Free An Offer He Can't Refuse by Christie Ridgway Page A

persisted.
    Frowning, Stan turned. "Cosimo briefly passed over the reins of the family to him something like twenty years ago. I forget exactly."
    Johnny choked the shaft of his club and tried masking his frustration with an encouraging tone. "The librarian told me you had the best memory in the valley. You couldn't have forgotten."
    Stan tipped his basket with his toe and a couple more golf balls popped out to roll idly about the Astroturf surface of the practice pad. "What are you planning to do with this information again?"
    "I… I'm not sure."
    His eyes narrowing, Stan gazed on Johnny. "You don't know what kind of story you're going to write?"
    "Maybe about the children of mobsters," he said off the top of his head. "You know, what it's like for the children who try to move out of their family's line of work."
    Stan regarded him in silence, then turned back to square up for another shot. "Salvatore had two daughters with his wife. And then there's one in the middle, another girl, that he fathered from his mistress. All three were raised together as sisters after the mistress died."
    Johnny knew who they were. Téa, of course, her blonde half-sister, Eve, and the youngest, Joey. "Interesting family setup," he murmured, thinking back to the night before. Interesting
woman
. Such a bundle of contradictions, Téa was, with her strait-laced clothes and her sometimes smart-ass mouth. Lousy in bed, the contessa had called him, a little smirk on her full lips. Then he'd touched her, feeling her velvety skin and her fluttering breath against his fingertips.
    The atmosphere in the car had gone from burgeoning sexual awareness to definite sexual combustion in the space of that breath, one of those inexplicable yet unstoppable events that songwriters blamed on the moon and that scientists blamed on pheromones. Johnny didn't know what to blame or what he was going to do about it either, even as he went half-hard just remembering it.
    "Later, Salvatore was murdered."
    Stan's comment dumped icy water all over him. "Murdered?" Johnny cleared his throat. "I thought the official verdict was that Salvatore disappeared."
    Stan gave him another sharp look. "That's right. But if you're in the California Mafia and you go away one day and never come back—that means you're dead, son. Murdered."
    "You don't know any more details than that? I don't mean the kind that come out in court documents or police reports, but the kind that people talk about on street corners."
    Stan pulled his fishing hat farther down over his eyes. "Those are old rumors you're asking about."
    Sixteen-year-old rumors. "Maybe Salvatore's death was accidental. Did anyone ever look into that? Consider that?"
    "A body has never been found, neither here or in Las Vegas. That's the last place Salvatore was seen, gambling at a casino."
    "So a hundred things could have happened to him then," Johnny pointed out. "A car accident, a heart attack, a… a… scorpion bite. It seems strange, don't you think, that everyone jumped to the conclusion that it was murder?"
    "Not when a body's missing and the Mafia's involved. In that world, job advancement means getting rid of the man on the ladder one rung above yours—or hiring someone else to get rid of him for you. The way I remember it, the story was that an enterprising young turk decided to rub out Sal Caruso and paid some hit man to do it—he was the last person Salvatore was seen with in Las Vegas. The mob boss's murder started a war on the streets and even more lives were lost until Cosimo got California's Italian underworld back under his control."
    Johnny grabbed up his wire basket and tossed the contents to the ground. Golf balls rolled around his feet and he teed them up one after the other, smashing the hell out of them because he couldn't obliterate that same story he'd first heard so long ago.
    When the balls were gone, he looked up to find Stan watching him with a trace of alarm. "You gotta take it easy, son. It requires