Prizzi's Honor by Richard Condon

dead.
    “Shaddap!” he shouted. “The Prizzis are out three hundred sixty dollars and nothing happened to you.”
    “Marxie is dead,” she said simply. “He was my friend. What is the loss to the Prizzis of some money which their insurance company is going to give back to them compared to what I have lost?”
    “What are you, a professional liar?” he cried. “Five minutes ago you said you wanted to marry me, and you know, if you got a big loss on your hands, I am the one who fixed you up with it.”
    “Maybe there is something wrong with your emotions,” she said, feeling safer because she had him talking and doubting what he thought he believed. “Marxie was dying. He had maybe a week, maybe ten days. I knew I was going to lose him. That is one legitimate set of emotions, okay? But you came in and gave it to him. When I left him, he was alive. When I walk in here, he is iced. What do you know—what do you care about a woman’s emotions? Either way, he had to go, but nobody was set for your way, Charley.”
    “Aaaah, shit,” he said. “Lissena me. Find the three hundred sixty. That’s all. Find it and bring it to me.”
    He left the house by the kitchen door and drove the car and Marxie’s body to the airport. He ditched the gun in an ashcan in Watts. He left the car in the airportparking lot for the rental people to find. He caught the red-eye out of LA, disillusioned with the most important thing in his life. Irene was a cold-eyed, hard broad, that’s what she was. Who needed a woman like that? All that shit about being a tax consultant! It was disgusting! She was like some lowest kind of hoodlum. He had almost broken his heart trying to figure out how he could explain to her about the environment, while all the time she was setting up the scam to beat the Prizzis out of the money. She had to be laying Louis because there was no other way she could get to Louis. Who else could have zotzed Louis behind Presto Ciglione’s? She stole the fucking money and she did the job on Louis so she had to know that the Prizzis would be sending somebody after her so she figured it out that if she gave them Marxie and half the $720 and came back with an armful of supermarket and that “I’m home, dear!” shit, anybody would buy it that she was just a simple tax consultant caught in some mystery web. The worst part of the whole thing was that she had to know that the Prizzis would send him after the money, and she had counted on that as her insurance. And he had let her do it.
    Shit! If he wasn’t trapped on this fucking 747 somewhere over Arizona, he would grab somebody’s car and drive back to her fucking house and blow holes in her, all over her.
    He had himself a Seven-Up and a corned beef sandwich, automatically began to remember all of Irene’s good points. She was a tremendous woman, no two ways about, he reminded himself. She drove a fifty-two-thousand-dollar car, so she had to be a terrific tax consultant. How many even men tax consultants made enough to drive a fifty-two-thousand dollar car? She could speak Puerto Rican like a native. She was crazy about him. She had a terrific house and tremendous clothes and she had probably gone to college with Maerose Prizzi and that was all very nice, but the importantthing, the unbelievable thing, was that she was crazy about him. He even had it on TV tape. As he measured Irene’s pluses against her possible minuses, he began to calm down.
    Could it be that Irene was two women, he wondered? That was possible. There had been a movie about that once and he could vaguely remember some magazine piece about it. The fact was, first and foremost, she was a wonderful girl. He knew what he knew and that was it. How could anybody fault a woman for marrying a man who had been good to her for most of her life? He told himself he should be grateful for that marriage because, at least, it had given Irene an understanding of the environment that she otherwise couldn’t have had.