The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter (A Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Book 1) by Joan Cochran (best authors to read .TXT) 📕

had my best interests at heart. But I have to face the fact that they’re not the people I thought they were. Those men were fantasies I created out of my own need for strength and constancy. My world is shifting and I don’t know if I’ll ever regain my ability to trust. But old ways of thinking are hard to change. I want to believe Tootsie’s the powerful father who’ll protect me from the monster in the closet. Maybe that’s why I keep returning to him after all I’ve learned.

After shaking hands with his teammates, my father packs his ball into its case and returns to where I’m sitting. He nods toward a heavy oak door behind me. A brass sign mounted on the wall above it reads “Gutter Lounge.”

“We can talk in there.”

The thunder and cheers of the alley fade as the large door shuts behind us. I follow my father to a cracked leather booth that forms a semicircle around a thick wooden table embedded with navigational maps. The small room is surprisingly cozy, with two walls of booths and a handful of tables. It’s deserted except for a young woman who looks up and smiles at us, then returns to polishing the bottles of colorful liquors that line the glass shelves of the mirrored bar. The room smells vaguely of mold and ammonia, but the heavily varnished table looks freshly polished. As my father slides into the booth, he asks the bartender to bring two beers.

While we’re waiting, I pull the envelope from my purse and slip out the yellowed clippings and morgue photo. I place them on the table, facedown. Tootsie eyes the clippings, but continues to chat about his game, recalling the old days when he never scored under two fifty.

After the bartender delivers the beer, I take my hand off the clippings.

“The guy who broke into my house today left these.” I push the articles and morgue photo before him. “He took a tube of my lipstick and scrawled ‘ask your father’ across the mirror.”

Tootsie looks shocked but says nothing as he peruses the article about the Kefauver commission and tosses it aside. It takes him less than a minute to read the business announcement about his and Uncle Moe’s restaurant contracts. When he sees the morgue photo, he brings a hand to his mouth. Panic flashes across his face so rapidly I’m not sure I’ve seen it. Then he flips the photo over and reads the caption.

When he’s through, he slaps the table with an open palm. “Son of a bitch.” His pupils are tiny and black and his jaw muscles are taut.

“Do these articles mean anything to you?” he says, tapping the pile of clippings.

“I’m the one who should be asking that question.”

He scowls and nods. “You’re right.” He takes a sip of beer and positions the mug dead center on its coaster. “These clippings were probably stolen from me, but I don’t know anything about the photo.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Years ago, someone mailed me every article that mentioned my business. At first, I thought it was a friend. That was until whoever sent them started adding nasty notes. I should’ve thrown them out long ago.”

“Where are they?”

“Who knows? I stuffed them away so many years ago that I forgot about them when I sold the business. As far as I know, they’re still in the warehouse.”

Before retiring, my father owned a building that housed his showroom, office, and a ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse. The warehouse was a dusty, foul-smelling storeroom with a leaking ceiling and dozens of floor-to-ceiling metal shelves where he kept the pots, pans, ovens, and refrigeration he exported to hotels and restaurants in the Caribbean. When he sold his business, he also sold the warehouse and inventory.

It’s a good thing my father got paid up front because the new owner bought his business with drug money. After he was busted, the showroom and warehouse—which were in a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood in downtown Miami—remained deserted.

“So you want to tell me what these articles are all about?” I say.

My father shrugs. “Why not? You heard of S and G?”

“That’s the group Uncle Moe testified about?” I don’t remind him he was cagey when I asked about it earlier.

“You got it. A bookie operation out of South Florida. It was run by Meyer Lansky, his brother, Jake, and some other tough guys. Back then, everyone and their uncle had a piece of Miami. It was what they called a free city—no single gang owned it. Each group had its own operation and its own set of hotels and restaurants.”

“What’s this got to do with you?”

“Not a hell of a lot. Except that if you wanted to do business in Miami, you did it with gangsters. They had the money and owned the hotels and restaurants. What were Moe and I supposed to do when they came in asking us to outfit their restaurants and bars? Say no thanks, we just deal with legit operations? We weren’t crazy. The cops knew which gangsters owned which restaurants and never bothered to shut them down. Who were we to judge?”

“So why did whoever left me the articles make such a big deal of your doing business with them?”

“I have no idea. If King Kong had walked into my store looking for a refrigerator, I’d have sold it to him. That’s called doing business. I wasn’t running a charity. Maybe it’s an old competitor. Someone still jealous we did so good in the old days. Who the hell knows?”

I look at him. We both know it can’t be that.

The oak door swings open and his friends, who’ve changed out of their bowling shoes and peeled off their elbow and knee braces, enter. One of the men—he can’t be much older than I am—nods at my father and points to a large table at the far end of the bar.

Tootsie waves. “I’ll be with you in a couple.”

I slide the morgue shot toward my dad’s beer