Private Entrance (The Butterfly Trilogy) (9 page)

     "Then how do you know you're half-Italian?" Uri Edelstein, his best friend, had once asked.

     "'Cause I can
feel
it," Fallon had replied. And it was true. Besides, in those days, in 1946 when Eastern mobs were moving in and taking over Vegas, the big juices were all wops. And since his mother wouldn't talk about it, it only stood to reason she was ashamed because she'd gotten into bed with a gangster.

     Michael didn't like doing
all
the work, so he pulled out of the big-hipped seamstress and switched places with her, lying on his back so she could climb on top and ride him, giving him a good view of her jiggling tits.

     Not knowing who his father was hadn't really bothered Fallon because he'd drifted into a life of crime himself, doing jobs for the local mob. But then Francesca was born. That was when Fallon's life did a complete turn around and he decided to go straight. He had worked hard all the years since, to create his sterling image. Michael Fallon was now a respectable businessman, serving on the boards of several charities, a deacon in his church, but his crowning achievement was going to take place the coming
Saturday, at the wedding that was going to grant him admission at last into the oldest, richest echelons of Nevada.

     He had to make sure there were no loose ends.

     It was not only his father's identity he was worried about, but his own underworld activities when he was young and fancied himself a Vegas high-roller, working any scheme he could that made money, even driving kidnapped babies across state lines.

     "Oh Mr. Fallon!" the jiggly seamstress cried.

     Time to end this. Clamping his hands on her hips, he lifted her off his cock and pulled her head down, saying, "Suck it." His mind was on other things now. The important phone call he was expecting. Michael tangled his fingers in her hair as he came in her mouth, then he slipped out from under her and said, "Better get back to work, doll." There were still yards of white lace to hem.

     He dressed quickly but paused to retrieve his money clip and peel off a hundred-dollar bill. "Here you go, sweetheart," he said, giving it to the seamstress, adding a wink and a smile.

     On the way out, he stopped at the wedding veil hanging by the door. Made of hand-beaded imported Italian lace, it was so heavy it was going to require three little flower girls to carry it.

     Michael trembled to touch it, remembering the night Francesca was born, the night his life turned around. His beautiful Gayane, lying dead on bloody sheets, the helpless infant in his arms. Something had flipped in Fallon that fateful night as he had held the tender little bundle in his arms, driving him to take his first step in cleaning up his life.

     He had found Karl Bakersfelt at home, making arrangements to pick up three illegally obtained babies.

     Michael had walked in holding out a cigar, that night years ago. "Congratulate me, I'm a daddy."

     "Hey," Bakersfelt said, accepting the fine Havana. He had heard Fallon's wife, Gayane Simonian, was knocked up. He waited. This meeting had to do with more than a cigar. Michael had an odd look about him, his manner was strange.

     Then it came: "Gayane is dead. She gave her life delivering my daughter."

     "Oh, I'm sorry about that," said Karl Bakersfelt who had purchased more babies than he could count, and never knew the mothers, whether they were alive or dead, and he didn't care.

     Michael had got a faraway look in his eye which, under other circumstances, would have alarmed Bakersfelt. But he understood where it came from. Man's wife dying like that. "She screamed, Karl. And there was so much blood. The doctor said he could save only one—my wife or the baby. I had to choose. What could I do?"

     "You chose the baby," Bakersfelt said unnecessarily, wondering why Michael had come, wishing he would get to the point because Karl had people waiting for infants.

     "I'm leaving the life, Karl," Michael said at last. "I'm making a clean break. I held that little creature in my arms and my heart melted like chocolate on a Vegas sidewalk in August. I vowed there and then to go straight."

     Karl grinned and reached for his lighter. "Fatherhood'll do that to ya. Okay, I won't call you no more. I'll find another hand-over guy."

     "The thing is," Fallon said cautiously, still unclear on all the nuts and bolts of his major life-changing decision. "I have to ask myself: can I trust old friends never to talk about the past?"

