Murder at Union Station - Margaret Truman [7]
In a sense, his father’s death liberated the fifteen-year-old Louis. He’d begun hanging out with local members of the Gambino family, whose social club was two doors down the street from the building in which the Russo family lived. His father had forbidden his son from hanging out with many of his newfound streetwise friends, and had smacked him one day when Louis returned with money earned by running errands for the mobsters. Now, with his father dead and the family really needing money, he felt free to pursue what soon became a full-time criminal career—loan-sharking, numbers collections, running prostitutes, and acting as an enforcer for his second family. It was in that role that he committed his first murder, whacking a Gambino soldier who’d been accused of holding back money, skimming from his loan-sharking operation. The twenty-one-year-old Russo took no particular pleasure from the act, nor did he suffer any particular pain. It was what he’d been paid to do, and he’d done it effectively, including dumping the body in a landfill. The body was eventually found and Louis attended the funeral, where he paid his respects to the victim’s widow and children.
Those were good days, he mused, half asleep, dreams and fragments of such memories filtering in and out of his mind. Better days than what the last dozen years had been.
He straightened and looked at his watch. The conductor had said they were forty-five minutes from D.C.’s Union Station. That was fifteen minutes ago. He neatly gathered the paper in which the Danish had been wrapped, put it in the half-empty coffee cup, checked that his return airline tickets were still in his jacket pocket, and gazed out the window as the train neared its destination. Then, sitting up straight, he fell deeply asleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
UNION STATION
Joe Jenks had been shining shoes at Union Station for three years. If you were going to shine shoes for a living, you couldn’t pick a better spot than the hundred-year-old beaux arts landmark, created in 1903 by an act signed by President Teddy Roosevelt, falling into disrepair over the ensuing years, but restored in the 1980s to an even greater architectural monument than it had been in its previous splendor. The working philosophy of its original architect, master builder Daniel H. Burnham, was “Make no little plans.” Had Roosevelt known that the Wright Brothers would prove man’s ability to fly a mere ten months after he’d put into motion the lavish plans for this centerpiece of rail transportation, he might not have called for such a grandiose design.
Working there as a bootblack was a dream come true for Jenks, who’d plied his trade on the street for too many years. It was comfortable working inside the sprawling station, now bright and beautiful, with all its shops and movie theaters, restaurants and services—a pleasant, fancy setting for spit-shining the shoes of important men and women passing through on their way to other cities and other business.
“Back when it opened in nineteen and eight,” Jenks’s grandfather, who had worked there as a Pullman porter, often told him, “old Union Station had some mighty fancy restaurants, like the old Savarin. My goodness, anybody who was anybody in the city dined there at the Savarin. Barbershop had a dozen chairs and a bootblack and a valet to press your clothes all nice and fine. Back then, Savarin was the only real decent place in all of D.C. where a white man could dine with a black man and nobody seemed to notice. Nobody seemed to care. Way it should be.”
Although Jenks was the oldest by far of the three bootblacks at Exclusive Shoe Shine, his was the shortest tenure, so he worked chair 3, alongside the two younger men who didn’t demonstrate the same sort