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I studied the menu, and when I looked up again, my brother was zigzagging across the floor, shaking hands along the way as if he were campaigning for office.
If anything was important in Beverly Hills, it was appearances, and Tommy was doing a fine job of keeping up his.
“Bro,” he said, arriving at the table. I stood. We hugged warily. He clapped me on the back.
“How’s it going?” I said.
“Fantastic,” Tommy said, sliding into the booth. “I can’t stay long. I’ll order.”
The waitress came over, cocked her hip, noted that we were identical twins, and flirted with Tommy. She took our lunch order from the “secret kitchen.” Throughout it all, I was pacing in my mind, trying to figure out how best to approach Tommy with what I knew.
He said, “I hear your friend Cushman is looking good for killing his wife.”
“He didn’t do it.”
“How much you want to bet?” he said.
Tommy’s business, Private Security, was an agency that placed bodyguards with celebrities and businesspeople who were looking for protection or status or both. Tommy had benefited from Dad’s contacts a lot more than I had. Tommy looked around the room, said, “As big a shit as Dad was, it would have taken us much longer to make it without him.”
“So, you’re really doing okay, Tommy? That’s good to hear.”
“Sure. Half the people in here are on my books, for Christ’s sake.”
Tommy leaned back from the table and glared at me suspiciously as the waitress set down dishes of cracked crab and garlic noodles, and asked if we needed anything else.
“We’re good, sugar,” he said to the waitress. To me, he said, “So what’s this about?”
“I hear you’re still wagering,” I said to my brother.
“Who told you that? Annie, that little—”
“I didn’t talk to her.”
“—bitch,” he said of his too patient, too forgiving wife and the mother of his son. “Why’d you call her, Jack?”
“I haven’t spoken to Annie since Christmas.”
“She should be grateful for the life I’ve given her,” Tommy said, breaking a crab in half with his hands. “Clothes. Cars. Everywhere she goes, people treat her like royalty. I’m going to have to explain to her again about flapping her mouth.”
“Does she know you’re into the Mob for six hundred thousand bucks, Tommy? Because I’ll bet you didn’t tell her that part.”
“It’s none of her business, big shot. And it’s none of yours either. Whatever I’m into, I can get out of. Trust me on that.”
“I wish I could.”
“Go to hell. Don’t call me anymore, okay? A Christmas card will do fine. No Christmas card would be even better.”
Tommy threw his napkin on the table and bolted for the front door.
Chapter 34
I DROPPED TWO hundred bucks on the table and followed Tommy out to Little Santa Monica Boulevard, a teeming thoroughfare that cuts through a canyon of office buildings and collateral businesses: a drugstore, an AT&T phone store, an assortment of trendy cafés and upscale banks.
“Tommy. Tom,” I shouted after him. “Talk to me, okay? Let’s talk. Tom.”
He pulled up short and turned, a frown on his face, clenched fists at his sides. I’d been toe-to-toe with my brother before, but this seemed more serious.
“Stay out of my business, Jack. I said I can handle it. I know these guys.”
