The Devil May Dance - Tapper, Jake (short novels in english .TXT) 📗

oblivious to the Marders’ concerns; they were soaked in bourbon, singing, laughing, and loudly gossiping about ghosts as they stumbled around the graveyard. Charlie and Margaret could make out pieces of their conversations.

There goes Wallace Beery.

He won an Oscar too, Frank!

Remember he and a couple mobsters beat that guy to death at the Troc?

Suzan Ball.

Lucille’s cousin.

Twenty-one?

Cancer.

Bit parts. Aladdin and His Lamp.

Here’s the Garden of Memory.

Some reverence, folks, Bogie is over there.

Bogart, Sinatra’s hero, was credited with coining the term Rat Pack to describe an altogether different group of friends, but both the term and Bogie’s beloved Lauren Bacall had been posthumously co-opted by his protégé Sinatra.

Charlie and Margaret headed back, and the snatches of conversation soon grew too distant for them to hear. They made their way over the hills on narrow paved roads to the parking lot. Earlier, Margaret, the ever-prepared former Girl Scout, had stashed the small first-aid kit she brought with her on all family excursions in the trunk of their rented white 1962 Impala convertible.

“We’re missing all the fun,” Charlie said as a gunshot followed by the pop of an exploding light bulb cracked in the distance. “I’m really fine, honey.”

“Sure sounds like fun,” Margaret said as she held out her hand for the keys. Charlie reluctantly produced them.

She inserted the key and opened the trunk while Charlie looked to the hills, where the echoes of crooning and guffaws sounded almost like local wildlife. Then Margaret screamed.

From the gauzy illumination of a distant streetlamp, Charlie saw the shape in the trunk, a big shape.

It was a body.

Charlie stepped closer. He recognized the face, as did Margaret, who turned away. He looked with horror at the woman that they’d last seen days before and that he’d seen quite a bit of in the past few weeks.

Her eyes were two bloody caverns; they must have been shot out. There was some brain and bone residue in the trunk but not enough to suggest she had been shot there. Her mouth was agape, her jaw helplessly, horrifically slack.

Charlie and Margaret stood frozen until the sudden arrival of the Rat Pack, who apparently had raced over in response to Margaret’s shriek.

Sinatra looked into the trunk.

“Charlie,” he said. “Just what the hell have you done?”

Chapter TwoNew York City

One month earlier—December 1961

The Marders’ phone did not usually ring at five in the morning, but Charlie had been up, staring at the ceiling, so he picked it up right away.

It was his father, Winston Marder. “Call my lawyer, Alistair Crutchfield. Then go to my house, get my diabetes medicine, and bring it to me. I’m in the Tombs.”

“You’re what?”

“It’s a nickname for the federal—”

“I know what the Tombs are!”

“Good, then I don’t need to give you directions.” The line went dead.

Charlie dressed quietly so as not to wake Margaret. She’d gone to sleep before him last night; these days, she regularly turned in before he did. Charlie’s nights were consumed with meetings, fundraisers, drinks with aides and consultants. He’d been in Congress for roughly eight years now, providing constituent services, pressing the flesh at street fairs and parties for local big shots, helping veterans, pushing for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and, less successfully, the Equal Pay Act for women. Charlie did whatever he could to stay viable as an Eisenhower/Rockefeller Republican in an increasingly Democratic Manhattan.

He tiptoed down the steps of their Greenwich Village brownstone and quickly hailed a cab to the Manhattan House of Detention, called the Tombs because the original structure, built in 1838, had resembled an ancient Egyptian mausoleum. The prison had been torn down and rebuilt twice since then, but the nickname stuck, as did its reputation for unrivaled wretchedness.

Two hours later Charlie was wedged into a small booth deep in the bowels of the facility looking through a thick pane of glass at his freshly arrested father.

“This place is infested with cockroaches and rats,” Winston Marder barked into his end of the telephone. “My cellmate weighs around eight hundred pounds and was pinched for molesting children. How do you think I’m doing?”

“But what did they charge you with?” Charlie asked.

“Some nonsense about consorting with known criminals. You can blame the playboy in the White House and his prick brother,” his father said, apparently by way of explanation. “A particularly specious charge to level against an attorney, as Alistair will prove. I’m sure they’ll cast it as part of Bobby’s crusade against organized crime.”

By his inflection, Winston conveyed his contempt for the attorney general. Charlie wondered if there was any truth to the charges but didn’t ask; the walls probably had ears.

“But why aren’t they offering bail?” Charlie asked.

“Some nonsense about me being a flight risk,” Winston said. “Where’s Alistair? Didn’t you call him?”

“He’s in Washington, he’s coming back on the first train.”

Winston grunted, a guttural note of dissatisfaction.

Winston Marder had a predilection for dark rooms and evening hours, so it had been years since Charlie had seen his father in such harsh light. What he saw under the fluorescent bulbs was dismaying. Winston’s skin looked almost greenish. The bags under his eyes appeared inflated and underlined. He was sixty-five but looked eighty, and his voice was shaky.

To the outside world, Winston was a savvy fixer and New York power broker who had worked his way up from a Brooklyn tenement to a four-story Upper East Side residence by making the right friends and the right deals. A Teddy Roosevelt Republican, he’d fought on the western front during the Great War and was wounded in the Second Battle of the Somme. Winston had a hand in every political pot he could reach. Seeking distraction after his wife’s death, he’d worked hard with his friend Governor Rockefeller to deliver the Empire State to Nixon in 1960, only to see that slick Jack Kennedy and his bootlegger father snatch it away.

The double blow of his wife’s death three years before and the election-night loss seemed to defeat Winston. Charlie’s father now often failed to show up