The Devil May Dance by Jake Tapper (books to read fiction txt) 📗

Thirteen Women. But it did no box office, and RKO and Selznick tossed her. Rumor has it she had to resort to nudie pictures. Anyway, long story long, she took a dive off the H of that sign up there.”

“How terrible,” Margaret said.

Goode’s voice had lost its usual hard-bitten tone, and she almost seemed to be talking to herself. “Left a note. ‘I am afraid. I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. P.E.’”

How odd and how sad that Charlotte memorized a suicide note, Margaret thought. A police siren cried in the distance. Goode shook her head as if to remind herself of where she was, took a last drag of her cigarette, then stubbed it out with her foot.

“It’s a rough town,” she said with a shrug, her tough exterior restored.

“It’s not any nicer in Washington,” Margaret said.

“No, I know,” Goode agreed. “We have Sinatra, you have Kennedy.”

“Oh, jeez,” Charlie said. “Let’s not get into that—Margaret has faith in her boy in the White House.”

“You do?” Goode asked.

“He added a women’s rights plank to the New Frontier,” Margaret said. “He’s appointed women to high-ranking posts. President’s Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt!”

“It’s all crap,” Goode said. “He’s like all the rest of them. He’s a pig.”

Margaret started to protest, but Goode’s face took on an angry expression. “Your worldview bears little resemblance to the real worlds of women like me and Peg Entwistle, all of us trying to make a living,” she said.

Margaret was stunned by the sudden shift in Goode’s mood, all her tour-guide bonhomie replaced by a barely contained rage. Within minutes she was driving them back home, an aggressive silence filling her junker. The night took an even worse turn when they got back to the hotel and the receptionist alerted Charlie that the Justice Department had left an urgent message: his father had had a heart attack.

Chapter SevenLas Vegas, Nevada

December 1961

“Zippedy-zoo-bah-zee-bah,” Dean Martin sang. “Zabbety-zoo-bah-zee-bah boom.”

“Scat,” said Sinatra.

“That’s indeed what I’m doing, pally,” Martin said. “Scat.”

“No, I mean scat like ‘get outta here, that sounds horrible,’” said Sinatra, prompting an explosion of laughter from the crowd watching the show in the Copa Room of the Sands Hotel.

It might have been just a random Monday night in December, but every night in Vegas was New Year’s Eve. At a table near the back of the room, Congressman Isaiah Street raised his eyebrows and polished off his scotch.

“What white folks find entertaining never ceases to amaze,” he said to Charlie and Margaret.

To thank Charlie for keeping John Wayne from stomping him, Sinatra had invited the Marders to take in a Rat Pack show. Charlie had then invited Street, a decorated Tuskegee Airman, Chicago Democrat, and one of only five Black members of Congress. He had been Charlie’s closest friend since 1954, when they’d met in Ike’s Platoon. So when Charlie called needing to talk, Street hopped on a plane. He discussed sensitive matters in person only, assuming, probably correctly, that J. Edgar Hoover had tapped the phones of every Black man with power.

“That’s Rosselli over there,” said Margaret, pointing out the handsome mobster. He chose that very moment to casually pinch the rear of a passing Copa Girl. Her face initially expressed shock, then Pavlovian deference.

“Who’s he with?” Street asked, craning his neck as Rosselli pulled out a chair at a table near the stage. “Is that Momo?”

“Sure looks like him from here,” Charlie said. He pushed his chair back from their tiny square table (dinner and two-drink minimum, $5.95 per person, not a room for people without some means). “I’m going to go over there and check it out.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Margaret asked.

“No, but I suspect a middle-aged white guy will blend better at this stag party than either of you.”

“Point, Charlie,” said Street.

“What is this thing called love?” Sinatra sang. Onstage, he and Martin slouched on stools, drinks in hand.

“Frank, if you don’t know, then we’re all in trouble,” Martin quipped. Then, in a singsongy voice: “Did you ever see a Jew-jitsu?”

“I did,” Sinatra responded, raising his hand.

Davis, who had considered himself a Jew since the 1950s and had formally converted earlier this year, ran onto the stage in mock offense.

“Be fair!” Davis barked at Martin as Sinatra pretended to hold him back. “Would you like it if I came onstage and asked, ‘Did you ever see a Wop-cicle?’” The audience ate it all up like the free breakfast buffet.

Charlie tried to saunter through the dimly lit room, filled to its maximum four-hundred-person capacity, but there was not a lot of room for sauntering. The crowd was clustered in groups of four, the tables inches from one another and set out in ten long rows. The Copa Girls followed the rules of the highway, moving on the right, passing on the left, yielding when necessary.

He approached Rosselli’s table. The mobster was leaning back in his seat expansively, a cigar in one hand and a highball in the other. Onstage Dean Martin protested Davis’s arm on his shoulder, saying, “I’ll go out and I’ll drink with ya, I’ll pick cotton with ya, I’ll go to shul with ya, but don’t touch me,” again to uproarious laughter from the room. Charlie got a good look at the people at the table: handsome Rosselli, ferrety Giancana, and an attractive dark-haired woman who was maybe twenty-five. He returned to Isaiah and Margaret, the only two people in the room who didn’t look delighted by what was happening onstage.

“Rosselli, Giancana, and a lady I haven’t seen before,” Charlie reported.

“I called a friend at LAPD about Powell’s murder,” Street said. “An eyewitness saw a car with Illinois plates speed away from the hotel, guys with fedoras inside. But the cops are wary. They’ve seen the LA Mob pull this move before, replacing plates and wearing costumes to implicate Momo and the Chicago syndicate.”

“So the theory