by Robert Greer
Reveling in their anonymity, Rollie Ornasetti and three of America’s most influential crime bosses walked into the rest stop dressed in business suits, looking for all the world like the capitalist businessmen they were, and headed for the private dining room. No one took notice as they strolled past the hostess’s station—not the balding black man with the overweight wife, or the dairy farmer from Wisconsin with his second wife and an assemblage of five kids, or the two teenage Puerto Rican sisters out on the make, or even the Calumet City, Illinois, off-duty detective with the telltale gun bulge beneath his leather jacket.
Forty-five minutes after their inconspicuous entry, the three crime bosses and their youthful Colorado connection sat in the private dining room leisurely drinking coffee and espresso and talking after having enjoyed a midafternoon meal, prepared by a chef from a five-star Chicago restaurant who had been whisked out to cook a meal that included shrimp scampi, linguini in wine sauce, and tender baby artichokes flown in from the West Coast.
Dabbing the corners of his mouth with a crisp linen napkin and suppressing a belch, Santo Trafficante shot Rosselli a quizzical glance. “I still don’t understand why you like to meet in such a public place.”
“It’s picturesque,” Rosselli offered, sipping his espresso, unperturbed.
“So’s the Riviera, and wouldn’t you know it? The place crawls night and day with plainclothes French cops.”
“This place doesn’t. More importantly, I can bring in my own private chef.”
“Whatever.” Trafficante took a sip of the tar-colored, high-test coffee he preferred to espresso, eyed Marcello, and asked, “Did you put our package from overseas to bed?”
“Sure did.”
“Did he look happy?”
“As happy as people like him can be.”
Trafficante nodded understandingly. “What’s his take on the Chicago scrub?”
Marcello shrugged. “Didn’t have one. I don’t think it really matters to him one way or the other.”
“Well, it sure as hell matters to me,” Rosselli interjected, his voice rising. “How the hell do you think the feds got wind of things?”
“Are you fuckin’ shittin’ me?” Trafficante said, trying his best not to snicker. “We’ve got a carful of loud-mouthed Cubans flying around the parade route for the whole damn world to see, and you wonder how the feds found out? Not to mention the fact that the local ass-wipes for America’s chief G-man and number-one sissy, Hoover, picked up our nutcase who was supposed to be a diversion straight off the bat. And you ask how? We shoulda let Ornasetti’s fuckin’ Creole boy pop that lunatic diversionary John Bircher like I wanted.”
“And quadruple the federal snooping that would follow? The hell we should’ve,” Marcello countered.
“Carlos is right,” Rosselli said, taking a sip of espresso. “Beats the hell outta me how the feds sniffed things out. Don’t really matter. What matters is, we’ve got additional shooting arcades lined up, and we don’t need to stir the pot.”
“Think that Louisiana half-breed Ducane could’ve been a plant? Maybe he tipped the feds off,” Trafficante said, looking squarely at Marcello.
“Not on your life,” Marcello countered sharply. “I watched him grow up.”
“You sure as hell stick up for him, Carlos,” Trafficante said with a smile. “That boy got somethin’ on you?”
“No more than he has on you, Santo.”
The conversation ground to a halt as the three crime bosses sipped their drinks in silence, recognizing that they were very close to telling tales out of school in front of Ornasetti, who hadn’t uttered a peep since the espresso had been brought out.
Helping himself to more coffee, Rosselli broke the silence. “You up for Tampa?” he asked, aiming his question at Marcello.
“Absolutely.”
“Could turn out to be another scrub,” said Trafficante, turning to face Ornasetti. “You’re the logistics whiz—whattaya say about Tampa?”
“Same as I said about Chicago. I’ll get the job done as long as there’s no interference from local cops or the feds, like we had here.”
“Who’s your high-position shooter down there?” asked Marcello.
Ornasetti responded quickly, hoping to demonstrate to the three crime bosses that he was on top of every nuance of their plan. “Some dumb-ass Puerto Rican out of Jersey. I promised him a bundle.”
Trafficante laughed. “Wonder how he’ll spend it?”
“That’s his call,” Ornasetti said with a quick snort.
Breaking into a pumpkin-faced grin, Rosselli spoke up: “Yeah. His call all the way.”