     The gold lighter froze in Bakersfelt's hand. "You can trust me, Michael."

     "Well, you see. I did some work for Joey Franchimoni, coupla hits, and I don't think Joey would keep quiet, especially as the Feds are pressuring him to sell his casino and leave town. Joey's the sort who might talk to get himself a break."

     "Yeah," Karl said, nodding. Joey the Nose, so named on account of he didn't have one, was known for his loose tongue.

     "So I visited him an hour ago and slipped him the salt," Fallon said, meaning he stuffed bichloride-of-mercury tablets down Joey's throat—a metallic poison favored by the Mob.

     "I ain't no stoolie," Bakersfelt said. "You can count on me."

     "Good, I just wanted to have your word on that. I'm a father now, gotta be respectable. No more ties with the old gang. No more hits or dirty stuff. My kid grows up, I can't be always worrying my past is going to come out. Know what I mean?"

     Bakersfelt nodded, he knew what Fallon meant, and he thumbed the gold lighter and produced flame, touching it to his fine Havana cigar. The explosion took away half his face, spattering his desk with blood and bone and black powder.

     "
Now
I have your guarantee," Fallon said to the dead man. Then he went around the house with a can of lighter fluid, squirting extra hard into the file cabinets that held records of blackmarket flesh peddling.

     It only took one match. The house went up like the rotted piece of tinder it was and cinders flew to the sky carrying the names of young mothers, adoptive parents, cities of birth, dates, routes driven, cash amounts—leaving no record of Bakersfelt's years of black-market baby trafficking, especially Michael Fallon's involvement in it.

     That was years ago and Fallon had believed he was safe. But recently he learned there were still a few loose ends that could connect him to Bakers-felt and the baby business.

     Leaving the seamstress to her work, Fallon made his way upstairs to the penthouse where he stripped off his clothes and stepped into the spacious marble shower. As he lathered his athletic body, Fallon thought about those days back in the late sixties, early seventies, when he ran blackmarket babies across the Western states. It was big money in those days, and easy. Just a driver and a nursemaid, picking up kids from other drivers—you never knew where they came from, mostly they were stolen, though—and dropping them off at their new families. All so damned illegal that there was no way to trace any of it, so Mike Fallon had rested easy with the thought that his own involvement in the operation would never be uncovered.

     And yet it had. By a certain nosy bitch named Abby Tyler who owned a resort outside of Palm Springs.

     Turning off the shower and wrapping himself in a robe, Fallon went to the window that overlooked Las Vegas. In the distance, buildings and grass met the edge of a vast ochre sea: the desert.

     Michael Fallon hated the desert because it reminded him of infinity. It just went on and on with no beginning, no ending, no purpose, no point. The desert gave him the creeps because there was no way of knowing or understanding it, no way of getting along with it, and no way of beating
it because the desert, like the house, always won. Therefore he embraced the concrete and glass and neon and cheap carpeting of the casino hotels, sucked in the bracing air-conditioning the way mountain climbers inhaled alpine air, and reveled in the hot bright lights the way most people worshiped the sun.

     He poured himself a scotch and wondered if the fucking phone would ever ring.

     Karl Bakersfelt had been only the first. Michael had then drawn up a list of people who knew too much and had gone about systematically silencing them. All these years later, with the wedding just days away, he was down to five on the list.

     The first involved a certain Nevada newspaper editor. The day after Fallon, at the time twenty-five years old, had married Gayane Simonian, the man had written: "Gregory Simonian, considered to be the founder of the famous Strip, has long been held in esteem for his refusal to do business with gangsters. The Wagon Wheel is considered the one casino not tied to 'outside' interests. But yesterday's wedding indicates a changing wind for Mr. Simonian, who now counts Michael Fallon as his son-in-law."

