The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter (A Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Book 1)
Page 28
Landauer rises and, turning his back on Daniel and me, trundles into the building. He lets the screen door slam behind him. No goodbye. His fifty-year vendetta is over. I stare at Daniel. This is what five decades of criminal living add up to? A paid bodyguard for companionship and meager vengeance behind a shack in a Miami slum.
I glance around the wooden patio. It smells of newly-cut timber and sawdust. Then it strikes me. This has to be where my father and Moe dumped Fat Louie’s body. Where Landauer brutally beat my uncle to death. I glance at the shack and wonder if the old gangster thinks he won—if living a bitter, lonely life and ensuring my father is miserable count as winning.
Looking at the river, I make out the shapes of the plastic bags, beer cans, and bloated fish that float by on the incoming tide. There’s a certain irony to turning this shack, the scene of who knows how many murders, into a late-night hangout for young men and women. I doubt any realize their Miami—their city of flashy neon nightclubs, marble skyscrapers, and landscaped boulevards—was built with the filthy lucre of violent gangsters. I’ll never come here again. And with a pang, I realize I may not see my father either. I steel myself to accept the truth. He made terrible choices and the blood that flowed from them is embedded in the wood rotting beneath this deck. I’ll miss the old man. But he isn’t the father I thought I knew.
When I return my gaze to the picnic table, Daniel’s leaning against it, his hands in his pockets. “You ready to go?” he asks. I nod and take a step in his direction. He takes my hand and we walk through the dark to our car.
A Note From the Author
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Published by Perricot Publishing
Book cover design by: PINTADO
All rights reserved
First printing
Copyright © 2018 Joan Lipinsky Cochran
ISBN: 978-0-9998280-1-4
Printed in the United States of America
About the Author
Joan Lipinsky Cochran was born in Miami, Florida and lives in Boca Raton, Florida. She is an adjunct professor, journalist and food columnist whose short stories have won numerous awards.
Other Books by Joan Lipinsky Cochran
Still Missing Beulah: Stories of Blacks and Jews in Mid-Century Miami
To access a Reader’s Guide, contact Joan
through her website
www.joanlipinskycochran.com
Acknowledgements
Few novels are the work of one person and I’d like to recognize those who helped bring The Yiddish Gangster’s Daughter to fruition. I’d like to acknowledge the guidance provided by my critique group, Prudy Taylor Board, Buck Buchanan, Joe Frarraci, Mary Yuhas and Maria DeSoto as well as Debbie Shlian and Eileen O’Brien, whose editorial remarks and encouragement proved invaluable. I’d also like to express my gratitude for the support, guidance and patience of my professors in Florida International University’s Creative Writing Program: my thesis advisers Dan Wakefield, Les Standiford, and Bruce Harvey along with John Dufresne and Lynn Barrett. David Morrell generously offered advice on structuring the novel and upping the stakes.
Many of the scenes in this novel revisit historical events documented by authors and researchers who did the real hard digging on the Jewish syndicate. I’d like to recognize Robert A. Rockaway’s But He Was Good to his Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangster, Albert Fried’s The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America and Leonard Slater’s The Pledge. Thanks to Dr. Deborah Shlian, Dr. Albert Begas and Sharon Plotkin for technical advice and to readers Stephen J. Forman, Susan Lebrun and Shelley Little.