Paolo rose from the floor. “I know where I seen her.” He slapped the dust off his knees.
Joe came off the icebox. “Where?”
“But he’s not sweet on her,” Dion said.
“Where?” Joe repeated.
Paolo pointed at the floor. “Downstairs.”
“In The Shoelace?”
Paolo nodded. “She come in with Albert.”
“Albert who?”
“Albert, the King of Montenegro,” Dion said. “Albert Who Do You Think?”
Unfortunately, there was only one Albert in Boston who could be referred to without a last name. Albert White, the guy they’d just robbed.
Albert was a former hero of the Philippine Moro Wars and a former policeman, who’d lost his job, like Joe’s own brother, after the strike in ’19. Currently he was the owner of White Garage and Automotive Glass Repair (formerly Halloran’s Tire and Automotive), White’s Downtown Café (formerly Halloran’s Lunch Counter), and White’s Freight and Transcontinental Shipping (formerly Halloran’s Trucking). Rumored to have personally rubbed out Bitsy Halloran. Bitsy got himself shot eleven times in an oak phone booth inside a Rexall Drugstore in Egleston Square. So many shots fired at such close range, they set the booth on fire. It was rumored Albert had bought the charred remains of the phone booth, restored it, and kept it in the study of the home he owned on Ashmont Hill, made all his calls from it.
“So she’s Albert’s girl.” It deflated Joe to think of her as just another gangster’s moll. He’d already had visions of them racing across the country in a stolen car, unencumbered by a past or a future, chasing a red sky and a setting sun all the way to Mexico.
“I seen them together three times,” Paolo said.
“So now it’s three times.”
Paolo looked down at his fingers for confirmation. “Yeah.”
“What’s she doing fetching drinks at his poker games then?”
“What else she going to do?” Dion said. “Retire?”
“No, but…”
“Albert’s married,” Dion said. “Who’s to say how long a party gal lasts on his arm?”
“She strike you as a party gal?”
Dion slowly thumbed the cap off a bottle of Canadian gin, his flat eyes on Joe. “She didn’t strike me as anything but a gal bagged up our money. I couldn’t even tell you what color her hair was. I couldn’t—”
“Dark blond. Almost light brown, but not quite.”
“She’s Albert’s girl.” Dion poured them all a drink.
“So she is,” Joe said.
“Bad enough we just knocked over the man’s joint. Don’t go getting any ideas about taking anything else from him. All right?”
Joe didn’t say anything.
“All right?” Dion repeated.
“All right.” Joe reached for his drink. “Fine.”
She didn’t come into The Shoelace for the next three nights. Joe was sure of it—he’d been there, open to close, every night.
Albert came in, wearing one of his signature pinstripe off-white suits. Like he was in Lisbon or something. He wore them with brown fedoras that matched his brown shoes which matched the brown pinstripes. When the snow came, he wore brown suits with off-white pinstripes, an off-white hat, and white-and-brown spats. When February rolled around, he went in for dark brown suits and dark brown shoes with a black hat, but Joe imagined, for the most part, he’d be easy to gun down at night. Shoot him in an alley from twenty yards away with a cheap pistol. You wouldn’t even need a streetlamp to see that white turn red.
Albert, Albert, Joe thought as Albert glided past his bar stool in The Shoelace on the third night, I could kill you if I knew the first thing about killing.
Problem was, Albert didn’t go into alleys much, and when he did he had four bodyguards with him. And even if you did get through them and you did kill him—and Joe, no killer, wondered why the fuck he found himself thinking about killing Albert White in the first place—all you’d manage to do would be to derail a business empire for Albert White’s partners, who included the police, the Italians, the Jew mobs in Mattapan, and several legitimate businessmen, including bankers and investors with interests in Cuban and Florida sugarcane. Derailing business like that in a city this small would be like feeding zoo animals with fresh cuts on your hand.
Albert looked at him once. Looked at him in such a way that Joe thought, He knows, he knows. He knows I robbed him. Knows I want his girl. He knows.
But Albert said, “Got a light?”
Joe struck a match off the bar and lit Albert White’s cigarette.
When Albert blew out the match, he blew smoke into Joe’s face. He said, “Thanks, kid,” and walked away, the man’s flesh as white as his suit, the man’s lips as red as the blood that flowed in and out of his heart.
The fourth day after the robbery, Joe played a hunch and went back to the furniture warehouse. He almost missed her; apparently the secretaries ended their shift the same time as the laborers, and the secretaries ran small while the forklift operators and stevedores cast wider shadows. The men came out with their longshoremen’s hooks hanging from the shoulders of their dirty jackets, talking loud and swarming the young women, whistling and telling jokes only they laughed at. The women must have been used to it, though, because they managed to move their own circle out of the larger one, and some of the men stayed behind, and others straggled, and a few more broke off to head toward the worst-kept secret on the docks—a houseboat that had been serving alcohol since the first sun to rise on Boston under Prohibition.
The pack of women stayed tight and moved smoothly up the dock. Joe only saw her because another girl with the same color hair stopped to adjust her heel and Emma’s face took her place in the crowd.
Joe left the spot where he’d been standing, near the loading dock of the Gillette Company, and fell into step about fifty yards behind the group. He told himself she was Albert White’s girl. Told himself he was out of his mind and he needed to stop this now. Not only should he not be following Albert White’s girl along the waterfront of South Boston, he shouldn’t even be in the state until he learned for sure whether or not anyone could finger him for the poker game robbery. Tim Hickey was down south on a rum deal and couldn’t fill in the blanks about how they’d ended up knocking over the wrong card game, and the Bartolo brothers were keeping their heads down and noses clean until they heard what was what, but here was Joe, supposedly the smart one, sniffing around Emma Gould like a starving dog following the scent of a cook fire.