A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

  “Hey, that’s the point of this exercise, isn’t it?”

  “Okay. What say we put this road show on the road.”

  Her mood changed as suddenly as a cloud dark with rain obscures the sun. “What say,” she agreed, any trace of merriment veiled in bleakness.

  We hit the causeway, which had speed bumps on it, and pulled up on the circular driveway in front of the Ruggeri spin-off in Bullhead City. Talk about understatement—a discreet bronze placard next to the front door read MEMBERS ONLY. Six or eight three-piece suits stood around, and a small sign on a board said VALET PARKING. One of the three-piece suits came around to the driver’s side of the Toyota. “Good evening, Mr. Gunn,” he said, bending to talk to me at eye level. “Welcome to Bullhead City’s premier den of iniquity.” He said it with a chillingly straight face.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Someone called ahead to reserve a table for two in your name at the River View. Whoever called said you would be driving a dirty Toyota. If you’ll leave the keys, we’ll park the car. Sir, do you want us to wash it for you?”

  “No, thanks. I drive better in dirty cars.”

  One of the valets opened the door for Friday, his eyes glued to the flash of thigh as she got out. She hooked one arm through mine and we made our way up the steps. “Open sesame,” Ornella said, waving her free hand and lo and behold the front doors opened magically before us.

  “What other magic tricks can you do?” I asked.

  “I can make things disappear,” she said. I looked quickly at her. She was dead serious.

  We started at the spit-shined Whistlestop bar to wet our whistles where, abracadabra, Friday made two bone-dry martinis disappear down the hatch while I was still nursing an Alabama Slammer. Relishing the crisp comfort of cold cash, I paid for the drinks and the refills with a factory-fresh hundred-dollar bill.

  “Ink dry on this?” the bartender asked, holding the image of Ben Franklin up to the light.

  “It must be—made that myself last night and hung it out to dry in the warm breeze coming off the desert.” Friday and I slid off our stools. “Keep the change,” I said.

  I could have sworn I saw the bartender talking into a house phone as we made our way up to the second-floor River View Restaurant. A table was set for two in a corner with a view of Laughlin across the Colorado and the gaudy River Palace, along with a handful of other medium-rise casino-hotel sore thumbs. A waitress wearing what might have passed for a cowgirl outfit when Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was living in my all-aluminum mobile home brought us two enormous menus. She stood balanced on one leg, holding on to one of her pigtails as if it were an overhead subway strap while we studied le carte du jour. We settled on shrimp cocktails, middling-hot chili con carne Mexican style washed down with two cold Negra Modelos, and finished up lingering over a steaming pot of geography-defying Nicaraguan Arabica.

  For the record, I ought to say I was becoming accustomed to the presence of the other Ornella Neppi, the one in the Sears duds and short dark hair neatly tucked behind her ears. While she gazed through the window at Laughlin across the river I gazed at her art-deco print of a dress unbuttoned down to her solar plexus. She turned unexpectedly to find me groping her chest with my eyes. “You really want to see cleavage, I need to bend forward like this,” she said. She leaned across the table until one of her breasts nearly fell out of her dress. “Girl stuff,” she said very seriously. “We practice this sort of thing in front of a mirror till we get it down pat.”

  I looked around to see if anyone was looking. “You’re embarrassing me,” I said.

  “Just clowning around—testing to see if you’re embarrassable,” she said, shrugging the breast back into the dress as she straightened in her chair. “This meal is going to set you back a pretty penny.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Easy. My menu didn’t have prices on it. Hey, I hope you’re not planning to put it on your expense account.”

  “Not going to set me or you back a pretty penny,” I said. “You’re forgetting the tab is being picked up by a couple of friends of mine over in Clinch Corners.” I raised a finger for the check, which arrived in no time on a silver tray. The cowgirl who brought it was holding a contraption that swallowed credit cards and regurgitated receipts.

  “Does this establishment accept cash?” I asked with snake-oil innocence.

  “Last time I checked, we sure as heck did,” the waitress said pleasantly.

  I glanced at the check and folded three spanking new hundred-dollar bills onto her silver tray. “You’ll be doing me a favor if you keep the change, dear,” I said.

