“When a lake freezes over, it doesn’t freeze all the way to the bottom,” Dani said.
“What?”
“It just freezes on the surface. The ice can be really thick . . . but there’s always water moving below it. You feel something. It’s just below the ice,” she said softly.
“Yeah. Well.” He shrugged.
“How does all this lead to Al Capone?” she asked, allowing him to return to the original tale.
“This is where you come in.”
“Me?” she gasped.
“You. And your father.”
Her gaze was riveted to his face.
“Your father was running on routes that had already been claimed. It was early days yet, and everyone was trying to get their foot in the door. Claiming territory. Supply lines. Paying off cops and judges and funneling money to whoever they needed to look the other way.
“I don’t know if your dad was with O’Banion’s gang. With a name like Flanagan, probably. But Johnny Torrio—the boss before Capone—sent a message.”
“My father was the message?”
“Yeah. And the cops heard it loud and clear. Murder, suicide, case closed. I saw it over and over again. And there you were, a little girl with mismatched eyes who needed justice. And I knew you weren’t going to get it. Your mother wasn’t going to get it. And your dad, for all his mistakes, wasn’t going to get it either.”
“What did you do?” she whispered.
“I’d heard about the work the Treasury boys were doing. T-men, they called them. I thought maybe it was something I could do. I didn’t want to be one of the bad guys, and everywhere I looked there were bad guys, and nobody was stopping them. And I had nothing . . . better . . . to do.”
“Because your family was gone,” she summarized, her mouth sad.
He nodded, the movement terse. “Yeah. So I . . . signed up.”
“That easy?”
“No.” He laughed, though the action didn’t curve his lips. “It wasn’t easy. But I’m not going to break it all down for you either. Jump ahead to Capone in ’29.”
“All right.”
“The department needed an inside man.”
“One that looked like an Italian and had a gift for accents?”
“Yeah. They had a plan that I would slowly infiltrate Capone’s inner circle. I pretended to be a mobster from Philly named Michael Lepito who was lying low at the Lexington Hotel in Chicago until my lawyers could work out a deal so I could go back home.”
“Where did you get the suits?” she asked. Of course Dani would want to know that.
“They were provided to me. I had to look the part, and bosses don’t wear cheap suits. Cops wear cheap suits. Capone had to be absolutely convinced.”
“And was he?”
“I guess so. Though when he found out I wasn’t a wop—that was his word, not mine—he couldn’t believe it.”
“He found out?”
“Not until it was too late. I was undercover for a year and a half. He found out about me at his trial. He saw me coming out of the elevator with the prosecutor.” For eighteen months he’d kept his cover. He listened, he played his part, and he never broke. Then something as simple as a courthouse conversation had blown it.
“You must have been scared.”
“I got out of town after that, yeah. But Capone’s at Alcatraz now. His organization was rattled to its roots. And so far . . . nobody’s caught up to Michael Lepito.”
“Or Michael Malone?”
“Just you, Dani. Just you.”
“That was a very good story,” she said slowly, her attention trained beyond him, mulling it all over.
“A very long story.” He glanced at the clock on the wall.
Dani lifted up the skirt of the bed and peered beneath it once more. Charlie strolled out like he’d been waiting for his cue. Then he sat, directly in the center of the floor, and began washing himself.
Dani swooped him up, triumphant, and Malone just shook his head.
“What a pain in the rump he is,” he growled, rising.
“If he weren’t, I wouldn’t love him so much.”
“I would like him a great deal more, however.”
She snickered but kept a firm hold on Charlie as she left the room.
“Good night, Michael,” she called.
He sighed, feeling like he’d just been subjected to a pat down and a cavity search.
“Good night, Dani.”
11
By late March, the temperature had risen enough that when Dani and Malone walked to the morgue on a Thursday morning, Dani pulling the wagon behind her, there was a decided feeling of spring in the air.