Chapter 4 #2
He lowered a window and inhaled the humid air. A clearer picture was beginning to form. Alfie had recruited a croupier. The phony ball was rigged. At a pre-arranged time, the croupier slipped it into the roulette wheel, and Alfie knew when to put his money down.
There were likely others involved, too. These schemes usually required a lookout, a person to distract security, maybe additional bettors to make the illegal move less obvious.
LaPorta had requested video of the roulette table from an hour before Alfie sat down.
The faces of everyone who even momentarily stopped there would be run through their system.
If anyone else helped pull off this swindle, it would be caught on tape.
Still, one thought nagged at the detective. How did Alfie know exactly which number to play? A rigged ball might fall heavily to one side of the wheel, but to an individual number? That would require some truly advanced level of technology.
“Hey, Vincent?” Sampson said, interrupting his thought.
“Yeah?”
“This woman we’re going to see. Who is she?”
“The suspect’s wife. Ex--wife, actually.”
“What does she have to do with it?”
“Well, he sent her the money. We need to find out if she—-”
Sampson slammed his horn at a jitney that had cut in front of him.
“Look at this fool!”
LaPorta blew out air and shifted in his seat.
In his briefcase was Alfie’s notebook. At the right moment, he planned to reveal it to Gianna Rule, but not until she tried to deny her part, or maybe even knowing Alfie.
That was usually how it went. I never heard of the guy. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Deep down he was curious about meeting this Gianna, seeing if she matched Alfie’s glowing description, and what it was about her that was so captivating. He thought about his own wife. He took out his phone and dialed her number in Miami.
“Hey, Vince,” she said, answering.
“How’s it going?”
“OK. I’m seeing my mom this afternoon.”
“Uh--huh.”
“And you? Chasing any bad guys?”
“One.”
“What’d he do?”
“Cheated on roulette. Stole two million.”
Even as LaPorta said the words, he realized he was trying to impress her.
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Just be careful, Vince. You’re not a real cop, remember.”
And there it was. The stinging comment he could always count on.
“Yeah, Barbara. You keep reminding me.”
“Am I wrong?”
“No, Barbara.”
“Are you carrying a gun?”
“No, Barbara.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Fine.”
“I’m looking out for you, Vince. So you don’t get hurt.”
“I don’t need you to look out for me.”
“Right. Because you’re not a cop.”
“OK. Good talk.”
“Look, I’m not trying to—-”
“It’s fine. Gotta go. Gotta do some not--a--cop business.”
He caught Sampson looking at him. His wife wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t technically a law enforcement officer. And Bahamian law forbade private gun ownership.
But the bigger truth was that his relationship with Barbara, a second marriage for both of them, was a series of combustible confrontations like these, followed by apologies, then a period of calm, then confrontations again.
It was one reason she stayed in Miami when he took this job.
They saw each other as often as his work would allow, and for now that seemed satisfactory.
LaPorta hadn’t really thought about the meagerness of “satisfactory” until Alfie and all his true love talk.
It made him reflect on the choices in his own love life and their hollow results.
Working in the islands, LaPorta often saw couples arm in arm, spontaneously kissing or groping one another—-on the beach, on the street, in the restaurants.
It made him envious. He’d had that once with Barbara.
At the beginning, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
But years passed. They started arguing over money and how much time she spent with her mother.
Everything cooled. What was it they said about passion and rocket fuel? They both burn fast?
A tourist bus pulled alongside the police car, and the smell of diesel was pungent.
LaPorta rolled up the window and adjusted the air--conditioning.
Then he reached into his briefcase and took out Alfie’s notebook.
He tilted it on its side and noticed something odd.
A single page had been folded back. It was fairly near the end, which felt like more than a coincidence.
What are you up to, Alfie?
LaPorta flipped to that page and began to read.
The Composition Book
Things my mother said she loved about me:
“Your shyness when you meet new people.”
Now, Boss, comes the part that you might find hardest to believe.
I became, briefly, famous.
It happened in the 1990s. By this point, Gianna and I had been married for twelve years.
