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

she returned to the car and stood outside his window. “Find your flask? Feeling better?”

“I’m fine,” he said sheepishly.

“Why don’t I drive so you can keep drinking.”

He slid over to the passenger side. Margaret got behind the wheel, handed the attendant a five-dollar bill from her purse, and started driving.

“Anyway, it was a deception campaign,” Charlie said to his wife, who was staring at the road.

“What did you think it was?” Margaret finally asked.

“Huh?” Charlie asked.

“You said you thought it was something else when your dad raised his index finger—what did you think it was?”

“Oh,” Charlie said. “Dad loved this essay Orwell wrote after the war about how the Krauts and Japs lost because their rulers weren’t able to see the reality in front of them, facts plain to any dispassionate eye. The quote was ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’”

“He touched your nose,” Margaret said.

“Right,” Charlie said. “I thought he was referring to something obvious that we’re missing.”

“So, a deception campaign,” Margaret said. “Something in front of our noses that we’re missing. What are we missing? Lola? Powell? Giancana?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said.

“Lot of deception, I guess,” Margaret said pointedly.

He was ashamed that Margaret knew enough about his drinking to be disappointed in him but decided to make the most of the moment. He told Margaret everything then, about the photograph of him and Lola in the hot tub and about how he couldn’t stop drinking. She listened, and when he finished, she kept driving in silence south toward their Manhattan home, the bare trees and milky light of the late-winter afternoon adding to his already pronounced sense of despair.

Chapter SeventeenNew York City

February 1962

Midway through another night of revelry, Sinatra surprised the crowd in the restaurant by standing up at his long table in the middle of the room, raising his highball, and toasting his fiancée. Their engagement had been announced in January but few had seen him with Juliet Prowse, a statuesque, full-lipped redhead who’d costarred with her beau in Can-Can two years before. She stood and beamed a smile toward her future husband while the guests clapped and hooted appreciatively, then sat back at her table with Frankenheimer, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury.

Shooting of The Manchurian Candidate had wrapped earlier that day, and the cast and crew, along with invited guests, were gathered for a celebratory dinner Sinatra was hosting on the third floor of Toots Shor’s legendary restaurant. Charlie and Margaret, like other honored-but-less-important guests, occupied a small table on the outskirts. They’d arrived late after reading bedtime stories to Lucy and Dwight, then leaving them in the care of Margaret’s mother—again—and tiptoeing out of the house with renewed pangs of guilt.

Margaret’s response to Charlie’s admission of having been photographed in a compromising position with Lola was mixed. Fortunately, she believed him and had no doubts of his fidelity. That was the good news. But after he told her the story on their drive back from Sing Sing, it was almost as if a barrier had been constructed between them, one built out of disappointment and embarrassment.

“Well, there’s Meehan’s motive,” she had noted. “If he ever gets that photograph, he’ll come at you like a bull.” She didn’t mention that he’d imperiled their entire world. Scandal, blackmail, defeat—anything was possible. She remained civil to him, but distant. He figured he was getting off easy, so he didn’t fight it. He’d been overjoyed when she’d agreed to come with him to Toots Shor’s tonight.

“I thought this place was on Fifty-First Street,” Margaret said.

“It used to be,” Charlie said. “Then some real estate guy who was trying to build a skyscraper told Toots he would rebuild his place one block over and give him one and a half million dollars if he moved.”

“Quite an offer.”

“Isaiah says Hoffa put up a loan from the Teamsters’ pension fund to underwrite it,” Charlie said. “Four million!”

New York City was full of swanky restaurants with award-winning chefs and gracious service; Toots’s place offered neither. It was a saloon with a pedestrian menu and a fabulous clientele, frequented by the likes of Sinatra, Babe Ruth, Jackie Gleason, Joe DiMaggio—all of whom were forced to wait in line and suffer occasional insults from Shor himself.

The Fifty-Second Street version was almost the same as the Fifty-First Street version, with plank oak floors, pine-paneled walls, and spacious and brightly lit rooms dominated by murals of sporting triumphs. The first and second floors each had an immense circular bar, and each dining room had an enormous fireplace with a bronze hood. The third floor, where Sinatra hosted his party, was accessible by elevator and winding staircase and fit three hundred people, though fewer than a hundred were present tonight.

“It feels like what I imagine a men’s club would be like,” Margaret observed. “Which is saying something, given how much of regular life in America is a men’s club.”

“What do you mean?” Charlie asked.

“You know,” Margaret said, sipping her martini. “We’re dames. Usually off camera. Like the First Lady. Or Juliet Prowse. Or sidekicks like Shirley.”

“You’re no sidekick,” Charlie protested.

“Not to you,” Margaret said. “But to them.” She tilted her head toward Sinatra and his crew. “And then there’s that other role women can fill…” Margaret nodded toward a corner table where Lawford and Giancana chatted with Judy and another young woman, this one in the process of slowly wrapping herself around the Kennedy in-law. Giancana’s face was lit by a wide, lascivious grin, clearly inspired as much by both women’s attention as by Lawford’s conversation. Charlie had long felt a pang of sympathy—or maybe pity was the better word—for Lawford, a showman who hung out with and had married into groups of more compelling performers. He existed alone in his Venn-diagram circle, a tenuous and less respected member of both the Kennedys and the Rat Pack, constantly overcompensating as he flitted among roles as a diplomat, actor, and bon vivant, failing miserably at all but the last.

“What