by Lou Berney
“Almost twenty years,” Leo said.
“It’s been quite an adventure, has it?”
The straight face, the wry twinkle. “Quite.”
They drove past the old neighborhoods, past the new neighborhoods. Las Vegas was booming, sprawling, leaking like a stain into the desert. Sure, the weather in winter was pleasant. But what else? Nothing. The city had the charm of chewing gum that you scraped off the bottom of your shoe.
Guidry wished he could show Charlotte around New Orleans. The French Quarter on a quiet Sunday morning, when only the birds and the birdlike old ladies were awake. The Garden District, the river at sunset, Plum Street Snowballs. Rosemary and Joan would flip when they saw the zoo at Audubon Park.
“How much farther?” Guidry said.
They were in the desert bona fide now. Civilization, if that was what you wanted to call Las Vegas, dwindled away behind them.
“Not far,” Leo said.
“Ed lives all the way out here?”
Leo lifted a finger off the wheel and gave it a flick. Was that a yes? Guidry was familiar with the mob’s purity code. Dirty business in Vegas depended on legal gambling, and legal gambling depended on the precarious fiction that business in Vegas was clean. So the various factions had an agreement: no public spats, no blood spilled or brains blown in front of the tourists. If a guy in Vegas needed hitting, take him out to the lonely desert—just like this!—and hit him there.
“You’re a handsome devil, Leo,” Guidry said. “I bet back in the day you had the ladies lined up around the block.”
That finally got a smile out of Leo.
“No?” Guidry said. He’d had his suspicions. “The lads lined up, then. Come visit New Orleans and I’ll make a few introductions.”
They’d been driving for twenty minutes. They were miles outside of Vegas proper.
“What am I getting myself into, Leo?” Guidry said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Give me a hint. What awaits me? Out of the goodness of your heart. It’s too late for me to do anything about it, so what’s the harm?”
Leo slowed the Silver Cloud. He turned onto a rough gravel road that sawed off into the rocks. After a quarter mile or so, around a cut, the gravel yielded to a freshly paved driveway lined with cactus.
“We have arrived,” Leo said.
Ed had gone space-age mod instead of Tudor. The house was a rambling split-level with entire walls made of windows and a flat white roof angled to look like the sail of a ship, like a shark fin. The grand entryway was framed by cement blocks arranged in a complexly decorative lattice.
“Well?” Ed came out of the house, wearing his usual. Billowing linen slacks, a silk shirt open at the collar, a pair of sunglasses on top of his head. He gave Guidry a rib-cracking hug. “What do you think?”
“I thought Leo was going to drive me out into the desert and shoot me,” Guidry said.
“Leo? No. What do you think about the pad?” Ed turned so that they could examine the house together. “It’s the latest thing, I’m told. But all that glass in the summer. You’re roasting, you feel like you’re going to burst into flames. Leo, who has class, thinks the house lacks class. He thinks I lack class, don’t you, Leo?”
“Shall I take the car around to the back, Mr. Zingel?” Leo said.
“Thank you,” Ed said. “Come on, boychick.”
They went inside. There was a sunken living room inside the sunken living room, that’s how big the place was. Fifteen-foot ceilings, a stone fireplace that could fit a small car, a curved white vinyl sofa and a zebra-skin rug.
On the rug stretched a girl, seventeen years old maybe, leafing through a magazine. She wore a man’s camp shirt and denim shorts cut shorter than short. Her long legs were dirty or tan or both. There were a few other beautiful teenage loungers, too. A couple of shirtless boys watching the fish in the giant aquarium, a girl with glasses painting her toenails, a girl with a paper sack full of cherries feeding them to a boy on the marble floor at her feet.
“Don’t worry about them,” Ed said. “They’re high as kites, most of them.”
“Friends of yours?” Guidry said.
“More like family, really. The wind blows them here, from all over the country. Cindy there by the fireplace is from Maine.”
“How about that.”
“Stop clutching your pearls, Mamie Eisenhower. I don’t touch them, I just watch. I’m too old to keep up. I don’t have them do anything to each other that they’re not dying to do already.”
