Oh, Bobby. You think you're baptizing yourself in purifying waters, but you're drowning, and there's nothing I can do to save you.
'Why's Daddy talking that way?' Scott asked. She rushed to his side on the sofa and wrapped her arms around him, trying to shield him from harm.
More shouts, each reporter clambering to grab the sword Bobby would dive onto next. He ignored the pack of jackals and continued on his own. 'I've bribed witnesses, used political influence, and violated every one of the Canons of Ethics and a few more that were never written down.'
'What about Martin Kingsley?' someone asked. 'Did he know?'
Christine held her breath.
No Bobby! Please!
'I was the piano player in the whorehouse,' Bobby said, 'but he called the tune. I never did anything without his express approval.'
Christine fumbled for the remote in a crevice of the sofa, found it, and clicked off the TV. She sank to the floor, her legs crossed beneath her. She felt numb, anaesthetized.
How could you do it? How could you do this to Scott and to me?
In that moment, she knew that their lives would never be the same, and the numbness gave way to the lacerating white heat of anger.
PART TWO
'If the Super Bowl is the ultimate, why are they playing it again next year?'
11
Two years later-Friday, January 27-Miami
Were the hell was the Cantor?
Bobby had been calling for three days, but the old bookie had disappeared, and no one could find him. Bobby had checked the Lincoln Road cigar store that was the front for the Cantor's bookmaking operation. Closed. He'd checked the dog tracks, the jai-alai frontons, and the good seats at the Panthers and Heat games. No sign of Saul (the Cantor) Kaplan.
He'd asked some of his own betting customers, Murray Kravetz, the sportscaster, Jose de la Portilla, the chef, and Philippe Jean-Juste, the Santero priest. Nobody had seen the little man with the turkey-wattled neck.
Now, at the wheel of his old Lincoln limo, Bobby was headed toward Calder Race Track with Scott by his side. Maybe the Cantor was at the track. Where the hell else would a bookie be on a cool, clear Friday afternoon when bettors believe the future is as bright as the Florida sun?
'What if Mr. Kaplan didn't lay off the bet and the Mustangs covered the spread?' Scott asked, as they crawled along the Palmetto Expressway behind a rumbling garbage truck.
Bobby gripped the steering wheel with sweaty palms and fought off a queasiness in his stomach. He hated to admit it, but he was a lousy bookie. Scott, a sixth grader, could pick the ponies better than he could and knew more about beating the point spread in football.
'Don't even think about it,' Bobby said. 'Vinnie LaBarca would make sushi out of me.'
How the hell had he gotten into this fix? So much had happened so quickly. Back in Dallas, he'd lost his job, his wife, and his ticket to practice law in a matter of months. He thought he'd had a heart attack, too, but the doctors said the piercing chest pains were stress-related.
Returning home to South Florida, he found there were few job opportunities for a disbarred mouthpiece. He got his chauffeur's license and worked off hours for Goldy Goldberg, an aging bookmaker, who eventually turned over a piece of business. Then, just four days earlier, Bobby had logged the biggest bet of his short, unspectacular career as a reluctant bookmaker.
On Monday morning, when Las Vegas made Dallas a seven-point favorite over Green Bay in Sunday's NFC Championship game, a mobster named Vinnie LaBarca had stopped at Bobby's sidewalk table at the News Cafe. He was in his mid-forties, short and stocky, with a square head that looked like a cinder block on his sloping shoulders. He wore a gray Armani suit over a black t-shirt and looked disdainfully at Bobby's plate of yogurt and fruit.
'Can you handle six hundred large?' LaBarca asked.
Bobby wasn't sure he'd heard correctly. LaBarca usually bet a couple thousand per game, but nothing like this.
'Six hundred thousand dollars?' Bobby whispered. It was a sum that demanded the respect of a hushed voice.
'Yeah. I'll take the Mustangs minus seven. Can you handle it?'
I can't even handle a new transmission for the Lincoln. I can't handle the rent or my son's tuition.
Bobby's pulse quickened with equal measures of excitement and fear, as if he were walking a tightrope over a fiery pit. This was his chance to get out of debt and to fight for his son. How could he insist Scott stay with him in Miami half the year if he couldn't even afford the boy's schooling? He was being eaten alive in the court proceedings, but this could change everything. If he could get the tuition paid, he could show the judge some stability.
'I got it covered,' Bobby shrugged, trying to sound street smart. 'Six hundred large on Dallas minus seven over Green Bay.'
LaBarca studied him with a gaze the wolf reserves for the sheep. 'I've only been stiffed once by a bookie.'
'Yeah?'
'I sliced him up, used the pieces as chum off the stern of my Hatteras.'
'I get it, Vinnie. I've got no intention of becoming shark bait.'
Later, when LaBarca had left, Bobby called the Cantor to lay off the bet. There was no chance of attracting anywhere near enough money on Green Bay to balance his own books. The ideal situation, Bobby had learned quickly, was to book an equal amount of action on both sides. With a 'splitter,' the bookie was assured a profit because he charged ten per cent vigorish on the bets his customers lost, but paid only the amount of the bet itself when the customer won. So a customer risks a hundred ten dollars to win a hundred, while the bookie risks a hundred to win a hundred-ten. The cautious bookie isn't betting at all. He's simply matching opposing bettors and taking what amounts to a broker's commission. By balancing his books, he can never lose. When Bobby booked a few thousand dollars on each game, it wasn't difficult to lay off a little here, a little there, and get splitters on most of the games, eliminating risk, earning his vig. But six hundred thousand dollars! No way.
When they had met earlier in the week, the Cantor had agreed to take it all, maybe spread around pieces to other bookies in Tampa and New Orleans.
'What do you want from it?' the Cantor had asked, eyeing Bobby suspiciously. He was nearly eighty, a small man with parched white skin who always dressed in a seersucker suit and polka dot bow-tie.
'Eighty per cent of the vig, forty-two thousand dollars.'
'You gonif! You got nothing at risk.'
