I wiped the tears from my eyes before I left to hit the streets, trying to figure out what I could do to survive. Not having a car in Vegas wasn’t as bad as other places because everything that was anything was concentrated in two areas, Glitter Gulch and the Strip.
The first thing I did was use eighty dollars to buy a headstone for Betty. It wasn’t dignified, being the only one out there without her name on a stone. Coming back from the granite place, I thought about my options. Living in the desert wasn’t as hard as most other places. Sure, it got cold in the winter, but it was survivable most of the year. There were bums who lived outside of town in caves dug into the soft sandstone sides of dried riverbeds. We had the same thing in Mina and Hawthorne, men who had nowhere to go when the mines closed and lived Stone Age, coming into town to pick up a day’s labor now and again and more often to hit the soup kitchens in North Las Vegas. The Salvation Army had a mission downtown that I heard served beans that weren’t too bad. And they let you stay a while in their bunkhouse as long as you were willing to listen to a sermon about God and salvation.
I couldn’t run my handout business, not without a car. Besides, Tony Lardino had taken it over after Betty was killed and I dropped it. That left picking up odd jobs like yard work and washing cars.
Fuck that! I’d sooner bust into parked cars of tourists and grab their cameras and rip out their radios before I’d get calluses raking someone’s yard for peanuts.
An idea was germinating in my mind as I walked past a house where an old guy sat on the porch playing cards by himself. I had seen him before, camped out on the porch, dealing out poker hands like there were other players at the table. His hands were kind of messed up, like he’d broken them. He had the look of a casino dealer, lean and wiry, intense and quick even when he was playing alone, but his hands were too screwed up for casino dealing. I figured the guy had once been a dealer and hurt his hands; now he lived poor on a little Social Security.
His house was little more than a tarpaper shack, but what really interested me was an old travel trailer in the backyard. It wasn’t much of a trailer, one of those things that looked like a camel’s hump on two wheels. Not more than ten or twelve feet long, you couldn’t stand up in it. You got into it on your knees through a small door on the side and had to crawl around inside. Little windows in the front and rear gave enough light so you didn’t think you were in a coffin. An old station wagon with a hitch was parked in the driveway, so I guess he pulled it at some time, but from the look of the dried, cracked rubber on the half-flat tires and the weeds growing around them, the trailer hadn’t seen a road in a long time.
I went through the picket fence gate, lifting it up to push it aside because it was hanging on only one hinge.
“Hi.”
The old man looked me over. “Howdy. What can I do for you?”
“I was looking at your trailer.”
“You interested in buying it?”
“No, more like renting it. I need someplace to stay.”
“Where do you live now?”
“Down the street, but I have to move.”
“It isn’t a live-in trailer. You can’t even stand in it. You working?”
“No, but I’m gonna be. I’ve got money.” Betty and I had been paying one-fifty a month for the one-bedroom dump we rented. If the old man was on Social Security, he probably wasn’t getting more than a few hundred a month, maybe no more than two-fifty. “I can pay you fifty a month, if I can use your icebox for a couple things, and your stove.” I figured I could live on Cream of Wheat if nothing else.
“Haven’t I seen you driving by here sometimes with your mother? Where’s your folks?”
“I don’t have any. Look, you want to make a deal or not?”
He chuckled. “Don’t be such a hard-ass, kid. I need to know whether you’re gonna knock an old man over the head for the jar of pennies I keep under my bed. But you look okay to me, just a little snarly. I’ll tell you what, we’ll draw for the first month’s rent, double or nothing.”
He shuffled the cards. His hands were twisted and gnarled from the old injury or arthritis, but he was still quick.
“They call you Lucky, don’t they?”
“How’d you know that?”
The old man shrugged and gave a small, secretive smile. “I hear lots of things.”
He spread the cards in a fan.
“Pull your card, kid.”
I looked over the fan of cards and drew a card. Ten of hearts. Not bad. It beat eight of the twelve other cards in the deck.
He pursed his lips, started for the center of the fan, changed his mind and flipped over a card off to the left.
Ace of spades.
