The Purple Don

by Solomon

  Joey loved the feeling of being drawn further into the Romano circle. Being a Made Man was one thing, but now Sal was looking to him for ideas. It put him into a fine position from which to expand, not only the ambitions of the Romanos but also to advance his own.

  “Florida.”

  Sal turned from the window with a raised eyebrow. “The Trafficantes have Tampa sewn up tighter than a spinster’s snatch Joey, and there’s balance we don’t wanna…”

  “Not Tampa, Sal. Miami.”

  Sal’s eyes screwed up like they were caught in a wave of smoke, even though his own cigar was still back on the desk. Joey could see the calculations going on behind Sal’s craggy face. Miami was not an area the New York Families had traditionally seen as a place for expansion of business. The Cubans, the Colombians, and the rest of the Hispanic diaspora ran through the city like threads of shit woven into a golden carpet. The X operation Joey had run with Enrico through the Miami airport had been strictly limited, and in the great scheme of things—although profitable in its own way—small potatoes.

  To beef up their presence in Miami would not cause ripples, it would generate tsunamis.

  Sal raised his hands. “Joey, no. It’s not that I don’t think you could; it’s whether we should. You want to start a war? We got things good here in New York and now L.A. The richest time I can remember, and plenty of that is down to you. We don’t need the distraction…”

  Joey flicked the end of his cigar with his tongue, and Sal looked ever more uncomfortable…but he wasn’t going to say anything to the boy.

  Joey in turn knew that he wouldn’t.

  Sal would be happy for Joey to run the operations out West and to contribute to how things were shaping up in New York. In those respects, right now, Joey was irreplaceable. But that might not last forever, so Joey knew he had to press his advantages now while he could. “I’m not going to start a war.”

  “I don’t see how we could move fully into Miami without starting the mother of all conflicts, Joey. Like I said, you have style boy, but you don’t want to run before you can walk.”

  “Sal,” said Joey, standing up. “I was born running.”

  Her skin was golden brown, her body firm and pliable. The white bed sheets were dazzling in Joey’s eyes as he pressed down on her shoulder blades and stroked in and out of her warm wetness. The slow rocking of the cabin on the gentle swell of the harbor complimented his rhythm perfectly, making him feel at one with nature in all its glory. He was the swell, he was the shift, and he was the motion.

  Her hands reached forward under his weight, grabbing and tugging at the sheets in ecstasy. Joey slid home and held the pressure against her as her body shuddered through the orgasm he’d created. Her head pushed away from the pillow, a throaty purr escaping her lips.

  “Joey…I…”

  “Shhh,” Joey said raking his nails down her spine, causing her back to arc in an ever tauter curve. “Just enjoy it…”

  She rolled her head over and around on her neck, as he pressed in harder. The pressure pulsing warmly across his thighs.

  Joey cursed inwardly as he felt the moment slipping away from him with a sudden jolt. That unwelcome feeling when the man isn’t sure if the erection is sustainable, as if his dick could lose interest and be followed in quick succession by the mind.

  A tiny flicker of doubt shivered in his head.

  But Joey knew how to deal with this.

  He took his left hand from her shoulder blade and pushed the palm gently against the back of her skull, pressing her back down onto the pillow. Muffled sounds of pleasure vibrated against his hand; he hadn’t pushed down too viciously, but it had the effect of lifting her desire, and she began grinding her ass back up, rotating her hips.

  Joey spat on his fingers and in one practiced movement slid an index finger between his belly and her ass, into the puckered hole above her pussy. She gasped, squirmed a little but accepted the invasion gladly. When Joey shifted, and slid his middle finger in to join the first, there was a small vocalization of surprise, but again she rolled with it. Pushing back, meeting the thrust of his fingers.

  When he was in past the second knuckle on both fingers, Joey widened the hole against the resistance of the muscles. Opening her up enough for the next round of their sex.

  Joey closed his eyes.

  It wasn’t the woman on the bed he conjured up in his mind, her legs working wantonly against the mattress, toes curling. It was Enrico.

