The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  My father didn’t like me out on the floor and when he caught me there, he waved me off it, didn’t like it even when I sunned myself by the pool, where I played the exhibitionist at Benny’s request. Ben had seen me one day, lying out on a towel near our bungalow, and he’d said to my father, “What’s this?” and my father had said, “What? The pool’s for guests now,” and Benny had said, “Shit on that, Ike. With her looks, I want her sunning herself at the fucking pool every day. Go on, Baby E. Go find yourself a chaise.” Ben thought I was beautiful, an asset to the hotel. And I was flattered. But soon enough I discovered the casino, where my assets actually made a profit. For me. The players, the men, anyway, usually gave me a chip or two as a tip for helping them win at the tables, and I’d been starting to save my money, my own little weekly stash that often surpassed my paycheck.

  Anyway, one night in the early summer of 1947, I was on the floor after the first show, leaning over the craps table, bringing good luck to a customer, one of those greasy-haired cowboys the free buffet had dragged in. My father was busy in the counting room and I was taking advantage of the opportunity while he was otherwise engaged. It must have been around eleven o’clock that I looked up and saw Lansky’s men from the El Cortez, little Moe Sedway and big Gus Greenbaum—Greenbaum, always red-faced, always bow-tied, cigar poking out of his box face, and his sidekick, the tiny, hand-wringing Sedway with his bashed-in nose, both of them in suits and ties—striding with uncommon purpose across the casino floor toward the counting room.

  All the dealers and croupiers were looking at them as they marched across the carpet, barking left and right as they went, “We’re in charge here, now,” and I could see the pit bosses exchanging looks with one another. An undertow of shock and surprise tugged at the cards and dice and the casino personnel, but not, apparently, at the oblivious customers, for whom Benny Siegel had built this pleasure palace. But Benny himself wasn’t here tonight. He’d had a big fight yesterday with Virginia and chased her home to Los Angeles, his car tailing hers west. I looked again around the casino. Sedway and Greenbaum were now pushing open the counting-room door, and after a minute, I saw my father step out from it, his face streaked with distress. He was scanning the place and I knew he was looking for me.

  When my father’s eyes found mine, he waved me over, but as it turned out, tonight my father didn’t just want me off the floor, he wanted me out of the casino altogether. He wouldn’t even give me time to change my clothes or find a tissue, hustling me in my teetering heels and my smearing eyeliner and my orange Pan-Cake right through the Flamingo Club and out into the hot June night, while my cowboy called after me, “Little girl, where you going? Don’t take my luck with you!”

  Then, with my father urging me, wildly, to hurry, while I asked him, equally wildly, “Why? Where are we going, Dad?” he pushed me down the drive, alternately prodding and dragging me, and he wasn’t satisfied until I’d folded myself and my spiky red heels and my costume of pink fluff into our Cadillac parked in the dark side lot.

  He jumped in the driver’s side and then leaned over the steering wheel, a little breathless, trying in vain to light up a Chesterfield. So what was the point of our big hurry?

  “Dad,” I said, “I have a second show in an hour.”

  On the other hand, I might not. We might not be returning to the hotel tonight. Tonight or ever. With my father, I never knew exactly. Every few years, it seemed, we were going somewhere new, where life would be better, bigger, full of riches, Magic Ike!, with me sewn into this costume of feathers and chiffon, the two of us saying goodbye to no one on our way out. If my father ever got his cigarette lit and started the car.

  When I couldn’t stand watching his stupid, trembling hands any longer, I took the gold lighter from him and helped him spark it. He inhaled deeply, able to hold onto the wheel now, and then exhaled a flat sheet of smoke from between his teeth, cigarette wedged like a flaming toothpick. I put the lighter down on the seat between us and it rolled there like a nugget from some long-ago Nevada mine.

  “What’s going on, Dad?”

  He took the cigarette from his mouth. “Ben was murdered twenty minutes ago. In Beverly Hills. At Virginia’s.”

  And then he started up the car.

