Sin City

by Harold Robbins

  “How did you know the wheel was gaffed?”

  “The sound of the ball rolling. It’s got a metal core that makes it a little heavier than an ivory ball. And it falls a little unnatural when the electromagnet that draws it to a canoe gets turned on by that switch.”

  “Aren’t you worried that upstaging their gimmick is gonna annoy the people who own this place?”

  “Naw, I had the boss with me. This is another little donation for Mr. Luciano’s vacation in Italy.” Con handed over his winnings.

  Meyer’s face lit up several watts. He tried to keep from laughing. “How did you pin the club on me?”

  “Hell, every croupier in the place looks at you like Jesus H. Christ is paying a visit.”

  “Walk me to my car,” Meyer said.

  They came out the front entrance and walked down a line of cars parked down the circular driveway.

  “What do you think of the Flamingo?” Meyer asked.

  Con knew it was a loaded question. It wasn’t just a question of money between Meyer and Bugsy—the two were old pals. He answered cautiously. “I think the Flamingo will make money eventually. It’s still being finished and people in L.A. aren’t in the habit yet of driving three hundred miles.”

  “I agree with you, Bugsy’s no fool. Unfortunately, he’s more of an idea man than a businessman. If he’d step aside and let us put businessmen in the club to run it, I think it would be a gold mine. Bugsy’s too much of a gambler.” He seemed to be talking more out loud to himself than to Con.

  A Cuban suddenly stepped out of the bushes and drunkenly waved a gun at them, jabbering in Spanish, of which Con caught the words reloj de pulsera.

  “He wants your watch,” Con said.

  Meyer was wearing a short-sleeve shirt that exposed the diamond-studded gold watch on his wrist. Con was between Meyer and the robber. “Give it to me.” He held out his hand to Meyer, who took it off his wrist.

  “Here you go, partner.”

  As Con was about to give the watch to the man, it slipped from his hand. The thief made a grab for it and Con’s big fist caught him on the side of the head. The Cuban went down like a hammered steer.

  Con took the gun. “So damn rusted, it probably wouldn’t shoot anyway.” He unloaded it and tossed it in the bushes. He picked up the gold watch and brushed it off before handing it back to Meyer. “Sorry, Mr. Lansky. Didn’t mean to get your watch dirty.”

  The next morning as Con was packing, a small package was delivered to him by the bellboy. Inside was Meyer’s diamond studded watch—and thirty-five hundred dollars. The note read: A token of my appreciation. No signature.

  28

  The day Con left Havana, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia, and a host of other big and small members of the New York families met in a banquet room at the Alhambra hotel. The hotel, with its reddish covered bricks made of fine gravel and clay, was modeled after the Alhambra palace in Spain. In the middle of the hotel casino was a replica of the Fountain of Linos, an alabaster basin supported by the figures of twelve white marble lions, symbols of strength and courage. Built like a fortress on a cliff above the Malecón, overlooking Havana harbor, the hotel had been financed with mob money. Lansky himself had suggested the design of the hotel. The little man knew history and selected a model from Spain.

  The meeting took place in the sala de los abencerrages—the name of a palace room derived from a legend in which Boabdil, the last king of Granada, invited the Abencerrages chiefs to a banquet in the room, then had them massacred. Some people thought Lansky used the name because he admired Baobdil’s cleverness.

  At the meeting, a grave Meyer Lansky rose from his seat to bring the “Siegel problem” before the group.

  “The Flamingo was projected to cost a million and a half,” Meyer said. “It’s up to nearly six million and still counting, but that’s not the problem we have to discuss. Lucky got suspicious about possible skimming when he got word from a friend who saw Virginia Hill in Switzerland.”

  Virginia Hill was Siegel’s girl and was as crazy tempered as Bugsy. She was known throughout the mob world as the lover of gangsters. Bugsy was her latest.

  “I did some checking through sources.” Meyer’s voice grew quieter. “Virginia has a Swiss bank account. In her name and Bugsy’s.”

