2
"Okay, fill me in, Eddie."
Angie sat at a table in the coffee shop of the Flamingo facing a man who had once been her brother-in-law. Eddie Latham. Jerry's brother. Seven years younger than Jerry, he was just thirty-one, and he looked like Jerry, though Jerry had been only twenty-five when he was killed in the Normandy Invasion. Eddie had been only fourteen when she saw him last, not long before she was arrested.
"Ma died a couple years ago," said Eddie. "She always thought you ought to've kept in touch."
"Maybe I should have," said Angie. "But she didn't keep in touch either. I was in jail three months in Manhattan. She came to see me once. I was in the reformatory thirty-nine months, and I got two letters from her. Anyway, I'm sorry you lost her, Eddie. How old was she?"
"She was sixty-four. Had a bad heart the last few years."
"So why have you come to see me?" Angie asked.
"I'd have looked you up a long, long time ago if I could've found you," he said. "I always thought Jerry married the prettiest girl in town. After Jerry was killed, I got the crazy idea I'd go to West Virginia and meet you when you came out of the slammer. But guess where I was: at Fort Dix, drafted, taking basic training. I was sent to the Pacific, but the war ended before I ever fired a shot or anybody fired one at me. I came home. I tried to find you. You won't believe this, but I hired a private eye. The last address the Federal Bureau of Prisons had for you was White Plains. You'd been given final release, and they didn't know where you'd gone. I gave up. Then a couple months ago I saw your picture in the paper: director of a big corporation. I said, Hey, that's Angie! So, first chance I got, I came to Vegas."
Angie smiled and shook her head.
"Simple story," said Eddie. He glanced around and frowned as if the bright bustle of the coffee shop offended him — not the right setting for what he apparently meant to be a solemn and significant conversation. "So where did you go in 1945, if you don't mind my asking?"
"I married again," she said. "Wyatt. We went to California, then came here. I've been here ever since."
"You and Jonas Cord must have a very friendly relationship," said Eddie.
Angie smiled and nodded. "Very friendly," she agreed.
Eddie took a package of Camels and a lighter from his jacket pocket. He offered her a cigarette, and she shook her head. Jonas had smoked little for years and had stopped smoking entirely after the heart attack. She didn't smoke in his presence, which meant in effect that she had stopped, too. Eddie lit the unfiltered Camel, drew the smoke down deep, and blew it out through his nose.
"I figured that," he said. He grinned. "I came along too early and then too late."
"You must be married."
"I was for six years. Two kids. She has them."
"I can't believe you came to Vegas to see me just for old times' sake, just because you're a romantic," said Angie. "What business are you in, Eddie?"
He stared into his coffee cup and took another deep drag on his cigarette. "That's the point, Angie," he said. "Somebody asked me to talk to you."
3
Captain Frank's was a fish restaurant on Cleveland's Ninth Avenue Pier. On a day on the cusp of spring, the view from the broad windows was of an angry green Lake Erie, its waves whipped up, spray flying and visible like snowflakes against the gray sky. The place was very well known in Cleveland, and well thought of.
A round table for six was saved every day for Carlo Vulcano, and rare was the day when he was not at his table. On days when he was not there, no one sat at his table, even his friends, for fear he would come in and find someone he did not want to talk to that day sitting at his table. People sat at his table only at his specific and personal invitation — usually four or five men, today only one.
That one was Eddie Latham.
"So. You are not able to report success."
Eddie shook his head. "I am sorry, Don Carlo. I did all I could."
"Did you offer to marry her?"
"I promised her what you promised: a villa on a Brazilian beach. I told her it was not too late to have children. But— She is loyal to the man. She thinks of him as her great benefactor. I think she is in love with him, Don Carlo."
"You invoked the memory of your brother?"
"She said we had to face a fact. Jerry was a grifter. That's what she called him, a grifter. She said that's what he was, at best."
"She told you nothing, then?"
"Don Carlo ..." Eddie turned up the palms of his hands. "I did everything I could."
"Did you speak of exposing her criminal record?"
"She says Cord knows about it."
Carlo Vulcano turned his face away from Eddie and for a long moment stared at the pitching gray-green water of the lake. "The newspapers who were so intrigued with her appointment to the CE board of directors did not take the trouble to discover it. I wonder— "
"She is still a beautiful woman," said Eddie quietly.
"You were taken with her, Eddie. If you had succeeded, you could have had her."
"Don Carlo, I am afraid she is not the kind of woman who— "
"Who what? That was your problem, Eddie. You do not understand women. Businessmen trade in women like they trade in commodities, like oil or wheat or pork bellies. You say she is beautiful. So is every one of them, to somebody. You were afraid of her, Eddie!"
"I did the best I could for you, Don Carlo. I would never think of doing anything less — for you."
"Uhmm ... Well, I'm told you're a good boy. We thought that being related to her you might be able to do more than the usual thing. But— Go now, Eddie. Go back to New York. I will not speak ill of you."
Eddie Latham wondered if he should not kiss the hand of the Don, but it wasn't offered to him, and already Don Carlo Vulcano was summoning others to his table. Eddie hurried out of the restaurant.
4
The Glenda Grayson Show was broadcast live, and when the star came off the set after her final number she was drenched with sweat. She was also high with exhilaration. She needed a shower, and she needed a drink.
Danny Kaye had come off the set just ahead of her and waited for her. He threw his arms around her. "We work good together, huh?" He laughed. "Hey!" He, too, was sweating and high. He seemed about to break into another song and dance.
"C'm in and have a drink, ol' buddy," she said, leading him toward her dressing room.
"What? Two more shows this season?" he asked as he walked beside her, holding her arm.
"Two more. Then, by God, contract," she said.
"Your producer was in the booth," said Kaye. "I thought he looked kinda grim. Does anything ever satisfy the man?"
"Nothing in this world ever entirely satisfies Jonas Cord," she said. "Bat you could satisfy. Not Jonas. Tomorrow I'll get a memo telling me it was a great performance but also telling me how it could have been better."
"Like a sponsor," said Kaye.
She threw open the dressing room door. "Scotch!" she cried. "Something for Danny!"
Sam Stein was sitting on the small couch in her dressing room, waiting for her to come off the set. Sitting beside him was a handsome, swarthy man she did not recognize. He was smoking a cigar and lounged comfortably on the couch, with his legs crossed. Glenda had no idea who he was, but if Sam had brought him he was okay with her.
Amelia had served as Glenda's dresser for the past two years. She was a handsome, formidable, slender black woman, maybe forty years old, so far as Glenda could estimate, and Glenda had learned to place confidence in her. She had a light Scotch with plenty of ice and soda waiting, and she handed it to the star and stepped behind her to begin unfastening her finale gown.