Nate rolled up his window, stubbed his cigar out in the car’s ashtray.
“Esme,” he said, his voice a purr.
And then he reached for me, pulled me on top of him, and without much preamble, pushed his engorged phallus inside me.
Given the circumstances, of course, I couldn’t deny him.
Survival City.
57
When Nate drove me back to my car, somewhat blindly because our moist heat had fogged the cold splattered windows of his Cadillac, his disheveled drive a mirror of our disheveled selves, he said to me as I stepped out into the chill, “Go find your father, Esme.”
And it was only then that I understood where my father might have gone.
58
After Nate careened off, I had to sit by myself for a moment in my big black Ambassador in the big black parking lot, still flushed but cooling fast, waiting for the vaporous warmth of Nate’s body and breath that still clung to me to crystallize here in the freezing air of my car and then drop to the floor of it like a small hailstorm. I had to be free of him to think straight and I couldn’t think straight with that wet thicket of him laid all over me, the bodily memory of what we had just so unexpectedly done, the sounds he’d made reverberating still in my ear, Esme, god fucking damn, I’ve missed you. And I had missed him. Despite my best intentions, if I had any, which I had begun to doubt. Or maybe this wasn’t such an unexpected reversal, after all. Why else had he been keeping me under such close watch except to have me returned to him one day, virgo intacta, or almost.
Eventually, I was able to start my car and edge it up close to the Desert Inn. I was planning to go directly to the hotel vault. Because even after the move to Paradise Palms, I kept my valuables here, where Nate said they would be safest. I could only hope they would all still be there, that Nate, wolf with a cock, vulture with a beak, hadn’t plucked them one by one out of the vault while I wasn’t looking, just as my mother feared our neighbors had done when our belongings lay in open display on our lawn, Nate leaving me with nothing, leaving me as he’d found me, a blond child in Benny Siegel’s mink. But despite his urgent exhortation, “Go find your father,” I couldn’t get out of the car just yet. Inside my skirt, my thighs were sticky with Nate’s ejaculate, the lining and wool fabric soiled with it. Nate had always been so careful to use a rubber, the rubbers the other girls complained about in the dressing room—along with their complaints about bladder infections and the clap—about having used those rubbers and getting knocked up anyway and now having to find some doctor with a hanger and a bottle of bleach. But Nate had not wanted to be careful tonight. And everything Nate did in this life was planned.
I got gingerly out of the car and walked with as much grace as I could muster to the lobby where I had the desk clerk pass me the key to my safety deposit box. And I found, when I opened the lid, every piece of jewelry Nate had ever given me, velvet boxes and soft leather envelopes of pearls and minerals, as well as the small red-and-gold leather box with a gold latch that held my mother’s ring, the big diamond with the many other diamonds trying to crawl all over it, the ring my father had given her with his first big payday after he started working for Mickey Cohen and the only thing he himself hadn’t pawned during the months right after her death.
I took a breath. So. I still could help my father. We had pawnshops all over Las Vegas, both on the Strip and downtown on Fremont Street, and here you could find well-organized stores, unlike the crowded Inglewood Boulevard pawnshop I visited so long ago with my father to hock my mother’s modest engagement ring. That place had been filled with household items, radios, musical instruments, toys, but Las Vegas pawnshops were different, less of that sort of stuff, more of what a gambler had on him at the moment he needed more cash so he could get back into the casino.
Here, the locked glass cabinets showcased almost exclusively jewelry—rings, watches, necklaces, cufflinks, stripped off in the passion of addiction, in the rush to get back to the tables, the cards, the dice, the ringing bells, the wheels turning, the glasses clinking, the roar of the win. And when those gamblers had nothing left but debts they couldn’t repay, they were conscripted as bagmen, smuggling cash in suitcases to cities all over the country, working off their debts at 7.5 percent per trip. If they wouldn’t serve and couldn’t pay, they were maimed or killed, whether they were big boys or small-time crooks. Or my father. That was the gospel. Debts had to be paid, one way or another. Theft had to be punished.