  The attention in his dick came back on point almost immediately as he thought of his erstwhile lover and friend. Enrico was no longer in Joey’s orbit.

  It was Joey who had pushed him away. Enrico had got crazy and moody over Joey fucking Bianca that day three years ago. Joey was on the verge of becoming Made and Enrico was playing spoiled brat and spurned lover.

  Joey kept him around for another few months, but even taking that ass against Enrico’s will had lost its allure. Joey didn’t need Enrico bitching and carrying on like a jealous teen. So in the end, after the most insane argument as they always were, Joey had told him to get the fuck away from him. He could still work for the family, but he didn’t want him in the same bed any more.

  Joey knew that in the end he would be cutting off his own nose to spite his face, because Enrico—when he wasn’t bitching or whining—was an exceptional lay. But Joey knew he needed to have his focus on consolidating his position. So he had cut Enrico out of his life with extreme prejudice.

  He’d not taken any of Enrico’s calls, and he’d worked the X end of the business through other parties, who would give Enrico his orders by proxy.

  But there were times, like now, as he pushed his dick into the woman’s tight ass, when flashes of Enrico would be conjured up from his memory to help with sexual focus. Joey admittedly liked women more in the aesthetic sense, and he could happily fuck them with his head in the right place. But this fuck wasn’t pleasure. It was business. It wasn’t about getting his dick sucked, it was about cementing a deal, and for that Joey needed the image of Enrico.

  He needed Enrico front and center in his head.

  The woman bucked back, hungrily swallowing Joey’s dick to the root. She wanted it hard, and she wanted it fast. In that respect, she was the opposite of Enrico, and so Joey—to replicate what he needed—told her to slow down. “Take it easy baby…I don’t want to finish before I have to…”

  She groaned and shivered beneath him, but pleasingly did as she was told. Joey made his back strokes long and smooth, as his thrusts built gently.

  In Joey’s head, Enrico was golden against the same white sheets, sweat pooling in the small of his back, his shoulder muscles bunching, his fingers starred and his ankles bending up to press against Joey’s thighs as he always had when they fucked in this way.

  Joey could feel the blood rushing hard through his head, his heart was a gunshot, and his loins were full of electricity.

  He was nearing the point of no return. On the bed the woman who was Enrico in his head, was orgasming in long, unending shudders of pleasure.

  Joey’s dick was a piston, the rush building from his nuts to the shaft. Edging up his dick like sap in the Spring, he was on the borderline of a shattering, Enrico-enhanced orgasm himself. He pushed at Enrico in his head, and the woman’s back rose as she came, first up onto her elbows, and then onto her hands. Her hair brushing Joey’s chest like a summer wind.

  “Joey!” the woman screamed.

  “Enrico.” Joey hissed through his lips.

  “Mother?” said Te Amo from the doorway of the cabin. “Mother? What the fuck are you doing with Joey! Joey Diamonds! Get the fuck away from my mother!”

  Present Day, August 1997

  Joey had no idea what was going to come out of Te Amo’s mouth as she started to speak from the stand.

  The courtroom was hushed and expectant.

  A surprise witness. A ratcheting up of tension. The Prosecutor looked like all his Christmases had turned up on the same day,
tied up with a red silk ribbon.

  Te Amo looked amazing, even Joey had to admit that to himself. Like Enrico, he hadn’t seen her for a very long time, and the intervening months since she’d surprised him and her mother in the throes of rabid coupling, had if anything made her even more beautiful—and Joey thought with a totally unnecessary stirring in his pants, a lot more like her mother.

  As he’d rolled off the Queen of Cocaine in the master bedroom of her yacht to see Te Amo in the doorway—gawping like a guppy caught in a surprise net—Te Amo’s hand mechanically reached for the gun she kept in her purse, and her eyes blazed with all the fires of thirteen hells.

  Joey had, for one of the only times in his life, been lost for words.

  Sophia Reyes, Te Amo’s mother had stood up from the bed, naked, not trying to hide her frame. The juices from her pussy slathering her thighs, she held up her hand and said, “It’s business darling. Nothing more.”

