by James Swain
“Mabel told you. Now, I didn't give her my number, but I did call her, and since she has caller ID, she must have scribbled the number down. You called, and she gave you the number. Bingo.”
“Why you making a federal case out of it,” his son said belligerently.
“You could have called my cell phone.”
“I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“I hate surprises.”
“Even when it's me?”
Especially when it's you, he almost said. “If I'd known you cared so much about Doyle, I'd have called you. But unless my memory's fading, the last time Sean came over to the house, you bloodied his nose.”
“I still wanted to pay my respects,” his son said. “Hey, you going to eat your bacon?”
Valentine glanced at the grisly strips on his plate. During his last checkup, the doctor had heard a swishing in his neck and determined his carotid artery was getting clogged. Someday, he would need to have it scoped, which sounded like no big deal, except two percent of patients had a stroke on the operating table and never came back.
“Why, you still hungry?”
Gerry frowned again. Valentine could never get him to admit anything, not even what day of the week it was.
“No,” his son said.
“Then why do you want my bacon?”
“I just don't want it to go to waste, that's all.”
“You still sending money to those starving kids in Africa?”
“Aw, Pop, for the love of Christ . . .”
Their waitress slapped the check down, then gave Valentine the hairy eyeball. She'd been lingering by the cash register eavesdropping. No doubt she'd figured out the bloodlines, and was now painting Valentine out to be a jerk for playing rough with his son.
Valentine removed his wallet. “Can you break a hundred? It's the smallest I've got.”
“Hey, Harold,” she yelled into the kitchen, “can you break a C-note for Donald Trump?”
A bullet-headed man stuck his head through the swinging kitchen doors, said, “Nuh-uh,” and disappeared.
Valentine laid his Visa card atop the check.
“We don't take credit cards,” she said.
He slid the check toward his son. “Cover this, okay?”
Gerry dug his wallet out. It was made of snakeskin and looked like something Crocodile Dundee might have owned. He dug around in the billfold, then said, “No.”
“You don't have ten bucks?”
“No,” he said again.
“Where's your money?”
Meeting his father's gaze, he said, “I lost it, Pop.”
Gerry owned a bar in Brooklyn, did a brisk business running a bookmaking operation in the back. He always carried a fat bankroll. Better than a ten-inch prick, he'd told his father, who'd slept with two women his entire life.
“How much?” Valentine asked.
“Fifty grand.”
Their waitress had dropped all pretense and was hanging on every word. Her name badge said Dottie.
“Dottie, how about a little privacy?”
She ignored him. “Did you really lose fifty grand, kid?”
Gerry lowered his head shamefully. Valentine slapped a hundred onto the check.
“I'll come by later for the change,” he told her.
Snow had hooded the cars, and they walked to the corner of Jefferson and stopped at the light. A half-block away, the surf pounded the desolate shoreline.
“Okay,” Valentine said. “Let's hear it.”
Gerry stared straight ahead as he spoke. “Last Saturday, I get a call from a guy named Rico Blanco—you don't want to know what he does for a living—and he invites me over to a club called the Spanish Fly in lower Manhattan. I've known Rico since high school, so I say, what's the harm?”
“Isn't that club in Alphabet town where all the drug deals go down?”
“Alphabet town got cleaned up,” his son said. “Studio apartments go for two grand a month, bathroom down the hall. Anyway, I meet Rico at the Fly. There's a bartender named Sid. He starts serving us drinks. Then this gambler comes in named Frankie Bones. Frankie is all flash and cash. I've heard Frankie is a made guy, but he's always seemed okay to me, you know what I'm saying?”
“Look at me,” Valentine said.
Gerry turned sideways and looked into his father's eyes.
“Get to the goddamned point, I'm freezing my nuts off.”
“I am,” his son insisted. “Sid turns on the TV. Next thing you know, we're watching football, Boston College playing East Bumfuck. BC is winning and Frankie starts hollering. Seems he got tossed out of BC for selling dope, nothing major, just nickel bags to guys in his frat house, only the cops got wind—”
“Get on with it!” his father roared.