I pulled my wad out of my pocket and peeled off five twenties. It left me with just twenty bucks.
“I guess they were wrong,” he said.
“’Bout what?”
“Calling you Lucky.”
18
I said an emotional good-bye to Suke and Naomi after helping load their car. I refused the money Suke tried to stuff in my pocket, telling her that I had plenty. “Save it for Naomi’s baby,” I told her.
My next stop was Morty Lardino. He held court at the back of a pool hall on a side street downtown. Morty was a small-time racketeer in a town that still had the shadow of the mob. People said Howard Hughes bought the mob out of Vegas with his checkbook, but they laughed all the way to the bank because they only got themselves out of the limelight. Vegas was a sea of loose money and it had an irresistible appeal to crooks. Besides, bottom feeders like Morty were always around. Morty was strictly a street-crime guy, collecting a commission from pimps, getting a cut from the drug pushers, importing girls and renting them to the whorehouses outside the county limits where prostitution was legal. But there were too many legal rackets in Nevada for a small-time hood to get rich quick. And the type of protection rackets that flourished on the East Coast, like laundries or garbage collectors, didn’t go well in a society where everyone owned guns and a lot of sheriffs still wore cowboy hats.
“Mr. Lardino,” I said, respectfully stopping five feet from his table. He was alone at the table. Another man had gotten up and gone to the john as I came in.
Morty was not quite as big as Tony, but he had a cold mean look, a junkyard dog with a small brain and big teeth. I heard his old man was a wop and his old lady a Jew. I was Heinz ketchup, but Betty said I had some Jewish and Italian blood, so I planned to play that card with him when I had a chance.
Taking a cigar out of his mouth, a diamond the size of Mount Rushmore flashed on his ring finger. He wore a black jacket heavily coated with dandruff and a dark-blue shirt with white polka dots, gray slacks, and white shoes. A gold chain was on his wrist and around his neck. I hated the gold chain look—it reminded me of that creep Kupka, who was weighed down with the stuff.
“What’d ya want?”
I came up to the table. My throat was dry. I heard Morty was a real ball breaker. A drug pusher had four fingers missing from his right hand and the word on the street was that Morty had stuck the guy’s hand under the blade of a paper cutter and pulled the handle himself after the dealer had shorted him on a payoff.
“I’m looking for a job?”
He flicked ashes off of his cigar as he squinted at me. “This look like the unemployment office, kid?”
“No, sir, but I heard you need someone to run errands.” What he needed was a bagman. The morning paper said a man was arrested last night trying to shake down a cop posing as a prostitute. I knew the dude, he hung around with Tony Lardino. His job was to collect money from the pimps and pushers in a bag and bring the bag to Morty. Every dime. The job paid well, but acting as a go-between for crooks and a mobster wasn’t exactly considered an opportunity assignment.
“You a wise guy?”
“No, sir, you can ask Tony about me, I ran the rag pushers for six months and paid him a cut. I was with him once when you drove up, but you probably didn’t notice
me.”
“What’s your name?”
“Zack Riordan, sir.”
“Riordan. Yeah, I know who you are. Your old lady got popped by that car salesman.”
I felt my blood rising. “Can I have the job?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
His squint deepened. “You’re shitting me, kid. You ain’t a day pass nineteen.”
I grinned. “I’m almost twenty-one. Besides, if I get busted, I’ll be a first-time youth offender. I won’t do any time.”
“You got an old man?”
“No. But I don’t need anyone.”
“Yeah, that’s right, you were a big-time rag pusher.” He threw back his big head and laughed.
The man who had been at the table with him came back from the john. Morty pointed his cigar at him.
“This is Sam. He’ll show you how to work the route. You know how to count, kid?”
“Count? Sure, I’m good with arithmetic.”
“Make sure you count real accurate, kid. You won’t have any fingers or toes to help you add with if I catch you skimming.”
