“Well, I sat through The Sound of Music,” Karen told him.
The man laughed politely and said, “I’d like to come in and share a few things about the Bible that you may not know.”
“Uhhhh,” Karen said, trying to look over his shoulder, “the prison chaplain did a pretty good job of that, you know, before my appeal went through.”
“Oh?”
This would be a good time to come home, Neal.
“Yeah,” Karen said, “and sitting on death row for all those years, I had a lot of time to read and everything…”
“If I could just come in and pray with you,” he said.
“I don’t pray well with others.”
The man scratched his head and looked down. Then he leaned on the door and said, “Look, enough is enough. I’m coming in the house.”
The man is big, Karen thought. If he wants to come through this door, I can’t stop him.
“I don’t think so,” she said as she tried to close the door.
Neal was at the bottom of the hill when he realized he’d forgotten the home-pregnancy test.
He thought about skipping it. He needed to get back, call Graham, and get Polly out of there, but this pregnancy test could provide important information, either way it went. So he turned the car around and parked it outside of Brogan’s.
He locked it up and went into the bar. Brogan was asleep, so Brezhnev settled for a low, threatening rumble as Neal came in. Neal set the keys on the bar and retreated.
It took him about three minutes to find what he was looking for in the store and another three minutes to get enough nerve to take it to the counter. He picked up a bottle of Coke, a package of chocolate-chip cookies, and some oven cleaner to make the pregnancy test blend in.
Evelyn arched an eyebrow at him.
“The oven’s dirty,” Neal said.
The eyebrow arched a little higher.
“And I’m thirsty,” Neal said.
Evelyn leaned over the counter and grabbed his wrist.
“Neal Carey,” she said, “you should marry that girl.”
“You’re right,” Neal said.
He paid for his purchases and started to walk back to the house.
Karen tried to shut the door, but the man stood his ground in the doorway.
Then another man came over the top of him and slammed the door back open. Karen was about to punch him when she saw the woman standing on the doorstep behind him.
“What are you doing here, Mrs. Landis?” Karen asked.
Candy held up her hands and said, “I want to see the cheap tart who says she’s been sleeping with my husband.”
Polly stepped up behind Karen and raised her hand.
Candy flushed, summoned up her nerve, and said, “My husband has a disgusting nickname for the sexual act. What is it?”
Polly looked her square in the eye and enunciated, “Jack-in-the-box.”
Candy Landis looked at the teased hair, the stiletto fingernails, the mascara, the eyeliner, and the skintight black outfit and asked the eternal question of the wronged wife: “What do you have that I don’t?”
Polly looked at Candy’s chiseled hair, her plain nails, her white blouse buttoned up to the neck and tied with a bow, and her tailored business suit that looked like a piece of armor.
Polly rolled her eyes and sighed. “Where to begin?”
Overtime watched this scene, put his car into a K-turn, and retreated down the street. He blessed his good fortune as he recalled one of Chairman Mao’s old sayings: “All is chaos under the heavens, and the situation is excellent.”
9
Levine pulled the plastic lid off the cardboard cup and frowned. He set the cup down on his desk and looked at the young accountant, who was taking his own coffee out of the bag.
“Does this look black to you?” Ed asked.
The accountant looked into Ed’s cup and said, “No, it looks regular.”
“Maybe you have the black.”
The accountant took the lid off the other cup and gave Ed the bad news. “Regular.”
“What did you tell the guy?”
“I told the guy one black, one regular.”
“He gave you two regulars.”
“Do you want me to go back?” the young accountant asked. He was afraid of Levine.
Levine was irritated. Why did deli guys invariably screw up and give you regular instead of black when it would be a lot better if they screwed up and gave you black instead of regular? You could always put the cream and sugar in, but you couldn’t take it out. It didn’t make sense.
“I have to get a coffeemaker,” Ed said. He started to drink the coffee and the relieved accountant sat down. “This better be an onion bagel, though.”
“It is. I watched him put it in the bag.”
“What’d you get?”
“Plain, toasted, with butter.”
Ed unwrapped his bagel and wondered why Spitz and Simon had sent him the only goy accountant in midtown. Maybe because they knew it was going to be an all-nighter. They’d better be giving me a discount on the hourly, Ed thought.
“So, what’d you bring?” Ed asked.
The accountant looked worried.
“You said a bagel and coffee,” he said.
“Your research,” Ed said. “What did you think, I brought you over here to eat? What do you have?”
The accountant wiped his fingers off on a napkin and reached into his briefcase.
“Mr. Spitz worked these up for you,” he said.
There goes the discount, Ed thought.
“What you’ll see there,” the accountant said, laying a stack of papers on the desk, “is that there are about twenty companies delivering various goods and services to the Candyland construction site. We managed to track eight of them back to the source and we should have the rest in a couple of days.”
Ed made himself swallow some coffee on the theory that there was still caffeine in there with the milk and sugar.
“And?” he asked, because the accountant was just sitting there looking proud of himself.
“The eight we traced go back to something called Crescent City Management in New Orleans.”
Ed felt his stomach turn sour, and it wasn’t the coffee. It was the knowledge that organized crime in Texas was a colony of Carmine Bascaglia’s empire in New Orleans.
“Who’s behind Crescent City?” Ed asked.
“A group of lawyers,” the accountant answered. “It’s all there in the report.”
“Eat your bagel,” Ed said. He started to worry. Was it possible that the mob had the arm on Landis? Had they just muscled their way in to get the job, or were they sucking the blood out of him, as well? There’d be so many ways to do it-eight guys on a job that needed five
… four supervisors on every electrical outlet… overcharges on materials… bill for top quality and deliver the cheap shit instead…
But what was in it for Jack Landis? It didn’t make sense for him to rob himself. Unless…
Oh shit. It was so wonderfully evil that Levine had to smile. No, it couldn’t be, could it? All that money pouring through the telephone lines-just dial 1-800-CAN-DICE and make your contribution to organized crime? Get yourself a time-share in a condo that is never going to be built? Or if it is, is going to fall down on you the first time you sneeze?
Nah.
But Graham sees a lot of trucks coming and going with no time to unload, then he thinks he sees Joey Foglio get out of a limo on the site, and… what?
What could Joey Beans have on Jack Landis?
Oh shit.
Ed set down his coffee and reached for the phone.
There was always a lot of controversy about what to do with the San Antonio River where it made the big bend downtown. The city’s important wives, who were sensitive about living in a backwater, wanted to turn it into the Venice of the West. Their businessman husbands, who were tired of pumping the water out of their store basements, wanted to pave the damn thing over and use it as a sewer.
The wives won.
The local story has it that those civic-minded ladies put on a puppet show for the city council, but a lot of cynics would tell that it was some heavy-duty string pulling at home that turned the tide, so to speak. Anyway, the city of San Antonio hired a designer named Hugman to turn their fair burg into the Venice of the West, and damned if he didn’t do it.