There was no way I could sell all of my jewelry tonight. No shop had that much cash and I didn’t have time to visit them one by one. So I piled everything into my black satin evening purse, a clutch, just about big enough, and decided on one item to rid myself of, my name necklace, the gold chain with the diamond charm that spelled my name, Nate’s first gift to me, the one I had stopped wearing after Tony Cornero’s death. It was easiest to let go of this first, these diamond-crusted letters. esme.
And then I left the DI, left the Strip, and drove downtown to Fremont Street, where I pulled over to the curb in front of an all-night pawnshop not far from the Golden Nugget, the big sign, Golden Nugget Gambling Hall, like a bloated sun, red and yellow, and like the pawnshop, perpetually open.
I got out of the Ambassador, carrying my swollen purse close to my chest like a child with a treat she doesn’t want anyone else to have, and pressed the pawnshop doorbell to be buzzed inside. I waved through the glass and grating at the tired man with rumpled hair the doorbell had roused. He stood up from behind the counter—was he wearing pajama bottoms?—and he opened his mouth at the sight of me, then came over to the door to open it for me himself.
“Miss Wells!”
The owner called me by name, of course. I’d have to drive to Salt Lake City or Phoenix or Los Angeles if I didn’t want to be recognized. But I didn’t have time for that.
He looked a little puzzled as to what was I doing here, though he stepped back to let me enter. “How can I help you? Buying or selling?”
“Selling,” I told him.
I followed him to the counter, still clutching my purse with both hands. I saw then he had a cot unfolded behind the counter. I’d interrupted his sleep. Well, I supposed if you weren’t at the casinos or the showrooms, the Las Vegas night in winter could be very long and very dull. Soporific. I opened my purse. I’d never actually done a transaction like this before, though I’d certainly watched my father do it, again and again, with my mother’s engagement ring and sometimes, even, with her wedding band. He had hidden his panic and desperation so well from me that I had never known of it, looking up at him from down below counter level, but now I did, and so I attempted to hide those same emotions from myself and from this man.
I moved to lay my necklace with the esme charm on the glass. And simultaneously, like a magician, the man slid a square of black velvet beneath the charm before it ever even hit the glass. The minute I saw the diamond esme lying there on that velvet I thought this was a stupid thing to sell. It had my name on it, and I had an unusual name. Who would want this? Who could give this as a gift to another?
The owner’s thoughts seemed to echo my own. “Are you sure you want to sell this, Miss Wells?”
I nodded. I was going to tell him that the diamonds could be pried out, repurposed, and I made ready to persuade him with my own charms that this charm could be refashioned to his benefit, but once I saw his face, I understood he wasn’t entertaining any of the thoughts I’d worried about, but a separate set of concerns all his own.
“Mr. Stein won’t be upset that you’re selling this?” He rubbed a hand through his hair.
Ah. So he was worried about fallout, not about resale. Did the whole world know my business? I straightened up, and stood, as Daddy Mack would say, tall. Very tall. I smiled. “Only if you don’t pay me what it’s worth.”
He gave me a small unhappy smile in return. Because, truly, there was nothing funny about any of this. With this charm, I’d wipe out his bankroll tonight—his ba
nkroll for the week—and I’d endangered him with my plots and plans.
But I’d get a fair price. A better than fair price. The man didn’t want Nate sending anyone to his shop to complain. In fact, I doubted he’d even display the charm. He’d probably lock it in his safe, keep it hidden.
Because after all, it was better for both of us if no one knew what I’d done or that he’d had a part in it.
59
The sun still hadn’t quite come up when I finally sent my car, its tires crackling, on the long twig-littered road, the krik-krak making a victory over the sounds of winter insects and the lapping water from the Vegas Wash. If my father wasn’t here, then I didn’t know where else he could be, and I would just have to wait here for him to find me, as I knew he would. Eventually. For this place was known only to the two of us.