The girl on the zebra-skin rug, Cindy from Maine, rolled lazily onto her back, lifted a long, slender, dirty, bare leg, and pointed her toes at the ceiling. She regarded Guidry from behind a spill of blond hair. She had the bluest, emptiest eyes he’d ever seen. The whitest, emptiest smile.
“Far be it from me to judge, Ed,” Guidry said.
Ed led Guidry through the living room, around the corner, past the kitchen.
A door.
“After you,” Ed said.
Guidry took a deep breath, but behind the door was not a secret tiled room with a drain in the floor—no, just the dining room. A wall of glass that faced the pool, a table with a snowy white tablecloth, a bucket of ice next to a bottle of Black & White. Guidry headed straight to the scotch and poured himself a double. But don’t relax just yet. All that this guaranteed, this and Leo coming in with a chafing dish of what smelled like lobster thermidor, was that Guidry would live to see another hour or two. Maybe.
“Dig in,” Ed said. “And don’t worry about Leo either. He’s the soul of discretion. Aren’t you, Leo?”
Guidry took a seat across the table from Ed, next to Leo. On the other side of the window, out by the pool, a pair of matched bronze teens lay glistening and motionless.
Guidry took a bite, a sip. He waited. Ed was having a ball, watching Guidry twist.
“So when do I leave, Ed?” Guidry said. “For Vietnam?”
“You’re eager to know,” Ed said. “The when and the how and the what-do-I-do-when-I-get-there. The pertinent details, as it were.”
“Exactly that.”
“I don’t blame you. But let’s show each other our cards first, get that out of the way. What do you say?”
So here it was. The first jolt, the first bump. Guidry knew what he had to do. Stay on his feet and not go down.
“I’d enjoy that, Ed,” he said. “But you’ve already seen all my cards.”
Ed laughed. “You’re a cool customer, boychick. I’ve always liked that about you. You’ve got aplomb in spades.”
Guidry was glad to hear that it appeared so, at least.
“Tell me what really happened,” Ed said. “You didn’t fuck Carlos’s daughter. Maybe you did. But that’s not why you’re on the outs. That’s not why he’s beating the bushes for you, practically shitting himself. If we’re going to be in this thing together, I need to know everything.”
“If we’re going to be in it together?” Guidry said.
“It’s a figure of speech.”
Tell Ed the truth. Tell Ed a lie. If Guidry admitted that he knew what happened in Dallas, that he had dirt on Carlos, Ed would be even more eager than he already was to help him. Carlos, exposed and vulnerable, Ed’s dream come true—stick Carlos right in the tender parts and make him squeal.
That was the one hand. On the other hand, the president of the United States had been assassinated. The Earl Warren Commission, the FBI. Ed didn’t need a headache that big, a headache like Guidry.
Maybe Ed already knew about Dallas and Carlos and this was a test. But the right answer? Guidry didn’t know. Ed Zingel, his wiles legendary, his motives unknowable. He waited, patient and smiling. Tell the truth, tell a lie. Guidry decided to go with a bit of each.
“It’s the Kennedy thing,” Guidry said.
“I suspected.”
“I don’t know much,” Guidry said. “I know that the real sniper drove down to Houston after the job. I heard Seraphine on a
call that I wasn’t supposed to hear.”
“What else?” Ed said.
“That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.”
As Guidry thought about Mackey and Armand and Jack Ruby. As he felt again the wet warmth of the Houston night on his skin, smelled the refineries as he popped the trunk of the Cadillac and unzipped the army duffel, as he saw before him the rifle, the brass shell casings.
“But Carlos thinks you have more,” Ed said.
“Those are all my cards, Ed,” Guidry said.
Ed leaned back in his chair and mused. Guidry poured himself another double. Don’t let Ed see your hand shake. Finally Ed nodded and tucked into his lobster thermidor.
“See how good that feels?” Ed said. “To unburden your heart to a friend?”
“Like a breath of fresh air,” Guidry said.
“I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. Jack was an arrogant son of a bitch, but he knew how to have a good time. And he knew how to play the game. Bobby was the problem.”
“You’re saying pop Bobby instead of Jack.”
“Don’t pop anybody. But sure, pop Bobby instead. Send a message, get Jack back in line. You can’t let a personal grudge stand in the way of business. Even a dumb wop like Carlos should understand that.”
