An Offer He Can't Refuse (10 page)

"Mack the Knife"

Bobby Darin

That's All
(1959)

Johnny didn't call Téa the next morning because he had an
early, important appointment with someone else. Stanley Thompson had retired as managing editor of the
Desert Bugle
ten years before, at the same time the
Desert Bugle
had retired from existence.

"The newspaper business was booming here after the war," the elderly man said, as Johnny forked over four twenties for two buckets of balls and the privilege to use the practice range at the prestigious Moonridge Country Club. "That's when air-conditioning and the leisure class came to Palm Springs."

They chose two open positions at the near end of the range. Beyond it were acres of carpet-quality grass and sparkling water that made up the playing field of a rich man's most frustrating sport. Johnny acted as caddy for both bags, because Stan Thompson looked as if a sneeze would blow him over, not to mention a full set of furry-headed golf clubs. "Is that when the Carusos came to the area as well?" he asked, placing Stan's bag on a stand.

The old man removed his pale blue fishing hat and squinted in Johnny's direction. "You want to talk about the
Carusos
?"

Johnny had been given Stan's name by the county librarian. She'd assured him that no one knew more about local history, including local mob history, than the old newspaperman. "I thought I mentioned it in the phone call when we set up the meeting."

Stan scratched the liver spots on his bald head, then pulled his hat back on. "You mentioned the Mafia. I assumed you wanted to write another story about Al Capone hiding out in these parts."

Johnny turned his back to set down his own bag. During the phone call, he'd picked up on Stan's assumption that he was a freelance journalist and hadn't corrected him. "I heard the Capone legend's a myth."

Stan shrugged. "Depends on who you talk to. The mob did move in during Prohibition and started some illegal gambling joints. But eventually club gambling was closed down in California and taken to Las Vegas."

"So where do the Carusos come in?" Johnny asked, withdrawing his driver from his bag.

Stan dropped a golf ball to the mat in front of him and used the toe of his shoe to put it in position on the rubber tee. Then he lined up, bony spine and sharp elbows facing Johnny. The swing he took wasn't powerful, but the ball sailed through the air in a smooth arc. The old guy hadn't lost it, Johnny thought, bending his knees and firming his grip to take his own shot. He drew his arms back.

'The Carusos are killers," Stan said.

Johnny's ball flew off his club in a wicked slice. It slammed into the net fencing on his right, then dropped to the ground like a dead man. "I've heard that before," he said to the older man, his gaze on the lifeless ball.

"When the rest of the Palm Springs mob moved on to Las Vegas or were absorbed into what became known as the Mickey Mouse Mafia in Los Angeles, the Carusos stuck it out here and stuck to the old moneymaking standbys—loan sharking, bookmaking, car theft."

They both lined up for second shots. "When did Cosimo Caruso take over the Palm Springs family?" Johnny asked, pitching his voice toward the other man.

Stan's head whipped over his shoulder. "Pipe down." In a maneuver straight out of an old gangster flick, he took sidelong glances in all directions, then let out a breath when he saw that the next nearest golfer was ten yards away. "You can never be too careful."

"Sorry." Johnny's subsequent shot did little better than his first, but he wasn't out here to improve his game. "What can you tell me about… you know who?"

Leaning on his driver like a cane, Stan hobbled closer. "He took over leadership of the Mafia in this area in the 1950s, and he did it in the usual manner, by killing the competition. He was young, and it took him time to become as smart as he was tough, but he managed to do it. You'll find few in Palm Springs who don't admire him in some ways."

'That include yourself?"

Without answering, Stan limped back to his place and took a few more drives that made Johnny's look like rookie stuff by comparison.

"You play on the tour, Stan?" he asked.

The old guy laughed, a dry, wheezy sound that mimicked the breeze shuffling the fronds of the many palms that dotted the country club's rolling fairways. "I'm no closer to pro than Cosimo is to sainthood."

"So what's the secret of his success?"

Stan cackled again and watched two Japanese business-men set up shop a few positions down the way. Then he turned back toward Johnny. "He went legitimate."

"The food company."

The old man nodded. "The gourmet food company, La Vita Buona. Mobsters get sent to prison because they get caught with cash they can't explain. Tax evasion doesn't make as sexy a courtroom drama as robbery, blackmail, and murder, but it puts the bad guys behind bars all the same. With a lawful business, there's all sorts of avenues for money laundering."

"So Cosimo funnels cash through the gourmet food business."

Stan slid a glance toward the businessmen, but they were engrossed in a conversation while cleaning their club heads with cashmere rags. "I didn't say that, exactly."

"But he
has
gotten rich."

"You ever taste that Tuscan sauce they bottle? It's worth the eleven bucks my wife says she pays for it."

Johnny moved to his bag, exchanging his driver for his two-iron. "Cosimo had a son, Salvatore." When he turned back, Stan was at his own bag and Johnny had to raise his voice. "What about Salvatore Caruso?"

