“You’re a thug,” Embers said, disgusted at my assertive approach to playing poker and my lack of finesse in handling a deck. “You have no patience, no timing, you’re always risking everything for the big pot. Poker is an introspective game, like chess, but you treat it like a fist fight. It’s a game of strategy and math, but you refuse to deal with the science of the game. You make blind bets, relying on luck. You draw on inside straights no matter how many times I tell you no poker player does. You chase Lady Luck, but she’s a prick teaser who flashes her snatch but crosses her legs when you try to stick it in.”
“I take chances because I want to be somebody, Embers, and I don’t have the rest of my life to wait.”
He taught me to spend as much time watching a player’s eyes as his hands. “Persian rug dealers know you expose your desires with your eyes. When they lay out the carpets, they watch your eyes and know the carpet you want by the way your pupils dilate. Once they know you want it, they have you by the balls.”
He was wrong about one thing—I did catch the math about casinos. No matter who’s playing, the casinos ultimately win because they play strictly by the odds. “The stars may lie,” Embers said, “but the numbers never do.”
After Morty Lardino choked to death eating his napkin, and Tony ran into an old friend’s homemade shiv in the state pen, I had gone back into the rag business, working the streets distributing pamphlets for massage parlors and escort services. The cops had gotten wise to the racket and required a license, forbidding minors from passing out racy stuff, so I got the license in Embers’s name and hired guys from a revolving pool of mission puppies—derelicts who didn’t smell and look so bad that they scared off the customers. Advancing from passing out pamphlets to soliciting business was a natural step, and pretty soon I was ferrying guys to the parlors and making “dates” for the escort services. The next step was having my own stable of girls and that’s where Leroy came in. He was a bona fide pimp from L.A. who ran girls on Sunset Boulevard. He came to Vegas to open a “branch office” but ran into trouble with the guy who controlled most of the street action and who had a lock on the best spots.
With my tourist contacts generated by the handouts, I was a natural for teaming up with Leroy—I provided the johns and he provided the whores. The girls turned the tricks in hotel rooms rented downtown and in North Las Vegas, but they never walked the streets.
“Consider yourself part of a franchise like Kentucky Fried Chicken—we even serve white and dark meat,” Leroy said.
I was paid twenty-five bucks for every john my guys brought in. From that amount, I had to give the guy who copped the deal five and the driver five, and Nike Monte, Morty Lardino’s replacement as street boss, too five plus a piece of Leroy’s action. That left me with ten bucks. I wasn’t getting rich, but with my other action, it helped keep me from having to do honest work. I could have cut Leroy from the deal and run girls myself, but I didn’t have the balls to be a true pimp. It took a real prick to manage whores.
“The greatest pimp in the world was Iceberg Slim,” Leroy told me. “He said a pimp is the loneliest bastard on earth, a guy who’s gotta know his whores but who can never let them know him. He’s gotta be God to the bitches. Is that shit profound or what?”
21
When Windell picked us up at Embers’s, he was driving a brand-new Plymouth Fury.
“Where the hell’s that tin can you drive?” I asked the nerd. His usual transportation was one of those minicars that Honda put out, hardly bigger than motorcycles and looked like they were built from recycled pea cans.
“This is a loaner,” he told us as we cruised toward the Strip. The car had a new-car smell and the dealer’s price sticker was still on the side window.
“They give you a loaner when they repair that piece of junk you drive? Bullshit.”
“Naw, it’s not that kind of loaner. I did a favor for a guy and he loaned me the car. He borrowed it from the dealer.”
I looked back at Leroy just as a cop car drove by and both of us froze.
“Windell,” I said, keeping the murderous rage out of my voice, “is this car hot?”
“Call it borrowed.”
“Bullshit.”
“Would I lie to you, man?”
“Do chickens have lips?”
“Okay, it was borrowed but the dealership don’t know it.”
“Stop this car, you little fucker, and let us out!”
The three of us made the ride to the Strip in Embers’s station wagon. On the way, Windell explained to us how his friend copped the cars.
“He goes into a dealership and test drives the car. When they park it back on the lot after the drive, he does a key switch, slipping a dummy key for the brand of car onto the ring and takes the real key off. Then he comes back during the night and drives it away.”
Leroy and me debated investing in the scheme all the way to the Pussy Kat Dance Club.
The Pussy Kat was a takeoff on the old taxi dance places of the twenties and thirties where you paid a dime to dance with a girl. Only in this case, the girl stripped in front of you for a hell of a lot more than a dime.
Sure, I could’ve gotten a girl to strip for me without paying, but somehow paying a woman to take off her clothes appealed to me. And of course not just any woman could get my juices flowing—like Philip Marlowe said in Farewell, My Lovely: “I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.”
He would have loved Janelle.
With all the free pussy Leroy and I could get, we still ended up at the Pussy Kat with Windell when we were carousing the Strip area. We paid the ten-dollar admission fee and got the usual entrance admonishment.
“Dances are twenty dollars, plus gratuity. Drinks are five. You have to order two drinks. Don’t touch the girls, their hair, their ass, their little toe, nada. You touch and he will escort you out.”
