How odd and how sad that Charlotte memorized a suicide note, Margaret thought. A police siren cried in the distance. Goode shook her head as if to remind herself of where she was, took a last drag of her cigarette, then stubbed it out with her foot.

“It’s a rough town,” she said with a shrug, her tough exterior restored.

“It’s not any nicer in Washington,” Margaret said.

“No, I know,” Goode agreed. “We have Sinatra, you have Kennedy.”

“Oh, jeez,” Charlie said. “Let’s not get into that—Margaret has faith in her boy in the White House.”

“You do?” Goode asked.

“He added a women’s rights plank to the New Frontier,” Margaret said. “He’s appointed women to high-ranking posts. President’s Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt!”

“It’s all crap,” Goode said. “He’s like all the rest of them. He’s a pig.”

Margaret started to protest, but Goode’s face took on an angry expression. “Your worldview bears little resemblance to the real worlds of women like me and Peg Entwistle, all of us trying to make a living,” she said.

Margaret was stunned by the sudden shift in Goode’s mood, all her tour-guide bonhomie replaced by a barely contained rage. Within minutes she was driving them back home, an aggressive silence filling her junker. The night took an even worse turn when they got back to the hotel and the receptionist alerted Charlie that the Justice Department had left an urgent message: his father had had a heart attack.

Chapter Seven

Las Vegas, Nevada

December 1961

“Zippedy-zoo-bah-zee-bah,” Dean Martin sang. “Zabbety-zoo-bah-zee-bah boom.”

“Scat,” said Sinatra.

“That’s indeed what I’m doing, pally,” Martin said. “Scat.”

“No, I mean scat like ‘get outta here, that sounds horrible,’” said Sinatra, prompting an explosion of laughter from the crowd watching the show in the Copa Room of the Sands Hotel.

It might have been just a random Monday night in December, but every night in Vegas was New Year’s Eve. At a table near the back of the room, Congressman Isaiah Street raised his eyebrows and polished off his scotch.

“What white folks find entertaining never ceases to amaze,” he said to Charlie and Margaret.

To thank Charlie for keeping John Wayne from stomping him, Sinatra had invited the Marders to take in a Rat Pack show. Charlie had then invited Street, a decorated Tuskegee Airman, Chicago Democrat, and one of only five Black members of Congress. He had been Charlie’s closest friend since 1954, when they’d met in Ike’s Platoon. So when Charlie called needing to talk, Street hopped on a plane. He discussed sensitive matters in person only, assuming, probably correctly, that J. Edgar Hoover had tapped the phones of every Black man with power.