“No, I’ll put it in.” Burt took a shot of asthma spray. “That’s not the problem. But the court won’t accept it.”
That was what was wrong with these fucking pansies, Teddy fumed. Why couldn’t he have one of those good old-time mob lawyers like Albert Krieger or Bruce Cutler? Someone who’d stand up and holler back at a judge. These soft-spoken types like Burt made him nervous. With their Scandinavian office furniture and their brusque young secretaries staring into computer screens.
And then there was Burt’s manner. A weedy small man in a gray suit with constantly blinking eyes, he wasn’t effeminate exactly, but something about his fey voice and precise little hand gestures made Teddy’s anxiety level rise steadily like the line on a fever chart.
“Anyway,” said Teddy. “Where the fuck were you the other day? They had me in lockup twelve hours before you bailed me out.”
“I had other appointments.” Burt twirled his index finger in a small arc.
“My ass. You were wearing goddamn jodhpurs, for fuck sake. What were you doing, playing polo?”
They were sitting in Burt’s spacious office in Pleasantville, just a few miles outside Atlantic City. Sunlight streamed in through the window and reflected off the top of Burt’s balding head, causing Teddy to squint when he looked back at him.
“What I was doing is immaterial,” said Burt, drawing a line through the air. “What we need to focus on is the case the prosecution is preparing. So far you’ve only been charged with racketeering. But my sources at the U.S. Attorney’s office tell me there’s a strong possibility they might bring a superseding murder indictment.”
Before Teddy could respond, Burt Ryan’s phone purred and his secretary told him he had Dave Kurtzman the casino owner on line one. Burt put up his hand to indicate the call would take less than a minute.
“Yeah, yeah,” he told the phone in a high, wheezy voice. “No, that’s not in your contract.. . No ... No, Dave ... Dave, no . . . That’s not an option ... I’ll get the doctor and tell them to back down.”
Teddy simmered in his seat, like a sorority girl waiting for a date to show up. He felt that tender ache down in his balls again. He was still getting up in the middle of the night and finding he couldn’t piss.
When Burt finally hung up the phone, he grimaced. “Superseding murder indictment? Based on what?”
“Based on the two DiGregorio homicides.” Burt took another quick hit off his asthma spray. “Or so I’m told. Do you have any idea what witnesses might be talking to them about that?”
“No!” Teddy’s cheeks leaped up toward his eyes. “That’s what I pay you to find out. I’m giving you three hundred fifty dollars an hour.”
The phone purred again and this time the secretary gave the name of a prominent real estate developer. “Francis, I thought I wasn’t going to hear from you today ...” Teddy went back to stewing and reading the two neat piles of documents parked at the edge of Burt’s desk. His eyes stopped on a request for proposal from Lenny Romano’s firm, concerning repairs on the City Hall parking lot. The tender feeling in his groin returned.
He flashed an angry look, but Burt ignored him until he got off the phone.
“I didn’t know about this contract,” Teddy said sternly,as Burt placed the receiver back in its cradle. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
Burt leaned forward and calmly took the document from Teddy. “I thought this had your approval,” he said, looking it over. “Lenny’s company is with you, isn’t it? Are you going to tell me you don’t know what’s going on with your own companies?”
Teddy drummed his fingers on the leather armrests and blushed. “I know what’s going on. I just didn’t know you were handling the contract.”
Burt seemed just ever so slightly annoyed. “Well, the other day I was over at the Doubloon casino, talking to my old college friend, Sam Wolkowitz, who’s in the cable television industry. And he told me your friend Vin’s son Anthony might be involved in managing a fighter named Barton, who might be on TV. But was I asked to be the lawyer representing the contract? No. Because that’s done at your discretion, Ted. And I know everything he does must meet with your approval. So who am I to get upset?”
Teddy felt like he’d been picked up and thrown across the room. Lenny Romano getting the City Hall contract, Vin’s son getting involved with the fights. And no one giving him a percentage. He didn’t want to tell Burt he wasn’t aware of these things, but he wasn’t sure how to keep from screaming either. His insides squeezed together tightly, alerting him that he’d soon have to go pass blood into the toilet again. How could he control his crew if he couldn’t control his own body?
