He kissed Rose one last time, gave her the address of his guest house, asked her to take a taxi there and wait for him. Then he got back into the only clothes he had, the bra and stockings, the skirt and the wig, and went out through the lobby, past the pool, and onward toward the tiki wing.
Agent Terry Sykes, alone on stakeout now, Keith McCullough having gone to watch the picket gate of Coral Shores, looked out from underneath his beach umbrella and saw a frumpy aging hooker knock on Paul Amaro's door. Sykes pursed his lips, shook his head, and t'sked. A man of Amaro's power and prestige should certainly have rated a less weatherbeaten chippy.
Inside the room, Angelina's father heard the knock, leaned away from the rolling table at which he was just finishing late breakfast. He wiped his mouth on a napkin, said, "Yeah?"
Louie spoke into the crack between the door frame and the door. "Paulie," he said in a rasping whisper, "it's your brother Louie."
There were quick footsteps. With a reckless and forgetful lack of caution, the door was yanked open, sunlight bleached the walls. Paul Amaro squinted at the man in drag, chewed his lip a second, then said, "Louie, what the fuck?"
"I was afraid," the younger brother said by way of explanation. "That was before." He ducked beneath Paul's arm and scraped into the room.
"Before what?"
Louie didn't answer. The door closed behind him, shutting out the naturalness of day. He swept off his winged sunglasses in the dimness.
"Where's Angelina?" Paul demanded.
"No hello?" said Louie. "No how am I?"
"Louie, where's my daughter?"
"Your daughter's fine."
"I'm asking where she is."
Louie glanced around the room, noted the small sad luxuries of the guest who dines alone—the single curling rose in the bud vase, the paper cap atop the streaming glass of water. He said, "Maybe we'll get to that. First we talk."
Paul Amaro was wearing a hotel bathrobe. His barrel chest stretched open the lapels. His breathing came with effort and his skin was splotchy red.
"Don't fuck with me, Louie. My patience is used up."
"I'm not gonna let you spoil things for her."
Paul stared at his brother, surprise and contempt swirling through the look. This runty man in a skirt and a wig, this meddling nobody with tits and wrinkled stockings, was telling him what he would and wouldn't let him do? "If you're gonna be an asshole—"
Louie interrupted him. "Paul, your daughter's in love with Sal Martucci. She came down here to find him. Haven't you figured that out by now?"
Paul Amaro turned his back and clenched his fists. The room, a big room, was feeling very small. Two beds left only narrow open lanes. The mirror didn't double space, it halved it, throwing back hard edges, jutting corners that blocked ways of escape. Angelina's father didn't turn around. He said, "She doesn't even know Sal Martucci, not really, what a piece a shit he is. What she felt for him, that was long ago, childhood, a crush."
"That may be," said Louie, "but she isn't gonna stop feeling it just because you want her to."
Paul half-turned, glanced briefly down at his breakfast table with its cooling coffee, its plate striped with streaks of drying egg. "What that fucker did to me," he said, "that's death. Even you know that, Louie. That cunt put me in jail."
Louie remembered all at once that the wig was on his head, he yanked it off and tossed it away. He ran a hand over his sweaty bald spot but before he could think of what to say he was saying it. "Paul," he told his brother, "for once in your life be honest. He didn't put you in jail. You put you in jail. You're a criminal, Paul. A bully and a crook and a criminal."
For a moment Paul Amaro just glared at him, his eyeballs throbbing and his body churning and heaving in his robe like something being born. At last he said, "You little twat, you have the fucking balls—?"
"Yeah," said Louie, more surprised than anyone, "I do. I do, Paul. Finally I do."
At a loss for logic, Paul Amaro spluttered, "Your asshole video, Louie. This whole mess started with your video."
The younger brother refused to be deflected. He put his hands on the hips of his skirt, leaned forward on his tippy shoes. "Okay, Paul, so say you kill 'im. Big man, you rub 'im out. What then? Your friends respect you more? Your enemies know to be afraid?"
Paul said nothing, stared vaguely at softening butter, hardening toast.
Louie hammered on. "One thing that happens, Paul? I'll tell ya one thing that happens. Kill 'im and your daughter hates ya."
There was a long pause filled with the hum of the a/c and a faint rustling of foliage from the world outside. Then some words leaked out of Paul Amaro. They were words he didn't know he had inside him, and could never in a hundred lifetimes have imagined he would say. He met his brother's eyes in the instant before he said them but then he looked at nothing. "She hates me anyway."