in his balls again. He was still getting up in the middle of the night and finding he couldn’t piss.
When Burt finally hung up the phone, he grimaced. “Superseding murder indictment? Based on what?”
“Based on the two DiGregorio homicides.” Burt took another quick hit off his asthma spray. “Or so I’m told. Do you have any idea what witnesses might be talking to them about that?”
“No!” Teddy’s cheeks leaped up toward his eyes. “That’s what I pay you to find out. I’m giving you three hundred fifty dollars an hour.”
The phone purred again and this time the secretary gave the name of a prominent real estate developer. “Francis, I thought I wasn’t going to hear from you today ...” Teddy went back to stewing and reading the two neat piles of documents parked at the edge of Burt’s desk. His eyes stopped on a request for proposal from Lenny Romano’s firm, concerning repairs on the City Hall parking lot. The tender feeling in his groin returned.
He flashed an angry look, but Burt ignored him until he got off the phone.
“I didn’t know about this contract,” Teddy said sternly,as Burt placed the receiver back in its cradle. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
Burt leaned forward and calmly took the document from Teddy. “I thought this had your approval,” he said, looking it over. “Lenny’s company is with you, isn’t it? Are you going to tell me you don’t know what’s going on with your own companies?”
Teddy drummed his fingers on the leather armrests and blushed. “I know what’s going on. I just didn’t know you were handling the contract.”
Burt seemed just ever so slightly annoyed. “Well, the other day I was over at the Doubloon casino, talking to my old college friend, Sam Wolkowitz, who’s in the cable television industry. And he told me your friend Vin’s son Anthony might be involved in managing a fighter named Barton, who might be on TV. But was I asked to be the lawyer representing the contract? No. Because that’s done at your discretion, Ted. And I know everything he does must meet with your approval. So who am I to get upset?”
Teddy felt like he’d been picked up and thrown across the room. Lenny Romano getting the City Hall contract, Vin’s son getting involved with the fights. And no one giving him a percentage. He didn’t want to tell Burt he wasn’t aware of these things, but he wasn’t sure how to keep from screaming either. His insides squeezed together tightly, alerting him that he’d soon have to go pass blood into the toilet again. How could he control his crew if he couldn’t control his own body?
He was having a bad moment. All the details of his life that he’d carefully arranged like items in the composition book were scattering like autumn leaves. And suddenly the leaves were in his abdomen and his head, swirling around, chasing away certainties. If Vin’s son wasn’t giving him a percentage, who was? And if no one was giving him a percentage, what made him a boss? And if he wasn’t a boss, what was he? He felt dizzy and sick, like he was about to vomit dry leaves on Burt’s expensive Oriental rug.
The phone rang once more and Burt picked it up directly. “Oh hi, Bunny. . . No, no. That’s all right.” He giggled. “You will? Oh sto-o-op!” Burt’s voice took a languid upperturn that made Teddy picture him wearing Hawaiian shirts and reading magazines about interior design.
“That’s entirely up to you,” said Burt, his hands performing a delicate arabesque through the air as he watched Teddy fidget from the corner of his eye. “You can get back to me anytime you want.”
He hung up the phone and turned back to Teddy as if he hadn’t missed a beat of their conversation.
“Jesus,” said Teddy in a woozy daze. “I remember when Dixie Dalton was my lawyer, he hardly had any other clients. He’d never take a call when I was in his office.”
“Well, you just can’t afford to have me on retainer like that,” Burt explained with a hand over his heart. “You’re not my only client. Speaking of which, you’re aware, are you not, that you already have an outstanding bill of twenty-seven thousand dollars you owe this office?”
“Madonna!” Teddy almost cried. “I had to put my fuckin’ house up to make the two hundred fifty thousand dollars’ bail. And now I got you squeezing me? Shit, Burt. Have a heart. It’s fuckin’ highway robbery.”
“Coming from you, Ted, that’s a compliment,” said Burt, picking up the phone again.
33
IT WAS TWO DAYS after Elijah had got his clock cleaned at the public workout. I was driving little Anthony to his special hearing class when I heard that rattling sound again and realized the gun I’d used to kill Nicky was still in the glove compartment. I didn’t know why I was taking so long to get rid of it. Maybe I wanted to get caught. We hit a bump in the road and I heard the gun slide toward the front of the compartment. Anthony Jr. looked down like he was thinking about opening it.
Just to distract him, I put on the radio. The first thing we heard after the weather was a sports report saying Meldrick Norman would be getting the title shot against Terrence Mulvehill in October, not Elijah. I almost drove off the road. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was putting my balls on the line—literally, if you believed Danny Klein—and they were running a train over them.
For a few seconds, I don’t know what I said or did. All I know is when I looked up, my little Anthony was cowering in the backseat. He looked like he’d seen one of those scary green monsters from his nightmares take the wheel.
“Hey, Anthony, take it easy.” I reached back to pat his knee. “Daddy was just fooling.”
But he shied away from my touch.
I dropped him off at the hearing school and drove right over to John B.’s house. He was crazed too, running around in his underwear with the cellular phone in his hand. He had no idea why his brother was out and Meldrick was in. Just the other day, the doctors had cleared Elijah to keep fighting, even after what had happened at the workout. For a second, I considered whether John might’ve just pocketed all the money without paying off the right people. But then he mentioned Elijah’s name and got that reverent look in his eyes again, and I knew he’d never do anything to hurt his big brother. His only role in life was to be the loyal younger sibling, forever carrying Elijah’s robe.
So we headed over to the Doubloon to try to find out what went wrong.
We found Frank Diamond the promoter standing in the lobby, talking to a bunch of reporters by the elevators. His shaved head looked newly waxed and buffed and his custom-made gabardine suit fit even more snugly around his barrel chest and broad shoulders.
“What’s up?” John B. asked crisply.
“What’s up?” Diamond turned to share a smile with the reporters like John was the butt of some joke he’d been telling. “Balloons are up. The sky is up. I’m up. If you had my stock portfolio, you would be too.”
They all laughed. John B. gave him a stone face. For the first time I saw a resemblance between him and his brother.
“Say, my man. We got business to discuss.”
“My man. My man.” Frank Diamond did a Stepin Fetchit–y imitation of the way John talked. “Hey, John, it’s thirty years since Martin Luther King, how come you’re still talking like a Pullman train porter? Didn’t you go to high school or anything?”
If I were John, I might have smacked him. But John just kept giving him that slow-burning look.
“We had a deal,” he said to Diamond. “I already worked this out with the boxing federation and the cable TV people.”
The reporters leaned in a little closer. Until a second ago, they’d been just casually bullshitting with Frank. Now they were getting ready to reach for their notebooks.
“Would you gentlemen excuse me a moment?” he asked the press.
They groaned a little and he took us into the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea coffee shop just by the entrance. We sat at a table in the corner.
“We had a deal as of yesterday,” said John B. “So why I gotta hear about Meldrick Norman today on the radio?”
“Yesterday I was lying, today I’m telling the truth,” Frank Diamond explained carefully.
“But we had a handshake.”
