“Third floor! They’re on the third floor!”
We ran down the stairs, crashin’ into other guests, until we hit the lobby. I could hear Sandra’s voice comin’ from the ballroom; she was just welcoming the audience and probably wonderin’ where we were. For the next two hours we covered the entire hotel and most of the grounds. We managed to lose ’em for a good hour while we sat on the roof weighin’ our options, but Lorenzo spotted us from the pool and gave a shout. Lucky for us . . . they coulda snuck up on us from behind and sent us flyin’. We scuttled over the old Spanish tiles, down another drainpipe, then back into the lobby. Suddenly, Morgan took a detour into the ballroom. I followed and found him standin’ like a statue . . . just listenin’ to Sam. She was singin’ somethin’ new . . . at least it was new to us. A slow number . . . people shoulda been dancin’, but the few couples out on the floor were so stunned by what was comin’ outta this gal that they just stood there, arms and hands kinda loose on each other. Sam was tearin’ up the joint with a song that started somewhere deep in her gut and was comin’ out all molasses, fire, whiskey, and he-ain’t-comin’-back-no-more:
I’ll hide my heart;
I’ll keep it locked away.
And I’ll find a part;
That’s easier to play . . .
For I love you only, darling . . .
And yet you don’t love me . . .
Sam stopped singin’, but her voice hovered in the air like a cloud. She hung her head and just sat for a moment. That’s when Morgan walked up to her . . . right in front of everyone . . . and kissed her hard.
“Don’t cry, Sam,” he said, liftin’ her face and lookin’ into her eyes. “No guy is worth it.”
“Huh?” Sam said, in complete shock.
Then we heard Enzio’s men right behind us and we took off like bats outta hell.
“Oh!” I heard Sam shout as we headed toward the ballroom doors. I kinda figured she’d figured it out.
We started to run through the lobby for the fourth or fifth time that night, when the Don and Berto walked out right in front of us. Then Lorenzo and the torpedoes came runnin’ from the ballroom. They joined each other, makin’ a nice little club of mobsters with their heaters trained on us. What they didn’t see was that they were all standin’ in front of the elevator and a big sign that said:
ELEVATOR CLOSED FOR REPAIRS.
PLEASE TAKE THE STAIRS.
“Well, ain’t this nice?” the Don said. “You two just showing up. You know, if you’d made it a little easier on me, I might have made it easier on you.”
“Don’t be a fool, Cannalzetti,” I said. “You shoot us here and you’ll have more witnesses than you’ll ever be able to silence. Just look around.”
The desk clerk dropped behind the counter. Two maids ran up the stairs and the four guests just hangin’ around ran out the front door.
“You were sayin’?” the Don said with a smile.
“Thanks!” I called out. “Thanks a lot . . . everybody.”
“People here are real cooperative and nice,” Enzio said.
“Yeah, pop,” said Berto, leanin’ real casual against the wall. “Once we take over Port Charles, let’s bring the operation down here!”
Only Berto didn’t realize he’d hit the elevator “call” button with his ass. And that’s the moment when the doors opened . . . onto a big, dark nothing. And that’s the same moment when Sam McCall came runnin’ out of the ballroom and into the lobby.
“Jason!” she yelled.
Every head turned to look at the bombshell and, on pure impulse, I ran forward with my arms out. Morgan was right with me . . . ’cuz we think alike when it counts. We shoved the three Cannalzettis and the two torpedoes into the elevator shaft and closed the door.
“Hey, fraidy-cat behind the desk,” I said, as Morgan grabbed Sam and we went tearin’ out of the lobby. “How many parkin’ levels underground?”
“Uh, three . . . and a basement,” said the clerk, stickin’ his head up.
“Sweet!” I said as I hit the open air.
We didn’t stop runnin’ till we were at the end of the pier. Fast Eddie was just pullin’ up the speedboat.
“I hope you don’t mind,” I said, climbing in. “I brought a few friends along. I figure if this works out, you might as well meet some of our wedding guests now.”
