She knew the answer had everything to do with her and nothing with him, and she was tired of thinking about it. She’d had the same reaction to the last guy in her life. She stared up into the darkness and thought about him. Ron Grimaldi had showed up in town, bought her parents’ old house, and chased her around for two and a half years before she relented. He wasn’t her type, but at least he was something new.
Nine months of Ron was enough to take the newness away. Janie realized that women were just objects to Ron—props for his own self-aggrandized vision. She’d seen it in Vegas the few times they’d gone there together for a weekend. Ron with a cigar, wearing a suit, throwing around money like it was nothing to him. She knew she was completely irrelevant to him. It could be her or any one of a thousand cocktail waitresses on his arm or in his bed and it would make no difference to him. Which was why ending the relationship was so easy. For Ron, a relationship was merely having a convenient and consistent sex partner. However, Janie wanted to redefine what they were doing was fine with him.
But between his effortless and expensive carousing and his ability to pay cash for the house, Janie was left with a lingering question as to why he was in Nickelback at all. It couldn’t have been for the forklift job out a Monarch. In fact, he barely seemed to know anything at all about the oil business. The only answer that made sense was that he hadn’t come to Nickelback for the job; he had come there to hide.
It wasn’t until she had decided to stop seeing him that Janie finally asked him about it directly. Late at night, while reclining on his black leather couch in the house where she’d grown up—which she had lately begun treating more and more like her own again—she sipped her wine and just came out with it.
“You’re not really a forklift driver from Houston, are you?”
He hesitated for a second, staring at her from the other end of the couch. “Look,” he grinned, mulling it over, “the only reason I’ll tell you is because the statute of limitations has run. And because I trust you. But you can’t tell anybody. I mean, anyone.”
She agreed. “Who would I tell?”
He cocked his head from side to side, as if trying to shake the pieces of his story into some kind of order inside his head. Then he took a sip of wine and leaned forward to set it on the coffee table. “Okay,” he began, nervously, sitting on the edge of the couch, clapping his hands together a couple of times.
“I used to work for a family, in New York.” He grinned and shrugged his thick shoulders. “You know, the mob, whatever people call it.”
“I didn’t think you were from Houston.”
“I had an uncle in Houston. Owned a car dealership. That’s why I picked it. But anyway, I was an accountant.” He laughed. “You believe that? Really. Yeah, I’m a numbers guy. Gray suit. Green eyeshade. The whole deal. You laugh but it’s true.”
Janie sat up on the couch, holding two fingers over her giggling mouth. “You’re a bean counter?”
Ron raised his right hand. “Swear to God. Fordham University, class of 1984.”
“And you worked for a Mafia family? How does one get a job like that?”
“Ah, it just sort of happened. I had some friends who had some friends. That kind of thing. But it’s not what you think. I mean, I went to work in a business office, right in mid-town. There were five accountants, some lawyers, business managers. I mean, anyone off the street would have just thought this was a small consulting company—which it basically was. I mean, you wouldn’t believe how huge this business was. These guys were investing in everything. Tons of real, legitimate businesses. It’s just that, instead of investor money, they were all propped up by illegal money.”
Ron took a drink from his glass. He seemed to enjoy telling the story, as though he’d been practicing in his head, waiting to get it off his chest for years. “So anyway,” he went on, “I worked there for about ten years, got to know the ins and outs of all the accounting tricks they were using to hide money everywhere, and then I decided to take some.”