“Show me,” Marty said.
“You want me to open it right here?”
“The fuck did I say?”
Frank lifted the briefcase onto his own lap, slid the locks, and the lid flipped open with a metallic click. Frank grabbed the silenced . 25 inside and fired five times through the briefcase lid. Then he put the gun back in the case, got out of the car, and walked away.
Right down the Strip.
Frank went back to his hotel room, wiped the gun down with isopropyl alcohol, did the same with the briefcase. Chicago had offered a cleanup crew to dispose of the weapon, but Frank didn’t trust anyone else to clean up after him. He’d chosen a. 25 for a reason, knowing that the bullets, after piercing the cheap briefcase, would have the juice to enter Marty’s skull, but not enough to exit. A parking lot attendant found Marty about an hour later. He thought the guy slumped on the wheel had had a heart attack until he saw the five holes in his head.
Frank got into his car and drove the back route through the Mojave, found a decrepit mine, smashed the gun into pieces, and tossed it and the briefcase down the shaft.
Yeah, easy to get rid of the gun, harder to get rid of the memories.
They don’t stay down the mine shaft.
Actually, there had been instant fallout from the Biancofiore job. Fat Herbie Goldstein started screaming all over town that he was out the $75,000 that Marty was evenless likely to pay him now that he was dead, and thatsomeone owed him this money.
“Tell Garth to pay him,” Frank told Mike Pella.
“Are you fucking kidding?”
“Tell him to sell one of his cars and pay the man,” Frank said. “Tell him The Machine said so.”
Donnie Garth paid Herbie Goldstein his $75K.
Which is how Frank became friends with Herbie Goldstein.
Fat Herbie sought Frank out after he got his money from Donnie Garth. Goldstein actually got on a plane, flew out to San Diego, and requested a sit-down with Frankie Machine. They had it over lunch, of course-if you were with Herbie, you wereeating.
Now, a lot of mobbed-up guys had the sobriquet “Fat.” Frank knew five of them personally. But none of them could play seesaw with Herbie Goldstein-they’d just be up in the air, looking down at almost four hundred pounds of Herbie, who’d probably be sucking on a Fudgsicle.
Anyway, Herbie took Frank out to lunch and said, “That was a decent thing, what you did for me. I just wanted to tell you in person I appreciated it.”
“It was the right thing,” Frank said.
“Not everybodydoes the right thing,” Herbie said. “Not these days.”
Herbie picked up the lunch check, which was no small thing, then extended an invitation: “If you’re ever in Las Vegas, I’ll show you a good time.”
Frank didn’t plan on going to Vegas, he really didn’t. But the invitation lingered in his head. The harder he worked, the longer hours, the dutiful, futile sex with Patty, the fights, the silences all made the offer from the 375-pound gangster seem like a siren song.
So one day, after a chef gave him agita over a perfectly fine unit of yellowtail, Frank threw a few clothes in the car and headed to Las Vegas.
He pulled into town and gave Herbie a ring. Ten minutes later, he was unpacking his clothes in a comped suite at the Paladin. He took a nice long bath in the in-room Jacuzzi, then a nap, then got up and got dressed to go meet Herbie in the lobby.
Herbie had two Playboy models with him, Susan and Mandy.
Susan, a petite blonde with an unpetite chest, was Herbie’s date. Mandy was for Frank. She had shiny shoulder-length brown hair, full lips, warm brown eyes and was wearing a dress that showed a body that deserved showing. Frank told himself that she was a platonic date, that’s all. A companion for drinks, dinner, and maybe a show, so he wouldn’t feel like the third wheel.
They did the town.
God, did they do the town.
The food, the wine, the shows-Frank was never allowed to reach for his wallet. Not that a bill came anyway, it never did. Herbie left a big tip, and that was it. They got the best tables, bottles of the best wine came over with compliments of the management, and they got invited to parties in the greenroom after the shows.
And then there were the women.
Fat Herbie Goldstein was not an attractive man, although he did bear an uncanny resemblance to Pavarotti-if the tenor had gone on an all-pudding diet for a couple months, that is.
And he wasn’t charming-if anything, Herbie had a kind ofanti- charm, where the wordrepulsive came from, Frank guessed. Herbie repulsed most people-with his voracious consumption, nonexistent table manners, and the rivers of sweat that always seemed to be running down his fat cheeks or pooling in his armpits. His clothes were rumpled and usually had food stains on them, he had a mouth like a sewer, and most people in Vegas would cross the street to avoid running into him.
But Herbie pulled women.
There was just no question about it. Frank never saw Herbie after dark without an absolutely drop-dead-gorgeous woman on his arm. And they weren’t hookers-they were dancers and models and good-time girls. They accepted presents from him, for sure, sometimes fairly big presents, like condos or cars, but it wasn’t just the money.
They really seemed to like being with Herbie, and the more time Frank spent with the guy, the more he did, too.
But that first night…
They rolled back into the Paladin around 3:00 a.m. When Frank went to say good night to Mandy, his Playmate, she looked at him funny.
“You don’t like me?” she asked.
“I like you fine.”
“What is it, I don’t turn you on?”
He’d had a hard-on all night. “You turn me on a lot.”
“Then let’s go make each other feel good,” she said.
“Mandy, I’m married.”
She smiled. “It’s just sex, Frank.”
No, it wasn’t.
After nine faithful years of marriage, the last few of them fairly unhappy, nothing was “just sex.” Mandy did things that Patty would never have thought of and wouldn’t have done if she had. Frank was starting in on his usual sexual routine when Mandy stopped him and said gently, “Frank, let me show you how to please me.”
She did.
For the first time in his life, Frank felt this sense of freedom about sex, because it wasn’t a struggle or negotiation or an obligation. It was just pure pleasure, and when he woke up in the morning, he wanted to feel guilty, but the fact was, he didn’t. He just felt good.
It didn’t hurt that Mandy had already gotten up and left, leaving only a little note telling him that she felt “well and truly fucked,” with one of those little smiley faces above her signature.
Herbie came by to take him to breakfast.
“You should try some Jew food,” Herbie said when Frank went for the bacon and eggs.
He ordered Frank an onion bagel with lox, cream cheese, and a slice of red onion.
It was delicious, and the contrasts of tastes and textures-sharp, creamy, soft, and crispy-was a revelation to him. Herbie knew what he was talking about. When you really got talking with him, it turned out that Herbie knew a lot about a lot. He knew about food, wine, jewelry, and art. He had Frank over to his house to see his collection of Erte and his wine cellar. You would never call Herbie a cultured man by any means, but he had some surprises in him.
Take the crossword puzzles, for instance.
It was Herbie who turned Frank on to the puzzles, and Herbie could do the SundayNew York Times puzzle in ink. Sometimes, Frank wasn’t so sure Herbie needed to write anything down at all-he might have all the words in his head. And he was a walking dictionary, although the funny thing was, he didn’t use any of those words in his conversation, ever.
“I guess I’m what you would call an idiot savant,” he said one day when Frank asked him about it. Although, when Frank looked up the termidiot savant, he realized that no idiot savant would know the expression.