“Oh, I like the way you think,” said Eddie, as he gunned the boat toward a sixty-foot yacht half a mile away.
“Sam, I have been such an . . . idiot,” Morgan was sayin’ in the back.
“I know.”
“I love you, you know that.”
“I know.”
“I’m thinking we should . . . we should . . . give it a try. That is . . . unless you’ve already learned not to love me.”
“Nope,” she grinned, then pointed to her heart. “It’s still there.”
“But I’m still me . . . I can be difficult,” Morgan said.
“I know.”
“I’ll have to stay out late. And be in danger a lot. And . . .”
“That’s right,” Sam said. “Pour it on . . . talk me out of it.”
Next thing I knew they were lip-locked.
“I called my kids back home,” Edward said to me, a big grin on his face. “They weren’t too happy. In fact, Tracy . . . my daughter . . . said she was going to find my first wife’s wedding dress and shred it, just so you couldn’t wear it.”
“Listen, Edward,” I said. “I couldn’t wear your wife’s dress anyway. We’re . . . we’re not the same size.”
“That’s all right.”
“Look, Edward . . . I might as well tell you . . . we can’t get married.”
“Why not?”
“Well, in the first place . . . I’m wearing falsies. This isn’t really my figure.”
“I’ll buy you a boob job.”
“I . . . carry a gun. I’m packin’!”
“Sounds exciting,” Edward said.
“I have a partner . . . it’s another man. And I’m with him all the time.”
“It’s a big house. He can have his own room.”
“Edward . . . I can never have children!”
“We can adopt . . . from Russia!”
“Oh . . . for heaven’s sake, Eddie!” I said, whipping off my wig. “I’m a guy!”
“Well, nobody’s . . .”
Chapter 14
Damian Spinelli
and the Case of Dante Falconeri, DOA
As a rule, I don’t like walkin’ into my private office and findin’ someone sittin’ in my chair . . . unless it’s a dame with a plate of food, a peek-a-boo nightie, or both. Anything else and I have to pull my heater.
I had been workin’ late, finishin’ up some paperwork on the Elizabeth Spencer case, and I needed a sandwich, so I headed to Rossi’s Round-the-Clock for a gefilte fish with provolone on pumpernickel. I’d been outta the office fifteen minutes, tops. So when I found the outer door open and my desk lamp glowin’ through the doorway, I reached, nice and easy, for my gun: There were a coupla mystery butt-cheeks on my private patent leather.
Bein’ dark outside, I couldn’t see who it was clearly; I could only make out a mop of brownish hair that kinda reminded me of both “Joanie” and “Chachi.” Suddenly, whoever it was spun the chair around so that it faced the window.
“You’re in my office, friend,” I said. “You’re even in my chair . . . and now you wanna go and turn your back on me? Not polite. Not polite at all.”
There was a long pause.
“You ever notice how beautiful this city is, especially at night?”
It only took me a second to recognize the voice; I knew I wasn’t gonna be enjoyin’ a plate of meatballs or baby-doll pj’s anytime soon.
“I don’t see much of the city from this window, Dante. Alls I can see is the launderette, the Easy Vegan cafe, and Branco’s Butcher Shoppe across the street. Sometimes, Mr. Fairman on the second floor over there decides to give himself
a sponge bath, so I get a little treat, but I ain’t sure what you’re talkin‘ about, sport,” I said, keepin’ my finger on the trigger. “What’s with makin’ like a mole and hidin’ in the shadows?”
“There are parts of this city that are gorgeous. And this state . . . hell, the whole country is a paradise, if you choose to see it that way.”
“I suppose,” I said, realizing that something somewhere was way off. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re doin’ here?”
“We take it all for granted, you know what I mean?” he went on. “I never bothered to appreciate anywhere I’ve been. Bensonhurst, Manhattan . . . and now here. Such wonders, right in front of me, and I just looked the other way.”
I felt the urge to belt him. Only this was one mook who would belt back, and hard. One smack from Detective Falconeri and I’d end up across the street in a plate of vegan slaw.
“You gonna start singin’?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said with a little laugh.