  “Business!?” Te Amo had screamed. Her voice had been so shrill and sharp, that Sophia’s bodyguard Joao had bounded into the room, SIG-Saur drawn and ready to off anyone who got in his way. When Joao saw the tableaux of frozen bodies—two naked and one rigid with shock—he’d bent, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and picked Sophia’s robe from the cabin floor, handing it to his boss.

  Sophia in turn had kept her eyes on her daughter with an unblinking stare as she put it on.

  “I…I don’t understand,” Te Amo had eventually said, as the color returned to her face, and Joey had managed to pull a sheet across his sagging erection.

  Joey had smiled at Te Amo, and shrugged. “Like she said, baby. Just…business.”

  Sophia hadn’t admitted outright to Joey that she’d arranged the fake hit on him and Te Amo, but Joey didn’t need her to any more. He’d gotten all the information he needed from Vinnie. But she had conceded that Te Amo had been feeding her information from the moment she’d snagged him at Seth’s funeral. It had caused a momentary flash of anger in Joey as they’d sat on the deck of the yacht in the harbor, watching the sun go down over the ocean.

  “So you know, I can say the word and Joao will afford you extra ventilation, Joey. You have balls of steel coming here, especially after the way you treated my daughter, but I suppose you wouldn’t have made the trip just to get yourself killed.”

  Joey had raised the Courvoisier to his lips, the gentle spirit kissing his lips with illicit warmth. “I didn’t come to be made dead, Sophia. I came to make a deal.”

  “What makes you think I want a deal? And especially one with you. You can take away the hiss, but you’re still a snake.”

  Joey grinned. “Oh I still have my fangs. Look, we want a better supply of coke in New York. We want a better product, a better deal. We want to run a bigger operation here in your town, and I want it to happen with your blessing.”

  “You want a lot.” Sophia lounged back on the deck sofa, crossing her long legs, kicking off her sandals.

  “I do. But I offer a lot in return.”

  “Go on. I’m all ears.”

  “To the five families, L.A. is an open city. Any one of them can set up an operation there, and as long as we don’t tread on another family’s feet, all is good. But if you were to open up business there…”

  “I know the rules, Joey. If I did that, there would be a certain amount of, shall we say, consumer resistance?”

  “Yes. We’d crush you like a mosquito.”

  “And…so…?”

  “Van Nuys.”

  Sophia arched an eyebrow.

  “It’s mine now. When I leave here later, it could be yours.”

  “On Sal’s say so?”

  “On mine. Sal has left our operations in L.A. to me. It is my gift to you, for the opportunity to work in and out of Miami in whatever way we choose.”

  Sophia considered.

  She nodded, stood, and began unbuttoning her blouse.

  “You don’t want to just shake hands?”

  Sophia shucked her shoulders out of the material, shook her head and held out her hand. “Where’s the fun in only shaking hands?”

  Joey stood too and smiled.

  But now in the court room there was nothing like a smile crawling across his face. There was an unwelcome twist in his gut, which was being transmitted to his lips.

  Te Amo knew where a lot of bodies were buried, and he guessed her turning up to testify meant that she no longer felt bound by whatever version of Omerta the Brazilian, Cuban, or Honduran gangs practiced. Maybe Joey fucking her momma’s ass had taken a while to percolate; maybe the seed of hate he’d planted that day had grown into a thorny tree of hatred. It was a real shame, because making the deal to cut the Romano family a hefty slice of the cocaine business in and out of Miami—in return for a blind-eye to their relatively small operations and distribution networks in L.A.—would make both the Reyes’ and the Romanos a tidy profit.

  Te Amo had stalked from the boat without a word, when Joao had made it very clear that he would drop her if she pulled the gun from her purse, even just as a threat. And that had been the last Joey had seen of her.

  Until today in the courtroom.

  The deal was good, the emotional fallout not so much.

  But Te Amo, according to Sophia, had left the country for Brazil, and would not be coming back any time soon. Joey didn’t even know she was back the in the country until he’d seen her coming into the courtroom.

