‘My watch?’ I said.
‘That’s a lot of damage to inflict for a watch, but the police found no wallet and they think it unlikely they’ll ever find the culprits. But they’ll want to interview you. It’s pretty routine. Don’t worry about it now. Sometimes details return with time.’
‘Today?’
‘No, no, of course not. We’ve told them you’ll be sedated and we don’t expect you’ll be able to tell them anything useful for quite a while. We don’t want you grilled when your system’s full of painkillers, do we?’ Then, glancing at my left hand, he continued, ‘We have a specialist surgeon here who set some of the broken bones and did what he could, but the hand will require a fair bit of work down the track.’
‘Can you fix it?’
‘You’ll have to talk to the surgeon about that, Mr Spayd. For the next few days anyway, you’ll have to rest. You have a concussion and we will need to keep you sedated, give your body a chance to heal. I’m afraid that hand is going to give you a good deal of pain for quite a while, but we can help with that.’
They must have been doping me up pretty heavily because the next few days were a blur. I would wake up, then fall back into a doze. I never felt fully awake, and I had great trouble staying alert. I know I had some visitors. Several serious-looking men in suits appeared at my bedside from time to time, and one day I came to and found Bridgett sitting by my bed. She looked like she had been crying but I was too woozy even to greet her.
When they first reduced the level of morphine in my system, I became more alert, but the pain in my hand steadily increased. It would start as an ache, like the first pangs of toothache, then build and build to a throbbing misery that wouldn’t go away until the nurse appeared to ‘fix’ my drip, sending me back into woozy semi-consciousness. I refused to think about the morphine. I’d seen what opiate dependency could do to a soldier, and I didn’t want to end up like Charlie Parker, with a raging heroin habit. He wasn’t the only prominent jazz musician hooked on horse either.
They must have been fiddling with the dosages because they seemed to reach some sort of balance where I began to feel more alert for longer periods without the crippling pain.
One day I opened my eyes and Bridgett was sitting beside the bed again.
‘Jack, you’re back.’
‘Hello, Bridgett,’ I croaked. ‘Wha’za date?’
‘Saturday, 10th of January.’
‘You get your points?’
She smiled sadly, bent over and kissed me on the mouth. I wish I could say it was lovely, but my lips were so dry, there was almost no sensation. ‘Only you would ask, Jack. Yes, thank you. Thanks to you, we made the profit we needed.’
I wanted to ask her a whole heap of questions but found I lacked the strength. ‘Get me a drink, Bridgett. My mouth . . . like paper.’ I forgot to say please.
She left and, moments later, returned with a glass containing a straw and held it up for me to take in my right hand. I sucked greedily, the water cleaning and loosening my tongue so that I was able to speak normally. ‘Thank you,’ I grinned, ‘for the kiss.’
She reached out for the glass and put it on the bedside table, then took my right hand. ‘Oh, Jack, if only you knew how worried I’ve been,’ she said, struggling to keep control. ‘You seem to be a bit more awake today. It’s the first time you’ve spoken coherently in nearly a fortnight.’
‘I think they’re adjusting the drug dosage, and starting to get it right. So, what happened? Tell me what you know, please.’
She began to tear up and dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Jack, what do you remember?’
I’d had plenty of time coming in and out of consciousness to recall what had happened and over the next half hour, pausing every once in a while to gather my strength or to make sure I got it right, I told her what happened to the point when Chicken Shit ran for his life, and the door crashed inwards and he ran into some guy’s arms.
‘Are you sure you feel up to hearing the whole story? Or the part of it I know?’ she asked.
‘Yes, yes, please. Not knowing is starting to drive me crazy. Sammy, Chicken Shit, Bandages, what happened to them?’
Bridgett looked bemused. ‘Pardon? Sammy I understand, but who else?’
I explained. ‘In my head I named Sammy’s offsider, the guy who took off with the pink Cadillac, Chicken Shit, and the minder with the fractured skull and obvious brain damage Bandages. Their actual names, I’ve discovered, are Rufus and Groucho, but somehow the nicknames are permanently embedded in my mind.’
