Sinatra rolled his eyes. He’d turned forty-six last month and what once might have played as impish now registered as old-man cranky. The sharp light from the streetlamp near them emphasized the crags in his weathered face, the scar on his neck, the onset of sagging jowls.

“Learn to read a room,” Margaret jokingly advised Charlie.

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” he replied.

“Classy broad, that Kay Gable,” Davis said about Gable’s fifth and final wife.

“She gave birth to their kid at the same hospital where Clark croaked weeks before,” Martin recalled.

“Look at the memory on Daig,” said Sinatra.

“Ring-a-ding-ding,” said Martin, grabbing the bottle of Jack and taking a swig. “Who wants another?”

“I do.” MacLaine, elfin-looking in her pixie cut and bright red lipstick, raised a hand. “Why would she want her husband to be buried next to another woman?”

“Interred,” Lawford drawled.

“Carole Lombard was the love of his life,” explained Davis. “Kay knew that.”

“Too bright,” Sinatra growled. He was glaring at a streetlamp that cast a punishing white light, washing them all out so it was almost as if they were in a grainy black-and-white talkie, Frank reduced to Ol’ Gray Eyes. “Pucci, give me your piece.”

“Fat” Tony Pucci, Chicago mobster Sam Giancana’s gigantic bodyguard, had a face that looked like it’d been whacked with an oar. Pucci glanced at Giancana, a buddy of Sinatra’s whose presence none dared question. The mobster nodded his assent, the light reflecting off his thick glasses, and Pucci reached underneath his jacket and pulled out what looked to Charlie to be a Colt Python .357 Magnum with a four-inch barrel and a nickel finish.

Sinatra, cigarette dangling from his lips, grabbed the piece, aimed it at the streetlamp, squinted, and fired. He missed, and the bullet pinged off the metal of the pole. He fired again. Another miss.

Giancana snorted. He would not have missed.

Charlie scanned the area to see if anyone had heard the shots, but no one was around for miles, it seemed.

Margaret remembered reading about Sinatra getting arrested after he and Ava Gardner took his Smith and Wesson .38s and shot out streetlamps and storefront windows in the small town of Indio, California.

“Apparently he was a better shot in Indio that night,” Charlie whispered to her, sharing the same thought.

No one cracked wise about Sinatra’s poor aim. This was the Pope, as he was known; they kept quiet. After missing a third shot, Sinatra calmly handed the gun back to Fat Tony.

“You do it,” Sinatra said to the bodyguard. “Jack Daniel’s keeps moving the target.”

“Wobble-wobble,” said Martin.

Fat Tony aimed and fired, and the bulb exploded, dropping a cloak of gray upon them all.