Chapter 4 - The Glass on St. Charles
The morning sun over St. Charles Avenue did not warm the stone facade of the Vance Building. It was a five-story structure of smoked glass and cast bronze, sitting proudly at the corner of a street lined with white antebellum mansions and ancient magnolias.
At ten o'clock, a black Cadillac Fleetwood pulled up to the granite curb.
Benny Romano stepped out from the driver’s side, his overcoat unbuttoned, his hand resting casually inside his pocket. He opened the rear door.
Carmine Orsini stepped onto the sidewalk. He wore a dark gray overcoat with a velvet collar, leather gloves, and a silk tie the color of dried port. He looked like an attorney on his way to an appellate argument, except for the two men who fell in behind him—burly dock bosses from the Bienville terminal who wore flat caps and carried lead pipes wrapped in morning newspapers.
They did not take the elevator. They walked up the central marble staircase to the fourth floor, where the double mahogany doors read: Vance Development & Holdings.
The receptionist—a young woman with silver earrings and a telephone headset—froze with her hand halfway to the intercom button.
"Mr. Orsini," she breathed, her face draining of color. "Mr. Vance is in a closed executive session with the parish planning commission—"
Carmine did not look at her. He placed one gloved hand flat against the meeting rail of the double doors and pushed.
The oak gave way with a sharp, pneumatic hiss.
The boardroom was twelve feet wide and thirty feet long, dominated by a glass-topped conference table where seven men in gray suits sat surrounded by architectural models of the proposed Riverfront Walkway expansion.
At the head of the table sat Marcus Vance.
He was seventy-two, with a full head of silver hair styled with rosewater pomade, skin the color of old calfskin, and a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses perched on his thin, aristocratic nose. He was holding an architectural pointer, indicating a red-lined sector on a map of Magazine Street.
The pointer stopped in mid-air.
The six planning commissioners—men whose campaign funds had been underwritten by Orsini trucking entities for ten years—looked from Vance to Carmine.
Not a single commissioner spoke.
One by one, without being told, three of them closed their leather briefcases. Two others reached for their overcoats on the mahogany rack by the window. Within forty seconds, the room had emptied of everyone except Marcus Vance, his private secretary, and Carmine Orsini.
Carmine walked to the head of the table.
He did not sit down. He pulled a chair out, turned it so it faced Vance directly, and leaned his hands on the backrest.
"Marcus," Carmine said.
Vance took off his reading glasses with slow, deliberate care. He laid them on top of the Magazine Street map. "Carmine. You usually send a runner when you want to renegotiate the terminal leases. Breaking down my reception door is a bit dramatic, even for your father's son."
"My father is dead, Marcus. And so is Emmett Fontaine's mind."
Vance’s eyelids flickered.
It was an almost imperceptible movement—the kind of microscopic tell that only men who spent their lives reading poker hands and death warrants ever caught.
"I don't know that name," Vance said smoothly.
Carmine signaled behind him.
Benny stepped forward, dropping a thick, blue-covered municipal portfolio onto the glass table. It hit with a heavy, flat slap that rattled the crystal water pitcher.
"That's the original title for 1420 Magazine Street," Carmine said. "Signed by the Spanish governor in 1794. Stamped by the territorial registrar in 1804. Purchased by Guillaume Fontaine in 1882."
"The lot was cleared by tax foreclosure," Vance said, his voice hardening like cooling slag. "The property was legally condemned after a catastrophic structural fire. I bought the municipal lien at public auction for forty-two thousand dollars. The city holds the deed."
Carmine reached into his overcoat and pulled out a small, heavy piece of metal.
He set it on the glass table, right in the center of the Magazine Street parcel on Vance's map.
It was a rusted, charred brass padlock. The shackle was bent double, scarred by the teeth of an industrial hydraulic spreader, but the four-hole tumblers were still visible beneath the soot.
Vance stared at the brass.
"Dennis Vidor had that lock in a tackle box under his bunk in Slidell," Carmine said, his voice dropping into that terrifying, conversational whisper. "It matches the gate hardware on the rear exit of 1420 Magazine. The serial number stamped on the bottom belongs to the maintenance shop at Vance Construction on Tchoupitoulas Street."
Vance didn't look up. He picked up his tortoiseshell glasses, his hand remarkably steady for an old man who had just seen a ghost walk into his office.
"Dennis Vidor is an alcoholic with late-stage cirrhosis," Vance said. "A court would throw his deposition out before the bailiff finished reading the docket."
"I am not a court, Marcus."
Carmine leaned down until his face was six inches from Vance’s ear.
"You took three years of that girl's life," Carmine whispered. "You made her wash my napkins in a basement while your nephew sold six-dollar macchiatos on the ground her grandfather paved with red bricks. You have until Friday afternoon at five o'clock."
"To do what?" Vance spat, his aristocratic mask finally slipping, his pale eyes narrowing into twin slits of pure, venomous spite.
"To sign the deed for 1420 Magazine over to Eleanor Fontaine," Carmine said. "To transfer two point four million dollars into a trust account at Hibernia Bank for Emmett Fontaine's medical care. And to take your nephew Julian out of this state before I decide that his truck would look better sitting at the bottom of the Mississippi River with him inside the cab."
Carmine straightened his coat, turned his back on the developer, and walked toward the door.
At the threshold, he stopped.
"And Marcus?"
May you like
Vance glared at him through the glass.
"If you ever touch a bakery in this parish again," Carmine said, "I won't use the fire department to inspect your buildings. I’ll inspect them myself."
