Live by Night (16 page)

The corridor was so narrow Dion's shoulders brushed along the walls as he walked ahead of Joe. Dim lights hung from a pipe above them, one bare bulb for every twenty feet or so, half of them out. Joe was pretty sure he could make out a door down the far end of the corridor. He guessed it was about five hundred yards away, which meant he could easily be imagining it. They slogged through mud, water dripping from the ceiling and puddling the floor, and Dion explained that the tunnels commonly flooded; every now and then they'd find a dead drunk in the morning, the last of the stragglers from the night before who'd decided to take an ill-advised nap.

“Seriously?” Joe asked.

“Yeah. Know what makes it worse? Sometimes the rats get to them.”

Joe looked all around himself. “That's just about the nastiest fucking thing I've heard all month.”

Dion shrugged and kept walking and Joe looked up and down the walls and then at the pathway ahead. No rats. Yet.

“The money from the Pittsfield bank,” Dion said as they walked.

Joe said, “It's safe.” Above him, he could hear the clack of trolley wheels followed by the slow heavy clop of what he assumed was a horse.

“Safe where?” Dion looked back over his shoulder at him.

Joe said, “How'd they know?”

Above them several horns beeped and an engine revved.

“Know what?” Dion said, and Joe noticed he'd grown closer to bald, his dark hair still thick and oily on the sides but ropey and hesitant up top.

“Where to ambush us.”

Dion looked back at him again. “They just did.”

“There's no way they ‘just did.' We scouted that location for weeks. The cops never came out that way because they had no reason to—nothing to protect and no one to serve.”

Dion nodded his big head. “Well, they didn't hear anything from me.”

“Me, either,” Joe said.

Near the end of the tunnel now, the door revealed itself to be brushed steel with an iron dead bolt. The street sounds had given way to the distant clank of silverware and plates being stacked and waiters' footsteps rushing back and forth. Joe pulled his father's watch from his pocket and clicked it open: noon.

Dion produced a sizable key ring from somewhere in his wide trousers. He opened the locks on the door, threw back the bars, and unlocked the bolt. He removed the key from the ring and handed it to Joe. “Take it. You'll use it, believe me.”

Joe pocketed the key.

“Who owns this place?”

“Ormino did.”

“Did?”

“Oh, you didn't read today's papers?”

Joe shook his head.

“Ormino sprung a few leaks last night.”

Dion opened the door, and they climbed a ladder to another door that was unlocked. They opened it and entered a vast, dank room with a cement floor and cement walls. Tables ran along the walls, and on top of the tables were what Joe would have expected to see—fermentors and extractors, retorts and Bunsen burners, beakers and vats and skimming utensils.

“Best money can buy,” Dion said, pointing out thermometers fixed to the walls and connected to the stills by rubber tubing. “You want light rum, you got to remove the fraction at between one sixty-eight and one eighty-six Fahrenheit. That's really important to keep people from, you know, dying when they drink your hooch. These babies don't make a mistake, they—”

“I know how to make rum,” Joe said. “In fact, you name the substance, D, after two years in prison, I know how to recondense it. I could probably distill your fucking shoes. What I don't see here, though, are two things that are pretty essential to making rum.”

“Oh?” Dion said. “What's that?”

“Molasses and workers.”

“Shoulda mentioned,” Dion said, “we got a problem there.”

T
hey passed through an empty speakeasy and said “Fireplace” through another closed door and entered the kitchen of an Italian restaurant on East Palm Avenue. They passed through the kitchen and into the dining room, where they found a table near the street and close to a tall black fan so heavy it looked like it would take three men and an ox to move it.

“Our distributor is coming up empty.” Dion unfolded his napkin and tucked it into his collar, smoothed it over his tie.

“I can see that,” Joe said. “Why?”

“Boats have been sinking is what I hear.”

“Who's the distributor again?”

“Guy named Gary L. Smith.”

“Ellsmith?”

“No,” Dion said. “
L.
The middle initial. He insists you use it.”

“Why?”

“It's a Southern thing.”

