I tried not to get shitty, I really did. But a wave of hate for this woman, who had so easily had what I wanted, washed over me.
‘Tess.’ Harry’s voice had a warning tone in it. He knew my moods pretty well. ‘It meant nothing.’
‘Not helping,’ I said in a sing-song voice.
‘You,’ he paused to emphasise the word, ‘mean everything to me. I’ve given up my family for you.’
He had me there and he knew it. I felt guilty about that.
‘Fine. It meant nothing.’ I crossed my arms across my chest. ‘But how do you know Billy is your child? Couldn’t he be Dick’s?’
‘I asked him. He said he and Cindy never had sex.’
I paused while I thought about that. ‘Do you see him much?’
‘Who Dick? Well he is one of Dad’s right-hand men.
I punched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Billy, not Dick.’
‘Oh.’ His smile told me he had known what I was talking about the whole time. ‘Well Cindy moved to her sister’s after she had him. So I don’t get to see him much. But he’s a good kid. Real smart too.’ It was impossible to stay mad when he was looking so proud.
‘Do you have any photos?’
He pulled his wallet out, removed a photo from its depths and handed it to me. It showed a small boy with dark blonde hair and deep brown eyes. He had a baseball mitt on one hand and the ball in the other.
‘He’s a cutey,’ I said.
Harry smiled in relief as I handed him back the photo. ‘You’re the best.’
‘You better still be saying that after tomorrow night,’ I said.
He laughed and lay back down, drawing me to him. ‘Well I guess we could practice a little,’ he said. ‘Just to make sure.’
I gave myself up to the glory of his mouth and his hands as we had a dress rehearsal for the wedding night.
***
To say our wedding was small was an understatement. Liss and Thor were our only witnesses. I was sad that Mom wasn’t there, but Liss had been more of a mother to me over the last year than Rose ever had been.
Harry said he didn’t care that his family was absent, that I was everything he needed. I think that was mostly true, but what person wouldn’t have a moment of reflection, a second of inner remorse that their family was missing at the most important event of their life.
We had our reception at the Chinese restaurant Harry took me to for our first date. The duck was as good as the first time we had gone there, but I had a different type of appetite on my mind.
Liss and Thor had given us a night at ‘The Bellagio Casino’ for our wedding present, and even though I was about to get what I had been after for the last few months, I was suddenly nervous.
I mean, it’s one thing to know the theory of what was about to happen, it was another thing to think about it in the cold light of day when passion was absent and only nerves ruled my head.
We didn’t speak during the elevator ride. Nor in the walk down the hall. Harry opened the door with one arm and swept me up against him with the other, then he carried me into the room.
The view was amazing, the room was sumptuous, the bed was enormous. That didn’t help with the tap-dancing concert going on in my stomach. I placed my over-night bag on the table and slipped my shoes off. Then, even though I was about to get what I had been wanting for the past few months, I walked over to the window.
Doubt had set up residence in my frontal lobe. What if I wasn’t any good? What if I was a lousy lay?
The sun was setting behind the Las Vegas night skyline. The flickering lights had a surreal quality. I concentrated on that as I took some deep breaths.
Harry joined me at the window and took my hand in his.
‘Look at that?’ He pointed at a couple of bulldozers sitting next to a huge hole near the front of the casino. I knew he was trying to distract me.
‘What’s going on?
‘They started landscaping without a planning permit.’
‘You need a permit to build a garden?’
‘It’s going to be an ornate garden with fountains. Lots of big holes to dig for mature plants. Now they need to wait for the permit to come through. It’s going to take months.’
I shifted my gaze from the huge hole in the ground back to the setting sun. ‘It’s beautiful.’ My face was so close to the window a little circle of fog formed.
‘Not as beautiful as you.’ He pulled me against him and wrapped his arms around me.
I leant back into him and sighed. He felt so big and strong. ‘My husband.’ I turned to him as I ran my tongue over those words.
‘My wife.’
