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

“And Socks worked for Lucky,” Sinatra continued. “So G-men met with Lucky. In prison. Where was he, Momo?”

“Dannemanna,” Giancana said, botching another name.

“Dannemora,” Martin corrected him.

“That’s the one,” said Giancana. “So they moved him to Great Meadow to be closer to the city.”

“Yeah,” Sinatra said. “So Lucky got to work. He had nothing else to do in prison, right? He also gave ’em names of Sicilians in New York who might know things, anything to help us prepare to invade Italy. So after the war, Lucky’s sentence got commuted—but he had to leave the country.”

“He went to Naples,” Giancana said.

“And then Havana!” said Sinatra, winking at Giancana.

Salute.

The night proceeded merrily, with a feast and copious carafes of Italian reds and the best stories the Rat Pack could tell with women present. Margaret was certain she was the soberest person at the table, except for maybe Patricia Lawford. None of the women spoke much, so Margaret entertained herself by playing zoologist and assigning hierarchical roles to the participants. Giancana was the apex predator, top of the food chain, no one around to challenge his dominance. Sinatra was the alpha, Martin the beta—his second in command. Davis and Lawford were omega wolves, assuming the court-jester roles, well liked and eager to initiate play but holding no power. She thought about the few species that practiced monogamy; there were no penguins at this table except for Charlie, Margaret, and Patricia Lawford.

Margaret then focused on Patricia, gorgeous and gracious, with the familiar Kennedy jaw and smile. She and Peter had married in 1954, and clearly the bloom was off the rose, if it had ever blossomed at all. Margaret noticed that when he reached for her hand, she flinched. When he put his arm around her, she pulled away from his touch. For his part, Lawford studiously avoided looking too long at any of the young women at the table, but Margaret thought he did so in a suspiciously unnatural way. Charlie had already told her that Lawford’s fellow Rat Packers referred to his Malibu compound as “High-Anus Port,” so dubbed for the wild parties Lawford threw whenever his wife was back east.

Margaret cast a benign smile in Charlie’s direction. He would never engage in anything along those lines. Charlie caught her eye and smiled back at her, and for a moment she felt as if they occupied a bubble of calm floating above the beautiful, troubled occupants of the glamorous restaurant.

Soon Patricia Lawford announced that she was feeling tired; her husband escorted her outside and returned to the table without her. Her exit combined with the copious amounts of alcohol consumed by then seemed to dissolve all remaining inhibitions. The young women with them were manhandled onto laps. Bottle after bottle of wine was emptied. Stories of varying degrees of truthfulness were shared.

“Nothing could be bigger / than to play it with a ni—” Martin sang, to the tune of “Carolina in the Morning,” before Davis interrupted him in the nick of time. “Tut-tut-tut!” Davis urged as Margaret and Charlie recoiled at Martin’s near use of the epithet.

Davis responded by channeling Cole Porter: “He’s a wop! / Records sell like Nestle’s / He’s a wop! / But they don’t top Presley’s.”

Charlie’s brain was a bubbling cauldron of concern. He felt guilty that he hadn’t yet been able to rescue his dad, worried about the photos Goode had told him about, anxious about Addington White’s impending arrival in town. He had a nagging suspicion they weren’t going to get off the hook even though he finally had an answer for Kennedy’s question. He also knew there was no way Margaret would leave without finding her niece. Despite calling Lawford several times to follow up on where he’d seen Violet, Charlie hadn’t learned anything. He hadn’t yet shared the news with Margaret. He didn’t want to get her hopes up.

Puccini stayed open long after almost every other diner had left—Sinatra and Lawford owned it, after all—so it wasn’t until roughly three in the morning that Sinatra had the idea they should all head to a cemetery to toast Death and his recent acquisitions. Forest Lawn in Glendale was thirty minutes away, barely a blink for LA, so their nine-car motorcade proceeded like a funeral cortege through the city’s empty, rain-soaked streets.

A right onto South Glendale Avenue followed by another right onto Cathedral Drive, and soon the motorcade came to its end at Forest Lawn. While Charlie parked, Margaret saw Sinatra in the distance, illuminated under a streetlamp, berating the young redhead. As she and Charlie got out of the car, they could hear more of Sinatra’s tantrum.

“—the hell off my hair!” he yelled.

“Uh-oh,” said Davis under his breath as he sidled up to the Marders, walking toward the graves.

“No touch-ay the toupee,” Martin said.

Sinatra continued to berate the redhead, albeit in more hushed tones, so only the occasional word echoed in the graveyard.

“Stupid,” he said, disdain dripping from his voice. “Dumb cooze.”

Margaret shook her head. Sinatra was so mercurial and abusive, she no longer thought his ego was that of the mere superstar; it was something more pathological.

Instead of being disturbed by the singer’s outburst, Charlie found himself experiencing an odd sense that this was familiar. He wondered why. Yes, he had now been in the scene long enough that these explosions were no longer out of the ordinary, but was that it? His mind turned to a faint memory from his childhood: He was sitting in the living room listening to “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” on NBC Radio’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He was maybe nine? Ten? From the study he’d heard his father viciously berating his mother. Something about an ignorant statement she had made over dinner; his dad never made those mistakes in front of important company, he said. Charlie turned up the volume. His dad had scrapped his way up the ladder without any sophisticated education and never let anyone forget it. The screaming continued.