The four women of his life, including Momma, had a kind of amused classiness because they were proud of themselves, but they all carried some kind of pain with them, too, the way he did. With Irene he could lean way out and look all the way around at her pride and at her joy in being alive, but he could also see the pain. Maybe what the doctor in the magazine hadn’t wanted to talk about was that people who fell instantly in love saw in each other some hope that the other would be able to lift the pain away, an impossible thing, but what the hell. That could be it. That could be why he and Irene loved each other.
***
The two sliding doors on the far side of the room were opened. Amalia came in, supporting the small, sere figure of Corrado Prizzi. They were followed by a deeply tanned man who wore sports clothes, which seemed comically garish beside the clothing of the others
in the room. Amalia led the old man to the empty chair at the head of the table and gently helped to lower him into the seat. Nobody greeted the tanned man, who sat next to Charley Partanna, facing Vincent and Angelo. Amalia left the room. Don Corrado studied a yellow vase on a small sideboard beyond the far end of the long table.
“We all know Cyril Bluestone,” Vincent said. “He is the president of our three hotels in Vegas and he is going to tell us what happened at the Casino Latino, the dirty bastards.”
Bluestone said, “We only found out because the collectors had started in to ask where was the money, back East. Ten days after we pay out to an IOU signed by a roller with one-hundred-percent credit, if we don’t get a check from them, the collectors go get it.” He reached into his inside pocket. “I got fourteen IOUs here. The biggest one is for $60,000, the smallest one is for $43,000. All of them together come to $722,085. The trouble is that when the collectors go to get the money, the roller who signed the IOU either was dead from a bad cold or something before he signed the paper, or he was in Europe or someplace where he couldn’t have signed the paper in Vegas. Every piece of paper is countersigned, that’s the house rules, by Louis Palo and by a man in the cage, Marxie Heller. Every piece of paper. Okay, I check it out. For every date on every piece of paper, it was during the ten-day vacation which Jack Ramen, the casino manager, took for the first time in three years. When Ramen went on vacation, the shift boss, who was also the assistant casino manager, took over the job. He was Louis Palo. With the family. Very experienced casino man. But every piece of fake paper he takes to the cage, he takes to the number three guy in the cage, Marxie Heller, who had to be Louis’ agent in the cage. They had ten days to operate. Ten days before
Ramen came back to work. Ten days before the collectors went out.”
“Where are Louis and Heller?” Charley asked.
“Louis is dead,” Vincent said. “Heller disappeared.”
“Louis was lying across the front seat of his car in the parking lot behind Presto Ciglione’s bar past the Strip,” Bluestone said. “He hadda have set up a meet out there because Louis was a very suspicious man.”
“We all know Louis,” Vincent said. “I know him when he was a helper on an ice truck, forty years ago. He came to my father, offered him his loyalty and friendship, and asked my father to help him. He was a suspicious man but he never forgot where his bread came from. We taught him his trade. He wound up for us in charge of the swing shift of our biggest casino in Vegas, in charge of all the table games and holding the deciding vote on keno and slot operations. He was our second man in the whole joint because he knew his stuff.
“He came up as a bust-out stickman. He was as good as Con McCreary. He was a boxman and a floorman—and how many dealers are too dumb to move up because they say they lose more money in tips than they get in the extra salaries? Louis could deal, figure operating expense, protect the bankroll, and work any layout. He had great moves and a head for numbers, but he could also control the rollers so they always came back. But as good as he was at everything, Louis’ biggest strength was the way he understood customer credit. He was like a machine, you know, a computer…”
“I want to point out,” Bluestone interrupted, “while he was a shift boss, which is while Jack Ramen was there, before Jack takes his vacation, and working the floor, Louis could never have taken a shooter’s paper to the cage for him and got the money. Ramen, the casino manager, could do that, but he wouldn’t do
it. He made the shooters go to the cage themselves and identify themselves, so if Louis had tried it solo, even when he was acting casino manager, it would have looked fishy and somebody would have tipped me. But if Louis had his agent inside the cage, then he could hand in fake paper from high rollers whose credit could be looked up right in the file, and he and his agent would countersign that paper and put it with all the other paper that had come in, and the agent would pay out the money to Louis.”