  The Prosecutor approached the stand, he was smiling at Te Amo. Joey could see the smug bastard thought he had something really juicy in his pocket.

  The last thing Joey wanted to do was show the world how scared he was now, how heavy the sword of truth that hung above his head, as he waited for Te Amo to cut the string and let it impale him.

  “Perhaps, Miss Reyes, you’d like to explain to the court how you are connected to the accused, Mr. Diamanti.”

  Te Amo licked at her cherry red lips, and her eyes became the whole focus of the room. “Well I’m no longer connected to Joey, I mean Mr. Diamanti. But for some years we were lovers.”

  The was an audible intake of breath in the room, and even Judge Bartholomew leaned forward in his chair, so that he did not miss a single salacious detail. “Go on,” said the Prosecutor.

  “I assisted Mr. Diamanti with his business dealings, helped with investments, and provided secretarial support when appropriate.”

  “His legitimate business dealings?”

  “Of course, Sir.”

  “You were aware that he was a member of the so-called Diamanti and latterly Romano crime families as well?”

  “No sir, I was not aware of that at all.”

  The Prosecutor shifted uneasily on his feet. Joey got the sense that things were not going the way he had thought they were going to go.

  “Miss Reyes, I’m afraid…” the Prosecutor began, his fingers working at the lapels of his jacket. But Te Amo was not for being stopped.

  “I knew you wouldn’t let me take the stand if I told you the truth out there. Not the whole truth…”

  Judge Bartholomew rapped his gavel on the bench. “Miss Reyes you will answer only the questions you are asked!”

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor, but I can’t do that!”

  Bartholomew banged at the desk again. “Miss Reyes you are in contempt of court!”

  “Your Honor, I know that I am, but this court is in contempt of itself! Not only do I have evidence, incontrovertible evidence, that Joey Diamanti is innocent of murder, but that the Prosecutor—the Federal Prosecutor in this court—should not be standing where he is. In fact, I have evidence he should be in jail himself!”

  Joey gripped Ray Rollins’ arm as Te Amo stared first at the Judge, and then hard at the Prosecutor, who was stepping back as if he’d come across a dangerous dog in a dark alley.

  Te Amo raised her finger and pointed at the Prosecutor, and spat her words at him, “The reason he should be in jail, is not only is he a member—a secret member,
of the Diamanti crime family—but he is also Joey’s Diamanti’s half-brother!”

  July 1992

  Lonnie the Weasel had always been a weasel. That’s how he got the nickname. He was a pissant little turd, who sucked up to the right people, and pissed on the guys he no longer thought could advance him in the Romano clan.

  Sal only kept him around because he would do the dirty jobs. If someone was needed to go through garbage to get a gun that had been thrown after a hit, Lonnie would do it. If someone had to make sure that a body that was rotting in woodland had been dug up by animals, Lonnie would be tasked with making sure the stinking corpse was put back in the ground deeper and covered better.

  Only a weasel would take on the dirty jobs, and Lonnie was that weasel. Joey had used him a couple of times out in L.A. to clean up after him, and Lonnie had done a fair job. But it was clear that Lonnie was developing a habit for booze, and his lips were loosening.

  “I didn’t say nuttin’, Joey! On my life!”

  Joey slapped Lonnie around the chops and the grey-haired man’s head snapped back. Red fingermarks appeared in the pale skin of his cheek, the Miami skyline though the condo window blazed in the dying sun, the windows reflecting golden light. Cars moved thought the streets, as Joey could smell the salt in the air from the sea. Or was it Lonnie’s sweat?

  He didn’t know, and he didn’t care.

  “Don’t lie to me, Lonnie. You were overheard. You think when I called you down here, I wouldn’t want to keep tabs on you?”

  “Honestly, Joey! I swear. I didn’t say nothing. This is all a mistake.”

  “The only mistake here was the one I made when I trusted you not to shoot your mouth off in a Miami bar about how you were some big shot down from New York to clean up Joey Diamonds’ mess.”