Bulls Island by Dorothea Benton Frank

caution, pulled out my cell, and punched in his number.
    “Yo,” he said on a speakerphone. “This is Vinny.”
    I know, hard to believe. But that’s what he said.
    “Vinny? It’s Betts.”
    “Two hours, eighteen minutes. Took ya long enough.”
    “Don’t be such a wise guy.”
    “Where are you? I’ll pick you up. I’m in my car.”
    Within minutes, after much hoisting and pulling, I was in the passenger seat of an enormous Chevy Suburban, listening to Andrea Bocelli crooning his little heart out, and opening the window slightly as Vinny’s Eau de Too Much was causing my throat to close up.
    “So, where are we going?” I said, hoping the answer wasn’t straight to his bedroom. I needed to gear up for that occasion, should it present itself. Ever.
    “Brooklyn. The River Café. I figured let’s have a look at Manhattan from over the river.”
    “Oh!” That was a relief. “Well, great idea. I’ve always wanted to go there.”
    “You’ve never gone to the River Café?”
    “Honey, I’ve never been to Brooklyn.”
    “What? You’re kidding me, right? How long you been here? And where’re you from anyway? I hear something southern over there.”
    “Nope. Not kidding. Almost twenty years, and Atlanta, Georgia.”
    “You’ve probably never been to Jersey either.”
    “Yes, I have. Look, I don’t have anything against Brooklyn, but why would you go there if you didn’t have a reason? And, FYI, I fly out of Teterboro all the time.”
    “Teterboro? Well, well! What kind of a big shot have I got here?”
    I giggled. “I don’t own the plane; my company does.”
    “Oh, I see. But you didn’t answer my question. What do you do for a living?”
    “Private equity, hedge funds, that kind of thing. Boring stuff. You?”
    “I got my fingers in a lot of pies. Hotels mostly.”
    “Yeah? Where?”
    “South Beach, boutique hotels. Very cool. You’d like ’em.”
    We were passing Lord & Taylor and my mind began to race. South Beach. Mafia. Chevy Suburban. Didn’t Tony Soprano drive one of these? That’s television, I told myself, not reality. Plenty of nice people drove Chevy Suburbans. Still, he had a manicure, didn’t he?
    “Isn’t that a lot of overhead? You know, housekeeping, constant maintenance, landscaping, liabilities? I’ve always looked at the hotel business and thought it would be tough to earn enough for all the effort it takes.”
    “Special events make money. You limit the guest rooms so it’s always a little bit difficult to get a reservation. You know, the cachet of staying in a place and all that. Then you gotta have a pretty big restaurant with a brand-name chef and a big bar…that type of thing. Trust me; the orange is worth the squeeze. Besides, labor’s dirt cheap in Miami.”
    “Bad boy. Don’t tell me you’re running your business with illegal aliens.” I pretended to be shaken by the news.
    “No. I got Harvard graduates changing the sheets and scrubbing down the showers. Whaddaya think?”
    “Right.” Vinny Whatever-his-last-name-was was so stereotypically mafioso I was waiting for Al Pacino to pop up from the backseat with a piano wire. “So why are you here? I mean, do you live in Miami, too?”
    “Palm Beach. I got a gorgeous place there. If you’re a good girl, maybe I’ll take you down there sometime. I keep a place here ’cause I like New York and the family’s here.”
    The family. Interesting.
    “You mean like your siblings?”
    He looked over at me, knowing exactly what I was thinking. “Yeah; them, too.”
    “And what does your family do?”
    “They got a little business in South Jersey.”
    “Oh. Well, that’s good.” Atlantic City. I knew it. “And so you stay in Miami because you just want your space?” Space to launder money, I thought.
    “Yeah, I went to Miami U, and after graduation I never really left. I love all that sunshine. Hate the frigging snow.”
    It was a crazy conversation filled with dangerous innuendo and I had been put