Something Borrowed, Something Black

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Now you look like a little girl,” he said. “I feel like a pedophile.”

  She was suddenly angry. “I’m not your little girl. I’m your wife.”

  “That’s what the man said.” He looked at her with no expression. There was nothing in his eyes now, not even distance. He was leaning down to kiss her again when she sat up, snatched hold of his collar in both hands, pulled his face against hers, and bit his lower lip hard. She tasted salt and iron on her tongue.

  He broke contact, put a hand to his lips, and looked at the blood on his fingers. “Think you can hold off eating me alive till I get back?”

  She was still holding his shirt. She pulled herself close and whispered in his ear. He actually colored.

  She held her wicked grin until he’d let himself out. Then she cried. After ten minutes she decided to stop behaving like a child bride and called room service.

  FIVE

  Johns Davis felt terrific.

  He knew he should be worried, and that he would be when the euphoria of survival wore off and he began to dwell on the fact that an attempt had been made on his life—an attempt on his life—and would probably be followed by another. At the same time he knew that whoever had given the order would hold off until the police began to lose interest. He was safer now than he’d ever been or would ever be again. But that wasn’t the reason he felt so good.

  Once, working to close a deal on fictional software-company stock over dinner in Morton’s steak house in Chicago, he’d gotten a piece of medium-rare Black Angus rib-eye caught in his windpipe. At first it was annoying, and he hoped to get it loose without embarrassing himself. One second later, he hoped he wouldn’t die. His companion across the table had just begun to notice his predicament when Davis managed to cough, projecting the bit of gristle into the napkin he was holding against his mouth. He took in a sweet lungful of air in a wheeze, and after apologizing for the disruption resumed his meal a minute or two later. From that point on he took smaller bites and chewed each thoroughly before swallowing. Although he failed to make the sale—not because of the incident, but because the potential buyer’s assets were tied up elsewhere—Davis had spent the rest of the day in wonderous consideration of the details that surrounded him and a new appreciation for pleasures he’d taken for granted, such as the musty-iodine taste of Glenlivet, the smell of freshly laundered sheets, the damp on his skin from the wind off the lake when he met someone at Soldiers Field. Being alive was the single greatest invention since the Swiss bank.

  In time, he’d grown accustomed to not having choked to death in Morton’s, and apart from taking more care with his knife and fork and refusing to speak with his mouth full, he might never have gone through the experience. Today was the first time he’d thought about it in years. Leaving police headquarters, enjoying the air-conditioned chill inside the cab after the heat on the sidewalk, he wondered if there might be a way to market such joie de vivre without actually having to strangle the customer.

  He’d spent four hours with the police, much of it sitting alone in a stiff chair in Lieutenant Christie Childs’s office, whose cool colors and shiny surfaces had given him the disorienting sensation of having been suddenly transported back East, and at the square table in the interrogation room (interview room, they called it these days), waiting to give his statement. Cops were the same all over, leaving you alone for long uncertain periods to wonder what they knew and how much they were finding out while your imagination simmered. He knew the protocol. He’d been brought in for questioning downstairs when the mayor was running for reelection on an anti-vice platform, and he’d done a ninety-day bit in the Cook County Jail when he mixed up his appointments and pitched a ten percent interest in the Trans-America Football League to a storm-door manufacturer who turned out to have taken a seven-figure loss when the World League went belly-up eight years earlier. That was stupid, but not half as stupid as cops thinking the same tired strategy that worked on teenage burglars was just as effective with seasoned pros. He didn’t have to be able to see through the two-way mirror to know they were just sitting around taking telephone calls and discussing Shania Twain’s ass. Letting him get ripe.

  He hoped they’d withhold the garrote angle from the press. In his business, word of mouth was his friend, publicity and notoriety were not. His coded Rolodex was filled with the telephone numbers of oil executives and corporate attorneys who enjoyed impressing acquaintances with the confidence that they had their very own bookie, reveling in this brush with the underworld, but let them switch on A.M. San Antonio and learn that the mob had indeed targeted him as one of its own and they would change those numbers in such volume Southwestern Bell would have to introduce yet another area code to handle the demand. It was an irony of his sphere of illegal endeavor that he had to remain as respectable as a deacon or a presidential candidate.

