Bad Luck (7 page)

He glanced over at his intended, Lorraine Bernstein, formerly a wonderful person, currently a matrimonial yo-yo. She was looking him up and down, squeezing her chin, inspecting him as if he were a horse on the auction block. Gibbons frowned. She had that school-marm look he hated. They'd been together sixteen years and in all that time she'd never, ever, looked like a Princeton professor of medieval history, not on the weekends. Not until now. He hated her hair tied back like that. He liked it loose, dark, silver-threaded, hanging below her shoulders. He liked her in jeans and sweaters too. But now she was beginning to look like all the other married women in this goddamn mall. Frumpy blouse, clodhopper shoes . . . shit. This
isn't the Lorraine he's been with all these years, this isn't the woman he thought he was marrying. He should never have agreed to this. Too late to back out now, though. She's too hopped up on this whole wedding thing. If he suggested that they forget about it and just keep things the way they are, that would be it,
finito
, the end. And he didn't want that. He loved her, for chrissake. When she wasn't acting like a nut case, that is.

“I like this one,” she said. “It looks good on you.”

“I don't like it.”

“Why?”

He held the sleeve out. “The color. It's too light.”

“All your suits are dark. You don't have anything like this. I think it looks very good on you.”

“I don't.” He started to take the jacket off. “I don't need a new suit. I can wear my blue suit.”

She motioned for him to be still. “Leave it on. Button the jacket.”

He could feel the muscles in his jaw contracting. “I never button my jacket. I always wear it open.”

“Just button it.”

She reached out to do it herself. Like a bossy mother buying her kid a Communion suit. He buttoned it himself before she could. Christ Almighty!

She smiled and nodded, satisfied with what she saw. “It's a very good cut. It looks good on you.”

He blew air out his nose. “But I don't like the color. It's too light.”

“It's a June wedding. You can't wear navy-blue in June. It's too somber. We have to look more . . . more spring-y.”

Spring-y?
A Ph.D. with twenty-plus years of teaching experience at an Ivy League university, author of three scholarly books and God knows how many articles, and she wants to look
spring-y
? She's snapped. She's a fucking wack. She should be committed.

Lorraine sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. She looked disgusted. “All right, all right, take it off. You
didn't want to come here in the first place. Wear what you want.”

She turned away and put on the pout. Gibbons looked at the ceiling. Here we go. This was getting to be an old routine. It started with the pout. The unspoken, married-people's compromise.

“You really think it looks okay?” He made like he was inspecting the tags on the sleeve while he watched her.

“I told you what I thought.” Indignation in her voice now. Gibbons stared down at the pant legs bunched up around his ankles and nodded in thought. The color wasn't that bad. May as well buy the goddamn thing. If he didn't do it today, she'd drag him out to more stores next week, and he definitely didn't want to waste another day in another goddamn mall. Just buy it and be done with it. By tomorrow he'd be down in Atlantic City, out in the field and on the job. He couldn't wait. He hadn't told Lorraine about his new assignment yet. She wasn't going to be happy. She didn't like him working the streets. Well, too bad. He had to get away from her precious wedding arrangements before she drove him nuts. Just get the suit and make her happy so that when he tells her that he's gonna be gone for a while on assignment, she won't be able to say anything. That was how the deal worked, the unspoken, married-people's compromise.

“Yeah, you may be right, after all,” he said. “I guess it is better to wear something light in June. Dark colors absorb sunrays or something like that, make you hot. It's not a bad suit, really. I think I'll take it.”

“Thank God,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Stay here. I'll get someone to take a fitting.” She steered around a rack of herringbone-tweed sport coats to look for a salesman.

Gibbons scratched his ear and watched her go. This was depressing. He never used to scheme and negotiate like this with Lorraine. Why was it so different now? Just because he finally agreed to make it official? They weren't even married yet, and he was already beginning to miss the way things used to be. Tozzi was a lucky bastard. He
was single and he was working undercover. What more could you want? Lucky bastard.

