Bedroom Eyes (12 page)

The man grinned and plunked his elbows back onto the bar, a satisfied smile on his face. Peeling the label from his beer, he began talking to the bottle.

Not once did he glance toward Tony. Not once did he check to make sure Tony heard his words through the din of the bar.

But Tony heard.

Loud and clear.

“Your man, you know the one, the pretty boy in the suit who sent you down, he’s got some big things planned. Yeah, buddy, big things planned.” Squeek rocked closer to his bottle, working a dirty fingernail under the side of the sweating label.

The smoke in the room crawled behind Tony’s eyes as he concentrated on what Squeek had to say. The irritation only heightened his sense that something big was afoot.

“Yeah, I heard he be jumping over the broom. Soon, too. But not because his heart says to do it.” Squeek cackled. “The old man done told him he has to.”

Tony took a long swallow of his beer. He knew the expression Squeek used referred to a manner of wedding ceremony used by slaves when they’d not been permitted church weddings.

So wedding bells were ringing for Hinson.

His hand clenched on his bottle. And Hinson’s boss had ordered the deed be done.

Surely not—

Squeek went on. “Thinking of you, I says to me, Squeek, go find out who the woman is. Tell Tony and maybe Tony can mess with him.” He grinned. “You know, mess with him by messing with her. That old devil wouldn’t like being the second pig at the trough.” He cackled and looked at his empty bottle.

Tony thought about the bills he had left in his pocket. Shit. He hoped some of those singles turned out to be tens. He bought another beer for Squeek and very casually said, “So you got her name for me, right, Squeek? So I can pick something out at the bridal registry.”

Squeek slapped his thigh. “You’re a funny guy, Tony. But yeah, you right, I got her name. A funny name, though. Not so easy to say.”

Tony knew the routine. He knew better than to ask outright what Squeek required as payment in exchange for his information. Squeek had a professional’s pride.

Tony’s mental replay of the night before was abruptly interrupted when the door to the Bayou Magick Shoppe opened. Tony tore his mind back to the present, watching as Penelope hustled down the steps in quite a huff. Tony wished he’d been a fly on the wall inside the shop, but as he’d been expecting one of Rolo Polo’s flunkies to appear, he’d kept well out of sight.

Rolo Polo peered over the top of his map. Penelope paused on the sidewalk. The same dude who’d taken her for a dollar drifted over. Tony smiled. No way Penelope would let herself be taken for a ride twice. She might be sheltered from reality, but he’d bet she was a quick learner.

Suddenly she turned and reentered the shop.

Tony let his mind drift back to what Squeek had asked of him. Strangely tongue-tied, the informant had danced around his request a bit, then finally blurted it out.

“My woman needs some help.”

Tony had narrowed his eyes, figuring Squeek’s woman had gotten in trouble with the law. For Squeek, he’d do whatever he could. Never once had Squeek fed him bad information, and that was deserving of a lot. “Shoot. Tell me what the problem is.”

Squeek picked at the mess of beer labels on the bar in front of him.

Tony waited. When Squeek didn’t say anything, he prompted, “Is she in bad trouble?”

Squeek looked at him with eyes wide with disappointment. “My woman,” he said slowly, “don’t get in trouble.”

“Sorry.” Tony hadn’t meant it as an insult.

“Me and my woman, we’ve been together now for five years.” Squeek held up four fingers and the thumb of his right hand and nodded solemnly. “A long time, five years.”

Tony had to agree with that statement. It was longer than he’d managed to stay married.

“But we got no kids,” Squeek said.

Tony heard what Squeek said, but for the life of him he couldn’t see how he could help with that problem.

Squeek turned to him then, and grabbed him by the arm. “You promise to find me a doctor who can help my woman and I’ll give you Penelope Fields’s name right this minute.”

His hunch confirmed, Tony said, “You got it, Squeek.” He had no idea how to find a fertility doctor, but his ma would know. And knowing his ma, she’d talk the doctor into seeing Mrs. Squeek for free.

Tony forgot about Squeek’s problems as Penelope rushed out of the shop again. She’d been in a huff the first time she exited the shop, this time she was livid. Tony raised his brows and pocketed the yo-yo as she slapped one loafer-clad foot in front of the other. Watching her eat up the sidewalk, Tony reconsidered his conclusion that Penelope was a quick learner. For a woman who’d fainted from heat only the day before, she sure hadn’t learned that lesson.

