by Angie Fox
He glanced past me to Beau. “Is it that bad to want a spot of company to watch a movie with once every few decades?”
It was actually quite sweet, but I couldn’t let my emotions get in the way. “I gave you something you wanted. Now you’re going to give me the information I came for. Do we have a deal?”
“I want another movie. Next Sunday night,” the gangster said, laying it on the table.
“Next Sunday good for you to hang out here again?” I asked Beau.
“Heck yeah,” Beau said with relish.
Wally gave a stiff nod. “Then we’ve got a deal.”
Who knew my annoying would-be bodyguard would be such a hot commodity?
Wally tented his fingers. “Okay, here’s the story. Lou’s in a bind, has been since he died. The poor guy’s got a secret he’s kept even from his gang.”
Yikes. That didn’t sound good.
Wally raised a brow at my surprise. Like he wasn’t used to seeing that look from people. Although to be fair, perhaps mobsters had better poker faces than I did.
“So what’s Lou’s secret?” I asked.
“A murder?” Beau suggested.
Wally leaned back in his chair and glanced past me to Beau. “Lou’s been spending a fair chunk of his afterlife tracking down a particular woman of interest. He’s been obsessed with her since he died.”
“Did she have anything to do with Lou’s death?” I asked. Perhaps she had something to do with Frankie’s as well.
Wally shrugged. “I don’t know much about her, only that those two were thick. Word has it he kept her holed up above a flower shop when they were alive.”
“Mildred’s Flower Heaven.” I gasped.
“That’s the one,” he said, impressed.
Frankie and I had been there last night.
“So where’s Lou going to be tomorrow night?” I asked. He’d never answered my original question, and I doubted very much it was an unintentional oversight.
Wally sighed. “Listen. Sometimes it’s best to keep the past in the past. You nosing around like this, trying to expose the whole thing… It might trigger a mob war.”
“Let us worry about that.” And believe me, I’d worry.
He didn’t appear convinced. “It’s your funeral,” he finally said. “Lou will be at Carson’s Supper Club downtown tomorrow after dark.”
“I know where that is,” Frankie declared, shimmering into view in the seat on the other side of Wally. He’d lost his entire left leg. We were on borrowed time.
“Damn it. I’m not dealing with you,” Wally growled then pointed to Beau. “Remember. Sunday night movie. Next week. Make sure he gets here, or I’ll send someone to remind you,” he added to me before he faded into a shadow and disappeared.
“He just had to be threatening right when I was starting to like him,” I mused.
“Just like a gangster.” Frankie grinned. “Now we know where to go. Good job!” he said, rubbing his hands together.
“It was Beau who made it happen,” I said honestly. He’d gotten Wally to open up. He’d given me the leverage I needed to ask questions. “But what did he mean about starting a mob war?” I asked.
“Yes,” Beau answered for Frankie. “Ellis won’t be happy about you being in some ghostly mob war.”
“I don’t know what any of it means,” Frankie said. “But I’ll bet my brother does.”
“We’ll ask him when we see him,” I agreed, glancing at Beau, hoping I wouldn’t regret what we’d just learned.
Chapter Sixteen
I said an honest-to-goodness thank you to Beau as we left the theater.
“Never in a million years would I have pegged you as a ghost hunter,” I admitted, stepping out into the alley as he opened the door for me.
“Hey, I’m just along for security,” he joked, allowing me to pass. “But, seriously, I’m glad I could help. I owe you that and a lot more.”
He gave me a quick, brief hug and I let him. “I have to go,” I told him, suddenly uncomfortable.
I didn’t want him getting too personal on me.
When you got right down to it, Beau Wydell possessed a lot of good qualities or I wouldn’t have dated him all those years ago. I liked that he was a friendly guy, ready to believe the best of everyone. I appreciated that he was as comfortable talking to the small-time chicken farmer in line with him at the bank as he was the big shots at the Wydell family law firm. And I praised Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the apostles that Beau seemed to have at last accepted that his brother and I were together. But Beau and I had been chummy enough tonight. It was time to not talk until the next family gathering.
