Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery

by Andrew Bergman

  “There” was the Flamingo, the extravagant resort that had become Bugsy Siegel’s last will and testament to the world. It was located, appropriately enough, on Flamingo Road, just off Las Vegas Boulevard, and the glowing red neon sign out front indicated that Vaughn Monroe himself, “Star of the Camel Caravan,” was currently appearing with his orchestra. As we drove through the main entrance to the hotel’s parking lot, I took off my necktie. The driver checked his rear-view mirror.

  “Thought you were freezing.”

  “Started sweating again,” I told him. “They doped me up six ways from Tuesday. My whole system’s haywire.”

  The driver chuckled and as he did I leaned over and wrapped my necktie around his throat. He made a few croaking noises and reflexively lifted his hands from the steering wheel. The Cadillac swerved onto a strip of gravel adjacent to the parking lot. As the driver pawed at his neck, I pulled harder on the tie, then wrapped it tightly around my right hand, which allowed me to lean across the front seat and shut off the ignition. The car came to a shuddering stop and so did the driver. He toppled over to one side and his jacket opened, revealing a shoulder holster and the cutest little .44 tucked inside it. I grabbed for the .44. The driver opened his eyes and pawed at the gun, but I pulled it out and smashed him on the back of the head in one fluid and elegant motion.

  This time he was out for keeps.

  I got out of the Caddy and opened the front door. The heat of nighttime air outside the Flamingo was absolutely volcanic; the temperature had to be at least ninety, stoked even hotter by a desert wind that blew grit and dust straight into my eyes. Cups, handbills, and sheets of newspaper swirled wildly around the parking lot. Breathing heavily, I leaned the driver carefully across the front seat, then opened the glove compartment and discovered yet another gun, this one a .38, and a half-empty fifth of Ballantine scotch. I pocketed the .38, then opened the scotch and poured a capful over the driver’s clothes. Anybody spotting him would only have to take a passing whiff to guess that he was loaded and, thus ignore the growing, reddening lump on the back of his head.

  I returned the booze to the glove compartment, slammed the car door, and began walking toward the main entrance of the hotel. I walked as quickly as my delicate condition would allow, scanning the crowd for unfriendly faces, but saw nobody who looked even remotely familiar. It was a motley throng that stormed the barricades of the Flamingo this late September night, and it was easy to see why Lansky was so pumped up about Las Vegas—this was Mecca for suckers. Chumps of every stripe and persuasion were streaming toward the Flamingo’s glass doors with the anticipation and excitement of kids heading toward a circus tent: servicemen in uniform, cowpokes in ten-gallon hats, Ohioans in short sleeves, and Los Angelenos in sunglasses and tight pants. There were fancy and unfancy women of every description. As the mob got closer to the doors and the first icy zephyrs of the casino’s arctic air-conditioning blew outward, some of the suckers actually began to run, the way I did as a kid when I would first lay eyes on the outfield grass of Yankee Stadium from the steps of the elevated train platform. The Flamingo was nothing if not a child’s dream of gaudy and imminent riches.

  As I entered the lobby along with the rest of the surging multitudes, I was stunned by a tidal wave of color and noise: the tutti-frutti hues of the slot machines and roulette tables, the hoarse shouts of the crap players, the relentless metallic chinging of the slots. I had never seen a casino this large or this frenzied; the California gold rush of 1848 had nothing on the human stampede inside the Flamingo. I stood and watched as the suckers darted past me like schools of fish, and suddenly realized, in a moment of startling and air-conditioned clarity, that for the first time in forty-eight hours I was a free man.

  The trick would be to remain that way. I figured I had a limited amount of time before Lansky and LaMarca recognized that something had gone awry, and in that time I would have to make a radical change in my appearance. To that end I waylaid an elderly bellhop.

  “There a barbershop in this dump?” I asked him.

  The hop stared at my gleaming head.

  “I’m not asking for an editorial opinion,” I told him. “A barbershop, yes or no?”

  “Downstairs,” he said. “Concourse A.”

