Chance (20 page)

"Yeah," I said.

We were 33,000 feet above western Pennsylvania in the firstclass compartment (neither Hawk nor I fit well in coach) on our way to Dallas to catch a flight to Las Vegas. I had survived the takeoff again. My tray table was down. I had a scotch and soda and the cabin crew was moving along the aisle serving food.

"Don't seem too smart," Hawk said.

"We was poking, but we wasn't getting anywhere.

"Cept the rocks jivin' in the bag. And what he think we going to do 'bout that anyway."

"We might tell Julius," I said.

The food service was moving closer to us. The food is almost always hideous on an airplane and I can never wait for it to get there.

"You think Julius don't know?" Hawk said.

"Might not know the details."

"And we do?"

"Marty doesn't know what we know," I said.

"He only knows we're pecking at it and we won't go away."

"So how come he don't hit me?"

"Maybe figured with me gone, you'd back off. Maybe figured he'd get you next."

Hawk sipped some champagne and thought about it.

"Nobody ever say Marty is smart," Hawk said.

"But even he got to figure killing you going to stir things up more than they calm things down."

"Maybe it wasn't the mob takeover stuff," I said.

A stewardess with big blonde hair put a tray of food on my table. Her name tag read CHERYL. I took a bite. Hawk looked over as I chewed.

"What'd you get?" he said.

"Might be chicken," I said.

"How about you?"

"They steamed the steak, just right," Hawk said.

"You think he don't want you to find Bibi?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"Because I think he killed Shirley Ventura. And Bibi knows it, or knows enough to let us figure it out."

Hawk chewed silently and swallowed.

"You ever wonder why they don't just serve you couple nice sandwiches on an airplane," he said. "

"Stead of trying to microwave you a five-course meal that tastes like a boiled Dixie cup?"

"Often," I said.

Hawk drank his champagne.

"Anytime somebody get killed and Marty in the area, it's a decent bet he done it," Hawk said.

"Plus they had something going," I said.

"She used to meet with him regularly. And she had the phone number of his hotel in Vegas when she was killed."

"Plus he had something going with her old man."

"Which might have had something to do with the mob realignment that was developing."

"Maybe Bibi will know something," Hawk said.

Cabin attendant Cheryl came by.

"Did you enjoy your meal, sir?" she said to Hawk.

"Horse died hard," Hawk said.

Cheryl smiled.

"More champagne?"

"Be a fool not to," Hawk said.

Cheryl produced a bottle at once and filled Hawk's glass.

"I'll keep it chilled for you up front," she said.

Hawk nodded gently.

"Be nice if you did," he said.

"And I'll check back regularly," she said.

As she walked away there was a little extra something in the way her hips moved, I thought.

"You think Cheryl's in love with you?" I said.

"Yes," Hawk said.

We survived the landing in Dallas. Cheryl gave Hawk a small slip of paper as we were getting off. He smiled at her and slipped it into his shirt pocket. Hawk and I killed an hour very dead strolling around DFW, and then got a plane to Vegas.

"Did I see Cheryl slip you her phone number?" I said to Hawk when we were airborne and I was able to get my teeth unclenched.

Hawk took the folded paper out of his shirt pocket and looked at it.

"Full name, address, and phone number."

"Does it say "For a good time call Cheryl'?"

"

"Course not, you think she forward or something."

"She based in Boston?" I said.

"Dallas," Hawk said.

"Too bad."

Hawk shrugged.

"Maybe stop off on my way back," he said.

"Be a fool not to," I said.

"Lester going to pick us up?"

"Yeah," Hawk said. "

"Less we crash and burn, killing all on board."

"Of course unless that," I said.

I ordered a scotch and soda from a senior stewardess with a deep whisky voice. She was heavyish with gray hair, and green rimmed half glasses hanging from a lavender cord around her neck. Hawk ordered champagne and she tramped off to get both drinks.

"Maybe she'll give you a note too," I said to Hawk.

"Be for you if she does," he said.

When I finished my drink, I leaned my seat back and closed my eyes and didn't sleep, just as I never sleep on an airplane, while I speculated on the most sensible way to exit when the plane crashed on landing. At ten minutes to eight Pacific time we banked languidly over a frenzy of neon in the middle of the velvet blackness, and at one minute to eight Pacific time we eased onto the tarmac at McCarran and taxied gently to the gate. Made it again. Lester was waiting for us and at twenty to nine we were sitting at the bar in the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino waiting to talk with Bernard J. Fortunate.

"We wrap this up quick," Hawk said, "before her show ends, we can come here and meet her."

