“Oh yes!”
“We own a piece.”
I faded back—I had all the photos I needed, but she was still talking to them. Finally, she beamed at them and said something—I was out of ear range, now—and bounced over to me.
“I think I made a good impression,” she said.
“They’re making impressions in their pants right now,” I said, taking her gently by the arm and walking her over to our room. I unlocked the sliding doors and we stepped in.
She jumped up and down, jiggling in all the interesting places. “They liked me! They said they’d give me an audition.”
“Vera. Sit down.”
She sat on the side of the bed and I told her about Jackie Payne. I gave her a fairly detailed version, starting with the religious parents in Kankakee and ending with death by overdose.
When I was finished, Vera wasn’t crying or anything, but her expression was sober and her eyes melancholy.
“You didn’t have to tell that story,” she said. “I know they’re gangsters. I don’t want anything to do with them.”
“I know. But you’re just starting out—and I saw today the effect you have on men.”
“It’s just my body.”
“No, lots of girls have big tits, kiddo. You have confidence, and stage presence. You’ll go somewhere. Just try not to do it by getting in bed…literally or figuratively…with the likes of Charley and Rocco Fischetti.”
She grinned up at me. “Hey—I wouldn’t care if that was Darryl Zanuck out there…I’m here with Nate Heller.”
“Actually, you’re here with Joe Samuels…who has work to do.”
I dropped the Kodak rolls in a packet off at the front desk; arrangements had been made for my film to be taken by courier to Mexico City and delivered directly to the Associated Press office, where it would be developed and the best shots of the Fischettis wired to Washington…where both Drew Pearson and representatives of Senator Kefauver would receive them.
From our poolside room I made two calls: room service, to bring us lunch; and the American consulate, where a lanky, well-tanned Narcotics Bureau agent named Dennison was waiting to hear from me.
“The photos are on their way,” I said.
“Good,” the agent said. “First thing tomorrow morning, I should have the proper warrants. I won’t pull in the local policia till the last moment.”
“Smart. Outfit guys have a piece of this town.”
“You haven’t been made?” Dennison asked.
“No. I’ll lay low till tomorrow morning.”
After I hung up, Vera looked at me with what pretended to be innocence and asked, “You’ll lay how?”
She was a handful. Two, actually.
I took her to another hotel to spend the evening—Los Flamingos, a hotel whose modernistic architecture stretched along the edge of an orange-and-slate-blue cliff three hundred and fifty feet above the ocean. The dining room had no outside walls, only a high-beamed roof; but we sat under a roofless section with the moon and stars as our ceiling, while in nearby papaya trees, yellow-and-blue macaws tried to make conversation with us.
Out in the ocean, under the moonlight, on the silver waves, a whale was spouting, and flying fish were leaping from the depths, huge creatures that looked like minnows from our high perch. We both ate charcoal-broiled red snapper, drank wine, and danced to a rumba band well into the night.
When we slipped into our room, back at La Mirador, just after one a.m., we were both a little tipsy and neither of us expected skunk-haired Rocco Fischetti to be sitting on the bed waiting for us, with my nine millimeter Browning in his hand.
“Go in the bathroom, honey,” Rocco said. His eyes were like dark stones close-set in that pockmarked face; the black slashes of eyebrow angled down in a scowl that his mouth was participating in. My suitcase was open on the floor—that’s where he’d found the gun.
Vera was clinging to my arm, shivering with fright. Like me, I had the feeling she was sober, suddenly.
“Honey,” he said, just a little louder, “in the damn bathroom.”
“Do it,” I told her.
She ran in there, glancing back at us, framed in light.
“Shut the door,” Rocco said.
She did.
I stood looking at him. Wearing the same white shirt and gray slacks as this morning, he was seated on the edge of the bed, the gun in his hand draped casually in his lap.
“This is the rod you waved in my face, in the Chez crapper, ain’t it?” he said.
“She’s an innocent, Rock. Let’s go someplace and do whatever we have to do. And leave her out of it.”
“Those shiners you give me—they’re almost gone.” He laughed hollowly. “I looked like a fuckin’ raccoon.”
“Rocky—we were friends once. Let’s settle this another time, in another setting—with this girl out of the picture. She’s an innocent kid.”
Rocco swallowed. Something was weird about him. Was he drunk?
“Jackie was an innocent kid, too,” he said.
“Yeah…yeah, she was.”
“What are you here for?”
“What do you mean, Rock?”
“What the fuck are you here for?” He hefted the nine millimeter. “To kill me? To kill Charley?”
Standing there casually motionless, I was nonetheless looking for the moment to jump him. The weird state of mind he was in might help—might….
“I’m not here to kill you,” I said. “You’d already be dead, if I were.”
“Or you’d be dead. Why are you here, Nate?”
“…you saw me.”
“Playing photographer. Yeah. You snapped me and Charley.”
“Yes. And those photos are on their way to Washington.”
I thought that might get a rise out of him, but he just sat there, zombie-eyed. Finally, he said, “That means, unless Charley and me clear out…tonight…we’ll be in cuffs tomorrow. On our way back home.”
“That’s pretty much it. yeah.”
“He’s fuckin’ ruined me, you know.”
“What? Who? Charley?”
Rocco sighed, nodded. He kept thumping my gun against his thigh, nervously. “He and Tubbo went against the Outfit.”
“Arranging the Drury and Bas hits, you mean?”
“Yeah. They had inside help, y’know.”
“I do know.”
And I told him who I figured it was.
He confirmed my suspicions with a shrug and a nod. “You don’t buck Accardo and Ricca or even old Greasy Thumb. You either die, or if you’re real lucky, you lose damn near everything. Giancana, that crazy bastard, he’ll be sitting where the Fischetti brothers was sitting.”
“Because your brother bucked the Outfit.”
“Yeah. Drury had all sorts of tapes of Charley and Tubbo talkin’—’bout the election and shit.”
“You haven’t told Charley about me, have you?”
“No—no, Nate, I ain’t told him, and Charley ain’t made you. He was too busy today looking at Little Miss Big Titties. I saw you, though. You kinda look like my fuckin’ brother, with that blond hair.”
“If you don’t tell him now, Rock, you’ll be arrested tomorrow, along with him. You know that, don’t you?”
“What the fuck’s it matter? Maybe I go back and plead the fifth, don’t cause the Outfit no trouble, and the boys see I’m a stand-up fella.”
“You want Charley to get dragged back to the States?”
“Oh, yeah. ’Cause if he does, they’ll either kill him…or his heart will. He’s a sick man, you know.”
“How sick?”
Rocco coughed a laugh. “Sicker than he fuckin’ knows.”
“What do you mean?”
A shrug. “Maybe somebody switched his little pink pills with, whaddyacallit…playsee what’s-it’s.”
Was I hearing this?
“Placebos, Rock? You switched your brother’s pills?”
“You tell him, Nate, and I will kill you.”