“It’s good scotch,” she said.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, “but—”
“No,” she said, “you don’t.”
“But I’m not giving you up.”
“That’s your choice, but I’m giving you up.”
“You could have done that over the phone.”
“You wouldn’t have accepted it. You needed to see it in my face.”
“See what?”
“That I’m serious. That when a woman moves on, she doesn’t look back, and I’m that woman.”
“Where . . .” He couldn’t seem to find the right way to hold his hands suddenly. “Where is this coming from? What did I do?”
“You didn’t do anything. I’ve been dreaming. I woke up.”
He put his hat beside his drink and reached for her hands, but she backed up.
“Don’t do this,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Why not?”
“Yes, Joe. Give me one reason why not.”
“Because . . .” He waved his hand at the walls for some reason.
“Yes?”
“Because,” he said, as calmly as possible, “without you . . . without knowing I have you to look forward to—and, no, not the sex, not just the sex anyway, but you—without that, the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is my son. Without you, everything’s just—” He gestured at the cross on her forehead.
“A crucifix?”
“Ash,” he said.
She drained her glass. “Are you in love with me? Is that what you’re peddling today?”
“What? No.”
“No, you’re not in love with me?”
“No. No, I mean, I don’t know. What?”
She poured herself another drink. “How do you see this going? You have your fun with me until we’re exposed?”
“We won’t necessarily be—”
“Yes, we will. That’s what’s been sinking in all week. I don’t see how the fuck I never saw it before. And if that happens, you can gallivant off to Cuba for a while and by the time you return, the noise will have died down. Meanwhile, I’ll have been shipped back to Atlanta where the family business will be handed over to the board of directors because no one is going to trust a dumb slut who fucked a gangster and turned her powerful husband into a cuckold.”
“That’s not what I want,” he said.
“What do you want, Joe?”
He wanted her, of course. Wanted her right now, in fact, on the bed. And if they could manage it without getting caught—and why couldn’t they?—he’d like to continue seeing her a few times a month until either they found themselves so swept up in each other that it made sense to consider some kind of bold break from the pack or they discovered their passion had been a hothouse flower, the bloom already curdling.
“I don’t know what I want,” he said.
“Great,” she said. “Magnificent.”
“I do know that I can’t get you out of my head no matter how hard I try.”
“How burdensome for you.”
“No, no. I just mean, look, we could try, couldn’t we?”
“Try?”
“To see where this takes us. It was working so far.”
“This?” She pointed at the bed.
“Yeah.”
“I’m married. To the mayor. This can’t take us anywhere but disgrace.”
“Maybe it’s worth the risk.”
“Only if there’s a reward for losing everything you know.”
Women. Jesus.
Maybe he was in love with her. Maybe. But did that mean he was supposed to ask her to leave her husband? That would be a scandal for the ages. Turn the handsome young mayor into a public cuckold? If they did that, Joe would go from outlaw to outcast. He’d never be able to do business in West Central Florida again. Possibly the whole state. They smiled more down south, Joe had learned, but they forgave less. And a man who stole the wife of the war hero son of one of Tampa’s oldest families would find every door in town shut to him. Joe would have to go back to being a full-time gangster; problem was, he was thirty-six and too old to be a soldier, too Irish to be a boss.
“I don’t know what you want here,” he said eventually.
He saw in her eyes that his answer confirmed something for her. He’d failed some kind of test. Hadn’t even known he’d been taking it, but he’d failed it all the same.
As he looked across the bed at her, a voice whispered in his head, Don’t speak.
He didn’t listen to it. “Am I supposed to put a ladder up to your window? We run off into the night?”
“No.” Her fingers shook slightly on her lap. “It would have been nice to know you considered buying it, though.”
“Do you want to run away?” Joe said. “Because I’m wondering how your husband and all his powerful cronies will respond to that. I’m wondering—”
“Stop talking.” She looked across the bed at him, her lips pursed.
“What?”
“You’re right. I agree with you. There’s nothing to discuss. So please stop talking.”
He blinked at that. Several times. Then he took a sip of the drink she’d poured him and awaited sentence for a crime he couldn’t remember committing.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
He placed the glass back down. “Preg.”
“Nant.” She nodded.
“And you know it’s mine.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m positive.”
“Would your husband know?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“He could get the math wrong. He could—”
“He’s impotent, Joe.”
“He’s . . . ?”
She gave him a tight smile and a tighter nod. “Always has been.”
“So you’ve never . . . ?”
“Twice,” she said. “Once and a half, really, when I think about it. The last time was over a year ago.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I know a doctor.” She said with false brightness. She snapped her fingers. “Problem solved.”
“Hang on,” he said. “Hang on.”
“What?”
He stood. “You’re not killing my child.”
“It’s not a child yet, Joe.”
“Sure it is. And you’re not killing it.”
“How many men have you murdered, Joseph?”
