The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

WHAT I DID NEXT was not rational. But I didn’t care. I got the address of the Atlas family’s business office in Galveston and told Valerie I’d see her that night.

“You’re going down there by yourself?” she said.

“Why not? The cops haven’t helped us.”

“Then I’m going, too.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

Bad choice of words.

“Aaron, we’re in this together or we’re not. Tell me which it is.”

One hour later we were in Galveston and motoring down Seawall Boulevard, the Gulf slate green, the waves streaming with rivulets of yellow sand when they crested and crashed on the beach. The air smelled like iodine and brass and salt and seaweed. The Atlas realty and vending machine office was located in a nineteenth-century home, painted battleship gray, close by the water. It had a small pike-fenced lawn with flower beds, and a shell parking lot on the side, lightning rods and a weather vane on the roof, rocking chairs on the porch, a gazebo with an American flag protruding at an angle from one of the wooden pillars. A client could not find a more welcoming and reassuring and wholesome environment in which to conduct business.

A bell tinkled above the door when we entered. No one was at the reception desk. Through the doorway of the dining room, I could see four men eating sandwiches, pushing pieces of meat back into their mouths, wiping off their chins with a smear of the wrist or hand.

I was afraid, and I was even more afraid that others would know I was afraid. Through a side window, I could see the Gulf and the waves swelling over the third sandbar, and I thought about the day I swam through the school of jellyfish.

The three men eating with Jaime Atlas were middle-aged and jowled and had heavy shoulders and paunches and wore their tropical shirts outside their slacks. They were the kind of men who abused their bodies with cigarettes and alcohol and unhealthy food and wore the attrition as a badge of honor. Their eyes had the same deadness I had seen in the eyes of Benny Siegel and Frankie Carbo. I wanted to be back among the jellyfish. Atlas stopped eating, his sandwich crimped in one hand, his eyes close-set, like a ferret’s. “What do you want?” he said.

“To see Mr. Atlas. You’re Mr. Atlas, aren’t you?”

“Who are you? What’s your name? You make an appointment?”

My palms were tingling; my tongue seemed stuck to the roof of my mouth. “I’m Aaron Holland Broussard.”

“The one threw a brick in my boy’s eye?”

“That’s not what happened, Mr. Atlas. Vick tried to throw a firecracker at another car, and it blew up in his face.”

“Where the fuck you get that?”

“The prosecutor’s office or the cops didn’t tell you? Vick did the damage to himself.”

I

saw his face shrink, as though his anger were sucking his glands dry. “Who do you think you are, coming in here talking shit? Answer me. You don’t come in here and talk shit to me about my son. Who told you you could come here and do that? Don’t just stand there. You got a speech defect? You got mutes in your family?”

Then I realized Vick had not only lied to his father, his father had not kept in contact with the authorities. In the meantime, Vick had allowed his father to direct his rage at Saber and me.

“Maybe Vick sent a couple of guys to terrorize my friend Miss Valerie,” I said. “He put his mouth in her hair. Is he around? I’d like to talk to him about it.”

“You were never taught manners?” he said. “You bust into somebody’s luncheon and start making accusations? Where’s your father work? Let’s get him out here. Who is he? What’s he do?”

The accent was an echo of the Bronx or the blue-collar neighborhoods in New Orleans, the vowels as round as baseballs. His eyebrows looked like half-moons of fur glued on his forehead. He wiped mayonnaise off his lip and then wiped his hand on the tablecloth. In the meantime his three friends were visually undressing Valerie, indifferent to my presence or the awkwardness in her face.

“Why don’t y’all show some goddamn manners yourselves?” I said.

Mr. Atlas set his sandwich down. He was breathing hard, his eyes heated, a canine tooth glistening behind his bottom lip. But whatever was on his mind, he didn’t get a chance to say it.

“I did a study on you at Rice University,” Valerie said. “You are known as a terrible person in every place you have lived. Lucky Luciano said you are not to be trusted. You were kicked out of Greece as a pimp and dope smuggler. You killed a taxi driver in New Orleans. You should join a church or a synagogue and see if you can change your life, because people are embarrassed to be around you.”

I stared at her profile. It was like the masthead on a ship plowing through the waves.

“She’s telling the truth,” I said. “I was at the library with her. There’s a ton of material on you.”

Mr. Atlas’s eyes were as black as obsidian. “Out.”