Casino Moon

33

IT WAS TWO DAYS after Elijah had got his clock cleaned at the public workout. I was driving little Anthony to his special hearing class when I heard that rattling sound again and realized the gun I’d used to kill Nicky was still in the glove compartment. I didn’t know why I was taking so long to get rid of it. Maybe I wanted to get caught. We hit a bump in the road and I heard the gun slide toward the front of the compartment. Anthony Jr. looked down like he was thinking about opening it.

Just to distract him, I put on the radio. The first thing we heard after the weather was a sports report saying Meldrick Norman would be getting the title shot against Terrence Mulvehill in October, not Elijah. I almost drove off the road. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was putting my balls on the line—literally, if you believed Danny Klein—and they were running a train over them.

For a few seconds, I don’t know what I said or did. All I know is when I looked up, my little Anthony was cowering in the backseat. He looked like he’d seen one of those scary green monsters from his nightmares take the wheel.

“Hey, Anthony, take it easy.” I reached back to pat his knee. “Daddy was just fooling.”

But he shied away from my touch.

I dropped him off at the hearing school and drove right over to John B.’s house. He was crazed too, running around in his underwear with the cellular phone in his hand. He had no idea why his brother was out and Meldrick was in. Just the other day, the doctors had cleared Elijah to keep fighting, even after what had happened at the workout. For a second, I considered whether John might’ve just pocketed all the money without paying off the right people. But then he mentioned Elijah’s name and got that reverent look in his eyes again, and I knew he’d never do anything to hurt his big brother. His only role in life was to be the loyal younger sibling, forever carrying Elijah’s robe.

So we headed over to the Doubloon to try to find out what went wrong.

We found Frank Diamond the promoter standing in the lobby, talking to a bunch of reporters by the elevators. His shaved head looked newly waxed and buffed and his custom-made gabardine suit fit even more snugly around his barrel chest and broad shoulders.

“What’s up?” John B. asked crisply.

“What’s up?” Diamond turned to share a smile with the reporters like John was the butt of some joke he’d been telling. “Balloons are up. The sky is up. I’m up. If you had my stock portfolio, you would be too.”

They all laughed. John B. gave him a stone face. For the first time I saw a resemblance between him and his brother.

“Say, my man. We got business to discuss.”

“My man. My man.” Frank Diamond did a Stepin Fetchit–y imitation of the way John talked. “Hey, John, it’s thirty years since Martin Luther King, how come you’re still talking like a Pullman train porter? Didn’t you go to high school or anything?”

If I were John, I might have smacked him. But John just kept giving him that slow-burning look.

“We had a deal,” he said to Diamond. “I already worked this out with the boxing federation and the cable TV people.”

The reporters leaned in a little closer. Until a second ago, they’d been just casually bullshitting with Frank. Now they were getting ready to reach for their notebooks.

“Would you gentlemen excuse me a moment?” he asked the press.

They groaned a little and he took us into the 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea coffee shop just by the entrance. We sat at a table in the corner.

“We had a deal as of yesterday,” said John B. “So why I gotta hear about Meldrick Norman today on the radio?”

“Yesterday I was lying, today I’m telling the truth,” Frank Diamond explained carefully.

“But we had a handshake.”

Frank Diamond sighed and asked the waitress to bring him a coffee with some Sweet’N Low. He rubbed the top of his bald head. Maybe he missed his hair.

“Listen, John,” he said with the kind of measured impatience you’d have talking to a senile grandparent. “I am going to make it very simple for you. Your brother isn’t worth as much to me as Meldrick Norman.”

He sat back and fixed the silk polka-dotted handkerchief in his breast pocket. He might as well have been licking our blood off a butcher knife.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “We’ve already paid the sanctioning fees and made our arrangements with the boxing federation people. Why do you get final say to knock it all down?”

“Because I am the promoter.” Frank flicked his hand through the air haughtily. “You’ve been dealing with the stage managers. I own the actors. Right now I have the champion, Terry Mulvehill, under contract. Anyone who fights him has to give me options on their next six fights. Now, Meldrick Norman is twenty-eight years old and relatively drug-free, as far as I know. So if he happens to knock my guy out, I’ve still got the champion another two or three years. Understand? Meldrick Norman becomes my fighter.”

