The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter (A Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Book 1) by Joan Cochran (popular books of all time .txt) 📗

so great. I could think of plenty of reasons Sammy’d drag me to a pit in the boondocks and none of them were good.”

“Did you try to get away?”

“I considered it but there was nowhere to go. Plus when the driver maneuvered to the back of the house and parked in an open field packed with Caddys and Rolls Royces, I figured I’d be okay. Sammy wouldn’t kill me around all these rich people. And he seemed jazzed, not angry. I was stunned when he knocked on the door of what looked like a two-car garage and a guy in white tails opened it.

“I couldn’t believe it. Sammy’d taken me to a carpet joint. I’d heard about these swanky casinos that operated outside the law, but I’d never been to one. Men and women in tuxedos and evening gowns. Gorgeous broads. I’d never been there but it looked how I imagined the Palace of Versailles would look. Crystal chandeliers. Oil paintings. Could have been Old Masters for all I knew. Of course, I played it cool, didn’t let on to Sammy that I was bowled over—even after he led me to this fancy buffet table loaded with caviar and champagne.

“Did you pay to go inside?” I say, imagining a scene from The Great Gatsby. We’re ten minutes from the Marmelstein’s and I’m eager to hear the end of the story.

“I didn’t. But Sammy arranged everything. He may have.

“I’d never been much of a gambler but I did okay at blackjack so I played a couple of hands before losing twenty bucks and calling it quits. I looked around for Sammy, who’d started at the table with me but disappeared. I figured he was playing craps or poker so I roamed around the casino. It was larger than I’d figured, with a leather bar that ran the length of the room and a dozen tables that faced a stage where a fat broad sang. But Sammy was nowhere to be found. I didn’t know a soul in the place and I was pretty uncomfortable around the swells with their tuxes and gorgeous dames. Which, I’m fairly certain, were not their wives.”

“He left without you?”

“That’s what I thought at first. Then I noticed a door to the left of the bar. It was set into a tufted burgundy leather wall. You couldn’t see it unless you were looking hard, which I was. I figured it was the john and Sammy was in there so I went in. Well I found him all right, at a green baize table where he was talking to a couple of mugs. It didn’t look like they were playing poker. This bull of a man—Itzhak Cohen—scowled when I entered the room. You could tell he was the boss because all the goons glanced at him. The room was small and windowless, with just enough space for the poker table and a couple of chairs. It stunk of cigar smoke. I mumbled “sorry” and turned to leave, but Sammy stopped me.

“ ‘It’s okay, Tootsie,’ he said, ‘I got some friends you should meet.’ ”

“There wasn’t much I could do at this point, so I stood by the table as Sammy made his introductions. I caught a couple of names, but Itzhak’s was the only one that stuck. The men nodded at me but seemed relieved when Sammy said he’d join me in an hour. I went to the bar and lingered over a scotch and soda until he came out.

“On the drive home, Sammy looked at me, eyebrows scrunched and serious. ‘I can count on you to keep your mouth shut, right?’

“I don’t know what he’s talking about but, of course, I agree.”

The traffic becomes more congested as Tootsie and I leave I-95 for Dixie Highway and drive past a neighborhood with ten-foot walls. Fences crushed beneath trees when Hurricane Andrew struck eight years ago have been rebuilt and already are concealed by South Florida’s rapacious vegetation. It’s remarkable how quickly Miami adjusts to change. People rarely spoke Spanish when I grew up here, but the thousands of Cubans who made it across the Straits of Florida changed that. Now more than half of Miami’s citizens claim Spanish as their first language. And Brickell Avenue—once an elegant boulevard lined with gracious estates—has been taken over by behemoth banking institutions that house the wealth of Latin American oligarchs. Whatever grows here—foliage, culture, crime, money—expands rapidly and supplants what came before.

My father coughs, drawing my attention. “You listening?”

“Yes.”

“As I was saying, in the tumult of working the docks and getting through a miserable winter without your mother, I didn’t think much about the night at the casino. Sammy brought me to a few joints after that, but I never ran into any of those goons and kept my nose out of his business.

“When my job was over a few weeks later, I returned to Miami to your mother and sister. What a relief that was.” He smiles. “Esther learned to sit up while I was gone and I spent every free moment with her. On my third day home, though, I was reading The Miami News and nearly gagged on my coffee. Right there on the front page was a mug shot of a clown I’d seen at the casino with Itzhak Cohen. The article said a fellow named Boom Boom Goldberg was charged in the murder of a Miami gangster, Harvey Pollock. I hadn’t paid much attention to Boom Boom that night in the casino, but even I could tell the schmuck was a mouth-breather. I figured the other goons set this fat head up for the murder of Pollock, knowing he wouldn’t rat them out.”

“Did you tell the police?”

My father gives me his what are you, stupid sneer. “Hell, no. It wasn’t my problem. I met the yuk once, in New York, what did I care? But when your mother read about Pollock’s murder, she had her own ideas. She informed me we were going to the man’s