Ornasetti smiled and took a sip of espresso without saying another word, aware that everyone at the table knew that people like Antoine Ducane and the Puerto Rican out of New Jersey were expendable—both of them men who had stepped into water that was way over their heads.
Chapter 4
Northwestern Mississippi, November 14, 1963
Mound Bayou, Mississippi, is a three-hundred-and-fifty-mile drive north and east of New Iberia, Louisiana, most of the drive in the shadow of the Mississippi River. The tiny Mississippi town was founded by former slaves in 1887 and in the seventy-six years since its somewhat ballyhooed founding had subsided into no more than a blink in the highway. Willette Ducane had driven over from New Iberia and taken U.S. 61 out of Baton Rouge early that morning, blazing the old highway for more than four hours, rolling through Natchez and Vicksburg in the fresh-eyed morning sun in a rush to meet her only child. Sugar Sweet had called her ten days earlier to say that his Chicago job was over and he’d be home on November 14. She’d tingled with excitement ever since.
When she pulled her gleaming black, six-month-old Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible off the highway and onto the dusty gravel driveway of the lone gas station in Mound Bayou and stepped out, a white-haired black man, whittling at a reed that he envisioned becoming a flute, looked up, eyed the solidly built, still curvaceous “redbone” woman who was approaching him, and let out a shrill, staccato whistle.
“You know any other notes?” Willette asked, ignoring the wolf whistle.
The man responded with a second loud whistle.
“Guess not.” Willette eyed the doorless lean-to behind the man, scooted around him, stepped through the doorway, and waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Looking back toward the whittler, she asked, “You got any cold soda pop in here?”
The man nodded toward a battered old ice tub sporting an ill-fitting, dingy white lid. “Grab one from inside the tub. Twelve cent for the little ’uns, eighteen for the bigs.”
Willette walked over to the tub, extracted a twelve-ounce Coke bottle from the icy water, popped the bottle top on the rusty lip of a wall-mounted opener, and took a long, slow swig. “Ah …” Looking back at the man, who hadn’t taken his eyes off her since her arrival, she said, “You gonna pump me some gas or sit there whittlin’ and dreamin’ ’bout yesterday all day?”
“Figured on doin’ both,” the man offered with a broad grin. Setting aside his half-finished flute and his knife, he rose, looking as if it hurt every bone in his body to do so, and headed for the Caddy.
“High-test,” Willette called after him.
“I figured that.”
“And wash my windshield while you’re at it. It’s a mess. Musta hit every bug between Baton Rouge and Mound Bayou on my way up here.”
The man glanced back as if he wanted to say something but instead continued toward the gas pumps without uttering a word. Reaching for the high-test nozzle with one hand and twirling the ancient pump’s reset handle with the other, he glanced back to drink in the full measure of the big-boned, order-shouting, Caddy-convertible-driving woman before starting to pump gas. She was a raven-haired Louisiana redbone, and Creole, there was no question about that. Thirty-nine, tops, he thought. Green-eyed and sultry, she reminded him of a compact, sepia-toned version of some World War II vintage pin-up. She looked as though she might not be w
earing a bra, but he couldn’t swear to it, and it wasn’t until that moment, as he leaned against the Caddy’s rear fender and gazed at her nonchalantly, that he realized she was barefoot. As he watched her standing in the doorway, looking more sassy than sexy, sipping a Coke, he felt the hint of an erection. She must be makin’ some lucky son of a bitch happy, he thought.
He set the gas nozzle’s automatic shut-off lever, moved toward the front of the Caddy, and pulled a dry-rotted rubber-tipped squeegee, its business end worn to a nub, from a water-filled bucket, prepared to wash down the windshield. Glancing through the windshield into the front seat, he saw something that made him realize the woman standing in the doorway of what could only loosely be called a store wasn’t someone to be trifled with. His penis slumped as, peering through the water-streaked glass, he eyed a holstered long-barreled .38 and box of shells resting on the passenger’s side of the front seat.
“You about done out there?” Willette called, tossing her Coke bottle into an empty trash can.
“Yep,” the man said, wiping a rivulet of greasy water from the windshield with a shop rag and tossing his squeegee back into the water bucket.