  On June 20, 1947, less than six months after the Flamingo’s grand opening, Bugsy was sitting in his Beverly Hills mansion when a member of Murder, Inc., fired a .30-caliber army carbine from outside the house and put four slugs in him. The first bullet entered Bugsy’s left eye.

  In Las Vegas, minutes after the echo of the fourth shot that hit Bugsy had faded, three men walked into the Flamingo hotel and announced they were the new management.

  29

  A week after Bugsy’s death, Con picked up Meyer at McCarran Airfield with the big Packard. Meyer rode in the front seat with Con.

  “Sorry to hear about Mintz,” Meyer said.

  Con shrugged. “Guys with bad tickers shouldn’t try to pork the young stuff.”

  Mintz had been humping a new B-girl upstairs at the club when he clutched at his ticker and yelled he was dying. He was right.

  “Mintz’s widow wants to sell the Lucky Irishman,” Con said. “I want to buy it. I’ve been running it for years while Mintz has been hopping in bed in L.A. and here in Vegas. I can turn more money than he ever did.”

  “You have the money?”

  “I have some of it. I’ve been saving.” He didn’t mention that he’d been skimming from the club for years or that he had increased his stake playing poker. Meyer wouldn’t appreciate either avenue.

  He handed Meyer a sheet of figures. “This is the breakdown for the club. And what I’ll need.” Sol had fixed it for him, explaining that Meyer would be impressed if he laid black and white numbers on him.

  “I met Ben when we were both just kids,” Meyer said. Con glanced at Meyer in surprise. The Little Man went on reminiscing. “I first saw him when a fight broke out at a curbside craps game. Someone yelled that the dice were loaded and fists started swinging. Ben was just a wet-nosed kid, and I was three and a half years older, but in those days the streets were mean and anyone over the age of ten had to take care of themselves. During the fight, a gun dropped and Ben ran over and picked it up. The guy who dropped it came at him and Ben held the gun in both hands and smiled as he pointed it at the guy. The guy just stopped cold in his tracks and looked at the business end of his own gun. We heard the police sirens scream as a squad car came around the corner. I ran over and grabbed the gun and threw it down an open storm sewer.

  “And you know what Ben said to me? Not thank you. Not mind your own business or even screw you. He just looked at me and said, ‘I needed that rod.’”

  Meyer shook his head. “Can you beat that? ‘I needed that rod.’ I’ll never forget it.”

  He stared down at the paper Con had given him. “You’ve been around long enough to know the rules. Don’t forget ’em. Someday you’ll pay us back but you’ll always owe us for the accommodation.”

  “You’re working for me now,” Con told Sol when he returned to the club. “Call a sign company, we’re changing the name of the club. I want a big sign, a thousand bulbs flashing the name Halliday’s. And no goddamn leprechaun. Tell ’em I want a bull, a snorting, bucking, kicking, piss-and-vinegar Texas longhorn.”

  Part 6

  “I HAD THREE QUEENS.”

  30

  LAS VEGAS, 1976

  The day came when we were to put Windell’s magic card-reading gimmick into play and get a chance to have some real money in our pockets instead of pennies and lint. I was sleeping in Janelle’s bed, soft and comfortable, and having one hell of a dream as a beautiful woman was sucking my dick. I didn’t know who the hell she was, but she looked like one of those hot Asian chicks with succulent breasts and pretty, pouty lips like those dames you see on ads for massage parlors. She thought I had the greatest egg roll in town.

&
nbsp; I awoke and realized that Janelle was under the blankets. I felt her hot hand around my still-asleep cock and then a pressure slowly began to build up in my abdomen. Her fingers squeezed my balls while her wet tongue began to run up and down my cock, now coming awake and responding to her licking. The heat was rushing to my loins. I grabbed her head and moved her mouth over my throbbing organ. It was hard now. “Suck it. Harder.” A rush of heat and fire swept through me and I came, feeling the electric shock down to my toes, pumping my cum into her hot juicy mouth. Then she was on top of me, rubbing her nakedness on my body, my cock between her thighs, rubbing her wet cunt over my cock until it grew stiff again and I plunged into her. She was tight between her legs and she squeezed my dick inside her. Her tongue flicked my ear and her teeth nibbled on the lob for just a second before her teeth sank into it and I yelped.