“I remember Marxie Heller now,” Angelo said. “He wore a silver toupee on the job and he had dark brown bags under his eyes like his wife kept the coffee grounds in there, a big-assed, bossy guy with about thirty-two hundred dollars’ worth of caps in his mouth.”
“When I tell my father about Louis Palo,” Vincent said, as if his father had stepped out of the room for a moment, “he sat for a while and remembered him. ‘He wasn’t a weak man,’ my father said, ‘except when flattery came into it. Louis couldn’t resist flattery. He was worse, maybe, than the rest of us.’ He liked clothes and his comfort. But, in all the years my father knew him, he was never a greedy man. I, myself, knew Louis was a brave man. He took Fufo Sapere, a maniac, in a bathhouse in Coney Island and he ran the crap game on Pier Nine like if he was handling school-kids. So—my father thought—if a man is afraid of nothing, and if he isn’t greedy for money, and he still isn’t smart enough to figure out a gimmick as good as this one, then—well, my father asks himself—how did this happen? It must be a woman, my father decides. A woman could think for him and flatter him until he was helpless. Tell them about Marxie Heller, Cyril.”
“Marxie Heller came to us four years ago from a man named Virgil Marowitz,” Cyril Bluestone said. “Marowitz is a moneylender, not a loan shark, except that the law allows him to be a little bit of a loan
shark. He has a chain of stores called Happy Finances in West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and he has done very well with them.”
“About seven years ago,” Vincent interrupted, “Marowitz decides that he needs protection because he has the kind of a business which was too sweet to just let it lay there by some people. He knew Eduardo. He made a meet with Eduardo and he came to the meet with a lot of paper. He says cable television is the place to be and he wants to bring in the financing for us to establish this in the Southwest. Forty million dollars the cable layout cost—some of it his money, some of it through a credit line he got together. He and Eduardo worked out a deal and Eduardo told him we would manage it for sixty-five percent. Now you got to know this—Marowitz thinks that anybody in our bidniz is glamorous, like a movie actor or something. Marowitz like wants to be known on his gravestone as the man who knew more people in the environment than Jimmy Hoffa. It is like if all Charley ever wanted was to be known as the intimate friend of all the members of the National Council of Churches.” He sighed. “Marowitz is a very weird fellow,” he said, “and that brings us to Marxie Heller.”
He sipped at a jelly glass of anisette. He nodded to Cyril Bluestone.
“Yeah,” Bluestone said, “Marxie Heller. He used to be with the old Detroit outfit, all slobs. They ate opium like it was the breakfast of champions. He was good with figures. He got TB but, because he was steady, the boys set him with Abe in Phoenix and he moved there, but the lungs didn’t get better so they laid him off. He must have met Marowitz and filled him with fairy tales about how he knew Capone and all lies like that, anyway Marowitz insisted on paying for Heller’s cure. And when Heller came out of the sanatorium, Marowitz made a job for him in the finance companies. That was ten years ago. Four years
ago, Marowitz sent me a strong recommendation to put Heller on at Vegas. He was a genius with figures, Marowitz said, and he hated to let him go but that Heller’s wife couldn’t stand Phoenix. We hired him. You know the rest.”
“Where is the wife now?” Charley asked.
“In LA,” Bluestone said. “I’ll give you Heller’s file with the wife’s address and all the background.”
“I think I should start with the wife,” Charley said.
“After Marowitz,” Vincent told him. “Tomorrow morning you fly out to Phoenix to see Marowitz. My father wants the money back and he wants you to lay it on Marowitz to take you to Heller.”
“You think Marowitz was in on the scam?”
“How do I know, Charley? Louis couldn’t have thought of it so who knows?”
Chapter Seven
Charley got to Phoenix at two
P.M.
It was hot. He rented a car, checked in at a downtown motel, and showered before he called Virgil Marowitz.
“Charley Part
ann
a,” Marowitz sang into the telephone. “What an honor! Are you in town? When can I see you?”
Charley hadn’t been able to figure out any way to believe what Vincent had said about this man looking at people in the environment as celebrities, but it was all in Marowitz’s voice so, against his own will, he tried to remember what Bogart did when he wanted to show that he was dangerous. He felt like four kinds of an idiot but he said, “We gotta have a little talk, Marowitz. I’m gonna pick you up in front of your office in twenty minutes. Be there.” He hung up.