The man was back to within a few feet of Willette when, checking her watch, she asked, “Mind if I wait here for a bit? Won’t be for more than fifteen, maybe twenty minutes at the most if the highway gods cooperate. I’m supposed to hook up with my son here in Mound Bayou. He’s drivin’ in from Chicago, and we’re headed back down to Po’ Monkey’s to take in some blues.”
The man smiled, aware that Po’ Monkey’s, a blues juke joint a few miles up the road in Merigold, was the best-known house of blues—if a former sharecropper’s swamp shack could be called that—between Chicago and New Orleans. “In need of a blues fix, I take it?”
“That and a reunion with my son. Boy’s been up North for a while.”
“Hope he didn’t pick up no bad habits up there,” the man offered pointedly.
Willette eyed him sternly. “I don’t expect he’d do that. He’s pretty much like me—independent, if you know what I mean—never been the followin’ kind. Whatta I owe you?”
“Seven dollars even for the gas, and eighteen cent for the Coke.”
Willette extracted a small coin purse from inside her bra, unzipped it, pulled out a five, two ones, and a half-dollar, and handed it all to the man. As he moved toward the lean-to to get change, Willette held up a hand in protest. “No need for change. I always get to feelin’ real generous when I’m about to hook up with my boy.”
“Thanks.”
Willette nodded and, without making eye contact again, headed toward the Caddy, wondering as she felt the man’s eyes track her to the car whether Sugar Sweet would look or act any differently than he had six months earlier.
Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, a down-home, Southern blues singers’ mecca, could rightfully stake a claim to being the best-known backwoods juke joint in the world. People, mostly country and almost always black, had been coming to the desolate-looking tarpaper shack in the middle of a floodplain to dance dirty and suck down the blues for more years than Willette could remember. She had first visited Po’ Monkey’s as a thirteen-year-old, large-breasted, broad-in-the-hips runaway who at the time looked every bit of eighteen. Now, a month on the downside of forty-four, she still felt like that same wide-eyed teenager whenever she stepped up to the eyesore of a blues edifice with its warped tarpaper skin and weathered hand-painted signs. The signs that directed patrons to refrain from smoking dope, to have their seventy-five-cent cover charge ready at the door, and to leave their personal music in the car or go back home.
Willette and Antoine had walked through the doorway of Po’ Monkey’s the instant the door swung open at 8:30 p.m. prepared to enjoy a show that started at 9 and planning to be there until closing at 1:45 a.m. Earlier, at a diner in Mound Bayou, they’d shared a feast-sized combo dinner for two that had included three jumbo-sized catfish, a skillet of cornbread and honey, two pints of coleslaw, piping-hot butter beans, and almost a quart of lemonade.
They now sat just a few feet from the famous juke joint’s battered contraption of a stage. Willette sprinkled two and a half packets of raw brown sugar on her second rum and Coke of the evening, looked across the table, and drank in her barely twenty-four-year-old son’s angular features, features that she’d often thought were far too keen for a black man’s, or even a Creole’s. He didn’t look much different than he had six months earlier. His hair was still unruly and his eyes as penetratingly green as her own. His face seemed a bit fuller, although she couldn’t swear to it, and there was a three-inch-long scar above his right eyebrow that hadn’t been there before his trip up North.
“Good to have you home,” she said, leaning across the table, slipping a hand around Antoine’s right hand and the long-necked bottle of beer he was holding, and squeezing tightly.
Antoine forced a smile, not wanting to remind his mother, the woman he’d always simply called “W,” that she’d told him that very same thing a half-dozen times in the past hour. He squeezed back affectionately, slipped his hand out of hers, rubbed his slightly painful jaw joint, and regrasped his beer.
Sensing that she might have embarrassed him, and enjoying it, Willette thought it was time to ask, after hours of small talk, a gluttonous meal, and two tumblers of rum and Coke: “What exactly did you do up North?”
“Worked.”
Willette flashed Antoine a familiar half smile that said, Don’t shit me, son—save that for white folks and fools. Antoine knew the smile well. It was the self-assured smile of a self-made woman, a smile that announced to anyone looking that it never paid to lie to W. Antoine drew in a thoughtful breath of Po’ Monkey’s smoke-saturated air. “I did a few jobs for some folks. Straightened out a couple messes.”
“Connected folks?”
Antoine nodded without answering.
“Anything go sour?” asked Willette, a woman who’d spent most of her life cooking for, cleaning for, running numbers for, or fornicating with Louisiana’s connected people—and lying to the cops about these activities.