“Not just an asshole thing?”

“Could be that too.”

The waiter brought their menus and Dion ordered them two lemonades, assuring Joe it would be the best he ever tasted.

“Why do we need a distributor?” Joe asked. “Why aren't we dealing directly with the supplier?”

“Well, there's a lot of them. And they're all Cuban. Smith deals with Cubans so we don't have to. He also deals with the Dixies.”

“The runners.”

Dion nodded as the waiter brought their lemonades. “Yeah, the local guns from here to Virginia. They run it across Florida and up the seaboard.”

“But you've been losing a lot of those loads too.”

“Yeah.”

“So how many boats can sink and how many trucks can get hit before it's more than bad luck?”

“Yeah,” Dion said again because apparently he couldn't think of anything else to say.

Joe sipped his lemonade. He wasn't sure it was the best he'd ever tasted, and even if it were, it was lemonade. Hard to get fucking excited about lemonade.

“You do what I suggested in my letter?”

Dion nodded. “To a T.”

“How many ended up where I figured?”

“A high percentage.”

Joe scanned the menu for something he recognized.

“Try the osso buco,” Dion said. “Best in the city.”

“Everything's the ‘best in the city' with you,” Joe said. “The lemonade, the thermometers.”

Dion shrugged and opened his own menu. “I have refined tastes.”

“That's it,” Joe said. He closed his menu and caught the waiter's eye. “Let's eat and then drop in on Gary L. Smith.”

Dion studied his menu. “A pleasure.”

T
he morning edition of the
Tampa Tribune
lay on a table in the waiting room of Gary L. Smith's office. Lou Ormino's corpse sat in a car with shattered windows and blood on the seats. In black-and-white, the death photo looked like they all did—undignified. The headline read:

REPUTED UNDERWORLD FIGURE SLAIN

“Did you know him well?”

Dion nodded. “Yeah.”

“You like him?”

Dion shrugged. “He wasn't a bad sort. Clipped his toenails in a couple meetings, but he gave me a goose last Christmas.”

“Live?”

Dion nodded. “Till I got it home, yeah.”

“Why'd Maso want him out?”

“He never told you?”

Joe shook his head.

Dion shrugged. “Never told me, either.”

For a minute Joe did nothing but listen to a clock tick and Gary L. Smith's secretary turning the stiff pages of an issue of
Photoplay.
The secretary's name was Miss Roe, and her dark hair was cut Eton-crop style into a finger-wave bob. She wore a silver short-sleeved vest blouse with a black silk necktie that fell over her breasts like an answered prayer. She had a way of barely moving in her chair—a kind of quarter-squirm—that had Joe folding up the paper and waving it in his face.

Good Lord, he thought, do I need to get laid.

He leaned forward again. “He have family?”

“Who?”

“Who.”

“Lou? Yeah, he did.” Dion scowled. “Why you got to ask that?”

“I'm just wondering.”

“He probably clipped his toenails in front of them too. They'll be glad not to have to sweep them into the dustpan anymore.”

The intercom buzzed on the secretary's desk and a thin voice said, “Miss Roe, send the boys in.”

Joe and Dion stood.

“Boys,” Dion said.

“Boys,” Joe said and shot his cuffs and smoothed his hair.

Gary L. Smith had tiny teeth, like kernels of corn and almost as yellow. He smiled as they entered his office and Miss Roe closed the door behind them, but he didn't get up, and he didn't put too much into the smile, either. Behind his desk, plantation shutters blocked most of the West Tampa day, but enough creeped in to give the room a bourbon glow. Smith dressed the part of the Southern gentleman—white suit over white shirt and thin black tie. He watched them take their seats with an air of bemusement, which Joe read as fear.

“So you're Maso's new find.” Smith pushed a humidor across the desk at them. “Help yourselves. Best cigars in the city.”

Dion grunted.

Joe waved off the humidor, but Dion helped himself to four cigars, placing three in his pocket and biting off the end of the fourth. He spit it into his hand and laid it on the edge of the desk.

“So what brings you by?”

