“No, you’ll send somebody else. All you guys are the same. You never go it on your own.”
He rose from his chair and looked around casually. “Good night, Miss Val. You got class. I’m a big respecter of that. Anything I can do for you, let me know. It’s an honor to have sat at your table.”
He waited for her to speak. She looked at her plate.
“So be it,” he said. “Good night to both of you. Maybe I’ll see Aaron again. Maybe not. Who knows? It’s a big universe out there.”
“Not big enough,” I said.
“We’ll see, smart guy.”
The band started playing again. He walked through the dancers to his table rather than around the dance floor.
Valerie lifted her face and opened her eyes. “I never saw anything like that in my life. What was the embarrassing thing you were going to do?”
“Nothing.”
She looked at me a long time. “You’re the best boy I’ve ever known.”
There are compliments you never forget and you never tell anyone about; instead, you hide them in an invisible place, and for the rest of your life, when the world about you is in tatters, you take them out and read them to relearn who you are.
Chapter
15
AFTER I PAID THE check, Valerie and I walked out the front door into the warmth of the evening and the wind blowing the palm trees on Seawall Boulevard. A minute earlier I had seen Cisco Napolitano go out the door by herself, while Atlas was still talking with his friends at the table in the corner. As Valerie and I walked toward my car, Cisco drove a dark blue Buick out of the parking lot and pulled to the curb across the street, waiting for Atlas, I figured.
“Is that the woman you told me about, the one who knew Bugsy Siegel?” Valerie asked.
“That’s the one.”
“Why is she staring at us?”
“I think she’s messed up. Maybe her life would have been different if she hadn’t gotten mixed up with some bad guys. You want to meet her?”
“No.”
But Cisco didn’t give us an option. As we passed the Buick, she opened the door and got out. Her sun-browned skin and black evening dress and pink orchid corsage were marbled with the reflection of the neon; her hair was twisted like snakes around her throat. “Is Shit-for-Brains coming?”
“I didn’t pay him any mind. What are you doing with a creep like that, Miss Cisco?” I said.
“Doing penance for being born. Tried to warn you, but you wouldn’t listen, kid. Now fuck off.”
How’s that for getting the message across?
But it wasn’t over. Atlas came out of the club just as we were walking away. When he saw us, he opened the trunk of the Buick and took something out, then got into the passenger seat with it and closed the door. Cisco Napolitano made a U-turn so she could drive past us. Atlas hung a chain out the window. Four rope loops were threaded through the links. He shook the chain as he passed us. “Meet your future, asshole.”
I CALLED SABER THE next morning. No one answered. I called that night and Mr. Bledsoe hung up on me. I tried again the next morning and Mrs. Bledsoe answered. “He’s not with you?” she said.
Two days later Saber came by the house in his heap. The windows were filmed with dirt, the fenders and hubcaps caked. My parents were at work. He didn’t cut the engine until he was in the porte cochere. When he got out, he looked back at the street, even though there was no traffic nor anyone in the yards. An envelope protruded from his back pocket, rounded to the shape of his buttocks. He was chewing gum, smacking it; his eyes were behaving like Mexican jumping beans. “My mom said you were looking for me.”
“I had a run-in with Vick Atlas at the Balinese Club in Galveston. His eyepatch came loose. Remember the firecrackers those guys were throwing? His eye was burned. That brick might have hit the windshield, but it’s not what did the damage to his face.”
“The cops never knew that?”
“They probably didn’t look at the medical report. Or maybe they don’t care.”
“Son of a bitch.”