     Fallon and his gunmen broke into the editor's home in the middle of the night and ordered him and his wife out of bed. Fallon had the editor tied to a chair, hands and feet, and when the man said, "What are you going to do?" Fallon had quipped, "I'm going to shoot you, of course. It's what
gangsters
do, isn't it?"

     Fallon had then made the wife take off her nightgown and kneel naked before him. While one of his goons held a gun to the editor's head, Fallon had unzipped his pants, pulled out his erect member and said to the kneeling wife, "Kiss it."

     When she refused, he said, "You only get one more chance. Then my friend there pulls the trigger."

     The terrified woman did as told, and as soon as her lips met turgid flesh, a blinding flash filled the room. Quickly restoring himself and zipping up his pants, Fallon gestured to the camera in Uri Edelstein's hands. Then he shook a threatening finger in the editor's face and said, "You say one more word about me in that filthy rag of yours and this picture is plastered all over
the fuckin' United States." On his way out, he had added with a cocky smile, "I told you I was going to shoot you."

     It wasn't the editor Fallon worried about now—that man had long since gone to his reward—but the henchman who had held the gun to the editor's head, one of Fallon's old goons. He was still alive somewhere in the United States and Fallon was worried that if he read about the upcoming wedding, he might get it into his mind to try a little blackmail.

     The second loose end went back to a day back in '72. A job in the desert, Rocco Guzman, buried up to his neck in sand.

     A pair of vultures, perched on a nearby mesquite bush, had watched in anticipation while another variety of vulture—in trousers and overcoats and hats—stood in a circle around the hapless Guzman. There wasn't another soul for miles. Across the desert, barely visible in the distance, were the towers of Las Vegas, adult playground of the Western world, affectionately known as Sin City.

     But those men had not been there for fun. Despite the golf clubs in their hands.

     "Where's the money, Rocco?" Michael Fallon had asked. It was before Francesca was born, back when he still worked for the Syndicate and hadn't yet started cleaning up his act.

     The man in the ground, his face growing purple, could barely talk, the sand constricted his rib cage and choked his throat. They had done a good job of burying him. Having his hands and feet bound in electrical tape had helped. He gasped something out.

     Fallon bent over. "What was that, Rocco?"

     Rocco, a flat-nosed hoodlum, couldn't talk. While the vultures watched.

     Michael Fallon, in long black cashmere coat and old fashioned wide-brimmed fedora on his head—an admitted affectation—wasn't really expecting a response from his erstwhile henchman. The money Rocco had stolen had been recovered. Fallon had brought him here to teach a lesson to the others. You work for Michael Fallon—whether it was drugs, prostitution, extortion, racketeering—you'd better be honest.

     Giving his men the signal, he had turned and headed back to one of the black sedans parked across the dunes. The golf clubs made cracking and
thudding sounds and Rocco managed enough breath to scream a few times before he was silent. Fallon wasn't worried about the body being found. The vultures on the mesquite bush would take care of that.

     But now, on this Monday afternoon as he got ready to make his walkthrough in the casino downstairs, he was worried about those men. Two had died of natural causes, one had gotten killed in a gang hit, leaving two who could still talk. Fallon had ordered them taken care of.

     The main chink in his armor, however, was still his mother, living in a Miami nursing home. No matter how much Michael had begged, pleaded, cajoled or threatened, his mother would not talk about his father. Wouldn't reveal his name. But if she were to do so now...

     The phone rang at last. Private line. "Fallon here." The news was good. All three men had been taken care of. That left just two people who could still ruin everything between now and the wedding.

     His mother. And Abby Tyler.

Y
OU NEED FINGERPRINTS
, J
ACK," HIS FRIEND IN FORENSICS HAD
said. "Buy Tyler a drink. Have dinner with her. When she isn't looking, take the glass. Without prints there's not much we can do." Jack returned to his room to check the fax machine, see if there was any new information on Abby Tyler. But there was still nothing from his contact at Hollywood Station.