“Yes,” Antoine said hesitantly.
“Affect any folks I’d know?”
“Come on, W. You know I can’t tell you that.”
“I know you can’t, sweetness. Sorry I asked.”
Winding the clock on the conversation and hoping to move it well past the issue of what he’d done, or not done, in Chicago, Antoine flashed his mother a slightly painful, loving smile. “What time’d you say John Lee’s comin’ on?”
“Supposed to go on at nine,” Willette said with a snicker, aware of Detroit bluesman John Lee Hooker’s penchant for arriving at a gig a tad on the late side of late.
“Guess we’ll …”
“Don’t be guessin’ nothin’,” said Willette, winking across the table at Antoine as she spotted the always trim, dark-skinned John Lee Hooker decked out in an iridescent gold silk shirt and an expensive-looking black hat with a stingy brim. He was standing near the juke joint’s entryway, chatting with a man who was bringing in the joint’s sidebar necessities—a stash of plastic cups, crushed ice and soda, and a bag of limes. Po’ Monkey’s rules required that patrons chaperone their own house-bought liquor. Willette glanced at her watch, surprised to see that it was only 9:20. Grinning and fully energized, she said, “We’re gonna get a full-blown taste of the blues tonight.”
Antoine tapped his beer bottle against Willette’s tumbler, thrilled to see the woman who’d always been as much a big sister to him as a mother so excited. “’Til the coon dogs sing,” he said, uttering a phrase the two of them had shared over the years whenever times had ascended to their highest or tumbled to their lowest.
“’Til the coon dogs sing.” Willette clicked her tumbler against Antoine’s beer bottle, sending a shower of rum and Coke over the rim and down onto the table. Watching John Lee Hooker amble toward the stage, she suddenly felt contented and warm inside. Contented enough to no longer be conce
rned about what Sugar Sweet had done up North in Chicago.
Chapter 5
Miami, Florida, November 18, 1963
The message he’d just been delivered, unwelcome and disturbing, threw Santo Trafficante Jr. off stride, sending him plunging off the treadmill he’d been working out on for the past twenty minutes and into the startled, waiting arms of the thin, cherubic-looking, bulbous-nosed man who’d given it to him.
“Tampa, my own turf—and we can’t buy a fuckin’ break. Shit. Another fuckin’ washout.” Regaining his balance, Trafficante adjusted the oversized University of Miami T-shirt that draped him and stepped out of the grasp of the wide-eyed messenger. “Who sent word?”
“Zambredo.”
Recognizing that the word was from a twenty-four-carat genuine source, Trafficante shouted, “Damn! And I rode all the way down here to Miami yesterday, flashing my face at every would-be politician, eager-beaver cop, judge, and prosecutor I could throw my body in front of just to establish my whereabouts, and the whole stinkin’ thing goes up in smoke.” His eyes narrowed in anger. “Ain’t that the shits?”
“Zammy says we shouldn’t’ve used no Cubans. Said word leaked out on the street there was somethin’ in the wind ’cause of so many of ’em poppin’ up everywhere. Tampa’s whole two-hundred-seventy-man police force was out patrollin’ the streets, and Zammy claims there were another four hundred or so feds millin’ around town. Not to mention a shit pot full of air force fuckers. You net it all out, that tight-assed, lyin’ SOB we’re after had six hundred goddamn people guardin’ him.”
Trafficante nodded. It was the weight-bearing nod of a man consumed by frustration. “So what about the Cubans? Same problem as Chicago?”
“Nope, a little different from what we had up there. Marcello says—now, this is accordin’ to Zammy, mind you—that you shoulda thought the whole Tampa thing out a little more. You and I know that Cubans don’t raise the same kinda eyebrows down here as they do up in Chicago,” the man, always a messenger and never much more, said with a dismissive sneer. “Four of ’em ridin’ ’round town down here don’t mean nothin’ except they’re out for a meal of fried bananas and beans, not lookin’ to off somebody. I’m guessin’ that not many cops, or for that matter even the feds, gave your Cubans much more than a real short look, if that. And that means that if they weren’t locked on to the Cubans as a diversion, they had plenty of time to keep an eye out for your shooter. Least, that’s what Marcello claims.”