  Bohdan Schevchenko.

  That was the name on the sheet Lieutenant Childs had read aloud from when that cop Sill, the cowboy cocksucker, had finished taking Davis’s statement. Davis had wanted to say Gesundheit, but he knew it was the wrong audience. Schevchenko was the character with the broken neck in the back of the Jag, immigrant from the Ukraine when the Iron Curtain rusted through, with suspected ties to the Russian Mafia, until yesterday under INS investigation for possible deportment. He had aliases, of course: Billy Bod, B.S., Shemp, Taras Bulba—Sean O’Reilly, which made even Sill snort. He’d been arrested four times in Detroit: once for assault with intent to commit great bodily harm less than murder, thing involving some poor fucker with sixteen shattered ribs and a pelvis broken in eleven places (Schevchenko was still wearing his steel-toed boots when they brought him in); three for homicide. Walked when witnesses and the bag-of-bones failed to pick him out of the lineup. Owned three convenience stores, what they called party stores back there, in Detroit and suburbs. This ten years after he washed ashore with a couple of hundred rubles in his pocket, good for two meals at McDonald’s if he didn’t order the big shake. Land of opportunity.

  Riding down St. Mary’s, watching tourists descend the steps to the Riverwalk, Johns Davis felt his euphoria fading. The fact that the police would be watching him, paranoid about the greasy old Sicilian Boys Club moving in on the birthplace of the Texas Republic (as if they hadn’t had tenure since Joe Bananas broke from Brooklyn in the sixties), was an annoyance, nothing more. He’d have to be careful whom he met with outside the office, not accept any bets over the telephone from anyone whose voice he didn’t recognize. His line had been tapped before, with or without a court order, and if they’d wanted to take him down they had plenty enough already. They wouldn’t do that, because it would create a vacuum, and Vice would be another eighteen months finding out who’d inherited the book and whether he was the sort of fellow they could live with the way they did with Davis. It was the anonymity of his clients he had to protect, which meant taking measures that would affect the efficiency of his operation and probably cost him some customers. He’d make up for all that after the cops lost interest.

  Someone had tried to kill him. That was more than annoying. Whenever he turned his head, the bandage around his neck reminded him just how close the noose had come to severing his windpipe. It still hurt to swallow. He’d had his life threatened in the past: Someone he’d stung when he was on the grift, or some unskilled help he’d hired wanted a partnership and came on like the Black Hand. Bellyachers. They never followed through. Sometimes even now, a CEO or a lawyer who thought he was Chris Darden got pissed over a bad call or an incomplete pass and accused Davis of fixing the game. A lot of bookies might have taken offense and sent someone to hurl the ass-wipe down an air shaft. Davis always shrugged it off. Sore losers forgot their threats the next time a fumble was recovered in their favor.

  You took the lemons with the honey. A number of Davis’s colleagues dipped into capital and bought personal protection, ex-cop bodyguards to start their cars, heat-sensitive alarms for when they stayed home to jerk off in front o
f the Playboy Channel. Not Davis. If you were going to lock yourself up, why not let the law do it for you? Let them stand the bill, and use what you saved to arrange for the little comforts.

  Safety was a mythical concept. As a wise man once said—he thought it was Al Capone, or maybe Huey Long—bodyguards always shoot second.

  It had him vexed. He’d have plenty of time to be scared later, when the grace period ran out. Even in the midst of desperation and panic during the act, he’d kept asking himself why. Who wasn’t important, and now that he could think without fear of immediate death or self-incrimination, he could guess the answer to that one. He’d directed the driver to his home. Now he leaned forward and gave him an address on Flores.

