him and Charley moved across the room and, both as a warning and as a precaution, broke Heller’s wrist by lifting Heller’s forearm with both his hands then crashing the wrist down violently upon the edge of the desk. Heller went under for a few seconds. Charley sat close to him and waited for his eyes to flicker again. He opened the drawer while he waited and took out a long knife. It had beautifulbalance. It would be a great throwing knife. He slid it under his belt at the small of his back. Heller came around.
    “Where is the Prizzi money, Marxie?” Charley asked.
    “Who are you?”
    “Charley Partanna.”
    “Oh, shit—Straight-Arrow Charley, the All-American Hood. Well, Charley, I am going to tell you I haven’t got the money and you are going to say you don’t believe me then everything is going to get rough for me, but that’s the facts, I don’t have the money.”
    “What’s the difference, Marxie? What you did, things had to get rough for you anyway. Come on.”
    “Where?”
    “Out to the car. Come on.”
    Heller got up. He stared at his ballooning wrist. “Jesus, this hurts,” he said to no one at all.
    “You won’t need it,” Charley said. Heller cradled the wrist in his good arm and shuffled out from behind the desk.
    Charley said, “Up against the wall, feet apart, hands over the head.” He found the gun in Marxie’s bathrobe pocket. He unloaded the gun, put the bullets in his pocket and dropped the gun in the wastebasket. “Out,” he said.
    They went out the back door and Charley moved Heller into the two-car garage. He told Heller to swing the door open, they went inside. “The light, Marxie,” Charley said, pulling down the garage door. Heller hit the switch. The light showed an Oldsmobile Cutlass and an empty space for another car.
    “You had time to think,” Charley said. “You want to tell me where the Prizzi money is?”
    “If I knew, maybe I’d tell you, maybe I wouldn’t, but I don’t know.”
    Charley took a revolver, which had a sound suppressor fixed to its barrel, from a shoulder holster andshot Heller three times; once in the face, once in the chest, and once in the throat. He put the weapon away and opened the trunk of the Oldsmobile. He picked Heller up from where he had fallen beside the car and folded him into the trunk. He slammed the trunk lid shut, put out the light, opened the garage door and went back into the main house.
    He sat in the darkened dining room just off the side door to the kitchen, which led from the driveway, and waited. He sat for