Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Short Story: The Mistake

 


 Louie the peach, Peachy they called him, was a half-assed, knock-around wise guy who had lived in town his entire for the entire 72 years of his life. He had been Made into the mob decades ago, just in time for the federal government to finally snap itself out of its trance and start a war against the mob on a national level, destroying it within ten years.

As a young man, Louie the peach watched in awe as bosses, big bosses long thought to be untouchable, fell one by one, sent to prison for the remainder of their lives. He watched as others simply turned informant while droves of tough guys faded into the abyss. 

In the end, when it was over, Louie the Peach, was left with hacking out a living in low-level scams and running a chop shop out of the garage in his house, under the guise of a used car dealership. He never married. He vacationed in Florida once a year and he played the lottery daily. You never know.

It happened that one Monday evening Louie was having his dinner at the Valley Diner when he felt someone staring at him. He looked across the counter and saw Butch Rienno, a mob big shot out of New Haven, smiling at him. He knew Rienno from around, he was a boss and although Louie the Peach had seen him plenty of over the years, he never spoke to him nor had any dealings with him but only because Rienno worked out of New Haven. They were about the same age, in fact, they looked alike, both short, stocky, bald and wore their ill-fitting clothes with a sort of resentment.

Rienno locked eyes with Peachy and whispered, “You know who I am right?”

“Sure” the Peach answered “Of course”

Without looking up from his coffee, Rienno continued in his hushed voice “Lower your eyes, don’t look at me, just listen.”

“Okay,” the peach responded and lowered his gaze to the counter.

“You speak Italian?”

“Me?” the peach asked.

“Who in the hell would I be asking that too?”

“Um…I…I use to…when I was a kid….I”

“Never mind, never mind….just listen. There is a pair of car keys next to my cup. You see them? Okay. I’m gonna leave. When I do, you wait for an hour. Take the keys and go out to the blue caddy. Get in, drive to your place, your chop shop operation. Park in there. Once you are inside, open the trunk. There are some objects in there. Take em out and hide em. Then chop the car. We’ll contact you for them in six weeks, maybe more”

Then the portly hood pushed himself off of the stool and waddled out the door into the parking lot and climbed into the passenger side of a red caddie that then sped away”

So the Peach did what he was told. He sat at the counter waiting for an hour to pass. He didn’t want to, but he did. It was about a half an hour into the wait when the waitress turned up the volume on the television set that was attached to the wall over the cash register.

“We interrupt our regular programming to report this breaking story happening now in Birmingham. Connecticut State Police and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigations have killed alleged New Haven-based Mafia Capo Butch Rienno in a gunfight which occurred roughly thirty minutes ago.

The melee started when a Birmingham police officer pulled the car that Rienno was riding in for having without dated plates. The Police have confirmed that the car’s driver, alleged organized crime member Robert “Bobby Boy” Donato drew a gun on the officer while attempting to speed away. Both Donato and Rienno were killed in the ensuing gun fight.

The FBI confirmed that Butch Rienno is their primary suspect in the Thayer Gallery art robbery. The FBI believes that Rienno had an overseas buyer for stolen high-end paintings through a fence in Europe who would sell the goods to buyers in France. Based on that, the bureau speculates, the Mob’s bosses had given Rienno permission to rob the Thayer Gallery in New Haven last month. The stolen works have a value of at least $500,000,000 making that robbery is the largest art heist in history. More on this later”

“Wow!” a voice bellowed out from directly behind the Peach who turned, startled. It was a cop staring up at the screen. The cop looked down at Peaches pale white face and realizing he had nearly given him a heart attack the cop placed his shoulder on Peaches shoulder and said 500 million! Imagine that? How’d you like to get your hands on some of those paintings?”

The Peach panicked. It was a set-up. They had been watching.

“I didn’t have nothing to do with it” he bellowed and threw up his hands.

“Yeah, me either”, said the cop with a wink and then turning his attention to a house painter who walked in the door said “O’Donnell!” and walked away to greet the man.

The Peach was rattled.

“Now what?” he mumbled. He looked out the window and across the parking lot to the Blue Caddy. It took him two seconds to decide that he wasn’t getting into that car. The feds were probably all over it, watching with binoculars from nearby rooftops. A sharpshooter would kill the second he placed the key in the ignition. Then he’d be standing in front of Satan with fire all over the place.

“I’ll go to hell” he whispered.

“We’ll still find you in hell” The Peach turned his head and look at Butch Rienno sitting in the stool next to him. There was a large bullet hole in his forehead. “You got your orders. From me. A Capo. Do what you're told. Because when we come to collect those object we entrusted to you and there not there….oh Mama Mia”

“Yeah, but your dead” Peach said.

“Yeah, I’m dead but not the hundred other guys in this operation we got here. You know how many of them are going to come out of the woodwork looking for those object we got stashed in that car?”

“No” the Peach shrugged.