  “Fucking bastard,” she said.

  Janelle worked a mid-shift at Halliday’s, noon to eight, and afterward would go home and get ready for her night job at the Pussy Kat. Hitting the casino in daylight worked perfectly for our scam because Windell and I had to wear special tinted glasses to see the glow of the ring. The glasses made me real uneasy. It was no big deal to see someone wearing sunglasses while playing craps or blackjack: Vegas was that kind of town, a place of dark glasses for cool dudes and red-eyed hangovers, but these glasses had a little reddish tint to them, although the red was more noticeable out in the sunlight than under casino lights.

  I’d been in Halliday’s a couple of times over a period of months when Janelle was getting off her shift, but not so much that anyone would recognize me. Just in case, I grew a goatee and wore a baseball cap. I called Windell about three o’clock before I left the house to head for the casino.

  “Did it work?” he asked about the test run that Janelle tried at home.

  “Like a charm. She wore the phony jewelry and I could see a glow when she pulled a high card with her fingers. It’s not perfect, sometimes the card doesn’t get drawn across your gimmick, but it’s like an eighty-percent deal.”

  “I still think we need to hit it together, double the take—”

  “No, I told you, I’m going in alone today.”

  I signed off with him and left the house wondering how brains like Windell’s get miswired. All high-grade ore between his ears and not a speck of good sense. It wasn’t a question of him not coming in out of the rain—he wouldn’t even know it was raining.

  I was nervous walking into the club and hid it behind a little bravado, getting a beer and jeering at a prostitute hanging out at the bar whom I recognized as being one of Leroy’s former girls. I guess she figured the early bird gets the worm.

  I dumped a roll of quarters in a bandit and then moseyed over to the pit to check out the table games. It was Wednesday afternoon, the place wasn’t packed, but business was good, five of the eight blackjack tables were open. I paused by the first table, checking out the action, then casually drifted to the next one, Janelle’s table. Bingo! As she drew cards from the shoe and touched them with her fingers, her ruby ring sometimes glowed. I took off my glasses and pretended to clean them. I watched a dozen cards get pulled and couldn’t see the ring glow.

  I kept going, like I was sizing up each table. I spotted something at another table. I didn’t know what it was about me, but as old Embers said, I was a disaster at poker but I could spot a cheat every time. He said he knew a woman who could walk the aisle in an antiques store, hardly look at the items, and some alarm bell went off inside her that told her when there was a counterfeit. “Human Geiger counters,” he called me and the woman, but that was because he and every old guy in town had bought themselves a Geiger counter so they could go prospecting for uranium. The stuff was more valuable than gold and easier to find.

  I knew the dealer, a woman, was skimming. I spotted it and casually hung around the table for a couple minutes and made a few dollar bets when it happened again. Once in a while, after raking in chips, she’d put her hand up to her neck as if she was scratching it. She was palming a chip and dropping it down her bra. Not too shabby. Pick up an occasional twenty-five-dollar chip and she could rake in several times more than her salary each month. And it wasn’t like handling a cash register, where they could count out the drawer and see if the dealer had pocketed chips; they had to catch her in the act because there were no tracks made by the chips and money that flowed across the table.

  After dropping a few bets, I went over to Janelle’s table and sat down, trying to keep a lid on my excitement and nervous energy. Grinning like a winner or appearing jittery before the first hand is dealt would look suspicious to the spy in the sky. Halliday’s had two-way mirrors in the ceiling and catwalks that security personnel used to spy on people.

  Halliday’s tables had minimum bets of one to five dollars, but he prided himself on no-limit bets. According to Janelle, if the betting got too rich, she signaled the pit boss, who kept an eye on the play and sent over a floorman to belly up to the table and keep both eyes open.

  I had ten yards on me and shoved the whole thousand across the table. “Hundred-dollar chips.” To insiders, they weren’t “chips” but “checks,” and I wanted to sound like a tourist. My game plan was to walk out with forty-nine hundred dollars in my pocket after an hour’s play: Get in, win fast, and get out before they decided to check me too close.