The bouncer was a guy with cannonball biceps, pects like hubcaps, and no neck.
These lap joints weren’t kidding when they said hands off. Not that they gave a damn about what customers did with the girls later—most of the girls could be “dated” on the side. But to appease the city’s self-appointed moral busybodies who were down on anything sexual because they weren’t getting any themselves, the clubs strictly followed the rules to keep their licenses.
We took a table and ordered the mandatory watered-down drinks. There were mostly young guys in the club, a bunch of frats from USC, a rich kid’s school in a L.A. slum. There were several lap dancers doing their thing when a carrot-top with freckles came over. She sized us up to see who was the big spender and made a beeline for Leroy. Smart girl. I had just paid him the five hundred I owed him, which left me with fifty bucks. Windell probably had a pocketful of the quarter slugs he stamped out.
“May I dance for you?” she asked Leroy.
“Give me the treatment, Red. I’ve been stranded on a desert island for ten years and you’re the first woman I’ve seen.”
“Well, honey, you’ve just been rescued.”
She started gyrating to the beat of the music, slowly twisting, teasing. It didn’t interest me much even though she was only a couple feet from my table. Lap dancing was personal. The guy who paid for the dance got the heat.
A girl entered the room and my eye caught hers and she came to the table. She was platinum blonde, so silvery that her hair looked like freshly minted silver. Her pale hair and pale skin made her hot red lips stand out even more. It was love at first sight for me. Well, if not love, then at least lust.
She smiled. “I’m Janelle. May I dance for you?”
“Please,” I said, a little too eagerly.
When she started moving her body to the beat of the music, everything faded around me in the club, except her. I felt like someone had turned off the lights and shut down the noise, leaving only a bright spotlight on her. The redhead taking it off for Leroy moved in jerky movements with the disco music. But Ms. Platinum moved fluidly, seductively,
like a queen cobra slithering to the subtle tone of a flute. She stripped down to her scarlet brassiere and panties. Her nipples were ready to jut out of the thin silk bra. She removed the brassiere slowly to reveal a cornucopia of succulent flesh, firm but lush, not too big but more than a mouthful. Her green eyes teased me as she got closer and closer. I felt the heat surging in my loins. Then she stepped out of her sheer silk panties to reveal the soft, fleshy mound that had been shaved. There was something wetly erotic about a shaved pubis. I always wondered why statues of men and women never showed pubic hair. I figured it was because bodies were so much more sensual when the groin was naked.
I looked into those laughing green eyes and wanted to taste those red lips so bad—both sets—I was ready to spread her onto the hard knob throbbing between my legs.
You know, I could have gone over and got it off with one of Leroy’s girls, or gone to one of the legit houses beyond the county line, even just hung around one of the clubs and picked up a female tourist hoping to get laid at least once during her three days in town, but it wasn’t the same. This girl, Janelle, didn’t just get my testosterone pumping, she got under my skin and into my head.
She took it all off, naked, down to red nail polish and unusual jewelry—rings on every finger, including one on her middle finger with a chain that looped back to a bracelet.
When she finished dancing, I pulled the fifty bucks out of my pocket and handed them to her.
“Over here, Janelle.” The call came from a frat jock.
She raised her eyebrows at me. “Current customers have the option for another dance.”
“Yeah, I—shit!” I realized I had given her my last money. Leroy and the redhead were gone, probably out to my car, where Leroy was getting his tires rotated. I leaned across and whispered to Windell. “You got any money?”
“Twenty slug quarters.”
I turned around to her, oozing with charm. “My buddy went someplace with the redhead. He’s holding my money, he’ll be back in a minute.”
She smiled like a loan officer who just discovered that the applicant had neither job nor collateral. “Enjoy your drink.”
Her voice sent shivers up my spine. I went after her, grabbing her arm. “Hey, I’m not kidding, my buddy’s got the money.”
“Hey, beat it, she’s going to dance for me,” the frat said.
“Piss off—”
Someone behind me clamped a hand on my arm and I turned to look up at the bouncer. I swear the ape’s hand circumnavigated my arm.
“You were told no touching.”
I got one backward glance at Janelle as the bouncer escorted me out. Contempt, that’s what she had for me, contempt because I didn’t have the price of a dance. Which only served to turn me on. I’d be hemorrhaging lust until I had this ruthless bitch. The next night I went back with money in my pocket but was told she was on “sabbatical” for a week.
Windell was always coming up with harebrained schemes and I got busy trying to figure out a way to make his latest one work. He had an idea about bribing an engraver at the Mexican company that manufactured most of the playing cards for Vegas to mark aces and ten-point cards.
“We’d only need it one night,” he said, “and we could rack up millions.”
Yeah, and spend it on new arms and legs after the casino bosses amputated ours and left us lying out in the desert as coyote bait. But the idea was intriguing. Everyone was always trying to beat blackjack using a count system or by positioning someone to see what the dealers dealt themselves. In Vegas, they called it “going for the money.” Every few months a scheme by players or players-and-dealers hit the papers. Then people like Windell and me who dreamt of breaking the bank at a casino—illegally, of course—would get their adrenaline up and lie awake nights trying to figure out the perfect way to pull it off.