He was having a bad moment. All the details of his life that he’d carefully arranged like items in the composition book were scattering like autumn leaves. And suddenly the leaves were in his abdomen and his head, swirling around, chasing away certainties. If Vin’s son wasn’t giving him a percentage, who was? And if no one was giving him a percentage, what made him a boss? And if he wasn’t a boss, what was he? He felt dizzy and sick, like he was about to vomit dry leaves on Burt’s expensive Oriental rug.
The phone rang once more and Burt picked it up directly. “Oh hi, Bunny. . . No, no. That’s all right.” He giggled. “You will? Oh sto-o-op!” Burt’s voice took a languid upperturn that made Teddy picture him wearing Hawaiian shirts and reading magazines about interior design.
“That’s entirely up to you,” said Burt, his hands performing a delicate arabesque through the air as he watched Teddy fidget from the corner of his eye. “You can get back to me anytime you want.”
He hung up the phone and turned back to Teddy as if he hadn’t missed a beat of their conversation.
“Jesus,” said Teddy in a woozy daze. “I remember when Dixie Dalton was my lawyer, he hardly had any other clients. He’d never take a call when I was in his office.”
“Well, you just can’t afford to have me on retainer like that,” Burt explained with a hand over his heart. “You’re not my only client. Speaking of which, you’re aware, are you not, that you already have an outstanding bill of twenty-seven thousand dollars you owe this office?”
“Madonna!” Teddy almost cried. “I had to put my fuckin’ house up to make the two hundred fifty thousand dollars’ bail. And now I got you squeezing me? Shit, Burt. Have a heart. It’s fuckin’ highway robbery.”
“Coming from you, Ted, that’s a compliment,” said Burt, picking up the phone again.
33
IT WAS TWO DAYS after Elijah had got his clock cleaned at the public workout. I was driving little Anthony to his special hearing class when I heard that rattling sound again and realized the gun I’d used to kill Nicky was still in the glove compartment. I didn’t know why I was taking so long to get rid of it. Maybe I wanted to get caught. We hit a bump in the road and I heard the gun slide toward the front of the compartment. Anthony Jr. looked down like he was thinking about opening it.
Just to distract him, I put on the radio. The first thing we heard after the weather was a sports report saying Meldrick Norman would be getting the title shot against Terrence Mulvehill in October, not Elijah. I almost drove off the road. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was putting my balls on the line—literally, if you believed Danny Klein—and they were running a train over them.
For a few seconds, I don’t know what I said or did. All I know is when I looked up, my little Anthony was cowering in the backseat. He looked like he’d seen one of those scary green monsters from his nightmares take the wheel.
“Hey, Anthony, take it easy.” I reached back to pat his knee. “Daddy was just fooling.”
But he shied away from my touch.
I dropped him off at the hearing school and drove right over to John B.’s house. He was crazed too, running around in his underwear with the cellular phone in his hand. He had no idea why his brother was out and Meldrick was in. Just the other day, the doctors had cleared Elijah to keep fighting, even after what had happened at the workout. For
a second, I considered whether John might’ve just pocketed all the money without paying off the right people. But then he mentioned Elijah’s name and got that reverent look in his eyes again, and I knew he’d never do anything to hurt his big brother. His only role in life was to be the loyal younger sibling, forever carrying Elijah’s robe.
So we headed over to the Doubloon to try to find out what went wrong.
We found Frank Diamond the promoter standing in the lobby, talking to a bunch of reporters by the elevators. His shaved head looked newly waxed and buffed and his custom-made gabardine suit fit even more snugly around his barrel chest and broad shoulders.
“What’s up?” John B. asked crisply.
“What’s up?” Diamond turned to share a smile with the reporters like John was the butt of some joke he’d been telling. “Balloons are up. The sky is up. I’m up. If you had my stock portfolio, you would be too.”