  Knowing most of the ten cards that ended up as Janelle’s hole card turned Lady Luck on her head. After twenty minutes and doubling my money, the pit boss passed a signal to Janelle to shuffle more frequently. Janelle had forewarned me that it was their way of terminating a run of luck by a player—if a random shuffle had accidentally stacked the cards in a player’s favor, they just shuffled again.

  I couldn’t keep the grin off my face as the chips started piling up in front of me. Maybe if I’d been robbing the poor box at church I would’ve had a little conscience, but hey, this was just one grifter pissing on another.

  It was so damn easy …

  “A counter?” Con Halliday asked, as he looked down at the blackjack table from the catwalk and two-way mirror above.

  “No, he hasn’t been here long enough. Thirty, forty minutes maybe, but he’s having a hell of a run of luck.”

  Aaron Bous had been Con’s security manager for a year and that made him an old-timer as a Halliday security chief. The old man was death on security because cheating was money straight off the top. Runs of luck were no problem, because no matter how lucky a gambler got, the odds were always with the house and either the gambler would be grinded down or others would lose, but a dollar stolen was a dollar out of Con’s pocket. There was always some wise guy coming up with a new way to cheat and Bous figured no one could keep up with it. Con’s attitude was that you could spot any gimmick if you looked hard enough.

  “Reshuffle?”

  “Yeah. After every ten hands. It looks real clean to me, Con. The guy’s just having a run of luck.”

  “He’s a grifter. I don’t know what the gaff is, but it’s there.”

  Bous looked to the security woman that was on the catwalk on the other side of the two-way ceiling mirror. “You see anything?”

  She shook her head. “Only that he’s too damn lucky.”

  “He play any other tables?” Con asked.

  “He dumped a few bucks at table five. Dollar bets.”

  “What’d he start with at this table?”

  “Hundred-dollar checks.”

  “The guy plays a buck at one table and increases his bet a hundred times at the next table? You’d have to have shit for brains to think he’s not going for the money.”

  I flipped a hundred-dollar chip onto the cocktail tray of the cutie who brought me a 7-high and caught a look from Janelle that would have made a Doberman turn tail and run. I was four big ones ahead, four thousand in chips on top of my own grand, and was right on schedule: Another ten or fifteen minutes and I could say sayonara. The nervousness I’d felt when I first sat down was
gone and I was surging with confidence.

  Then a shadow fell across the table.

  A Mack truck wearing a cowboy hat sat down at the empty seat to my right. I didn’t need an introduction to know that the infamous Con Halliday was dealing himself in. He put down a dollar bet.

  “Is that okay, honey?” he asked Janelle.

  “It’s a five-dollar table, Mr. Halliday.” Janelle smiled bravely, but her lips gave a little quiver.

  “Well, we’ll waive that limit, honey, I wouldn’t want those busybodies in Carson City to claim I was making big-money bets in my own casino.” He grinned at me. “How ya doing, son? Looks like you got a piece of my retirement there.”

  “Not really.” I think that’s what came out. I had the 7-high glass to my lips and almost spit a mouthful of the stuff onto the table.

  People started crowding around. Con Halliday was a celebrity in Glitter Gulch and attracted a crowd wherever he went. And it wasn’t hard to spot him, with that big body, big hat, and Mississippi gambler’s suit.

  “I thought I knew all there was to know about blackjack, son, but watching you play, I realized that I had missed something because you handle those cards the way Conway Twitty plays his guitar.”

  His words were pure corn, his grin glittered, but his eyes were snake-mean.

  “I been lucky.”

  Janelle dealt me two cards and I hardly looked at them. The people who crowded around the table made me claustrophobic. I knew Janelle’s ring flashed when she took her hole card, but nothing was registering. Halliday took a hit on twelve and Janelle turned up a six, giving him eighteen that he stood on. The palms of my hands were sweaty and I wiped them on my pants.

  Just when I thought things were bad, they suddenly went to hell.

  Someone sat down to my left and I turned to look into another pair of sunglasses. Betty always said that when you get goose bumps, it’s because a goose had walked over your grave. I felt a whole flock of them walking up and down my spine.