“You can say that again.”
With occasional variations for temperature, season, and family configuration (Joey, the youngest, hadn’t any grandchildren yet), this conversation was indistinguishable from those Dexter held every Monday morning with whichever of Mr. Q.’s sons he happened to encounter at the shop. All were such perfect proxies for their father that it was tempting to regard them as drones: men whose every movement was controlled from afar. Yet occasionally, Dexter thought he glimpsed, in the vacancy of their faces, stores of memory, knowledge, and savvy opinion.
He wrote a check to Mr. Q. for eighteen thousand dollars: his legitimate earnings for the previous week. Waving dry the ink, he said, “War is good for nightclubs, and that’s a fact.”
“Pa will be happy to know it.”
“The roadhouses aren’t quite as flush, with gasoline in such short supply. But the city clubs more than compensate.”
“Son of a gun.”
“Say, I’d like to speak with your pa this afternoon, if he’s a minute to spare.”
“You know where to look.”
“Why don’t I stop by around three.”
This plan, so casually made that it hardly qualified as an appointment, could not have been more ironclad had it been typed into an executive diary by a secretarial school graduate fluent in stenography.
Before saying goodbye, Dexter slipped Frankie three envelopes fat with cash: the week’s undocumented profits. The thickest, always, were the gaming proceeds, marked “No. 1” in pencil on the outside.
“Say, you haven’t seen Badger lately,” he said, turning to go.
“Why, he’s in here most days,” Frankie said.
“Making out okay, new to the city and all?”
“Well enough, I’d say,” Frankie said, with a chuckle that could only mean Badger was bringing in money. How—picking pockets at the racetrack? Even that seemed over his head. The kid had surprised Dexter by not returning after he’d put him out of the car last October. Word had reached him later that Badger had affixed himself to Aldo Roma, an old-school racketeer and one of Mr. Q.’s lesser chiefs, with whom Dexter maintained a cordial, wary distance.
Back in the Cadillac on his way to Heels’s place, he began preparing for his visit to Mr. Q. Other bosses whiled away their days in social clubs, gossiping with their lieutenants—not this one. For as long as Dexter could remember, there had been rumors that Mr. Q. was finished, a doddering loony fiddling with cucumber seeds, driving a horse cart packed with jars of tomato jam in his bedroom slippers. Yet the tendons of his power stretched from Bensonhurst to Albany to Niagara Falls, Kansas City, New Orleans, Miami. The coherent functioning of this corpus was a neat trick that required not a little hocus-pocus. Did the thing run itself? When—how—did Mr. Q., who was surely pushing ninety, oversee it? Was there another man behind the man—a deeper potentate whose proxy Mr. Q. had secretly become? How did he spend his money? Was it true he’d purchased a small South American country?
Dexter had had a vision—the sort of revelation that gobsmacked him once every few years, and that Mr. Q. counted on him to provide. It had come while he was standing on the beach with the crippled girl, right after Thanksgiving, and had strengthened and ramified in the weeks since: an unforeseen dividend of that charitable act.
Heels lived with his ailing mother in the same Dyker Heights house where he’d grown up: knickknacks and cut crystal, lace curtains indistinguishable from their embellishment of cobwebs. He was a committed bachelor, as they said. He appeared at the door in a Rangoon dressing gown with velvet lapels, his last shock of yellow-white hair brilliantined to filigree over a ceramically shiny pate. He carried a cigarette in a long ivory holder. “Apologies, boss,” he said. “Mother’s been fussy this morning; I haven’t had time to dress.”
“Those from Sulka?” Dexter asked, gesturing at the pajamas with turquoise piping visible under his dressing gown. Heels had a good eye—one of many things Dexter liked about him. He owned several vicu?a coats.
“Custom,” Heels said. “I find Sulkas just a shade too rough.”
“You’re a tender flower,” Dexter rejoined dryly.
“Coffee, boss?”
While Heels went to get it, Dexter settled onto a couch in the parlor. Music was open on the upright: Chopin. Dexter had always assumed Heels’s mother played, but she’d taken to her bed in recent weeks. “Heels,” Dexter said when he returned with the coffee. “Don’t tell me you can play Chopin.”
“Only when I’m tight.”
Heels ran the Pines directly, but in the past couple of years he’d become Dexter’s all-around man at the New York clubs. Every midmorning, when they’d both had a few hours’ sleep, they reviewed a list of concerns—or headaches, as Dexter had come to think of them. Today the first order of business was a police raid the night before at Hell’s Bells, in the Flatlands. Three dealers and a croupier were in the Tombs; Heels would bail them out.
“Same lieutenant?” Dexter asked.
“The very one.”
“You’ve talked to him?”
“Tried. He claims not to speak our mother tongue.”
“Holding out or showing off?”
“The latter, I’d say, seeing as he made no demands. And there was mention of ‘cleaning house,’ ‘moral turpitude,’ and ‘scum of the earth.’?”
Dexter rolled his eyes. “A mick?”
“Phelan.” Heels grinned. His own name was Healey.
“I’ll fix it,” Dexter said.
Understandings with the law were axiomatic, of course, and by far his greatest business expense. Arrangements were required at every level, from the beat cops who enjoyed a regular bottle and the occasional envelope to district commanders and beyond. It was in this realm, where police brass kept company with union leaders and state politicos, that Dexter’s business and family lives came closest to touching. Undoubtedly, his father-in-law’s blue blood and known intimacy with the president afforded Dexter a degree of protection beyond what he paid for. He was as close to untouchable as any man could be in his line of work, yet there would always be idealistic young lieutenants wanting to make a name. Most could be turned with the right combination of blandishments. Purists, like Phelan, were transferred by their superiors to other districts.
Next problem: Mrs. Hugh Mackey. She had come around the Pines twice, with police, loudly demanding an inquiry into her husband’s disappearance.
“Men skip town every day of the week,” Dexter said. “Even when they aren’t trying to blackmail their former employers.”
“She says her Mackey would never walk. Devoted husband, adoring father. Tears.”
“What does she want?”
“Same thing he did, is my guess.”
“That’s easy. Pay her off.”
A ma?tre d’ who appeared to be skimming off the house. A manager who might have fallen into dope. Fighting among the girls who worked the gaming tables at the Wheel, in the Palisades. “Screaming, clawing, pulling of hair,” Heels said. “We should charge a supplement.”