He let me go with a frown and a wave. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I guarantee it,” I said, slipping into my car, which was parked ahead of his. “I’ll be sure to thank your brother as well.”
“You do that,” he called after me, his smile wooden.
Frankie sat brooding in my passenger seat.
“Who popped your balloon?” I asked, starting up the car. He’d been excited a few minutes ago when we learned where Lou would be tomorrow night. “It’s all coming together.”
“Look at me,” he said, pointing down to his leg. It had disappeared up to his hip. “I’m a mess.”
I felt a prickling jolt as he drew his power out of me.
“Your leg will come back,” I assured him. “And we definitely put your energy to good use tonight.”
Despite Beau—or perhaps because of him—it couldn’t have gone better.
“Yeah, but I’ve got to thinking,” he said, drawing a hand through his hair.
“Well, don’t start doing that,” I joked, pulling out. Frankie liked to leap before he looked.
“I’m serious,” he said, leaning stiffly back against his seat. “According to Wally Big Ears, Lou’s been chasing this girl for his entire afterlife. He’s obsessed with her. But he never said a word to me about it.”
“Maybe Wally is wrong,” I suggested, turning at the intersection.
“It’d be the first time,” Frankie said, absently cracking his knuckles. “The kicker is, he’s my brother and I don’t know either way. Lou and I…” He swirled his hands around. “We hardly talk now that we’re dead. For a long time before that, even. Lou could have joined the circus for all I know. He comes around the old gang once in a blue moon. I can go years without seeing him at all. And when we do say two words to each other, it’s either small talk or we fight.”
“Were you okay with this before you learned Lou was the one who killed you?” He’d never spoken much about his brother.
“I mean, it is what it is.” He sighed. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”
I didn’t want to lecture or remind Frankie that he was half of this relationship. I knew firsthand how hard it was to change the status quo in certain relationships and how impossible it could be to try to change another person.
But still. “Did you start losing touch gradually?” I asked. “Sometimes, things like this sneak up on you before you know it.” I made another right turn, heading back to Main Street. “It’s hard to know how to break through and talk again.”
“Exactly.” Frankie flopped against the seat. “I mean, how do you start with a person you hardly know anymore?”
“Some people don’t say anything at all. Time goes by and they never get the chance.”
“And then some of us die and still don’t talk,” Frankie mused as I turned right onto Main and headed toward the highway.
“Were you ever close to your brother?” I asked.
Frankie rested his head against the back of the seat and stared straight ahead. “Lou basically raised me after our parents died. I quit school and worked at the feed lot. Lou joined the mob.”
“How old were you?” I asked, keeping one eye on the darkened road and one on my gangster.
“I was nine. He was thirteen, almost a man. He started as a runner for Gas Pipe Joey.”
“Gas
pipe?” I asked.
“That was Joey’s favorite weapon. Bad luck for him, he died holding an umbrella,” Frankie snarked. Ghosts could only keep what they’d died with, which I imagined could be limiting in the afterlife. “So now he’s running around threatening to whack everyone with an umbrella,” Frankie continued. “Don’t get me wrong, that thing still smarts. But it doesn’t have the same impact, if you know what I mean.”
I did.
“Anyways, between Lou in the organization and me bagging feed, we had a rat-trap apartment and two squares a day.”
“Wow. That sounds hard,” I said, focusing on him as much as I could as I merged onto the highway.
“Those were actually the best days,” Frankie said with a smile in his voice. “We had a lot of fun back then.”
“No bedtime,” I joked, glancing at him.
He smiled a little. “No. Didn’t need one. I fell into bed every night, beat. They worked us six days a week back then, dawn to dusk. And Lou was out at all hours.” He glanced out the window. “Lou rose up to working the numbers, and when he got bigger, he did some time in enforcement.”
“That sounds…pleasant.” Perhaps.