In the six years since that night Ben Siegel was killed and my father brought me up here, my father and I had never spoken of this property to anyone, knowing instinctively somehow that we might one day need a safe house, a place that was wholly ours and wholly our secret, our own Flamingo penthouse emergency back exit. Of course, there was no penthouse here, no anything, as we had never built our house, only dreamed of it, but perhaps it was better this way, because if we had built our Silver Lair, then someone would have known about it and about these acres.
My two headlights flickered weakly up the long drive, up the hill, lost their way for a second or two at the bend, and then pushed onward. If my father were here, he wouldn’t be able to see the car or see me behind the wheel. All he would see was a dark shape approaching, two headlights, two white circles of glare, which could belong to any car, any owner.
But when I reached the top of the drive, I was the one who didn’t recognize the car there before me, a gold Dodge Dart, parked a few yards up ahead, so I stopped quickly, quietly, engine a purr now, though soon enough I recognized the driver inside the Dart. It was, thank God, my father, revealed in a sudden flash of color when the car door opened and the interior light went on.
There he was, in his long winter coat and his fedora with its green feather, his tan leather gloves, his red plaid muffler, ready for the cold but not much else.
Maybe the Dart was a stolen car, maybe a borrowed one or one hurriedly bought at a used car lot somewhere, but it was a nondescript car, clearly a safe car he’d gotten and had kept hidden in some rented garage, hidden from me, along with everything else. Or maybe he’d traded his Cadillac for it earlier tonight. But at least he’d had the sense to try to make it a little harder to be hunted until I could flush him out of here.
Because that was now my unhappy job.
“Esme?” he called out.
I could hear the wariness in his voice.
“It’s me,” I called back.
“You alone?”
“I’m alone,” I said, and I got out of my car.
He trudged toward me then. He was wearing rubber boots, unhinged metal buckles flapping and chattering. Maybe he knew it was going to snow. It did that sometimes in winter. You could often see snow on the mountains but sometimes snow fell even across the valley. The winter after Benny died, it had snowed and snowed, but our streets and sidewalks and our car roofs and the flat roofs of the few hotels we had then on the Strip had turned only a momentary white before the soft layer of snow disappeared like some desert mirage. I remembered thinking then it was a sign from God of the afterlife: Benny’s with me now, little girl.
My father came up close to me and kissed my cheek. “Smart girl. Didn’t expect to see you up here until tomorrow.”
I studied him in the pale beams cast by my headlights. The big yellow moon was setting low now in the west. I’d left my headlights on so I could see better, but given that moon, I didn’t really need any other light. Up close my father looked as he hadn’t at a distance—greasy, sweaty, unkempt, not his usual sweet self—and I figured I probably looked the same, having been running around all night, too, in my ridiculous stilettos, in and out of casinos and cars and swimming pools, squatting on top of a man, skittering across the linoleum of a pawnshop. And, suddenly, I understood I was exhausted.
My father stepped back to take my measure. “So,” he said, “if you’re here, that means you’ve already heard about Gus.”
I nodded.
“Gus was a thief. But every man working Vegas is a thief, of one kind or another.”
“Even you.”
He shrugged. “The minute you took up with Nate Stein, I started saving for a rainy day. After your pills, I really started shoveling. And now, it’s that day. Raining cats and dogs, baby girl.” He rapped his gloved fist on the trunk of my car. “I need you to go by the house for me.”
“I’ve already found the money,” I said.
“Well.” And he looked at me, a little astonished. “I’m giving you an A-plus for today’s work. It’s in your car?”
“It was.” And then I was a little afraid to say this, but I did. “I gave it all to Nate.”
My father stared at me, blank as a school blackboard at midnight, and then his shoulders went round under his wool overcoat. Anger and something else, despair? “Now, Esme, that wasn’t smart.”
“I had to do it, Dad.”
He shook his head. “You can’t buy your life back from a man like Nate Stein, if that’s what you think.” He stood there, looking at me, shaking his head, and then, oddly, he grinned. “You’re still a child.”