  The number belonged to the Hotel Brazil, a white frame Spanish Colonial mansion with functional black shutters and potted palms on the balconies. Davis paid the driver and walked around to the back, where a kind of greenhouse had been built onto the original structure, enclosing a dining room and bar in heat-reflecting glass. More palms and ferns with fronds as big as windmill sails grew out of spaces left among the terra-cotta tiles on the floor. Near the roof, yellow canaries and green parakeets—live birds, living out their spans indoors—made a chirruping racket and occasionally dive-bombed the help. The waiters and busboys, trained under fire, went on smoothing the table linens and setting out the silver without flinching. Couple of bills to the health inspector per visit to look the other way on that, Davis thought. No telling how many silk dresses and bowls of French onion soup were spoiled by the splatter from above.

  A Chicano waiter opened the door to inform him the dining room would open at four o’clock. Davis was pretty sure he used eyeliner.

  “Please tell Señor Rivera that Johns Davis would like a moment of his time.”

  “John Davis.”

  “Johns,” he corrected. “With an s.”

  The waiter tipped his head forward—nice touch, not a lot of Mexicans could manage it without caricature—and closed the door politely in his face. Two minutes later he returned and opened it wide. “Señor Rivera is in his booth.”

  He threaded his way among the tables packed too closely together, looking at the floor to avoid slipping on birdshit and above to avoid avian collision. The place had begun to attract cigar-smoking young professionals from downtown, and Rivera had added tables without regard to the fire ordinances as they applied to building capacity: There was another couple of bills a week, with maybe a standing reservation for the fire marshal and a young lady of his choosing. A row of Casablanca fans suspended from the center girder stirred the aroma of good Corona-Coronas and Tennessee sour mash.

  Spanish Rivera was seated in a horseshoe-shaped booth at the end of the bar, sorting cash-register receipts from one pile onto another on the table. In between he paused to enter amounts into an electronic calculator that made a pleasant little prerecorded noise identical to the chunkety-chunk of an old-fashioned mechanical adding machine. He was a brown-skinned septuagenarian with thick black glossy hair that may or may not have been his original color but was almost certainly a wig, toreador-style sideburns, and a moustache that looked like a caterpillar. Thirty or so pounds ago he may have looked like Gilbert Roland. He wore a white linen suit, French cuffs with platinum links, and a big silver-and-turquoise ring on the third finger of his left hand. His real name was Vincente Syracusa. He’d come to America with his mother in 1928 after his father was executed by Mussolini along with all the other mafiosi in his village in Sicily.

  “You look like a priest today, my friend,” he greeted, without looking up from his receipts. “Have you renounced Satan and women since we spoke last time?”

  “Well, Satan, I guess, though I can’t say if he’s given up on me. Women seem to have. I was in an accident yesterday. That’s what I came to talk to you about.”

  “I heard you smashed up your expensive foreign car. You should buy American. Give a little something back to the country that’s been so good to you. I myself have been driving the same Ford Lincoln Continental for fifteen years. One hundred and eleven thousand miles. If it stops working tomorrow it owes me nothing. Then I will go out and buy another Ford Lincoln Continental.”

  “Ford owns Jaguar now. Anyway, I didn’t come here to talk about the car. It’s the man who was in the backseat.”

  “I heard about this, too. A slipshod attempt. It’s a new century, and the garrote is so—Turkish. Even children in high school know enough to use firearms.”

  “I’m kind of glad he didn’t. I was rooting for myself.” Davis smiled, but the old man was scowling at his figures. “The man’s name was Bohdan Schevchenko. I was wondering if you’d heard of him.”

  “A communist? I dislike communists. They are almost as bad as fascists.”

  “I don’t know how he voted. He was a hitter from Detroit. If there’s a contract out on me I thought you might know something about it.”

  Spanish Rivera looked up for the first time. He had black eyes, something Davis had only read about in books. They belonged to a conquistador, and had probably been the reason Vincent Syracusa had decided to pass himself off as some kind of South American nobility. They seemed to swallow whatever light shone into them.

  “I’m not asking you if you signed off on it,” Davis added hastily. “In Chicago, whenever someone in New York or Vegas wanted to send in a stone killer, they had to clear it through the Outfit, the local family. If Detroit did this by the numbers, I figure they’d come to you and ask permission. I’m not asking you to intervene. I’d just like to know where I stand. I mean, if I’ve pissed someone off, I need to know who so I can find out what it was and make things right.”

