panther stalking her prey.
“What’re you talking about?”
“I know about you and that guy Nicky they found under the Boardwalk.”
I felt pressure building up behind my eyes as my skin turned cold. “I told you I wasn’t responsible for that.”
“I heard.” She stood five feet in front of me and looked right through my eyes down into the pit of my stomach. “You said it was your family. I’m sure that would be enough to interest the police, or the F.B.I., or whoever’s investigating that case.”
“I wouldn’t talk about that if I was you.” I clicked my heel on the concrete floor. “Something could happen.”
“Fuck you,” she said. “Don’t pull that with me. Yourfather already did it. And he’s way better at it than you are.”
She picked up her panties and began to put them on. Here I’d been worried she’d talk and ruin the deal I had with Frank Diamond. And in the meantime, she was thinking about putting me in prison for life on this homicide. I began to have what I think is called an olfactory hallucination—when you smell something that isn’t there. Except it wasn’t Nick under the Boardwalk that I smelled. It was that terrible cat odor in my house.
“Is this any way for two people who care about each other to talk?” I asked.
“It’s the way people who don’t trust each other talk.” She slowly started to pull on her bra. Somehow she didn’t seem as threatening with her clothes on.
“Come on. Let’s go for a ride. We can get a drink somewhere.”
“Forget about it, I brought my own car.” She fished her keys out of her handbag and rattled them at me. “From now on, you and I are not friends and we’re not lovers. We’re just business partners. And the only word you have to remember is ‘half.’ As in ‘half the revenue.’”
She put on the rest of her clothes without talking or even looking my way. I was still shivering from the water she’d thrown on me. I knew I should just go and cut my losses, but there was one question that’d been bothering me the whole time we were talking.
“That thing you said before?” I asked her. “About how Terrence was a better lay than me? You said that just to hurt me, right? You didn’t mean it, did you?”
“Oh yes I did.”
45
I WOKE UP AT about ten one morning the week beforethe fight to the sound of my kids playing on the jungle gym I’d built them in the backyard. It was the nicest thing I’d heard in months.
I went out onto the back porch to have a look at them. Carla was lying in a deck chair beside the jungle gym, with her belly swollen and a wet towel over her face, not wanting to deal with the world. And I was sorry all over again that I’d abandoned them in the name of getting ahead. All I ever should have wanted was an ordinary life.
But before I could get the screen door open to go out and play with my kids, a voice from the kitchen stopped me.
“Where do you think you’re going, you little cocksucker?”
I turned and saw Teddy sitting at my kitchen table. I must have walked right by him in my daze. He looked terrible, like he’d dropped about twenty pounds in two weeks. His skin had a pale cast and for some reason, his eyes reminded me of an old lady’s. But the most unusual thing about him that morning was that he wasn’t with my father.
“Siddown a minute, will you?”
I sat. “How’s it going, Ted? I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“All right, enough of that bullshit,” he said, cutting through the social amenities. “I want to have a serious talk with you. Because of the great affection between your father and me, I sometimes feel I can’t speak my mind in front of him. Particularly when it comes to you.”
“Speak your mind.”
I was wearing just a pair of white boxer shorts and I suddenly sensed he was staring at my legs. I crossed them and moved my chair away from the table a little.
“As you must know, our
“I know what you mean.” Ever since I’d killed Nicky, I’d felt as if there was a cage around my heart.
“Anyway.” He coughed and frowned. “When they put pressure on an organization like ours, people sometimes don’t do the right thing, and they turn on each other. So I have three things I want to tell you.”
“Shoot,” I said. And immediately realized that was exactly the wrong word to use.
“Number one,” he said, raising an index finger that was as fat as a thumb. “If I ever find out you or anybody else is talking to the feds or the local bulls, I will sever your motherfucking head. Is that clear to you?”
“Yes sir.”
“Number two.” I’d never seen Teddy go so long without eating. “If I ever find out you’ve been running around on my beloved niece with another woman, I will sever your fucking head.”
“Okay. That’s fine.”
“And number three.” He stopped talking for a second and his lips quivered. I wondered how sick he was. “Number three is this,” he said. “I heard a rumor that you were managing a fighter and getting a big casino contract. But at the hospital the other day, your father told me that wasn’t true.”
“Yeah, right, it’s not true,” I lied with a poker face.
“Well, I just wanted to come over here and emphasize it for myself. That if I ever learn you been making money off another business, like a trucking concern or boxing promotion, and not paying back the money you owe me, I will sever your motherfucking head. Now what do you think of that?”
“It sounds like you’re kind of anxious to sever my head, Teddy.”
He didn’t crack a smile. “You know, your real father,Mike, he liked to make a joke outa everything too. And look what happened to him.”
His words put a chill inside my heart, and I knew for the first time with absolute certainty that Teddy was the one who’d killed my real father. I just stared at him for a long time, wondering if I could kill him without destroying all the legitimate things I’d tried to do in my life.
“Remember,” he said, starting to stand up. “You got ninety more days to pay me the money you owe me. Or else you come work for me full-time.”
“I remember.”
“Give my love to Carla and the kids. I never get to see enough of them these days.”
46
P.F. WAITED UNTIL TEDDY was about to sit down on thecrate outside the grocery store on Florida Avenue before he honked the horn and called him over.
“What do you want?” Teddy lumbered over to the driver’s side window. “I thought I said I had nothing to say to you.”
“People who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” P.F. sang.
“Yeah, you’re starting to look like Barbra Streisand too.”
Actually, it was Teddy who was starting to look like a woman. An old woman, to be precise. With round feminine haunches and a big butt replacing the sandbag he used to have on his stomach. P.F. wondered if he’d been
