Matt was already chaffing at having to kowtow to a notorious capo. He should be referring the old man to Hell for his sins. Yet Macho Mario was so obviously pleased to exercise his long-gone powers… He was old and not what he had been, unlike something sinister Matt had glimpsed still stirring like a Jurassic beast on the Las Vegas scene.
“I’m interested,” Matt said, bracing his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward and concentrated all his attention on Macho Mario, “to know the dirt on a really bad man active from the seventies, and probably before as a punk, to the nineties. Someone who would tie a man to the prow of the Goliath’s sinking ship attraction and let him die slowly in the dark just out of sight of a hooting audience of tipsy tourists there for the midnight show.”
Even as he said it, Matt realized that he was now broadcasting in Vegas at the same hour as Cliff Effinger had probably died, only he hadn’t hosted a talk radio show then. Not yet.
“Hmm,” Macho Mario hummed as he sank back into his own chair. “You said ‘active’ into the nineties. How about just up to the nineties? I have a cork-popper for you, my boy.”
The old man beckoned Aldo near. Aldo went on one knee to be level with his uncle’s seated, shrunken frame. “Some lubricant for my aging vocal cords, nephew. This will be a long story for me to tell and my future—?” His small black pupils flicked to Matt.
“Nephew-in-law, I believe,” Aldo said, “but don’t quote me. What are you drinking?”
“We will have Compari with Perrier water.”
Aldo rose to rattle bottles and glasses behind the bar at the back of the shaded, sprawling bedroom that smelled of Vick’s VapoRub.
Mario leaned forward and whispered to Matt, “Compari and Perrier water. The first drink James Bond ordered in his first book, Casino Royale. I like that “casino” is in the title. I ordered that same drink when my casino-hotel opened.”
Mario rubbed his shiny lined palms together as Aldo set a stubby old-fashioned glass with an iceless blood-red drink on a swinging side table attached to Mario’s chair and gave Matt a matching glass.
“Grazie,” the old man told Aldo. “Now step back. You may know much of this, but I have a feeling this young man needs to know it all. And I will tell all, young Matt, although you only are only a whisper of family, if you promise to come and tell me what comes of it, if anything.”
Matt nodded. “Grazie.”
Aldo had retreated, like a discreet butler, to the room’s far shadow. Mario glanced to his distant position.
“‘Grazie,’” the old man repeated. “You have a not bad Italian accent for a blondie, but it will get better. All right. Have you heard of a man named Benny Binion?”
Matt nodded. The Binion name was notorious in Vegas history. “A lot. Owned the Horseshoe Casino Downtown. Didn’t it used to have a million dollars embedded in a giant Plexiglas horseshoe in the lobby?”
“Yes. Benny founded the World Poker Championships at the Horseshoe. Where’d you grow up?”
“Chicago.”
Mario cackled and sipped. “You’re going to like this. Binion was a hanger-on of the Chicago Outfit that tried to take over Vegas. Almost did. Offed Bugsy Siegel. He was a killer hick out of Dallas and Fort Worth. Took over the numbers-running and gambling rackets there with a pistol and a sawed-off shotgun. Loved to be called ‘Cowboy’.”
“He put on rodeos and cutting horse events, all that Western stuff, playing the fine generous citizen then.
“No finesse. We Fontanas had our eyes always on the future, the Strip. He dug his bootheels into the sawdust floors of Glitter Gulch downtown. The ‘Horseshoe’. The name said it all.”
Matt had a question. “Isn’t that what they call the dealing mechanism that holds multiple decks for games of chance. The ‘shoe’?”
Mario’s upper lip curled. “Never thought of that, but ‘Leslie’ a.k.a. ‘Benny’ Binion didn’t either, I bet. Despite his girly first name, he was a crude, murderous thug with a trail of dead men behind him even before he hooked up with the Chicago Outfit here, and you know how bad they were.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Hmmph. Word was enforcer Tony Spilotro out of Chicago liked to get a guy alone in the desert and put his head in vice and crank until his eyeballs popped out.”
Matt suddenly knew what a face going “a whiter shade of pale” felt like.
