A Matter of Conviction

“They call me Big Dom ’cause I’m a shrimp,” he said. He laughed. “But everybody knows if they ever really call me a shrimp, they’re dead.” He laughed again. “Dead. So they call me Big Dom.”

“You’re a very tough punk,” Gunnison said sarcastically. “Tell Mr. Bell the story before I bust that pool cue over your head.”

“These kids you’re trying to send to the chair, Mr. Bell. They’re all nice guys.”

“They committed murder,” Hank said.

Big Dom shrugged. “Lots of nice guys all through history have killed people. In a war, the more people you kill, the more medals you get. That don’t make them any less nice, does it?”

“What makes you say these boys are nice?”

“They all got heart,” Big Dom said. “Courage. You can count on them. They’re not going to turkey out when you’re supposed to go down on another club. They’re okay, every one of them.”

“Is Di Pace a Thunderbird?”

“No, man. He don’t swing with our club.” He studied the table. “Twelve ball banked up to this corner.” He shot and missed. “Not enough chalk on the stick,” he said. He began chalking the stick, the blue dust particles covering the front of his dark shirt. He didn’t seem to care very much. “We got a tight club here, mister,” Big Dom said. “Danny wasn’t one of us, but he never punked out of nothing, either. Whenever we jitterbugged, he was there with us. He never let us down.”

“Is he a good fighter?” Hank asked.

Big Dom shrugged. “Who gets time to notice when everything’s jumping? But he knocked the crap out of a kid named Bud when he first moved around here. I wasn’t around that day, but Diablo told me all about it. That night, we sent a little squad around to take care of Danny. But he’s all right. Take it from me. A good kid.”

“Who — with two other good kids — killed Rafael Morrez.”

“Maybe Morrez needed killing,” Big Dom said. “What do you think he was? An angel or something?”

“He was blind,” Hank said.

“So? Being blind makes him an angel?”

“What are you saying?”

“Tell him your story,” Gunnison said. “We haven’t got all day.”

“Okay, okay.” Big Dom put down the pool cue. “It happened like only this spring. There was this Spanish girl like a lot of the guys on the club used to make it with, you know. She was no prize package, but she was always available. So some of the guys from the Horsemen, they found out about it. Like this girl didn’t mean crap to them, you know what I mean? But all of a sudden, just because the Birds are making it with her, they get excited. So we had a meet. Me and Frankie, and Diablo and Gargantua. There was a cool on at the time, until this thing with the girl happened.”

“A cool?”

“Yeah, like no fighting. What do you think, we fight all the time? Man, don’t you think we got anything better to do?”

“All right, so what happened?”

“So we tried to decide where it was gonna be and all that. First, it was gonna be a fair one, like you know where two guys put on the gloves, but we decided the hell with that, so it was gonna be a real bop, only we couldn’t settle where, so we decided to have another meet the next night. Only you can’t trust those Spanish guys, I mean they’re all hopheads, how the hell can you trust them, they’d knock off their own mothers for some pot. So that very night, right after we had the meet, I mean with everything still up in the air about where the bop was gonna be, that very night...”