The Devil May Dance

by Tapper, Jake

  “How’s your investigation into the Powell murder?” asked Goode.

  “Hello, Charlotte,” Meehan said, a bit warily. He looked over his shoulder, then leaned closer to the table to speak confidentially. “We’ve figured out which mobsters were in town that day, and we’re right now winnowing down the list.”

  Margaret furrowed her brow. She had read that exact sentence, attributed to “a police source,” in that morning’s Los Angeles Daily News.

  “You’re sure it was a Mob hit?” Goode asked.

  “He was in hock to the sharks,” Meehan said. “The way he was killed…I don’t want to be too graphic”—Goode snorted appreciatively—“but it had the signature of a specific button man.”

  “We know he was shot in the eyes, Detective,” Margaret said coolly. “Thank you for protecting our delicate sensibilities, though.”

  Meehan smiled. “If it shoots people in the eyes like a duck…” he said.

  She briefly considered telling Meehan about Powell’s membership in the Church of Scientology and her trip to the Casa de Rosas, but then she thought better of it. For all she knew, they had filed a complaint.

  Always on the hunt for someone more powerful to talk to, Meehan stole a look into the mirror on the wall behind Margaret and Goode, spotted a target, patted Charlie on the back in a moment of quick and quiet acknowledgment, and bade them adieu.

  “Charlie!” bellowed a familiar voice. Sinatra, at the back table. “Congressman Charlie Marder, grab that gorgeous lady of yours and come back and join us, you little so-and-so!”

  Goode winked at Charlie and Margaret and gestured for them to go ahead. They stood obediently; Margaret told Goode she would call her soon, and they made their way to the Chairman’s table in back.

  “Come here and revive me, you exquisite creature,” Sinatra barked at Margaret, accidentally spilling valuable bourbon in her direction. “Too much death tonight. We were in the middle of toasting Ernie Kovacs when we heard Lucky Luciano croaked.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t heard,” Margaret said, as she smoothed down the back of her maroon dress and sat to Sinatra’s left; Charlie squeezed in between his wife and Sammy Davis.

  “Today,” said Manny Fontaine, who had joined their party as well. “Crazy story. Do you know Marty Gosch? A producer. Flew to Italy to pitch a picture he wants to make about Lucky’s life. Lucky had a heart attack at the airport.”

  “He was in his early sixties,” said Giancana. The table was silent for a second as everyone waited to see how Giancana felt about Luciano’s demise. “That’s a hell of a ride for a guy like him,” Giancana said. “We should all be taken out by God and not by a wiseguy.” He raised a glass of red wine. “Salute.” Everyone joined him.

  “Cento di questi giorni!” added Martin.

  “He should never have been deported,” said Sinatra. “All the good he did for the U.S. during the war, he shoulda got a medal.”

  A young woman at the table—she had red hair and sweet pinches of baby fat that appeared when she smiled, which was often—asked Sinatra what he was talking about. The singer was only too happy to air what was clearly a long-held grievance.

  “You kids! You’re just babies!” Sinatra started. “Okay, so, during the war, Navy Intelligence was concerned that Italian spies were infiltrating the docks. So they reached out to Socks Lanza for help—any info to protect us from Mussolini’s double agents. Project Underworld. Socks gave ’em union cards so they could be undercover.”

  “Socks controlled the docks,” Giancana said.

  “Hey, that rhymes,” noted Martin. He began to croon “Socks…controlled the docks” to a round of titters and chuckles.

  “Seussian,” Margaret said to Charlie; Lucy and Dwight loved The Cat in the Hat. They made sad pouts at each other, missing their kids.

  “You shoulda seen Socks,” Martin added. “He was like a refrigerator with feet.”

  “And Socks worked for Lucky,” Sinatra continued. “So G-men met with Lucky. In prison. Where was he, Momo?”

  “Dannemanna,” Giancana said, botching another name.

  “Dannemora,” Martin corrected him.

  “That’s the one,” said Giancana. “So they moved him to Great Meadow to be closer to the city.”

  “Yeah,” Sinatra said. “So Lucky got to work. He had nothing else to do in prison, right? He also gave ’em names of Sicilians in New York who might know things, anything to help us prepare to invade Italy. So after the war, Lucky’s sentence got commuted—but he had to leave the country.”

