The Old Turk's Load by Gregory Gibson Read Free Book Online Page B

boyfriend and the father and dead mother. He just wanted to move them around, for now, into the classic configurations.
Little hunks of mind cheese, like a man setting himself up for heartbreak by forcing his rebellious daughter into a role she didn’t want. A spoiled, willful girl determined to escape her domineering father. A predatory boyfriend who knew how to work his meal ticket. And vaguely—the late Mrs. Mundi. His instinct told him she could be the key to all this.
He’d have to figure out her story to get to the bottom of Mundi’s bullshit, which would mean having Jarkey tail Gloria, which was fine. That was how he’d do it.
The clams arrived, Bloody Mary standing tall behind them.
Good Old Julie
J
    ulius Roth had a shiny balding head, a thick neck, and slabs of torso that rippled beneath his short-sleeved white shirt. He projected the genial physicality of a football player who’d taken up accountancy and he reinforced the impression by keeping a mechanical pencil in his breast pocket.
    Richard Mundi had discovered Roth during the postwar years when he, Jimmy Murchison and Harlan Kraft, were doing suburban developments on Long Island.The sprawl was moving unstoppably across Nassau County and he and his partners were getting very rich buying farmland cheap and turning it into “affordable housing”— acres of tacky boxes with names like Seaview Heights. Julius Roth, really just a kid then, was one of Murchison’s project managers and he stood out from the hard, greedy crowd of low-level bosses because he had an uncanny ability to make men work. Itinerant framers, Canuck wallboard guys, burned-out GI electricians, it didn’t matter. Roth had his crews running like drill teams. He was as tough as any, but he was smart with people, too, and Mundi recognized he was bound for bigger things. So he took him on as a protégé and Roth blossomed. Mundi then moved him over to the Newark operation and watched him work his way to the top of the heap, overseeing the squads of snoops, mules, and goons in that branch of the enterprise. It turned out to have been a brilliant move.
    Along with his nascent administrative skills, Roth demonstrated a knack for real estate. As the Long Island action dried up, he began acquiring distressed properties in the greater Newark area on behalf of Mundi Enterprises. He was able to squeeze value out of these tenements, small businesses, and defunct industrial sites by recycling them for use by immigrants and African-American entrepreneurs. Over the years he’d turned Newark into the company’s sole profit source, and now he answered only to Mundi, having risen above Seamster and Mossman, displacing Murchison and Kraft in the chain of command.
    At the moment he was briefing his boss on a troubling occurrence over in Jersey. Two of their offices, the one on Ferry Street and the one down on Hillside Avenue, had been tossed. In broad daylight. No doubt about it being Mob guys, either. They’d barged in, slapped people around, emptied drawers, and turned over desks, just the way they’d come around trying to intimidate some business, trying to muscle in. Except it wasn’t a shakedown.
    “They’re letting you know that they know you’ve got their stuff,” Roth told his boss.
“It’s a bluff.”
“Call it that. But it’s also a reasonable deduction. First, they wait for the shit to show up on the streets. When that doesn’t happen, they start looking around for someone smart enough to sit them out.They have to figure out the whole operation and who’s running it. When they get all that, then they start to squeeze.”
“Fuck them.”
“You don’t want to get into it with those guys.”
“They got no proof of anything. Seamster took care of that at street level. There’s no fuckin’ way they can connect us. They’re just shaking trees, waiting for something to fall out.”
“Maybe. But supposing they tried everyone else and you’re the last one left? They’re gonna shake