Charlie Opera (3 page)

“The last time you told me,” Charlie said. “That was fair. I think you should tell me now if there is something going on.”

They were sitting alongside each other in the sports book area. Betting at the sports book had already ended for the day a few hours earlier. Charlie had refused to talk in their room. He had told his wife that he felt caged in upstairs. He looked around the expanse of the betting parlor as he waited for her response.

“There’s nothing going on,” Lisa lied. “There’s nothing to tell.”

Charlie sipped at his third gin and tonic. They had been sitting there for half an hour. Lisa had started with white wine. Now she was drinking Diet Coke.

“Well, then, what is it?” he asked. “Do you just hate me? Do you want to kill me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What gives with the brush this afternoon? You damn near took my head off, Lisa.”

“I apologized for that.”

“Jeez, well then, I guess I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

“You know what I mean. I was wrong. I’m sorry. There, I said it again.”

“What the hell brought it on? And what about the dam bursting when I walked in the room? I bought you a present, for Christ sakes.”

Lisa turned away from him. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been edgy. I think we have problems we can’t solve right now.” She looked around herself. “Not here, anyway. Not in Las Vegas.”

“Oh, well, what the hell, then. Next time use a tire iron. We’ll solve our problems in an emergency room.”

“I’m through saying I’m sorry, Charlie.”

“Right. Of course you are.”

He was frustrated. It was obvious Lisa was holding something back. He knew he was drunk, but he wanted her to tell him the truth. He finished his third gin and tonic. He set the glass on a ledge alongside his chair and craned his neck to look for a waitress.

“I thought Las Vegas would be good for us,” he said.

“So you could walk,” Lisa said, with a touch of sarcasm in her voice.

Charlie ignored her.

“Well?” she said.

“I thought we’d have things to occupy us,” he said. “I like to walk. You used to like to walk. Now you like to shop. There’s plenty of both to go around. I thought we wouldn’t be on top of each other here. I made a mistake.”

Lisa huffed.

He thought about the affair she had been involved in two years earlier. She had met another lawyer on the West Coast during a corporate case they were involved in together. They met secretly for more than three months before she finally confessed to Charlie.

“Have you talked to John lately?” he asked.

“Let’s not go there, okay?”

He downed his drink. “I guess that’s an answer.”

“You’re drunk,” Lisa said. “I won’t talk to you while you’re drinking.”

“Then I’ll make it easier for you,” Charlie said. He spotted a waitress near a row of slot machines to his right. He called to her.

“I’m not going to watch this all night,” Lisa said. “You getting drunk.” She stood up from her chair.

Charlie looked his wife up and down. She was still a beautiful woman. She had recently turned forty years old, but there was no way of guessing her age. At 5-foot-4, 108 pounds, she was both lean and muscular. A month ago she had changed her hair color from auburn back to her original color, brunette. She was wearing her hair short again, instead of the long cut Charlie preferred. In the tight black slacks she was wearing, Charlie saw Lisa for the knockout his wife truly was.

Of course she is having an affair, he was thinking.

“Waitress!” he yelled.

A chubby woman in a much too tight waitress outfit stopped to write his order.

“I think you’ve had enough,” Lisa said.

Charlie lit a cigarette. “I think maybe we both have,” he told his wife.

Early the next morning, Charlie woke up in a ditch behind a construction site. A big man wearing a construction helmet was holding a towel spotted with blood.

“You all right?” the big man asked.

Charlie had trouble sitting up. His body was sore. His hands felt bruised.

“Where am I?”

“The Palermo,” the big man said. He was waving somebody over to them. “Bring it over here!”

Charlie strained to see through the glare of the sun. Flashing lights made him dizzy.

“You’re cut pretty bad there, mister,” another man said. “Looks like you were mugged.”

Charlie immediately checked for his wallet. The fingers of his right hand hurt from trying to jam them inside his front pants pocket.

“I think one of those fingers is broke,” the big man said. “Maybe another one. Looks like you still have your wallet, though.”

