Smith said, “What?”
Joe looked at Dion. “He’s fucking her.”
Dion stood. “Without question.”
Joe pulled a pair of train tickets out of his jacket. “She is a work of art, that one. Falling asleep inside of her must be like getting a glimpse of God. After that, you know everything’s going to be all right.”
He placed the tickets on the desk between them.
“I don’t care who you take—your wife, Miss Roe, hell, both of them or neither of them. But you will board the eleven o’clock Seaboard to do it. Tonight, Gary.”
He laughed. It was a short laugh. “I don’t think you under—”
Joe slapped Gary L. Smith across the face so hard he left his chair and banged his head on the radiator.
They waited for him to get off the floor. He righted his chair. He sat in it, all the blood gone from his face now, though some speckled his cheek and lip. Dion tossed a handkerchief at his chest.
“You either put yourself on that train, Gary”—Joe lifted his bullet off the desk—“or we put you under it.”
Heading to the car, Dion said, “You serious about that?”
“Yes.” Joe was irritated again, though not sure why. Sometimes a darkness just came over him. He’d like to say these sudden black moods had been happening only since prison, but the truth was they’d been descending on him since he could remember. Sometimes without reason or warning. But in this case, maybe because Smith had mentioned having children and Joe didn’t like thinking about a man he’d just humiliated having any kind of life outside this job.
“So, if he doesn’t get on that train, you’re prepared to kill him?”
Or maybe simply because he was a dark guy given to dark moods.
“No.” Joe stopped at the car and waited. “Men who work for us will.” He looked at Dion. “What am I, a fucking field hand?”
Dion opened the door for him and Joe climbed inside.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Music and Guns
Joe had asked Maso to put him up in a hotel. His first month here, he didn’t want to think about anything but business—that included where his next meal was coming from, how his sheets and clothes got washed, and how long the fella who’d gotten to the bathroom ahead of him was going to stay there. Maso said he’d put him up at the Tampa Bay Hotel, which sounded fine to Joe, if a little unimaginative. He assumed it was a middle-of-the-road place with decent beds, bland but serviceable food, and flat pillows.
Instead, Dion pulled up in front of a lakefront palace. When Joe spoke the thought aloud, Dion said, “That’s actually what they call it—Plant’s Palace.” Henry Plant had built the place, much like he’d built most of Florida, to entice land speculators who’d come down over the past two decades in swarms.
Before Dion could pull up to the front door, a train crossed their path. Not a toy train, though he’d bet they had those here too, but a transcontinental locomotive, a quarter mile long. Joe and Dion sat just short of the parking lot and watched the train disgorge rich men and rich women and their rich children. While they waited, Joe counted more than a hundred windows in the building. At the top of the redbrick walls were several dormers Joe assumed housed the suites. Six minarets rose even higher than the dormers, pointing toward the hard white sky—a Russian winter palace in the middle of dredged Florida swampland.
A swank couple in starched whites left the train. Their three nannies and three swank children followed. Fast on their heels two Negro porters pushed luggage carts piled high with steamer trunks.
“Let’s come back,” Joe said.
“What?” Dion said. “We can park here and walk your bags over. Get you—”
“We’ll come back.” Joe watched the couple stroll inside like they’d grown up in places twice this size. “I don’t want to wait in line.”
Dion looked like he was about to say more on the subject, but then he sighed softly, and they drove back down the road and over small wooden bridges and past a golf course. An older couple sat in a rickshaw pulled by a small Latin guy in a white long-sleeve shirt and white pants. Small wooden signs pointed to the shuffleboard courts, the hunting preserve, canoes, tennis courts, and a racetrack. They drove past the golf course, greener than Joe would have bet in all this heat, and most people they saw wore white and carried parasols, even the men, and their laughter was dry and distant on the air.
He and Dion drove onto Lafayette and into downtown. Dion told Joe the Suarezes went back and forth from Cuba and few knew much about them. Ivelia, it was rumored, had been married to a man who’d died during the sugar workers’ rebellion back in ’12. It was also rumored that the story was a front to disguise her lesbian tendencies.
“Esteban,” Dion said, “owns a lot of companies, both here and over there. Young guy, way younger than his sister. But smart. His father was in business with Ybor himself when Ybor—”
“Wait a minute,” Joe said, “this city’s named after one guy?”
“Yeah,” Dion said, “Vicente Ybor. He was a cigar guy.”
“Now, that,” Joe said, “is power.” He looked out the window and saw Ybor City to the east, handsome from a distance, reminding Joe again of New Orleans, but a much smaller version.
“I dunno,” Dion said, “Coughlin City?” He shook his head. “Doesn’t have a ring to it.”
“No,” Joe agreed, “but Coughlin County?”
Dion chuckled. “You know? That’s not bad.”
“Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
“How many sizes your hat go up when you were in prison?” Dion asked.
“Suit yourself,” Joe said, “dream small.”
“How about Coughlin Country? No, hold it, Coughlin Conti-nent.”
Joe laughed and Dion roared and slapped the wheel and Joe was surprised to realize how much he’d missed his friend and how much it would break his heart if he had to order his murder by the end of the week.
Dion drove them down Jefferson toward the courthouses and government buildings. They ran into a snarl of traffic and the heat found the car again.
“Next on the agenda?” Joe asked.
“You want heroin? Morphine? Cocaine?”
Joe shook his head. “Gave them all up for Lent.”
Dion said, “Well, if you ever decide to get hooked, this is the place to come, sport. Tampa, Florida—illegal narcotics center of the South.”
“Chamber of commerce know that?”
“And they’re plenty sore about it. Anyway, reason I bring it up is—”
“Oh, a point,” Joe said.
“I do have them now and again.”
“By all means then, proceed, sir.”
“One of Esteban’s guys, Arturo Torres? He was pinched last week for cocaine. So normally he’d be out half an hour after he went in, but they got this Federal task force sniffing around right now. IRS guys came down beginning of the summer with a bunch of judges, and the furnace got turned on. Arturo is going to be deported.”
“Why do we care?”
“He’s Esteban’s best cooker. ’Round Ybor you see a bottle of rum with Torres’s initials on the cork, it’s gonna cost you double.”
“When’s he supposed to be deported?”
“In about two hours.”
Joe placed his hat over his face and slouched in his seat. He felt exhausted suddenly from the long train ride, the heat, the thinking, that dizzying display of wealthy white people in their wealthy white clothes. “Wake me when we get there.”
After meeting with the judge, they walked from the courthouse to pay a courtesy call on Chief Irving Figgis of the Tampa Police Department.