Charlie Opera (5 page)

He watched her fluid movement behind the bar. He could tell she was experienced. She reached for bottles in the bar well without having to look at them. She poured drinks without having to measure.

Her body wasn’t bad either. He guessed her to be 5-4, no more than 120 pounds. He put her age somewhere between 30 and 35 years old. When she was up close again, he noticed she had bright blue eyes.

Later, when the bar was less active, Samantha Cole answered his original question.

“North Dakota,” she said.

Charlie was caught off guard. “Huh?”

She pointed to her nametag. Charlie read it aloud. “Samantha Cole, Devil’s Lake, North Dakota.”

“But you can call me Sam,” she said. “We already did this last night, you know. You probably don’t remember. You were pretty drunk.”

“Let’s do it again anyway.” He extended his bruised right hand across the bar.

Samantha took his hand carefully and smiled.

“See? Now I remember.” He was looking into her eyes then.

“What?”

“Why I came back down here tonight,” he said. “Your pretty smile. I remembered your smile.”

He was there the night before. He had left her a good tip and never caused her trouble. He had actually made her laugh a few times.

Tonight he was banged up from a mugging, he told her. She wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth, but he wasn’t making anything more of whatever had happened to him. He told her he was mugged. He showed her his black eyes and bandages. There were no excuses or macho story to go along with his bruises. He had remembered her and wanted to see her again.

Because she had a pretty smile.

Between serving drinks, wiping down the bar, and running tabs, Samantha enjoyed her brief conversations with Charlie. She watched him watching her as she worked behind the bar. Last night he was drinking gin and tonics. Tonight it was straight club soda. He had told her he was staying off the booze to regain his equilibrium.

“How long you here for?” she asked.

“Few more days,” he said. “I feel kind of awkward going back home like this. I’m hoping some of the bruises will clear up.”

She had noticed he was wearing a wedding ring the night before. Now he wasn’t.

“I was a little worried I acted stupid last night,” he said. “Being so drunk and all. Tell me I wasn’t obnoxious.”

“You were fine. You remember hitting the four aces?”

“Vaguely.”

“Well, I do. You left me a fifty-dollar tip.”

He thumbed over his shoulder toward the casino. “Better you than them.”

Samantha was curious. “Did they get your money? The money you won from the four aces? When you were mugged, I mean.”

“That’s the crazy thing. No, they didn’t. Nothing. They didn’t take anything.”

She pointed to his left hand. “Except your wedding ring,” she said coyly. “Unless you’re not wearing it tonight.”

Charlie looked at the ring finger of his left hand. He smiled when he remembered why the ring was gone. “That’s the other thing,” he said. “My wife dumped me.”

John Denton held a cold wet towel against the left side of Lisa’s badly bruised mouth. She was barely awake. The painkillers permitted her to drift into sleep. She would need to go back into surgery again later. They would have to stay in Las Vegas another few days before she was healed enough to travel.

The oral surgeon had told them Lisa was lucky her jawbone wasn’t broken. Although she lost one of her upper front teeth, the surgeon was pretty sure he could save the other three that had been pushed back. At least he was sure of saving one.

So far there were more than twenty stitches inside her mouth. She would need at least one false tooth. She might need an entire bridge. Her mouth would be sore for a few weeks. She would require return visits to a periodontist for several months.

Denton wasn’t sure what had happened or why. He was awakened by a cracking sound he later assumed were Lisa’s teeth breaking. There was a follow-up thud, he guessed, when she hit the floor. He saw two men in the doorway. One had pointed a gun at him. The other man was kneeling or squatting. He saw the man get up and put something in a handkerchief. He saw both men leave quickly. One of them slammed the door closed.

Denton had rushed off the bed to the floor where Lisa lay unconscious. Her mouth was bleeding badly. The floor was stained with a puddle of her blood. He turned the lights on. Her lips were one giant mass of swollen flesh.

He called 911 for an ambulance. Because of the nature of the emergency, the police responded to the call as well. They questioned him for a long time before Denton was released. He was forced to tell them the entire story: How he was the woman’s lover. How the woman had left her husband during their vacation. How she had called him in California and asked him to come to Las Vegas.