“Right. So Frankie starts betting on East Bumfuck—”
“And you started betting on BC.”
“How could I not bet on them? It was like watching a scrimmage.”
“And you started winning,” Valentine said. “Let me guess. By halftime, you were up ten grand.”
Gerry's expression turned sullen. All his life, his old man had been a mind reader, knowing exactly where and how he'd screwed up. “Twenty,” he said.
“You took a drunk for twenty grand? Shame on you.”
“Pop, cut it out.”
Valentine bit his lip. He was trying to be civilized about this and let Gerry present his case, but it was hard. He loved his boy more than anything in the world, but it did not change who his son was.
“So what happened?”
“Start of the fourth quarter, East Bumfuck's quarterback gets knocked out. The coach sends in some red shirt. Frankie pulls out this monster wad and throws it on the bar. He says, ‘Seventy grand says BC is going down.' Then he goes to the john. I ask Rico and Sid what they think—”
“And they told you to do it,” Valentine said. He could no longer feel his toes and decided to finish his son's tale before he got frostbite. “So you bet the farm against a loud-mouth drunk on a game that was a sure thing. But then a crazy thing happened. The red shirt starts throwing the ball like Dan Marino. He runs BC's defense up and down the field. One touchdown, two touchdowns, three, then four. Of course, your buddies are feeling terrible. And when the game's over and BC loses, well, they're downright miserable that you've lost all your money. Weren't they?”
“You're really enjoying this, aren't you?”
“It was a setup, Gerry. The game was a tape. It's the oldest hustle in the world. Didn't you see The Sting?”
The clouds had opened up like a busted feather pillow. Snowflakes stuck to everything they touched, the two men turning white before each other's eyes.
“So what happened?” his father asked.
“I wrote Rico a marker,” Gerry said. “Rico sold the marker to these hoods named the Mollo brothers. They tracked me down to Yolanda's apartment. They slapped me around, then Big Tony made a move on Yolanda. I'm sorry, Pop, but I caved in.”
“Meaning what?”
“I gave the Mollos the bar.”
Gerry had borrowed fifty grand to buy the bar, plus gotten Valentine to put the place in his name, his own history with the law a major deterrent in gaining a liquor license. On paper, the bar was Valentine's, even though he'd visited the joint only once.
“How the hell did you give them something you don't own?”
“They think I own it, Pop.”
Valentine thought about his clogged artery, wondering if the pressure building inside him might send a piece of plaque to his brain. “What do you want me to do?”
“I know this is going to sound stupid . . .”
“Try me.”
“Lend me another fifty grand so I can buy the bar back.”
“What?”
“Come on, you've got the money. What's the point of sitting on it? You're just going to give it to me eventually.”
“I am?”
“Sure. Have you ever seen a Brinks truck at a funera
l?”
Valentine's jaw tightened. His son had come here to put the squeeze on him. He placed his hands on Gerry's chest, and gave him a shove.
Gerry slid backward on the slick sidewalk. Then he took off at a dead run. Crossing the street, he entered a wooded park.
“Come back here.”
Puffing hard, Valentine entered the park and followed Gerry's footprints until they disappeared beside a brick wall. Did his son think he was born yesterday? Standing on tiptoes, he peeked over the wall. Gerry sat in a frozen flower bed, cell phone in hand.
“Will you listen to me? My father said no. That's right. N O. Well, you're just going to have to move.”
It was Yolanda, Gerry's third-year med-school girlfriend whom Valentine hadn't met but had a low opinion of anyway.
“Hey, stupid . . .”
Seeing his old man climbing over the wall, Gerry started to run, his butt caked with brown dirt and leaves.
“Come back here!”
“I'll figure out something,” Gerry told Yolanda, fleeing through the woods toward a frozen pond.
“I said come back here!”
Kneeling, Valentine packed a snowball between his gloveless hands, then hurled it with all his might. He'd always had a strong arm, and the snowball arced gracefully in the air, then returned to earth and hit the back of his son's head. Gerry fell like he'd been shot.