Rolo Polo jammed his map into a crumpled wad and took off after her. As soon as he’d moved out of earshot, Tony slipped from behind the gate and, sticking to doorways as much as possible, kept both of them in sight.

Driving through the French Quarter toward her Warehouse District apartment, Penelope gathered steam to fuel her indignation toward Mrs. Merlin. How could she have sent her on a scavenger hunt like that?

Stuck at the red light on Canal, she watched the stream of people flowing past, among them a contrasting mix of several women, each with a baby stuck on a hip and clutching one child in hand, side by side with geeky guys in white shirts and pocket protectors in town for what had to be a computer convention. Calming slightly, Penelope reconsidered rushing straight home.

She needed facts. Cold, hard, objective information. Only from Mrs. Merlin’s lips had she heard of such a thing as candle magick. She pursed her lips in concentration. The blare of a horn behind her jerked her into motion and she swung the car sharply to the right, rather than proceeding straight ahead toward home.

She’d go to the Barnes & Noble in Metairie. She’d read about the gigantic bookstore, but never taken the time to visit. She knew enough about the city to find the freeway and find an exit that would lead her to Veterans Memorial Boulevard, which she understood to be the main drag cutting through the sprawling suburb of Metairie.

Penelope found her way there, getting lost only once, which she reckoned wasn’t too bad for someone used to relying on the El in Chicago for her transportation needs.

She knew the second she stepped into the store she could spend the day there, lose complete track of time. Fortifying herself with a cappuccino, she fought off the temptation to wander every lovely book-filled aisle and instead asked directions to the section where she might find books on magick.

Sipping her drink, she took the escalator and studied the New Age section. Intent on her law and tax studies, Penelope had never strayed into such a section in any of the many bookstores or libraries where she spent so many hours of her life.

Unfamiliar titles and subjects assailed her eyes and she was reminded of the way she’d felt her first day in a law library. So many volumes, so many unknowns. Then she’d been intrigued by the intellectual challenge. And now, facing this odd array, she felt faintly superior, assuming the books were written by nuts who wanted to embrace make-believe rather than accept the rational world in which they dwelled.

Rather than taking charge of their own realities, people retreated into witchcraft, magick, reading auras, chakras—whatever those were—anything that gave them hope for a better world.

Which, now that she thought about it, was absolutely the same thing she did by slipping into her fantasy world. Instead of finding the courage to try to date more, to attempt to meet men, even to do something so bold as to venture into the world of online dating, Penelope had withdrawn.

Her imaginary lover Raoul might occupy her mind, but he was cold comfort on lonely nights, and a poor escort, indeed, for law firm social functions.

Penelope closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of chocolate that sprinkled the foam topping of her cappuccino. Yes, she acknowledged, she needed to make some changes in her life.

Just because she’d followed the path her mother had committed her to didn’t mean she couldn’t be a lawyer and enjoy the rest of her life more. A lawyer wasn’t such a bad thing to be.

Her mother had told her, more times than Penelope could count, “Better a lawyer than a waitress.” And even though Penelope sometimes still blamed her now-deceased mother for not letting her carve her own way through life, she had to admit she’d far rather be a partner at LaCour, Richardson, Zeringue, Ray, Wellman and Klees than be pushing coffee across the counter at Barnes & Noble.

Penelope wrinkled her nose, remembering what the ponytailed Mr. Gotho had accused her of. Was it wrong to prefer being a lawyer to being a waitress? Penelope didn’t think of that as having too much ego, especially considering she’d far rather have become a chef than a lawyer anyway.

The oddly young but somehow ageless Mr. Gotho had been about to help her, too, Penelope was sure of that, when something she’d done had set him off. It had been right after she’d thought of him and Mrs. Merlin as undereducated. Well, perhaps she was a bit of a snob about that, but she had loved her mother, despite her nagging ways, and her mother had dropped out of high school her senior year, pregnant with Penelope.

That was a story Penelope had heard more times than she ever cared to remember. Just once, filtered in among those stories, Penelope would have liked to have learned something about the man who had fathered her. But on that topic her mother remained constantly silent.