They all laughed. John B. gave him a stone face. For the first time I saw a resemblance between him and his brother.
“Say, my man. We got business to discuss.”
“My man. My man.” Frank Diamond did a Stepin Fetchit–y imitation of the way John talked. “Hey, John, it’s thirty years since Martin Luther King, how come you’re still talking like a Pullman train porter? Didn’t you go to high school or anything?”
If I were John, I might have smacked him. But John just kept giving him that slow-burning look.
“We had a deal,” he said to Diamond. “I already worked this out with the boxing federation and the cable TV people.”
The reporters leaned in a little closer. Until a second ago, they’d been just casually bullshitting with Frank. Now they were getting ready to reach for their notebooks.
“Would you gentlemen excuse me a moment?” he asked the press.
They groaned a little and he took us into the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea coffee shop just by the entrance. We sat at a table in the corner.
“We had a deal as of yesterday,” said John B. “So why I gotta hear about Meldrick Norman today on the radio?”
“Yesterday I was lying, today I’m telling the truth,” Frank Diamond explained carefully.
“But we had a handshake.”
Frank Diamond sighed and asked the waitress to bring him a coffee with some Sweet’N Low. He rubbed the top of his bald head. Maybe he missed his hair.
“Listen, John,” he said with the kind of measured impatience you’d have talking to a senile grandparent. “I am going to make it very simple for you. Your brother isn’t worth as much to me as Meldrick Norman.”
He sat back and fixed the silk polka-dotted handkerchief in his breast pocket. He might as well have been licking our blood off a butcher knife.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “We’ve already paid the sanctioning fees and made our arrangements with the boxing federation people. Why do you get final say to knock it all down?”
“Because I am the promoter.” Frank flicked his hand through the air haughtily. “You’ve been dealing with the stage managers. I own the actors. Right now I have the champion, Terry Mulvehill, under contract. Anyone who fights him has to give me options on their next six fights. Now, Meldrick Norman is twenty-eight years old and relatively drug-free, as far as I know. So if he happens to knock my guy out, I’ve still got the champion another two or three years. Understand? Meldrick Norman becomes my fighter.”
I nodded. It was a daisy-chain operation. My father and Teddy would’ve been impressed. No matter who won, Frank remained the promoter, entitling him to revenues from the TV rights and ticket sales.
He poured half a packet of Sweet’N Low into his coffee and then folded the rest of the packet in half and left it next to his cup. Fish designs swam around the dark blue border of his saucer. To me they looked like sharks.
“Now, I like your brother, but he is an old over-the-hill warhorse,” he told John. “And if by some chance he managed to throw a lucky punch and knock my guy out, what would I be left with? An old man ready to retire.”
“But we had a handshake with the boxing federation,” John B. insisted.
“Not worth the paper it isn’t written on,” Frank said, stirring in the powder with the end of his spoon.
He rubbed the top of his head again. And smiled.
I felt my heart sinking. I’d borrowed sixty thousand dollars from Danny Klein and most of it was already spent on fees and expenses. I had no way to pay it back. Which meant Danny would be sure to tell my father and Teddy. I felt my balls retracting into some cavity within my body.
Frank sat back and sipped his coffee. His eyes scanned the rest of the green-and-red coffee shop, like he was searching for someone else to fleece. The late-afternoon crowd was starting to thin out. I wondered if the casino deliberately made the food unpalatable here so people would spend less time eating and more time gambling.
I put up the best argument I could make, spur-of-the-moment. “Don’t you think you’re being kind of shortsighted? I mean, Elijah Barton’s a name with worldwide recognition. No one’s heard of Meldrick Norman.”
Frank Diamond wrinkled his brow. “Excuse me, but who are you anyway?”
“This is my partner, Mr. Russo.” John B. lowered his eyes and swallowed his words again. In his mind, he was already flat on his back painting boats again.
Frank Diamond gave him a long look, like John B. had just let his Rottweiler shit on his putting green.