An invisible knife pierced Valentine's heart. Years ago, Lois had made him promise never to fight with his son when he was in a bad mood. “You'll hurt him,” she'd warned.
He ran through the forest in a panic. What if he'd scrambled Gerry's brains, turned the worm into a vegetable, could he live with that? No, no, of course not. He loved him; that had never changed. Coming to the forest's end, his eyes fell on the spot where his son had fallen.
Gerry was gone.
5
The Great One
Cursing, Valentine climbed into his rental. Buying Gerry the bar had been an olive branch, his way of trying to make peace. And now Gerry had given it away to a bunch of hoods. His son could screw up a wet dream.
The engine whined but did not turn over. The car was made by Ford and called a Probe. Naming a car after a surgical procedure seemed pretty dumb. Through the snowy windshield he saw a white van with tinted windows pull up to the corner.
The light changed, but the van did not move. Rolling down his window, Valentine stuck his head out and remembered that Doyle's killers had been driving a white van. He reached into his pocket for the Glock, then realized how stupid that was.
Get out of the goddamn car.
He had the door open when he heard a gunshot. A bullet cracked the windshield dead center. He hit the pavement hard, struggling to draw his gun, when he heard the van speed away.
He lifted his head. Without his bifocals, he couldn't see worth a damn, and the van's license was a blur.
Blue gunpowder smoke hung in the frigid air. He got up, then popped the hood of the Probe. The main wire to the distributor cap hung down. He reconnected it, then got in and tried the engine. Soon the heater was blowing and his teeth had stopped chattering. But his heart would not slow down.
Valentine drove back to the Drake wondering why the European had come after him. Had he been at Doyle's funeral, and heard Valentine's eulogy? Back in Sicily, where Valentine's family was from, it was common for killers to murder their victims' best friends to avoid retribution later on. Which meant the European would probably try again. He needed to start being a lot more careful. And switch motels.
Frank Porter's mini-Mercedes sat idling in front of the Drake. He parked on a side street so Frank wouldn't see his windshield, then hiked over. Porter hit the unlock button.
“How'd you find me?” he asked, climbing in.
“I called your office,” Porter said. “Mabel told me.”
Valentine made a mental note to tell Mabel not to do that anymore.
“I need a favor,” Porter said.
“What's that?”
“I told Archie Tanner about your offer to help. Archie says, ‘Screw that. Hire him.' I told Archie I'd have to ask you. Archie says, ‘It's your ass if he says no.' ”
Archie Tanner owned The Bombay and was one of the richest men in New Jersey. He was also a mean, foul-mouthed thug and disliked by everyone in the casino business.
“Your ass, as in your job?” Valentine said.
“That's right,” Porter said.
Normally, Valentine would have said yes, just to help Porter out. Only this was Archie Tanner, a man he'd never trusted.
“I need to talk to him first,” Valentine said.
“About what?”
“My terms.”
Porter blew out his cheeks. “Okay.”
Soon they were heading north on Pacific Avenue, and Valentine noticed that Porter looked pale. He'd recently gone through a bitter divorce, with his ex getting everything but the house.
“So how's the joke-telling business?”
Porter smiled thinly. “I heard a joke which sums it up pretty well.”
“What's that.”
“Do you know the difference between a comedian and a pizza pie?”
“No.”
“You can feed a family of four with a pizza pie.”
Twenty minutes later, they were sitting in Archie Tanner's penthouse office atop The Bombay. Archie knew how to live, and the room's panoramic view was the best in town. To the east, cruise ships dotted the churning black waters of the Atlantic; to the west, a private Lear jet landed at Bader Field, the airport's crisscrossing runways forming a black cross in the snow.
And then there was the office itself. Burnished mahogany book shelves, polished wood floors covered with Persian rugs, a marble desk the size of a sports car. On the walls, framed photos of Archie clowning with Frank Sinatra, sparring with Muhammad Ali, kissing the Pope's ring.