  “Sure am glad to oblige a satisfied customer,” she said.

  “How can you tell I’m satisfied?”

  Smiling a knowing smile, she looked from me to Friday and back to me. “Probably had something to do with the grin on your face during dinner.”

  “Aren’t you overdoing the big-spender-from-the-East bit?” Friday remarked when the cowgirl was out of earshot.

  I noticed our cowgirl whispering to the head waiter at the door of the restaurant. I waved my entire arm to attract his attention. I caught his eye and pointed so he’d know I meant him and not the waitress. He came waltzing over pronto. He waltzed adroitly, which I attributed to the Nike sneakers I spotted under his ankle-length white butcher’s apron.

  “Where can a gent find a little action in Bullhead City?” I asked.

  “We have action that fits all sizes,” he said. “Why don’t you start at one of the blackjack tables upstairs. See where it goes.”

  “What do you say, darlin’? We could kill an hour at blackjack, then look around for something more stimulating.”

  “Blackjack for an hour is fine by me,” Friday said.

  Fact of the matter is I happen to be one hell of a blackjack player. I have a pretty fair idea of the odds going for the house and against the chumps putting down money, so it came as no surprise to me when, having bought a thousand dollars worth of chips from the cashier on the third floor of this members-only den of iniquity, having noisily flashed my thick wad of new hundred-dollar bills in the process, I found the stack in front of me growing taller.

  “Surprise, surprise, you seem to know what you’re doing,” Friday said.

  She was standing next to my left shoulder, the fingers of her right hand resting lightly on my right shoulder, her right breast brushing lightly against my left arm. The two parties to my left obviously caught the body language because both men sat there (losing steadily) with smug smiles plastered on their lips. I doubled down on aces, a red hundred-dollar chip on each of them, and pulled one blackjack and one nineteen, which beat the dealer’s seventeen. Friday reached over to add the three hundred dollars’ worth of chips to my stake, giving me a whiff of her perfume as she straightened my leaning stacks of Pisa with her delectably long fingers.

  You can read a lot into the expression in someone’s eyes. I could see from hers that she wasn’t used to being on the winning team.

  I glanced at my father’s Bulova. Ha! He would have had to work a month of Sundays to accumulate what I’d won at blackjack in less than an hour. With studied casualness, one of the tuxedo suits patrolling the sanctum stopped to watch me play. He edged closer to whisper in my ear. “Not sure I should be telling you this, given this is your lucky day” is what he said. “If blackjack is too tame for you, there’s a serious game of Texas hold ’em going on on the top floor.”

  “Don’t say,” I said. I turned to Friday. “You ever play Texas hold ’em?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Want to learn?”

  She shrugged her shoulders why not.

  I turned back to the tuxedo. “How does one get upstairs?”

  “Staircase through the door behind that curtain,” he said, pointing with his chin.

  I collected my chips and dropped them into my jacket pocket. “What say we mosey on upstairs and take a look-see at this Texas hold ’em,” I t
old Friday.

  “What do we have to lose?” she said. She was looking around the room, studying the players, studying the tuxedos, studying the dealers as if she had a lot to lose.