I liked the sound of those words even better.
He bent his head and kissed me and all my nerves flew out the window. Suddenly there were no pretty lights. There was just Harry. I wrapped my arms around him, pulling him hard against me. And then, a delicious amount of time later, I finally got my way.
***
We’d been blissfully married for a month when Jolly Jim next came to the club. There was nothing jolly about him at all when he sat in the booth nearest the stage. His face had a grey pallor and even though the day was not that hot he had a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
Lou the Brain, Mickey and Riley followed in a close pack and sat opposite him. If Jim looked stressed, Lou looked positively nauseous. Mickey and Riley looked as if they couldn’t remember their own names, but there was nothing new there.
Something bad had gone down.
Jim pivoted in his seat and looked at Harry and me. He crooked a finger and Harry slid off the bar stool.
‘Better go see what he wants.’
I bit my tongue to stop any smart remarks escaping. I didn’t like the fact that Jim only had to crook a finger to get Harry to jump. That was my job.
Harry came back a minute later and said, ‘He wants to meet you.’
‘Me?’ My voice came out as a squeak.
Harry squeezed my hand. ‘He won’t bite. And besides, he is my father.’
He had a point. It was the least I could do for him. I took a deep breath and re-arranged my dress and then followed Harry back to Jim.
Jolly Jim looked up at me and then patted his knee. ‘Have a seat.’
‘No thank you.’
He patted his knee again. ‘Sit.’ His voice was gruff and held the tone of a man used to getting his own way.
‘I only sit on my husband’s knee.’ I glanced sideways at Harry. He had a small smile on his face.
Jim let out a laugh. It held the maniacal edge of a mad man.
‘Looks like you got yourself a feisty one,’ he said to Harry. ‘That’s good. She’ll keep you on your toes.’
‘She certainly does that,’ Harry murmured.
‘Now about your present.’
‘We don’t need a present,’ I said. I didn’t want anything from him.
‘You tellin’ me I can’t give my own son a wedding gift?’ His glare forced me back a step.
‘We already have everything we need.’ I stopped short of saying each other.
‘Nonsense.’ His hand made a crack as it connected with the table top and I hopped back another step. ‘All ya got is each other.’
I raised my chin in the air and looked down at him. ‘I must thank you for that.’
He looked baffled.
‘Harry is a wonderful husband. And that must have come from somewhere. I’m guessing it’s the fine example you have set him over the years.’ Nobody could say I couldn’t bullshit with the best of them. It was a well-known fact that Jolly Jim had been anything but faithful to Harry’s deceased mother, Eva.
‘Well now,’ Jim puffed out his chest, ‘you still need a proper present. I’m having something delivered.’ He turned away from me to Harry. ‘Sit down, there’s somethin’ ya need to hear.’
Realising a dismissal when I heard one, I wandered back to my bar stool. Harry was still sitting in the booth when I climbed onto the stage, but now his face wa
s as grave as theirs.
At the end of my last song they all stood up and shuffled out of the booth. Harry held his arm out to me. It trembled slightly as it wrapped around my waist.
‘See ya Tess,’ Mickey said. I nodded my head at him and then he and Riley headed for the front door.
Lou bobbed his head at me before he left, but I pretended I didn’t see. Jim held his arms out and moved in for a hug. With a table and chairs behind me there was nowhere to go. He wrapped me in his arms and squeezed hard enough that my ribs had a real good think about breaking. Then he whispered in my ear, ‘You can have him for now, but family always comes home to roost.’
‘I am his family now,’ I whispered back. I pasted my biggest, brightest smile on as I pushed back from him, but it was so brittle I felt my face might shatter.
‘Real little hell cat,’ Jolly Jim said. There was something akin to approval in his voice.
‘What was that about?’ Harry led me back to the bar.
‘That’s not important,’ I said. ‘What you were talking about obviously was.’
He sighed and slumped onto his bar stool. ‘Do you remember me telling you about Dick?’
