“Can I buy you a drink, Alex?”
“Maybe if you tell me your name.”
“Chuckie.”
Alex laughs. “Bullshit. You just made that up.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Well, okay, Maybe Chuckie,” Alex says, “I guess you can buy me a dirty martini.”
Thirty minutes later they’re out in the alley, Sal with his back to the wall and his fly open, Alex on his knees, sucking him off.
Sal wraps his fingers in Alex’s thick hair.
This is the last place in the world he should be, but it feels so good and the boy is beautiful.
Danny cradles Ian in his arms and rocks him gently back and forth, softly singing “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”
They’ve had a hard time getting him down tonight. Terri tried everything, bundling him up tighter because maybe he was cold, loosening the blankets because maybe he was too hot, rocking him in his chair, laying him down on the floor in front of the television, but the boy kept crying and squirming and kicking.
Even the usually reliable “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” failed, which Ian usually falls asleep to before Willie gets through the first chorus. Not tonight, and Danny said he’d take over so the exhausted Terri could go in and take a long, hot shower.
Danny hits replay on the song for about the thirty-seventh time and starts singing again and rocking and finally feels Ian get heavy, and his breathing gets soft and rhythmic, and Danny just enjoys holding his child for a little while before he carries him into the bedroom and oh-so-gently sets him down in the crib and tiptoes out.
Terri is just out of the shower. Body and hair both wrapped in towels.
With this look on her face.
Stricken.
“What?” Danny asks.
“I felt something,” she says, “in my breast.”
The woman is both buxom and statuesque. In her feathered headdress, she moves gracefully across the lawn like a beautiful, exotic bird.
Madeleine watches her.
All the models are dressed in Manny Maniscalco’s most iconic creations. Madeleine made sure that the showgirls wearing Manny’s greatest designs at the party following his funeral possessed the bodies to show them off at their best.
Some people in the greater Las Vegas community, the serious business types less associated with the Strip, think it vulgar and grotesque, this fete thrown on the grounds of his estate, with the scantily clad chorus girls wandering around displaying themselves. Especially so as it was the idea of a woman who, when they were married, regularly cuckolded her late ex-husband.
Madeleine doesn’t care what they think.
She knew that Manny, a deeply ugly man, loved above all things to surround himself with beauty, especially of the feminine kind.
So she wanted to give him this.
Madeleine had moved back to the estate when she found out that he was terminally ill. They’d stayed in touch over the years, on the phone or for the occasional dinner, and at one of the latter she saw that he was obviously sick and pried it out of him. When, weeks later, the doctors told him there was nothing more they could do, and Manny wanted to die at home instead of in the hospital, she simply moved in to take charge of his care.
She brought in round-the-clock nurses to administer medication and to wash him, but she sat with him most of the time, kept him company through the long nights, wiped his forehead, held his hand.
They talked and laughed about the old days, the trips they took, the dinners they had, the shows they saw, the characters they knew.
When he died, it was Madeleine who closed his eyes.
She went off and cried, then pulled it together and started in on the business of planning his funeral and this elaborate send-off.
Everyone who is anyone is there, for Manny was highly regarded and deeply beloved in all of Las Vegas’s interlocking circles. The mayor, the congressman, businesspeople, show people, casino types, and wiseguys stand chatting on the lawn, nibbling canapés, sipping fine wines and sharing stories about Manny.
And whispering about Madeleine, for the news about Manny’s will is already grist for the Vegas rumor mill, and the gossip is that she moved in on him during his last days to charm him in his weakened state, to bring in a lawyer and, in her presence, change his will.
It isn’t true.
No one was more shocked than Madeleine when the lawyer revealed that Manny had left her everything—the majority shares of Maniscalco Manufacturing, tens of millions in stocks and bonds, real estate holdings, more millions in cash. Everything is hers now—the estate, the mansion, the horses, the stables, the tennis courts, the pool.