  I took an escalator down to Concourse A, a brightly lit corridor dizzyingly carpeted with pink flamingos on a black background. The concourse was the hotel’s shopping area; it featured clothing and jewelry stores aimed at the visiting chumps, a souvenir and art shop overflowing with “authentic” western and Indian artifacts, and Angelo’s Men’s Hair Styling. Angelo’s was an elegant little establishment, with blinds on the door and a curtained window festooned with dozens of signed photographs of the show business luminaries who had honored the shop with their presence and shorn hair. A cardboard clock hanging on the door indicated that the place stayed open for business until eleven o’clock at night. I checked my watch—it was a quarter past ten.

  When I opened the door to Angelo’s, a little bell tinkled melodiously, and despite the lateness of the hour, three barbers smiled at me like I was a long-lost relative.

  “Good evening,” said the barber closest to the door. This had to be Angelo—with his thinning black hair and Sacco and Vanzetti mustache, he could have posed for a mural depicting Italian immigration.

  “You’re Angelo?”

  “I am Angelo,” he said in lightly accented English, then smiled and gestured toward a row of unoccupied leather chairs arrayed against the wall. The other two barbers—one a gray-haired gentleman with rimless steel spectacles, the other young and deeply tanned, were giving haircuts. Angelo was administering a shave to a nearly prone customer in the first chair whose face was covered with a luxurious snowfall of foam.

  “You want a trim or shave?” he asked.

  “I want to know if you sell hairpieces,” I told him. “Like a temporary thing, but of decent quality. I don’t want to look like I’m wearing a coonskin hat.”

  “Sure. Have a seat. Frankie, he’s gonna help you; he almost done.” Angelo waved his razor in the direction of the tanned barber, who nodded at me and indicated with five upraised fingers how much time he had left with his mute, crew-cutted customer.

  I took a seat and picked up a copy of Look magazine. General MacArthur was on the cover, staring majestically and myopically into the future with the look of a guy who has spent most of his life posing for photographs.

  “How was the first show, Mr. Monroe?” I heard Angelo say.

  “Beautiful,” rumbled a basso voice from beneath the shaving cream. It was Vaughn Monroe, in the flesh, getting a shave between shows. “Except I find out two guys in the band and one of the Moon-maids got the clap.”

  “No!”

  “Can you believe it?” Monroe continued in those richly upholstered tones. “I warned everybody before we got here, I said this is a town that plays hard.…”

  “Sure,” Angelo cooed.

  “But you gotta watch who you play with, guys and gals, and make sure you wear a little raincoat, capisce? So what happens? Two of my horn players start banging chorus girls bareback and one of the Moonmaids, Cissy, thinks she got a dose from that pig Jackie Lane.”

  “The comedian?”

  “Can you believe it? Her boffing that fat slob?”

  “’Atsa terrible, Mr. Monroe.”

  “It gets worse. Eddie, he plays tenor, he comes and tells me he can’t do the midnight show, ’cause he’s gotta go to the doc. Every time he takes a leak he says it feels like he’s pissing lava.”

  “Oh my God … lava. Sonofabitch.” Angelo clucked and started shaving the crooner’s prominent chin.

  “Hey, I can play the sax,” I heard myself say.

  Monroe tilted his head. Angelo abruptly stopped shaving, to avoid slicing the singer’s chin in half.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Buddy Barrow,” I told him.

  “Barrow?”

  “Barrow as in Berkowitz.”


  “You’re a sax player? For real?”

  “Well, I’m better than no sax player, let’s say that.” It was the truth; I had played the tenor sax in high school. Once a month, I played scales. “Just don’t give me any solos.”

  “You have the clap?” Monroe asked.

  “Not yet,” I told him, “but I just got here.”

  The velvet-voiced singer roared with laughter, and the barbers and other customers joined in. It was a regular laugh riot in this place.

  “All I need is a room here, Mr. Monroe. Like I said, I just got into Vegas. Need to change, get organized.…”

  “My road manager will take care of it. And call me Vaughn.” The crooner settled back in his chair and Angelo resumed work on his much-adored kisser. “Good thing for me I came in for a shave, boss.”

  “You betcha,” Angelo said, as cheery and uncomplicated as a character in a Sunday comic strip.