Old-time mobsters were as bloodthirsty as Genghis Khan and Dracul the Impaler, and yet such torture had happened in the last century. So Jack the Hammer hadn’t been a Grimm Brothers’ fairytale ogre, but the real thing, a thug of his time.
And someone was now taking that jackhammer of his out of cold storage in the desert.
There was only one reason for the storied violence of the mob. To threaten and intimidate to get money.
“Hey, kid. Suck a little Compari. From the old country. Put some blood back in your face.”
Matt snapped out of his nightmarish speculations and did as he was told. One sip told him that Compari was a bitters, nothing sweet about it. Just like Matt’s situation.
However, Uncle Mario was getting a little glow. “Arriving here just as the fifties were starting, Binion was a braggart, always buying up this property or that to get something going, whether the party wanted to sell or not.”
Matt nodded. “I just heard of a case like that, um, today, involving a building my landlady inherited.”
“Nothing evil’s new.” The old man leaned forward and Matt strained toward him to hear as his thin voice got lower. “Benny got more careful as he got more established, but I know for sure one unsolved murder he got away with. Ever hear about a jazz joint named the Zoot Suit Choo-Choo?”
Way too eerie to be a coincidence. Matt tossed off his Compari in one gulp while Mario winked approval at him.
“Ah…” Matt coughed. He tried to sound naive. “Wasn’t that an all-black nightclub that got started in the fifties across the tracks from the Strip?”
“You’re thinking of the Moulin Rouge. That was the first integrated hotel-casino, big-time operation. Chorus girls, acts, gambling. The Zoot Suit Choo-Choo was a low-rent joint, for kooks and the hip cats back then. Independent. Not mob. But the Strip was already clawing outward for land, and a crook like Binion always had his big ears to the ground.”
Macho Mario’s eyes lost themselves in rumpled bags of flesh as he searched his memory. “Black guy named Jumpin’ Jack Robinson owned the place and starred there like he was Cab Callaway on a budget. Maybe he wasn’t black, maybe Mexican, hell, maybe Giacco from southern Italy who had Americanized his name like a lot of them performers did then. Perry Como, Dean Martin.”
Mario leaned closer, prompting Matt to perch on the edge of his squeaky, squishy “whoopee chair” seat so the old man didn’t fall face-first on the floor. His breath smelled of garlic, false teeth adhesive and Compari. The name Giacco, pronounced “Jacko”, shivered down Matt’s spine.
“Yeah, the murder method harked back to Spilotro style,” Mario whispered, going hoarse and a little “Marlon Brando” as The Godfather. “They were zoot suit wearers. You know, baggy pants, long jacket, pancake hat with a feather in it and a ‘cat chain’, an overgrown watch chain down to their ankles. Real clowns. I can’t believe some of the dumb stuff I lived through. Some of those chains were twenty-four carat gold, and worth stealing. Some were steel toilet chains, you know, when the tanks were way up on the walls and you needed a pull chain as long as your you-know-what.”
Matt almost choked again.
“Naw, a kid like you wouldn’t know. Anyway, that’s how Jumpin’ Jack was found dead, hanging from his cat chain on an onstage light pole. Zoot Suit dancing king and Sin City wild card. Nineteen fifty-six. Never solved.”
“And no suspects?” Matt had heard this story before and glanced over his shoulder to glimpse Aldo’s pale suit, his undrunk glass of Compari blood red against it and positioned like a crimson pocket handkerchief. Aldo had told this story before, only days before.
Mario chuckled. “Cops wanted to finger a rogue mobster for it. A guy they called ‘Jack the Hammer’. He was famous for taking guys out into the desert and using a jackhammer to encourage them to talk, or keep quiet forever. A real paisano, not a nobody out of Dallas. Name of Giaccomo Petrocelli. Giaccomo. Italian for ‘James’, but in English it shortens to just plain ‘Jack’. Giacco the Hammer.”
“What happened to this monster?”
“Somebody offed him back in the nineties. Most of his power was gone. He never adapted to Vegas going corporate. You had to be smoother than a jackhammer then. But I never made him for the Robinson killing. I think it was Benny Binion having a last run at being the knee-jerk Cowboy killer he was before settling down to make real money from his enterprises.
