Going Too Far

Marie’s gaze narrowed. “Why did you just call him Jimmy the Head?”

“Answer my question first and then I’ll answer yours.”

She picked around the edges of her bran muffin, eating only the pieces that fell off onto her plate. “My father and Uncle Jimmy go back a ways. I think they came over from Italy together.”

“Great.”

“What does that mean?”

He debated telling her, then decided she’d probably get it out of him one way or another. “It means that Jimmy is called the Head because he heads up one of the most powerful crime families in the Midwest.”

Marie had the olive-colored skin that went with her rich Mediterranean heritage. Not that you could tell at that moment because she’d gone as pale as copy paper. “You’re kidding.”

“I wish I was.”

“Holy shit.”

Holy cow to holy shit. Quite a jump for Marie even on a bad day. And fitting. Because Ian had thought exactly the same thing when the agents had asked Frankie Sr. about Jimmy, and Frankie had shrugged and explained that they were friends. Very good friends. Not something one usually went around bragging about, especially to U.S. Treasury agents.

“So what happened to my father’s accountant?”

Ian finished off his coffee, then wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I think the treasury agents believe he’s wearing cement boots at the bottom of a very large pond,” he said from behind his napkin.

But Marie had heard him and looked about a flinch away from flinging her coffee into his face.

“You can’t possibly believe that, can you?” she asked, color returning to her face in full.

“I didn’t say that. I said I think the agents believe that.”

She looked like she’d been physically struck. “Why that’s stupid. Ridiculous. Ludicrous.”

“It’s fact.”

She went silent and still, looking much like a statue as she stared at him in dawning realization.

Ian felt decidedly uncomfortable. All these years and never once had he thought that the joking rumors about Frank Bertelli were true. Don Bertelli, indeed. Hell, the morons among the kids his age had also habitually greeted the Schlachter kid down the street with a Nazi salute. Certainly none of them had ever truly believed he was a Nazi.