quickly, tucked the gun back in his waistband, and left the place, like a storm cloud heading out to sea.
“Aw, look what he did here!” Teddy tried to stand in his seat but the table got in the way.
Vin gave him a hard look. “Why’d you have to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Tell him my Anthony whacked his father.”
“Well he did, didn’t he?”
Vin scratched his head. “Yeah, but you didn’t have to tell him that.”
“Why not?” Teddy shivered. “If Anthony pulled the trigger on his old man, why shouldn’t he have to deal with the consequences?”
“Because he’s not expecting to get that kinda call from Nicky. We’re leavin’ him out there by himself.”
Teddy gingerly moved out of the booth. “Hey, Vin, it’s his problem now. He should take care of Nicky the way he took care of his father. If he got rid of the tree he can get rid of the branch.”
Vin shook his head and examined the greasy skim on the tabletop. “It’s not right. We’re leaving him exposed.”
Teddy wasn’t listening. He was too busy plucking at the dampened front of his pants. “Aw, I can’t believe this,” he said, looking for something he could use to wipe himself. “Total lack of respect. It demeans all of us.”
Vin threw a couple of balled-up napkins at him. “Clean it up yourself.”
16
AS WE PULLED OUT of Rafferty’s parking lot, the redI-Roc behind me flashed its high-beams in my rearview mirror. I should’ve recognized it as a danger signal.
“How’s the fight?” Rosemary asked as she settled in on the passenger side and fixed her seat belt.
“Which one? My whole life’s a fight.”
“You know.” She crossed her legs under the glove compartment. “The one you were telling me about.”
“Oh.”
It’d been so long since Carla was interested in what I was doing that the question caught me off guard.
I ignored the way the I-Roc followed us out of the parking lot. “I was just over at the Doubloon the other day, talking to some people.”
I mentioned the name of Sam Wolkowitz’s company and Rosemary nodded as if she was impressed. After the last fight I’d had with Carla, it was a relief not having to explain everything.
“You know I was making fun of you the other night,” she said. “But then I thought—when was the last time you ran into anybody with any goals around here? My ex-husband Bingo, he was a degenerate gambler—actually he was just a degenerate, he’d show up at the party already wearing the lampshade. Anyway, he’d gamble on anything. He would bet on the sun coming up in the west if he could get the right odds. He never understood how you have to work toward something.”
Listening to her was like hearing someone speak my language for the first time. I turned the corner onto Atlantic Avenue and a casino billboard practically screamed from ontop of one of the buildings: DREAMS COME TRUE AT OUR SLOTS. The I-Roc was still on our tail.
“You mind if I turn on the radio?” Rosemary asked.
I flipped on an oldies station for her. I was in the mood for one of those old doo-wop songs from the fifties, with the singer’s voice rising out of his throat and climbing to the top of the night to light my way. Instead, I got a forlorn lady with an orchestra. I started to change the station.
“Leave that,” said Rosemary. “It’s Billie Holiday.”
I’d heard the name before, but I’d never really paid attention. Billie Holiday didn’t sound happy. We pulled up at a red light. All she had left was a bare ruined choir of a voice that made me think of empty bottles and old roses. Every time she’d reach for a high note, her voice would start to crack and she’d move away from it the way a girl would move down the bar from a guy who’d broken her heart too often.
Still you could tell she’d once been a great singer, same as you could tell Atlantic City was once a great town. There were little hints everywhere if you knew where to look. Over on the corner of Missouri Avenue, a sign said this was where the 500 Club used to be. Where Dean Martin met Jerry Lewis, where Frank Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board himself, would drop by unannounced and riff the night away with Sammy Davis Jr. or the Pete Miller Orchestra or whoever else was around. Now there was just a parking lot. Back a few blocks, there were vacant, rubble-strewn lots where grand old hotels like the Traymore and the Shellburn once stood.
Up closer to Texas Avenue, where I lived, Jack Cashard’s Steakhouse was a cinder with a name on it, and the dance hall next door hadn’t survived the fire either. In the old days, when all the celebrities and businesspeople came down here, a kid could make forty, fifty dollars a night just parking Cadillacs and Lincoln Town Cars around back. Now all you had was Pick-a-Flick video across the street and dozens of pawn shops with neon WE BUY GOLD signs out front.
“You’ve changed,” Billie Holiday sang in that broken bell of a voice she had. “That sparkle in your eyes is gone/Your smile is just a careless yawn/You’re breaking my heart/You’ve changed.”
“You know what I think sometimes?” I said as the traffic light turned green and the blue-and-red neon from the Doubloon down the block flashed over my windshield. “I think the casinos might have been the worst thing that ever happened to Atlantic City.”
“How’s that?” Rosemary asked. “The place was a dump for years before they came in.”
“I know, and then they came in and everyone thought the streets would be paved with gold. But look at this place. Me and my family could never even get a contract to replace the toilet paper dispensers at the casinos.”
Rosemary closed one eye and put a bobby pin in her hair. “You know, Anthony, I don’t understand something. You’ve got all these balls in the air. First you say you don’t have anything to do with the people who run the club. Then you say something about getting in the fight game. Now you’re telling me you couldn’t get a contract from the casinos.” She touched my wrist and in a half-ironic voice she asked: “Are you trying to tell me you’re in the Mafia or something?”
In the rearview mirror, I saw the silhouette in the I-Roc combing his hair. “Why do you say a thing like that?”
Billie Holiday was still singing on the radio: “You’re not the angel I once knew/No need to tell me that we’re through/It’s over now/You’ve changed.”
I looked up and saw there was a half-moon hanging over Bally’s Grand. It was what I used to call a casino moon, because the yellow casino sign was so bright, the moon looked cheap and unimpressive by comparison. That was Atlantic City. You couldn’t trust anything about it.
“There’s no such thing,” I said.
“What?”
“No such thing as the Mafia.” That was what my father taught me to say whenever outsiders asked you about the Family.
“Yeah? So what do you and your father do for a living?”
“We’re businessmen trying to get a little something for ourselves. Just like these people running the casinos.”
She laughed as we went by the Italian Dimension clothing store and neared Our Lady Star of the Sea, the old yellow church my mother dragged me to once before she died. I was feeling all these emotions I didn’t know what to do with, so I just kept them inside.
There were stragglers out on the sidewalk in front of the 7-Eleven. Hookers and low-level drug dealers mixing it up in the glare of the red-and-white sign. They weren’t human really. They were more like shadows of what other people wanted at midnight. You put a light on them and they’d disappear.
“Look at these women, will you?” I tried to change the subject. “Any one of them would give you a blow job for ten dollars.”
“Twenty-five dollars.” Rosemary told me with absolute assurance.
I started to ask how she knew, but then the street light changed and I had to hit the brake.