Although not really…
“Good enough if you weren’t the one who missed a protection payment.” Frankie guffawed.
Oh my. I’d always said I wanted to know more about Frankie’s former life, but now I wasn’t so sure.
“Lou did okay, but he never loved it like I did,” Frankie mused.
“So when did you join?” I asked, watching him dig a silver cigarette case out of his jacket pocket.
“July 4, 1928,” he said, resting a smoke on his bottom lip and lighting up. “I call it independence day,” he added with a smirk, taking a deep drag and blowing out.
I wasn’t crazy about him smoking in my car, even if ghostly smoke didn’t do much to the upholstery, but I let him go this time.
How did one put in an application for the mob? “Did Lou sponsor you in or something?”
“Hell no!” He laughed. “Lou hated it. His entire goal had been to work hard and make enough money for me to go back to school. He thought I should be a dentist. Me!” Frankie announced as if Lou had suggested he fly to the moon.
I probably should have agreed, or at least suggested something else respectable, but I wasn’t going to lie. “I honestly can’t see you as anything but a mobster.”
“Me neither,” Frankie said, taking another drag. He relaxed a bit, letting his hand drape outside the glass window. “It’s like this: Lou would get told by the boss to keep the vagrants out of the moonshine stills. I mean, we had dozens of suppliers with hundreds of stills hidden all over the woods around here.”
“In Sugarland?” I gasped.
“It got a lot of people through the depression,” he said as if he were providing a public service. “It also made a lot of other people happy.”
“A regular Norman Rockwell moment,” I deadpanned.
“I don’t know who that is.” He took a drag. “Anyhow, you had a lot of bums at that time, a lot of folks riding the rails looking for work. They didn’t realize that they were stealing liquor from protected suppliers, our people, you see.”
“I can’t believe all this went on in Sugarland,” I said, turning onto the rural road toward home.
“Really?” Frankie drawled.
I supposed we had seen a lot together.
“You know, I did run across some copper coils in the attic a few years ago.”
Had my ancestors been distilling moonshine too?
“You sell those coils?” Frankie asked.
“No.” I hadn’t thought of that. “I recycled them.”
“Of course,” the gangster groused. “Anyhow, we had a good business going back then, and it became crystal clear to anybody with half a brain that Lou never loved his job,” Frankie said, blowing smoke out the window. “He’d get told to teach a thief a lesson, and what did Lou do? He’d just shoot in the air and yell at the guy. Very boring. And not one hundred percent effective.” Frankie rested an elbow on the windowsill and looked at me as if he expected me to gasp at Lou’s lack of finesse. He rolled his eyes when I didn’t appear properly put-out. “What you do is you lock them in your trunk and drive around for a while. That way, the low-down dirty thief is scared, you get rid of a few spiderwebs in the trunk, and the muck who tried to take from you has no idea where the moonshine even is anymore.”
“Frankie,” I admonished.
“Or if you want to get more creative, maybe you make them drink moonshine until they puke and fall asleep. Then you drop ’em off on the front porch of the president of the local Temperance Society,” Frankie reasoned. “I’ve done that, and it is a lot of fun. But you don’t just shoot in the air and call it a night. At that point, you might as well give the guy a glass of warm milk and tuck him into bed.”
“Not everyone has your flair for the dramatic.” Thank goodness.
The gangster shrugged. “All I’m saying is I figured Lou got tired of the life. He stopped showing up at the parties. He pulled all the boring shifts. He didn’t even congratulate me when I set fire to Al Capone’s houseboat and didn’t get caught.”
“That is…” I wasn’t going to go there. “Okay, it’s tough when you don’t have common interests with someone you love. I mean, you and Lou went through a lot together in the early days.”
He took a drag, but he didn’t protest. “I assumed he was avoiding me because he didn’t approve of my lifestyle. I figured he’d come around. Now I find out he shot me.” Frankie shook his head and took another drag. “He hated to shoot anyone, and he shot me.”
