Norman Partridge - The Ten-Ounce Siesta

The casino boss furiously crunched a stalk of celery that wore a sheen of Snap-E-Tom tomato cocktail and vodka, all that remained of the third Bloody Mary he’d mixed since Jack walked through the big double doors of the suite of rooms overlooking the Las Vegas Strip.

“The woman in the trunk was our driver,” Freddy said between bites. “Kitty Crocetti, from Chicago. Jimmy Two-Nose Crocetti’s niece. Christ on a cross, Jack. First someone does her point blank with a hand cannon, then you set her on fire with an emergency flare, and now I gotta ship her ass home in a box. Jimmy Two-Nose is gonna be pissed.”

Jack wanted to ask how a guy got a nickname like Jimmy Two-Nose, but he knew that this was not the time to play name-that-gangster. Freddy G had been grilling him for almost an hour, his cohorts watching the action without a word.

It was plain that Freddy wasn’t happy. Neither were his companions. Their expressions grew sterner in direct proportion with the level of Freddy’s unhappiness. Jack couldn’t blame them. As employees of the last old-guard casino owner on the Vegas Strip, they knew all too well that an unhappy Freddy Gemignani was a dangerous thing.

When Freddy G became unhappy, somebody usually ended up taking a dirt nap in a remote comer of the Mojave Desert. Jack Baddalach did not want to be that somebody. He looked at the other men in the room and was distressed to find that none of them would make eye contact. Most likely they figured there was no use getting attached to a man who might very soon be sleeping with the prairie dogs. That’s how bad Jack’s story was playing out.

Jack massaged the knotted bruise high on his forehead. Right now he could have done quite nicely without it, but it was too late to tell that to the woman who’d slugged him with the butt of her machine gun. If he wanted to keep on sucking air he’d better start playing detective, and start playing good. But he had to have a place to start.

Not with the kidnapped Chihuahua. Obviously. And not with the bullet-ridden, toasted Mafia princess.

“So the driver was a plant,” he said, because he had to start somewhere. “He was working with the dognappers.”

Gemignani cringed at the very mention of the last word. “Yeah. Must be. Most likely he’s the one popped a cap on Miss Kitty, then took her place.” Freddy shook his head. “Christ on a cross. Poor little girl got her head blown off over a Chihuahua. Thank God it wasn’t my grandbaby in that limo. This crew we’re dealing with must be nuts.”

“Yeah.”

Freddy made himself another Bloody Mary. “Now about this driver. Let’s talk about him. What was he like?”

“Well, the guy seemed a little squirrely. He talked an awful lot. Told me all kinds of things about himself. Too many things. Especially for a guy who was a plant. That’s the only thing that makes me wonder how he fits into the deal.”

“He probably fed you a bunch of bullshit, Jack. Wanted to get you to drop your guard. Make sure you wouldn’t suspect him until it was too late.”

“Yeah. Could be. But maybe not. Maybe the stuff he told me was true. Maybe he figured I was a dead man, and it didn’t matter what he said.”

“Slow down, Jack. First things first. Let’s start off with the basics.” Freddy nodded at one of the other men-a thin guy with a big bunch of stencils and some kind of sketch pad. “Guido here is an artist. Used to work for Vegas PD. Now he works for me. He’s gonna ask you some questions about the driver and his gang, then come up with some pictures that we can use to track ’em down.”

Jack nodded. Freddy came around the desk. He looked Jack dead in the eye-Jack looking up, Freddy looking down.

Jack got the funny feeling his boss was looking for something specific. A sign of some sort.

The casino owner didn’t blink. After a moment he turned away and headed for the doors with his Bloody Mary in hand and the three other wise-guys in tow.

Freddy said, “Do your best, Jack.”

The double doors swung open. As they started to close Jack heard the casino owner take a big bite out of a fresh celery stalk, and then all that was left of Freddy was his shadow, a heavy blotch on the white carpet.

The door slammed closed.

Freddy’s shadow was gone.

Guido passed a stack of stencils to Jack, who shuffled through them intently.

Every stencil held a different nose. Noses that resembled potatoes or yams or bananas. Roman noses. Hooked beaks. Gnarled W. C. Fields specials, Michael Jackson chop jobs, Dick Nixon ski jumps.

Jack thumbed through the samples, trying to remember the limo driver. The thing he’d mistaken for a sketch pad lay before him on Freddy G’s big mahogany desk. It was the kind of pad used by police artists, and the only thing it held was an empty head, round and bald. That part had been easy to remember. But it was Jack’s job to fill in the rest of it, and right now he couldn’t seem to remember-

Guido coaxed him along. “Just take your time, Jack.”

Jack sighed. “I’m having kind of a hard time with this. I mostly only saw the guy from the back.”

“Okay. But you must remember something about him. Maybe his eyes. Maybe you saw them in the rearview mirror. Or his mouth.” Guido patted Jack on the shoulder. “Try closing your eyes and picturing him. Sometimes that helps.”

Jack closed his eyes, trying to remember the driver. The guy’s voice was in his head, right there, telling that goofy story about his ex-wife’s anaconda tattoo, and Jack concentrated on the voice, reaching out. . and he felt that he was getting closer. . closer.

“One thing I remember-”

“Yes? His eyes? His nose?”

“His neck,” Jack said. “I remember the guy’s neck. The back of it, anyway. He was heavyset, lots of folds on his neck. You know what I mean?”

“I think so. But I’m not sure where this will get us-”

“His neck. You understand what I’m saying? It looked like a pack of weenies.”

Jack opened his eyes. Guido stared at him, suddenly as expressionless as Freddy G had been during the interrogation. Then Guido looked down at his stencils.

“Does that help any?” Jack asked.

“I’ve got to be honest with you,” Guido said, looking over the noses and lips and eyes. “I’ve got a lot of stuff here. But I don’t have any weenies.”

Jack didn’t like the way Guido took his leave. Stalked off was more like it-the artist tucked the pad with the empty bald head under his arm and went through the big polished doors muttering about packs of weenies. His last words to Jack were: “I think maybe we’d have had some luck if I’d brought along a Mr. Potatohead.”

And the hell of it was that Guido was right. Really. Because Pack O’ Weenies did have a head kind of like Mr. Potatohead’s. It was the God’s honest truth. Only Pack O’ Weenies was white, not Idaho spud brown.

Describing the dognappers hadn’t gone any better. Jack did okay with the first woman, the one he’d punched out. He remembered those lace-covered wrist braces she wore, and he remembered her sunglasses and those determined lips that were the color of blood oranges. But when it came to remembering the other women-in particular the older one he’d begun to think of as “Grandma”-well, that was tougher. He did okay with Grandma’s white snow-cone helmet of hair, but when he started describing her wizened grapefruit-sized breasts and that cantilevered S amp; M black leather brassiere, Guido threw up his hands and made some crack about bringing in a comic book artist.

That was when Jack gave up on the whole thing. He sure wasn’t going to mention the old guy with the beef jerky face and the top hat, let alone the fact that the guy wore a rattlesnake for a necktie.