Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

She shook her head. “Even if I could return under my own name, the Church does not allow it.”

“So you’ll always be married to him.”

“In name,” she said.

“But what’s a name?” he said.

She laughed. “Agreed.”

He moved her on top of him and looked up her brown body into her brown eyes. “Tú eres mi esposa.”

She wiped at her eyes with both hands, a small wet laugh escaping her. “And you are my husband.”

“Para siempre.”

She placed her warm palms on his chest and nodded. “Forever.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Light My Way

Business continued to boom.

Joe began greasing the skids on the Ritz deal. John Ringling was open to selling the building but not the land. So Joe had his lawyers work with Ringling’s to see if they could reach an accommodation that would suit both. Lately the two sides had investigated a ninety-nine-year lease but had gotten hung up on air rights with the county. Joe had one set of bagmen buying the inspectors in Sarasota County, another set up in Tallahassee working on state politicians, and a third group in Washington targeting members of the IRS and senators who frequented whorehouses, gambling parlors, and opium dens the Pescatore Family had stakes in.

His earliest success was to get bingo decriminalized in Pinellas County. He then got a statewide bingo decriminalization bill on the docket, to be heard by the state legislature in the autumn session and possibly put on the ballot as early as 1932. His friends in Miami, a much easier town to buy, helped soften the state even further when Dade and Broward Counties legalized pari-mutuel betting. Joe and Esteban had crawled out on a limb to buy up land for their Miami friends, and now that land was being turned into racetracks.

Maso had flown down to take a look at the Ritz. He’d survived a bout with cancer recently, though no one but Maso and his doctors knew what kind. He claimed to have come through it with flying colors, though it had left him bald and frail. Some even whispered that his thinking had grown muddy, though Joe saw no evidence of it. He’d loved the property and he’d liked Joe’s logic—if there was ever a time to strike at the gambling taboos, it was now, as Prohibition tragically collapsed before their eyes. The money they’d lose on the legalization of booze would go right into the government’s pocket, but the money they’d lose on legal casino and racetrack taxation would be offset by the profit they’d make from people dumb enough to bet against the house on a mass scale.

The bagmen also began to report back that Joe’s hunch was looking good. The country was soft enough for this. You had cash-strapped municipalities from one end of Florida to the other and one end of the country to the other. Joe had sent his men out with pledges of infinite dividends—a casino tax, a hotel tax, a food and beverage tax, an entertainment tax, a room tax, a liquor license tax, plus—and all the pols loved this one—an excess revenue tax. If, on any given day, the casino cleared more than eight hundred thousand dollars, the casino would kick 2 percent of it back to the state. Truth was, any time the casino came close to clearing eight hundred large, they’d skim the take blind. But the politicians with their small plates and their big eyes didn’t need to know that.

By late ’31, he had two junior senators, nine members of the U.S. House of Representatives, four senior senators, thirteen county representatives, eleven city councillors, and two judges in his pocket. He’d also bought off his old KKK rival, Hopper Hewitt, editor of the Tampa Examiner, who’d begun running editorials and hard news stories that questioned the logic of allowing so many people to starve when a first-class casino on Florida’s Gulf Coast could put them all to work, which would give them the money to buy up all those foreclosed houses, which would need lawyers to come off the breadlines to do the closings proper, who would need clerical staff to make sure it was written up nice.

As Joe drove him to his train for the return journey, Maso said, “Whatever you need to do on this, you do.”

“Thanks,” Joe said, “I will.”

“You’ve done some real good work down here.” Maso patted his knee. “Don’t think it won’t be taken into consideration.”

Joe didn’t know what his work could be “taken into consideration” for. He’d built something down here out of the mud, and Maso was talking to him like he’d found him a new grocer to shake down. Maybe there was something to those rumors about the old man’s thinking of late.

“Oh,” Maso said as they neared Union Station, “I heard you still got a rogue out there. That true?”

It took Joe a few seconds. “You mean that ’shiner won’t pay his dues?”

“That’s the one,” Maso said.

The ’shiner was Turner John Belkin. He and his three sons sold white lightning out of their stills in unincorporated Palmetto. Turner John Belkin meant no harm to anyone; he just wanted to sell to the people he’d been selling to for a generation, run some games out of his back parlor, run some girls out of a house down the street. But he wouldn’t come into the fold, no matter what. Wouldn’t pay tribute, wouldn’t sell Pescatore product, wouldn’t do anything but go about his business as he’d always run it, and his father and grandfathers had run it before him, going back to when Tampa was still called Fort Brooke and yellow fever killed three times more people than old age.

“I’m working on him,” Joe said.

“I hear you been working on him for six months now.”

“Three,” Joe admitted.

“Then get rid of him.”

The car pulled to a stop. Seppe Carbone, Maso’s personal bodyguard, opened the door for him and stood waiting in the sun.

“I’ve got guys working on it,” Joe said.

“I don’t want you to have guys working on it. I want you to end it. Personally, if you have to.”

Maso got out of the car, and Joe followed him to the train to see him off even though Maso said he didn’t need to. But the truth was, Joe wanted to see Maso leave, needed to, so he could confirm that it was okay to breathe again, to relax. Having Maso around was like having an uncle move in with you for a couple of days and never leave. And worse, the uncle thought he was doing you a favor.

A few days after Maso left, Joe sent a couple guys to put a little scare into Turner John, but he put a scare into them instead, beat one into a hospital, and this without his sons or a weapon.