Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“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.”

They 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.”

The 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.