  “He went to Naples,” Giancana said.

  “And then Havana!” said Sinatra, winking at Giancana.

  Salute.

  The night proceeded merrily, with a feast and copious carafes of Italian reds and the best stories the Rat Pack could tell with women present. Margaret was certain she was the soberest person at the table, except for maybe Patricia Lawford. None of the women spoke much, so Margaret entertained herself by playing zoologist and assigning hierarchical roles to the participants. Giancana was the apex predator, top of the food chain, no one around to challenge his dominance. Sinatra was the alpha, Martin the beta—his second in command. Davis and Lawford were omega wolves, assuming the court-jester roles, well liked and eager to initiate play but holding no power. She thought about the few species that practiced monogamy; there were no penguins at this table except for Charlie, Margaret, and Patricia Lawford.

  Margaret then focused on Patricia, gorgeous and gracious, with the familiar Kennedy jaw and smile. She and Peter had married in 1954, and clearly the bloom was off the rose, if it had ever blossomed at all. Margaret noticed that when he reached for her hand, she flinched. When he put his arm around her, she pulled away from his touch. For his part, Lawford studiously avoided looking too long at any of the young women at the table, but Margaret thought he did so in a suspiciously unnatural way. Charlie had already told her that Lawford’s fellow Rat Packers referred to his Malibu compound as “High-Anus Port,” so dubbed for the wild parties Lawford threw whenever his wife was back east.

  Margaret cast a benign smile in Charlie’s direction. He would never engage in anything along those lines. Charlie caught her eye and smiled back at her, and for a moment she felt as if they occupied a bubble of calm floating above the beautiful, troubled occupants of the glamorous restaurant.

  Soon Patricia Lawford announced that she was feeling tired; her husband escorted her outside and returned to the table without her. Her exit combined with the copious amounts of alcohol consumed by then seemed to dissolve all remaining inhibitions. The young women with them were manhandled onto laps. Bottle after bottle of wine was emptied. Stories of varying degrees of truthfulness were shared.

  “Nothing could be bigger / than to play it with a ni—” Martin sang, to the tune of “Carolina in the Morning,” before Davis interrupted him in the nick of time. “Tut-tut-tut!” Davis urged as Margaret and Charlie recoiled at Martin’s near use of the epithet.

  Davis responded by channeling Cole Porter: “He’s a wop! / Records sell like Nestle’s / He’s a wop! / But they don’t top Presley’s.”

  Charlie’s brain was a bubbling cauldron of concern. He felt guilty that he hadn’t yet been able to rescue his dad, worried about the photos Goode had told him about, anxious about Addington White’s impending arrival in town. He had a nagging suspicion they weren’t going to get off the hook even though he finally had an answer for Kennedy’s question. He also knew there was no way Margaret would leave without finding her niece. Despite calling Lawford several times to follow up on where he’d seen Violet, Charlie hadn’t learned anything. He hadn’t yet shared the news with Margaret. He didn’t want to get her hopes up.

  Puccini stayed open long after almost every other diner had left—Sinatra and Lawford owned it, after all—so it wasn’t until roughly three in the morning that Sinatra had the idea they should all head to a cemetery to toast Death and his recent acquisitions. Forest Lawn in Glendale was thirty minut
es away, barely a blink for LA, so their nine-car motorcade proceeded like a funeral cortege through the city’s empty, rain-soaked streets.

  A right onto South Glendale Avenue followed by another right onto Cathedral Drive, and soon the motorcade came to its end at Forest Lawn. While Charlie parked, Margaret saw Sinatra in the distance, illuminated under a streetlamp, berating the young redhead. As she and Charlie got out of the car, they could hear more of Sinatra’s tantrum.

  “—the hell off my hair!” he yelled.

  “Uh-oh,” said Davis under his breath as he sidled up to the Marders, walking toward the graves.

  “No touch-ay the toupee,” Martin said.

  Sinatra continued to berate the redhead, albeit in more hushed tones, so only the occasional word echoed in the graveyard.

  “Stupid,” he said, disdain dripping from his voice. “Dumb cooze.”