At Valley Hospital, Charlie learned the damage. He had a slight concussion. Two of the fingers on his left hand were severely bruised. His nose was fractured. Eight stitches were required to sew a cut along his hairline behind his right ear. He had a severely bruised rib on his right side and bruises to his chest, shoulders, and back. When he saw himself in the small mirror on the back of a door, Charlie saw that both his eyes had turned black and his upper lip was swollen. A small gauze bandage covered the stitches behind his right ear. The knuckles on both his hands also were bruised.

An emergency room doctor was asking him questions.

“Do you want to fill out a police report?”

Charlie shook his head. “No.”

“Do you know who did this to you?”

“No.”

“Is there someone here with you I should contact?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. There’s no one.”

“What about back home? Is there someone we should contact back in New York?”

Charlie shook his head again. “No,” he said. “Thank you.”

He was still trying to piece together what had happened the night before. He had spent a lot of time at one of the casino bars playing dollar slot poker while he drank gin and tonics. He remembered that he was pretty drunk. He had won a small jackpot.

Four aces, he remembered. He had hit a four-aces bonus polka machine for five hundred dollars.

He remembered making friends and singing with people at the bar. He remembered some guy and his girlfriend. They wore cowboy hats. They sang something country-western.

Charlie also had made friends with the barmaid, Samantha Nicole, or something like Nicole. She was a pretty redhead with freckles and a bright smile. He couldn’t remember where the barmaid had said she was originally from, but she also had spoken with an accent.

He wasn’t sure what time he had left the bar, but he knew it was pretty late. He had wanted to get some air before heading back upstairs to his room. He knew Lisa was still pissed at him for being drunk. He also remembered never going back to the room. He remembered drinking again instead.

When he finally left the casino bar, Charlie had walked across Las Vegas Boulevard to watch the Pirate Show up close at the Treasure Island Hotel. He was standing in the middle of a huge crowd of spectators. A man had befriended him there, a short, bald man.

The two of them had stood there watching the show, making small talk. The short man was from Chicago, out to Las Vegas on business, he had said. He was with the construction company building the new hotel, the Palermo. Charlie told the short man how he had watched some of the cranes working through the night from his room at Harrah’s.

“We have them working twenty-four hours a day out here,” the short man had said. “Or they’d never be built in time. The money they spend on these things, it’s important they can open their doors to pay for themselves.”

Charlie had become fascinated with what the short man knew about the casino construction business. How many people it took to build one, how many dollars it cost for the electric, plumbing, carpets, glass, neon. Then Charlie told the short man about the window cleaning business he had recently sold. He was curious about how much money window cleaners were making in Las Vegas. He had asked how much a window cleaning contract for a place as big as the Palermo was worth.

The short man said he would find out and took Charlie to the Palermo model. It was closed, but the short man had keys with him. They did a walk-through together, the short man quoting facts about the costs of the room as he pointed at light fixtures and furniture. Charlie remembered shaking his head in amazement.

Then the short man walked Charlie out back behind the model. It was dark there. The last thing Charlie remembered was another man standing in front of him with a pipe. The man had said something Charlie couldn’t remember. Then Charlie felt the air being knocked from his solar plexus. He felt kicks and punches. Everything went black.

It was nearly ten-thirty in the morning before he was released from the hospital. He took a taxi back to Harrah’s, but Charlie didn’t go straight up to his room. He walked again instead. He took the route past the construction site where he was assaulted the night before. Two uniformed guards stood watch at the front gates as construction trucks lined up to enter the site. The guards checked each driver for identification.

Charlie stopped at the Palermo model to look for the short man who had befriended him the night before. It bothered him that he was mugged but not robbed. It didn’t make sense. He considered describing the short man to the people working at the Palermo model but decided against it.

He was getting too many looks from passersby to interrogate anyone. When he saw himself in the reflection of a mirror hanging outside the model bathroom, Charlie was reminded that his head and hands were bandaged.

