“Who says I changed my mind?” Lester gave the question a touch of bravado.

Ted smiled at him. “You’re here.”

Lester looked away, taking his time to frame an answer. “It was the old lady. Miller. You were straight with her. She’s prime for a good con. They already got to her once. You could have spun her a story and taken her for everything she’s got left. Only you didn’t. I realized that despite the strange way you have of making a living, you’re not a crook.” Having finished his speech, Lester lay back on the long pew and closed his eyes. Moments later he said, “Of course, if you were to offer me a percentage, I wouldn’t say no.”

-39-

-39-

They found Lester a baggy suit at the parish thrift store, disagreeing briefly on whether blue or brown was more convincing. Lester won with the argument with the point that stains would show up better on the brown. Ted didn’t haggle, paying too much and earning disapproving looks from both Kenzie and the church volunteer at the checkout.

Kenzie claimed the job of distressing the clothes based on her as-yet-unrevealed artistic talents. She attacked with ketchup, coffee, and the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag. She balked at urine, but Lester persevered, though insisting, reasonably, that only his own be used. Ted withheld an opinion. Verisimilitude in costuming was out of his jurisdiction. And he wasn’t going to be the one posing as a wino.

Mohammed dropped Lester off two blocks from the address, leaving him to shuffle the rest of the way in his bedroom slippers, carrying an ass-pocket flask of Relska Vodka. He was in place by eleven o’clock. Two hours early, but they agreed he needed the time to fade into the background.

Kenzie stayed hidden in Mohammed’s car with her camera and telephoto lens. It was coming up to noon, but the wide streets were nearly bare. The pathways between the projects on the other side of the boulevard, however, were crowded with young black men wearing white Stanley Kowalski shirts and black jeans and young black women minding toddlers. Ted did not see one person look at him, but he could feel that they all knew he was there and did not like it. A white man in a suit was an affront or possibly a threat. Ted recognized all the societal reasons why this hostility existed and empathized. But on this day the malice was focused on him. He imagined the towering structures as buttes in some John Ford western, smoke signals rising and alerting one and all of his presence.

He crossed the street, avoiding any chance of confrontation. This was their neighborhood, and he was the intruder. Moving on was all he could do to return normalcy to their world.

The advantage to Ted and his coconspirators was that Russian mobsters would be even more apparent and less welcome.