The Far Side of the Sun (26 page)

‘Yeah. Those two had a load of shiny buddies, a whole boxful of old coins, real beauties.’ He reached out and gripped Dodie’s chin, keeping her from retreating as his large arrogant face jumped closer, filling her vision. His skin bore the damage of a life spent in harsh sun and harsher cold, etched with lines of distrust. ‘Know anything about that, little lady?’

‘No.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Morrell didn’t mention anything about them to you?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘He didn’t drop the box in the alleyway and you picked it up, but just happen to have forgotten about it right now?’

She jerked her chin free of his hand and stood up, catching him by surprise, so that he was forced backwards.

‘No, Sir Harry. That is not what happened. I am not a thief.’

‘And I am not a fool.’

She headed for the door.

‘Hang on there, Miss Wyatt.’

She didn’t stop.

‘Wait!’

Her hand was on the hefty brass handle.

‘You and I, we want the same thing, Miss Wyatt, so let’s —’

She swung around. ‘You don’t care who murdered your friend, you just want your gold back and the police kept out of it.’

‘Well, well, Miss Wyatt, quite a little firecracker, aren’t you? But you’re wrong about Morrell. I do care. About him, not just about the gold. But you’re right about the cops. I sure don’t want them around, sticking their noses into my business, asking damned fool questions that I don’t want to answer.’ His hand was swiping through the air, knocking the questions away.

Dodie said, ‘You’ve heard from the police my version of that night’s events. Now tell me yours.’

For a moment it seemed that he was going to refuse, but she saw him think better of it.

‘It’s straightforward really. Morrell came to my home, we conducted our business, knocked back a few drinks and spun a tale or two about the bad old days, then he left.’

‘With the box of coins?’

‘With the box of coins.’

‘And Flynn Hudson? He was there too?’

‘Yes, the Hudson guy was there too. But most of the time he was keeping watch on the outside, making sure we weren’t disturbed.’ He hesitated, uneasy all of a sudden. ‘Except for when he checked out the rest of the house to be sure that there was nobody eavesdropping.’

‘Is that when Mrs Sanford walked in?’ she asked.

His eyes widened. A dark vermillion flooded his cheeks and Dodie braced herself for his rage to break loose again, but instead he started to laugh. A big booming sound that racketed off his rocks and shook the glass in the windows.

‘Damn you, Miss Wyatt,’ Sir Harry Oakes laughed. ‘Damn you to hell.’

They rode in one of the horse-drawn surreys, the horse ambling along in a jaunty straw hat under the sun’s unblinking gaze. Flynn took Dodie to a bar in the old part of town. It wasn’t much of a bar but it was quiet and peddled a decent local beer. They opted for a table outside in a dusty patch of shade and Flynn sat silent while Dodie reeled off what had gone on between Sir Harry and herself.

He grew restless, lighting too many cigarettes and taking impatient mouthfuls of his beer while she described the exchange when she was ordered out of the office, when Oakes hadn’t yet realised she was not there to make trouble for him but to glean information. When she finished, Flynn sat quiet, pondering what she’d told him.

‘Better satisfied now?’ he asked at last. ‘Now that Oakes has told you what he knows.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘Didn’t what?’

‘Tell me what you know.’

Flynn stubbed out his cigarette. He plucked a stray spotted beetle from the front of his white shirt and placed it on the table where it proceeded to chase round in circles. Right now Dodie felt like that was what she was doing, chasing round in circles, unable to step back and see the whole table.

‘You didn’t tell me what you know,’ she said again.

‘About what?’

‘The box of gold coins.’

‘Ah, that.’

‘Yes, that.’

‘There was a reason.’

She waited.

He placed his hand next to hers on the table, so that they lay side by side on the wooden surface, touching but not crowding each other. His was long-boned like the rest of him, with dark scabs healing on his knuckles, the remnants of his fight with the hoodlums.

‘Some things are better not told. It’s safer for you. Not to know certain things.’