“Well, Mr. Russo, let me explain something to you,” he said. “Elijah Barton couldn’t draw flies to a dump.”
I started to interrupt, but he held up his hand.
“I’m not running a nostalgia business,” he said, thrusting out a jaw so big you could have boiled coffee in it. “I am an attorney and a fight promoter. I have a fiduciary responsibility to go out there and try to make the best deal. As it stands, we’re barely going to sell out the seats in the arena, but that’s okay. The casino will make its money back at the tables. I am not, however, going to associate my good name with a third-rate production.”
It was a little bit like talking to Teddy. Except instead of eating the pancakes off my plate, he was just tasting them and spitting them back in my face.
Frank ran his hand over his smooth scalp once more. Hedidn’t miss his hair. He was jerking off his head because putting us down felt so good.
“People all over the world love my brother!” John B. protested.
“He couldn’t draw flies,” Frank Diamond repeated slowly with a level stare. “The sooner you understand that, the better off we’ll all be. Especially your brother. It doesn’t do a man his age any good getting himself hurt in the ring. We all saw what happened at the workout the other day.”
My head was spinning. I couldn’t imagine what Teddy would do to me when he found out I’d borrowed another sixty thousand on top of the amount I owed him. Stomping on my balls wouldn’t satisfy him. He’d probably want to pour battery acid on them.
I wanted to fall on my knees and beg Frank Diamond for mercy. But Vin had taught me there were limits to what a real man would do. And a real man would never debase himself in front of another.
So I reached over to grab Frank’s wrist. “Promises were made to us.”
Frank swatted my hand away. “You know, you people are too much. You live in this dreamworld where somehow everything’s going to come true and work out if you wish hard enough.”
I was about to jab a finger in his face and warn him not to talk to us like that, but instead I knocked over my water glass and broke it.
Frank Diamond flapped his hands dismissively, like he’d had enough of this tomfoolery. “Maybe it’s too much sun or too much saltwater taffy. The rest of the business world’s not like Atlantic City. One day you have to wake up and face the reality that what you’ve got isn’t worth anything to anybody else.”
“You oughta watch it,” I said, as my lap got soaked and my future sailed over the cliff like a junked car. “One day you might just need the peo
ple you’re stepping on.”
“When I need something I call room service,” Frank Diamond said as he got up to leave. “Otherwise, I don’t want to be disturbed.”
34
TEDDY SAT ON AN examination table. Dr. Josephson, a thin, wiry-haired urologist, adjusted his glasses and looked at his chart.
“I see you’ve already had a checkup, so this is just another step in the process,” he said. “I notice Dr. Lawrence examined you. We went to med school together.” He smiled.
Another bloodsucking parasite, Teddy thought. Doctors and lawyers. Burt Ryan estimated his legal bills would be well into six figures by the end of the year. And who knew how much this clown was going to charge? They were already down to under thirty-seven thousand dollars in the coffers.
“I’m going to give you a prostate exam,” said the doctor. “You’ve had one of these before, haven’t you?”
Teddy shook his head nervously. He’d avoided going to the doctor for years, as much out of superstition as frugality. If they didn’t find anything wrong, there wouldn’t be anything wrong. But since that little breakdown the other day in Burt Ryan’s office, he’d realized he couldn’t put off the visit any longer.
The doctor took a deep breath and slipped on a rubber glove. “Please lower your pants and lie on your side.”
Teddy inched away from him. “What’re you gonna do?”
“It’s a routine digital exam.”
“You’re gonna put a finger in my ass?”
The doctor opened a jar of Vaseline. “I can assure you there’s nothing unusual about it.”
Teddy couldn’t believe his ears. He’d once had a man beaten unconscious with a crowbar for making fun of his weight, and now he had to let this creep stick a finger up his butt. It was like being back in reform school. The things theother boys would do to him in the showers. Uncle Benoit in his first foster home. A little bit of that clammy, weak feeling spread down to his knees. For years, the extra weight had been like a layer of insulation, protecting him from the pain and humiliation. But here was someone trying to get inside him again.
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