When he finally returned to his hotel room, it was a little after one o’clock in the afternoon. Lisa was gone. He remembered denying there was anyone with him to the doctors at the hospital when he was asked if there was someone they should contact. He remembered denying there was anyone at all.

He wondered then if it had been wishful thinking on his part that there was no one to contact. He looked around the room and noticed something was strange. He crossed the room to the windows then turned around to look the room over again. The room had been tidied up by the housecleaning service, but something seemed out of order.

He lit a cigarette from a pack on the small table and immediately realized what was different. His wife wasn’t just out someplace getting sun or shopping or working out. His wife was gone.

It was then that he spotted the note she had left him on his nightstand.

“I can’t believe I’m sitting here,” Vincent Lano said. He lit a Marlboro cigarette, coughed violently after inhaling, and rubbed his eyes to keep them from tearing.

“You think maybe it’s time you quit?” Joey Francone asked. He was nearly half Lano’s age at twenty-five. He was dressed in skintight black pants, a black T-shirt, and black shoes. His huge arms bulged under his tight shirt.

They were parked at the far end of a minimall lot. Lano had moved the rented Ford Taurus under the shade of a row of trees. It was 110 degrees in the afternoon sun.

“How long they been in there?” Lano asked.

Francone glanced at his gold Rolex. “A long time.”

Lano stretched his neck. “Six fuckin’ hours in a plane and now another six hours in a car,” he said. “And then he’s flyin’ out here. For what?”

“He lost face in front of his crew,” Francone said.

“Because he slapped some broad? Guess what? He should’ve kept his hands in his pockets.”

Francone showed disgust at the comment. “First of all, the guy japped him, okay? Second, the guy broke his jaw. In front of people. He’s gotta make it right.”

Lano turned away from Francone to spit phlegm. “It’s offensive is what it is,” he said. “What it’s become.”

Francone craned his neck to see across the street. He glanced down at his watch. “Almost seven hours now,” he said.

Across the street from the minimall was the motel the two men were watching. They were waiting for a woman to leave the motel. Then they would assault the woman and take one of her front teeth. It was what their boss wanted.

It was also a job that upset Lano. He had never hit a woman in his life. “I guess the joke’s on me,” he said as he took another drag on his cigarette and immediately coughed up more phlegm.

Lano was fifty-two years old and dying from throat cancer. He was diagnosed with the fatal disease shortly before he left New York, but Lano never shared the information. After thirty-four years in the rackets, the aging mobster didn’t want anyone to know.

He was a made member of the Vignieri crime family of New York for more than twenty years. He had made his bones the old-fashioned way, killing his first man on orders by his twenty-first birthday. He had killed three more by his thirtieth birthday.

Now, so many years down the road, confronted by a death he couldn’t avoid, Lano was having second thoughts about the life he had chosen.

Francone, the young wannabe seated next to him in the front of the rented Ford Taurus, waved at the secondhand cigarette smoke. Francone was a close friend of Nicholas Cuccia, another young punk, who had recently become Lano’s new boss. Francone was a neat freak, nonsmoker, bodybuilder, with maybe five assaults, Lano guessed, to his entire mob résumé.

Maybe the kid had a hit under his belt. Lano doubted it.

Too many guys like Francone were next in line to become made men when the mob books opened again. It bothered Lano that punks like the one seated next to him would soon be his equal.

“Least you could do is take a walk with those things,” Francone told Lano. “Gimme a break a few minutes. I’m suffocatin’ over here.”

Francone didn’t like Lano or all of the bitching and moaning he did. He, too, had taken the long red-eye flight from New York to Las Vegas the night before last. He, too, had been sitting in the car all fucking day. To top it off, he was missing back-to-back workouts while the old bastard sitting next to him slowly killed the two of them with his never-ending chain-smoking.

“Fuckin’ kids,” Lano said. He let the driver’s side window all the way down.

Francone shook his head. It was ninety-five degrees in the shade. He had two choices: he could choke to death on cigarette smoke, or he could sweat to death from the heat. He cracked the rear windows to let some more of the smoke escape.