“Well, we’ll talk to him tomorrow night and sort it out.”
He looked at me doubtfully.
“We’ll at least learn the truth.”
“That’s all I ask,” Frankie said, ashing his cigarette out the window. “Maybe that and a single shot to each of his kneecaps.”
We’d worry about that later.
I turned down the long driveway to my house. A few raindrops scattered over the windshield, and I hit the wipers.
Looked like we made it home just in time.
“By the way, there’s someone following you again,” Frankie said.
“What?” I looked into the rearview mirror and saw a pair of headlights. My heart jumped, and then I realized they appeared to be the same headlights that had sent me into a tizzy earlier tonight. I slowed as we neared the house, and a black Mercedes took shape behind me. “Dang it, Beau.”
“That’s my cue to head for the shed,” Frankie said, evaporating from the seat next to me.
Lucky gangster. I needed to learn that trick.
I pulled around to the back of the house and flew out of the car before my annoying ex could finish parking. “It’s bad enough you followed me to the theater, but now you’re following me home?” I asked, storming up to his car.
It was presumptuous and out of line and exactly like Beau.
A fat raindrop smacked my forehead, and I brushed it away.
“I know this is weird,” he said, leaving the windows open as he shut off his engine.
“Ya think?” Honestly. “Seeing as you don’t need to ‘protect’ me from any ghosts here at the house, you need to go.”
“I have a confession to make,” he said, getting out of the car.
That was the opposite of leaving.
A smattering of rain pegged my arms. “Tonight’s not the night,” I said, retreating toward my back porch, brushing away the chill of the rain. I had enough going on with the hunt for Frankie’s brother, my own boyfriend threatening to arrest me, and Jorie’s death. I didn’t need Beau misinterpreting our success at the theater as a springboard to a new phase in our polite-yet-distant friendship.
“This is important,” he said, oddly determined.
“Then tell me now,” I said, taking the stairs. I’d be inside in a minute, and Beau wasn’t invited.
“Ellis didn
’t send me to help you tonight. He said he was worried, and I sent myself.”
I stopped at the top of the stairs and stared down at him. “You lied to me.”
“Not exactly. You thought he sent me, and I just didn’t correct you.” He stood kind of helpless at the bottom of the steps. “So when you said you were going to thank him, I wanted to tell you he doesn’t know.”
“Why, Beau?” I asked. “What part of your conversation with my boyfriend made you think you should invite yourself on my ghost hunt tonight?”
He ground his jaw. “I didn’t want to see you screw up and get arrested, you idiot. And I didn’t want to see you get hurt.”
Oh, please. “I can take care of myself.” I’d proven that to him, to Ellis, and to the entire town. Many times over.
The rain started falling harder. I backed up to keep my toes dry. He kept talking.
“I’d like to clear up a few more things as well,” he announced from the yard.
“Me too,” I said. “Just because we are friendly doesn’t mean I want to be friends.” Beau and I had worked to bury our animosity after our broken engagement, and we’d done a decent job of it. But he had to understand one important distinction. “You are not my buddy, and my relationship with your brother is none of your business.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he ground out. He launched himself up onto my porch, rain dripping from his hair down into his eyes. “You and Ellis are screwing things up, and I’m not going to stand by and watch it happen.”
“And you think you’re a relationship expert all of a sudden?”
“Absolutely not. I have no idea what I’m doing,” he said as I backed up to keep him from dripping on me. “But you need to know Ellis was extremely upset when he called me. Think about it,” he pleaded. “When does Ellis ever ask me for advice? Never. But he did tonight. I’ve never seen him so defeated or you so dumb, so I’m stepping in. For better or worse.”
“Are you saying he was sad?” I asked, surprised and a little heartened. “Because my main takeaway from our conversation was the whole ‘I’m going to arrest you’ part.”
“Yeah.” Beau shook the wet from his button-down shirt. “Ellis wished he hadn’t said that. I told him it was a good move, though.”