19
“Working the route” meant hanging around the streets, watching the action. After you got to know the players—the pimps, prostitutes, and drug pushers—it was pretty easy to estimate what they were taking in. Once each night I took a collection from the players, stuffing the money in my jacket pockets. Sometimes it was nickel-and-dime stuff from a pusher, but a pimp was usually good for a couple hundred. Sam and Morty knew from past history exactly what each player should pay. I got grilled when it wasn’t exactly what they expected. I kept track of the take using a code scribbled on a piece of paper small enough to swallow it if I got busted.
Most of the action took place downtown in Glitter Gulch. Streetwalkers and overt pushers were a no-no on the Strip. Most whores got sent over to the Strip by a call from a hotel bellman. A few hung around the cocktail lounges after slipping a bartender a twenty, but the lounges in the big clubs had service managers who, following the universal policy, tolerated prostitution only if it was done subtly.
Once a night I made a run up to the Strip and hit the bellmen and barmen on the route. I needed a car for that; it didn’t look good for a mob bagman to ride a city bus, and I asked the old guy I rented the trailer from if I could use his station wagon for a few bucks when I needed it. He let me use the car as long as I kept gas in it, accompanying me several times just to get out of the house. His name was Paul Embers and I was right about his prior occupation. He was an old-time dealer and gambler, now living poor.
“I worked all the old clubs,” Paul told me, “from Cal-Neva on the California-Nevada border in South Tahoe, to Harold’s Club and Harrah’s in Reno, down to Binion’s Horseshoe on Glitter Gulch and the Dunes on the Strip. I dealt blackjack the night the Flamingo opened. Bugsy stood right next to me watching me deal to George Raft, who came in to help his pal Bugsy. I’ve seen mushroom clouds from the atomic blasts at the testing grounds. In ‘fifty-six I saw Elvis when he opened at the Frontier. He sang ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ He flopped and they fired him after a week. I’ve seen so many Helldorado Day parades I should be the grand master.”
Embers hadn’t been just a casino dealer, but a professional poker player, the kind of guy you would call a card sharp. Despite his hands being deformed, he could still shuffle and deal better than me.
I asked him what happened to his hands.
“Jack slipped and a car dropped on my hands when I was fixing a tire,” he explained.
Cards were his life—his sex life, his children, his filet mignon. And poker was his game.
“Poker’s the only real game of skill in a casino,” he said. “All the rest are just pits where you throw your money because the odds are always with the house. With six decks, blackjack’s become a game of chance to all but a few freaks who can count that many cards. You can have runs of luck with poker, good and bad, but you have the same odds as everyone else at the table. With the odds neutral, it comes down to who’s the best poker player.”
Embers knew everything about poker—including how to cheat. He started teaching me to play and to watch for cheating.
“You can’t play poker timidly, you have to be completely fearless. A poker table is a battlefield in which no quarter is asked or given. I’ve played poker all my life. Played my first game in Helena, Montana, in the back of a saloon when I was sixteen. I’ve seen men lose their homes, jobs, families, and their lives at the turn of a card. Poker is my poison and my aphrodisiac. The only hand I won’t bet on is aces and eights. It’s the bad-luck hand Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he got shot in the back by Dirty Jack McCall.”
He showed me how to cheat.
“With a false shuffle and cut, the cards look like they’re being mixed, but they don’t change order,” Embers told me. “You then deal out the cards in a prearranged order from a cold deck. Slipping aces to the bottom and dealing them to yourself is another easy scam. Dealers will peek at the top card, see it’s something they want, and deal the next cards or off the bottom until they can drop the good card on themselves or their buddy. When playing blackjack with a single deck, one of the swiftest moves is to gather up the cards on the table and slip some back on the top where you want them rather than on the bottom where they belong.
“Marking the back of cards with your fingernail so you can identify them later is the easiest cheat. Another trick is to hold back a couple of aces, hide them up your sleeve, and pull them out when you need them. A trick used by some small-time grind joints is to use decks with fewer ten-count cards than smaller cards, that way the dealer doesn’t go bust as often when he’s forced to hit a sixteen. But the easiest way to cheat is simply to use a marked deck.” He spread a deck out on the table we were sitting at and pointed at a card. “What’s that card?”
“I dunno.”
