Don Winslow - The winter of Frankie Machine

Patty didn’t seem to care.

They’d pretty much given up on having a kid, pretty much given up on the marriage itself, so she seemed almost relieved to have him gone on weekends. He made a couple of halfhearted invitations for her to come with him, but she recognized them for what they were and turned them down.

“We’d be the same people in Vegas as we are here,” she said once.

“I don’t know,” Frank said. “Maybe we wouldn’t.”

He really tried one time.

“We’ll go for drinks, dinner, some nice shows,” he said. Maybe back to bed afterward-for more than turning over and going to sleep.

“Is this the routine you’ve got down with your bimbos?” she replied.

There weren’t any bimbos, not yet, but he didn’t bother to deny it. Let her think what she was going to think. What difference did it make, anyway?

So he went to Vegas by himself.

He was never alone for long.

While Frank enjoyed the solitude of the long drive, listening to his opera tapes on the car stereo, singing along without bothering anyone, he was ready for some companionship by the time he got there.

If you couldn’t find company in Las Vegas in those days, it was because you wanted to be alone.

So he’d check into his room, shower, change clothes, then go over to Herbie’s place.

Herbie had taken some of his shark money and bought a nondescript little club tucked away in a strip mall among a bunch of auto-body shops. It was far away from the Strip, the casinos, and the usual spots the feds had under surveillance, and that was the point. You didn’t know about Herbie’s unless you were supposed to, and if a tourist or a citizen waiting for his car to be fixed happened to wander in, he left in a hurry with a polite but firm “This place ain’t for you, friend.”

Herbie’s was for wise guys, period.

For some reason or another, Herbie’s became the hangout of choice for the California guys. They were all back from the joint now, and all in Vegas, living large off the skim.

Mike was back-he’d actually moved to Vegas, thinking it was going to be his big chance, and he was usually sitting at a table with Peter Martini, aka Mouse Senior, who had just been made boss. And Peter’s brother Carmen was usually there, and so was their nephew, Bobby, a nightclub singer.

And, of course, you had Herbie, sitting doing his crossword puzzles with Sherm Simon in the corner that became known as “Little Israel.”

So there were plenty of guys to hang out with, and sometimes Frank sat at one of the tables and listened to the bullshit sessions, but mostly he’d go back into the kitchen and cook.

Those were good times, standing at the stove, listening to the guys while whipping up thelinguine con vongole andspaghetti all’ amatriciana, thebaccala alla Bolognese andpolpo con limone e aglio. It was almost like the old days when he was a kid, back when San Diego’s Little Italy was still intact and people still made real meals.

Frank had really missed cooking as he spent more time at work and less time at home, and he and Patty had slipped into the routine of having their dinners separately. Herbie had a beautifully equipped kitchen and imported the best ingredients, so the cooking was a pleasure and a joy.

And listening to the guys-the conversations, the jokes, the ball busting.

Hanging out with mob guys, Frank thought, was like being frozen in some perpetual junior high school time warp. The conversations were always about sex, food, farts, smells, girls, small dicks, and homos.

And crime, of course.

The only thing at Herbie’s being cooked up more than pasta was crime. Most of the scores never came off, of course-they were just bullshit-but some of them did. There were plots to get in on the legal brothels north of the city, a plan to sell machine guns to motorcycle gangs, a very serious discussion on how to make counterfeit credit cards, and Frank’s personal favorite-Mike’s theft of three thousand T-shirts and two hundred twenty-inch TV sets from the convention center.

“What are you going to do with two hundred TV sets?” Frank asked Mike after the score had actually come off.

“What am I going to do with three thousand T-shirts?” Mike asked.

Frank was going to ask him why he’d stolen the T-shirts in the first place, but then he realized that it was a stupid question, akin to the “Why climb Mount Everest?” query-the answer was, of course, “Because it’s there.” The truth was that wise guys would steal anything, even stuff they didn’t want and couldn’t use, just because they could steal it.

Anyway, these things kept Frank amused.

And it wasn’t just the guys; it was also the women.

It had been tough that first time, cheating on Patty, but then Frank started seeing all kinds of women, at first in the gravitational orbit of babe magnet Herbie Goldstein, then on his own.

He saw models, showgirls, croupiers, dealers, and tourists who were in town for a good, uncomplicated time, which Frank gave them. He took them to nice dinners, to shows, always treated them like ladies, and was a generous, caring lover. Frank found out that he really liked women and that they returned the compliment.

Except Patty.

He treated her badly and she returnedthat compliment.

He talked about it with Sherm one night during a quiet moment at Herbie’s. “Why can’t you be with your wife the way you are with your girlfriends?”

“Different breed, my friend,” Sherm said. “Different species entirely.”

“Maybe we should marry the girlfriends.”

“I tried it,” Sherm says. “Twice.”

“And?”

“And they turn into wives,” Sherm said. “It starts to happen when they’re planning the wedding, this metamorphosis from sex kitten to house cat. It doesn’t work. You don’t believe me, ask my lawyer.”

“Youare a lawyer.”

“Ask mydivorce lawyer,” Sherm said. “Tell him I sent you-he has a boat named after me.”

“I don’t think it’s them,” Frank said. “I think it’s us. Once we stop trying to get them into bed-because now they’realways there -we stop making the effort. We turn them into wives.”

“I think it’s just the way of the world, my friend,” Sherm said. “The way of the world.”

I don’t think so, Frank thought.

He resolved to go home and give it a real try with Patty again. Treat her like a mistress instead of a wife and see what happened. But he didn’t-it was easier to go to bed with showgirls.

Or just hang out with Herbie.

It was always good spending time with Herbie, working theNew York Times Sunday crossword over bagels and lox with an opera broadcast as a background, or drinking a wine that Herbie had discovered, or chuckling over the plots and plans of Mike Pella, the Martini Brothers, and the rest of the crew.

They were good times.

They all ended when he had to go kill Jay Voorhees.

Jay Voorhees was the security chief at the Paladin, in charge of making sure that the casino wasn’t being skimmed, so in the interest of efficiency, he was also in charge of the skim. He was good at it, the Harry Houdini of the counting room, the way he could make coins and bills escape from lockboxes.

Then the FBI got to him, started to put pressure on him, and he caved.

Ran to Mexico, where the feds couldn’t get to him. Fine as far as it went, but Chicago wasn’t looking to extradite him; they were looking to make Houdini disappear for good. Because Voorhees knew everything-he could give up Carmine, Donnie Garth, everybody. Then the whole house of cards, as it were, would come tumbling down. They had to find Voorhees and put him out.

People think it’s easy to disappear.

It isn’t.