Ed’s personal grudge against Carlos was the reason Guidry was sitting there right now, sipping scotch and picking at a plate of lobster thermidor. Guidry chose not to point out the irony.
The teenagers who were spread out by the pool still hadn’t moved. Guidry wasn’t sure that they were even still breathing. Leo left and returned with a pot of coffee. Ed wiped his mouth and tossed the napkin onto the table.
“You want to hear something funny?” Ed said. “I was about to retire. Call it a day. But then Jack gets popped, LBJ takes over, and I start to think … hmm, Vietnam. So you see? For you and me both, that first bullet in Dallas turned everything around.”
“Ed,” Guidry said.
“What?”
“I put my cards on the table.”
“And now it’s my turn?” Ed said. “Okay, let’s talk turkey. I’m going to get you on a flight out of Nellis. A colonel with a bomber wing is a friend of mine. He—”
Ed stopped. The empty-eyed girl with the legs, Cindy from Maine, had wandered into the room. She slid onto Ed’s lap and smiled her white, empty smile at Guidry. When Leo cleared his throat, she bared her teeth and snapped at him, like a dog biting at a fly. Leo ignored her. He tipped a spoonful of sugar into his coffee.
“When is it, Ed?” Guidry said. “The flight out of Nellis?”
Cindy tugged at Ed’s jowls. “Daddy. Are we going to play today?”
“Is it time?” Ed said. “Boychick, you’re going to get a kick out of this.”
No. Whatever it might be that Ed had in mind, no, no, no. And definitely not now, not yet. Guidry smiled. Aplomb in spades, sure.
“I’d love to finish our conversation first,” Guidry said.
“We’ll have plenty of time to talk,” Ed said. “Trust me, you’ve never seen anything like this in your life.”
Guidry caught Leo’s eye. Leo’s Clark Gable mustache twitched.
“Leo doesn’t approve of our shenanigans,” Ed said. “Do you, Leo?”
“C’mon, Daddy,” Cindy said. “We want to play.”
Leo stood. “I’ll gather the equipment.”
“Ed,” Guidry said. “I don’t want to be a drag, but maybe—”
“You’re not a drag, boychick,” Ed said. “If I wanted a drag working for me in Saigon, I’d send Leo.”
A good-natured warning. Guidry guessed there wouldn’t be a second one. “Let the games begin,” he said.
On the way outside, Guidry stopped in the bathroom. A signed Picasso over the toilet, authentic as far as Guidry could tell, probably worth a fortune. A charcoal sketch of a catlike creature with wings and fangs, devouring itself. He took a leak and combed his hair. From far away in the house, he heard a faint bang, like a door or the lid of a coffin slamming shut. He heard a shriek of laughter or terror. Get me out of here, he thought.
Out back, on a half acre of lush emerald grass that Ed must have kept watered around the clock, the teenagers had gathered. Eight of them, stripped down to their underwear, the four boys in their Fruit of the Loom whities, the four girls in bras and panties. Leo went down the line with a carton of raw eggs. Each of the boys selected an egg.
“Come here. I’ll explain the rules to you.” Ed sat on the flagstone patio, smoking a cigar. “The egg goes on top of the guy’s head. The nylon stocking holds the egg so that it doesn’t fall off.”
“Naturally,” Guidry said.
The boys already had their nylons. The girls helped the boys get the eggs fixed in place. The sheer, flesh-colored nylons, when pulled all the way down to the chin, flattened and blurred the faces of the boys, as if a thumb had tried to rub out a mistake. The egg protruding from the top of the skull … Guidry didn’t know what the hell that looked like. A tumor, a rudimentary horn?
Leo went back down the line with a Coleman cooler box. What was in the cooler? Fish, naturally. Each fish was more than a foot long and frozen stiff. One fish for each of the girls. Guidry wished that Picasso could get a load of this. He’d throw up his hands, throw in the towel.
“We played this when I was a kid,” Ed said, “the camp where my parents used to send me in the summer.”
Ye gods. “What in the hell kind of camp was that, Ed?” Guidry said.
“See, the girl rides on the guy’s shoulders. She has the fish. The object of the game, it’s simple. Use your fish to break the other eggs. Don’t let anyone break your egg.”
Leo came over to sit with them. “Ready when you are, Mr. Zingel.”
