Then there were the rackets, everything from dope to dirty pictures, and we had a little of everything in those departments. They were illegal but they had to be run the same way as a legitimate business. The same rules applied — supply and demand, profit and loss, income and expenditures.
The third class was investments. You could buy a piece of a stock swindle or a satchel of hot money or anything else. You invested your dough and took a capital gain or loss the way Wall Street plays the market or the way Swiss bankers bet on Latin American revolutions. We had a lot going for us there, too, and I kept busy.
“There are people to meet,” Tony said. “You’ve got a little dough — you could get something going on your own. Open a club, start a business. The dough is there. All you got to do is take it.”
“I’m happy.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. I like to sit in the background, Tony. It’s quieter.”
“You hot?”
I shook my head. “I just hate flashbulbs. They hurt my eyes.”
“You must be hotter than hell,” he said. “What’s the charge?”
“No charge.”
“Nothing that can get fixed?”
He couldn’t fix murder in Connecticut. And that would be the charge if they started printing my picture in the papers. The captions didn’t have to call me a hood. They could refer to me as a captain of local industry and the payoff would still be the same. A trip to Connecticut and the end of the ballgame.
“Nothing you can fix,” I said.
Tony walked over to the window and looked out. He asked me if I had anything to drink. I kept a bottle of the red wine he liked in a desk drawer. I poured him a glass and he sipped it.
“You been working hard, Nat.”
“Not too hard.”
“It’s September,” he said. “You worked all summer without a break. I took a few weeks, went up in Canada to catch fish. Everybody takes a vacation in the summer. Even the slobs who work for a living get away for a week in the mountains. You stayed cooped up in a lousy little office...”
“It’s a good office. And I’m here a hot three days a week.”
“Still, you need a vacation.”
I didn’t say anything. I took out a cigarette and lit it with my lighter. The lighter was fourteen-karat gold and it worked perfectly. It was engraved, To Nat From Tony.
“Ever been to Vegas?” Tony asked.
“Not for a while.”
“You’re not hot there, are you?”
“I told you,” I said. “I’m not hot at all. Anywhere.”
“Sure,” he said. “I forgot. Vegas is a nice town, Nat. You’d like it there for a week. Everything on the company, of course. A paid vacation. Stay at a good hotel, eat good food and drink good liquor.”
“You mean there’s a job for me?”
He shook his head. “Strictly a vacation,” he said. “Oh, there’s a guy or two you should see. Just to talk to. It’s good to keep in touch with people, good for business. But I could send anybody down. Hell, I could go myself. I just think you could use a vacation.”
“Maybe I could.”
“Stay a week or two weeks. Put up at the High Rise. It’s a good place and I know the guy who runs it, guy name of Dan Gordon. A sweet guy — you’ll like him. When can you leave?”
“Any time.”
“I’ll call Gordon,” he said. “Tell him to have the red carpet ready. You want me to tell him to keep a broad on ice for you? Or do you want to bring your own?”
I put out my cigarette. “I’ll bring my own,” I said.
I saw Anne that night. I picked her up and we ran over to our favorite place for steaks and then drove out along the lakeshore. There was a summer-stock outfit out there and they were doing an Arthur Miller thing that she wanted to see. The meal was good, the drive cool and fresh, the play not too bad. It was a tight gutty script and even a bunch of amateurs couldn’t louse it up too badly. Annie enjoyed it.
The relationship we’d managed to drift into was a kind of cockeyed one. We didn’t talk about that night we’d had, after the killings. We hadn’t forgotten it — we just didn’t talk about it. It hung there between us, a violent moment I think neither of us wanted to face squarely. Instead, we kept things on the surface. We saw each other two, three times a week. I rarely called her. I would run into her at one of the spots she frequented or, occasionally, pick her up at the club where she worked. She waited tables there a few nights a week. It was a sucker trap. The pay was a joke but tips were good and she made enough to cover the rent on her apartment.
We ate together some of the time, saw a show together some of the time, drove around together some of the time, slept together some of the time.
So far as I knew, Anne wasn’t seeing anybody else.
Still, we weren’t going together exactly. We had no claims on each other, no strings to pull. She was pretty familiar with my apartment at the Stennett, but she still lived in her own humble flat and spent most of her nights with no bedroom company. It was loose and uncommitted, the rules not too well defined.
On the way back from the summer playhouse I had the Lincoln’s top down. The wind played with Anne’s hair. The air was cool and clearer than usual. The moon wasn’t around but there were a hell of a lot of stars in the sky. I draped an arm around her and she leaned against it.
“Good play,” I said.
“What would a hood like you know about plays?”
“I’m a very dramatic hood.”
“Uh-huh.” She had her head cocked and she was looking at me in a special way she had — sizing me up, trying to look through me. It was a habit of hers. Sometimes it bothered me a little.
“A dramatic hood,” she said. “Too dramatic. You play games with words, Nat.”
“Meaning?”
“I don’t know. Where did you go to college?”
“Tuskegee Institute,” I said. “I’m passing.”
“Uh-huh. You’re an odd one, Nat.”
We always fenced verbally. Sometimes I thought of it as a rather involved form of foreplay. It wasn’t just that, though. And it was less fencing than wrestling. We used words like half-nelsons.
I said, “I’m just an organization man, ma’am.”
“The hood in the gray flannel suit?”
“Uh-huh. The modern mobster. It’s all a business now — haven’t you heard? You need a college diploma to rob a filling station. That’s what happens when you get mass education and automation going for you.”
“Did you explain all that to Baron when you shot him?”
She said it casually, but it was like a casual stroke with a shiv.
“I read about that,” I said. “The Mafia murdered him. It said so in the papers.”
“And all you know—”
“—is what I read in the papers. Put your head down, Annie. Relax.”
She put her head down. I can’t say she relaxed. I took the skyway into the city, then drove around aimlessly for a while. We stopped somewhere on the north side and had a drink in a quiet neighborhood bar. There was an old Bogart movie on the television set but the picture kept rolling and the bartender kept trying to fix it. We left.
Back in the car again I said, “I’m taking a vacation. A week or two in Las Vegas. Why don’t you come along for the ride?”
She thought it over. “I don’t want to,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Reasons.”
“It would be a break. A lot of sun, a comfortable hotel suite, a different floor show every night. Fifty different ways to lose money legally. All-expense-paid vacation for two. How about it?”