  Fifteen minutes later I was staring at the mirror as Frankie, the young barber, rotated a curly brown hairpiece till it sort of fit on the top of my head.

  “What do you think?” Frankie asked.

  I thought I closely resembled a springer spaniel, but the overall effect wasn’t quite as monstrous as I had anticipated. And the very good news was that I was nearly unrecognizable: 1 hadn’t had a full head of hair since I was nineteen, and had been truly, legally bald since I’d turned thirty. I couldn’t say the rug was an improvement, but it did the job for which it was designed: concealment.

  “Pretty good,” I told him. “Could you take a bit off the sides? Make it look a little less toup-y.”

  “Sure. This is just for sizing.”

  He took a tape measure and made the appropriate marks, then lifted the rug off my head and put it on a white dummy head and made the minutest of snips. Monroe arose from his chair, as clean-shaven as a newborn. He had a very large head and broad shoulders; from a distance he looked like the actor Lee J. Cobb, but when he got closer he looked like a bandleader, all white teeth and shiny surfaces.

  “How much longer, Frankie?” he asked my barber.

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “When you’re done, Buddy, you go to the desk and check in, then get to the club by eleven-fifteen.” Monroe looked me over. “Where are your clothes?”

  “In a locker,” I lied.

  “Great,” he said. “Thanks for bailing me out, Buddy. Bad news is I can only give you twenty-five bucks for the show.”

  “I’ve worked for less,” I told him.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, I hit the shops and purchased a cheap valise, as well as socks, underwear, a couple of white shirts, two pairs of slacks, and two blazers—one blue, one burgundy. I told the shopkeepers that my name was Buddy Barrow, that I was a novice member of the Monroe orchestra, and that I wanted to charge the purchases to my room, a necessary strategy since I was walking around with less than sixty dollars in cash. The God of the Hebrews was on my side: A call to the front desk ascertained that I had indeed been registered to room 207, but had yet to check in. The purchases were cleared without further inquiry. I was genuinely starting to like this town—try and pull a stunt like this in a Manhattan hotel and the house dick would drag you through the lobby by your nose hairs.

  With my brand-new valise filled with brand-new clothing, the newly coifed LeVine followed a diminutive but muscular bellhop across the still-riotous lobby toward the first bank of elevators. A tag on the hop’s white-braided uniform identified him as HAPPY. He looked to be no more than twenty-three years of age.

  “That’s quite a moniker,” I said to him as we waited for the elevator.

  He stared blankly. “What?”

  “Happy.”

  “Oh yeah,” he brightened. “My real name is Ronnie. But I thought I would get farther in Vegas if I identified myself as Happy. The guests get a kick out it. They say, ‘How come you’re happy when I’m feeling so bad?’—stuff like that.”

  “A lot of snappy patter.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Where you from originally?” I asked, Mister Congeniality.

  “Canton, Ohio. But this place is the beans.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. It’s whatever you want however you want whenever you want.” The elevator arrived and a half dozen giddy Americans emerged, roaring drunk and eager to lose their life savings. “If you need any assistance in that area”—he gestured for me to get in the elevator—“don’t hesitate to ask for Happy.”

  “Are you by any chance referring to the possibility of good-natured female companionship?” I asked him.

  “Yes sir, I am.” The doors closed and Happy pressed a large white button for the second floor. “Just call the bell desk and ask for Happy.”

  “And get lucky.”

  He smiled. “No luck involved, sir.” The elevator started with an unsettling jerk. “And the girls are the best—beautiful and stacked and clean as a whistle. Have to be, the kind of clientele we get.”

  “You guys draw plenty of celebrities, I would guess?”

  “Always, sir.”

  “I hear that Lansky stays here sometimes.”

  Happy’s face turned into a slab of marble.

  “Don’t know any Lansky, sir.” He turned to the front and that was pretty much the end of our conversation.

  Room 207 was a nice-sized double with a shower and a tub and real bath-sized soap in the bathroom. I handed Happy a buck and tried to win myself back into his good graces by telling him I’d let him know if my hormones started acting up.

  “Most gorgeous girls in the world, sir,” he said, warming up to me once again. “Any age, any shape, any color.”