  The top floor of the four-story house of ill repute was two-thirds wraparound terrace and one-third private club consisting of sawdust on the floor and a clipper ship’s worth of mahogany, a bar replete with spittoons and four green-felt poker tables set at right angles to each other and lit by shafts of light coming from the ceiling. Only two of the tables had activity around them. Gunn, the seeing-eye detective, counted two dealers and fifteen or so marks, the players totally riveted by the closed cards they’d been dealt, the kibitzers flirting with their lady friends or the lady friends of other kibitzers. From the masks of concentration on the faces of the players and dealers you would have thought I’d meandered into a crash course on string theory, I’m not talking bathing costumes. I began my sojourn on the fourth floor at the house bank, cashing in my fifty-dollar chips for two-hundred-dollar chips, adding eight five-hundred-dollar chips to my stake. I turned back to the tables and found an empty seat at one of them. Ornella stayed behind at the bar. The dealer acknowledged my presence with a curt nod. Including me, there were eight players at the table. I anteed up a hundred dollars to get into the game. He dealt me two hole cards. I peeked at the corners the way I’d seen serious gamblers do in movies, hiding them with my free hand, to discover a seven of spades and a four of hearts, nothing to make your heart beat faster. The dealer set out the flop, three cards faceup, a jack and an ace and a five of hearts, giving me hope for a straight or a flush, so I stayed in for another round before I folded, which set me back four hundred bucks. By the time the dealer dealt the river, the fifth and last open card, there were two players left and something like fifteen thousand dollars in the pot. A hostess appeared at my elbow to offer me a drink on the house. I said thanks but no thanks. I needed to keep my head clear and my hand steady. There was some heavy bidding when the flop hit the table the next hand. The gent I took for the house player upped the ante, bluffing the weak-kneed out, and eventually walked off with the pot—probably ten grand by then—with two pairs. “You in?” the dealer asked as my attention wandered. I tossed in a red chip. Cards came my way but I only had eyes for Friday, who was standing near the bar. She appeared to have frozen in her tracks. I folded as soon as I could and went over to her. She was staring across the room, her face as white, despite the blush-on blushed on with abandon in the Sears dressing room, as the white cliffs of Dover, not that I’ve ever seen the white cliffs of Dover. “’Sup?” I asked, having finally deciphered the coded question posed by the mean, lean thug guarding the Baldini elevator.

  “It’s him,” she said, her normally musical voice stuck on a single note in the octave, her lips barely moving as she spoke.

  “Gava?”

  “Emilio in the flesh.” She turned away and sucked oxygen through her nostrils as if it was in short supply.

  “You’re sure?”

  She didn’t turn back to double-check. “The house dude who climbed onto the high stool in front of the window, the one watching the tables—it’s him. It’s Emilio.” She caught another quick look over her shoulder. “Jesus, he’s changed. Though not changed so much that I wouldn’t recognize him. He’s the same but he’s trying to look different. His hair is different. It was long and shiny black when he appeared before the judge, now it’s short and dirty blond. He’s wearing horn-rimmed eyeglasses. I never saw him wearing eyeglasses. He’s grown a mustache—”

  “Or glued one on.”

  She was getting a grip on her emotions. “What do we do now?” she whispered.

  “You order another of your very dry martinis and nurse it. I play poker for a half hour. Win or lose, we skedaddle.”

  I returned to my seat at the table. From time to time I caught a glimpse of Gava, his head angled to one side as if he were hard of hearing in one ear, studying the players and the play from his high chair. He was obviously a pro, not to mention some kind of bigwig on the fourth floor because tuxedos kept coming over to check with him. Sometimes he nodded yes. Sometimes he nodded no. When he nodded yes the door at the back near the staircase would open and a new mark with or without a date was allowed into the room.

  Luck was running with me at my hold ’em table for a while. I pulled a pair of nines in the hole and the river gave me a third one to take one hand, and hidden aces over the flop’s double fours to squeak past two hole kings on another. Then the table turned against me. I dropped all of my winnings and most of my nest egg in five hands that I thought I could win. The guy I fixed to be the house player won them all. I watched the dealer’s fingers closely but didn’t see anything that looked out of the ordinary, though I reckoned a really good dealer could collect the cards and shuffle them till the cows came home and give them to me to cut, then deal them so that the house player wound up with a pair of aces and one more on the river. Go figure.

  I noticed Friday had settled onto a bar stool. I smiled at her but she didn’t smile back. Seeing the bail jumper in the flesh had discombobulated her. I pushed back my chair and climbed to my feet. “Too rich for me,” I said. Two of the players laughed out loud in scorn, which made me want to take them down a peg or two, but I got a handle on my anger and went over to Ornella.

  “What say we check out of this joint,” I said. She seemed incapable of speech. I took her by the elbow and led her to the bank where I traded in the few chips left to me for cash.

  One of the tuxedos held the door open for us. “Come back next time you’re feeling lucky, Mr. Gunn.”