“Ace of diamonds, queen of hearts, jack of spades—in this deck, the aces and face cards are marked. Watch.” He bent the end of the deck and let them flow by his thumb at high speed so I could see the pattern on the back in motion. “You can tell the deck is marked because there are interruptions in the pattern on the back of the cards as I fan them.”
I picked up one of the cards and examined the familiar design on the back.
“Paul, this is the deck you pulled the ace from to beat me out of an extra month’s rent. You cheated me.”
He stared at me like I’d just accused the pope of bigamy. “Of course. This is Las Vegas.”
20
LAS VEGAS, 1975
I met Janelle at a lap-dance club. I had just turned twenty-one, my phony license said I was twenty-three, and I could pass for twenty-five. Sometimes even I forgot how old I really was.
The last several years had gone by as if I was operating at jetsetter speed. My bagman job with Morty Lardino lasted until a drug dealer high on his own supply pulled a Saturday night special on me when I asked for Morty’s cut. I was out of the North Las Vegas alley and halfway to the Strip before he got it cocked and locked. I don’t know what happened to the guy—the word on the street was that Morty cut off his balls, stuffed them in his mouth, then buried him up to his neck in an ant hill out in the desert.
Facing a gun in the hands of a crazy was bad enough—Vegas and the mob had taken a backslide that made it unhealthy to be associated with guys like Morty. Since the mob discovered Vegas back in the forties, the town had been neutral territory, like seeking sanctuary in a church back in the days of the king’s men. There were hits, but never in town. The designated target was taken far out into the desert and simply disappeared, or followed home to Chicago or Jersey and hit. But after the boss of bosses, Vito Genovese, died in prison in ’69, and guys like Tony Spilotro, the mob’s Chicago enforcer who took out Sam Giancana, came to Vegas to fill the void created when Howard Hughes left with his billion-dollar checkbook, mob disputes—some of them acted out in Vegas, even on
e in the parking lot of a big club on the Strip—erupted. The War of the Godfathers was no place for a kid who was getting paid chump change to do Morty Lardino’s dirty work.
Soon after I left Morty’s employment, the fat man died scarfing down a plate of spaghetti. I heard that he suffered a café coronary from gulping down a sausage too fast. I also heard he choked to death when a couple of Jersey thugs stuffed his cloth napkin down his throat. Tony disappeared from the streets, too, DOA. He caught a college student flirting with his girlfriend and scattered the guy’s brains with his baseball bat. While he was in the state slammer, another con—a guy who had to eat his shit on the streets of Vegas when Uncle Morty was alive—gutted him in the prison yard with a homemade shank.
Windell Palmer, a nerdy jerk I did some street deals with, picked me and George Leroy Smith up at Embers’s house. Leroy was a pimp from L.A. Windell was a world-class twerp, the prototype of the skinny kid with Coke-bottle eyeglasses who got sand kicked in his face at the beach but still never redeemed himself by eating Wheaties. Next to him, Woody Allen was Dirty Harry.
I met Windell when I spotted him using quarter-size metal slugs to get a free Coke at a gas station. Turns out he stamped out the slugs with a machine he put together with scarps and a sewing machine motor. I had him stamp them out by the thousands and put them into the paper rolls that held ten dollars worth of quarters and sold them for five dollars a pop. They worked fine in quarter slots, but the casinos were on to it real fast and we stopped selling them. Most casinos considered it a capital offense to rip them off. Thugs who earned their living in every kind of known racket reacted with the violent indignation of a religious fanatic if someone took them for a buck.
Leroy brought me into another racket—pimping—but I never considered myself a contender for a shot at the title. There are some things you need to be born to do well. Kids who learn how to stand up on skis at three years old become good skiers, but they have to be born with the knack to ski good enough for the Olympics. I learned that lesson first when Embers tried to make me into a world-class card shark—I learned all the moves, I could spot a false shuffle, a bottom deal, a marked deck, the whole nine yards, but no matter how many hours I spent in front of a mirror watching my own hands, I didn’t have the speed and finesse that Embers had before his accident. Pimping was something else I only had amateur standing at.
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