Gibbons scanned a row of suits hanging against the wall, slick-looking European-cut suits. Giorgio Porgio, Tozzi's kind of thing. A black one with faint blue pinstripes caught his eye, and he picked up the sleeve to check the tag. He saw the price and nearly shit his pants. Eight hundred and ninety-five bucks? For a suit? In Macy's? You gotta be kidding.

He parted the suits on the rack to get a better look at this thing. It was definitely Tozzi. Tozzi liked guinea clothes like this. He'd spend nine hundred dollars on a suit like this if he could afford it. He had champagne tastes about a lot of things, come to think of it, but he was in the wrong line of work for the high life. A special agent's salary just didn't stretch that far . . .

Gibbons thought about that call-in tape that Ivers had played for him, Tozzi's wiseguy attitude. Champagne tastes. Must be a lot of perks working for someone like Russell Nashe. A lot of temptations too. A personal bodyguard must see all the good stuff—the cars, the women, everything money can buy. Everything Tozzi could never afford. Maybe Ivers's suspicions aren't that farfetched. Maybe Tozzi likes being Mike Tomasso. Maybe it's more fun than being Mike Tozzi.

Of course, Tozzi isn't the type to be satisfied working as someone else's body slave. Tozzi's too much of a hot dog. He never goes for the first down, not when he can grandstand it and throw the bomb. Gibbons looked at the black suit on the rack. Tozzi is in a good position if he decided to go bad. Offer Nashe a deal, offer to string out the investigation, make it look like he's digging hard, then in the end tell the Bureau he's come up empty, that Nashe is as clean as they come. In exchange for the good report card Nashe pays him off nicely. And then there's Sal Immordino. Mafia guy like him would love to have an FBI agent in his pocket, especially one from the Manhattan field office. Lot of potential there if Tozzi wanted to turn bad.

Doubtful though. Not Tozzi. He can be an asshole, but he's not a rat. Gibbons puckered his lips and looked at the nine-hundred-dollar suit, imagined Tozzi in it, behind the wheel of a black Mercedes or a Corvette maybe, Ray-Bans, hot-looking babe next to him. Gibbons dropped the sleeve with the price tag and buried the suit back in with the others. He didn't want to think about it.

“Is this the lucky groom?” a swishy voice crooned behind him.

“That's him.”

Lorraine was standing behind the swish, that gooney wedding-smile on her face. The guy had the same gooney smile curling under his big beak.
The lucky groom?
What the hell was she doing, telling this guy their personal business? For chrissake. A potbellied old queer with dyed red hair and a face like a cockatoo. Gibbons spotted the yellow tape measure hanging around the queer's neck. He looked at Lorraine and groaned. Shit, this
must
be love. Why else would anyone put up with this crap?

“If you'll come this way, sir, we can get your measurements and you'll be all set.”

Gibbons didn't say a word. He picked up his pant legs and padded off behind the cockatoo toward the fitting room, Lorraine bringing up the rear. In the fitting room the cockatoo bowed his head and gestured like a coachman for him to stand up on the carpeted blocks in front of the three-way mirror. Gibbons stepped up and looked at his three reflections in the three mirrors. Three guys with thin gray hair and too much forehead in baggy pants and untied shoes about to buy a suit he didn't even like. Three fucking married men. He sneered into the mirror just to show himself that he was still the same guy.

“Now we'll just button this up.” The cockatoo reached around Gibbons's waist from behind. Instinctively Gibbons clenched his wrists.

“I can do it,” he said.

“As you wish.” The cockatoo seemed unperturbed.

Probably likes being manhandled, Gibbons thought. His kind do.

The cockatoo pulled down on the hem of the jacket, then smoothed the material over his back. He kept running his hands over Gibbons's back, pulling and tugging here and there, making little frustrated grunts and mumbles with each yank on the material. Gibbons glared over his shoulder, wondering what the hell he was doing.

“You got a problem back there?”

“Well . . . yes. I do.” The cockatoo kept fussing with the jacket. “Are you standing up straight, sir? This jacket just isn't hanging right on you.”

