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For a moment as I sat there in my car, listening to the cooling engine tick and tock, I still had
nothing. Then I realized that if you replaced the mink stole with a Ship N Shore blouse, you had
Wanda Frati.
Chaz Frati of Derry had set Bill Turcotte on me. That thought had even crossed my mind . . . but I
had dismissed it. Bad idea.
Who had Frank Frati of Fort Worth set on me? Well, he had to know Akiva Roth of Faith
Financial; Roth was his daughter’s boyfriend, after all.
Suddenly I wanted my gun, and I wanted it right away.
I got out of the Chevy and trotted up the porch steps, my keys in my hand. I was fumbling through
them when a panel truck roared around the corner from Haines Avenue and scrunched to a stop in
front of 214 with the leftside wheels up on the curb.
I looked around. Saw no one. The street was deserted. There’s never a bystander you can scream to
for help when you want one. Let alone a cop.
I jammed the right key into the lock and turned it, thinking I’d lock them out—whoever they were
—and call the cops on the phone. I was inside and smelling the hot, stale air of the deserted
apartment when I remembered that there was no phone.
Big men were running across the lawn. Three of them. One had a short length of pipe that looked
to be wrapped in something.
No, actually there were enough guys to play bridge. The fourth was Akiva Roth, and he wasn’t
running. He was strolling up the walk with his hands in his pockets and a placid smile on his face.
I slammed the door. I twisted the thumb bolt. I had barely finished when it exploded open. I ran
for the bedroom and got about halfway.
15
Two of Roth’s goons dragged me into the kitchen. The third was the one with the pipe. It was
wrapped in strips of dark felt. I saw this when he laid it carefully on the table where I had eaten a
good many meals. He put on yellow rawhide gloves.
Roth leaned in the doorway, still smiling placidly. “Eduardo Gutierrez has syphilis,” he announced.
“It’s gone to his brain. He’ll be dead in eighteen months, but you know what? He don’t care. He
believes he’s gonna come back as an Arab emirate, or sumshit. How ’bout that, huh?”
Responding to non sequiturs—at cocktail parties, on public transportation, in ticket lines at the
movie theater—is dicey enough, but it’s really hard to know what to say when you’re being held by
two men and about to receive a beating from a third. So I said nothing.
“The thing is, you got in his head. You won bets you weren’t supposed to win. Sometimes you lost,
but Eddie G got this crazy idea that when you lost, you were losing on purpose. You know? Then you
hit big on the Derby, and he decided you were, I dunno, some kind of telepathic gizmo who could see
the future. Did you know he burned down your house?”
I said nothing.
“Then,” Roth said, “when those little wormies really started to bite his brain, he started to think
you were some kind of ghoul, or devil. He put out the word all over the South, the West, the
Midwest. ‘Look for this guy Amberson, and bring him down. Kill him. The guy is unnatural. I could
smell it on im but I didn’t pay attention. Now look at me, sick and dying. And it’s this guy’s fault.
He’s a ghoul or a devil, or sumshit.’ Crazy, you know? Toys in the attic.”
I said nothing.
“Carmo, I don’t think my friend Georgie’s listening. I think he’s dozing off. Give him a wake-up