  17

  It didn’t take us long to leave the Strip. In 1947, Highway 91 held only the El Rancho, the Last Frontier, the Flamingo, and the soon to be opened Thunderbird with its three angular supersized tricolored Egyptian phoenixes, red, green, and yellow neon, those hotels looking impressively fulsome alongside the skeletal beginnings of the Sahara, the Sands, and the Desert Inn, the latter of which Nate Stein would come out from the Midwest to run alongside Wilbur Clark and Moe Dalitz, with the flying saucer of its Sky Room going up, up, up. But as big as these hotels were, within a minute or two we were past them and past the little motels that trailed them like crumbs, the Pyramids, the Rummel, the Sage and Sand. We found ourselves soon enough nowhere at all in the flat dark desert, which was bigger still, where the moon hung in the sky like a weight, ballasting the many stars pressing down heavily upon us.

  Benny. From white tie and swallowtails to corpse in six months.

  I put my palms to my eyes, lids heavy with false eyelashes and now tears. I hated to think that Ben no longer inhabited his beautiful body and that I would never again see him climbing out of his little roadster with a present for me, most recently, last week, a mink coat, my first mink, totally inappropriate for fifteen-year-old me.

  Yes, I cried there in the car while my father drove, and this was before I even saw the newspaper photographs of Benny slumped on Virginia’s couch, his beautiful eyes turned bloody, his beautiful, rough baby face massacred, his hands soft in his lap. He had died thinking himself one who had well pleased his masters. But obviously he hadn’t.

  I didn’t have to ask who killed him. I already knew someone as important as Ben Siegel wouldn’t be killed unless Meyer Lansky had agreed to it. Someone—Greenbaum, Sedway, or Stein—must have been whispering in Lansky’s ear. The only reason men were killed in this life was over money.

  Or for talking to the government.

  But Ben despised the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, whom he invariably referred to as that cocksucking son of a bitch, even in front of me, that’s how bad Hoover was. So Ben would never have spoken to one of Hoover’s agents. No. So it had to be about money. Though as it turned out, it was about more than that.

  I quietly picked at my nail polish.

  Lansky’s men were forever in the casino conferring with the pit bosses and the shift managers and the box men and the section supervisors and the hard count supervisors in the counting room, of which my father was one. They, not Ben, kept the real watch over the money at play on the gaming tables, over the reported profits and losses. I’d been wondering just how much credit Benny was getting for this great green landslide of cash he’d promised Lansky was coming since 1945 when we first broke ground, a landslide that had finally manifested itself since our reopening four months ago. If Lansky appreciated Ben for having pulled all this off, if he trusted Ben, then why all the oversight?

  The answer. He wasn’t appreciated. He wasn’t trusted. As this night now made clear.

  The car plowed on, and eventually my father turned east toward Lake Mead, though we didn’t go nearly that far, just toward the mountains that lay before and around Lake Las Vegas, to the Las Vegas Wash, a marshy waterway. He turned onto a long dirt drive, which spiraled upward partway into those mountains and eventually, a few miles up, he parked on a ridge. From here, we could see the Strip, tiny winking colored lights in the west and the low dark purple of the Wash below, the mountain peaks cutouts against the sky. It was like being a Gabrielino Indian squatting at the top of Mulholland Drive before the city ever took its place at the table. My father liked to look at things from the heights.

  He got out of the car. I watched him reach into his suit jacket pocket and take out his pack of Chesterfields, shake and smack it, pul
l out another cigarette, rummage again for his lighter.

  He was already smoking a second cigarette by the time I reached him. It was hot, as hot as the day Ben first brought us out here, a furnace-heated wind flowing by us, god knows what animals flowing by us, too, little animals we couldn’t see, maybe couldn’t even hear. Raccoons. Bats. Lizards. Prairie dogs. Or worse, bobcats. Rattlesnakes.

  My father was still looking out into the warm moonlit dark when I came up behind him and said, “Dad, where are we?”

  “Home.”

  I tugged at his hand. Be serious.