I nodded. It was a daisy-chain operation. My father and Teddy would’ve been impressed. No matter who won, Frank remained the promoter, entitling him to revenues from the TV rights and ticket sales.

He poured half a packet of Sweet’N Low into his coffee and then folded the rest of the packet in half and left it next to his cup. Fish designs swam around the dark blue border of his saucer. To me they looked like sharks.

“Now, I like your brother, but he is an old over-the-hill warhorse,” he told John. “And if by some chance he managed to throw a lucky punch and knock my guy out, what would I be left with? An old man ready to retire.”

“But we had a handshake with the boxing federation,” John B. insisted.

“Not worth the paper it isn’t written on,” Frank said, stirring in the powder with the end of his spoon.

He rubbed the top of his head again. And smiled.

I felt my heart sinking. I’d borrowed sixty thousand dollars from Danny Klein and most of it was already spent on fees and expenses. I had no way to pay it back. Which meant Danny would be sure to tell my father and Teddy. I felt my balls retracting into some cavity within my body.

Frank sat back and sipped his coffee. His eyes scanned the rest of the green-and-red coffee shop, like he was searching for someone else to fleece. The late-afternoon crowd was starting to thin out. I wondered if the casino deliberately made the food unpalatable here so people would spend less time eating and more time gambling.

I put up the best argument I could make, spur-of-the-moment. “Don’t you think you’re being kind of shortsighted? I mean, Elijah Barton’s a name with worldwide recognition. No one’s heard of Meldrick Norman.”

Frank Diamond wrinkled his brow. “Excuse me, but who are you anyway?”

“This is my partner, Mr. Russo.” John B. lowered his eyes and swallowed his words again. In his mind, he was already flat on his back painting boats again.

Frank Diamond gave him a long look, like John B. had just let his Rottweiler shit on his putting green.

“Well, Mr. Russo, let me explain something to you,” he said. “Elijah Barton couldn’t draw flies to a dump.”

I started to interrupt, but he held up his hand.

“I’m not running a nostalgia business,” he said, thrusting out a jaw so big you could have boiled coffee in it. “I am an attorney and a fight promoter. I have a fiduciary responsibility to go out there and try to make the best deal. As it stands, we’re barely going to sell out the seats in the arena, but that’s okay. The casino will make its money back at the tables. I am not, however, going to associate my good name with a third-rate production.”

It was a little bit like talking to Teddy. Except instead of eating the pancakes off my plate, he was just tasting them and spitting them back in my face.

Frank ran his hand over his smooth scalp once more. Hedidn’t miss his hair. He was jerking off his head because putting us down felt so good.

“People all over the world love my brother!” John B. protested.

“He couldn’t draw flies,” Frank Diamond repeated slowly with a level stare. “The sooner you understand that, the better off we’ll all be. Especially your brother. It doesn’t do a man his age any good getting himself hurt in the ring. We all saw what happened at the workout the other day.”

My head was spinning. I couldn’t imagine what Teddy would do to me when he found out I’d borrowed another sixty thousand on top of the amount I owed him. Stomping on my balls wouldn’t satisfy him. He’d probably want to pour battery acid on them.

I wanted to fall on my knees and beg Frank Diamond for mercy. But Vin had taught me there were limits to what a real man would do. And a real man would never debase himself in front of another.

So I reached over to grab Frank’s wrist. “Promises were made to us.”

Frank swatted my hand away. “You know, you people are too much. You live in this dreamworld where somehow everything’s going to come true and work out if you wish hard enough.”

I was about to jab a finger in his face and warn him not to talk to us like that, but instead I knocked over my water glass and broke it.

Frank Diamond flapped his hands dismissively, like he’d had enough of this tomfoolery. “Maybe it’s too much sun or too much saltwater taffy. The rest of the business world’s not like Atlantic City. One day you have to wake up and face the reality that what you’ve got isn’t worth anything to anybody else.”

“You oughta watch it,” I said, as my lap got soaked and my future sailed over the cliff like a junked car. “One day you might just need the people you’re stepping on.”

“When I need something I call room service,” Frank Diamond said as he got up to leave. “Otherwise, I don’t want to be disturbed.”