‘Well, let me begin at the beginning as I try to recall the sequence of events. The person who saved your life was one of the kitchen hands, Jim-Jay Bullnose.’
I must have looked blank because she went on, ‘You remember, the busboy you sent to alert me when you were in the kitchen attending to Hector? Well, he was on late nights – I know I shouldn’t let a fifteen-year-old be on duty past midnight but that’s Las Vegas; his family needs the money, and all staff volunteer for that shift work to get the extra pay, especially at this time of the year.’
‘Gotta do something for the boy,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Well, it seems one of the other coloured people in the parking station saw what happened and came running into the kitchen. With New Year’s Eve coming up, I’d gone to bed early and nobody wanted to be responsible for waking me and they were too scared to tell Lenny.’ She shrugged. ‘They regard you very highly, Jack, but associate Lenny with Sammy, whether we like it or not, and he was with two guys in the twenty-four-hour café over in the regular who obviously weren’t guests. But someone remembered Jim-Jay Bullnose was on duty out front and had been the one who’d initially told them all about Sammy’s Westside basement and also called me the night Hector was hurt. He lives with his family in the tenement next door to that dreadful place. By the way, among the coloured staff, it is, or was, known as Mr Sammy’s torture chamber. And, well, he’d previously fetched me for Hector, so he volunteered to phone me, to dial my apartment number.
‘Thank god Lenny was still up with the two men from Chicago. I immediately alerted him. Jim-Jay Bullnose then took them in a car that the two men had hired, Lenny having enough presence of mind not to take a company car to the basement on the Westside.’ She paused. ‘Lenny forbade me to accompany them . . .’ Then suddenly she burst into tears. ‘They arrived too late to save your hand and . . . and it’s . . . it’s all my fault you stayed on! Oh, oh, Jack!’ she wailed.
I patted her on the shoulder with my good hand for some time while she had a bit of a weep – more than a bit. ‘Bridgett, stop it!’ I kept repeating as firmly as I could with my failing voice. Then, finally, when she seemed a little more in control, I asked her, ‘Who knows about this; I mean, apart from the coloured staff?’
‘You mean the police?’ she sniffed.
‘Well, no, the hospital told me they’ve settled for a mugging by parties unknown who stole my wallet, but they’ll want to interview me at some stage.’ I didn’t mention the stolen Rolex, in case this set off a fresh bout of weeping.
Bridgett finally wiped away her tears. Her mascara had run and her eyes were bloodshot, but she still looked beautiful. ‘Sorry, Jack, I feel so guilty . . .’ But eventually she composed herself, realising perhaps that this was no time for confessions, which would change nothing. ‘The two men from Chicago took over. It was close to dawn on New Year’s Eve by the time I’d made all the arrangements; private ambulances, getting the company Convair prepared to take a stretcher and ready to fly. They wanted nobody to know what had happened and insisted I do the organising, as usual.’ Bridgett sighed. ‘I don’t get it with these hoods – they must think coloured people can’t think or act. The entire hotel staff would have known every detail by noon at the latest. They gave Jim-Jay Bullnose a hundred dollars the previous night when he took them to the basement and said they’d kill him if he ever went to the police. He brought it to me and asked if he should keep it. It was, of cour
se, a veritable fortune for his family. I told him he had no choice, he couldn’t return it or they’d get suspicious. He then told me the story of what happened in the basement. I’ve sent him on the Greyhound to his aunt and uncle in Alabama, just in case. I’ve spoken to his parents and they’ve agreed I can see he gets a proper education.’
‘What about the hospital; they didn’t question Sammy and Bandages leaving the day before they were expected to?’
She gave a grim laugh. ‘The hospital . . . well, they, whoever was on duty, is evidently prepared to say that Sammy and whatshisname, Bandages, had been officially signed out that night. I guess by your Chicken Shit guy.’
‘Seems strange, though, the two guys arriving from Chicago. Sammy must have known they were coming and this was his last chance to get at me. Lenny told me they were taking him and Bandages back to Chicago the following day.’