Gibbons grinned and caught Lorraine's eye in the mirror. The cockatoo kept pulling on the jacket, trying to figure out where the problem was. Then he found it, under the left armpit. Gibbons unbuttoned the jacket and reached in where his gun rested snugly in its holster. Excalibur, the .38 Colt Cobra Gibbons had used his entire career as an FBI agent. The cockatoo stared at the revolver in the mirror. He looked pretty pale all of a sudden.

“You can let it out a little on this side, can't you?” Gibbons was trying not to smirk.

The cockatoo coughed. “As you wish, sir.”

“I wish,” Gibbons said.

“I don't,” Lorraine said. She looked pissed as she stepped over and hissed in his ear. “Did you have to bring that?”

“I always bring Excalibur when I get a new suit. Otherwise it ends up being too tight.”

“This suit is for our wedding, for God's sake. You don't need a gun to get married.”

“Well, I'm not gonna wear it just once. After the wedding I can wear it to work. What the hell did you think?”

She didn't answer. He knew what she wanted to say, but she didn't say it. Another one of the symptoms of this wedding disease she had. No arguments. Extremely non-confrontational. She was probably afraid he'd back out if she got him too riled up. Of all the crazy things she was doing now, this was the worst.

She pursed her lips and nodded. “Of course. You're right.” Then she went back to her place.

Goddammit! He hated when she did this. These days she just swallowed whatever he said and made like everything was fine and dandy. He knew she didn't like his carrying a gun and working the streets, but she hadn't said boo about his work in the past two months. Anything not to rock the boat. Jesus!

“Sir, I'm sure we can accommodate your . . . your—”

“Gun.”

“Yes, I'm sure our tailor can take the jacket out as you wish.” The cockatoo looked very jumpy.

“Good. You do that.”

The cockatoo nodded and went back to work with his tape measure, chalk marker, and pin cushion. Quietly, this time.

Gibbons tried to catch Lorraine's eye in the mirror again, but she wouldn't look at him. This was the suffer-in-silence phase.

“What do you hear from Tozzi these days?” he asked. She loved her cousin, used to baby-sit him when he was a kid. Gibbons knew this would bring her out.

She lifted her eyes and shrugged. “Not much. Aunt Concetta told me he dropped by to see her a few weeks ago. She said he didn't look happy, but he wouldn't talk about it. She said he got very moody when she asked him if there was anything wrong. She called and asked me if I knew what was wrong with him. She was certain there was something wrong.”

“Your relatives always think there's something wrong,” Gibbons said. “It's in the blood.” Goddamn suspicious Italians. Never met one who wasn't.

Lorraine shrugged again. “Maybe so, but Aunt Concetta is pretty sharp, even at her age. She was right about Daniel.”

“Who?”

“Daniel. My ex. The guy who ran out on me.”

“Oh yeah. Mr. Bernstein.” Another queer.

“Aunt Concetta thought there was something wrong with him the first time she met him. She was right. The bastard had another wife in Missouri and a fiancée in Toronto.”

“And he was a homo too, wasn't he?” Gibbons glanced in the mirror at the cockatoo for a reaction. The bird kept his head down and concentrated on sticking pins in the pants. Probably afraid he'd get shot if he said anything.

“Bisexual. And that was just a rumor. We never found out for sure.”

Lorraine's face changed. The dopey smile was gone and that handsome, ageless beauty was back. She could look like a great painting sometimes. A face you could study for years and never pin down in your mind. This was the Lorraine Gibbons wanted to marry.

“Bastard,” she said in a whisper.

“Excuse me, sir,” the cockatoo whispered, afraid to interrupt. “Do you want cuffs on the trousers?”

Gibbons looked down at the cockatoo on his knees. “No cuffs.” The guy seemed to be shaking a bit, afraid he'd stick Gibbons with a pin. Gibbons shook his head. Pathetic. “What about that girl Tozzi had been seeing? The redhead. She still around?”