Cliff Booth’s Cleveland pizza-shop double killing turns an ordinary meal into a blunt demonstration of how easily violence can pass for justice when the killer’s reputation serves him better than evidence. After two mob enforcers threaten Abigail Pendergast, Cliff shoots them in public and persuades police that he acted in self-defense; the episode becomes, as the narration puts it, the first time he gets away with murder.

Background and Confrontation

After deciding he was not suited to being a pimp, Cliff returned to the United States, drifted around the country for several years, and eventually reached Cleveland. There he sought out Abigail Pendergast, an old high-school acquaintance who was one of the mistresses of Rudolfo “Patsyface” Genovese, a Mafia-connected hoodlum. They met in a Gay Nineties pizza joint, where sawdust covered the floor, checkered tablecloths covered the tables, a player piano supplied the music, and a Charlie Chaplin film played on the wall. The casual, almost theatrical setting would soon become the scene of a double killing.

As Abigail reached for a napkin, she noticed Pat Cardella and Mike Zitto at the bar, drinking beer and making faces toward their table. She told Cliff that the men worked for Rudy and would eventually come over to chase him away. Cliff turned to look at them despite her protest; they answered with an unmistakable hostile stare. Rather than leave, he went on eating. When the two men approached, Cliff told Abigail to go into the ladies’ room and lock the door, removing her from the confrontation before it began.

The Warning and the Medal

With Abigail safely out of the dining room, Mike took her empty chair while Pat dragged over another; Cliff kept eating as they settled in across from him. Pat ordered him to leave and warned that if either man saw him around Abigail again, he would spend a long time in the hospital. Mike reinforced the threat by asking whether Cliff understood. Cliff pointed between them to confirm that the warning came from both men. When Mike identified them as Italian, Cliff answered with a question about how many Italians he had killed.

Cliff drew out his Medal of Valor and dropped it on the table with a bang. He said that on the day he earned it he had killed at least seven Italians, possibly nine, and that he had killed Italians every day during his long service in Sicily. The medal made his wartime record an object lesson for the two men: Cliff presented his killing as the very thing that had made him a hero. He then linked that status to his license to carry a gun, laying a snub-nose .38 beside the medal. His warning was no longer merely a boast about the past; the weapon made clear that he was prepared to use lethal force in the restaurant.

The Shooting and Its Aftermath

Cliff made the threat explicit: he said his wartime record had earned him the standing of a hero and the right to carry a gun, and that he could shoot both men in the restaurant and get away with it. Pat and Mike reddened, but when Mike began to answer, Cliff snatched the snub-nose .38 from the table and fired once into each man’s skull. Customers screamed and dropped to the floor; the two men toppled from their chairs onto the sawdust. Cliff then shot each of them twice more. The killing followed his boast almost literally, converting the Medal of Valor and the pistol beside it from props in a warning into the instruments of a public double homicide.

When the Cleveland Police Department questioned him, Cliff supplied a self-defense account: he said the men had tried to kidnap him and Abigail, and that the heavier one had threatened to shoot him and throw acid in her face. He presented himself as frightened and unsure what to do. The account was his version of events, not an independently established explanation of the shooting; the narrative makes clear that his story needed to be plausible, not necessarily convincing.

The police knew who Pat Cardella and Mike Zitto were. In the book’s account, that knowledge and Cliff’s status as a World War Two hero tilted the encounter with the law in his favor: the officers accepted a plausible justification for killing the two gangsters. The chapter names this his first escape from murder charges, a distinction that places the Cleveland shooting within a larger pattern. In the Hollywood stunt community, people likewise suspected that Cliff had deliberately killed Billie Booth, although the authorities had labeled her death a misadventure because his account of a diving accident could not be disproved. In both cases, suspicion and responsibility remained distinct from what officials could establish; the outcome depended on a story that the evidence could not readily defeat.

The two episodes are not identical: in Cleveland, Cliff killed openly and immediately invoked the protection he believed his war-hero status afforded him, while Billie’s death had been ruled an accident after the fact. But together they sharpen the episode’s central irony. Cliff’s reputation for military service, admired by some and feared by others, does not merely accompany his violence; it helps him survive its legal consequences. The restaurant killing therefore marks not just a confrontation settled by gunfire, but the first demonstrated instance of a method that his plausible stories and the authorities’ limited knowledge could make effective.

The Earlier Case and the Meaning of Plausibility

The Cleveland shooting also casts light on why Cliff’s earlier account of Billie Booth’s death could survive official scrutiny. The Hollywood stunt community admired his military service but widely suspected that he had murdered his wife. Many of its members had seen Billie drunkenly berate him in public, and Cliff himself told authorities that she had been drinking when she died. Investigators who did not know her lacked the context that stuntmen and their wives believed made that detail significant; suspicion among acquaintances, however, was not proof of what had happened on the boat.

Cliff’s own account of his responsibility was as compromised as his public defense. He treated the shooting as an impulsive act rather than a planned murder, dwelling on whether his finger had pulled the trigger by conscious choice or by instinct, and on whether the movement was closer to a twitch. He felt regret, yet still tried to avoid prison, reasoning that remorse and self-punishment could stand in for legal accountability. The authorities, less aware than the stunt community of his violent tendencies, faced an event with no surviving witness besides Cliff: they could not readily disprove his explanation of a mishandled diving accident. The Cleveland case makes that earlier evasion newly legible—not as proof of what happened to Billie, but as a second instance in which a plausible story and a favorable public identity separated suspicion from legal consequence.