‘The guy that broke Cindy’s heart?’
He nodded. ‘They found him and Silent Sal at the warehouse.’
‘Dead?’
Even though I’d been the one to say it, when he nodded his head again I felt dread tap me on the shoulder and take a seat on my lap.
‘How?’ I was torn between knowing and not knowing.
‘Shot in the head. Execution style.’
Yep. It was just like when you pass a bad car accident, wanting to see what had happened, then unable to wipe the grisly snapshot from your mind. I didn’t even know what they looked like but my mind did a pretty good job of sketching them in.
‘Giuseppe Greco.’ The name came out in a hoarse whisper. ‘He’s here then?’
‘No.’ Harry ran one hand through his hair. ‘He wouldn’t have killed them like that.’
‘What would he have done?’ Why did these questions keep coming out of my mouth?
‘He would have tortured them.’ My face must have showed the turmoil my stomach was feeling. ‘Hey,’ he said, dragging me onto his knee. ‘I won’t let anything happen to you.’
‘It’s not me I’m worried about.’
We were silent for a moment, listening to Helene sing. ‘So who did it?’ As much as I told myself I didn’t want to talk about it, I couldn’t seem to help myself.
‘They don’t know. But Dad had Dick and Silent Sal looking into the missing money.’
‘So either the killer was the one who took the money, or…’
‘Or someone taking advantage of the current turmoil to try and weaken Dad’s position.’
‘I thought your Dad was the boss.’
He pulled a face. ‘It’s a little more complicated than that.’
‘How?’ I seemed to be saying that a lot that night.
‘Dad represents the Las Vegas Mafia on the Mafia Commission.’
‘You guys have a commission?’
‘The Mafiosi have a commission, yes.’ He said Mafiosi in such a way as to delineate himself from them.
A smug smile crept onto my face. Me one, Jolly Jim none.
‘There are quite a few bosses in Vegas. Most of them own casinos. At the moment they all answer to Dad.’ He paused and scratched his chin. ‘It wasn’t always that way. But about ten years ago the FBI had a huge crackdown in Vegas. It was either work together or die. Now there are contractual agreements between the owners of all the casinos. They all own a stake in each other’s properties. It makes it very difficult to determine who is behind what.’
‘Which one does your Dad own?’ I had a sneaking suspicion things might go better for me if I didn’t know all this, but hey, in for a penny, in for a pound.
‘The Pink Flamingo.’
I let out a whistle. ‘That’s a nice hotel.’
‘It’s the biggest.’
‘That’s why he’s the boss?’
Harry nodded and reached over to the bar to pick up the beer Thor had just placed in front of him. Thor and Liss were too busy to listen to our conversation but I was planning on filling them in later. It wasn’t fair to them to have us living there without knowing the potential threat. If they weren’t happy about it, we would just have to move out.
‘So you think someone might be trying to climb the Mafiosi ladder?’
‘They’re all pretty pissed. Dad’s in charge of the money, but it comes from all of them.’
It was a grim thought. A city full of angry Mob bosses hungry for your blood. I didn’t think I’d have the guts to come out in public if I were Jim. But that’s why I was just a saloon singer and he was the Mob boss.
4
You Don’t Own Me
The present from Jolly Jim turned up the next day while Harry and I were enjoying a leisurely brunch. He was on a break from college and Thor and Liss had employed him as the club’s handyman. It had turned out the only thing that had needed the attention of a handyman that morning had been me.
Liss brought the extravagantly wrapped box into the kitchen and placed it on the table.
‘This just came for you two.’ She plucked a card from the outside of the box and handed it to me.
‘Harry and Tess’ had been written so hard onto the envelope that at one point, the tip of the pen had pierced the paper. I handed it to Harry. Nobody I knew was that uptight.
He used his knife to slit the end of the envelope and then pulled out the card. ‘It’s from Dad.’ He placed the card back onto the table and reached out for the gift.