“So. Talk about Binion in the seventies, nineteen-seventy-one, is when the really ugly action started. As far back as forty-nine Binion arranged a head-to-head poker tournament between Johnny Moss and ‘Nick the Greek’, who dropped two mill. Two mill in nineteen forty-nine! So twenty-one years later, Binion held a tournament for six high-rollers and Johnny Moss won again. Binion made it annual and anyone could buy in with ten thousand bucks. Benny hoped it would get as big as fifty players. Now there are thousands.”
“So when did Binion’s reign end? What did he die of?” Matt asked.
“Get this,” Mario said with a ho-ho-ho chuckle. “Heart failure did in the ‘Cowboy’ killer from Dallas. I’ll never forget the date because it was December 25, 1989. A Christmas present to Vegas as one of the most ruthless founders went down. He gave the rest of us a bad name. And he was immediately put into the Poker Hall of Fame in the New Year. And that’s when the family fun began, when son Lonnie ‘Ted’ Binion began running things after Benny’s death.
“Ted! A hopeless alki and drug-addict. Fifty-five the guy was. You’d think he’d make something of himself, like my sister’s boys. Nicky, the youngest, owns the Crystal Phoenix, which is in a class of its own. Aldo here and his brothers run this hotel and their custom limo service and some other little things we won’t mention.” Wink.
“Ted had millions stashed all over Vegas, in his house and hotel and out there in the desert in Spilotro and Petrocelli country, including a huge underground vault holding a hoard of silver bullion and coins. The asshole only shared the location with the one guy he should have offed on completion of the job. Get this: the one who built the vault. Seriously stupid. And the guy was pronging his young stripper girlfriend at the time. Beyond stupid.
“Guess what?”
“Someone killed Ted for the money.”
“Tried to make it look like a drug overdose, but it was faked. Nasty kinda death, drugged and then overdosed and then smothered.”
“I remember news about excavating that huge desert vault,” Matt said. “Who got the money?”
“Crazy. The scheming couple was convicted of murder, but went to a retrial on a technicality, where they were acquitted of murder, but convicted of burglary! Binion had changed his will two days before his death to exclude his girlfriend, but she got it all anyway, the house and the millions in its safe. There were millions in the hotel safe too, and still four or so million unaccounted for, and it has never been found. Presumed to be buried out on the Mojave.”
Mario finished his Compari with a lip smack. “Fitting end for a bad outfit over six decades from Dallas to Chicago to Vegas. I love it when the legal system screws itself royally. Benny Binion was dumb not to have a bigger family. My nephews would never try to off me for my money, because there are too many of them. They can watch each other.”
“They’re also savvy businessmen who can make their own money, unlike what you say of the Binion clan.”
Aldo came over and clapped Matt on the shoulders, raising him from the sinkhole of the potty chair at the same time. “Thanks for the great reference, Uncle, but I think our time has passed.”
A woman in hospital scrubs covered in tiny penguins had materialized like a magician’s assistant to take the still full Compari glass from Uncle Mario’s hand.
Matt started to bid the old guy farewell when he realized Macho Mario Fontana was in lullaby land.
20
Intervention Convention
Aldo had reluctantly left Matt at his car in the Gangsters limo lot.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at, but it’s getting at you, my man,” Aldo had said in parting. “Time for a time out, maybe. I got some roles to play in your wedding, dude, and I don’t want to lose the opportunity.”
Matt bit his lip as hard as he thought driving home to the Circle Ritz. He turned in the parking lot on autopilot, surprised to find a black Chrysler speeding after him and cutting him off from turning fully into a parking space.
In the next moment a white SUV squealed around the corner to hem in both vehicles.
When a silent black Tesla followed, Matt got out of the Jaguar where he’d stopped it.
Frank Bucek got out of the Chrysler. Molina and Detective Morrie Alch jumped out of the SUV to join him.
“What’s this?” Matt asked. “I’m being arrested?”
“You ought to be.” Molina, dressed in a khaki pant suit with a badge gleaming on her belt, strode up to him. “Frank? Do you want to do this or should I?”
Behind them, Aldo and his rumpled ice cream suit lurked behind the authorities, shrugging.