We were in our -thirties, and as I’ve mentioned in the previous pages, our relationship had shifted toward practical matters.
Coordinating work schedules. Saving money to buy a house.
And discussing having children, something Gianna yearned for.
Sadly, I did not. My music career had never taken off, but the press release job revealed a talent for writing that I didn’t know I had.
I spent all my time on that now, mostly freelance stories for magazines and newspapers.
Music had been so subjective; I could never tell why someone didn’t like a song.
But with writing, my gift for jumping time proved invaluable.
I could turn something in, find out what the editors didn’t like, then go back a few days, redo it, and give them exactly what they wanted.
It got me a reputation as someone who could get big stories done well quickly. Which got me paid more.
It also meant I could get assignments at any time and have to suddenly go away for a stretch, then bury myself in trying to meet a deadline.
I didn’t see how raising a baby would fit with that.
And if I’m being truly honest, I bristled at sharing Gianna’s attention.
I liked the fuss she made over me. Little notes she’d leave around the apartment.
Having my favorite albums playing when I got home.
I knew she would embrace motherhood and worried her focus on me would diminish.
That’s a selfish view, one I am ashamed to share.
But selfishness is always clearer when you’re looking back on it.
There was also this concern: how would my power work with a child?
If I traveled back to before the baby was born, would that baby be the same?
And having lost people I loved, my mother, Wesley, Yaya, did I want to become so deeply attached to another soul whose final fate, despite my gift, I could not alter?
I convinced myself it was better not to take such risks.
This, as you might imagine, created friction with Gianna. “Come on, sweetie,” she would whisper in bed, “don’t you want to make a mini me--and--you?” Other times, when I voiced hesitations, she’d snap, “Alfie, you have no idea what it’s like to feel your fertility withering!”
I was tempted to undo those disagreements, go back, erase them from Gianna’s memory. But if I did, I would still remember them. Which would make us uneven. And uneven in love is unhealthy.
So I left those arguments alone. I took the smooth and the rough with Gianna, because it was us. Part of the tapestry, as she had once said.
Still, our marriage was shifting, as most do over time. We’d moved to a bigger apartment. We’d traded coziness for workspace. The romantic meals we had cooked together were now more often Chinese takeout. We went to bed at different hours, wearing sweats and T--shirts.
Gianna took these changes in stride, and I tried to do the same.
But I did miss the spontaneity. The passion.
Sometimes, when she was sleeping, I would stare at Gianna’s face and remember the aroused way she made me feel when we were younger, arriving at her door and imagining us in bed before the night was done.
What is it about time and love that turns us from red with desire to pale with familiarity?
?
The famous part of my life also coincided with my becoming, momentarily, rich.
Yes, Boss. I once had a lot of money. You might find that strange, seeing as I’ve been living in small apartments or your guest house all these years, and rarely wearing anything fancier than khakis.
But remember, this is a story of my lives before this life, and of so many things that were different.
I want to say that money was never an issue with Gianna. She was decidedly nonmaterialistic, often warning how finances change relationships. And my mother, as I’ve said, had warned me never to use my second tries for wealth.
But, I admit, I did try once, in our first year of marriage. Gianna’s birthday was coming up and she was still wearing that toy ring from our wedding. I wanted to get her a real one. Something impressive.
I had read about a computer stock that had soared in price over its first three days on the New York exchange.
Figuring even my mother would be on board with a ring for my wife, I twiced myself back a week and found a broker to invest five hundred dollars the day the computer stock debuted.
It quad-rupled to two thousand before I sold it.
I went to a jewelry store on Forty--Seventh Street and spent all the money on a small, round--cut diamond in a bezel setting.
On her birthday, I took Gianna to an Italian restaurant, and after the food came, I said I had something special to give her. She opened the box and her eyes bugged out. “Oh my God, Alfie, it’s so beautiful.” She put it on and kissed me. She flipped her hand left and right. I was happy.
“But, Alfie, how can we afford this?”
I didn’t really have a plausible lie, so I made the mistake of telling her about my stock success.
“You don’t follow the stock market,” she said.
“I had a hunch.”
“About a computer company?”