“Well, I have some nickels to throw, so turn around and let’s hear it.”
He spun away from the window and brought my desk lamp up to his face.
I nearly dropped my gun. Like I’ve said before, I’ve seen some things; some I wanna remember, some I’ll never forget. Like this. Only thing was, this wasn’t the first time.
Dante Falconeri . . . was blue.
“Still want me to sing?” he asked. “Some Billie Holiday . . . or Ma Rainey? A little Bessie Smith, perhaps?”
I sat down across from him.
“Start talkin’,” I said. “And I’m guessin’ you’d better be quick.”
“I just came from General Hospital. They didn’t want to let me go, but all the tests said the same thing. My vital signs are slowing down and there’s nothing they can do, so I didn’t want to spend my last moments staring at monitors and ceiling tiles. They told me I have only . . . only . . .”
“Twenty-four hours to live,” I said.
“Yeah,” Dante said, after a bit. “How’d you know?”
“You only get twenty-four hours with Dendrobates azureus.”
I flashed back to my days helping the Colombian government in a few hush-hush raids on their local drug thugs.
“Come ON!” I said. “Look, it’s . . . God, it’s four thirty-five in the morning, Spinelli, and I can’t tell if I have heard one word of truth out of you this entire evening. Now you want me to believe you were working to bust up drug cartels?”
“It would be hard to imagine another circumstance where and when I might have encountered the Blue Poison Dart Frog, Steel-tongued Solicitor. It is native only in certain parts of South America. So, yes, I have sojourned to points south and . . .”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jackal-hopper. I just don’t buy it.”
“Then where, pray tell, would I have gotten this?”
Spinelli lifted up his T-shirt just above his “utility belt,” and there on his left side was a small, blue patch of skin surrounding a one-inch scar.
“What’s that?”
“The drug lords enlisted the help of several native Indians. Their arrows usually don’t miss.”
“Go on,” I said . . . once again caught in his web and too tired to fight.
The federales hoped to score a large amount of uncut fairy-dust, but the drug lords had made a deal with a local native tribe and they were waitin’ with arrows tipped with poison from the frogs. Most of my team turned into blueberries right in front of me. I got hit as I made my escape. I crawled to a local village, where a kindly native girl sucked all the poison outta me with a 1978 Hoover, set on reverse, as her grandmother banged on the generator for electricity. It was only thanks to Miranda and Abuela Vicky that I was still kickin’. I never saw any of my men again. But I’d heard they’d all . . .
“Only twenty-four hours,” I repeated to Dante. “And then your heart’s gonna stop. When did you get hit?”
“That’s just it,” Dante said. “I never got hit with anything. I have no idea how this happened. That’s why I came to you, Spinelli.”
“Fine. Here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” I said. “When did you go blue?”
“About three hours ago. Around eleven, I guess.”
“What were you doin’ before that?”
“I don’t kiss and tell,” Dante said. “Let’s just say I was with a lady. Lulu Spencer.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But Lulu left my place around ten forty-five. That’s when the cab arrived . . .”
“You sent your girlfriend home in a cab?” I asked him. “You didn’t drive her home your own self?”
“I was tired.”
“Classy. And before that?”
“Well, before that . . . we . . . we . . .”
“Yeah, I meant before that.”
“We left the restaurant around nine, I guess. And before that . . .”
“Hold up,” I said. “Which restaurant?”
“O’Connor’s.”
“The sushi joint on Lexington?”
“Yeah . . . it’s Lulu’s favorite. We even have two seats reserved just for us at the sushi bar.”
“They knew you two were comin’ in?”
“Every Wednesday night, seven-thirty. Regular as a Swiss watch.”
“And you didn’t do nothin’ out of the ordinary after that, huh? You didn’t bump into anyone? Go into a shop? Buy the lady some Juicy Fruit?”
“Nothing.”
“Then it doesn’t make any sense. From what I know and what I’ve seen of this poison, it takes effect fast . . . like that clean-you-out stuff they give you to drink before they stick a scope up your keister.”