He put on a black short-sleeved sports shirt and black slacks and a pair of heavy shades. He got out the map of Phoenix the car rental company had given him and traced out the streets to the address of the Happy Finances office. He got into the car and drove there. There were four separate people in front of the building so Charley gave it a short blast with the horn and a short, roly-poly, grinning man came half-running, half-walking to the car. “Mr. Partanna?” he asked eagerly, with a voice that was pitched higher than an Abercrombie & Fitch dog whistle.
Charley nodded.
“I’m Virgil Marowitz.” He opened the door and got into the car. “What a privilege and a pleasure, Mr. Partanna. May I call you Charley?” He clutched the sides of his head with both hands and keened. “I cannot get it through my head that I am riding through the streets of Phoenix with Charley ‘the Enforcer’ Partanna. My God!”
How does anybody talk to a freak like this? Charley thought. This was business! The Prizzis had been clouted for a gang of money! Bogart never did it in any of his picture shows the way Charley did it to Marowitz. “Listen to me, friend,” he said. “I come here a couple of thousand miles to tell you that your man, Marxie Heller, stole $722,085 from my people.”
“
Marxie
? I always thought his gang name was Moxie.”
“Shaddap! You are going to make out a check for the seven-twenty-two then we are going to your bank to have it certified. All right? All right. I am going to ask you only once—where is Marxie Heller?”
“Mr. Partanna! I haven’t seen or spoken to the man in more than four years. Where are we driving?”
“We drive till it gets dark,” Charley said. “Then you get out and dig a hole with that shovel on the back seat, then I do the job on you and drop you in the hole and cover it up.”
Marowitz turned around and looked at the back seat. There was a new shovel on it.
“Do I have any choice, Charley?
God
, this is exciting! I have dreamed about going along on an execution but I never ever imagined that I would be the gangland victim.”
“Gangland?” Charley said.
“Do I have a real choice?”
“Two. Give me the money and Heller, and you can sleep in your own bed tonight.”
“Well, then,” Marowitz said, “no need to drive any
further. We can go straight to my bank and I’ll make you out a counter check which they will certify.”
“Okay,” Charley said. “Where is Marxie Heller?”
“I purely don’t know, Charley, so I cannot answer that question. But I could make a highly educated guess. But before I make that guess, I’ve got to tell you something. I just don’t believe you’d kill me because of the complicated way the cable TV company is set up. The Prizzis own sixty-five percent of a forty-million-dollar investment in the cable only so long as I am well and strong enough to protect the revolving credit fund which pours in the operating money. I made the deal with the Prizzis because I thought I was beginning to need protection. If anything happens to me, that credit would just collapse. I designed it that way. Ed Prizzi knows that. Icing me, to put it in the
vivid
way you fellows say it, would be a hundred times more expensive for the Prizzis, in terms of their honor and their money, than the winkly little amount you say that Heller stole.”
“Jesus, you are something else, Virgil,” Charley said, exasperated, but admiring.
“Oh, I’ll give you the certified check,” Marowitz said. “Ed Prizzi will never let any of your people cash it, but I’ll tell you what; if your uncle Vincent will give me the thrill of forcing me to appear in front of the Grand Council of organized crime, or even just the New York-Chicago families’ Commission—either one of them the
final
court of American culture—for a ruling on whether or not I should pay the money because I recommended Marxie Heller for a job in Vegas four years ago, then I will
gladly
pay the fine if the council, in my presence, rules against me.”
“Virgil—”
“Yes Charles?”
“All—shit!” Charley said, throwing a U with the car. “We’ll go back to my motel and get out of this fucking heat while I call New York.”
Vincent Prizzi told him to stay where he was, he would call him right back. He called back in seven minutes. “Somebody screwed up, Charley,” he said. “Buy the man a drink.”
Charley went to the quiet table in the corner of the air-conditioned bar. Virgil greeted him with a sunny smile.
“What a business!” Charley said. He called a waiter and ordered two
jugo de piñas con Bacardi
.