  “I believe you, kid.”

  Happy winked at me, I swear to God, then he left the room and I sat down on the bed and started wondering how the hell I was going to get out of Vegas alive. I started by taking the .38 I had lifted from the Caddy driver and placing it just behind the Gideon Bible in the top drawer of the night table. It was a start, but I had the feeling it wouldn’t be nearly enough.

  ELEVEN

  I changed in a large dressing room backstage at the Flamingo’s nightclub. Monroe’s band played in white shirts with black pants and red cummerbunds and there was a lot of comic byplay as I got into my outfit, particularly when the group found out I was filling in for Eddie Jonas, the clap-afflicted tenor sax man.

  “I know who he got it from,” said a long-faced bass player. “She was just a little heavier than Kate Smith.” The room rocked with the musicians’ laughter.

  “He’s hopeless,” said a trombonist. “This is like the third time in the past two years. Plus he’s got a wife and two kids in Jersey.”

  “Not for long,” I told them, and there was more hilarity in the room—slapped thighs, wiped eyes. Musicians weren’t all that different from private dicks: They maintained a naturally suspicious view of mankind, and, deep down, they were all patsies.

  The midnight show began promptly at five past the hour. The opening act was Les Charlivels, an allegedly French dance troupe, made up of three painfully thin, rough-looking dames and four guys who looked about as French as the Pittsburgh Pirates. I peered out from behind the curtain and checked out the room—it looked to be pretty well filled, with only a few unoccupied tables near the back. A quick look around the room revealed no recognizable kissers, and that bothered me more than if I had spotted someone. I wasn’t comfortable with my ignorance of Lansky’s and LaMarca’s whereabouts, because I knew that once they found their driver knocked ga-ga in the front seat of the cream-colored Caddy, they were going to get very busy very fast. As long as I was on stage, I was safe. Once I got off, I was going to be the proverbial sitting duck. A sitting duck with a twenty-dollar toupee.

  I hustled back to the dressing room and studied the tenor sax charts for the midnight show. Nothing looked especially complicated. Ten minutes before show time, Monroe came into the room and threw his arm around me.
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  “I really appreciate this,” he said in that luscious baritone. Listening to him was like slipping into a hot bath.

  “Hey, it’s my pleasure, Vaughn … and I can always use a job, however brief.”

  “Who’ve you played with, Charlie?” he asked.

  “A whole shitload of hotel bands in the Catskills,” I told him. “Lew Brown, for one.”

  “How is Lew?” Monroe asked.

  “The usual,” I said.

  Monroe chuckled. “Still cranky as hell?”

  “Maybe more so.” I was shameless. Once I started lying, it was like running red lights—go through one, might as well go through them all.

  “Who else?” the singer continued. He wasn’t letting me off the hook so easy.

  “Some other smaller bands,” I vamped. “Sy Glotzer, Irv Tapp … house bands in the mountains.”

  “Don’t know them.” He looked into my eyes for a scary moment. “But I’m sure you’ll be fine. Any screwups, the boys’ll cover for you.” He started picking through the charts. “We’ll start with ‘Let It Snow.’”

  “Sure.” I nodded.

  “Then go to ‘Ballerina.’ I like to start with the very familiar. Particularly with these yokels. Then we’ll do ‘Trolley Song,’ ‘Tallahassee,’ and ‘Haunted Heart.’”

  “Great,” I mumbled, and jotted the titles down on a slip of paper.

  “Then I just bullshit for a couple of minutes, tell some lousy jokes, kiss the audience’s butt, tell them they’re the greatest crowd I’ve ever played for.” Monroe smiled. “Actually, the audiences here are pretty damn good. Love almost everything; I think half of them never saw a live band before.”

  “Lot of shitkickers out there,” I said.

  “Mucho shitkickers, but hey, that’s not their fault. Gotta play like you’re playing for the king of England.” I liked this guy; he had very little pretension to him, show biz or otherwise, and after the collection of assassins and con artists I had run with for the past week, he seemed as honest and pure as Gary Cooper in a mountain stream yammering about the Spanish Civil War.