New Novel – The Man Who Murdered Too Much

I’m reading a book. The villain has told us he’s been forgiven for his murders. By whom is uncertain, but that’s what he tells us. This confuses me. On the other hand he says he is justified in doing what he has done. He had a good reason to kill all of these people. But on the other side he is looking for forgiveness.

The villain tells us after every murder he felt bad. He really felt bad after he killed the two African-American teenagers, one a girl, who were sitting in a car with a guy Smith he set out to kill.  He tells us he thought they were three guys in a car waiting to kill him and they had hoods on because it was a snowy night as if it were snowing inside the car. The autopsy showed they had no hoods.  OK he says, they were silhouettes so he couldn’t see who they are.  When he got into the back seat of the car he just shot three purple shadows in the snow.

But he regretted it even though it was justifiable. They shouldn’t have been with the guy Smith that he planned to murder.

We hear a killing, a regret, another killing, a regret.  We hear he’s not a hit man – didn’t take payment for his hits although he did get paid for them. He’s not a serial killer – they kill for fun – he never got any joy out of it or any satisfaction. He felt every time he was murdering people he “put his life at risk.”  This is a new term he’s conjured up imagining that when he sneaks up behind someone and shoots them in the back of the head his life is at risk. That’s sort of imports the idea that the villain has the right to defend his life when it is at risk so all the murders are self-defense. He hasn’t gone that far but if pushed would probably say that.

If he felt bad and got no joy out of doing it, wouldn’t you think he would stop? Not in this silly novel. He would have stopped but he couldn’t. He apparently felt he had a sacred mission to take care of family and friends. He made clear that murdering people for them wasn’t the only thing he did, he gave them money also to help them along.

He particularly liked to murder people who were going to testify against his friends like he is doing now. It seems unusual seeing a guy who killed government witnesses now in the government’s boat rowing along with it. He liked to murder guys, like the guys in Al Notarangeli’s gang because Gerry Angiulo the Mafia boss in Boston asked him to do it. He got paid for that but that was not for hitting  murdering them, it was for his expenses.  How did he justify doing that. They had killed someone else. Did he know that other person. No but he was one of Gerry’s men so he was helping out his friend Gerry.

The book I’m reading was written by a junior at Wellesley with a fertile imagination. Things like that don’t happen. So I go on for a bit longer not believing her third-rate crime novel has any relation to reality.

The highlight of the villain’s murders is the successful murder of business man Roger Wheeler. Roger was doing something unforgivable to one of his friends, John Callahan.  The villain was on the run after being indicted in a 1979 Race Fixing case, the one where O’Sullivan took Whitey and Stevie Flemmi out of because they were FBI informants, and was living in Florida. Callahan helped him out giving him use of his car and his condo.  Callahan had been the president of Wheeler’s company but was fired and now Wheeler was checking his company’s books which would lead to the discovery Callahan was stealing money.

Ever willing to help a friend, the villain who had murdered another guy who was going to testify against the husband of a woman friend aside from those others who were going to testify against his brother and fellow gang members,  seeing that his friend Callahan might be charged with larceny some time down the road, the villain felt he was justified in killing the guy who might bring charges against him. He risked his life, he says, ambushing Wheeler at a Tulsa, Oklahoma, golf course and shooting him in the eye.

Then he kills Callahan about a year later. That’s because his partners tell him he has to do it. Here’s the guy who just killed another for this friend now killing him. This was justified because his partners told him they killed another guy (Halloran) for him so he had to murder Callahan to save them. Funny, they had nothing to do with Callahan – the only one at risk from his testimony would have been the villain – but you got to blame someone for the murder so why not them.

If you were reading this book by now you would have been laughing at the absurdity of it. But listening to Martorano and seeing the chubby little guy who is the villain telling that story to you, you begin to recognize how out of touch the man is with reality and how absurd it is this seriously demented man could be used as a witness.