Stan glanced over his shoulder. "Long dead," he said, his tone dismissive.

But this was the heart of the information Johnny needed. "Did you know him?"

Stan shook his head.

"Did you know
of
him?" he persisted.

Frowning, Stan turned. "Cosimo briefly passed over the reins of the family to him something like twenty years ago. I forget exactly."

Johnny choked the shaft of his club and tried masking his frustration with an encouraging tone. "The librarian told me you had the best memory in the valley. You couldn't have forgotten."

Stan tipped his basket with his toe and a couple more golf balls popped out to roll idly about the Astroturf surface of the practice pad. "What are you planning to do with this information again?"

"I… I'm not sure."

His eyes narrowing, Stan gazed on Johnny. "You don't know what kind of story you're going to write?"

"Maybe about the children of mobsters," he said off the top of his head. "You know, what it's like for the children who try to move out of their family's line of work."

Stan regarded him in silence, then turned back to square up for another shot. "Salvatore had two daughters with his wife. And then there's one in the middle, another girl, that he fathered from his mistress. All three were raised together as sisters after the mistress died."

Johnny knew who they were. Téa, of course, her blonde half-sister, Eve, and the youngest, Joey. "Interesting family setup," he murmured, thinking back to the night before. Interesting
woman
. Such a bundle of contradictions, Téa was, with her strait-laced clothes and her sometimes smart-ass mouth. Lousy in bed, the contessa had called him, a little smirk on her full lips. Then he'd touched her, feeling her velvety skin and her fluttering breath against his fingertips.

The atmosphere in the car had gone from burgeoning sexual awareness to definite sexual combustion in the space of that breath, one of those inexplicable yet unstoppable events that songwriters blamed on the moon and that scientists blamed on pheromones. Johnny didn't know what to blame or what he was going to do about it either, even as he went half-hard just remembering it.

"Later, Salvatore was murdered."

Stan's comment dumped icy water all over him. "Murdered?" Johnny cleared his throat. "I thought the official verdict was that Salvatore disappeared."

Stan gave him another sharp look. "That's right. But if you're in the California Mafia and you go away one day and never come back—that means you're dead, son. Murdered."

"You don't know any more details than that? I don't mean the kind that come out in court documents or police reports, but the kind that people talk about on street corners."

Stan pulled his fishing hat farther down over his eyes. "Those are old rumors you're asking about."

Sixteen-year-old rumors. "Maybe Salvatore's death was accidental. Did anyone ever look into that? Consider that?"

"A body has never been found, neither here or in Las Vegas. That's the last place Salvatore was seen, gambling at a casino."

"So a hundred things could have happened to him then," Johnny pointed out. "A car accident, a heart attack, a… a… scorpion bite. It seems strange, don't you think, that everyone jumped to the conclusion that it was murder?"

"Not when a body's missing and the Mafia's involved. In that world, job advancement means getting rid of the man on the ladder one rung above yours—or hiring someone else to get rid of him for you. The way I remember it, the story was that an enterprising young turk decided to rub out Sal Caruso and paid some hit man to do it—he was the last person Salvatore was seen with in Las Vegas. The mob boss's murder started a war on the streets and even more lives were lost until Cosimo got California's Italian underworld back under his control."

Johnny grabbed up his wire basket and tossed the contents to the ground. Golf balls rolled around his feet and he teed them up one after the other, smashing the hell out of them because he couldn't obliterate that same story he'd first heard so long ago.

When the balls were gone, he looked up to find Stan watching him with a trace of alarm. "You gotta take it easy, son. It requires a lot of energy to live a good, long life so you shouldn't use it all up in one day."

"Yeah?" Johnny muttered. "Maybe I'm not so sure about a good, long life ahead." He wasn't sure he wanted one, if it would never include the answers he needed to get a decent night's sleep.

"You might be right about that if you decide to contact them."

"Contact who?" Johnny asked.

'Those Caruso girls," Stan replied. "Cosimo is very protective of those three."

Which got Johnny thinking about Téa again. For some reason, he was starting to feel a little protective of the contessa himself. She was smart, she was funny, she was sexy in a half-exotic, half-innocent way he itched to explore.

He remembered the sleek feel of her lips against the tip of his finger and the way her perfume had bloomed in the car like the scent of hot flowers when he'd touched her. She turned him on. She tempted him. To put it bluntly, he wanted to take her to bed.

That was the hell of it, though, because his Main Street Magee values were starting to nag at him again. While he might not be a man who enjoyed getting close to people, he'd never considered himself a user before either. A player perhaps, but not a user.

And besides sex, he wanted to use Téa Caruso for information.

Jesus, the one he should be protecting her from was
himself
.

And he could. He could go away from Palm Springs. Go back to Vegas or to somewhere else. Delving into the past was all so damn complicated to begin with and the temptation of Téa would only make it more so. Perhaps the best thing to do now was to sell the house and hope that time would rebury the memories.