So Frank pats Mouse Junior down pretty thoroughly.
He doesn’t find any wires or mikes.
Or guns.
That would be the other possibility-Mouse Senior wanting to make absolutelycertain that I don’t tell the feds who ordered up the Goldstein thing. But Mouse would have sent one of the few soldiers he has left. Even Mouse wouldn’t send his own kid on a mission to try to hit Frankie Machine.
You want your son to buryyou.
“You want coffee or beer?” Frank asks, taking off his raincoat. He keeps the pistol in his hand.
“Beer, if you got it,” Mouse Junior says.
“I have it,” Frank says. Good, he thinks, it saves me the trouble of brewing up a pot. He goes into the kitchen, grabs two Dos Equis, then changes his mind and takes two of the cheaper Coronas instead. He comes back out, hands them the beers, says, “Use coasters.”
The two kids sit on his sofa like bad students in the principal’s office. Frank sits down in his chair, with his pistol on his lap, and kicks off his wet shoes. That’s all I need, he thinks, a cold. They go through the preliminaries: “How’s your father? How’s your uncle? Give them my regards. What brings you boys to San Diego?”
“Dad suggested it,” Mouse Junior says. “He said I should come talk to you.”
“About what?”
“I got a problem,” Mouse Junior says.
You got more than one problem, Frank thinks. You’re stupid, you’re lazy, you’re uneducated, and you’re careless. What did the kid do, a year and a half of junior college before he dropped out to “help Dad with the business”?
“We-” Mouse Junior begins.
“Who’s ‘we’?” Frank asks.
“Me and Travis,” Mouse Junior explains. “We have a sweet little porno operation running. Golden Productions. We’re getting a piece of half the distribution that comes out of the Valley.”
Frank doubts it. You can read the papers and know the San Fernando Valley produces billions in porn every year, and these kids don’t look like billionaires. Maybe, maybe, they have the arm on a few operations, but that’s about it.
Still, it’s lucrative. How many times did Mike Pella try to get me to invest in the porn business? And how many times did I refuse? For one thing, it used to be all mobbed up, back when it was illegal. Two, as I told him, “I have adaughter, Mike.”
But since porn went mainstream, most of the money in it is strictly legit. You set up shop, or you invest, like you would with any other business. So what…
“Bootlegs,” Mouse Junior explains. “We invest in the studio so we can get a good master. We distribute a bunch of those on the legit market, but for every one we sell legally, we bootleg three.”
So they sell one of the company’s videos and three of their own, Frank thinks. Basically, they cheat their own partners.
“It’s even easier with DVDs,” Travis explains. “You can press them out like pancakes. The Asians can’t buy enough of blondes with big tits fucking and sucking.”
“Watch your mouth,” Frank says. “This is my home.”
Travis turns red. He forgot what J. had warned him, that Frankie Machine doesn’t like profanity. “Sorry.”
Frank talks to Mouse Junior. “So what’s your problem?”
“Detroit.”
“Can you be a little more specific?” Frank asks.
“Some guys from Detroit,” Mouse Junior says, “friends of ours, have done a little porn out here, and okay, maybe they introduced us to some people. Now they think they’re owed.”
“They are,” Frank says. He knows the rules.
Besides, Detroit-aka “the Combination”-has had a piece of San Diego forever, since back in the forties, when Paul Moretti and Sal Tomenelli came out and opened a bunch of bars, restaurants, and strip clubs downtown. Back in the sixties, Paul and Tony ran a lot of heroin through those joints, but after Tomenelli was murdered, they settled into loan-sharking, gambling, strip clubs, porn, and running whores.
Anyway, they carved out their piece.
Because of Moretti’s prestige, his son-in-law Joe Migliore got a pass in San Diego, never having to kick up or even answer to L.A. It was like Detroit had its own separate little colony in the Gaslamp District. They still do-Joe’s kid, Teddy, still has Callahan’s down in the Lamp, and runs his other businesses from the back room.
“If Detroit set you up with these connections,” Frank tells Mouse Junior, “youdo owe them.”
“Not sixty percent,” Mouse Junior whines. “We do all the work-make the videos, set up the warehouses, do the bootlegs, get to the Asian markets. Now this guy wants a majority share? I don’tthink so.”
“Who’s the guy?”
“Vince Vena,” Mouse Junior tells him.
“You’re sideways with Vince Vena?” Frank asks. “You do have a problem, kid.”
Vince Vena is a heavy guy.
Word is, he just made it on the ruling council of the Combination. No wonder Mouse Junior is scared. The L.A. family was never that strong-it used to bow to New York, then Chicago, and now there’s a power vacuum as the East Coast families are getting hammered by old age, attrition, and the RICO statutes. So now Detroit is positioning itself to move in on what’s left of the West Coast, and in one of the few profit centers left. And it makes sense to start with Mouse’s kid, because if you pull that off, you’re proving a point: Mouse Senior is so weakened by the Goldstein indictments, he doesn’t have the strength to protect his own son.
If Vena succeeds in extorting sixty points out of Mouse Junior, the L.A. family might just as well give up the ghost entirely. Which is fine with me, Frank thinks. New York, Chicago, Detroit, it’s all the same. It’s all going the way of the dinosaur anyway. Doesn’t matter who shuts the lights out-it’s still dark.
“Why are you coming to me?” Frank asks, even though he knows the answer.
“Because you’re Frankie Machine,” Mouse Junior says.
“What doesthat mean?”
What it means, Mouse Junior explains, is that they’ve “calendared” a sit-down with Vena to hammer out a deal.
“Do it,” Frank says. “If Vena says sixty, he’ll take forty, maybe even thirty-five. You give him a cut of the pie, then you just go out and make a bigger pie, that’s all. There’s enough for everybody.”
Mouse Junior shakes his head. “If we don’t stop it here…”
“You stop it here,” Frank says, “you start a war with Detroit.”
And let me tell you what your old man already knows, kid. You don’t have the troops. But Mouse Junior’s too young to know that. Too much testosterone bouncing around in there.
Mouse Junior says, “I’m not rolling over for this guy.”
“So don’t,” Frank says.
It’s not my problem.
I’m retired.
“Fifty K,” Mouse Junior says.
Thatis high, Frank thinks. There must be more money in this porn thing than I thought. It shows they have resources, but it also shows how weak they are. You don’t normally pay cash to have this kind of thing done-you give it to one of your soldiers in exchange for future business considerations, or maybe getting him straightened out.
But L.A. doesn’t have many soldiers left. Not good ones anyway, guys who could do this kind of work.
Fifty K is a lot of money. Invested well, it would pay a lot of tuition.
“I’m going to take a pass on this one,” Frank says.
“Dad said you might turn it down,” Mouse Junior says.
“Your father is a wise man.”
Actually, he’s a jackass, but what the hell.
“He said to tell you,” Mouse Junior continues, “that he would consider this a personal favor, a matter of loyalty.”
“Meaning what?”
Frank’s going to make him say it.
“With everything that’s happening in Vegas,” Mouse Junior says, his voice quivering a little, scared. “The Goldstein stuff…Dad would like to know that you’re, you know, on the team.”
So there it is, Frank thinks. It’s two birds with one stone. Mouse Senior gets his Detroit problem taken care of, and he gets an insurance policy on my silence over Goldstein, because I can’t go to the feds with a fresh hit on my hands. And if I don’t do the Vena job, I make myself suspect as a possible rat. So either I take Vena out or I put myself in the bull’s-eye. But if Mouse Senior doesn’t have the soldiers to take Vince himself, why does he think he has the resources to make a run atme? Nobody in the Mickey Mouse Club has either the skills or the stones.