“Hello? Connie? Uh-huh. Yeah, girl. He did? I mean, why would he even think she would go out with him?” She broke into hysterical laughter. “My daddy would say that he couldn’t help it. But I think he needs somebody to help him help it . . .”

Her words, tone of voice, even the way she stood was different. I shook my head again and took the second stairway to the third floor, where our bedrooms were. Then I scaled the straight-up fireman’s ladder through the portal to the roof.

The circular crown of Roundhouse contained my twenty-seven rosebushes in their simple clay pots. From the moonlight-colored Musk Rose to the deep red Maiden’s Blush, from pale coral Bourbon blossoms to the passionate yellow Molineux.

I visited my rosebushes every day. They glowed for me, sang in colors for me. And they offered me a place and time where I could smoke my one cigarette of the day. Lucky Strike, LSMFT, the finest cigarette a workingman could hope for.

The added benefit of a single smoke a day was that the first cigarette is by far the best. That first deep drag is both elegant and ecstatic. Mmm.

8

8

The rose-garden roof of Roundhouse was the place I felt most comfortable. At the highest point in Brighthope Bowl, the sky above it was almost always blue. The rosebushes rustled against one another in the upper breezes and I was alone. For me there’s a deep satisfaction in solitude.

I leaned over the turret edge and saw the sire of the Longo clan, Erculi, ambling toward Orchestra’s blue-and-white manor. He looked fifty but was nearer seventy and always dressed in gray gardener’s clothes. He and his four sons worked on the property, holding simple titles like groundskeeper, machinist, housepainter, and chauffeur. But the Longos were anything but simple. In Sicily they had gotten into a beef with a rival clan. Reynard told me that there were thirteen deaths among the Longos and the Trifilettis before Erculi decided to migrate his immediate male kin to America. Reynard said that in his lifetime Erculi had killed thirty-one men.

Thus far I had kept Erculi and Mouse away from each other. No reason to tempt fate.

Returning to the kitchen a good half hour later, I saw that my daughter was still on the phone. “Are you still on that thing?”

“It’s Aunt Jewelle,” Feather said, holding her hand over the mouthpiece. “I think she wants to talk to you.”

“JJ,” I said into the receiver.

“Hey, baby,” the real estate mogul murmured, almost shyly.

Jewelle loved men but she didn’t trust ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of us, including both her husbands. I was one of the few she believed would be there for her on her own terms—even if she didn’t know what those terms might be.

“I hear Feather’s tryin’ t’make your house into a hotel.”

“Daddy!”