“I've been asked to look over Lou Ormino's affairs for a little bit.”

“But it's not permanent,” Smith said, firing up his own cigar.

“What's not?”

“You as Lou's replacement. I just mention it because the people 'round here like dealing with who they know, and no one knows you. No offense meant.”

“So who in the organization would you suggest?”

Smith gave it some thought. “Rickie Pozzetta.”

Dion cocked his head at that. “Pozzetta couldn't lead a dog to a hydrant.”

“Then Delmore Sears.”

“Another idiot.”

“Well, then, fine, I could do it.”

“That's not a bad idea,” Joe said.

Gary L. Smith spread his hands. “Only if you think I could be right for the job.”

“It's possible, but we need to know why the last three supply runs have been hit.”

“You mean the ones heading north?”

Joe nodded.

“Bad luck,” he said. “Best I can figure. It does happen.”

“Why don't you change the routes then?”

Smith produced a pen and scribbled on a piece of paper. “That's a good idea, Mr. Coughlin, is it?”

Joe nodded.

“A great idea. I'll definitely consider it.”

Joe watched the man for a bit, watched him smoke with the diffused light coming through the blinds and spreading over the top of his head, watched him until Smith started looking a little confused.

“Why have the boat runs been so erratic?”

“Oh,” Smith said easily, “that's the Cubans. We don't have any control over that.”

“Two months ago,” Dion said, “you got fourteen shipments in one week, three weeks later it was five, last week it was none.”

“It's not cement mixing,” Gary L. Smith said. “You don't add one-third water, get the same consistency every time. You've got various suppliers with various schedules, and they might be dealing with a sugar supplier over there had himself a strike? Or the guy who drives the boat gets sick.”

“Then you go to another supplier,” Joe said.

“Not that simple.”

“Why not?”

Smith sounded weary, as if he were being asked to explain airplane mechanics to a cat. “Because they're all paying tribute to the same group.”

Joe removed a small notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. “This would be the Suarez family we're talking about?”

Smith eyed the notebook. “Yeah. Own the Tropicale up on Seventh.”

“So they're the only suppliers.”

“No, I just said.”

“Said what?” Joe narrowed his eyes at the man.

“I mean, they do supply some of what we sell but there are all these others too. This one guy I deal with, Ernesto? Old boy has a wooden hand. You believe it? He—”

“If all the other suppliers answer to one supplier, then that supplier is the only supplier. They set the prices and everyone else falls in line, I assume?”

Smith gave it all a sigh of exasperation. “I guess.”

“You guess?”

“It's just not that simple.”

“Why isn't it?”

Joe waited. Dion waited. Smith relit his cigar. “There are other suppliers. They have boats, they have—”

“They're subcontractors,” Joe said. “That's all. I want to deal with the contractor. We'll need a meet with the Suarezes as soon as possible.”

Smith said, “No.”

“No?”

“Mr. Coughlin, you just don't understand how things are done in Ybor. I deal with Esteban Suarez and his sister. I deal with all the middlemen.”

Joe pushed the telephone across the desk to Smith's elbow. “Call them.”

“You're not hearing me, Mr. Coughlin.”

“No, I am,” Joe said softly. “Pick up that phone and call the Suarezes and tell them my associate and I will have dinner tonight at the Tropicale, and we'd really appreciate the best table they have as well as a few minutes of their time once we've finished.”

Smith said, “Why don't you take a couple of days to get to know the customs down here? Then, trust me, you'll come back and thank me for not calling. And we'll go meet them together. I promise.”

Joe reached into his pocket. He pulled out some change and placed it on the desk. Then his cigarettes, his father's watch, followed by his .32, which he left in front of the blotter pointed at Smith. He shook a cigarette from the pack, his eyes on Smith as Smith lifted the phone off the cradle and asked for an outside line.

Joe smoked while Smith spoke Spanish into the phone and Dion translated a bit of it, and then Smith hung up.

“He got us a table for nine o'clock,” Dion said.

“I got you a table for nine o'clock,” Smith said.