“That has nothing to do with—”
“If even half the stories I’ve heard are true, I’ll assume several,” she said. “Either personally or on your orders. But you think you’re going to—”
He came around the bed so fast, her chair toppled as she stood.
“You’re not doing this.”
“Oh, yes, I am.”
“I know every abortionist in this town. I’ll blackball you.”
“Who said I’m doing it here?” She looked up into his face. “Would you kindly take a step back?”
He held up his hands, took a breath, and did as she asked.
“All right,” he said.
“All right what?”
“All right. You leave your husband, come with me. We raise the child together.”
“Catch me,” she said. “I’m swooning.”
“No, listen—”
“Why would I leave my husband to live with a gangster? Your chances of being alive this time next year aren’t much better than a soldier’s in Bataan.”
“I’m not a gangster.”
“No? Who’s Kelvin Beauregard?”
Joe said, “Who?”
“Kelvin Beauregard,” she repeated. “A local businessman in Tampa back in the thirties. Owned a cannery, I believe?”
Joe said nothing.
Vanessa took a drink of water. “Rumored to be a member of the Klan.”
Joe said, “What about him?”
“My husband came to me two months ago and asked if y
ou and I were intimate. He’s not a fool, you know. I said, ‘No. Of course not.’ He said, ‘Well, if you ever do become intimate, I’ll send him to jail for the rest of his fucking life.’”
“That’s smoke,” Joe said.
Vanessa shook her head slowly, sadly. “He has two signed affidavits from witnesses who place you in Kelvin Beauregard’s office the day someone shot him through the head.”
Joe said, “He’s bluffing.”
Another head shake. “I’ve seen them. According to both affidavits, you nodded to the gunman just before he pulled the trigger.”
Joe sat on the bed and tried to figure a way out of the box. But he couldn’t. After a while, he looked up at her, his hands hanging off his knees.
Vanessa said, “I’m not getting tossed out of the mayor’s mansion and tossed out of my family, so I can land on the street and give birth in the poorhouse to a child who will grow up seeing his father through bars. That is”—she smiled sadly at him—“if one of the judges in my husband’s pocket doesn’t sentence you to death instead.”
They sat in silence for five minutes. Joe tried to find an escape hatch and Vanessa watched his search fail.
Eventually Joe said, “Well, when you put it that way.”
She nodded. “I thought you’d come around.”
Joe said nothing.
Vanessa gathered her purse and velvet cloche. She looked back at him, her hand on the door. “For a smart man, I’ve noticed you have a lot of trouble seeing what’s directly in front of your nose. You might want to work on that.” She opened the door.
By the time he looked up, she was gone.
After a few minutes or so, he retrieved the drink he’d left on the dresser and sat in the chair by the window. He couldn’t think through a gray cloud that settled in his head and seeped into his blood. He understood on some fundamental level that he was in shock, but he couldn’t identify which stimulus—her pregnancy, her plan to abort it, her severing of the relationship, or the paper her husband held on Joe’s freedom—had most directly caused his paralysis.
To clear his head or at least get blood flowing to it again, he picked up the phone and asked for an outside line. He’d forgotten to call Dion and let him know that he’d relieved Bruno and Chappi of their responsibilities. It would be just his luck today that he got them fired.
There was no answer at Dion’s and then he remembered that it was Wednesday, which always meant a trip to Chinetti’s Bakery. Joe decided he’d just head back there after his next call; everyone would have returned by then and the sponge cake would probably still be warm.
He hung up, picked up the phone again, and got another outside line. He called into work and asked Margaret if he had messages.
“Rico DiGiacomo called twice. Said it was urgent you return his call.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“That gentleman from Naval Intelligence?”
“Matthew Biel.”
“That’s the one. He left an odd message.”
Margaret had been Joe’s secretary since 1934. In that time she’d heard plenty of odd.
“Relay it to me,” Joe said.
She cleared her throat and her voice dropped an octave. “What will happen next has already happened.” Her voice returned to normal. “Know what he means?”
“Not exactly,” Joe said. “But these government types sure do love making threats.”
When he hung up, he smoked a cigarette and worked his way, as best he could, through his one conversation with Matthew Biel. It didn’t take him long to recall the moment when Biel had promised that Joe wouldn’t like “what we do next.”
So whatever that act, it had already been executed.
Do your worst, Joe thought, as long as you’re not trying to put me in the ground.
Speaking of which . . .
Joe called over to Rico DiGiacomo’s, got his secretary, who put him right through.
“Joe?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck, where you been?”
“What? Why?”
“Mank’s not in a sanitarium.”
“Sure he is.”
“No, he isn’t. He’s back in Tampa. And he’s looking for you. He was seen a block up from your house. Two hours before that, he cruised the block outside your office. Wherever you are, you need to stay there. Hear?”
Joe looked around the room. At least Vanessa had had the decency to leave behind the bottle of scotch.
“I can do that,” Joe said.
