resting places of such long dead celebrities as William Powell, Sonny Bono, Busby Berkeley, and a handful of Sinatras, including OF Blue Eyes himself.
The office had reminded him that any flowers he left behind would be cleared out on Wednesday. Nodding, Johnny hadn't confessed he'd brought nothing for the grave site. He wasn't sure he was going to get out of the car.
But he did. He forced himself to open the door and leave the cool, controlled climate of the Jag. Braced for pain, but hoping instead for some new power to re-inter the memories that had been hounding him, he slowly approached Section A-4,plot#52.
In an area with a billion and six golf courses, the carpet-quality of the grass was no surprise. But his father's grave marker was. Johnny supposed he'd ordered the simple gray granite piece mounted flush to the ground, but he didn't remember it. It certainly hadn't been in place on the day of the burial.
From the foot of the site, he studied the marker as if it was one of Dan Brown's famous DaVinci clues. Noting the words "Loving Father" and the 8 x 10 black-and-white of a cocky, laughing Giovanni Martelli mounted under clear plastic, he waited for revelation or reaction.
And the only thing he felt was the mundane certainty that it was his mother who had selected the stone. She would have been the one to provide the photo of Giovanni, circa eighteen years old, too.
Johnny focused on it, seeing nothing of himself in the handsome features. While he was 100 percent Italian, the progeny of a Martelli and a Travisano, he had the blond hair and blue eyes of the Northern variety. He looked, as a matter of fact, much more like European mongrel Phineas Magee, the man whose surname he'd used as long as he could remember.
Johnny's parents had been divorced since he was a baby, Giovanni agreeing with Johnny's mother that it created a more stable family if their son used the same name she used, that of her second husband and the little half-brother that came along shortly after that new marriage.
To his credit, Giovanni Martelli had been fully aware that his own life and lifestyle weren't winning any stability prizes.
The devil-may-care tilt of his father's head in the photo said it all. He'd been a kid from a seedy Los Angeles suburb who'd knocked up his girlfriend at sixteen. Yeah, he'd done the right thing and wedded her in the Catholic Church, but then she'd used the brains that had put her on the Honor Roll at the high school for teenage mothers and gotten out of the bad marriage and into college. There she'd met a graduate student who didn't mind the little kid that came as part of her package.
Anna Travisano Martelli might have fallen for Phineas Magee fast, but she fell in love with him for good.
After the divorce, Giovanni Martelli had moved from Los Angeles to Palm Springs and found work doing... as a child, Johnny was never sure what. But whatever it was meant there were lean times and there were flush times, and which kind of time it was was evidenced by the digs his father would bring Johnny to during his annual ten-day summer visit.
Sixteen years ago, Johnny's father had been flush. He claimed to be selling cars at a luxury lot and told Johnny there was a special woman he hoped to bring into his life. He said he was out of debt and not playing deep anymore and that he was keeping clear of the "old crowd." As he'd always kept Johnny far away from that crowd, it wasn't until he was dead that Johnny learned from the cops that Giovanni had been hanging around the California Mafia for years.
His gambling habit had been his entree into the underworld. Rumors were that he'd paid off some of his debts to the bookies with the kinds of favors that cops didn't want to detail to a shell-shocked teenage kid.
But not one of that old crowd or the special woman had shown up at Giovanni Martelli's closed-casket funeral or subsequent burial.
Being gunned down in your own driveway apparently put people off.
Being gunned down by the Carusos in retaliation for your own alleged hit of that family's crime boss really put people off.
"Miscusi!"
At the unexpected sound of the voice, Johnny jolted. His heart slamming like a hammer against his breastbone, he spun around in a semicrouch.
A black sedan idled at the nearby curb,