Aldo sighed and hit a speed-dial number on his cell phone. “Hey, Nicky. Assemble the clan. I got a feeling we’re in for a bumpy ride on the wedding carousel.” He hit another number. “Nurse Rachel, incoming.” He checked the rose-gold Rolex that (of course) matched his rose-gold iPhone, and then the Gray Ghost did a whip-neck Uey heading back south on the highway.
Matt felt his spine impact the back of his seat.
19
Don of the Dead
Matt had glimpsed Macho Mario Fontana once. From a distance, at Aldo’s and Temple’s Aunt Kit’s wedding at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel.
Matt had been most impressed that Macho Mario had all his hair at his age. And half of it was impressively silvered. He almost resembled the most Interesting Man in the World, recently replaced by a younger actor in the Dos Equis TV ads. Or the more professionally preserved Anthony Bennedetto, a.k.a. Tony Bennett.
Since Mario’s sister, Mama Fontana, had founded an empire on pasta sauce, most people, including Matt, considered Macho Mario an aging Don, quaint, colorful, and a harmless throwback, even respectable.
The new Mob Museum in the renovated 1933-built post office and courts building downtown treated former mob kingpins like any other Vegas icon from Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack to Elvis and Liberace, Phyllis Diller and Celine Dion, David Copperfield and Siegfried and Roy.
And Macho Mario also had his own personal high-profile exhibit at the Fontana Family hotel-casino, Gangsters. His personality seemed lavish on peccadilloes and light on lawlessness, but he definitely had been an up-and-coming young player in the bad old days of the seventies.
So when Aldo gingerly escorted Matt into the plush, secluded penthouse of Gangsters Hotel, Matt was prepared to tread lightly. He’d been suckered by one old man and he wasn’t about to do likewise with another.
“Aldo, Aldo, Aldo.” A portly man wearing a quilted maroon satin robe rose out of his easi-lift chair to kiss his eldest nephew on each cheek. “You are here to tell me of times gone by.” Macho Mario turned to Matt. “And I hear we are to have a priest marrying into the Family. What a weird world, but our own. Bene, bene,” he added in the manner of a Papal blessing.
“Ex-priest,” Matt emphasized. “And I didn’t just walk away like some. I was officially laicized when I left. I honored my vows until then.”
“Yes, yes, yes.” Macho Mario waved his left hand bearing a heavy gold signet ring as he sat again. “You are a real rules respecter. And we of a certain brotherhood respect that loyalty to be demonstrated to the letter. Most impressive, my boy. But now you marry, eh? I recommend it, having done it three times, not all blessed by the Holy See. So, even better for you, my son. You have less time to sin like me.”
Mario kissed his fingers in Matt’s uneasy direction. “You are like a seasoned Mama Fontana sauce. Sautéed in Holy Orders and a blessed man for it, but now graduated into the sadly human world we all live in. What can I do for you? Aldo said you needed my counsel.”
Matt guessed it had been many, many years since Macho Mario’s counsel had been seriously sought.
“Sit,” Mario offered, or ordered. The only nearby option at a conversational level opposite the senior booster model Mario occupied was a wheeled and closed potty chair. This situation was surreal, but Matt sat.
“I need your help,” Matt said. Baldly.
Mario tented his fingers and nodded. “Direct. That is good. I have it to give. I admire a man humble enough to seek.”
Matt was already chaffing at having to kowtow to a notorious capo. He should be referring the old man to Hell for his sins. Yet Macho Mario was so obviously pleased to exercise his long-gone powers… He was old and not what he had been, unlike something sinister Matt had glimpsed still stirring like a Jurassic beast on the Las Vegas scene.
“I’m interested,” Matt said, bracing his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward and concentrated all his attention on Macho Mario, “to know the dirt on a really bad man active from the seventies, and probably before as a punk, to the nineties. Someone who would tie a man to the prow of the Goliath’s sinking ship attraction and let him die slowly in the dark just out of sight of a hooting audience of tipsy tourists there for the midnight show.”
Even as he said it, Matt realized that he was now broadcasting in Vegas at the same hour as Cliff Effinger had probably died, only he hadn’t hosted a talk radio show then. Not yet.
“Hmm,” Macho Mario hummed as he sank back into his own chair. “You said ‘active’ into the nineties. How about just up to the nineties? I have a cork-popper for you, my boy.”
The old man beckoned Aldo near. Aldo went on one knee to be level with his uncle’s seated, shrunken frame. “Some lubricant for my aging vocal cords, nephew. This will be a long story for me to tell and my future—?” His small black pupils flicked to Matt.
“Nephew-in-law, I believe,” Aldo said, “but don’t quote me. What are you drinking?”
“We will have Compari with Perrier water.”
Aldo rose to rattle bottles and glasses behind the bar at the back of the shaded, sprawling bedroom that smelled of Vick’s VapoRub.
Mario leaned forward and whispered to Matt, “Compari and Perrier water. The first drink James Bond ordered in his first book, Casino Royale. I like that “casino” is in the title. I ordered that same drink when my casino-hotel opened.”
Mario rubbed his shiny lined palms together as Aldo set a stubby old-fashioned glass with an iceless blood-red drink on a swinging side table attached to Mario’s chair and gave Matt a matching glass.
“Grazie,” the old man told Aldo. “Now step back. You may know much of this, but I have a feeling this young man needs to know it all. And I will tell all, young Matt, although you only are only a whisper of family, if you promise to come and tell me what comes of it, if anything.”
Matt nodded. “Grazie.”
Aldo had retreated, like a discreet butler, to the room’s far shadow. Mario glanced to his distant position.
“‘Grazie,’” the old man repeated. “You have a not bad Italian accent for a blondie, but it will get better. All right. Have you heard of a man named Benny Binion?”
Matt nodded. The Binion name was notorious in Vegas history. “A lot. Owned the Horseshoe Casino Downtown. Didn’t it used to have a million dollars embedded in a giant Plexiglas horseshoe in the lobby?”
“Yes. Benny founded the World Poker Championships at the Horseshoe. Where’d you grow up?”
“Chicago.”
Mario cackled and sipped. “You’re going to like this. Binion was a hanger-on of the Chicago Outfit that tried to take over Vegas. Almost did. Offed Bugsy Siegel. He was a killer hick out of Dallas and Fort Worth. Took over the numbers-running and gambling rackets there with a pistol and a sawed-off shotgun. Loved to be called ‘Cowboy’.”
“He put on rodeos and cutting horse events, all that Western stuff, playing the fine generous citizen then.
“No finesse. We Fontanas had our eyes always on the future, the Strip. He dug his bootheels into the sawdust floors of Glitter Gulch downtown. The ‘Horseshoe’. The name said it all.”
Matt had a question. “Isn’t that what they call the dealing mechanism that holds multiple decks for games of chance. The ‘shoe’?”
Mario’s upper lip curled. “Never thought of that, but ‘Leslie’ a.k.a. ‘Benny’ Binion didn’t either, I bet. Despite his girly first name, he was a crude, murderous thug with a trail of dead men behind him even before he hooked up with the Chicago Outfit here, and you know how bad they were.”