“We’ll hunt him down. Okay. We’ll put him in the ground if we have to.”
“Fair enough.”
“You just sit on your hands until we can fix this.”
Joe thought of Mank out there, trolling, him and his rheumy eyes and flaky scalp, breath smelling of rotgut and salami. Mank didn’t play a finesse game the way Theresa or Billy Kovich had. Mank just came at you, engine revving and guns blazing.
“All right,” he told Rico. “I’ll sit tight. You call me as soon as it’s done.”
“You bet. Talk soon.”
“Rico,” Joe said.
Rico’s voice came back on the line. “What? What?”
“You need the number here.”
“Huh?”
“To call me back.”
“Right. Shit.” Rico laughed. “Right. Let me get a pen. Okay. Go.”
Joe gave him the direct line to the room.
“Okay, okay. Be back in touch,” Rico said and hung up.
The curtains in the room were drawn, but Joe noticed there was a gap between the ones that covered the window that overlooked the jetty. He lay on his stomach on the bed and tugged the hems of the curtain panels until they crossed over each other.
Then he got off the bed in case Mank was out there right now, trying to ascertain his position in the room.
He sat on top of the dresser and stared at the tan walls and the painting of the fishermen casting off from a storm-drenched shore. The Cantillions had placed reproductions of the same painting in every room. In this room it hung too low, and two weeks ago Vanessa had accidentally knocked it askew, trying to find purchase as Joe entered her from behind. Joe could see the scratch the back of the frame had nicked into the paint. He could also see her hair again, its ends damp against the side of her neck. He could smell the liquor on her breath—it had been gin that day—and hear the slap of their flesh as their movements grew more frantic.
He was surprised how acute the memory was, how much it hurt to explore it. If he sat here all day and thought about her with nothing but a bottle of scotch and no food, he’d come out of his skin. He needed to think about something else, anything else. Like—
Who took a contract to kill someone and then entered a sanitarium in the middle of the job?
Had that been some kind of ploy to throw Joe off the scent? Or an actual moment of madness? Because whoever had put the contract out on Joe would have been more than a little dismayed when Mank bugged out and checked into the cuckoo house. In that case, the man who’d taken out the contract would have hired somebody else to clip both Joe and Mank. No, killers on an active contract didn’t take time off to get their brains unfried and then pop back up on the day of the hit to finish the job. It made zero sense.
Joe had half a mind to go out on the street right now and talk to whichever of Rico’s men had seen Mank, because he’d bet a thousand dollars they’d mistakenly seen someone who looked like him. Make it two thousand dollars, that’s how sure he was.
His life, though? Would he bet that? Because those were the stakes. All he had to do was stay in this room—or this box, as he was already starting to think of it—and pretty soon this would be over. Rico and his guys would track down this Mank impersonator—or, okay, possibly Mank himself—and Joe could start sleeping again.
Until then, stay in the box.
He raised his drink to his lips, but stopped before it got there.
The box is the point.
What was it Vane
ssa had said in her parting shot? He saw everything but what was directly in front of his nose.
If someone had been trying to kill him these past two weeks, he should be dead by now. Until he’d actually been made aware of the alleged plot, he’d walked the streets blithe and ignorant. An easy target. Even after he’d been appraised of the potential danger, he’d tried running the rumor down; he’d bartered for Theresa’s life; gone on the boat with King Lucius and twenty drug-poisoned killers. He could have been easily killed on any of several drives—to Raiford, to the Peace River, hell, just tooling around town.
What was the killer waiting for?
Ash Wednesday.
But why wait?
The only possible answer was because they weren’t waiting. There was no “they.” Or if there were, “they” weren’t trying to kill Joe.
They were trying to keep him on ice.
He picked up the phone, got an outside line, and asked to be connected to the Lazworth Sanitarium in Pensacola. When he got through to the switchboard there, he told the girl who’d answered that he was Detective Francis Cadiman of the Tampa Police Department and he needed to speak with the chief of staff immediately in regards to a murder.
The girl put him through.
Dr. Shapiro got on the line and asked what this was about. Joe told him there’d been a murder last night in Tampa and they’d need to speak with one of his patients about it.
“We believe,” Joe told the doctor, “that this man could kill again.”
“Kill my patient?”
“No, Doctor. Quite frankly, our suspect is your patient.”
“I don’t follow.”
“We have two eyewitnesses who place a Jacob Mank at the scene of the crime.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I’m sorry, but it isn’t, Doctor. We’ll be coming by directly. I thank you for your time.”
“Don’t hang up,” Shapiro said. “When was this murder?”
“Early this morning. Two fifteen actually.”
“Then you have the wrong man. The patient in question, Jacob Mank?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Tried to kill himself two days ago. He sliced his own carotid with a shard of glass from a broken window. He’s been in a coma ever since.”
“You’re positive?”
“I’m staring at him right now.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Joe hung up.
World Gone By: A Novel (Joe Coughlin Series) Page 20
