Page 35 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

N ext day after church and Sunday dinner A.J. drove the rented Chevy Malibu up onto the bridge spanning the dark Mississippi, headlights reflecting off gleaming streetcar tracks running down its center. Only half past five. The sun had been down for an hour already.

Lana, home for the holidays from Champaign, had been disappointed when he called to tell her he had to see his godfather tonight.

They’d planned to go dancing at a Belleville club then get a motel room.

Their chemical attraction still pulsed, their paths still diverged.

She was applying at med schools, hoping to follow in her parents’ footsteps, and he had just re-upped for another four years.

What an ironic couple they would make: she trained to save lives, he to take them.

He parked at the curb before Bogdan’s redbrick flat, stepped out into brittle night air smelling of coal smoke, and shivered. His blood had thinned after a six-month deployment in the Caribbean. Which made him think of Dupuis heading for Florida the next week. He’d been thinking about it all day.

Three steps up the worn marble stoop to pound on the door, which soon opened. Bogdan pulled him into his living room with a bear hug, took his jacket, and felt his biceps. He patted his bronzed cheek.

“You look leaner and meaner than last year.”

“Right on both counts.”

Bogdan led him into the kitchen and fetched two beers and a bottle of bourbon from the fridge.

At the kitchen table they toasted, downed shots, and chased them with Falstaff.

His godfather had grown a bit grayer and a bit heavier though still physically intimidating—even to someone skilled in martial arts—thanks in part to his menacing mien.

Bogdan wanted to know what he’d been up to in the Caribbean. A.J. told him what he could. Next he asked: “You been winning at poker?”

“Not so much lately. Guys won’t play me once they realize I always walk away winners. You taught me too well.”

“Not well enough. I need to show you how and when to lose so people think you’re vulnerable and get lured in. You don’t kill the goose until it’s good and fat.”

Preliminaries out of the way, both men fell silent for a moment.

“What’s up, A.J.? I know your people were listening when you called. I got the drift something more than just catching up.”

A.J. nodded. “A ghost from Christmas past appeared yesterday, Richard Dupuis. I need your help figuring how best to exorcise him.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Tried to blackmail me.”

A.J. told Bogdan about the note Dupuis had sent and meeting him at The Blue Note despite loathing the man.

“I always hated the bastard. I saw from the beginning, when she first got involved with Dupuis, how it accelerated her downward drift. More late nights, more booze, more men. Then the stories he fed her about my father. So I went to The Blue Note thinking maybe I’d slap him around a bit if the occasion arose, just for old times’ sake. ”

A.J. recounted the details of Dupuis’s blackmail attempt. When he’d finished, Bogdan stroked his moustache and goatee then poured them each another shot.

“This is bullshit, A.J., pure bullshit. Could be making the whole thing up—maybe he knows nothing about it. But even if his story’s true, how do we know the triggerman is still alive and eager to play, for whatever reason?

How could Dupuis get the Feds interested without putting his own tits in the wringer?

He’s a loser with weak cards hoping you’ll fold. ”

A.J. nodded. “What I figured.”

“And if you paid him ten gees he’d feel he had a live one on the line and maybe come back for more. How’d you leave it?”

“I didn’t tell him to shove it like I wanted to. Just not to hold his breath. He’s leaving for Miami after New Year’s Eve. That’s the deadline. Probably reckoned he could scare me, like I was a new kid on the block.”

Bogdan nodded. “Agree. Whole thing’s ridiculous. Like a Prohibition gangster movie. A scheme he just pulled out of his ass. I think you can ignore it or tell him go fuck himself if it makes you feel better.”

A.J. sat staring at Bogdan, thinking. He slid his shot glass toward him. Bogdan poured him another and one for himself.

“Agreed. But something else about this bothers me, Godfather. Why I needed to see you. An intuition. It came to me his morning. Something that would make it a different case and demand a cleaner resolution. Some closure.”

“What’s that, A.J?”

“I’m wondering whether Dupuis offered my mother a similar deal ten years ago.”

Bogdan frowned and tapped his fingers on the table like he was calling for another card.

A.J. went on: “A vulnerable woman, a depressed alcoholic who wasn’t always thinking straight.

And na?ve about underworld ways. A sitting duck for a man like Dupuis, who’d already poisoned her against my father.

If he was also trying to blackmail her, maybe that’s why she killed herself.

To end the perceived threat. To guard me and my future.

To protect my legacy and my father’s name.

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems.”

Bogdan again stroked his mustache. “Possible. Particularly for a snake like Dupuis.”

A.J. shook his head. “All these years, Bogdan, ever since I read her autopsy report when I was twelve and figured she had abandoned me on purpose, I tried to understand why. How could a mother love her son and do that? Yeah, she wanted to shield me from shame. Birthing a bastard in Tank Town, where people have nothing to do but talk, would have been rough on all of us. But maybe there was more. If she was also under a blackmail threat maybe she made the ultimate sacrifice to protect my future. A great unselfish act. Something a loving mother might do.”

Bogdan pursed his lips, gazed into his whiskey glass, and nodded. “If Dupuis pressing her contributed to your mother’s death, yes, that would make it a different case.”

“Which means I need to kill him.”

Bogdan looked up from his drink to A.J., who sat jaw clenched, nostrils flaring with each breath.

“Don’t joke.”

“Dead serious.”

“Hold on, A.J. You don’t know that’s the case.”

“I’ve been holding for ten years.”

“No, son. Don’t think like that. It won’t change nothing.”

“It’ll change everything. At least for me. Justice means something. There won’t be any for my mom or me unless I deliver it.”

He lifted his chin toward his shot glass. His godfather poured more Old Fitzgerald. A.J. went on:

“Always hated him and what he did to my mom. And to me. Slapped me for mouthing off to him. And more. When I was eleven I was gonna slash the bastard’s throat. Not sure I could have done it, but I pictured it time and again, taking my father’s hunting knife to him.

“Last night I went to The Blue Note wondering if that anger still lingered, whether I still had murder in my heart. Then to help me answer my question the fucker tries to blackmail me.”

Bogdan studied A.J., his thoughts drifting back to Czeslaw Oswiecki’s cellar speakeasy on a hot summer night in 1929. There, too, he sat drinking boilermakers alongside another young man with a Roman profile and murder on his mind.

“Thirty years ago, I suggested to your father how to make his troubles disappear. Advice, for better or worse, he took to heart. Now I need to advise you as well, though with benefit of hindsight. I understand your anger even if I can’t experience it.

And that you want payback for your mom. Maybe vengeance for your father too, in a way.

And I know you’re trained Special Ops who could pull it off quietly. ”

“Damn straight.”

“Doesn’t mean you can get away with it.”

“No one will know. Not even you. Fingers will point toward East Side gangsters.”

Bogdan shook his head. “Since you met with him in public there’s already a trail leading back to you. Not to mention some history. I don’t like the odds.”

A.J.’s eyes strayed to a church calendar hanging on the refrigerator, the outline of a fish imprinted on each Friday. Bogdan continued.

“I loved your father like a brother. He was a good man though not a good role model in all things. This is one of them. Dupuis ain’t worth it. Not worth sticking your neck out for something whose only payoff is abstract.”

A.J. now focused on his shot glass, turning it on the mahogany tabletop. “It would make me feel lots better. That’s concrete.”

“Okay. I get it. But let it cool down, A.J. This just cropped up yesterday. Give it time. Let’s figure a way to fuck him up and get some payback without you having to bet the ranch. I’m sure we can.”

A.J. kept studying the twirling shot glass. “Yeah, maybe,” he said. “But this isn’t the sort of thing I can forget or forgive.”