Chapter 23
RAFFAELE
The elevator doors close.
I exhale into the empty cabin and lean back against the mirrored wall, watching myself watch myself in the panel across from me.
How did Antonio Martinez know where she lived?
The question’s been with me ever since. I push it open now.
Timeframe first. The simplest variable.
I split Antonio’s lip in my office at, what?
Eleven-thirty in the morning? He left under his own power maybe forty minutes after arriving.
He drove home. His men called whomever they had a relationship with at the firm, and Antonio called whomever he calls when his pride’s been kicked in.
By the time those two strangers walked into Bea’s apartment, the clock had moved no more than seven hours. Probably less.
Which means whoever told Antonio already knew where she lived.
And that’s where it gets ugly, because there’s only one version of her address that’s real.
When I brought her up to the executive floor, I had her HR paperwork changed.
The address on file downstairs—the one any clerk could pull, the one half the senior partners’ assistants could get inside a day—is a decoy.
I made sure of it. If someone went looking for Bea Mendez through the normal channels, they’d get a ghost—one of a handful of empty units the firm keeps on the books for exactly this.
The real address isn’t downstairs. It’s up here. On this floor. In the locked file in my office, in the system that only opens to the executive suite.
Which makes the list very short.
Me.
Lorenzo.
Marcy, who runs the floor and has clearance to the cabinet.
I rule out Marcy. Years at the firm. Her husband did time for the Torinos and never said a word. No connection to Antonio, no incentive, no history of moving information that wasn’t hers to move. And if Marcy had ever wanted to sell me out, she’s had a hundred quieter chances than this one.
That leaves two names.
Mine and Lorenzo’s.
The elevator opens.
I cross the lobby on autopilot. The doorman straightens. I nod. He nods back. The morning light is exceptionally bright outside.
Lorenzo’s car is at the curb. Engine running. Driver’s side door cracked. He’s not in it.
I stop walking.
I look around.
There. By the service entrance. Lorenzo, in shirtsleeves, his jacket draped over one arm, talking to a guy in a maintenance jumpsuit I don’t recognize. Lorenzo’s laughing at whatever the man just said. He claps the guy on the shoulder. The guy laughs back.
It’s the way Lorenzo always is with people. The way he was with the gate guard at Antonio’s Wednesday night. The way he’s been with everyone, everywhere, for five years. He talks to strangers like they’re about to be old friends, and they tend to oblige him.
I’ve always thought of it as charm.
I’m suddenly looking at it differently.
“Boss. Perfect timing. I was just heading out. Old man’s going gambling again. The underground room on the west side. Needs me to babysit while he hands his money to Victor Moreno.”
“Victor Moreno?”
“Senior. The father.” He waves a hand. “Calm down. It’s a thing they do. Have done it for a hundred years. He’ll be fine.”
“They do this regularly?”
“Once a month. Last Friday of every month.” He glances at me. “You didn’t know?”
“No.”
“Mm.”
Vincenzo kept compartments. He always had. There were rooms in his life he never opened to me even after twenty years. I knew not to ask about them. Most of the time, the system worked.
But Lorenzo was in this one. And I wasn’t.
What else do you know?
“I’m coming with you.”
He pauses with his hand on the driver’s door.
“You sure, boss? It’s just babysitting. Lot of standing around watching old men drink and lose money. I figured you’d want a shower and nine hours of sleep instead.”
“I’ll shower later.”
“Suit yourself.”
He shrugs and gets in.
I take the passenger seat, making sure to watch his hands on the wheel as he pulls out.
The ring. Heavy gold, signet, third finger of his right hand.
The rumor, when I had bothered to listen for it, was that it came off his father’s body after the business with the family in Chicago.
I never asked. It’s not the kind of thing you want to know in detail about the people you go to war with.
He pulls out of the garage fast.
He’s always driven this way. I made my peace with it years ago. He’s not driving any differently today.
A man with a guilty conscience drives carefully. A man worried about being watched drives the speed limit.
He’s doing neither.
That’s the problem with looking at someone you’ve known for five years through a new lens. The lens doesn’t show you anything new. It just shows you the same picture and waits for you to decide what you missed.
The casino is under a laundromat on the west side.
You go in through a supply closet behind the dryers. Down a narrow stair lit by a single bulb. Through a steel door with a panel beside it that takes a few knocks in a specific rhythm. Lorenzo does the rhythm without looking at the panel. He’s done it a thousand times.
The door opens.
The man behind it knows him.
“Castellano.”
“Tony! How’s the wife?”
“She left.”
“Then how’s whoever you’re paying to forget that?”
Tony laughs. Lorenzo laughs. The man behind the door registers me a second later than I’d expect.
“Mr. D’Amico.”
“Tony.”
We go in.
The room is wood-paneled and old. Someone has put work into making it look like the 1920s. Smoke hangs at chest height. A small jazz combo plays in the corner without anyone listening to them. Maybe twenty players, mostly men of a certain age.
The center table is the one I’m here for.
Vincenzo is at it. Whiskey in one hand, cards in the other, slouched. Across from him: Victor Moreno Sr.
Vincenzo’s laughing.
Victor Sr. is laughing back.
Outside of two state funerals, I’ve never seen them at the same table before.
They look like brothers now.
Lorenzo guides me to a spot along the far wall. Decent sightlines. Two exits within reach. He gestures for a drink, and one of the women working the floor brings him whiskey without asking.
He hands the glass to me.
“You look like you need it more than I do.”
I take it. I don’t drink.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Boss. I’ve been telling you about this for years.”
“No, you haven’t.”
He squints at me. “Eh. Maybe I haven’t. It’s the kind of thing you don’t bring up because everybody’s supposed to know.
The two of them were drinking together when my father was a kid.
They came up together. Then the eighties happened, you know the eighties, and they became enemies on paper.
But this they kept.” He gestures at the table.
“Neutral ground. No business. Cards and shit-talk. Once a month, like the moon.”
“And you’ve always known?”
“Everybody knows.”
“I didn’t.”
He looks at me. “Yeah. Okay. That is interesting.”
He says it without performance. Without smirk. He’s noticed, the same way I have, that there’s a hole in my information where there shouldn’t be one.
I drink, after all.
The whiskey’s cheap. The room is wrong. The two old men at the center table are laughing about a hand Vincenzo just lost, and Victor Sr. is leaning forward to refill Vincenzo’s glass himself, and Lorenzo is at my elbow watching me watch them.
I run the question back through my head one more time.
Lorenzo has been with me for five years. He’s done every job I’ve ever asked of him without complaint.
He also knew where she lived.
He’s also the most comfortable person in this room full of Morenos.
He’s also, I’m realizing, one of the only people in this city who could move between the two old men at that table without raising an eyebrow on either side.
I don’t say any of it.
I drink. I watch. I wait.
Vincenzo loses another hand. He laughs at the ceiling like it’s the funniest thing that’s happened to him all week. Victor Sr. tips his head, almost fond, and rakes the chips across the felt.
Beside me, Lorenzo finishes his drink.
“Smoke break,” he announces.
“Mm.”
“Back in five.” He pushes off the wall. He’s pulling a pack out of his jacket as he goes. “Don’t get into anything, boss. You and I haven’t had a fight in five years, and I’d hate to lose.”
I watch him cross the room.
The combo’s still playing. Vincenzo’s still laughing. Victor Sr.’s hand is on the deck.
I count to fifteen.
Then I follow him.