In the Age of Love and Chocolate (Birthright #3)(32)

* * *

By March, the first of the new wave of Dark Rooms was ready to open. The location was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and it had been quite easy for us to get the place going once we had the money—the laws and many of the logistics were the same as those for the Manhattan club, and travel by the L train, though it only ran once every other hour, was not difficult. The new club was in a building that had once been a Russian Orthodox cathedral. Though my cousin Fats had run a speakeasy out of a church for years, this was my first “holy” location. Perhaps I should have paid greater consideration to the spiritual issues, but I didn’t—it was not my faith, and as I have already mentioned, I had more or less given up on organized religion during that period of my life. In its favor, the site was central and picturesque, with yellow brick walls and copper-helmeted domes in the Russian style. In truth, the Russian part gave me pause more than the cathedral part, as I still did not wish to associate the club with my Russian crime family. But the Dark Room was so popular in Manhattan that I thought the potential association wouldn’t be much of a hit. Plus, the price was right.

I was getting dressed for the opening of the new club when my cell phone rang. It was Jones. “Ms. Balanchine, there’s a body outside the Manhattan club. The police have already been called, but I think you should come down, too.”

* * *

The police were slow in those days, so I was not surprised to find that the body had not been attended to by the time I arrived. An overweight man lay facedown on the steps. I could not see any obvious trauma to the body. Even from behind, he looked familiar. I knew you weren’t supposed to touch a body at a crime scene, but I couldn’t help myself. I bent down and I lifted the big onion-shaped pate, which reminded me of the domes of the Brooklyn club. The head was still unnaturally warm in my hands.

It was my cousin Fats, the boss of the Family.

I was not an observant Catholic anymore, but I crossed myself.

I instructed Jones to cover Fats and then to erect velvet ropes, routing our customers around my cousin’s body. While I waited for the police to arrive, I went inside to call Mouse, who in a relatively short time had managed to become Fats’s second-in-command. “Mouse, Fats is dead.”

Mouse, like me, was not a crier. She was silent for several moments, which I knew to be her way of coping with hardship.

“Are you still there?” I asked.

“Yes, I was thinking,” she said in a voice that sounded as calm as milk. “It must have been the Balanchiadze. Look at the timing. They knew you were opening the second Dark Room location, and they must have decided to make a statement by killing Fats. It’s only a theory, but Fats had been fighting with them for months. He was trying to protect your business.”

“Why didn’t he come to me?”

“He wanted to keep you out of it, Annie,” she said. “There will be a scramble to see who leads the Family now that Fats is gone. I wonder…”

“Yes?”

“Maybe it should be you? Everyone in the semya respects you so much.”

“I can’t do that, Mouse. I have a job and I have no interest in running the Family.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Why would you?”

“I know you and Fats were close,” I said. “Will you be okay?”

“I’m always okay,” she said.

* * *

The police didn’t arrive to claim Fats’s body until eight p.m., a full three hours after Jones had reported the death. They tossed Fats into a black bag, and I was told that that concluded the investigation.

“Do you want to look for evidence?” I said to one of the police officers. “Maybe ask me a couple of questions?”

“You telling me how to do my job now, missy?” the police officer said. “Look, Fats Medovukha was a high-level gangster. There’s no crime here. It was only a matter of time before he ended up with three bullet holes in his chest. We’ve got real situations, and a force that’s about forty percent of the size required to deal with all of them.”

I felt angry. I knew the same sentiments had been expressed when my father had died. My cousin couldn’t help that he’d been born a Balanchine any more than I could. “He was my cousin,” I said. “People cared about this man.”

“Oh, so you knew the deceased, did you? Maybe you want us to investigate you?” the police officer said. “The victim is usually close to the perpetrator.”

“I’ve got friends, you know. Bertha Sinclair comes to my club every week.”

The police officer laughed. “You think she isn’t aware that your cousin was killed? She’s the one who told us to bring the body to the morgue and consider this matter closed.”

* * *

I was four hours late for the Brooklyn launch. When I finally arrived, the party was in its denouement. It looked like it had been a good party, but I was in no mood for partying anyway.

“What happened?” Theo asked me.

I shook my head and told him I would tell him later.

I went to get myself a drink from the bar. I needed to clear my head. Mr. Delacroix sat down next to me.

“Where were you?” he said.

I related my evening. At the end, I asked, “If this had happened when you were DA, would you have acted as Bertha Sinclair has? Would you have tossed Fats’s body in a bag and told me there wouldn’t be an investigation because my cousin was a bad guy from a bad family?”