  “We’re home, Esme. I bought this land for us. Look around. The plan was to build us a house here and surprise you.” He dropped his cigarette to the dirt, ground at it with his shoe. “I just wanted you to see it. Because now it’s not going to happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Benny’s gone, and I was Benny’s man.”

  True. Under Ben’s aegis, my father had gone from box man, keeping watch over the craps games, to section supervisor and then to shift manager and just last month, he had been promoted to supervising the hard count in the counting room. Whatever sins of theft Ben had committed, perhaps my father had, too. Not copper wire this time, but paper bills. That must be why we had run from the casino, why we were really here, so close to the Wash that I could hear water, where perhaps my father had a boat waiting, tied to some post and ready for us to set sail in the dark to Lake Mead. After all, everybody knew my father had followed Benny Siegel out to the desert and opened his hands to catch the manna falling from the heavens. But so had a lot of other men. And a lot was forgiven them, a lot overlooked by the thieves they served, because they understood a man needed to make a little on the side. Though there was a line, a limit. And my father wasn’t a big boy in Vegas. Not yet, anyway.

  “So what are we going to do?” I asked him.

  “We’re going to go back to Los Angeles. Tonight.”

  A retreat to Los Angeles wouldn’t save us. Benny was just killed there.

  My father wasn’t thinking. But I was.

  Because what could we possibly find if we drove south through the vast Las Vegas valley ringed by mountains and then east through the low desert of Palm Springs, the mountains slowly giving way to flat scrubby acre after acre until we reached, eventually, the Los Angeles basin, with its mountains and hills to the north that ran all the way to the ocean, as did the highway? I remembered the route well enough from the treks my father and I made to and from Las Vegas during the war until we finally settled in Vegas for good. I would fidget, opening and closing the windscreen against air that was first temperate and then freezing and then temperate and then freezing as we went up in altitude and then down.

  While my father and I had been steeped in this emerging Las Vegas of the past few years, Los Angeles had been changing, too. A chaos of demolition and construction for a new freeway had destroyed much of Boyle Heights, old houses flattened like the carcasses of movie sets surrounded by broad swaths of recently carved earth and stacks of iron pilings. Housing projects for the poor had been built in the Boyle Flats after the war. The shopkeepers who hadn’t yet joined my grandfather in Evergreen Cemetery—the Kartzes and the Resnicks and the Hoffmans and the Shonholtzes—would have grown older, and their children, my parents’ generation, would have moved north to what had once been farmlands and were now suburbs, neat rows of identical homes stretching up Hazeltine Avenue to Magnolia Boulevard, all the old stockyards and furrowed acres and orange groves turned to block after block of happy streets and houses, the subdivisions built on land Mr. Mayer had been prescient enough to buy thirty years ago. So what would we recognize? What would be home?

  And if we did go back to Los Angeles (with my mother’s mirrored dresser), and if Mickey Cohen wouldn’t put my father on his payroll again, he would be back to the tracks, back to his race sheets, back to selling tip sheets at the park gate on Prairie Avenue, stones on a milk crate holding the papers from the wind. ike’s tips. Back to his red notebooks full of calculations, to a cheap hotel room on Inglewood Boulevard, where he would sit on a painted metal lawn chair in the evenings, shooting the breeze with the other aging bachelors who had made their unlucky lives revolve around the horses and who had nothing to look forward to but the excitement of the next day’s races, the dream of the win, which would do little more for them than provide one night of good drinking and a few months’ more rent.

  And I? What would I do there? Go back to the track with him, old enough now to lay bets myself? Beg Buzz for a role in some picture, that is, if Buzz even remembered me, little Esme, Dina’s baby sister, if he ever even believed that fib? Ask Mickey Cohen if I could dance at the Clover or Ciro’s?

  If the thought of such a return exhausted me, it had to also exhaust my father.

  No. In Los Angeles, my father wouldn’t have these beautiful hotels to work in, the silver slots, the green baize, the waxed, paper woven chips of packed clay and sand, the carpeted rooms, the swimming pools, the great vast space of the valley, this site, the first acres of property he had ever owned. We wouldn’t have our free bungalow to live in on the Flamingo grounds or our free meals at the hotel restaurants.