  Margaret shook her head. Sinatra was so mercurial and abusive, she no longer thought his ego was that of the mere superstar; it was something more pathological.

  Instead of being disturbed by the singer’s outburst, Charlie found himself experiencing an odd sense that this was familiar. He wondered why. Yes, he had now been in the scene long enough that these explosions were no longer out of the ordinary, but was that it? His mind turned to a faint memory from his childhood: He was sitting in the living room listening to “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” on NBC Radio’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He was maybe nine? Ten? From the study he’d heard his father viciously berating his mother. Something about an ignorant statement she had made over dinner; his dad never made those mistakes in front of important company, he said. Charlie turned up the volume. His dad had scrapped his way up the ladder without any sophisticated education and never let anyone forget it. The screaming continued. Young Charlie turned up the volume again. Winston came out of the study, but before he could aim his rage at his son, Charlie ran into his room, slammed the door, and cried into his pillow.

  “Do you think it’s okay for us to be here?” Margaret asked Charlie as they made their way around tombstones.

  “They seem to think it’s okay,” Charlie said, shrugging, coming back to the moment.

  Dean Martin ran over to one of the young women and lifted up her skirt from the back. She shrieked; everyone laughed.

  “‘It was the wont of the immortal gods sometimes to grant prosperity and long impunity to men whose crimes they were minded to punish,’” Margaret said, quoting another great Roman. “‘They did so in order that a complete reverse of fortune might make them suffer more bitterly.’”

  “No one here’s suffering yet, folks,” Lawford said, overhearing. “But try me tomorrow around seven a.m.”

  They stumbled through the damp, dark grounds of the cemetery, drinking from flasks and bottles, exclaiming when someone discovered a notable burial site. It was truly a Who’s Who of Hollywood’s departed: Bogart, Gable, and Lombard were some of the names shouted across the headstones and tombs.

  “Hey, isn’t Fatty Arbuckle here somewhere?” Sinatra asked.

  Dean raised a martini glass he’d somehow managed to transport from Puccini. “If so, we should pay our respects.”

  “Pay our respects to a fat old perv who killed a girl by shoving a Coke bottle up her yoo-hoo?” asked the redhead, disgusted.

  “That’s a filthy lie!” Sinatra yelled with rage. “He was smeared by that dead slut’s lying friend and those yellow journalists with Hearst. Two mistrials and they kept going at him. The guy wouldn’ta ever hurt a fly! The hell he went through because of those dirty prosecutors!”

  The mention of dastardly DAs made Charlie think of his father, alone in the prison infirmary. Margaret saw the expression on Charlie’s face and reached for his hand.

  “Fatty was cremated, anyway,” MacLaine noted, taking a delicate swig from a cup of bourbon Davis offered.

  Thoughts of jails and hot tubs ate at Charlie’s insides like sulfuric acid; by the time Sammy fired Fat Tony’s gun at the angel-adorned crypt of a long-dead racist producer, propelling stone shrapnel into Charlie’s shoulder, the congressman was grateful for an off-ramp to head back to the hotel. He was relieved that Margaret was similarly inclined, a comfort that evaporated as soon as Margaret opened the trunk of their rental car looking for a first-aid kit. There lay Lola, her eyes shot out, her mouth open, her body twisted unnaturally. Margaret gasped, instinctively backing away, fleeing death. Charlie stopped breathing altogether for maybe thirty seconds. He had seen death before, had caused it before, but there was something physically painful about seeing someone who had been so full of life snuffed out callously like just another cigarette.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Los Angeles, California

  January 1962

  “Dead bodies just happen to show up whenever you two are around,” Detective Meehan observed.

  Margaret—exhausted after the long night of drinking and revelry followed by the shock and horror in the cemetery parking lot—rolled her eyes. “Didn’t a cop say that to Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity?” she asked. “Your delivery was better, though,” she added with a broad and insincere smile. She had been shaken by the sight of poor Lola, but she was not about to allow herself to be bullied by this fraud.

  Meehan snorted. “Pretty glib for someone with a corpse in her trunk.”

  “Pretty glib for a cop who knows about the corpse only because we immediately called the police,” Margaret said, cool as November.