Bridgett looked serious for a moment. ‘Jack, I simply don’t know. If money changed hands, and it always does, the ward supervisor or head nurse or whoever . . . I really can’t say.’ She paused. ‘The remainder comes from Jim-Jay Bullnose. When the men broke down the door of the basement, they forgot all about him. One of them had lifted the door back to cover the entrance but it left a crack that allowed Jim-Jay to see into the room. The guys from Chicago wrestled Chicken Shit to the ground but Bandages was squealing and pointing at him, ‘He kill Mama! He kill Mama!’ He showed them the gun lying in the corner, then ran over, grabbed it and fired two bullets into Chicken Shit, evidently killing him instantly. He then pointed the gun at you, but one of the men from Chicago had his gun out and shot him dead.’
‘Christ! That’s two citizens America isn’t going to mourn,’ was all I could think to say.
‘Anyhow, Jim-Jay Bullnose knew better than to hang around and fled for his life. It seems, according to Lenny, they carried the near-dead Sammy out of the basement to the pink Cadillac parked around the corner, having retrieved the keys from Chicken Shit’s pocket. They laid Sammy in the luggage compartment, and the two men drove it back to the Firebird while Lenny drove you in the hired car to Emergency and carried you to the entrance then left before he was seen.
‘I arranged for a private ambulance and a doctor whose lips are sealed. Occasionally we need him, and we reward him very well. He’s a compulsive gambler who usually gets his gambling debt wiped out. It seemed the bullet hadn’t entered any of Sammy’s vital organs but had smashed into the bone in his hip. He, the doctor, patched him up and gave him a stiff shot of morphine with further supplies for the journey and said Sammy was okay to fly. It was decided that one of the Chicago men, a trained medic, would accompany the ambulance to the airport and travel with him. The other was going to stay and help clear up the mess in the Westside cellar. Because, of course, Lenny couldn’t be seen anywhere near it. By sunrise the Convair was in the air with Sammy on a stretcher on the way to Chicago. The pink Cadillac has since disappeared.’
Even by Nevada police standards, you could walk a circus elephant through the holes in this case, though, no doubt, some deep pockets would be filled to the brim with untraceable, used large-denomination notes. ‘What happened to the two dead guys in the basement? They disappear with the Cadillac?’ I asked.
‘No, the Chicago guy must have hidden their bodies in the cellar; then it was boarded up. Lenny was back at the Firebird on the phone, calling all the right tradespeople and anyone else he needed to cooperate.’ Bridgett paused then explained, ‘He may be a cleanskin but he’s still Mafiosi and he knows who to call.’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, keeping that skin clean must sometimes get pretty tricky.’
Bridgett nodded, then continued. ‘White security guards were hired before the plane had even taken off, and the derelict two-level tenement containing Sammy’s torture-chamber basement was roped off with a ‘Danger. Building Unsafe’ sign. By noon the wooden building had been bulldozed and the basement filled with concrete to a depth of twelve feet. According to staff, informed by Jim-Jay Bullnose’s parents, twenty big concrete trucks arrived during the morning. By lunchtime the basement was filled to street level with cement. They let it set and the next day they removed the wood and bulldozed the rubble back over it. Lenny is one of the few people in Las Vegas who could have made all this happen on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day!’
I smiled. ‘I know one other!’
‘No, Jack, there are some things . . . I knew you were safe in hospital and were not going to die. The rest was Mafiosi business. I refused to cooperate; that is, beyond arranging for the private ambulance and the doctor for Sammy, and that was always going to happen with his release from hospital that day and could be explained. Lenny did it all himself, even arranging for a case of beer to be sent to every truck driver and workman involved, with an extra little envelope attached. The envelopes, he got Mr Sanders to do.’
‘And through all of this not a policeman in sight?’ I suggested.
Bridgett gave a bitter laugh. ‘No, you’re wrong. According to the staff, two motorcycle traffic cops directed traffic, to allow the trucks to turn onto the site. I daresay they’ll have no trouble taking their kids to California for the holidays.’