  Made me uncomfortable, everyone knowing my name. “Sure, why not? Your liquor’s as good as anybody’s and cheaper if you don’t count what I lost at cards.”

  I didn’t waste a smile on the tuxedo. He registered my failure to smile with a mean snicker. So it goes. You can’t satisfy everyone.

  Twenty-four

  The art and craft of following someone from in front, by Lemuel Gunn, with two n’s. I didn’t invent the technique but I don’t deny I perfected it, offering (to my colleagues on the homicide gig in the New Jersey State Police) the rule of thumb that your chances of success increased if you worked the night shift, which was another way of saying that taillights tend to look alike in the dark; headlights on the other hand can be as distinctive as your lady’s eyes. I’d parked the rented Toyota on a narrow residential street up from the causeway, which, you’ll remember, was the only way into or out of the waterfront den of iniquity. Friday was supposed to be catching forty winks on the backseat. I caught a glimpse of her wide-open eyes every time the headlights of a passing car swept across my windshield spattered with the corpses of insects.

  “Sleep comes easier if you shut your eyes,” I remarked somewhere around two in the morning.

  After a moment I heard her voice husky with fatigue drift over my shoulder. “My Corsican grandfather used to nap after lunch with his eyes wide open,” she said. “You need to try it sometime.”

  I had parked near enough to the corner to keep an eye on the joint’s front door. I could see the valet-parking dudes in three-piece suits ferrying cars around to the circular driveway, I could see the marks and their lady friends climbing in and heading across the causeway, turning left as they came off it toward town. I was beginning to think that Gava a.k.a. Restivo the Wrestler might be spending the night with an elbow on the Whistlestop bar when I caught sight of a lean man with a mop of blond hair emerging from the building. He must have phoned ahead because the car, a black sport number of foreign manufacture judging by the low phallus-shaped silhouette, materialized as he reached the circular driveway. Gava chatted up the valet who had brought it around, laughing and punching him playfully in the chest before he climbed, feet first, into the racing car. From a distance it appeared as if he was fitting himself into riding boots. I could hear him gunning the motor from my perch two hundred yards away. His parking lights flicked onto bright and the machi
ne growled its way across the causeway. I started the Toyota’s motor but I didn’t light off my headlights until I turned the corner onto the main drag, a football field ahead of Gava. I watched him gaining on me in my rearview mirror until Ornella, realizing something was up, sat up.

  “I need you to scrunch to one side or the other,” I said. “Hard to follow someone from in front when you can’t see out the back.”

  “Oh, sorry.” She moved over. The racing car was closing the gap so I sped up just enough to stay discreetly ahead of him. Two cars fell into line behind him. After six or seven blocks, the phallus signaled a right turn. Speeding up, I continued on for another block, turned right at the corner and right two blocks down and right again onto a long stretch of classy postwar residential apartment buildings set back from the street. I was expecting to see a pair of headlights coming toward me. Nothing. I pulled up at the curb, cut the motor and the lights and leaned into the steering wheel, thinking.

  “So you’re supposed to be street-smart and lucky,” Friday said encouragingly.

  “Right now I’m running on lucky,” I said. I had an idea. “Give me your mobile telephone and wait here.”

  I got out and started down the sidewalk, eyeing the parking spaces between hedges in front of each of the apartment buildings. At midblock I spotted the silhouette of the phallus tucked in for the night in a space with rose vines woven into an overhead trellis. Making my way to the building’s lobby, I sidled past the phallus. It was a coal black Ferrari with red leather bucket seats, the hood over the motor was still pleasantly warm to the touch. In the dark I opened Friday’s mobile telephone and removed the chip, then smiling to beat the band, walking very carefully as if I were a wee bit tipsy, went up the steps and pushed through the door into the lobby. There was an elderly black man with a light gray crew cut and a trimmed white beard behind the night desk, and a thick glass door between me and a bank of elevators through which nobody went unless the night man buzzed you through. “My pal dropped this climbing into his Ferrari at the fancy riverside casino joint,” I said, holding out the mobile telephone. “Tried to catch up with him but couldn’t gain on that racing car of his. Will you give this to him in the morning?”