Read Online The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner - Free Book Online

corners of his mouth up, though he was furious at himself, not amused.
Cream puff.
Not Fredo Corleone, who’d knocked up half the showgirls in Vegas and was on his way back there to take care of the other half. He took a deep breath. He was not going to laugh. “I don’t want no trouble. I don’t want to assume anything, but”—and here he had to fight the giggles again—“did I pass the test or not?”
    They exchanged a look.
    The man in white came around the corner of the building.
Here it comes,
Fredo thought. But he wasn’t carrying Fredo’s gun. Instead, he had that wet, mangled piece of paper, the handbill, spread out on a clipboard, dabbing at it with a handkerchief. “Mr. Frederick?” he said. “Can you explain this?”
    “What’s that?” Fredo said. Which was when he remembered:
he’d left his gun back in the room.
“I never seen that.”
    The man put his face close to the note. “It’s signed ‘Forgive me, Fredo,’ ” he read. “Who’s Fredo?”
    Which he pronounced to rhyme with
guido.
    Which caused Fredo, finally, to erupt in laughter.
    The warm-ups his doctor had prescribed took half an hour, tops, but Johnny Fontane was taking no chances. He started them in the desert, stopped in Barstow for a steaming mug of tea with honey and lemon, and was going through the regimen of humming and ululations for maybe the fiftieth time when he blew through a red light a couple blocks from the National Records Tower. An LAPD motorcycle cop swung behind him. They came to a stop together, near the back entrance of the building. Phil Ornstein—second in command at National—stood alone at the curb, pacing, smoking.
    Johnny ran his fingers through his thinning hair, grabbed his hat from the seat beside him, and got out of the car. “Take care of this,” Johnny said, jerking a thumb toward the cop. “Will ya, Philly?”
    “Got that right.” Phil put out his cigarette. “We thought you were driving down here after your midnight show. There’s a room at the Ambassador Hotel we paid for and you never checked into.”
    The cop took off his helmet. “You’re Johnny Fontane,” he said, “aren’t you?”
    Without breaking stride, Johnny turned, flashed a million-dollar grin, made his fingers into six-shooters, winked, and fired off a few imaginary shots.
    Phil, on his way to talk to the cop, stopped, sighed, and ran his fingers through his hair.
    “The wife and I loved your last picture,” the cop said.
    It had been a Western, a real piece of shit. As if anyone would believe a guy like him on a horse, saving decent folk from desperados. Johnny gave the cop the autograph he wanted, right on the back of his ticket pad.
    “Making records again, huh?” the cop asked.
    “Trying to,” Johnny said.
    “My wife always used to love your records.”
    That’s why none of the record companies in New York would give him a contract—no singer who’d ever been more popular with women than men (said some
pezzonovante
at Worldwide Artists) had ever managed to change that. But what Johnny hated even more was the past tense: not
loves
but
used to love.
Movies were fine, though even now, with his own production company and an Academy Award (currently swaddled in his daughter’s toy crib at his ex’s house), the people who ran things out here still made him feel like some dumb Guinea who’d crashed the party. The long waits on the set bored him silly, and he’d had about enough of smart-asses calling him One-Take Johnny. From here on, if he could get the right part, swell, but he was moving on. It just wasn’t where his heart was. He wasn’t really an actor, not really a hoofer, not really a teenster idol or even a crooner. He was Johnny Fontane, saloon singer—a good one and, if he gave it his all, which this contract with National gave him the chance to do, maybe one of the best who’d ever lived. Maybe
the
best. Why not? It’s hell when the person you know you are isn’t the person people see when