"Get a picture of us with her," I said, "to bring back to Lee Farrell."

Bernard J. Fortunato came into the bar and sat on a stool next to me. He was still wearing his Panama hat, and a pink and white necktie. He had a toothpick in his mouth.

"How you doing," he said.

He looked appraisingly at Hawk.

I introduced them.

"You as good as you look?" Fortunate said.

Hawk smiled.

"Or as bad," he said.

Fortunate nodded, and turned to me.

"She's still here. She went up to her room maybe an hour ago, hasn't come down. Room five twenty-one, I already duked the desk clerk."

"There a back way out of here?" I said.

"She either gotta come through the lobby," Fortunato said, "or use the fire stairs that dump out in the alley at the end of the building nearest the Strip."

I pointed.

"That end?" I said.

"Yeah."

I looked at Hawk, he nodded and left the bar.

"Where's the house phone?" I said.

"Lobby, near the desk."

I paid the bartender and Bernard and I walked to the lobby.

There was a small reception desk there and some phones to the right. A guy in a short-sleeved blue and white striped shirt sat behind the desk smoking a cigarette without taking it out of his mouth. Now and then he leaned away from the counter and flicked the accumulating ash into a receptacle I couldn't see. Or maybe onto the floor.

"How much you duke him?" I said to Fortunato.

"I give him a C," Fortunato said.

"It'll be on the bill."

There was a rack of Las Vegas guide magazines, advertising on their covers celebrations of infinite scope built around superstars of colossal magnitude, whom I, in my ignorance, had not always heard of. On the other hand, I had heard of Debbie Reynolds.

"Call Bibi," I said.

"Tell her who you are, that you work for Marty, and you want to see her in the lobby right now."

"And she scoots down the back stairs and your pal grabs her in the alley."

I nodded. Bernard picked up the phone and spoke into it. He listened and spoke again.

"You don't know me, but my name's Fortunato and I work for Marty Anaheim."

He paused, listening.

"Yeah, you do," he said.

"He's your husband."

He listened, moving the toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other.

"Have it any way you want," he said.

"I'm in the lobby. I want to see you. I can come up or you can come down."

He winked at me.

"No, no, sis, those are the choices, you come down or I come up."

He listened, nodding slightly.

"Okay, but I don't see you in fifteen, I'm knocking on your door."

Then he hung it up, and grinned at me.

"I guess she wants a head start," Bernard said.

"Says she was in the shower, has to get dressed, be down in fifteen minutes."

"Might be true," I said.

"Sure. I got a tenner says she'll be in here with the schwartza in less than three minutes."

"His name's Hawk," I said.

"No offense. Hell, I call myself the mini guinea."

I looked at my watch. We waited. A group of people who must have gotten off a tour bus from Kansas trouped in through the front door. They turned right and followed their tour guide down the corridor toward the ballroom where Debbie's next show was gathering momentum. As they cleared the lobby, Hawk walked in the front door with his hand gently on Bibi Anaheim's arm. It was two minutes and thirty-four seconds from the time Fortunato called.

"You owe me ten," Fortunato said.

"I didn't bet," I said.

"You don't want to count it?" I said.

"Naw, my line of work you can't tell the difference between who you can trust, and who you can't… time to find another line of work."

Bernard tipped his hat forward a little lower over the bridge of his nose and we left him getting a drink at the bar in the hotel lobby. Probably waiting for Debbie.

It was about 11:30 and Convention Center Drive was the road less traveled at this time of night in Vegas. Hawk and Bibi and I were nearly the only people on the street, as we walked west toward the Strip in the neon-tinged late-night twilight, which was about as dark as it gets in Vegas. If Bibi was glad to see us, she had mastered her emotions completely. She had not spoken since Hawk had brought her into the lobby. And as she walked between us she seemed to be dwindling inside her silence, as if eventually it would become so thick we couldn't find her.

"Told her we ain't working for Marty," Hawk said.

I nodded.

"We've been looking very hard for you," I said.

She gave no indication that she'd heard me.

"Mostly we were worried about you. You've had a lousy life for quite a while."

We got to the Strip and turned left, heading south toward The Mirage. On the Strip the dry desert night was full of people and cars and lights, thick with the smell of exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke, and deodorant spray and hair spray and mixed drinks and cologne and desperation. There was a lot of energy on the Strip but it was feverish, the kind of energy that makes you sleepless, that makes you drive too fast, and chain-smoke, and drink heavy. The Strip was choked with people in dogged search of fun, looking for the promise of Vegas that had brought them all from Keokuk and Presque Isle and North Platte. It wasn't like it was supposed to be.