She made herself remove her hand and wrap it around her beer. ‘What else don’t I know?’

He laughed. ‘Sure are persistent, aren’t you?’

‘You should know that by now.’ She kept her expression stern. ‘What happened to the box of coins?’

‘Dodie, I have no idea.’ He frowned. His dark eyebrows hunched together and she was certain he was seeing Morrell on the star-lit night moving off with the hoard of gold like an old-time pirate who had struck lucky. ‘Johnnie Morrell went off with it while I stayed behind, like I told you. To speak to Oakes.’

‘Morrell didn’t have it with him when I found him.’

‘So either he was robbed or…⁠’

‘He hid it somewhere.’

‘I’ve been over the route. Goddammit, I’ve hunted everywhere.’ He smacked the table with annoyance.

‘No success?’

‘No.’

‘But it does mean he might have been killed for the coins. Not because he was involved in…⁠’ she rolled her eyes at him, ‘whatever it is you and he were involved in.’

‘If it’s just plain robbery, you realise what that leaves us with, Dodie? Anyone on this whole damned island could be the murderer.’

‘That’s true. Except for one thing.’ She picked up her glass.

He watched her drink her beer. ‘What’s that?’

‘He told me he was too frightened to go to the hospital because there would be people waiting for him there, and…⁠’ the image of Morrell bleeding strings of crimson on to her floor reared up in her head, ‘and he – like you – said it would be better for me if he told me nothing.’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t you men realise how bloody annoying that is?’

He smiled at her. ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard you cuss, Miss Wyatt.’

‘Well, there’s plenty more where that came from if you don’t tell me more about what’s going on.’ She abandoned her beer and let her hand push up against his on the table. ‘Be honest with me, Flynn. Please. If Morrell was too frightened to go to hospital, it wasn’t just some chancy robber he was afraid of, was it? It was… what? Your “organisation”, as you call it? Why would they want to kill him? Who are they?’

Flynn sat back in his chair. He removed his hand from the table and his face changed. The angles hardened and he regarded her with a flat stare.

‘I work for the mob. The American mafia, call it what you will. In Chicago. So did Morrell.’

Dodie’s fingertips became ice cold.

‘A mobster?’ Her voice came out hollow. The words seemed to bleed in her mouth. ‘You do all that we hear about the mob? With drugs and alcohol. And gambling. Murder and protection rackets. You do all that?’

‘Yes.’ He seemed to recede deeper into the shadow until she didn’t know who he was.

Dodie asked Flynn to take her to his room. She knew it was somewhere near because he’d mentioned it earlier.

‘It’s two streets away,’ he told her. ‘Can you walk that far? Is your back up to it?’ He was polite.

‘Yes.’

What she needed was to be alone with him, away from the curious ears and eyes of passing strangers. He walked her to a street that was so narrow it cradled the heat and wouldn’t let go, and Flynn moved along it at her pace, for which she was grateful. His arm under hers felt solid and dependable. But it was an illusion. Flynn Hudson was anything but solid and dependable. He was a criminal. And now the gap between them seemed to have stretched into an ocean. No boat. No bridge. Nothing to get her across it.

Flynn unlocked the purple-painted front door of one of the scruffier houses and helped Dodie upstairs to a tiny room. She was glad of the help. Her back was throbbing and her feet seemed to have developed a mind of their own. The room buzzed with heat and he threw open the window, but it made no difference, just let the hot air outside move inside. Two flies crawled listlessly on the sill.

‘It’s not much,’ he acknowledged. ‘But it’s enough.’

It consisted of a narrow bed with spotless sheets and pillow, a hard chair, a chest of drawers and two hangers on a hook on the door. A mirror with scurvy was nailed to one wall. Dodie wanted to go to the chest and open its drawers, to stir her hands through their contents. To look under his pillow. Beneath his bed. In the pockets of the jacket hanging on the back of the door. To find him again.