None of it, he knew, sounded very plausible. He was an attorney himself. Denton knew how ridiculous a position he was in. He knew how bad he looked to the police.

“Yes, they knew each other a long time... more than two years... Yes, they had had a previous affair... Yes, the husband had known about it... Yes, he was married too... He had left his wife... No, his wife didn’t know who Lisa Pellecchia was... No, he didn’t expect Lisa would ask him to come to Vegas... Yes, he loved her... Yes, she was leaving her husband for good... Yes, Lisa left her husband a note... at the hotel they were staying... Harrah’s... room 1719... Yes, he had met the husband before... in New York... on business... Yes, he saw Mrs. Pellecchia during that trip... Yes, the husband was confrontational... No, but, well, yes, the husband had issued a threat... not exactly a threat... a kind of threat.”

His Q&A with the police had gone on for more than an hour. In the end, the police seemed to think it was the husband who had assaulted Lisa. Denton didn’t think so, but he couldn’t be sure. Charlie Pellecchia had been dumped in a very abrupt way. Denton felt guilty about it, but only for Lisa. It made him sick to think he might be responsible for what had happened to her.

He didn’t like providing the police with the story about how he and Charlie had first met, but Denton knew he could be liable as an attorney if he held anything back. He wasn’t exactly on moral high ground, being where he was with another man’s wife, but if it was Lisa’s husband who had assaulted her, he wanted a full prosecution of the crime.

It wasn’t starting off the way he had hoped. He was sick from what had happened to Lisa. He held her left hand as she lay asleep in the hospital bed. After a minute of watching her sleep, he leaned over to kiss her forehead.

They drove to the resort town of Laughlin after taking care of Nicholas Cuccia’s request for one of the woman’s teeth. The plan was to spend some time in a few connected Laughlin spots for an alibi, should they need one. Lano was supposed to pay the balance of the fee they owed an emissary of a Las Vegas crew for setting up the Pellecchia couple. Then Lano and Francone were supposed to drive back to Las Vegas the following day to meet with their boss at the Bellagio.

It was a straightforward game plan except Lano had had enough of Cuccia, Francone, and his own mob life. What the aging gangster did instead was drop Francone off at the hotel where they were registered as guests for the night while he went to park the rented Lincoln Town Car. Instead of parking, however, Lano turned around and headed back for Las Vegas.

When his pager started to beep fewer than thirty minutes later, Lano turned it off. He made a decision about his own mob life: it was over. There were other decisions to make. Lano used the time it took to drive back to Las Vegas to consider them.

Charlie and Samantha managed to maintain a pleasant conversation while she worked the crowded casino bar. Samantha told him she was originally from North Dakota, divorced once herself, and attempting to finish off a psychology degree at the University of Las Vegas. She had been working at Harrah’s for nearly three years. She was living in Las Vegas nearly ten years.

“I thought you had an accent,” Charlie said when the bar was finally slow and they had a chance to talk. He slipped his Harrah’s player’s card into the slot to earn credits for playing the poker machine.

“It’s midwestern,” she told him. “I can’t lose the ‘oh’ pronunciation. Like in ‘boat’ or ‘coat’ or ‘throat.’ I’ve tried, trust me. You want coins?”

Charlie stuck the end of a fifty-dollar bill in the money slot. “I’ll use cash,” he said. “Have you tried Brooklyn? To lose the accent.”

“Maybe I should,” she said. “I was once a real-to-life farm girl.”

He tried to picture her in a denim outfit with suspenders and her hair tied up. He smiled thinking about it.

“What?”

“I was picturing you on a farm.”

“Milking a cow?”

He shook his head. “Just looking pretty.”

It wasn’t a standard line, but Samantha knew where it was going. She had been propositioned a thousand times since working the bar station. For whatever reason, most men drinking at a casino bar assumed the women who worked there were desperate for dates. Sometimes it was flattering. Most times it was annoying.

Except Samantha was having fun with him again. She had had fun with him the night before.

“So tell me. What the hell was that you were singing last night?”

“Uh-oh,” Charlie said. He started to blush.

“It was Italian, but we couldn’t figure it out.”

“‘We’? This is getting uglier by the second.”

She set a coaster for a new customer. When she looked back at Charlie, he was still blushing. His face was bright red.

