I opened a locker and undressed. I threw my shirt and tie on one hook, my suit coat and pants on the other, my shoes and dress socks on the bottom of the locker. I put my wallet, keys, and cell phone on the top rack. The clothes fit pretty well; the shoes were a little snug but it wasn’t worth complaining.
“Size thirteen,” Cimino said. “What are you-six-three? Six-four?”
“Somewhere in there.” Six-three, two hundred thirty in college, when measurements mattered. I hadn’t weighed myself in years.
“You were an athlete?”
“Played some ball in college.”
“What college?”
“State.”
“What position?”
“Wide-out.”
“No shit?”
I closed my locker. “Is there a lock or something?”
He shook his head. “This is the Gold Coast Athletic Club.” Apparently, that was supposed to mean that no locks were necessary. Rich people don’t steal? In my experience, they do it more than anyone.
I was handed a racquet, and I followed Cimino onto a court. It was clear from the outset that he knew how to play the game-he was rather adept at hitting the ball low against the front wall so it bounced twice before I could reach it-but he was pushing fifty years old and he was overweight and, it appeared, was not very athletic even during his heyday. It wasn’t really a challenge. I didn’t hit with the same strategic precision, but I could chase down most balls and force him to run a lot, which he didn’t like doing. It occurred to me that if I worked him hard enough, I could induce cardiac arrest, kill him, and get the feds off my back.
It also occurred to me that Lee Tucker, were he here, would have counseled me to let Cimino win. Keep me on his good side, that kind of thing. But I wasn’t wired that way. Put me in a competitive sport, and you better keep your hands away from the cage.
It felt good. I used to be a workout fanatic, but I had dropped off after everything happened with Talia and Emily. I hadn’t gained weight-if anything, I’d lost some-but my muscles felt loose and flabby and I didn’t have much wind.
“Enough. Fuck. Enough.” Cimino’s gray shirt was plastered to his chest with sweat. He ran a hand towel over his face and then wrapped it around his neck. I followed him back to that reception area, where we drank orange juice and Cimino ate a plate of cantaloupe.
“That was fun,” I said, putting the cool glass against my forehead.
“For you, fuckin’-A it was.”
A man in a sport coat and slacks approached him. “Mr. Cimino, hello.”
“Hey, Rick, how are you?” He shifted upright, with some discomfort, and shook hands.
“Very well,” the man said. He gave Cimino a knowing nod. “Everything’s great.”
“Great, Rick. Good to see you.”
The man left us, and Cimino seemed to focus on me awhile. He finished off his plate of cantaloupe, devouring them with the same enthusiasm he probably brought to any moneymaking scheme he could get his hands on.
“All right, Jason Kolarich,” he said. “Now it’s time we talk.”
34
“So you were a prosecutor,” Cimino said. “Why’d you quit?”
I rubbed my thumb with my index and middle fingers, the universal sign for money. “Tired of struggling to make ends meet.”
He watched me. I thought of this as an audition. I wasn’t completely lying about my reason for leaving the county attorney’s office, but this was the answer he wanted to hear.
“Okay, so you hit it big at a fancy law firm, and then you left. Now you’re all by yourself at a rinky-dink law firm and you want to work for a state procurement board?”
I thought about that for a moment. “I wanted more flexibility,” I said. “Being my own boss, I can do whatever I want. Nobody’s looking over my shoulder.”
He nodded. But I had only given half an answer.
“But you know something?” I went on. “They don’t knock down your door quite as much when you’re not working alongside Paul Riley and those other lawyers. They want someone with gray hair. They want experience. So I figured, I needed to branch out more. Make some connections, meet the right people, show them what I’m capable of. I’m betting that when I show what I can do, people will notice. Maybe one day, I’ll have one of those 911s in my garage.”
I was feeding him red meat. He’d done the same, after all, probably after working under other people. My law firm was nothing compared to Ciriaco Properties, but the concept was no different.
Work hard and the money you make goes into your pocket, not the guy’s above you. And I didn’t have to take anyone’s shit. I worked as hard as I wished. It was hard to imagine any other way now. It would feel like a small defeat to go back to working for someone else.
“You got family?” he asked.
“My mother died a few years back from cancer. My old man’s in prison.”
“For what?”
I had a feeling Cimino already knew all of this. “Fraud,” I said. “He’s a grifter. A con artist. And a shitty one. A drunk.”
“You get along with him?”
“No.”
“Why not? He offended your moral sensibilities?”
Actually, he did. I was always ashamed of my father’s chosen profession, to the point that I repeated his lie-that he worked in “sales”-to everyone at school and quickly tired of trying to justify his actions to myself. But I didn’t think it made sense to show Cimino my sense of moral outrage. It wasn’t exactly a job requirement here.
“No, it wasn’t that.” I took a drink of orange juice. “I had two problems with him. One, he didn’t do it well. He was lazy. You know how he got caught the first time? He scammed some old guy on some bogus time-share thing, got a nice down payment from the guy, but it turns out this guy’s brother was retired FBI. So the brother gets the G to follow my dad around, and it took all of about two days to pinch him. He was too damn lazy to scout out his target.”
Cimino seemed to find this interesting, maybe even surprising. “And what was the other reason?” he asked me. “You said two things.”
“The worst part was that he didn’t look out for us. He didn’t provide. We were dirt poor, and he spent half of his loot on booze. He ignored my mother, and he took swats at my brother and me. You know, the beatings, I could’ve handled, if he put food on the table. If he took care of Mom. You take care of your own, or you can’t look at yourself in the mirror.”
Now this part was coming from the heart, but I wouldn’t normally have shared all of this. I was trying to create an image for Cimino, an image that reminded him of himself. I didn’t know the details of Cimino’s life, but I assumed from the wedding band that he was married and he probably had kids. And no doubt, guys like him, they tell themselves they’re doing it for their family. They wrap themselves around the dual justifications of familial obligations and past difficulties-a poor childhood, perceived inequities-to rationalize their criminal behavior. There are all sorts of players in their little game, but the bad guy is never them.
At his behest, I elaborated, telling him about my brother, Pete, who was still trying to get a grip on himself. We briefly touched on my wife and daughter-“Hector told me,” Cimino said, sparing us both the morbid details. He was probably wondering how the loss of Talia and Emily factored into everything. Did it make me more reckless? Would I be unsteady? Unpredictable?
I was wondering some of those things myself.
Some time passed. Cimino got another glass of juice and some more fruit. A couple of old guys, one of whom was a judge I once tried a case in front of as a prosecutor, wandered in and out.
Cimino bit at a cuticle on his thumb. “You know, kid, you’re right about one thing. There’s a lot of opportunity out there. This thing here. This thing, there’s a lot of room for everyone to make money. This could be one big happy fucking family. But you know what the catch is?”