“Right then we were working the Moulin Rouge, which was the only room left on the Strip that wasn’t using rock. I could see it wouldn’t last—I learned about squeeze plays the first time I got jumped in an alley by five kids bigger than me. Man, I figured here I was making only a hundred a week but next month I could be starving to death.” He uttered a B-flat grunt of sour laughter and threw up his arms, gesturing. His arms fell to his sides and he said gloomily, “So one night Sal Aiello, he owns the Moulin Rouge, he comes to my door selling Mafia cookies.”

He looked at me to see what effect that had. “I’m not dense,” he said defiantly. “Look, Aiello offered me a chance to write my own ticket, and if I turned it down where was I supposed to go? I wasn’t about to go back to the bottom—I been there, it’s too crowded. So I gave my boys their closing notice. That’s one thing you learn in that business—how to get off.”

I said, “So then Aiello gave you a job. Doing what?”

“Bagman,” he said without hesitation. “I was clean, no criminal record. I was ideal—the cops wouldn’t shake down a guy like me at embarrassing times like when I’m carrying a satchel full of payoff money for the monthly sheet of potbelly politicians.”

“Who’d the money go to?”

He looked at me from under his thin eyebrows. “I don’t think that’s included in the price of your ticket.”

“All right,” I said, saving it for later. “Go ahead.”

“Okay, I’m on the payroll and then something happens that gets me sore at Aiello.” He squinted at me as if to divine how much I knew about that.

I decided it would help to tell him. “I know about Aiello and Joanne.”

“Christ. Everybody alive and his idiot half-brother seems to know about that. Hell, I guess I should have kept it to myself, but she was my wife. The bastard didn’t think I’d lift a finger. He thought I was too scared. He was right. Christ, that crazy Jo goes and shacks up with him just for kicks I guess because she didn’t know any better, and what do I do about it? Nothing. Oh, I belted Jo a few good ones, but I didn’t go near Aiello. If I had, I’d have ended up part of the pavement on a road-construction job. Like he did. But the trouble with me is, I didn’t know enough to keep my mouth shut. I got pissed off—hell, who wouldn’t?—and I loaded up with too much to drink one night and I started beefing in a bar about that bastard Aiello. I didn’t spell anything out, just called him some names, but Pete DeAngelo hears the tail end of it. That’s my luck. So Pete hears me beefing and he walks me outside and taps me around a little. Maybe I had that coming. It taught me my lesson. But right after that I find a couple cops waiting at my house with a warrant and a half a kilo of uncut heroin they claim they found taped inside my toilet tank. It was a railroad—you never saw anything that raw. I was clean, man, I never in my life messed with narcotics.”

“Who planted it? The cops?”

“No. Aiello or DeAngelo, one of them had it done. Then they phoned in an anonymous tip to the cops. They made sure Joanne was out of town that week so it wouldn’t get pinned on her—they wanted her around here handy where they could keep pins stuck in her.”

He turned palms up and looked at me. “And you ask me why I think they’re after me. I can’t pretend I didn’t have a beef against Aiello—it gives me a nice neat motive to go after him the minute I get out of jail, right? Good old Aiello. When I got arrested he was as nice and fatherly as you could ask. Comes to the visiting room and tells me it’s all for my own good, the organization likes to keep the hired help in line and once in a while it calls for teaching a little lesson. I’m the student. He gets me an organization mouthpiece and the guy pleads me guilty, which I was in no position to argue. I walk into Superior Court and the judge hands me seven to ten years, and then Aiello tells me the boys don’t hold any hard feelings, it’s just this is the way things get handled when you step out of line. He promises me there’ll be a good job waiting for me when I get out, and he gives me his word on his mother’s grave nobody’s going to touch Joanne while I’m away. Of course that’s to keep me from getting so unhappy I might decide to sing to the cops. Joanne’s their hostage to make sure I don’t talk right? But I figured Aiello meant what he said about treating me square when I got out—which is why I went up there last night.”

Maybe he thought he detected ironic disbelief in my face; he said angrily, “Hell, what else could I do?”

“You tell me.”

“If I’d turned state’s evidence they might have gone for Joanne or they might have gone for me—they can find a way to slip a hit man into a prison cell if they want to. Either one of us could’ve ended up with our heads in a basket. Okay, so I built up a reputation for keeping my mouth shut, but what choice did I have? It didn’t mean I was happy, I admit—if I was happy I wouldn’t be here talking to you like this. But goddamn it, I’ve seen them put the fix on when they wanted to. Tony Senna got arrested a few years ago and he’s got a record as long as your arm, but they bribed the Records Division to supply the court with a clean record sheet for the trial, and he got off with a suspended sentence as a first offender. First offender my ass. Then there was a bookie they caught chiseling on the receipts a few years back, so two torpedoes beat his head in with tire irons. Some cop caught them both red-handed, but the fix goes in and when the cop gets on the stand he testifies he saw the bookie fall on his head. They could have bought me the same kind of fix, but hell, they framed me in the first place, why should they?”

He was lying back now, sprawling, staring at the high sepulchral ceiling. “Five years is a long time when you break it up into hours, Crane. The only thing that keeps you going is knowing you’re going to get out. But I’m out twenty-four hours and already they’re writing up a contract on me. Look, I don’t want to go out in a blaze of glory—I don’t want to go out at all. That’s why I had to talk to you.”

“All right,” I said. “You’re talking. Where does it get us?”

“I ain’t finished,” he said. “I got us up to yesterday so let’s finish it.”

I nodded patiently.

“A guy owes me some bucks, see? Sal Aiello. He promised me a job and some bucks to get started again when I got out, and like I told you, I believed him. Why should he lie to me? So I been a good boy, I got my parole and I took the bus back here and I cruised around downtown yesterday afternoon looking for somebody that could give me a ride out to Aiello’s house. They don’t use buses in his neighborhood.

“Okay, I ran into Tony Senna, he’s cruising the taco district picking up shylock money and numbers payoffs. Right out in bare-ass daylight—man, you know the fix is in with the cops down there.”

“And?”

“I chased around with Tony, said hello to some of the guys, and finally he finished his rounds and DeAngelo picks us up in his Mercedes. Every time DeAngelo whispers at me I get the feeling he’s trying to sell me a used car, but I needed the ride out to Aiello’s and that was where they were headed. There was some small talk like how did I like stir and who’d I get to know up there. DeAngelo’s put on a little weight and wearing a fancy Sy Devore-type suit looking like a goddamn movie star and I could see everybody was doing fine while I was away. There’s a lot of talk about getting ready to legalize gambling. Finally we get out to Aiello’s place—big house, pool, panoramic vista, the works. About a mile north of Madonna’s place. It was dark by the time we got out there. DeAngelo goes right out to the pool and strips down and starts splashing around, striking poses for a chick Aiello’s got decorating the pool—you know Aiello, he’s always had a harem problem.”

He paused to marshal his memories, probably wondering how much I really knew about Aiello and Joanne. Aiello had been a relentless womanizer with a broken-down libido who used women and discarded them; sometimes I wondered how much satisfaction such men got from their compulsive conquests.