Night Work (11 page)

    

    "Cool, huh?" Gus smiled.

    "Jesus." Frank looked around. "It's beautiful."

    Vincent nodded. "The phones'll be hooked up before noon, and the furniture's scheduled to be delivered around three."

    The office was located on the first floor of a recently constructed eight-suite building. The area the new company would occupy was thoughtfully designed and far more spacious than Frank had dared to imagine it might be. A reception area just inside the entrance led to a long hallway where three offices, an ample conference room, and two bathrooms were located. The walls were off-white, the carpets a nondescript beige.

    "Tell him about the other stuff," Gus said eagerly.

    "There's also a fax machine, copier, and a computer system on the way." Vincent bounded down the hallway to the first office and proudly pushed open the door. The room was empty, but had wall-to-wall carpeting and two large windows. "This is yours. I'm taking the one next door, and I figured we'd give Gus the one in back."

    "You're sure we can afford this?" Frank asked, hesitantly entering his new office.

    Vincent looked at Gus. "Give us the room, would you, pal?" Gus frowned but made no reply, quietly closing the door behind him. "Not to worry, Frank."

    "Just seems a bit excessive, no?"

    "Check it out. We started with twenty-five grand, right? I know a guy who knows the guy who owns this place. Regular rent runs seven-fifty - we got it for six and a quarter. I paid the whole year off. Seventy-five hundred. The furniture and the rest of the shit's all coming in through channels Michael either controls or influences, so what everybody else pays and what we pay are two different things, cabeesh?"

    Frank nodded. "What'll we have left in reserve?"

    "I got everything from initial start-up costs for the direct mail and telephones sales right down to our fucking business cards figured in," Vincent said. "We're still sitting on twelve-five."

    "What about the accountant?"

    "We meet with him and the lawyer on Monday. They're both friends, Frank. We officially begin operation bright and early Tuesday morning, and when it's all said and done we'll still have ten large in the bank."

    Just as Frank began to relax there was a knock at the door. Gus stuck his head into the room. "Benny Dunn is here to see you guys."

    Although Benny was primarily a friend of Vincent's, Frank had also known him for years. Because he'd been in on several scams with them in the past, he was a trusted friend; because he had experience in concert security and crowd control, they had decided to offer him a job.

    "Tell him we'll be right with him," Vincent said.

    Frank waited until Gus had closed the door before he spoke. "You'll have to talk to him yourself, Vin. I got plans. Go ahead and offer him the job."

    "No problem," Vincent said. "What's the matter, you all right?"

    "I had a tough night."

    "Sandy giving you a hard time?" Frank flashed him a look that left little to the imagination. Vincent responded by handing him an envelope. "That ought to keep her panties out of her asshole for a while."

    Frank opened the envelope, thumbed through fifteen hundred dollars in cash. "What's this about?"

    "There was three thousand bucks left over. I split it down the middle. I know it ain't much, but I figured it'd help until things get rolling. Now, you want some advice on the marital problems?"

    "Absolutely not."

    "Go home," Vincent said, undaunted, "give your old lady a couple hundred to blow on herself, then put the rest away. Take her out to dinner, maybe a movie, then hop into bed and slip her the sausage real good."

    "I've got a better chance of fucking you."

    "Trust me, she'll come around a lot faster than you think."

    Frank stuffed the envelope in his pocket. "I can't believe we're actually pulling this off."

    "It's a whole new world, dude." Vincent grinned. "Believe it."

    

    

    Sandy watched Frank and his father prepare the grill on the small cement patio just beyond the glass sliders. Oddly, the two men seemed markedly distant, even when they were together.

    "I love your hair," her mother-in-law said from the kitchen.

    "Thanks," Sandy said absently. "I went to that new salon over on Wilshire."

    "Better not let Darren find out. Hair dressers take it personally when you try someone new."

    "He'll get over it."

    Constance Ponte poured two tall glasses of lemonade and joined Sandy at the double glass doors. "You realize there's a good chance they'll blow up the entire neighborhood?"

