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

Young Charlie turned up the volume again. Winston came out of the study, but before he could aim his rage at his son, Charlie ran into his room, slammed the door, and cried into his pillow.

“Do you think it’s okay for us to be here?” Margaret asked Charlie as they made their way around tombstones.

“They seem to think it’s okay,” Charlie said, shrugging, coming back to the moment.

Dean Martin ran over to one of the young women and lifted up her skirt from the back. She shrieked; everyone laughed.

“‘It was the wont of the immortal gods sometimes to grant prosperity and long impunity to men whose crimes they were minded to punish,’” Margaret said, quoting another great Roman. “‘They did so in order that a complete reverse of fortune might make them suffer more bitterly.’”

“No one here’s suffering yet, folks,” Lawford said, overhearing. “But try me tomorrow around seven a.m.”

They stumbled through the damp, dark grounds of the cemetery, drinking from flasks and bottles, exclaiming when someone discovered a notable burial site. It was truly a Who’s Who of Hollywood’s departed: Bogart, Gable, and Lombard were some of the names shouted across the headstones and tombs.

“Hey, isn’t Fatty Arbuckle here somewhere?” Sinatra asked.

Dean raised a martini glass he’d somehow managed to transport from Puccini. “If so, we should pay our respects.”

“Pay our respects to a fat old perv who killed a girl by shoving a Coke bottle up her yoo-hoo?” asked the redhead, disgusted.

“That’s a filthy lie!” Sinatra yelled with rage. “He was smeared by that dead slut’s lying friend and those yellow journalists with Hearst. Two mistrials and they kept going at him. The guy wouldn’ta ever hurt a fly! The hell he went through because of those dirty prosecutors!”

The mention of dastardly DAs made Charlie think of his father, alone in the prison infirmary. Margaret saw the expression on Charlie’s face and reached for his hand.

“Fatty was cremated, anyway,” MacLaine noted, taking a delicate swig from a cup of bourbon Davis offered.

Thoughts of jails and hot tubs ate at Charlie’s insides like sulfuric acid; by the time Sammy fired Fat Tony’s gun at the angel-adorned crypt of a long-dead racist producer, propelling stone shrapnel into Charlie’s shoulder, the congressman was grateful for an off-ramp to head back to the hotel. He was relieved that Margaret was similarly inclined, a comfort that evaporated as soon as Margaret opened the trunk of their rental car looking for a first-aid kit. There lay Lola, her eyes shot out, her mouth open, her body twisted unnaturally. Margaret gasped, instinctively backing away, fleeing death. Charlie stopped breathing altogether for maybe thirty seconds. He had seen death before, had caused it before, but there was something physically painful about seeing someone who had been so full of life snuffed out callously like just another cigarette.

Chapter FourteenLos Angeles, California

January 1962

“Dead bodies just happen to show up whenever you two are around,” Detective Meehan observed.

Margaret—exhausted after the long night of drinking and revelry followed by the shock and horror in the cemetery parking lot—rolled her eyes. “Didn’t a cop say that to Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity?” she asked. “Your delivery was better, though,” she added with a broad and insincere smile. She had been shaken by the sight of poor Lola, but she was not about to allow herself to be bullied by this fraud.

Meehan snorted. “Pretty glib for someone with a corpse in her trunk.”

“Pretty glib for a cop who knows about the corpse only because we immediately called the police,” Margaret said, cool as November.

“Chris Powell was killed shortly after you came to town, and now there’s this doll,” he said. “I don’t want to tell my supervisors that you’re not being cooperative. There was a dead girl in your trunk, Mrs. Marder.”

“Dr. Marder,” she said quietly.

“Pardon?”

“Look,” she said, exhaling deeply, “we’re obviously horrified. We called and are cooperating, and we’ll tell you anything you need to know. Just spare me the film noir dialogue.”

It soon became clear to Meehan, though, that she didn’t know much. To Margaret, Lola Bridgewater was one of dozens of young women who flitted around the edges of Rat Pack parties. “The people you should be talking to are Mr. Sinatra and his pals,” she told Meehan. “Or her friend Judy. I barely knew Lola.”

“Why would anyone whack her?” Meehan asked.

Like half the locals Margaret had met since she arrived, Meehan acted as if there were a camera on him; he had all the scenery-chewing subtlety of Kirk Douglas. She thought momentarily of Bugs Bunny pretending to be Edward G. Robinson: Myah, see! It’ll be coytans for you, Mugsy! Coytans!

“I don’t know why anyone would kill Lola,” Margaret said. “Except perhaps to frame us, I suppose. As for who would do that, you’d have to ask my husband why we’re here, but it does involve law enforcement and top officials of the Justice Department, one of whom is on his way out here as we speak.”

Meehan’s hard-boiled facade broke for a second around the eyes and mouth; Margaret could see the revelation not only shocked but rattled him. She often saw this in men—they were offended when a woman stood up for herself. It would rankle them as if their very manhood were on the line. Then it would come out that she had some connection to powerful men—whether her husband the congressman or, in this case, the attorney general—and the men wouldn’t know what to do with their indignation.

“I need to…” Meehan said. He hesitated, then abruptly left.

When Meehan entered Charlie’s interrogation room, he found the congressman at the table, his head buried in his arms, fast asleep. But he sat up as soon as Meehan walked in and delivered his “Dead bodies just happen to show up” line.

“Lola Bridgewater was her name,” Charlie said soberly. “Horrible, horrible, horrible. We called you as soon as we found her.”

Meehan sat down across the table from Charlie and shook a cigarette out of his pack of Marlboros. “You