Flesh and Gold by Ann Aptaker

Author:Ann Aptaker [Aptaker, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781635552690
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2018-09-16T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

A couple of tourists—him in an off-the-rack dinner jacket, her in a pink satin coat that wasn’t bought on Fifth Avenue—are taking up Rudi Hidalgo’s time at the Sevilla Biltmore’s concierge station in the headache pattern lobby. Noticing me, he answers the last of the tourists’ questions—“What’s the name of that place where Hemingway hangs around?”—and sends them on their way to the Floridita bar.

Hidalgo is not happy to see me. He stiffens in his suit, a white linen double-breasted number that surrounds his plump body like a plaster cast.

“What’s the matter, Rudi? Maybe you thought I was dead?”

“Why would I think such a thing?”

“You knew, didn’t you, that I’d get a working over from Santiago. That’s why you sent me there. I bet you figured a thug like Santiago would finish me off, get me out of your hair and out of your business, and you’d never even get one finger of your own manicured hands bloody. Wasn’t that the idea?”

“Shhh! Keep your voice down. We are in a fine hotel.”

“Yeah, so I saw with Mr. and Mrs. Package Tour. Listen, Hidalgo, we can talk here or we can find a booth in the bar.”

“No. Not the bar. We can talk in my office.” Hidalgo signals with a flourishing hand to a clerk at the reception desk to take over here. He then waves me along to follow him to a door behind the concierge station.

Inside his office, Hidalgo turns on a desk lamp but he doesn’t sit down at his desk. Not that there’d be much room. His office is the opposite of Agnes’s. Where her desk was sparse, his is a mess of papers, menus, cigarette and cigar packs, matchbooks, a telephone, and a half-empty bottle of rum. I guess all his fussy grooming is just false advertising. The guy’s a slob, which fits my current opinion of his soul.

“Why are you here, Gold?”

“I’m here because you’re a louse, Hidalgo. The worst kind of creep. But you’re a louse with contacts in places I need to be to find the woman I’m looking for. Did you know Santiago sold her to Charlie Ossatura? And did you know Ossatura is dead?”

Even in the shadowy light of the desk lamp, I can see Hidalgo’s face go pale. He finally sits down in his chair, which creaks. “I have never met this Ossatura.” He says it like he’d rather bite through his tongue than say the guy’s name.

“But you know who he is, or was. Used to be a big shot in the Mob, but fell out of favor and wound up in Havana as just another of Meyer Lansky’s lackeys. Poor guy took a shiv to the chest, right in front of my eyes. Right in front of Lansky’s eyes, too.”

Hidalgo waves my words away, says, “That is nothing to me,” with a bravery he can’t quite pull off.

“Uh-huh. Speaking of our mutual friend Lansky, how did you get hold of the Enriquez painting I purloined for him?”

He sits up a little straighter for this one.

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