“I know I’m a goner, Jackal,” Dante said. “I’ve made my peace with that. But I have to know who did this to me and why. Lulu will want those answers too. I have one day to find them.”
“Hang on . . . you probably ate around eight o’clock . . . turned blue at eleven. Two AM now . . . so actually you got about eighteen hours.”
“Okay, thanks for that update.”
I walked over to the office closet and pulled out my spare fedora and a pair of winter gloves.
“Put these on and flip up the collar of your coat. Try to act natural. O’Connor’s is closed now, but they’re probably still cleanin’ up. Let’s take a drive.”
“Spinelli, if you don’t answer that phone, I will. Now let me have it!” I said to him when I saw that now-familiar twitch for the fourth or fifth time.
“Whoever possesses this number is no longer calling, per se; I have received a text,” he said, looking down.
“Well, what does it say?”
Even I was curious as to who it was, exactly, that could plague Spinelli to such a degree.
“It only says ‘S, need your help. B.’ There is nothing further.”
“Well, who’s ‘B’? Not Sonny, not Jason,” I mused.
“I am still of the mind that it is a prank and I shall treat it as such. The morning fast approaches and I have little time to finish.”
“Lay on, MacJackal-hopper!”
Now I was just getting silly.
The back door of O’Connor’s was wide open. We brushed past an old man sweepin’ fish parts into a bucket and headed for the manager’s office. Dante stayed behind me as best he could. A few sushi chefs were still there and the conversation was pretty wild from what I could tell as I got closer. I turned on the Japanese translator in my noggin and halted outside the office door to listen. Turned out that an unknown chef had worked the bar that night from the hours of 7:15 to 9:30. No one knew his name or where he came from. Everyone was too busy mindin’ their own beeswax, slicin’ and dicin’ pretty for the people. And it just so happened the new guy worked right in front of the seats holding Dante and Lulu’s derrieres. The problem with the guy wasn’t that he was no good . . . he was too good, and the other chefs were runnin’ scared. Mystery man could do the work of three people all at once . . . and he brought his own fish in a sm
all industrial cooler . . . the kind they reserve for totin’ hearts and kidneys. The manager told the chefs not to worry, that the guy had just been hired for the evening at the request of an investor, and that’s the last anyone would ever see of him. Then I heard a sigh of relief from someone and the unmistakable sound of a sake bottle being unscrewed.
I backed Dante into the parkin’ lot and got him into the Mercedes . . . the one Elizabeth Spencer had let me borrow. The one I had no intention of givin’ back. I had to think.
“What did you find . . . ?”
“Quiet, hear me? I gotta work this out. The chef you had was a substitute. He was only there for one night: tonight. So he had to be the muscle. But you say you never got hit with anything . . . you never felt it. But what if you . . . ?”
I turned to Dante.
“What did you eat tonight?”
“The usual,” he answered. “A crab hand roll, two orders of smelt eggs, and cucumber salad.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, Lulu had me try some sushi that the chef had given her. We didn’t even order it. He said it was made special, just for Lulu. But she was feeling kinda flirty so she fed me one of the two pieces. But . . . oh, jeez, now I remember . . . she didn’t eat the rest of it ’cause I said it tasted strange. But she didn’t want to offend the guy, so she wrapped the second piece in a napkin and I stuck it in my coat pocket.”
“The coat you’re wearin’ . . . now? As you sit your ass in my car? This coat?”
“Yeah!”
I belted him one right in the puss. I couldn’t help myself. And I musta looked pretty heated ’cause Dante didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow.
“Gimme!”
He fished the napkin out and unwrapped it carefully as I turned on the overhead light. It was a piece of yellowtail sittin’ on top of some crumbled rice. Real ordinary.
Unless you counted the blue streak runnin’ down the middle.
“You didn’t think a piece of blue fish was somethin’ strange, huh?” I yelled at him. “Something not to be eaten, maybe? And it comes to you from a guy you’ve never seen before? Huh?”
The Secret Life of Damian Spinelli Page 18