Porter picked up a book on the coffee table. It was Archie's ghost-written autobiography, The Great One: The Life and Times of Atlantic City's Living Legend.
“Archie send you one?”
Valentine nodded. Archie had bought several thousand copies and sent them to everyone in town. The inscription on his copy had read To the squarest guy in Atlantic City.
“So, what did you think?”
“I read ten pages and threw it in the garbage.”
Porter rolled his eyes. In the adjacent office they could hear Archie chewing someone out. The brunt of his assault was either a dopey fuck or a fucking dope, and when the door opened and the great one marched in, Valentine was surprised to see three attractive young misses in tow. One blond, one brunette, one African-American, all dressed in stylish leather miniskirts and black leggings. The blond had been crying, her cheeks still moist. Valentine rose from his chair.
“Sit down, sit down,” Archie said, pumping his hand. For a punk, he cleaned up well, and wore a handsome blue Armani suit and silver necktie that accentuated his deep tan. When Valentine remained standing, he bristled.
“What's the matter, you got piles?”
“There are ladies in the room.” Facing them, he said, “Name's Tony Valentine. Nice to meet you.”
The ladies introduced themselves. Gigi, Brandi, Monique. Hardly any makeup, no jewelry, Monique sporting a little rose tattoo on her bare shoulder. They were a far cry from the rough-and-tumble females that had worked in the casinos twenty years earlier. Archie stood behind his desk, not enjoying being upstaged. “I call them my Mod Squad,” the casino owner said. “One blond, one brown, one black. Get it?”
Valentine eyed him the way he would any other blow-dried moron. “You know, Archie, with all this dough you ought to consider buying yourself some class.”
Archie's face grew red. He looked like he wanted to bust Valentine in the mouth, only Valentine knew that wasn't going to happen. Thirty years ago, he'd ticketed Archie for speeding and found bootleg cigarettes in the trunk of his car. He'd let Archie go because he knew his old man, and that single act
of kindness had let Archie later obtain The Bombay's gaming license, his record clean as a whistle.
“Ladies, if you don't mind, we have business to discuss,” the great one said.
The Mod Squad filed out, with Brandi catching Valentine's eye. She winked.
“Pleased to meet you,” Valentine said.
“So how's retirement treating you?” Archie asked, sitting at his desk sipping Evian out of a Waterford tumbler.
Valentine swirled the ice cubes in his soda. Life had been treating him crummy, but he didn't think Archie really cared.
“I opened a consulting business. It keeps me busy.”
“Still catching hustlers, huh? You were always the best, wasn't he, Frank?”
Porter nodded. “Tony's the best.”
“That's what I said. I remember when The Bombay first opened. We were getting killed at blackjack. Everybody was beating us, even little old ladies. I didn't know my ass from my elbow back then, so I tell another casino owner, and he says, ‘Call Tony Valentine. He's the best at catching cheats.' Now, I've known Tony a long time. How long has it been, Tony?”
“Since I busted you,” Valentine said.
Archie burst out laughing. “What a kidder. Anyway, so Tony comes in, takes a stroll through the blackjack pit, and comes up to me. He says, ‘Hey, Arch, were you born yesterday? You're using playing cards with a one-way back design. I said, ‘So?' And he says, ‘If a card gets turned around, every player at the table can track it.' So we replaced the cards, and our problems vanished.”
Valentine sipped his soda. He didn't remember the incident, which he attributed to the fact that so many casinos had gotten ripped off back then. Atlantic City hadn't known what it was doing, and hustlers from around the globe had come running.
Rising, Archie crossed the spacious room and stopped at the floor-to-ceiling window that faced the ocean. “You and Doyle were buddies, weren't you?”
“That's right.”
“I was down in Florida when he got killed. I would have come to the funeral, but business had me tied up.”
“You buying Disney World?”
Archie took a big fat cigar from his pocket and fired it up. “I'm buying hotels, Tony. Hotels that I'm going to turn into casinos. Florida isn't going to let the Indians have a monopoly forever. Gambling generates taxes, and taxes build roads and schools, two things Florida desperately needs.”