He turned from me and walked up toward the summit of the hill, to the site where we had once imagined our house would eventually stand, more Wells’ Loft than Silver Lair, perched up high with the birds, a nest from which we could look down on the Gabrielinos, or, from this eastern Nevadan perch, the Paiute, I guess. After a moment I followed him. Through a crack in the mountains, where in the daylight we could see the water, I could now in the dark only smell it, wet and fragrant. My father reached into his pocket and took out a pack of Chesterfields, shook and smacked it, pulled out a cigarette, rummaged for his lighter. He lit the cigarette, took a moment to smoke at it, opened his mouth to expel a mass of blue fumes. Only then, it seemed, could he bear to face me. But I was the one who spoke.
“You have to leave,” I told him. “Tonight.”
“That’s exactly what I was going to say to you.” He headed back toward me in his boots, his traveling boots, his overcoat. “But I’m not leaving without you.”
“I can’t go with you, Dad.”
“What are you talking about?” His boot buckles clicked sharply, impatiently.
I shrugged, and when I did that I could smell Nate’s Brylcreem on the collar of my cape, in my own hair. God fucking damn, Esme.
And my father guessed then at the real reason, or maybe he figured it all out for certain right that minute.
“Oh, no. You think I’m going to leave you behind here, at the mercy of this place, at the mercy of these men, at the mercy of Nate Stein?”
And I thought, When haven’t I been at someone’s mercy? I’ve been at yours most of my life.
“What exactly did you hear about Gus?” he asked.
“Just that he’s dead.”
“He was ambushed at home. In Phoenix. A few hours ago. In bed, in his pajamas, holding a heating pad, TV on. They almost cut his head clean off. They were probably trying to cut it off, put it in his lap. And nobody knows but you and me and a few of the big boys.”
So Gus was right now and would remain until he was discovered by someone this morning—by his wife, perhaps, or by his housekeeper—propped up in his bed with his heating pad and his television on, suffusing the room with the warmth of the living, even as the heating pad warmed Gus’s stilled flesh. Heating pad. Pajamas. Bed. Television aglow. All the creature comforts of a man in need of comfort no longer. My father, with his head in his lap. No. My father was still alive, standing here in his overcoat, smoking a Chesterfield. Because of me.
But my father wasn’t finished. “They left his wife hogtied, face down on
her living-room sofa with her throat slit. She bled to death into a towel. What kind of man does that to a woman? Or sends someone else to do it?”
I imagined myself tied up, my throat slashed while I bled helplessly into a bath towel, not even a hand loose to wag in ineffectual effort to stop my life from dripping from me.
“You remember what happened to Nick Circella’s girl, the cocktail waitress?”
Yes. She’d been tied to a chair, beaten and tortured to death with a blackjack and a blowtorch. Someone found out she’d been talking to the FBI.
“It’s not safe for you here anymore.”
My father’s point? Gender was no shield, if that’s what I might mistakenly believe, from my association with men like him, from my association, in fact, with him. I think then I began to reek, like him, with panic.
My father shook his finger at me. “And Gus wasn’t just killed over the skim, Esme, if that’s what you think. He was killed because Nate Stein wants a piece of every goddamn pie in Las Vegas, and that piece of pie, that pie, belonged to Gus. And there’s no limit to the mayhem Nate Stein can wreak when he doesn’t get what he wants.”
Because that was how Nate took care of business. With mayhem. Set in motion by telephone.
My father gave me a crooked smile. “Nate’s already got you hogtied, doesn’t he, Esme?”
More than my father could imagine.
“I’m not leaving you to him. No matter what. So what do you say we go try to find ourselves a little peace and happiness before it’s too late. Even if we have to leave here the same way we arrived, a couple of coins jingling in our pockets.”
Jingling. Yes. That reminded me.
“Dad, I have something for you.”
I crunched my way back to my car, reached for my heavy black purse in the front seat, and shook the thing in the air above my head so he could see how full it was, how heavy it was, a real treasure sack.
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 29