    "Of course."

    "Lemonade?"

    "Oh, thanks."

    "Fresh squeezed."

    "Really?"

    Connie shrugged. "That's what the carton said."

    Sandy laughed and began to relax. Unlike many women, she genuinely enjoyed her mother-in-law's company. Connie was a squat woman just a shade over five feet tall, with an ample figure, dark skin, raven-black hair which she always wore up; big brown eyes, and a round, cherubic face. She'd worked for years as an operator for an answering service in New Bedford, and had a quick, often acidic sense of humor Sandy admired.

    "Would it be an understatement to suggest that you're a tad tense this afternoon?"

    Sandy sipped her lemonade. "It shows, huh?"

    "Like a beer gut."

    "I'm worried."

    "About Frank?"

    "About Frank, me, this new business - all of it."

    Connie smiled knowingly. "Frank has always been stubborn, honey, and he's always been restless. Even as a little boy he was restless."

    "Do restless boys always grow into restless men?"

    "Mine did."

    Sandy found Connie's eyes. "He's throwing away so much."

    "He's managed to hang onto what's really important," she said, slipping an arm around her daughter-in-law's waist. "Even in the glow of this wonderful moment, it suddenly occurs to me that I have toes thicker than your waist. I hate you."

    Sandy burst out laughing. "Oh, stop," she said, turning her attention back to the patio. "Maybe we shouldn't watch this."

    "You're right. Lets start on the dip while nobody's looking."

    

    

    A steady breeze helped to cool the otherwise humid air as Frank watched his father spray lighter fluid across a bed of charcoal. "That's more than enough, Dad."

    Joseph nodded curtly but said nothing. Frank constantly wore his heart on his sleeve - a trait he'd inherited from his mother - but his father possessed an uncanny ability to conceal much of his emotion behind a face often void of discernable expression. It was only one of the many differences that made it difficult for the two men to relate to each other, and frequently resulted in their conversations being nothing more than inconsequential chatter. But in this instance Frank had forced the issue, cornering his father by explaining about the new business and the fact that he'd left his job.

    "Do you want me to light it?"

    "I've got it, thanks." Joseph held a long match against the coals until they ignited, then increased the heat and closed the lid on the grill. He was several inches taller than his son, had dull gray hair he kept extremely short and neatly parted to the side, and a thin, almost frail build. His face was angular, with dark eyes, a long, narrow nose, and a thin-lipped mouth. Dressed in khaki slacks, a pair of brown leather sandals and a lightweight pullover shirt, he quietly sipped a wine cooler and absorbed what his son had just told him. "I wish you could have asked my advice prior to putting your plan into action, son. Isn't quitting your job somewhat premature?"

    Frank lit a cigarette. "We've got some cash ahead of us, we'll be all right."

    "How does Sandy feel about this?"

    "Not great. I'm sure she thinks I've gone nuts."

    "She may not be alone on that count."

    "I'm just taking a shot, Dad. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It won't be the end of the world, for God's sake. There'll always be plenty of stores to work in."

    Joseph folded his arms across his narrow chest. "Perhaps," he said softly. "But you put so much time and effort into that company, and that position specifically."

    "You said yourself that I was wasting my talent working at a place like that," Frank reminded him. "If I had a nickel for every time you told me that, I'd - "

    "I certainly wasn't suggesting that you run out and join the circus, Frank. Good Lord, professional wrestling, could there possibly be a vocation more distasteful and crude?"

    "Jesus, aren't we fancy?" Frank chuckled, mostly to himself. "And all this time I thought you were just a lowly high school teacher busting your ass for twenty-five grand a year, like all the other marks."

    Joseph shook his head. "That didn't take long, did it? It seldom does."

    "What are you talking about?"

    "They've gotten to you."

    "Who?"

    "You know exactly what I'm talking about."

    Frank rubbed his eyes. "I didn't come here to argue, Dad."

