Fontaine shrugged. “Last I heard, it was Mob debts,” he said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sinatra said.

Though Charlie and Fontaine had been shielding Sinatra from the street and police barriers prevented fans from approaching them, Fontaine looked around nervously. “Let’s change the subject,” he said.

Sinatra put a concerned hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “How’s your pa?” he asked.

Not great but alive, was the answer. After landing at Idlewild Airport a few days before, Charlie and Margaret drove the fifty miles north to Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining. In its 137-year history, the prison had housed many celebrities, from Lucky Luciano to bank robber Willie Sutton to Tammany Hall political boss Jimmy Hines. And now Winston Marder.

They were met at the gates by Wilfred Denno, the warden. Bald and ingratiating, Denno was so eager to show off the prison to a New York congressman and his wife that he seemed to have briefly forgotten they were there to visit his ailing inmate father. It was a straight line from the entrance to the grounds to the prison infirmary, and Denno’s travelogue was unceasing: “The train tracks that bisect the property are underneath us in a tunnel” and “The stained-glass windows in the chapel were made by convicts out of old pharmacy bottles” and “The prison shops make more than a mil a year from dog licenses and shoes, brooms and paintbrushes”—until Margaret politely reminded the warden that although there were eighteen hundred prisoners in the five-tiered maximum-security cell blocks, they were there for exactly one, an ailing man in the prison hospital.

Hospital was being generous, Charlie thought. It was just a long room in an industrial building that also housed the prison gymnasium, which provided a constant background of banging and clanking, shoe-squeaking and occasional shouts. Patients were lined up in cots just feet from one another on both sides of the room, some of them shackled to the bed. Charlie was temporarily distracted from the dismal sight by its echoes of Lucy’s favorite bedtime book, Madeline; this was a darker version of that orphanage, with his own aged father occupying a cot at the far end. As they approached his bed, the old man seemed to sense their presence, and through the tangle of IV tubes suspended from the wall above him, Winston turned his head toward them. When his eyes met Charlie’s, he smiled weakly.

His father looked older and frailer, gray and shriveled. Charlie and Margaret could hear his heavy, labored breathing.

“Charlie,” he said, his voice reedy and raspy. He extended a trembling hand to his son and beckoned for him to come closer, so Charlie took a nearby wooden chair and pulled it up to the bed. Margaret stood at the foot, her face grave with concern. Denno nodded his approval to the guard.

“I…know,” Winston said, his voice strained. He tried to push out a third word but couldn’t.