“Well?” she said, waiting for him.

“Opera,” he whispered.

“Is that what you call it?” She opened a fresh bottle of Heineken and set it on the coaster.

“Pretty bad, huh?”

“We thought it was opera, but I think you may be tone deaf.”

Charlie toasted her with his club soda. “I’ve been called worse,” he said. “To dinner.”

Samantha was confused.

“Will you go with me?”

Samantha stuttered as she felt her own face blushing. “I-uh, I-uh, I can get fired for that.”

Charlie was leaning forward, both elbows on the bar. “Make it lunch then,” he said. “You owe me if I sang for you.”

A customer sitting midbar held up a hand. Sam said, “I’ll be right back.”

She thought about it as she served a vodka tonic. He seemed interesting. He wasn’t just another drunk hitting on a barmaid. She looked at him over her shoulder. He was watching her right back. She liked his confidence.

“What’s lunch?” Samantha asked when she returned to his end of the bar.

“Setting the parameters?”

“It’s a fair question.”

“Whatever you say it is. And I promise not to sing.”

Samantha smiled as a new customer waved to her. “Let me think about it,” she said.

Francone slammed the telephone down as he shook his head at Allen Fein. “I don’t know what the fuck he’s doin’,” Francone said. “He coughed up blood a few times, but he’s always coughin’ up blood. I figured he went to park the car.”

Fein was middle-aged, short, and fat. He wore a baggy blue and black Sergio Tequini sweat suit. He looked up at Francone from the stool he was sitting on. “What makes you think he might have turned?”

Francone was still shaking his head. “Two fuckin’ days I ain’t been in a gym,” he said. “You guys got a place here I can work out?”

Fein held up a finger. “Joey? What makes you think your friend may have flipped?”

Francone was examining his biceps then. “Huh? Oh, because of the way he was talkin’. It’s been like that since Nicky was upped to skipper. Lano’s pissed he was passed again. He was cryin’ about Nicky the whole fuckin’ trip. He was talkin’ subversive about the thing we came out here to do. Especially the broad.”

“Is it possible he just got sick and checked himself in at a hospital someplace?”

Francone was doing isometric wrist curls. “Who the fuck knows with that guy? He could be at the hospital, he could be at a fuckin’ cigarette sale, or he could be talkin’ with the Feds at an FBI office. He’s got his own agenda lately, thinks who the fuck he is.”

“I don’t need this blowing up in my face,” Fein said, clearly annoyed. “It was a simple accommodation. It shouldn’t become a federal case.”

“I agree,” Francone said as he strained to curl an imaginary dumbbell. “I know Nicky had to reach out for this. And he appreciates it.”

“Yeah, well, his appreciation won’t do me any good should this thing turn up on the six-o’clock news tomorrow.”

“Hey,” Francone said. “Nobody wants that.”

Fein took a deep breath. “Why don’t you keep trying to locate your friend?”

Allen Fein had been fronting mob business in Las Vegas for more than three years. He was a certified public accountant as well as a licensed attorney in the state of Nevada. Recently he had stepped up his involvement to broker deals between mob crews visiting Las Vegas and others seeking to invest there.

He occasionally made deals his boss wasn’t aware of. Arranging the surveillance of the Pellecchia couple in Las Vegas was one such deal. He had been contacted through channels. A New York crew was looking for help. Fein had arranged it without the proper authority. It was a dangerous backdoor move.

Setting up the husband at the Palermo construction site was a perk Fein received cash on the spot for. At the time, the five thousand dollars seemed like an easy score.

Now it looked like he would be forfeiting the remaining five thousand dollars. If Jerry Lercasi ever found out about the deal Fein had put together with the New York crew, the five thousand dollars would represent the cost of the accountant’s life.

Dealing with the idiot bodybuilder from New York wasn’t making the problem any easier. He was never impressed with the average intelligence of Las Vegas wiseguys, which was why he had become so confident getting more involved in the day-to-day operations of mob business. Talking with this musclehead, Fein was even less impressed with the pawns of the underworld.

Except his boss, Jerry Lercasi, wasn’t just another wiseguy. Lercasi was the most powerful mobster in Las Vegas. He also was a ruthless killer.