“We were tailed,” Aldo admitted. “It’s been such a long time since any cops wanted to do so, I didn’t look. Sorry. They caught up with me after you left Gangsters.”
“I can’t drive where I want?” Matt was stunned. “You’ve been having me followed, even Rafi that time?”
Molina smiled. “I wouldn’t send a civilian on an assignment without having him checked from time to time. And you stumbled into some interesting criminals. We like where you drive. It’s been very instructive, but now it’s time for an ‘intervention’, as you might say.”
“You are throwing that at me?” Matt was furious.
Frank stepped between him and Molina. “Matt, you are in over your head. It’s not your fault. You should know even the ATF is involved as well as the locals and the FBI. It has an interest in any weapons at large in this country. The FBI put me in Las Vegas because of what you’re tiptoeing around the edges of. You have no right to risk yourself like this when you’ve found the woman you love. If one of my sons—and mine are still pre-teens, thank God—was doing what you’ve been doing, I’d have been so proud I’d cry and then I’d confine him to home for a month.
“You’ve bulled your way into a crime of the century. But you’ve got to give it up. You can’t go solo on this. You can’t risk everyone around you. You’ve got to let us pros take the reins.”
Matt stood still. In one way, he was relieved to shrug the suspicions and conclusions he’d been carrying off his back like a hiking pack. In another sense, he owned what he’d found out. He had earned his own conclusion.
Molina came around Bucek to face him. “Sometimes you’ve just got to let the past slide away. Sometimes you’ve got to let someone else show you the way. Isn’t that right?”
Matt looked up at the Circle Ritz, at the people who lived there who needed to be safe from intruders and old crimes coming home to roost.
He nodded.
Molina looked over her shoulder at Detective Alch, who was already holding up some color computer printouts. She slammed the flimsy pages atop the Jaguar roof. “You know this man?”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “Chuck Effinger. My…half-brother. My God.” He paged through the three sheets. “What happened to him?”
“Nothing good. He has a long minor-crime rap sheet, but in this case, he’s the assault victim.”
“What did they use on his arms?”
“Not sure. Hydrochloric acid. Sander. Blowtorch. They wanted him to talk and we’re sure he did. But not to us. He’d see us in Hell first.”
She looked into his shocked eyes. “I’m sorry. You n
eed to know this is serious. You need to know we’re going to get these guys and are working on it even now, and you can stay away from these crooks and go and have your happy wedding, with Aldo and all the king’s men on security.”
She lowered her voice so only he could hear. “I’m sorry to blazes I referred you to such a compromised source. I’m putting security details on the Circle Ritz, the church, and the Crystal Phoenix. Nothing of this should touch you now. Okay?”
Matt nodded, still dazed. “Okay, Lieutenant. I did my job for you and I trust you to do your job for me. And mine.”
“I promise to get you and yours safely to the wedding on time.”
21
Midnight Louie’s Dream Wedding
Many people joke about “wedlock”. I suppose that is because the bride and bridegroom vow to be ever faithful and forego any romps of a romantic nature with someone else forever and ever.
Not a problem in the case of Mr. Matt, who is a proven celibate. That word is not to be confused with the ceremony’s celebrant, who is Father Hernandez and also one of these professional celibates.
But neither man was kidnapped and conveyed to the bottom of the altar steps of Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in a zebra-striped carrier!
(Although I understand that in olden days some brides were taken to the ceremony by force, hence the large number of groomsmen in weddings.) In our case, Fontana brothers.
I am royally annoyed by being confined, carried away, and treated like some human infant. Why? Am I not cooperative beyond all the usual behavior of my kind?
Do I not wear—again, when I was forewarned to fight it with every nail sheath?—the formal white tie around my neck. (On a breakaway band, so I cannot strangle if I get excited and try to run.) Please. Give me some credit. I know it is my job now to pose next to Mr. Matt’s gray pant leg, immobile as a Buckingham Palace guard, during the interminable mumblings of the prayers and sermons and vows, and not move a muscle. I must admit I do have the impressive head of thick black fur for the job, if not the stature.
Cat in an Alphabet Endgame: A Midnight Louie Mystery (The Midnight Louie Mysteries Book 28) Page 17