"I didn't know Sal ever had a main squeeze," I said. "Word was he would diddle anything with two legs, including little boys and billy goats."
"That's four legs, Mike. Yeah, they say he was a twisted mother, but Tommy says Sal discovered Chrome on a South American trip—she's a star down there, you know—and booked her into a showroom at a Vegas casino that old Alberto still has a piece of. Apparently Howard Hughes doesn't own every damn craps table in Nevada. Anyway, Sal panted after her like a horny puppy dog and she liked the attention. That was the word on the Strip, anyway."
"So Little Tony probably saw her perform there. Maybe stole her away from Sal."
He shook his shaggy head. "No. He didn't get interested till after you rid the world of Sal. Who, one would think, would find plenty of billy goats and little boys to diddle in whatever circle of hell you dropped him in."
"Let's hope the little boys and billy goats are doing the diddling, Lonnie. So what's the deal with this Chrome broad and these bent lasagne boys? Is she their beard or what?"
He waved that off with the hand holding the cigarette. "Naw, she's just another show biz type who cozies up to whoever has the money to make her famous. She's gone as far as she can in Latin America—like anybody in her game, Chrome knows she's not a real star till she makes it in the real America."
"You think Tony really digs her?"
"Who knows? I heard those young bartenders of his march in and out of his penthouse like a parade of little tin soldiers. My guess, and it's just a guess, is Chrome and Anthony are strictly business partners. But, hell, maybe he does love her, considering the money he's spending on the broad."
"What do you mean?"
"Man, he's laying out hundreds of thousands launching this tour of his new locations, nationwide. They have their own Lear jet, and are taking her full band and all of their gear."
"Their own damn plane?"
"Yeah, like Hefner or Sinatra. Lavish layout, lounge with a bar, plus she can fly home and see her folks and do gigs down south of the border that she already had booked. Maybe Tony is crazy about her. She is one big, beautiful animal."
"So I hear," I said.
"Anyway, this wild-ass seventies lifestyle—guys like Sal and Anthony, they swing in ways that even an old prowler like you could never imagine. No offense meant. You been at Club 52, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well you saw the scene. Men and women, women and women, men and men, two men and one woman, it's a Rubik's Cube of fleshly delights. To guys like Anthony, gender labels are just labels. Lot of that going around these days, Mike." The reporter flashed me a mocking smile. "Hey, man, aren't you into androgyny?"
"I don't dig science fiction," I said.
I let him wonder about that and slipped out of the booth, leaving a sawbuck behind to cover the damage and the tip. I needed to get to the hotel to clean up a little.
After all, like the old song said, I had a date with an angel. Even if she was an assistant district attorney.
Chapter 10
WE SAT AT THE bar at P.J. Moriarty's at Sixth and Fifty-second, waiting to be seated. It was a straight-ahead steak and chop house that the restaurant critics looked down on and hungry patrons packed. John, the Irish bartender, brought me an icy Miller without asking and took Angela's drink order. She said she'd have the same, so I slid mine over to her.
"You look great," I said.
And she did, in a cream-in-the-coffee silk blouse and a simple short black skirt, her long, full black hair touching her shoulders. The strength of her face and the intelligence and beauty in those big dark eyes recalled Velda, even if this one lacked my ex-secretary's distinctive fashion-flouting pageboy. This woman's forehead was high with a strong widow's peak, as if the brain in that lovely noggin demanded air, like electronic equipment that might otherwise overheat.
"You clean up pretty well yourself," she said. Her beer arrived and I took it—it had taken almost thirty seconds. John was slipping.
"Thank the Commodore Hotel," I said, gesturing to the dark gray suit. "If they didn't have in-house dry cleaning, I'd be screwed, with as little wardrobe as I brought up from Florida."
Her eyes tightened, just a little, and she sipped her beer and didn't look at me when she asked, "When this is ... over ... are you going back there?"
"Don't know."
Half a smile blossomed. "Well, that shows the city's back in your blood. Before, you were just vacationing here."
"I know. Maybe I love smog and panhandlers."
Her half smile was both sweet and teasing. "How do you make a living, anyway? Everything I hear about you says you've spent decades doing favors and cleaning things up for friends and, well, mostly dispensing a sort of rough justice, when you deem it necessary."
"The big-paying cases don't make the papers." I shrugged. "All that publicity attracts business. I do all right."
"Will you open your office back up?"
"Maybe. Is that why you asked me out to dinner? To get my life story? I mean, this is our second date, and it's your idea again."
She laughed just a little. "No. We have things to talk about. I saw the questions in your eyes in that hallway outside Joseph Fidello's apartment."
"That place was an apartment like a matchbox is a fireplace. But I do have questions, yeah."
She cocked her head and the dark hair fell nicely. "I'll try to give you some answers. But first—can we eat? I'm starving."
Her timing was impeccable, because the head waiter, Samuel, motioned me from his stand that our booth was ready. I'd asked for one back by the kitchen, normally a lousy seat but I liked that the clatter and in-and-out of waiters would cover our conversation.
But Angela hadn't lied—she was hungry, all right, and she was no vegetarian feminist, despite the light breakfast I'd witnessed a couple of days ago. She got the lamb chops special and she put it away like a stevedore who missed his last meal.
"Watching you make those chops disappear," I said, working on my medium rare New York strip, "makes me wonder if I'm the next lamb set for slaughter."
"I skipped lunch," she said as delicately as possible with a mouthful. "This always happens. I try to skip a meal, to be good, then dinner comes around and I'm very bad. Good thing I burn a lot of calories. But it's tough, watching my figure."
"Not from where I sit," I said.
We shared cheesecake off a communal plate. The dessert was almost as good as the sense of shared intimacy. She was a strong woman, smart and big with the kind of curves the fashion magazines abhor. Like Velda. I frowned at my mind's damn insistence on bringing up past history....
"Something wrong, Mike?"
"No. I want to ask you something—were you working with Bill Doolan on a case?"
She shook her head. Her tongue licked whipped cream off her upper lip. "I never even had the honor of meeting him. He was a legend."
"No, he wasn't. He was a man. Flesh and blood. He had his weaknesses—like an eye for pulchritude."
She laughed.
"What?"
"I don't think," she said giggling, "I ever heard that word spoken out loud before."
"My vocabulary might surprise you."
"You're a surprise in general, Mike. Why do you ask if I knew Doolan?"
I gestured to her. "Because here you are—sniffing around the edges of my investigation into his murder."
"Don't you mean suicide?"
"No. It's a murder. It might not be ready for presentation to your office, Angela, but I'm completely convinced Doolan was murdered. Somebody close to him did it—a woman, maybe. That was his weakness."
"Pulchritude," she said, not clowning it. "My interest is strictly Club 52. I can't imagine your late friend was a habitué of that Weimar Republic flashback."