“Quite an establishment,” Shayne observed.
“Yeah, the best.” Zito called, “Hey, anybody home?”
He looked into a big front room. “I know he expects us.”
Returning to the front door, he sounded a chime. A maid appeared and led them through the building to a flagstone terrace overlooking the bay. Here a small family group was having breakfast.
De Blasio, touching his mouth with a napkin and then throwing it down beside his plate, came to his feet and advanced toward Shayne with outstretched hands. He was in his late fifties, deeply tanned, with graying, wavy hair. Despite his plaid Bermuda shorts and ankle-length socks, he still managed to convey the impression that when he advised people to do a thing, they usually did it.
“Mike Shayne, so we finally get together. I always thought of you as my type of guy.”
“Yeah,” Shayne said hurriedly, ignoring the extended hands. “Listen, I don’t feel so hot. Can I use your bathroom?”
“Why not? Angela, show Mr. Shayne…”
The maid took Shayne to a small downstairs bathroom, where he retched violently, partially drowning out the sound by flushing the toilet. He turned on the cold water and put his head under the faucet, then dried himself on a hand towel.
When he returned, Zito and the boss were conferring, apart from the others. De Blasio dismissed the loan shark with a flick of his heavily ringed fingers, and coming back, introduced Shayne to the three people at the table.
His only son, Carl, had recently returned without a degree from the University of Alabama to enter the family business. He was taller than his father, thin, and shaggy. His wife, Nicola — they had been married eighteen months — was plump, dark, and shy. The other man was the chief adviser, the consigliere. Shayne had once tried, and failed, to convict him for bribing a police officer. His name was Musso Siracusa, and he gave Shayne the briefest of nods. Mean-looking and heavily built, he was one of the few real-life mafiosi who could have been hired to play the part in a TV melodrama.
De Blasio asked courteously if they could offer Shayne anything to eat.
“I’ll try coffee,” Shayne said, sitting down.
The daughter-in-law poured him a cup, and then excused herself prudently so the men could talk. Shayne raised the coffee almost to his lips and set it down without tasting it.
De Blasio began, “You’ve hurt us at times, Shayne, but I don’t hold it against you. Because you’re honest about it; you don’t sneak.”
“Can we get down to it?” Shayne said. “I’m going to have to puke again in a minute.”
Siracusa leaned forward, his eyes small and hot. It was said about him, and Shayne thought it was true, that he had killed five people during the guerrilla warfare that ended with the De Blasios in undisputed control of the Miami rackets. By choice, he was a strangler.
“Show some respect, louse,” he said hoarsely.
Shayne placed his knuckles on either side of his coffee cup and returned his stare coldly. Carl De Blasio put in quickly, “I’ve got a date to play tennis in half an hour. We don’t have to go through a lot of formality, do we? We all know where we are.”
“You’ll be on time,” his father said. He touched Siracusa on the arm and rebuked him gravely. “Shayne is sincere. He doesn’t lie. We’re going to treat him like a gentleman. If he was a different type of guy, we wouldn’t protect him. You’re too nervous; wait in the house.”
Siracusa bowed silently and left, taking his coffee with him.
De Blasio explained, “He still has some bad blood about when you had him pinched that time.”
“He wasn’t out of circulation very long.”
“No. We got one of our judges on it, but it went on his sheet. That’s old history; forget it. When you asked Larry Zito to loan you, I advised him to go ahead, maybe it would lead to an association. You are one man. You refuse to deal, to get together with people, and where you end up you have everybody mad at you from all sides. When you needed help, did any of your old friends come forward? Definitely not. Among us, when a person is where he can do a favor for somebody, it is remembered.”
“Well—” Shayne said vaguely.
De Blasio sipped his coffee. “I know what you did on St. Albans, the heist in the elevator. I think it made sense. Instead of going against the house odds, you picked someone who already won. Three out of four, at least, would keep quiet. You went with the percentage. I like that.”
“I’ve already had my nose rubbed in it,” Shayne said. “I’ll have the dough for Zito in a week or ten days, as soon as I get on my feet. So don’t lean on me. This is a good time for people with Italian names to stay out of the papers.”
De Blasio smiled. “But we don’t swallow a thing like this lying down, Shayne. We have a strong law against any kind of heist in St. A. Any money that’s clipped there, we want to be the ones to do the clipping. If Mike Shayne can get away with it, every hotshot in this part of the world is going to flock down there and take unfair advantage.”
Carl pointed out, “This means you’ve got an obligation on top of the thirteen thousand you owe Larry.”
Shayne rubbed his forehead. “Let me grab a couple of hours’ sleep, and maybe I can come up with something.”
“No, we need to move before the talk gets started,” De Blasio said. “I have something, a job you can do for us, and I’d say the exchange would be just about even.”
“Can you give me some cognac to put in this coffee?”
Carl called the maid, who brought an unopened bottle. Shayne poured fresh coffee and added a splash of cognac. It was too hot to drink. He held it under his nose to get the benefit of the fumes.
“Go ahead. But don’t expect enthusiasm.”
De Blasio, meanwhile, had been forking up pancakes. He washed the last mouthful down with a swallow of coffee.
“There’s been a lot of crazy stuff in the papers. Rourke has this series of write-ups going in the News. Any other time, I’d laugh about it, the things he gives us credit for doing. The amount of truth there, you could stick in the eye of a mosquito. But it’s doing some harm. I didn’t cry any tears for Mr. Sherman Meister. He was an annoyance. I couldn’t watch him; I tuned to another channel. Now everybody claims I paid for the hit. There’s heat everywhere, and it won’t die out as long as Rourke keeps on writing those articles on the front page of the paper.”
“That’s the business he’s in,” Shayne said.
“I’ll tell you what I think — it’s a lousy business. For me, I’ve been bum-rapped all my life; I walk with a clean conscience. But it’s bad for the outfit. The paisani are being pushed, their spots are being pulled. Cops who’ve been on the payroll for years are giving us the back of the hand. And it s this Rourke who’s keeping it boiling. Now, what we want you to do, Mike,” he concluded, “is stop it for us.”
Shayne looked at him blankly. “How the hell do you think I can do that?”
“You can get in to see him. Tell him you’re in a corner and that unless he does this thing, you’ll get your head beat in.”
“You’ve heard about freedom of the press? That’s the guy’s religion.”
Carl said, “And we want his notes and phone numbers. He’s been building that file for years. We want it.”
Shayne shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
“‘Can’t’?” De Blasio said thoughtfully.
“If you knew Tim Rourke, you’d know it’s impossible. His desk is right in the middle of the goddamn city room. And what the hell — he knows that file by heart. There’s no way to stop the series, short of—” He broke off, and De Blasio nodded.