‘What do you think it is?’ My voice came out a few notes higher than normal.
Oh please don’t let it be a horse’s head.
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
I was betting he wasn’t guessing horse’s head.
He finished removing the paper and opened the box. I let out a sigh of relief when he didn’t utter an oath and jump back from the contents.
So not a horse’s head.
‘It’s a punch set.’
‘Oh lovely.’ Liss reached into the box and pulled out the bowl. Glasses, wrapped in tissue paper, nestled in its depth. ‘We don’t have a punch bowl. We’ll be able to use this for your party.’
‘Our party?’ I didn’t know anything about a party.
She pulled a face and looked at Harry. I glanced between the two of them. It was evident by the guilty look on both their faces that a conversation I should have been a part of had happened without me.
‘Well,’ Liss said, ‘you didn’t really have a proper reception, and nobody from Harry’s side was at the wedding….’
I knew she thought she was doing us a favour so I resisted the urge to shout, ‘That’s because we didn’t want them there.’ And then a thought occurred to me. Harry had known about this as well, which meant perhaps I had been the only one who hadn’t wanted them there. What sort of control freak did that make me?
I sighed, picked up the punch bowl and smiled at Harry. ‘It’s beautiful.’
His shoulders relaxed slightly but the look on his face was still tense.
I suspected if I tried to keep him away from his Dad I would only end up driving a wedge between us. ‘So when is our party?’
‘Next Saturday. We were going to tell you. We just hadn’t worked out how.’ His voice trailed off as if realising how bad that sounded.
Geez, anyone would think I had two heads and scales. ‘It’s okay.’ I reached out a hand and took his. I hadn’t been that unreasonable, had I?
Of course I should have guessed that Jolly Jim had only just begun his win-back-my-son campaign.
The phone rang about five minutes later. Thor put down the paper and reached behind him to pick up the receiver. ‘Yellow,’ he said in his deep baritone. ‘Yup. He’s right here. I’ll put him on.’
He picked up the phone and handed it and the receiver
across the table to Harry.
I met Liss’s eyes and she grimaced. We both knew who it was.
‘Yep thanks Dad, we just finished opening it… Yes, we love it… Tess said it was beautiful… We’re going to use it at the party next Saturday… No, we’ve already planned it… Huh, that many… No, you’re right, they won’t all fit here… Well in that case I guess that would be a better plan… I’m sure it’s not too late to cancel the catering… No need to reimburse us… Okay, thanks again… See you then.’
He hung up the receiver and handed the phone back to Thor. I knew he was using the action as a diversion tactic, and try as hard as I might, I couldn’t stop my foot from tapping on the floor.
‘Change of plans?’ Liss said in the same tone of voice she might have used to ask him if he wanted milk in his coffee.
‘Turns out Dad invited some of his friends to the party.’ He smiled grimly. ‘They won’t all fit here.’
‘That’s a shame,’ she said in the same calm voice.
‘How many?’ I was proud of how level my voice sounded.
‘Oh a hundred, or two.’
‘Two hundred?’ Goodbye level voice, hello helium-balloon sucking woman.
‘Maybe a few more.’
I collapsed back into my seat. Just how many Mafiosi were there in Vegas? It occurred to me, not for the first time, how naïve I was, especially considering I had grown up in a house frequented by a mobster.
‘You know what this means?’ Liss had an excited look in her eyes.
‘Yes.’ Visions of hordes of men, ready to execute my father-in-law danced in the front of my mind. We were all going to die.
‘We need to go dress shopping.’
‘Just what I was thinking,’ I lied.
***
The next week was surreal. I mean, I’d gone from wanting nothing to do with the Mafia, to picking which flowers I wanted at my Mob-hosted party. The phone rang hard and fast with queries varying from which canapés I would prefer, to what colour did I want the chair covers to be. It soon became clear that Jim didn’t just want Harry back in the fold. He wanted me there as well.
Tess's Tale (The Chanel Series Book 3) Page 5