“This is the Verve album you made,” I said, smiling. “Will you sign it?”
“I already have. I…didn’t use your name, since I know Jack isn’t really it.”
I popped the jewel case open and read what she had signed, in black felt-tip, across a song list of Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer and Frank Loesser: “To my favorite one-morning stand. Yours always, Angie.” Then, pro that she was, she had signed her full signature below: Angela Dell.
“This means a lot,” I said. “I don’t treasure much, but I’ll treasure this.”
“Least I could do.”
“Probably, considering I didn’t tell your husband you’re the one who hired his murder.”
She dropped her coffee cup, but it was mostly empty and didn’t spill, didn’t even break.
We had that section to ourselves, and our voices were low, so I wasn’t making a scene. Her dropping the coffee cup was as close to making a scene as either of us came.
She said, her voice as throaty as if she were singing“ Cry Me A River,” “You can’t be serious, Jack…”
“Dead serious. Jerry G’s father is so out of it, he gives senility a bad name-he couldn’t organize a fart in the bathtub, let alone set up a hit. And as for Jerry G? He was going to the trouble of having Dickie spied on-baby Madonna, remember?”
“That…that girl Chrissy? She was working for Jerry G?”
“Yeah. Oh, he’s dead, by the way. Somebody shot him about…not quite an hour ago. I believe it was a robbery, but it’ll probably wind up officially some kind of tragic accident. Powers-that-be wouldn’t want Haydee’s Port to go to hell.”
“Jerry G is dead?”
“I’m not going to repeat myself. Your husband or whatever the hell he is hired me to deal with Jerry G, and I did. He was also considering having the old boy taken out, till I gave him the latest medical update.”
“Just because that girl was spying on-”
“You don’t bother gathering intel on somebody you’ve already hired someone else to eliminate. Period. Anyway, look at his behavior-Jerry G knew, from Chrissy, that I was working for your husband…but if he knew or suspected I was here to take him out, he wouldn’t simply have had me beaten up-he would have had me killed. Last night he did try to have me killed, after he heard enough from Chrissy to gather I probably did have a contract from Dickie to remove his ass. But Jerry G stupidly sent a couple of bouncers to deal with me, who were in over their heads, or anyway are now.”
She said nothing. A waitress strolled over, filled Angela’s coffee from a container in one hand, and my iced tea from a pitcher in the other. Then we were alone again, us and our freshened liquids.
“What makes you think,” Angela said very quietly, looking at her wedding-ring-free hands, folded neatly near the coffee cup, steam rising from it like ghosts, “that I took out the contract?”
“No other candidate makes sense. You are still the wife, separated or not, and that puts you in a position to inherit everything. You are by birth a Giardelli, and female or not, would be in a good position to, first, utilize your connections to set up a hit, and second, take over the Paddlewheel with Chicago’s blessing. With your show biz background and expertise, all those years in Vegas, who better to run the Paddlewheel and its expanded operation? Especially when riverboat gambling comes in, and everything gets more respectable…Also, as a wife, you’d be more likely to have an accident staged than a simple drive-by hit. Hell, maybe there was double indemnity! Didn’t work for Barbara Stanwyck, but that’s just an old Hollywood movie, where crime doesn’t pay. Anyway, I don’t see Jerry G as the kind of guy who’d go to the trouble of disguising a killing as an automobile accident.”
Her lips trembled a little. Her voice, too: “What if…what if I told you I love my husband. That I still love my husband.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. Your motivation may be greed, or it may be love or anyway the kind of love that curdles into hate when your guy gives you table scraps-say, like your little ongoing piano bar gig-at the same time he’s taking various baby Madonnas upstairs to his Playboy pad, for a banquet. These kinds of things are complicated. Emotions.”
The wide-set green eyes were as unblinking as her husband’s. “Why did you… take care of Jerry G, if you knew he wasn’t responsible for the contract on Richard?”
I shrugged. “Hey, I made it clear to Dickie that I had my doubts about Jerry G. I let him know that my services included trying to determine who took the contract out, and so on. But Dickie was convinced it was Jerry G. He wanted Jerry G gone, and I admit I developed a certain grudge against the guy myself, so I took the job. Did the job. End of story.”
The eyes remained wide but the flesh around them was tightening. “End of…”
“I haven’t told Dickie about you, or anyway my theory about you.”
Now she frowned. The eyes finally narrowed, and fear was in them. “What are you after? What do you want from me?”
I lifted the CD. “This’ll do. This is plenty.”
“…You’re not telling Richard?”
“No. I did the job he hired me to do, and I’m out of here.”
“How do you know I won’t…won’t go to my ‘Chicago connections’ and somehow make this happen some other way?”
“I don’t. Do what you want. Fuck him. Kill him. Fuck him, then kill him. He’s your husband. But I don’t want a contract from either one of you. I’ve had my fill of Haydee’s Port.”
She had a clubbed baby seal expression, and just couldn’t find any words. Hard to sing torch songs over breakfast.
“I’ll enjoy this,” I said, gesturing with the CD, “I really will…I’ll get the check.”
I left her there to contemplate her future, and Dickie bird’s, and went to my room and showered and shaved and changed my clothes and got my things and got the hell out.
I did make one stop on my way-that little mobile home with the rusting Mustang out front. I had a paper bag in my left hand, held in a choke hold, like a trick-or-treater protecting his candy hoard.
I went up the handful of wooden steps and knocked. Nothing. It took prolonged and increasingly insistent knocking to get a response, and I finally got the little kid. He opened the door fearlessly and glared up at me.
“Mommy’s sleeping,” he said, and started to shut the door.
I pushed in, shut the thing behind me and looked down at the tow-headed boy in the Star Wars pajamas. “Listen, kid-I don’t care if your mom is home. Don’t go just opening the door ’cause somebody’s knocking. You don’t know who it might be.”
From the bedroom came her voice: “ Jack? ”
“Go watch TV, kid,” I said.
He gave me a dirty look but followed instructions, and I tiptoed around the wooden train set to where she was receding into the bedroom. She was in a t-shirt and cotton panties, had no makeup on and her natural blonde hair was ponytailed back and she looked fucking great.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said, her voice indicating she was glad she’d been wrong.
“Listen, Candace. I’m on my way out of town. When you left the Lucky, was there any fuss going down?”
“No.”
“What time did you walk home?”
“Around quarter to six.”
So she’d been gone when I dropped by to see Jerry G.
“Well, you need to know something,” I said. “There’s going to be a change of management. Some bad shit went down not long ago, but you don’t know anything about it.”
“I don’t?”
“No.” I handed her the paper bag.
“What’s this?”
“Fifteen grand.”
“What!”
“Yours.”
She held it in a choke hold just like I had. “Are you kidding… Why…?”
“Because you saved my life. That’s just some crumbs that got spilled, and maybe they’ll do you some good.