  Rivera’s eyes moved, and Davis realized the room was silent. The rustle of linens and clinking of silver and stemware had ceased. The waiters were eavesdropping. Caught in the act, they left their stations and drifted on out the back door into the kitchen.

  “The order may not have come from Detroit,” Rivera said when they were alone. “The city is a clearinghouse for assassins.”

  “I thought of that. If it’s someone local behind it, bringing in someone from outside would be one way to avoid drawing fire. I mean, if it was an illegal operation.”

  “‘Unsanctioned activity’ is a better term.” Rivera rested the hand wearing the heavy ring on his calculator. “My granddaughter attends computer-science classes at the University of Texas. Whenever she makes an error, or the computer malfunctions, a message informs her that the program has performed an illegal operation and will shut down. An entire generation is being taught to think of an illegal operation as a minor mistake that is easily corrected. Do you have children?”

  “None I know of.” Davis smiled again, got nothing back.

  “Just as well. One worries. You are a good man, my friend, a man of trust. When you came to San Antonio and asked my permission to do business, I will be honest, there were those who said you would try to steal from me, you were not paisan, lying and cheating was your stock in trade. I decided to give you a chance. I have never had to wait even a day to receive my commission, and the accounting has always been acceptable, within the margin of variability. If for any reason someone of my association has taken it upon himself to bring you harm, he will answer for it.”

  “Would you have any idea who it might be?”

  “That may be a question I should be asking you. If, through oversight or distraction, you have failed to acquit yourself as scrupulously with someone else as you have with me, that person will be the one with whom I must deal.”

  “When I lose, I pay off right away. I never chisel the odds.”

  “Then the burden is upon me. I accept it.”

  Davis thought about that until a screeching birdfight among the palms broke his concentration. “Thank you, Señor Rivera.”

  “My friends call me Vincent.”

  Davis thanked him again and said good-bye, although he didn’t call him Vincent. It had not seemed an invitation the way h
e’d said it, any more than Rivera’s pledge of faith had satisfied him that the proprietor of the Hotel Brazil had had nothing to do with the attempt on his life. Those old capi were past masters at the art of appearing to answer a question without giving up any information.

  The old man was not called “Spanish” because of the surname he’d assumed or his resemblance to a half-forgotten Hispanic movie actor. In the suite of rooms on the top floor of the hotel where he directed all criminal activities in greater San Antonio, he kept shelves and shelves of books on the history of the Spanish Inquisition, the largest such collection in private hands. From them he had drawn inspiration for the many colorful ways in which he’d had his enemies put to death in the days when he was establishing his authority. It was said his big silver ring was made from fillings pried out of their teeth before they died.

  SIX

  In the morning, Laurie Macklin dialed room service, then broke the connection before anyone picked up. She was suddenly sick of the room. She put on slacks, a light top, tied her hair up in a scarf so she wouldn’t have to fuss with it, and went downstairs. When the waiter at the reservation desk told her the restaurant was full and the wait was twenty minutes, she put on a pair of sunglasses with tortoiseshell rims she’d bought for the honeymoon and walked up Sunset.

  It was a beautiful day, sunny and relatively smog-free, with only a light-yellow haze fuzzing the HOLLYWOOD sign in the hills. She walked up a gentle grade, admiring the Spanish Modern houses with their red tile roofs still holding out against the creep of skyscrapers, and marveling at the fact that she had the broad sidewalk to herself. In Dayton on a day like that, the street would be busy with pedestrians even on a workday. Automobile traffic, of course, was steady, spiderlike Porsches sharing the pavement with pickups plastered with mud and held together with chickenwire. Beverly Hills and East L.A. were only minutes apart by freeway, like New York Street and Dodge City bunted up next to each other on the Universal back lot. No wonder there had been riots; but she saw no signs of the destruction now. Not like Detroit, where they were still clearing away the debris from 1967.