“All of them. Plus a couple of hundred wise guys from down New York. And when you tell them “I don’t have what you want”….. oh Madone! You’re gonna wish you went to hell”

“What’s in the trunk?” he asked.

“Oh not much, about a half billion in artwork. It got misplaced into the trunk from the Thayer Gallery”

“How’d it get misplaced in the truck?”

“It leaped in on its own. It’s very motivated art I stole it, how do you think it got there? That cop and that guy are looking at you”

Peach moved his gaze from Butch Rienno, and his bullet wound and caught the cop and O’Donnell the painter looking over at him. He nodded, smiled and returned his gaze to Butch Rienno’s bullet wound.

“Does that hurt?”

“What’s that?”

Peach pointed a finger to the large bullet hole in Rienno’s forehead head.

Rienno narrowed his eyes and then felt around his face until he found the hole with his palm.

“Oh that!” he smiled “Naw, not really….a little bit, but, truthfully, it went in and out so fast, I didn’t feel anything. It doesn’t look so good though does it?”

“Well, you know” the Peach lied “As far as bullet holes go, it’s not bad. I seen worser”

“Look kiddo,” Rienno said in a fatherly tone “We brought that art stuff up here because New Haven is real hot right now. You got ten million thousand FBI looking around rocks for these painting because, and may I add unbeknownst to me, several of them were on loan from some country with like, Chinese people in it, something like that. So we brung it up here because it's too hot to take anywhere else and the cops would never think of coming to this one horse town to look for anything”

The hoodlum stopped speaking and looked across the counter at the pie display. “I wish I could have a piece of that”

“Go ahead” the Peach answered “I’ll buy it for you. Go ahead. I didn’t know ghosts could eat”

“They can’t. But I’m not a ghost. I’m your conscious. Big difference. Rienno replied tiredly “I’m here because your over-stressed. Ghosts show up because…..I don’t know why ghosts show up, anyways, look at the situation. If you go out there and get into the car and take off one of two things is gonna happen. One, nothing will happen. You go home stash the painting like I told you, few months, some very grateful New York guys show up hand you fortune in cash and you’re in the shade with them for the rest of your life. Or, two, you start to drive away, and the FBI nabs you before you could blink. But that’s not gonna happen and I’ll tell you why. They want the paintings, not you. Right now, as far as the feds are concerned they got their guy…..me…..now they paintings. What happens next is up to you.”

The Peach weighed both arguments, turned to dead Butch Rienno and asked: “You com’n with me?”

Rienno shrugged “What choice do I have?”

The ride to his grey ranch house at the end of Oak Lane was uneventful. No cops, no FBI, no problems. He pulled into his garage where he had torn apart hundreds of cars over the past and sold them for parts.

He climbed out of the blue caddie, waddled to the back of the car and before opening the trunk, he reconsidered and walked over to hidden drawer on his walk bench and took out a .38 revolver he kept hidden there and returned to the trunk.

Butch Rienno reappeared standing next to him, staring at the trunk.

“You gonna shot the trunk? Put it out of its misery?” he asked

Holding the pistol in his right hand and aiming dead ahead he opened the trunk with his right hand and when it popped open he took a giant step backward. Lying in the truck were a dozen or more painting, some rolled up, others lying flat. The Peach walked back to the car and looked over each painting. They were heavier than he thought they looked.

“Sirens.” he said

“Lots of them. Four at least, maybe six,” added Butch Rienno “Headed down a dead end street.

“It’s a raid.” The Peach said. His breath was short. His heart started to pound.

“The FBI.” Rienno “They are to you.”

“No!” the Peach screamed “They were on to you! They must have had a tail on you

when you was in the diner.”

The Peach did a quick calculation of the number of crimes committed in stealing the painting. It added u to a minimum 25 years in federal prison.

“Twenty-five years ain’t all that bad,” Rienno said.

“Not when your 72 years old” The Peach yelled back and then he really, really panicked.

He had two options. Become forty years young or destroy the evidence. He decided to destroy the evidence, 13 magnificent works of art that will never be replaced and when he lit the match the Gods gasped and then they cried.

What Louie the Peach learned that night was that 500-year-old art works burns very fast. In a matter of seconds, flames engulfed the pictures and destroyed them. One particularly hot spark flew

The city fire department gave Louie the Peach of commendation for gallantry in assisting them in fighting the fire that destroyed his house, garage and car. The fire chief made a solemn apology for not arriving to the scene early so they could have kept the electric power fire from burning his home. Someone, deeply moved that a man of Louie’s age should have to start over again, set up a go-fund me page that brought him $50,000.

The insurance companies representing the utility company, under intense public scrutiny, settled the case without an investigation and handed Louie several million dollars for the destruction of, as his lawyer put “His beloved and much bemoaned domicile” and the loss of six stolen cars that he was in the midst of chopping down for scrap and parts when the fire and a very good lawyer miraculously converted them into “irreplaceable used cars”.