    "Those like myself who, 'bust their ass for twenty-five grand a year,' as you so eloquently put it, are far from being marks." Joseph opened the lid on the grill, checked the coals, then slammed it shut and looked directly at Frank. "For the most part, we're honest, decent, hard-working people who prefer to earn a living instead of stealing one, which by the way is significantly more than I can say for Vincent Santangelo and the rest of his charming family."

    "You don't even know Vincent."

    "I don't know Charles Manson, either, but something tells me he's not the sort I'd like to sit and have a chat with."

    "You don't know anything about Vincent."

    "He's a Santangelo, Frank. That's all one needs to know." Joseph grabbed a spatula and a platter of meat and headed for the grill. "I'm infinitely familiar with his kind. I grew up around them."

    "So did I."

    Joseph momentarily froze then put the platter down on a small plastic table next to the grill. "Now you listen to me. Your mother and I had to decide between a house in the suburbs or a college education for you. In the final analysis it wasn't much of a decision. We stayed in the neighborhood and banked the money necessary to get you a decent education. Our salaries simply wouldn't allow us to do both. Am I supposed to apologize for that?"

    "That's not what I meant," Frank said quietly.

    "We believed that in the long run, providing you with an opportunity to get out of the neighborhood was of far greater importance than our upward mobility," Joseph said, dismissing Frank's statement entirely. "But you never took advantage of our sacrifice, never wanted to get your degree. No, you were going to rule the world with a completion certificate from a one-year technical school."

    Frank dropped his cigarette to the cement and crushed it beneath his shoe. "I didn't mean for us to get into all of this. I just wanted to tell you what was happening, that's all. I'm starting a business - people do it all the time - and I was hoping somebody might actually be happy for me. I should have known better."

    "I admire your drive, son - sincerely I do - but there's a right and a wrong way to do things. You're a grown man, you understand what I'm saying."

    "I understand perfectly," Frank told him. "I just don't agree."

    Joseph began positioning hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. They sizzled and smoked, and he stepped back a bit and waved at the air with his spatula. "I think the heat may be a bit high."

    "Safe bet," Frank muttered.

    Once he'd gotten things under control Joseph stepped away from the grill, closer to his son. "Your grandfather worked for forty years in a mill."

    "I've heard the story."

    "Then there's certainly no harm in sitting through it again, is there?" Joseph offered a stiff smile. "He worked for forty years in a mill. I don't ever remember him doing anything else. From the time I was a small boy my father always seemed old to me; always look so tired. All the man knew was work and family. There was nothing else in life for him - no hobbies or other interests particularly - only getting up at the crack of dawn each day and going to work in that hellhole. To him, a man wasn't really a man if he didn't properly support his family. Even as a child it seemed unfair to me that we didn't have more. Someone who worked so hard should've had more. Of course, my father wasn't an educated man - never made it beyond the third grade and spoke broken English until the day he died. Still, he was far from stupid. There's often great wisdom in simplicity, Frank."

    "Just ask me, I'll tell you."

    Joseph ignored the wisecrack. "It's a shame he died before you were born. I think you'd have gotten along famously with him."

    "I wish I'd known him."

    "When I was growing up in the neighborhood the opportunity to become involved with certain unsavory people was always an option. A lot of kids I grew up with went that route."

    "What's your point?"

    "That the decisions we make often determine the course the remainder of our lives take," Joseph said through a heavy sigh. "I was never a tough kid, couldn't fight a lick. I used to get the hell beat out of me on a regular basis. I was one of those kids who read the Charles Atlas stories on the back cover of comic books and dreamed about transforming myself from a ninety-pound weakling into a muscle man who could easily overpower his attackers and leave with the beautiful girl on his arm. But I knew the real answer couldn't be found in some comic book fantasy. Across the street and down the block were all those men with the expensive suits and big cars. Their girlfriends and wives wore mink coats, fancy gowns and all sorts of flashy jewelry that in those days you generally only saw in the movies. Those people never looked tired or old, yet they had all the things my father was killing himself to attain. I wanted to be like those men, and wondered for a time if my father was nothing but a fool."