Free Kill Me Tomorrow by Richard S. Prather

first—and only—bit. Reformatory bit at that. Arrested maybe twenty times in the next forty years but never spent another day in the slammer. But if ever anybody should have been put away for good it was Pete Lecci. In thirty years there were three, four men who stand out for me. Guys so miserable, so sly and rotten and—inhuman maybe, you almost got to admire them for being such complete sonsofbitches. Lecci was one of them. Yeah, Lecci. You better believe it.”
    Walt guzzled some beer and went on, his voice soft, as if he were talking more to himself than to me, roaming among those thirty years of memories.
    â€œPete Lecci was a Cosa Nostra Don, sure. Big one, right at the top, member of the Commissione . But more than that. He was as close as anyone, even Maranzano and Luciano and Genovese, ever got to being the real number one, the Capo di tutti Capi —Don of Dons, boss of all bosses. Couldn’t prove it, but they say in his best years he owned, and I mean owned right down to their shorts, two Cabinet members, half a dozen federal judges, Congressmen and Christ knows how many cops. Heroin, prostitution, labor unions, loan-sharking, gambling—racetracks, dog tracks, numbers, slots, stock market—if there was a buck in it he was in it. And murder, naturally. Can’t play all those games if you’re sensitive.”
    Walt stopped talking, seemed to come back from somewhere else. Then he looked at me alertly and said, “What in hell is Pete Lecci doing at Sunrise Villas?”
    â€œMaybe you’ve guessed. That’s what I’ve been wondering.”
    While Walt finished his beer in silence I went through the papers in the folder. I remembered that Lecci had dropped out of sight more than twenty years ago, retired either voluntarily or involuntarily. More often than not, a Mafia bigshot is “retired” after being treated to a sumptuous dinner complete with booze and friendly talk by his dearest pals, who then shoot him several times in the head. But that hadn’t happened to Lecci. He’d been seen around or there’d been word about him for a few years after he’d come down off the mountain. Then there were rumors: he was sick; he’d died; he’d moved to Italy or Brazil or Sardinia; his ex-buddies, fearing he was getting soft in the head but still knew too much and thus could spill too much, had gagged him with cement; lots of rumors. Never, however, one that said Pete Lecci had moved to Arizona.
    I read with care one of the typed sheets of bond paper, on which was detailed Lecci’s family history. Not the Cosa Nostra “Family,” but his own blood relations.
    Mother and father, uncles and aunts— mafiosi families are uniquely loyal, close-knit; they stick together, present a united front against all that is not Mafia or non- mafiosi . There’s a lot of intermarriage among members of the various Mafia groups or Families as well, binding the Brotherhood together, appropriately, with ties of blood.
    It was difficult to picture that wrinkled and wasted old man I’d seen today as young and vigorous, his flesh pressed against the flesh of a woman, his lips on her lips, their limbs entwined. Yet Pietro “The Letch” Lecci had not only married but had fathered two children, a son, Antonio, and a daughter, Angelica.
    The son had been killed in an alley one week after his twenty-fifth birthday, shot by a rookie patrolman who emptied his service revolver into young Lecci after taking two slugs from the hood’s gun in his own chest. The patrolman died in that alley. But so did Antonio Lecci.
    Angelica married, and soon gladdened Dad’s heart by giving birth to his grandson, Giuseppe, and two years later to the first of his three granddaughters, Andrea; three years and a bit later, Felicca came along; and then Maria, two years after Felicca. The man whom Angelica Lecci married was a minor hoodlum named Massero Civano,