Hitman Melodies Section 13

XIII.
Mrs. Gilbert Sullivan took possession of the house in Apollo, New Jersey, and wrote a lengthy expose of organized crime for the Metro Star. Knopf offered her a book contract, and soon, Songs of Death, was a major best-seller. The names were changed, (for the most part), and most of the characters were dead anyway, so no reprisal efforts were directed at her. Anyway, she was pretty invisible while she stayed in New Jersey, and, later, she moved to Europe where she maintained secret apartments in London, Paris, and Munich. Her book made a lot of money, but the initial financing for her new lifestyle came from a lovely charm bracelet given to her by Sebastian Chronic. The charms were disguised with pearls, but on closer investigation, they were discovered to be safe deposit box keys--about ten of them. When Maddy had made the complete rounds, she had amassed about two and a quarter million dollars in cash, which she deposited in Swiss bank accounts herself.
Hollywood offered her tens of thousands of dollars for the scores to Sebastian Chronic's musical compositions, but she couldn't bring herself to broker the deal. When she realized that Private Eyes were closing in on her, the house in Jersey suddenly burned to the ground, taking all of Sebastian's papers with it; a Puerto Rican lawn man had accidentally spilled some gasoline on a corner of the front porch, and it was gone in a flash. Rinaldo bought the property for practically nothing, and rebuilt.
Maddy never parted with the recording of Sebastian's final song, and the cassette of My Own; she would listen to this music in private when she got blue, when she doubted that life was worth living, when she wanted to remember. Reviewing these pieces brought to mind the greatest man she had ever heard of, the greatest love she ever would know, and the person who thought enough of Maddy High to trade his life for hers. She wondered if Jesus would have been a good hit man.
The Milano-Chen connection didn't last long; too much inner turmoil over too little led to the gradual disintegration of what had been an efficiently-run drug business; it broke down into a medley of little private operations that the cops picked on when there was a break in their schedule. The Milano crime family declined into nothing, and the Chinese Mafia drifted back to Taiwan. Anyway, Dong Yang Chen was an asshole.


Glennallen, AK, July 08