It wasn't the adventure of a lifetime, but it had to be. You couldn't admit that it wasn't. You'd come too far, expected too much, planned too long. If you stayed up later, played harder, gambled bigger, looked longer, saw another show, had another drink, stretched out a little further…

"I was in Fairhaven High School a few days ago," I said to Bibi.

"Nice-looking old building. Looks like a real high school, doesn't it."

She didn't respond. As we walked through the crowd, people would occasionally stare covertly at Hawk.

"I met your friend Abigail," I said.

Nothing.

"Abigail Olivetti," I said.

"Hey, Abbey, where's the party?"

Bibi was silent.

"Almost twenty years ago," I said.

Bibi started to cry. Nothing dramatic, just some tears silently on her face. She made no move to wipe them away.

"Seems a long way back, doesn't it?" I said.

She nodded.

"Didn't work out so good," I said.

She shook her head.

"We might be' able to make it work better," I said.

She stopped walking and stood crying in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the Desert Inn. I put my arm around her shoulder. She stiffened and turned stiffly toward me and stood stiffly against me so she could cry on my chest. Hawk appeared to pay no attention, but I noticed he had moved in front of us so that he shielded her with his body and people couldn't see her crying.

We stood like that for a while and finally she stopped crying, though she made no visible effort to do so, and pulled stiffly away from my chest. She seemed no longer in concealment, as if the crying had revealed her and she had nothing left to hide.

"I met Marty my senior year," she said.

"Everybody was scared of him but me."

We began to walk again. The sidewalk was crowded but people seemed to give us room. When you walked with Hawk you never got jostled.

"Where'd you go when you got to L.A.?" I said.

"I had a friend in Oceanside, Dianne Lalli, I went to see her."

"From high school?" '"Yes. I don't have any friends after high school. Did you really see Abbey?"

"Yes, she's married, three kids, lives in Needham, works in a bank."

"What's her husband do?"

"Works for the telephone company."

Bibi nodded gently.

"Mine don't," she said.

"You stay with Dianne Lalli all this time?"

"No, her husband didn't like me staying there. I went up to Portland for a little while, then I came here."

"Why here?"

"Anthony."

"You think he's here?"

"I know he's here. He's got an answering service. It was how we used to get in touch, you know, when he couldn't call me at Marty's house, and I couldn't call him at Shirley's."

"And you called it."

"And he called me back. From here. The Mirage. He said I should come and join him."

"After he run out on you that way," Hawk said, "wouldn't think you'd want him back."

"I don't. It's why I'm staying where I'm staying," Bibi said.

"He's crazy. He's got to finish what he started. He's got to lose everything."

"He know you're here?"

"Not yet."

"So why'd you come?" I said.

"The money he took was ours."

"Where'd you get it?" I said.

"He skimmed it from Gino and Julius," Bibi said.

"For us. It was for us to start a new life."

"Whose idea was that?"

Bibi almost laughed.

"The new life was mine. The funny thing is the skimming idea was Shirley's. She got him to start holding out on Julius, said even if her father caught him he wouldn't do anything, because he was her husband."

"She wanted to get out of the house?"

"Guess so," Bibi said.

"Away from her mother, Anthony says."

"Was supposed to be a new life for her too," I said.

"How'd Gino get involved."

"New lives are hard," Bibi said, "aren't they. Anthony liked the deal. He figures he's doing Julius. He may as well do Gino. Only this time he got caught."

"By Marty," I said.

She looked surprised.

"How'd you know," Bibi said.

"I'm a trained detective," I said.

"And instead of blowing the whistle, Marty cut himself in."

"Yes."

"And he became Anthony's partner, which is how you met Anthony."

"Yes."

She spoke so easily and without affect that it was hard to realize that she was telling me most of what I'd been trying to find out since Julius and Shirley came to hire me.

"And Marty met Shirley," I said.

"Marty knew Shirley?"

"Yeah," I said.

"They used to meet regularly."

"Was he sleeping with her?"

"I don't think so."

"Lucky for her," Bibi said.

"Was the deal more than just money?"

"I don't know, it might have been."

"Was Marty happy being number two for Gino?"

"No. He said Gino was a pansy, and he hated taking orders from him."

I looked at Hawk.

"He using Anthony as his inside man in Julius's outfit," Hawk said.

"While he was funding a war chest," I said.

Hawk nodded slowly.

"Could be," he said.

"And then, as luck would have it," I said, "here came the Russians."