“Mount up, ladies and gentlemen!” Ed said. “A hundred bucks to the last team standing, winner takes all!”
He opened a drawer in the side table next to him and took out a gun and fired into the air. Guidry didn’t have time to brace himself. The crack zinged off the canyon walls, zinged back around and around. Guidry felt like he was being shot at from every direction at once.
“Giddyup!” Ed said.
At first there was just a lot of stumbling, a lot of giggling. Eight teenage kids high as kites, the boys half blind because of the nylons over their heads, the fish so slippery that the girls could barely keep a grip.
Guidry glanced over at Leo. This wasn’t so bad. Leo looked away.
The girls began to swing the fish hard, harder. One boy took a vicious smack to the face. He staggered, dazed. Cindy from Maine maneuvered into position, white smile gleaming, and blindsided the girl on the boy’s shoulders, a blow that almost took her head off. A fish frozen solid—it must have been like getting hit with a two-by-four.
A girl with pigtails smashed the egg on top of a boy’s head, smashed and smashed, driving him to his knees. Guidry, who’d seen rough action, who’d been on the beach at Leyte, remember, winced. Cindy broke the second egg and then just for the hell of it grabbed the girl’s hair and yanked her backward off her partner’s shoulders. The girl hit the ground with a crunch that made Guidry wince again. When the girl sat back up, her mouth full of blood, Cindy laughed.
“Ed,” Guidry said.
Ed grinned. “Did I tell you? The almighty id. Nature’s most beautiful creation. Give it sunshine, watch it blossom.”
“Someone’s going to get hurt.”
“Maybe not,” Ed said.
Here was the savior, Guidry reminded himself once again, into whose hands he had delivered himself. Get me out of here now.
One egg left. Cindy went in for the kill. The two girls hammered savagely at each other. Their partners went down. The girl with the pigtails tried to crawl away. Cindy chased her, caught her, pinned her, beat her until the girl’s screams turned to whimpers and Cindy’s fish, softening in the heat, flew apart in her hands.
Two of the boys dragged the girl with the pigtails into the house. Cindy came over to
collect her prize. She knelt in front of Ed. She had a smear of blood on her cheek, what might have been part of a handprint, and glittering silver fish scales caught in her eyelashes. Ed tucked a hundred-dollar bill beneath her bra strap.
“And you get to be queen for the day,” he said.
“I like to win, Daddy,” Cindy said.
“Watch this,” Ed told Guidry. He lifted the gun and pressed the barrel against her forehead. “Do you want me to blow your brains out, Cindy?”
She smiled her white, empty smile. “I don’t care.”
Ed put the gun away. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Go get cleaned up. Have some candy.”
Ed drove Guidry back to the Hacienda himself. He told stories most of the way. How he and Norman Biltz had raised millions of dollars for Jack in ’60. How Sam Giancana wanted to put pressure on Bobby, so he had Marilyn Monroe drugged and passed around at the Cal-Neva in Reno. Ed owned copies of the pictures, if Guidry ever wanted to see them.
Guidry listened and smiled. He had a headache, and his stomach was starting to cramp again. He tried delicately to edge the conversation back to that flight out of Nellis. Ed ignored him. He told more stories about the good old days.
Guidry listened and smiled. He thought about Charlotte. Her eyes, her smell, the taste of her sweat. All the usual dumb clichés. Guidry was disappointed in himself. Her laugh and her frown. Ye gods, what was wrong with him? If a thought puzzled or enticed her, if she found a notion dubious or tempting, she squinted one eye shut the way she did when she looked through the viewfinder of her camera.
“We did a few deals,” Ed was saying, “but he never succumbed to my charms.”
Guidry listened and smiled. Did a few deals with who? “I can’t imagine that, Ed.”
It wasn’t real, Guidry knew, what he felt for Charlotte. It was puppy love, a trick of the light, a temporary infatuation brought on by the novelty of the situation (his first Oklahoma housewife!), by the burden of stress under which he’d been laboring.
Then why did it feel so real? Why the wrench of joy in his gut when he pictured himself getting back to the hotel and strolling out to the pool and seeing Charlotte and the girls again, seeing them look up, light up. The force of that desire—to be right there, right this minute—unnerved him.