  “Chris Powell was killed shortly after you came to town, and now there’s this doll,” he said. “I don’t want to tell my supervisors that you’re not being cooperative. There was a dead girl in your trunk, Mrs. Marder.”

  “Dr. Marder,” she said quietly.

  “Pardon?”

  “Look,” she said, exhaling deeply, “we’re obviously horrified. We called and are cooperating, and we’ll tell you anything you need to know. Just spare me the film noir dialogue.”

  It soon became clear to Meehan, though, that she didn’t know much. To Margaret, Lola Bridgewater was one of dozens of young women who flitted around the edges of Rat Pack parties. “The people you should be talking to are Mr. Sinatra and his pals,” she told Meehan. “Or her friend Judy. I barely knew Lola.”

  “Why would anyone whack her?” Meehan asked.

  Like half the locals Margaret had met since she arrived, Meehan acted as if there were a camera on him; he had all the scenery-chewing subtlety of Kirk Douglas. She thought momentarily of Bugs Bunny pretending to be Edward G. Robinson: Myah, see! It’ll be coytans for you, Mugsy! Coytans!

  “I don’t know why anyone would kill Lola,” Margaret said. “Except perhaps to frame us, I suppose. As for who would do that, you’d have to ask my husband why we’re here, but it does involve law enforcement and top officials of the Justice Department, one of whom is on his way out here as we speak.”

  Meehan’s hard-boiled facade broke for a second around the eyes and mouth; Margaret could see the revelation not only shocked but rattled him. She often saw this in men—they were offended when a woman stood up for herself. It would rankle them as if their very manhood were on the line. Then it would come out that she had some connection to powerful men—whether her husband the congressman or, in this case, the attorney general—and the men wouldn’t know what to do with their indignation.

  “I need to…” Meehan said. He hesitated, then abruptly left.

  When Meehan entered Charlie’s interrogation room, he found the congressman at the table, his head buried in his arms, fast asleep. But he sat up as soon as Meehan walked in and delivered his “Dead bodies just happen to show up” line.

  “Lola Bridgewater was her name,” Charlie said soberly. “Horrible, horrible, horrible. We called you as soon as we found her.”

  Meehan sat down across the table from Charlie and shook a cigarette out of his pack of Marlboros. “You don’t seem particularly distraught.”

  Charlie stared at Meehan coldly. �
��I don’t know what that means. I didn’t know her well, but it’s very sad. We’re very upset, Margaret and me. As for my reaction to seeing a dead body, I wish I could tell you Lola’s was the first I’ve seen, but it isn’t. I fought in France.”

  “Who do you think killed her?” Meehan asked after taking a long drag from his cigarette. He tilted his chair back on two legs and squinted through smoke at Charlie as if someone were filming them in black-and-white.

  “I have no idea,” Charlie said, which was true. “An enemy of mine? An enemy of Frank’s?”

  “The Mob?”

  Charlie thought about it. “Maybe,” he said. “But why would the Mob want Lola dead? Why would they put her in my car? Seemingly to frame me—but again, why?”

  “What have you done to piss them off?” Meehan asked.

  Charlie paused. “I can’t really get into it in detail unless DOJ says I can, but I’m out here looking into some matters that might involve organized crime,” he said. “Maybe they figured that out.”

  “Offing that chickie seems like pretty harsh retaliation for spying,” Meehan observed. “Unless they were trying to set you up, as you say. But then what? And why her?”

  There was a knock at the door and Attorney General Robert Kennedy entered, with Addington White and Margaret in tow; Meehan gasped, then tried to pass it off as a cough.

  “That’ll be all, Detective,” Kennedy said—Boston Irish trumping LA flatfoot. Meehan scurried out the door without another word. Kennedy’s suit jacket was draped over his arm; his shirtsleeves were rolled up and his tie was loose. White, conversely, was as buttoned up as if he were walking into a baptism. Charlie rose to shake hands with them. They were the rats who’d gotten him into this fix, but he nevertheless was glad to see them.

  “Let’s all have a seat, shall we?” Kennedy motioned to the small table. White lit a cigarette as Margaret reached for Charlie’s hand and gave it a squeeze.

  “Glad you went to the police,” Kennedy said.