‘Would you like me to fetch you a glass of water?’ he asked.

She shook her head. She didn’t want him to leave.

‘Please sit down, Dodie.’

She perched on the edge of the bed, took off her straw hat and fanned herself with it. He leaned his long frame against the door, observing her for a full minute before he came over.

‘Lie down. Rest your back.’

‘No, I’m fine, thank you.’

He raised one dark brow. ‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

But her body was no better than her feet. It had a will of its own and caved in with a sigh of relief as it sank backwards, and stretched itself out on Flynn’s pristine bed. Dodie was appalled.

‘Better?’ he asked.

‘Yes, thank you. I’ll only stay a moment.’

‘Stay as long as you like.’

She closed her eyes. Outside, children were squabbling somewhere in the dust, making a racket that only stopped when a man bellowed at them. In the silence that followed, she could pinpoint Flynn’s breathing.

‘So,’ he said. That was all.

‘So,’ she said opening her eyes. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘How much do you want to know?’

‘All of it.’

In the quiet of the stifling room she could hear him considering which words to choose.

‘Do you know what I wanted to be when I was a kid?’

‘What?’

‘A pianist.’ He laughed at himself. ‘Dumb kid. Didn’t know better. But I was born in the Bronx in New York and back in those days there were over sixty piano factories in the borough. They employed five thousand workers and I was hell-bent on becoming one of them. As a kid I used to mooch around those places after school doing odd jobs, sweeping up stuff, and one of the guys taught me to play. I was nothing special but I could hold a tune okay by the age of nine.’

Dodie rolled on to her side and propped her head on one elbow. She could see it in his eyes. Those pianos still eating him up, the music playing in his head.

‘What happened?’

He shrugged. ‘When I was ten I went to work for my pa after school instead.’

‘Doing what?’

He gave her a slow smile. ‘I became a runner.’

‘What does a runner do?’

‘Delivers packages. Takes messages. Checks out if streets are clear. Keeps tabs on the cop patrols. That kind of thing.’

She frowned. She didn’t mean to. Didn’t want him to think she was judging him. To have a father who messed up your childhood dreams was sickeningly familiar. She was frowning
for
him, not
at
him.

‘What was it your father did?’

‘He ran bootleg liquor.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘No, Dodie. I don’t think you do. It was Prohibition. Thirteen violent years when President Woodrow Wilson intended us Americans to be dry and abstinent and God-fearing. It didn’t work, of course it didn’t. It just made the bootleg gangs rich and got too many people shot.’

‘Your father was a member of one of those gangs?’

‘You bet he was. He was thick with Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Then got caught up in the Five Points Gang for a time. He and Luciano shifted over to Joe Masseria’s organisation, the Brooklyn gang boss, just before I started running for him. My pa helped Luciano run his bootlegging racket for him – not that Pa ever got rich, mind you. He drank too much of the merchandise.’

He laughed as if he’d made a joke, but his eyes had darkened and retreated into his head. His fingers were rolling strands of sweet-smelling tobacco into a cigarette with perfect precision, but Dodie had could tell he was no longer seeing what was in front of him. He took his time lighting the cigarette and inhaled deeply, sucking the memories back in.

‘Anyway,’ he spoke rapidly, ‘when I was twelve my parents were gunned down in the street in front of me. A revenge killing. Sicilians are good at revenge.’

‘Flynn, I’m so sorry. How —’

But he kept going. The need to spit it out was too strong. ‘Luciano sent me to Chicago, in case they came for me too. That’s where I met up with Johnnie Morrell. He was in with Al Capone by then. I went to work for them.’ He exhaled a long stream of smoke towards the open window. ‘The rest, as they say, is history.’

He stood up, flexed his shoulders as though something was gripping them and he had to wrench them free. He moved over to the window, staring out at the sun-bleached street, where a wind was sneaking up through the seagrape, no more than a furtive ripple of air, but it made life easier for a moment in the hot little room.