‘Well, thank God you kept your nose clean, Mrs Fuller. I should have known better than to suggest . . .’ I didn’t complete the sentence.
Bridgett looked serious and, once again, on the edge of tears. ‘When I was forbidden to accompany the three of them to Sammy’s basement, I became terribly distraught. Jim-Jay Bullnose was the only one who knew where it was or, I swear, I would have tried to get to you. Jack, please believe I would have happily implicated myself, thrown caution to the winds and gone with them in the hope of finding you safe and sound.’
‘No, no, I’m glad you didn’t,’ I said; then, seeing her distress, I fell silent, gulping back my own tears, though I could feel one errant teardrop sliding down my cheek. ‘Oh, shit!’ I muttered, reaching out and taking her hand. She bent over as if to hold my hand against her cheek but then suddenly pulled back. ‘Jack, I’ll resign, I’ll look after you forever, if you’ll have me. We’ll leave. I’ve got my two points. Oh, Jack, how can I ever —’
‘Shush! I’m a big boy. No, no, Bridgett. That wouldn’t work. Don’t even think about it! I made the decision to stay, all on my own,’ I said, recovering. The last thing I wanted was for her to settle for me out of a sense of obligation.
‘Jack, I’ve thought of nothing else. I was in a terrible state, thinking I was letting you down by not coming to find you. I had no sleep that night. I’ll do anything —’
‘You’ll do nothing, you hear? Nothing of the sort! How do you think I’d feel?’
‘Oh, Jack, this is too awful for words.’
I had never seen her like this. ‘Bridgett, pull yourself together. Tell me what you did New Year’s Eve without me there.’ Perhaps that would distract her.
She sniffed and reached into her sleeve for a handkerchief, and blew her nose. The composed Mrs Fuller emerged almost at once. ‘I can’t say it was easy preparing for New Year’s Eve, acting as if nothing had happened.’ Bridgett brushed at her tears and smiled, now looking at me in a distinctly mischievous way. ‘But the joint was jumping!’
‘Oh, so you found another piano player, did you?’ I said, pretending to be miffed.
‘Oh, something much, much better than that,’ she teased. ‘I paid Chef Napoleon Nelson for his usual shift and then gave him the night off from kitchen work. His staff could manage – he’d prepared absolutely everything.’ She paused, and I wondered where this was leading. ‘And then I rehired him with The Resurrection Brothers for the GAWP Bar.’
I stared at her blankly. ‘Bridgett, you didn’t! You did that?’ I exclaimed.
‘Well, there have been headline acts with coloured musicians before.’
‘Yes, but these are kitchen staff or the equivalent, all amateurs and all black. You must have known you were taking a chance. What if some of your ladies objected?’
‘They were sorry to hear about your hand but they took it well, and the free Krug champagne – compliments of Jack Spayd – helped put them in a party mood. By the way, fifty-six large bunches of roses arrived for you from the GAWP ladies on New Year’s Day. I guess Las Vegas ran clean out of red roses. I’m sorry you weren’t able to appreciate them.’
Bridgett continued, eyes dancing. ‘Some GAWP members, I admit, were a little surprised when they discovered the band members were all black. But it didn’t last. Nobody walked out and they simply loved the music. As you know, other casinos have headline acts with Negro stars and musicians, but this is the first time in Las Vegas an all-coloured band of local church musicians has ever played at a casino. They especially loved Chef Napoleon Nelson. My goodness, you’d have thought he was Count Basie with his big band, the way the ladies carried on. They simply lapped it up.’
‘Bridgett, that took a lot of guts.’
‘Not at all; it was fun and took my mind off you, Jack.’
‘And, in the process, you thumbed your nose at Chicago!’ I laughed.
‘Well, maybe. I acted as MC and pointed out that the members of the band were all working folk who’d come at short notice as a special favour to you, many giving up overtime jobs on New Year’s Eve to do so. We passed around a silver champagne bucket and it filled three times over with folding money,’ Bridgett laughed.
Jack of Diamonds Page 61