A couple of weeks after being put down by Janelle, I was cruising down Fremont Street in Glitter Gulch, rolling around my head a going-for-the-money idea, when I saw Janelle walk into the Golden Gate. I parked and found her inside the club, methodically losing money at a quarter machine. She reminded me of the way Betty used to play the slots, as if she was there to make a contribution rather than having any real hope of winning. I slipped onto the stool next to her.
“Long time no see.”
She glanced at me. Not a real look, just a sideways glance. She wore a tank top that displayed her nipples.
“It’s the big spender.”
I grinned. “You’re making a mistake. You don’t know who you’re talking to. I’m Big Zack Riordan, the guy who runs this town. If you’re real nice to me, I’ll buy you a fur coat to warm up that cold personality of yours.”
She made a little sound deep in her throat like she was going to be sick. “What’d you buy it with, sport, those slugs your friend had? Go jack off, will ya?”
I always carried a handful of Windell’s metal babies with me and I pulled one out and flipped it up and caught it. I dropped it in a slot and pulled the handle.
“Women usually come crawling to me after—”
I looked as the tumblers stopped on a jackpot emblem, then a second one, and a third. A light flashed above the machine and a fog horn went off. I stared stupidly at the three medallions on the pay line and the list of winning combinations.
I had just won my first jackpot since I was three months old—five hundred dollars. From a quarter slug.
Janelle leaned over and her hot, wet tongue licked my ear. “Wanna fuck?”
22
We went to her place. I still lived with Embers. The little humpback trailer flipped over in a high wind and I replaced it with one that was slightly bigger but still as ratty. Janelle’s place was the usual one-bedroom, one-bath, drywall, low-income Vegas apartment. They grew like cabbage patches as casinos opened and workers poured into the town.
She poured into my arms the moment we stepped into her apartment. I kicked the door shut as I was kissing her. Her body was hot and solid, firmer than any woman I’d ever been with. She yanked her tank top over her head and pushed her skin-tight blue jeans down, leaving her standing in white silky bra and panties. We moved our way to the couch in between our kissing and my stripping.
I undid her bra and buried my face against the lush melons, Chanel No. 5 robbing me of my senses. Her nipples were distended with excitement. I took one in my mouth while my hands pulled off the white panties and I moaned with delight. I had never felt a naked pussy before. “Eat me,” she cried. My lips found her clit and I worked into a frenzy of passion, as she grabbed the back of my head and pulled me in deeper and deeper as she spread her legs, grinding her hips and arching her back. As soon as she exploded, she was ready again, pushing me back onto the couch and mounting me. I stood up, holding her buttocks in both hands, letting her ride my erection, pulling her back so my cock rubbed against her clit. She grabbed me by the side of my head and bit my mouth as she came again.
23
“Trying to take a casino is too risky,” Embers said. “You’re not looking at jail time if you get caught, but a bullet in the back of the head.”
Janelle, Windell, and me were at the New Frontier scarfing up the cheap buffet. That was one good thing about Vegas—the town was full of ninety-nine-cent breakfasts and three-ninety-nine buffet dinners. All the casinos wanted you to do was lose your shirt when you came for the cheap eats.
“No one’s ever gotten away with making a big hit on Vegas. This isn’t just a town and gambling isn’t just an industry. The underworld tentacles reach from one end of the country to the other.”
“Nobody’s been smart enough to do it yet,” Windell said.
Embers’s opinion of Windell’s smarts was evident by the way the old man chewed the tough roast beef as he looked at Windell, as if wondering what mud hole it had been dragged out of.
I said, “Windell’s idea about hitting a bunch of clubs with marked cards and all of us running around pulling in thousands every hour at blackjack tables is i
mpractical. I was thinking more in terms of one club, one deck, one table, one hit. If we can get a dealer to substitute marked decks for regular ones, we could easily earn six or eight thousand at a table before anyone started taking a closer look. The secret is not to get greedy. When we reach a set amount, say five thousand, we cash in. If each of us pulls that stunt once or twice a week, by the end of the month we’d have a hundred grand or more.”
Embers snorted. “By the end of the first week, you’ll be in a shallow grave with coyotes digging you up.”
Janelle and I had been knocking around together for three months when I made reservations at the restaurant in the Sands for Janelle’s birthday. I didn’t have a suit and one birthday wasn’t worth laying out the bread for one, so I rented a tux. It wasn’t a wedding, but I wanted to wear a tux because I never had one on before. Janelle wore a blue sequined dress that fit her as if it was painted on and displayed her valleys, peaks, and dangerous curves. We really thought we were hot stuff. Here I was with a real tux on and going to a fancy restaurant, like we were rich people, not just a lap dancer and a guy with a pocket full of slugs.
When we came up to the maître d’s desk, the guy looked at me like the Acme rental tag was hanging from my monkey suit. He had a glass of clouded liquid on the desk, the kind of stuff you feed an ulcer. There was a whispered conversation between him and a cold, pale broad wearing black lipstick who was holding menus.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Riordan, but it became necessary to rebook your reservation for tomorrow night. We have an opening at ten-thirty then.”
Sin City Page 9