  I didn’t want to go back. And not only because of all that.

  If I had come to love Las Vegas, in part it was because it was not Los Angeles, so much of which was colored for me by my mother and my memories of her. This place, this desert, was raked clean of her. She had never stepped foot here, and so nothing, not a single sight anywhere, not a speck of it, reminded me of her. But I couldn’t say this to my father.

  I looked around at the mountain ridges above me, the valley and the Wash below. Right now, even late at night, it was so hot you wanted to dig a hole to find earth deep enough and cool enough to offer some relief. But in five months, there would be no place more beautiful. And what was more, this place, these acres, was ours. About what other square foot of ground could we say that?

  If my father’s sins had been too egregious, he wouldn’t be left standing here. And if my father wasn’t going to be killed, there was no reason to leave. We should stay, take our chances. My father knew a lot about the Flamingo, had been here since the beginning, and that knowledge had to be worth something to the new bosses. Because there just weren’t that many men willing to leave the vice-rich cities of Miami, Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Cleveland to come out to this hellhole of a desert with its couple of gaming tables. Lansky thought Vegas was so hot it was the mythical Hades itself. Mickey Cohen couldn’t stand the flying grit pelting his clothing and dirtying his skin. At this point in time, 1947, if you were going to drop everything and head for Nevada, Reno was the place to go, not Las Vegas. Only a very few men thought Vegas was going to be much of anything. Ben was one of them, but Ben wasn’t thinking anything anymore.

  “Dad,” I said finally, “all these hotels are going up. Who are they going to get to work all those casinos? Men like you, men who’ve been here, who know the business. ”

  My father shrugged. I couldn’t tell if that gesture meant he was agreeing with me or not. He looked off, lit another Chesterfield. Like many men out here, he was a chain-smoker. But he was listening.

  So I continued. “If Lansky’s men are in Vegas, it’s because they know something.”

  My father laughed, shortly. “They know this town’s getting ready to blow the hell up.”

  I nodded and watched him smoke.

  He smiled without looking at me. “Well, maybe I can ride this out a little.”

  Yes.

  “See what’s coming.”

  Yes.

  I looked down. I was so much better at this than my mother, with her flailing arms and her shrieking. Ike, what did you do?

  I came closer to him and nestled myself under his arm. We were an odd couple, to be sure, a man in an overpriced bespoke suit in imitation of his betters and a skinny blond fifteen-year-old wearing false eyelashes and a feathered dress and red high heels in im
itation of hers. But I didn’t care if we were odd, I only cared that we were devoted to each other. And that I had won. Because despite what my father said about my having my grandfather’s mind, I was more truly the product of my parents, those two schemers.

  I waited a little before I spoke again. “So where’s the new house going to be?”

  That got him going. And while my father pointed here and there and took my hand to help me walk the site and talked to me about what room would have been where, etc., if only we could have stayed and built it. Then, as we continued our tour, his tense changed to where this and that will be when we do build it, shades of Benny Siegel with the Flamingo, Here be this, here be that. And that was all Benny Siegel was now, a shade.

  The first time I saw Ben was when my father had gone with Mickey Cohen to the track at Santa Anita to take bets from whatever customers they could lure from the windows with the promise of better odds, and I stood near them, dancing like a little monkey on a leash, attracting the eye which was followed soon enough by a wallet. While we were there, we three grifters, Benny Siegel strolled by us on his way to his box, wearing a shiny blue tie, a button-down shirt, a brushed gray suit, a two-toned handkerchief tucked into the pocket of the jacket, his hair lightly oiled and combed back, his face tanned, his eyes two shining jewels. I’ll never forget what he looked like that day. He chatted with Mickey and my father, then bent and kissed my hand with a gallantry that made me feel as if a choir of angels had burst into heavenly song all about me. Benny, those blue eyes of his ashine with self-love and ambition.