As far as Penelope knew, her conception might have been immaculate. Living with a single mother who maintained a firm distance from any man, Penelope had often thought it was no surprise she herself had never gotten close to a man.

But she knew it wasn’t any fear of repeating her mother’s path that held her back. She simply didn’t understand how to attract a man.

She stared into her cooling cappuccino, then lifted her eyes to the shelves. She had work to do. Best to concentrate on that.

Spotting a row of books on the art and magick of candle burning, Penelope gathered them in one arm and carried them and her coffee to a deep chair in a reading circle placed near the escalator. Several other customers had settled there, reading everything, Penelope noticed, from
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
to celebrity biographies to comic books.

Penelope wished she’d picked some other, more sensible choices to serve as cover for her reading material. Anyone who glanced over at her selections would assume she was one of those woo-woo weirdos. Why, all the books she’d selected spelled magic with a “k” on the end, as if the word itself carried its own mystical meaning.

Oh, well, she couldn’t be any more embarrassed today than she had already been. The very idea of asking out loud for frog’s testicles! Coloring slightly, Penelope opened the first book and began to read.

Tony almost lost Penelope leaving the Quarter. She’d surprised him with that sharp swerve onto Canal and her path to the interstate. Old Rolo Polo had clung tight, though, and stopped down the row from her in the parking lot of Barnes & Noble.

Amused by Rolo Polo having to stake out a bookstore, Tony had remained in his car until the fat man had finally turned off his car, and presumably his a/c, then trundled into the store. He’d purchased a cold drink, then retreated to the air-conditioned foyer, where he pulled a throwaway tabloid from the several piles stacked there and propped it in front of his face.

Observing all this from his car, thankful for the broad plate-glass windows that opened the front of the store to easy view, Tony wondered whether Rolo Polo even knew how to read.

Trapped for the moment, Tony had no choice but to wait it out in his car. Rolo Polo guarded the way in and out of the store. Sooner or later perhaps he’d let down his guard and go in search of the men’s room. Then Tony could slip inside.

He hadn’t intended to do it, of course, but now he felt a strong urge to see Penelope again. He’d grab some fancy-looking book off the shelf, locate her, then pretend to be deep in the book when she bumped into him.

She’d be impressed. Probably even go out with him. Maybe not to bed. Not on the first date, anyway.

Whoa.
Tony ran a hand roughly through his hair. “Get a grip, Tony-O,” he said, turning off the ignition and rolling down his windows. It was hot as hell in the parking lot with the sun punishing his car, but he hated to waste the gas to run the a/c.

He reminded himself his only reason for following Penelope to the bookstore was to see where Rolo Polo’s interest in her lay. Rolo Polo was a direct path to Hinson and therefore to Hinson’s boss, a mobster with ties to both New York and Las Vegas, but a man so clever he rarely showed a hand in any of his undertakings.

Hinson served as lawyer and chief functionary. In the old days he would have been called the
consigliore,
a term made popular in
The Godfather.
But the Louisiana mob types weren’t so old-fashioned, and the family Hinson worked for consisted of a peculiarly New Orleans blend of suburban businessmen, French Quarter real estate tycoons, and working-class thugs. Thus Hinson spent a great deal of his time poring over contracts and other legal mumbo-jumbo.

Sweltering in the paved parking lot, Tony wiped a band of sweat from his forehead and prayed for Rolo Polo to take a leak. He and the fat man had too much history behind them for Tony to take the risk of Rolo Polo spotting him.

And since Tony expected any day now that Hinson would be offering him a job on behalf of his boss, it was no time to arouse suspicion. Too much stood at risk.

So he sat in the car and sweated. Within a few more minutes, his shirt clung to him. He hoped Penelope, cool and comfortable inside the store, appreciated his sacrifice.

“Don’t kid yourself,” he said, fiddling with his radio. A mournful song of love lost and never regained filled his ears and he snapped the radio off.

He wondered what had inspired Penelope to visit both the Bayou Magick Shoppe and Barnes & Noble. She was a studious type, of course, but she’d seemed intent on some purposeful course of action when she’d entered the Bourbon Street shop.