"Marty a glasnost guy," Hawk said.

"I don't know anything about Russians," Bibi said.

"No reason you should," I said to Bibi.

"And since they all in on this scam together, he takes up with Shirley," Hawk said.

"To keep track of Anthony, like he used Anthony to keep track of Julius."

"What I like is how Marty thought he was running Anthony," I said.

"Only he wasn't. Anthony got enough money to get away from Shirley and he took off with Marty's war chest. And Marty's wife."

"And Marty left with Shirley rolling around loose on the deck worried about her man," Hawk said.

"So he had to kill her when she showed up out here," I said.

"Because she knew what was going on, or enough of it to cause him trouble."

"And gonna have to kill her," Hawk said, nodding at Bibi, "and he gonna have to kill Anthony."

"If we're right," I said.

"We might be," Hawk said.

"Yeah," I said.

"We're due."

"I don't follow what you're saying," Bibi said.

"Did he kill Shirley?"

"I like him for it," I said.

"It makes some sense."

"I don't know why."

"If we're right," I said, "Marty's trying to run the whole mob scene in Boston. You don't have to know why we think so, just remember the part about how he has to kill you too."

"That's not news," Bibi said.

"He'd have killed me anyway, one way or another. In some ways he already has."

I nodded.

"I don't know if I can ever love anybody again. I don't know if I can ever be with a man again."

"That can be fixed," I said.

"First though we got to fix this."

"I'm going to get my money back before Anthony loses it," Bibi said.

"It's mine, and, in God's truth, I got nothing else to care about."

"Care about yourself," I said.

"Getting my money back is the best I can do," Bibi said.

"How you going to get the money?" Hawk said.

"If there's any left."

"Whatever he has left, I want," Bibi said.

"However I can get it.

He took everything I ever had."

"Like your style," Hawk said as if he were thinking out loud.

"Want some help?" I said.

"I don't want any help from any men," she said.

"Even you. I know you're a good man. Both of you are good men. But I have to stay clear of men for a while."

"Help is help," I said.

"Regardless of the source."

"I never met a man that cared about me. I know you do, but I can't react to it, you know? Not now anyway. And even you are trying to use me to nab Anthony."

"I want to make sense out of Shirley Ventura's murder and I want to see to it that you don't get hurt," I said.

"When you went to Portland, how'd you get there?"

"Train."

"How'd you pay for the ticket."

"I had mon…" She paused as she remembered.

"Okay, you gave me money and I ran away on you. I know. But you need to understand. I've been exploited all my life by men. I'm not able to trust you. I have to do what I can do by myself. I got a right."

"Affirmative action," Hawk murmured.

"I never been on my own before. I married Marty when I was seventeen to get out of the house. Didn't work out. Fifteen years later I took up with Anthony to get away from Marty. That didn't work out, either. I been looking for men to take care of me all my life, and I don't want to do it anymore."

"Why were you in such a hurry to get out of the house?"

"My old man was an asshole."

"And so were his replacements," I said.

Bibi stared at me for a moment.

"Well, that's over," she said finally.

"No more assholes."

"So much for us," Hawk murmured.

"Must be kind of scary," I said.

"On your own all at once."

"Yeah, it is, but no scarier than my life has been. I know you want to help me, and as much as I can, I appreciate it. I'm grateful. I am. But damnit I can't depend on a man, even you."

"It's a good thing to change," I said.

"But it's kind of hard to do alone. And it's kind of hard to do all at once."

"This is the first step. Don't you get it? I can't turn to you. I want to. For God's sake I'm scared to death Marty will find me. But I simply cannot."

I looked at Hawk.

"I don't think I'm winning this conversation," I said.

" Tears not."

"Okay," I said.

"You want to go back to your hotel?"

Bibi was quiet for a bit, looking at me.

"Yeah," she said, "I do."

"Would you prefer to walk back alone?"

She took a deep inhale.

"Yes," she said.

"I would."

"You know if Marty can find you, he'll kill you. Anthony too, I think, if he had the balls."

"He doesn't," Bibi said.

"Can never be sure," I said.

Bibi looked at me grimly with her lips clamped shut.

"Okay," I said and made a be-my-guest gesture with my hand and stepped aside. Bibi began slowly to walk back along Las Vegas Boulevard toward Convention Center Drive. After a few steps she turned.

"I get some money," she said, "I'll pay you back."

"Sure," I said.

She went a few more steps back along the empty street. Again she stopped and turned.

"I appreciate what you've done, both of you."

"Glad to help," I said.