Charlie Stella - Charlie Opera

“This Anthony Rizzi is coming in when?” Gold asked.

“This morning, later tonight, early tomorrow morning. America West out of Kennedy. An overnight. He changed the flight twice already.”

“What’s that about?”

“Anthony Rizzi. A guy with so much money he got bored and bought his way into the mob as an associate. It doesn’t say it on there, but I spoke to an O.C. guy in New York. They think Rizzi’s coming here to make his bones. Maybe to whack Lano or to be a part of whacking Lano.” Iandolli chuckled. “The thing is, this Lano, the guy they think is getting whacked, was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. His partners in crime don’t know it, but O.C. does. His doctor gave him a few months.”

Gold looked confused. “Maybe they wanna put him out of his misery.”

Iandolli shook his head. “Lano’s a mustache to these kids,” he said. “They’re purging the old mobsters for morons like this Rizzi character, clowns who have nothing better to do with million-dollar businesses besides trying to act like tough guys.”

“So this Rizzi guy isn’t a real mobster then.”

“New York calls him ‘The Crier,’” Iandolli said. “They fucked with him one night, sent one of teir guys to test his balls, man to man. An undercover cop cut him off on a street outside one of his warehouses or some shit. Rizzi cried, he was so scared. Their guy pinned him against his Mercedes, and Rizzi sprouted tears like a fountain. They nicknamed him ‘The Crier.’ Imagine having a mob name like that?”

Gold was still confused. “So what makes them think they’re sending this Rizzi here to whack this other guy?”

“They’re bleeding Rizzi for his business. They get a sucker like this on the line and they make him feel like a gangster until he’s dry. They let him play with the big boys until they don’t need him anymore. Then they cut him loose or whack him. It happens here, too. Happens anywhere there’s a mob and suckers with money and no life. They find these guys like Rizzi and clean them out. New York thinks Cuccia is setting Rizzi up. He comes out to Vegas to supposedly make his bones and they wind up killing two birds with one stone.”

“Lano and Rizzi,” Gold said.

“Sooner or later.”

“This guy Rizzi is worth that much?”

“Ten million or so, what his business is worth,” Iandolli said. “His wife dumped him for another woman. New York thinks he’s trying to be a tough guy ever since. He’s buying his button into the mob, and these guys are more than happy to sell it to him. Ten million to these guys is like owning Microsoft.”

“That’s an expensive button, ten million,” Gold said.

“The money should be the least of his problems,” Iandolli said. “Once they have that, they won’t need him.”

Anthony Rizzi checked in at the registration desk at Caesar’s Palace a few minutes after noon. Now he was exhausted. He was having conflicting feelings the past few nights about his adopted lifestyle. Rizzi needed a drink.

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes as his bags were wheeled on a cart being pulled by a valet. He followed the valet through the casino to a long marble hallway with high-priced stores on either side. He noticed the number of Asian women in the walkways and wondered if he might lure one into his bed before he left Las Vegas.

He left several messages with the front desk at the Bellagio for both Nicholas Cuccia and Joey Francone. He spent the next ten minutes dressing. He spent the following twenty minutes combing his hair. It lay in a perfect left-to-right swirl, covering the large bald spot on the top of his head.

He was a short, fat man with very light skin, puffy cheeks, and dark blue eyes. His mother was German-Irish. His father was Dutch-Italian. He had concocted a long, involved story about his last name. Mostly, he denied his mother’s side of the family and his father’s Dutch mother.

After painstakingly grooming himself, Rizzi spent the next hour on the Cleopatra Barge with a tall Asian prostitute who called herself Niko. He had spotted her and another prostitute, a tall blonde in a red-sequin dress, earlier. Both women had propositioned him as a team, but Rizzi told the blonde he could only handle one at a time today and that he was kind of looking forward to an Asian broad because it had always been a fantasy of his to “eat a noodle.”

The prostitutes had both giggled while they huddled a few seconds before breaking up. The blonde left Rizzi to negotiate with his fantasy date.

“Let’s just say I’m a businessman,” he told the prostitute when she asked what he did for a living.

“What kind of business?” Niko asked. She had a slight Asian accent. She was swirling a plastic straw in her white wine spritzer. She licked at the straw just before Rizzi answered h question.

“Little of this and a little of that,” he told her.

“You sound very mysterious to me,” she said. She sipped her spritzer carefully. She set the glass back down on the napkin as she sat back in her chair.

The cleavage showing from her low-cut blouse caught Rizzi’s eye. “You’re a very beautiful woman,” he told her.

“Sank you. Also very espensive.”

“I’ll bet,” he said as he took a sip of Absolut.

He figured Niko was worth five hundred for the night, but he’d go as high as seven-fifty.

“You ever stay here before?” he asked.

“Overnight? Yes, of course.”

“Do you have a change of clothes?”

“No, silly. That would be your present to me.”

“That depends on where you buy them.”

“Gift store,” she said. “Sweatshirt, T-shirt. I have underwear in my purse.”

Rizzi gave a quick glance at the purse on her lap. “In your purse, huh?” he asked. “What else you got in there?”

“Condoms,” Niko said. “Lipstick. Advil. K-Y Jelly. Tums. I have sensitive tummy.”

“Ah, so you swallow.”

The prostitute suppressed a giggle. “If you are generous,” she said. “Yes, I do that.”

The guy at the hospital told John Denton he could go to the police or to the woman’s husband or he could forget the whole thing. The guy had given him the information. It was up to Denton to decide what to do next. The guy had said his name was Vincent Lano. He was the same man who had held the gun on Denton at the motel. He had told Denton that he was ashamed of what he had participated in. He apologized for what had happened to Lisa.

Denton had frowned at the man. His apology wouldn’t change anything.

Now he was struggling with the information he possessed. Lisa deserved to know what was going on. So did her husband. So did the Las Vegas police.

Denton couldn’t talk to Lisa in the condition she was in. He didn’t want to talk to her husband, and he was afraid to talk to the police. The fact that he was an attorney and was legally bound to report a crime made the problem all the more daunting.

Because the mob was involved, Denton avoided calling the police. He decided to talk with Charlie first.

He called Harrah’s and was disappointed when nobody picked up. He left a message on voice mail:

Charlie, this is John. I’m at Valley Hospital with Lisa. A man came here today with information about what happened to you and Lisa. He gave me the names of the people responsible. I’ll wait for your call. I’m not sure if I should call the police. I don’t know if calling the police will make it more dangerous for Lisa. Please get back to me as soon as possible.

He added the bit about it possibly being more dangerous for Lisa if he called the police to protect himself.

Then he felt guilty for worrying about his own problems while Lisa lay in a hospital bed on painkillers with a mouth full of stitches.